The above lecture from The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
Another interesting article:
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Nutrition and Cancer
The overall result of these experiments (described in the research paper from the journal Mechanisms of Aging and Development reproduced in pdf format below) on squamous cell carcinoma in mice is that healthful diets increase the growth rate of cancer. Poor diets decrease its growth rate. This is probably a general effect that applies equally well to humans.
...if diet restriction were practiced by all cancer patients in the United States, the resulting life-extension might equal or surpass that resulting from the combined efforts of the entire current medical oncology effort.
While it is likely (although not proved) that excellent nutrition strengthens the immune system and other defense mechanisms in such a way as to lower the probability of contracting cancer, it is clear that, once cancer has established itself, excellent nutrition leads to its accelerated growth. This may not be true of all cancers, but it is likely to be true of a large fraction of them.
The growth rate of cancer in these mice was varied over a 20-fold range by diet alone. Super nutrition (lots of vitamins, etc.) increased the growth rate two-fold, while diet restriction reduced the growth rate ten-fold.
The research paper reproduced in pdf format below summarizes work carried out by my coworkers and me when I was President and Research Director of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. The results of these experiments caused an argument between Linus and me, which ended our 16-year period of work together. He was not willing to accept the experimentally proved fact that vitamin C in ordinary doses accelerated the growth rate of squamous cell carcinoma in these mice. https://www.nutritionandcancer.org/vi...r/s99p1074.htm
Remember that all animals produce their own vitamin C, unlike humans who can't.
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It turns out that emerging data showed that ascorbate was differentially toxic to some tumor cell lines at concentration in the millimolar to tens of millimolar range. That�s an incredibly high concentration to have to achieve in blood and tissues. Indeed, if you told most pharmacologists that you had a new experimental compound for the treatment of cancer (or any other disease, for that matter) but that it required blood and tissue concentrations of 10 mM to be effective, nearly all of them would suggest that you give up in a hurry because of how difficult it is to reach concentrations that high in humans without toxicity. Even so, two and a half years ago, there came a study published in PNAS by Mark Levine and colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the the National Institutes of Health. The PNAS study was simply an in vitro study using five tumor cell lines that showed selective toxicity due to ascorbate in tumor cells compared to normal cells at concentrations that are achievable with intravenous doses of ascorbate. It turns out that ascorbate was four- to twenty-fold more toxic to the tumor cells tested than to normal cells, and that cell killing depended upon hydrogen peroxide generation, as it was abrogated when cells were pretreated with peroxide scavengers. It�s a pretty straightforward paper. My only quibbles with it were that the concentrations of ascorbate used were very high, in the 2 to 20 mM range (hence the need for very high intravenous doses of vitamin C to achieve such levels in the blood) and that Levine only used monocytes, lymphocytes, fibroblasts, and breast epithelial cells as the �normal� cells. Also, he only exposed the cells to the ascorbate for one hour, even though the paper itself states that it can take several hours for a large intravenous dose of vitamin C to be eliminated from the body. At the time I thought that the paper represented an interesting in vitro observation, but, as they say, you can kill tumor cells in vitro with just about anything if you crank the concentration high enough. In vitro experiments can generate hypotheses, but they are inherently highly artificial systems. As clinicians, we want to know if this works in vivo. Many are the chemotherapeutic agents that appear to kill cancer cells selectively in vitro but fail in animal experiments. All in all, this study was hardly a stunning vindication of Pauling. https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...en-vindicated/
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- Jim
That which does not kill us makes us stronger. -Friedrich Nietzsche
Revolutionizing Diagnostic Medicine Through the Telecosm
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