Korean Functional Foods

Koreans believe the adage of food as medicine. Therefore, herbs or fruit ingredients such as ginger, cinnamon, adlay, mugwort, pomegranate, and ginseng are used for their therapeutic effects as much as cooking. This book provide information related to Korean functional food. It first describes the history and culture of Korean foods, and then compares Korean diet tables with other Asian countries and Western countries. Also, the book will cover detailed information of Korean functional foods such as kimchi, soybean products, ginseng, salt, oil and seeds. It also deals with its health benefits and processing methods, followed by rules and regulations related to its manufacture and sales.

Dr. Kun-Young Park is Professor in the Dept. of Food Science and Nutrition,Pusan National University, in Busan, Korea. He earned a food science degree and masters of science at Korea University and completed his PhD in food science at the University of Nebraska . Professor Park’s research interests are 1) Korean traditional foods and their cancer prevention and antiobesity effect and 2) Phytochemicals, functional foods, anticancer and antiobesity. Currently his research is on Korean fermented functional foods, such as Kimchi (Korean fermented vegetables), Doenjang (Soybean fermented paste), Kochujang (Red pepper powder-soybean fermented paste), and their chemopreventive and antiobesity effects. He has published approximately 400 research papers and reviews, and have been invited or presented more than 800 papers at domestic or international symposia.Dr. Kwon received his Ph.D. in Biological Science and Biotechnology from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul in 1986. After finishing his postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute, MIT, Cambridge, USA, he has started his research as a research scientist at Korea Food Research Institute (KFRI). He worked at KFRI in the field of food biological chemistry. He worked as adjunct professor at Sookmyung Women’s University in 1997-2003. He is a representative professor of United University of Science and Technology since 2004. He worked as a Director of Emerging Food Technology Division, Director of Food Convergence, etc. in KFRI. In 2014, he was the president of KFRI. After resigning his position, he worked as an Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Ethnic Foods published by Elsevier and vice-president of Korean Society of Foods and Nutrition. He has studied the anti-metabolic syndrome, and anti-aging food. He had experience to collaboration work with Institute of Food Research (IFR), Norwich, UK. He has published more than 250 research papers in several renowned SCI international journals in the areas of ethnic foods and bioactive food components and those papers were cited about 1,500 times in SCI journals. He is high research achievement as his H-index is about 30. He is a Fellow of Korea Academy of Science and Technology, Korea since 2011.Professor Ki Won Lee had been an assistant and associate professor in Konkuk University from 2006 to 2011, and currently is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Biotechnology at Seoul National University in Korea since 2011. He received his Ph.D. in Food Science and Technology from Seoul National University in Korea in 2004, and did his Post-doctoral research in the Hormel Institute at University of Minnesota in USA. He has published more than 230 research articles and review articles on functional foods in a number of prestigious journals including Nature Reviews Cancer, Lancet, and Nature Structure and Molecular Biology, and his research has been cited over 6600 times by peer-review papers and his H-index is 40. He is serving as a director of Emergence Center for Personalized Food-Medicine Therapy System in Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technology, a director of Center for Anti-aging Industry, as well as a director of 6+a Rural Wellness Convergence Center in Korea. He is a CEO of