Word: diets
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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...
Health experts are not ready to list the foods that will keep cancer at bay, but some broad outlines of an anticancer diet are taking shape. Beta carotene might not be the key, but fruits and vegetables, which contain it, seem to help. Lycopene might not be the answer, but it too is found in fruits and vegetables. Fiber works--and again, fruits and vegetables (especially beans), as well as whole grains, are an ideal source. So along with giving up tobacco (mouth, throat and lung cancer) and limiting alcohol consumption (too much booze leads to cirrhosis, which leads...
...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...