Spices In Cancer Prevention: An Overview

Culinary herbs are herbaceous plants that add flavour and colour to all types of meals. Spices have been part of Indian folk and traditional medicine since ancient times. But recently, extensive work is being conducted all over the world to demonstrate the anti-mutagenic and anticarcinogenic potential of some of the commonly consumed spices. This renewed interest in natural medicines today is mainly due to the fact that many chronic diseases including cancer still remain difficult to cure. As such, attempts are being made to identify naturally occurring anticarcinogens, which may lead to new strategies for cancer prevention. This article is an attempt to consolidate some of the works that has been carried out on spices and their active principles in order to prove their probable cancer preventive properties. It is now becoming clear that the beneficial properties in spices are due to the presence of potent phytochemicals in them. Plants have the capacity to synthesize a diverse array of chemicals. In plants, these compounds function to attract beneficial and repel harmful organisms, serve as photoprotectants, and respond to environmental changes. In humans, they can have complementary and overlapping actions, including antioxidant, antimutagenic and antiinflammatory effects, modulation of detoxification enzymes, and induction of apoptotic activity and so on. Thus, incorporation of these spices in our regular diet may prove to be beneficial for our health. Nevertheless, the effect of spices in the context of total diet still remains to be evaluated. It is still not clear that mechanisms that appear to influence disease risk in animals, often fed high doses of these spices, can be extrapolated to humans consuming realistic amounts of these spices as part of their daily diet.