Role of Dietary Supplementation of Natural Products in the Prevention and Treatment of Liver Diseases

The practice of medicine using either natural agents as they are or derivatives of natural products for treating the human diseases is commonly referred to as “natural medicine” or “naturotherapy.” The usage of naturotherapy has been there for thousands of years for many human diseases. Naturopathy medication, by definition, must exist in the nature, and is generally used without addition of any chemicals, without or with marginal processing. Herbs, diet supplements, plant derivatives, nutrient supplementation, etc. generally fall into the category of natural medication. Liver, being the most important in detoxification of chemicals and major regulator of body energy storage and expenditure as well as the central hub of metabolic activity, is constantly under the pressure of getting damaged. Humans encounter many liver diseases like alcoholic liver disease, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, cirrhosis, hepatitis, and cancer. The prevalence of liver diseases is increasing each year, demanding the high need for developing effective therapies. Although, over the years, we have achieved a considerable advance in liver disease prevention, screening, diagnostic, and treatment methodologies, the rate of liver diseases is in continuous rise. In addition, because targeted therapy for liver diseases is not much successful till now, the appreciation related to traditional herbal medicine is constantly increasing. In this chapter, we discuss briefly few of the herbal plants, which showed efficacy in in vitro studies. We also highlight the preclinical evaluation undertaken for each of these plants towards the goal for healing a variety of liver diseases.