A FB friend shared an article with me: Scientists Discover Cancer Tumors Are “Addicted” to This Common Antioxidant, which cited a research article titled “Catabolism of extracellular glutathione supplies cysteine to support tumours” published in Nature (here) with a second research paper that is mentioned in the summary article, which is titled “Taurine from tumour niche drives glycolysis to promote leukemogenesis”, found here.
What is important to know about these articles is that they explain that taking excessive antioxidants can lead to serious harm by supporting cancer development and growth! While cancer lives on glucose and glutamate, we now understand that it can recruit other elements with specific functions and use them to achieve its goal of getting access to food (glucose, primarily)! This is how:
Glutathione
The main human antioxidant, is made up of 3 amino acids: cysteine, glutamate and glycine, and can be catabolized (broken down into its basic elements) to release the individual amino acids, each of which is glucogenic—meaning they convert to glucose easily. Cancer cells are loaded with glutathione and when the researchers blocked off cancer cells’ access to glutathione, cancer growth reduced.
Taurine
The second study I linked to about taurine found that aggressive myeloid leukemias form a critical dependency on taurine transporters. The research showed that when they prevented the cancer cells from having access to taurine, it significantly impaired myeloid leukemia (cancer) growth. They found that cysteine dioxygenase type 1 (CDO1)-driven taurine biosynthesis is restricted to osteolineage cells, and increases during myeloid disease progression. Blocking CDO1 expression in osteolineage cells impairs LSC growth and improves survival outcomes. The elimination of taurine uptake inhibited mTOR activation and downstream glycolysis—the glucose the cancer cells need.
Summary
Please don’t believe those articles that push plant antioxidants or excessive supplements for cancer prevention or cure (or for general health). Clearly there are lots of nuances to cancer research and we don’t yet know enough about it!
The taking of antioxidants is also harmful because our immune system uses oxygen as oxidative burstsor respiratory bursts to get rid of virus, bacteria, or any other pathogens.
Triggered by infection, the enzyme NADPH oxidase deliberately produces reactive oxygen species (ROS), such as superoxide and hydrogen peroxide, to kill bacteria and fungi (read more on this here). Taking antioxidants can reduce your immune system’s ability to kill these pathogens! It can keep you sick or sicker longer.
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Angela A Stanton, PhD, is a Neuroeconomist focusing on chronic pain--migraine in particular--physiology, electrolyte homeostasis, nutrition, and genetics. She lives in Southern California. Her current research is focused on migraine cause, prevention, and treatment without the use of medicine. As a forever migraineur from childhood, her discovery was helped by experimenting on herself. She found the cause of migraine to be at the ionic level, associated with disruption of the electrolyte homeostasis, resulting from genetic variations of all voltage dependent channels, gates, and pumps (chanelopathy) that modulate electrolyte mineral density and voltage in the brain. In addition, insulin and glucose transporters, and several other variants, such as MTHFR variants of B vitamin methylation process and many others are different in the case of a migraineur from the general population.
Migraineurs are glucose sensitive (carbohydrate intolerant) and should avoid eating carbs as much as possible. She is working on her hypothesis that migraine is a metabolic disease.
As a result of the success of the first edition of her book and her helping over 5000 migraineurs successfully prevent their migraines world wide, all ages and both genders, and all types of migraines, she published the 2nd (extended) edition of her migraine book "Fighting The Migraine Epidemic: Complete Guide: How To Treat & Prevent Migraines Without Medications". The 2nd edition is the “holy grail” of migraine cause, development, and prevention, incorporating all there is to know. It includes a long section for medical and research professionals. The book is full of academic citations (over 800) to authenticate the statements she makes to make it easy to follow up by those interested and to spark further research interest. It is a "Complete Guide", published on September 29, 2017.
Dr. Stanton received her BSc at UCLA in Mathematics, MBA at UCR, MS in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, PhD in Economics with dissertation in neuroscience (culminating in Neuroeconomics) at Claremont Graduate University, fMRI certification at Harvard University Medical School at the Martinos Center for Neuroimaging for experimenting with neurotransmitters on human volunteers, certification in LCHF/ketogenic diet from NN (Nutrition Network), certification in physiology (UPEN via Coursea), Nutrition (Harvard Shool of Public Health) and functional medicine studies. Dr. Stanton is an avid sports fan, currently power weight lifting and kickboxing. For relaxation (yeah.. about a half minute each day), she paints and photographs and loves to spend time with her family of husband of 45 years, 2 sons and their wives, and 2 granddaughters.
Follow her on Twitter at: @MigraineBook, LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelaastantonphd/ and facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DrAngelaAStanton/
Stanton Migraine Protocol 