Could This Make Cancer Vanish?

By Dr. Mercola

Each day, some 1,600 people die of cancer in the United States. That number goes up 10-fold, up to 21,000 if you include the global population.

While conventional medicine has little to offer outside the standard “cut, poison, burn” approach, new evidence suggests simple dietary modifications could effectively both treat and prevent the majority of these cancers.

Travis Christofferson is the author of a phenomenal book called “Tripping Over the Truth: The Return of the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Illuminates a New and Hopeful Path to a Cure.”

I read 150 books last year and this was one of the best. In my view, it’s required reading for anyone who has cancer or knows someone who has cancer. This book has inspired me to passionately review the medical literature on mitochondrial metabolism for a book that will be published next year.

forth.

We’ve noticed that once you put people under this dietary state, everything becomes more effective, even traditional chemotherapy and radiation. At the same time, you’re mitigating side effects because healthy tissues are able to withstand the toxic payload from traditional chemotherapy. But the exciting thing is you add on these other metabolic therapies, their synergistic mechanisms overlap.”

Mitochondrial Function Is Critical for Health

We’re now starting to realize that mitochondrial dysfunction is at the core of virtually all diseases, and support for nutritional ketosis is growing by leaps and bounds. For over 80 years, it’s been the standard of care for intractable seizures in children. But now we’re also finding it can benefit a wide array of other diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, obesity, diabetes, heart failure, heart disease, and arthritis, just to name a few.

One of the basic reasons why it works so well is because it drives your inflammation down to almost nothing. I’m doing this myself. I just had my high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (HS-CRP) test done, and it was at 0.7, which is a healthy level. And when inflammation disappears, your body can heal.

It will also take the proverbial foot off the gas pedal of aging. Sadly, my guess is that over 99 percent of the population is not receiving the benefits of this approach simply because they either haven’t heard of it or don’t understand it.

My next book will explain how to tie this all together. There are so many lives at stake, and people are going to die prematurely if they don’t have access to this information. I’ve never been so driven before about cancer prevention — it’s like a whole new phase of life for me, because now I’m really beginning to understand what the answers are.

Jury’s Still Out on Ketogenic Diet for Body Builders and Strength Athletes

While the ketogenic diet appears to be very beneficial for most disease states, one thing it might not be excellent for is building really big muscles. For that you typically need more protein, which will cause gluconeogenesis, so you may not get the benefits of ketosis.

Some will argue this point though. Dominic D’Agostino, Ph.D. who teaches Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology at the University of South Florida College of Medicine lives on a ketogenic diet and is phenomenally muscular and strong.

I interviewed him about the benefits of nutritional ketosis back in 2013. One of the ameliorating factors is that the ketogenic diet does have a branched-chain amino acid-sparing effect, because ketones have a very similar structure to the branched-chain amino acids valine, leucine, and isoleucine. These three are also the most important amino acids for building muscle. According to Travis:

“[D’Agostino] has done a study — I don’t think it’s published yet; it’s getting kicked around by a couple of journals — where they took resistant-trained athletes and put them on a normal Western diet, and a ketogenic diet, and then monitored them over a period of time. They found no decrease in muscle mass and no decrease in performance.

The interesting thing is, when you look at all those pathways, you’re right. It looks like that’s one thing it would inhibit. But it’s got this protein-sparing effect, because you burn fat. So it spares the protein tissue. I think the jury’s still out. It may be that if you want to get to an anabolic state and build muscle mass, you might still get by with a ketogenic diet.”

I think the next phase of the research is the signaling properties of the [ketone] molecules. Because we know as a fuel, they’re thermodynamically incredible. They’re so superior to glucose. They just burn cleaner, they’re more efficient, and there’s more energy there.

When you look at the ATP content of a cell burning a ketone body, the ratio of ATP to ADP is shifted in favor of ATP tremendously. The ratio of reduced glutathione to oxidized glutathione is shifted in favor of the reduced form, which is the antioxidant form.

So as a fuel, it’s incredible what it does within the cell. Now as a signaling molecule, what it does to the architecture of the DNA and the expression of genes, that’s equally compelling. We’re going to sort that out slowly. But that’s where the new phase of the research is, because it tampers down all these anti-inflammatory effects.

It looks like it has a very similar effect to just a sustained caloric restriction. The jury is out on humans, but all evidence points to maybe not a huge increase in life span, but definitely a huge increase in health span. Like if you were predisposed to getting type 2 diabetes in mid-life, if you were in that state, you may never get it. If you want to live well for a long time, that’s what you’re after. That’s what it looks like the benefit will be.”

Interestingly, Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek,” is also a staunch advocate of the ketogenic diet after it reversed his Lyme disease.¹ It had debilitated him to the point that he was essentially on sick leave for nine months. Virtually any chronic infection is likely to improve on this kind of diet. It will also radically improve your resistance to colds and flus.

Unpublished Research Confirms Sugar May Be Directly Responsible for Cancer Growth

In researching his book, Travis had long discussions with Ko about sugar, and its ability to promote cancer. Her research — much of it still unpublished — shows that simply giving too much sugar to a cell will provoke it to start exhibiting all the phenotypes of cancer.

So glucose by itself, at least within the model she was using, can start to shift cells toward cancer. It does this by upregulating the expression of a critically important enzyme called hexokinase II, which by itself, is responsible for the Warburg Effect.

It’s also largely responsible for the immortalization of the cancer cell, meaning it doesn’t allow the cancer cell to die as programmed. Hexokinase II inhibits apoptosis, or programmed cell death, thereby allowing the defunct cell to proliferate, when under normal circumstances it should have died and been eliminated from the system.

To tie back to what we discussed earlier, hexokinase II is the enzyme 3-bromopyruvate inhibits. By inhibiting hexokinase II, the lactic acid builds up and poisons the cancer cell to death from the inside.

More Information

I have never given away a book as much as I have given away Travis’ book, “Tripping Over the Truth: The Return of the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Illuminates a New and Hopeful Path to a Cure,” and if you or someone you know has cancer, I cannot stress its importance enough. Get yourself a copy, and read it.

If you end up being as convinced of the merits of this theory as I am, there are several really good resources out there that you can peruse to put these dietary recommendations into practice:

Sources and References

• ¹ Fatburningman.com May 4, 2015
• ² DietaryTherapies.com
• ³ Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb
• ⁴ The Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies
• ⁵ Metabolicoptimization.com

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