There is a debate about cancer, as to whether cancer is a genetic disease, e.g. it’s in your genes and there is little you can do, or is it a metabolic disease, caused by what you eat, how you live, etc. The metabolic school of thought seems to be leading the argument, at present, and this suggests that you might have more control over your fate regarding cancer than previously thought. I recently finished reading Sam Apples new book “Ravenous” based on Otto Warburg and his cancer research from the early 20th centenary, which I can highly recommend.
This from Sam Apple’s book, “In 1982, researchers at the American Cancer Society selected a population of more than 900,000 Americans and asked them to fill out surveys that included basic personal information, such as their weight, height, and smoking habits. By 1998, almost 60,000 of the participants had died of cancer, and the American Cancer Society was anxious to figure out why. Among those digging through the data was Eugenia Calle, an American Cancer Society epidemiologist. Her study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003, found that being overweight or obese increased the risk of nearly every cancer she looked at. Compared with a woman of normal weight, the women in the highest-weight category were 62 percent more likely to die from cancer. The most obese men, in turn, were 52 percent more likely to die from cancer.”
In 2007, the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute of Cancer Research jointly published a five-hundred-page report entitled 'Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer'. The report discusses the evidence linking diet to cancer and finds that the most convincing link is 'greater body fatness' to 'cancers of the colorectal, esophagus (adenocarcinoma), pancreas, kidney and breast cancer,' and possibly gallbladder cancer as well.
Most significant is that there is a group of 'diseases' including: Type 2 Diabetes, cardio vascular disease (CVD), PCOS, caries, macular degeneration, obesity, hypertension, stroke, Alzheimer’s and Cancer. These diseases are sometimes referred to as 'Western' diseases, or diseases of civilization, as their prevalence significantly increases after a society adopts western style nutrition including sugar, white flour and polyunsaturated industrial seed oils. So although we don’t hear it stated, cancer growth does seem to be assisted by a high carbohydrate diet including high levels of sugar and polyunsaturated omega-6 seed oils.
I read that cancers growing in a laboratory are fed insulin and glucose and don’t survive on ketones which also supports the research mentioned earlier. One researcher claims that fructose is the “perfect food” for a growing cancer precisely because it helps cancer cells to survive in low-oxygen environments.
Researchers have found that insulin and glucose reduce cancer sensitivity to chemotherapy, meaning that the chemotherapy is less effective. With a Ketogenic diet, chemotherapy is apparently more effective, cancer is more sensitive to the treatment and patients could expect to have a faster and easier recovery. There is a recommendation that they should also fast for 3 days prior to chemo, fast during the chemo and then for 2 days following. This comes from Dr Nashua Winters and Valter D. Longo, but undertake your own research of course.
From Annette Bosworth MD comes the information that one of the most renowned cancer treatment centers in the world, M. D. Anderson in Texas USA, will not begin chemotherapy for brain cancer until the patient has been in ketosis for 2 weeks.
There is a description of how cancer cells grow and divide called the Warburg effect named after the researcher Otto Warburg who was the first to identify that cancers are ravenous for glucose. This claims that most cancer cells need a glucose fuel source to grow and divide, and depriving them of this prevents cancer from growing. There is a secondary related effect of high levels of Insulin and Insulin Like Growth Factor (IGF-1) caused by high levels of insulin, stimulating cancer growth. Both have been known about for decades but until recently, largely ignored by mainstream cancer therapy. This suggests that a low carbohydrate diet, reducing glucose in the body and thereby lowering insulin levels, could halt or slow cancer proliferation.
A Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan makes use of cancer’s affinity for glucose. By inserting into your blood, a radioactive dye with glucose, a subsequent scan can locate the places in the body where glucose is being absorbed. For a cancer scan this lights up the body in places where cancer cells are ravenously eating the glucose, helping to identify if and where it has spread.
Professor Jurgen Schole, from the University of Hanover, in 1986 after his low carbohydrate research said, “we were able to demonstrate that the rates of tumor growth in experimental animals, which follow the application of carcinogens, diminish significantly when carbohydrates are replaced by the isocaloric amount (same calorific value) of fat.”
Do vegetarians suffer less from cancer? It is my understanding that many Hindus in India are strictly vegetarian. They suffer from Cancer as do other vegetarian societies. In The Masai, The Inuit and native Americans on the Great Plains, cancer was rare to absent and these societies were heavy meat eaters, sometimes solely for many months of the year. Although this is only an association, it does seem significant, as does their very low levels of sugar consumption.
It seems clear from very recent research and examination of historical research that has been overlooked for years, that sugar is likely to be “a primary promoter” of cancer. Sugar pushes up glucose and fructose levels, which push up insulin levels which then stimulates cancer.
This also from Sam Apples book, - Lewis Cantley, the scientist who pioneered the study of how insulin activates the pathways linked to cancer, is among the researchers who have grown alarmed about sugar. He has reportedly stopped eating sugar himself for a simple reason. His research has led him to the conclusion that today’s “high consumption of sugar” is “almost certainly responsible for the increased rates of a variety of cancers in the developed world.”
The repeated heating and cooling of Omega-6 polyunsaturated oils in restaurant fryers, breaks down molecules, oxidizing the oils and creating new compounds and this gets worse as the heating is repeated, as it contaminates and reduces the 'smoke point' for the oil. Novel polymers (molecules your body does not recognize, so triggers inflammation) are produced, that cause problems for restaurant cleaning, with new and more powerful cleaning compounds needed to remove the residues from walls and drains.
If we eat food cooked in this 'soup', I am not surprised that cancer rates are rising. At home you can avoid this by frying in saturated fat with lard, tallow, avocado oil, butter or coconut oil. Olive oil is not generally advised for frying as it has a lower 'smoke point', which is the temperature at which it begins to burn, oxidizing and creating harmful chemicals.
I am aware of another suggestion, that long term use of 'fat soluble' statins is anecdotally linked to multiple cancer events in people, maybe because the statin mechanism interrupts the body’s manufacture of LDL cholesterol, which now is becoming recognized in its non-oxidized form, as a healing material and integral to an immune response.
For more Information about using your food as medicine take a
look at my book on Amazon.
Regards George Elder