recorded overlap. For example, American tribes used wild strawberry fruits as a medicinal for diarrhea, stomach pain, and irregular menstruation, as well as a dietary item (Schmidt and Klaser Cheng 2017).
Plant medicines were used to treat a wide range of human symptoms, including liver conditions, urinary infection, skin problems, inflammation, toothache, diabetes, flu, and bronchitis. Other plant preparations were valued primarily as disinfectants. Historical records reveal that single plants could serve as resources for prescribed treatments against a wide range of diseases, because the diverse phytochemical profiles in wild herbal species enable single plant species to have bioactivities relevant against multiple potential disease targets.
Edible medicinal and dietary polyphenolic resources are usually processed/preserved today, for year‐round use, by freezing the plant material. In traditional cultures, where freezing is (or in the past, was) not an option, materials are preserved and used after (i) desiccation, (ii) preparation of infusions, (iii) decoction and maceration, or (iv) tincture (Pinela et al. 2017). Dried plant materials were either ground into a powder form or pressed between stones into dried cakes. In some cases, berries were pressed and pounded into wild game meats before co‐drying (with a low fire or just hot sun) into a protein/fat/polyphenol‐rich high‐energy food called pemmican or wasna, used in Native American Lakota and Cree cultures. This method not only preserved the polyphenol‐rich berries for year‐round consumption, but served as a natural antimicrobial additive for the meats. Infusions were prepared by soaking dried leaves or powders in (usually boiling) water so that the water‐soluble polyphenols were released (tea‐like preparations). Decoction/maceration is applied especially to tougher plant tissues (woody plant materials), which can be cut into small sections and crushed, then boiled in water for 10–20 minutes to fully extract the phytochemicals from the intractable matrix. When the volume of liquid has been reduced and cooled, additional water can be added and the process repeated. The replicated simmering and boiling cycles can concentrate some of the more stable phytoactive components. Tincture involves extraction of plant materials with alcohol, and storage in the same medium. A still‐popular preservation method in Alaska and northern Canada is the preparation of Eskimo ice cream or agutuk, which is made by whipping fresh wild berries into animal fats (caribou, moose, or walrus tallow, or seal oil). Copious amounts of sugar are typically added (and sometimes fish are added) to the shelf‐stable mixture, which is most often stored in a freezer prior to consumption (Wapner 2012).
The Native American traditional diet was one that many nutritionists would consider a healthy gold standard (consisting of fruits/berries, lean meat, fish, and wild vegetables), and the active hunter/fisher/gatherer lifestyle contributed to lean body mass. Polyphenol‐rich plant intake contributed to the very low incidence of diabetes and other pathologies of metabolic syndrome in Native communities. The forced relocation of Native American tribal communities to reservations in the 1800s separated people from their traditional food sources, and made them dependent on government rations of high‐carbohydrate commodity foods (Goetz 2012). Consequently, the modern incidence of obesity is now 1.6 times higher in Native communities than in the general population, and health conditions including diabetes and heart disease are running rampant (American Diabetes Association 2018). Poverty, lack of access to healthy food options (food deserts), and increasing dependence on highly processed, nutritionally devoid staple foods have contributed to the conditions. Declining Native health status is the impetus behind the resurgence of interest in re‐examining wildcrafted subsistence foods, and re‐educating tribal youth on the health‐relevant attributes of traditional diets and plant‐based medicines (Burns Kraft et al. 2008; Kellogg et al. 2010; Schreckinger et al. 2010; Flint et al. 2011; Wapner 2012; Joseph et al. 2014; Kellogg et al. 2016).
3.3 How Wildcrafted Edible Plants Differ from Agricultural Commodities
Obviously, wildcrafted foods are more time consuming to source and to harvest as opposed to simply stopping by a grocery store. Fruits and vegetables foraged in the wild may, to some consumers, be less aesthetically appealing than typical commercial market produce (Soukand 2016; Pinela et al. 2017). For example, wild berryfruits may be smaller and less sweet, have larger, harder, and denser seeds, and provide lower yield per plant; root crops grown in unprepared soil will not be uniformly shaped or sized, fruit or vegetable produce that has not been sprayed routinely with pesticides may exhibit some insect or pathogen damage. However, it is the adversity of the harsh unprotected wild growing environment that specifically provokes accumulation of redundant, overlapping polyphenolic profiles, which effectively protect the plant from the ravages of nature (Wynn and Fougere 2007; Wapner 2012; Li et al. 2016; Pinela et al. 2017). The impetus behind a plant’s production of antioxidants is to counter the oxidative stressors in the natural habitat (Li et al. 2016). In addition, the unbuffered environmental pressures in the wild cause spatiotemporal variation in the chemical profiles of the plants (Dhami and Mishra 2015). Dar et al. (2017) hypothesized that in the wild, perhaps nature has preselected phytochemicals that influence health (primarily plant health) and then may have specific metabolic roles for all living things that consume or interface with those plants. Farm‐cultivated plants are bred to encourage higher yields of the edible plant part, but generally have less energy to expend on production of expansive root systems or generation of secondary compounds. Wild plants maintain a much higher level of genetic diversity than domesticated cultivars, which is in part responsible for the rich phytochemical multiplicity accumulated in the edible fruits and foliage, and is the impetus behind some current efforts to breed back key traits from wild relatives into farmed plants (Zhang et al. 2016).
Wild plants demonstrate pharmacologically unique activities, and a plethora of phytochemical constituents with lesser pharmaceutical activity play roles in augmenting the activity of primary active constituents (Wynn and Fougere 2007; Dhami and Mishra 2015). Traditional medicine has rarely included identification of the specific bioactive components in the whole plant or whole wild fruit extract, in part because these recognized interactions (additive, concomitant, antagonistic, or synergistic) between the myriad phytochemical constituents potentiate their bioactivity once ingested by animals (Phan et al. 2018). The presence of multiple recognized biologically active constituents combined with a diversity of other phytochemicals with lesser (or moderating) bioactivities allows for a wide range of therapeutic coverage from wildcrafted botanical drugs; in herbal medicine, polypharmacy is de rigueur. The potency of wildcrafted medicines is linked to these interactive phytochemical effects, as a single isolated compound from the plant will not be as biologically active as a crude or semipurified extract that retains the potentiating interactions. Herbals have nutritional and pharmaceutical elements that interact with one another polyvalently; thus the clinical effects may have greater depth and breadth than those affected by synthetic drugs (Wynn and Fougere 2007; Joseph et al. 2014). Wild polyphenol‐enriched fruits have been noted for potent antiviral, antimicrobial, anti‐inflammatory, cognition enhancement, and cancer chemoprotective capacities, in addition to robust antioxidant activities, that generally exceed levels in cultivated fruits (Li et al. 2016).
Combination effects (additive or synergistic interactions, as well as antagonisms) that impact human health are widely cited for natural product compounds, although notoriously difficult to precisely characterize (Caesar and Cech 2019). Only recently, the crucial role of the gut microbiome in catabolizing polyphenolic compounds from plant foods, generating biologically active metabolites that return to circulation, has been documented, which has enriched our understanding of polyphenolic metabolite bioavailability (Lila et al. 2016). In terms of the potentiating interactions, pharmacokinetic synergy refers to the situation when one phytoactive component may enhance or alter intestinal absorption, metabolism, distribution, or elimination of another component (resulting in a change in concentration of the active component at the therapeutic target in the body). For example, herbal medicines with fibers, mucilage, or tannins can alter the absorption of other phytochemicals. Pharmacodynamic synergy refers to the case when two or more compounds interact with a single therapeutic target at a receptor site (Wynn and Fougere 2007).
Three seismic changes in the food we eat have occurred over history: the discovery of cooking, the emergence of agriculture/cropping,
