The Ketogenic Diet and Tumor Growth: Reduce Sugar, Starve Tumors
A doctor in the 1930’s won the Nobel Peace Prize for his discovery of the effects of sugar on cancer, why this discovery is amongst the most important:
In modern society, 1 in 2 males will experience a form of cancer in their lifetime and 1 in 3 females.
Although there is an increase in the diagnostic rat, the positive, is the decrease in the death rate.
A topic across any disease in science and nutrition always remains on sugar, with animal products a close second.
Studies up until now, have made it abundantly clear that sugar intake can increase your risk of cancer development, as well as increase metastatic spread of the already existing disease.
There is a scan called PET scans that take photos of all cancer growths within one’s body.. They work by injecting the body with radioactive glucose (sugar), which will cause the cancer cell growths or tumors to light up on the scans indicating the presence of cancer.
Doctors discovered this special type of scan after discovering what tumors love and retain live off of: sugar.
Therefore, cancer cells get to that sugar quicker than any other cell in your body, to eat and survive, which is what makes these scans so successful at showing cancer.
Your body has 2 choices for fuel and energy: fat or sugar.
A normal, healthy body can intake sugar in all its available forms of fruit, carbohydrates, processed sugars and use it as fuel and remain relatively healthy (as long as the latter two remain consistently low in our daily diet.)
However, cancer cells are aggressive mutated cells that will want to get their hands on the sugar fuel first and fuel themselves.
Sugar produces massive amounts of acid and inflammation, and because of that, your body will want to burn it off first and get rid of it. The bodies healthy cells are essentially bullied out of intaking the glucose (sugar) or energy from the cancer cells.
Sugar feeds Cancer:
There is a lot of research on dietary sugar in relation to lowered immune function, and risk for cancer.
In 1931, Dr. Otto Warburg won a Nobel prize for his research on sugar and cancer cell metabolism. His work was later backed by Dr. Patrick Quillin, former Director of Nutrition for Cancer Treatment Centers of America, who explained that cancerous tumors are intensive glucose metabolizers.
In simple terms, cancer cells uptake glucose at 10-12 times the rate of normal healthy cells.
Quillin further stated that:
“Trying to beat cancer while eating a diet that constantly raises blood glucose is like trying to put out a forest fire while somebody’s throwing gasoline on the trees.”
Cancer tumors have been shown to also be able to take advantage of insulin resistance in the body which occurs as a result of too much sugar in the bloodstream.
Insulin resistance explained simply is when the pancreas makes the hormone insulin to open the door to the cell to give it the glucose in order for the cell to carry out all of their basic functions. The cell becomes “resistant” to the insulin when a poor diet creates clogging barriers in their “key holes” which leaves insulin knocking at the door with the glucose, but no one is there to answer.
So what do cancer cells do when this phenomenon occurs? They welcome all the sugar from the blood into their cells and hijack the insulin developed by the pancreas to let the sugar into their mutated cells.
Ingesting a high amount of refined carbohydrates and sugar leads to elevated insulin release which is associated with increased risk for cancers in general. IGF or insulin-like growth factor contributes to cancer by stopped apoptosis (programmed cancer cell suicide). Our cells are scheduled to die to make room for healthy, new cells, but cancer cells find ways to turn off these mechanisms and continue to grow.
Scientists tested their sugar theories on fruit flies by triggering cancerous growths in them, and feeding them two types of diet.
When the flies were fed low-sugar diets, their tumors generally remained very small and localized. But after the flies were placed on calorie-matched, high sugar diets, the tumors grew aggressively and spread. One of the researchers stating, “the tumors just went crazy.”
What the researchers concluded was that oncogenes (a mutated gene thought to cause cancer) act together with high dietary sugar to increase insulin resistance throughout the body, while also increasing insulin receptors (the doorways in the cell that welcome insulin and glucose) SPECIFICALLY in tumor cells.
Enter Ketogenesis:
Since the body gets it’s energy from sugar and fats, when you eliminate or dramatically decrease sugars from your diet and increase healthy fats, your body enters ketosis.
When the body burns fat, it makes things called ketones, which it then uses as fuel. Ketosis occurs when carbohydrates and sugars are not consumed, and therefore insulin levels are low, which is important for starving and weakening tumors.
If you can reduce sugar and grains in your diet including rice and pasta, and increase healthy plant based keto fats including: avocado, raw seeds, raw nuts, cold pressed oils MCT coconut black cumin seed, raw nut butters, hummus and tahini, you will be adopting a studied, healthy diet that can help heal your body.
There is also evidence that ketones work by preventing cancerous cells from eliminating reactive oxygen species created by radiation therapy.
What about Fruit?
A healthy serving of fruit a day will still keep your body in ketosis if you follow the rest of the guidelines and eliminate other sugars.
There are many cancer-fighting phytonutrients in whole fruit, and its fiber content helps avoid sugar spikes in the blood.
However, we should consume, by volume, a fruit to vegetable ratio of no more than one to three, and cancer patients should avoid the high-fructose fruits.
According to Joseph Mercola, MD, fruits with the highest fructose content per serving include dried fruits like figs, raisins and apricots, as well as mango, grapes, pears, watermelon, and persimmons. Thus, these should be appropriately avoided by cancer patients.