The Importance Of Flowers In Human Life

Flowers are associated with human life since time immemorial. Beside aesthetic beauty, several flowers are used for edible purpose viz., rose, marigold, calendula, hibiscus, hollyhock, carnation, chrysanthemum, nasturtium, lotus, cosmos and pansies etc. These flowers have medicinal as well as nutritional values and are rich source of vitamins, antioxidants and mineral elements. They are also rich sources of chlorophyll, flavanoids, xanthophylls, caretenoids, betalins and anthocyanins pigments that are used in colouring food, beverage, and textile and paper industries. Flowers have anticancer, anti-inflammatory and antimutagenic properties too. The flowers are used as vegetables and other purpose since time immemorial, however, flowers for supplementary

One can get its best example by seeing changing the life style as well as food habits of people in day to day life. Everybody wants to get shortcuts in all respect of life especially in terms of food which can be easily realized by seeing the popularity of fast foods among the all generations either child, youth and adults. It leads to worldwide biggest problem of obesity among children’s. Other than obesity these types of eating habits also causes heart diseases, cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis and many more and it is also one reason behind of reducing life expectancy rate nowadays. The peoples that are suffering from these diseases are become depended on medicine throughout their life span and by taking these medicine from the doctor one can alleviate the symptoms of diseases but cannot get rid of it. So, nowadays people are attracting towards its alternate source i.e., nutraceuticals. The concept of nutraceutical was given by Stephen De Flice in 1989, who was the founder and chairman of the Foundation for Innovation in Medicine. The term nutraceutical consist of two words i.e., nutrition + pharmaceuticals. According to Stephen De Flice, nutraceutical can be defined as, “a food (or a part of food) that provides medical or health benefits, including the prevention and or treatment of a disease”. Hippochrates stated that our food should

The colour of flowers is due to presence of various chemical compounds or pigments but among them carotenoids and flavonoids are important one (Friedman et al., 2010). Mato et al., 2000 reported that higher the level of flavonoid content means that flowers contained more antioxidant properties. Most of the edible flowers are rich sources of vitamin and mineral elements. The flowers are available in different colours and enriched in anthocyanin, caraetonoid and flavanoid etc pigments that attract the pollinators for pollination (Grotewold, 2006) and suggest a high antioxidant activity that is of interest for human nutrition (Benvenuti et al., 2016). De Pascual-Teresa and Sanchez-Ballesta, 2008 studies about the anthocyanin from plant to health and they found that flavonoids are considered a very important phytochemicals in plant foods due to their strong antioxidant activity and other beneficial physicochemical and bio-logical properties. Most of the ornamentals species showed anti free radical functional food (Barros et al., 2010; Kaisoon et al., 2010). All Edible flowers are rich source of antioxidants, effective as antitumor, anti-inflammatory and anti mutagenic biological agents (Chanwitheesuk et al., 2005; Ukiya et al., 2002; Ukiya et al., 2006 & Wongwattanasathien et al., 2010). These edibleflowers have