Word: diets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tear up my morning menu now that two new studies reported last week in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest that fiber may not protect against colon cancer? Not on your life. There are lots of other reasons, backed by solid research, for eating a high-fiber diet. Among them: it lowers blood pressure, decreases the cholesterol level and lessens the chances of developing type II, or adult-onset, diabetes...
More than anything else, the reports show how little we understand about the ways diet affects health. In the larger of the two studies, Dr. Arthur Schatzkin of the National Cancer Institute and his colleagues recruited 2,079 men and women ages 35 and older who had had a precancerous polyp removed from their colon in the previous six months. (About 5% to 10% of such polyps eventually become malignant.) The volunteers were then randomly divided into an "intervention group," which ate a low-fat diet that included five to eight servings of fruits and vegetables each...
After four years, the folks on the intervention diet had eaten an average of 35 g of fiber a day, against 20 g for their typical-fare counterparts. Yet both groups developed the same number of new polyps. A second NCI study, involving 1,303 people ages 40 to 80, divided into high-fiber and low-fiber groups, produced similar results...
Even if fiber doesn't inhibit polyps, it may still help prevent colon cancer. Maybe you have to eat a lot more fiber-rich fruits and vegetables to get any benefit. Maybe you have to eat right and exercise more. Maybe you have to eat a healthy diet for a long time. ("Think of it this way," says Dr. Steven Zeisel, a nutrition expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was not involved in either study. "When you stop smoking, you don't immediately lower your risk of lung cancer. It can take 10 years...
COCOA PUFF Hard to believe, but cocoa--well, a defatted extract of it--may be good for the heart. In a study, rabbits were fed a cholesterol-rich diet along with 200 mg of the extract daily. After two months, the bunnies' blood vessels did a better job contracting and relaxing than the vessels of rabbits fed the same diet but deprived of the extract. Cocoa contains powerful antioxidants called flavonoids that sweep up damaging molecules in cells. The rabbit news isn't license to drown in hot chocolate. But food companies are working on cocoa-extract supplements...