Longevity
Life Can Be Simple
How enzyme blockade from heavy metals works, and why caffeine's strengthening effect on your anti-tumor immunity matters far more than most realize.
Longevity
How enzyme blockade from heavy metals works, and why caffeine's strengthening effect on your anti-tumor immunity matters far more than most realize.
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Sometimes life is simpler than you think.
Take heavy metals as an example. If you're exposed to them, you can bust your ass all you want. It won't help. It's straightforward to understand: everything in your body works on the basis of enzymes and proteins. When you block them—for example irreversibly through heavy metals—you, as an organism, can no longer function.
Oh! So please, spend an afternoon philosophizing about this. If your enzymes don't work, you, as an organism, can't function. Then absolutely nothing works in you. Even mechanisms that are supposed to protect you can no longer take effect, because your body simply can't understand it anymore.
That's why there are numerous articles about heavy metals on our blog. The solution usually comes down to: finding the source of heavy metal exposure (usually fish and chocolate, but also legumes from abroad ;)), consistently eliminating it, and supplementing with N-Acetyl-Cysteine. The latter becomes glutathione in your body and binds heavy metals. The effect in studies is surprisingly strong. Cysteine is your shield—it happens to be particularly abundant in egg protein.
Another example is cancer. I (Chris) read studies daily. To find the nuggets and extract what's relevant to practice. Just now a study comes up that examines a cancer drug. At first, totally uninteresting, but the authors write something fascinating:
Adenosine, through activation of A2A and A2B receptors on immune cells, is one of the strongest immunosuppressive mediators. It has been shown that the hypoxia-A2A-adenosine signaling pathway impairs the recruitment and activity of anti-tumor T cells in the tumor microenvironment.
Now it gets interesting, because we know quite a bit about this. Adenosine, for example. Familiar to us all, because high activity of, say, nerve cells creates increased adenosine. That in turn activates the adenosine receptors mentioned above (e.g., A2A receptor) ... and that makes you tired! That's why we drink caffeine and coffee. Both are so-called adenosine receptor antagonists. They block the effect of adenosine.
Yes, you understand correctly: adenosine doesn't just make nerve cells tired, but also "anti-tumor T cells" in the tumor environment. The tumor "knows" this, which is why it produces more enzymes that create adenosine. These researchers' approach: find a drug—in this case Ceritinib—that inhibits adenosine production.
In Loriot's words, "I don't know, doctor, I don't know." We actually have several natural adenosine receptor antagonists in our food. The most trivial example would be caffeine. Every teenager drinks it nowadays in energy drinks with taurine. Apparently the best cancer prevention, because: all of this can be proven. That's why there's now a multitude of serious studies showing exactly that:
Caffeine definitely has an anti-cancer effect.
In 2015, for example, this was impressively demonstrated. A simple experiment. They injected mice with a known carcinogen. While nearly half the animals developed cancer, over 80% of those mice that were allowed to drink caffeine in their water remained tumor-free. And while mice injected with highly aggressive melanoma cells (black skin cancer) happily grew tumors, the caffeine mice simply didn't get tumors at all.
The authors already wrote back then:
Based on three separate experimental observations, it is speculated that the primary effect of caffeine, responsible for the marked reduction in cancer rate in this model, consists of enhancement of anti-tumor immunity.
That's what's called proof of principle. Similar results were shown a few years ago in human brain tumor cells. And again in 2022. And from epidemiology we now know this correlation too. We reported on this a few years ago. Caffeine-containing beverages massively protect against brain tumors.
And it shows us, once more, that "lifestyle" works far, far more powerfully than most of us really understand. A healthy body is incredibly strong and resilient. You can hardly restrain yourself from social criticism at this point. But that exists on the blog, on the topic of "Long Covid."
