Without providing an alternate regulatory framework, the default mechanism is to require functional foods to be evaluated and licensed as drugs. The costs associated with this process would mean that only large pharmaceutical firms would have the necessary investment and human resources to enter this potentially lucrative field. Even if a functional food were to be approved under the drug approval structure, market opportunities would be severely restricted in actual retail practice. Adding to our inflexible regulatory environment, Canada's poor record in encouraging research and development investment in life sciences, including the food and pharmaceutical sectors, suggests that future investment in functional food research and development may be severely limited, in addition to being heavily concentrated in the hands of a few organizations. Preservation of the regulatory status quo could also lead to the erosion of consumer spending within Canada.
Canadian consumers are neither in a cultural nor marketing vacuum.
There are already hundreds of Internet sites accessible to Canadian consumers which offer nutrition advice as well as health related products. Canadian consumer spending will flow to these sources, if access to legitimate and licensed products available in other countries is denied in Canada. An estimate of the net cost to the Canadian economy is beyond the scope of this study and the resources available to the authors.