All you health experts (or maybe just anyone with an opinion)

Factual Questions
21

The idea isn’t that vitamin C prevents cancer, but that it reduces free radical damage. Less free radical damage may result in a lower probability of getting cancer. This is one of many supposed benefits of anti-oxidants, of which vitamin C is one.

It is the burnt fat in meat that has a lot of free radicals- there’s no dispute about that. Whether you believe free radical “damage” in the body increases the risk of cancer is another story :slight_smile: I believe it does, based on what I’ve read (sorry, no cites at my fingertips- check out sailor’s :)).

Arjuna34

22

sailor, I gather your answer is no?

sailor: “Burnt food is the same thing.” As is campfire smoke?

Arjuna, do you have any evidence (as opposed to theories) that taking vitamin C may prevent cancer* in humans?

*By reducing free radical damage resulting in a lower probability or by any other means?

23

Yeah, but what kind of cancer? In the mouth? throat? Intestines?

24

Since I’m not a researcher, I don’t have any direct evidence :). You might try this book: link to book ,
written by the head of the Packer Lab at Berkeley. From what I can gather, vitamin C’s preventative effects (if any) result from C’s increase in the effect of vitamin E’s anti-oxidant properties. You might also try

Block. G. 1991. Vitamin C and cancer prevention: The epidemiologic evidence. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 53 (suppl. 1):270-82.

Krinsky, N.I. and H. Sies, eds., 1195. Antioxidant vitamins and beta-carotene in disease prevention, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 62, no. 6, (S):1299S-1540S.

Woodall, A. A. and B. N. Ames. 1997. Diet and oxidative damage to DNA: The importance of ascorbate as an antioxidant. Vitamin C in Health and Disease, ed. by L. Packer and J. Fuschs. New York: Marcel Dekker.

Levine, M. C. Conry-Cantilena, Y. Wang, R. W. Welch, et. al., Vitamin C pharmacokinetics in healthy volunteers: Evidence for a recommended dietary allowance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93(8):3704-09.
For info on free radical damage in general, try

Packer, L., ed. 1984, and A. Ong., eds. 1998. Biological oxidants and antioxidants: Molecular mechanisms and health effects. Champaign, Ill.: AOCS Press.

Halliwell, F. and J.M.C. Gutteridge, eds. October 1998. Free radicals in biology and medicine, 3d. ed., Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.

Ohigashi, H., T. Osawa, J. Terao, S. Watanabe, T. Yoshikawa, eds., 1997. Food Factors for chemistry and cancer prevention. Tokyo: Springer-Verlag
Pappas, A. ed. 1998, Antioxidant status, diet, nutrition, and health. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press
Again, things are far from proven, but free radical damage does seem to play a big part in some cancers, and anti-oxidants can greatly reduce free radical damage. Once you get cancer, it’s not much help, though (at least not directly). It also appears that just taking one type of antioxidant isn’t as good as an entire spectrum. Antioxidants such as lipoic acid, vitamin E, vitamin C, Coenzyme Q10, and glutathione all interact with each other to produce antioxidant effects that they can’t do individually. To further complicate things, each person’s response is different, so ideally you’d have blood work done to measure your reaction to any supplements.

There is some info online at http://www.veris-online.org/
Sorry for the lack of other online resources- there’s a huge amount of half-baked info out there, and it’s easier to get reputable info the old fashion way at the moment :frowning:

Also, sorry for the lack of nice formatting for the above citations …

Arjuna34

[note: I shortened the link to prevent side-scrolling. -manhattan]

[Edited by manhattan on 09-24-2000 at 11:16 AM]

25

I almost forgot Linus Pauling’s famous book Cancer and Vitamin C. This is pretty much a useless reference, filled with anecdotal evidence instead of clinical evidence.

Arjuna34

26

More to the OP question is this CNN article about burnt fat causing cancer:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/dining/070500grill-meat.html

This article has a good summary of the current research, without making too many of the usual mainstream media mistakes :slight_smile:

Arjuna34

27

Arjuna34, Thanks for the research. It looks like what we have is (1) a lot of good chemistry research (I’d like to get grants to grill steaks), (2) even more speculation, some of it plausible, (3) only a little evidence suggesting that eating the burnt bits may increase the risk of breast cancer in women (I assume Tomcat is not a woman). I guess we all pay our money and take our choice: eat the burnt bits for 70 years taking a chance we may increase our risk of dying prematurely from cancer or we can choose to avoid the burnt bits and/or marinate the steak and/or spread tea or cherries on the steak, and/or take a lot of vitamin C for 70 years and maybe die later of cancer. I think I’ll just avoid driving on freeways as much as I can.

28

I have a hyper-smart friend who is very up-to-date on this type of stuff. He computed the expected average increase in his life-span due to not eating the burnt fat on one steak, and compared that to the time it took to trim the fat off. IIRC, the times were comparable, so he decided to eat the fat :slight_smile: Of course his results aren’t valid for anyone else since he factored in as much as he could about himself in his computations (not that they’re that valid anyway, given the ridiculous amount of assumptions you have to make- he just did it for fun).

Arjuna34