Tuesday, April 28, 2009

"c" for cattle



This post is responding to one of the news I read in Reuters.com entitled "Cattle genes may give clues about human health" as several points I quoted below attract my attention

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists have created the first genetic blueprint of domestic cattle, saying on Thursday the map may lead to tastier beef, better milk and even new insights about human health.

The Hereford cow's is the first mapped livestock animal sequence, and the researchers think it will help explain how cattle evolved, why they ended up with a four-chambered stomach, and why they almost never get cancer.

"Having the genome sequence is now the window to understanding how these changes occurred," said Harris Lewin of the University of Illinois, who worked on the research published in two reports in the journal Science.

Regarding cancer, I am quite curious how this scientific finding helps to prevent or reduce cancer incidence in human.

One of my reasons would be, the marked difference between human nutrition and cattle nutrition. As we are aware of, too much of meat product, especially red meat is associated with higher cancer incidence. Furthermore, people who avoided meat are much less likely to develop cancer. But yet, contraindicate findings been reported over the time regarding this subject, and I personally think that the meat: vegetable consumption ratio could provide us some indications to these contraries.

Besides that, fiber content in food we consume very likely to help us to get rid of the carcinogens found in our food. Furthermore, it can prevent disruption in the sensitive balance of beneficial bacteria in our gut. This prevents the inflammation of our digestive walls and disturbance to the gut-associated immune system.

Having said that, besides genetics, the food, that is forage, taken by cattle is very likely to prevent them or reduce their incidence of getting cancer.

However, it is still too early to derived at any conclusion, and all the points I pointed out are just merely my personal opinions.

As I am a strong believer that a disease is an unique interaction between host, agent and environment.





No comments:

Post a Comment