Review Article Therapeutic Potential of Dietary Phenolic Acids

Copyright © 2015 Venkata Saibabu 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. Although modern lifestyle has eased the quality of human life, this lifestyle’s related patterns have imparted negative effects on health to acquiremultiple diseases.Many synthetic drugs are invented during the lastmillennium butmost if not all of them possess several side effects and proved to be costly. Convincing evidences have established the premise that the phytotherapeutic potential of natural compounds and need of search for novel drugs from natural sources are of high priority. Phenolic acids (PAs) are a class of secondary metabolites spread throughout the plant kingdom and generally involved in plethora of cellular processes involved in plant growth and reproduction and also produced as defense mechanism to sustain various environmental stresses. Extensive research on PAs strongly suggests that consumption of these compounds hold promise to offer protection against various ailments in humans. This paper focuses on the naturally derived PAs and summarizes the action mechanisms of these compounds during disease conditions. Based on the available information in the literature, it is suggested that use of PAs as drugs is very promising; however more research and clinical trials are necessary before these bioactive molecules can be made for treatment. Finally this review provides greater awareness of the promise that natural PAs hold for use in the disease prevention and therapy. 1