Nutraceuticals Role in Stress, Aging, and Neurodegenerative Disorders

Nutraceuticals Role in Stress, Aging, and Neurodegenerative Disorders

Manisha Choudhary, Sandeep Tripathi, Rajesh Kumar Kesharwani
Copyright: © 2019 |Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-3267-5.ch010
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Abstract

Nutraceuticals and functional foods have attracted considerable interest recently because of their well-known safety and potential nutritional and therapeutic effects. Nutraceuticals include food supplements, dietary supplements, value-added processed foods, as well as non-food supplements such as tablets, soft gels, and capsules etc. which are packed with bioactive components. Life expectancy continues to rise and along with a rise in the lifestyle diseases (i.e., obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders). Functional foods and nutraceuticals constitute a great promise to improve health, neurodegenerative disorders, and aging-related chronic diseases. A collective effort by the academia, industry, government, and research organization must keep on promoting nutraceutical and functional food to contain the menace of lifestyle diseases.
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Categories Of Nutraceuticals

Nutraceuticals are non-specific biological therapies used for the prevention in many diseases are categorized on the basis of their sources or origin, pharmacology as well as chemical component (Dureja, Kaushik, & Kumar, 2003; Hathcock, 2001; Chauhan, Kumar, Kalam, & Ansari, 2013) (Figure 1):

  • 1.

    Dietary Supplements

  • 2.

    Functional Food

  • 3.

    Medicinal Food

  • 4.

    Pharmaceuticals

Dietary Supplements

A dietary supplement is a product that contains nutrients derived from food products. The “dietary ingredients” present in these products are: metabolites, vitamins, minerals, herbs, and amino acids.

Functional Foods

Functional foods are designed foods which provide enriched foods close to their natural state to consumer, rather than manufactured dietary supplements in liquid or capsule form. A process of making enriched food is called Nutrification. Functional foods provide required amount of vitamins, fat, carbohydrate, amino acid etc to body. Established requirement that functional food should possess are (Singh, Kesharwani, & Keservani, 2018; Aluko, 2012):

  • 1.

    Functional foods should be in their naturally-occurring form,

  • 2.

    Functional foods should be an essential part of our daily diet,

  • 3.

    Functional foods should regulate a biological process in hopes of preventing or controlling disease.

Medicinal Foods

Transgenic cows and lactoferrin for immune enhancement, transgenic plants for oral vaccination against infectious diseases and health bars with added medications. If you want to try medicinal foods, it must be under the guidance and supervision of a trained and experienced medical professional (Salak-Johnson, & McGlone, 2007).

Nutrients: Substances which have established Nutritional functions e.g. Vitamins, Minerals, Amino Acids, Fatty acids, etc. Minerals and Vitamins or in combination of both together with other antioxidants are most common Nutrients used or supplemented for wellness of human being (Keservani, Sharma, & Kesharwani, 2016).

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