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Regulation (EC) No. 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims made on foods (so-called "Health Claims Regulation" – HCV) enables food companies to market foods with an effect-related claim. Eight years after the regulation came into force, the aim is to provide a brief overview of regulatory developments in the implementation of the HCV and information on the procedure for the authorisation of health claims. In addition, the requirements for the scientific substantiation of health claims and the necessary evidence criteria are discussed. The EFSA has set high hurdles for scientific substantiation. The aim of the article is to highlight weaknesses in the approach taken to date, provide an overview of the issues that remain unresolved and highlight options for overcoming the scientific requirements.

Many relevant EU projects were funded during last decade and MARK-AGE (European Study to Establish Biomarkers of Human Ageing) was the first focused on the identification of biomarkers connecting itself with a previous funded project, i.e. GEHA (Genetic of Healthy Ageing) that identified European families with longevity component (Franceschi et al., 2007). MARK-AGE was mainly a cross sectional study, based on definite assumptions and focused on an age range between 34 and 75 years, in order to identify early biomarkers of biological vs. chronological age, potentially capable of predicting the rate of ageing later in life.

Within the MARK-AGE project, a population study (3337 subjects) was conducted to identify a set of biomarkers of ageing which, as a combination of parameters with appropriate weighting, would measure biological age better than any single marker. The MARK-AGE project involves 14 European countries and a total of 26 research centres.

Many candidate biomarkers of human ageing have been proposed in the scientific literature but in all cases their variability in cross-sectional studies is considerable, and therefore no single measurement has proven to serve a useful marker to determine, on its own, biological age. A plausible reason for this is the intrinsic multi-causal and multi-system nature of the ageing process.

While assessing the applications for possible health claims for food constituents, we advocate the integration of additional elements, namely grading of evidence, consideration of the risk-benefit ratio and epidemiological and health economic factors.

DNA strand breaks are one of the most common genotoxic lesions and they can also arise as intermediates of DNA repair activity. We have previously published an automated method for measuring DNA strand breaks based on fluorimetric detection of alkaline DNA unwinding [1], and here we present a mathematical model of the FADU assay, which enables to an analytic expression for the relation between measured fluorescence and the number of strand breaks.