Nutraceuticals are foods or food constituents that provide medical or health benefits, including the prevention and/or treatment of a disease. Nutraceuticals have advantage over conventional medicines because they can avoid side effects and can take the place of a natural dietary supplement, among other benefits. Nutraceuticals are typically grouped on the basis of their natural source or chemical grouping, or categorized into nutrients, herbals, dietary supplements, dietary fiber, and so forth. Within the nutraceutical industry, the most rapid growth has been in natural/herbal products and dietary supplements, the latter of which are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure their safety Herbal nutraceuticals are used as powerful instruments in maintaining health and to act against nutritionally-induced acute and chronic diseases, thereby promoting optimal health, longevity, and quality of life.
The inclusion of foods, dietary supplements, and herbal products in the development of 21st Century medical treatment paradigms can help assure their convenience, acceptability, and accessibility. Plants from widely separated regions of the world that are components of traditional medicines used to treat specific conditions are phylogenetically clustered. This feature has significant cross-culture patterns that can inform drug development and supports the value of linking robust ethnobotanical and ethnomedical studies with 21st Century technologies and systems analyses to speed the identification of functionally relevant bioactivities. However, the amount of scientific evidence on foods, dietary supplements, and herbal products varies widely, and hence need thorough scientific evidences before their uses.
On 16th December 2022, Research and Innovation Support for Higher Impact (RISHI) will lead the
International Conference, “Foods, Dietary Supplements, and Herbal Products Treating the Diseases of the 21st Century: Moving from Traditional to Scientific Research”. This conference will contribute to exploring the role of food, dietary supplements, and herbal products in the treatment of 21st Century diseases in a more scientific manner and explore the gaps in their scientific acceptability.
This Research Topic therefore welcomes both research and review papers on the following topics:
• food diversity and its effect on consumption and health;
• nutraceutical research: from traditional to the scientific revolution;
• dietary supplements of natural origin in the treatment of disease conditions;
• processing and functionality of natural products;
• traditional natural products and their role in the treatment of diseases;
• when food becomes medicine in the treatment of disease conditions;
• medicinal plants: diversity and functionality;
• digital marketing of traditional natural products: meeting the supply and demand.
Only manuscripts relating to nutrition and food science should be submitted to Frontiers in Nutrition.
Pharmacological research and manuscripts relating to non-food compounds and herbal medicines should be submitted to Frontiers in Pharmacology. In such cases, the manuscripts submitted to this project will be peer-reviewed and need to fully comply with the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version
here). Importantly, please ascertain that the ethnopharmacological context is clearly described (pillar 3d) and that the material investigated is characterized in detail chemically (
pillars 2 a and b, see the ConPhyMP statement Front. Pharmacol. 13:953205.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.953205).