The notion of improving the condition of skin through the ingestion of nutrients has longstanding roots in history. A food or food product that imparts medical or health benefits, other than its primary nutritive purpose, is considered a nutracuetical.
The term is a combination of the words nutrition and pharmaceutical, initially coined by Dr. Stephen L. DeFelice1, founder and chairman of the Foundation of Innovation Medicine (FIM), Crawford, New Jersey. Nutraceuticals are not subject to the same testing and regulations as pharmaceutical drugs nor are they classified as medical devices. The human integument is continuously exposed to fluctuations in internal and external environments that may influence its anatomy and physiology. These may include photo-ageing, inflammatory processes, immune dysfunction, imbalanced epidermal homeostasis, and a whole plethora of other skin disorders.2 Advances in nutritional science scrutinise the relation between food intake and subsequent health, and impacts ingredients that may have cause to be biologically relevant at a cellular level for optimising skin conditions. Nutraceuticals refer to…
