Cancer Prevention - Part 2

There are magical anticancer compounds in fruits and vegetables that can help in cancer prevention. Variety of colors matters in the diet. Let’s talk about some of these compounds. Indoles are found in white and green cruciferous vegetables. Things like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage are the whites and greens. We know that cauliflower doesn’t have enough vitamin C, but it’s not the vitamins in fruits and vegetables that help in cancer prevention. Most of the vitamin studies have fallen short. It’s the colors, the pigments, that are the nutritional heroes that fight against cancer.

What do indoles do? They reduce the production of one of the stages of cell division in the cancer process. We also know that indoles can act as negative estrogen regulators and alter the effects of estrogen. Most of the breast cancer in women is estrogen receptor positive. What that means is that women are vulnerable to the increased amounts of estrogen. If indoles can actually down regulate that estrogen receptor, it may reduce the risk of the most common form of breast cancer. Research also suggests that they can be invaluable in the prevention of cervical and prostate cancer.

Are there creative ways that you can put more broccoli and cabbage into your diet? Think a little about it.

Lycopene is the red pigment. If the food is red it rules. Things like tomatoes, pink grapefruit and watermelon are great red foods. The whole fruit is preferred, but juices can serve as a reasonable substitute. Let’s say you’re travelling and you don’t have the availability of a fresh salad, but a can of tomato juice would be a great substitute. It’s not quite as good, but almost.

Multiple roles exist for lycopene in cancer prevention. It accesses an antioxidant, protecting those wonderful cell membranes you have. It may prevent abnormal cell division. Large epidemiological studies show a relationship between those who have low levels of lycopene in their blood and an increased prevalence of prostate cancer. However, currently studies haven’t demonstrated the prevention of prostate cancer through increased consumption of lycopene.

Cooked tomato products actually have an increased amount of bioavailable lycopene. When you are trying a veggie burger, put ketchup on it.

Spice up your food with some additional color. For the color gold, try turmeric. Turmeric, which is a traditional curry spice, is actually a cancer prevention powerhouse. A compound in it called cuncurmin is thought to induce the aberrant cells to die, rather than proliferate.

However, as we discovered with many dietary compounds, there can be some downsides to using turmeric. Turmeric, particularly when used as a supplement and not a spice, may reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy. Sometimes compounds that are needed for cancer prevention actually are not a good idea during cancer treatment. This is where you need to talk to your physician. Sometimes good for prevention may not be so good during treatment.

What about yellow and orange foods like carrots and corn? In a recent study published in the American journal of clinical nutrition, carotenoids present in these foods were found to decrease the risk of breast cancer in post-menopausal women.

What about the other colors of the rainbow? What about some blue, purple and some additional red? Simply stated, think berries. Berries such as blueberries, raspberries and strawberries contain wonderful chemicals that can repair the DNA damage. Remember that the damage to DNA is the first step of cancer development. We’ll be reviewing more common dietary recommendations for cancer prevention in my next post.

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Cancer Prevention

Let’s talk about cancer prevention. What can we do to prevent it? Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, and the most feared diagnosis. Although heart disease is the number one killer of Americans, the diagnosis of cancer is the most terrifying. Clearly we have much to do in the prevention of cancer. Poor diet is estimated to account for 30% to 35% of the cancers. Therefore, we can do something to modify our risk. Please keep in mind that modification of risk does not preclude the need for early detection and diagnosis. Although you might do everything possible in terms of diet and exercise, make sure you keep up with diagnostic testing.

Outside of diet, there are other lifestyle risk factors: tobacco use, alcohol consumption and lack of exercise. These can increase the overall risk of almost all cancers.

Here I want to talk about the dietary strategies and lifestyle modifications needed to reduce cancer risk.

Both tobacco and alcohol initiate and promote cancer development. Not only they cause cell damage, they also promote cancer development.

The American Cancer Society suggests that 1 million skin cancers could be prevented by eliminating sun exposure. This is a double edged sword. We know that the sun is a great source of vitamin D. By eliminating sun exposure, you can also eliminate one of your major sources of vitamin D. Sun screen can be very effective for preventing skin cancer, but it must be applied in an appropriate way. The higher the Sun Protection Factor (SPF), the better.

Exposure to UV light in tanning salons can be just as dangerous as exposure to the sun itself.

Some of the most exciting things in terms of cancer development is that we now know that certain viruses have been implicated in cervical cancer and possibly others as well. New vaccines can be given to prevent certain forms but not all of cervical cancer.

The current thinking is that nutrition can either act as a cancer promoter or a cancer-cell killer. According to the American Cancer society, diet and weight management can aid in the prevention of cancer. If you’re struggling with weight management and exercise, you might want to think about this as your deposit in the cancer prevention account.

There appears to be a dose-related response to exercise. That means that 30 minutes of exercise is good, but an hour would be better. Human bodies evolved to move. Apparently, in this case, what is happening is that individuals who do not exercise become resistant to insulin. They make of it, and the more you make, more you promote cancer development.

Simple Recommendations

What do you think of a plant-based diet? The more of your plate is occupied by vegetables, the better. Think about having a meat-less Monday, were your main dish might be vegetarian.

A recent study that included more than half a million subjects (this is a lot!!) suggest that those who consume the highest amount of red meat have a higher mortality rate. This study is known as the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. Mortality rates from both heart disease and cancer were increased with increasing red meat consumption.

What are some big recommendations from this study? Reduce the meat and avoid grilling. Grilling can increase the charring of that meat. It is the charred meat that can increase the risk of cancer.

Well, suppose you’re invited over somebody’s house and they are not really great with their grilling skills and you’ve got everything that’s significantly blackened. Trim off as much of that as you can and maybe flavor it up with a bit of barbecue sauce.

Regarding alcohol use in cancer prevention, the best approach is no alcohol. Keep in mind that alcohol minimally is going to serve as an initiating event. If you do drink alcohol, the recommendation is to limit your intake to one drink per day for women and two for men.

Avoid cured meats. These are processed meats, such as bacon, ham and hot dogs. Individuals are trying to get away from beef and pork, we now have cured turkey products. We have now turkey hot dogs and everyone believes that’s better for them. The problem is the curing of the meat. Cancer-causing compounds are formed when meats are cured.

Well, here I ended talking more about what we should avoid to prevent cancer. In my next post I’ll talk about a healthy diet and lifestyle that would help in cancer prevention.

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Cancer Statistics

It is interesting to look at cancer statistics. Thanks to research we know many facts about cancer incidence and the factors that contribute to it. There is a very strong racial and geographical bias in who gets cancer and who doesn’t. The geography is interesting. In Japan, there was a very high risk of gastric cancers probably due to eating lots of smoke foods. That risk is starting to disappear as habits change. There was, according to many cancer statistics, a very low incidence of uterine cervical cancer in Israel probably due to specific sexual practices and circumcision.

If you look at some of the charts of cancer statistics in female population, there is an interesting change in trend in lung cancer. This has to do probably with the advent of the women’s liberation movement, which made it much more acceptable for women to smoke. Lung cancer rose at a dramatic rate.

It is interesting that the incidence of breast cancer stayed about the same, but the death rate from lung cancer now exceeds the death rate from breast cancer. There are more breast cancers still, but lung cancer is much more fatal. There is also a decline in colon cancer because of endoscopy. We started looking at colon cancers through the colonoscope and it turned out we can take out most of them in early stages. Now we are getting to these before they are full blown cancers and we’ve achieved a huge decline in both incidence and death rate.

Lung cancer is very high in Asia, where people smoke much more heavily than in this country. Primary hepatic cancer (cancer of the liver) is very high also in Asia because of a combination of something called aflatoxin. Aflatoxin is a toxin that comes from a fungus and they occur in poorly stored grains. Liver cancer is very common in Asia and Africa, and virtually unheard of in America. Maybe you’ve heard that someone got liver cancer, but I’m almost sure he doesn’t.

There is a difference between primary cancer and metastatic cancer. When a cancer starts, for example, in the breasts, that is called primary breast cancer. When that cancer spreads to the brain or the liver, it is still breast cancer. It’s not liver cancer. It is very rare to see primary liver cancer, meaning that the cancer started in the liver cells.

We see a lot of melanomas of the skin due to ozone depletion in the Southern hemisphere. There is big hole in the ozone layer right over Australia. Cancer statistics start to show a very high incidence of both melanomas and other kinds of skin cancers due to UV light.

There are racial factors in the incidence of cancer. Blacks, for example, are protected from the effects of UV light by the melanin, which are benign cells in the skin that filters out those lights. Skin cancers in blacks are much rarer.

Poverty is also linked to cancer. Just like it is with infectious diseases, it is not very good to be poor.

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Causes of Cancer

Here I want to talk about some known and common causes of cancer. Common causes of cancer are carcinogens, which are those things in our world that cause cancer. They are divided into three groups: physical, chemical and biological agents. In 1755, we probably had the first connection between cancer and an environmental agent. Percivall Pott, a pathologist in England, noticed that there was a prevalence of scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps. These were boys who worn an outfit, were tight to a rope and lowered down to a chimney, where they swept all the coal tar. These boys got these skin cancers on their scrotum. It was, according to Pott (and it turned out to be true), the constant contact of the coal tar against the scrotum skin. The interesting thing was that the French didn’t get this, because they washed their clothes every day. The English boys didn’t, so they had constant coal tar residues.

Four years later, John Hill noticed the association of cancers of the nose and the oral cavity in patients who chewed tobacco. He just made the connection; he didn’t know why that happened. Then, in 1950 there were two sets of investigators who ended a very long debate, noting the relationship between cigarette smoking and cancer.

This is the history of how we found environmental agents in the causes of cancer. There are three big groups of environmental carcinogens: chemical, physical and biological. Most carcinogens only produce cancer in a very small number of patients. Most of the time, our body’s defenses would prevent cancer from occurring. So, the connection between an environmental factor and a type of cancer is very difficult to establish. Most smokers never get cancer, for example, even though cigarette smoking is still one of our most common causes of death.

Tobacco is the most important of the causes of cancer. It causes 30% of cancer deaths (of all cancers combined). Everything else pales in comparison to this. If we got everybody to quit smoking, then we would have 2000 deaths a year from lung cancer instead of 200000 a year. The money spent on research and prevention could be spent in something else also.

Alcohol is also linked to cancer. When it is combined with tobacco, it is very potent in causing cancers of the mouth. How often do you see someone holding a drink who is also smoking?

Food additives are a small percentage of the causes of cancer. Food flavorings are one example. Certainly saccharine causes cancer in mice. The link in humans is still a little fuzzy.

Industrial chemicals: there are some industrial chemicals that are huge causes of cancer not only for the workers, but for people in the general population also.

Asbestos are microfibers that probably spear the cytoplasm and the nucleus of the cell. They probably also mix chemicals that never should had been mixed. They cause mesothelioma, a kind of cancer. There is an interesting controversy with asbestos. Asbestos in the ground doesn’t really hurt anybody. Miners have a problem, however. Asbestos in walls that are well sealed are less harmful than when you try to remove them, because that’s when you spread it to the workers. Leaving the asbestos where it is would probably do the most in preventing this kind of cancer.

Ionizing radiation: it is the kind of radiation which has a lot of energy and can move electrons in an atom. This could cause mutations in DNA molecules.

Electromagnetic fields: they are usually on the papers, but there is no hard evidence there had been cancer increases because of them. This is still very controversial.

Nuclear Energy: this is one that comes up a lot because of the fact that radiation is emitted. As far as we know, however, the industry of nuclear energy is pretty clean. There have not been increases in cancer deaths, except in places like Chernobyl. We did learn about cancer from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We learned, unfortunately, how much radiation you need to get cancer.

Ultraviolet Radiation: we know that both types A and B of ultraviolet radiation are carcinogenic (skin cancer).

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