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Hot Pepper Kills Prostate Cancer
brian0918 writes "U.S. and Japanese researchers have announced results of a study showing that capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot, can cause prostate cancer cells to kill themselves. 'Capsaicin led 80 percent of human prostate cancer cells growing in mice to commit suicide in a process known as apoptosis, the researchers said.' This led to tumors one fifth the size of those in untreated mice."
Lehmann estimated that the mice ate the human equivalent of 400 milligrams of capsaicin three times a week. That is about the amount found in three to eight fresh habanero peppers, depending on how hot the peppers are.
I may be a lightweight bastard, but I cannot eat a single habanero without violently vomiting.
400 mg of Capsaicin is basically like eating pepper spray. Even if it's in capsule pill form you may vomit it up from your stomach. I wonder if there's any way for a local application to the prostate instead of standard ingestion.
I'm cooking up a great big pot of hot hot hot chili for my girlfriend right now!
I have issues with all "[insert product here] causes cancer" studies. The mechanisms that cause a cingle cell to become cancerous are not known. Ther are people who smoke for 30 years and don't develop cancer. Then there are folks like my father in law. Smoked 20 years, and got skin cancer, but not lung cancer. Until someone figures out DEFINITIVELY(sp?) how cancer starts, how can they say anything "causes" cancer?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
By now, in this age of medicine[marketing], most common substances and behaviors both increase and decrease your risk for any cancer, depending on who and when you ask, and what report has just come out.
It's like the fad diet thing. "Carbs evil! Eat meat! No, eat carbs! Tofu FTW!"
Thoughts? Well, I just know that a lot of people tend to end up with cancer at some point or another. Maybe it's new definitions in diagnosis, maybe it's the 1000 or so nuclear tests put on by the US alone, maybe it's the terrorists (gasp!) poisoning the water hole, or maybe it's lifestyles.
The important thing is: you are going to die someday, and that's that. Live life aware of it, but not consumed by it.
Not so. Frijoles, known to be destined for gringo intestines, were not soaked overnight.
Simple and effective. Google for Aztlan, sometime...
H. Pylori has been linked to stomach cancer as well. I think I remember reading that the cause may have been damage to the lining of the stomach. It makes sense to me that large quantities of capsaicin could repeatedly damage the lining of the stomach in turn possibly leading to stomach cancer. Hopefully the amount used in the doses to treat prostate cancer would be lower than the doses that may cause stomach cancer.
And we know this anonymous coward is a "scientist" and consults for "Pfizer" because...
Sounds an awful lot like a naturopath rhetoric coming from someone pretending to be in a position of authority.
"Carbs evil! Eat meat! No, eat carbs! Tofu FTW!"
...and actually reading the numbers.
Huh? Tofu is pretty much all protein, not carbs.
Anyway, if your conclusion from "we get contradictory info, and we're all going to die someday anyway" is "ignore all the info" that's just another extreme approach that's going to hurt you.
It's like you should probably avoid the extreme diets premised on dubious (or little-explored) studies. But you aren't choosing between that and eating Ho-Hos and pizza for every meal. There's a ton we *do* know about leading a healthy life. Don't spend hours a day counting calories, but get some exercise, avoid the junk food (just don't even bring it home unless you have an iron will), and start eating less if you start getting fat. It's not that hard once you're in the habit, and you'll live a much better life than anyone swinging between the extremes.
About cancer... often it's worth checking into actual incidence rates of different cancers before you make choices of what recommendations you want to ignore. Some carcinogens have a tiny effect. Something like smoking has a pretty huge effect (something like 1 in 19 people get lung cancer in their lives, and 90% of people who die from lung cancer are smokers.. and that's ignoring all of the other health effects of smoking, including other cancers).
In the end, you do have to balance the benefit against the gain, but it IS worth putting some thought into
Yes, freaking out at every headline isn't much use (since many of the reporters don't always seem to understand the actual significance of the studies they're reporting on... they just want the big headline), but that doesn't mean useful info isn't readily available. If you don't want to parse it yourself, talk to your doctor about it.
Then there are folks like my father in law. Smoked 20 years, and got skin cancer, but not lung cancer. Until someone figures out DEFINITIVELY(sp?) how cancer starts, how can they say anything "causes" cancer?
Just because there's some collaborating and perhaps unknown factors that influences the eventual outcome doesn't make it false, it is merely a probability rather than a certainty.
Let me take an example: Some women gets raped. Some of these women commit suicide. But because some of these women didn't commit suicide, we can't conclude that being raped causes suicides? Huh? In fact, I think you dismissed all of psychology, social science and anything else that doesn't deal in absolutes.
We've quite clearly isolated smoking as a cause of increased rate of cancer. It's neither required nor guaranteed, but the world doesn't just work in black or white. We only know it is part of the answer, not the whole answer.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1: Flatulance in mexican food is caused by the combination of large quantities of protien and carbs, which due to varying digestive processes, leads to a reaction that causes farting. Mexican food is almost devoid of fat, save for vegitable oils and cheese which further the problem along. Asian diet is the same; it's only european diet, with it's milk and cattle, that has the large amounts of fat and has for the most part, infected old world cuisines. New world quisine: meatball sub with cheese. Old world quisine: Meatball sub with lettuce, spinach, tomato slices, olives, green peppers, onion, and mabye some green olives for flavor (packed and eaten; it's basically a compressed salad).
2: Capsaicin basically causes the blood vessels to dialate, which increases blood flow. You'll notice how people with heavy diets of fat and protien don't get sick when they eat Capsaicin/hot food; that's because the constriction and dialation of the blood vessels free's up blocked up cholesterol, causes the heart to work harder, makes the kidney's healthier from consistant cleaning out, and most importantly, the extra blood flow causes every cell in the body to dump toxins. But will doctors tell us that capsaicin can drop your cholesterol level to far healthier levels in weeks? Gotta sell those pills.
Cayenne pepper has the largest amount of Capsaicin known per pound, it's pepper of which is almost all Capsaicin. If you want a good cleaning, all you need to do is make a tea out of it, chug it down, cough for an hour and then go to bed; it causes a really nice warm fuzzy tingly feeling all over the body. It has other uses too, like increasing the affect of other things you take several fold.
IN MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, torkd is more right than you are.
Neuropathy is a disease or damage to the nerve. The result can be either a lack of firing or an overfiring or firing without stimuli.
Lack of firing causes numbness. Not painful.
Firing without stimulus or overfiring is neuralgia, or nerve pain without a cause or out of proportion to the stimuli.
Overfiring can be caused by factors other than neuropathy - strychnine causes it, for one - so it is possible to have neuropathy without neuralgia and neuralgia without neuropathy.
From the web site you link to, diabetic neuropathy MAY, CAN, and SOMETIMES DOES cause neuralgia. From that same web site, diabetic neuropathy DOES NOT ALWAYS result in neuralgia.
As torkd points out, the nerve disease or damage is not itself painful - it _can_ cause firing of neurons that are interpreted as being painful, however. I think this is just a nit-pick though.
And your rebuttal of Yeah - go tell that to people who can't sleep because their legs burn at night & they also have other pain. is obviated by the people with diabetic neuropathy that have numbness instead - like me. As torkd wrote [P]eople will go on with an ulcer on their foot for weeks and not know it.or like me, they may not be able to tell if the bath water is hot or not and may get scalded without knowing it. I take showers now as my hands are not (yet) affected and I can tell if the water is to hot or not before I get burned. I do a daily visual inspection of my feet for sores or bruises to try to prevent complications.
My diabetic neuropathy is NOT PAINFUL.
Anecdotal evidence that your post is not as accurate as the one by torkd.