Tag Archive for: cancer treatment

Research Update: Cancer and Diet

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A recent paper used an interesting approach to treat pancreatic cancer using a high-fat diet. That flies in the face of the typical approach: “If it was ever alive, don’t eat it.” In other words, a vegan diet. I’ve reviewed fasting prior to cancer treatment, which demonstrated improved outcomes for those who fasted, but this diet is radically different.

The Study

This study was all about finding the weakness in a defensive mechanism and attacking it.

Researchers were studying the mechanism that cancers use to get energy. The thought is that cancers use sugars and carbs, but cancer’s need for fuel to grow isn’t that limited. Researchers were studying how cancers switch to using fat as a fuel when there are no carbs available. Just like with the keto diets, the liver, and subsequently cancer cells if present, switch to using fat as a fuel in the form of ketone bodies. The protein that stimulates this switch is called eIF4E.

Researchers were able to find a current chemotherapy drug called eFT508 that blocked the ability of eIF4E to turn on the fat metabolism pathway. However, that didn’t stop the cancers from growing—they used other fuels such as carbs. But when they first treated the cancers with the chemotherapy drug that prevented the cancer from using fat as a fuel, then put them on a high-fat diet, the tumors all shrank.

In this study, the type of cancer was pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest. This was a rodent study, but the chemotherapy drug is already approved for use in humans. Clinical trials are surely to follow in humans.

The Bottom Line

The authors speculate that cancers have more than one weakness that can be exploited with a combination of dietary and pharmaceutical interventions. Their breakthrough came almost 15 years after discovering what blocked the fat metabolism pathway. To me, this is one of the most exciting studies I’ve read in a long time. Just remember that this was one potential treatment for one type of cancer, but it represents hope.

I’ll be back in a week with a new Memo. If you’re here in the U.S., enjoy the final holiday of the summer—but don’t forget to eat your fruits and vegetables.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-08-fasting-ketogenic-diet-reveals-vulnerability.html
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07781-7

How Fasting Impacts Your Mitochondria

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The research scientist in the webinar focused on mitochondria and aging in his part of the presentation. He has helped research and develop a nutrient that appears to help with mitophagy, the process of removing and replenishing old mitochondria. The naturally produced chemical is called urolithin A. It’s produced naturally by the microbiome in response to eating foods such as fruit, especially pomegranate, and nuts. The problem is that we may or may not produce enough urolithin A, depending on the state of our microbiome. There has been decent research on the supplement, and I talked about the supplement in Aging with the Vengeance: Reclaiming Your Power.

What caught my attention was that intermittent fasting may also help with renewing and replenishing mitochondria. The problem becomes what kind of fasting are we talking about? Complete fasting? Eating during only a few hours per day? I’ll cover the two most popular forms.

Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is “in” right now. It is especially popular when combined with the Paleolithic or the ketogenic diet. What it essentially means is that you take in no calories by mouth for up to 20 hours per day, often called the 20:4 approach, and then you eat during that four-hour block of time. Research has shown that people lose weight, get better control of their prediabetes, and may even reduce some of the metrics related to cardiovascular disease such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels. But specific to mitochondria, the data are nowhere near as clear.

Fasting Mimicking Diet

I first encountered the fasting mimicking diet, or FMD for short, when I looked at the research of Valter Longo. He’s a scientist who has used periodic fasting with patients undergoing cancer treatment. For one to five days before treatment, they go on an FMD which drops down to 500 calories per day in some cases, and then they go back to their regular diet and go through their normal chemotherapy protocol. The critical factor is that he’s shown an improved quality of life as well as improved outcomes for people who used the FMD during treatment as opposed to those who ate their normal diet.

In research in mice, using FMD has demonstrated a reduction in symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Parkinson’s disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and others have also benefited from the FMD approach. Dr. Longo has created a commercial program that is available.

Why FMD? As near as I can gather, the concept utilizes the body’s protective mechanisms that allow energy to continue to be produced at a high enough rate to continue carrying on with life (such as searching for food in other eras) in the absence of food until food can be found. Research in athletes who’ve used FMD versus a normal diet has demonstrated maintenance of strength and endurance after going through a five-day FMD protocol while continuing to work out.

The Bottom Line

In my opinion, FMD makes sense. Fasting for two days and then going back to your normal diet for a couple of weeks just makes more sense than obsessing about when you can eat every day. But you may feel intermittent fasting’s a better way to go for your life, and that’s fine as well. One thing for sure is that I’m going to continue to follow this research.

The whole point to this is that restricting calories for long blocks of time stimulates the body to take good care of our mitochondria; that’s one battle that we have to win if we expect to age with a vengeance. And the great thing is that you can begin at any age.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

How Does Alternative Medicine Affect Cancer?

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The final study this week is an analysis of survival data on people who selected only alternative medicine as treatment after being diagnosed with a non-metastatic cancer. The subjects declined any conventional cancer treatment defined as surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and hormone therapy. Let’s take a look at this observational study.

Researchers used the National Cancer Database to identify people who selected “other unproven cancer treatments administered by non-medical personnel”; 281 were identified over a 10-year time span. They were compared with 560 randomly selected subjects who chose conventional treatment. All were tracked for an average of 5.5 years.

The results were dismal. Over the 5.5 years, those who chose alternative medicine were 2.5 times more likely to die than those who chose conventional treatment. The rates were worse for individual forms of cancer such as breast, lung, and colorectal cancer. The only type of cancer for which had no significant differences in mortality was prostate cancer; that’s to be expected as most prostate cancers are slow growing and rarely cause death quickly.

This was simply an observational study. We don’t know the types of alternative medicine used nor whether any people returned for conventional treatment when the alternative medicine wasn’t working. However, I still think it speaks volumes: If you’re diagnosed with cancer, don’t play games. Get the strongest treatment possible; if you don’t, it could cost you your life sooner rather than later.

If you want more information about the study and the place of complementary and integrative treatments if you have cancer, listen to the newest Straight Talk on Health MP3, Alternative Medicine and Cancer. Normally you’d have to be a Member or Insider to listen to Straight Talk on Health, but because this topic is so important to your health, I’m making it available to everyone if you click on the link in this memo (I’m asking you to share it only when appropriate). If you like it, that’s one more reason to join DrChet.com.

What are you prepared to do today?

Dr. Chet

 

Reference: JNCI: doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djx145.

 

Exercise and Breast Cancer Treatment

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Cancer treatment isn’t for wimps. Surgery can be difficult as can radiation treatment. But of all the common treatments that really seem to knock people for a loop, chemotherapy is tops. Nausea. Fatigue. Hair loss. Fortunately, there are some medications that can help with those side effects, but one of the things that may help the most is exercise. Let’s take a look at a study published just this month.

Researchers in Germany put women undergoing chemotherapy on a weight-training program, an endurance program, or continued with standard care that included neither. They were interested in how . . .

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