Transformation from passive health to proactive prevention: research progress on glucose-lowering components and its mechanism of food and medicine homology resources

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 <i>Astrogali radius, Persicae semen, Menthae haplocalycis herba, Houttuyniae herba</i>, <i>etc</i>. 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 philosophy from treating existing diseases to preventing them, particularly for chronic metabolic diseases like diabetes.