A practical guide to making your food your medicine

• Explores the healing benefits, cultural history, and culinary use of 56 herbs and spices

• Explains how to easily incorporate herbs and spices into everyday cooking to enhance flavor, nutrition, and healing

• Presents scientific research on the benefits of phytochemicals, including their preventative effects on chronic diseases such as arthritis and Alzheimer’s

For thousands of years, herbs and spices have been valued not only for flavor but for their powerful medicinal properties. This book reveals how the seasonings already found in your kitchen—such as turmeric, garlic, cinnamon, black pepper, ginger, rosemary, thyme, and oregano—can support better health and a longer life.

Drawing on peer-reviewed scientific research and ancestral healing traditions, Nathaniel Altman explores the medicinal value and cultural history of more than 50 culinary herbs and spices. He explains how herbs and spices provide concentrated amounts of phytochemicals, and he shows how these powerful compounds can help prevent and manage today’s most common chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, arthritis, and neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Altman also explores how phytochemicals protect human cells from inflammation, oxidative stress, and metabolic damage, while supporting energy production, digestion, hormone regulation, and cellular repair.

Each herb or spice has its own in-depth section, exploring its origins, cultural history, traditional culinary uses, and scientifically proven health benefits. The author explains how to easily incorporate herbs and spices—alone or in blends such as garam masala and herbes de Provence—into meals and beverages to enhance flavor, nutrition, and healing.

Blending history, cooking, and medical research, Altman reclaims the overlooked power of herbs and spices to demonstrate how well-seasoned food can be our medicine.