Starving Cancer Cells: We Need Metabolic Oncology, Stat!
I write about Thomas Seyfried’s work in “How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed.” I wanted to also highlight Peter Attia’s podcast interview of Thomas Seyfried.
What is most exciting beyond what I say in “How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed” is that Thomas Seyfried’s recommendations are, albeit very slowly, making their way into clinical practice, most fully in Turkey.
Here is the summary of what Thomas Seyfried recommends and why. Most cancer cells are metabolically handicapped, typically with quite clear damage to their mitochondria. One can argue about whether the mitochondrial damage came first, leading to inaccurate gene preservation and replication, or whether errant genes came first leading to mitochondrial damage. But whatever the reason cancer cells have mitochondrial damage, it opens the door to metabolic therapies that disadvantage cancer cells relative to normal cells. These metabolic therapies can often be better targeted toward harming cancer cells and leaving normal cells unharmed than the typical chemotherapy.
The technical terms are confusing, but there are two categories of reactions that provide energy to a cell: “fermentation” reactions that don’t need oxygen and “respiration” reactions that do need oxygen. Cancer cells rely heavily (and often almost exclusively) on “fermentation” reactions, even when oxygen is available.
The key “fermentation” reactions take glucose (blood sugar) and glutamine (a common amino acid contained in many proteins and one that the human body itself can make).
Fasting and a ketogenic diet can do a lot to reduce blood sugar and thereby starve cancer cells. Drug treatment can push blood sugar down further and starve cancer cells more. Normal cells don’t need blood sugar since they can live off of ketones.
Pushing glutamine down has to be done by drug treatment, and needs to be done intermittently, since the normal cells need glutamine, too, though not as much as cancer cells do.
Ideally, Thomas Seyfried argues,
metabolic treatment should be pursued for a few weeks before surgery in order to shrink the tumor and give it less fuzzy boundaries, making surgery easier and more effective.
He argues that radiation can exacerbate cancer and should be avoided.
Instead of radiation, he recommends treatment with hyperbaric oxygen at 2.5 times atmospheric pressure, which stresses out cancer cells and cleans up the bad blood vessels feeding the cancer cells, and isn’t too hard on normal cells.
Steroids, often used to treat cancer, have the unfortunate effect of raising blood sugar, making more nutrients available for the sugar-hungry cancer cells.
Chemotherapy does not directly conflict with metabolic therapy, but can be quite harsh in its side effects.
I hope that many doctors listen to this podcast so that metabolic cancer therapies will begin to become more available. As I mentioned in “How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed,” there are many clinical trial investigating types of metabolic cancer therapies, though there aren’t yet clinical trials of exactly what Thomas Seyfried recommends. The idea that it is unethical not to do surgery, radiation and chemotherapy right away stands in the way of trying out metabolic therapy as the primary approach. Two cases seem especially favorable for trying out metabolic therapy as the primary approach:
cancers that have been almost certain death sentences even when treated with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy and
cancers detected very early or quite slow growing, so that an acceptable option of “watchful waiting” can be traded in for metabolic therapy.
In the interview, Peter Attia identifies that Thomas Seyfried, while excellent on the science, is not the ideal advocate for this extremely promising but also quite radical new approach to cancer. The cause of metabolic oncology (cancer medicine) could really use additional talented advocates with the right credentials.
I find Thomas Seyfried’s basic argument quite convincing. It could make a big difference to how many people die of cancer if borne out. It deserves a real chance to prove itself.
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see: