Butter That May Fight Cancer

     Dairy products as well as red meat contain large amount of fatty acids that can clog the arteries, and such are recently banned from healthy diet. However, hidden among these obvious artery‑clogging animal fats is an unusual fat ‑ conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) that may be a potent anticancer agent. In animal study some types of CLA were found to prevent cancerous growth. However, the amount of this fat present in meat or dairy products is not sufficient enough to have anticancer effect in human. The researchers, therefore, tried to develop better butter. Dale Bauman and his colleagues at Cornell University just did that, they figured out a way to increase the level of CLA in cow's milk. It turned out that when they supple­mented cow's diet with sunflower oil, the level of CLA in the butter from their milk increased significantly, about 4.5%, that is almost eight times the amount present in reg­ular cow milk. Researchers from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, L.P. Clement and his colleagues, then added fat from this butter to the diet of rats with the control animal receiving the same amount of butterfat, but the normal proportion of CLA.

   The animals were on these diets for a month when the investigators injected them with chemical carcinogens. Most of the animals on the normal diet, 93%, developed cancer compared to 50% of those receiving CLA‑enriched diet. Their report appeared in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Nutrition.

   The data suggest that natural CLA present in animal prod­ucts is beneficial in preventing cancer. More importantly, level of this fat can be naturally increased in food products, thus adding a simple strategy to cancer prevention.