Scientists find a common nutrient can prevent tumor growth and make cancer drugs work better – do you get enough of it?

A crucial nutrient in oily fish has been shown in the laboratory to provide some level of immunity against cancer.

Mice fed a vitamin D-rich diet had stronger immune resistance to experimentally transplanted cancers and improved responses to immunotherapy treatment compared to mice not given nearly as much vitamin D.

Scientists discovered that the nutrient triggers a process in the intestines that produces Bacteroides fragilis bacteria, which they say gave the mice the necessary immunity boost.

The body synthesizes vitamin D from sunlight and some foods, including oily fish, egg yolks and some dairy products.

In the winter months or in areas closer to the poles, it can be difficult to get the amount of sunlight you need.

It’s not clear exactly why the bacteria appear to have immune-boosting powers, but the study sheds light on the promise of new insights and therapies for cancers that act on the gut microbiome.

Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute in London, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Aalborg University in Denmark revealed last week that feeding mice a diet packed with vitamin D responded better to immunotherapy against cancer. and better resistance to tumors.

Vitamin D acted on the cells lining the intestine, changing the types of bacteria that lived there and allowing Bacteroides fragilis to thrive.

Caetano Reis e Sousa, head of the Immunobiology Laboratory at the Crick, and senior author, said: ‘What we showed here came as a surprise: vitamin D can regulate the gut microbiome, favoring a type of bacteria that gives mice better immunity gives against cancer.

‘This could one day be important for treating cancer in humans, but we don’t know how and why vitamin D has this effect through the microbiome. More research is needed before we can say with certainty that correcting a vitamin D deficiency has benefits for the prevention or treatment of cancer.”

The NIH recommends keeping vitamin D levels above 50 nanomoles per liter, which is recommended for bone health, although people cannot know their exact levels without a blood test.

About 42 percent of Americans are deficient in vitamin D. Signs that you are getting too little of the vitamin include fatigue, bone aches or pain, depression or feelings of sadness, hair loss, muscle weakness, loss of appetite and a weak immune system.

It is recommended to have about five to thirty minutes of sun exposure per day without sunscreen, as SPF ≤8 can block the body’s ability to absorb the UVB rays to effectively produce vitamin D.

Exploring new treatment options could help scientists make progress in the fight against some of the most aggressive cancers, including gastrointestinal cancers whose growth has been linked to the gut microbiome.

To better investigate the link between vitamin D and cancer prevention, researchers analyzed a patient data set from 1.5 million people in Denmark, which showed a link between lower levels of vitamin D exposure and a higher incidence of cancer.

Evangelos Giampazolias, cancer surveillance expert at Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and lead author of the study, said: ‘A key question we are currently trying to answer is how exactly vitamin D supports a ‘good’ microbiome.

‘If we can answer this, we could discover new ways in which the microbiome influences the immune system, potentially offering exciting possibilities in preventing or treating cancer.’

Vitamin D has also been shown to positively impact other aspects of people’s health, including preventing heart attacks, maintaining diabetes and preventing dementia.