Can I eat my way out of cancer?
Mission BTB: Year 2 of my ongoing cancer journey
The concept that one’s body is a very intelligent organ designed by the grandmaster to self-heal and self-correct by maintaining the balance or steering it back in balance is not new. This is forgotten in our modern mechanical lives where people are seeking quick fixes without effort. There are some very provocative book titles and YouTube channels on the topic of diet and lifestyle as medicine. In my research, I have come across some excellent resources and some fantastic people who drive continuous education and adoption of a diet-first approach to health.
This blog is about my personal takeaways from this journey of enhancing my diet and lifestyle choices in support of my own health. I will share useful resources that others may tap into and what I have been doing from a diet-lifestyle perspective. This is a long blog, as it has been hard to leave out pertinent details, but you may still want more specifics on some topics — I can answer those through comments.
Picking up from the last blog (First treatment and first win… but too short-lived and humbling), phase 2 of the medical treatments started in earnest in Oct 2019, and it was clear that we need to rapidly expand by looking into complementary and alternate approaches to my treatments and healing as well. This blog will cover phase 2 (Oct’19 — Aug’21) of my treatment and health journey as well.
Complimentary or Alternate — This is a hot topic that can divide people. Indian culture, like many other eastern or ancient cultures, has a very rich history and knowledge base on these topics. But, like everything else in our times, it has gone through so much metamorphosis and western reinterpretation and is tainted by commercial and social media interests that it is impossible to just take anything for granted now.
A chance encounter with a cancer patient who cured himself with a diet
I had a profound interaction with a patient at the Rajeev Gandhi Cancer Center in Delhi, India in Nov’19. I decided to get a PSMA PET scan as they are very specific in showing Prostate Cancer spread and were not commercially available in the US at that time (yes, the US is not always ahead!). I was in the nuclear medicine waiting room with this patient (age 50yrs+) who had brain cancer and he was waiting for his scan. As his brother and my wife Monika got talking, we learned that his tumor has been shrinking very rapidly over the past 6 months. His doctors did not believe this could happen. As they showed us the progress thru past periodic scans, they were hopeful that today’s scan would continue that trend, and the tumor will be almost gone. The magic here was the diet regimen the patient was following. His whole family had put a lot of effort into supporting that. His brother was a TV producer who had taken 4+ months off from work to fully focus on taking care of his health.
His disciplined diet was an Alkaline and Vegan diet that included a very structured and clean combination of specific fruits, vegetables, soups, lentils, and quinoa, all cooked in a very specific style to maximize nutrient intake. Vegan except for ghee (clarified butter), which is generally considered a healthier choice of cooking fat.
So here we were, face-to-face with a patient who showed proof with his scan results that he managed to tame the beast and was on the way to being cancer-free through a rigorous and specific diet regimen. While he went through the conventional treatment in parallel, doctors did not expect or believe that the treatment would cure him. Therefore, the diet is believed to have played a critical role in his journey toward a cure. It was quite an eye-opener as a very direct encounter with a patient… cancer of a different organ, different situation than mine, but still very intriguing and relevant.
My Own Transformation:
Pre-disease (2018 and before): I was always a vegetarian. I ate out a lot for work-related socialization and due to business travel. So, I had my fair share of unhealthy external meals and drank maybe 2–3 drinks per week (mostly wine and beer)
2019: With chemo and other treatments, I hunkered down to mostly home-cooked meals. We were very concerned about reduced immunity and being infection-prone due to chemo. So, I avoided uncooked foods like salads during the chemo phase. I integrated recommended food list in the diet from PCF (Prostate Cancer Foundation) diet guidelines, and from Dr. William Li’s book (Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself) and focused on anti-angiogenic foods. I started intermittent fasting in Oct 2019, eating between noon-8 pm, with a minimum of 14 hr. to a preferred 16 hr. fasting window. I lost about 18 lbs. between Oct 2019 (180 lbs.) — Feb 2020 (162 lbs.). Since then, my weight has been stable in the low-mid 160s.
2020: I ate salads for lunch every day with a focus on bringing lots of greens and various micro-nutrients. Dr. Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease), Dr. Collin Campbell, Dr. John McDougall, and Dr. Dean Ornish were critical in my research journey. Understanding the angiogenic nature of milk-dairy-related products as well as the health issues related to casein protein in dairy, I became a Vegan in November of 2020. Giving up dairy was not an easy mental choice as an Indian, I grew up loving dairy and it was an integral part of my diet. While the initial push for this came from a doctor friend, after my research, I could clearly recognize this as an investment in my health.
2021: I continued intermittent fasting, now with a vegan diet. During this time, I came across a brilliant educator, Lalit Kapoor, on the topic of PBWF (Plant Based Whole Foods). I started cold-pressed-style juicing at home. Juicing at home is a serious effort of bringing good organic produce from farmers' markets, prepping, and juicing in a batch size sufficient to justify the effort and juice maintaining its goodness. It would take Monika and me about 2.5 hrs. of juicing sessions once a week. No small effort! This phase lasted about 6-months. After we started traveling more frequently, I regularly bought cold-press juice from grocery stores instead. Between juices and salad lunches, my consumption of greens and highly nutritious raw foods has been very high.
2022: I continued the 2021 game-plan, but in June 2022, started a very structured new diet based on an Indian ayurvedic-inspired diet combination of the DIP diet plan from Dr. Biswaroop Choudhry and the millet diet from Dr. Khader Vali. I start the day with large amounts of fruits (750gm), then large salads (400gm each for lunch and dinner), both based on my body weight; and cooked foods only using ancient grains like millet, eaten after a specific amount of salad for lunch and dinner. So, I eat very little cooked food. I have eliminated all processed foods to the best I can. Accommodating this large amount of fruit in the diet reduced my fasting window to 12–14hrs now, below the threshold of effective intermittent fasting in my personal view.
My plan is to follow this diet strictly for at least 4 months. I am 2 months into it now. The idea is to retune one’s immune system to how it might have been in ancient times. Bringing our body to the original pristine state before we started exposing it to so many toxins in our foods and the environment. Reverting the immune system back to its original state will enhance our body’s natural ability to fight cancer (and many other diseases) on its own. Millet is an ancient grain with organic old-style farming and is more suited to drive back the change in our body unlike modern grains like rice, wheat, and white flour that have been significantly modified for commercial reasons.
In my view, the intent of diets and food recommendations is to create a sustainable lifestyle around them and not just do it for a specific period and then forget about them. There may be a specified period where I must follow a strict regimen to cleanse the system and get it to the desired level, but then I must maintain the lifestyle. I am a very social person and love to meet up with friends and family… and there is always good food involved with that. When we travel, there is fun in experiencing some local cuisines and we have to eat restaurant food.
So, I have been practical about not giving up all the “living” while finding the right balance of sticking to my dietary plans.
My current Diet and Lifestyle Summary
- Current diet plan: Following the above DIP + millet diet plan for 4 months with 90%+ rigor… other than weekend dinners at friends’ places or occasional travel and outside eating
- Processed/packaged foods: it’s not zero, but very minimal and occasional
- Simple Sugars: Almost completely eliminated from day-to-day consumption, replaced with date-based desserts for occasional consumption. But that does not mean I won’t enjoy a good piece of cake/pastry/Indian sweet/Vegan ice cream from time to time.
- Dairy: Almost completely eliminated from day-to-day consumption, replaced with oat milk or almond milk products. But again, there will be times when I enjoy a slice of regular pizza or some other Indian delicacy outside of our own house. I used to love Paneer (Indian cottage cheese) and would consume it at every opportunity, but now I rarely eat it.
- Cold-pressed juice: I try to consume a full bottle (16oz) of green or red juice before my main lunch meal, 3–4 times a week. The idea behind consuming it on an empty stomach is to increase the absorption of micro-nutrients.
- Alkaline diet: There is a lot of discussion on how an alkaline diet and environment are better to fight diseases, especially cancer. Dr. Otto Warburg who won the 1931 noble prize for cancer discovery, went as far as saying “No disease, including cancer, can exist in an alkaline environment.” This strong positioning has been debated ever since and I have not seen a definitive current position on this. But if you see the food chart below, 90%+ of my daily diet comes from foods that are Alkaline. Exceptions being some coffee/black tea/alcohol.
- Coffee/Black Tea: While I drink a lot of green tea and have developed a taste for Matcha oat milk lattes, I just love an occasional good coffee. I have gone from drinking 2–3 daily cups of coffee, plus 2 daily cups of chai (Indian tea made with black tea leaves and milk) most of the past decade to now maybe just 2 coffees/week, and maybe 2–4 black teas/week. Coffee’s pH is ~5 and black tea’s pH is in the 4–5 range, so on the acidic side but not the most acidic drink/food.
- Alcohol: I have never been a big drinker… drinking was mostly for socialization. Both my wife Monika and I would only drink at home for an occasion or when we had company. While I have not completely stopped drinking and still enjoy a good beer or occasional wine with friends, my consumption now may be 2–3 drinks/month vs. 2–3 drinks per week in my pre-cancer life. Alcohol is one of the most acidic things in my diet with pH in the 3–4 range.
- Supplements: I have also been working with an Integrative Oncologist at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health for a few years now. They have helped me with essential supplements in addition to my diet. These include Vit B-12 (vegan), Vit D-3, Pomi-T (polyphenols for the immune system), Cal-Mag-Zinc (bone health), and medicinal mushrooms (immunity enhancement). Since these supplements can conflict with the treatment, UCSF helps guide when to take or not take these depending on the treatments I am on.
- Lifestyle: Other than a few phases where my physical health has prevented it, I have tried to maintain a moderately active lifestyle with daily walks, yoga 3–4 times a week, and almost regular meditation. I picked up yoga and meditation practices from Sivananda Ashram in Grass Valley, CA, in Jan’20. I stayed regular with those till Oct ’21 when my physical health got in the way of yoga practice, and it has stalled since then.
- Long Fasting: While I have been doing intermittent fasting for a few years, there are dialogs related to long fasting of various durations to help cleanse/reset/heal from diseases. While this works for some types of auto-immune disease, I have not found sufficient data on this related to prostate cancer and hence have not tried it yet. I even consulted with the TrueNorth Health Center of Santa Rosa, CA which provides medically supervised fasting retreats, and they did not believe long fasting will have a direct benefit for me in prostate cancer especially given what I am already doing.
So the bottom line is this — I have built a sustainable lifestyle around healthy eating and living that has become part of me. There are occasional additional regimens that I may follow, as I am currently doing with the DIP + millet diet, but over the past 3 years, I have sustained most of what I have started, and that in my view is a critical thing.
Doing all of this is not trivial. You need a very supportive family/caregiver to help you manage all these meals and dietary specifics. Thank you so much family!
Treatment & Health: Phase 2: Fall 2019 — Summer 2021
I’ll call this phase 2 of my treatment journey, covering 2 types of ADT (Androgen Deprivation Therapies) treatments in this phase. The normalized PSA chart below shows that other than the occasional dip/flattening of the curve, the PSA had a gradual climb thru this phase, moving from a normalized value of 4.6 to 52 in this phase. I believe that the treatments and my lifestyle helped slow down the growth of cancer (compare the slope of the PSA curve between Jul’19-Oct’19 when I was under no treatment, vs. from Nov’19-Aug’21). But it did not put me in remission or reduce the progression of cancer in my body.
During this phase, my quality of life was good, and I did not have any meaningful symptoms or pains, allowing me to live and work the way I wanted. Each of my treatment regimens has given me between 6–12 months of control before cancer stopped responding to it and we had to make a change… so I have always been living with what’s next and when… the backdrop of a terminal disease does not go away unless you are in sustained remission!
What have I gained from all the diet and lifestyle changes?
I truly believe that all the dietary discipline and changes have helped me fine-tune my immune system to be as good as it can be, creating a defensive shield for me. While I cannot say with any reasonable confidence that my diet and lifestyle have directly slowed down or reduced my disease, what I can say is that I have had a very good quality of life through all the treatments even to date. Each of these treatments comes with many side effects disclosures, and fortunately, I have sailed through all the treatments without meaningful issues and side effects. That is no small accomplishment. I ascribe that to having a very strong and healthy rest of the body and immune system, which helps me fight the toxicity of the treatments given… and I hope that continues (fingers crossed) as my treatments are getting harsher as we go. So no — I have not been able to eat my way out of cancer, but I have faith that all this investment in my diet has been helping me.
There is no dearth of people talking about magical cures through diets and pushing the envelope of belief on what one can achieve with the diet. Given my Indian heritage, I get a lot of advice and input from various people in India, as dietary/naturopathy/ayurvedic approaches are very big in India. There is also a dialog about the keto diet helping with cancer here in the US, and I am sure there are many more diets that people promote and believe in. There are some hardcore believers who push the mindset that one should stop all allopathic treatments as they create a lot of toxicity, and one should just use diet to cure oneself.
While there is real science and logic behind adopting a healthy diet to enhance one’s immune system and make it the primary tool to fight disease, the challenge in this domain is that there is not enough controlled data and studies to be able to provide proof and direct correlation between a very specific diet element and a very specific type of cancer. There is a lot of generalization and some anecdotal evidence that drives emotionally charged or commercially oriented (social media influencers) responses and recommendations. Having a serious or terminal disease is a life-altering experience for the patient, family, and everyone around. Hence, patients are also willing to believe in magic pills.
My approach so far has been that diet is complimentary to the treatment options I have, rather than stopping allopathic treatments and relying on diet as the only pathway. All these recommendations are really good practices, and one should adopt as many as possible, with as much rigor as possible.
My simple moto is that these diet & lifestyle changes only help, and cannot hurt, so why not invest in one’s body and fine tune it to fight the disease.
The journey with the disease can be long and you cannot give up everything in life that gives you pleasure — so if living life means sampling foods outside of the daily diet norm, it’s ok. At the end of the day, a more peaceful and happier mind is also integral to fighting the disease. So don’t stop living life!
While my focus is on dealing with my own variant of Prostate Cancer, I do believe there are many other chronic and auto-immune diseases that can be dealt with and cured with the correct diet and lifestyle, and I have come across many books and many people over the years who have been able to accomplish that. With cancers, I have also come across a few anecdotal success stories, but cancer is a very complex beast, with a vast array of variants, sub-types, and stages of cancer spread.
I truly wish for and personally support more funding and systemic research in this field. There is nothing more important for our bodies to have a natural way of correcting the imbalance or malignancy as the primary pathway, rather than through allopathic drugs that have many side effects and trade quality of life to correct the disease.
There is more awareness and momentum around this topic, and I encourage all my readers to consider dietary and lifestyle changes as proactive and preventive tools for healthy living. In the resources section below, you will find a link to a file where I have aggregated a lot of useful information to get started. And in case you are dealing with any medical issues, have a dialog about it with your medical professional, as we need to push the medical establishments to change their approach to integrating dietary methods in their practices and support more funding and research on these topics.
What’s your experience with diet and lifestyle changes and their impact on your or your loved ones’ health? Would love to hear others’ experiences and discuss this topic through comments.
References and Resources
As the list of resources is exceptionally long, besides resources hyperlinked in the blog itself, I have aggregated them in a downloadable document below that anyone with the link can download.
Cancer Diet & Lifestyle Resources — Amit Gattani
UCSF-PCF Diet Guidelines for Prostate Cancer
My journey through blogs so far (in chronological order)
My Ongoing Journey with Stage 4 Prostate Cancer: Mission Beat the Beast (MissionBTB)
Why am I finding my cancer diagnosis so late?
Creating a Personal & Professional Support System
First treatment and first win… but too short-lived and humbling!
