If a food is fortified with vitamins or minerals, the label has to tell you exactly how much or how little has been added. That’s not the case with herbs or other added ingredients. Snapple, for example, refuses to divulge the amount of ginseng it puts into its Ginseng Tea. And even when labels say how much is in each serving, most shoppers have no idea whether that’s a lot or a little.
   For example, according to its label, each cup of Peace Cereal Vanilla Almond Crisp with Ginkgo & Gotu Kola (“an Herbal Brain Power Cereal”) contains two milligrams of ginkgo leaf extract. What it doesn’t say is that two milligrams is just one or two percent of the 120 to 320 milligrams that were used as a daily dose in studies of people with Alzheimer’s.
   How do companies decide how much herb or other “functional” ingredient to add to their foods? Do they evaluate the scientific literature to determine how much is effective...or safe? Don’t bet on it.

“It’s highly probable that many functional foods either block or increase the absorption of drugs, which could increase their toxicity or block their effectiveness,” says Stephen DeFelice of the Foundation for Innovation in Medicine. “We urgently need more studies on interactions between functional foods and pharmaceuticals.”