Cancer Cells Are Addicted To Methionine, An Amino Acid Found Abundantly In Animal Food

There really are no shortage of studies that link eating animal food to cancer, either its development or its progression. Here’s another:

Essential Amino Acid In Humans, Methionine, Controls Cell Growth Programs, Eurekalert, 4 January, 2019

Our findings on how cells perceive methionine as a growth cue are illustrated in the simple cartoon (below). When methionine is limited, cells do not grow. When methionine is abundant, it acts as a growth signal and triggers a cascade of biochemical events, ultimately leading to cell growth.

This study provides a much-awaited explanation on the role of methionine in sustaining cell growth, and it might clarify why cancer cells are addicted to methionine for their growth.

Methionine Coordinates A Hierarchically Organized Anabolic Program Enabling Proliferation, Molecular Biology of the Cell, 2018

I wrote about this in 2015: When You Starve Cancer Cells Of Methionine, They Die.

Dr. Greger’s video, Starving Cancer with Methionine Restriction, includes this graph that shows fish, chicken, red meat, eggs, and milk contain higher amounts of methionine, while fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains, and beans contain lower amounts:

You can get enough methionine from a plant-based diet. Here are 14 elite vegan athletes. You probably get too much methionine on a diet that includes animal food every day.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s