November 19, 2010 Cocoa is safe for diabetics and may modestly improve HDL-good cholesterol      Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance that occurs naturally in all parts of the body. The body needs some cholesterol to work properly. But if there is too much cholesterol in the blood, it can stick to the walls of the arteries.

November 18, 2010 Soy antioxidants protect premenopausal women from breast cancer      Ann Weaver of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute reports a protective effect for soy isoflavones against breast cancer risk in premenopausal women. Dr Weaver and her associates compared 683 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients with 611 women with no history of the disease. Dietary questionnaire responses were evaluated for the intake of total and specific soy isoflavones from food.

November 17, 2010 One of the ways that Alzheimer's disease destroys the brain is by turning off the antioxidant activity of Catalase      Researchers from the University of California, San Diego state that there is strong evidence that the accumulation of the toxic protein beta-amyloid in the brain is related to the extreme oxidative damage that afflicts Alzheimer's patients. They report a cause of some of the damage that occurs in these diseased brains. Chemistry professor Jerry Yang administered amyloid beta, a neuro-toxic compound found in the plaques that form in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients, to cultured brain neural cells.

November 16, 2010 Eating fish strongly decreases the risk of dying from prostate cancer      Researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, McGill University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the National Cancer Institute in Maryland state that prostate cancer incidence varies widely (by 60-fold globally) throughout the world suggesting that lifestyle and diet have a big impact for protection or causation. In this case the study was to see if eating fish is protective.      There was not an association between consuming fish and having a lower incidence of prostate cancer.

November 15, 2010 Both Tea and Coffee decrease the risk of brain cancer      Coffee and tea lovers may have a decreased likelihood of developing the most common form of malignant brain tumor in adults, a new study suggests. The researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, the German Cancer Research Institute and from throughout Europe who participated in the EPIC study were led by Brown University scientists who examined the effects of coffee and tea on the risk of glioma in more than 521,000 adults from nine countries in Europe. Gliomas are a group of brain and spinal cord tumors that make up about 80 percent of all malignant brain cancers in adults.