Eating walnuts can help protect against prostate cancer
20 July Times of India
A new study has found that eating a modest amount of walnuts can
protect against prostate cancer. Researchers at the School of Medicine
at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio injected
immune-deficient mice with human prostate cancer cells.
Within three to four weeks, tumors typically start to grow in a large
number of these mice. The study asked whether a walnut-enriched diet
versus a non-walnut diet would be associated with reduced cancer
formation. A previous study found this to be true for breast cancer.
Three of 16 mice (18 per cent) eating the walnut-enriched diet developed
prostate tumors, compared with 14 of 32 mice (44 per cent) on the
non-walnut control diet.
Also of note, the final average tumor size in the walnut-fed animals
was roughly one-fourth the average size of the prostate tumors that
developed in the mice eating the control diet. “We found the results to
be stunning because there were so few tumors in animals consuming the
walnuts and these tumors grew much more slowly than in the other
animals,” study senior author Russel Reiter, Ph.D, professor of cellular
and structural biology at the Health Science Center, said.
“We were absolutely surprised by how highly effective the walnut diet
was in terms of inhibition of human prostate cancer,” he added. |