The War on Cancer

[JEY100]

Dr Peter Attia has begun a series of posts on cancer, opening with an introduction speech by another oncologist on the state of cancer research and treatment over the past 40 years. http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/war-cancer. The entire article is excellent but difficult to copy all the links and graphs. The conclusion gives a good sample of the tone.

In any case, when the Human Genome Project was near completion, President Clinton hosted a White House ceremony and announced that, “it will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases, and that humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal.”

The hubris of it all. It’s reminiscent of the quote of Sidney Farber. Hopefully this is not tempting fate. Theologians tell us the only unforgivable sin is pride. The increasing complexity of the science is affording us quite a dose of humility. British Physicist Brian Cox said that “being at the junction of the known and the unknown is a beautiful place to be for a scientist,” but it seems the more we know, the more we don’t know. Not unlike Winston Churchill’s characterization of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Not unlike modern theoretical physics, one questions whether we are capable of understanding the complexity of the science. Hopefully it’s not like trying to teach my dog quantum theory. We are so smart, but it seems that the cancer cell is smarter. It bobs and weaves, slips our punches, and when we back it into a corner, it defends itself in remarkable ways borne of millions of years of evolutionary acumen much of it hidden in the dark matter of our genome.

Maybe we should call a truce in the War on Cancer and concentrate on prevention. Besides smoking, the most preventable cause of cancer seems to be obesity. It is generally thought that obesity may account for about a third of many cancer types, particularly breast, colon, uterus, kidney and esophagus. Obesity is a risk factor for type II diabetes and these patients are not only more likely to get cancer, but to have poor outcomes. Other speakers will explore the relationship of obesity and cancer, the epidemiology and the science, and see if this lends support to any practical prevention measures.

Gary Abrass, M.D. April 19, 2012

[Seejay]

I like what Robb Wolff wrote. The researchers are only baffled because their underlying model is not right and things don't fit.

The conclusion almost gets there. Cancer used to be considered a metabolic disease. But then the person calls obesity a cause. Sigh. More "cargo cult science".

[Liz53]

Exactly what Seejay said about obesity being a cause. I prefer Gary Taubes' explanation that what causes obesity also causes diabetes, cancer, heart diseases and other metabolic diseases. For now (till we come up with a better/more refined explanation) I'm putting my money on high insulin levels and the resulting inflammation as the cause of all these diseases.

[Bob-a-rama]

My own theory is that the medical profession doesn't want to cure cancer. Why? Because it is too profitable to treat cancer.

There is a doctor in Texas (Burzynski) who has been curing cases of cancer the medical profession has given up on. What has the FDA done, but attacked him again and again and again and again. I read a book about him. There is a movie, it's a little less informative than the book but will give you a quick overview.

Other promising treatments have been thrown out by the FDA. A neighbor of mine got breast cancer, and went to Germany to get treatment there that is not available in the USA because the FDA doesn't approve it. It worked.

64 countries have banned GMO foods because they believe they cause cancer. The FDA has done everything it can to make sure that GMO foods are not only available in the USA but aren't even marked as GMO so that we can avoid them ourselves.

Cancer treatment is one huge, profitable business. The big business of medicine makes billions of dollars per year on chemo, radiation and surgery. If cancer was cured or prevented tomorrow, these business would fail, the stockholders would lose and the management would be out of work not to mention doctors, nurses, big pharma, and the entire infrastructure of cancer treatment.

Since the FDA represents the medical corporations instead of us, they use everything in their power to block any cancer prevention or cure - including strong-arm tactics, false arrests, search and seizure and so on. Watch the movie. You can rent it from Netflix.

So we are on our own. The FDA and Medical business has a dual role. We need them but they are also the enemy. So we need to take care of ourselves, prevent as much as we can, and when we need them, be an educated consumer and do your homework before you walk into the waiting room.

End of rant.

What happens when the medical profession wants to see where the cancer is? Very often they give you sugar with some kind of tracer and they watch where the sugar goes. It goes right to the cancer cells, because they are hungry for sugar. So applying common sense logic (no medical experience) that tells me that avoiding sugar should have the positive effect of not feeding cancer. Seems logical anyway.

Bob

[ojoj]

My own theory is that the medical profession doesn't want to cure cancer. Why? Because it is too profitable to treat cancer.

There is a doctor in Texas (Burzynski) who has been curing cases of cancer the medical profession has given up on. What has the FDA done, but attacked him again and again and again and again. I read a book about him. There is a movie, it's a little less informative than the book but will give you a quick overview.

Other promising treatments have been thrown out by the FDA. A neighbor of mine got breast cancer, and went to Germany to get treatment there that is not available in the USA because the FDA doesn't approve it. It worked.

64 countries have banned GMO foods because they believe they cause cancer. The FDA has done everything it can to make sure that GMO foods are not only available in the USA but aren't even marked as GMO so that we can avoid them ourselves.

Cancer treatment is one huge, profitable business. The big business of medicine makes billions of dollars per year on chemo, radiation and surgery. If cancer was cured or prevented tomorrow, these business would fail, the stockholders would lose and the management would be out of work not to mention doctors, nurses, big pharma, and the entire infrastructure of cancer treatment.

Since the FDA represents the medical corporations instead of us, they use everything in their power to block any cancer prevention or cure - including strong-arm tactics, false arrests, search and seizure and so on. Watch the movie. You can rent it from Netflix.

So we are on our own. The FDA and Medical business has a dual role. We need them but they are also the enemy. So we need to take care of ourselves, prevent as much as we can, and when we need them, be an educated consumer and do your homework before you walk into the waiting room.

End of rant.

What happens when the medical profession wants to see where the cancer is? Very often they give you sugar with some kind of tracer and they watch where the sugar goes. It goes right to the cancer cells, because they are hungry for sugar. So applying common sense logic (no medical experience) that tells me that avoiding sugar should have the positive effect of not feeding cancer. Seems logical anyway.

Bob

The trouble is that with all the mystique and reputation surrounding cancer research, you cant actually say anything to the general public. I totally 110% agree with what you've said, but you only have to look at facebook, the media, social groups of all kinds and they're forever doing "fun runs", sponsored "this and thats" for cancer research and anyone who criticises or questions is on a par with the devil!!!!!!

The other angle is that you have two groups, the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry working in perfect financial harmony together and of course our governments cream taxes off the top!

Jo xxx

[Zei]

How about all those sugar-laden food products proudly spouting the cute little pink ribbons supporting breast cancer? Oh, uh, breast cancer awareness, of course! I'm pretty sure not enough people are aware of cancer as a metabolic disease for those junk food manufacturers to suspect their sugary products may actually promote the disease, but I'm glad at least I know to steer clear of their stuff.

[Bob-a-rama]

An ounce of prevention ... ...

It's something I hope I am doing. We all choose to believe something from the vast amount of information and disinformation out there.

And you can't believe the media. 90% of the US media (included TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines) is owned by 6 giant corporations. And the bulk of that 90% is owned by Fox, G.E. and Disney. They do not tell you what is good for you, they tell you what is good for them, and that includes the news and entertainment shows. The news reporters even call themselves "presstitutes".

TV, newspapers, and radio are sales media disguised as information and entertainment media. The sooner you know that, the sooner you will stop believing what they tell you, and the better off you will be.

If I ever get "the C word" I'll go to Texas and see Burzynski. He takes people with terminal cancer that the establishment medicine have told to get their affairs in order and years later they are still cancer free. And the FDA uses the feds to continuously harass, arrest, and shut them down. They even had gov't employees steal their patents. Because Big Hospital, Big Pharma, the AMA and other interests don't want them to steal their cash cow.

OK, I'm on a rant again. Sorry about that. It's a shame, our country has turned from a representative republic to an oligarchy run by a few huge corporations and the international bankers. And they call us a democracy - we never were, and are far from that now.

Rant over.

Read the labels. Avoid sugar and high glycemic starch.

Avoid all soy, corn, cottonseed, canola and squash products unless they are certified non-GMO. Avoid milk and cheese unless the farmers don't use rBGH artificial hormone on their cows. 64 countries (including all of Europe and Canada) have banned these because they cause cancer. We haven't because of Monsanto and Big Medicine are part of the oligarchy.

I guess the rant wasn't really over, and perhaps never will be unless we reclaim our country, and I don't see that happening. I wish I knew how to do it, but I have no idea short of electing me dictator and I'd refuse the job because I'd probably be murdered in less than 6 months ;)

Read the labels, investigate the ingredients, don't believe anything you hear or read in the corporate media, and stay healthy.

Bob

[M Levac]

Exactly what Seejay said about obesity being a cause. I prefer Gary Taubes' explanation that what causes obesity also causes diabetes, cancer, heart diseases and other metabolic diseases. For now (till we come up with a better/more refined explanation) I'm putting my money on high insulin levels and the resulting inflammation as the cause of all these diseases.
Me too. I will add though that I also make the distinction between primary and only. So, if we target insulin signaling through a ketogenic diet (a la Richard Feinman), and it doesn't work as intended, then we must look at secondary causes that act the same way as dietary carbs do.

[M Levac]

About prevention. Feinman got it right with using a ketogenic diet to treat cancer. The same therapy can be used to prevent cancer too. Here again though, it's the same problem with primary vs only. So, even though we take care of about 75% of the problem with low-carb we still gotta watch out for the other stuff that can do the same thing carbs do.

The idea just popped up that maybe it's about carb sensitivity. Sure, but couldn't it be possible that carb sensitivity is a function of other things rather than just the carbs? What if we could treat those other things, remove the carb sensitivity? I don't mean that we could then eat more carbs. I mean we could explain why we are so sensitive to a tiny amount of carbs (besides wheat which I think is another problem altogether).

[teaser]

Some of the researchers on cancer and the ketogenic diet suggest that to reach the sorts of reductions in blood glucose and increases in ketones achieved in mouse studies, people would need to go on periodic water fasts. The ketogenic diet for rodents seems to be more aggressive than the one used for epilepsy--the diet for human epilepsy is 90 percent calories from fat, it's often 95 percent calories fat with mice. I don't think we'd do well on that long term--but we could probably do it intermittently.

I was looking at this yesterday (no free text):

Forty percent methionine restriction decreases mitochondrial oxygen radical production and leak at complex I during forward electron flow and lowers oxidative damage to proteins and mitochondrial DNA in rat kidney and brain mitochondria.
Caro P, Gomez J, Sanchez I, Naudi A, Ayala V, López-Torres M, Pamplona R, Barja G.
Source
Department of Animal Physiology II, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Abstract
Eighty percent dietary methionine restriction (MetR) in rodents (without calorie restriction), like dietary restriction (DR), increases maximum longevity and strongly decreases mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and oxidative stress. Eighty percent MetR also lowers the degree of membrane fatty acid unsaturation in rat liver. Mitochondrial ROS generation and the degree of fatty acid unsaturation are the only two known factors linking oxidative stress with longevity in vertebrates. However, it is unknown whether 40% MetR, the relevant methionine restriction degree to clarify the mechanisms of action of standard (40%) DR can reproduce these effects in mitochondria from vital tissues of strong relevance for aging. Here we study the effect of 40% MetR on ROS production and oxidative stress in rat brain and kidney mitochondria. Male Wistar rats were fed during 7 weeks semipurified diets differing only in their methionine content: control or 40% MetR diets. It was found that 40% MetR decreases mitochondrial ROS production and percent free radical leak (by 62-71%) at complex I during forward (but not during reverse) electron flow in both brain and kidney mitochondria, increases the oxidative phosphorylation capacity of brain mitochondria, lowers oxidative damage to kidney mitochondrial DNA, and decreases specific markers of mitochondrial protein oxidation, lipoxidation, and glycoxidation in both tissues. Forty percent MetR also decreased the amount of respiratory complexes I, III, and IV and apoptosis-inducing factor (AIF) in brain mitochondria and complex IV in kidney mitochondria, without changing the degree of mitochondrial membrane fatty acid unsaturation. Forty percent MetR, differing from 80% MetR, did not inhibit the increase in rat body weight. These changes are very similar to the ones previously found during dietary and protein restriction in rats. We conclude that methionine is the only dietary factor responsible for the decrease in mitochondrial ROS production and oxidative stress, and likely for part of the longevity extension effect, occurring in DR.

Non-genetically modified mice don't generally die of heart disease--so calorie restriction, protein restriction, methionine restriction studies of lifespan tend to have cancer as a major endpoint. So when you say "this intervention increases maximum lifespan" to a certain extent, what you're saying is, this intervention reduces cancer.

increases the oxidative phosphorylation capacity of brain mitochondria,


Oxidative phosphorylation is how we generate ATP from fat and ketones. An increase in oxidative phosphorylation capacity of mitochondria--even in a diet that isn't actually low in carbohydrate--sort of makes things more similar to the effects of a ketogenic diet. The more a cell is depending on the mitochondria for energy, the less it's depending on glycolysis. It's a slower, but more efficient way of producing ATP.

The decrease in ROS production also happens in a ketogenic diet;

The ketogenic diet reverses gene expression patterns and reduces reactive oxygen species levels when used as an adjuvant therapy for glioma.
Stafford P, Abdelwahab MG, Kim do Y, Preul MC, Rho JM, Scheck AC.
Source
Neuro-Oncology Research, Barrow Neurological Institute7 of St, Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix, AZ, 85013, USA. Adrienne.Scheck~chw.edu.
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Malignant brain tumors affect people of all ages and are the second leading cause of cancer deaths in children. While current treatments are effective and improve survival, there remains a substantial need for more efficacious therapeutic modalities. The ketogenic diet (KD) - a high-fat, low-carbohydrate treatment for medically refractory epilepsy - has been suggested as an alternative strategy to inhibit tumor growth by altering intrinsic metabolism, especially by inducing glycopenia.
METHODS:
Here, we examined the effects of an experimental KD on a mouse model of glioma, and compared patterns of gene expression in tumors vs. normal brain from animals fed either a KD or a standard diet.
RESULTS:
Animals received intracranial injections of bioluminescent GL261-luc cells and tumor growth was followed in vivo. KD treatment significantly reduced the rate of tumor growth and prolonged survival. Further, the KD reduced reactive oxygen species (ROS) production in tumor cells. Gene expression profiling demonstrated that the KD induces an overall reversion to expression patterns seen in non-tumor specimens. Notably, genes involved in modulating ROS levels and oxidative stress were altered, including those encoding cyclooxygenase 2, glutathione peroxidases 3 and 7, and periredoxin 4.
CONCLUSIONS:
Our data demonstrate that the KD improves survivability in our mouse model of glioma, and suggests that the mechanisms accounting for this protective effect likely involve complex alterations in cellular metabolism beyond simply a reduction in glucose.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20831808

[RawNut]

Ketosis might not be absolutely necessary. This study (http://cancerpreventionresearch.aacrjournals.org/content/3/9/1124.full) showed that low carb mice with 10% or 20% of calories from carbs benefited as much as the no-carb ketogenic mice.

In this study (http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/71/13/4484.full), there was a difference between the 10% and 15% CHO mice but they were eating ridiculous amounts of protein - about 60%!


I do believe though, that a ketogenic diet would be best at preventing cancer in the first place since it upregulates endogenous anti-oxidant production and reduces the DNA damage that can initiate cancer.


This study supports Teaser's regarding methionine restriction. They are basically on a low carb diet.

The day-to-night transition produced a twofold higher heat increment of feeding (3.0 degrees C vs. 1.5 degrees C) in MR vs. controls and an exaggerated increase in respiratory quotient (RQ) to values greater than 1, indicative of the interconversion of glucose to lipid by de novo lipogenesis. The simultaneous inhibition of glucose utilization and shift to fat oxidation during the day was also more complete in MR (RQ approximately 0.75) vs. controls (RQ approximately 0.85).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20538896

[WereBear]

Once medicine gets on a wrong road, it's HECK to get off it.

Look what Pasteur went through to get that crazy "microbe" theory off the ground. Lister was ridiculed for years for promoting his antiseptic surgical methods. Semmelweis was thrown in an asylum and beaten to death because he wouldn't shut up about doctors washing their hands.

Right now, NO chemotherapy drugs are passed on to human trials unless they meet a certain standard against leukemia cells. This might be why blood cancers have such a high success rate... and other cancer treatments... don't.

[Cleome]

How about all those sugar-laden food products proudly spouting the cute little pink ribbons supporting breast cancer? Oh, uh, breast cancer awareness, of course!

Yup, ran into those at my local grocery store yesterday...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2550/3975555327_aa0a707175.jpg

[WereBear]

Yup, ran into those at my local grocery store yesterday...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2550/3975555327_aa0a707175.jpg

I now have a visceral revulsion towards those pink ribbons. Something like 80% of donations go right back to organizational salaries.

This take from a woman journalist on her experience was very thought provoking (warning about triggers for treatment issues)

http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/cancerland.htm

[Bob-a-rama]

I once had a friend who managed a local chapter of a very famous charitable organization -- until he found out that one dollar out of every five donated actually made it to a charity, and when it got there most of that was absorbed in the salaries of the people in the charity.

When I give I give locally and if possible directly.

I'd rather give the homeless person on a corner a buck than to see 80 or more cents of that buck go to someone driving a Benz and wearing a Rolex.

BTW, for political correctness, instead of homeless person, we should call them "urban campers" ;)

Seriously, there are plenty of ways to give locally where the people volunteer and the administrative costs are minimal. It just takes a little research.

Bob

[WereBear]

Speaking of which, I think these folks are on the right track:

http://www.singlecausesinglecure.org/

[KDH]

I recently had a friend pass away. As far as I could tell, she was poisoned to death with chemotherapy. And then encouraged to eat things that would continue to feed the tumors, so they could keep poisoning her. Made me mad as hell. She was 36 years old. The torture lasted five YEARS.

[Nancy LC]

That's tragic, KDH. I'm so sorry. :(

[Aradasky]

http://youtu.be/rBUGVkmmwbk You Tube of the movie of Dr Burzynski . HOWEVER read this, too. Hope will never go away....

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/stanislaw-burzynski-bad-medicine-a-bad-movie/

[Bob-a-rama]

While the movie may only consist of 3 testimonials, I've been reading about him for quite a few years. Not consistently, but occasionally in the health-based publications that I subscribe to or have subscribed to in the past.

I've read about scores of people who were given up on by the medical establishment and told to get their affairs in order, came to the clinic out of desperation, and became and stayed cancer free for decades.

Sure they haven't gone through FDA clinical trials, but that's more the fault of the FDA who favors Big Pharma over everybody else.

Remember Vioxx. Merck conducted the trials, and people who used Vioxx as a pain killer were 50 times more likely to get a fatal heart attack (that cured their pain, for good). When the report was written, the drug they tested it against, which never had a reputation for being heart healthy was claimed to be 50 times more effective at stopping heart attacks.

The FDA approved the drug, and in the 5 or so years it was on the market, more Americans died from Vioxx than did in the entire Viet Nam war. Merck made billions of dollars mass-murdering US citizens and when it could no longer be covered up, the FDA fined them to what amounted to be about 1% of their profits on the drug.

So much for FDA testing.

Treating cancer is a very profitable business. Curing cancer is not. Big Pharma, Big Hospital and the others involved will do everything they can to keep those profits rolling in, including discrediting anybody who comes up with a decent cure, slapping frivolous lawsuits against them, and even hiring respectable sounding scientists to discredit them.

So does that mean I believe in Dr. B 100%. No, but I definitely believe in the conspiracy against him, and that conspiracy is so ferocious that I believe Dr. B must be into something good. They have never proven quackery.

Bob

[KDH]

It is unbelievable how many people believe they are "eating healthy" because they stop eating cake and drinking soda. Oatmeal for breakfast, potatoes, rice and rolls with their tiny low-fat slice of protein for lunch and dinner, grapes and jello for snacks... They are set up to fail. It's sick.

[ojoj]

It is unbelievable how many people believe they are "eating healthy" because they stop eating cake and drinking soda. Oatmeal for breakfast, potatoes, rice and rolls with their tiny low-fat slice of protein for lunch and dinner, grapes and jello for snacks... They are set up to fail. It's sick.


We get this at work. The all come in in the mornings with their tiny salads, water bottles, rice cakes and a piece of fruit - which is all gone by mid morning, so lunchtime comes and someone goes off to the bakers and brings back donuts, cakes, biscuits/cookies. After the initial "Oh I shouldnt", "I'm on a diet", they all nosedive in lol!!!!! I just sit there with my pork scratchings/rinds and lump of brie!

Jo xxx

[KDH]

We get this at work. The all come in in the mornings with their tiny salads, water bottles, rice cakes and a piece of fruit - which is all gone by mid morning, so lunchtime comes and someone goes off to the bakers and brings back donuts, cakes, biscuits/cookies. After the initial "Oh I shouldnt", "I'm on a diet", they all nosedive in lol!!!!! I just sit there with my pork scratchings/rinds and lump of brie!

Jo xxx

I bring in a zip-loc full of bell peppers, cheese and salami slices, pickles, basically whatever I find for the day. And have to hear "how can you eat that!?" from people twice my size drinking their slimfast.

Is there a diplomatic way to say "I do it so I don't look like you anymore?" I've always been at a loss about that...

[ojoj]

I bring in a zip-loc full of bell peppers, cheese and salami slices, pickles, basically whatever I find for the day. And have to hear "how can you eat that!?" from people twice my size drinking their slimfast.

Is there a diplomatic way to say "I do it so I don't look like you anymore?" I've always been at a loss about that...


I guess seeing is believing - its just they dont see it!!!

Jo xxx

[Bob-a-rama]

I also get a kick out of the people who will order donuts and chase them with coffee that has aspartame instead of sugar.

And KDH, no, there is no diplomatic way of saying it, except perhaps, "Will power".

Bob

[keith v]

we get donuts EVERY friday. They refuse to buy Slami, or cheese or anything. They did get bran muffins and bagels tho cause they are healthier right?

People laugh when I call it Crack day. They think I'm joking.

[aj_cohn]

Is there a diplomatic way to say "I do it so I don't look like you anymore?" I've always been at a loss about that...

How about "Because it's easier than the alternative."?

[Nancy LC]

The Unsustainable Economics of Cancer Drugs (http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/22/the-unsustainable-economics-of-cancer-drugs/)
An economist looks at cancer treatments. There are comments about which ones are ineffective against what sorts of cancers.

The profit motive is certainly a factor. Doctors are, after all, human beings who respond to incentives. Oncologists are among the highest paid doctors, their salaries increasing faster than any other specialists’, and they typically derive more than half of their income from selling and administering chemotherapy drugs. Chemotherapy can also help oncologists inflate their survival-rate data. It may not seem all that valuable to give a late-stage victim of lung cancer an extra two months to live, but perhaps the patient was only expected to live four months anyway. On paper, this will look like an impressive feat: the doctor extended the patient’s remaining life by 50 percent.
Tom Smith doesn’t discount either of these reasons, but he provides two more.
It is tempting, he says, for oncologists to overstate— or perhaps overbelieve in— the efficacy of chemotherapy. “If your slogan is ‘We’re winning the war on cancer,’ that gets you press and charitable donations and money from Congress,” he says. “If your slogan is ‘We’re still getting our butts kicked by cancer but not as bad as we used to,’ that’s a different sell. The reality is that for most people with solid tumors — brain, breast, prostate, lung — we aren’t getting our butts kicked as badly, but we haven’t made much progress.”

[JEY100]

Dr. Attia continues the cancer series to answer this question understandable to the layman and in 1,000 words. Wildly fudges the word count ;) but it is an excellent short explanation of the metabolic theory of cancer with good definitions of the energy process of cancer growth.

http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/way-exploit-metabolic-quirk-cancer

Excerpt of the concluding paragraphs, with an interesting reference to metformin studies:

You can probably tell where I’m leading you. What happens if we reduce the amount of glucose in the body? Could such an intervention ‘starve’ cancer cells?

An insight into this came relatively recently from an unlikely place – the study of patients with type 2 diabetes. In the past few years, three retrospective studies of patients taking a drug called metformin have shown that diabetic patients who take metformin, even when adjusted for other factors such as body weight and other medications, appear to get less cancer. And when they do get cancer, they appear to survive longer. Why? The answer may lie in what metformin does. Metformin does many things, to be clear, but chief among them is activating an enzyme called AMP kinase, which is important in suppressing the production of glucose in the liver (the liver manufactures glucose from protein and glycerol and releases it to the rest of the body). This drug is used in patients with diabetes to reduce glucose levels and thereby reduce insulin requirement. So, the patients taking metformin may have better cancer outcomes because their glucose levels were lower, or because such patients needed less insulin. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) also appear to play an integral role in cancer growth as recently demonstrated by the observation that people with defective IGF-1 receptors appear immune to cancer. Or, it may be that activation of AMP kinase in cancer cells harms them in some other way. We don’t actually know why, but we do know that where there is smoke there is often fire. And the ‘smoke’ in this case is that a relatively innocuous drug that alters glucose levels in the body appears to interfere with cancer.

This may also explain why most animal models show that caloric restriction improves cancer outcomes. Though historically, this observation has been interpreted through the lens of less ‘food’ for cancer. A more likely explanation is that caloric restriction is often synonymous with glucose reduction, and it may be the glucose restriction per se that is keeping the cancer at bay. Fortunately this paradigm shift in oncology – exploiting the metabolic abnormality of cancer cells – is gaining traction, and doing so with many leaders in the field. Over a dozen clinical trials are underway right now investigating this strategy in the cancers that appear most sensitive to this metabolic effect – breast, endometrial, cervical, prostate, pancreatic, colon, and others. Some of these trials are simply trying to reproduce the metformin effect in a prospective, blinded fashion. Other trials are looking at sophisticated ways to target cancer by exploiting this metabolic abnormality, such as targeting PI3K directly.

To date, no studies in humans are evaluating the therapeutic efficacy of glucose and/or insulin reduction via diet, though I suspect that will change in the coming year or two, pending outcomes of the metformin trials.

[teaser]

Though historically, this observation has been interpreted through the lens of less ‘food’ for cancer. A more likely explanation is that caloric restriction is often synonymous with glucose reduction, and it may be the glucose restriction per se that is keeping the cancer at bay.

I think I have to disagree with this a little bit. Reduction of glucose availability to cancer cells may be the mechanism, but that doesn't mean that calorie restriction isn't important, in a way. Suppose you ate 1500 calories, 150 grams of glucose. Some of the glucose would go to the cancer cells, some would be used by healthy tissue. Add five hundred calories of fat to that diet--and that dietary fat competes for uptake by healthy tissue--but the cancer cells still prefer glucose. So the reduction in calories may cause a greater decrease in glucose availability to cancer cells than the simple reduction of dietary glucose itself.

[JEY100]

New (highly technical) paper published by Thomas Seyfried:

Cancer as a metabolic disease: implications for novel therapeutics

http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/01/18/carcin.bgt480.full.pdf

[RawNut]

Thanks for posting that, Janet!