Saturday, March 29, 2008
Anti-Cancer
Flavonoids Now Found to Help Promote Colon Health
By Greg Arnold, DC, CSCS, September 11, 2006, abstracted from "Flavonoids and Colorectal Cancer in Italy" in the August 2006 issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
As a group of over 5,000 compounds contained in fruits and vegetables, flavonoids have been found to possess a number of health benefits, including helping maintain cell and blood vessel health as well as being a very potent antioxidant. It is widely believed that flavonoids play the central role in the health properties of fruits and vegetables. However, with all the attention flavonoids have received regarding health, their role in helping promote colon health has been inconsistent. While the Iowa Women's Health study, which studied nearly 35,000 postmenopausal women, found no association between flavonoid intake and colon cancer, a "borderline" association was found in a Finnish study between flavonoid intake and colorectal cancer. Now a new study has found that flavonoids may indeed help promote colon health. In the study, researchers studied food frequency questionnaires for nearly 2,000 patients with colon cancer and compared them with nearly 4,200 control patients (no history of cancer) completed between 1992 and 1996. The questionnaires assessed the patients' diets during the two years before cancer diagnosis or hospital admission, including 78 foods or food groups plus questions aimed at assessing fat intake and general dietary habits. The researchers found that the average intake of total flavonoids was around 138 mg per day and the individual classes of flavonoids were 25 mg per day of soy isoflavones and 20 mg of anthocyanidins per day. Those in the highest 20% intake of isoflavones (more than 34 mg per day), anthocyanidins (more than 32 mg per day), and total flavonoids (more than 191 mg per day), had a 24%, 33%, and 19% reduced risk of colorectal cancer, respectively. For the researchers, "some classes of flavonoids, in particular isoflavones, anthocyanidins, flavones, and flavonols, significantly decreased the risk of colorectal cancer and could account, at least in part, for the protective effect of vegetable and fruit consumption against colorectal cancer in this population."