Is Snakehead fish (Channa species) Good for Wound Healing?

 

I received a question in a WhatsApp chat who asked me this:

Dr Lim

May I ask if it is true sea cucumbers and ikan haruan (snakehead fish) have healing wound properties among so many, many food, and nutritional claims. You are the only nutrition / medical / scientific and food expert here we can consult. I asked so many other doctors, but they have no clue. Some say they are rubbish.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S222541101730069X

Kindly enlighten me.

Thank you.

Jessie Ng

………………………………………………….

My answer to above question is:

I really do not know with certainty. The paper published showed some evidence, but more work needs to be done for confirmation.

 Foods in their hundreds have traditionally been used for their curative properties for centuries by different cultures. There must be a lot of truth in them. Nutrition and their therapeutic properties are so overwhelmingly complex these days that it has branched off into a separate discipline, called "functional foods”. 

The action of functional foods in the body in the maintenance of health and curative medicine is so complex that it is almost impossible even for researchers in nutrition and practising nutritionists to catch up. Nutrition research tops the list of all branches of medical research with an annual expenditure of no less than US $ 100 billion being spent globally. Research in cancer comes only next with an annual expenditure of less than US $ 15 billion.  

Despite the landslide avalanche of research papers in nutrition being churned out globally, we still do not understand fully their medicinal properties, because unlike drugs that are just pure isolated chemical compounds, food substances produced by photosynthesis in plants and vegetables contain not just one pure isolated substance, but the combination of tens of hundreds, if not thousands of them with varying natural medicines and properties. To make it even more complicated, they all react, interact among themselves or differently inside the body on ingestion. There is just no way we can trace them using our usual analytical procedures such as radioisotope tracing, stable isotope tracers, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, metabolomics, genetic and molecular techniques, cell cultures and animal models, biochemical assays or computational modelling, positron emission tomography (PET) scans among others. We use these procedures for research in biochemistry or in molecular biology too.

Food and nutritional chemistry and biochemistry is so complex that it is almost impossible to know everything even by using the above tracing procedures. You can see this paper you sent to me to read is quite a simple one to understand for a researcher but is quite a technical one for others unless they are medical researchers.  So, we don’t expect the ordinary public to know all these nutritional-medical claims?  We don’t expect medical doctors to know either as you have said after asking them.

First, it is very daunting to trace the therapeutic or metabolic pathways of all these foods for their medicinal properties. It is so unlike the functions of other nutrients like carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, and trace elements that are already studied. Secondly, food substances are unlike drugs.  

Drugs are specially designed by computer simulations, synthesized by pharmaceutical chemists, studied by pharmacologists (not pharmacists), assayed by molecular biologists and toxicologists, analysed by analytical chemists...etc working as a team in pharmaceutical companies in the US, UK, Germany, Switzerland. They command the highest salaries among all other scientific / health-care professionals in the world. We cannot beat them.

This paper you are showing me is just one of the research papers on the medicinal properties of sea cucumbers among tens of hundreds of other foods that may have curative properties for other diseases.

As far as I know there are many scientific papers already published on the post-surgical wound healing properties of ikan haruan (Channa striata) or snakehead fish. This has traditionally been used by the Chinese, Malays and SE Asian people for a very long time already. Now this sea cucumber? I really do not know for certainty, although there is some scientific truth in this traditional belief.  

 The problem is so complex that even nutritional scientists who are in the frontiers of nutrition research, like medical scientists, do not know, how do we expect a licensed professional practicing nutritionist to know? 

I need to do a thorough search in the scientific literature to give the answer.

Give time. Tonight, is Chap Goh Mei, and I shall be going out shortly for dinner, and hence I cannot answer you fully at the moment? 

In the meantime, Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine said:

"Let Food Be Thy Medicine" 

But Rockerfeller, the "Father of Modern Petroleum Chemical Medicine" changed it to:

 "Let Petroleum Chemicals be Thy Daily Food" 

What else to say or claim?

jb lim