Conventional treatments for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) present a number of problems, in terms of both safety and efficacy. A number of different alternative therapies have been studied, including dietary modifications, nutritional supplements, botanicals, and antibiotics. While the response to these treatments is variable and often unpredictable, some patients have shown dramatic improvement or ...

Utilization of natural products is radically changing. Changes were mainly due to the outcome in the market of a plethora of new food supplements, and in particular those generally named botanicals for their common plant origin. The validation of these novel products needs powerful analytical devices tailored for the study of herbal extracts in order to assess composition and face their natural...

Herbs and botanicals are used by a large number of people in the United States and have been used therapeutically in Europe for decades. Consumers are becoming more interested and subsequently better informed on the use of herbs to self-treat minor illness. Unfortunately, because of conflicting and anecdotal information, variable potency, and the widespread availability of herbs, many home care...

This is the fifth in a series of six articles to discuss the major classes of dietary supplements (vitamins; minerals; amino acids; herbs or botanicals; and metabolites/constituents/extracts). The major focus is on efficacy of such dietary supplements to enhance exercise or sports performance.

BACKGROUND Consumers increasingly choose food supplements in addition to their diet. Research on supplement users finds they are likely to be female, older and well-educated; Furthermore, supplement users are often characterised as being especially health-oriented, an observation which is termed the 'inverse supplement hypothesis'. However, results are dependent on the substance in question. Li...

Botanical dietary supplements (herbal products) have flooded the market in the United States over the past decade, and studies show a significant percentage of Americans use them. With increasing frequency and duration of exposure, some serious adverse effects, though relatively uncommon, have been reported. Among the most troublesome is the association of some botanicals with serious hepatotox...

Recently, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) began reviewing articles about dietary supplements. The purpose of this commentary is to provide guidelines to authors and reviewers for articles on one category of supplement ingredients, botanicals. The botanicals in the studies published by the AJCN tend to fall into 1 of 2 groups: 1) plants as foods containing nonessential bioactiv...

Detection of drug-drug interactions is essential during the early stages of drug discovery and development, and the understanding of drug-botanical interactions is important for the safe use of botanical dietary supplements. Among the different forms of drug interactions that are known, inhibition of cytochrome P450 (P450) enzymes is the most common cause of drug-drug or drug-botanical interact...

Nutraceuticals are bioactive chemicals that found in everyday foods or botanical sources. They can be consumed as functional dietary supplements and provide additional health benefits addition to the important nutritional components. Antioxidants, phytochemicals, fatty acids, amino probiotics just a few of compounds gathered sources make up supplements. well-known for their role illness treatme...

When it comes to supplements, ?working out? which ones are safe and effective can be difficult. Unfortunately, there is a lot of mixed information on supplements in general, but this becomes clearer cut when focusing on specific amino acid supplements. To date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) [2] isn't authorized to regulate supplements as safe or effective ? whether they be amino a...