For those of you who are in the medical community, you might already know that TEDMED 2012 happened just a little while ago. If you have not heard of TEDMED, it serves as a forum for people to get together and share ideas on health and medicine. While waiting for the videos of the 2012 conference to be added to the TEDMED website, we rememberd a very excellent speech given by Dr. William Li of the Angiogenesis Foundation during a TED (the more general and widely known conference) talk in 2010. He went about trying to answer the question “can we eat to starve cancer?” by leveraging foods that are known to inhibit angiogenesis.
So what is angiogenesis?
According to the Mirriam-Webster dictionary angiogenesis is simply:
“the formation and differentiation of blood vessels.”
A very simplistic definition, certainly, but how it relates to cancer is a little bit more complex. Normal angiogenesis helps keep you healthy. It allows your body to build blood vessels for nutrients to travel to new tissue, and can also aid in repairing damaged tissue and helping heal from wounds. Unfortunately angiogenesis creates those same nutrient pathways toward cancerous tumors, helping them grow. When fighting cancer, angiogenesis is not a good thing.
With that, we highly recommend watching Dr. Li’s talk on the subject of anti-angiogenic foods and how they can help “starve” cancerous tumors. It is very informative and one of our favorite videos on the subject:
Where do black raspberries fit in?
As it turns out, black raspberries are a very powerful anti-angiogenic food. And while certainly more studies need to be done in this area, this is yet another mechanism that black raspberries happen to excel in that can potentially aid in battling cancer.
5 Comments
What a very informative site, I have found alot of very useful information here on black raspberries and still have a lot more to read. Thank you very much for the time and effort you have put in.
I can’t believe how much background science has been done on black raspberries. Wow!
This looks yummy and I’m so jealous that your wild black rasirerbpes are just coming on. Ours are almost past, but we have enjoyed a couple of my mother-in-law’s yummy black rasperry pies and we made a black rasperry cobler.
It’s good to be with the experts.I’ve learned something new on how helpful and how powerful a black raspberry is as an anti-angiogenic food.I wonder what will happen if we take to much of the required dosage of eating or taking this into our body?
Joe – The problems you would see with taking too much black raspberry extract or freeze-dried black raspberries are basically the same problems you would get by eating a whole bunch of any kind of fruit or berry. While black raspberries are relatively low in sugar, taking large quantities would still be a substantial amount of sugar and calories in general.