I have a friend in LA who runs the Nutritional Oncology Research Institute.
Now in 15 years plus of research, I know a lot of the ins and outs of a lot of natural therapies. From Liposomes to Cannabinoids, and Diets to Lifestyle.
I spoke with him recently, and he says he is very excited about the amino acid Taurine. 10 grams a day has a very potent anti cancer effect.
I expressed concerns about Taurine can boost testosterone levels, which has implications with hormonally driven cancers.
He did concur that the foundation of any treatment should be based on Methionine restriction cycles and a vegan diet. He then has his patients take high doses of sodium selenite amongst other agents. He gets remarkable results.
Personally if I had cancer, the first thing I would do is a week long water fast before anything else.
Food for thought, or rather lack of, for those interested in this field.
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taylor123
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How low does the methionine have to be ? My husband would do low methionine fasting around chemo time when he was on the Carbo/Taxotere routine. With the mini chemo we are on now we are not doing that. But we do eat plant based vegan. If there are any papers about the Taurine I would appreciate a link so that I could read them.
There is almost nothing in the PCa literature to suggest that taurine would be beneficial, so I'm interested in how your friend came up with 10g/day as a dose, & just how "potent" the effect is.
The irony is that I was very interested in taurine about 10 years ago when my wife had very bad A-Fib. A chaotic heartbeat took her to ER. She was put on a drug that she was told she would need for the rest of her life.
Within a week her heart was racing for no reason & her doctor told her she needed to double up on the drug. (ER had warned her not to exceed the dose.)
But the crazy episodes continued. I came across a well-reasoned hypothesis that taurine might help, but in some cases, arginine might also be needed. She began using 2g taurine + 1g arginine, 3 times/day on an empty stomach. The events stopped within two days. She cut back to once/day. & now she often forgets, but starts up again at the first sign of a heart flutter.
From what I could gather, taurine insufficiency increases with age.
However, the body doesn't seem to need much (far less than 1g), & omnivores should be able to get that from fish or meat. Taurine is one of the numerous micronutrients that are low in a vegan diet:
"Plasma taurine levels are lower, and urinary taurine excretion is substantially lower, in vegetarians than in omnivores. Platelets are rich in taurine, which functions physiologically to dampen the calcium influx evoked by aggregating agonists--thereby down-regulating platelet aggregation. Supplemental intakes of taurine as low as 400 mg daily have been reported to markedly decrease the sensitivity of platelets to aggregating agonists ex vivo. Although the average daily intake of taurine from omnivore diets may be only about 150 mg, it is credible to speculate that a supplemental intake of this magnitude could normalize the platelet function of vegetarians in the long term; in any case, this thesis is readily testable clinically. Taurine is just one of a number of nutrients found almost solely in animal products--"carninutrients"--which are rational candidates for supplementation in vegans." [1]
For my wife, taurine treatment improved blood flow to the heart. At that time, it seemed to me that an improved blood flow to my cancer was not a good thing. Subsequently, I realised that the hypoxia caused by a tumor outgrowing its blood supply, induced a change in affected tumor cells that made them almost impossible to treat. Consequently, I use a nitroglycerine patch to try to defer hypoxia. There is a human study to back that up [2].
The one PCa-taurine paper that seems worth mentioning is recent. It is a cell study from S. Korea, which found that taurine could inhibit epithelial to mesenchymal transition [EMT].
EMT is a shape-shifting trick that cancer cells may use during metastasis [4]. It is definitely something that we should try to inhibit. Can it be achieved in the body? Would 10g do it?
Animal studies aside, do guys on the bodybuilding sites reported success with taurine in raising testosterone? In any case, I doubt this would happen during ADT. & would it be consequential for those not on ADT?
Your friend uses "Methionine restriction cycles and a vegan diet."
Whatever my feelings are about veganism, it is an ideal way to restrict micronutrients.
In particular, amino acid restriction means that the body is unable to commit to growth. Hence, levels of IGF-I (insulin-like growth factor I) will be much reduced. A very good thing.
Methionine is an essential amino acid - but more about that below. It is a methyl donor. Methionine converts to SAM (SAMe) which delivers methyl throughout the body. PCa is greedy for methyl & uses it to silence tumor suppressor genes.
Most diets do not contain a lot of methionine. Consequently, most of our methionine is from recycling. When SAM drops off its methyl we are left with homocysteine. This can be converted back to methionine if there is a methyl donor in the diet. Folate (or folic acid) is the usual donor. Thus, methionine restriction has to involve folate restriction.
Folate comes from greens (foliage), but since many of us don't eat our greens, the FDA has seen fit to add folic acid to grains (including rice). It would be a very restrictive vegan diet if it did not include greens & grains. For methionine itself:
"High levels of methionine can be found in eggs, sesame seeds, Brazil nuts, fish, meats and some other plant seeds; methionine is also found in cereal grains." [5]
I don't know what is meant by a restrictive "cycle". One month on, one month off sort of thing?
He uses sodium selenite. Good for him. It is looked down on since it is inorganic. Studies tend to use other more bioavailable forms such as L-selenomethionine or L-methylselenocysteine. Selenium conjugated with methionine will mostly find that it has become a building block of protein. & we shouldn't take any chemical that has "methyl" as part of its name. It will be a potential methyl donor.
Taurine has no side effects as far as I recall. It should be taken between meals. If anyone sees a lengthening of PSA doubling time, or any potent effect, please report it. Can't do any harm IMO.
You write "Folate (or folic acid) is the usual donor. Thus, methionine restriction has to involve folate restriction." I tried to limit my folate and other nutrients that tend to increase methionine and I wound up with high homocysteine values. Is this a Hobson's Choice? Heart disease, Alzheimer's vs. cancer? Vegan or carnivore, both diets provide methyl donors. I still feel that the most effective of the dietary approaches is CR, which, as I have stated in the past, few of us want to do. I have been taking 2,500 mg of magnesium taurate every evening for over a year. Why, I can't remember! (But I will find out). As for Sodium Selenite (inorganic selenium), "When sodium selenite enters the cell, it interacts with two molecules of glutathione producing hydrogen selenide. Hydrogen selenide is used as a building block of selenoproteins. However, excess hydrogen selenide activates the synthesis of superoxide anion, a powerful oxidant." In tests on prostate cells sodium selenite induced apoptosis and reduced the level of active glutathione in cells to near zero. "Cancer Interventions--The New Protocol (CTP8.8) Basic Principles, Strategies and Interventions" March, 2011.
"Hobson's Choice?" That depends. There is a Scandinavian intervention study where homocysteine was lowered. For most men, folic acid &/or B12 takes care of that. Unfortunately, there were just as many cardio events as in the control arm. Homocysteine might simply be an artifact of heart risk caused by something else (not folate or B12 deficiency or elevated homocysteine.) I don't know if they figured it out. Here is a 2007 review of the issue: [1].
A Swedish study noted a link between insulin & homocysteine [2]: "Associations between serum insulin and homocysteine in a Swedish population-a potential link between the metabolic syndrome {MetS} and hyperhomocysteinemia: the Skaraborg project.
It's interesting you mention the positive effect taurine had on your Wife's chaotic heartbeat. I also know somebody who rectified their atrial fibrillation with it. Interesting note on the arginine as well.
So, the mechanism behind the protocol is to sensitise the cancer cells via glutathione depletion which is a consequence to the methionine restriction. This increases oxidative stress within the cancer cell. The sodium selenite is the final oxidation punch to push the cells to demise. He uses Sodium Selenite because it is quite simply, the most effective form of it. Inorganic or not, I don't know of anybody on his protocol who has had any toxicity from the selenium or side effects. And lets be honest, considering the highly toxic chemicals cancer patients have to often succumb to, taking intermittent high doses of sodium selenite is nothing.
We know cancer cells are damaged mitochondria replicating out of control, and I have long shared the view that we need further oxidative stress to eliminate them. This is why high doses of liposomal vitamin c can have a positive effect, it's due to the oxidation it causes.
I don't agree our diets are low in methionine. Methionine is abundant in animal protein, and in the west we are consuming far far more than we ever have, or ever needed.
I must confess he mentioned adding taurine to his protocol in a passing comment, and I have not yet been able to fully converse on it with him. However I too believe, amino acids hold vital keys in beating this insidious foe.
I've been on this journey a long time with Dad, and I am still to this day met anybody who has impressed me as much as Mark Simon. He is incredibly knowledgeable. His passion for this derives from him losing his Wife to breast cancer, before he turned his genius to this work.
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