Doctor Franco Berrinoformer director of the department of preventive and predictive medicine and president of the “La Grande Via” Association, epidemiologist and great acute disseminator of the principles of well-being starting from a healthy diet, still amazes his readers with a new book, written together to Enrica Bortolazzi, The Pearl Forest (Solferino edition). A work that guides us to discover, among many things, gods numerous active ingredients existing in nature and used for the production of many drugs, including anticancer ones. But that of the authors is not only an invitation to discover its surprising healing properties, to reconnect with nature, but also a warning: if we “recognize the importance of biodiversity for hers potential to provide us with new and effective medicineswhy are we working to destroy it by deforesting and replacing traditional crops with industrial monocultures”?
For millennia, mankind has used plants not only as food, but also to relieve pain and cure disease.
Even today, the plant world contributes to the development of medicine and the discovery of new drugs. Since ancient times, willow bark has been used as an analgesic and to lower fever. It was known to Hippocrates, but before that to the Sumerians, Assyrians and Egyptians, and was also used by Native Americans. Only at the end of the 19th century was acetylsalicylic acid isolated and marketed under the name of Aspirin, but only very recently has its mechanism of action been discovered. Other classic examples are opium for pain, digitalis, extracted from the beautiful Digitalis purpurea, for heart disease, ergotamine, extracted from ergot, for migraines and to stimulate uterine contractions, quinine, extracted from the Andean plant Cinchona, for malaria, Galega officinalis, from which metformin is derived, used since the Middle Ages for diabetes.
According to the World Health Organization, medicinal herbs and plant extracts are used by 80% of the world‘s population, much more in economically less developed countries than in rich ones. Of the drugs prescribed today, 30% derive from vegetable substances, 9% are modifications of vegetable substances, and 5% are of animal origin. Even today, half of the new drugs that are discovered are of plant origin. The big pharmaceutical companies continue to sift through the plant world, and steal information from the traditional medicines of the different peoples of the world, to find new molecules and modify them in order to be able to patent them; but they are extremely far from having explored all plant biodiversity. The forest provides food and medicine to over a billion people. Indigenous communities know how to obtain medicines from barks, leaves, roots, resins. In addition, 2.5 billion people who live from proximity agriculture benefit from the gifts of the forest, firewood and building wood, fruits, nuts, vegetables, spices and game.
Thousands of plant substances are known for their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, pain-relieving, antiproliferative, coagulant, anticoagulant, tranquilizer, muscle relaxant, cardiac contraction activating, cholinergic, serotonergic, dopaminergic and other properties active on the nervous system, such as those of coffee, tea , hemp, sleeping poppy, belladonna, mandrake, fly agaric, psylocybe, etc. Many dozens of plants are being studied for their anti-inflammatory properties, dozens more, many already known to Ayurvedic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, for their usefulness in cardiovascular diseases. In the 1950s it was discovered that the vinca alkaloids (vinblastine and vincristine) had anticancer properties; subsequently numerous other natural substances derived from plants contributed to the oncologists’ arsenal, such as taxanes (paclitaxel, docetaxel), extracted from the yew, known as the “tree of death” due to its toxicity, well known in Tibetan medicine, the derivatives of podophyllotoxin (etoposide, teniposide), extracts from the resin of a herbaceous plant, topotecan and irinotecan, extracts from the bark of Camptotheca acuminata, a Chinese tree, anthracyclines (doxorubicin, epirubicin), isolated by Italian researchers in the 1960s from one streptomyces.
For millennia, Chinese medicine has known medicinal mushrooms, such as Lentinulus edodes (shiitake), capable of strengthening the immune system and our defenses against tumors.
Paradoxically, while we recognize the importance of biodiversity for its potential to provide us with new and effective medicines, we are busy destroying it by deforesting and replacing traditional crops with industrial monocultures.
Taken from The Pearl Forest, Copyright RCS MediaGroup