Is It True That Only 2 Or 3 % Of Cancer Patients Survive Chemotherapy?
The reason why we have so few people surviving is because of the standard of care. It has to be changed, if it’s not changed, there will be no major progress. Period.
A ketogenic diet is nothing less than drug-free cancer treatment. This 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 recommended for everyone whether you have cancer or not. It’s simply a diet that will help optimize your weight and overall health, as eating this way will help you convert from carb-burning mode to fat burning.
In contrast to normal neurons and glia, which transition to ketone bodies (beta-hydroxybutyrate) for respiratory energy when glucose levels are reduced, malignant brain tumors are mostly dependent on non-oxidative substrate level phosphorylation due to structural and functional abnormalities in mitochondria. Glucose and glutamine are major fuels for malignant cancer cells.
The transition from glucose to ketone bodies as an energy source is an ancestrally conserved adaptation to food deprivation that permits the survival of normal cells during extreme shifts in the nutritional environment. Only those cells with a flexible genome, honed through millions of years of environmental forcing and variability selection can transition from one energy state to another. This proposes a different approach to cancer management that exploits the metabolic flexibility of normal cells at the expense of the genetically defective and metabolically challenged.
This evolutionary and metabolic approach to cancer management is supported from studies in orthotopic mouse tumor models and from case studies in patients. Calorie restriction and restricted ketogenic diets (R-KD), which reduce circulating glucose levels and elevate ketone levels, are anti-invasive, anti-angiogenic and pro-apoptotic towards malignant cancer.
Current conventional cancer treatment typically involves chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Chemotherapy is a cytotoxic poison, and radiation is devastating to the human body. More often than not, the treatment is what eventually kills the patient. This can no longer be accepted as the best we can do. The reason why we have so few people surviving is because of the standard of care. It has to be changed, if it’s not changed, there will be no major progress.
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.
The ketogenic diet can have such a dramatic and rapid effect on cancer. All of your body’s cells are fueled by glucose. This includes cancer cells. However, cancer cells have one built-in fatal flaw – they do not have the metabolic flexibility of your regular cells and cannot adapt to use ketone bodies for fuel as all your other cells can. So, when you alter your diet and become what’s known as “fat-adapted,” your body starts using fat for fuel rather than carbs.
When you switch out the carbs for healthy fats, you starve cancer out, as you’re no longer supplying the necessary fuel – glucose for their growth. Your normal cells have the metabolic flexibility to adapt to using glucose to using ketone bodies. But cancer cells lack this metabolic flexibility. So we can exploit that.
It’s the most basic step without which few other dietary strategies are likely to succeed. In order to be effective, you must first STOP doing that which is promoting cancer growth or poor health in general and then all the other preventive strategies have the chance to really have an impact. Please remember addressing your diet should be at the top of your list. Naturally, processed foods and soft drinks do not belong in a cancer-preventive diet, as they are loaded with carbs that turn into fuel for cancer cells.
Carbs also raise your insulin and leptin levels and keeping your insulin and leptin signaling healthy is imperative if you want to avoid the chronic disease of all kinds, including cancer. Processed foods may also contain trans fat – the only type of fat you really need to avoid like the plague. They are also loaded with omega-6 fats. Increasing the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is another potent way to increase your risk of cancer cell proliferation.
If you or someone you know is challenged with cancer, the healthiest option may be to replace the carbs with beneficial fats and limit your protein to high quality organic pastured sources only. While you can take carbs to very low levels in ketogenic diets, you must have some protein every day to replace your body’s requirements.
The key is to add healthy fat to replace the carbs and excess protein. Healthy options include:
Olives and Olive oil.
- Coconuts and coconut oil.
- Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk.
- Organic raw nuts, especially macadamia nuts, which are low in protein and omega-6 fat.
- Organic pastured egg yolks and pastured meats.
- Avocados.
It’s difficult to know just how many people have suffered poor health because they followed conventional low-fat recommendations, but I’m sure the number is significant. The fact is that you’ve been thoroughly misled when it comes to dietary advice. Still today, many doctors, nutritionists, and government health officials will tell you to avoid saturated fat and keep fat consumption to below 10 percent while keeping the bulk of your diet, about 60 percent, as carbs. This is madness, as it’s the converse of a diet that will lead to optimal health.
As an example, you’ve probably seen the whole grain label, which is certified of all things. Do whole grains support heart health? Hardly. Other lifestyle factors that have been found to have an impact on chronic disease and cancer include:
- Increasing the self-destruction of mutated cells which, if allowed to replicate, could lead to cancer.
- Reducing the spread and reproduction of cancer cells. Causing cells to become differentiated (cancer cells often lack differentiation).
- Reducing the growth of new blood vessels from pre-existing ones, which is a step in the transition of dormant tumors turning cancerous.
Cancer is the second most lethal disease after heart disease not counting iatrogenic mortality, aka “death by medicine”. We all know that the war on cancer has been a dismal failure. Tragically, conventional wisdom is blind when it comes to cancer prevention and treatment and hundreds of thousands die prematurely every year as a result. They have little to no appreciation of the concepts discussed in this article. But you don’t have to fall into that trap as you know better and can take control of your health and ability to treat cancer in your own hands.
The ketogenic diet, which can be summarized as a high-fat, moderate protein, no-grain-carb diet, has brought many back to health even after being diagnosed with aggressive cancer and given no hope of survival.
Severely limiting sugar or fructose, processed foods of all kinds, sweetened beverages as well as diet versions, and replacing carbs with healthy fats and high quality protein can do what no medicine can – it can prevent disease from setting in, and may even be the U-turn you’re looking for if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer or other chronic diseases.
Add to that appropriate sun exposure, sleep, effective stress management, and regular exercise, and you’ll be well ahead of the rest of the population.