Antioxidants – Supplement during cancer? Nutritionist advice
” The antioxidants and how good they are against cancer”
This statement always frighten me…
First off: I am not a doctor and you should listen to your doctor.
I am just providing information about a topic that alot of people get mixed up.
That statement frightens me
because a person already diagnosed with cancer/tumor might hear this statement and believe that antioxidant supplementation can help her/him treat the cancer.But in fact:
In some cases that might instead lead to an increase of cancer/tumor growth.
Here is why
Antioxidants are good against taking care of radicals which result in your body beeing better prevented against early development of diseases including cancer cells.”Antioxidants stop radicals”.
Their effect against an already existing cancer/tumor in a patient is however debated alot in studies.
Some of the chemotherapy drugs and radiation against cancer are ment to produce radicals that will damage the DNA of the tumor cells and in the end hopefully terminate the tumor.
In that case: antioxidant supplementation will reduce the effect of the chemotherapy/radiation and will instead benefit the tumor growth.
Some other studies point out that some antioxidant supplements during cancer treatment can help the surrounding tissue around the tumor to stay out of harm.
The main point
I was trying to get to is to be carefull about commenting about antioxidants and cancer. There is a difference between prevention and treatment. You never know who is going to read and might end up getting the wrong idea.Once again: Listen to your doctor.
Getting your antioxidants through food can almost never go wrong! So continue eating alot of fruit and vegetables! =)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17761641
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24828241
https://integrativeoncology-essentials.com/2013/03/hey-doc-can-i-take-antioxidants-during-chemo-and-radiation/
https://www.oncologynutrition.org/erfc/eating-well-when-unwell/is-it-safe-to-take-antioxidant-supplements-during-chemotherapy-and-radiation-therapy/
Nice post! Totally agree.
Nonetheless there ARE antioxidants that has anti-cancer effects, in both preventing cancer AND slow down the cell division of the cancerogenic cells (maybe even stop?). Sulphoraphane in broccoli being one example.
But as you say, patients who are diagnosed with cancer, should listen to their doctors.
Indeed, there is some specifik antioxidants that regulates different systems in our bodies, like sulphoraphane, that has shown alot of promising benefits against cancer, mostly skin cancer during the initiation phase, and some other areas aswell. But sulphoraphane mostly help preventing and during the early stage of cancer. So yes, there are some specific, and hopefully alot more, antioxidants that show some of the anti-cancer properties. But they should not, currently, be seen as a replacement to chemotherapy or other treatments if not the doctors say so, which was the subject of this topic. To NOT try to make people mix them up. There will always be exceptions.