As a biomedical area, the association between diet and cancer is at about the same stage of development as was diet and atherosclerotic vascular disease 20 years ago. We have tantalizing epidemiologic observations, which, along with dietary studies utilizing experimental animals, suggest that a variety of dietary components may modulate the transformation and promotion stages of carcinogenesis.
Among these are the energy nutrients, several vitamins and minerals, and nonnutrient substances, which are both natural and inadvertent constituents of the food supply. This diversity of agents, as well as the observations that many individual factors are site-specific in their effect on target organs, makes this a complex field indeed.
The first chapter of this book presents an overview of the entire field and is a good summary of the scope of the problem. The subsequent sections are based on the several categories of individual nutrients. Each furnishes an extensive and technical,