Scientists using sophisticated machine learning and ‘food mapping’ techniques have shown how disease-fighting molecules in fruit and vegetables act in similar ways to cancer drugs.
The scientists, at Imperial College London, hope that extending our knowledge of specific cancer-beating molecules (CBMs) will lead to the development of a new generation of ‘hyperfoods’ and personalised diets.
The scientists fed data of 7962 bioactive molecules within foods into a computer model which predicted 110 cancer-beating molecules (using an ‘anti-cancer drug likeness’ threshold). This in turn was used to construct a ‘food map’ with anti-cancer potential of each ingredient defined by the number of cancer-beating molecules found.
Cancer cell arrest
As expected, plant-based foods display the greatest diversity of CBMs, including oranges, grapes, carrots, coriander, dill, cabbage and wild celery. Tea (both black and green) was found to contain particularly high levels of anti-cancer molecules from catechins, which protect against DNA damage and suppress inflammation, leading to cancer cell arrest.
In their paper in Scientific Reports, the researchers wrote: “Being able to first identify food ingredients and later design ‘hyperfoods’ that are richest in CBMs and having health-promoting or therapeutic influence, represents an unprecedented opportunity to reduce healthcare costs and potentially enhance health outcomes for chronic diseases.”
“Food represents the single biggest modifiable aspect of an individual’s health and the machine-learning strategy here is a first step in realising the potential role for ‘smart’ nutritional programmes in the prevention and treatment of cancer.”
They added: “Food represents the single biggest modifiable aspect of an individual’s health and the machine-learning strategy here is a first step in realising the potential role for ‘smart’ nutritional programmes in the prevention and treatment of cancer.”
The London team say they envisage that this first list of cancer-fighting foods will serve as one of the pillars of a new type of gastronomic medicine, and could help develop personalized “food passports” to provide individually tailored and therapeutically functional foods.
Whole food approach
The researchers stress that the potential of foods to exert a preventative or therapeutic capacity depends on the the bioavailability and diversity of disease-beating compounds contained in them. They say that much previous work in this area has been based on “one-dimensional” thinking – that is, applying a focus on molecular components in isolation. When anti-proliferative compounds have been studied when acting in isolation – for example in supplements form – they don’t appear to consistently confer the same level of benefit as when they are present in a whole food.
The team cites the example of apples. Apple extracts, they say, contain bioactive compounds that have been shown to inhibit tumour cell growth in vitro. However, phytochemicals in apples with the peel preserved inhibit colon cancer cell proliferation by 43%, whereas this effect was found to be reduced to 29% when apple without peel was tested.
Based on such observations, the scientists say that the successful implementation of food-based approaches in the fight against complex diseases such as cancer will rely on a “consortium of biologically active substances, such as those present in whole fruits and vegetables, in order to increase the chances of success”.
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