I don’t know about you, but I do sometimes wonder why (or do I mean how?) good foods are good for you. I know that they contain more things like anti-oxidants and vitamin precursors and vitamins and minerals, but I don’t have a very clear idea of how those things work their magic, if indeed they do. And then I was watching a Tedtalk by a chap called William Li, a doctor with a special interest in cancer.
He was talking about blood vessels and the extremely delicate balance that regulates the life and death of blood vessels in the body, and I realized that I could remember almost nothing about angiogenesis and the hormones that control it. Once I did. Then Li slipped into cancers, and showed that tumours depend for their survival on their blood supply. Cut it off, and tumours shrink. In fact, he said, we probably have loads of mini tumours popping up all the time, less than the size of the tip of a ball-point pen, but in the absence of a blood supply, they just wither and die. Fascinating, so there are fancy drugs that block the growth of blood vessels — antiangiogenesis drugs — and that offer a new approach to treating cancer. And those same drugs can treat obesity in mice genetically predisposed to eat until they become, in Li’s words, “furry tennis balls”.
And then he moved smoothly into diet. And lo, there were lots of foods, many of them them fruits and vegetables, that seemed to have potent anti-angiogenic activity in lab tests. Some of them, combined, are more potent than either on its own or both together. He listed a bunch of foods, and then something that made me perk up even more.
“For each food type, we believe there is different potencies within different strains and varietals. And we want to measure this because, well, while you’re eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that’s most potent for preventing cancer?”
Wow. A man who starts from the assumption that not all varieties are equal. While I am not too happy with the continuing medicalization of nutrition and diet, treating good food as no more than a series of active ingredients, I am glad that at least someone in the medical establishment is taking agricultural biodiversity seriously. Li’s bottom line:
Everyone could benefit from a diet based on local, sustainable, antiangiogenic crops.