Traditional foods and diets can provide health benefits beyond their nutrient composition because of the presence of bioactive compounds. In various traditional healthcare systems, diet-based approaches have always played an important role, which has often survived until today. Therefore, investigating traditional foods aimed at health promotion could render not only novel bioactive substances but also mechanistic insights. However, compared to pharmacologically focused research on natural products, investigating such nutrition-based interventions is even more complicated owing to interacting compounds, less potent and relatively subtle effects, the food matrix, and variations in composition and intake. At the same time, technical advances in ‘omics’ technologies, cheminformatics, and big data analysis create new opportunities, further strengthened by increasing insights into the biology of health and homeostatic resilience. These are to be combined with state-of-the-art ethnobotanical research, which is key to obtaining reliable and reproducible data. Unfortunately, socioeconomic developments and climate change threaten traditional use and knowledge as well as biodiversity.

中文翻译：

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传统食品中旨在促进健康的生物活性成分：新机制见解和先导分子的途径？

由于存在生物活性化合物，传统食品和饮食可以提供超出其营养成分的健康益处。在各种传统的医疗保健系统中，基于饮食的方法一直发挥着重要作用，并且往往一直延续到今天。因此，研究旨在促进健康的传统食品不仅可以提供新的生物活性物质，还可以提供机理见解。然而，与针对天然产品的药理学研究相比，由于化合物相互作用、效力较弱且相对微妙的影响、食物基质以及成分和摄入量的变化，研究这种基于营养的干预措施甚至更加复杂。与此同时，“组学”技术、化学信息学和大数据分析的技术进步创造了新的机遇，并通过增加对健康生物学和稳态恢复能力的深入了解而进一步加强。这些将与最先进的民族植物学研究相结合，这是获得可靠和可重复数据的关键。不幸的是，社会经济发展和气候变化威胁着传统用途和知识以及生物多样性。