Does Asparagus Cause Cancer?

The amino acid, asparagine, is thought to be “digested” by cancer cells to help metastasize or spread throughout the body.

The study of all the recent headlines used mice, who were in-bred to lack immunity, and then injected with cancer cells.²

The mice were fed a chow with either no, low or high amounts of asparagine.

Spread of cancer to the lung was increased in mice on high-asparagine diet. Injecting an enzyme that blocked asparagine lowered the spread.

In Conclusion:

1. The mice were not fed asparagus.
2. Asparagine did not cause cancer.
3. The main foods HIGH in asparagine, such as fish, poultry, dairy, pork, beef, and eggs, apparently do not make as controversial of headlines. Fruits and vegetables are generally LOW in asparagine.
4. Thanks to some help from my colleagues, we figured that a person weighing 80 kg or 176 lbs would need to eat up to 1,013 asparagus spears per day to equal what the mice were fed in the high asparagine diet.⁴

References

Special Thanks To: Dr. Jonathan Hommel, Dr. Mike Roberts, Dr. Chris Lockwood (drchrislockwood.com)

1. Hurst P.L., Boulton G., Lill R.E. (1998) Towards a freshness test for asparagus: spear tip asparagine content is strongly related to post-harvest accumulated heat-units. Food Chemistry, 61, 381–384.
2. Knott, S. R., Wagenblast, E., Khan, S., Kim, S. Y., Soto, M., Wagner, M., ... & Maceli, A. R. (2018). Asparagine bioavailability governs metastasis in a model of breast cancer. Nature.
3. Lea, P. J., Sodek, L., Parry, M. A., Shewry, P. R., & Halford, N. G. (2007). Asparagine in plants. Annals of Applied Biology, 150(1), 1-26.
4. Reagan-Shaw, S., Nihal, M., & Ahmad, N. (2008). Dose translation from animal to human studies revisited. The FASEB journal, 22(3), 659-661.
5. https://gaiacantelli.scienceblog.com/259/the-science-you-should-have-heard-of-this-week-lets-talk-about-asparagine/
6. http://nutritiondata.self.com