The Edge sees food as weapon in cancer war
‘Emphasis surely has to be more on prevention,’ says U2 guitarist
The lead guitarist of U2 has more on his mind than music.
In 2006, The Edge’s sevenyear-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. Sian recovered and is now 19.
The experience heightened his interest in health and cancer, and especially in angiogenesis, which focuses on the formation of new blood vessels.
In recent years, several anti-angiogenesis drugs have been developed to disrupt the blood supply that cancers need to grow.
Yet The Edge, whose real name is David Evans, is convinced that certain foods can play a similar role, and he’s pressing for more research.
He’s a board member of the Angiogenesis Foundation, a Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit headed by William Li, an internal medicine physician who studied under angiogenesis pioneer Judah Folkman.
Q How did your daughter’s experience affect you?
The Edge: I was, I guess like any parent would be, sent into a complete tailspin. Coming out of that, part of what I was determined to do was to fully understand what this meant.
The good news is that chemotherapy protocols are very well understood and the success rate is high. As it happens, we were able to provide dietary changes to offer additional support to combat the disease.
What I really felt acutely, having brought my daughter through this treatment, is we can do better than chemotherapy.
It’s brutal, it’s very crude; you basically are killing cancer cells at a slightly higher rate than you are killing normal cells. As a strategy, it seemed like a blunt instrument. I couldn’t imagine that we couldn’t do better.
When I discovered the angiogenesis approach, I thought, “This is part of the future. It might not be the whole future, but it’s part of it.”
Q How are you trying to promote that approach?
The Edge: We’re communicating with scientists from other fields, talking to government officials about what we know and where we see the future and also doing public outreach ... We’re just trying to encourage greater interest in this area.
The emphasis surely has to be more on prevention, and angiogenesis and diet is an obvious place to look.
Dr. Li: We want to use the tools of biotechnology to ask questions about how foods actually work in the body. This is almost a redefinition or reconceptualization of nutrition, away from macro- and micronutrients to ask: “What happens to foods when they encounter human cells?”
We are really at the beginning of this era of research to begin understanding how whole foods, combinations of whole foods, and even how they are prepared can make a difference.
Q It’s hard to prove that any particular food can prevent cancer. What is the evidence that the specific foods might actually protect people from the disease?
The Edge: Some of it is in the state of being a very good theory, a theory that has a lot of evidence around it, population studies, there are actually laboratory tests that the foundation has funded where you literally grow human cells in a petri dish and see what happens when certain foods are added.
Of course, that wouldn’t pass muster as hard, scientific, FDA-approved, proof. But it’s really compelling when you start to see in a petri dish that these foods are having an effect which in some cases rivals pharmacology.
What we need is for the government to step in and fund this research ... the system is set up for Big Pharma developing drugs with big profit margins.
We don’t want them to stop, but what isn’t being done right now is a lot of funding of greater understanding of these molecules in food.
Dr. Li: It’s tempting for all of us to want the magic bullet, the one thing to make everything else go away, but the body of research has shown that both health and disease are much more complicated.
We think food is one of the pieces of the puzzle of life. And when you marry together all the tools that are available with what we put on our plate and the choices we make in the grocery store, we think there is literally an undiscovered country that can contribute to the health of society.
What we’re really trying to do is develop a platform of understanding not just one food but many foods and combinations of foods.
One of our first priorities is to systematically study whole, unprocessed foods using laboratory assays that have been used traditionally for drug discovery.
Q What do you eat?
The Edge: I actually do eat berries every day, different ones, and whole food as much as I can. I eat foods with anti-angiogenic properties.