CAT | Research
When people think of ways to prevent cancer, lung cancer is often the first that comes to mind. Everyone by now knows that smoking and tobacco use can cause lung cancer (along with oral cancers): and so it stands to reason that not smoking will prevent it.
Yes, the vast majority of lung cancers are caused by smoking. But in an interesting
series on lung cancer, the New York Times started with a piece highlighting how 10 to 15 percent of lung cancer patients have never smoked at all.
While research is looking at why some non-smokers get lung cancer, and there are several possibilities, one potential way everyone can protect himself against the disease is through a healthy diet. AICR’s expert report found that diets high in fruit and foods containing carotenoids probably lower the risk of lung cancer. Carotenoids are in a lot of fruits and vegetables, such as carrots, sweet potatoes, and broccoli.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death. More people die of lung cancer than from cancers of the breast, prostate and colon combined.
You can read more about lowering lung cancer risk in Cancer Research Update.
For help quitting smoking, one resource is the government’s smokefree site.
A new batch of cancer statistics was published online today and it bodes good news, relatively speaking, for people diagnosed with cancer. The report found that overall cancer mortality rates have steadily decreased over the last 16 years, translating to approximating 767,000 fewer deaths from cancer.
Avoiding inactivity is one of the latest pieces of advice for cancer survivors.
To read the report visit CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.
The lower cancer death rate occurred in all racial/ethnic groups in both men and women, with the exception of American Indian/Alaska Native women, in whom rates were stable.
A few highlights from the report:
• Among men, death rates for all races combined decreased by 21.0 percent between 1990 and 2006, with decreases in lung, prostate, and colorectal cancer rates accounting for nearly 80 percent of the total.
• Among women, overall cancer death rates between 1991 and 2006 decreased by 12.3 percent, with decreases in breast and colorectal cancer rates accounting for 60 percent of the total.
• Breast, lung, and colon are the three most common types of cancer in women, accounting for an estimated 52 percent of cases in 2010. Breast cancer alone is expected to account for 28 percent of all new cancer cases among women.
And although the lower rates of mortality (and incidence) is overall great news, cancer still accounts for more deaths than heart disease in persons younger than 85 years, the authors note.
The report comes at a time when research is now clearly showing that a healthy lifestyle can help cancer survivors, both physiologically and psychologically. For the latest news and information, visit AICR’s News section for Cancer Patients and Survivors News section.
In the lab, the compound that gives chili peppers their kick – called capsaicin — shows off a lot of health benefits. It fights cancer, and acts as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant.
Today’s issue of Cancer Research Update features a study looking at another possible health boon for chili peppers: its fat fighting potential. This study found that animals eating a high-fat diet gained less weight with capsaicin than without. It also showed that capsaicin appeared to change 20 fat-related proteins in the body. You can read more about it in CRU.
A lot of studies looking into capsaicin’s anti-obesity effects stem from research showing that capsaicin is linked to increased thermogenesis. Basically, thermogenesis means heat production. Thermogenesis is important in regulating obesity. The idea is that increasing thermogenesis leads to food converted into energy (as heat) instead of fat.
There’s a lot of interesting animal studies on thermogenesis and capsaicin, and even human studies – see here – but right now, it’s too soon to douse your meals with chili peppers just for weight control, or even cancer protection. Peppers – of all varieties – do contain plenty of health benefits and certainly can spice up a meal. In general, the more capsaicin a pepper contains, the hotter it is.
For the daring, you can find out how your favorite chili pepper rates on the hotness scale here. (If you take too big a bite of a hot pepper, grab a cup of milk, not water: milk contains a protein called casein that neutralizes capsaicin’s effects.)
Have you ever tried one of the hot-hot chili peppers? Good or bad?
Watching TV is already linked with several negative health outcomes, here’s one possible reason why.
A new study has found that if we were to base our diet entirely on foods in TV ads, we would be eating 25 times the recommended servings of sugars and 20 times the recommended servings of fat. Our diet would provide less than half of the recommended servings of
vegetables, dairy, and fruits.
The study is published in this month’s Journal of the American Dietetic Association. You can read the abstract here.
The study analyzed food ads during 84 hours of primetime and 12 hours of Saturday morning shows over a 28-day period. The result was about 800 food ads. After analyzing the food’s nutritional content and serving size, researchers compared the food item to the recommended Daily Values (based on a 2,000 calorie daily diet) and the Food Guide Pyramid.
The average observed foods contained too many serving of sugars, fat, and meat and too few servings of dairy, fruit and vegetables. These foods also oversupplied 8 nutrients – including sodium, saturated fat, and thiamin – and undersupplied 12 nutrients, many of which are linked with heath benefits, including vitamins A, D, and E.
You may not knowingly base your diet on TV ads but media messages are powerful influencers of our eating behavior, suggest the authors. (By age 65, according to the study, the average person will have seen about 2 million ads on television, a lot of which are for food.)
The authors recommend several strategies to increase awareness and change. You could also watch a little less TV.
AICR’s expert report found that watching a lot of television probably increases the risk of overweight and obesity. And excess body fat causes seven types of cancer, along with several other health disorders.
Is there a food ad you find particularly bothersome? Or one that you love?
This Sunday, millions of cancer survivors will celebrate the 23rd National Cancer Survivors Day, a day of events held in hundreds of communities around the world. 
To mark the occasion, today’s issue of AICR’s Cancer Research Update recaps ongoing research examining how physical activity may help survivors feel better. You can read the article here.
Research exploring how diet, weight, and physical activity influence recurrence and secondary cancer is a booming field. Right now, AICR recommends that – after treatment – cancer survivors follow AICR’s cancer prevention recommendations for diet, physical activity and healthy weight maintenance (unless otherwise advised by a health professional).
You can find more information on issues before, during, and after cancer diagnosis by visiting AICR’s Cancer Patients and Survivors.
The (relatively) good news: With today’s treatments, children who get cancer are surviving longer then ever before. According to the National Cancer Institute, the 5-year survival rates for all childhood cancers combined increased from about 58% in 1975–77 to 80% in 1996–2003.
The bad news: Many childhood cancer survivors face a variety of health problems
throughout their lives.
A new analysis of childhood cancer survivors highlights the medical problems and other health challenges these children face as adults. The study is published in the current issue of Cancer; you can read the abstract here.
In the study, researchers drew upon data from a National Health Interview Survey that included 410 adult survivors of childhood cancer and almost 300,000 people without cancer. The study found that childhood survivors were more likely than other adults to say their health is only fair or poor (24% compared to 11%), more likely to be unable to work because of medical problems (21% compared to 6%) and more likely to be limited by their health in terms of the work they could do (31% compared to 11%).
Lately, there’s been a lot of work investigating how lifestyle choices can play a role in helping childhood cancer survivors. One study, funded by AICR, is looking at how certain foods may influence the effect of common treatment for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Other studies are looking at the benefits of physical activity, both during and after treatment.
To learn more about the research in this field, read ScienceNow’s Childhood Cancer Survivors: Healthy Living.
And for more information on childhood cancer, visit NCI.
21
Enhancing Ovarian Cancer Treatment with Plant Compounds
0 Comments | Posted by Mya in Diet, Research
One of the big challenges in cancer treatment is resistance, when cells never react or stop reacting to a chemotherapy drug’s lethal effects. For ovarian cancer, resistance can occur with the commonly-used drug cisplatin.
The phytochemicals found in plant foods may help, a new study suggests. The study is preliminary, conducted on cancer cells, yet it suggests that a phytochemical called kaempferol may help this ovarian treatment be more effective.
Kaempferol is a flavonoid, one of the largest groups of phytochemicals and studied previously for its role in protecting against cancer. It’s found in many plant-foods, including berries, tea, and broccoli.
You can read the study here.
AICR has funded many studies on the effects of dietary components on cancer treatments: We featured a couple of them on breast cancer treatment in this months eNews.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths because it is often diagnosed only in its advanced stages. This week, two new studies on pancreatic cancer suggest there are lifestyle habits that can prevent this disease.
Source: NCI. Unfortunately, incidence (and mortality) have changed little in recent years.
The first study, highlighted in today’s issue of Cancer Research Update, supports findings from AICR’s expert report linking higher body weight and waist circumference to increased risk. The study used pooled data from a major National Cancer Institute group of participants, which included about 4,400 individuals – half with the disease and half without. You can read more about the study in CRU.
The second study linked heavy alcohol use and binge drinking to increased risk of pancreatic cancer in men. Previous research has produced conflicting findings on the alcohol-pancreatic cancer link.
But this study – which you can read here – found that the more men drank, the higher their increased risk. This held true even if the men consumed the alcoholic drinks years or decades prior to diagnosis. The study included about 500 individuals with the cancer and 1,700 controls, and the participants reported their history of alcohol consumption. There was no connection between alcohol consumption and pancreatic cancer risk among women.
AICR’s expert report found that foods containing folate — such as beans, leafy greens, and peanuts — probably protect against pancreatic cancer. Want to add some folate to your day? Spinach will help. Try making AICR’s Turkey, Spinach and Apple Wrap.
An intriguing AICR-funded study on flaxseed and ovarian cancer is making news today. The study investigated ho
w a flaxseed-enriched diet would effect ovarian cancer development in hens. Although the study was conducted in animals, it will hopefully lead to research that will help ovarian cancer survivors.
Why hens? Hens are the only other animals besides humans known to spontaneously develop ovarian cancer, and at a relatively high rate. That makes hens a strong model to study ovarian cancer, a disease dubbed “the silent killer” because it is often not detected until the later stages.
You can read a news report about the study here.
You can also read an earlier report on the study and the lead scientist Dale Hales, PhD. , which we wrote about in Cancer Research Update.
10
Obesity and Inactivity: The Evolutionary Perspective
0 Comments | Posted by Glen in Diet, Physical Activity, Research
AICR’s expert report concluded that carrying excess body fat is a convincing cause of six different cancers (colorectal, postmenopausal breast, esophageal, endometrial, kidney and pancreatic) and a probable cause of gallbladder cancer as well. That means that in the US alone, obesity is responsible for over 100,000 cancer cases every year.
And as obesity figures continue to rise, that number is likely to grow even larger.
How did we get here?
Last week, at the 3rd International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health, many researchers presented data tracking recent trends in the amount of leisure-time physical activity we’re getting, nowadays. But one of the keynote speakers, Dr. William Leonard of Northwestern University, presented an intriguing talk that took the long view.
The very long view.
Like, hundreds of thousands of years long.
Dr. Leonard is an anthropologist, you see. He talked about how humans evolved, specifically how how changes in our diet and activity level changed our body type.
Basically, said Dr. Leonard, as our brains got bigger, they placed larger demands on our metabolism, and our diets became more nutrient- and calorie-dense to support them.
Leonard proposed that the recent and much-talked about uptick in the calorie-density of our foods over the past few decades (higher fat content, larger portion sizes) is simply an extension of what’s been happening to us, on an evolutionary scale, for millions of years. But the difference is key: dietary changes that used to to take thousands and thousands of years to occur have happened within a single lifetime.
Even so, he suggested that we might be missing the real story by focusing so much on the increase in calories in our diets. In fact, he notes, while calorie content of the diet in the developed world has increased since the fifties, that increase leveled off in the 80s. Yet obesity rates continued, and continue, to rise.
To explain this, he suggests that it’s decreased calorie expenditure that plays a larger role in obesity than caloric intake.
Throughout our evolution, our caloric intake increased to match greater and greater needs we placed upon our bodies – hunting calorie-dense animals is more demanding than gathering low-calorie-dense crops. But this eon-old trend toward increased calorie-burning is now experiencing a dramatic reversal: Our jobs have become much more sedentary since the 80s and the advent of the computer.
Our bodies have evolved over millions of years to actively and effectively meet our caloric needs from the environment. But now we’re suddenly accelerating the trend toward more calories – and by changing the physical environment to make things easier, we’re reversing the evolutionary trend toward burning more calories.
The net effect: we’re upsetting an equilibrium our species has managed to maintain for thousands and thousands of years.
