Hot chili peppers might help fight prostate cancer: study

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/health/view/198056/1/.html

LOS ANGELES : Capsaicin, the heat-generating element in the chili
peppers that delights spicy food lovers around the world, causes
prostate cancer cells to kill themselves, researchers said Wednesday.

A team of US cancer scientists found in tests on mice that capsaicin
could provoke apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in the cells behind
human prostate cancer, the most common cancer among men in the United
States.

According to the scientists at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer
Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the tests
showed the potential of repressing the growth of the cancer cells in
humans.

"Capsaicin had a profound anti-proliferative effect on human prostate
cancer cells in culture," said the institute's Soren Lehmann.

"It also dramatically slowed the development of prostate tumors formed
by those human cell lines grown in mouse models," he said.

To conduct their test, the researchers fed the heat-generating alkaloid
found in all types of chilis orally to mice. Lehmann said the dose was
equivalent to a 200 pound (90 kilogram) man eating from three to eight
of the ultra-hot habanero peppers three times a week.

The heat of habanero peppers registers up to 300,000 Scoville units,
compared to a maximum of 5,000 Scoville units for jalapenos and 175,000
for bird chilis popular in Southeast Asia and Africa, according to the
Chile Pepper Institute of New Mexico State University.

Lehmann's research team found that the capsaicin interfered with the
cancer cells' ability to avoid apoptosis, which occurs normally in many
tissues as they replace aged cells with new ones.

Cancer cells are able to mutate or change genes to avoid a programmed
dying off.

The team found that the doses of capsaicin induced about 80 percent of
prostate cancer cells to move toward apoptosis.

Prostate cancer kills about 221,000 people worldwide every year. - AFP
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I eat many different chilies including habaneros every week and have for
many years.  It didn't stop me from getting PC.  I think the key word
here is 'might'.

Larry