Sea buckthorn berries: A potential source of valuable nutrients for nutraceuticals and cosmoceuticals

Sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides L), an ancient crop with modern virtues has recently gained worldwide attention, mainly for its nutritional and medicinal value as the berries contain different kinds of nutrients and bioactive compounds including vitamins, fatty acids, free amino acids and elemental components. This review briefly summarises the current literature and discusses its potential as a crop and its post harvest processing. The available compositional data regarding sea buckthorn berries is tabulated to produce a comprehensive source of recent information on chemical and medicinally important constituents of different origin and varieties. The presence of valuable chemicals and nutritionally important constituents in sea buckthorn berries, and from the scientific knowledge of their importance, it is clear that sea buckthorn berry is one of the most important sources of these constituents, and should be used as alternative nutritional sources in the commercial market. Similarly in depth investigation on the effect of processing on the total nutrient content of sea buckthorn berries species growing in different agro-ecological regions needs to be carried out. Thus, several important knowledge gaps identified in this paper would give impetus to new academic and R&D activities, in turn generating innovative job profile in food and cosmoceutical industries. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.