The healthy diet that can feed tumours

Cancer sufferers may think they’re eating healthily—but they could be inadvertently feeding the tumour.

Foods that are rich in vitamin B7, or biotin, would be on everyone’s healthy eating list—avocado, salmon, eggs, nuts and seeds, and sweet potato are among them—but they could be helping cancer spread.

Scientists at the University of Lausanne have discovered that biotin gives cancer cells a ‘get out of jail’ card if they are starved of their primary food source, glutamine, which some cancer therapies try to do.  If successful, the cancer cells stop growing.

Glutamine is an amino acid that plays a major role in metabolism, providing essential components needed to build proteins and DNA, and without it, cells cannot continue to grow and divide.  But that’s true for cancer cells, too, which oncologists say have a ‘glutamine addiction’.

Starved of this vital amino acid, cancer cells can find pathways to other food sources with the help of biotin.  This would explain why some cancer therapies fail, the researchers said.

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