Cancer Weakness Discovered: New Method Pushes Cancer Cells into Remission

Which makes sense. Chemo (limiting cell division, etc.) and/or starvation are "nuclear" options which rely on healthy cells weathering stress more so than cancer cells. Targeting (essentially assumed-to-be-novel) cancer cells specifically (say oncolytic viruses, pathway-blocking molecules or antibodies) seems extremely difficult without sheer luck of prior research matching particular tissues.

But they actually did effectively target them. Six out of six complete remissions.

> Telling people to stop eating a type of food doesn’t really help those who have cancer at the moment.

I disagree. Telling to not eat folate will help them.

If it was not true why are they giving you drugs to stop the folate cycle?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-01017-8

https://www.nature.com/articles/bjc201711

Why continue to eat something that has been proven over and over again to drive tumor growth?

It was LITERALLY how they found out that methotrexate worked.

https://cen.acs.org/food/diet-change-course-cancer/100/i33 Indeed, the very first potent cancer drugs were based on the effects of cell metabolism. In the late 1940s, while pediatric pathologist Sidney Farber was treating children with anemia—a condition brought about because they had leukemia —he found that using folate (vitamin B9) could make the leukemia advance surprisingly quickly. That led him to successfully treat their leukemia with methotrexate, a drug that inhibits folate activity. Methotrexate is still widely used against cancer and several other diseases today.

> How about we stop putting things in food until we can prove they don’t cause cancer.

I agree, but that doesn’t really help those who have cancer at the moment.

>Telling people to stop eating a type of food .

Some claim a ketogenic diet may help. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31399389/ . "Major conclusions: The ketogenic diet probably creates an unfavorable metabolic environment for cancer cells and thus can be regarded as a promising adjuvant as a patient-specific multifactorial therapy."

I am a lay person but:

* In the introduction of the linked BMJ article you can read:

"Folic acid is a synthetic form of the essential B vitamin folate, also named folacin, pteroylglutamic acid or vitamin B9. Folic acid is in the human body converted to 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, which also is the form of folate found in dietary sources and is particularly abundant in vegetables, fruits and grains. "

* In Wikipedia "folic acid" is redirected to "folate".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folic_acid

In the "folate" WP page you find this sentence:

"Manufactured folic acid, which is converted into folate by the body, is used as a dietary supplement and in food fortification as it is more stable during processing and storage."

> but I think more people should avoid folic acid

And of course, there's people on the opposite end of the spectrum. For stroke survivors with certain kinds of vascular causes, folic acid supplementation is encouraged to reduce the risk of future strokes.

> My understanding is that folic acid feeds the growth of inflammatory bacteria much more so than natural folate sources.

That comment warrants justification. Web searches are hard to formulate to support that. In the general literature, [1] is fairly typical and benign, not supportive. Can you provide some references?

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327290

> Your link is about folic acid supplements, NOT folate.

It does not matter and this show you know little about the folate cycle. DHFR, the enzyme that metabolizes Folic Acid, also bidirectionally converts DHF and THF (folates).

https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/P00374/entry

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jack-Fletcher-3/publica...

> Folic acid is shelf-stable pro-vitamin that about 60-70% of the population is able to turn into Vitamin B9.

That would mean 60 to 70% of the population cannot process folate, not just folic acid. When did you even get this number?

> Poor methylators are on a spectrum, from 'not very good methylators' to 'very poor methylators'. I don't really grok biochemistry,

No, you do not grok at all well. You know who does? Me.

Thanks for the note about my father.

But I want to show you how ridiculous it is for them to say that folic acid reduces the toxicity of PEMETREXED.

The side effect of the drug is because it inhibits the folate cycle, which is why it stops cancer. So they want to give folate to someone who’s taking an anti-folate medication? Every oncologist I ask about this cannot give me a straight answer.

The drug inhibit DHFR. When you take full late, you need the HFR to metabolize the folate. It’s just ridiculous and doctors have no understanding of basic nutritional biology. They were never taught in schools and they don’t care about it.

Pemetrexed is chemically similar to folic acid and is in the class of chemotherapy drugs called folate antimetabolites. It works by inhibiting three enzymes used in purine and pyrimidine synthesis—thymidylate synthase (TS), dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), and glycinamide ribonucleotide formyltransferase[16][17] (GARFT). By inhibiting the formation of precursor purine and pyrimidine nucleotides, pemetrexed prevents the formation of DNA and RNA, which are required for the growth and survival of both normal cells and cancer cells.