A brief review on the growing concept of nutraceuticals

Abstract

While all agree that the term "nutraceutical" comes from the association of the words nutrition and pharmaceuticals, it was actually coined in 1989 by Stephen DeFelice, MD, founder and chairman of the Foundation for Innovation in Medicine (FIM), Cranford, NJ. According to DeFelice, any food or part of food that would provide health benefits or prevent and even treat any disease, mainly chronic ones, would be termed nutraceutical. Since then, the word became commonly used to include any food, plants, herbs, vitamins, minerals, proteins or other ingredients like pre- or probiotics, that would have the aforementioned benefits by targeting a substance insufficiency in the body or by simply supplementing and increasing the total daily intake of a constituent, metabolite, extract or the combination of these ingredients. However, although nutraceuticals would become largely regulated by the different health bodies in various countries like the US Food and Drug Administration, European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the Chinese SFDA, the Indian FSSA and others, the word nutraceutical remains with no regulation definition.