Isn'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?
Vitamin 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]
What 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.
My 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.
I 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…)
> 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.
What'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]
> 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.
I mostly agree. Above 50nmol/L it's not so important, but most evidence would still point towards it being slightly healthier to be on the higher end of the reference range for Vit D, so therefore if you wanted to optimise your health you probably should be targeting around ~150nmol/L. We know our ancestors would have had Vit D concentrations around these levels so there's no good reason to think it would be unhealthy either.
Additionally, and what you missed here is that a lot of people in the northern hemisphere get close or fall below that 50nmol/L clinically deficient level during winter months. This is why I think in general it's probably better for people to take a low dose of Vit D than not (especially during the winter).
But to your point, if you're spending time outside and getting a bit of sun exposure every day then it's probably not needed.
> We know our ancestors would have had Vit D concentrations around these levels so there's no good reason to think it would be unhealthy either.
Yeah, I certainly don't think it's unhealthy, I just haven't seen any studies demonstrate really any effect at all over the lowest normal value. If you have some studies I'd love to see them so I can cite them in the future.
I 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.
That 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].
I’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.
We'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.)
Is 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.
There 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)
Kind 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.
The 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.
IF 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.
Tim Ferris' Tools of Titans has a section from a doctor (not oncologist) who recommends fasting the days before chemo treatment. Supposedly it sensitizes the cancer cells to the chemo. I'm hesitant to give advice to cancer patients on the internet but there's more recommendations (in my book it's pg. 32-33). He also mentions keto diet, exogenous ketones, metformin, dichloroacetic acid, and finally hyperbaric oxygen, rapamycin in "modest, intermittent doses" and finally sequencing the tumor to see if a checkpoint inhibitor could be effective.
Again, recommendations from a health guru book and not an actual doctor, that I'm just copying here in case it helps. I have no experience with cancer other than a close relative passing away when I was much younger.
It sounds like a really bad idea for a Stage IV cancer patient to fast. In later stages they frequently already have substantial weight loss... and in the last few weeks, people actually stop eating entirely as the body starts to shutdown. Death usually occurs when the weight loss reaches 30-40%.
Encouraging them to stop eating seems like it would just accelerate death.
I just went through 6 cycles of 5-day IV chemotherapy (AIM) and I fasted for all of them, for a total of over 35 days of water-only fasting during the last 5 months. I can’t find the PubMed link right now but there were small studies that looked like healthy cells would go into kind of a suspend/preserve mode that lessened side effects, whereas cancer cells still experienced the intended cytotoxicity. I tolerated the treatments quite well, lost hair of course but only vomited twice during the whole time. Lost weight each time but was able to put it back on quickly during the following week for each cycle, though I do want to watch body composition (don’t want to trade muscle for fat).
Did it make a difference in effectiveness? I actually have my follow up scans tomorrow to find out. As you can imagine, I really really hope so.
I'm not a doctor. Ive just spent a lot of time looking into this (as im sure you have) because a close relative died from Stage IV lung cancer.
There are studies on fasting with chemo.. and depending on the type of cancer its either effective or ineffective. My comment was specifically about the end stages where cachexia is common (from my link above):
"Cachexia is associated particularly with cancer where the prevalence can reach 50–80% in advanced malignant cancer."
And all of the advice Ive found says fasting is not recommended for patients with cachexia.
It sounds like it was fine in your case though because you were able to regain the weight. Best of luck with your scans.
Certain hard cancers are known to depend on blood sugar for growth as they can't metabolize anything else. It makes sense that a keto diet, therefore, would slow tumor growth, and I've heard of oncologists recommending it. Keto diets prevent prevent elevated blood sugar naturally. It's not a silver bullet but when it comes to cancer you've got to take every advantage you can get.
Have a read to the book: Cancer as a metabolic disease.
I don't know how true is what they claim in the book, but basically it's the following.
All cancer cells obtain their energy from fermentation and not oxidation. They use glucose for that fermentation process and they propose fasting and a ketogenic diet as a treatment.
Antioxidants can actually promote fermentation and inhibition oxidation.
Lots of people have responded to this with similar strategies to what we used. Keep in mind, my wife was 35 when she went through this. We had a 1 and a half year old, she was breastfeeding and was in decent shape overall. For the first few treatments, she was able to fast for a couple of days before. She did a fairly strict keto diet for a few treatments as well, with her ketone levels being 1.5 millimolar or higher. She did take metformin for a little while, although she quit taking it after a while because she just forgot and was overwhelmed.
All that being said, she pretty much abandoned all of the additional about halfway through her treatments. She had to have half her liver resected, and she had a HIPEC procedure at the same time. When they did the final biopsies on her metastases in her liver, it was 100% dead. She's now been NED (no evidence of disease) for a few years now. I don't have delusions that it will never come back, but I can hope.
I don't know if anything she did helped the chemo do it's job. It's not exactly something you can A/B test. I think it's possible, but I also think her being so young and in good shape to start with made the biggest difference.
I was involved in some vitamin D work. It is really close to what this doctor described about Vitamin C. Or most really ubiquitous natural products really. I've seen all kind of incredible claims and their contrary, and in the end no epidemiologic study or clinical trial showed anything conclusive.
That's why observational studies consistently show vitamin deficiency correlates with various types ill health, but controlled experiments consistently show that supplementation fails to improve it.
Apparently it’s because of ethics committees. You can’t do a controlled experiment on people who are vitamin deficient, so iirc modern studies are such comparing people who are not deficient to people who take additional vitamins and find no effect. Which of course doesn’t mean that vitamin supplementation is worthless.
Vitamin D deficiency isn’t great, but the health influencer industry really blew this out of proportion. The number of people taking excessive doses because they think more is better is getting scary.
You don’t need a lot of Vitamin D to avoid deficiency. Taking even 5000 IU for an extended period of time can cause Vitamin D excess.
Vitamin D confuses a lot of people because it accumulates over a very long time period. You can take the same dose every day but not approach overdose range for a year or more. It builds up if you’re taking too much, and there is a lot of overlap between “too much” and some of the regimens pushed by health influencers.
> Her oncologist didn't like the idea because there is also lots of research that says it spurs growth in tumors.
To be fair, if that's the effect you're going for it doesn't seem like the best option. If you want something to promote oxidative stress, take something like pawpaw supplements or a drug like metformin.
Tumors need more energy than normal cells, and oxidative stress interferes with the ability of your mitochondria to produce energy. So yeah, it makes intuitive sense that antioxidants are not what you'd want for cancer. Although as you mentioned, these systems are pretty complicated and there are a lot of chemicals that can act as antioxidants in some circumstances and oxidative agents in others.
Not exactly. My understanding of the Warburg effect is that cells rely upon glycolysis for their _additional_ energetic demands but still have functioning mitochondrial with the ability to oxidise fats; a lot of the pentose phosphate pathway is upregulated in tumors as they're busy making amino acids for protein biosynthesis. Of course, tumours do literally everything imaginable somewhere so take this with a glacier sized disclaimer. The main thing is that the reactions that are favoured tend to be either anaplerotic (contributing carbon towards the Krebs cycle) or straight up anabolic. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
Could this be why meditation was shown to reduce tumor size? I saw a recent article, on here I think, about a study showing proof via imaging that meditative practices of aligning chakras was successful at reducing tumors where chemotherapy could not. Could it just be that extreme relaxation causes the tumors energy demands to exceed the bodies supply in a relaxed state?
I may be a square, but I think it’s insane to self-medicate with supplements without the oncologist being fully aware and supportive.
Cancer sucks and is complex enough without adding more variables. Especially if you’re dealing with immunotherapies and managing secondary infections and other complications. Plus, any problems that develop are going to be divvied up between various specialists.
For 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.
Humans 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.
It 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.
Animals 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.
As frugivorous apes we got enough vitamin C from our diet that that mutation was a survival advantage. Synthesizing nutrients you can get from your diet is a waste of energy.
Similarly, other species of animals cannot synthesize certain nutrients they get from their diet. Cats, for example, cannot synthesize taurine and must get their required taurine from consuming meat.
> As frugivorous apes we got enough vitamin C from our diet that that mutation was a survival advantage. Synthesizing nutrients you can get from your diet is a waste of energy.
This is speculative and honestly not the simplest explanation. Deleterious mutations will happen in the absence of selective pressure, and there was no selective pressure.
You don't have to cast everything as evolution playing 4D chess. Sometimes genes just break, and not for good reasons.
> For 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.
You’re describing absorption tolerance, but the body doesn’t need anywhere near that much Vitamin C.
The idea that you need to “titrate to bowel tolerance” as the alternative medicine practitioners say is rather nonsensical. Nothing in the diets we evolved to consume has anywhere near enough Vitamin C to cause loose stools (from Vitamin C excess)
You can consume more than enough Vitamin C for your body to ever use with regular food. Taking these megadose supplements at unnaturally high doses may get some absorbed into your body, but it just gets excreted back out.
One 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/#:~:tex....
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadBut 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-...
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.
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.
What a time to be alive.
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…)
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.
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
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5593895/
> So long as your serum 25OHD concentration is >50nmol/L according to this meta analysis, there's no clear effects.
I mostly agree. Above 50nmol/L it's not so important, but most evidence would still point towards it being slightly healthier to be on the higher end of the reference range for Vit D, so therefore if you wanted to optimise your health you probably should be targeting around ~150nmol/L. We know our ancestors would have had Vit D concentrations around these levels so there's no good reason to think it would be unhealthy either.
Additionally, and what you missed here is that a lot of people in the northern hemisphere get close or fall below that 50nmol/L clinically deficient level during winter months. This is why I think in general it's probably better for people to take a low dose of Vit D than not (especially during the winter).
But to your point, if you're spending time outside and getting a bit of sun exposure every day then it's probably not needed.
Yeah, I certainly don't think it's unhealthy, I just haven't seen any studies demonstrate really any effect at all over the lowest normal value. If you have some studies I'd love to see them so I can cite them in the future.
I think we're basically in agreement.
Anyway, the conclusion was that more antioxidants is not necessarily better and that we still don't understand how things work.
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/coenzym...
2. https://youtu.be/9Z7X9WPWv4Y?si=avOV0u4ruy_zNslr&t=746
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21990298/
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4899293/
Emphasis mine.
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.
But as you say, there should be a threshold you don't want to cross with antioxidants, and supplements can easily do that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
> The researchers say their findings highlight the potential risk of taking antioxidant supplements when they’re not needed.
Taking dietary supplements full of antioxidants could help cancerous tumors grow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37349870 - Sept 2023 (66 comments)
They've been reporting this since 2015:
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-tumo...
URL changed as well. Submitted URL was https://newatlas.com/medical/antioxidants-stimulate-blood-ve... (the same one you mentioned there, so I couldn't track the 2015 ref)
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.
Again, recommendations from a health guru book and not an actual doctor, that I'm just copying here in case it helps. I have no experience with cancer other than a close relative passing away when I was much younger.
Encouraging them to stop eating seems like it would just accelerate death.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5114624/
Did it make a difference in effectiveness? I actually have my follow up scans tomorrow to find out. As you can imagine, I really really hope so.
https://news.usc.edu/29428/fasting-weakens-cancer-in-mice/
There are studies on fasting with chemo.. and depending on the type of cancer its either effective or ineffective. My comment was specifically about the end stages where cachexia is common (from my link above):
"Cachexia is associated particularly with cancer where the prevalence can reach 50–80% in advanced malignant cancer."
And all of the advice Ive found says fasting is not recommended for patients with cachexia.
It sounds like it was fine in your case though because you were able to regain the weight. Best of luck with your scans.
In the context of chemotherapy, couldn't that be a quantitatively useful benefit?
"Fasting improves therapeutic response in hepatocellular carcinoma through p53-dependent metabolic synergism"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35061544/
I did upvote you.
I don't know how true is what they claim in the book, but basically it's the following.
All cancer cells obtain their energy from fermentation and not oxidation. They use glucose for that fermentation process and they propose fasting and a ketogenic diet as a treatment.
Antioxidants can actually promote fermentation and inhibition oxidation.
All that being said, she pretty much abandoned all of the additional about halfway through her treatments. She had to have half her liver resected, and she had a HIPEC procedure at the same time. When they did the final biopsies on her metastases in her liver, it was 100% dead. She's now been NED (no evidence of disease) for a few years now. I don't have delusions that it will never come back, but I can hope.
I don't know if anything she did helped the chemo do it's job. It's not exactly something you can A/B test. I think it's possible, but I also think her being so young and in good shape to start with made the biggest difference.
My doctor literally gave me such an oral prescription as my vitamin D levels are low.
You don’t need a lot of Vitamin D to avoid deficiency. Taking even 5000 IU for an extended period of time can cause Vitamin D excess.
Vitamin D confuses a lot of people because it accumulates over a very long time period. You can take the same dose every day but not approach overdose range for a year or more. It builds up if you’re taking too much, and there is a lot of overlap between “too much” and some of the regimens pushed by health influencers.
To be fair, if that's the effect you're going for it doesn't seem like the best option. If you want something to promote oxidative stress, take something like pawpaw supplements or a drug like metformin.
Tumors need more energy than normal cells, and oxidative stress interferes with the ability of your mitochondria to produce energy. So yeah, it makes intuitive sense that antioxidants are not what you'd want for cancer. Although as you mentioned, these systems are pretty complicated and there are a lot of chemicals that can act as antioxidants in some circumstances and oxidative agents in others.
Isn't the mitochondria usually silenced in cancerous cells?
Could this be why meditation was shown to reduce tumor size? I saw a recent article, on here I think, about a study showing proof via imaging that meditative practices of aligning chakras was successful at reducing tumors where chemotherapy could not. Could it just be that extreme relaxation causes the tumors energy demands to exceed the bodies supply in a relaxed state?
Cancer sucks and is complex enough without adding more variables. Especially if you’re dealing with immunotherapies and managing secondary infections and other complications. Plus, any problems that develop are going to be divvied up between various specialists.
High-dose vitamin C enhances cancer immunotherapy https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aay8707
posted this in response to the wrong comment earlier
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.
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.
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.
Similarly, other species of animals cannot synthesize certain nutrients they get from their diet. Cats, for example, cannot synthesize taurine and must get their required taurine from consuming meat.
This is speculative and honestly not the simplest explanation. Deleterious mutations will happen in the absence of selective pressure, and there was no selective pressure.
You don't have to cast everything as evolution playing 4D chess. Sometimes genes just break, and not for good reasons.
You’re describing absorption tolerance, but the body doesn’t need anywhere near that much Vitamin C.
The idea that you need to “titrate to bowel tolerance” as the alternative medicine practitioners say is rather nonsensical. Nothing in the diets we evolved to consume has anywhere near enough Vitamin C to cause loose stools (from Vitamin C excess)
You can consume more than enough Vitamin C for your body to ever use with regular food. Taking these megadose supplements at unnaturally high doses may get some absorbed into your body, but it just gets excreted back out.
Absorption and use are two different things.
Intravenous High-Dose Vitamin C in Cancer Therapy https://www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/ras/ras-cent...
High-dose vitamin C enhances cancer immunotherapy https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aay8707
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.