Botanicals:
Botanical Index - Wild Edibles & Medicinals - Flower Essences - Aromatherapy - Healing Foods
Botanical Index - Wild Edibles & Medicinals - Flower Essences - Aromatherapy - Healing Foods
“Let food be thy medicine,” as taught to us by Hippocrates, is as true today as it was in 400 BC. Using a focus on food to support the highly complex processes of detoxification and biotransformation is the wise approach. If an apple contains at least 700 different phytochemicals, it is better to eat the apple as one of a variety of foods than to try to replicate its benefits with single nutritional supplements. A recent review of this subject stated this concept succinctly:
It is very difficult to imagine how a single phytochemical— [that is] selected as representative of a whole food, such as lycopene in tomatoes, resversatrol in grapes, sulforaphane in broccoli, and beta-carotene in carrots—would offer an advantage [when] used as a food supplement, because a variety of fruit and vegetables seems necessary to provide the mixture of vitamins and minerals that appear to favor protection against neoplasia. Ingesting whole fruits and vegetables exposes the digestive milieu to enzyme modulating components of varying amounts and proportions in which unpredictable synergistic and /or antagonistic (or both depending on the enzyme involved) interactions occur among thousands of different chemicals in their natural matrix.—How can we imagine that these benefits could be reproduced just by supplements of single representative phytochemicals? The beneficial or harmful outcomes of a single compound can be quite different from those elicited by the same compound within complex mixtures. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
It is very difficult to imagine how a single phytochemical— [that is] selected as representative of a whole food, such as lycopene in tomatoes, resversatrol in grapes, sulforaphane in broccoli, and beta-carotene in carrots—would offer an advantage [when] used as a food supplement, because a variety of fruit and vegetables seems necessary to provide the mixture of vitamins and minerals that appear to favor protection against neoplasia. Ingesting whole fruits and vegetables exposes the digestive milieu to enzyme modulating components of varying amounts and proportions in which unpredictable synergistic and /or antagonistic (or both depending on the enzyme involved) interactions occur among thousands of different chemicals in their natural matrix.—How can we imagine that these benefits could be reproduced just by supplements of single representative phytochemicals? The beneficial or harmful outcomes of a single compound can be quite different from those elicited by the same compound within complex mixtures. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
