IT’S no secret that a healthy lifestyle might help your body fight cancer. Now it seems this is partly because diet and exercise alter the expression of our genes.
Dean Ornish and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, took prostate biopsies from 30 men with early-stage prostate cancer and got them to eat a low-fat diet of vegetables and whole grains, take moderate exercise, and attend stress management classes. Three months later, a second biopsy revealed changes in the expression of hundreds of genes.
Some genes involved in tumour formation were less active, while some disease-fighting genes were…
