Broccoli, not pizza sauce, cuts cancer risk -studyBy Deena Beasley LOS ANGELES, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Eating lots of broccoli, or even coleslaw, may help protect men from prostate cancer, but consuming tomato products probably will not, researchers said on Tuesday. A study conducted at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that just three daily servings of vegetables cut a mans risk of prostate cancer nearly in half. "And when we compared relative potency, vegetables from the cruciferous family, like broccoli and cabbage, reduced the risk even further," Dr. Alan Kristal, a co-investigator of the study, said in an interview. The results called into question earlier research extolling the prostate cancer-fighting benefits of lycopene, a carotenoid found most abundantly in cooked tomatoes. "Every mens magazine in the country says eat more spaghetti sauce to cut your prostate cancer risk, but we found no relation at all," Kristal said. The handful of studies that have shown protective effects of lycopene were flawed because they did not control for total vegetable consumption, he suggested. Scientists believe vegetables protect against cancer because they contain a wide variety of phytochemicals, which are essentially toxins produced to protect the plants. When consumed, the phytochemicals trigger the activity of enzymes that can detoxify cancer-promoting compounds in the body. The new study looked at the associations of total fruit and vegetable consumption in 1,230 Seattle-area men between the ages of 40 and 64. Half of the men in the study had been diagnosed with prostate cancer while the other half were randomly selected. The results, which will be published in Wednesdays Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showed that men who ate three or more servings of vegetables a day had a 48 percent lower risk of prostate cancer, compared with men who ate fewer than one serving a day. The strongest effect was for cruciferous vegetables, including broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts and cabbage-based dishes such as sauerkraut and coleslaw. "At any given level of total vegetable consumption, as the percent of cruciferous vegetables increased, the prostate cancer risk decreased," Kristal said. He said vegetables in the broccoli family contain a certain type of phytochemical that boosts production of a class of enzymes that are particularly active in the prostate, but said scientists were uncertain how the cancer-fighting process works. The study also found no association between total fruit intake as well as that of specific fruits, such as citrus, and reduced risk of prostate cancer.
