-
Asked by on 14 Jul 2020. This question was also asked by .
-
Sarah Montgomery answered on 14 Jul 2020:
I don’t think there are any foods that have the same effect as a vaccine (that is, to create an immune response which makes you resistant to disease in the future). There can be bacteria in food which cause an immune response, like in food poisoning, but that’s a little different.
However, foods often contain what chemists call an “active ingredient” – a chemical compound which has an effect on your body. For example caffeine is the active ingredient in coffee! Many of these can help to prevent or reduce symptoms of disease. Scientists do often look at the ingredients in a food or other “natural” remedies and study them in controlled conditions to see what they really do, and whether it’s worth giving people that ingredient on its own to help with a disease.
You mentioned acids – I don’t think the phosphoric acid in Coke is very good for you, but it looks like some companies sell citric acid (which is in lemon juice) as a treatment for kidney problems. So you’re right about acids as drugs!
-
-
Valerie Vancollie answered on 14 Jul 2020:
Foods contain vitamins and minerals so they can definitely be used to prevent diseases, like sailors used to get scurvy as they didn’t get enough vitamin C and this was prevented by taking along more oranges or lemons. This is why we now have daily recommended doses of many vitamins, to ensure we don’t get those diseases.
Eating the wrong foods can also make you ill as things like heart disease, diabetes… are mainly caused by eating what’s bad for you.
Many drugs have also come from looking at traditional foods or remedies that various people have been using for generations in areas where particular diseases were most prevalent.
I don’t know of any vaccines which are food based or where eating a particular food gives you the necessary antibodies for a disease rather than giving your immune system all it needs to be healthy. I also think it’s less likely that a food could be a vaccine, but perhaps I’m wrong. -
Angela Downie answered on 14 Jul 2020:
Hi!
This is a great question. Food/diet are very important in the treatment of certain diseases, such as diabetes were your body struggles to control your sugar levels. It is not commonly used directly as a medicine, although some food definitely has interesting properties like honey which has antibiotic properties or ginger which can help reduce nausea.
I also really like how you thought that acids in food could help fight disease! Acids are definitely harmful to living things and could do a lot of harm to virus and bacteria.. unfortunately this also means acids aren’t great for us and so our body works very very hard to maintain a very neutral pH in most of our body (Although our stomachs are very acidic environments so that food can be broken down!). If you try and make your body more acidic your kidneys will make sure you can’t as this would be very dangerous.
In terms of vaccines, they are usually made up of dead or very weak virus, or bits of virus. This is because what they do is show are body something that is potentially dangerous, so that our body is prepared to fight it if it ever comes across it again! -
Alena Pance answered on 14 Jul 2020:
Not only they CAN, but they HAVE BEEN used for a long time… this is where the drink ‘gin and tonic’ in fact comes from. During the British time in India, it was known that quinine is very effective against malaria but because it is so bitter, the brits mixed it with gin and lemon to make it more palatable and keep themselves protected against malaria. Indeed quinine is related to chloroquine, which has been used for a long time. Some parasites developed resistance to it so its use has declined in many places but it is still very effective against some of the Plasmodium species, particularly Plasmodium knowlesi.
In that same tone, the only drug that is still very effective today to treat malaria is artemisinin. This comes from a chinese herbal remedy that used the plant Artemisia annua to treat fever and the active component was identified by Tu Youyou, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2015 for this discovery.
There are many medicinal herbs that have been used for hundreds of years, even aspirin comes from shrubs from the genus Spirea, and many of these remedies are still used today in many places.
Comments