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Study: Some Antioxidants Could Increase Cancer Rates
sciencehabit writes "Many people take vitamins such as A, E, and C thinking that their antioxidant properties will ward off cancer. But some clinical trials have suggested that such antioxidants, which sop up DNA-damaging molecules called free radicals, have the opposite effect and raise cancer risk in certain people. Now, in a provocative study that raises unsettling questions about the widespread use of vitamin supplements, Swedish researchers have showed that moderate doses of two widely used antioxidants spur the growth of early lung tumors in mice."
Also, cancer cells are more susceptive to oxidative damage due to their generally higher cell division rate. This is also why ionizing radiation usually damages cancer cells more than regular cells.
Since when sentences need verbs?
we should stop putting unnatural things into our bodies that should only be enjoying god's creations
Yeah, all the great things god created, like Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Clostridium tetani, Variola virus, Poliovirus, let's put all that stuff in our bodies, not those evil vaccine things!
Supplements are just one more useless thing that businesses convince people they need. The only ones that need them are businesses, to make shitloads of money.
If you have a varied and balanced diet and don't suffer from any condition that makes you need a reinforced dose of any particular nutrient, you don't need any dietary supplements.
Eat properly and exercise! It's easier, cheaper, and it works.
You do realise that was completely debunked years ago?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Replicate studies if you don't trust them.
Well, since this is consistent with findings of previous studies which were not specifically looking for this - for example, a Vitamin E supplement trial which was called off early due to the high cancer rates in the active drug group (http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/news/major-study-of-supplements-and-prostate-cancer-halted) - I'd say that this result is correct.
Of course, maybe that researcher was on the take too, right?
If you're eating in any way sensibly, you should have no need of extraneous vitamin supplements anyway.
There are certain conditions (either genetic or self-imposed, like veganism) where you don't get all that's required - and then you need to get a nutritionist on the case, not just buy things in dosages you have no clue of and take 100% RDA of on top of your normal diet.
It's an RDA for a reason. Not only is it a suggested (not absolute) minimum, but also a suggested maximum too. People miss the fact that anything other that can potentially be damaging (there's not been much study into it, but if X amount of a certain vitamin shows that you're healthiest and "plateaus" around that usage, why would you need to take more?) in the same way as lack of it.
And, with stuff like vitamins, it's not instantaneous results, so you can't correlate it with whether you feel better or not or got sick or not directly. In the same way that it will take you time to notice you don't have enough (say) iron in your diet, it might take you longer to notice that you have too much.
Your body is a machine that's honed by evolution. Eat well, eat properly, eat what it has evolved to eat (which includes meat!) and the amount it has evolved to cope with. And then you'll be fine.
"Now, in a provocative study that raises unsettling questions about the widespread use of vitamin supplements"
I believe that should be worded, "Now *another* provocative study" After all, there's been a continuous stream of these. For whatever reason, the human body doesn't like being dosed with massive amounts of chemically reactive substances, gee, what a surprise.
You can get the same dose from eating fruit, but that has no known downsides in multiple studies. If you're worried about your health, eat your fruit and veg - like they've been saying forever,
This is a common sleight of hand in the pharma (or general 'sickness industry') sponsored mercenary pseudo-science, when they want to "prove" that inexpensive, non-patentable substance X which is actually good for you, "causes" cancer -- they give X to mice bred specifically to develop cancers they wish to blame on X. After the coarse grained form of the "discovery" story is retold in mass media (or on Slashdot), it becomes "X causes cancer."
To see exactly how this sleight of hand works, consider substance X that improves circulation and promotes growth and vitality of blood vessels (e.g. gingko biloba, arganine, etc), which are all the effects normally good for you. But if you get a cancer, then cancer will use the improved blood supplies and stronger angiogenesis to feed itself, hence it will grow faster than if you had poor circulation and suppressed angiogenesis. That is then twisted to declare "X causes cancer." In fact the cancer was caused by the genes that were deliberately bred into this type mice.
More generally, onset of cancer turns values upside down -- what was good for you when you were healthy, becomes bad for you when you get cancer, since cancer will co-opt it for its own growth. What was bad for you (poor circulation, cellular toxins and pro-oxidants, heavy metals, chemo, etc) becomes good for you, since it may affect cancerous cells more than the non-cancerous cells.
A useful analogy illustrating the nature of this reversal of values in cancer, is to consider human society as a (super-)organism, which it is in many ways. In a peacetime, roads and other transport systems are good for the social organism. But in the case of war, the good transport systems often becomes a major downside since the enemy can use those roads to advance its troops and boost supply lines. In contrast, poor transportation in peacetime is bad for the social organism (backward nations). But it is also bad for the potential enemy during war. This can be easily observed on historical examples, such as WWII, where German blitzkrieg conquered the more developed nations, such as France, Netherlands, Poland very quickly, while it got bogged down in the backwards Balkans, with lots of mountains and few roads, and never really had control of those territories (except for the major cities, which were few in numbers). Similarly, in more recent wars, the backwards, mountainous undeveloped Afghanistan (or jungles of Vietnam) is practically impossible to conquer, while the more developed Iraq was overrun in weeks.
Hence, the above style of mercenary "science" using cancer mice to "prove" alleged carcinogenicity of wholesome Vitamin C or E is analogous to mislabeling transport systems and other infrastructure as a national weakness, and advocating going back to stone age, by demonstrating how much quicker the nation can be conquered if their infrastructure is good.
It is also similar to policies which mislabel personal liberty and privacy as harmful and deadly, by showing how terrorists (or drug dealers, crazies, etc) can take advantage of those liberties and privacy to cause harm. These are all the same kind of scams as the above "study" scaring people away from the vitamins C and E. All of such scare campaigns are often promoted by the very same people from the same crony front groups/NGOs, as result of natural synergies of interests -- a need to condition and herd the sheep with common scare tactics.
I actually find these kinds of "studies" quite useful, since they help me identify what is good for me -- it is always the stuff that the sickness industry is trying to scare me away from (e.g. fat, meat, eggs, bacon, cholesterol, tobacco and other ancient medicinal/entheogenic plants, etc). Further, as a rule the greater the efforts and lengths they go to with their scare mongering about X, the better X must be for me (i.e. worst for their profits). The most useful one for my health was when it dawned on me to invert "make sure have the regular medical checku
Homeopathic remedies, by definition, have zero detectable content of anything.
Heh, reminds me of an oldie, but a goodie -
All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot;
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom,
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid.
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small.
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
-- Monty Python
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
A trivial case is folinic acid, aka leucovorin, which is used with 5 flourouracil as the 5FU-LV pair and with third and fourth adjuvants. Old hat. Note: common folic acid is an oxidized precursor of folinic acid.
"Show" is a relative term to the level of evidence. Your tone implies you are looking for grade A evidence, with multiple multimillion dollar trials. There are a lot of lower level evidence cases and what is more important is the individual case. Extensive individualized lab work is already doable but not common. Few spend multimillions for large trials on commodities. Yet.
word.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
eat what it has evolved to eat (which includes meat!)
Actually, it's possible to eat well enough on a purely vegan diet, it's just that most vegans don't do that. You just need to focus on eating protein and B-vitamin rich plants like beans and kale.
Michael Pollan boiled it down to 3 ridiculously simple rules that I've found work well enough for all practical purposes:
1. Eat food (by which he means things that your great-grandmother would recognize as something you'd want to eat)
2. Not too much (for obvious reasons)
3. Mostly plants (that seems to be what we're evolved to eat, probably because plant food isn't as hard to chase down)
I am officially gone from