Biodiverse food plants in the semiarid region of Brazil have unknown potential: A systematic review

Food biodiversity presents one of the most significant opportunities to enhance food and nutrition security today. The lack of data on many plants, however, limits our understanding of their potential and the possibility of building a research agenda focused on them. Our objective with this systematic review was to identify biodiverse food plants occurring in the Caatinga biome, Brazil, strategic for the promotion of food and nutrition security. We selected studies from the following databases: Web of Science, Medline/PubMed (via the National Library of Medicine), Scopus and Embrapa Agricultural Research Databases (BDPA). Eligible were original articles, published since 2008, studying food plants occurring in the Caatinga. We assessed the methodological quality of the studies we selected. We reviewed a total of fifteen studies in which 65 plants that met our inclusion criteria were mentioned. Of this amount, 17 species, including varieties, subspecies, and different parts of plants, had data on chemical composition, in addition to being mentioned as food consumed by rural communities in observational ethnobotanical studies. From the energy and protein data associated with these plants, we produced a ranking of strategic species. The plants with values higher than the average of the set were: Dioclea grandiflora Mart. ex Benth (mucuna), Hymenaea courbaril L. (jatoba), Syagrus cearensis Noblick (coco-catole), Libidibia ferrea (Mart. ex Tul.) L.P.Queiroz (juca), Sideroxylon obtusifolium (Roem. & Schult.) T.D.Penn. (quixabeira). We suggest that the scientific community concentrates research efforts on tree legumes, due to their resilience and physiological, nutritional, and culinary qualities.