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UCLA Center for Human Nutrition
Warren Hall Laboratory
900 Veterans Avenue
Room 1–2-217
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1742
E-mail: dheber{at}mednet.ucla.edu
This modest volume is entitled Nutrition and Cancer Prevention; however, it has virtually no clinical information useful for uninitiated health care practitioners or researchers outside the field of nutrition and cancer. The book is a compilation of fairly brief chapters on various substances that are classified as dietary components, including vitamins, carotenoids, synthetic vitamin analogs, minerals (calcium and selenium), phytosterols, polyphenols, isothiocyanates, and lipids (n–3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid, and sphingolipids), with brief chapters on obesity and alcohol as risk factors for cancer. The list is neither adequately complete nor adequately detailed in its parts. Although some of the chapters, such as the n–3 fatty acids and colon cancer chapters by BS Reddy and the flavonoid chapter by J-R Zhou, are adequate, many others are overly brief and difficult to read. They are dense with references and often do not adequately explain the findings being discussed in a manner comprehensible to the reader. An additional weakness is the overemphasis of scientific results from the authors' own laboratories to the exclusion of other important work in the field. There is also a lack of information that is useful in bringing together the disparate topics covered in the book. How the various dietary components interact is not discussed adequately, except in a brief chapter on how dietary components protect against cancer. This chapter does not fully explain any of the mechanisms that are targeted, such as apoptosis, proliferation, or checkpoint regulation. Instead, where full chapters are needed, only brief paragraphs over a few pages are provided. This overview is wholly inadequate for researchers and too brief and full of jargon for the uninitiated reader. Therefore, researchers, including fellows and faculty interested in the field of nutrition and cancer, would be better served through careful reading of available review articles on these topics. Those new to the field would be better off finding a more definitive and clearly written text on this subject.