REVIEW article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutritional Epidemiology
This article is part of the Research TopicImpact of Plant Bioactive Compounds on Human Nutrition and HealthView all 6 articles
Transformation from passive health to proactive prevention: Research progress on glucose-lowering components and its mechanism of medicine-food homology resources
Provisionally accepted
Tianhao Li1,2
Jie Li1,3
Yinfei Sun1,3Dongqi Liu1,2Juntao Liu1,3Jing Han1,2Xiaoyu Chen1,2*
Wenyi Kang1,2,4*- 1National Research and Development Center for Edible Fungus Processing Technology, Henan University, Kaifeng, China
- 2College of Agriculture, Henan University,, Kaifeng, China
- 3School of Life Sciences, Henan University, Kaifeng, China
- 4Joint International Research Laboratory of Food & Medicine Resource Function, Kaifeng, China
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Diabetes and its complications pose a threat to global human health. In the modern society, effectively preventing diabetes is a crucial means of safeguarding public well-being. Mounting evidence indicates that medicine-food homology foods possess significant medicinal and dietary value. However, these materials' active compounds, and their structure-activity relationships on hypoglycemic function are unclear, this hinders the comprehensive utilization and development. In this review, 64 materials from 106 medicine-food homology foods claimed by the official possess a powerful hypoglycemic effects, according to statistics at the Web of Science, PubMed, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases. Current research indicates that these medicine-food homology foods contain Astrogali radius, Persicae semen, Menthae haplocalycis herba, Houttuyniae herba, etc. Terpenoids, flavonoids, alkaloids, phenylpropanoids, iridoids, and polysaccharides are regarded as their key bioactive compounds. This paper investigated and summried that the structure-activity relationships between these hypoglycemic constituents (triterpenoids, flavonoids, alkaloids, phenylpropanoid, iridoid and polysaccharide) and diabetes-related targets. In addition, this paper also reviews glucose-lowering mechanism of active compounds from medicine-food homology foods, including modulating digestive enzymes, regulating glucose metabolism (glucose absorption, gluconeogenesis and glycolysis), promoting insulin secretion, increasing insulin sensitivity, improving oxidative stress, reducing inflammatory response, promoting GLP-1 secretion and regulating gut microbiota. At the same time, the potential side effects of food with the same origin as medicine and food were discussed.Finally, the applications of medicine-food homology resources in glycemic management functional foods were reviewed. This provides a basis for the development of hypoglycemic functional food in the future,suggesting a shift in human health This is a provisional file, not the final typeset article philosophy from treating existing diseases to preventing them, particularly for chronic metabolic diseases like diabetes.
Keywords: Medicine-food homology resources, Hypoglycemic effect, Gut Microbiota, hypoglycemic food, structure-activity relationship
Received: 08 Aug 2025; Accepted: 04 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Li, Sun, Liu, Liu, Han, Chen and Kang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Xiaoyu Chen, chenxiaoyu@njau.edu.cn
Wenyi Kang, kangweny@hotmail.com
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