What Are Medical Foods?
Medical foods is a unique category of FDA regulated products that meet the distinctive nutritional requirements or metabolic deficiencies of a particular disease state. The distinctive nutritional needs associated with a disease reflect the total amount needed by a healthy person to support life or maintain homeostasis, adjusted for the distinctive changes in the nutritional needs of the patient as a result of the effects of the disease process on absorption, metabolism and excretion. Medical foods such as Theramine® which is specifically formulated to manage the pain and inflammation of specific disease states, go beyond simple dietary interventions, and are specifically formulated to meet the distinctive nutritional requirements of a specific disease that cannot be met with a simple dietary shift. Increased nutritional requirements can be the result of inadequate ingestion of nutrients, malabsorption, impaired metabolism, loss of nutrients due to diarrhea, increased nutritional turnover rates inherent in certain disease states, or the impact of drug therapies. The nutritional requirements of an individual in a disease state can be considerably different from those of a healthy individual. Recognizing and managing these increased nutritional requirements should be an integral part of the medical management of clinical conditions. This may be accomplished through the use of an FDA-regulated therapeutic product class known as Medical Foods.
Benefits of Medical Foods
Prescription drugs are widely used by both physicians and patients and can be a very important component in the treatment of disease. Unfortunately, these therapies do not address the increased nutritional requirements of a disease and are often associated with a number of adverse side effects.
Medical foods are an important and often complementary category of therapeutic agents known to address disease through a nutritional pathway, and can often mimic the therapeutic effects of drugs. This class of FDA regulated therapies has been in use since the 1950's, and are composed of ingredients that are Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS).
As awareness about the relationship between nutrition and disease increases, physicians and patients are incorporating medical foods as part of a total disease management strategy. Medical foods offer patients an effective therapeutic tool for managing pain, sleep, and cognitive disorders without many of the risks associated with pharmaceutical drugs.
Indications
Physician Therapeutic’s medical foods are amino acid-based, FDA-regulated medications specially formulated to manage the increased nutritional requirements associated with the altered metabolic processes of certain disease states. Clinical data suggests that addressing the nutritional deficiencies associated with certain disease states can reduce symptoms of a disease and improve clinical outcomes.*