Abstract
Spices and herbs are key dietary ingredients used across cultures worldwide. Beyond their use as flavoring and coloring agents, the popularity of these aromatic plant products in culinary preparations has been attributed to their antimicrobial properties. Last few decades have witnessed an exponential growth of biomedical literature investigating the impact of spices and herbs on health, presenting an opportunity to mine for patterns from empirical evidence. Systematic investigation of empirical evidence to enumerate the health consequences of culinary herbs and spices can provide valuable insights into their therapeutic utility. We implemented a text mining protocol to assess the health impact of spices by assimilating, both, their positive and negative effects. We conclude that spices show broad-spectrum benevolence across a range of disease categories in contrast to negative effects that are comparatively narrow-spectrum. We also implement a strategy for disease-specific culinary recommendations of spices based on their therapeutic tradeoff against adverse effects. Further by integrating spice-phytochemical-disease associations, we identify bioactive spice phytochemicals potentially involved in their therapeutic effects. Our study provides a systems perspective on health effects of culinary spices and herbs with applications for dietary recommendations as well as identification of phytochemicals potentially involved in underlying molecular mechanisms.
Highlights
Culinary practices across cultures around the world have evolved to incorporate spices and herbs in them
While cooked food must have provided with much-needed energy supply, it is intriguing that they flavor the food with nutritionally insignificant quantities of herbs and spices
Going beyond the ability of spices to act as flavoring and antimicrobial agents [2], our analysis of spice-disease associations text-mined from biomedical literature shows the broad-spectrum benefits of spices
Summary
Culinary practices across cultures around the world have evolved to incorporate spices and herbs in them. The potential utility of these aromatic plant products in recipes has received a lot of attention leading to multiple rationales for their wide-spread use in food preparations [1,2]. Apart from their use as flavoring agents, spices have been suggested to be of value for their ability to inhibit or kill food-spoilage microorganisms [2]. Beyond their antimicrobial properties, the diverse therapeutic values of spices have been highlighted through in vivo and in vitro studies. Spices have been reported to possess therapeutic potential for their hypolipidemic [3], anti-diabetic [4], anti-lithogenic [5], antioxidant [6], anti-inflammatory and anticarcinogenic [7] activity.
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