Cancer a disease of the metabolism rather than genetic
In a study of more than 1,200 patients, published in the Friday, August 3, issue of Oncotarget, an international team of 35 co-investigators from 17 institutions spanning the U.S., Brazil and Europe reported that cancer occurs because cancer cells make and use energy differently from normal cells. The new study finds that cancer is a metabolic disorder which challenges decades of genomic research.
In a study of more than 1,200 patients, published in the Friday, August 3, issue of Oncotarget, an international team of 35 co-investigators from 17 institutions spanning the U.S., Brazil and Europe reported that cancer occurs because cancer cells make and use energy differently from normal cells. The new study finds that cancer is a metabolic disorder which challenges decades of genomic research.
Cancer as a metabolic disease: implications for novel therapeutics
Abstract
Emerging evidence indicates that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease involving disturbances in energy production through respiration and fermentation. The genomic instability observed in tumor cells and all other recognized hallmarks of cancer are considered downstream epiphenomena of the initial disturbance of cellular energy metabolism. The disturbances in tumor cell energy metabolism can be linked to abnormalities in the structure and function of the mitochondria. When viewed as a mitochondrial metabolic disease, the evolutionary theory of Lamarck can better explain cancer progression than can the evolutionary theory of Darwin. Cancer growth and progression can be managed following a whole body transition from fermentable metabolites, primarily glucose and glutamine, to respiratory metabolites, primarily ketone bodies. As each individual is a unique metabolic entity, personalization of metabolic therapy as a broad-based cancer treatment strategy will require fine-tuning to match the therapy to an individual’s unique physiology.
Abstract
Emerging evidence indicates that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease involving disturbances in energy production through respiration and fermentation. The genomic instability observed in tumor cells and all other recognized hallmarks of cancer are considered downstream epiphenomena of the initial disturbance of cellular energy metabolism. The disturbances in tumor cell energy metabolism can be linked to abnormalities in the structure and function of the mitochondria. When viewed as a mitochondrial metabolic disease, the evolutionary theory of Lamarck can better explain cancer progression than can the evolutionary theory of Darwin. Cancer growth and progression can be managed following a whole body transition from fermentable metabolites, primarily glucose and glutamine, to respiratory metabolites, primarily ketone bodies. As each individual is a unique metabolic entity, personalization of metabolic therapy as a broad-based cancer treatment strategy will require fine-tuning to match the therapy to an individual’s unique physiology.
- Cancer - General - Barry Groves (Second Opinions)
- Cancer - Breast - Barry Groves (Second Opinions)
- Cancer - Colon - Barry Groves (Second Opinions)
- Cancer - Colorectal links
- Cancer - Pancreatic
- Cancer - Skin - Barry Groves (Second Opinions)
- Carbohydrates and Cancer
From Hugh Khan, a doctor working on the frontlines
Eating for oncological sanity, the ketogenic diet to the rescue.
In recent times there has been a trend in fasting to "upregulate autophagy". This can go down the slippery eating-disorder slope as, like veganism, it offers another option of veiled anorexia nervosa. Unlike religious fervor that undergirds vegan idiocy, autophagy is backed with nobel-prize winning science.
Whilst strategic fasting may offer some benefit in terms of quick immune dampening, amelioration of inflammation, junk macro-protein recycling (think amyloid plaque, Lewy bodies, adhesions, scar tissue etc), more rapid rise in blood ketones, a reset of the insulin-glucagon axis and other axes, one must bear in mind that this is essentially an alarm-bell survival mechanism kicking in due to starvation. There are degrees of starvation, certainly, and when medically planned in the context of time-restricted eating, this is a very good thing if one were finding reprieve from junk, hyper-processed carbage and transitioning to a sensible, ancestral-based menu such as carnivory pure or applied.
In the context of (advanced) neoplasia, one would think associated cachexia must certainly be upregulating autophagy, and no surprise, it is. But as with most things in life, therein dangles a damoclean sword - tumours can use autophagy as friend or foe. The primary link provided informs us that autophagy's double-edged precariousness depends on context.
If cancer-induced loss of appetite could cure cancer, then the intrinsic cachexia should be its own cure. But we know clinically and more importantly, from common sense, this just isn't the case. As we watch our patients and loved ones wither away, instinctively, we know that to force-feed them in some way even if to maintain muscle mass is a good index of quality of life and maybe, survival.
Causes of appetite loss are numerous - due to the cancer, neoplastic syndromes, as a side-effect of chemotherapy or opioid analgesia and depression. Just to name a few.
How do we nourish, a patient suffering from (advanced) malignancy? With the same approach that would have first prevented it. Ketogenically. A menu devoid of glucose and fructose. And possibly low in L-glutamine. A menu adequate in protein, bioavaiable micronutrients, and high in healthy fat including MCTs for rapid raising of blood ketones. Must this be complicated? Hardly.
"Eat meat, not too little, mostly fat" a wise woman did say.
But if one were treating a child suffering from solid tumours, then it would be hard to administer meat, let alone down a nasogastric tube (NGT). Just try blending it then loading a syringe. Bone broth could work this way, if used to blend/liquify meat substrate. But parents are frazzled, and cost is often an issue. A plain-vanilla shopping list is therefore ideal.
And so one protocol for the adult or paediatric approach is to devise liquid nutrition for easier drinking or force-feeding via NGT. In golden ketogenic ratios using real food. Grass Fed dairy preferred.
50ml cream, 50ml coconut milk/fat, 2 tsp of MCTs, 50 ml full cream milk, 50 ml water. 200 ml to be pump-fed over 4 hours as tends to be the typical protocol, or you simply feed by 10-20ml syringe aliquots. Flush the NGT after such feeds. Doing this three times a day or more, depending on the weight/age of your paediatric patient, will maintain weight and might even allow some weight gain, a key index in quality of life and survival. It will also arrest autophagy gone awry, but at the same time deprive (most) solid tumours of their much-needed dietary glucose thereby ameliorating the Warburg effect.
Yes, this is basically a modified fat-fast but oncologically tweaked.
You could add some manner of multivitamin/mineral. This is not ideal but in lieu of the circumstances, let's keep the bathwater with the baby. You could add a few other immune tonics (olive leaf extract, cordyceps, maybe fish oils, maybe turmeric) to the mix, depending on where they are in chemotherapy. I would avoid high-antioxidant load during chemotherapy as we want maximum damage to tumour cells, but cod liver oil and its Vit A (and D) should be a decent substitute for fish oil regardless.
You can also add several time-tested drugs to this mix, but I shan't elaborate on these since off-label use is again, a test of clinician mettle vs peer approval by the idiots who surround us. But any drug that suppresses/shunts glucose away from the tumour is good. Any drug that raises the already over-clocked metabolism of the tumours is also fine. Any drug that decreases systemic inflammation is in this context fine. Any drug that decreases angiogenesis in this context is fine - think thalidomide. Any drug that can be directly injected into the tumours for local toxicity is fine. You balance this off with tumour lysis syndrome, but if the patient is only offered palliative care or clinical trials, who the fuck are you to dictate what other gambles a patient might choose to take?
Doesn't dairy cause cancer? No. Not if you focused on the fat. Whatever minuscule IGF-1 that remains will be destroyed by your liver anyway. Furthermore, dairy, if grassfed, has CLA, something that is antitumorigenic. If you could find a way to blend in grassfed butter or ghee into the mix above, then do so but this might require raw egg yolks for emulsification. I prefer not to put an immune-compromised individual at any risk of salmonella and I do not want to use soy-derived lecithin although this is likely a non-issue, even if the tumour is estrogen-sensitive as the amount is likely irrelevant and your tamoxifen should take care of this.
Doesn't meat cause cancer? Please call me an ambulance. I laughed so hard I might have suffered a stroke.
It is reprehensible that oncologists, the medical profession as a whole and dietitians refuse to admit that this simple way of ancestral eating could prevent and treat something like this. Preferring to pick on isolated failures than zoom out and see this from a public health perspective is the obfuscation and confabulation so pertinent to science and medicine. That they continue to insist dietary sugar is essential is beyond criminal. But they still do so. Why? Because of silly indoctrination, but really, career prospects and $$$$. You're a doctor? An oncologist? A revered dietitian? Good. So you can read. And you still recommend dietary carbs? Tell me how PET scans work. Tell me how inadvertently putting the patient back on a diet that significantly contributed to their cancer risk and triggered their cancer in whole or significant part makes any clinical sense. That you offer clinical trials that Big Pharma will profit from but you refuse to let food be medicine makes a sad joke at the expense of your patients.
Primary reading
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6527373/
Further reading
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01019-z
https://www.cell.com/trends/biochemical-sciences/fulltext/S0968-0004(15)00241-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0968000415002418%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Eating for oncological sanity, the ketogenic diet to the rescue.
In recent times there has been a trend in fasting to "upregulate autophagy". This can go down the slippery eating-disorder slope as, like veganism, it offers another option of veiled anorexia nervosa. Unlike religious fervor that undergirds vegan idiocy, autophagy is backed with nobel-prize winning science.
Whilst strategic fasting may offer some benefit in terms of quick immune dampening, amelioration of inflammation, junk macro-protein recycling (think amyloid plaque, Lewy bodies, adhesions, scar tissue etc), more rapid rise in blood ketones, a reset of the insulin-glucagon axis and other axes, one must bear in mind that this is essentially an alarm-bell survival mechanism kicking in due to starvation. There are degrees of starvation, certainly, and when medically planned in the context of time-restricted eating, this is a very good thing if one were finding reprieve from junk, hyper-processed carbage and transitioning to a sensible, ancestral-based menu such as carnivory pure or applied.
In the context of (advanced) neoplasia, one would think associated cachexia must certainly be upregulating autophagy, and no surprise, it is. But as with most things in life, therein dangles a damoclean sword - tumours can use autophagy as friend or foe. The primary link provided informs us that autophagy's double-edged precariousness depends on context.
If cancer-induced loss of appetite could cure cancer, then the intrinsic cachexia should be its own cure. But we know clinically and more importantly, from common sense, this just isn't the case. As we watch our patients and loved ones wither away, instinctively, we know that to force-feed them in some way even if to maintain muscle mass is a good index of quality of life and maybe, survival.
Causes of appetite loss are numerous - due to the cancer, neoplastic syndromes, as a side-effect of chemotherapy or opioid analgesia and depression. Just to name a few.
How do we nourish, a patient suffering from (advanced) malignancy? With the same approach that would have first prevented it. Ketogenically. A menu devoid of glucose and fructose. And possibly low in L-glutamine. A menu adequate in protein, bioavaiable micronutrients, and high in healthy fat including MCTs for rapid raising of blood ketones. Must this be complicated? Hardly.
"Eat meat, not too little, mostly fat" a wise woman did say.
But if one were treating a child suffering from solid tumours, then it would be hard to administer meat, let alone down a nasogastric tube (NGT). Just try blending it then loading a syringe. Bone broth could work this way, if used to blend/liquify meat substrate. But parents are frazzled, and cost is often an issue. A plain-vanilla shopping list is therefore ideal.
And so one protocol for the adult or paediatric approach is to devise liquid nutrition for easier drinking or force-feeding via NGT. In golden ketogenic ratios using real food. Grass Fed dairy preferred.
50ml cream, 50ml coconut milk/fat, 2 tsp of MCTs, 50 ml full cream milk, 50 ml water. 200 ml to be pump-fed over 4 hours as tends to be the typical protocol, or you simply feed by 10-20ml syringe aliquots. Flush the NGT after such feeds. Doing this three times a day or more, depending on the weight/age of your paediatric patient, will maintain weight and might even allow some weight gain, a key index in quality of life and survival. It will also arrest autophagy gone awry, but at the same time deprive (most) solid tumours of their much-needed dietary glucose thereby ameliorating the Warburg effect.
Yes, this is basically a modified fat-fast but oncologically tweaked.
You could add some manner of multivitamin/mineral. This is not ideal but in lieu of the circumstances, let's keep the bathwater with the baby. You could add a few other immune tonics (olive leaf extract, cordyceps, maybe fish oils, maybe turmeric) to the mix, depending on where they are in chemotherapy. I would avoid high-antioxidant load during chemotherapy as we want maximum damage to tumour cells, but cod liver oil and its Vit A (and D) should be a decent substitute for fish oil regardless.
You can also add several time-tested drugs to this mix, but I shan't elaborate on these since off-label use is again, a test of clinician mettle vs peer approval by the idiots who surround us. But any drug that suppresses/shunts glucose away from the tumour is good. Any drug that raises the already over-clocked metabolism of the tumours is also fine. Any drug that decreases systemic inflammation is in this context fine. Any drug that decreases angiogenesis in this context is fine - think thalidomide. Any drug that can be directly injected into the tumours for local toxicity is fine. You balance this off with tumour lysis syndrome, but if the patient is only offered palliative care or clinical trials, who the fuck are you to dictate what other gambles a patient might choose to take?
Doesn't dairy cause cancer? No. Not if you focused on the fat. Whatever minuscule IGF-1 that remains will be destroyed by your liver anyway. Furthermore, dairy, if grassfed, has CLA, something that is antitumorigenic. If you could find a way to blend in grassfed butter or ghee into the mix above, then do so but this might require raw egg yolks for emulsification. I prefer not to put an immune-compromised individual at any risk of salmonella and I do not want to use soy-derived lecithin although this is likely a non-issue, even if the tumour is estrogen-sensitive as the amount is likely irrelevant and your tamoxifen should take care of this.
Doesn't meat cause cancer? Please call me an ambulance. I laughed so hard I might have suffered a stroke.
It is reprehensible that oncologists, the medical profession as a whole and dietitians refuse to admit that this simple way of ancestral eating could prevent and treat something like this. Preferring to pick on isolated failures than zoom out and see this from a public health perspective is the obfuscation and confabulation so pertinent to science and medicine. That they continue to insist dietary sugar is essential is beyond criminal. But they still do so. Why? Because of silly indoctrination, but really, career prospects and $$$$. You're a doctor? An oncologist? A revered dietitian? Good. So you can read. And you still recommend dietary carbs? Tell me how PET scans work. Tell me how inadvertently putting the patient back on a diet that significantly contributed to their cancer risk and triggered their cancer in whole or significant part makes any clinical sense. That you offer clinical trials that Big Pharma will profit from but you refuse to let food be medicine makes a sad joke at the expense of your patients.
Primary reading
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6527373/
Further reading
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01019-z
https://www.cell.com/trends/biochemical-sciences/fulltext/S0968-0004(15)00241-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0968000415002418%3Fshowall%3Dtrue