Widely renowned, selenium exists as one of the most significant nutritional antioxidants. Antioxidants benefit the body by preserving the immune system against everyday stressors like exposure to sunlight and pollution. They also improve other bodily functions and processes.

Dietary selenium may be associated with:

• Improved energy
• Increased resistance to disease
• Probable delay of aging

Selenium also enhances the activity of the enzyme glutathione peroxidase, which aids the immune system. An enhanced immune system can benefit the body in many ways, keeping one much healthier overall. Additionally, selenium neutralizes free radicals that directly attack cells at the molecular level. Selenium is an essential component of the diet, both by itself and in combination with other antioxidants.

Present in all tissues of the body, selenium serves as an activating component of the enzyme glutathione peroxidase, which protects cells from free radical damage.

Various studies show that dietary selenium, exhibiting a preventive power against cancer, reduces incidences of death due to the following:

• Breast cancer
• Colon cancer
• Leukemia
• Lung cancer
• Ovarian cancer
• Prostate cancer
• Rectal cancer

In other words, a diet containing sufficient amounts of selenium may be useful as a preventive and therapeutic agent in cancer care and treatment according to some healthcare professionals. The selenium interacts with chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments in a synergistic fashion as the treatments work toward a cure.

Controlled studies conducted over six years show a marked increase (up to 11 times greater) in the incidence of fatal cancers for people with the lowest quintile of selenium levels. These studies propose that a dietary selenium deficiency is a significant factor in many kinds of cancer. Including healt

hy levels of selenium in one's diet may improve the immune system and general health considerably. Selenium as a cancer preventive agent selenium_cancer_preventive_agent

Therapeutic nature of selenium

Could higher levels of dietary selenium truly help to prevent cancer? In a number of different tumor models, animals that consumed diets with elevated levels of selenium experienced repressed carcinogenesis (El-Bayoumy 1991; Ip and Hayes 1989). Many of these animal studies involved the inorganic form of selenium, sodium selenite; whereas we know that the majority of selenium comprised in the human diet is organic in form.

Scientists Ip and Ganther gracefully demonstrated the presence of a relationship between the form of selenium and its contribution to chemoprevention (1992a; 1992b). Chemoprevention relies on vitamins, drugs and other elements to reduce the risk or delay the development or recurrence of cancer. Some nutritional supplements on the market contain forms of selenium with chemopreventive traits.

Selenium's amino acids, selenomethionine and Methylselenocysteine (MSC), are stable, non-oxidizing and nonmutagenic. While we know that selenium restrains the growth of mammalian cells, we do not know precisely how this occurs. Some researchers suggest the answer may have something to do with apoptosis - programmed cell death - or breakage of DNA strands, among other possibilities.