The benefits that proper nutrition can have for maintaining our health are almost self-evident nowadays. It is also self-evident that diet can help to cope with many diseases. After all, thousands of years ago, our ancestors used to say that food can become our medicine.
But what about some diseases that seem insurmountable even for the heaviest drugs such as cancer? Can diet help combat them?
A study published in the journal Science Nature answered this question positively, concluding that diet could play an important role in the treatment of cancer.
This study showed that drastic restriction of an amino acid, found mainly in red meat and eggs, increased the efficacy of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in mice, slowing tumor growth.
This research is at a preliminary stage, but its findings are supported by previous studies.
They restricted methionine intake
The research team limited the intake of methionine in mice, an amino acid that is essential for the functioning of the body but is only obtained through food because the body does not produce it by itself. This amino acid is also used by cancer cells to grow.
Methionine is one of the 9 essential amino acids that the human body cannot form on its own, but is ingested through diet. It is believed to play a role in blood vessel formation, wound healing, liver health and muscle mass development.
Scientists initially limited methionine to healthy mice to confirm that it would have the expected effects on their metabolism. They then imposed the same diet on mice suffering from colorectal cancer or soft tissue sarcoma, a rare type of cancer.
The administration of a very small dose of chemotherapy, which alone was not expected to have any effect on colorectal cancer, caused a "significant decrease in tumor growth," according to the report. The same effect was observed when they combined methionine reduction with radiation in mice with soft tissue sarcoma.
Cancer cells stop "feeding"
"Cancer cells starve when we deprive them of certain nutrients," said Jason Lockasseel, lead author and professor at Duke University in North Carolina,
"Certainly not the cancer drug" but "shows that there are very interesting interactions with the food we consume, how this changes metabolism and how these changes in cell metabolism could have some impact on tumor growth. ", He added.
Like all cells, cancers have metabolic needs to grow. For years, scientists have found that cancer cells need two key elements to "feed", glucose and methionine. For this reason, they recommend limiting sugar, red meat, trans fats and other similar foods.
Hope for human
In a first step of extending human research, the researchers administered this diet to six healthy humans for three weeks. They concluded that the effects on their metabolism were similar to those observed in mice.
This reinforces the hypothesis that such a diet could have some effect on certain tumors in humans, according to scientists. Of course, as the researchers point out, this is a case in point and experiments on cancer patients are needed to confirm it.
"Human studies are needed before drawing conclusions about dietary restrictions as an approach to cancer treatment," said Paul Faroa, a professor of cancer epidemiology at Cambridge University who did not participate in the study.
However, the author of the study, Jason Lockasseel, has put another dimension that shows that sometimes the thirst for pharmaceutical companies for more profits is "braking" the development of science. As she explained, clinical nutrition studies often find it difficult to find a financier because their results are difficult to exploit financially.
Bibliography:
- Xia Gao, Jason W. Locasale, Dietary methionine influences therapy in mouse cancer models and alters human metabolism, (2019), Nature Communications
