Alternative medicines from edible bitter plants of Besut, Malaysia

In Besut, some elderly is believing the bitter taste vegetables may provide medicinal benefits. However, discontinuity of their knowledge to the young generation leads to deterioration. To this time, there still no documentation is done on the consumption of edible bitter plants in Besut. This research conducted to reveal their knowledge in consuming edible, bitter and native plants for medicinal purposes. From the field visit and conversation, a list of accessions had been made, followed by the frequencies on how it had been used. A dendrogram, to show the linkage between the purposes of the studied plants as alternative medicine and supplement had been done by using IBM SPSS Statistics 20 software and bar chart plotted by using Microsoft Excel. There were 15 native families comprised of 17 plants species had been consumed for treating 31 types of health problems. The highest percentage of diseases treated represented by digestion problems, 64.7 %. The species of Morinda citrifolia (mengkudu besar) found achieved the highest uses among the studied plants. The value of Pearson correlation, r = 0.633, showed a positive correlation between the purposes of treating diabetes and digestion problems at a significant level, p = 0.01. Based on the dendrogram, there was the nearest linkage at the distance of 3/25 in a cluster of 3Crateva religiosa (dala), Oroxylum indicum (beka) and Tylopilus felleus (kulat gelam) which were used for treating hypertension, diabetes and supplement for a person with poor food appetite. The bitter taste from plants was stimulated positive perception of people to eat them as alternative medicine. Besides the leafy vegetables, mushroom also had been consumed as healing food