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Antioxidants found to spur cancer growth and metastasis in mice
- kypro 3y agoIsn't this already known? The reason I only take a low dose of Vit E is because higher doses can increase the risk of cancer – like I assumed is true of all antioxidants?
- arcticbull 3y agoVitamin E is fat soluble, which means that you can definitely take too much (unlike C for instance, which is water soluble). It can cause headaches, nausea, blood thinning and rarely even fatal bleeding. I suspect that's a much bigger reason to be careful with the quantity of fat-soluble vitamins you take. But also note that vitamins aren't FDA regulated, and they're a complete grab bag in terms of quality and bioavailability. Generally unless prescribed by a doctor for a specific condition or if you know your diet is lacking in a specific vitamin (like B complex for vegans), you get more than enough from your diet. [1] [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/do-multivitamins-make-you-healthier https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/do-multivitamins-...
- gremlinsinc 3y agoWhat about vitamin D? I've had gastric sleeve surgery a decade ago. Ever since every blood test I take usually has me deficient in that. My doctor has me on 5 to 10k, right now trying 5k. I also have gout and an abnormally high amount of kidney stones sitting in my kidney, last month I had to get a catheter and 2 trips to the ER over one lousy kidney stone. I'm wanting to figure out the best way to regulate the things in my body with less Kidney stones, uric acid etc, and that won't upset my depression, anxiety, and ADHD.
- Gibbon1 3y agoMy suspicion about vitamin D is the positive effects are minor. Short term deficiency doesn't do anything. But long term chronic deficiency negatively impacts your health. And deficiency in children is much worse than in adults[1]. I think sure take vitamin D but don't expect much. [1] Friend that's a public health nurse says they're seeing kids with rickets and bad teeth in Marin County. Because vegetarianism, sunscreen and milk alternatives. They don't see any of that with poor kids in Oakland because they're on WIC and not getting woo woo healthcare.
- arcticbull 3y ago> woo woo healthcare What a time to be alive.
- 2devnull 3y agoI don’t know, the advice in that link is, don’t take a multivitamin because there isn’t a lot of evidence it will do a lot of good. Instead they say you should just have a perfect diet, and to consult with a dietician if you feel you aren’t getting a perfect diet. Seems to me that few people eat a perfect diet, and I’d be amazed if there’s evidence dieticians work better than multivitamins. People don’t eat right, not because they need education, but because unhealthy diets are tasty, cheap, convenient, etc… And multivitamins are not all the same, they have radically different formulations, so I doubt the results of any research that didn’t specify a specific multivitamin, or break results by gender or age. (Vitamin needs/ deficiencies are often age related. Consider subsets like prenatal vitamins, vitamins for the elderly, etc…)
- kypro 3y ago> Vitamin E is fat soluble, which means that you can definitely take too much I think we're talking about different things here. You're talking about the risk of toxicity from taking high doses of fat-soluble vitamins. I'm talking about the risk of taking anti-inflammatory supplements / drugs generally (regardless of dose). In general I agree with you on taking vitamins, however the reason I take a very low dose of Vit E is because I have a genetic predisposition to liver inflammation. Vit E is one of the few things which helps me reduce this inflammation which helps me mitigate against long-term damage, but reducing inflammation too much can increase risk of liver cancer, hence why I only take a low dose. This is also the reason patients with late-stage liver disease are typically not given Vit E because they're at a higher risk of developing liver cancer. On taking Vitamins generally I think most people in the West would benefit from a high-quality low dose Vit D supplement. Something around 1,000 - 3,000 UIs daily is almost certainly safe and the majority of people would benefit. Higher doses are probably preferable in many cases, but you should be monitoring blood concentrations at that point to ensure you're not reaching toxic levels. Otherwise, yes, supplementing is silly unless you have a reason for it. I hang out in a lot of liver health communities one of the most common reasons I find people have unexplained elevated liver enzymes is because they're taking low quality (often herbal) supplements.
- arcticbull 3y agoWhat's interesting with Vitamin D supplementation is there doesn't appear to be any strong clinical evidence for its effectiveness unless you're severely deficient and on the road to rickets. So long as your serum 25OHD concentration is >50nmol/L according to this meta analysis, there's no clear effects. [1] > In conclusion, supplementation of vitamin D-replete individuals does not generate overall health benefits; however, correction of severe vitamin D deficiency remains essential. Probably would be a lot better off going outside and synthesizing your own. Spending time in nature and in the sun does a lot of other useful things - for instance UV exposure induces nitric oxide synthesis too, which lowers blood pressure. [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-021-00593-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-021-00593-z [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5593895/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5593895/
- ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 3y agoAnother condition for supplementation is the possession of a disorder which causes malabsorption, like SIBO.
- GoToRO 3y agoI saw a documentary where they presented a study in which they did exactly that: they gave about 7 people high doses of antioxidants. Because antioxidants good. About 3 of them got cancer before they could finish the study. They had to stop the study early.
- arcticbull 3y agon=7 is pretty small for a nutritional study that didn't even finish. I'd be very wary of relying on that.
- GoToRO 3y agoNobody is relying on anything. The early results were too scary for people (scientists and patients) to continue. Anyway, the conclusion was that more antioxidants is not necessarily better and that we still don't understand how things work.
- CrHn3 3y agoThat does not seem to be the case for coQ10[1]. With coQ10, it's only effective at a therapeutic level which entails higher doses[2]. Vitamin E as α-tocopherol has been associated with increased prostate cancer[3]. Natural tocopherols rich in γ-T, γ-TmT, or similar tocopherol mixtures show more promise for cancer applications[4]. 1. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/hp/coenzyme-q10-pdq https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/hp/coenzym... 2. https://youtu.be/9Z7X9WPWv4Y?si=avOV0u4ruy_zNslr&t=746 https://youtu.be/9Z7X9WPWv4Y?si=avOV0u4ruy_zNslr&t=746 3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21990298/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21990298/ 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4899293/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4899293/
- jasfi 3y agoDoes this mean a bad diet is preferable when you're fighting off cancer?
- mistrial9 3y agothere are clusters of very different disease that are all under the label "cancer"... the short answer is "no"
- dundarious 3y ago> The researchers say their findings highlight the potential risk of taking antioxidant supplements when they’re not needed. Emphasis mine.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stephen_g 3y agoI’d expect generally very much no - since a bad diet is often going to have a lot of carbs and sugar which is just easy fuel for things like cancer. It seems from studies I’ve read that it causes big problems either having too little or too much antioxidants. I haven’t had time to read this one yet but observational studies seem to pretty overwhelmingly show positive health benefits for a diet that has a relatively high amount of antioxidants, but RCTs giving very large does of antioxidants often have to be terminated early due to adverse effects. So seems like it’s hard to hit the ‘too much’ level with diet but very easy with supplements.
- jasfi 3y agoSorry I should have clarified, I meant no fruit, vegetables or salad. Sounds like terrible advice. But as you say, there should be a threshold you don't want to cross with antioxidants, and supplements can easily do that.
- adamredwoods 3y agoWe've spoken to oncologists and cancer nutritionists, none of them think that what you eat truly can effect cancer or not. So there is no magic food or magic diet that will cure a person of cancer. (Excluding starvation because that can kill the patient and not recommended at all.)
- ginko 3y agoCan't wait for fruit to come with a cancer warning.
- magicalhippo 3y agoBananas are radioactive[1], just lacking the label. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
- downvotetruth 3y agoCalafia can't match the Chiquita "little gift" bananas sticker that lets you know she'll keep giving.
- gotoeleven 3y agoThis product is known by the state of California to cause and prevent cancer.
- baz00 3y agoYep. My digital multimeter causes cancer, only in California.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dundarious 3y agoYou are probably joking, but because it leads to very illegitimate conclusions (emphasis mine): > The researchers say their findings highlight the potential risk of taking antioxidant supplements when they’re not needed.
- alaaf 3y agoIs this about concentrated synthetic vitamin C or about the natural form? From a chemistry perspective the same, but the natural one comes in a different "package" of other substances (vitamin C complex). I wonder if the effect is the same.
- ta988 3y agoThere were a lot of studies on that early on but they were not really followed on. Most of the time current studies use synthetic or natural but purified enough that there is nothing else there (so the same molecule really)
- throwawaymaths 3y agoKind of hilariously, James Watson was on a crusade about this, specifically yowling about how Pauling was totally wrong to megadose C (he argued specifically from the Warburg hypothesis) but it was around then that he started making tone-deaf, arguably racist comments (...also many racist comments against scots irish americans), and he got canceled and i think everyone stopped listening to him writ large.
- ramoz 3y agoSimilar thread from just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37349870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37349870
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Taking dietary supplements full of antioxidants could help cancerous tumors grow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37349870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37349870 - Sept 2023 (66 comments)
- tptacek 3y agoIn mice (with xenografted tissue). They've been reporting this since 2015: https://newatlas.com/medical/antioxidants-stimulate-blood-vessel-growth-cancer-tumors/ https://newatlas.com/medical/antioxidants-stimulate-blood-ve... The actual press release from Karolinska might be more informative and a better link than whatever New Atlas is: https://news.ki.se/antioxidants-stimulate-blood-flow-in-tumours https://news.ki.se/antioxidants-stimulate-blood-flow-in-tumo...
- dang 3y agoMice in the title now. Thanks! URL changed as well. Submitted URL was https://newatlas.com/medical/antioxidants-stimulate-blood-vessel-growth-cancer-tumors/ https://newatlas.com/medical/antioxidants-stimulate-blood-ve... (the same one you mentioned there, so I couldn't track the 2015 ref)
- pcorsaro 3y agoThe debate about Vitamin C in the cancer world is never ending. My wife had stage IV colon cancer a few years ago, and we went through tons and tons of research to try and find things to supplement her chemotherapy. A lot of the "alternative" medicine people suggest doing extremely high dose Vitamin C intravenously because supposedly at higher doses, it becomes oxidative and generates free radicals in the blood stream which can kill a lot tumor types. Her oncologist didn't like the idea because there is also lots of research that says it spurs growth in tumors. He said that Vitamin C gets studied so much because it's cheap to get, but it's never really produced any meaningful results. There was a study he liked about taking extremely high doses of Vitamin D, but I can't really remember why.
- bettercallsalad 3y agoAs somebody with a relative identified with stage IV cancer, did you have any luck to finding an effective supplement to chemo?
- darkclouds 3y agoIF you do an excess of iron (chloride), it reduces the CD4 cells and increases the cytotoxic CD8 cells. I say chlorides because consistently for many studies, notably zinc but applies to Iron, phytates and tannins bind and inhibit the absorption of these two metals, but leave copper alone. Chloride based metals get into the body very quickly. I'd also look at the mistakes in some studies, different parts of the world have different theories and its possible if you look at enough to see old theories being quoted and not assertions from more recent studies. The jury is out on what is a good diet to consume for different types of cancer let along a healthy life, its contradictory at best, zinc is good for tackling some cancers, and bad for others. Copper is good for tackling some cancers and not others, and that just looking at two common metals in the diet. So if the experts knew, I think they would recommend a diet to go on, but they are so steeped in patient privacy they undermine their own authority I think, not to mention come across in general as quite dictatorial. I have also been messing with some body building amino acids and I liked histdine which is one of the four amino acids that start with zinc, the other three are glutamic acid (glutamate), aspartic acid and cysteine (N-Acetyl Cysteine). Histidine is precursor for histamine which helps immune cells migrate through tissue. Aspartic acid mediates some cysteine based immune responses. Its also worth looking at vit D, a Wellcome trust study had reverse engineered the human genome about a decade ago and found that most of the Vit D receptors are concentrated around immune system genes (2776 iirc). But you need zinc and cysteine to build the zinc fingers found on these vit D receptors and vit D will switch on some genes and switch off some genes. Oncologists have access to the testing and measuring equipment, I see no harm if interested in this stuff to get the data from their tests and check their theories against studies found in google scholar, if you wanted piece of mind. These experts dont always publish their theories so there isnt the transparency, and they dont ask about diet which can be significant in some cases, so they undermine their expertise imo. And thats before you get into the debate of hackers tampering with results and other things which seem to question the fragile nature of computer security. And I'm not recommending anything other than question the experts.
- haunter 3y agoEverything [in excess] causes cancer
- Sunspark 3y agoFor ascorbic acid (vitamin C) specifically, there is such a thing as too much of it.. in humans, the level that is too much is when it gives you loose stools.. if you back off that, then the body is likely using what it needs. Most animals make vitamin C internally in the amounts they need. We are only one of a handful that do not, because we have a mutation that prevents us from finishing the process, otherwise we would also be making it ourselves too. Animals don't drop dead left and right from cancer. I would suggest if one tries to eat a balanced diet then this will help with avoiding cancer. Lastly, the longer you live, the more certain it becomes that you will get cancer of any type. What we are doing here is trying to live healthy enough that we die before we live long enough for cancer to become a problem.
- classichasclass 3y agoHumans and other related primates are also very efficient at recycling vitamin C. Our daily requirements aren't zero, but they are lower than I think is popularly surmised.
- sph 3y agoIt virtually reaches zero the lower amount of carbohydrates you consume. Vitamin C shares the same intake pathway as glucose, so the least glucose in your bloodstream, the less need for supplementation, and the trace amounts found in meat are enough. Inuits consuming their diet of purely meat and fat for 6+ months a year do not get scurvy, and it is not a generic mutation either, as testified by Europeans that lived among them and adopted their diet without issue. See Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the ethnologist who spent years living and eating like an Inuit, and anyone following a strict carnivore diet. The entire meme about sailors getting scurvy because they didn't eat their vegs is because their diet was pretty much poor quality carb-heavy food like rice, potatoes and bread, so even just supplementing with lemons was enough to keep scurvy at bay.
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoAnimals don't drop dead left and right - in the wild -from cancer because they typically die before cancer grows. Cancers generally grow pretty slow. You don't go from 1 cancer cell to 2 billion in 6 months. It typically takes a long time. Animals raised indoors do get cancer at a fairly high rate. Though not as much as humans. The diet factor is a huge part for sure. Virtually all the major bodies like the UN agree on this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LorenPechtel 3y agoIf it helps the body it likely also helps the cancer.
- ipnon 3y ago“Dosis sola facit venenum.”
- nmitchko 3y agoWith all we see around cancer, it's time to study fembendazole and other anti-tubulins seriously.
- basilgohar 3y agoWhy? The way you say it implies this is self-evident, but I'm completely clueless about either of these and why this logically follows.
- tylerekahn 3y agoThe Block Center does high dose intravenous Vitamin C as part of their chemo+complementary regimen.
- brewdad 3y agoWhat’s their success rate compared to other treatments?
- joshuajill 3y agoI find the fact that media keeps talking about cancer as one single disease unhelpful at best. Look at what the title of the research article is: "Antioxidants stimulate BACH1-dependent tumor angiogenesis" The researchers conclusion: "We conclude that BACH1 is an oxygen- and redox-sensitive angiogenesis transcription factor." Then compare how the author of the article put it.
- cjbenedikt 3y agoOne more reason why very little research goes into that area is that the pharma industry isn't interested in a "cheap" solution. It is nigh impossible to find grants for any research to that end. However, some work sounds promising https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9231292/#:~:text=Recent%20reports%20have%20also%20shown,chemotherapy%20%5B34%2C35%5D https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9231292/#:~:tex....
- alistoriv 3y agoSo... they support anabolic processes. Shall we avoid eating and drinking too?
- henry2023 3y agoSome people believe that fasting starves tumors. So... Maybe?