Double good news on cancer prevention….

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Focus on Your Health:

In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.

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Today's post: Tuesday, 2-27-2007

Double good news on cancer prevention….

1. There are several measurable blood markers of probable future cancer risk.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this, particularly for the measure that seems likely to be most important of the ones listed in the article I recently read.

2. Eating cruciferous vegetables sharply improves these factors. Not only is this also true for smokers, it seems to take them from worse than nonsmokers to almost as good as nonsmokers on these measures.

Altogether, this is extremely good news. It’s quite one thing to read that eating cruciferous vegetables has a track record of reducing the amount of cancer people get or slowing or stopping cancers. It’s quite another to be able to get a before & after test and see directly that it IS working for you.

That’s a good bit more motivating than eating the cruciferous vegetables & hoping they help protect you as much as they did other people.

The HSI e-newsletter I get sometimes has very useful information.

(See: Health Sciences Institute of Baltimore
Health articles and a daily email newsletter covering a variety of alternative health topics, including new research, natural treatments, and breakthroughs.
www.hsibaltimore.com )

Recently, they reported on Irish research that contains both of these news items.

At the Northern Ireland Centre for Food and Health (University of Ulster), researchers did before & after blood tests of a group of half smokers & half nonsmokers before & after adding 85 grams a day of watercress, a cruciferous vegetable, each day.

They tested for:

DNA damage to white blood cells which dropped by more than 20 percent.

Levels of lutein (an antioxidant) which increased by 100 percent.
Levels of beta-carotene (an antioxidant) which increased by one third.

And, levels of triglycerides which dropped by 10 percent.

And, they tested for other blood lipids apparently & for activity of detoxifying enzymes.

The first biomarker listed, DNA damage to while blood cells is extremely important. Ian Rowland, the lead researcher said that blood cell DNA damage is an indicator of whole body cancer risk.

It’s also worth noting that these measures are also good for measuring your likely rate of aging. And, since antioxidants also help prevent heart disease by reducing the oxidation of blood lipids – particularly LDL, these tests also indicate heart disease risk to some degree.

The levels of these tests were much worse in smokers before the trial & post test though that may be in part because they also had previously eaten a less health-enhancing diet I suspect.

The good news is that eating the watercress boosted their blood levels on these tests by an even greater percentage than they were boosted in the nonsmokers. And, that was most true for boosting the antioxidants.

The HSI article also listed almost all the different cruciferous vegetables.

I’ll do a post on that next time. I’ve very rarely eaten many of them & never eaten some of them. But I’ll include some tips on eating the ones I do know something about.