Health - Vitamin C and Cancer

Cancer is in the air, this week, it seems. Someone I know just had a double mastectomy, and then someone else I know just had a mastectomy, and someone else is having a hysterectomy, so I kinda have to write about health issues this week. Bear with me.

Via Raw Story comes a report of a study done at Johns Hopkins which explains exactly how Vitamin C fights cancer - and its not at all what researchers have thought for the past X years.

Vitamin C can help to prevent cancer, but not the way that scientists thought, according to a study published Monday in the United States.

Scientists have long thought that vitamin C and other antioxidants help to fight cancer growth by grabbing volatile oxygen free radical molecules and preventing them doing damage to DNA.

But researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that antioxidants play a different role in the fight: they destabilize a tumor’s ability to grow under oxygen-starved conditions.

Before you rush out to buy that giant bottle of supplements, though, the researchers would like you to know that their study is still in its early stages.

OTOH, what can it hurt to make sure you get plenty of foods that contain vitamins C and D, and bag the buttered rolls and steaks and potatoes and pastries and sodas and snacks and ... et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

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