Amorfrutins: A promising class of natural products that are beneficial to health.

The incidence of complex noncommunicable diseases has strongly increased over the last several decades in the US, Europe and other parts of the world that have adopted a western lifestyle (M. Ezzati, E. Riboli, Science- 2012, 337, 1482-1487; S. Smyth, A. Heron, Nat. Med.- 2006, 12, 75). Despite considerable investment in the development of new types of drugs, options for the treatment of many common diseases remain inadequate. If current trends prevail, the rising incidence of disorders such as obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) will soon result in an unsustainable burden on society (World Health Organization Technical Report Series- 2000, 894, i-xii, 1-253). Given the difficulty of treating fully developed complex disorders, new strategies for early intervention and prevention of common diseases are of great interest. Dietary natural products with beneficial effects, such as the recently described antidiabetic and lipid-lowering amorfrutins, could pave the way for efficiently treating and preventing metabolic and other complex diseases (C. Weidner, et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA- 2012, 109, 7257-7262).