Short description:

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.

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Long description:

Discover neglected wild food sources&&&0151;that can also be used as medicine!

The long-standing notion of &&&0147;food as medicine, medicine as food,&&&0148; 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&&&0151;antioxidants as mediators of high-altitude nutritional physiology
  
• Northeast Thailand&&&0151;&&&0147;wild&&&0148; food plant gathering
  
• Southern Italy&&&0151;the consumption of wild plants by Albanians and Italians
  
• Northern Spain&&&0151;medicinal digestive beverages
  
• United States&&&0151;medicinal herb quality
  
• Commonwealth of Dominica&&&0151;humoral medicine and food
  
• Cuba&&&0151;promoting health through medicinal foods
  
• Brazil&&&0151;medicinal uses of specific fishes
  
• Brazil&&&0151;plants from the Amazon and Atlantic Forest
  
• Bolivian Andes&&&0151;traditional food medicines
  
• New Patagonia&&&0151;gathering of wild plant foods with medicinal uses
  
• Western Kenya&&&0151;uses of traditional herbs among the Luo people
  
• South Cameroon&&&0151;ethnomycology in Africa
  
• Morocco&&&0151;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.

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Table of Contents:

Introduction (Andrea Pieroni and Lisa Leimar Price) Asia Europe North America The Caribbean South America Africa Chapter 1. Edible Wild Plants As Food and As Medicine: Reflections on Thirty Years of Fieldwork (Louis E. Grivetti) Introduction Genesis Three Decades of Ethnobotanical Research Reflections and Potential Research Areas Coda Chapter 2. Tibetan Foods and Medicines: Antioxidants As Mediators of High-Altitude Nutritional Physiology (Patrick L. Owen) Introduction Adaptations to Altitude Oxidative Stress and Antioxidants Tibetan High-Altitude Food Systems Tibetan Medicine Summary Chapter 3. Wild Food Plants in Farming Environments with Special Reference to Northeast Thailand, Food As Function and Medicinal, and Social Roles of Women (Lisa Leimar Price) Introduction Wild Plant Foods in the Farming Environment Women's Roles, Women's Work, and Women's Knowledge Consumption and Nutrition Overlaps: Medicinal and Functional Food Medicinal and Functional Food Wild Plants of Northeast Thailand Gathered Food Plants of Northeast Thailand with Medicinal Value Investigations of Wild Plant Foods As Functional/Medicinal Foods in Thailand Multiple Use Value, Rarity, and Privatization Conclusions Chapter 4. Functional Foods or Food Medicines? On the Consumption of Wild Plants Among Albanians and Southern Italians in Lucania

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