Let Thy Food Be Thy Medicine Plants and Modern Medicine

by Hefferon, Kathleen

• ISBN13: 9780199873975
• ISBN10: 0199873976
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Are herbal medicines effective? Are organic foods really better for you? Will the cure to cancer eventually come from a newly discovered plant which dwells in the Amazon basin? Will medicines ever become affordable and available to the neediest? How will we produce enough food to keep up with an ever-increasing world population? Written with these issues in mind,Let Thy Food Be Thy Medicineis a response to the current flood of conflicting information regarding the use of plants for both consumption and medicinal purposes. Kathleen Hefferon addresses the myths and popular beliefs surrounding the application of plants in human health, revealing both their truths and inaccuracies, and provides an overview of the technologies scientists are using to further their research. The book covers herbal medicines, functional and biofortified foods, plants and antibiotics, edible vaccines, and organic versus genetically modified foods, discussing each from a scientific standpoint. It these topics together for the first time, providing a much-needed overview of plants as medicine. Intended for scientists and professionals in related disciplines as well as the interested reader educated in the sciences, this book will confront claims made in the media with science and scientific analysis, providing readers with enough background to allow them to make their own judgments.

Table of Contents

Plants and Human Health

Our Early Relationship with Plants

Plants as Medicine

Bioprospecting For Medicines form Plants

Ethnobotany and Medicine

Modern drug discovery and indigenous cultures

Plants and Drug discovery

Examples of Medicines derived from plants

Impact of Biopiracy, Preservation of Biodiversity

Intellectual Property Rights for Indigenous People

The Lure of Herbal Medicine

History

The bioactive compounds in herbal medicinal plants

Examples of Herbal Medicines

Traditional Indian Medicine

Traditional Chinese Medicine

What nonscientists should know about Herbal Medicines

What scientists need to know about herbal medicines

Could herbal medicine and Western medicine complement each other?

Farming Medicines from Plants

Why farm for pharmaceuticals from plants?

New production systems

How does it work?

Technologies used to design plants expressing biopharmaceuticals

Clinical trials of therapeutic proteins produced in plants

Allergies, oral tolerance, and dose response relationships to plant-made vaccines

Scale-up and commercialization opportunities for plant-derived therapeutic proteins

Plant production platforms for molecular farming

Molecular farming requires its own unique set of regulatory guidelines

Superfood: Functional and Biofortified Food

The science behind functional foods

Functional foods and human genetics

The Mediterranean Diet: The ideal diet?

Do dietary supplements work?

Functional foods as superfoods

Biofortified foods and hidden hunger

Can biofortified foods make a difference?

Food Security, Climate Change, and the Future of Farming

Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution

The Green Revolution missed Africa

Agricultural makeover: sustainable intensification

Up and Coming technologies; crop improvement

Improved farming techniques

Environmental uses for plants

Agricultural sustainability and organic food

The Importance of Biodiversity

Foods as drugs

What will the food industry look like?

An urban answer to increased food production: vertical farms

Agricultural sustainability and protection of biodiversity: a daunting challenge

Biodiversity and the search for new medicines

The importance of public perception in shaping our future

Regulating agricultural innovations can be a double-edged sword

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