Serendipitously, Nutrition and Cancer was born in 1975 out of an off-hand conversation in a hallway during a break in an AACR meeting. Dr. Ernst Wynder, founder of the American Health Foundation, and pioneer in the field of preventive medicine, asked a group of us if it was time to launch a journal dedicated to role of nutrition in cancer causation and prevention. We all agreed and, in 1978, the first issue of Nutrition and Cancer was published. The founding editor, Dr. Gio Gori, wrote in that issue, that “the journal was born not to hail a new scientific society or some esoteric speciality but rather to fill a need created by the mounting interest in nutrition and its relationship to health and disease.”
In 1999, I came on as Editor and have watched the journal grow rapidly over time into a major source of basic and applied research into nutrition’s role in cancer, both in the USA and around the world. Well over 50% of the papers published in Nutrition and Cancer now come from countries outside the USA, with a growing percentage coming from Asian countries.
Although, as Doll and Peto have shown, approximately one third of cancers can be attributed to environmental factors such as diet, the emphasis in the cancer research community has been on genetic and molecular approaches to treatment and the development of, often very expensive, anticancer drugs. This imbalance is slowly being rectified as the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet, omega-3 fatty acids, dietary fiber, and plant polyphenols, such as resveratrol, have penetrated the research community and the general public.
From a public health perspective, it could be argued that preventive measures, such as the simple idea put forth by John Snow that sewage should be separated from drinking water to prevent cholera, or the discovery by Edward Jenner, that vaccinations can prevent smallpox, are far more valuable to society than complex and expensive medical treatments. However, as the Covid epidemic has shown, the lack of any serious commitment to public health and preventive medicine in the USA and other Western countries, is now painfully clear.
Since its inception, the journal has followed the Bradford-Hill Criteria for Causation, which rests on epidemiology but emphasizes the critical importance of biological plausibility. Because association does not necessarily imply causation, information from animal model, In vitro, molecular and gene expression studies, must be brought to bear on any hypotheses inferred from epidemiology
As for the future, while epidemiology, animal model and in vitro studies will remain as guide-posts, the effect of specific nutrients at the level of the gut microbiome and gene expression (i.e.,methylation of DNA and acetylation of histones), will, no doubt, become more prominent.
In any event, it is time for me to step down and make way for a new generation of researchers. It has been an honor and pleasure to serve as Editor, and to have the support of our Editorial Board, Associate Editors and the hundreds of reviewers who have taken the time out of their busy schedules to make sure that every paper published in Nutrition and Cancer was fit to be published. I wish the best to Dr. David Montrose of SUNY, Stony Brook, the incoming editor of Nutrition and Cancer. And, as stated in my introductory editorial, in 1999, “I invite you to use Nutrition and Cancer as your journal of choice to present novel and exciting research aimed at reducing cancer incidence and mortality through nutritional means,”
Editor, Nutrition and Cancer: An International Journal
[email protected]
Funding
The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.
Related Research Data
