W. Elaine Hardman, PhD
W. Elaine Hardman, PhD, associate professor, department of biochemistry and microbiology, Marshall University School of Medicine, Huntington, West Virginia.
It’s time to bring back Waldorf Salad — that delicious salad of chopped apples, grapes, celery, watercress and walnuts. A new study, funded partly by the American Institute for Cancer Research, has demonstrated that walnuts suppress the development of breast cancer tumors in mice.
What is so special about walnuts? I asked W. Elaine Hardman, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Marshall University School of Medicine in Huntington, West Virginia, the study’s lead author. “Of all the common nuts, walnuts contain the highest amount of omega-3 fatty acids,” she told me. Walnuts also have significant amounts of antioxidants and phytosterols, compounds that have been shown to individually slow cancer growth.
To see if the dietary addition of walnuts would impact cancerous tumors, Dr. Hardman tested 40 female mice that had been implanted with cells of human breast cancer tumors. Once the tumors reached 3 mm to 5 mm in diameter, half the mice stayed on their standard mouse diet, while the other half ate a diet adjusted to include ground English walnuts, the human equivalent of two ounces per day. Within 35 days, growth of breast cancer tumors in the walnut-fed mice had slowed to the extent they were half the size of the tumors in the non-walnut fed mice. “We were all surprised that the study came out that well,” says Dr. Hardman. The team hadn’t expected that adding such a small amount to the diet would be enough to suppress the growth as much as it did.