Can you treat cancer with nutrition? Here's what doctors are

Can you treat cancer with nutrition? Here's what doctors are

While the majority of the cancer establishment continues to seek a magic bullet pharmaceutical cure for cancer, another group of physicians has been taking a fresh look at the concept of a nutritional cure. It turns out that preventing, or even reversing, some forms of cancer may involve not the development of expensive drugs, but something as natural as sunshine.

In the Lab

In a laboratory study JoEllen Welsh, a researcher with the State University of New York at Albany, took human breast cancer cells and treated them with a potent form of vitamin D. The cancer cells shriveled and died within a few days of exposure to megadoses of "the sunshine vitamin."

"Vitamin D enters the cells and triggers the cell death process," said Welsh. She described the processes as "similar to when we treat cells with Tamoxifren [anti-cancer drug which causes adverse reactions in many women]." Researchers repeated the petri-dish experiment in mice, injecting them first with breast cancer cells and then with Vitamin D. After several weeks, the cancer tumors in the mice shrank by 50 percent.

Human Studies

Experiments outside laboratories have so far focused on vitamin D's preventive effects on cancer. A French study released early in 2011 found that higher levels of vitamin D, obtained through diet and supplements, helped reduce the risk of breast cancer. Most significantly, the 10-year study involving over 60,000 post-menopausal women found that the effects of the nutritional vitamin D were boosted when women received greater exposure to actual sunshine.

Researchers, led by Dr. Pierre Engel of the INSERM (Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale, the French equivalent to the National Institutes of Health in the U.S), discovered that women living in the areas which received more sunshine had only about half the risk of breast cancer of women who made their homes in areas with less sun.

The sunshine seems to offer a more powerful healing effect than supplements: women who consumed less vitamin D but who got lots of sunshine had a 32 percent lower risk of breast cancer than dwelling in less sunny regions. However, the greatest protection from breast cancer was among women who consumed the high levels of dietary vitamin D and who also received regular, generous sun exposure. Read more