From the beginning of the third millennium, a category was added in the overlapping field of medicine and nutrition. These disciplines have been approached separately for a very long time. Due to the scientific interest in the medicinal use of food, there has been a need to introduce a new term. This term bridges medicine and nutrition. In Dutch you could translate the term nutraceutical as ‘nutraceutical’ or ‘a nutruceutic agent’. NB! This article is written from the personal view of the author and may contain information that is not scientifically substantiated and/or in line with the general view.
Contents:
- Nutraceutical naming
- Food contains nutraceuticals
- The healing power of nutraceuticals
Nutraceutical naming
Dr Stephen DeFelice introduced the term nutraceutical . Nutra stands for nutricion, which refers to a nutrient. Ceutical is the last part of the word pharmaceutical which means pharmaceutical. For a long time the term was only used by DeFelice, but since the enormous influx of attention to medicinal foods, the term has come into common use among scientists and appears in hundreds of scientific papers. From the beginning of the third millennium there has been great interest in food that works against diseases. If this food has been scientifically proven to have a medicinal effect, it is called a nutraceutical. Another term used in science is functional nutrition . The function of the food concerns its medicinal capacity.
Food contains nutraceuticals
Nutraceuticals are not so much supplements as is sometimes thought. An apple is a nutraceutical because the substances contained in this fruit have medicinal properties. The idea that food is medicine is not new. This idea has become increasingly widespread in our time, especially since the turn of the millennium when more and more scientific studies show that whole food is healthy, while individual isolated components from food are a lot less healthy. In ancient Egypt, nutraceuticals were already used avant-la-lettre. In ancient Greece people also used food as medicine . Hippocrates, the founder of modern pharmaceutical medicine, said: let food be your medicine.
Kool / Source: PublicDomainPictures, Pixabay
The healing power of nutraceuticals
In fact, all whole products such as fruits, vegetables, herbs, nuts and seeds are nutraceuticals. They are medicinal products. You just need to know what this common food offers healing properties. The healing power of cauliflower is of course different from the healing power of cherries. Each natural product works against a different range of diseases. You can also look at it another way: each product is good for a different part of the body. Beets are good for the blood, carrots are good for the liver, cranberries are good for the bladder, walnuts are good for the brain and so on. In fact, every natural food is a nutraceutical because each food provides healing benefits to a different part of the body.
