Does Aspirin Stop Cancer

This is a very interesting and relatively brief summary of the topic - the short answer is - "we don't know who will get the most benefit for the new risks."
http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2014/08/aspirin-and-cancer-story-more-complicated-than-many-are-reporting/

Cure Your Own Tooth Decay?

I highly recommend this author and his web site.

Ramiel Nagel
Author of Cure Tooth Decay & Healing Our Children
http://www.curetoothdecay.com
http://www.healingourchildren.net

From his latest newsletter:
P.S. Please tell your friends how they can get a valuable free
chapter of "Cure Tooth Decay" by signing up for this informative
newsletter at:
http://www.curetoothdecay.com/tooth-decay-newsletter.htm

P.P.S. If you have a dental question, you can use our new
automated help system to find an answer to your question or
to post new questions. http://curetoothdecay.com/community.htm

How to Make Doctors Irrelevant - The Daily Beast

Now she is conducting clinical trials in MS patients to prove this wasn't a fluke, and the studies are going very well. In addition, she uses a nutritional approach at the VA with her traumatic brain injury patients, as well as those in her therapeutic lifestyle clinic. She finds that all kinds of people get better—even those with difficult-to-treat conditions like Parkinson's, fibromyalgia, obesity and other autoimmune conditions. "The first thing that happens [to patients in my clinic] is they have decreased pain, better mental clarity, and more energy," Dr. Wahls said. "The women say the weight is falling off and the men say that their love lives are better."   http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/23/how-to-make-doctors-irrelevant.html 

People who make predictions about the future are people who choose to feel certain in the face of evidence that 99+% of predictions are wrong.  I predict this is a very good picture of what medicine will become in the future.  You and I both will be better off if I'm right.

We Need To Take Meditation More Seriously As Medicine | TIME.com

To be fair, I’m not sure how I would have responded had my surgeon suggested I meditate before or after surgery to ease my anxiety or post-operative pain. My guess is, like many women, I would have been skeptical: what exactly did sitting in half-lotus pose or breathing deeply have to do with the tumor in my right breast?  And why was a doctor— whose job and training and every measure of success is rooted in science and clinical outcomes— prescribing a spiritual or religious method of therapy?

But a new review study, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine, suggests that the ancient Eastern practice of mindful meditation can offer real help for patients with depression, anxiety, and pain. And researchers are increasingly demonstrating the measurable influence of meditation on the brain, proving that mindfulness programs can make us feel happier, have greater emotional resilience and take fewer sick days.

http://ideas.time.com/2014/01/17/we-need-to-take-meditation-more-seriously-as-medicine/

We attended Chris Kresser's presentation in support of his new book, Beyond Paleo, and he made reference to a study in which:
-The participants were in the highest risk group of mortality from heart disease (black men)
-The test was - one group doing meditation, one group on statins, one group not treated by either

Guess who "won"?  Indeed, the meditation group fared better than the statin group. Side effects of statins?  It's a long undesirable list.  Side effects of meditation?  It's a long, desirable list, not to mention, it doesn't have to cost $3/day.

So, all you meditation rock stars, you have a leg up on the rest of us, please accept my salute.

BMJ: We Missed the Mark on Sat Fat

This is a great read, I highly recommend you read the whole piece.

"The aspect of dietary saturated fat that is believed to have the greatest influence on cardiovascular risk is elevated concentrations of low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Yet the reduction in LDL cholesterol from reducing saturated fat intake seems to be specific to large, buoyant (type A) LDL particles, when in fact it is the small, dense (type B) particles (responsive to carbohydrate intake) that are implicated in cardiovascular disease.4

"Indeed, recent prospective cohort studies have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk.5 Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective. The source of the saturated fat may be important. Dairy foods are exemplary providers of vitamins A and D. As well as a link between vitamin D deficiency and a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, calcium and phosphorus found commonly in dairy foods may have antihypertensive effects that may contribute to inverse associations with cardiovascular risk.6 7 8 One study showed that higher concentrations of plasmatrans-palmitoleic acid, a fatty acid mainly found in dairy foods, was associated with higher concentrations of high density lipoprotein, lower concentrations of triglycerides and C reactive protein, reduced insulin resistance, and a lower incidence of diabetes in adults.9 Red meat is another major source of saturated fat. Consumption of processed meats, but not red meat, has been associated with coronary heart disease and diabetes mellitus, which may be explained by nitrates and sodium as preservatives.10

"The notoriety of fat is based on its higher energy content per gram in comparison with protein and carbohydrate. However, work by the biochemist Richard Feinman and nuclear physicist Eugene Fine on thermodynamics and the metabolic advantage of different diet compositions showed that the body did not metabolise different macronutrients in the same way.11 Kekwick and Pawan carried out one of the earliest obesity experiments, published in the Lancet in 1956.12 They compared groups consuming diets of 90% fat, 90% protein, and 90% carbohydrate and showed that the greatest weight loss was in the fat consuming group. The authors concluded that the “composition of the diet appeared to outweigh in importance the intake of calories.”

"The “calorie is not a calorie” theory has been further substantiated by a recent JAMAstudy showing that a “low fat” diet resulted in the greatest decrease in energy expenditure, an unhealthy lipid pattern, and increased insulin resistance in comparison with a low carbohydrate and low glycaemic index diet.13 In the past 30 years in the United States the proportion of energy from consumed fat has fallen from 40% to 30% (although absolute fat consumption has remained the same), yet obesity has rocketed."

This one is a mind blower, as I have read the NNT was 100, whereas baby aspirin is 40.  It's much worse than that:

"A meta-analysis of predominantly industry sponsored data reported that in a low risk group of people aged 60-70 years taking statins the number needed to treat (NNT) to prevent one cardiovascular event in one year was 345.20 The strongest evidence base for statins is in secondary prevention, where all patients after a myocardial infarction are prescribed maximum dose treatment irrespective of total cholesterol, because of statins’ anti-inflammatory or pleiotropic (coronary plaque stabilising) effects. In this group the NNT is 83 for mortality over five years. This doesn’t mean that each patient benefits a little but rather that 82 will receive no prognostic benefit.21 The fact that no other cholesterol lowering drug has shown a benefit in terms of mortality supports the hypothesis that the benefits of statins are independent of their effects on cholesterol."

http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6340

Nat Geo, Slavery, Sugar, and Why We Got Fat

This is the money line, which is a restatement of the theorem well articulated by Gary Taubes in "Good Calories, Bad Calories":
"Johnson summed up the conventional wisdom this way: Americans are fat because they eat too much and exercise too little.  But they eat too much and exercise too little because they're addicted to sugar, which not only makes them fatter but, after the initial sugar rush, also saps their energy, beaching them on the couch." The reason you are watching TV is not because TV is so good," he said, "but because you have no energy to exercise, because you're eating too much sugar."
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/sugar/cohen-text

JAMA - Higher Cholesterol Please

Cholesterol and Mortality:

30 Years of Follow-up From the Framingham Study
Keaven M. Anderson, PhD; William P. Castelli, MD; Daniel Levy, MD
JAMA. 1987;257(16):2176-2180. doi:10.1001/jama.1987.03390160062027.
ABSTRACT | REFERENCES
From 1951 to 1955 serum cholesterol levels were measured in 1959 men and 2415 women aged between 31 and 65 years who were free of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer. Under age 50 years, cholesterol levels are directly related with 30-year overall and CVD mortality; overall death increases 5% and CVD death 9% for each 10 mg/dL. After age 50 years there is no increased overall mortality with either high or low serum cholesterol levels. There is a direct association between falling cholesterol levels over the first 14 years and mortality over the following 18 years (11% overall and 14% CVD death rate increase per 1 mg/dL per year drop in cholesterol levels). Under age 50 years these data suggest that having a very low cholesterol level improves longevity. After age 50 years the association of mortality with cholesterol values is confounded by people whose cholesterol levels are falling-perhaps due to diseases predisposing to death.

(JAMA 1987;257:2176-2180)

.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=365739

The most widely respected medical journal, The Journal of the American Medical Association, published a study entitled:

"Cholesterol and Mortality. 30 Years of Follow-up from the Framingham Study." Shocking to most, this in- depth study showed that after the age of 50, there is no increased overall death rate associated with high cholesterol! There was, however, a direct association between low levels (or dropping levels) of cholesterol and increased death.

Specifically, medical researchers reported that CVD death rates increased by 14% for every 1 mg/dL drop in total cholesterol levels per year.141 For example, an individual whose total cholesterol levels dropped 14 mg/dL during 14 years would be expected to have and 11% higher death rate than persons whose cholesterol levels remained constant or rose during the same period.
http://thepeopleschemist.com/does-the-family-really-need-lipitor-and-aspirin/

In other words, cholesterol is a marker, a correlate, of health going wrong, not a cause of health going wrong, which is why efforts to manipulate cholesterol do not make people less sick.

Mercola on Cancer and Ketogenic Diets

Mercola.com 20130616
The Mercola "story at a glance":
·   A ketogenic diet, which calls for minimizing carbohydrates and replacing them with healthy fats and moderate amounts of high-quality protein, can offer hope against cancer, both for prevention and treatment
·     Your normal cells have the metabolic flexibility to adapt from using glucose to using ketone bodies. Cancer cells lack this ability so when you reduce carbs to only non-starchy vegetables, you effectively starve the cancer
·     Cancer can be more accurately classified as a mitochondrial metabolic disease. Few people inherit genes that predispose them to cancer (most inherit genes that prevent cancer), and inherited mutations typically disrupt the function of the mitochondria
·     The mitochondria—the main power generators in your cells—are believed to be the central point in the origins of many cancers. Your mitochondria can be damaged not only by inherited mutations, but also by a wide variety of environmental factors and toxin
·      Fasting has remarkable health benefits and strengthens your mitochondria network systems throughout your body. As long as your mitochondria remain healthy and functional, it’s very unlikely that cancer will develop

Does sugar play a role in the ability of a cancer cell to thrive and displace healthy cells?  In many cases, this seems to be the case.  Thus, intermittent fasting would seem a valuable tool in stopping the growth cycle of cancerous cells, as would carb restriction.  There seem to be many factors in cancers, and once they reach the growth stage some do not respond well to ketogenic diets, but seem to suffer when glucose and fructose are in short supply.  
It's all pretty simple until one tries to indulge an activity like CrossFit which requires higher carb intake if one hopes to be at one's best, due to the relatively low amounts of glycogen which the body will store  when carb levels are kept at ketogenic leves (seemingly 75g/day or less for me).  At that point, intermittent fasting, carb loading once per day, and perhaps weekly carb binges may be necessary.  However, even without those, CF performance can be passable when in a ketogenic state, and most life activities are well enhanced by cyclic ketogenic eating, and as the linked article points out, this approach may hold significant protective elements for cancer prevention.   

Vitamin D - You Need More Until Proven Otherwise By Testing

This Mercola article is a great summary of the vitamin D link to cancer.

An optimal vitamin D level is critically important in minimizing your cancer risk; a study of menopausal women showed that maintaining vitamin D serum levels of 40ng/ml cut overall cancer risk by 77 percent.

GrassrootsHealth founder Carole Baggerly believes 90 percent of ordinary breast cancer is related to vitamin D deficiency; in fact, breast cancer has been described as a “vitamin D deficiency syndrome”.

Vitamin D can stop breast cancer cells from spreading by replenishing E-cadherin, one of the glue-like components giving structure to those cells.

In addition to being a strong cancer preventative, vitamin D is crucial for pregnant women and their babies, lowering risk for preterm birth, low birth weight, and C-section; 80 percent of pregnant women have inadequate vitamin D levels.

The most important factor is having your vitamin D serum level tested every 6 months, as people vary widely in their response to ultraviolet exposure or oral supplementation; your serum level should be kept between 50 and 70 ng/ml for optimal health.

The Only Thing You Need To Know About Saturated Fat

What about saturated fat? It’s true that some studies show that saturated fat intake raises blood cholesterol levels. But these studies are almost always short-term, lasting only a few weeks. (5) Longer-term studies have not shown an association between saturated fat intake and blood cholesterol levels. In fact, of all of the long-term studies examining this issue, only one of them showed a clear association between saturated fat intake and cholesterol levels, and even that association was weak. (6)

Moreover, studies on low-carbohydrate diets (which tend to be high in saturated fat) suggest that they not only don’t raise blood cholesterol, they have several beneficial impacts on cardiovascular disease risk markers. For example, a meta-analysis of 17 low-carb diet trials covering 1,140 obese patients published in the journal Obesity Reviews found that low-carb diets neither increased nor decreased LDL cholesterol. However, they did find that low-carb diets were associated with significant decreases is body weight as well as improvements in several CV risk factors, including decreases in triglycerides, fasting glucose, blood pressure, body mass index, abdominal circumference, plasma insulin and c-reactive protein, as well as an increase in HDL cholesterol. (7) 

If you’re wondering whether saturated fat may contribute to heart disease in some way that isn’t related to cholesterol, a large meta-analysis of prospective studies involving close to 350,000 participants found no association between saturated fat and heart disease. (8) A Japanese prospective study that followed 58,000 men for an average of 14 years found no association between saturated fat intake and heart disease, and an inverse association between saturated fat and stroke (i.e. those who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke). (9)

http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy

Grab the steak, eggs and bacon - bon appetite! And don't forget the heavy cream for your coffee ...

"Lowering" Cholesterol and "Wishing on the Moon" - Which Is More Effective?

The answer to that question is - we don't know.  Perhaps neither!
After over 40 years of telling you that lowering cholesterol is good for you, your government - NIH, surgeon general or USDA - has yet to prove it. Folks die every day with "low" cholesterol, and many with "high" cholesterol live for a long time and with good health.  If you are counting on this very poor health correlate, you should probably rethink your strategy.

However, the foods in this article are good choices - beef, pistachios, almonds, and small amounts of tomato juice - aside from their so called cholesterol lowering properties.  They are blood sugar neutral and nutrient dense.  Hunt and gather yourself some of this soon!
http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/cholesterol-fighting-foods

"Men's Health" Or Not, Pt 2

In a wandering and not particularly useful article about endothelial disease (aka, damage to the one cell thin but very important lining of arteries), MH gives one bit of usable advice - get a test.
"The test for endothelial dysfunction isn't as simple as having your cholesterol checked, but it's no colonoscopy either. It requires a device called the EndoPAT. First, sensors attached to your fingertips monitor your normal bloodflow; then the main artery of your upper arm is restricted with a blood pressure cuff for 5 minutes. When the cuff is removed, the sensors measure the change in the amount of blood pumped with each heartbeat, an indicator of your vessels' ability to dilate. Because a computer controls the test, the technician's level of expertise doesn't affect the outcome, making the measurement exceptionally reliable, say Penn State researchers. To find a provider in your area offering the EndoPAT, visit itamar-medical.com/EndoPAT."
http://www.menshealth.com/health/new-heart-threat

Interesting side bits, the context for which the author seems not to understand -
- "the fatter your belly, the skinnier your arteries." In other words, abdominal girth is the best predictor for poor health for a number of reasons, including endothelial disfunction.  And the best way to reduce abdominal girth is carb restriction.
- mercury is bad for arteries, and omega 3 fatty acids are good.  How to get one with out the other can be a problem.  USDA recommends tilapia, sardines, catfish, salmon, and anchovies.  However, if you feed tilapia or catfish or salmon in big ponds or pens with the same rotgut you feed grain finished cattle, you won't be getting much in the way of omega 3s.  That leaves sardines, anchovies, wild caught salmon, the catfish you catch from lakes and rivers, and supplements as you means to get the omega 3s that will help balance the inevitable doses of omega 6s you get.
- lots of trans fats are left in processed foods that say "no trans fats".  Which is why you don't want to eat that crap they wrap in commercial wrappers and call "food" anyway.

Finally, MH tries to hammer on the saturated fat boogeyman - just don't fall for it.  They say there's a magic threshold of 10% of total calories which is the safe limit for sat fat consumption.  Before they should pretend to know that's true, don't you think they should first prove there's any risk whatsoever for high consumption of saturated fat?  And if it surprises you to know that no one's ever proved there's any risk whatsoever for high consumption of saturated fat, you should have been reading this blog for a longer time!  Fat is high in nutrition, provides a stable, long burning source of energy, is hormonally neutral, does not trigger blood sugar spikes, and is probably the perfect food - because it has 9 kcal per gram.  If you are going to be able to break your sugar addiction, you'll have to get comfortable eating fat, primarily saturated fat.  For most of us, our health will benefit from the shift from mostly carb calories to mostly fat calories.

Men's "Health" Or Not

In an article about high blood pressure (HBP), Men's Health shows the value of health journalism by listing a bunch of techniques which:
1. Most folks do anyway
2. Folks with metabolic syndrome, which is the largest cause of HBP, can't or won't want to do
3. May not actually help that much; they may just be things that folks that are healthy do, and folks that have metabolic syndrome don't do, meaning they will be correlates with HPB, not causative agents

What the article could have said, but didn't, is that carb restriction cures metabolic syndrome and HPB in about 80% of the population.

So, salt restriction, 2 drinks a day, and exercise may be counted on to lower HPB by a few points, if at all.  If that's your treatment you'll get on or stay on meds.  Or, you can stop sugaring yourself to death and get off of meds and eat as much salt as you like, if you are one of the 80%.

Luckily for "Men's Health" there's no such thing as medical malpractice journalism.

http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/lower-blood-pressure/ticker-tracker-home-edition.php

Diet May Slow Alzheimer's Disease

Mercola on Understanding Alzheimer's
The intro from mercola.com:

"Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. This fatal and progressive condition destroys brain cells, resulting in memory loss and severe thinking and behavioral problems (aggression, delusions, and hallucinations) that interfere with daily life and activities.

"The cause is conventionally believed to be a mystery. While we know that certain diseases, like type 2 diabetes, are definitively connected to the foods you eat, Alzheimer's is generally thought to strike without warning or reason.

"That is, until recently.

"A growing body of research suggests there may be a powerful connection between the foods you eat and your risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, via similar pathways that cause type 2 diabetes. Some have even re-named Alzheimer's as "type 3 diabetes.""

It's a good read - 

Can I Eat Paleo Without Getting Heart Disease?

Kresser Heart Disease Compendium
Want to review why you can in good conscience enjoy bacon, steak, burgers, cheese and butter and live to tell the tale? Read on.  

• Study Reveals Doubt on Cholesterol Drug
• Three Eggs a Day Keep the Doctor Away!
• The Truth About Statin Drugs
• Research Alert: Antidepressants & Cholesterol
• Inflammation Worsens Danger of Heart Disease
• More on Statin Side Effects
• More Silly Shenanigans Against Saturated Fat
• Have Some Butter With Your Veggies!
• New Study Puts Final Nail in the "Saturated Fat Causes Heart Disease" Coffin
• Ten Steps to Preventing Heart Disease Naturally
• Why You Should Eat More (not less) Cholesterol
• For a healthy heart, stick to butter

Head Scratcher

It's a head scratcher that an organization like this - the health newsletter of Harvard - is lazily recommending actions that are ten years out of date.  Even the institution's own scientists have moved past the "lowfat to lower cholesterol" fad and back towards science.

The emailed newsletter starts:
"People can reduce cholesterol levels simply by changing what they eat. For example, if you are a fan of cheeseburgers, eating less meat (and leaner cuts) and more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains can lower your total cholesterol by 25% or more. Cutting back on saturated fat (found in meat and dairy products) and trans fat (partially hydrogenated oils) can reduce cholesterol by 5% to 10%."

They recommend these four things to "lower your cholesterol":
"Stick with unsaturated fats and avoid saturated and trans fats.  
"Get more soluble fiber. 
"Include plant sterols and stanols in your diet."

Head scratcher part 1: There's no evidence - after forty years or more of examination - to show that "lower cholesterol" is a benefit for mortality reduction.  Your government, in its infinite wisdom, spent nearly a billion dollars to prove that its advice to reduce cholesterol and fat intake was in fact good for mortality reduction.  Said government failed to show any such thing.  

Second, eating plant sterols and stanols to lower cholesterol is equivalent scratching your private parts to make the sun come up sooner - I guess is might work, but the evidence is sketchy.  Sure, if you believe the conjecture that cholesterol is a cause of early mortality by causing damage to blood vessels, then it might be considered a common sense thing to use a "natural" plant based "food" to lower cholesterol.  But after forty years, and still no direct evidence that cholesterol manipulation via diet (or statin) is helpful for reduced all cause mortality - REALLY?!  A dearly beloved family member would dutifully down benecol every night on a piece of bread and announce proudly that it was "reducing" her cholesterol - how I managed to keep my pie hole shut about that I'll never know.  The kicker?  For females her age, "low cholesterol" correlates with increased mortality.  
The idea that fiber helps mortality is all the rage, but suffers, like the idea of diet to reduce cholesterol, from a lack of evidence.  Why people remain so in love with the idea is a little confusing when there are so many reasons not to down magnum doses of fiber and so little in the way of evidence that fiber is a big benefit - or any benefit.
The topic of cholesterol and causation of disease is very, very complex.  Seems like folks with "high LDL" (which can mean a lot of cholesterol packaged in LDL particles, or a large number of LDL particles, or some combination of both) have a higher correlation with heart disease; but some folks with "normal" LDL die young (Tim Russert being a prime example, his was reportedly 70, which is "low").  HDL has a correlation with reduced mortality, but efforts to raise HDL do not decrease mortality.  Insurance companies - who have a lot more at stake in your health than do your doctors - bet on your ratio of total cholesterol to LDL cholesterol.  
I read this newsletter to gauge changes in the perception of the common view.  At least this perspective - of doing what is best for you based on changes you can verify for yourself without relying upon "expert opinion" - has become obvious for the old guard.  They advise:
"Find the diet that work for you. When a friend or relative tells you how much his or her cholesterol level dropped after trying a particular diet, you may be tempted to try it yourself. If you do and after a few months you discover that you’re not getting the same benefits, you may need to chalk it up to genetic and physiological differences. There is no one-size-fits-all diet for cholesterol control. You may need to try several approaches to find one that works for you.  Although diet can be a simple and powerful way to improve cholesterol levels, it plays a bigger role for some people than for others. If your doctor suggests a lower-fat, lower-cholesterol diet, and despite your best efforts it isn’t working, you may need a different kind of diet, or medication, or both to bring cholesterol down."
It is curious to consider how this will all play out over time.  I don't see a day when all of the "experts" who have advocated low fat and statins to save the world will just have a conference and announce "what we've been telling you was bogus."  At some point, however, the truth will be too obvious for any rational denial.  The "It's the Sugar, Stupid" paper (from Monday and Wednesday's post) will be another nail in the "low fat for health" coffin, making the causality chain something like:
1. Too much sugar causes metabolic derangement (metabolic syndrome)
2. Unchecked, metabolic syndrome progresses to diabetes (full blown loss of glycemic control), and excess carbohydrate in general exacerbates the issue once one is over the metabolic syndrome threshold
3.  Diabetes predicts about a ten year shorter lifespan, and a much shorter period of active life.
The role of fat and cholesterol in this chain is minimal, and if eating high fat and high cholesterol helps you retain glycemic control and avoid metabolic syndrome, we've been in reverso-world the last 30+ years.

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."

DHA, Females, Disordered Eating

I gave my presentation called "That Stuff Will Kill You" the weekend of February 16th, at Wolf River CrossFit, and it was a great time for me.  The crowd was attentive, and appeared to catch the "big rocks" of the presentation.  The process of preparing for and delivering this presentation is one that drives a good deal of revision, refinement and creativity as I reconsider how to best present the material.  This time was no exception.  I wish I could find an audience for this product about every two months - the creative cycle would be at its best on that schedule.

One issue that occurred to me was an explanation for the phenomenon of disordered eating.  Lierre Kieth's book, The Vegetarian Myth, pointed out a correlation between low fat diets and disordered eating, but I was left with little to hang my hat on in terms of causality.  Then, I ran across this article in Psychology Today that points out just how fat human females are supposed to be, relative to other mammals.
"Evidence from all over the world suggests that men strongly prefer women who have a lot of body fat (roughly 30 percent of their body weight) and whose body fat is distributed in a particular way, with very little in the waist but much more in the hips, buttocks and thighs, producing a small waist-hip ratio."

Reportedly, a healthy human female carries a higher body fat percentage than a whale.  There's no other female mammal that can hold a candle to a human female for carrying fat.

Lassek and Gaulin point out that a healthy human female stores a high proportion of hip fat as DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), which is one of two long, branched chain omega-3 fatty acids that are essential nutrients for humans.  DHA is the raw material necessary to build a human brain.

The term "essential nutrient" means we cannot make much if any DHA on our own.  There is an implication that may be drawn when considering any essential nutrient, which is that our genome evolved in an environment from which that nutrient was a plentiful part of the diet.  Put another way, if we didn't have readily available sources of DHA, vitamin C, vitamin D, creatine, B vitamins, fats and complete proteins (IOW animal proteins), and other trace minerals (magnesium, zinc, etc) in our diets as hunters and gatherers, we wouldn't be here as we are.  Because all these essential nutrients WERE readily available in our hunter and gatherer diets, we did not evolve to make these for ourselves (nor did we evolve to be independent of, for example, magnesium intake).

So, shifting gears a bit, consider a young lady who is transitioning into fertility.  Her genetic hormonal milieu should be driving metabolic processes which command that she accumulate large quantities of fat, but not just any fat.  She needs animal fats, and probably seafood of some kind if she can get it.  In fact, I'll bet such a gal would benefit from eating as many grassfed animals and their livers and brains as possible, so that she can reach the genetically programmed goal of filling the substantial quantity of fat on her hips with a brain's worth of DHA.

Why would this imperative be specific to a human?  As Lassek and Gaulin wrote:
"The reason this is a promising idea is that humans have extraordinarily large brains, on the order of six or seven times larger than expected for a mammal of our size.  Is it just a coincidence that humans have brains six times larger than similarly sized mammals, and that women have six times as much fat as typical mammals?  Probably not."

Now consider that same young lady emerging in to Neoland, in which the salient cultural message is that fat is bad for her, and skinny butts are a virtue.  She eats low fat, and as a result, eats high carb.  She feels HUNGRY!  Why?  She'll be hungry for all the reasons a high carb diet makes anyone hungry AND she's depriving herself of a nutrient that her genome thinks she needs in monster quantities.  At this point of deprivation, mis-information, and emotional disarray you might think it was a miracle if a person did not have an eating disorder.

Now, I'm as unqualified as a fella could be in actually telling anyone with disordered eating what to eat, or when to eat it, or anything of the sort.  But if you are willing to bite on the conjectures inherent in the narrative above, the thing you would want to tell your young lady is - eat fat!  Here's the fish oil!  Have some grassfed porterhouse and have some more!  Skip the wheat, sugar and other low fat neofoods, and chow down on anything fat that you can find!!!  Dinner time, honey, eat up!

Stock up the house with:
Avocado.  Coconut oil with grass fed chicken eggs.  Bacon!  Macadamia nuts and lots of salt.  Sour cream.  Butter on every veggie that comes to the table (Kerry Gold, s'il vous plait).  85% cacao chocolate, dressed in unrefined coconut oil if possible.  Full fat, pastured cow dairy.  Delicious full fat hard cheeses.

The dirty little secret is these foods are very difficult to overeat.  Add sugar and that story is entirely different - think of the difference between stuffing yourself on lard, and stuffing yourself on oreo cookies.

Fats to avoid - all those neolithic fats from seeds and corn that have been hydrogenated to turn industrial waste into a "food" product.

Foods to avoid like it's a matter of life and death - anything soy and anything that is made with wheat or breaded/fried.  Anyone who's struggling with emotional issues or addictive/compulsive behavior would be well served to skip the dose of opioids you get from modern frankenwheats (never mind the excessive glycemic response, the intestinal permeability, and the phytates which block mineral absorption).  Skipping these foods has no downside from a nutritional perspective.

Point out that the best fat loss machine on the planet is the Atkins diet, so that she may think you want her to achieve to goal of being "too lean".  But make sure she realizes that when she's eating as nature intended - lots o fat - appetite is a signal of physiological need, not a force to be contended with.  You might even dare her to eat so much fat and protein that she gets "fat".  I would also make sure she was getting the other good stuff - grass fed dairy, magnesium, zinc, sunlight and/or a good vitamin D supplement, and plenty of cholesterol.  You would want her to get anything that would add up to a "OK, that's enough of that" signal.

I do not know if anyone has tested this idea.  I do not know if it would work.  I do believe that a low fat diet is about the most unnatural thing one could conceive in terms of diet, and that for a young person in particular, the combination of low fat, excess carbohydrate, and the natural stresses of the time could easily be a toxic brew.  The worst that could happen from a high fat intervention is the person could learn that fat isn't toxic and may be just the nutrient she needs.

This concept, by the way, is a perfect example of how epidemiological science could work to benefit an understanding of human nutritional needs.  An observational study could determine the correlation between those with disordered eating and low fat diets.  If the correlation is weaker for those with high fat diets, it would justify an intervention study to determine causality.

FOD Whats? Heck No I Don't Want to Eat That

"Sue Shepherd says she never expected to become famous for taming cantankerous stomachs.

"The 38-year-old Australian dietitian invented a food regimen with a bizarre name in her early 20s to relieve symptoms of bloating and stomach cramps. It’s now being adopted internationally, changing the way doctors manage a set of digestive troubles known as irritable bowel syndrome."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-28/taming-stomachs-with-fodmap-diet-spurs-8-billion-market.html

I'd heard of the term "FODMAPS" from Chris Kresser, but hadn't followed up at all, so I found this explanation interesting.  The sample diet the posted was interesting but raised many questions.  

I think this is a telling statement:
"Because it avoids foods with high-fructose corn-syrup, it can be difficult to procure appropriate products in the U.S. where the ingredient is widespread, he said, in everything from jelly to ketchup."
In other words, if you eat stuff in packages with labels, you are eating food with FODMAPS.  
So here's the BLUF:  if you eat according to the Paleo template (meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar no wheat) you will have eliminated most FODMAPS anyway, and several other problematic foods that the FODMAP diet seems to include.  To me, then, this diet is an explanation for one of the reasons why the paleo template serves us so well.

Meaning - you'll feel better, which is the point, and one I probably should make more often. Losing fat is great, being healthy is great, not being embarrassed or limited by a "beer tumor" is great, but the point of any of it is that your best life starts when your pursuit of what makes your life great is not limited by the side effects of eating nasty "foods".

Otherwise stated - it is easy for us paleolithic types, stuck in a neolithic society for which we are not optimized in many ways, to fixate on gaining pleasure from food by eating sweets, wheat, alcohol and other treats which we become addicted to (in greater or lesser degrees).  This is self evidently not the best way to have a fulfilling, satisfying, or exciting life, and for many, boils down to bare existence.  The trick is to eat such that, unhindered by health or energy deprivations, you can fill your life with activities and relationships that fulfill you.  

One of the characteristics of a "good diet" then, is that it does not require your effort and attention day and night to sustain it for years, or to sustain it when not in your normal routine.

At least, that's the way I see it.  

Here are a few more tidbits from the FODMAP article.  The story is another nail in the "more fiber is better" bandwagon, and generally aligns with the observations of the paleo template, but I found the story interesting in and of itself:

“I pieced together what was an experimental diet,” said Shepherd, who began teaching the regimen in her private dietetics practice in early 1997. “I wasn’t randomly picking these foods -- they all had something in common: they were all potentially not absorbed in the small intestine.”

"Peter Gibson, gastroenterology professor at Melbourne’s Monash University, helped coin the term Fodmap to describe the molecules people with irritable bowel syndrome have difficulty stomaching -- fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols found in dozens of everyday things from apples and wheat to milk, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugarless chewing gum."

"Shepherd, who has celiac disease, tested her diet on 25 people, preparing all their meals herself for 22 weeks in a study that formed part of a PhD thesis at Monash. She found the diet quelled symptoms in at least 70 percent of participants, compared with 12 percent given a placebo meal resembling typical Australian fare."

“Usual diets here in the U.S. are laden with Fodmaps,” Portland dietitian Catsos said. “Doctors have pushed high-fiber diets and fiber supplements almost across the board for IBS patients. Therefore, health-conscious Americans are guzzling smoothies filled with yogurt and fruit, juicing, eating loads of cruciferous vegetables, beans and high-fiber nutrition bars and nuts, then they wonder why their IBS has gotten worse.”