Eating and Healing (Traditional Food As Medicine)

Discover neglected wild food sources—that can also be used as medicine!

The long-standing notion of “food as medicine, medicine as food,” can be traced back to Hippocrates. Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine is a global overview of wild and semi-domesticated foods and their use as medicine in traditional societies. Important cultural information, along with extensive case studies, provides a clear, authoritative look at the many neglected food sources still being used around the world today. This book bridges the scientific disciplines of medicine, food science, human ecology, and environmental sciences with their ethno-scientific counterparts of ethnobotany, ethnoecology, and ethnomedicine to provide a valuable multidisciplinary resource for education and instruction.

Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine presents respected researchers’ in-depth case studies on foods different cultures use as medicines and as remedies for nutritional deficiencies in diet. Comparisons of living conditions in different geographic areas as well as differences in diet and medicines are thoroughly discussed and empirically evaluated to provide scientific evidence of the many uses of these traditional foods as medicine and as functional foods. The case studies focus on the uses of plants, seaweed, mushrooms, and fish within their cultural contexts while showing the dietary and medical importance of these foods. The book provides comprehensive tables, extensive references, useful photographs, and helpful illustrations to provide clear scientific support as well as opportunities for further thought and study.

Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine explores the ethnobiology of:

• Tibet—antioxidants as mediators of high-altitude nutritional physiology
  
• Northeast Thailand—“wild” food plant gathering
  
• Southern Italy—the consumption of wild plants by Albanians and Italians
  
• Northern Spain—medicinal digestive beverages
  
• United States—medicinal herb quality
  
• Commonwealth of Dominica—humoral medicine and food
  
• Cuba—promoting health through medicinal foods
  
• Brazil—medicinal uses of specific fishes
  
• Brazil—plants from the Amazon and Atlantic Forest
  
• Bolivian Andes—traditional food medicines
  
• New Patagonia—gathering of wild plant foods with medicinal uses
  
• Western Kenya—uses of traditional herbs among the Luo people
  
• South Cameroon—ethnomycology in Africa
  
• Morocco—food medicine and ethnopharmacology
  
  

Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine is an essential research guide and educational text about food and medicine in traditional societies for educators, students from undergraduate through graduate levels, botanists, and research specialists in nutrition and food science, anthropology, agriculture, ethnoecology, ethnobotany, and ethnobiology.