Health & Medicine
Soy Foods Reduce Risk of Colon Cancer in Rats
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Aug 05, 2013 01:36 PM EDT
Want to reduce your risk of colon cancer? Eating soy foods might help. Scientists have discovered that lifelong exposure to genistein, a bioactive component in soy foods, protects against colon cancer by repressing a signal that leads to accelerated growth of cells, polyps and eventually malignant tumors.
The cells in the lining of our guts turn over and are completely replaced weekly. Yet in about 90 percent of colon cancer patients, an important growth-promoting signal is always on. This leads to uncontrolled growth and malignancies. Yet soy may actually help prevent this uncontrolled growth, repressing the signals sent.
In order to examine the part that soy plays in this repression, the researchers modeled lifetime exposure to soy by feeding pregnant rats and their offspring a diet containing soy protein isolate and a diet containing genistein compound. The offspring were then exposed to a carcinogen at seven weeks of age, though they continued to eat either the soy protein or the genistein until they were 13 weeks old.
After the study, the researchers then inspected the colons of rats in both soy groups and compared them to rats in a control group. They noted the number and severity of tiny abnormal growths in each. They also compared Wnt signaling, which is an important signaling pathway in terms of colon growth, before and after the carcinogen exposure to see whether either diet had any effect on its upregulation.
So what did they find? It turns out that the rats that had been fed genistein had signaling levels that were similar to rats that had not received the carcinogen. This seemed to indicate that colon cancer is highly influenced by dietary and environmental factors.
"Genistein decreased the expression of three genes and repressed this signal process that is associated with abnormal cell growth and development," said Hong Chen, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The genetic information you inherit from your parents is not the whole story. Our dietary choices, our exposure to environmental toxins, even our stress levels, affect the expression of those genes."
The findings are published in the journal Carcinogenesis.
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First Posted: Aug 05, 2013 01:36 PM EDT
Want to reduce your risk of colon cancer? Eating soy foods might help. Scientists have discovered that lifelong exposure to genistein, a bioactive component in soy foods, protects against colon cancer by repressing a signal that leads to accelerated growth of cells, polyps and eventually malignant tumors.
The cells in the lining of our guts turn over and are completely replaced weekly. Yet in about 90 percent of colon cancer patients, an important growth-promoting signal is always on. This leads to uncontrolled growth and malignancies. Yet soy may actually help prevent this uncontrolled growth, repressing the signals sent.
In order to examine the part that soy plays in this repression, the researchers modeled lifetime exposure to soy by feeding pregnant rats and their offspring a diet containing soy protein isolate and a diet containing genistein compound. The offspring were then exposed to a carcinogen at seven weeks of age, though they continued to eat either the soy protein or the genistein until they were 13 weeks old.
After the study, the researchers then inspected the colons of rats in both soy groups and compared them to rats in a control group. They noted the number and severity of tiny abnormal growths in each. They also compared Wnt signaling, which is an important signaling pathway in terms of colon growth, before and after the carcinogen exposure to see whether either diet had any effect on its upregulation.
So what did they find? It turns out that the rats that had been fed genistein had signaling levels that were similar to rats that had not received the carcinogen. This seemed to indicate that colon cancer is highly influenced by dietary and environmental factors.
"Genistein decreased the expression of three genes and repressed this signal process that is associated with abnormal cell growth and development," said Hong Chen, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The genetic information you inherit from your parents is not the whole story. Our dietary choices, our exposure to environmental toxins, even our stress levels, affect the expression of those genes."
The findings are published in the journal Carcinogenesis.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone