Extra fruit will not help fight cancer

[kebaldwin]

Extra fruit will not help fight cancer
By Nicole Martin
Last Updated: 2:21am BST 18/07/2007

Eating more than the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day does not improve the survival chances of breast cancer sufferers, according to a new study.

Benefits of a healthy diet to breast cancer patients have long been documented

Researchers found that women who had been treated for early stage breast cancer and who had increased their intake of fruit and vegetables were just as likely to experience a recurrence or die from the disease as those who continued eating five pieces a day.

The benefits of a healthy diet and regular exercise to breast cancer patients have long been documented, with scientists saying only last month that women with the disease can halve their risk of dying from it if they eat fruit and take up walking.

But the latest study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found consuming more than the recommended amount did not significantly improve the health of sufferers.

Marcia Stefanick, professor of medicine at the Stanford Research Centre in California, who led the study, said she was "really surprised and disappointed by the results", but urged people not to interpret them as evidence that eating fruit did not make a difference in breast cancer.

In Britain, there are 41,000 cases of breast cancer are each year and nearly 13,000 deaths.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/18/nvit318.xml

[kebaldwin]

Can the right food cut cost of cancer pills?

By Julie Steenhuysen
Mon Jul 16, 6:32 PM ET



Taking advantage of the power of food to boost the effectiveness of drugs could sharply lower the cost of cancer treatments, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

"We can use drug interactions to our advantage," said Dr. Ezra Cohen, a cancer drug expert at the University of Chicago Cohen, whose work appears in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

He and colleague Mark Ratain analyzed data from a recent clinical trial showing how food affected GlaxoSmithKline's new breast cancer pill Tykerb, known generically as lapatinib.

The drug is supposed to be taken on an empty stomach. But taking it after a full meal would boost the amount of the drug circulating in the body by 167 percent, and taking it after a high-fat meal would boost it by 325 percent, the researchers found.

That might allow patients to use 40 percent less to achieve the same effect as taking it on an empty stomach. At a cost of $2,900 a month, the change could save each patient, or insurers, $1,740 or more a month, the researchers said.

And washing it down with grapefruit juice might allow patients to use as much as 80 percent less, they said. That could reduce the recommended dosage from the current five, 250 mg pills on an empty stomach to just one pill with a full meal and grapefruit juice chaser, they said.

But the researchers hastened to say they are not recommending that patients try this on their own.

"The first word of caution is 'do not try this at home.' The last thing we want is to have patients take their drug with food or change the dose on their own," Cohen said in a telephone interview. "That could be potentially dangerous."

The point, he said, is that instead of looking at drug interactions with food as something to be avoided, researchers should seek ways to benefit from them.

Food sometimes enhances the effectiveness of drugs because some foods are broken down by the same processes that the liver uses to break down drugs. If liver enzymes are all busy working on the food, they are not available to break down as much of the drug, meaning it circulates for longer in the system.

Cohen and Ratain are currently studying the effect of grapefruit juice, which is known to delay the breakdown of many drugs, on Wyeth's immune suppressant drug sirolimus or Rapamune, but there are many possibilities.

"The list can go on and on in terms of the agents that could be favorably modified to reduce dose and perhaps specific side effects," Cohen said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070716/hl_nm/cancer_food_dc;_ylt=AnH63NRsxSrGzn13hnF.dB_VJRIF

[NorthPeace]

I have read another article about the first study above, and it seems there was likely a bit of cheating:

"But they may not have been so honest about the calories they ate. The super-veggie group gained 1.3 pounds and the comparison group gained 0.88 pound, on average. 'There's no question they were underreporting on calories, especially the heavier women,' Pierce said, or they would have lost weight." (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070717/ap_on_he_me/diet_breast_cancer_2;_ylt=Ap4CkI6dugNmsk7dNkXPzFwE1vAI)

Both groups gained weight. The participants did not provide the researchers with accurate information. Personally I am losing weight rapidly on a high vegetable diet with no calorie counting or reporting.