Human Breast Milk Kills Cancer, Swedish Researchers Claim

Human breast milk kills cancer.

This is an amazing find, but only in the past 2 or three years has the research on it begun to pick up. What researchers discovered and confirmed in that time is what scientists have been saying for decades - and wise women for millennia: Mama's milk is best. To put it in more modern terms, the hu-juice is one bad mama jama.

Milk of most types comes in two parts. If you remember Miss Muffet you can say it with me: Curds and Whey. The curdy part of human breast milk (before it sours and actually becomes curdy) is protein and also known as casein. The liquidy part is the whey.

It turns out human milk has a rather benign Clark Kentish compound called alpha-lac. Don't be scared of the name. It basically means "milk protein in a certain shape". In its purely pumped form, alpha-lac goes about its humdrum duty of being part of the milk. No cancer crusading happening here.

While a-lac hangs out in the whey, it has a friend from the other side of the tracks--the casein. This best bud is oleic acid. Don't let the sciencey name scare you. Just think of it as French for "Popeye's Spinach" (if you don't speak French that is) which sits quietly in a can doing nothing until it's needed.

Separate, they go about their daily liquid nipple baby feeding duties. The wicked part comes when they slide down a baby's throat into its tummy.

Important Note: Not in the bottle, not in the mouth, and NOT in an adult's tummy.

The baby's stomach has a pH around 4.5. pH is just a fancy number for the magic that allows a-lac to join with oleic acid and together turn into a Super Duper cancer killing crime fighting agent (if you think cancer is a crime of course).

Essentially, the nearly neutral nature of the baby's stomach is just the right environment for our Clark Kent to unfold itself and refold itself into the shape that affects cancer cells but not normal cells. You could call an infant's stomach, say, the phone booth in which a-lac turns from a normal shy milk protein to a superhero in the immune system.

Oleic acid is like the key that locks the new tumor killer into its lethal shape. Without it, when our hero passes into any other environment with a different pH, it would change back to its non-cancer killing form. In a way, its kind of like the Velcro on Superman's cape and tights. The new improved form gets a pseudonym: MAL (multimeric alpha-lactalbumin-- all that means is it has more than one shape).

Enough with the Superman metaphors, I promise!

Once a-lac, now known as MAL, is spiffed up and ready for action, it has to actually get to cancer cells. When it meets regular healthy cells, it does nothing (It's not into killing civilians!). When it runs into tumor cells, or cells with a propensity to grow and grow unchecked, it gets into those havoc wreaking cells and stages a two pronged attack.

First it has a chat with the mitochondria. Mitochondria are often described as the powerhouse of the cell. They have another critical job-to tell a cell when it should die. MAL convinces this powerhouse that it should cause the cancer cell to commit suicide. (Cell suicide is called apoptosis). Then MAL sneaks on down to the nucleus, the brain of the cell, and chops the DNA up into itty bitty pieces, so the cancer cell can't keep replicating itself.

In two swift blows, this nifty compound has eradicated cancer from the infant's stomach and does so repeatedly as long as the infant is nursing and the cancer is of a susceptible type.

Wait! You might say. You mean only infants can benefit from this?

Well, no. But adults can't just drink breast milk to get the effect. An adult's stomach is pH of around 1, which means an adult's stomach is too harsh and would digest or tear up a-lac instead of changing it to the right shape to have cancer killing properties. Researchers have come up with a method to make cancer killing MAL that in theory can be used in adults--but we'll save that for another article.

Read my other (or upcoming articles) to find out more about how scientist have replicated this compound so it can be given to adults, how this discovery applies to potential treatment of cancer and adults and children, what types of cancer it affects, what kinds of studies have been done, a brief history of this discovery, upper-level versions of these articles and more!

All descriptions, metaphors and regular people breakdowns of scientific terms and concept came from the author's vast brain cell libraries and personal imagination island.

All research information in this article came from the following publications:

1. Hakansson A, Zhivotovsky B, Orrenius S, Sabharwal H, Svanborg C.

Apoptosis induced by a human milk protein.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1995 Aug 15;92(17):8064-8.
PMID: 7644538 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

2. Hakansson A, Andreasson J, Zhivotovsky B, Karpman D, Orrenius S, Svanborg C.
Multimeric alpha-lactalbumin from human milk induces apoptosis through a direct effect on cell nuclei.
Exp Cell Res. 1999 Feb 1;246(2):451-60.
PMID: 9925761 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

3. Svensson M, Sabharwal H, Hakansson A, Mossberg AK, Lipniunas P, Leffler H, Svanborg C, Linse S.
Molecular characterization of alpha-lactalbumin folding variants that induce apoptosis in tumor cells.

J Biol Chem. 1999 Mar 5;274(10):6388-96.
PMID: 10037730 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

4. Svensson M, Hakansson A, Mossberg AK, Linse S, Svanborg C.
Conversion of alpha-lactalbumin to a protein inducing apoptosis.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000 Apr 11;97(8):4221-6.
PMID: 10760289 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]