What are neutraceuticals, and what are pharmaceuticals?
Through the ages, different cultures found medicinal properties in foods that were available to them. These would include spices like turmeric, which would then be used in poultices for their anti-inflammatory and anti bacterial properties for wound care. These then evolved into tinctures and extracts of different herbs, roots and barks in old world medical systems, e.g. Ayurvedic systems, as well as those used by native healers.
With the development of the modern pharmaceutical industry, new chemical compounds were developed. These targeted specific targets in the body’s physiological systems. These included cardiac medications which helped stabilize the hearts electrical systems, or helped the blood flow better to the heart and brain; drugs to prevent seizures or blood clots; drugs to compensate for the body’s decreased ability to produce insulin and thyroid hormones, drugs to kill cancer cells. These also included drugs to kills bacteria and viruses: antibiotics and antiviral therapy. These drugs went through intensive testing for efficacy and safety, and needed approval by regulatory authorities like the FDA to be marketed to the public. This went hand in hand with being able to patent the compound for exclusive manufacture and marketing, and being able to charge prices to ensure profit.
In this system, natural products went ignored by mainstream medicine for many decades. They started getting a second look as alternative and complimentary medicines started being used by people exploring these options on their own. Natural products have been found to have a lot of health benefits, but have some major limitations in our knowledge base about how they are absorbed, what the minimum doses are, what drug interactions are caused, with what ill effects. Thus far, clinical trials have not been comprehensive and widespread, because of the lack of financial backing. These products cannot be patented, hence do not provide a financial incentive to the pharmaceutical industry to be able to reap the benefit of investing in such research. Trials have been limited to small studies undertaken by individual motivated researchers, and have been unable to be expanded to large, blinded trials which are the gold standard in establishing benefit. This is necessary to establish safety and therapeutic dosages, i.e. the dose needed to have the desired effect, e.g. decrease blood sugars, or cholesterol, or blood pressure, or prevent kidney stones, or heart attacks or strokes, or cancer. Without such research, we don’t really know why we are consuming billions of dollars worth of these products. In addition, neutraceutical manufacture is outside the purview of regulation of manufacture, and we don’t really know if the capsule contains what it says it contains. We don’t know how these substances interact with each other in our bodies, or with our other medicines. Such research is important, but it is unclear whether it will ever get done, but it is vital that it does, so we can use neutraceuticals safely and wisely.