Cancer Prevention through Diet

Green tea, leafy green vegetables offer protective effect against lung cancer.

According to the Los Angeles Times (1/12, Healy) "Booster Shots" blog, "finding foods and nutritional supplements that can help prevent cancer is one of those one-step-forward, two-steps-back areas of research." Thus, "cancer researchers these days are at pains to hold their enthusiasm in check over new studies that seem to offer new hope in the prevention of lung cancer."
Now, a team of scientists in Taiwan says that "drinking green tea may counter the effects of smoking on lung cancer risk," Bloomberg News (1/13, Gale) reports. In fact, "for both smokers and non-smokers, those who didn't drink green tea had a fivefold greater risk of lung cancer than people who drank at least one cup a day," while "smokers who didn't consume any had a 13-fold higher risk of the cancer, compared with smokers who drank at least one cup."
Investigator I-Hsin Lin "found the protective effect especially evident in a group of smokers she studied who have specific genotypes that have been linked to cancer risk in some studies," WebMD (1/12, Doheny) reported. "These include IGF1 (insulin -like growth factor 1), IGF2, and IGFBP3." Apparently, the "green tea drinkers who didn't have a genotype termed by the researchers as susceptible had a 66% reduced risk in lung cancer, compared to the green tea drinkers who were susceptible." Heavy smokers who "had the susceptible genotype had an even higher risk."