Every time I visit my in-laws I am bombarded with questions about supplements and nutrition-I guess my father-in-law believes I have the expertise because I write about this stuff. Anyway, I always tell him to ask his doctor about the vitamins and other nutrients he wants to take for his heart, perhaps even see a nutritionist. But visit after visit somehow we wind up sitting at his kitchen table talking about the latest nutrient he's added to his heart health arsenal (i.e., kitchen cabinet, pictured left).

My father-in-law is very good at doing his research, whatever the subject-he's given my husband and me great financial advice; he's even improved our golf game. But I am particularly impressed when it comes to supplements. In fact, there are definitely times that he is more knowledgeable than I am about this subject. I wonder, however, if there is another reason he continues to talk to me about this. Could it be that he has no one else to talk to?

My father-in-law has told me time and again that his cardiologist is "extremely knowledgeable" and I don't doubt that. I'm sure he's very good at putting in stents and doing bypass surgery. But I suspect he's probably a little deficient when it comes to talking about other interventions like nutrients or relaxation therapies. Thankfully, they're not all that way.

Mimi Guarneri, MD, a practicing cardiologist and author of the book, The Heart Speaks, was a speaker at this year's CRN Annual Conference. I found her to be incredibly smart and inspiring-she IS integrative medicine personified.

I happened to read Dr. Guarneri's book cover to cover on the plane ride home from the conference. In it she speaks about a variety of cases she's dealt with over the years, which have taken her from treating the heart like a broken machine, to treating it as the essence of human beings, the "whole heart." In an interview with WebMD earlier this year, she said: "I am not an alternative medicine doctor…I look at the whole person-mind, body, spirit-and use the best of Western medicine and alternative medicine, the best of both worlds."

Today she resides at The Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine in La Jolla, CA, where patients can get such treatments as acupuncture, biofeedback, healing touch, massage, mindfulness-based stress reduction, "stress mastery" and diathermy. There's even an herbal pharmacy, which stocks vitamins, dietary supplements and botanical medicines. Centers like this take patients beyond cholesterol tests and EKGs, and there must be more of them in this country if we have any chance of fighting heart disease, which has been the number one killer of Americans for as long as I can remember.

As for the rest of the world, there is no time like the present for nutraceuticals. As countries around the globe become more developed, they too are likely to fall victim to major health issues like obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. And wherever there is a health issue there should be solutions that marry the best traditional and conventional medicine have to offer.

Our International Markets Report (page 34) seems to expand each year we put it together. This time around we are covering nine regions, including Australia/New Zealand, Canada, China, Eastern Europe, India, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East and Western Europe. Capsugel's Peter Zambetti also offers a nice preface to this report, which discusses the most established as well as up-and-coming markets for dietary supplements and functional foods.

Someday I hope every consumer the world over has a medicine cabinet like the one in my father-in-law's house. In fact, maybe it's time I did a little rearranging myself.

Rebecca Wright
Editor
rwright@rodpub.com