How vegetables prevent cancer
We have all heard it — vegetables are good for our health, we should eat more vegetables in order to stay healthy, we should definitely add more vegetables to our diet, we should eat broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage and other similar phrases. It is known that vegetables can prevent and combat many diseases, cancer included. That fact has been around for a while, but the mechanism couldn’t be fully explained.
Researchers from UC Santa Barbara have finally cracked it. They have shown how vegetables can prevent and combat breast cancer.
“Breast cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women, can be prevented by eating cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage and near relatives of cabbage such as broccoli and cauliflower,” said one of the authors of the study Olga Azarenko, who is a graduate student at UCSB. “These vegetables contain compounds called isothiocyanates which we believe to be responsible for the cancer-preventive and anti-carcinogenic activities in these vegetables. Broccoli and broccoli sprouts have the highest amount of the isothiocyanates.”
“Our paper focuses on the anti-cancer activity of one of these compounds, called sulforaphane, or SFN,” Azarenko added. “It has already been shown to reduce the incidence and rate of chemically induced mammary tumors in animals. It inhibits the growth of cultured human breast cancer cells, leading to cell death.”
Azarenko discovered the amazing ability of SFNs by a technique similar to to the way that the anticancer drugs taxol and vincristine inhibit cell division during mitosis.
“SFN may be an effective cancer preventive agent because it inhibits the proliferation and kills precancerous cells,” said Leslie Wilson, UCSB cancer researcher.
The research is published in Carciogenesis.
Source: ucsb.edu
