Review Article Medicinal Plants and Their Inhibitory Activities against Pancreatic Lipase

Copyright © 2015 Atefehalsadat Seyedan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Obesity is recognized as a major life style disorder especially in developing countries and it is prevailing at an alarming speed in new world countries due to fast food intake, industrialization, and reduction of physical activity. Furthermore, it is associated with a vast number of chronic diseases and disabilities. To date, relatively effective drugs, from either natural or synthetic sources, are generally associatedwith serious side effects, often leading to cessation of clinical trials or evenwithdrawal from themarket. In order to find new compounds which are more effective or with less adverse effects compared to orlistat, the drug that has been approved for obesity, new compounds isolated from natural products are being identified and screened for antiobesity effects, in particular, for their pancreatic lipase inhibitory effect. Pancreatic lipase inhibitory activity has been extensively used for the determination of potential efficacy of natural products as antiobesity agents. In attempts to identify natural products for overcoming obesity, more researches have been focused on the identification of newer pancreatic lipase inhibitors with less unpleasant adverse effects. In this review, we consider the potential role of plants that have been investigated for their pancreatic lipase inhibitory activity. 1