The many uses of fruit and vegetable powders

The growing need for clean label products is a broad demand but a real one. According to Nielsen, clean label products have been the biggest growth drivers of the packaged food and beverage industry in the past five years. Fruit powders can help slim down ingredient labels and increase wellness claims as they are natural and retain many of their built-in health advantages.Welch’s Concord Fruit Powder is packed with a wide variety of polyphenols. The polyphenols found in concord grapes have been shown to help support a healthy heart and early research indicates they also provide enhanced cognitive function. The fruit & vegetable powder format has a denser concentration of the polyphenols allowing it to have a real effect on products.

Herbal extracts are primarily added to the cosmetic formulations due to several associated properties such as antioxidant, anti inflammatory, antiseptic and antimicrobial properties. Even today, people in rural and urban areas depend upon herbs for traditional cosmetics. Information on the herbal cosmetics was collected via electronic search (using pub med, scifinder, Google Scholar and web of science) and library search for articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore, information also was obtained from some local books on ethnopharmacology. The herbal extracts, as a whole or part, have been used for various ailments of the skin, hair, and dental care for overall appearance. Cosmetics alone are not sufficient to take care of skin and others body parts, it requires association of active ingredients to check the damage and ageing of the skin. Herbal cosmetics have gained much popularity among the population. Herbal cosmetics products claimed to have efficacy and intrinsic acceptability due to routine use in daily life and avoid the side effects which are commonly seen in synthetic products. Due to the awareness of the environmental damage caused by industrialization, a trend has developed to use products with natural ingredients. Various adverse effects may occur in the form of acute toxicity, percutaneous absorption, skin irritation, eye irritation, skin sensitization and photosensitization, sub chronic toxicity, mutagenicity, and photo toxicity by the usage of synthetic products that’s why today’s generation prefers herbal cosmetics for hair, skin and dental care. This review attempts and emphasizes the benefits of herbal extracts in cosmetics.

The Rise Of Functional IngredientsFunctional foods are typically classified as traditional foods that have been enriched with an ingredient (bioactive in many cases) that is able to provide additional benefits to human health. These days, a functional ingredient does not have a strict definition, however, they are broadly considered as ingredients that have the potential to influence health over and above their basic nutritional value. These ingredients can be obtained from a variety of sources such as primary produce, marine sources, microorganisms as well as inorganic raw materials. Many of these functional ingredients can also be used for the preparation of nutraceuticals which include food & beverage products as well as dietary supplements.