For hundreds of years, indigenous populations have developed drugs based on medicinal plants. Many practitioners, especially advocates of traditional medicine, continue to support the use of plants and functional foods as methods by which many ailments can be treated. With relevance around the world as a complementary and alternative medicine, advancements for the use of both ethnopharmacology and nutraceuticals in disease must continually be explored, especially as society works to combat chronic illnesses, increasingly resilient infectious diseases, and pain management controversies. The Research Anthology on Recent Advancements in Ethnopharmacology and Nutraceuticals discusses the advancements made in herbal medicines and functional foods that can be used as alternative medical treatments for a variety of illness and chronic diseases. The anthology will further explain the benefits that they provide as well as the possible harm they may do without proper research on the subject. Covering topics such as food additives, dietary supplements, and physiological benefits, this text is an important resource for dieticians, pharmacists, doctors, nurses, medical professionals, medical students, hospital administrators, researchers, and academicians.

A vast majority of the world’s population lacks access to essential medicines and the provision of safe healthcare services. Medicinal plants and herbal medicines can be applied for pharmacognosy, or the discovery of new drugs, or as an aid for plant physiology studies. In recent years, there has been increased interest in the search for new chemical entities and the expression of resistance of many drugs available in the market has led to a shift in paradigm towards medicinal research. Herbal treatments, the most popular form of folk medicine, may become an important way of increasing access to healthcare services. Advanced Pharmacological Uses of Medicinal Plants and Natural Products provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of drug discovery from natural sources that allow for the effective treatment of human health problems without any side effects, toxicity, or drug resistance. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as ethnobotany, therapeutic applications, and bioactive compounds, this book is ideally designed for pharmacologists, scientists, ethnobotanists, botanists, health researchers, professors, industry professionals, and health students in fields that include pharmaceutical drug development and discovery.

This work presents up-to-date information on chemical, pharmacological, clinical studies and historical uses of common dietary Chinese herbs. Authored by native experts in the field, the reader is introduced to each herb with a brief chronological review of Chinese literature on dietary herb uses, with chapters dedicated to each selected herb including color photos for each herb. In addition, Chinese characters as well as the Latin botanical name indices, and chemical structures for the known active compounds are also provided. The clear layout examines the health benefits that have been studied for centuries, including current clinical and toxicological data. A wide range of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) herbs are investigated for their suitability into daily diets for maintaining general wellness or disease prevention. In the past decades, natural health products, dietary supplements, functional foods, or nutraceuticals have emerged in the West due to the increasing demand for non-pharmaceutical healthcare products. Traditional Chinese Medicine disease prevention and treatment incorporates the use of foods, and herbal medicine in an integrated manner, and thus the dietary Chinese herbs in used in TCM for thousands of years could be sources for developing new, effective, and safe ingredients to capture the rapidly expanding opportunity in the global market place.