Nutraceuticals Vs. Functional Food

Introduction

Plants have formed the basis of health care throughout the world since the earliest days of humanity; they are still widely used and of great importance in international trade. The famous Hippocratic quotation “Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food” is now supported by numerous scientific data concerned with the beneficial role of nutrition in health improvement.

On the other hand, a number of “lifestyle diseases”, sometimes also called “diseases of civilization” are closely associated to lifestyle changes especially in food habits due to the tremendous increase of junk food consumption. Nutritional deficiencies in such cases are mainly referred to either generation of undesirable ingredients during food processing

1. Nutraceuticals versus Functional Foods

The term “nutraceutical”, a combination of the two words "nutrition" and "pharmaceutical", was first coined in 1989 by Stephen DeFelice, the founder and chairman of the Foundation for Innovation in Medicine (FIM) to designate “a food (or part of a food) that provides medical or health benefits, including disease prevention and/or treatment”. However, according to (Vanessa et al., 2012) “this term as frequently used in marketing still have no regulatory definition”. Yet, earlier attempts have been made to define “functional food” and “nutraceutical” (Kalra, 2003; Zeisel, 1999). A food is said to be considered as “functional food” if either “consumed as part of a normal diet and delivering one or more physiologically active ingredients that may enhance health within the food matrix” (Zeisel, 1999) or “cooked or prepared using scientific intelligence with or without knowledge of how or why it is being used” (Kalra, 2003). The term is assumed, as well, to designate “a food with special health functions but which is not used for therapeutic purposes” (Yuexin Yang, 2008). In all cases, this food is supposed to provide the body with the required amount of vitamins, fats, proteins, carbohydrates etc… needed for its healthy

4. Risks and Side Effects of Dietary Supplements

Despite their various health benefits, dietary supplements like drugs may have risks and side effects. In most cases, the deficiency of clinical investigations that ascertain the safety of dietary supplements and similar products constitute a major drawback in human consumption. Most dietary supplements are self-prescribed with no proof of the given health claims from any of the medical team members as physicians, nurses, or pharmacists.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started a long time ago to monitor dietary supplements safety and issued a series of reports on illness, injury, harmful effects or adverse reactions from supplements intake. For example in 2013, exposures to dietary supplements accounted for more than 100,000 calls to US poison control centers (Mowry, Spyker, Cantilena Jr, McMillan, & Ford, 2014); out of these calls, more than 8,000 people were treated in health care facilities; and more than 1000 cases were transferred to poison control centers with moderate to severe outcomes. These data could be underestimated because most cases who suffer from mild or even serious side effects, illnesses, or drug interactions do not report neither to a poison control center nor to the