I thought I would share an interesting presentation by Craig Thompson, President and CEO of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. If you have 30 minutes to spare, it is worth a look. For some time now, we have known that tumors have a much higher glucose demand than healthy tissues. However, this fact rarely translates into dietary advice. The hypothesis is that if tumor needs glucose, then consuming a diet that is low in carbohydrate will effectively starve the tumor and result in necrosis. A diet that contains a higher proportion of calories from fat would in principle be less oncogenic. Thompson acknowledges in the Q&A that current dietary advice would argue against a high fat diet due to the focus on “heart-healthy” diets, but that we need to balance that against the desire to prevent cancer – waiting to treat the disease is clearly not good enough. It is unfortunate that he doesn’t discuss the fact that the demonization of cholesterol and fat is probably misguided. Nonetheless, there are also some interesting ideas out there on using a low carbohydrate dietary strategy to treat advanced cancer, including the work of Eugene Fine and Richard Feinman. You can download a recent paper on the subject here, in which a small (10 patient) sample was studied. You can read Eugene’s discussion of the work on Richard’s blog - it is encouraging to note that even in this very small study, there was a statistically meaningful correlation between disease stabilization (with one case of remission) and dietary ketosis. Getting back to the original point of this post, have a look at Thompson’s presentation (below). Hopefully in the future we can move in a the direction of funding for dietary cancer prevention – there is good reason to believe in this “tumor starvation” approach.
cancer – prevention vs. treatment
20 Thursday Dec 2012
Posted in Research, Stuff I think is cool
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Give them a decade or two and they’ll rediscover insulin potentiation therapy.
We simply didn’t evolve to eat as much sugar as we do. It’s toxic stuff…it’s powerful and volatile, as fuel should be… but it’s also in EVERYTHING. I have recently been trying to cut fructose corn syrup of high fructose corn syrup or glucose fructose sugar (you know it’s bad when they keep changing it’s name) out of my family’s diet due to its associations with diabetes and even Alzheimer’s… and it requires very close-reading of the labels. In spagetti sauce – sugar… In salami, or all things…sugar. The industrialisation of food is not good for any of us.
do you think that the cancer treatment business is largely a
fraud?
No. The treatment business is not fraudulent. It may be the case, however, that more $$ and consideration should be put into prevention through wise dietary choices. Few people understand the unintended consequences of eating poorly – it is not common to think about cancer being a possible outcome of eating one extra donut, but it may in fact be the case that the metabolic derangement that results from poor diet is related to cancer progression.