People often say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but what about a bowl of ice cream?

Food scientists at Penn State are trying to add nutriceuticals, or health-enhancing food substances, to dairy products such as ice cream, yogurt and milk.

"Nutriceuticals are food products that are designed to improve health, like herbs and botanical extracts," said John Coupland, assistant professor of food science. "What we're trying to do is take these and add them to foods to create 'functional foods' that go above and beyond the normal dietary expectations of those foods."

Coupland works primarily with Omega-3 fatty acids, which are oils found in fish. He said these oils have been shown to help memory and reduce the risk of heart disease and Attention Deficit Disorder.

But the problem, he said, is that most people do not get enough Omega-3s in their diets.

"Americans don't eat much fish compared to other cultures, which is why Americans have such high levels of heart disease," he said. "If people would eat more herring, for example, they could get the fish oils and nutrients that they need, but people aren't going to do that."

He suggested the creation of functional foods is essentially a way of getting substances like Omega-3 fatty acids into people's diets "almost on the sly."

Bob Roberts, associate professor of food science, said it is easier to alter the food itself than to alter people's eating habits.

"It is difficult to change a person's consumption pattern," he said. "We want people to consume food for food's sake."

Roberts specializes in dairy product processing, and his part in the research is to figure out how to supplement ice cream, yogurt and milk with Omega-3 fatty acids.

The first step of the process is to extract the oils from fish or algae, Coupland said. Then the researchers use a technique called "emulsion science," in which they separate the oil into very small droplets that can be dispersed easily in other liquids.

Roberts said the major obstacle so far is that Omega-3 fatty acids are unstable with oxygen, and when oxidation occurs, the emulsion breaks down into products with a fishy odor.

"The basic problem is getting them into the food and not having [the food] taste fishy," he said.

To solve this problem, he said they are trying to figure out how to "oxidatively stabilize the emulsion," or how to get the Omega-3 fatty acids into the food and keep them stable.

"Right now we are still working out analytical techniques, like how fast the oxidation and the odor happen," he said.

This will help them figure out at what point in the process they should add the emulsion to the food. Studies so far have shown the Omega-3 fatty acids should be added to dairy foods prior to pasteurization (to destroy any disease-causing microorganisms), probably while the mix is being compounded or put together, he said.

Coupland said milk has been the most difficult product to supplement with Omega-3s.

"It does not have much flavor to start with, but it must mask the flavor of the nutriceuticals," he said. "People expect it to taste bland, so even very small amounts of [Omega-3 fatty acids] will be noticeable."

He said making sure the foods taste how people expect them to is important to the success of the research.

"The foods will have no nutritional benefit if people don't eat them," he said.

Roberts said he thinks Omega-3-fortified yogurt would be more popular than Omega-3-fortified ice cream.

"Yogurt has a culture of being good for you, but ice cream doesn't, so that might not work as well," he said.

However, Tom Palchak, manager of the University Creamery, said ice cream supplemented with nutriceuticals might attract a new market of people who cannot consume ice cream normally.

"It would be a new category of ice cream, and we would treat it that way," he said, adding that the Creamery would continue to produce ice cream in the same way that it has for the past 100 years.

He said the Creamery would consider producing nutriceutical-enhanced ice cream if the FDA determined it was safe for the public, although that process could take between a couple of years and a decade.