To Your Health

A. Aflatoxins are strong toxins produced by molds growing in foods like corn, peanuts, and soybeans when they are improperly stored. They are carcinogenic and eating them greatly increases the risk of liver cancer. Aflatoxins are not as big a risk today compared to a couple of decades ago when their connection with cancer was first discovered. At present the amount of aflatoxins in the American food supply is probably negligible because the increased awareness of the cancer hazard has led to much-improved storage methods. This is not the case in other parts of the world.

For instance, the people in certain parts of China have an extraordinarily high rate of liver cancer, related in part to routinely eating foods contaminated with these carcinogenic aflatoxins. Research published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 found that a form of chlorophyll, chlorophyllin, at 300 mg per day, reduced the damage from aflatoxin consumption by about half. The authors of the report theorize that chlorophyllin acts as an "interceptor molecule" to block the absorption of aflatoxins and other carcinogens in the diet. Both chlorophyll and chlorophyllin apparently work by forming complexes with carcinogens while they are still in the digestive tract, which keeps them from being absorbed; they also hinder the binding of carcinogens to DNA in the liver.

Chlorophyllin is similar to chlorophyll but more soluble in water. Chlorophyll is found in remarkable amounts in green leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale, chard, bok choy, etc. Less than an ounce of the fresh leaves from these vegetables would supply the 300 mg used in this research. Chlorophyllin had previously been reported to protect animals from other carcinogens besides aflatoxins, including the carcinogens found in overcooked meat and those generated by industrial pollution.

Eating green vegetables that are rich in chlorophyll is a practical way to reduce the risk of liver cancer and other cancers caused by environmental hazards such as the aflatoxins that may still be present to a small extent in nuts and other foods. As a bonus, both nuts and the foods rich in chlorophyll are good sources of magnesium. Because of the publicity given to calcium and the popularity of calcium supplements, it is sometimes difficult to maintain the balance of magnesium with calcium.

In addition to providing much-needed magnesium, nuts are a tasty source of the omega-3 essential fatty acids, from which we make the anti-inflammatory prostaglandins our bodies need to normalize our response to infections. Typically our American diet is out of balance with regard to essential fatty acids, providing too much of the omega-6 family and too little of the omega-3 family.

Several years ago the National Academy of Sciences published a book entitled Toxicants Occurring Naturally in Foods, which documents that there is at least one harmful substance in every single food we eat. The take-home lessons from that book are that it is best to eat a variety of foods so that we do not receive too much of any single toxin, and that the nutrients we need to counter the toxins found in one food are obtained from other foods. All this information supports a longstanding recommendation to eat a variety of foods, and nuts are indeed part of a well-balanced diet.