Nourished Magazine :: Wisdom to thrive by

Unlike the prevention of many other diseases the prevention of cancer requires no government help, and no extra money. - DR OTTO WARBURG

Recently, Cancer Research UK placed advertisements on TV in the United Kingdom showing three young girls, one after the other, captioned ‘Teacher’, ‘Lawyer’, ‘Cancer’. What they were saying was that, after 50 years and countless billions spent on research, one in three people will get cancer. Indeed they admit that after all that expense, ‘Cancer is a major public health problem in the UK with over 250,000 people developing cancer each year and over 150,000 dying of the disease.’1

As cancer is so widespread and the subject of so much research effort, it may come as a surprise for you to learn that, despite the introduction of radiotherapy in the 1920s, of chemotherapeutic drugs after the Second World War and the advances in chemotherapeutic drugs since, the proliferation of X-ray machines, scanners, computers and the rest of our high-tech equipment, plus the advances in other branches of medicine, the sacrifice of millions of animals (and people) in research, and the spending of billions of dollars, pounds and other currencies on studies to broaden our knowledge of how cancers start and how to combat them, we really have little more idea of how to cure or treat cancer at the beginning of the twenty-first century than we did at the beginning of the twentieth; that overall chances of survival haven’t really changed all that much.

It is one of the great medical myths that, because the medical profession has been so successful in curing other diseases, more people live long enough to get cancer and we need to spend more money to combat this disease. This is total nonsense! Cancer has nothing to do with our extended longevity – our children get cancer, and other human cultures in which there is no cancer at all live as long as we do.

Cancer is a word we dread. Not so long ago the word was taboo. If you or a member of your family had cancer you kept the fact within the family. It was as if people feared that, if it were known that they had cancer, they would be socially unacceptable. Others seemed to fear that if ‘cancer’ were mentioned, they might get it too. But then, until comparatively recently, cancer was a comparatively rare occurrence and little understood.

Today all that has changed: over the last few decades we have all become much more aware of cancer. For today, cancer is no longer the rarity it once was; it’s is a disease that affects us all. At the beginning of the nineteenth century about one death in 50 was due to cancer. By the beginning of the twentieth that number had almost doubled to one in 27. Thirty years later it had doubled again to one in 12 and by 1960 – another 30 years – it was one in 6. Based on statistics in 1992, the American Cancer Society predicted that by the end of the twentieth century the number would be one in 2. They were not far out: As Cancer Research UK’s advert shows, one in 3 people will get a cancer and that cancer will kill more than one in 4.2

Many books have been written about cancer and how to avoid it. They vary widely in their advice. Some have a pecuniary bias: published by a pharmaceutical or medical concern to boost sales; others report ‘miraculous’ cures by people who have had a remission and want to tell others how (they believe) they achieved it; and still more are by peddlers of weird and wonderful potions that have been around for so long that ‘there must be something in it’. The more than 600 cancer charities in the UK soak up billions of pounds every year from people who fear cancer and hope that their charity might help them one day. It’s a mirage.

In 1971, America’s President Richard Nixon declared War on Cancer and promised a cure by the USA’s bicentennial in 1976. Billions upon billions of dollars and other currencies have since been allocated to, and spent on, finding a cure. Without success. We’re still assured that a cure may be found any day now – it all depends on how much money is raised for the research (Scientists have been making those promises, almost word for word, for a century). And so we keep raising money, more and more every year, while the numbers of our friends and family members who fall victim to this hideous disease continue to grow.

The truth is that cancer is a long way from being beaten. The vast amount of time, money and resources spent on drugs, together with innovative advances in highly sophisticated diagnostic machinery have done practically nothing to alleviate the suffering from cancer.

What is cancer?

My dictionaries, both English language and medical, agree on a definition of cancer. It is ‘any malignant tumour arising from the abnormal and uncontrolled division of body cells that then invade and destroy the surrounding tissues’.

But that really doesn’t tell us a lot.

The problem is that, although cancer is now so widespread throughout the world, our knowledge about it is really incomplete and the question, What is cancer? is actually quite difficult to answer.

We know that cancer has no single cause. We know that it isn’t a disease you can ‘catch’ like flu. It is generally believed that we all have cancer cells within our bodies, probably many thousands of them but that, in the healthy body, our immune systems deal with them before they develop into tumours. For us to get cancer, then, it seems that some factor is required which suppresses our bodies’ immune system leaving it in too weakened a state to resist the growth of a tumour, together with a trigger which causes a malfunction in one or more cells. It could be a stressful event, an environmental, medical, dietary or emotional crisis, a food or medication – indeed anything which lowers our body’s defences and allows a small focus of cancer cells to develop to the stage where the immune system can no longer combat it.

Cancer begins when a cell divides. No matter how many birthdays you have had, very little of your body is more than about eight years old. This is because of a process of programmed cell death (apoptosis) and renewal that goes on throughout our lives. Apart from the obvious signs of parts of the body continually growing – hair and finger and toe-nails – most body cells have a programmed life. At the end of that life they die and are replaced. When this happens, a process of cell division called mitosis makes new cells. In the process of mitosis, one cell divides to form two cells. First the DNA, the genetic blueprint in the nucleus of the cell which is in the form of a double helix, ‘unzips’ itself, dividing into two strands, each with half of the original genetic code. Then each of those strands reconstructs the original other half. This ‘replication’ process produces two identical sets of genetic information and allows the one cell to produce two genetically identical daughter cells. In this way is the body first made, grown during childhood and then, throughout adult life, repaired.

As it is in dividing cells that cancers start, it may be assumed that the parts of the body most prone to cancers are those that divide most frequently. And so it proves.

If anything should disrupt or change the genetic code when this DNA replication takes place, it can lead to mutations and, in some cases, the deregulation we call cancer. This deranged cell may be so genetically damaged that the gene that would normally bring about its death by apoptosis no longer functions. As time passes, the cell does not die but reproduces itself over and over again to crowd neighbouring cells and form a tumour. At this stage it is said to be benign. However, it may continue to grow out of control and metastasise (spread) throughout the body. It is at this stage that it changes from benign to malignant. This is the danger period for, once a tumour has metastasised, conventional medicine has very little answer for it and the prognosis is bleak.

Causes of cancer

There are as many forms of cancer as there are different types of cell in the body. And there are many agents that can cause a cell to become cancerous. They include viruses, carcinogenic (cancer causing) particles in the air we breathe and the food we eat, ionising radiation – x-rays from medical machines and gamma radiation from the earth we live on and ultra-violet radiation from the sun. Even a hard knock, a cut or other source of inflammation can begin a cancer’s growth.

Within our bodies we have an extremely competent and effective defence against invasions from outside. Replicated cells are new but they carry on their cell walls the correct code and they are recognised by the immune system as ‘Self’ – being part of us. Organisms from outside the body, carry on their cell walls a foreign code, and are recognised by the immune system as foreign – ‘Non-self’ – and attacked mercilessly. This attack by the immune system is so powerful that it can destroy a transplanted organ completely in a very short time. The problem in the case of cancer cells is that they teeter on the brink of Self and Non-self. Finding the answer to this problem is crucial to survival and it borders on the philosophical as much as the medical: where is the dividing line between Self and Non-self? Unfortunately, as far as the immune system is concerned it seems that, in many cases, a cancer cell is still regarded as Self, albeit slightly eccentric, and so it is allowed to survive and flourish.

This is the problem our immune system faces once a cancer has established itself. It is vital, therefore, to prevent that establishment by avoiding, as much as possible, things that have been shown to start a cancer or promote its growth.

Cancer: a disease of civilisation

It has long been known that there exist enormous differences in the frequency of different types of cancer in various popula­tions throughout the world. History shows that each type of civilisation, like each social group and each way of life, has diseases which are peculiar to it. While this fact is well recognised by medical historians, its explanation is a matter of controversy. Is the reason for the variability in incidence of disease to be sought in peculiarities of human constitution, in genetic traits that make some people more suscept­ible or resistant to the disease? Or are environmental factors more important when determining the types of diseases are most common in a given community?

Fortunately, the past still survived until well into the twentieth century in the form of several populations who had remained almost completely isolated, and whose mode of life differed profoundly from that of us in the industrialised countries. In other words, these primitive peoples could be used as control groups for a study of what modern civilisation has done to us. But the time for studying the surviv­ing primitive populations is getting short because ancient social structures everywhere are disappearing or are being grossly altered.

No cancer – from the Arctic to the Equator

For over a century and a half, medical missionaries, anthropologists and explorers searched in vain for cancer among the primitive peoples they visited. The Inuit (Eskimos) have probably been isolated as long as any prim­itive people. Indeed, many still had a Stone Age culture until just a few decades ago, and they therefore provided excellent material for anthropological studies.

It was remarked upon by all who studied them that ‘Cancer is not to be found among the Eskimos.’ Dr. Samuel King Hutton was a board member in the management from London of the Moravian Mission to Labra­dor during the first half of the twentieth century. Writing of the Labrador Eskimos in 1925, he says:

Some diseases common in Europe have not come under my notice during a prolonged and careful survey of the health of the Eskimos. Of these diseases the most striking is cancer. I have not seen or heard of a case of malignant new growth in an Eskimo. In this connection it may be noted that cookery holds a very secondary place in the preparation of food – most of the food is eaten raw, and the diet is a flesh one; also that the diet is rich in vitamins.’3

In his book, The Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen’s writes, ‘My sincerest wish for our friends the Nechilli Eskimos is, that civilization may never reach them.’ 4

The Inuit were not alone in being free from cancer; away from Western civilisation cancer-free societies were ubiquitous. From the tropical frontier Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote in 1957: ‘On my arrival in Gabon, in 1913, I was astonished to encounter no cases of cancer . . . This absence of cancer seemed to me due to the difference in nutrition of the natives as compared with the Europeans.5

In 1915, Dr. Frederick L. Hoffman wrote an 826page volume, The Mortality from Cancer Throughout the World6 Under ‘Cancer among Primitive Races’ Hoff­man reports that:
‘The rarity of cancer among native races suggests that the disease is primarily induced by the condi­tions and methods of living which typify our modern civiliza­tion . . . cancer is exception­ally rare among the primitive peoples. . .’

This rarity of cancer in the Nineteenth Century was not restricted to primitive populations. In his important book, Cancer: Civilization and Degeneration, Dr John Cope discusses the early eating habits of the English and the rarity of cancer at the time. He notes in particular that cancers increased in England as the consump­tion of meat declined.7

Where does the fault lie?

As far as conventional medicine is concerned, the preferred methods for treating cancer are surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. Cancer cells are removed or their growth slowed – but no attempt is made to eliminate the disease by strengthening the body’s natural defence, the immune system. Indeed, chemotherapy and radiation, by compromising the immune system, do exactly the opposite.

Not surprisingly, many scientists have been profoundly disappointed in the trend of cancer research and its lack of success since the end of the nineteenth century. In the preface to his book, Cancer: Nature, Cause and Cure, Dr. Alexander Berglas of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, wrote in 1957 ‘Over the years, cancer research has become the domain of specialists in various fields. Despite the outstanding contributions of these scientists, we have been getting farther and farther away from our goal, the curing of cancer.’8

More than 30 years in the field of cancer research convinced Berglas that the methods of research ‘had the peculiar result of becoming an obstacle to the study of the whole’, and that to continue as they were, ‘is not to our advantage’. ‘I have come to the conclusion’, he wrote, ‘that cancer may perhaps be just another intelligible natural process whose cause is to be found in our environment and mode of life.’ Berglas was writing particularly of the foods we eat and the way in which they are grown and prepared.

Interestingly, under ‘Prediction of Cancer Mortality’, Berglas says the National Cancer Institute of the United States predicted (pre­sumably in 1956) that ‘32%, of newborn children are expected to contract cancer during their lifetime’. That estimate is remarkably accurate.

As to the contrast between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ coun­tries since 1900, Dr. Berglas wrote: ‘Accounts of regions free from cancer reveal the influence of civilization on the processes of cancer. . . . We are faced with the grim prospect that the advance of cancer and of civilization parallel each other.’

Are Primitive People Permanently Cancer Free

The answer to this question from eye witnesses at the time is unanimously, No. Primitive peoples have no more immunity to cancers than we have. Once introduced to ‘civilised’ foods they succumb to the disease as readily as we do. While there were no known cases of cancer when Dr Albert Schweitzer first went to in Gabon, he noted sadly that: ‘In the course of the years we have seen cases of cancer in growing numbers in our region. My observations incline me to at­tribute this to the fact that the natives were living more and more after the manner of the whites . . ‘

But What Aspect of our Diet Causes Cancer?

When it comes to possible dietary causes of cancer, frontier doctors have written apparently contrary views based on their own experiences: when they could find no cancer among vegetarian cultures they were prone to warn against meat; and where no cancers were discovered among meat eaters they tended to caution against mixed or vegetarian diets.

Major General Sir Robert McCar­rison, a British army doctor who worked predominantly in the Indian sub-continent, warned against meat as probably being the cancer-causing agent. McCarrison was particularly impressed with the health of the Hunzas, a people who live in a secluded valley in the Karakorum Mountains. He attributed their health to their mainly vegetarian diet. A typical statement appears in McCarrison’s Studies in Deficiency Disease published in 1921. After quoting, with ap­proval, the famous Danish nutritionist, Dr. Mikkel Hindhede, to the effect that ‘The principal cause of death lies in food and drink,’ McCarrison wrote of the Hunza:

‘My own experience provides an example of a race, unsur­passed in perfection of physique and in freedom from disease in general, whose sole food consists to this day of grains, vegetables, and fruits, with a certain amount of milk and butter, and goat’s meat only on feast days. . . . Amongst these people the span of life is extraordinarily long; and such service as I was able to render them during seven years spent in their midst was confined chiefly to the treatment of accidental lesions, the removal of senile cataract, plastic operations for granular eyelids, or the treatment of maladies wholly unconnected with food supply.’

But many more have pointed out that, before they started to get cancer in the twentieth century, the traditional diet of the Inuit came entirely from animal sources and contained no plant material at all. And, actually, cataract at least is connected with ‘food supply’.

It is always suggested when diseases such as cancer start appearing after people adopt a ‘healthy’ Western diet that, as these diseases are generally diseases of old age, their appearance must be because these peoples are living longer. But that’s an excuse not borne out by evidence. Dr. Diamond Jenness, in his book, The Copper Eskimos, says:

‘Amongst adults, death was nearly always due to natural causes, either old age or the perils that are inseparable from life in the Arctic!’

And Dr. Henry W. Greist, in his Seventeen Years with the Eskimos,speaking of the ancestors of those north Alaskans among whom he was first able to diagnose cancer in 1933, says: ‘the Eskimo of the far North was healthy . . . He lived to a very great age!’

So what is the answer? The difference in health patterns between primitive and civilised peoples seems to lie in two directions: Firstly, infants are reared in primitive societies as Nature intended them to be reared: ­at the breast; and secondly, the people live on the unsophisticated – and unprocessed – foods of Nature.

McCarrison discusses these at length:
‘I don’t suppose that one in every thousand of them has ever seen a tinned salmon, a chocolate, or a patent infant food, nor that as much sugar is imported into their country in a year as is used in a moderately sized hotel of this city in a single day . . . enforced restriction to unsophisticated foodstuffs of Nature is compatible with fertility, long life, continued vigour, perfect physique, and a remarkable freedom from digestive and gastro­intestinal disorders, and from cancer.’

But the food of civilised societies is very different. We are no longer content with such unsophisticated natural foods. McCarrison declared that we ‘prefer preserved, purified, polished, pickled and canned’ food. He goes on (about ‘civilised’ food):

‘One way or another, by desiccation, by chemicals, by heating, by freezing and thawing, by oxidation and decomposition, by milling and polishing, he applies the principles of his civilization – the elimination of the natural and substitution of the artificial – ­to the foods he eats and the fluids he drinks. With such skill does he do so that he often converts his food into a “dead” fuel mass . . . in consequence of food habits they have fostered, normal bodily function cannot be sustained . . .’

That was written over three-quarters of a century ago. Not only is the situation no better now, has deteriorated even further. Today, relatively few people eat food that hasn’t been massively processed and denatured. And, apart from ‘5 portions of fruit and vegetables’, all the foods regarded as ‘healthy’ by conventional nutritionists are processed: the cereals, bread, pasta, polyunsaturated vegetable margarines and oils, low-fat dairy products, soya. Of the tens of thousands of different food products sold in supermarkets, only a very small proportion are really fit for human consumption.

Cancer research has hampered progress

Given the fear with which a diagnosis of cancer is viewed, it is not surprising that a great deal of time and resources have been devoted to finding both the cause and a cure. But dogma of one sort or another has hampered progress in both areas.

When Louis Pasteur stated his germ theory of disease in 1862, it was greeted with derision. By 1874, when Joseph Lister acknowledged that his success with aseptic surgery was due to Pasteur’s theory, all that changed. Now all diseases, including cancer, were thought to be caused by micro-organisms. This belief was strengthened later when 3 scientists, Moreau, Loeb, and Jensen, showed that cancer cells could be successfully grafted from one species to another.

In Cancer: Civilization and Degeneration, John Cope talks of the way in which the two discoveries above derailed the research on cancer.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century cancer was studied mainly as it existed in human beings in the consulting room, at the bedside, in the operating theatre and in the postmortem room. And that search was of the widest possible character. ‘Not only pathology, but physiology, anthropology, zoology, botany were made to contribute material, and so also were history, chem­istry and statistics . . .’ After the two discoveries, Cope tells of how he believed it all went wrong:

‘It would be difficult to exaggerate the expectations which were aroused by the progress in scientific method implied by these two events. Towards the end of the century the opposition with which Pasteur’s work had at first been received gave place to a tendency to look for microorganisms as the cause of every disease; and so it naturally came to pass that the methods of experimental laboratory research, which had proved so successful with cholera and tuberculosis, were made use of to throw light on the nature and origin of cancer.’

After it was discovered that cancers could be grown artificially in laboratory animals, this seemed to facilitate the investigation of cancer. Laboratory mice grow cancers much more quickly that do humans and they were expendable in a way that a doctor’s patients were not. The researcher could use the mouse as he would a testtube or flask, and throw it away when done with it. Thus cancer research among mice was so much easier that there seemed every justification for the optimism with which Jensen’s discovery was regarded. It looked like the solution of the cancer problem.

And so laboratories were built all over the civilised world; huge sums of money were spent; the lives of many scientists were devoted to the quest; and whole libraries of magazine articles and books testified to the scientists’ patience, industry and ability. ‘And now,’ writes Cope, ‘after all these years of noble toil, not even the most sanguine research worker can point to anything that can by any stretch of the imagination be termed a solution of the problem which the researchers set out so confidently to answer.’

In 1931, Dr. William Henry Woglom, a great American laboratory cancer researcher, put the results more decisively than most when he summed up the achievements of cancer research, saying that so far as human beings were concerned he was unable to point to any sign of progress whatever.

The May 1955 edition of the Danish Medical Bulletin carried a paper on The Danish Cancer Registry by the registry’s director, Dr. Johannes Clemmesen who evidently felt, as Dr Cope did, that cancer research had swung too far towards exclusively animal experimentation. This artificial production of cancers in multitudes of small animals is directed toward discovering, if possible, either before or after they die, how to slow down or stop the deadly cancers inflicted upon the creatures with the laudable purpose of finding out how to alleviate or cure malignant disease in humans. Its de­plorable actual result, Clemmesen said was that, ‘in fifty years and after hundreds of millions spent’, their skills had not improved even sufficiently to prevent the ever-increasing numbers of cancers. Like Cope, Clemmesen felt that this swing away from human research was a retrograde step. He urged scientists to make active use of ‘the collection of in­formation on the distribution of malignant disease, among various ethnological groups in different regions, in relation to any relevant local factors’. Which was exactly what the medical missionaries had been urging for decades. Now, yet another 50 years on, it still hasn’t happened and we suffer even more cancers.

Cope didn’t question the quality or quantity of effort put into labora­tory cancer research; what surprised him, I think, was that those engaged in cancer research seemed not in the least discouraged by their total lack of success. ‘On the contrary,’ he says, ‘they seem full of conviction of the imminence of some discovery which will reward them for their industry and patience’ while out of a veritable mountain of more than a third of a century’s labour, nothing had emerged other than ‘a cancerbearing mouse’.

Cope believed that experimental cancer research had become so isolated and so entrenched that, without being aware of it, researchers almost instinctively regarded those who criticised them or questioned their authority or adopted other methods of working, as being posi­tive enemies. This attitude, of course, stifles innovation and lateral thinking. Cope said that: ‘It must ever be held as one of the worst evils of laboratory cancer research that . . . it is responsible for holding up for a generation one of the greatest and most promising advances of the nineteenth century.

It has now held research up for 4 generations as all of the above is as true today as it was three-quarters of a century ago. If Cope was right, and I see no reason to doubt it, we are still approaching the problem of cancer in entirely the wrong way. But there is hope; there is something we can all do to reduce to a minimum our chances of suffering from cancer. It lies in the way cancers use energy.

Cancers are sugar junkies

If you search the Internet using the words ‘cancer’ and ’sugar’, the name Otto Warburg will come up time after time.

It’s now more than 70 years since Otto Warburg, Ph.D. won the 1931 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering that cancer cells have a fundamentally different energy metabolism compared to healthy cells. The crux of his Nobel thesis was that malignant tumours frequently exhibit an increase in anaerobic metabolism compared to normal tissues. In other words, they don’t like oxygen.9

The significance of this is that fat and ketone bodies as a source of energy require oxygen while glucose doesn’t. And that in turn which means that cancer cells are dependent on glucose for growth. All cells can use glucose, but cancer cells consume as much as 4 or 5 times more than normal, healthy cells. In fact, cancer cells seem to have great difficulty surviving without glucose. A study carried out by Johns Hopkins researchers found evidence that some cancer cells are such incredible sugar junkies that they’ll self-destruct when deprived of glucose.10

‘The change when we took away glucose was dramatic,’ said Dr Chi Van Dang, director of haematology . . . ‘We knew very quickly that the cells we had altered to resemble cancers were dying off in large numbers . . . Scientists have long suspected that the cancer cells’ heavy reliance on glucose – its main source of strength and vitality – could also be one of its great weaknesses.’

Normal body cells can use fat and ketone bodies derived from fats metabolised aerobically for energy. The waste products of the process are carbon dioxide and water which are excreted. The process by which cancer cells derive their energy is one of anaerobic fermentation of glucose with lactic acid as a waste product. The large amount of lactic acid produced is then transported to the liver where it is processed into glucose ensuring the cancer cells have a constant supply of energy.

This pathway for energy metabolism is very inefficient in that it extracts only about 5% of the available energy in the food supply and the body’s calorie stores. The cancer is wasting energy, and the patient becomes tired and undernourished. This vicious cycle increases body wasting,11 which is one reason some 40% of patients die from malnutrition (cachexia).12

In addition to being dependent on glucose, most tumours also have abnormalities in the number and function of their mitochondria.

These abnormalities prevent the tumour cells from using ketone bodies, which require functional mitochondria for their oxidation.

As cancers thrive on glucose, cancer therapies should encompass regulating blood-glucose levels. This is best done via diet, supplements, and non-oral solutions for those patients who lose their appetite, with the aim of starving the cancer and simultaneously bolstering immune function. Intravenous feeding, of course, should not use standard glucose-based formulae.

Can low-carb diets prevent cancer?

If cancers cannot survive without glucose, surely it follows that a low-carb, high-fat diet is likely to prevent a cancer starting in the first place. Just that piece of knowledge could stop all the heartbreak, pain and misery that cancer causes – not to say the huge cost to the NHS. I say low-carb, not low-sugar, because we must keep in mind that the body breaks down all dietary carbohydrates into glucose.

Two of the most common cancers are breast cancer which, incidentally, is not confined to women, and lung cancer. In the context of blood sugar and cancer risk, it may be significant that UK research suggests that people with coeliac disease – and who, as a consequence, don’t eat wheat and other cereals – have only about one-third the risk of either of these cancers.13 This adds more weight to the other evidence that it is carbs that increase cancer risk. Furthermore, an epidemiological study in 21 modern countries in Europe, North America, and Asia, revealed that sugar intake is a strong risk factor that contributes to higher breast cancer rates, particularly in older women.14

Another 4-year study at the National Institute of Public Health and Environmental Protection in the Netherlands found that cancer risk associated with the intake of sugars, independent of other energy sources, more than doubled for cancer patients.15

As cancers need glucose so much, cutting off the source of that energy is similar to cutting off the blood supply – though not quite as drastic for the rest of the body.

Cancer Patients Don’t Need Carbs

One of the biggest obstacles to using sugar- and starch-reduced treatment in cancer patients in the past has been that it was generally believed that the brain couldn’t function properly without glucose. But a study published in May 2003 showed that the brain can use ketone bodies made from fats just as other normal cells do.16 It was also shown nearly 70 years ago that ATP, which is our body cells’ real source of energy, is delivered from the liver to the brain by red blood cells.17 So there is absolutely no need to worry about the brain being starved of energy if we cut carbohydrates out of the diet.

Ketogenic diet therapy of brain cancer

A low-carb, high-fat (ketogenic) diet may be the best way to attack brain cancers. Just like other body cells, normal brain cells can oxidise ketone bodies as well as glucose for energy. And, in a similar way to cancer cells in other parts of the body, brain tumours lack that metabolic flexibility and are largely dependent on glucose for energy.18192021222324 Although some brain cancers do metabolise ketone bodies, we needn’t worry about it as this metabolism is largely for synthesis of fats rather than for energy production.2526

In a recent paper, Drs Thomas Seyfried and Purna Mukherjee of the Biology Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, describe how new therapeutic approaches, which lower circulating glucose and elevate ketone bodies target brain tumours while enhancing the metabolic efficiency of normal brain cells.27

They say:

‘In addition to increasing ATP production while reducing oxygen consumption, ketone body metabolism can also reduce production of damaging free radicals. . . . The reduction of free radicals through ketone body metabolism will also reduce tissue inflammation provoked by reactive oxygen species. Thus, ketone bodies are not only a more efficient metabolic fuel than glucose, but also possess anti-inflammatory potential.

Discussing a trial published in 1995 of a low-carb, high-fat diet in patients with brain tumours, the two doctors go on the say that although radiation and chemotherapy had caused severe life threatening adverse effects to the patients, they responded remarkably well to the ketogenic diet and experienced long-term tumour management without further chemotherapy or radiation. Then came the bad news which was that, despite the logic of these studies and the dramatic findings, no further human studies or clinical trials had been conducted on the therapeutic efficacy of the ketogenic diet for brain cancer. Why not? Seyfried and Mukherjee say that:

‘The reason . . . may reflect a preference of the major Brain Tumor Consortia for using “hand-me-down” drug therapies from other cancer studies rather than exploring more effective biological or non-chemotherapeutic approaches. This is unfortunate as our recent findings in brain tumor animal models show that the therapeutic potential of the restricted [ketogenic diet], . . . is likely to be greater than that for any current brain tumor chemotherapy.’

In other words, this potentially effective cancer therapy won’t be used simply because it doesn’t fit with current ‘politically correct’ medical thinking.

Carbs and Cancer

Cancer patients and those wishing to avoid the disease don’t need to cut out all foods that contain carbs. If care is taken the less concentrated carbohydrate foods may still be consumed.

Sugars are considerably worse than starches as far as damage to the immune system is concerned. There is also evidence that the same may apply in the case of cancer. A study of rats fed diets with equal amounts of calories from sugars or starches found the animals on the high-sugar diet developed more cases of breast cancer than those on the high-starch diet.28 The Glycaemic Index (GI) can a useful tool in guiding the cancer patient toward a healthier diet, but it has flaws. It seems advisable that cancer patients should avoid not only all processed foods whatever their GI, but fresh foods with a GI over 40, and also all fruit. Fresh green leafy vegetables may be eaten freely and some of the starchier root vegetables with a low GI, such as carrot, may be eaten in moderation. Foods from animal sources, with their fat, which have a GI of zero, should, of course, form the basis of all meals.

Conclusion

The truth is that the more cancer research has focussed on a cure for existing disease, rather than its prevention, the less seems to have been achieved. Despite the countless billions that have been devoted to alleviating the suffering caused by cancer, we are no closer to a cure now in the first years of the twenty-first century than we were in the first years of the twentieth.

Isn’t it about time we concentrated on prevention rather than cure? And to this end, the relatively unsophisticated research of the nineteenth century seems to be far more useful than all the very expensive research of the last 100 years put together.

It is beyond doubt that it is highly processed foods that are the major dietary cause of cancer, particularly as they are inevitably based on cheap concentrated carbohydrates. Most of these are the processed foods mentioned above, but some are those that are promoted today as ‘healthy’. Specific examples of these will be discussed in later chapters.

In his book, Dr. Berglas emphasised that carcinogens in modern foods were not immediately harmful. ‘As a rule’, he wrote, ‘a relatively long latency period of carcino­genesis, often lasting several years, is observed in man.’ Using similar logic, if we revert to healthier practices today, it could still be many years before cancer is eradicated. But we have to start somewhere and the sooner we start, the sooner cancer will no longer blight our lives.

To fight any disease, surely it makes sense to remove anything that might support that disease. The point is that if you cut off a cancer’s energy supply by reducing blood glucose levels to a bare minimum, cancer cells have been shown to slow their rate of growth, stop growing altogether or even die off – and critically, there are no adverse side effects whatsoever.

So, instead of spending billions of dollars, pounds and other currencies developing one form of toxic chemotherapy after another – which by and large don’t work – why aren’t we telling cancer patients: ‘Stop eating sugar immediately’? And, as prevention in this case is definitely better than cure, why are we still telling people to eat large quantities of carbohydrate-rich foods?

The refusal of the cancer industry to consider further research into a low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet as a treatment for brain cancer, reported by Drs Seyfried and Mukherjee, if true, is, I believe, utterly reprehensible. It should also be trialled in other cancers, particularly as the standard treatments for cancer have such an abysmally poor record.

Cancer Research UK’s Mission Statement says that its ‘vision is to conquer cancer through world-class research, aiming to control the disease within two generations’, to ‘carry out world-class research into the biology and causes of cancer’ and ‘to reduce the number of people. These might look to be laudable aims, yet they spend practically nothing on preventing cancer. They, like the rest of the ‘health industry’, seem to me to be more intent on keeping their jobs by ensuring they don’t eliminate cancers and, thus, make themselves redundant.

There are 4 aspects of modern ‘lifestyle’ that increase the risk of a cancer. The first is a carb-based diet, the second is polyunsaturated vegetable oils and margarines, the third is a low blood cholesterol level the last is lack of sunshine. In other words, all the ‘healthy’ things we are advised to do increase cancer risk.

In his book, Cancer: Disease Of Civilization,Stefansson suggests the line to be followed in the ‘fight against cancer’:29

• Learn how men formerly lived where diligent and competent search for generations has revealed little or no cancer.
• On the frontier, pay heed to what the changes were that took place through the several decades which preceded the first detec­tion of cancer, and to those changes which took place thereafter during the rise of cancer toward its present dread frequency.
• Likewise, in our cities and rural communities, observe how those groups now live who are least afflicted by cancer, and how those live that are most afflicted.

Let’s face it. Cancer doesn’t look like being cured once it has affected someone. If we really are serious about defeating the scourge of cancer, the only real answer is to prevent it. And as there are (or at least were) many cultures in which cancer was completely absent, we could do a lot worse than to study them and their diets. Books such as Stefansson’s Cancer and Dr Weston A Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration are invaluable in this respect. They should be required reading for all who profess to practise ‘health’. In the meantime, the government and cancer charities should warn about the potential for the foods to cause or exacerbate cancers, rather than promoting them.

References

1. From Cancer Research UK’s Memorandum and Articles of Association, 2001.
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3. Hutton, Dr. Samuel King. Health Conditions and Disease Incidence among the Eski­mos of Labrador. Poole, England, 1925.
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6. Schweitzer, Dr. Albert. Preface to Cancer: Nature, Cause and Cure by Dr. Alexander Berglas. Paris, 1957.
7. Hoffman, Dr. Frederick L. The Mortality from Cancer Throughout the World. The Prudential Press, Newark, New Jersey, 1915.
8. Cope, Dr. John. Cancer: Civilization and Degeneration. London, 1932.
9. Berglas, Dr. Alexander. Cancer: Nature, Cause and Cure. Paris, 1957.
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About the Author...

Barry Groves originally trained as an electronic engineer and was commissioned in the Royal Air Force with which he served until 1982. After marrying in 1957, Barry and his wife, Monica, became very overweight. They tried low-calorie dieting, inert fillers, sweaty plastic clothes, exercise, et cetera, with no long-term success. Then, in 1962, Barry discovered the low-carb diet. It worked spectacularly well – and still works today. Thus began his interest in the role of food types in the aetiology of obesity. He decided to leave the RAF at the earliest opportunity to research the subject. A columnist writing about dietary and health matters for several health-related magazines such as The Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Caduceus and Namaste. He has also written columns for the Weekend Financial Times, The Oxford Times, and The Glade. An International author, Barry has written a number of popular and more technical books which have been published in countries as far apart as Argentina and Russia, as well as all English-speaking countries. With a doctorate in nutritional science, he currently divides his time between writing and lecturing in hospitals to medical professionals about the management and prevention of 'modern diseases' such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. He also gives less technical talks to Womens' Institutes, Probus, and other groups. His books include: "Natural Health & Weight Loss may be the best non-technical book on diet ever written" Joel Kauffman, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of the Sciences, Philadelphia, PA The Perfect Weight Plan: Be Slim without Dieting– a completely new kind of video and DVD. Fluoride:Drinking Ourselves to Death? second-opinions.co.uk