Cancer ‘Wal’led Off with Walnuts

Nuts are the ultimate snack food.  They’re crunchy, tasty, satisfying and delicious—four crucial elements to any snack connoisseur.  And unlike what we typically think of when we hear the word snack, walnuts are nutritional (or should I say “nut”ritional).  They have more omega-3 fatty acids than any other nut (pecans have some omega-3s; all the others are high in heart healthy monounsaturated fats), and have been found to block LDL cholesterol levels from climbing.

There’s something else that walnuts may be good at blocking, though:  Breast cancer.  That’s right, they can literally block the formation of malignant tumors in the breast, according to Marshall University’s School of Medicine and a study done on genetically-altered rats.

This wall of protection that walnuts provide was discovered after researchers genetically altered a group of rats so that they would eventually develop breast cancer.  No two ways about it, like it or not, they were going to get it one way or another.

Each of the rats were fed the exact same diet as the other, but a select sampling of the rats supplemented with walnuts every day for the entirety of the analysis period.

All of the rats developed breast cancer by the age of five months, as was expected.   All of them except the rats that supplemented with walnuts.  They didn’t develop breast cancer until three weeks later!  No doubt a crazy discovery.

Now, as mentioned in past articles, results performed on rats don’t always translate to what will be observed in humans, but there really seems to be something special about walnuts.  Because according to this study’s lead researcher, Elaine Hardman, simply supplementing with omega-3 fatty acids does not provide the same layer of protection that walnuts do.  The wall of protection in walnuts is much more fortified.

“[Omega-3 fatty acids] did reduce cancer incidents,” said Hardman, “but not as dramatically as the walnut-containing diet did.”  Hardman discovered this after performing a separate study in which rats supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids at the same dose as those supplementing with the walnuts did, but this time the omega-3s come from a different source.

Clearly, there’s something special about walnuts that provides this extra layer of protection.  What it is sure to be a hard nut to crack.

Cynics to this study will likely say that while walnuts blocked the formation of breast cancer tumors, they didn’t block it entirely.  In other words, all they did was postpone the inevitable.  True enough, but as Hardman noted in the presentation of her study at the American Association of Cancer Research conference, three weeks to the human is a lifetime to a rat.  The average rat lives no more than six months.

Translation:  The prevention of cancer growth creates the opportunity to take preemptive action, whether it’s through cancer screening or dietary modifications. Who ever said snacking was bad for your health?

Source
naturalnews.com