The Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson has warned that cancer patients could be hindering their own treatment by taking multi-vitamin pills with antioxidants. The health benefits of supplements containing antioxidants such as vitamins A, C and E are the subject of debate; while some studies suggest that they could offer protection against cancer, other studies show that people taking multi-vitamins may not benefit from the supplementation or even seem to slightly shorten the lives of those who take them...
Professor Watson, who with Francis Crick discovered the ''double helix'' structure of DNA in 1953, also argues that such pills could be doing more harm than good. In a new paper, he claims that the reason late-stage cancers often become untreatable is that they produce high levels of antioxidants which stop highly effective oxidant therapies from working. Therefore, the time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use, much more likely causes than prevents cancer.
January 11, 2013
Source: Dept of Toxicology, Maastricht University
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4157390913990570048#editor/target=post;postID=3138316986882336177
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