Drug Free Cancer Treatment

"To some, a ketogenic diet amounts to nothing less than a drug-free cancer treatment. The diet calls for eliminating carbohydrates, replacing them with healthy fats and protein.

"The premise is that since cancer cells need glucose to thrive, and carbohydrates turn into glucose in your body, then cutting out carbs literally starves the cancer cells.

"This type of diet, in which you replace carbs with moderate amounts of high quality protein and high amounts of beneficial fat, is what I recommend for everyone, whether you have cancer or not. It’s simply a diet that will help optimize your weight and health overall, as eating this way will help you convert from carb burning mode to fat burning."

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/03/10/ketogenic-diet.aspx?e_cid=20130310_SNL_Art_1&utm_source=snl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20130310

Some facts - cancer was not present in aboriginal Eskimos, and has not been detected in large numbers in other aboriginals; until they were introduced to sugar and wheat.

The best model for cancer is that it results when a cell gains a growth advantage over neighboring cells, and does not self eliminate ("apoptosis") when damaged.  Many cancers are:

1. Highly insulin sensitive

2. Highly sensitive to IGF1 (more or less a 90 day moving average of insulin levels)

3. Dependent on sugar/fructose fermentation for energy

In other words, the model for low carb cancer treatment is at least plausible.  I sure hope they keep testing this approach.  

The obligatory "Granny Smith" story:

"CBN News recently published an article on the ketogenic diet.² Clearly, many people are realizing that what we have been doing in terms of fighting cancer is simply not working, and we cannot afford to continue in the same way. Prevention must be addressed if we ever want to turn the tide on the growing incidence of cancer across all age groups. But even more astounding, in terms of treatment, is that cancer may respond to diet alone.

“Dr. Fred Hatfield is an impressive guy: a power-lifting champion, author of dozens of books, a millionaire businessman with a beautiful wife. But he'll tell you his greatest accomplishment is killing his cancer just in the nick of time,” CBN News writes. "The doctors gave me three months to live because of widespread metastatic cancer in my skeletal structure," he recalled. "Three months; three different doctors told me that same thing."

"Dr. Hatfield was preparing to die when he heard of metabolic therapy, also known as the ketogenic diet. He had nothing to lose so he gave it a try, and... it worked. The cancer disappeared completely, and at the time of his interview (above), he’d been cancer-free for over a year."

Attia & IFIK

For my friends and clients working to get into and stay into nutritional ketosis, I posted one day's worth of meals from Peter Attia's web site as an example.  This post is Attia's typically long and information dense post, but I think I'm on read number five or so and still gaining insights into what he's teaching. IOW, I like it.

Note the percentages of intake:

Carbs - 90g or ~360kcal

Protein - 131 or 419-524kcal (some say an average of 3.2kcal of protein becomes fuel after to losses in hair, skin, nails, and protein spills from urine)

Fat - 218 or 1962kcal

Thus, his intake is ~80% fat.  He is measuring his "success" in nutritional ketosis via a ketone measuring tool (.5 to 1.5 mmol/dl being ideal for "nutritional ketosis"), which was something like $1000.  You and I can get a pocket ketone meter nowadays for a few bucks, but the strips are $2-$6 each.  Thank you Canadian online pharmacy for the $2 strips!  Without that I would not be willing to do the ketone self experiments.

One more note - Attia thinks of himself as an cyclist aka endurance athlete, but also does one workout in three of relatively high intensity core strength and conditioning work.

http://eatingacademy.com/personal/what-i-actually-eat-part-ii-ifik-2

• 7 am — morning workout – flat intervals on bike (75 minutes).
• 1 pm – Nicoise salad:
  2 cup butterhead lettuce, 1 tomato, 10 black olives, 8 oz tuna steak, 1 hard boiled egg, 0.5 cup red onion, 2 oz lemon juice, 4 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp mustard.
• 7 pm – Chicken salad with nuts:
  2 cup romaine lettuce, 1 tomato, 0.5 cup cucumber, 2 oz cashews, 2 oz walnuts, 8 oz chicken breast, 6 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar.

Daily totals:

Carbohydrate – 89 gm

Protein – 131 gm

Fat – 218 gm (about 15% SFA, 70% MUFA, 15% PUFA)

Calories – 2,900

Your Brain On Ketones

"And now let's really get down to the mitochondrial level. Mitochondria are the power plants of our cells, where all the energy is produced (as ATP). Now, when I was taught about biochemical fuel-burning, I was taught that glucose was "clean" and ketones were "smokey." That glucose was clearly the preferred fuel for our muscles for exercise and definitely the key fuel for the brain. Except here's the dirty little secret about glucose - when you look at the amount of garbage leftover in the mitochondria, it is actually less efficient to make ATP from glucose than it is to make ATP from ketone bodies! A more efficient energy supply makes it easier to restore membranes in the brain to their normal states after a depolarizing electrical energy spike occurs, and means that energy is produced with fewer destructive free radicals leftover."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201104/your-
brain-ketones?page=2

What is the significance of the above to you, dear reader?  Mainly that it is another indicator that a high fat, minimal carb diet which supports ketone production is healthy for the noodle.  As the author says:

"What does it all mean? Well, in the brain, energy is everything. The brain needs a great deal of energy to keep all those membrane potentials maintained - to keep pushing sodium out of the cells and pulling potassium into the cells. In fact, the brain, which is only 2% of our body weight, uses 20% of our oxygen and 10% of our glucose stores just to keep running. (Some cells in our brain are actually too small (or have tendrils that are too small) to accommodate mitochondria (the power plants). In those places, we must use glucose itself (via glycolysis) to create ATP.)

When we change the main fuel of the brain from glucose to ketones, we change amino acid handling. And that means we change the ratios of glutamate and GABA. The best responders to a ketogenic diet for epilepsy end up with the highest amount of GABA in the central nervous system.  One of the things the brain has to keep a tight rein on is the amount of glutamate hanging out in the synapse. Lots of glutamate in the synapse means brain injury, or seizures, or low level ongoing damaging excito-toxicity as you might see in depression. The brain is humming along, using energy like a madman. Even a little bit more efficient use of the energy makes it easier for the brain to pull the glutamate back into the cells. And that, my friends, is a good thing."

Eat meat, eggs and vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch and no sugar/wheat.

What's Driving You Crazy?

Emily writes like I like it - and covers a lot of ground.  Read on to find out why low sugar intake - counter intuitively since the "conventional wisdom" is you need to eat a minimum of 150g/day of carbohydrate to adequately fuel your brain - may be the superior way to feed the grey matter in that bucket you call your head.

"The modern prescription of high carbohydrate, low fat diets and eating snacks between meals has coincided with an increase in obesity, diabetes, and and increase in the incidence of many mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. In addition, many of these disorders are striking the population at younger ages. While most people would agree that diet has a lot to do with the development of obesity and diabetes, many would disagree that what we eat has much to do with our mental health and outlook. I believe that what we eat has a lot to do with the health of our brains, though of course mental illness (like physical illness) has multifactorial causes, and by no means should we diminish the importance of addressing all the causes in each individual. But let's examine the opposite of the modern high carbohydrate, low fat, constant snacking lifestyle and how that might affect the brain."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201104/your-brain-ketones?page=2

Taubes: Ketogenic Metabolism Is Good

When I interviewed ketosis experts, however, they universally sided with Atkins, and suggested that maybe the medical community and the media confuse ketosis with ketoacidosis, a variant of ketosis that occurs in untreated diabetics and can be fatal. ''Doctors are scared of ketosis,'' says Richard Veech, an N.I.H. researcher who studied medicine at Harvard and then got his doctorate at Oxford University with the Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs. ''They're always worried about diabetic ketoacidosis. But ketosis is a normal physiologic state. I would argue it is the normal state of man. It's not normal to have McDonald's and a delicatessen around every corner. It's normal to starve.''

Simply put, ketosis is evolution's answer to the thrifty gene. We may have evolved to efficiently store fat for times of famine, says Veech, but we also evolved ketosis to efficiently live off that fat when necessary. Rather than being poison, which is how the press often refers to ketones, they make the body run more efficiently and provide a backup fuel source for the brain. Veech calls ketones ''magic'' and has shown that both the heart and brain run 25 percent more efficiently on ketones than on blood sugar.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=18&src=pm

Back in the dark ages, they used to say eating too much protein is bad for the kidneys.   However, like the sasquach, there's no evidence this is true.  There never was.  And recent testing shows the opposite - those in kidney failure do well on a ketogenic diet.  What absolutely WILL wreck the kidney's however is a high carb diet leading to metabolic syndrome and progressing to type II diabetes; which is why you see the kidney dialysis centers so many places these days.

Coconut Oil For Alzheimer's

This is a nice video -

BLUF:  Ketones generated from coconut oil consumption seem to help folks who are losing their minds.

I hope this is right, and if it is, then intermittent fasting (which mainly means not eating between dinner and lunch), in combination with coconut oil, should do even better, since that fasting period enables/demands significant ketone production (IOW, you don't have to be on a full, stage 1 Atkins level of carb restriction to be in ketogenic metabolism by the time you get up in the AM, and you can extend that phase through IF).

So how would it feel to be losing weight, to be full of energy (and not hungry) even though you rarely eat anything before 10:00AM, to not have to bother with making a meal every morning, and to possibly be disease proofing yourself at the same time?  You'd be setting yourself up for optimal blood sugar control, by running primarily on fat all day long.  How much impact would that make in your life?  For me, it has been most excellent and I highly recommend you experiment with IF after you achieve glycemic control through a 30 day run of eating meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

A Million Plus Years of Survival of the Fittest Yields Amazing Capability

This is a summary of this post, which I also referenced here.

Low carb, or starvation metabolism, is the 'normal' metabolism.  Low carb intake, or starvation, presents the opposite challenge than what we neolithic humans usually face (how to dispose of excess blood sugar before it damages our nervous system), in that it has to generate enough glucose to feed glucose dependent tissues (primarily, the brain!).

A quote from the article:  "the metabolism of carb restriction = the metabolism of starvation. I would maintain, however, based on my study of the Paleolithic diet, that starvation and carb restriction are simply the polar ends of a continuum, and that carb restriction was the norm for most of our existence as upright walking beings on this planet, making the metabolism of what biochemistry textbook authors call starvation the ‘normal’ metabolism."

Where does the body come up with glucose when you are either starving or restricting carb intake?  First, from muscle tissue, protein from which is broken down in the liver to create glucose.  However, this isn't an ideal solution for the long term, for the obvious reason that you'll live better with more muscle, especially if you need to hunt and kill some food.  So keeping mind, as Dr. Eades reports that "normal blood sugar represents only about a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in the entire blood volume", you might assume that an "average person requires about 200 grams of sugar per day to meet all the needs of the glucose-dependent tissues".  So, how can a starving human spare glucose?  Easy, ketones, which are a fabulous glucose substitute, and are a by product of the break down of fats in the liver which is part of gluconeogenesis.  That's right - the machine is so incredibly efficient that it converts protein to sugar, a process powered by the body's really big energy storage tissue, fat, the by product of which (ketones) reduces the amount of gluconeogenesis required.

"Although ketones can’t totally replace all the sugar required by the brain, they can replace a pretty good chunk of it. By reducing the body’s need for sugar, less protein is required, allowing the muscle mass (the protein reservoir) to last a lot longer before it is depleted. And ketones are the preferred fuel for the heart, making that organ operate at about 28 percent greater efficiency."

As the Dr. says, "Fat is the perfect fuel."  This process is beautiful, man, just beautiful.  At least, it is if you are a *geek like me.*

Dr. Eades again:  "If, instead of starving, you’re following a low-carb diet, it gets even better. The protein you eat is converted to glucose instead of the protein in your muscles. If you keep the carbs low enough so that the liver still has to make some sugar, then you will be in fat-burning mode while maintaining your muscle mass, the best of all worlds. How low is low enough? Well, when the ketosis process is humming along nicely and the brain and other tissues have converted to ketones for fuel, the requirement for glucose drops to about 120-130 gm per day. If you keep your carbs below that at, say, 60 grams per day, you’re liver will have to produce at least 60-70 grams of glucose to make up the deficit, so you will generate ketones that entire time."

In the mean time, while you are making your own sugar and ketones from stored fat and ingested fat and protein, your body's systems are not fully engaged transforming and packing excess sugars into fat cells.  When not tied down by that emergency, your body will clean up AGEs (advanced glycation end products), amyloid plaques and such, while sustaining a low blood sugar level, meaning these things are not regenerated in as great a volume.  

Low blood sugar, fewer AGEs and decreased amyloid plaques is likely an all win scenario - unless you would like the challenge of rapid aging with atherosclerotic disease, loss of internal tissue pliability, loss of memory and cognition, and the other not-so-delicious results of metabolic syndrome. 
Edited 10 March, 2011