# Data-driven analysis of biomedical literature suggests broad-spectrum benefits of culinary herbs and spices

## Abstract
Spices and herbs are key dietary ingredients used across cultures worldwide. Beyond their use as
flavoring and coloring agents, the popularity of these aromatic plant products in culinary
preparations has been attributed to their antimicrobial properties. Last few decades have witnessed
an exponential growth of biomedical literature investigating the impact of spices and herbs on
health, presenting an opportunity to mine for patterns from empirical evidence. Systematic
investigation of empirical evidence to enumerate the health consequences of culinary herbs and
spices can provide valuable insights into their therapeutic utility. We implemented a text mining
protocol to assess the health impact of spices by assimilating, both, their positive and negative
effects. We conclude that spices show broad-spectrum benevolence across a range of disease
categories in contrast to negative effects that are comparatively narrow-spectrum. We also
implement a strategy for disease-specific culinary recommendations of spices based on their
therapeutic tradeoff against adverse effects. Further by integrating spice-phytochemical-disease
associations, we identify bioactive spice phytochemicals potentially involved in their therapeutic
effects. Our study provides a systems perspective on health effects of culinary spices and herbs
with applications for dietary recommendations as well as identification of phytochemicals
potentially involved in underlying molecular mechanisms.

## Authors
1. Rakhi N K<sup>1,2</sup>
2. Rudraksh Tuwani<sup>1</sup>
3. Jagriti Mukherjee<sup>1</sup>
4. Ganesh Bagler<sup>1*</sup>

<sup>1</sup>Center for Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-
Delhi), New Delhi, India
<sup>2</sup>Department of Bioscience and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Jodhpur,
India  
<sup>*</sup>Corresponding Author (ganesh.bagler@gmail.com, bagler@iiitd.ac.in)

## Acknowledgement
G.B. thanks the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-Delhi) for providing
computational facilities and support. R.N.K. thanks the Ministry of Human Resource
Development, Government of India and Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur for the senior
research fellowship. R.T. (Research Associate) and J.M. (Research Intern) are affiliated to Dr.
Bagler’s lab at the Center for Computational Biology, and are thankful to IIIT-Delhi for the
support.

## Author Contributions
G.B. conceived the idea and supervised the work; G.B., R.T. and R.N.K. designed and performed
the experiments; R.N.K and R.T. performed the data collection and cleaning; R.T. implemented
the computational models; G.B., R.T. and R.N.K analyzed the results and wrote the manuscript;
R.N.K. and J.M. performed the annotations; All the authors reviewed and approved the final
manuscript.