A restrictive diet in methionine, an amino acid found in particular in red meat and eggs, would help boost the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in certain cancers.
In 2015, 17.5 million people were diagnosed with cancer worldwide. That year, 8.7 million of them died from it, making it the second leading cause of premature death on the planet, after cardiovascular disease. Also, many researchers are working to improve the effectiveness of cancer treatments. According to a study published in the journal Nature, the drastic reduction of methionine, an amino acid found in particular in red meat and eggs, would increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, slowing the growth of tumours. If this discovery is very interesting, it is however still too early to hope for an effective remedy on humans.
Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina (United States) have reduced the intake of methionine in the food of mice, an amino acid essential for the functioning of the body but which must be provided by food because we can’t make it ourselves. They tested this restrictive diet on healthy rodents and then on mice with colorectal cancer and of sarcoma soft tissues. In colorectal cancer patients, a low dose of chemotherapy was sufficient to cause “a marked reduction in tumor growth”. The same effect was observed in those with soft tissue sarcoma.
Starve cancer cells
This could be because methionine is used by cancer cells to grow. “We starve cancer cells by depriving them of certain nutrients”explains Jason Locasale who conducted the study “It is certainly not a universal remedy against Cancer”but “it shows that there are very interesting interactions with the food we eat, how it changes metabolism (…) and how these changes in cellular metabolism could have an effect on tumor growth”, he continues.
Based on their results, the researchers then tested this low-methionine diet on six healthy people for three weeks. They were then able to observe effects similar to those observed in mice. Thus, such a diet could have an effect on certain human tumors, they welcome.
However, “before drawing conclusions about the potential of dietary restrictions as an approach to treating cancer, human studies are needed”, nuance Paul Pharoah, professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Cambridge ( United Kingdom), who did not participate in the study. Unfortunately, clinical studies in nutrition are struggling to find funding because their results are hardly profitable, explains Professor Locasale.
Vitamin D may also slow the progression of colorectal cancer
This study is of course not the first to establish links between diet and cancer. In recent months, several studies have looked at foods that may promote or, on the contrary, prevent colorectal cancer. While researchers have found that a pro-inflammatory or antioxidant diet could almost double the risk of developing this disease, others claim that a vitamin D supplementation may slow its progression.
Since 2004, cancer has been the leading cause of premature death in France, ahead of cardiovascular diseases. In 2018, 400,000 new cases were diagnosed in the country, resulting in 150,000 deaths. In men, the most common cancers are those of the prostate (48,427 new cases in 2013), then those of the lung (32,500 cases) and the colon-rectum (24,000 cases), according to figures of the Arc Foundation for cancer research. In women, breast cancer comes first with 59,000 cases, followed by colon-rectum (21,000 cases) and lung (17,000 cases).
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