Here I am writing, never mind the blizzard outside. :-p Since I am on a carrot kick right now, I wanted to continue the discussion despite the snow. I recently found out about a very interesting molecule in carrots that seems to have been missed by the public knowledge radar. Until a few days ago, when I thought about carrots, Vitamin A and beta-Carotene (which cleaves into two molecules which each form Vit A) were the molecules that came to mind. So, when I heard that beta-Carotene adsorbtion was reduced by cooking, I initially thought carrots should be cooked. However, I saw an issue with that conclusion: I have heard about the remarkable cancer fighting effects of *raw* carrots.
What is in raw carrots that has such significant cancer fighting properties?
Beta-Carotene does not appear to be the answer. One paper investigating the relationship between beta-Carotene and cancer found that not only did Vitamin A and beta-Carotene supplementation *not* have anti-cancer benefits, but this supplementation may have actually had adverse effects if the person was a smoker or was exposed to asbestos. Another study also found that supplementation with beta-Carotene to observe lung cancer among smokers did not have any effect on cancer rates and also may have been harmful.
The answer? Falcarinol.
Farcarinol is a bioactive polyacetylene (and I have a paper discussing this family of molecules and their presence in food, but that is for yet another post). A highly referenced study published in 2005 investigated the effects of feeding rats carrots or falcarinol on the developement of induced colon tumors/cancer.
Three groups of rats were investigated. One groups was fed rat chow + uncooked carrots known to contain 35ug falcarinol/g, one group was fed rat chow + falcarinol add to a starch substrate that equaled the amount in the carrots, and the control group was just fed rat chow + the starch.
Both the carrot and falcarinol groups showed a significant reduction in (pre)cancerous lesions, but this was not seen in the control group. Since falcarinol alone had the same positive effect as the carrots, the evidence shows that falcarinol is the active molecule against cancer.
The rat’s carrot consumption was the equivalent to 400-600g a day for a human. Which is really easy to obtain via juicing, and not too hard to eat that amount with the proper motivation.
So, the cancer fighting molecule in carrots is now known. How does cooking or other processing affect it? What other plants are sources for falcarinol? I will address these issues in following posts. No need in making a mega post; I don’t want to wait to publish posts on these interesting findings. :-)
Another study was published in 2009 on the Differential Effects of Falcarinol and Related Aliphatic C17-Polyacetylene on Intestinal Cell Proliferation. I am going to continue the discussion for this article in part III of this topic, but I wanted to go ahead and post the link for curious minds.
