Science at UM [S03-ep15]: Diet and cancer

[Podcast] - Published on January 25, 2024 in Science-Society

This week on A l’UM la science, Sophie Tissot, a doctoral student at the Mivegec laboratory, Mivegeclaboratory, talks to us about evolution, cancer, and nutrition. Our report takes us on a tour of the PhénoArch platform with Bertrand Muller. Finally, our last-minute guest is Agnès Pesenti, who presents the upcoming Science Bar. A program co-produced with Divergence FM and broadcast every Wednesday at 6 p.m. on 93.9.

It's January 24, the first month of the new year is barely over, and yet New Year's resolutions are already a distant memory. Do you know what the most common resolutions are among French people? The very original trio: exercising, eating better, and of course losing weight.

So we can talk about fashion dictates, body tyranny, etc., but perhaps this obsession with food in our modern societies also betrays an intuition of a kind of evolutionary imbalance. We know the harmful effects of our diets on our bodies. The links between diet and cancer, for example, have been widely demonstrated. It's sad, but the more you eat and the richer your diet, the more you risk feeding your future cancer.

Today, evolutionary oncology is taking a close interest in these links between food availability and tumorigenesis and is attempting to understand whether this correlation exists only in mammals or whether humans share this trait with species that are very different from them in evolutionary terms, such as fish or hydras. To do this, science is doing what it does best: experimenting and comparing.

We discuss this with Sophie Tissot, a doctoral student at the Mivegec laboratory and also at CREEC, the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Cancer Research. She is the lead author of this study entitled "The impact of food availability on tumorigenesis is conserved throughout evolution," published in the journal Scientific Reports.

In the second part of the program, Bertrand Muller, a researcher at Lepse, the laboratory for plant ecophysiology under environmental stress, introduces us to PhénoArch, a phenotyping platform dedicated to analyzing the genetic determinants of plant responses to drought, temperature, and light.

Finally, for our last-minute interview, Agnès Pesenti, head of scientific culture at UM, is here to wish you all the best for the new year and announce the return of the science bar with an upcoming conference on January 25 on the question: "Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence?"

At UM Science, you have the program, so let's get started!

Co-production: Divergence FM / University of Montpellier
Host: Lucie Lecherbonnier
Interview: Aline Périault / Lucie Lecherbonnier
Production: Alice Rollet / Tom Chevalier

Listen to the program “A l’UM la science” on Divergence FM 93.9

Keywords: Science at UM, Research, Science, Company