Pulling antioxidants starves cancers

Ads on television and in health-food stores extol the benefits of antioxidant vitamins, but they don’t mention that cancerous tissues may depend even more than healthy ones on access to antioxidants. In fact, scientists have just devised an anti-antioxidant dietary therapy that suppresses breast cancer in rodents.

Previously, Craig D. Albright’s team at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill had shown that some tumors turn off a normal process that leads to cell suicide, or apoptosis.