European Union future trends

Foodomics, Functional Foods, and Nutraceuticals There is a clear trend in medicine and biosciences toward prevention of future diseases through adequate food intakes and the development of new functional foods and nutraceuticals. Although there is no officially accepted definition of functional foods, the definition proposed by Diplock et al. (73) is commonly used in the European Union and considers that a food is functional when it beneficially affects one or more target functions in the body beyond adequate nutrition in a way that is relevant to an improved state of health and well-being and/or reduction of risk of disease. Functional foods may include both natural (unmodified) foods and foods in which a component has been added, removed, or modified (including the bioavailability) by... 

The decline of the welfare state has created an increasing level of awareness by individuals that the well-being—current and future—of themselves and their families is more in their own hands and less in the hands of the state. This development has created a breed of consumers that demand anytime-anywhere delivery of quality financial services. At the same time we have witnessed an increased sophistication of the consumers in terms of the financial products they buy and the channels of service delivery they use. These trends are universal among developed economies, from the advanced and traditionally liberal economies of North America, to the increasingly deregulated economies of the European Union and pre-accession States, and the post-Communist countries. 

Sustainability and integrated coastal management are part of a new trend in coastal management and they offer opportunities to address many future coastal concerns. The European Union has adopted eight principles of best practice for integrated coastal zone management... 

Thus the statistical pattern is governed by the political development in Eastern Europe. During the cold war East European countries had no excess to the major producers of synthetic zeolites thus they developed technologies to use their abundant natural deposits for catalytic applications. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, accompanied by a political and economic crisis, led to a decrease of research activity in this field. The slight recovery of this trend in recent time is associated with an increased number of English papers written by East Europeans (lift of the iron curtain). One may extrapolate that in the future natural zeolites will become less important for catalytic applications. 

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