Diet, nutrition and physical activity all have an important role in determining the risk of developing certain common cancers. There is new research exploring how we can reduce the burden of cancer in our society just by modifying lifestyle habits.
It’s an attractive approach because focusing on prevention, rather than treatment, can help reduce health care costs. It also empowers people to take a greater role in their own health improvement.
Goals
The Nutrition and Cancer Program is a multidisciplinary group of investigators whose major aim is to remove the obstacles that keep our society from improving their health. They focus on the following goals:
- To examine 1-carbon nutrients, retinoids, carotenoids, tea catechins and select antioxidant micronutrients to identify which of these dietary components genuinely convey protection against cancer, and to define under what conditions they exert these effects
- To discern the molecular, biochemical and cellular mechanisms by which these compounds exert their preventive effects
- To delineate endogenous and exogenous factors that interact with the abovementioned nutrients that further modify their cancer preventive effects (e.g. age, single nucleotide polymorphisms, alcohol and tobacco use)
- To define those conditions under which the correction of obesity, or optimization of caloric balance and physical activity, impact on intermediary biomarkers of cancer risk, and to define the molecular, biochemical and cellular mechanisms by which these factors exert their effects