A new reason to eat your veggies

Abstract

Earlier this year, a study by researchers at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University in Corvallis found a new way in which broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and other cruciferous vegetables may help ward off cancer.1 Researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by contrast, linked a high-fat diet to a heightened risk of colon cancer.2 More than a decade ago, European researchers delving into historical records from northern Sweden came to a more startling conclusion. Dietary overindulgence among boys aged 8 to 12 years, which was due to the remote region's feast and famine cycles of the 1800s, led to significantly shorter life spans among their grandchildren.3 In all 3 cases, the science has highlighted how nutrition and diet may exert powerful effects on health and disease, sometimes over successive generations, through mechanisms that are firmly rooted in epigenetics. The combined efforts are fueling the rise of nutrigenomics, which examines how diet and nutritional components might help regulate genetic on-off switches. Emily Ho, PhD, associate professor of public health and human sciences at Oregon State University, says the findings to date have barely scratched the surface, especially with regard to anticancer mechanisms. “I think there's a lot of diet-derived compounds that still have potential, but just haven't been looked at yet,” she says. Dr. Ho and her colleagues found that one of those compounds, broccoli's sulforaphane, may help regulate DNA methylation and thereby dictate which genes are active. Her group had already gathered evidence that the same compound may inhibit harmful enzymes that interfere with normal interactions between histone proteins and DNA, meaning the cancer-fighting compound may influence 2 distinct epigenetic pathways. Among the follow-up studies, Dr. Ho's group is examining the potential benefit of giving a broccoli extract to male patients at high risk of prostate cancer and to female patients at risk of developing recurrent breast cancer. “I've always been a good broccoli eater,” Dr. Ho says. Her research offers yet another reason why others might want to follow her lead.