Is Food killing Us?
From earliest time people have been aware that some plants are poisonous and should be avoided as food. Other plants contain chemicals that have medicinal, stimulatory, hallucinatory, or narcotic effects. In the past 50 years, great strides have been made in understanding nutrition and the role it plays in human health. Federal agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture, and Enviromental Protection Agency, as well as many state and local agencies, are charged with interpreting and enforcing laws dealing with the safety of the food we eat and the water we drink. The food supply in the United States is widely recognized as safe, economical, and of high quality, variety, and abundance. Despite these efforts, concerns remain that some dietary components may contribute to the problem of cancer in humans. Cancer-causing chemicals that occur naturally in foods are far more numerous in the human diet than synthetic carcinogens, yet both types are consumed at levels so low that they currently appear to pose little threat to human health. The greater cancer threat in the human diet today comes not from minor chemicals in food, but from diets too rich in calories and fats, or alcohol. (NRC Report 1)
After assessing the data on more than 200 known carcinogens in food, including 65 naturally occurring substances, the tests determined that both chemicals appear to cause cancer in similar ways and can be evaluated in the lab. More recently, however researchers have begun to look at the comparative risk from chemicals that occur naturally and have found that some of these have the ability to cause or help spread cancer in laboratory animal tests. A few natural toxins are associated with levels of cancer in humans. By heating whatever food, hundreds of different mutagenic substances originate. Cycad plants are important food sources in tropical regions and were found to cause liver and kidney tumors when fed to rats. The more protein food contains, the more mutagenics originate due to cooking etc. Since the 1930's, scientists have recognized that the occurrence of certain cancers may be related to substances in the diet or to patterns of food intake. More naturally occurring chemicals should be tested on and individual basis for their ability to cause cancer. The activity of antioxidants is very limited, not even large amounts of all the antioxidants in the world combined can disarm a part of these mutagenics. For example, naturally occurring chemicals could also be accorded a higher priority for testing if they fall in the same chemical class as known chemical carcinogens, contain chemical groups also found in carcinogens, and are likely, based on structural comparisons with known chemicals, to be unusually stable. Early studies on chemicals that cause cancer were carried out to determine what levels of exposure to specific chemical, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and certain food colors, such as butter yellow, resulted in the formation of cancers in the liver and gastrointestinal tract of rodents. Generally, consuming vegetables proves to be protective against cancer, simply because consuming vegetables is less cancerous than consuming other prepared foods. Later it was discovered that naturally occurring chemicals were present in some foods, such as mycotoxins (chemical produced by fungi) and plant alkaloids, could also cause cancer in animals. If we only live long enough, these substances eventually will cause cancer. Many foods that are barbecued have found levels of natural carcinogens also.
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