Functional foods of the world

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Oct, 2006  by Irene Alleger

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Eating and Healing: Traditional Food as Medicine

by Andrea Pieroni and Lisa Leimar Price, Editors

Food Products Press (Haworth Press, Inc.), 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, New York 13904; 800-429-6784

Quality paperback, c. 2006, $39.95, 406 pp.

In Eating and Healing, a diverse group of researchers, including anthropologists, botanists, and ecologists, report on the use of medicinal foods in indigenous cultures. Edited by an ethnobotanist/pharmacognosist and an anthropologist, the book, full of fascinating information, is a surprisingly readable text by scholars.

The first chapter is a good example of the multidisciplinary nature of the work. Louis E. Grivetti is a geographer trained in nutrition. His chapter, "Edible Wild Plants as Food and as Medicine: Reflections on Thirty Years of Fieldwork," is derived from research done in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Evidence suggested that dietary use of edible wild plants remained an integral component of the diets of many sub-Saharan groups: "Our findings emphasized the need for caution when planners and economists embarked upon agricultural development, since expansion of agricultural fields into bush lands merely to produce more acres/hectares of domesticated cultivars--at the expense of edible wild plant habitats--was a short-sighted policy."

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Fifteen more chapters follow, all described with fieldwork details, making Eating and Healing an important and interesting book for anyone interested in medicinal foods used throughout the world.

A chapter on "Tibetan Foods and Medicines" explores the use of antioxidant foods as mediators of high-altitude nutrition. Other chapters look at wild plants in farming environments in northeast Thailand and among Albanians and southern Italians. Another chapter describes the use of digestive beverages as medicinal food in a cattle-farming community in northern Spain.

On the north coast of British Columbia, the aboriginal people use red laver seaweed (Porphyra abbottae) as an important traditional food. The harvesting, processing, and use of this seaweed, ongoing for many centuries by the Gitga'at and their ancestors, is still practiced today. The use of seaweed worldwide is discussed; seaweed accounts for some ten percent of the diet in countries such as Japan.

The book also includes a chapter on herbal use in the US and the problem of establishing safety standards. An overview of Chinese Medical Theory is also included as a basis for herbal use in the US. The chapter, "Medicinal Foods in Cuba: Promoting Health in the Household," includes an extensive table of medicinal food plants used in Cuba--most of them cultivated in traditional home gardens:

  Within Cuban households, staple and secondary foods are regarded as
  the main way to preserve good health and treat minor ailments. Most
  starch-rich tubers and viandas of African origin are regarded as
  nourishing foods, as they were used and cultivated by slaves faced
  with hard work on the sugarcane plantations. Fruits and, to a lesser
  extent, vegetables, are used mainly as depuratives ("good for the
  blood") and in the treatment of gastrointestinal afflictions.

Another chapter discusses "Healthy Fish" in the Amazon Basin. In particular, the oils of some fish species are used in treatments of illnesses such as lesishmaniosis, rheumatism, cystitis, and earache. "Edible and Healing Plants in the Ethnobotany of Native Inhabitants of the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest Areas of Brazil" offers another extensive chart of edible and healing plants of Brazil.

In "Food Medicines in the Bolivian Andes," the researchers report on medicinal plants used by Quechua healers from the Bolivian Andes. The top five plant families in terms of medicinal species are reported to be the Asteraceae, Apiaceae, Ericaceae, Rosaceae, and Ranunculaceae.

There's a chapter on "Gathering of Wild Plant Foods with Medicinal Use in a Manpuche Community of Northwest Patagonia." The exotic herb menta (Mentha piperita) and the native fruit plant michay (Berberis Heterophylla) were the plants used most frequently in the local diets (75% of interviewees used them).

In "Dietary and Medicinal Use of Traditional Herbs Among the Luo of Western Kenya," researchers write: "The Hausa of Africa eat many kinds of leafy vegetables at the end of the rainy season, the time of greatest risk of malaria infection. These are food plants, but they may also treat malaria, for laboratory investigation shows that they increase red blood cell oxidation."

This review can give just a taste of a remarkable global overview of the great variety of documented medicinal foods used by traditional peoples of the world. Eating and Healing also addresses issues tied to global change. Rural subsistence and urban populations both face health problems related to the simplification of diets and the erosion of biocultural diversity: "That traditional systems once lost are hard to recreate underlines the imperative for the kind of documentation, compilation, and dissemination of eroding knowledge of biocultural diversity represented by this volume."