By SOLA OGUNDIPE
IN the relentless pursuit for a cure and lasting treatment for cancer, researchers, who are forever looking beyond the ordinary and regular approaches, may have found a significant link that ties the secret to cancer cure and prevention in humans, to green plants.

Just recently, Tammie McQuistan, a research assistant in the Linus Pauling Institute at the Oregon State University in the United States of America, came up with an amazing discovery that chlorophyll, the green colouring matter that plants utilise in manufacturing their food through photosynthesis, can and does offer human protection from cancer, when tested against modest carcinogen exposure levels most likely to be found in the environment.

The discovery is even more incredible because in high doses, chlorophyll itself is noted to be cancer-causing. “There’s considerable evidence in epidemiologic and other clinical studies with humans that chlorophyll and its derivative, chlorophyllin, can protect against cancer,” said McQuistan in the study published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology,

The study, like others before it, however found that chlorophyll can reduce tumours, up to a point,but at very high doses of the same carcinogen, chlorophyll actually made the problem worse.

Beyond confirming the value of chlorophyll, the research raises serious questions about whether traditional lab studies done with mice and high levels of toxic exposure are providing accurate answers to what is a real health risk, what isn’t, and what dietary or pharmaceutical approaches are useful.

The study also found that the protective mechanism of chlorophyll is fairly simple – it just binds with and sequesters carcinogens within the gastrointestinal tract until they are eliminated from the body. t the lower carcinogen doses and cancer rates relevant to humans, chlorophyll was strongly protective.

“The central assumption of such experiments is that intervention effects at high carcinogen dose will apply equally at lower carcinogen doses,” the researchers noted.