Although I’m hardly surprised, it is a tragedy that that there has yet to be a single, high-quality clinical (human) trial conducted to investigate a very promising anticancer phenomenon that researchers have known about since 1959.
It was discovered that if you try to grow cancer cells in a medium with little-to-no methionine (an essential amino acid), often the cells would stop growing, dividing and they would undergo apoptosis (“cell suicide”.) Similar findings were subsequently reported in many studies using animals implanted with tumors. When fed a methionine-restricted diet their tumors grew more slowly, spread less often and the animals survived longer then those fed a regular diet. Importantly, harmful effects due to short-term methionine restriction were rarely seen in the animals or normal cells studied.
These studies discovered that a wide-range of cancer types require methionine to grow and divide (this is called “methionine-dependent”), such as:
- breast cancer
- bladder cancer
- pancreatic cancer
- lung cancer
- brain tumors
- stomach cancer
- leukemia
- lymphoma
- head and neck cancer
- melanoma
- sarcomas
- etc…
Methionine restriction has been shown to be safe in at least one study with cancer patients who were placed on a low-methionine diet for 17-18 weeks. The patients lost on average 0.5 kg per week while on the study but it is not known whether this weight loss was due to the diet (0.6-0.8 g of protein, 25-35 kcal, and 2 mg of methionine per kilogram per day) or cancer progression since all the patients had advanced disease (metastatic cancer.)
How Does Methionine Restriction Cause Anticancer Effects?
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