Carrots
Prevent Cancer
Now there's another reason to eat
carrots. A compound found in the popular root vegetable has an
effect on the development of cancer.
Although experts have recommended that
people eat carrots for their anti-cancer properties, it has not been
known exactly what component of the vegetable has this effect.
Now, a team of researchers, from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne
in England and Denmark, have discovered that a natural pesticide, called
falcarinol found in carrots reduced the development of cancer in rats by
one third.
The study, published today in the
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, explains how falcarinol
protects carrots from fungal diseases, such as liquorice rot that causes
black spots on the roots during storage. The scientists investigated the
compound after a previous published study suggested it could prevent the
development of cancer.
The research team carried out tests on
twenty-four rats with pre-cancerous tumours in laboratory conditions.
They divided them into three groups and fed them different diets.
The team found that after 18 weeks, rats
who ate carrots (the popular orange variety) along with their ordinary
feed and the group which consumed falcarinol with their feed - in a
quantity equal to that conained in the carrots - were one third less
likely to develop full-scale tumours than the rats in the control group.
The researchers will now take the results
a step further by finding out how much falcarinol is needed to prevent
the development of cancer and if certain types of carrot are better than
others. The experiment was conducted using raw carrots so
researchers do not yet know if eating boiled carrots or drinking carrot
juice, for example, would have the same effect.
Falcarinol is toxic in large amounts but
to obtain a lethal dose you would have to eat 400 kilograms of carrots
at once. Researchers suspect it is effective because it stimulates
mechanisms in the body that fight cancer, although they have yet to
carry out a detailed analysis in this respect.
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