10 ms·

Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

92 points by forloop 11y ago

sbierwagen 11y ago
On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research_and_vitamin_C_advocacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and-cancer-has-linus-pauling-been-vindicated/ https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.
- Devid2014 11y ago
  There are really many types of chancer, and Vitamin C (if confirmed) seems to help only from some types of it. So that he died of cancer say absolutely nothing about Vitamin C.
  - chc 11y ago
    It certainly says that vitamin C doesn't cure all cancers.
  - majkinetor 11y ago
    Right, but almost all cancers depend on this pathway. GLUT receptor mega overexpression is a milestone in cancer evolution and vitamin C in its oxidized form competes with glucose which is in cancer cells almost exclusive energy source.
- haffi112 11y ago
  Well, he was 93 years old. That's still kind of beating the odds in a way.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >He died in 1994, of cancer. Why is this brought out in such a dismissing and ironic way? He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal. Hell, there are so many different types of cancer, that even if megadosing C helped with one it probably wouldn't help with all. He lived to his 90s. At that point it was either cancer or heart disease that kills people. That fact that he lived to 93 is pretty impressive in itself. As someone who recently went on Vitamin D supplements due to low D in my bloodstream, I find it incredibly interesting how medicine is always changing. This knee-jerk skeptic idea about how everything but the current accepted status quo is "quackery" and mocking guys like Pauling is reprehensible. Just a few years ago, no one was checking Vitamin D levels. Now my depression and lethargy have been turned way down as my Vitamin D increases. Hell, I remember being a teen with ulcers and being told to lay off the spicy foods. I tried to explain to the doctor that I never eat that and he shrugged and wrote me a script for Zantac, it being prescription-only at the time. A few years later H. pylori's role in ulcer creation was revealed and now the standard treatment isn't large doses of zantac, but two weeks of amoxicillin. My ulcers magically went away after that treatment. Medicine is one of things that moves fast and the jury is still out on a lot of marginalized treatments, concepts, and research. I wouldn't be surprised if Pauling's research eventually fleshed out into some kind of cancer treatment, or at least as a supplemental treatment.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - pluckytree 11y ago
    I never understood the mocking, either, especially since he’s been proven extremely right about the ill-effects of consuming processed sugars. I suspect it’s rooted in his anti-nuclear and anti-war views and it just grew from there. His views on Vitamin C were just a convenient target. It’s uncomfortable to those with analytical minds to accept the fact that we know so little about the human body and how it works. Studies are always contradicting each other because the scientific method dictates that studies must be reduced to the minimum of variables. But the body is far too complex for that. Most of what I was taught nutritionally in school as a kid was wrong. Most of the health advice was wrong. We were told butter is evil and we should eat margerine. We were told fat was evil and that cholesterol causes heart disease despite no evidence other than correlation. We don’t know how or even if consumed cholesterol gets turned into cholesterol in the bloodstream. It’s virtually universally believed that salt is bad despite it being an essential nutrient. It’s universally believed that sun is bad and we must slather ourselves with sunscreen and now we all have Vitamin D deficiencies. Read the literature that comes with any prescription drug and there will be a paragraph explaining that they have no idea how the drug works. Many are no more effective than a placebo. There’s a perception that has persisted most of my life that we are always at a point where we have these things figured out, but ten years later they are proven wrong, but we don’t seem to notice that. There is an almost religious fervor surrounding science when it comes to our health and nutrition. Lots of research in the past few years surrounds gut bacteria, something that wasn’t even on the charts even 10 years ago. Now we are realizing that we not only know nothing, we know less than nothing. I don’t think Pauling will be vindicated on Vitamin C because this came from a time when it was universally thought that there was a pill or an injecton for anything and we just had to discover it. If you read Pauling’s books, you’ll realize that he never advocated it as a panacea, but part of a complete dietary and mental regimen. His research is compelling and it’s not hard to see how he came to the conclusions that he did. It’s good to hear I’m not the only one learning from history and realizing the uncomfortable fact that we know so little and this treatment of ulcers is the exception rather than the rule. How did we not discover this was bacterial for so long? It’s not like this is the 19th century after all.
- arbitrage 11y ago
  If you live long enough, you have a really good chance of getting some type of cancer.
  - triangleman 11y ago
    Really because I heard that once you get past a certain age, let's say 65, your chance of getting cancer goes way down.
    - vecter 11y ago
      When you hear something about a field you know very little about, your default reaction should be skepticism. People say bullshit stuff all the time and pass it off as fact. I don't know much about cancer biology, but what you heard sounds wrong. I don't see why, as you live longer, your body gets better at fighting cancer. If anything, the opposite sounds more likely. One possibility is that someone is citing data with survivorship bias. That is, the people who make it past 65 have good genes that generally lower their chances of getting cancer. Even if this were the case, obviously it doesn't imply a causal relationship where passing 65 years reduces your chance of getting cancer.
      - nonbel 11y ago
        Flip 5 coins and stop when each turns up tails, record the number of trials until the last coin is tails (just use # trials for the last coin...). Repeat this 100 times. Does the probability of ending on a given trial keep increasing with trial#? No, it will peak depending on the number of coins and probability of tails for each coin (here always close to 0.5). This is the same as accumulating n number of modifications in a cell until it grows into and gets detected as a tumor. Instead of accumulating "tails" you are accumulating mutations or whatever it turns out to be.
        nonbel 11y ago
        Not sure why this was downvoted... It is easy to prove to yourself. Here is some R: #p=Prob(tails), n=# Coins, q=Prob(heads), Npop=# times to repeat p=.5; n=5; q=1-p; Npop=1000 #Flip one Coin 100x and find first tails (probability of getting one mutation) OneCoin=function() which(sample(0:1,100, prob=c(q,p), replace=T)==1)[1] #Flip n coins and find last one to turn up tails (probability of accumulating n mutations) OneSet=function() max(replicate(n,OneCoin())) #Repeat Npop times, like different people in a population res=replicate(Npop,OneSet()) hist(res, breaks=Npop/20)
- prodmerc 11y ago
  But he was in his 90's. Really, the only way to test if it worked is to make him relive his life without vitamin C :-)
- LordKano 11y ago
  A lot of people advocate cannabis as a cure for cancer. I remind them that Bob Marley died from cancer.
empath75 11y ago
Kind of depressing that the study to investigate vitamin c injections won't get funded because drug companies can't sell it.
- macns 11y ago
  This. Article ends with: > But Cantley says it may be possible to make an oral formulation that reaches high doses in the blood—which may be one way to get companies interested in sponsoring trials.
- epistasis 11y ago
  Well, it won't get funded by a company unless there's a profit incentive, however there's other funding avenues for clinical trials like this. Besides applying for grants (which is extremely slow and extremely time consuming), research institutions often have small amounts of funds for running a trial in house, especially for something like this which only involves a few gene tests and an inexpensive treatment.
api 11y ago
Lots of mice studies don't translate well into humans. This one is highly specific -- a specific mutation. It's unlikely to have much bearing on real world cancer.
- OopsCriticality 11y ago
  Very true. To be charitable, the future is in personalized medicine, so if a vitamin C population subset can be well-defined then maybe there's something here. That said, cancer cells are notorious for expressing efflux pumps and in so doing frustrating treatment, and there's every reason to think that would happen here given the high doses and long time needed for therapeutic effect. I have to say, the very first thing that came to mind when I read the article was Xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/1217/ http://www.xkcd.com/1217/
- notlisted 11y ago
  Why is this comment down-voted? It's true. Mouse-models, especially for colon and breast cancers, have proven to be less-than-dependable (Cf. Voskoglou-Nomikos)
- nonbel 11y ago
  >[Supp Methods:] "To test the effect of vitamin C, two million HCT116 or VACO432 cells were injected subcutaneously into the flank of 6 to 8-week-old female athymic nude mice (Harlan, Indianapolis, IN). After 7-10 days, mice with tumors of 40-60 mm3 were randomly divided into two groups. One group was treated with freshly prepared vitamin C (sodium ascorbate in 400 ul PBS, 4 g per kilogram of body weight) by intraperitoneal (IP) injection twice a day (HCT116: n=6, VACO432: n=6). Control group mice were treated with PBS instead of vitamin C with the same dosing schedule (HCT116: n=4, VACO432: n=7)." [...] [Caption Fig 2:] "Tumor sizes were measured 2-3 times per week in an unblinded manner." http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa5004 http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa5004 Not only are they mice, but they have no immune system[1]. Also, the dose of vitamin C is like consuming an entire bottle twice a day (~240 g)[2]. They are honest about the lack of blinding, which is good, but obviously that should make us wary of these findings. Also, they do not report tumor size before splitting into treatment vs control groups (only saying mice with 40-60 mm^3 tumors were used). Put the larger ones in the control group and you can easily appear to be slowing tumor growth for totally artefactual reasons. For example, start with low initial (40) and high initial (60) cells in two different mice. If the cells all divide every day how many do you expect after 1:3 days. Low: 40,80,160; High: 60,120,240; Difference: 20,40,80. The difference seems to grow just due to the starting conditions, growth rates were the same. So these results are uninterpretable without knowing the starting tumor sizes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_mouse [2] http://www.allergyresearchgroup.com/buffered-vitamin-c-240-grams-8.5-oz-powder http://www.allergyresearchgroup.com/buffered-vitamin-c-240-g...
acd 11y ago
Is this why taking Vitamin C is good when you start to get a cold?
- harryf 11y ago
  If you consider the evolution of homo sapiens and it's predecessor, homo erectus, you have about 1.98 Million years where their diet would have been rich in Vitamin C; berries, fruit, vegetables etc.; their primary food sources, supplemented occasionally by meat when available. Farming only began to develop around 20,000 years ago, causing grains take a bigger role in home sapiens diet and reducing the relative Vitamin C consumption. Meanwhile we didn't physically evolve during that time. So one might expect that our bodies are evolved to thrive when Vitamin C intake is high...
  - ams6110 11y ago
    And insects. Sounds disgusting to most of us who consume the modern western diet, but insects would have been a source of protein and fat.
  - scott_s 11y ago
    It's a reasonable hypothesis, yes. But it has been researched, and it turns out to not be the case.
- zappo2938 11y ago
  Vitamin C has been proven to not have an effect on viral colds either way.[1] Vitamin D on the other hand has been proven to be an immune system modulator.[2] Unlike Vitamin C, most people develop Vitamin D deficiency.[3] I strongly advice you and everybody based on these studies to get yearly blood work and talk to a doctor about taking 4000IU daily supplement of Vitamin D. Also massive doses of Vitamin D can have negative effects. As for Vitimin C, just because someone is a Noble Prize winner or brain surgeon doesn't mean they are an authority on all things. Ben Carson makes my point. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23440782 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23440782 [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/ [3]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vitamin-d-deficiency-united-states/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vitamin-d-deficien...
ant6n 11y ago
Vitamin C correlated with dead of tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice
mcone 11y ago
This seems to contradict another recent study [1] that found that Vitamin C promoted cancer (melanoma) growth. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/10/14/antioxidants-may-give-a-boost-to-cancer-cells-making-them-spread-faster-study-suggests/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/1...
- dualogy 11y ago
  That's the nasty thing about cancerous cells, they can adapt to "feed" (via blood) on a wide range of macro- (glucose, protein, fatty acids, even ketones for some rare types) and micro-nutrients (vitamins, "antioxidants") just like "healthy" cells. What baffles me is that even autophagy either doesn't seem to always work (easy to induce by water-fasting for a couple of weeks) --else every sufferer would do so until in remission-- or that we still don't seem to have pharmaceutical ways of jumpstarting/forcing "99% effective" autophagy..
- swsieber 11y ago
  It would actually contradict it if this article mentioned melanoma like the post you found. I highly suspect we'll find individual ways of treating most individual cancer types before finding one that targets them all.
Amorymeltzer 11y ago
While it is easy to criticize any animal model study, especially when targeting cancer, we should be HIGHLY skeptical of any mouse study that uses vitamin C. Why? Mice synthesize their own vitamin C; humans do not (hence, it should properly be called ascorbic acid in mice, not vitamin c). The biological pathways involving this compound are very different between species, and deserve special consideration.
- cjhveal 11y ago
  The dose makes the poison (or the cure). According to the article they gave daily injections containing 300 oranges worth of vitamin C (which google tells me is over 15 grams of vitamin C, an order of magnitude larger than the daily recommended dose for adult humans). Certainly being skeptical is still warranted, as OP is correct, there are significant differences in how this particular compound is handled species to species. However, simply that mice produce ascorbic acid does not imply that they produce it in quantity great enough to impact this kind of tumor.
  - Amorymeltzer 11y ago
    No of course not. It does mean that this particular pathway is very different in the mouse model, and studies of vitamin C and mice should be taken with an extra grain of salt.
    - cjhveal 11y ago
      In this regard, I think we agree very much! I simply wanted to point out that the specific example that they endogenously synthesize ascorbic acid wasn't a great reason for why this particular trial wouldn't be valid. Be skeptical of any scientific claim made, especially around possible links between animal models and human clinical environment, and even more especially when the systems involved are not highly conserved cross species.
  - mtgx 11y ago
    Isn't it dangerous for a human to take that much in a day? What about for a month every day?

92 points by forloop 11y ago

On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research_and_vitamin_C_advocacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and-cancer-has-linus-pauling-been-vindicated/ https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.

Devid2014 11y ago
There are really many types of chancer, and Vitamin C (if confirmed) seems to help only from some types of it. So that he died of cancer say absolutely nothing about Vitamin C.
- chc 11y ago
  It certainly says that vitamin C doesn't cure all cancers.
- majkinetor 11y ago
  Right, but almost all cancers depend on this pathway. GLUT receptor mega overexpression is a milestone in cancer evolution and vitamin C in its oxidized form competes with glucose which is in cancer cells almost exclusive energy source.
haffi112 11y ago
Well, he was 93 years old. That's still kind of beating the odds in a way.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>He died in 1994, of cancer. Why is this brought out in such a dismissing and ironic way? He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal. Hell, there are so many different types of cancer, that even if megadosing C helped with one it probably wouldn't help with all. He lived to his 90s. At that point it was either cancer or heart disease that kills people. That fact that he lived to 93 is pretty impressive in itself. As someone who recently went on Vitamin D supplements due to low D in my bloodstream, I find it incredibly interesting how medicine is always changing. This knee-jerk skeptic idea about how everything but the current accepted status quo is "quackery" and mocking guys like Pauling is reprehensible. Just a few years ago, no one was checking Vitamin D levels. Now my depression and lethargy have been turned way down as my Vitamin D increases. Hell, I remember being a teen with ulcers and being told to lay off the spicy foods. I tried to explain to the doctor that I never eat that and he shrugged and wrote me a script for Zantac, it being prescription-only at the time. A few years later H. pylori's role in ulcer creation was revealed and now the standard treatment isn't large doses of zantac, but two weeks of amoxicillin. My ulcers magically went away after that treatment. Medicine is one of things that moves fast and the jury is still out on a lot of marginalized treatments, concepts, and research. I wouldn't be surprised if Pauling's research eventually fleshed out into some kind of cancer treatment, or at least as a supplemental treatment.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pluckytree 11y ago
  I never understood the mocking, either, especially since he’s been proven extremely right about the ill-effects of consuming processed sugars. I suspect it’s rooted in his anti-nuclear and anti-war views and it just grew from there. His views on Vitamin C were just a convenient target. It’s uncomfortable to those with analytical minds to accept the fact that we know so little about the human body and how it works. Studies are always contradicting each other because the scientific method dictates that studies must be reduced to the minimum of variables. But the body is far too complex for that. Most of what I was taught nutritionally in school as a kid was wrong. Most of the health advice was wrong. We were told butter is evil and we should eat margerine. We were told fat was evil and that cholesterol causes heart disease despite no evidence other than correlation. We don’t know how or even if consumed cholesterol gets turned into cholesterol in the bloodstream. It’s virtually universally believed that salt is bad despite it being an essential nutrient. It’s universally believed that sun is bad and we must slather ourselves with sunscreen and now we all have Vitamin D deficiencies. Read the literature that comes with any prescription drug and there will be a paragraph explaining that they have no idea how the drug works. Many are no more effective than a placebo. There’s a perception that has persisted most of my life that we are always at a point where we have these things figured out, but ten years later they are proven wrong, but we don’t seem to notice that. There is an almost religious fervor surrounding science when it comes to our health and nutrition. Lots of research in the past few years surrounds gut bacteria, something that wasn’t even on the charts even 10 years ago. Now we are realizing that we not only know nothing, we know less than nothing. I don’t think Pauling will be vindicated on Vitamin C because this came from a time when it was universally thought that there was a pill or an injecton for anything and we just had to discover it. If you read Pauling’s books, you’ll realize that he never advocated it as a panacea, but part of a complete dietary and mental regimen. His research is compelling and it’s not hard to see how he came to the conclusions that he did. It’s good to hear I’m not the only one learning from history and realizing the uncomfortable fact that we know so little and this treatment of ulcers is the exception rather than the rule. How did we not discover this was bacterial for so long? It’s not like this is the 19th century after all.
arbitrage 11y ago
If you live long enough, you have a really good chance of getting some type of cancer.
- triangleman 11y ago
  Really because I heard that once you get past a certain age, let's say 65, your chance of getting cancer goes way down.
  - vecter 11y ago
    When you hear something about a field you know very little about, your default reaction should be skepticism. People say bullshit stuff all the time and pass it off as fact. I don't know much about cancer biology, but what you heard sounds wrong. I don't see why, as you live longer, your body gets better at fighting cancer. If anything, the opposite sounds more likely. One possibility is that someone is citing data with survivorship bias. That is, the people who make it past 65 have good genes that generally lower their chances of getting cancer. Even if this were the case, obviously it doesn't imply a causal relationship where passing 65 years reduces your chance of getting cancer.
    - nonbel 11y ago
      Flip 5 coins and stop when each turns up tails, record the number of trials until the last coin is tails (just use # trials for the last coin...). Repeat this 100 times. Does the probability of ending on a given trial keep increasing with trial#? No, it will peak depending on the number of coins and probability of tails for each coin (here always close to 0.5). This is the same as accumulating n number of modifications in a cell until it grows into and gets detected as a tumor. Instead of accumulating "tails" you are accumulating mutations or whatever it turns out to be.
      - nonbel 11y ago
        Not sure why this was downvoted... It is easy to prove to yourself. Here is some R: #p=Prob(tails), n=# Coins, q=Prob(heads), Npop=# times to repeat p=.5; n=5; q=1-p; Npop=1000 #Flip one Coin 100x and find first tails (probability of getting one mutation) OneCoin=function() which(sample(0:1,100, prob=c(q,p), replace=T)==1)[1] #Flip n coins and find last one to turn up tails (probability of accumulating n mutations) OneSet=function() max(replicate(n,OneCoin())) #Repeat Npop times, like different people in a population res=replicate(Npop,OneSet()) hist(res, breaks=Npop/20)
prodmerc 11y ago
But he was in his 90's. Really, the only way to test if it worked is to make him relive his life without vitamin C :-)
LordKano 11y ago
A lot of people advocate cannabis as a cure for cancer. I remind them that Bob Marley died from cancer.

empath75 11y ago

Kind of depressing that the study to investigate vitamin c injections won't get funded because drug companies can't sell it.

macns 11y ago
This. Article ends with: > But Cantley says it may be possible to make an oral formulation that reaches high doses in the blood—which may be one way to get companies interested in sponsoring trials.
epistasis 11y ago
Well, it won't get funded by a company unless there's a profit incentive, however there's other funding avenues for clinical trials like this. Besides applying for grants (which is extremely slow and extremely time consuming), research institutions often have small amounts of funds for running a trial in house, especially for something like this which only involves a few gene tests and an inexpensive treatment.

api 11y ago

Lots of mice studies don't translate well into humans. This one is highly specific -- a specific mutation. It's unlikely to have much bearing on real world cancer.

OopsCriticality 11y ago
Very true. To be charitable, the future is in personalized medicine, so if a vitamin C population subset can be well-defined then maybe there's something here. That said, cancer cells are notorious for expressing efflux pumps and in so doing frustrating treatment, and there's every reason to think that would happen here given the high doses and long time needed for therapeutic effect. I have to say, the very first thing that came to mind when I read the article was Xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/1217/ http://www.xkcd.com/1217/
notlisted 11y ago
Why is this comment down-voted? It's true. Mouse-models, especially for colon and breast cancers, have proven to be less-than-dependable (Cf. Voskoglou-Nomikos)
nonbel 11y ago
>[Supp Methods:] "To test the effect of vitamin C, two million HCT116 or VACO432 cells were injected subcutaneously into the flank of 6 to 8-week-old female athymic nude mice (Harlan, Indianapolis, IN). After 7-10 days, mice with tumors of 40-60 mm3 were randomly divided into two groups. One group was treated with freshly prepared vitamin C (sodium ascorbate in 400 ul PBS, 4 g per kilogram of body weight) by intraperitoneal (IP) injection twice a day (HCT116: n=6, VACO432: n=6). Control group mice were treated with PBS instead of vitamin C with the same dosing schedule (HCT116: n=4, VACO432: n=7)." [...] [Caption Fig 2:] "Tumor sizes were measured 2-3 times per week in an unblinded manner." http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa5004 http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa5004 Not only are they mice, but they have no immune system[1]. Also, the dose of vitamin C is like consuming an entire bottle twice a day (~240 g)[2]. They are honest about the lack of blinding, which is good, but obviously that should make us wary of these findings. Also, they do not report tumor size before splitting into treatment vs control groups (only saying mice with 40-60 mm^3 tumors were used). Put the larger ones in the control group and you can easily appear to be slowing tumor growth for totally artefactual reasons. For example, start with low initial (40) and high initial (60) cells in two different mice. If the cells all divide every day how many do you expect after 1:3 days. Low: 40,80,160; High: 60,120,240; Difference: 20,40,80. The difference seems to grow just due to the starting conditions, growth rates were the same. So these results are uninterpretable without knowing the starting tumor sizes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_mouse [2] http://www.allergyresearchgroup.com/buffered-vitamin-c-240-grams-8.5-oz-powder http://www.allergyresearchgroup.com/buffered-vitamin-c-240-g...

acd 11y ago

Is this why taking Vitamin C is good when you start to get a cold?

harryf 11y ago
If you consider the evolution of homo sapiens and it's predecessor, homo erectus, you have about 1.98 Million years where their diet would have been rich in Vitamin C; berries, fruit, vegetables etc.; their primary food sources, supplemented occasionally by meat when available. Farming only began to develop around 20,000 years ago, causing grains take a bigger role in home sapiens diet and reducing the relative Vitamin C consumption. Meanwhile we didn't physically evolve during that time. So one might expect that our bodies are evolved to thrive when Vitamin C intake is high...
- ams6110 11y ago
  And insects. Sounds disgusting to most of us who consume the modern western diet, but insects would have been a source of protein and fat.
- scott_s 11y ago
  It's a reasonable hypothesis, yes. But it has been researched, and it turns out to not be the case.
zappo2938 11y ago
Vitamin C has been proven to not have an effect on viral colds either way.[1] Vitamin D on the other hand has been proven to be an immune system modulator.[2] Unlike Vitamin C, most people develop Vitamin D deficiency.[3] I strongly advice you and everybody based on these studies to get yearly blood work and talk to a doctor about taking 4000IU daily supplement of Vitamin D. Also massive doses of Vitamin D can have negative effects. As for Vitimin C, just because someone is a Noble Prize winner or brain surgeon doesn't mean they are an authority on all things. Ben Carson makes my point. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23440782 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23440782 [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/ [3]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vitamin-d-deficiency-united-states/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vitamin-d-deficien...

ant6n 11y ago

Vitamin C correlated with dead of tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

mcone 11y ago

This seems to contradict another recent study [1] that found that Vitamin C promoted cancer (melanoma) growth. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/10/14/antioxidants-may-give-a-boost-to-cancer-cells-making-them-spread-faster-study-suggests/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/1...

dualogy 11y ago
That's the nasty thing about cancerous cells, they can adapt to "feed" (via blood) on a wide range of macro- (glucose, protein, fatty acids, even ketones for some rare types) and micro-nutrients (vitamins, "antioxidants") just like "healthy" cells. What baffles me is that even autophagy either doesn't seem to always work (easy to induce by water-fasting for a couple of weeks) --else every sufferer would do so until in remission-- or that we still don't seem to have pharmaceutical ways of jumpstarting/forcing "99% effective" autophagy..
swsieber 11y ago
It would actually contradict it if this article mentioned melanoma like the post you found. I highly suspect we'll find individual ways of treating most individual cancer types before finding one that targets them all.

Amorymeltzer 11y ago

While it is easy to criticize any animal model study, especially when targeting cancer, we should be HIGHLY skeptical of any mouse study that uses vitamin C. Why? Mice synthesize their own vitamin C; humans do not (hence, it should properly be called ascorbic acid in mice, not vitamin c). The biological pathways involving this compound are very different between species, and deserve special consideration.

cjhveal 11y ago
The dose makes the poison (or the cure). According to the article they gave daily injections containing 300 oranges worth of vitamin C (which google tells me is over 15 grams of vitamin C, an order of magnitude larger than the daily recommended dose for adult humans). Certainly being skeptical is still warranted, as OP is correct, there are significant differences in how this particular compound is handled species to species. However, simply that mice produce ascorbic acid does not imply that they produce it in quantity great enough to impact this kind of tumor.
- Amorymeltzer 11y ago
  No of course not. It does mean that this particular pathway is very different in the mouse model, and studies of vitamin C and mice should be taken with an extra grain of salt.
  - cjhveal 11y ago
    In this regard, I think we agree very much! I simply wanted to point out that the specific example that they endogenously synthesize ascorbic acid wasn't a great reason for why this particular trial wouldn't be valid. Be skeptical of any scientific claim made, especially around possible links between animal models and human clinical environment, and even more especially when the systems involved are not highly conserved cross species.
- mtgx 11y ago
  Isn't it dangerous for a human to take that much in a day? What about for a month every day?