ABSTRACT
Cancer of the esophagus is a malignancy that exhibits a pattern of occurrence that has attracted the attention of many researchers interested in the dietary and nutritional epidemiology of cancer. The esophagus is in such close contact with the dietary environment that it is intuitive that the search for environmental factors would focus on this category of risk. Esophageal carcinogenesis has been attributed by different investigators to excesses and deficits of dietary exposure that may act through several different mechanisms. Tea drinking is a common dietary feature of many of the regions that experience high esophageal cancer rates. There are several different epidemiologic approaches to studying the role of dietary vitamin A in cancer inhibition in human populations. S. S. Mirvish and others have demonstrated that the formation of certain nitroso compounds linked in animal models to gastric carcinogenesis may be inhibited by the presence of vitamin C.
