Changing the Public’s Health Behaviors by Diet and Chemopreventive Interventions

Abstract

In the last decade, cancer prevention has witnessed a great increase in the importance attached to diet and related chemopreventive interventions. There are several apparent stimuli for this. Firstly, the positive health value of nutrition in general and of some specific nutrients may be an outgrowth of developments in basic laboratory studies of carcinogenesis. As the number of substances examined in laboratory models grew, it was perhaps inevitable that some test substances would prove to have inhibitory, rather than carcinogenic, effects. Indeed, the application of basic carcinogenesis research methodology has proved as capable of identifying inhibitors as carcinogens.