Nutraceuticals

Nutraceutical is an amalgam of two terms, “nutrition” and “pharmaceutical,” hybrid word introduced by Stephen L. DeFelice in 1989, founder and chairman of the Foundation of Innovation Medicine. Nutraceuticals are food product of natural origin owing health benefits like the improvement of physiological performance and also effective various diseases.

The nutraceuticals includes a variety of products derived from isolated nutrients, dietary supplements, and genetically engineered designer foods, herbal products, processed foods, and beverages. Among them, “vitamin-enriched” health-promoting products and also fresh foods like vegetables, fruits, and fermented foods populated with live cultures can be considered to be functional foods with probiotic benefits. Thus, nutraceuticals provide a proactive healthcare approach with tremendous therapeutic impacts on human body. Nutraceuticals are a leading trend in healthcare medicine in the market and connected to food science with pharmaceutical dosage forms hosting food bioactive compounds as active principles in formulations (pills, powders, capsules, parenterals, etc.). These bioactive constituents are phytochemicals and are known to sustain or promote health.

The nutraceutical industry exploited a broad class of phytochemicals described as phytoestrogens, terpenoids, limonoids, glucosinolates phytosterols, polyphenols, carotenoids, flavonoids, isoflavonoids, and anthocyanidins with specific pharmacological effects on human health as antioxidants, antiinflammatory, antibacterial, antiallergic, antifungal, chemopreventive, hepatoprotective, hypolipidemic, neuroprotective, hypotensive, antiaging, diabetes, osteoporosis, carminative, antispasmodic, heart diseases, induce apoptosis, DNA damage, cancer, diuretic, CNS stimulant, analgesic, and immunomodulator (Gupta and Prakash, 2014; Karwande and Borade, 2015). Nutraceuticals are magic bullets holding a promising future for public health. Although nutraceuticals are not a new product nowadays, confusion still exists between foods with health claims and dietary supplements.