Nutraceuticals for metabolic syndrome management: from laboratory to benchside

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a world-wide epidemic disease associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Treatment strategies include pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic methods, with varying degrees of success rate all over the world. Pharmaceutical interest in this field is growing, together with patients' requests for supplementary (or "alternative") treatments. The knowledge of nutraceuticals beneficial effects in subjects with the MetS could help us to better define the appropriate treatment for these subjects, in particular those with contraindications for commonly used drugs, or to achieve guidelines suggested targets. On the other side, it could be not convenient to use a nutraceutical to treat each metabolic syndrome component (i.e. from 3 to 5) in each affected subjects. Thus, this review tries to focus on widely marketed nutraceuticals with clinically demonstrated effects on more than one component of the MetS, namely omega-3 fatty acids, berberine, psyllium and other soluble fibers, cinnamon, chromium picolinate, banaba, and bitter gourd.