This is a little old, but still exciting news. A New Scientist article reveals a possible new cancel therapy that has been showing promising results in the labs. Even more surprising, the drug used in the study, dichloroacetate, is cheap, easy to produce, and patent-free. Based on a study done by University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, the article states:

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

While it’s a long way from being proven useful on humans and even longer before we see it active use, it’s still something to be excited about.

Links to followup:

• Official DCA Research Information
• The DCA Site

RadicalBehavior.com has a handy formula to calculate the number of calories one should eat in a day.

To do a simplistic calorie content for me each day, I use the light activity setting and then add all the activities I do to get the count of all the calories I should be doing. For instance, if I run for 30 minutes, I add the calories I should I burn doing that activity to the calories calculated from that formula to decide how many calories total I should eat. It’s not exact, but it works for me.

I added a simple Daily Calorie Calculator here using RadicalBehavior.com’s formula. You can find it here.