SCIENCE FILE - In Brief - Caffeine, exercise may fight cancer

Exercise and moderate caffeine consumption together could help ward off sun-induced skin cancer, researchers said Monday.

Experiments on mice showed that caffeine and exercise together somehow made them better able to destroy precancerous cells whose DNA had been damaged by ultraviolet radiation, scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Either caffeine or exercise alone increased by roughly 100% the mice’s ability to kill precancerous cells. But the mice that did both showed a nearly 400% increase.