ABSTRACT
Nutraceuticals are products that have medicinal importance in addition to nutritional value. They possess physiological benefits, providing a barrier against multiple acute to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders, and have the power to reduce the aging process. Nowadays, interest has moved from allopathic to Ayurveda to nutraceuticals. Traditional medicinal approaches, like pills and tablets in semi-solid form, lack efficacy and bioactive targeted delivery. Liposomes, niosomes, and ethosomes are some of the approaches utilized in the past to deliver nutraceuticals. Among them, various phytochemicals (nutraceuticals) such as rutin, resveratrol, curcumin, herbal polyphenols, and carotenoids (beta-carotene) present in orange, green, and yellow vegetables and fruits possess anti-cancer properties and have been used against various neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Most recently, multiple therapeutic and medicinal techniques have been reported for targeted delivery of nutraceuticals against Alzheimer’s disease; their inherent antioxidant properties provided immune function improvement. In the medicinal approach, curcumin used in different nanoformulations, such as micelles, has provided bioactive targeted delivery. The success of these techniques depends on precise selection of the types and properties of nutraceuticals. Though they are adequate, scaling up these techniques to a large scale is troublesome. This chapter overviews the application of such techniques using nano-nutraceuticals and their future concerns.
