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What’s going on with nutraceuticals and medical foods?
March 7, 2017
By: Ben Locwin
Contributing Editor, Contract Pharma
At the last medical conference I gave a speech at, I asked an informal poll of the audience: “How many of you, with a show of hands, takes a vitamin/mineral or other supplement?” The results were surprising. Well over 90% of the audience raised their hands, simultaneous with a wry smile as though they were catching themselves doing something that they would advise against. The supplement industry in the U.S. is estimated at $35 billion last year, according to Statista, and is expected to reach $278 billion worldwide by 2024 based on data from Grand View Research, Inc. This worldwide growth also includes the medical foods market. Recently, Nestlé announced groundbreaking strategies to approach fortified medical foods—a market estimated at $15 billion—banking on the segment to the tune of $500 million, which is the budget to 2021 at Nestlé’s Institute of Health Science (NIHS) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The nutraceutical and medical foods industries are in an interesting place at the moment. Dietary supplements represent a market that has defied all analysts’ expectations and has grown even when competitor markets have shrunk. The interesting thing about these markets is that they represent a forward-looking advancement philosophy to the foods and nutrients we eat (‘improving on nature’), which is in stark contrast to the majority of popular media about foods—the messages which espouse whole foods, unprocessed foods, raw foods, and organic or non-GMO foods. So the public has a bit of an identity crisis within itself. Do people want raw, organic, unprocessed foods in all practical cases? Or do we want to put our faith in nutraceutical supplements to give us high-dose specific micronutrients that we may be lacking? The real science Of course, I’ll give you the real science, which suggests in-aggregate that nutraceuticals aren’t very effective for people. For example, curcumin, which has been touted for everything from treatment for Alzheimer’s disease to bone loss to baldness has recently shown to be less-effective than previously thought. Perhaps it’s due to assay confounding. The authors of this research on curcumin chemistry noted, “Curcumin has recently been classified as both a PAINS (pan-assay interference compounds) and an IMPS (invalid metabolic panaceas) candidate. The likely false activity of curcumin in vitro and in vivo has resulted in >120 clinical trials of curcuminoids against several diseases. No double-blinded, placebo controlled clinical trial of curcumin has been successful.”3 Let’s look at the multivitamin/mineral market. It is estimated to be worth about $12 billion annually, and about 53% of American adults (>70% of those 65 and older) take these supplements. Similarly, Larry Appel, director of the Johns Hopkins Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research noted that, “Pills are not a shortcut to better health and the prevention of chronic diseases.” Appel was co-author of an article2 in the Annals of Internal Medicine (2013), which looked at various studies of vitamin/mineral supplements. Here’s some of what the researchers found:
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