ABSTRACT
Dietary supplements are also called food supplements, dened as any product (other than tobacco) that is intended to supplement the diet. It mainly contains one or more of the following: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or other botanical; an amino acid or metabolite; an extract; or any combination of the previously mentioned items. According to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, a dietary supplement may be marketed in food form if it is not represented as a conventional food and is clearly labeled as a dietary supplement (IFIC 1999, IMNRC 2004). Nutraceutical, which is a hybrid of nutrition and pharmaceutical, was coined in 1989 by Stephen L. DeFelice, founder and chairman of the Foundation of Innovation Medicine (Kalra 2003), and dened as “Food, or parts of food, that provide medical or health benets, including the prevention and treatment of disease” (Keservani et al. 2010a). Functional foods, according to their generally accepted denition, are “any food or food ingredient that may provide a health benet beyond the traditional nutrients it contains” (IFIC 1999). There are indications for some benecial effects of nutraceuticals such as antioxidant, mushrooms, vitamins, essential amino acids, phytochemicals, and polyunsaturated fatty acids in infant foods on the developing immune response (Keservani et al. 2010a, Chintale et al. 2013).
