Compounds found in fruit helped reduce tumors, study finds
Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.comBlack raspberries prevent colorectal cancer in mice
Seeded on Tue Nov 2, 2010 3:28 PM EDT (msnbc.com)
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Think of all the time, effort, and money researchers have expended in their efforts to make mice healthier. Perhaps it's the mice who shall inherit the Earth.
From Wiki Answers:
What is giving a raspberry? When you put your mouth on someone's belly and blow on it.
From the headline I pictured black people giving mice raspberries and wondering why Hispanics, Asians or Whites don't work.
I was thinking along those lines but the colorectal part had me thrown off... I guess that's where the black raspberry comes in... LOL
Aren't Black Raspberries Blackberries?
Blackberries are big and solid, black raspberries are smaller and hollow. I always figured they had about the same nutritional value but this article didn't specify whether or not that was true, just that they are different.
I'd like to know, too - because blackberries are way easier to find and I'm already eating them everyday.
Two points arise
(1) Don't believe a thing until it has be tested on human cancer
(2) The antioxidant story is a marketing gimmick. There is no good reason to think that antioxidants do you any good
True. However we only have to assign a probabilistic belief to it at all times. At this point I'm highly certain that berries are good for you.
The problem is that people are too willing to assume that what works in mice will automatically work in humans. In fact, what works in very controlled mouse studies almost always fails in human studies. There are simply too many complex dissimilarities between mice and men.
But the bottom line is that even with a big fail in human trials, each step puts us a little closer to understanding the complex functional activities within tumors.
One big problem is that when MD's basically took over cancer research in the early 1960's (previously it was more often conducted by PhD's in various disciplines) the prevailing theory was that cancer was an "organizational" disease. This was too complex for MD's who had no training in research methods and soon all cancer research was (and most still is) directed toward cellular theories, though the trend is moving slowly back to organizational approaches.
The analogy that is used is that cancer is analogous to a traffic jam. The organizational approach suggests that traffic light timings and one-way streets and time-of-day all contribute to a complex situation and that you have to change the organization of traffic to effect a cure. The cellular approach blames it on individual cars and seeks to understand how blowing up individual cars would effect the traffic jam. I understand that it is an oversimplification, but it is why the cellular approach always makes promises of "cures" for individual cancer types but never delivers the cures.
Surgery is a primitive organizational approach. But other than that, there have been few successes with the organizational approach (such as strangling the blood supply to tumors) and almost none to the cellular approach. We are still in a primitive state of cancer "cures" where we poison the entire person with chemotherapy and radiation and depend on the higher metabolic rate of cancer cells to become poisoned more quickly and not survive as well as normal cells. This represents no change over the 1880's treatment of syphilis by large doses, just short of fatal, of heavy metals such as mercury. They actually worked fairly well, though dosages were difficult to control and the treatment sometimes killed the patient, just as with modern chemotherapy.
My bottom line is that you have to read these things with a great deal of skepticism. It's kinda like my engineer friend in college who got really hung up on fuel additives and little magnets on his gas line and super-slick oils ---- all guaranteed to improve your gas mileage by some high percentage. He finally gave it up when we pointed out that if you added up all the percentages, he would have to stop often to bail out his gas tank if they worked as promised and since he was showing NO improvement in gas mileage when he actually measured it, it was unlikely that the expense of the products could ever be justified. (We used the cost of gasoline as the gold standard for gasoline additives. LOL)
So read these things and be glad for progress in science, but don't load up on black raspberries just yet.
Thank God ! That's one less worry.
Such nonsense! I wonder how many people reading this will actually think that black raspberries will prevent colorectal CA in humans.
Start the countdown until your inbox is filled w/ spam trying to sell "black raspberries derived supplements" to prevent and cure cancer. I can't wait for the infomercials touting the 'scientific proof.' Oooh, and the Black Raspberry Diet book to help you lose weight, keep cancer at bay, reverse arthritis, prevent Alzheimer's, give you younger-looking skin, promote world peace and unlimited rice pudding, etc etc etc.....
What's more frightening; that I could think these up, or that all three are probably already in the works?
Still, in the medical industry, it sucks to be a mouse.
Yummy, i love black berries, they look like red raspberry but bigger and more plumb and no seed to discard! Come to think of it, I wish cultivators would go away from tartness of berry for pie making and lean a greater more toward sweetness of berry for eating fresh...wishful thinking since berries got more demand and shelf life being tartness for pie making...
Eating fruits is healthy. I could have told you that without genetically engineering mice and torturing them.
Of all the fruits generally available, berries offer the biggest nutritional bang per calorie. While government regulations and popular nutrition often portray all fruits to rank about the same, it's just not the case. There's a reason why highly colored fruits and vegetables are the ones to pick. The pigments themselves within the plants confer a lot of the health benefits from the fruit. Less beneficial fruits like apples and pears, while a good source of pectin (soluble fiber) and a few other common vitamins and minerals, do not supply the valuable anthocyanins and flavanoids that berries contain. Make sure to include at least some amount of assorted berries in your daily diet in order to reap the benefits of these healthy and tasty fruits. Rational, effective nutrition for fat loss and long-term health: http://www.NutritionPerfected.com
Naturally occurring flavonoids in plant-based foods have been shown to have anti-cancer activity in numerous laboratory studies, including cancer cell culture experiments and studies using laboratory animals. Unfortunately, what works in petri dishes or laboratory mice very often does not work in humans, as has been confirmed by numerous prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled human clinical research trials. That being said, a diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables, and in whole grains, has repeatedly been linked to a lower incidence of cancer and cardiovascular disease in humans.
Robert A. Wascher, MD, FACS
Author, "A Cancer Prevention Guide for the Human Race" (2010)
Guys,
I can't believe people are so dismissive of this! Berries are packed with antioxidants. Numerous studies have shown the benefit of antioxidants on cancer. Therefore, berries can help prevent cancer.
Look at all the work done on resveratrol from grapes - or vitamin c (another antioxidant) or beta carotene.
This seems so obvious, that it is a shame that people have to GM mice to prove this. Kinda stupid behaviour!
Get eating berries - cure cancer the natural way.
No need to wait until this has been PROVEN to work in Humans - What's the harm in eating berries now? Ye got nothing to loose. And everything to gain. Ye make it sound like it would be pointless to eat them until this has been proven to work in humans... Sheesh!
Black raspberries are high in antioxidants that prevent free radical to your colon cells. According to research, have found that eating 1 cup daily can result in an 80% drop in cancerous tumors in the colon. I know black raspberries have a higher orac score than blackberries (19000 vs 6000) and help to prevent the colorectal cancer.