Newly-found anti-cancer goodness from Olive Oil
Harvesting olives in Lebanon
Daylife/AFP/Getty Images
Good quality extra-virgin olive oil contains health-relevant chemicals, ‘phytochemicals’, that can trigger cancer cell death. New research sheds more light on the suspected association between olive oil-rich Mediterranean diets and reductions in breast cancer risk.
Javier Menendez and Antonio Segura-Carretero led a team of researchers who set out to investigate which parts of olive oil were most active against cancer. Menendez said, “Our findings reveal for the first time that all the major complex phenols present in extra-virgin olive oil drastically suppress overexpression of the cancer gene HER2 in human breast cancer cells”.
Extra-virgin olive oil is the oil that results from pressing olives without the use of heat or chemical treatments. It contains phytochemicals that are otherwise lost in the refining process. Menendez and colleagues separated the oil into fractions and tested these against breast cancer cells in lab experiments. All the fractions containing the major extra-virgin phytochemical polyphenols (lignans and secoiridoids) were found to effectively inhibit HER2.
According to the authors, “These findings, together with the fact that that humans have safely been ingesting significant amounts of lignans and secoiridoids as long as they have been consuming olives and extra-virgin oil, strongly suggest that these polyphenols might provide an excellent and safe platform for the design of new anti breast-cancer drugs”.
Every little bit helps. Since our wee household actually buys and consumes extra-virgin olive oil by the case – maybe we have a head start, eh?
Cripes! I’ll have to ditch my regular olive oil and start getting extra virgin again. I quit because it was so expensive but if it might help kill cancer…
(I’ve got prostate cancer.)
hhopper
December 29, 2008 at 6:20 pm
There is a safe alternative now to cancer treatment with the recent research indicating that “Biologically active compounds in extra-virgin olive oil have the ability to shrink certain malignant breast tumors”. One of the reasons that people in Mediterranean countries live well into their 80s and 90s is due to the fact that they use olive oil in the kitchen. Even I am going to use olive oil in cooking and salads after reading the benefits of olive oil in The Washington Times extra-virgin olive oil as a breast cancer medicine
Ginna Dorkin
January 7, 2009 at 3:48 am