Nutraceuticals The Past, Present and Future

Nutraceuticals The Past, Present and Future

– QualPharma – July 2018

“Nutraceuticals are natural or bioactive chemical compounds claiming to be health promoting and disease preventing products with some medicinal properties.”

Human beings have always looked at nat-ural products as a major source of nutri-tion since ancient times. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” were the words said by Hip-pocrates, the Father of medicine around 2500 years ago.
Nutraceuticals, the functional foods is based on the concept of “personalised medicine” for maintenance of health. The increasing interest among the consumers and their awareness among the health have enormously led to the increase in the growth of market for these products in the recent years. This article mainly focuses to provide complete evolution of nutraceuti-cals since the past to the present and the future.

A piece of History:
Role of daily dietary requirements has always paid an important role even before the development of the concept of Nutrition. It has always been an interested area of research. Biomedical research for the past 20 years has revealed that diet plays an important role in the prevention and progression of many of the major chronic diseases, such as atherosclerosis and can-cer. In 1989, The Foundation for Innovation in Medicine (New York, U.S.), coined the term “Nutraceutical”, to provide the name for this rapidly grow-ing area of biomedical research. Dr. Ste-phen DeFelice (1992) defined nutraceuti-cal as ―any substance that may be considered a food or part of a food and which provides medical or health benefits including the pre-vention and treatment of disease.