On 6/12/2008 Arnold wrote:
Yes - Like Chemo,radiation, etc. Vitamins are important but will not kill cancer cells.
Yes I know that. Id like to show you what Vitamins Antioxidants realy do. So lets talk about the Antioxidants Vitamin C . We poor humans are one of the few mammals on Gods earth that cant produce our own Vitamin C. We have to get it from the food we eat. Most of the animals in the wold produce there own vitamin C. Do you know that the white Mice that once were use for the testing of vitamins and cancer also produce there own vitamin C and if the mice were our size they would produce about 16000mg of it a day. Vitamin C is an Antioxidants it main roll is to protect the cells in our bodys from damage caused by unstable molecules known as free radicals. I read this in science daily last year on sep 12 2007 It will explain a little bit about what Vitamin C dos. the statement that vitamin C kills cancer all started " Nearly 30 years ago when Nobel laureate Linus Pauling famously and controversially suggested that vitamin C supplements can prevent cancer,
since then a team of Johns Hopkins scientists have shown that in mice at least, vitamin C - and potentially other antioxidants - can indeed inhibit the growth of some tumors but just not in the manner suggested by years of investigation. A few years ago these Johns Hopkins investigators discovered the surprise antioxidant mechanism while looking at mice implanted with either human lymphoma (a blood cancer) or human liver cancer cells. Both of these cancers produce high levels of free radicals that can be suppressed by feeding the mice supplements of antioxidants, either vitamin C or N-acetylcysteine (NAC).
However, when the Hopkins team examined cancer cells from cancer-implanted mice not fed the antioxidants, they noticed the absence of any significant DNA damage. "Clearly, if DNA damage was not in play as a cause of the cancer, then whatever the antioxidants were doing to help was also not related to DNA damage," says Ping Gao, Ph.D, lead author of the paper.
That conclusion led Gao and Dang to suspect that some other mechanism was involved, such as a protein known to be dependent on free radicals called HIF-1 (hypoxia-induced factor), which was discovered over a decade ago by Hopkins researcher and co-author Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Program in Vascular Cell Engineering. Indeed, they found that while this protein was abundant in untreated cancer cells taken from the mice, it disappeared in vitamin C-treated cells taken from similar animals.
"When a cell lacks oxygen, HIF-1 helps it compensate," explains Dang. "HIF-1 helps an oxygen-starved cell convert sugar to energy without using oxygen and also initiates the construction of new blood vessels to bring in a fresh oxygen supply."
Some rapidly growing tumors consume enough energy to easily suck out the available oxygen in their vicinity, making HIF-1 absolutely critical for their continued survival. But HIF-1 can only operate if it has a supply of free radicals. Antioxidants remove these free radicals and stop HIF-1, and the tumor, in its tracks.
The authors confirmed the importance of this "hypoxia protein" by creating cancer cells with a genetic variant of HIF-1 that did not require free radicals to be stable. In these cells, antioxidants no longer had any cancer-fighting power.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Authors on the paper are Dean Felsher of Stanford; and Gao, Huafeng Zhang, Ramani Dinavahi, Feng Li, Yan Xiang, Venu Raman, Zaver Bhujwalla, Linzhao Cheng, Jonathan Pevsner, Linda Lee, Gregg Semenza and Dang of Johns Hopkins. " so we learn a bit more about how vitamin C helps our body fight cancer God Bless