▎Editor of WuXi AppTec content team
Palm oil is a natural oil derived from tropical plant oil palm. From the perspective of world production and trade volume, palm oil is one of the top food oils. Maybe it doesn’t appear directly in your home like soybean oil and rapeseed oil.kitcheninside,But if you often eat processed foods such as instant noodles, puffed foods, and pastries, you will almost inevitably consume palm oil.
Among various edible oils, palm oil is the most commonly used in processed foods. One of the main reasons people favor palm oil is that it is very suitable for long-term high-temperature heating and has better stability than many other vegetable oils. When it is used to make fried food, it has a good-looking color and is not easy to deteriorate.
These advantages of palm oil and itsHigh saturated fatty acid contentrelated.The main saturated fatty acid in palm oil is palmitic acid, The content is as high as about 40%; in addition, palm oil also contains some unsaturated fatty acids, including oleic acid, linoleic acid and so on.
In this new study, the scientists analyzedThe relationship between palmitic acid, oleic acid, linoleic acid, three dietary fatty acids and cancer cell metastasis. The spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body is one of the most dangerous features of cancer and the main cause of death from cancer. The intake and metabolic changes of fatty acids have always been thought to be related to cancer metastasis. In order to further understand which fatty acids in the diet may cause changes related to cancer metastasis, the researchers conducted a series of experiments.
When they first cultivated human oral cancer or skin cancer cancer cells, they temporarily added fatty acids to the cancer cells at a concentration within the physiological range of human serum. These cancer cells were then transplanted into the corresponding tissues of mice fed a standard diet. Several fatty acids have no effect on the primary tumor, butPalmitic acid significantly increases the ability of cancer cells to metastasize to the lungs, and promotes the invasiveness and size of metastasesIn contrast, cancer cells treated with oleic acid or linoleic acid did not have a significant effect on cancer cell metastasis.
Another set of experiments directly fed a diet rich in palm oil to tumor mice.Even after only eating for just ten days, the cancer cells transplanted into mice showed stronger metastasis ability.In contrast, the mice in the control group also ate a lot of vegetable oil, but switched to olive oil, there was no increase in metastasis.
The researchers pointed out thatThese cancer cells are only in intimate contact with palmitic acid for a short time, even if they return to a normal diet afterwards, they can still retain the “memory” that promotes metastasis.. To this end, scientists have further explored this “promoting transfer of memory” mechanism.
Through methods such as single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics, they found that this process is related to the epigenetic changes of metastatic cancer cells, that is, the expression pattern of genes is changed through molecular modification without changing the DNA itself. Under the influence of palmitic acid,Changes in cancer cell epigenetics mediate long-term stimulation of metastasis.
Among the large number of genes that tumors are induced by palmitic acid to change their expression, the researchers noticed that there are a series of genes related to nerve function. Preliminary studies have shown that by preventing tumors from obtaining stable nerve signals, they can significantly reduce their metastasis-promoting memory.
The research author concluded at the end of the paper,These results highlight the long-term health risks associated with a diet rich in palm oil and the progression of cancer metastasisAt the same time, it provides insights on the mechanism, or helps to find new therapies to help cancer patients slow down or prevent the metastasis of cancer cells.
Source of title picture: 123RF
Reference materials:
[1] Gloria Pascual et al。， （2021） Dietary palmitic acid promotes a prometastatic memory via Schwann cells。 Nature Doi： 10.1038/s41586-021-04075-0
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