Supplement targeting cancer awaits studies

What's new with herbal supplements? Probably more than I could know. That's the problem with, and also the excitement of, delving into this topic. However, there are a few updates to pass along that might help you consider, or reconsider, your views on certain supplements.

Schiff Products, owned by Weider Nutrition of Salt Lake City, sent its vice president of research through South Florida recently to show off some new products.

Luke Bucci, a gregarious Ph.D., is such a proponent of supplements that, fearing his family history of prostate cancer would catch up with him, he overdosed on zinc as a preventive years ago and became anemic.

He says he's more cautious now. But he has started to take the company's new Prostate Health supplement. What I found interesting about it was an ingredient that many may know, but I didn't, calcium D-glucarate. It's also in the company's Breast Health supplement, and has been considered a possible cancer fighter.

According to Bucci, it "removes unwanted compounds" from the body, including steroid hormones. It occurs naturally in the body -- Bucci said the body makes 2-4 mg. a day -- and in certain foods, like apples, grapefruit, broccoli, and bean sprouts.

No human studies have so far supported its cancer-prevention properties. Bucci referred to studies in high-risk breast cancer patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

I talked to a spokesman for a doctor who has been involved with such studies -- Alexandra Simkovich Heerdt -- who sent me statements the doctor had made to Prevention magazine. Basically, Heerdt called the calcium D-glucarate "promising" but "not effective in the forms available at reducing breast cancer risk."

However, she said the 200-mg.-per-day dose in over-the-counter products like Schiff's Breast Health seemed safe, and that women in her study got much higher doses daily "with no toxicity."

Heerdt didn't address prostate cancer apparently because, as Bucci said, calcium D-glucarate hasn't been tested for prostate cancer prevention. Press releases from Schiff called the company's new Prostate Health supplement "one of the first" to use calcium D-glucarate as part of its formulation.

Like so many supplements, then, there is no guarantee that using calcium D-glucarate in any form will give you a boost against cancer, but it seems unlikely to cause you harm.

There is, however, some positive news concerning flaxseed and prostate cancer prevention.

Duke University Medical Center is reporting that a diet rich in flaxseed seems to reduce the size, aggressiveness and severity of tumors in mice that have been genetically engineered to develop prostate cancer. And in 3 percent of the mice, the flaxseed diet kept them from getting the disease at all.

The bad news is that the amount the mice consumed was 5 percent of their total food intake, which would be "a very difficult amount for humans to eat, but it does signal that we are on the right track and need to continue research in this area," Duke's researchers said.