The world-wide rate of incidence of cancer disease has been only modestly contested by the past and current preventive and interventional strategies. Hence, the global effort towards novel ideas to contain the disease still continues. Constituents of human diets have in recent years emerged as key regulators of carcinogenesis, with studies reporting their inhibitory potential against all the three stages vis-a-vis initiation, promotion and progression. Unlike drugs which usually act on single targets, these dietary factors have an advantage of multi-targeted effects and pleiotropic action mechanisms, which are effective against cancer that manifest as a micro-evolutionary and multi-factorial disease. Since most of the cellular targets have been identified and their consumption considered relatively safe, these diet-derived agents often appear as molecules of interest in repurposing strategies. Currently, many of these molecules are being investigated for their ability to influence the aberrant alterations in cell’s epigenome for epigenetic therapy against cancer. Targeting the epigenetic regulators is a new paradigm in cancer chemoprevention which acts to reverse the warped-up epigenetic alterations in a cancer cell, thereby directing it towards a normal phenotype. In this review, we discuss the significance of dietary factors and natural products as chemopreventive agents. Further, we corroborate the experimental evidence from existing literature, reflecting the ability of a series of such molecules to act as epigenetic modifiers in cancer cells, by interfering with molecular events that map the epigenetic imprints such as DNA methylation, histone acetylation and non-coding RNA mediated gene regulation.

过去和当前的预防和干预策略对世界范围内的癌症发病率提出了适度的质疑。因此，全球为控制这种疾病而采取的新想法的努力仍在继续。近年来，人类饮食的成分已成为致癌的关键调节剂，研究报告了它们对所有三个阶段的抑制潜力。启蒙、提升和进步。与通常作用于单一靶点的药物不同，这些饮食因素具有多靶点作用和多效作用机制的优势，对表现为微进化和多因素疾病的癌症有效。由于大多数细胞靶标已被确定并且它们的消费被认为相对安全，因此这些饮食衍生的试剂通常作为重新利用策略中感兴趣的分子出现。目前，正在研究其中许多分子影响细胞表观基因组异常改变的能力，以用于抗癌的表观遗传治疗。针对表观遗传调节因子是癌症化学预防的新范例，它可以逆转癌细胞中扭曲的表观遗传改变，从而将其引导至正常表型。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了饮食因素和天然产物作为化学预防剂的重要性。此外，我们证实了现有文献中的实验证据，反映了一系列此类分子在癌细胞中充当表观遗传修饰剂的能力，通过干扰绘制表观遗传印记的分子事件，如 DNA 甲基化、组蛋白乙酰化和非编码RNA介导的基因调控。