Researchers Show How Vitamin C Helps Fight Cancer

Some people believe, some do not, that antioxidants like vitamin C can prevent cancer. Linus Pauling was the first to make this statement about vitamin C and he was laughed at by some and he was a Nobel laureate.

Now a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins have proven Pauling right, but not the way most of those who have believed in vitamin C think it works. 

The standard belief is that vitamin C, and other oxidants as well, grab the volatile oxygen free radical molecules and prevent any damage that free radicals have been known to inflict on a person's DNA. However, the study just released by Johns Hopkins puts another twist on the situation.

This is one of the times that research produces a happy accident. The researchers did not expect to get the results they did. The evidence showed that the role of the antioxidants may be to stop a tumor's ability to grow under conditions where they are deprived of oxygen.

The researchers made their discovery using mice who had been implanted with one of two human cancers, lymphoma- blood cancer- or liver cancer. These cancers are similar in the fact that they both produce very high level of free radicals that can be suppressed by giving one of two antioxidants, vitamin C or N-acetylcysteine (NAC).

When they examined the cancer cells from the control group of mice who had not been fed the antioxidants, they expected to find DNA damage, but there was virtually none to be found. If there was no DNA damage, then it could not be a factor in developing cancer and the antioxidants cold not help by repairing DNA damage, like it was thought to.

The team set out to find what was really happening and they looked at a protein that had been discovered more than 10 years ago by one of the team members, Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D. The protein is named HIF-1 (hypoxia-induced factor. When they checked the mice cancer cells, it was present in large number, but in cells that had been treated with vitamin C, it had disappeared