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Showing posts from April, 2010

Is nutrition research any use without genetics & genomics?

Headlines all over the press today were “ 5 a day doesn’t prevent cancer ”. So after all these years set in stone it’s all been a waste of time? Hard to tell really, the paper in question is all about cancer but as the Walter Willett editorial points out the same study group provided evidence that 5 a day reduces stroke and heart disease by 30%. But maybe that’s not right either, maybe Dr Aragon in Woody Allen’s Sleeper was right (this is from an interesting article about nutritional genomics by the way): The study: Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Overall Cancer Risk in the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) by Boffetta et al , published online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It involved almost 500,000 people in a prospective study looking at nutrition and cancer between 1992-2000. Over 30,000 developed cancer but the detailed analysis revealed only a minor F&V protective effect of a few percent, if any at all. Disappointing to