At a dose of melatonin one-thousand times less than the safrole, the scientists prevented the DNA damage by more than 90 percent of what was otherwise expected.
32.
But it will still have : ethyl alcohol, benzo ( a ) pyrene, ethyl carbamate, furan derivatives, furfural, hydrazines, psoralens, quercetin glycosides and safrole.
33.
The evidence started stacking up just two years ago, when Reiter and his colleagues showed that a small dose of melatonin could shield rats from a cancer-causing chemical called safrole.
34.
For example, sassafras, still widely available in health food stores, contains a carcinogen, safrole, that was banned decades ago by the Food and Drug Administration from use in foods.
35.
Since the bark was the most commercially valued part of the sassafras plant due to large concentrations of the aromatic safrole oil, commercially valuable sassafras could only be gathered from each tree once.
36.
Notable among these are the use of mercury-aluminum amalgam ( an unusual but easy to obtain reagent ) as a reducing agent and detailed suggestions on legal plant sources of important drug precursors such as safrole.
37.
Sassafras root is still used to flavor traditional root beer, although since sassafras was banned by the U . S . Food and Drug Administration because of the carcinogenicity of its constituent safrole, most commercial recipes do not contain sassafras.
38.
In 1960, the U . S . Food and Drug Administration banned sassafras bark along with sassafras oil and safrole as flavoring agents because of their carcinogenic properties although toxicological studies show that humans do not process safrole into its carcinogenic metabolite.
39.
In 1960, the U . S . Food and Drug Administration banned sassafras bark along with sassafras oil and safrole as flavoring agents because of their carcinogenic properties although toxicological studies show that humans do not process safrole into its carcinogenic metabolite.
40.
But when rats got tiny doses of melatonin before their safrole shots, they exhibited 41 percent less damage than their untreated counterparts _ and those receiving a slightly larger dose of melatonin suffered just 1 percent as much liver damage as the controls.
