**3. Nutraceuticals and functional foods**

Nutraceutical foods, a borderline between food and drugs, are conventional or processed foods that have or added a useful food component which has a health beneficial effect [57, 58]. Nutraceuticals foods provide medicinal and health benefits and these include prevention, management and/or treatment of a disease. Examples of nutraceutical foods are isolated nutrients, dietary supplements, functional foods, medicinal products and processed foods such as cereals, beverages and soups [59, 60]. The interest of nutraceuticals in prevention of CVDs was invigorated after the examinations of a proximate relationship between their consumption, as shown by higher levels of plasma and low CVDs incidence [61, 62]. Japan is the first country that introduced functional foods in the 1980s and is the only country that has distinct regulatory system that approves functional foods [58]. Functional foods contain dietary fibres, polyphenolic compounds, herbs and botanicals and oligosaccharides with their correlating health benefits [63]. It is believed that functional foods use their cardio-protective effects mostly via antioxidant actions which lower blood lipid levels.

The following factors differentiate functional foods from dietary supplements: (1) Functional foods are expected not to only supplement the diet but should also play a role to prevent and/or treat disease(s) and (2) Functional foods are utilised as traditional foods or as exclusive items of a meal or diet [64]. Dietary components play useful roles apart from basic nutrition and this led to the development of nutraceuticals and functional food concept [65]. Functional foods have different mechanism of actions, such as decreasing low density lipoprotein and elevated blood total cholesterols [66].

#### **3.1 Functional foods with health related properties**

Different functional foods are beneficial in preventing and treating CVDs (**Table 3**). Dietary fibres of fruit (with pectin) and vegetable, fish oil and oily seeds such as walnut, almond and many others lower the lipid levels in humans and this is attributed to both prevention of fat absorption and termination of synthesis of hepatic cholesterol [81]. A higher consumption of whole grains, bioactive compounds, antioxidants vitamins and folic acid appears to reverse the harmful vascular effects of homocysteine in the heart [82, 83]. A substantial cardiovascular benefit of polyphenolic compounds, vitamins (ascorbic acid, vitamin E), and minerals such as selenium and magnesium in food is thought to be the ability of these components to scavenge free radicals generated during atherogenesis [84, 85].


*Role of Functional Food in Treating and Preventing Cardiovascular Diseases DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96614*

#### **Table 3.**

*Different functional foods beneficial in preventing and treating CVDs.*
