WESLACO — Some of the nation's leading cancer researchers have agreed to help teach a college level course this spring that explores why fruits and vegetables are so good for us.
Sixteen eminent medical and agricultural researchers, professors, biochemists and nutritionists will provide lectures from their respective institutions across the country via interactive video conferencing to students at 10 locations across Texas.
The lecture series, "Phytochemicals in Fruits and Vegetables to Improve Human Health," is based in Weslaco in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and is the brainchild of Dr. Bhimu Patil, a post-harvest physiologist at the Texas A&M-Kingsville Citrus Center at Weslaco.
The class begins Jan. 16 and will be held Tuesday evenings, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.
"This is the second offering of this class," said Patil, "which was the first of its kind in the world when we first did this in 1999. We expect many more students this time around, thanks to a growing interest in this relatively new field of study."
The course will focus on studies that continue to prove that phytochemicals, those naturally occurring compounds in plants, have an astounding ability through their biological activity to prevent human diseases, including heart disease and certain cancers.
"From the minds of some of today's top medical and agricultural researchers, we'll be learning how phytochemicals react to different human diseases, how to enhance these functional compounds through agricultural practices, and what the current information status is of these compounds that prevent human diseases," Patil said.
New to this year's course will be lectures on atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases and how to prevent them through nutrition, how soybeans help prevent diseases, diet and prostate cancer, how diet affects colon cancer and how phytochemicals are affected during processing.
"For example," said Patil, "we now know that when juice is extracted from fruits and then stored, the amounts of vitamins in the juice decrease, but limonoid glucosides increase. These compounds help prevent oral cancer and may even induce detoxifying enzymes to prevent other diseases, actually increase."
Patil said extensive student evaluations in 1999 helped improve the upcoming class.
"We've moved away from the chemistry-type lectures to make the class much easier to understand, since both teachers and students are from multi-disciplinary backgrounds. We're expecting a variety of students including dietitians, nutritionists, graduate and undergraduate students from various fields, and even other medical and agricultural researchers," said Patil.
Funded by USDA's Challenge Grants program, the lecture series will be transmitted via satellite to 10 Texas A&M and University of Texas locations in Weslaco, Kingsville, College Station, Stephenville, Lubbock, Victoria, Houston, Dallas, Edinburg and Brownsville. Corpus Christi may also be a site.
Besides Patil and other researchers at Texas A&M and the Texas A&M University System Health Science Center, instructors for the lecture series will include scientists from the AMC Cancer Research Center in Denver, Baylor College of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, The Ohio State University School of Public Health and University of Houston-Victoria.
Patil encourages students to sign up as soon as possible since class size at each location will be limited. For more information, contact Patil by phone at (956) 968-2132, via e-mail atb-patil@tamu.edu, or visit the class Web site at http://phytochemicals.tamu.edu.