Spinach is a popular leafy vegetable. When it is cooked with tomato and coriander leaves, it tastes better and its nutritional value rises many times over, and lemon adds another dimension. Research has identified four such edible foods with medicinal qualities that block the formation of cancer cells. It found that tomato, spinach, coriander leaves and lemon peel act against cancer, heart disease, diabetes and kidney disease, among other illnesses.

Since September 2018, Professor Dr AHM Khurshid Alam of the pharmacy department at Rajshahi University has been researching the anti-cancer role of edible foods with a team of researchers. His team, Dr Md Golam Sadik, Dr Mamunur Rashid, Dr Aziz Abdur Rahman and a number of students, collected about 68 kinds of edible foods sold in Bangladeshi markets: 31 vegetables, 17 fruits and 20 spices. They studied them to see whether they play any role in preventing cancer.

The study stands out for using several different types of cancer cell, such as lung, cervical, kidney and colon cancer, and for including almost all the edible foods found in Bangladesh. Remarkably, four foods were found to be effective in preventing cancer. The researchers showed that tomato, spinach, coriander leaves and lemon peel resist cancer.

The study was published on 1 January 2024 in the journal Cancer Research, published from Australia. A separate review article on 11 edible foods that boost the immune system was published in 2021 in the journal Heliyon, published from America.

Dr Khurshid Alam said these components of edible foods give the body extra protection against cancer at two levels. Their nutrients boost the body's immunity and also make healthy cells resistant to cancer, and healthy cells can then kill nearby cancer cells. These foods are easy to find and have no side effects. "In truth they are part of our daily diet, and we eat them without thinking. If we know which ones help prevent cancer and can plan our diet accordingly, edible foods will play a great role in preventing cancer."

He added that cancer has become one of the deadliest diseases across the world, and that unregulated lifestyles and eating habits are making it worse day by day. In this situation, identifying and properly using edible foods that can build resistance to cancer in the body can greatly reduce the rate of infection.

Expressing concern, Dr Khurshid Alam said controlling cancer has become almost impossible because no device has yet been invented to detect specific biomarkers or cancer-initiating cells (CIC). Bangladesh has 20 lakh cancer patients, with about 1.5 lakh people newly diagnosed every year, of whom about one lakh die. In 2020, around 10 million people worldwide, one in six, died of cancer.

According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), cancer is currently the second-highest cause of death worldwide, and researchers expect it to take first place by 2040. Cancer is also the second-highest cause of death in Bangladesh, so how to control it has become everyone's concern. In this situation, the government must form a high-powered technical committee now and take firm steps on how to tackle it, and researchers must also focus on finding alternative methods of cancer treatment. With all this in mind, Dr Khurshid Alam and his team have shown that anti-cancer qualities lie within vegetables.

Earlier, Dr Khurshid carried out separate research on the mulberry fruit, bark and root and found anti-cancer properties. That paper was published on 19 January 2013 by the UK-based science journal BioMed Central Research Notes. Another paper was published on 9 December 2016 in the US-based journal PLOS ONE. In recognition, Dr AHM Khurshid Alam received the University Grants Commission gold medal that year. In addition, 94 of his research papers have been published in local and international journals.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.