Sunny Health

Obesity is linked to many things. One of those things is cancer.

In 2002, about 41,000 new cases of cancer in the United States were estimated to be due to obesity.

There have been numerous reports on this subject, and there is a general consensus now among many doctors that preventing weight gain can reduce the risk of many cancers.

If you are already overweight or obese, do try to shed that excess fat through adopting a healthy, low-calorie diet and regular exercise. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be able to offer some ideas on how you can do so, so watch out for it.

Even a weight loss of only five to 10 percent of total weight can provide health benefits. So don't wait any longer.. act to ensure that your life is free of cancer!

References:

http://www.cancer.gov

What do Green Tea, Mushrooms and Soya Beans have in common? Read on to find out.

Its always been known that eating right is one aspect of living a healthy lifestyle. But when it comes to food that contain anti cancer properties, some are truly more equal than others.

Soy Good

Take soya beans for example.

Scientists have long believed there was some link between consumption of soy bean products and cancer prevention.

A recent collaborative study between the Department of Community, Occupational and Family Medicine in NUS, the University of Southern California and the University of Minnesota has discovered that regularly eating soya bean products can cut the risk of breast cancer by 18 per cent.

The study looked into consumption patterns of Chinese Women with regard to soy foods including fried soya bean curd like "taukwa" and "taupok". Over a decade, after taking into consideration other dietary and lifestyle factors, the risk of breast cancer was 18 per cent higher in the group that ate less compared to the group that ate more.

The researchers also found that the more soy protein women after menopause consume, the lower the estrogen levels in their blood. This is significant because breast cancer needs estrogen to grow.

And one does not need to eat large amounts of soya to benefit from its protective effects, as just one glass of soya milk a day was enough to help reduce the risk of breast cancer, according to one of the researchers, Assoc Prof Koh Woon Puay of NUS Department of Community, Occupational and Family Medicine.

Some Mushrooms with that Tea?

Green Tea and Mushrooms are also potent cancer fighting foods, according to results of another study at University of Western Australia reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP), and in order to maximise the effect you have to consume both of them.

The study found that chinese women who did this significantly cut their risk of breast cancer and, in the case of those who already have cancer, lessened the severity of the disease.

According to Min Zhang, one of the researchers in the study, the risk of breast cancer significantly declined with the highest intake of dietary mushrooms, though fresh and dried mushrooms were equally effective.

As in the case of soya beans, Min Zhang found that eating as little as 10 grams, or less than one button mushroom daily, would have a beneficial effect. Min also discovered that women who consumed the most fresh mushrooms around two-thirds less likely to develop breast cancer compared with those who did not eat mushrooms.

In addition to lowering the cancer risk, green tea and mushrooms also cut the malignancy of any cancer which did form, Min reported.

On an objective note, the results from these research studies do not confirm 100 per cent protection from cancer if you consume those foods.

However, eating some mushroom and tofu and drinking green tea everyday won't hurt and there is certainkly a chance that it may help you steer away from breast cancer. So why not try it? It's a win-win proposition for sure.

Besides, if you form a diet based solely on those three items, you're guaranteed to look trim!

References:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i003gzjglHjyx9moZeDh5Ra4ijnQ
http://www.nus.edu.sg/research/rg150.php

Many people will be familiar with the term Stem Cells. Yet, a majority still have no idea what it truly is.

In fact, when I asked a few people recently, one thought that its some kind of vegetable!


Stem cells are...

Put simply, stem cells are the basic building blocks in our body. Theoretically, they can be transformed into any other kind of cell.

To quote the National Institute of Health, stem cells "have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body. Serving as a sort of repair system for the body, they can theoretically divide without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive."

To date, two major types of stem cells have been identified, which are embryonic and adult stem cells.

Importance of stem cells

Why are stem cells important? They have HUGE potential. They allow us to grow new organs, new bones, new limbs, literally anything we possess in our body. Organ donations would no longer be necessary. If we can grow our own organs, we can use them to replace any damaged or diseased ones that we have. This would also eliminate the problem of rejection, since the grown organ would be an exact duplicate.

Stem cells and cancer treatment

Stem cells have a major role in cancer treatment and research. A form of stem cell therapy is already used, for example, in the form of bone marrow transplants, which is used to treat leukemia and other types of cancer, as well as various blood disorders. However, this process merely involves taking something - a blood stem cell to be precise - which we know that works and putting it in patients.

According to Cancer Research UK, an organisation which supports cancer research in the United Kingdom, What is interesting is that stem cells and cancer cells are remarkably alike in many ways. And so scientists may be able to better understand cancer by studying stem cells. In fact, in doing so, some scientists now believe that cancer is directly caused by faulty stem cells called cancer stem cells.

Indeed, that may explain why cancers relapse - because cancer treatments do not, or rather cannot as of yet, tackle cancer stem cells.

Applications of stem cell research

For those who already have cancer, stem cells may hold for them the promise of new organs without any kinds of drawback in the future. They may be able to discard the diseased organ and put in the new one, though that would be over-simplying the process!

But the ultimate goal would be to see how we can stop cancer from ever developing, and scientists may be able to answer that question with stem cell research. It would allow them to observe cell growth right from its very birth. Armed with that data, they may then be able to see how they can nullify the cancer development process.

While such results are still a long way off, other research efforts using stem cells have already started to bear fruit.

In a Jan 2009 article of Medical News Today, Israeli researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology's Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Rambam Medical Center reported success in using stem cells to grow a cancerous tumor in a mouse that mimics the way the tumor would develop in the patient's body.

This discovery may help pave the way toward personalised cancer treatment, a concept which many Singaporeans may be familiar with given that the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) has used it in its projects, including one to develop personalised drug treatments for liver cancer patients in 2005.

Looking ahead

We can look forward to even more exciting breakthroughs in the future, as Geron, a biopharmaceutical corporation in America, announced in Jan 2009 that it is embarking on the world's first human clinical trial of embryonic stem cell-based therapy.

NCCS too will no doubt be involved in leading the field as well, building upon its experience in research and clinical trials.


References:

http://stemcells.nih.gov
http://www.nccs.com.sg
http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/
http://www.cancercenter.com/stem-cell/stem-cell-faqs.cfm
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/135477.php
http://www.geron.com/media/pressview.aspx?id=863