You’ve likely heard the saying ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ but it appears the fruit may have more healing properties than experts first thought.
Now, Maritime researchers are using the unlikely combination of apples and fish in the fight against breast cancer.
“The compound is a combination of a compound from apple peel and fish oil, one of the omega-3 fatty acids,” says researcher Wasu Fernando, a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University’s agricultural campus in Truro.
For the past three years, Fernando has been studying how properties found in food can be used to treat breast cancer. She says, when it comes to the fish-apple combination, the results are promising.
“In the mice model, we induced the tumour growth first in mice, then we injected the compound, so the size of the tumour was shrinking significantly, even compared to a control group,” she says.
So why apples and fish oil?
Fernando says they each have strengths that compensate for the other’s weaknesses. For example, DHA, the specific compound in the omega-3 fatty acid, can’t stay stable for long periods of time.
“And you need to have antioxidants around it to protect the DHA molecule from oxidation,” says Fernando’s supervisor, Vasantha Rupasinghe.
He says, on the other hand, the compound in the apple peel is poorly absorbed into the bloodstream on its own.
“So putting a fatty acid to any molecule, the ability of this flavonoid to absorb in our body will enhance,” says Rupasinghe.
So far, mice that have been treated with the apple-fish oil combination have shown little to no side effects. In addition, Fernando says the treatment is safe.
“So the compound was selectively killing breast cancer cells while saving normal cells, which was something really encouraging that we saw the healthy cells were not destroyed,” she says. “At the same time, the negative breast cancer cells were killed.”
More research is needed before human trials of the treatment can begin.
