“Natural News” Takes Idiotic to the Next Level
November 13th, 2009
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Why do I even bother going to Naturalnews.com? Sometimes someone points out how badly misinformed it is, and I go, and each time, a little piece of me seems to die (metaphorically) as I see comments by others who buy into the endless stream of false and downright idiotic crap they spew. At least it works well as a one-stop-shop for all the quackery you can think of. Chances are, if there is medical advice that is false, it can be found there…
Bicarbonate of soda, also known as sodium bicarbonate or most commonly as “Baking Soda.” Is some pretty damn useful stuff and is about as versatile as household chemicals get. It’s a mild abrasive, an alkaline, it’s absorbent, water soluble and non toxic. Because of these properties it can be used as a general purpose cleaning agent, a deodorant, a leavening agent in cooking, a general purpose alkaline, for neutralizing acidic substances or as a means of generating CO2, such as when mixed with vinegar. It has useful chemical properties that help take the oxidation off oft tarnished silver and make it useful in numerous other capacities. A teaspoon will cure heartburn and in medical settings, it is occasionally used to treat conditions like acidosis.
It has it’s limits though. So while it might work as a heartburn cure, it’s not going to work as a cure for say….. cancer. Of course, that’s not what the nut balls at Natural News would like you to think:
Bicarbonate of Soda Used to Cure Stage Four Prostate Cancer:
(NaturalNews) Bicarbonate of soda or baking soda to cure cancer? The amazing abundance of alternative cancer cures is more than most of us know, close to 400! The more notorious alternative cancer cures are the ones that get attacked viciously by the Medical Monopoly. Those cures are the ones that begin to develop into public practices that threaten their monopoly.
Then there are those inexpensive non-toxic remedies that slip by the Medical Monopoly virtually unnoticed. Some become like folk medicines that can be administered individually. This type of application worked for Vernon Johnston. He used baking soda and molasses as the driving force to recover from aggressive stage 4 prostate cancer, which had even metastasized into his bone matter!
….
But he also advocates the oral aluminum free baking soda with maple syrup method in his book Sodium Bicarbonate – Rich Man`s Poor Man`s Cancer Treatment. Dr. Sircus is also a proponent of high magnesium dosages, usually transdermal, to assist healing with many maladies including cancer.
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After a few weeks, Vernon received a medical examination that confirmed his complete cure from prostate and bone cancer! His story was written up in a local California newspaper, The Valley News. Vernon`s case proves Mark Sircus`s point about oral sodium bicarbonate`s potential for healing any cancer, not just cancer in the digestive tract as Dr. Simoncini`s maintains.
Dr. Mark Sircus in his September 2009 newsletter stated: “My overall treatment philosophy for cancer is to trap the cancer in a deadly crossfire and beat the crap out of it with safe concentrated nutritional medicinals and solid health practices including plenty of sun exposure, exercise, touch via massage, and breathing techniques that you can see on Vernon`s site. But, as Vernon`s case demonstrates, the sodium bicarbonate is the lead . . . power . . . itself”.
…
We are fortunate that despite all the Medical Mafia`s efforts to suppress natural cancer cures, so many options are still available. Do your own research. You can start here in the sources section.
Of course, it’s worth noting that there is no independent confirmation that the individual in question ever had cancer to begin with or that the cancer has really gone away and is not still festering and slowly killing him. Even these reports are true, a single isolated case, with little documentation and no controls proves nothing. It just about makes me weep that any other fellow member of the human species could be gullible and ignorant enough to actually believe this, and I do know, some people WILL believe this.
Anyone who understands the first thing about cancer and cancer treatment will realize that there is no magic formula to kill cancer cells. Cancer is a condition (or rather a number of conditions) in which the body’s own cells divide out of control, invading healthy tissue and damaging organs. Targeting and destroying these cells is no simple task, and doing so almost always involves some collateral damage to healthy cells. Except in the narrow circumstance where a cancerous growth is self-contained and easily removed by surgery, it comes down to trying to pick chemicals, drugs and therapies that will have a greater impact on the cancerous cells than the healthy ones.
Considering that billions of dollars and decades of research have gone into trying to find compounds that are even marginally better than existing treatments at selectively killing cancer cells, claiming that simple baking soda will “naturally” and magically fix one of the most complex problems in medicine seems absurd even for the likes of “natural news.” Of course, if this were the case, it would also have been nearly impossible to keep this information secret, as is being claimed.
Finally, as has been mentioned before: the big pharmaceutical companies, despite what some might claim, have not been able to banish all natural, non-patentable compounds from use in medicine. For treatment of mania and bipolar mood disorders, the gold standard remains simple, inexpensive, lithium salts. The most common blood thinning drug for continuing therapeutic use in heart patients is a synthetic version of a compound derived from tree bark and decades out of patent, known as aspirin. While many medicines and treatments are expensive and complex, millions of lives have been saved by substances as common and inexpensive as aspirin, iodine, rubbing alcohol or quinine.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 13th, 2013 at 12:06 pm
I’m not saying it’s unappreciated, it’s just that it becomes tiresome to deal with this sort of troll, who often have nothing better to do with their time but spin their bizarre fantasies into long posts, and most of the rest of us have more productive things with which to occupy our time than deconstructing their ravings. As long as someone is willing to step into the breach each time it’s fine, but in the long run they seem to have more sitzfleisch and eventually wear the sandbaggers down.
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May 13th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
Correction, I meant to say that lactic acid “INCREASES metastasis and pain in cancer patients”. (I tried to post this yesterday, but it failed to post, having lot’s of problems trying to post lately.)
Your logic is so flawed.
Inheriting genes that are more susceptible to cancer is not the same as inheriting flawed genes, or cancer mutations, etc. It simply means those people need to try harder to prevent cancer than others without the gene – eg. through diet and exercise, etc.
It’s the same as those who inherit genes that give them a lower metabolism than others. They naturally battle more to loose weight than others and have to exercise that bit more and eat that bit more healthily to keep the weight off. It is not guaranteed that they will get fat, like it is not guaranteed that some people will get breast cancer, or that there is a faulty “breast cancer gene”. However when it comes to those born with a childhood cancer, or who develop a childhood cancer early on it is the result of environmental causes in the mother’s body, or even affecting her DNA during pregnancy (or possibly even before she became pregnant), or the same causes affecting the child from a young age (after birth), or even affecting the father’s DNA before conception. If this were not true then those with this gene that causes childhood cancers would die before they can reproduce and that gene would have long ago been bred out of existence. (I’m talking here NOT about a gene that makes cancer more likely at any time of your life, but those genes accused of causing childhood cancers. It can only be enviromental causes due to this valid reasoning.)…continued below…
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May 13th, 2013 at 1:58 pm
test comment…won’t go through…testing…
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May 13th, 2013 at 2:01 pm
…And yes, amongst other causes, it has been proven that often breast cancer is linked to increased mould fermented cheese consumption. The mould releases afla-toxins which can induce breast cancer. They have found traces of these toxins in breast cancer biopsies. Additionally Dr Simoncini didn’t claim cancer was caused by a fungus, he claimed it was a fungus which is somewhat true since most, or all tumors consist of cancer cells intertwined with fungus/mould/yeast. Source for this entire paragraph below including more details on the mould fermented cheese that you can scrutinize in more detail from the study that was done.
See : naturalnews.com/035876_baking_soda_cancer_fungus.html
…continued below…
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May 13th, 2013 at 2:02 pm
TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS TAXPAYERS – THEY PAY THEY PAY THEY PAY THEY PAY– NOT FREE, NOT FREE, NOT FREE NOT FREE – GET IT YET ? GET IT YET? GET IT YET? GET IT YET? Big Pharma influences the government, government regulates their natural health opposition into the ground when it comes to private practice and buys their drugs (with taxpayer’s money) to use in “free” government hospitals. Get it? They don’t care about saving money on cheaper alternatives in government hospitals, just like they don’t care about saving money by not starting wars all over the Middle East. (wonder which country benefits from that?)
I mentioned Pauling’s prizes purely because they give him credibility – that’s why! (although earning a Nobel prize is not the only way to earn credibility). Credibility that somehow just suddenly seems to evaporate into thin air according to you simply because his newer breakthrough’s were too revolutionary for the mainstream to accept. Sorry I’m not buying it (and many doctors and PhD’s out there are also not buying it although they may be in a brave minority)
This just get’s better by the second. So now you are saying that acidic conditions in the body can shrink tumours, even though alkalkine conditions stop them from metastasizing. Don’t you think that is somewhat contradictory? Even if both theories were true, and increasing acid levels can shrink tumours, if the tumours are already more acid than the surrounding tissue, they would need to be even more acid to reduce tumour size (kill cancer cells due to over acidity). This probably would cause the acidosis you speak of and maybe kill the patient and not only that but it would promote metastasis which can be prevented by reducing acidity as evidenced by the mouse bicarbonate trial I posted.
CONTINUED BELOW…
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May 13th, 2013 at 2:04 pm
To repeat the study I quoted was from the same journal as yours and was much newer than your one. You ask: “Later studies that refute its findings?” Yes, that is exactly what I am saying with my later study – are you that slow to catch on? You say “Metabolic acidosis is something you see in the end stages of cancer, not at the beginning. It is treated with sodium bicarbonate to restore a normal pH, not to kill the cancer.” – - – I never said it could kill cancer, or reduce tumour sizes. The acidosis you speak of is a process with a beginning and an end. It’s starts when tumours start forming and is only treated with bicarbonate when it becomes so bad that it threatens the person’s life. This is when you decide to call it acidosis, but the truth is that is can and should be treated much earlier and that will yield positive results from day one as it did in the animal trial I linked to.
They started using it from early on with those animals to slow the metastasis from the earliest stages which it did relatively well. They did not do it only when the animals lives were threatened with full blown acidosis. If there was not at least mild acidosis at the very beggining, then the bicarbonate would have had much less effect in reducing metastasis, than what it did in that trial. You say: “In most cancer patients the blood pH is normal and any bicarbonate ingested or injected is simply excreted in the urine – it can be useful to alkalize the urine in patients on some chemotherapy drugs, to prevent renal calculi.” – - – If ingesting, or injecting bicarbonate doesn’t increase PH (as you imply) and it is just “excreted into the urine” then how does it reduce acidosis which is a low blood PH is it not? Why did they give it to those mice in their drinking water and how did it slow metastasis if it did not do so through a change of PH in the blood. I’m not even an MD and I’m running circles around you. Maybe you should apply as a lab assistant at another place with more competent professors.
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May 13th, 2013 at 2:11 pm
Journals do NOT retract studies nearly often enough – that is precisely why there are so many contradictory studies out there. If there are 30 studies out there that support Vitamin C as a treatment for heart disease and there are 30 that show no benefit of Vitamin C, the Big Pharma inspired authorities reach a consensus that “this proves Vitamin C does not work for heart disease for anyone”, instead of asking why the studies are contradicting themselves when they should not be doing that if they were carried out correctly. If they were carried out correctly they should support the same conclusion (at least for the same age groups, etc.)
You say: “The hemp oil literature is interesting, but is far from proven, and has nothing at all to do with bicarbonate in the treatment of cancer.”
That’s like saying radiotherapy has not nothing to do with chemo in treating cancer, or that surgery has nothing to do with chemo in treating cancer. They all form part of a group of treatments that in combination are more effective than alone, you seem to accept that, but deny alternatives the same opportunity to work together holistically so that you can attack them individually as not effective enough. However, even taken individually, they are far more effective and/or safer than chemo and radiation individually with medium to long term use…
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May 13th, 2013 at 2:12 pm
You say: “A natural treatment can be horribly toxic and remain popular as a treatment for centuries without anyone noticing.” If it is so “horribly toxic” then how can it “remain popular as a treatment for centuries without anyone noticing.” Maybe you mean mildly toxic, or something. Chemo is the only thing that is “horribly toxic” that keeps getting used for years, or decades (and if Big Pharma allows for centuries) without people objecting to the severe and immediate side effects that get progressively worse.
“RDA is set higher than is required to prevent deficiency” – RUBBISH!!! It is often set too low, this is why there is often revision of the RDA amounts and they are INCREASED more often than not, NOT decreased!!! There is NO magnesium in white bread, white rice and white pasta unless it is added artificially (which it often isn’t). Magnesium is found in the bran of wheat, rice and oats, etc. These foods don’t contain this bran which gets removed from them. Urbanized westerners eat more of this processed food than others (especially American’s). It’s common logic, so if your statistics don’t agree with common logic, then there is something wrong with your statistics. (maybe they are from a small group of westerners who like brown bread, rice, etc. more than the whiter varieties, or there is some other flaw in your stats.)
Regarding your link to the abstract on osteoporosis, here are some quotes from what it says:
“The exact disease burden is difficult to quantify because of the paucity of data.”
“Population-specific normative data for bone density are lacking in large parts of the world.”
So how then would they conclude that: “Osteoporosis poses a huge challenge in developing countries due to demographic transition and aging of the population coupled with limited availability of resources”
CONTINUED BELOW…
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May 13th, 2013 at 2:14 pm
Of course if you were looking at the poorest PARTS of the developing world where SOME are starving to death, then yes, I’m sure those people will be sick in more ways than one. “Aging population”, what do they even mean by that? Do they mean the third world has more old people than the west and therefore more osteoporosis? Even if that were true, that would not be a valid way of comparing the two and would be unfair statistically speaking.
Hemp oil has been successful in many animal models – for cancer, but never gets to human trials, so of course the mainstream will say “interesting, but not there yet”. As long as it is prevented getting to human trials, they will keep saying that ad infinitum. When it does the results will probably be manipulated, or criticised for invalid reasons. This is what happens time and time again. Individual testimonials of those using hemp and other medicinals for cancer confirm it, but of course their testimonies are not “scientific enough” because they were not part of a clinical trial. This is why I linked to pages revealing what is happening in clinical trials on a massive scale and who funds most of them and when not funded by Big Pharma, government, or trials like Linus Pauling’s often show better results for natural alternatives, or worse results for drugs. I agree that there is limited “scientific” info on treatments like bicarbonate for cancer, but that is by design and what we do have so far is very encouraging.
Chermotherapy, as far as far as I know, does not shrink tumour size, but reduces metastasis by killing fast dividing cancer cells in the bloodstream which are still left after tumour resection by surgery, yet bicarbonate is shown in that study to do the same in mice models without side effects that limit longer term use. Yet, it is still the chemo you favour and the alternatives you hate all because one particular alternative we are discussing cannot reduce tumour size – BUT NEITHER CAN CHEMO!
Logically, if you applied bicarbonate to those mice for a longer period it may have had an even greater effect at reducing metastasis to the point of zero percent spread (i.e. tumours remain, but 100% of metastasis is reduced). Over a longer period than that you may even notice the original tumours shrinking due to extended use of bicarbonate who knows, the benefit of reducing metastasis buys to extra time to use a treatment for ‘that much’ longer enabling it to work ‘that much’ better. Have you not wondered how much more effective bicarbonate would be if the original tumour was removed by surgery and the bicarbonate was administered? Think about how much more successful that would have been in those mice models I linked to. How much better exactly remains to be seen in all these cases, unless you want to include personal testimonials as evidence. I have read that theoretically if you increase PH high enough and quickly enough using cesium chloride you can weaken the original tumour cells so badly that the immune system can destroy them, and they can even, if certain cases revert to normal, healthy cells.
This makes me think that is may be true that increasing acidity can also have a similar effect like you said, because although cancer calls are more acidic – even they must have an acidity threshold limit. However since they are naturally acidic and acidity helps them spread, it makes sense to rather reduce it as much as possible into the opposite direction.
If this is true, it may or may not include inducing temporary alkalosis. If it does, then we should ask, what is worse? temporary alkalosis? or long term organ damage and other side effects from chemo? I am not necessary advocating raising PH too high, since moderately high PH has already been shown effective in mouse models (but you don’t consider it effective if it reduces metastasis and not tumour size, despite that fact that we have surgery to reduce tumour size in many cases which can be combined with bicarbonate treatment.) This large paragraph is mainly hypothetical, although there is some evidence of it in testimonials and even in studies by doctors not recognised by the mainstream. –
A. KEITH BREWER, Ph.D. :
http://www.cancer-coverup.com/brewer/printbrewerreport.htm
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May 13th, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Chris (part one) said:
So what you’re saying is you don’t believe in random genetic errors and mutations. You will not allow that cancer can sometimes be caused by bad genetic luck. No doubt this affords you some amount of comfort, believing that you have control over cancer. You don’t. You can reduce risk factors, but sometimes, it just plain happens.
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May 13th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
…Above link refers to cesium chloride therapy another, possibly more effective way at increasing PH.
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May 13th, 2013 at 4:08 pm
Shafe as I said, “If this were not true then those with this gene that causes childhood cancers would die before they can reproduce and that gene would have long ago been bred out of existence.”
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May 13th, 2013 at 4:51 pm
Chris (part 9) said:
But that’s not even close to true. Genetic predisposition to cancer is no guarantee that you will get cancer before you procreate or even at all. And there’s nothing that says that a given cancer gene can’t express itself at different ages in different people. The same gene that kills one boy at 5 years old may kill a man at 35. But in most carriers, it won’t express at all.
Further, the way I read your writings, you don’t allow for the occurence of random genetic errors and mutations that have no genetic or environmental cause. Sometimes cancer is just bad luck, and no amount of juicing or colonics will change that.
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May 13th, 2013 at 5:22 pm
Chris,
No contradiction at all. Cancer cells, like normal cells, grow better in slightly alkaline conditions, and behave more normally i.e. they don’t try to spread to other parts of the body or grow their own blood supply.
That’s true, neither acidosis or alkalosis are practical methods of treating cancer because the best evidence we have suggests that normal cells and cancer cells prefer the same pH conditions. Both acidosis and alkalosis would harm the patient as much as the tumors. That’s the problem with cancer, as it is made up of the patient’s own cells.
That is supported by these references showing that alkaline pH stimulates bladder tumor growth in rats:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2548750
And this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2548752
And this one, which found that both alkaline and acid urine stimulated cancer:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10654592
Acidosis occurs when a patient is either ingesting or producing more acids than they can excrete, in diabetic ketoacidosis, kidney failure, salicylate poisoning, COPD etc.. In those cases bicarbonate can help to correct the acidosis. In the vast majority of people who are not acidotic, the body will just excrete the excess bicarbonate.
They gave them amounts of bicarbonate that didn’t affect the blood pH. They speculated that it might have had its effects through increasing the buffering capacity of the animals’ blood.
If you really think that you are seriously deluded.
I’ll have to explain to all the professors from Cambridge University in the UK that taught me. That should give them a good laugh.
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May 13th, 2013 at 5:24 pm
Re: Aristolochia:
No, I mean toxic enough to cause kidney failure and renal cell carcinoma in hundreds of people.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12495362
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22493262
There is less magnesium in white bread, rice and pasta, than in their brown counterparts but it isn’t true they contain none at all, which is why it is a good idea to eat more wholewheat, and plenty of fresh vegetables. There are lots of good sources of magnesium including chocolate, refried beans, canned tomato paste and spinach. A Big Mac contains more than 10% of the RDA for magnesium, and a cup of semi-sweet chocolate contains almost half the RDA.
Except it isn’t true that these foods don’t contain magnesium. I’m not referring to stats, I’m referring to my personal experience over several years either measuring serum magnesium or authorizing magnesium reports. Deficiency is rare, as I wrote earlier. Sorry if that doesn’t agree with the garbage you have read on alternative health websites, many of which will try to convince you that your body is unable to absorb magnesium from food, and that you have to buy magnesium chloride solution (they call it magnesium oil as it sounds better) to rub on your skin to absorb it. Why it doesn’t occur to people to wonder why our bodies would only be able to get enough magnesium this way, beats me. People eating the Standard American Diet are not short of any nutrients, unless they eat a really weird diet (which happens) but they consume far too many calories. It really is as simple as that.
You don’t allow your profound ignorance in multiple areas to limit the nonsense you come out with, do you? Have you ever spent any time in a developing country? Osteoporosis is a serious problem across the developing world. In India for example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9111786
“Aging population” means an increasing proportion of the population is elderly because of increased life expectancy, mainly due to conventional medicine, instead of the traditional medicine these people used to use that limited their life expectancy to around 40. You painted this ridiculous picture of people in the developing world all eating brown rice and not suffering from osteoporosis which is just wrong.
You, sir, are an ignorant buffoon. Of course chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, can shrink tumors. Both these treatments are designed to kill cancer cells. Chemotherapy is often used to shrink a tumor before surgery, to make it easier to remove.
What do you mean, “without side effects that limit longer term use”? All the mice in this study died, of their cancers. It may turn out that bicarbonate will be a useful addition to cancer treatment, but it is most certainly not the miracle cure that Simoncini claims, and will not work without other chemotherapeutic drugs. There is still the big question of the relative size of a mouse and a human and the relative size of tumors. Many treatments that are effective in mice and rats have failed in humans.
From what I understand, any remaining cancer cells would have grown better thanks to the bicarbonate, if it had any effect at all.
The very first thing I found when searching for cesium chloride and cancer was a case of cardiotoxicity in a woman taking it as a cancer treatment.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19586358
Another study on rats showed that some but not all tumors’ growth slowed, but the rats suffered severe toxicity. It concluded that, “CsCl may have a therapeutic effect against prostate cancer, but one cannot overlook the acute toxicities also described”.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17294190
I’m not impressed.
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May 13th, 2013 at 6:00 pm
I missed this:
You do know that reading Natural News has been proven to damage your brain, don’t you? They were referring to this study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3091896
It found an association between fatty cheeses and breast cancer, but larger and more recent studies refute this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15213021
Aflatoxins usually come from moldy peanuts or brazil nuts and can cause liver cancer. Blue cheeses do not contain aflatoxins unless something has gone very badly wrong.
Absolute nonsense. In all my years working in diagnostic pathology I never heard of any tumor that consisted of “cancer cells intertwined with fungus/mould/yeast”. Simoncini got it badly wrong. He quotes on his websites some studies that found a small number of cancer patients had positive blood cultures for fungal infections, most of these infections were candida. He misinterprets this to mean that most cancer patients have systemic candida infections, which is not true. In any case, bicarbonate doesn’t kill fungus, antifungal drugs do, but antifungal drugs don’t cure cancer either.
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May 13th, 2013 at 7:52 pm
Bladder cancer is probably one of the few exceptions to the rule, but not so with other cancers as evidenced by the trial in question here:
You say: “Cancer cells, like normal cells, grow better in slightly alkaline conditions”.
Referring to the cancer cells, if by “grow”, you mean “metastasize”, then:
Why do they say: “…Here, we show that oral NaHCO3 selectively increased the pH of tumors and REDUCED the formation of spontaneous metastases in mouse models of metastatic BREAST cancer. This treatment regimen was shown to significantly increase the extracellular pH, but not the intracellular pH, of tumors by 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy and the export of acid from growing tumors by fluorescence microscopy of tumors grown in window chambers…The above data have shown that oral bicarbonate therapy significantly reduced the incidence of metastases in experimental models of BREAST and PROSTATE cancer” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834485/
Let’s start there, then I will address you other comments.
Care to explain?
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May 13th, 2013 at 8:16 pm
Shafe said:
I think this is a big part of why people fall for supplements, complementary and alternative medicine.
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May 14th, 2013 at 2:40 am
Chris,
You don’t understand what “metastasize means either? Oh dear. OK, here’s a quick, very simplified, ‘cancer for dummies’.
When a solid malignant tumor grows it often becomes encapsulated and outgrows its blood supply, so the middle of it dies, due to lack of oxygen and glucose and an inability to get rid of waste products leading to increased acidity, among other things. So you end up with a mass of rotting necrotic tissue in the center of a layer of cancerous cells growing outwards. This is what I mean by cancer growth or progression. If the cancer is invasive, it infiltrates the normal tissue surrounding the tumor, making it harder to surgically remove completely. If not, the tumor just gets bigger and bigger until it is treated or crushes an essential organ or otherwise kills the patient.
Metastasis refers to cancer cells from one part of the body forming secondary malignant growths at a distance from the primary site. Breast cancer, for example, often leads to metastases in bone. These are tumors in the bones, but made up from breast cancer cells, so they are still breast cancer, not bone cancer, aka bony metastases.So tumor progression (or growth) and metastases are two very different things. Preventing metastasis is important, but if you don’t stop tumor progression somehow, the patient will still eventually die (like those mice did).
The passage you quoted explains this, I notice:
Though I’m guessing that you don’t understand what distal, colonization, proximal and invasation mean either. Oh, and “experimental models” are just that, experimental. There are many, many potential cancer treatments that showed promise in experimental models but failed at the first human hurdle.
For someone who thinks they are running rings around me you sure do fall over a lot.
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May 14th, 2013 at 2:53 am
I should perhaps clarify that what I am suggesting is that malignant tumors are fighting for survival as they outgrow their blood supply, being starved of glucose and oxygen and poisoned from the inside by their own waste products, which changes their metabolism and induces large numbers of mutations allowing microevolution. making them more likely to metastasize, form their own blood supply through angiogenesis and develop resistance to treatment, whether conventional or not.
Normal cells don’t normally spontaneously travel off and start growing elsewhere in the body. If they do they cause problems, e.g. endometriosis. Normal cells don’t usually grow additional blood supplies either. Both these are unusual characteristics of cancers that bicarbonate appears to reduce in the experimental mouse model, I suspect through reducing the microevolutionary pressure of the acidity inside the tumor. Normalizing cancer cells would be a useful thing to be able to do, but unless bicarbonate stops tumor growth, which in this study it did not, it will only be a small part of an effective cancer treatment.
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May 14th, 2013 at 3:55 am
Anon said:
I’m sure you are right. It would be nice if there was some diet or lifestyle that could guarantee us health, and although this is what many forms of CAM promise, it’s a false promise. There are lots of things that damage our DNA, as I mentioned before, including free radicals that are a part of normal metabolism. Our bodies repair that damage, but it isn’t 100% effective, and sometimes the imperfectly repaired damage will lead to cancer. It is also becoming clear that cancer isn’t one disease, it is thousands of diseases, and even in a single tumor there may be many different cancers, due to the microevolution I talked about earlier. If diet can’t prevent cancer, it seems exceedingly unlikely it can cure cancer once it is established, yet that doesn’t stop the likes of Chris from claiming it can.
Chris keeps insisting that CAM treatments, “are far more effective and/or safer than chemo and radiation individually with medium to long term use…” yet provides no evidence at all to support this claim. It’s worth looking at the clinical trial of the Gonzalez protocol for pancreatic cancer compared with conventional chemotherapy, which is based on Gerson therapy, often touted as a cancer treatment. Gonzalez claimed that his regimen of juices, supplements, enzymes and coffee enemas was far superior to conventional treatment, yet in the trial not only did the patients on chemotherapy live on average 3 times longer than those on Gonzalez’s treatments, but they had a better quality of life.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19687327?dopt=Abstract
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May 14th, 2013 at 6:30 am
Krebiozen said:
It’s not difficult to see why.
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May 14th, 2013 at 8:00 am
BMS said:
It’s not just the enemas. I read an account of a patient following the Gonzalez regimen. It would be nice to report that he spent his final months putting his affairs in order, spending time with his loved ones or otherwise wringing the last few drops out of joy from his life. But sadly, when he wasn’t subjecting himself to the rectal java lava, he was either juicing or cleaning the juicer, in a desperate, futile attempt to prolong his life.
That’s one reason I get so annoyed with idiots who claim that alternative treatments can cure cancer, and why I am willing to spend time arguing with them.
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May 14th, 2013 at 8:15 am
The coffee enemas would have been enough for me. The desperation that leads people to turn to these modern witchdoctors is really sad.
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May 14th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
To repeat. I never said I am aganinst surgery, or alternative treatments other than bicarbonate which CAN shrink tumours. I might give more detail on some examples in greater detail soon…
Of course I know the difference between tumour growth and metastasis. I simply assumed you could have been referring to metastasis instead since that is what I was talking about a lot in the bicabonate mouse trial that I assumed you had eventually stopped avoiding talking about. That is why I said “if” (IF by “grow”, you mean “metastasize”). I assumed YOU had got it wrong! (because YOU didn’t ellaborate enough)
Thanks for the biology lesson, but now you are really just contradicting yourself. (but I’ll get to why in the next paragraph.) The more you open your mouth, the more you put your foot in it.
When it comes to cancer even Cambridge University comes up short as evidenced by decades of little, or no improvement in cancer treatment success rates in the mainstream. If brain fog, liver damage, hair loss, mouth sores, weakness and a devastated immune system count as “improved quality of life due to chemo”, then chemo is a wonderful success. Various organs damaged by radiation treatment is not much different.
To quote you, you said: “When a solid malignant tumor grows it often becomes encapsulated and outgrows its blood supply, so the middle of it dies, due to lack of oxygen and glucose and an inability to get rid of waste products leading to INCREASED ACIDITY, among other things. So you end up with a mass of rotting necrotic tissue in the center of a layer of cancerous cells GROWING OUTWARDS. This is what I mean by cancer growth or progression.”
However, just a short while before that you wrote:
“Cancer cells, like normal cells, GROW BETTER in slightly ALKALINE conditions”.
Care to explain that one?
Am I just misunderstanding you again?
Quote Comment
May 14th, 2013 at 2:08 pm
PS. To ellaborate on why you contradict yourself:
Cancer cells release lactic acid waste via the fermentation process of creating energy.
Helathy cells DO NOT and they DO NOT in most cases use fermentation, but rather they use aerobic respiration which does NOT release lactic acid as a waste product (I will give you the chemical reactions in detail on Wikipedia and link to it if you wish.)
Therefore, the outside layers of the tumour survive and grow because the fluids they are exposed to OUTSIDE the tumour are LESS ACIDIC than those in the CENTRE of the tumour which are extremely acidic. But this external fluid (and blood in arteries to a lessor extent) is NOT ALKALINE in cancer patients like you suggest, it is still ACIDIC, but it is simply LESS ACIDIC because it receives lactic acid waste from the centre of the tumour which is the source of the lactic acid and therefore contains a higher concentration of it. This reduction of PH outside the tumour and inside the tumour only get worse (more acidic) and the cancer progresses leading to what you would call acidosis in the end.
Comments?
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May 15th, 2013 at 9:54 am
Chris,
If you have evidence that any alternative treatments can shrink tumors, I would be very interested. I have never come across any convincing evidence of this. What evidence do you have to support your claim that bicarbonate shrinks tumors? Why do you believe this?
So it’s all my fault? Why would I use the word “grow” to refer to cancer cells from one part of the body forming secondary malignant growths at a distance from the primary site?
So you keep claiming, yet you haven’t managed to demonstrate that I have got anything wrong so far. Conversely you have come out with lots of idiotic statements that are demonstrably untrue, such as white bread comtains no magnesium, chemotherapy doesn’t shrink tumors, normal cells don’t produce lactic acid, tumors grow better in acidic conditions etc etc..
I’m referring to what we understand about human biochenistry, cell biology, physiology etc. etc. You should take a look at some actual facts instead of parroting Natural News, or whatever other source of misinformation you prefer. It is true that we have had little success in treating some cancers, such as pancreatic, lung and brain cancers, yet alternative medicine has absolutely nothing to offer in any of these. A patient is still far better off wiith conventional care for these cancers, as palliative chemotherapy, for example, can make the final stages of cancer much more comfortable than anything CAM can offer.
We have made a lot of progress with other cancers over the last 40 years or so. Five (and ten) year survival in childhood leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer and prostate cancer, for example, have greatly improved. Take a look at the SEER cancer database some time.
I think you overstate the side effects, especially the “devastated immune system”. Personally I would prefer some nasty side effects if the treatment saved my life. Also, untreated cancer is far worse than any treatments, believe me. The people I speak to who have experienced chemotherapy and radiotherapy mostly tell me it wasn’t so bad. I have a friend who is undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma at the moment, and he has had to take a couple of days off work, but says that the flu he had last year was much worse. I have other friends and family who were successfully treated for cancer and suffered hardly any side effects, like my friend who had lymphoma 30 years ago, had chemotherapy, lost her hair, temporarily, but is alive and well today, my brother who is living with kidney cancer, my sister-in-law who had a brain tumor successfully treated and is now having treatment for myeloma, but is enjoying her life… .
Quote Comment
May 15th, 2013 at 9:54 am
The center of a tumor dies, partly because the increased acidity kills the cancer cells there. The outer parts survive because they are perfused with blood with a pH of 7.40 i.e. slightly alkaline. The waste products of all cells are acidic, so if there is a poor blood supply, they will become more acidic because the waste products cannot be taken away so easily. It seems pretty simple to me. Does anyone else have difficulty understanding this?
That’s yet another complete and utter untruth. Wikipedia has it right, but I guess you must have misunderstood it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid
Normal serum lactate is around 1 mmol/L because we constantly produce it during normal metabolism, producing about 1,300 mmol or 90 grams of lactic acid per day. Red blood cells only use fermentation to produce energy from glucose since they lack mitochondria, so they constantly produce lactate. It is thought that our brain may actually use lactate rather than glucose for energy.
During vigorous exercise our muscles produce more than can be broken down, which can lead to lactic acidosis, which I have personally measured in athletes after running a marathon. Any cell, cancerous or healthy and normal, will switch to fermentation if it doesn’t have enough oxygen for glycolysis. Cancer cells often (but by no means always) use fermentation to derive energy from glucose because they are often deprived of oxygen due to their poor blood supplies – the same reason the insides of tumors are more acidic than other tissues. Also, lactic acid is not the only source of acidity in tumors, there are other organic acids produced and, most importantly, carbon dioxide. Here’s an article on lactate and its role in health and disease, which you might notice doesn’t mention cancer at all.
http://ceaccp.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/3/128.full
There is some evidence that lactic acid in tumors may help them to survive a lack of glucose, but since there isn’t a way of depriving tumors of glucose without depriving the rest of the body of glucose too, this isn’t very helpful.
What I would call acidosis? It’s the scientific term for this condition, not some word I invented on a whim. You’re just making this up as you go along aren’t you? I have dealt with this every day for years, measuring lactate and blood pH in patients, many of them with cancer. You should really learn a bit about a subject before you start coming out with all this nonsense – people might believe you and make life-altering decisions based on that.
There’s a technical term for patients whose arterial blood is acidic – dead, or very nearly dead. I have seen acidic arterial blood on occasion, but I don’t remember any of those patients surviving. It’s what you see after someone has had a cardiac arrest several minutes previously.
The vast majority of cancer patients are not acidotic until the very end stages, when their bodies are unable to excrete the acids produced by normal metabolism and those produced by their tumors. Even then their blood is not usually acidic because they increase their respiration rate to blow off more carbon dioxide to compensate, leading to a compensated metabolic acidosis, though their blood pH may be lower than normal. Acidemia (acidic blood) is an immediate precursor of death
Quote Comment
May 15th, 2013 at 1:57 pm
I don’t recall saying that bicarbonate can definitely shrink tumours. (I may have said something about raising PH to high enough levels MAY do this.)
Chemo may shrink tumours in high enough doses that come with SEVERE side effects, but often they become resistant and grow back after that if surgery cannot remove them. Therefore often any reduction in tumour size is only temporary and reversable, unless you continue the poisoning regime for years until organ damage finally kills you. Breast cancer only has a higher cure rate because of early detection and surgery after early detection. If it has metastasized deadly high dose chemo is needed, which may also then lead to resistance to the chemo drugs and/or regrowth of tumours and almost always deadly side effects.
I was saying that YOU only refer to it as acidosis when the stage of the acidosis reaches the state of acidemia near the end. Acidosis, as I have said already, not that, it is a process. Wikipedia confirms this:
“Acidosis is an increased acidity in the blood and other body tissue (i.e., an increased hydrogen ion concentration). If not further qualified, it usually refers to acidity of the blood plasma.
Acidosis is said to occur when arterial pH falls below 7.35 (except in the fetus- see below), while its counterpart (alkalosis) occurs at a pH over 7.45 The term acidemia describes the state of low blood pH, while acidosis is used to describe the processes leading to these states” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acidosis
Even if red blood cells and muscle cells (when exercising) in healthy individuals produce lactic acid, the same phenomenon happens in those with cancer as well. However, in addition to this, cancer cells produce lactic acid and this is an extra source of lactic acid that healthy individuals don’t get because they don’t have nearly as much cancer cells and their healthy immune system keeps the numbers of the few circulating cancer cells very low.
This results in fluids surrounding tumours becoming “more acidic” than elsewhere in the body and, after time, the blood becoming “more acidic than normal”. This starts happening anywhere below a PH of 7.35 (or there about). If PH is between 7.35 and 7.00 this is “more acidic than normal”, although technically still alkaline since it’s over 7.00. I suspect it can easlily get to below 7.00 (acidic) in the fluid surrounding tumours – even if it’s only 6.99 and even if it takes blood PH longer to reflect this. The fact that tumours keep growing in this environment outside the tumour (and doesnt just stop growing once it get to 6.99 or below) means they prefer slight to moderate acidicy (or at least lower acidity than normal healthy PH).
Therefore they do NOT grow faster with increased alkalinity, unless that alkalinity is below normal and above 7.00 PH which although alkaline is MORE ACIDIC than normal PH (let me know if you have proof of this happening in most types of cancers. In the bicarbonate trial on mice, tumours did not shrink, but they did not get bigger either as far as I remember and which you imply would cause them to grow bigger).
Bicarbonate raises the alkalinity to higher PH than normal, which should sooner or later also reflect in the blood at least slightly with prolonged treatment (over 1 month), just as cancer patients eventually have dangerously low PH blood levels. With PH of 6.99 and below the fact that tumours keep growing in this environment directly outside the tumour (and don’t just stop growing once it get to 6.99 or below) means they prefer and grow in slight to moderate acidicy.
Wikipedia: “The rate of cellular metabolic activity affects and, at the same time, is affected by the pH of the body fluids. In mammals, the normal pH of arterial blood lies between 7.35 and 7.50 depending on the species (e.g., healthy human-arterial blood pH varies between 7.35 and 7.45). Blood pH values COMPATIBLE WITH LIFE in mammals are limited to a pH range between 6.8 and 7.8. Changes in the pH of arterial blood (and therefore the extracellular fluid) outside this range result in irreversible cell damage.[1]“
It would make sense then, that you can TEMPORARILY increase fluid outside tumours (and even blood) to a PH of up to 7.8 without “irreversable cell damage”. There is no evidence that this will cause tumours to grow in most types of cancer. (especially when over 7.45)
The fact that tumours keep growing in an increasingly acidic environment, even until eventual death from acidemia says that (broadly speaking) they grow in acidic conditons – even those very near to the extremely low PH that kills their centres causing the rot you speak of.
Quote Comment
May 15th, 2013 at 2:51 pm
PS. …continued from above… White bread, pasta and rice DO in fact contain NO magensium in most, if not all cases (unless they are fortified, which I personally, have not encountered). Go buy a loaf of white bread and check the ingredients and nutrient table on the pack. The magnesium is from the wheat/rice bran (brown parts of the wheat) not included in white bread, rice and pasta.
I also said MOST normal cells don’t produce lactic acid waste – NOT ALL !!!
Once again you are twisting my words.
My next comment will be on increased glucose consumption of cancer cells compared to normal cells and the ability (which you denied is possible) to reduce glocose levels in the body to low enough levels to be safe for normal cells but unsafe, or at least suppressive to growth rates of cancer cells who need much more glucose than normal cells. (the bottom line is that we consume far more sugar than we need to in order to maintain good health, from soda drinks, to desserts, cakes, chocolates, tea and coffee – tea & coffe are fine, but it all adds up. We can very safety cut out sugar intakes by half or even 75% and this will severely hamper cancer growth rates. Google search for: “Insulin potentiation therapy”)
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May 16th, 2013 at 5:19 am
Chris,
I’m not going to bother addressing most of your desperate back-pedaling, as I think it is obvious to anyone who is still following this and isn’t yet bored to tears.
One point:
What you wrote was this:
All red blood cells use fermentation, and all normal cells will switch to fermentation if deprived of oxygen. It isn’t some unique property of cancer cells as you implied.
Bicarbonate does not kill cancer, it is not yet proven as a useful treatment for cancer in humans, and if it ever is it may be as a treatment used in addition to chemotherapy that lowers the risk of metastases, that’s if it works in humans the way it did in the mouse study you referenced, which is far from certain.
You still insist that white bread contains no magnesium at all. I will simply observe that 100 grams of unenriched white bread contains 26 milligrams of magnesium, the same as enriched bread. As I wrote before, wholewheat bread contains more magnesium, but bread is by no means the only source of it. There’s a list of different foods and their magnesium content here:
https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25w304.pdf (It’s a PDF)
I suppose it is unreliable as it is an evil government website so maybe you would prefer this one, which states 100 grams of white bread contains 23 milligrams of magnesium:
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/baked-products/4872/2
Most foods don’t list their magnesium content, but only a fool would conclude from this that they don’t contain any magnesium at all, like this wholewheat bread:
http://quitehealthy.com/nutrition-facts/wheat-bread/180762.html
I’m looking forward to this, as I know that with even prolonged fasting our bodies maintain our blood glucose high enough to keep both normal and cancer cells adequately fed, by breaking down glycogen, then fats, then muscles. The only way to reduce blood glucose enough to starve a tumor is by giving the patient insulin, which has been tried and which is extremely dangerous, as it can lead to brain damage and death. Insulin also encourages tumor growth, so it seems doubly unwise. A big problem in advanced cancer is cachexia, which will certainly not be helped by half-starving the patient.
Insulin potentiation therapy is used with conventional chemotherapy, which I thought you disapproved of. As the American Cancer Society points out:
The only real evidence is this:
http://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatmentsandsideeffects/complementaryandalternativemedicine/pharmacologicalandbiologicaltreatment/insulin-potentiation-therapy
Smaller increases in tumor size? No long-term improvements? I’m not impressed.
Quote Comment
May 16th, 2013 at 12:54 pm
The point is – AND THIS IS THE BOTTOM LINE – that most cancers metastasize (and possibly also “grow” – - as in tumour size) when directly exposed to lower than normal PH levels (below 7.35) which is easily achievable in the fluid outside tumours, as opposed to arterial blood which is slower to change and changes less in PH but can still reach acidemia after long enough in cancer patients. (as you admit, although you wrongly call it acidosis)
As I have said, acidosis is a process – and I have proved that as per Wikipedia.
Acidemia is the final state before death that you were speaking about – and even that doesn’t just happen all of a sudden. I hope you will acknowledge your error in this regard, then maybe I can also accuse you of back-peddling.
Very often (but NOT ALWAYS) tumours do not press against vital organs and thus a growing tumour is OFTEN not as dangerous as one that in the process of metastasizing. Therefore, often, BUT NOT ALWAYS, preventing, or slowing metastasis is far more important in cancer patients. Dr. Philip Binzel, M.D emphasizes this here: http://www.cancertutor.com/Other/ShrinkTumors.html
Every bit counts. Sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda does this well in mice models and theoretically there is no reason to believe it won’t work in humans as the increasing acidity of tumours is the main cause of metastasis and bicarbobnate slows/reverses this process by increasing tumour PH and may even prevent it totally when monitored carefully for extended periods of time (over 1 month) with breaks in between if necessary. PH is easy to monitor as you know. The reason I say that it may even stop metastisis entirely, with longer term use, is that the longer the fluids outside the tumour remain above normal in PH, the more lactic acid the tumour will secrete since tumours secrete more when there is an opportunity to do so and the environment around them is less acidic. The environment outside tumours will then become more acidic, needed continued bicarb treatment to raise the PH again, until eventually the tumour PH is at a heralthy level, or slighly higher than that in PH. You may have another way to explain exactly how bicarb is able to low tumour PH.
Another way of looking at it, and which you may mind find more proof of, is simply that tumour PH is increased the longer it is directly exposed to a higher PH environment created by the bicarb, even if it is slighly higher than in the tumour, tumour PH will continue to increase slowly, but surely until it eventually gets to 7.35 (normal), or higher (i.e. the same as the bicarb affected fluid surrounding it). After 1 month in the mouse trial metastasis decreased by 50% compared to a zero percent decrease in the controls, it therefore makes logical sense that metastasis will decrease further after 1 month as tumour PH levels continue to decrease even further since they are not yet normal after only 1 month.
CONTINUED BELOW:
Quote Comment
May 16th, 2013 at 2:15 pm
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE…
Additionally, I said healthy cells “DO NOT in MOST cases use fermentation”.
Maybe I should have said “MOST healthy cells do NOT use lactic acid fermentation MOST of the time.”
(ie. most healthy cells being, all those, that are not red blood cells, and most of the time meaning when muscle cells are not excercising, etc.)
Cancer IS a LOW OXYGEN environment that you speak of and which rarely occurs in healthy indivualls as much as in cancer patients/cancer cells – and why won’t you admit that cancer patients are more ACIDIC than healty ones because healthy ones don’t have as much cancer cells, even if only showing up in the internal fluids directly outside tumours and less in blood levels, but more and more over time until the acidemia at the end. You just keep trying to avoid the obvious. Most chemotherapy drugs severely acidify the body as well ADDING to the problem as far as PH is concerned (which is why bicard is often given).
In the abstracts of the French trial they just said “cheese”, nit mould fermented, but if you read the whole trial then it’s posible that they ellaborate and say mention that it’s mould fermented. Mould fermented cheese, even if safe when straight from the factory, is more dangerous than other mould prone foods because if a dangerous type of mould starts growing on a cheese made with dafe mould, you may not even notice since there is already safe mould on it so how would you know the difference between the two? (you would on food that doesn’t have mould to begin with.)
Additionally not all moulds used to make cheeses are 100% safe.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15826038
I will find another one on cheese that I can’t find right now.
Here is some info on studies and actual studies themselves on magnesium defficiencies that you deny is happening on a large scale:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15930481
http://www.ancient-minerals.com/magnesium-deficiency/
http://www.jigsawhealth.com/resources/magnesium-mineral-deficiency
I will get to sugar, glucose and Insulin potentiation therapy (IPT) in the next comment as you have brought up a lot I needed to first address. I was not advocating IPT, but just told you to google it because there is a connection there to glucose and cancer growth rates, despite the dangers of using IPT, like the dangers of using chemo. Yaaaawn!!! More on all this in the next comment(s)…
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May 16th, 2013 at 3:09 pm
Oh this is painful.
Chris, two suggestions:
1) Having earlier brought cheese into the argument to support your claim that cancer is a fungus, you would do your reputation a credit by not rehashing the subject.
2) Wikipedia makes a weak club when trying to beat someone over the head with an argument. Click through to the source.
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May 17th, 2013 at 10:22 am
Chris,
Tumors grow despite, not because of, lower pH, they are poisoned by their own acidic wastes, which is why fast growing tumors die inside. It’s not my fault you are trying to bluff your way through acid-base homeostasis, which is a complicated subject, using Wikipedia and failing to understand it properly. It took me a couple of years of study and practical experience before I got my head around it.
Patients with acidosis may have a normal arterial blood pH, but a low base excess, because they have compensated by blowing off more CO2 – a compensated metabolic acidosis. Cancer patients are not normally acidotic until they are in the advanced stages, when their vital organs are starting to fail, and their tumors are producing a lot of acidic wastes, though the cachexia is more of a problem than the acidosis. As I have written several times, I have only seen acidemia very rarely, and in patients close to death, whether from cancer or some other illness. Acidosis and acidemia are consequences of cancer, not causes.
I have no idea what you are trying to argue here, as acidosis is the least of a terminal cancer patient’s problems. Thanks for drawing my attention to that Wikipedia article, which is inaccurate and needs some serious editing, which I will do when I have some time. Here’s a better explanation of acidosis:
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/242975-overview
You are trying to oversimplify something very complex. Not all tumors are acidic, some even induce alkalosis, such as some adrenal tumors, which can lead to severe hypokalemic alkalosis.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8325290
Some studies have looked at decreasing tumor pH and using high blood glucose to treat cancer, for example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3905356
What do you think kills most cancer patients? Mostly either a tumor, primary or metastatic, invades some essential organ, or a tumor gets so big it prevents an essential organ from functioning, or the cancer has simply taken such a toll on the patient’s body that their immune system can’t cope any more and they succumb to infection, which is probably the most common cause of death in cancer patients. Preventing metastasis and invasion would be great, it is by no means certain that bicarbonate can do this.
That’s a quack website full of dangerous nonsense. Please refer to proper scientific sources.
As I have repeatedly explained, that’s not true, for various reasons, not least the relative size of mice and men. We can cure cancer in mice and other animals, but we are still struggling with many human cancers. Here’s an article about the problems of translating mouse models of cancer to human treatments.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/28860/title/Building-a-Better-Mouse/
The increasing acidity of tumors is the main cause of metastasis? Not hypoxia, or lack of glucose, or genetic mutation? How well will ingesting bicarbonate increase tumor pH when the tumor is constantly producing acids, and has a poor blood supply? Here, for your education, is a study from 1922, when they tried giving cancerous mice vast amounts of either hydrochloric acid or sodium bicarbonate.
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/jcanres/7/2/149.full.pdf
The results?
That seems to contradict what you are suggesting about higher doses over a longer period.
Quote Comment
May 17th, 2013 at 10:28 am
Contd.
Are you suggesting an arterial stab is easy? It isn’t something I would like to undergo once, much less regularly. Venous blood isn’t as useful and urine and saliva pH are useless, except to indicate possible infections.
If that is how it worked in that mouse study, if that very small (n = 12) mouse study is replicated (it didn’t seem to work too well back in 1922), and if that translates to humans, then maybe it might prove to be a useful adjunct to conventional treatment. That’s a lots of ifs. Even if they all pan out, bicarbonate certainly won’t be enough on its own, as this study suggests:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3314784/
It concludes:
The bottom line is that anyone with cancer would be well advised to get proper treatment i.e surgery, and/or chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy as suggested by a reputable oncologist. The author of that study said she was continuing her experiments, but she hasn’t published anything on this since (apart from a similar study that found DCA ineffective), which I suspect implies it didn’t work.
The 12 bicarbonate-treated mice still had a total of 147 metastatic lung lesions between them, which weren’t going to go away however long treatment continued. As the study I cited above concluded, it may not be possible to increase tumor pH to normal without causing a dangerous alkalosis which, I remind you, can cause respiratory arrest..
Why won’t I admit it? Because generally speaking it isn’t true, and even if it was true it has little bearing on your arguments. We have the capacity to excrete vast amounts of acids. A marathon runner will generate far more acids (organic acids and CO2) than any tumor, yet she can excrete them easily. The vast majority of cancer patients, I repeat wearily once again, are no more acidic than you and I, something I know from measuring their blood pH. As long as their kidneys and lungs are functioning, they can excrete any excess acids produced by their tumors, and as I keep reiterating, acidity, hypoxia and lack of glucose are the consequences of cancer, not causes.
Really? I thought it was to alkalize the urine to prevent kidney damage from the products of tumor necrosis.
As for cheese, I have no further comment.
On the effects of magnesium deficiency, your first link is to a scientific study that doesn’t control for diet, apart from calorific intake. Most people who have a higher intake of magnesium are eating a generally healthier diet that contains more magnesium. Any improvements in health may be due to the magnesium, or because they are eating more fruit and vegetables and less red meat, high-fat dairy products, and refined grain, which may improve health for other reasons, such as increased potassium intake. The other links are to websites that are selling supplements and “magnesium oil” – not reliable sources of information. As I wrote before, many people are not getting the RDA for magnesium, but that is not the same thing as deficiency. The best way to avoid magnesium deficiency is to eat a health diet, as conventional doctors will tell you.
I had heard of IPT before. It’s dangerous and it doesn’t work. There used to be a craze for putting patients in insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas as a treatment for various illnesses, even depression and schizophrenia. It didn’t work for that, and resulted in brain damage and death in many.
You do seem to have changed your tune somewhat since you dropped in at #34 here spouting vast amounts of idiotic nonsense and accusing everyone here of being idiots. That’s progress of sorts I suppose.
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May 17th, 2013 at 11:06 am
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE:
I brought up the cheese fungus issue again because I hadn’t yet properly addressed what Krebiozen considerd a rebuttal of what I at first said about it.
Wikipedia is pretty mainstream (like all of you on here) and gives CONTEXT to the sources and I quote it because often it has good sources and because you will consider its articles more valid than something like Natural News. If there is disagreement on here about what the source is saying then context and logic become important. Are you incapable of clicking on the source (citations) to verify it once you are on the Wikipedia page?
Any website I link to has sources to verify most, if not all of what they claim, so I don’t see a problem with that, especially if I’m linking to Wikipedia. If the part on Wikipedia, or elswhere that I refer to is not properly referenced, then by all means call me out on it.
The amount of magnesium Krebiozen mentioned in white bread is so small, it may as well BE zero.
The amount equates to about 3 percent of the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA), also called the DV.
I also meant to state in the previous comment the following regarding sugar an glucose.
Krebiozen is confusing drastically reducing sugar consumption, to going on the general food fast which can allow blood sugar to drop to dangerous levels leading to fats and muscle, etc being broken down.
I am not advocating the latter.
I am advocating a high protein and possibly a high (good) fat diet, combined with a low carb (wholewheat) and extremely low sugar diet (that gets sugar mainly from fruit) for cancer patients.
Our brains only need relatively small amounts of sugar, and so do the rest of our cells.
Our ancestors lived with FAR less sugar before the start of the refined sugar cane industry.
Like salt, nowadays it’s found in almost everything.
Why use insulin therapy to reduce blood glucose when you can more safely reduce glucose by simply consuming far less?!!! Even with the trial (above) on IPT cancer.org concluded: “the women in the IPT group had smaller increases in tumor size than either of the other groups.”
What’s ridiculous about this trial (unless I am misunderstanding it), is that it seems that even the IPT group were administered small amounts of the chemo drug that the other groups were given:
“Even though they used LOWER DOSES of methotrexate than usual, there were some side effects (mouth sores) noted in the IPT group.” – - – - – No wonder there were side effects!
cancer.org also concluded “This study did not look at survival, quality of life, well-being, or lasting effects.”
No wonder it can then go on to say: “No long-term improvements were shown by this study.”
And then you (Krebiozen) agree with all of that bull without a single objection.
I actually expected more from you than that !!!
I do however believe it is safer to reduce sugar consuption, than to reduce blood levels with the use of insulin, that’s why I don’t recommend it.
“In oncology, the Warburg effect is the observation that most cancer cells predominantly produce energy by a high rate of glycolysis followed by lactic acid fermentation in the cytosol, rather than by a comparatively low rate of glycolysis followed by oxidation of pyruvate in mitochondria as in MOST NORMAL CELLS.[1][2] The latter process is aerobic (uses oxygen). Malignant, rapidly growing tumor cells typically have glycolytic rates up to 200 TIMES HIGHER than those of their normal tissues of origin…tumor M2-PK, a form of the pyruvate kinase enzyme, is produced in all rapidly dividing cells, and is responsible for enabling CANCER CELLS to CONSUMER GLUCOSE at an ACCELERATED RATE…Many substances have been developed which INHIBIT GLYCOLYSIS, and such inhibitors are currently the subject of intense research as anticancer agents,[12] including SB-204990, 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2DG), 3-bromopyruvate (3-BrPA, bromopyruvic acid, or bromopyruvate), 3-BrOP, 5-thioglucose and dichloroacetic acid (DCA). Clinical trials are ongoing for 2-DG and DCA.[13]” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect
Quote Comment
May 17th, 2013 at 12:00 pm
CONTINUED FROM ABOVE (REPLY TO 136).
I doubt that there is much difference between artery blood PH and venous blood PH as you suggest.
Blood PH is not difficult to measure.
Stopping this type of blood PH from going too high is what is important in preventing death. Increasing PH of fluid directly outside tumours is probably less dangerous and is probably what resulted in the 50% reduction in metastasis in the bicarb mouse study.
A marathon is temporary, while tumours secrete lactic acid 24 hours a day (did you bother to consider that as well as the fact that blood Ph is different to tumour, or tissue PH.
And even if the body detox organs are able to remove the acidity created by tumours effectively, often by that stage (as with nutrients and their opposite positive effects), it has already done it’s job. (i.e. decreasing tumour/tissue PH and promoting metastasis in the case of acidity) You say: “it MAY not be possible to increase tumor pH to normal without causing a dangerous alkalosis” – - – I don’t recall reading about those mice developing “dangerous alkalosis”from the baking soda.
You say: “The vast majority of cancer patients, I repeat wearily once again, are no more acidic than you and I, something I know from measuring their blood pH.” – - – - Even if their blood PH is almost the same, their tissue PH is not, due to the tumours releasing all that lactic acid which promotes metastasis without the need of it significantly increasing blood PH.
“Really? I thought it was to alkalize the urine to prevent kidney damage from the products of tumor necrosis.” – - – - What’s the difference, either way, chemo causes dangerously high acidity levels that are reduced with bicarbonate (in this case). You have only proven my point, that blood PH, is not the only PH, that is important in managing. For some reason you don’t seem to have a problem with tissue, or tumour PH abnormalities.
You say: “Most people who have a higher intake of magnesium are eating a generally healthier diet that contains more magnesium.” – - – Is that not obvious? I am totally dumfounded by the stupidity of this remark.
“As I wrote before, many people are not getting the RDA for magnesium, but that is not the same thing as deficiency.” – - – - I beg to disagree, this is the whole reason RDA’s were set up in the first place – to prevent defficiencies. The articles I linked to from the “magnesium industry” have valid references to back up what they say, but I guess that doesn’t count in your opinion!!! You seem to think a defficiency is only apparent when people are suffering from immediate medical conditions relating to a lack of certain nutrients in their diet. Like blood PH in cancer patients, it often takes time for the negative results of defficiencies to develop if they are not severe defficiencies. This however does not mean that you cannot be defficient if you don’t suffer yet from some medical condition at the present time.
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May 17th, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Correction, above is part 4, and above that is my part 3.
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May 17th, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Correction, above is part 4, and above that is my part 3.
“Tumors grow despite, not because of, lower pH, they are poisoned by their own acidic wastes, which is why fast growing tumors die inside.”
I said metastasize, not grow.
When I did mention grow I said “and POSSIBLY also “grow” – - – - POSSIBLY !!!
(I said this because tumours do grow at a lower than normal PH – between 7.00 and 7.35 and don’t appear to grow with the treatment of bicarbonate in trials (except maybe with some cancers as you have insinuated, but that is only SOME, not most cancers.)
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May 20th, 2013 at 6:05 am
Chris,
I’m getting tired of this, but magnesium myths are a particular bugbear of mine. Just for fun let’s look at the amount of magnesium in the diet of someone who eats the quintessential unhealthy American diet, eating McDonalds food (other fast food outlets are available) and junk food all day – I have only selected only medium portions. The figures are in the form: mg magnesium per 100 g of the food, the weight of a portion, and then = the total magnesium in a portion.
Breakfast
Sausage McMuffin with egg 18 mg/100g 162 g = 29 mg
Hash Browns 21 mg/100g 56 g = 12 mg
Medium coffee 43 mg/100g 473 g = 203 mg
Lunch
Big Mac 20 mg/100g 215 g = 43 mg
Medium Fries 32 mg/100g 117 g = 37 mg
Chocolate shake 16 mg/100g 473 g = 76 mg
Apple Pie 7 mg/100g 77 g = 5 mg
Dinner
Chicken McNUGGETS 22 mg/100g 162 g = 36 mg
Medium fries 32 mg/100g 117 g = 37 mg
Hot Fudge Sundae 19 mg/100g 179 g = 34 mg
Snacks (not McD)
1 Snickers 41 mg
Total = 553 mg
That’s 131% of the RDA of an adult male, more in younger men and women. I’m not saying that everyone gets the RDA, but magnesium deficiency is rare, because it is present in many foods, even unhealthy ones. The RDA is calculated to ensure that almost everyone who gets that much will not be deficient, so it is higher than the amount needed to prevent deficiency in most people. The epidemic of magnesium deficiency that CAM proponents will try to sell you “magnesium oil” to cure is mostly a myth.
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May 20th, 2013 at 7:11 am
Chris (part 3 response to 136) said:
Imagine how we felt when you claimed cancer was a fungus.
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May 20th, 2013 at 9:14 am
Chris,
I’m not confusing anything. You seem to think, as CAM proponents often do, that the more sugar you eat, the higher your blood glucose. There is such a thing as homeostasis. Eating less sugar will reduce the spikes in blood sugar and insulin that are bad for us, since they can lead to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome etc. and there is some evidence that insulin can stimulate tumor growth, and cancer is associated with obesity. However, even if you don’t eat any sugar at all, your blood glucose will remain at a level high enough to keep your body’s cells fed, and high enough to keep tumors fed as well. In the final stages of cancer cachexia often occurs, when tumors consume all the patient’s nutrients, causing them to waste away, with symptoms of malnutrition even if they are well fed. You cannot starve a tumor to death without starving the patient to death as well.
By the way, wholewheat bread is not low carb, it contains about the same amount of carbohydrate as white bread, but it breaks them down into sugar more slowly i.e. it has a lower glycemic index. All carbohydrates (that we can digest) are broken down into sugars – eating a baked potato actually leads to a bigger spike in blood glucose than eating a candy bar, as sucrose has a medium GI and potato has a high GI. That usually upsets “sugar is poison” brigade, but it is true.
Because you can’t. Blood glucose levels are quite tightly controlled even in prolonged fasting.
The idea is that IPT may make lower doses of chemotherapy work better, not to use it on its own. If hypoglycemia cured cancer, insulinomas would cure themselves – these are tumors of the pancreas that secrete insulin and cause low blood sugar – Steve Jobs had one of these.
The point is that there is no good reason to believe IPT would help cancer on its own, even with chemotherapy the results are modest at best, it has the potential for severe side effects and there is no other evidence to suggest it is useful. I think it’s a red herring.
If only that were possible, and there was evidence that lowering blood sugar helped cancer you might be right, but it isn’t and there isn’t.
I’m not sure why you quoted a section of Wikipedia about the Warburg effect which supports everything I wrote. Yes, many cancer cells use fermentation as a source of energy, and inhibiting glycolysis may be useful, but it is more likely that cancer cells will simply switch back to glycolysis. My point is that your idea of starving them to death by not eating sugar will not and cannot work.
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May 20th, 2013 at 9:24 am
Contd.
There’s a difference of about 0.50 pH (quite a bit in terms of H+ concentration), but arterial blood has been freshly cleaned by the liver and kidney and oxygenated by the lungs so it gives us a better idea of the condition of blood being supplied to tissues, which is why blood gas measurements, which include pH, are almost always carried out on arterial blood.
How would you know? How many blood pH measurements have you made, and how? It requires venepuncture and access to expensive equipment.
You are still just making it up as you go along, aren’t you? How do you increase the pH of the fluid outside a tumor without increasing blood pH? Where do you think that fluid comes from? Do you think it just sits there? All our tissues are constantly perfused with blood, and if they aren’t they quickly die i.e infarction followed by necrosis.
Vigorously exercising can produce as much as 40 mEq of organic acids (not including CO2) every minute but, according to that mouse study that you are so fond of, the acid production rate of tumors is about 0.1 mEq per gram of tumor weight per hour, or 0.0017 mEq per gram per minute, so a tumor would have to weigh 23.5 kg to produce as much organic acid as vigorous exercise. To put it another way, an hour’s exercise is equivalent in terms of organic acid production to a 1 kg tumor. For a patient with a tumor weighing that much, acidosis would be the least of their problems.
Do try to keep up. As I pointed out above, the authors of the mouse study wrote in another similar study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3314784/
Metabolic alkalosis really isn’t not a good thing to induce in patients for uncertain benefits.
Yes, tumors are more acidic than normal tissue (not by very much, actually). Are you suggesting that a tumor secrete acids which somehow make their way to other tissues without passing through the blood on their way? Please do explain how you think that works.
Which of the many different types of chemotherapy produce “dangerously high acidity levels”? Bicarbonate is sometimes given with chemotherapy to alkalize the urine to allow the products of tumor necrosis to be excreted more safely.
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May 20th, 2013 at 9:35 am
Contd.
I am dumbfounded by your inability to understand a simple concept. I will try to put it more simply. Plants contain lots of chlorophyll, so if we looked at people’s dietary intake of chlorophyll we would probably find a correlation with better health. We cannot conclude from this that chlorophyll prevents disease. Similarly, we cannot use the fact that people whose diets include more magnesium are healthier to conclude that magnesium is the reason. In this case magnesium is a possible confounder, which makes this kind of epidemiological research difficult. People who eat less vegetables may also be more likely to smoke, or eat unhealthy foods, more confounders, reasons why the magnesium/good health correlation may not indicate causation. Good studies control for these confounders, but it is difficult to control for all of them.
Even more simply, people who eat a diet with lots of magnesium have lower blood pressure, less cardiovascular disease etc.. People who take magnesium supplements do not. The conclusion is surely that it isn’t magnesium that lowers blood pressure or prevents CVD in the first group, but something else (carotenoids, phytochemicals, fiber, ascorbate, take your pick). Here are a couple of studies that show what I mean.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004640.pub2/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19958415
Maybe you are thinking of estimated daily requirements? I’m not arguing against people eating a healthy diet, but against your claim that:
I think I have demonstrated that this is simply not true.
As I have pointed out over and over, acidosis in cancer patients is not a cause of cancer, it is a result. If acidosis caused cancer, we would expect to see more of it in athletes, since they spend more time in a state of acidosis than most of us, but we don’t:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3395188/
Incidentally, if you want to experience alkalosis, and think it is good for you, just hyperventilate until you feel dizzy, your extremities start to tingle and your muscles cramp. By blowing off more CO2 you have induce a temporary respiratory alkalosis. I don’t recommend this, but it does do more or less what taking a lot of bicarbonate does.
As for magnesium, if deficiencies were common I would expect supplementation to have some beneficial effects, but if you look through the literature, as I have, you will find study after study that find benefits from high-magnesium diets, but no benefits from magnesium supplements. The whole orthomolecular idea, that if a nutrient prevents disease, consuming vast amounts of it must be even better, is dead and should be buried, in my opinion.
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May 20th, 2013 at 2:42 pm
Even athletes don’t exercise 24 hours a day, whereas tumours release acid 24 hours a day, as I think I said already. Additionally, the breathing rate of athletes automatically increases during intense exercise to compensate, and that does not happen in most cancer patients as, if they excercise at all, it is far less and also less intense. While cancer patients breathing may automatically increase uncontrollably as you suggest once they reach acidemia, this is only in the final stages and when the BLOOD acid levels in veins, or arteries get too high, which is NOT necessary to promote tumour metastisis. (see below for what IS necessary)
As YOU have said, “if you want to experience alkalosis, and think it is good for you, just hyperventilate until you feel dizzy, your extremities start to tingle and your muscles cramp. By blowing off more CO2 you have induce a temporary respiratory alkalosis.” – - – - – - – - – - Although I would argue that the dizzyness felt is probably due to too much oxygen flooding the brain all at once.
The lactic acid that the tumours release virtually saturate the fluids and tissues DIRECTLY SURROUNDING THE TUMOUR and not so much the blood supply in the veins and arteries. This is a major reason why these tumours metastasize – because the lactic acid they secrete directly lowers the PH of the fluids directly outside the tumour AND THIS AFFECTS THE TUMOUR that is making direct contact with these fluids.
I hope that answers your question clearly enough this time.
This is what I was saying and bicarbonate neutralises it, thereby reducing tumour PH as shown in the mouse trial. Additionally they said “Our mathematical model confirms bicarbonate acts as an effective agent to raise tumour pHe, but POTENTIALLY induces metabolic alkalosis at the high doses necessary for tumour pHe normalisation.” – - – - – Come back to me when they say “CONCLUSIVELY”.
While the process of acidosis may NOT be a cause of cancer, and yes, it MAY be a result of cancer, it also contributes to METASTASIS, which bicarbonate can slow/reduce and which, if not reduced, makes cancer worse, which in turn generates even more lactic acid in other tissues further away by the creation of secondary tumours (like a snow ball effect). If you think a growing tumour is bad, think SEVERAL growing tumours in addition to the first one. (METASTASIS – which can be reduced).
Also, while not all tumours are acidic, most of them are, or at least a significant amount of them are, such that we should not ignore this fact.
Re the two trials you linked to:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004640.pub2/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19958415
The first one shows little, or no link between magnesium supplementation and a reduction in blood pressure.
I agree with this conclusion. This is a given, BUT DOES NOT DISCREDIT OTHER HEALTH BENEFITS OF MAGNESIUM SUPPLENTATION WHICH IS OFTEN, AS JUST ONE EXAMPLE, ADVISED BY DOCTORS FOR HEART BEAT ARRYTHMIA. Potassium defficiency, or excess sodium is mainly what raises blood pressure (there is a balance between the two called the sodium potassium pump). If I remember correctly magnesium supplementation also has some good results in reducing asthma, or it’s symptoms at the very least. This is partly due to the fact that magnesium allows hemoglobin to transport more oxygen in the blood if I remember correctly.
The second link seems to conlude that magnesium supplements were SAFE and that “there was a modest relationship between DIETARY magnesium intake and a reduced risk of CHD in male subjects…but not female”. It was probably the potassium in the high magnesium foods that caused any benefit, although magnesium does enhance the absorbtion of potassium.
You will find that even with those promoting orthomlecular medicine, while they may promote the use of high amounts of certain vitamins, it is usually for the TREATMENT of disease and not for prevention. (WHEN IT COMES TO SUPER HIGH DOSES OF CERTAIN VITAMINS)
I suspect you don’t mind doing the same when it comes to drugs.
Additionally, they usually advise high amounts of these vitamins in conjuction with other vitamins, both in supplement and food form. So they (vitamins, or minerals) are often not advised to be taken in isolation. i.e. they recommend a variety. Moderate amounts of vitamins, or nutrients (and usually in food and supplement form) is what they encourage for prevention, not very high amounts when it comes to prevention.
You say: “Yes, tumors are more acidic than normal tissue (not by very much, actually)”
Then why do their insides die for the acidity levels getting so high?
Their outsides are less acidic than this due to less acidic fluids surrounding the tumour and dilluting the lactic acid somewhat, but not that much less, since there is a lack of blood supply with tumours which is needed to carry away this lactic acid. Additionally, the fact that bicarbonate slowed metastasis to the extent mentioned in the trial further trivialises your comment.
CONTINUED BELOW…
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May 20th, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Enough is enough. Chris, please get your own blog.
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May 20th, 2013 at 3:17 pm
BMS said:
I have to agree, this has gone on long enough. This commenter is not interested in an exchange of ideas, he is only using this space as a platform for his idiotic ranting.
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May 20th, 2013 at 3:59 pm
DV82XL said:
But there’s such perfect circularity to his arguments. It’s a scientific oddity. It’s also a fascinating study in the conservation of ignorance.
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May 21st, 2013 at 7:00 am
I have had enough of this too. It is weird being told I am wrong about things that I was taught by very respectable people with great knowledge (for example I was lucky enough to be taught about the structure of hemoglobin and oxygen dissociation curves by Max Perutz) and have passed exams on, and that years of experience have confirmed are correct, by someone who thinks a website like Natural News is a reliable source of information. That’s the Dunning Kruger effect in action. It does seem to me that Chris is now pretty close to arguing what I have been saying all along, so I think my work here is done.
Apologies to the blog owner for contributing to this flood.
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