Abstract

The concept of nutraceuticals is widely used in clinical practice. At present, there are many nutraceutical products covering drugs, dietary supplements and food ingredients that can be applied for management of health disorders. For effective use of nutraceuticals in internal medicine, the delivery of nutraceuticals for body usage is very important. Based on the present advanced nanotechnology, many new techniques can be used for improving delivery of nutraceuticals. The updates on delivery of nutraceuticals using nanotechnology will be summarized and presented in this brief article.

INTRODUCTION

For everyone, the four essentials of life include food, habit, dressing and drug. Drug has been known and used for managing of diseases for thousand years. Nevertheless, to get the good health, not only drug for treatment of disease but also food for health promotion is important. Food is accepted as the source of necessary nutrition for everyone. Nutrition from food passes basic biological process in human body and further help normalizing physiological process (1). Within the recent years, the new concepts for applying and integrating the use of food as drug for fighting of diseases and promoting health are raised (2, 3). This is the origin of the nutraceuticals concept (2). In fact, using food as drug can provide several advantages. Food is generally ingested and it has lower toxicity comparing to drug. In nutraceuticals, the food is accepted as the source of nutrition that can be further use for controlling and modifying of physiological process within human body.
The concept of nutraceuticals is widely used in clinical practice. The focus is usually on the active ingredient within food that can be useful in medicine (4 - 5). Sim ...