ABSTRACT
With the great advances made by the pharmaceutical industry, our modern Western culture has distanced itself from the notion that phytochemicals may have specific medicinal actions. Phytochemicals acting as agonists or antagonists of kinases or phosphatases involved in a signal transduction pathway may ultimately a¡ect the expression of a gene or sets of genes regulated by that specific pathway. Flavonoids are polyphenolic phytochemicals with antioxidative, anticarginogenic, and estrogenic activity that exert their ejects through various biological processes including signaling cascades. The ability to point out both negative interactions and potentially promising positive interactions between drugs and phytochemicals may provide great practical health benefits to the consumer. One of the most exciting advances in the field of regulation of gene expression by dietary constituents is the explosion of information becoming available regarding nuclear receptors such as peroxisome proliferators activated receptor, farnesoid X receptor, pregnane X receptor, aryl-hydrocarbon receptor, and many others.
