Bioactive Phytocompounds and Products Traditionally Used in Japan

Abstract

For centuries, East Asian people have used traditional herbs or functional foods as folk medicine to treat or prevent diseases, long before the introduction of Western medicine. Although Western medicine is often effective in curing acute diseases, it is not necessarily applicable to the prevention of diseases. In the twenty-first century, there has been a great upsurge of interest in the biological functions of food ingredients in relation to their physiological activities in vivo. A mass of scientific data accumulated has stressed the presence of an interrelationship between lifestyle-related diseases, such as cancer, heart disorder, and diabetes, and daily food intake, and these kinds of diseases are considered to be preventable through diet modification. In order to use foods to improve health, we first need to clarify scientifically the functions of the foods, and to give reasonable scientific answers to questions such as How well does this work? How safe is it? What type of conditions is it best used for? Research aimed at answering these kinds of questions is still considered a less scientifically valid field than conventional medicine. In addition, foods or herbs with various biological functions are gradually being recognized as having a use as second medicines, able to intervene in the prevention or therapy of diseases. Post-operative cancer patients are actually employing their own devised foods menu to inhibit the recurrence of disease due to remaining malignant cells. In this chapter I describe the functions of general vegetables and plants available in Japan, such as garlic powder (antibacterial activity, prolongation of blood coagulation, antioxidant activity), garlic odor (antibacterial activity), Japanese cypress oil and oil flavor (antibacterial activity), edible mushrooms (Grifola frondosa, maitake) or nonedible mushrooms (Lampteromyces japonicus Singer, tsukiyotake), and sweetcorn powder (cancer-curing activity). © 2006 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.