An international team of researchers has identified a protein that helps compounds in some vegetables prevent cancer. (p. 182)

Asian women tend to have much lower breast-cancer rates than their Western counterparts--unless they move to Europe or North America. Then the cancer�s incidence in these women begins to match local norms.This observation has suggested that something about the Western way of life, probably diet, promotes cancer--or that something about Eastern diets inhibits the development of breast malignancies. Strong support for the latter comes from a recent study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.The study showed tha...

Twelve years ago, scientists uncovered a mechanism to explain why the folk remedy of eating cranberries fights urinary tract infections. It now appears that the medicinal powers of the pucker-inducing berries might extend to breast cancer as well.For years, Najla Guthrie and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in London have been exploring anticancer prospects of flavonoids, natural antioxidants, isolated from citrus juices (SN: 5/4/96, p. 287). Because deeply pigmented berries also contain dozens of such compounds--several with suspected anticancer activity--Guthrie recently t...

One arcane family of fats may be tapped to treat or prevent a host of diseases. (p. 136)

Citrus fruits may deserve a more prominent role in the diet. A research team in Canada has just shown that drinking several glasses of orange juice daily can pump up blood concentrations of the so-called good cholesterol.Boosting this high-density-lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol can slow the buildup of artery-clogging plaque (SN: 9/9/89, p. 171).In their study, Elzbieta M. Kurowska and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, monitored changes in cholesterol concentration and related blood chemicals in 16 men and 9 women for 23 weeks. The middle-age volunteers were...