Raw deal for smokers

You either love it or hate it, but either way it seems that eating the Japanese favorite, sushi, could cut your risk of lung cancer, especially if you're a smoker. Toshiro Takezaki and his colleagues at the Aichi Cancer Center in Nagoya, Japan, reckon rates of lung cancer are so low in Japan compared with figures for the US and the UK because of the Japanese passion for raw fish dishes, despite the fact they are often also heavy smokers. Lung cancer rates are just two-thirds as high as those in the UK, according to Takezaki who published his findings in the British Journal of Cancer.

He and his team looked at the diets of 4000 healthy people and 1000 lung-cancer patients to see whether there was a correlation between what people ate and the incidence of lung cancer. "We found decreased [numbers] of adenocarcinomas in both males and females who consumed cooked/raw fish, but not dried/salted fish at the highest quartile frequency, compared with the lowest," says Takezaki, "This study suggests cooked/raw fish consumption lowers the risk of adenocarcinoma of the lung in Japanese people." The team suspects that the key factor is the presence of large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids in fish oils although the biochemistry is yet to be proven.

Reference:
Br. J. Cancer, 2001, 84(9 ), 1199-1206. Abstract.