Haldi and Gobhi can keep prostate cancer at bay

Adding haldi to your vegetables while cooking is not only good for enhancing its taste, but also very effective at the prevention and treatment of prostate cancer, say researchers.

The scientists tested turmeric, also known as curcumin, along with phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC), a naturally occurring substance particularly abundant in a group of vegetables that includes watercress, cabbage, winter cress, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, cauliflower, kohlrabi and turnips.

The team from the Rutgers' Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy noted that in contrast to the high incidence of prostate cancer in the United States, the incidence of the disease was very low in India, which has been attributed to the dietary consumption of large amounts of plant-based foods rich in phytochemicals, i.e. nonnutritive plant chemicals that have protective or disease-preventive properties.

For the purposes of their study, researchers used mice bred so that their immune systems would not reject foreign biological material, and injected the mice with cells from human prostate cancer cell lines to grow tumors against which the compounds could be tested.

Source