Word: diet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Eating right to prevent heart disease may seem complicated and confusing, but it's a breeze compared with trying to design an anticancer diet. Cardiovascular disease is relatively simple; it's the result of normal bodily processes taken to the extreme. Cancer, by contrast, involves changes in the programming of DNA within the nuclei of individual cells. Beyond that, heart disease is an illness that affects a single organ system, while cancer is dozens of different diseases that target body parts as radically different as the brain, breast and bone...
That being the case, it's no surprise that the relationship between diet and cancer is still largely a matter of educated guesswork--and in many cases, the guesses have turned out to be wrong. Take the much publicized link between high-fat diets and breast cancer, for example. Women who live in Western countries, where high-fat diets are the norm, tend to have high breast-cancer rates. Even more telling: women of Japanese ancestry who live in the U.S. get the disease six times more often than their grandmothers and great-grandmothers in Japan. Yet a huge recent...
...series of targeted studies in Finland and the U.S. showed that beta carotene supplements don't ward off cancer at all. This doesn't mean that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables doesn't reduce the risk of cancer, says Harvard's Walter Willett, or even that carotenoids aren't protective. But, he concludes, "it looks like taking beta carotene in high pharmacological doses is not the right thing...
...makers of cereals and breads can advertise on their packages that these foods may provide certain health benefits. Such a move was made possible after the FDA agreed with General Mills, maker of Cheerios, Total and Wheaties, that the latest research supports a label indicating that a low-fat diet that's high in whole-grain foods may reduce the risk of heart disease and certain cancers...
None of this argues for a return to an all-butter diet. Margarines may not lower LDL levels much, but lower them they do. What's more, food scientists in Europe have developed margarines free of trans-fatty acids, and these are slowly making their way to grocery shelves in the U.S. Until they're in wide use here, it's up to manufacturers to give consumers the food labels they need--and it's up to consumers to read them...