Dried Plums can help Reduce Risks of Colon cancer, Says Study

In the US alone, 200,000 to 3 million new cases are reported every year, and almost 50,000 patients lose the battle against the illness.

The California Dried Plum Board presented the research at the 2015 Experimental Biology conference in Boston.

Many studies and surveys have recently concluded that people’s diets can influence how the composition of colon gut bacteria changes, and how their metabolism behaves. During the research, a few of the rats were fed with dried plums and others with control diet.

Dried plums have phenolic compounds that have different effects on the human health such as acting like antioxidents that neutralize the effects from free radicals, which can damage the DNA.

“The hypothesis we tested in this experiment was that consumption of dried plums would promote retention of beneficial microbiota and patterns of microbial metabolism throughout the colon”.

The reason is pretty simple: the dried plums help our microbiota – also known as gut bacteria – stay healthy.

Turner added that the data supports the hypothesis that dried plums protect against colon cancer, which may be due in part to their ability “to establish seemingly beneficial colon microbiota compositions in the distal colon”. The team learned that dried plums raised the levels of a protective bacteria called Bacteroidetes and thus reduced inflammatory processes.

Dr. Turner’s group explored the link between diet and colon health further by giving two groups of rats the exact same caloric and nutritional diet except for one group’s food included dried plums.

Dried plums contain chemical compound known as phenolic compound.

Texas A&M University-College Station, along with the University of North Carolina, had come up with a study to learn how dried plums may impact the body’s microbiome. Eating dried plums also reduced levels of aberrant crypt foci, which are often a strong indicator of cancer development.

As colon cancer remains the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States when men and women are considered separately, according to the American Cancer, it is also the second-leading cause when the figures are combined. This si important because Derek Seidel, research assistant and doctoral graduate student, offered a statement of his own informing that a high number of aberrant crypts is a clear warning sign that the individual is developing colon cancer. Naturally, this new development proved monumental – suggesting that regularly consuming dried plums could be a great dietary method in reducing colon cancer risk. This initially leads to intestinal inflammation, then to recurrent inflammation, and once this starts to persist, colon cancer starts to develop.