BEVERLY HILLS – Resveratrol is certainly the powerhouse of what nutritional supplements can offer with a mind-boggling cornucopia of across-the-board, high-end benefits to improve health dramatically. Yet these remarkable benefits have been somewhat elusive owing to extremely limited bioavailability when resveratrol is taken orally. Not only has it been difficult to enhance its solubility and increase absorption owing to acids and digestive enzymes in the stomach, intestines, and liver but it has also been a challenge to inhibit resveratrols metabolism to other substances and sustain high plasma levels. Moreover, delivering them in adequate amounts to the most important tissue targets has been virtually unachievable. Until now.
Nanospheres are about to change all that, because they embrace and embody state-of-the-art nutrient-delivery technology that can defeat the pitfalls of the oral delivery route.
A product of nanotechnology, as the name implies, nanospheres are very small particles, measured in nanometers (nm), or billionths of a meter. These particles, with dimensions in the range from 1 to 1000 nm, are now burgeoning into the field of drug- and nutrient-delivery systems with diameters as small as 50 nm or even lower. The ones starting to show particularly great efficacy are made of natural lipids, in which lipophilic compounds, such as resveratrol and curcuminoids, can readily dissolve. Their purpose is to improve the bioavailability of such compounds by exploiting their own special size range and unique properties.
Long under development, nanospheres typically consist of a central, spherical core of a natural, plant-based lipid, such as a solid triglyceride (fat), encased by a shell consisting of a natural phospholipid, such as phosphatidylcholine. The latter acts as an emulsifying agent during the production process; thereafter it serves a protective function, its chemical properties playing a vital role in stabilizing the nanospheres in their aqueous environment.
Resveratrol dissolves into the lipids as the nanospheres form during the fabrication process; it winds up being dissolved primarily in the core or in the shell. There, it’s protected from its environment until the nanospheres are destroyed by lipases, which are enzymes that break down fats into fatty acids and glycerol. The resveratrol is then released.
