Antioxidants May Speed Up Progression of Cancer
Cancer pills?
Antioxidants are often pushed as being beneficial for health, largely based on speculations and uncertain observational studies. But could supplementation with antioxidants on the contrary be harmful? Yes, probably.
A new study on mice shows that those who received antioxidant supplementation – including Vitamin E – suffered a dramatic worsening of their lung cancer.
Of course, mice are not humans. But studies on humans show alarming signs that supplementation with antioxidants is harmful for us too. They may increase the risk for certain cancer forms and supplementation with high doses of the antioxidant Vitamin E increases the risk of dying prematurely.
Your body makes its own antioxidants, in the right place. Supplementation with extra antioxidants may be harmful, among other things by preventing the immune system from fighting infections… and cancer cells. Antioxidants may neutralize one of the immune system’s weapons against unwanted intruders, oxidizing agents.
The irony is that excess doses of antioxidants might protect the cells you want to eliminate: harmful bacteria and cancer cells.
Could it be dangerous too?
The idea that people should eat real unprocessed food as much as possible seems to be one of the most difficult to have people understand. maybe because it is too obvious.
And as for Doug Beard's question, we naturally make less and less CoQ10 as we age. Maybe part of this has to do with the fact that people do not eat organ meats, rich in CoQ10. Maybe. But supplement with CoQ10 has been looked at in great detail by Langsjoen and coll in a series af articles (see for example Langsjoen PH, Langsjoen JO, Langsjoen AM, Lucas LA. Treatment of statin adverse effects with supplemental Coenzyme Q10 and statin drugs discontinuation. Biofactors 2005; 25(1-4): 147-52).
There does not seem to be a dangerous level of Coq10. In fact, some patients were so depleted of CoQ10 with statin therapy that it took megadoses of Co Q10 before they could reach therapeutic levels. Anything below these blood levels was useless and produced no positive effects. Could we achieve this by eating a lot of organ meats? Maybe. But in face of statin-induced cardiomyopathy, I would play on the safe side and use pharmacological doses of Co Q10. I myself take CoQ10 supplements and krill oil supplements on top of eating a LCHF diet. I started someone in my family on supplemental CoQ10 because she had developed statin induced heart failure. Of course, her physicians are brainwashed by the industry and state "it is impossible", that her heart failure is due to some "viral infection", not to extraordinary statins. They also constantly try to start her statins again (she is over 80 years old!) Fortunately, CoQ10 is giving excellent results and we'll soon confirm with an echocardiogram that the failure is now resolved.
We're back to the point from the start: the way to go is real foods that we were meant to eat and not supplements.
This one is a review of astaxanthin.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22214255
These authors examined the effects of astaxanthin in young and old dogs. More benefits were seen in the old dogs. Both made more ATP.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23100599
And here is one in fruit flies which showed benefits to mutant SOD (antioxidant enzyme) flies and detrimental effects (lower lifespan) in normal files. This is the only paper that I have read which suggests caution. These are fruit flies though.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23879808
Maybe some antioxidants (not all of them are created equal) can be beneficial particularly if there is inflammation and excess oxidative stress. Sort of like the people who eat the SAD. And the excess exposure to some of the 80,000 odd chemicals that many of us get from our environment.
It seems that the pharmaceutical industry is spending money trying to create fear in people who take supplements. Far more fear should be the norm when taking prescription drugs.
I know people take it to thin the blood. But has it ever been claimed to be a cancer therapy, or even a preventive in anything other than multivitamin form?
I don't think you could extrapolate from this to other antioxidants - vit E is a specific vitamin with its own receptor, it's not just an antioxidant, it's fat soluble but prefers different radical species from other fat soluble AOs, and water soluble AOs are different (ORAC and TBARS are not equivalent), and phenolic AOs may not even be antioxidants in the body and work in very different ways.
Look at fig 4 in the second study http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/1/166.full
The association with cancer in each class of antioxidant is driven by a single, atypical study which had a strong result where the others were neutral, or in the case of selenium, beneficial.
If you did a meta-analysis of a real carcinogen, most studies would show a significant association with cancer, not just 3 or 4 out of 21. Yet these 3 or 4 are strong enough to skew the average.
(there are vit E studies with reduced mortality in that meta-study too)
You can learn from the studies themselves that certain antioxidants reduce the rate of certain cancers at certain doses, while certain other antioxidants increase the rate of certain other cancers.
This is information which is obscured by a meta-analysis that lumps all antioxidants and all cancers together - quite a ridiculous method given the heterogenicity of both.
But they make the point that when using NAC (water soluble) the results were the same.
I think prevention is the important question, and they did not test this.
My wife and I are using a Centrum multivitamin (voor Adults under 50) it states on the bottle it has 100% of the "recommended vitamin E beside all other daily recommended vitamins.
We eat a LCHF diet with plenty vegetables, would you recommend eliminating this supplement?
Thank you,
Martijn
cancer? Doesn't seem to get much press.
(Dietary tocopherols and tocotrienols associated with reduced lung cancer risk in humans).
Here's an RCT of vit E (dl, 50mg) and beta carotene (20mg) intervention in smokers. Vit E didn't increase lung cancer (beta carotene did), but did decrease prostate and colon cancers. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199404143301501#t=articleDis...
Cancer cells have a high affinity for sugar and eat it at a rate 8 times that of normal cells. Cancer cells have in fact up to 15 times more insulin receptors than normal cells.
“Compared to normal cells, cancer cells have a prodigious appetite for glucose, the result of a shift in cell metabolism known as aerobic glycolysis or the "Warburg effect." Researchers focusing on this effect as a possible target for cancer therapies have examined how biochemical signals present in cancer cells regulate the altered metabolic state.”
(http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120626131854.htm)
Researchers have thus proven that cells that need glucose in order to survive can be destroyed by glucose restriction. In a rather elegant paper, Graham et al. (Graham NA, Tahmasian M, Kohli B, Komisopoulou E, Zhu M, Vivanco I, Teitell MA, Wu H, Ribas A, Lo RS, Mellinghoff IK, Mischel PS, Graeber TG. Glucose deprivation activates a metabolic and signaling amplification loop leading to cell death. Mol Syst Biol. 2012 Jun 26;8: 589. doi: 10.1038/msb.2012.20.) state that: “glucose withdrawal activates a positive feedback loop involving generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by NADPH oxidase and mitochondria, inhibition of protein tyrosine phosphatases by oxidation, and increased tyrosine kinase signaling. In cells dependent on glucose for survival, glucose withdrawal-induced ROS generation and tyrosine kinase signaling synergize to amplify ROS levels, ultimately resulting in ROS-mediated cell death.”(Graham et al., 2012)
Santisteban et al. conducted a study in 1985 where they fed three different types of diets to mice suffering from mammary tumors. What they found was eye-opening: the higher the average blood glucose, as measured by glycated haemoglobin , the faster the rate of tumor development and the quicker the animals would die of their cancer. There was no “safe” level: even mice with “normal” average blood sugars died earlier than mice with “low” average blood sugar.
And it makes sense! Cancer cells (all cancer cells) love sugar and need it to grow. Normal cells can live perfectly well without glucose and can strive on either ketone bodies or fatty acids. Cancer cells cannot. They only can process glucose and to an extent, the amino acid glutamine as energy. So the lower the blood glucose, the more it will be difficult for the cancer to grow. By switching to a ketogenic diet, very low in sugar, some people have starved their cancer and are now healthy. This “cancer starvation” technique can be combined with every conventional medical treatment. (See Santisteban GA et al., 1985 and Poff AM et al., 2013).
Poff AM, Ari C, Seyfried TN, D'Agostino DP. The ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy prolong survival in mice with systemic metastatic cancer. PLoS One. 2013 Jun 5;8(6):e65522. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0065522. Print 2013.
Santisteban GA, Ely JT, Hamel EE, Read DH, Kozawa SM. Glycemic modulation of tumor tolerance in a mouse model of breast cancer. Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 1985 Nov 15; 132(3):1174-9.
“We have dramatically increased survival with metabolic therapy (ketogenic diet). So we think it's important to get this information out. It's not just lab mice. I've been in correspondence with a number of people, At least a dozen over the last year-and-a-half to two years, and all of them are still alive, despite the odds. So this is very encouraging.”
(Dr. Dominic D’Agostino, Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States of America, 2 Department of Biology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States.)
http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v10n07.shtml
Antioxidants may help to prevent cancer, but once you have cancer, it's best not to take them.
I'm working very hard to prevent cancer recurrence with a strict ketogenic diet. I'd hate to undo the good work of a disciplined diet by adding antioxidants at this point.