How diet influences colon cancer

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-03/miot-hdi030116.php

Public Release: 2-Mar-2016
How diet influences colon cancer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Over the past decade, studies have found that obesity and eating a high-fat, high-calorie diet are significant risk factors for many types of cancer. Now, a new study from MIT reveals how a high-fat diet makes the cells of the intestinal lining more likely to become cancerous.

The study of mice suggests that a high-fat diet drives a population boom of intestinal stem cells and also generates a pool of other cells that behave like stem cells -- that is, they can reproduce themselves indefinitely and differentiate into other cell types. These stem cells and "stem-like" cells are more likely to give rise to intestinal tumors, says Omer Yilmaz, an MIT assistant professor of biology and leader of the research team.

"Not only does the high-fat diet change the biology of stem cells, it also changes the biology of non-stem-cell populations, which collectively leads to an increase in tumor formation," says Yilmaz, who is a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and a gastrointestinal pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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