"Cancer, Interrupted: Garlic & Flavonoids"
Remember this study, in which garlic
won out as the #1 anticancer vegetable?
Well, let’s see what it can do.
This is what’s called a comet assay,
currently the standard technique for the evaluation of DNA damage.
What you’re looking at is the DNA of a single cell—
a normal human breast cell—
as visualized under a fluorescence microscope.
It’s in an electric field, trying to pull
the negative-charged DNA to the right.
But, our DNA is normally supercoiled tightly together.
But, you add a carcinogen,
like, in this case, the cooked-meat chemical PhIP,
that literally breaks up our DNA.
You can see the chopped pieces of DNA breaking away,
and flowing out in kind of like the tail of a comet,
which is why they call it the comet tail test.
The larger the tail, the more DNA has been broken off into pieces.
But, if you repeat the experiment,
and this time, what if you add the same amount of carcinogen,
but, also add in some garlic phytonutrients at the same time?
You get some damage, some DNA breakage—
but not as much as before.
Which kind of garlic would be expected to work the best?
Garlic, or elephant garlic, the so-called
“garlic for people who don’t like garlic?”
And, the answer appears to be garlic-garlic is best.
What about flavonoid phytonutrients,
found in “fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains?”
Here are the top 100 sources in the world.
Do they have a protective effect
on the meat mutagen-induced DNA damage?
They took white blood cells from healthy individuals and colon cancer patients,
and exposed them to increasing doses
of two cooked meat carcinogens:
IQ (found mostly in fried bacon and baked fish),
and PhIP (found mostly in fried bacon, fish, and chicken).
They used the comet assay again,
measuring how much DNA was broken off in the tail.
And, as you can see,
as the concentration of meat mutagens increases,
so does the DNA damage.
They then continued to pump in that meat mutagen at the highest level,
but started adding some plant phytonutrients—
quercetin, found in foods like apples, red onions, and berries,
and rutin, found in citrus, buckwheat, and asparagus.
Even as the highest carcinogen dose continues,
adding plant phytonutrients starts to bring the damage down.
That happened in both healthy individuals (the solid line),
and cancer patients (the dashed line).
But, I want you to notice something else.
Even at a zero concentration of cooked meat chemicals,
there was more DNA damage present
in the white blood cells circulating in cancer patients.
And, they didn’t have, like, blood cancer;
they had colon cancer.
Even though the cancer was just in their colon,
their whole body was affected by the disease state.
Their whole body was under increased oxidative stress,
inflicting “significantly higher DNA damage.”
Or, maybe the DNA damage came first,
and it’s one of the reasons they have cancer in the first place.
Either way, cancer patients experience
“less reduction of induced DNA damage”—
suggesting that “higher concentrations of flavonoids
would be required to achieve [the same] protective effect.”
So, cancer (and other chronic disease) victims
need even more fruits and vegetables
to reduce the damage done by carcinogens.