Re:Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that wor...
by pama on Friday January 10, 2025 @12:11AM
(#42652711)
It is indeed somewhat surprizing why it took so long to figure out grapefruit juice (and it was by accident during the study of the effects of coffee on a drug). Some of the early drugs that interacted with grapefruit juice where short-term agents like antibiotics, and others like channel blockers didnt have obvious detrimental toxicity though they might have had effects that were above the range of typical human variability. Powerful statins became household items a bit later, and all the cancer drugs were invented after this association was already known.
That said, "a food that cures cancer when eaten" is not the bar for experimentation. More realistic might be something like "a dietary or behavioral protocol that, in some way, ameliorates this or that indication".
For organisms with our body plan, "a cure for cancer" is like talking about "a cure for defection". But clearly there's "stuff that is efficacious against particular instances of cancer", a lot of which we found through techniques like natural product screens, i.e. "just trying stuff", rather than via rational drug design.