Chelf Vicki Rae - Superfood nuts: a guide to cooking with power-packed walnuts, almonds, pecans, and more

As the director of Colon Cancer Prevention at UConn Health, I oversee a program that offers patients entry into a clinical study of early-stage abnormal growths in the colon, among other things. Patients who consent to the study fill out a questionnaire that asks for a breakdown of their tree nut consumption. Patients also provide a blood specimen and answer a series of demographic questions about their overall health and risk factors for colon cancer, such as their BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, smoking history, and NSAID intake. The patient is then provided with a state-of-the-art colonoscopy examination using a high-definition endoscope and contrast dye-spray to illuminate the bowel wall and provide images of even microscopic lesions. We remove up to ten of these lesions and then study their biology in the laboratory. We also have a number of mouse genetic models of colon cancer that we routinely use in the laboratory to gain a better understanding of the earliest stages of GI cancer. Using the models, we have defined a number of nutritional variables that may contribute to cancer risk, including the levels of folic acid.

Our interest in exploring novel ways to reduce cancer risk in people began several decades ago when the relatively new field of cancer prevention with the use of natural products and non-toxic synthetic agents (e.g., aspirin) was in its earliest days. In the 1960s the field of cancer prophylaxis was created by the insights of Dr. Lee Wattenberg. It was later refined in the 1970s by Dr. Michael B. Sporn, who coined the term cancer chemoprevention while working at the National Cancer Institute. Spurred by the realization that a wide variety of natural products could have a beneficial effect on a persons risk for developing myriad cancers, we launched our research program to find new mechanisms that could be exploited for cancer prevention. Progress in this field of research over the past few decades has been extraordinary, with many new approaches developed that may ultimately contribute to the eradication of cancer.

One such strategy that has been under intense scrutiny in recent years is the health benefit of consuming what we generally refer to as the Mediterranean Diet, a way of eating that is rich in fruits and vegetables, legumes, fish, and olive oil (Fazio and Ricciardiello, Phytochemistry Reviews, 2014). One key ingredient of the Mediterranean Diet is the tree nut. Of the various tree nuts, walnuts offer a remarkably healthy nutritional composition, including ellagitannins, vitamin E, omega-3 fatty acids, polyphenols, phytosterols, melatonin, and fiber. We have recently tested the potential for walnuts to protect against intestinal cancer using a mouse genetic model in our laboratory (Nakanishi et al., Cancer Prevention Research, 2016). We reported that walnuts added to a Western style diet loaded with a number of common fats found in the American diet and less calcium and vitamins provided protection against cancer development. Not only that, but the walnuts actually acted like a probiotic agent, causing a remarkable change to the community structure of the intestinal microbiota. We are excited by these recent findings and have initiated a series of related studies to test the beneficial effects of walnuts in a second mouse cancer model, as well as an experimental model of inflammatory bowel disease.

I believe this book is extremely timely and of great importance to the general population. Offering a natural and healthy way to potentially reduce risk of cancer by simply incorporating an outstanding nutritional source (that is, tree nuts) into your diet makes sense, both from the nutritional standpoint and from a scientific perspective.

Daniel W. Rosenberg, PhD

Professor of Medicine and Health Net, Inc.

Chair in Cancer Biology

Investigator, Center for Molecular Medicine

University of Connecticut School of Medicine