High-dose FSO strategy

[Guest guest]

This diet is built on a house of cards. It is a

proposal to use exceedingly high doses of flax

seed oil with extremely high doses of caffeine,

over exertion in exercise, along with short

starvation fasts. Anyone can attempt it as there

is nothing that is controlled or

prescriptive. The cancer patients who tried this

for a single day apparently chose not to continue

and opted for chemo instead, and died.

I have often wondered why Budwig strongly

discouraged high doses of flax oil. Her

experience was not one of making proposals of

therapy, but of clinical practice of some, what,

60 years? She administered FSO all her life to

many thousands of patients and died in her

ninties. Not only was she credible but FSO (with

sulfur) in medicine was used continually for over

300 years before she popularized its use for cancer.

Flax seed oil consists of unsaturated oils

(mostly omega-3) in the form of

triglycerides. This means that digestion of each

mole of triglyceride yields a mole of glycerol

which is a cancer-feeding triose. Glycerol does

not seem to be unhealthy for those who are free

of chronic disease. The problems of glycerol and

cancer seems to be primarily one of the high

concentration of aquaglyceroporins in cancer cells. (See Below.)

Any distortive diet such as this will selectively

kill only those cancer cells that it can kill --

perhaps only those with low membrane

concentrations of glycerol-gobbling

aquaglyceroporins. It would thus share a common

feature with most chemotherapies: immediate

shrinkage followed by growth. The abstract below

suggests a more interesting strategy might be to

target the aquaporins, but even then one must

look at the prevalence and function of aquaporins

on any high-value real estate in the body, e.g.,

brain cortex, retina, pancreas, etc.

I am sorry that so often I can't get caught up in

everyone's flights of fancy, but it is only after

you throw out the garbage can you find the good

stuff. The devil is in the details.

Aquaporins­new players in cancer biology

Journal of Molecular Medicine

PublisherSpringer Berlin / Heidelberg

ISSN0946-2716 (Print) 1432-1440 (Online)

Volume 86, Number 5 / May, 2008

A. S. Verkman1 Mariko Hara-Chikuma1, 2 and s C. Papadopoulos1, 3

(1) Departments of Medicine and Physiology,

University of California, 1246 Health Sciences

East Tower, San Francisco, CA 94143-0521, USA

(2) Department of Dermatology, Graduate School

of Medicine, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

(3) Academic Neurosurgery Unit, St. ’s,

University of London, London, UK

Abstract The aquaporins (AQPs) are small,

integral-membrane proteins that selectively

transport water across cell plasma membranes. A

subset of AQPs, the aquaglyceroporins, also

transport glycerol. AQPs are strongly expressed

in tumor cells of different origins, particularly

aggressive tumors. Recent discoveries of AQP

involvement in cell migration and proliferation

suggest that AQPs play key roles in tumor

biology. AQP1 is ubiquitously expressed in tumor

vascular endothelium, and AQP1-null mice show

defective tumor angiogenesis resulting from

impaired endothelial cell migration.

AQP-expressing cancer cells show enhanced

migration in vitro and greater local tumor

invasion, tumor cell extravasation, and

metastases in vivo. AQP-dependent cell migration

may involve AQP-facilitated water influx into

lamellipodia at the front edge of migrating

cells. The aquaglyceroporin AQP3, which is found

in normal epidermis and becomes upregulated in

basal cell carcinoma, facilitates cell

proliferation in different cell types.

Remarkably, AQP3-null mice are resistant to skin

tumorigenesis by a mechanism that may involve

reduced tumor cell glycerol metabolism and ATP

generation. Together, the data suggest that AQP

expression in tumor cells and tumor vessels

facilitates tumor growth and spread, suggesting

AQP inhibition as a novel antitumor therapy.

For more on aquaporins by the same author, see:

http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/212/11/1707

Journal of Experimental Biology 212, 1707-1715 (2009)

Review Article

Aquaporins: translating bench research to human disease

A. S. Verkman