1,721,344 research outputs found
Nutraceuticals and botanicals: Overview and perspectives
No full textThe discovery, development and marketing of food supplements, nutraceuticals and related products are currently the fastest growing segments of the food industry. Functional foods can be considered part or borderline to these products and may be defined as foods or food ingredients that have additional health or physiological benefits over and above the normal nutritional value they provide. This trend is driven by several factors, mainly due to the current consumer perceptions: the first and dominant being 'Natural is good', and other secondary, such as the increasing cost of many pharmaceuticals and their negative secondary effects, the insistent marketing campaign, the increasing perception of the need of a healthy diet and its importance in the health and homeostasis organism conditions. However, the central point is that nutraceuticals, botanicals and other herbal remedies, including the entry of new functional foods, are important because of their acceptance as the novel and modern forms to benefit of natural substances. Due to the rapid expansion in this area, the development of several aspects is considered as it could influence the future of the market of these products negatively: an imbalance existing between the increasing number of claims and products on the one hand, the development of policies to regulate their application and safety on the other, rapid and valuable controls to check the composition, including the plant extracts or adulteration to improve efficacy, like the presence of synthetic drugs. It is interesting to see that, from the negative factors reported by the market analysts, a change in consumers preferences is absent. The functional properties of many plant extracts, in particular, are being investigated for potential use as novel nutraceuticals and functional foods. Although the availability of scientific data is rapidly improving, the central aspect concerns the validation of these products. The first step of this crucial aspect is the security of the composition, obtained by the useful and adapted analytical approach. On the other hand, in the first instance, security is assured by the millenary use as food of the great majority of these plants. The importance and the novelty of functional food are inherent in the possibility to renew the secure use of plants to maintain healthiness of man in novel forms of use adapted to modern times. The market of 'other substances', after the emergence of the first period of enthusiastic explosion, is entering into the maturation period, with three important arguments to face: (a) security in composition, production and sale, avoiding easy conversions or convenient approaches and favouring competence and professionalism, (b) definition of influence of metabolic aspects, including scientific validation and (c) regulatory aspects, e. g. the claims definition and relative influences. The last aspect seams to be in primis the most crucial and fundamental to the future of all the sectors. The role of European Food and Safety Authority (EFSA) in the EU market must be considered and consequences if negative decisions on 'other substances' claim will be adopted in each country's legislation
Impact factor or useless fight
No full textThe JIF is a measure of the importance of an academic journal, reflecting the average number of citations of recent articles published in the journal. Therefore, journals with a higher JIF are deemed to be more important than those with a lower JIF. Authors publishing in journals with a high JIF have a competitive advantage. JIF calculation started in 1975 for those journals that were indexed in the Journal Citation Report (www.nd.edu/-pkarmat/citations/citations.html). Initially, most of the researchers considered the JIF an impartial and reliable validation. They even appreciated the simplification of a complex evaluation to a number that allowed a very simple and immediate comparison. For a short time, this was the single generally accepted solution, despite the complication in calculating the JIF. However the JIF’s dominance has been short. Some started to consider the matter in a different way and the criticism finally converged into a protest. The main proposed solutions are to continue with the JIF as it is, to revise and correct it, or to adopt other evaluation methods
Identification of thiosildenafil in a health supplement
No full textThe presence of a sildenafil derivative, the thiosildenafil, in an herbal product has been evidenced first by HPTLC and later determined by isolation and analysis of spectroscopic data. The analyzed product is nowadays marketed as dietary supplement containing herbal extracts and claimed for male and female sexual improvement. This report is noteworthy since it is clear that adulterated materials can cause serious health problems if they are consumed as herbal "natural" products, generally considered deprived of toxicity by the consumers. The use of a simple and reliable method, based on HPTLC, to determine synthetic adulterations is reported in this paper
About the role of natural product research
No full textIn recent years, Natural Product Research (NPR) has witnessed a marked increase in number of published papers. The main improvements are related to the impact factor (IF) and the papers
received for publication. The IF has stabilised over the crucial limit of 1 and is currently increasing. The journal is now receiving over 2000 papers per year. There is evident growth, which we hope can continue in future years
HPTLC fingerprint: a modern approach for the analytical determination of Botanicals
Full text linkAvailability of rapid and reliable methods for detection of quality in plant raw materials and botanicals is urgently needed. The recent HPTLC instrumentation allows to obtain fingerprints useful to ascertain identity and composition. The results of direct application of HPTLC devices in selected cases, using the fingerprint approach, are here reported, considered and compared with other methods. HPTLC is proposed as an useful tool for analytical validation of the novel forms of natural products
Shedding light on bioactivity of botanicals by-products: neem cake compounds deter ovipositioj of arbovirus Aedes aldopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) in the field
No full textNeem the tree of 21st century
No full textDuring the last decay, the commercial importance of Neem tree (Azadirachta indica A. Juss) increased exponentially, as well as its global diffusion and the number of derived products in the market. Despite the identification of hundreds of constituents in the seed oil, the main marketed product, a lot of chemistry still must be carried on. The high complexity of chemical composition and the derived multiple activity ask for an exceptional research validation. Azadiractins, among the main constituents of the oil and so far considered the responsible of the insecticide activity, could be only in part involved, calling for investigation on other constituents, including the degradation products. Starting from reliable chemical data, Biology can take the center of the scene to validate neem as the multipurpose tree of the future. Starting from the actual medical and insecticidal applications it is time to explore other possible commercial applications in accordance with the future depicted by the International Research Institutions
Analisi di multi ingredienti di origine vegetale mediante un nuovo metodo basato sul fingerprint HPTLC
No full textAnalysis of multi-ingredient food supplements by fingerprint HPTLC approach
Full text linkThe increase of import/export of every kind of herbal products calls urgently for adequate controls. Analysis of herbal food supplement (botanicals) is a difficult task, like in the composition determination of a multi-ingredient product, where several botanical drugs were used. Actually, this is an important argument in consideration of health security. The authors reported the results of an analytical approach based on HPTLC (high performance thin layer chromatography) fingerprints comparison and tailored to determine the composition of marketed multi-ingredient botanicals. The method gave positive data in case of the presence
of 3-5 species, whereas difficulties were recorded when the number of plants is increased
- …
