GLUTAMINE: A Simple Way To REDUCE Chemotherapy Side Effects

The truth about glutamine in cancer care—and why avoiding it is a BIG MISTAKE. #metaboliccancertreatment #starvingcancer #chemotherapysideeffects

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Episode Description:

If you or someone you know are going through chemotherapy, this is something you really need to know.

There’s a compound that’s been studied for years…
Not to fight cancer directly — but to make treatment more tolerable and more effective.

We’re talking about reducing:
• nerve damage
• nausea and GI toxicity
• treatment-limiting side effects

And yet, it’s often misunderstood — and sometimes even avoided for the wrong reasons.

In this breakdown, Dr. Chaplin explains:
• why one common belief about it is completely backwards
• what actually happens in the body during chemo
• and how it may help you stay on treatment longer

This isn’t about hype. It’s about making treatment easier to get through.

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Inquiries: 

info@elevatingcancertreatment.com

https://elevatingcancertreatment.com

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Disclaimer:
The information provided in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and does not constitute medical advice. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard or read in this podcast or on this channel.
Reliance on any information provided by Dr. Jay Chaplin or Elevating Cancer Treatment is solely at your own risk. Dr. Jay Chaplin is a scientist and drug developer, not a medical doctor providing patient care. The content presented here reflects general scientific understanding and research, and may not be applicable to your individual health circumstances. Individual medical conditions and treatments vary, and no two situations are exactly alike.
Always consult with your personal healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment plan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Why is nobody talking about this? This is clinically proven fact, not some internet myth, and it is the exact opposite of what people are hearing online. Something can be true, meaningless, and harmful all at the same time. And right now there are some very loud voices on the internet telling people something pretty shocking. They're telling you to turn your back on your best friend during chemotherapy. Not metaphorically, literally. They want you to run the other direction. And what is this supposed villain? It's an amino acid. Yeah, an amino acid, a building block of protein that makes up your body and all of your food. Apparently it's feeding your cancer, and you should eliminate it from your diet totally and take drugs to block it. And that can sound true and terrifying and hopeful unless you actually look at the science. Because when we do, a very different picture appears. Hello and welcome to Elevating Cancer Treatment, where we explain the science and debunk myths to help you navigate your health journey. My background is a little different. Beyond educating about cancer, I'm actually designing new drugs that are defining the future of oncology. This direct hands-on experience offers me a very different perspective of how these cancer treatments work on the body, interact with the cancer cells, and cause side effects. And these are insights that I'm excited to share with you. If that sounds interesting, make sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and hit that notification bell so you never miss an update. And please share it if you find it useful. I'm Dr. Jay Chaplin. An important reminder, I'm a PhD, not an MD. The information in this video is education and it's not medical advice. Every cancer is unique and no general information applies to everyone. Please remember that. Always consult with your healthcare provider for guidance on your specific situation. And two quick things. First, as a thank you for being here, I've created a free resource, 10 things to elevate your chemo journey, which you can download from the link below. And second, by signing up, you'll also get updates on that innovative cancer treatment I'm working on. I'm confident it represents a significant advancement in immunotherapy. So please take a moment, download your free guide, and join us in shaping the future of cancer treatment. So the misinformation problem. Dealing with cancer misinformation online is like playing whack-a-mole. You smack down one myth and three more pop up wearing fake lab coats. One of the hardest parts of this is when claims are woven together so tightly that you can't clearly separate them. And a perfect example of this is the claim that you have to eliminate both sugar and glutamine from your diet to starve cancer. We've talked about the sugar angle before. While reducing carbohydrates can slow the growth of many cancers, though not all, there are some important realities. Zero carb diets cannot starve cancer away, it doesn't eliminate it. Sugar does not cause cancer in the first place, and for some cancers, very low carb diets can actually backfire badly. And this kind of nuance is hard to get from the internet headlines, which is why we don't make generic recommendations to clients. The details always matter. So for many people dealing with cancer, low-carb diets can be very helpful. But glutamine, that's a totally different story. If you look at cancer cell line studies, something interesting happens. If you block a cell's ability to use glutamine at all, you can kill cancer cells. It looks really great. So naturally people ask, why aren't doctors doing that? And that's because biology is messy and real life is much more complicated than a culture dish. Every cell in your body needs free nitrogen to make new DNA. That's required for cell division, for tissue repair, for fixing constant DNA damage just from everyday life. The problem here is that free nitrogen in the form of ammonia is very toxic to cells. So your body packages it safely using glutamine and glutamic acid. Here's how the system works: nitrogen gets attached to glutamic acid, that turns it into glutamine. The glutamine travels safely through the body wherever you need it, then the nitrogen is removed again to make DNA components, and that leaves you with glutamic acid again. Every cell in your body uses this system, which means if you block it, you don't just kill cancer cells, you kill everything that divides quickly, especially your intestinal lining, and we'll come back to that later. Now this brings us to a fascinating historical experiment and something you should know for the next time anyone online tells you that glutamine is bad for you. The chemotherapy disaster. So back in the late 1950s, scientists developed and tested a drug called 6-diazo-5-oxo-L-norleucine, or mercifully Dawn for short. Dawn blocks several pathways that use glutamine for DNA production. It doesn't stop glutamine from being taken up by the cancer cell. It stops the removal of the nitrogen from it. More than eight separate pathways, in fact. The idea? You starve the cancer cell of nitrogen and you block its ability to fix or make new DNA. The reality? It failed spectacularly. Patients develop severe gastrointestinal damage. Why? Because the drug destroyed the rapidly dividing cells of the gut lining. So in mice, a single large dose can be tolerated, but repeated doses as low as 1 mg per kilogram were lethal, dead, gone, with tiny repeat doses because the intestines can't heal. So yeah, blocking glutamine can kill cancer cells, but it also kills your healthy cells too, and the rest of you, especially your intestines. And that makes it a terrible therapy. That's that drug that's being used to justify the you can kill cancer by starving it from glutamine claim. Not the same thing at all. So there's another misunderstanding here. People say we should block glutamine metabolism, but technically, glutamine isn't the thing being metabolized. It's converted into glutamic acid, and the glutamic acid is what's actually being burned in the mitochondria for energy. And glutamate, it's everywhere. It is the most abundant amino acid in both protein and in your bloodstream. And glutamine isn't the only nitrogen source either. Several other amino acids can be interconverted back and forth for nitrogen and metabolism. Glutamine's just the best. Asparagine, aspartate, and arginine can all go through this. So to truly eliminate glutamine metabolism, you would need to remove five of the 20 amino acids from your diet, which is impossible. That's why they're called non-essential amino acids. Individually, they aren't essential, but the group absolutely is. If you have any one, you can convert it back and forth. So, can you block glutamine uptake? No, you can't. Can you block glutamine metabolism without damaging healthy cells? Also, no, no. There's yet another wrinkle. That famous glutamine addiction seen in cancer cells. It may largely be an artifact of cell culture experiments. When tumors are studied directly, before removal or immediately afterwards, using tracer studies, they show something really interesting. So this is where labeled glucose or glutamine are injected a few hours before surgery, and the amount of that label incorporation is measured after the tumor is removed. You can see which one has been taken up and used. In real life, most tumors rely very heavily on glycolysis, on sugar, but they show minimal increases, if any, in glutamine usage over normal cells. Why? Because cell lines behave differently than tumors living inside organisms. Which brings us to one of the most important phrases in cancer biology. Please say it with me. Cell lines don't tell you what actually happens in the body. Even when they are implanted into animals later, they've been changed and they aren't the same thing anymore. Even if a tumor can't get glutamine from the bloodstream, it still has backup plans. Cancer cells can increase autophagy or self-cannabalism to recycle internal proteins, or they can actually cannibalize nearby cells. Yeah, cancer cells can literally eat neighboring cells for nutrients. So trying to remove glutamine from the bloodstream won't starve them, they'll just eat their neighbor. They'll get it somewhere else. Cancer is many things, but adaptable is at the top of the list. All this biochemistry is nice. It's clean, I like it. But what matters most is human data. If glutamine truly fed tumors, we would expect two things: higher cancer rates in people who supplemented with glutamine regularly, and faster tumor growth in patients who were taking it. But that's not what we see, not at all. Bodybuilders, many of whom regularly take large doses of glutamine, actually have lower cancer rates than the general population. Of course, there are lifestyle factors there, but clinical studies are much more controlled. So multiple studies using 10 to 40 grams per day of glutamine for extended periods found, with one poorly controlled exception, every study showed either decreased tumor growth, often in melanomas, or no effect at all on tumor growth. So, how do we reconcile this with those cell culture experiments? We got three important factors. Here's why the myth falls apart. First, every cell needs glutamine, so your body ensures you never run out. Your skeletal muscles produce it all day, every day, and release it into the bloodstream to feed the rest of your body. The only way to deprive a tumor of glutamine would be to eliminate all of your muscle mass, which is not a recommended cancer therapy. Second, cancer adapts. Many cancers sensitive to glutamine loss, like glioblastomas and certain liver cancers, rapidly activate enzymes to make their own glutamine, especially tumors driven by C. MIC or KRAS mutations or amplifications. In some studies, glioblastoma cells produce so much glutamine that they actually exported it to their environment. Why? Because other cells will trade glucose or other amino acids that are scarcer and more important for that glutamine. Essentially, they barter nutrients with the tumor, which means that when you try and starve the body of glutamine, you may actually accelerate cancer's growth by enhancing that barter strategy. Third, activated immune cells have metabolism very similar to cancer cells. They also require glutamine. You restrict glutamine and you weaken and slow your immune system's ability to fight the tumor. In fact, glutamine deprivation can also increase PDL1 expression, which allows tumors to better hide from immune attack. So restricting glutamine may hurt your immune system's ability to control the tumor in multiple different ways. That's bad. So, glutamine is not the villain the internet says it is. Instead, it may be one of your best allies during treatment. And I know that's a big claim. So why do I say that? Because researchers originally did those glutamine studies for something else entirely. Reducing chemotherapy toxicity, and you really need to hear this. Clinical trials tested glutamine to reduce many things chemotherapy-induced nerve damage, GI toxicity, and heart damage from certain drugs. And the results across the board are really impressive. Now we talked before about how glutamine helps prevent or treat neuropathy caused by both platinum-based chemotherapy and taxol. That in and of itself is huge because neuropathy is one of the main reasons patients have to reduce doses or stop treatment early. But that's not nearly all glutamine does. It also helps reduce nausea, diarrhea, and damage to the intestinal lining, particularly with the commonly used chemotherapy drugs Fifluorousyl, 5FU, and arinatican. Both of those have a strong protection with. Again, doses of 10 to 40 grams per day just in food or drink have been shown to reduce both severity and duration of the symptoms. It's also been shown to reduce the heart issues that come with doxorubicin. And unlike steroids, these benefits do not come with the cost of increased tumor growth or immune suppression. It actually improves immune function, like we talked about earlier. So that's a double win. This is a big deal. We even have evidence showing that low blood glutamine levels correlate with faster cancer progression and worse survival outcomes, which is the exact opposite of what the internet myths are predicting. Low glutamine harms the patient. It increases the chances of death. But it doesn't slow the cancer. Supplementation, on the other hand, improves tolerance to chemotherapy, it supports immune function, it reduces treatment side effects, and it even improves survival odds just by itself. Why is nobody talking about this? This is clinically proven fact, not some internet myth, and it is the exact opposite of what people are hearing online. So, yes, cancer cells do use glutamine. That statement is true, but so does every other cell in your body. And trying to eliminate it doesn't starve the tumor, it starves you. Which is why glutamine isn't the enemy. During chemotherapy, and to a lesser extent radiation, it is actually one of your best friends. So if this was a surprise to you, think about what else we can set up to help better treat your cancer. This is the kind of thing that I dig into and find as gold nuggets to give to our clients to make their treatment path easier and more effective. Beyond these videos, if you need more personalized guidance or a deeper dive into specific treatments to have your treatment be as effective as possible, I offer one on one sessions and medical advocacy. You can find information on our website, which is linked down below. Again, if you found this video informative, please give it a thumbs up, click the notification bell, and subscribe to our channel for more science based cancer insights.