J Med Plant Res. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Nov 25.
Published in final edited form as:
J Med Plant Res. 2015 Jun; 9(23): 681–692.
Published online 2015 Jun 17.
PMCID: PMC4659479
NIHMSID: NIHMS738836
Abstract
Bamboo
plants play a significant role in traditional Asian medicine,
especially in China and Japan. Biomedical investigations on the
health-benefiting effects as well as toxicity of different parts and
species of bamboo have been carried out worldwide since the 1960s, and
documented a wide range of protective effects of bamboo-derived
products, such as protection against oxidative stress, inflammation,
lipotoxicity, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Some of these products
may interfere with male and female reproductive function, thyroid
hormone metabolism, and hepatic xenobiotransformation enzymes. The
diversity of bamboo species, parts of the plants available for medicinal
use, and different extraction methods suggest that bamboo has great
potential for producing a range of extracts with functional utility in
medicine.
Keywords: Bamboo,
traditional medicine, natural product, antioxidant, inflammation,
cancer, lipotoxicity, cardiovascular disease, toxicity, reproduction,
thyroid hormone, phase I and phase II hepatic enzymes
1. Overview
Bamboo refers to any of a group of plants in the subfamily Bambusoideae, which is a part of the true grass family. This subfamily consists of more than 70 genera and about 1,450 species (Gratani et al., 2008),
and members of this subfamily grow in diverse climates from subarctic
to tropical regions. The versatile application of bamboo in people’s
daily lives in Asia was vividly described by William Edgar Geil in his
book A Yankee on The Yangtze: being a narrative of a journey from Shanghai through the central kingdom to Burma, which was first published in 1904 (Geil, 2010).
He wrote, “A man can sit in a bamboo house under a bamboo roof, on a
bamboo chair at a bamboo table, with a bamboo hat on his head and bamboo
sandals on his feet. He can at the same time hold in one hand a bamboo
bowl, in the other hand bamboo chopsticks and eat bamboo sprouts. When
through with his meal, which has been cooked over a bamboo fire, the
table may be washed with a bamboo cloth, and he can fan himself with a
bamboo fan, take a siesta on a bamboo bed, lying on a bamboo mat with
his head resting on a bamboo pillow…He might then take a walk over a
bamboo suspension bridge, drink water from a bamboo ladle, and scrape
himself with a bamboo scraper.”
In addition to the uses in daily
