review · Sustainability
A strong relationship links plant nutrition with human health, as the nutritional profile of edible plants directly influences dietary outcomes. Plant bioactive compounds, including alkaloids, carotenoids, flavonoids, phenolics, and terpenoids, offer therapeutic benefits shaped by botanical, environmental, and clinical factors. Environmental conditions, such as climate change, pollution, and problematic soils, exert positive or negative effects on the accumulation of these compounds. Under stress, plants often produce higher levels of bioactives to increase stress tolerance, which simultaneously enhances their therapeutic value for human consumption. In addition, agro-biotechnological methods such as plant tissue culture provide tools to produce these valuable bioactives, particularly from underexploited or endangered plant species. This synthesis reviews these interconnected relationships between plant growth conditions, bioactive yields, and human nutrition using pictorial visualisations.
Understanding how environmental conditions influence the nutritional and medicinal quality of edible crops helps link sustainable farming practices directly to human wellness. Clarifying how plants produce protective compounds under stress, and using biotechnology to safeguard rare plant resources, provides essential guidance for improving human dietary health through better management of agricultural systems facing climate change and soil degradation.
Plant tissue culture tools could enable agricultural biotechnologists and producers to cultivate valuable therapeutic bioactives from endangered or underexploited species. Furthermore, understanding stress-induced bioactive production can inform crop management strategies under challenging environmental conditions. However, as this work is an early-stage review synthesising observational literature, operational applications remain in preliminary phases rather than near-market implementation.
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Is there any relationship between plant nutrition and human health? The overall response to this question is very positive, and a strong relationship between the nutrition of plants and humans has been reported in the literature. The nutritional status of edible plants consumed by humans can have a negative or positive impact on human health. This review was designed to assess the importance of plant bioactive compounds for human health under the umbrella of sustainable agriculture. With respect to the first research question, it was found that plant bioactives (e.g., alkaloids, carotenoids, flavonoids, phenolics, and terpenoids) have a crucial role in human health due to their therapeutic benefits, and their potentiality depends on several factors, including botanical, environmental, and clinical attributes. Plant bioactives could be produced using plant tissue culture tools (as a kind of agro-biotechnological method), especially in cases of underexploited or endangered plants. Bioactive production of plants depends on many factors, especially climate change (heat stress, drought, UV radiation, ozone, and elevated CO2), environmental pollution, and problematic soils (degraded, saline/alkaline, waterlogged, etc.). Under the previously mentioned stresses, in reviewing the literature, a positive or negative association was found depending on the kinds of stress or bioactives and their attributes. The observed correlation between plant bioactives and stress (or growth factors) might explain the importance of these bioactives for human health. Their accumulation in stressed plants can increase their tolerance to stress and their therapeutic roles. The results of this study are in keeping with previous observational studies, which confirmed that the human nutrition might start from edible plants and their bioactive contents, which are consumed by humans. This review is the first report that analyzes this previously observed relationship using pictorial presentation.
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DOI: 10.3390/su14148329
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