I came across this article:
http://www.functionalfoodscenter.net/files/49461330.pdf and wanted to share with the group.
Has anyone had positive experiences with the three “foods” mentioned in the study?
A function food is a fancy name for a “nutraceutical,” a food containing health-giving additives and having medicinal benefit. The paper you cite is from an alternative medicine journal and cites some evidence for the use of these three foods (although I we should be wary of calling anything a food that contains the word “extract”). It gives weak evidence that any of them work and actually reveals potential adverse health consequences (olive leaf extract was observed to cause DNA damage in humans).
If you want to do research on these topics you can go to pubmed. For instance you can find 176 papers on the “diabetes and turmeric” (although you have to be careful, it is often misspelled as tumeric in some of the alternative medicine papers). A good place of objective information on alternative medicine is NIH which runs the National Center for Complimentary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). Here is what they say about Turmeric and Fenugreek (they don’t even mention olive leaf extract, a bad sign). The only positive thing they have to say about any of these is that fenugreek has been found in a few small studies to lower blood sugars.
Perhaps others have had some good personal experiences, but there isn’t overall any scientific evidence for these and I would not NIH and others have been looking.
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