Diet & Cancer: A Conversation

Get Healthy or Die Tryin’?

Hearing that you or a loved one has been diagnosed with cancer is life altering. I know — I went through it with my husband, Randy, who was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an incurable brain cancer. Regardless of the prognosis, every day, for the rest of your life, will be lived under the cloud we call cancer. You wake up each morning and go to sleep each night knowing that you or your loved one has cancer. You will worry about the results of the next scan, a feeling I call “scan-xiety”, and wonder every day if you are doing all you can possibly do. Once diagnosed, you wonder if you can change the outcome with diet and changes to your lifestyle. After all, if healthy living is the key to living healthy, then surely healthy living can make you healthy, right?

Previously I wrote about reducing your risk of getting cancer through diet and healthy living and the role of diet and exercise in optimizing your quality of life and managing the symptoms. This conversation discusses whether or not our life choices can change the course of cancer.

What Makes Cancer Cells Cancerous?

Human cells are produced, mature, and then die. Under normal circumstances, this process repeats itself every second of our lifetime. If the body’s cells do not die naturally, when they are damaged or mutated, than unnecessary clusters of old and new cells build up and eventually tumors develop. There are 3 important control points that regulate human cells: (1) cell growth, (2) communication between cells, and (3) cell death.

Cell Growth: A variety of genes are involved in the control of cell growth and division. The cell cycle is the cell’s way of replicating itself in an organized, step-by-step fashion. Cancer starts when cells grow out of control and crowd out normal cells. This makes it hard for the body to work the way it should. Cancer can start in any cell, any where in the body. Cancer is an example of uncontrolled cell growth.

Communication: Normal cells send chemical signals to each other all the time. Normal cells obey signals that tell them when they have reached their limit and will cause damage if they grow any further. Healthy, normal cells listen and cease to divide, resulting in cell death. However, something in cancer cells overrides the normal signalling system. It is analogous to the organized crossing that occurs at a busy intersection with a traffic light. People stop and wait when the light is red and cross the street when the light is green. Imagine the chaos that could occur if those lights were ignored and people crossed busy highways whenever they wanted.

Cell Death: Normal cells can repair themselves if their genes become damaged. This is known as DNA repair. If the damage is too bad, they will self destruct. This is called apoptosis. In cancer cells, the molecules that decide whether a cell should repair itself are faulty. If cells don’t repair the damage to their genes properly, this leads to more problems. Rather than having controlled cell death, cancer cells exhibit uncontrolled cell death. New gene faults, or mutations, can make the cancer cells grow faster, spread to other parts of the body, or become resistant to treatment. Cancer cells can override the signals that tell them to self destruct, so they don’t undergo apoptosis when they should. Scientists call this “making themselves immortal”.

Most agree that your immune system is your first line of defense against everything that could harm your body. When it is compromised due to illness, lifestyle choices, or medications, it cannot protect you from the initial stages of cancer development. You are effectively left defenseless. Transplanted organs (and the immune suppressant drugs prescribed) as well as chronic infections can damage the immune system and lead to damaged cells, uncontrolled cell production, and cancer masses.

The Era of Precision Medicine:

What do you do if you get cancer? Chemotherapy and radiation have been standard of care for many years. Yet the evidence is mounting that chemotherapy may increase the likelihood of second cancers. This is more common with blood cancers and with chemotherapeutics that are alkylating agents, which are known to interfere with the cells DNA. Chemotherapy is known to be a greater risk factor for leukemia as well as some solid tumors. The side effects from both chemotherapy and radiation are extensive. They can include dizziness, sensory loss, nausea, diarrhea, loss of hair, loss of appetite, leading to malnutrition, loss of white blood cells, permanent organ damage, organ failure, internal bleeding, tissue loss, cardiovascular leakage (artery deterioration) to name but a few. In fact, chemotherapy is not able to differentiate between the cancerous cell or the healthy cell and surrounding healthy tissue thus it is killing all actively dividing cells, both healthy and carcinogenic. Some may call this “death by doctoring”.

With the launch of precision medicine, including the Cancer Moonshot initiative by the federal government, research is now focused on targeted and immuno- therapies. Immunotherapies aim to increase the patients immune system to fight tumor cells. We now recognize that cancers are fundamentally diseases of the genome and that understanding cancer begins by identifying the abnormal genes and proteins that confer the risk of developing cancer. Many different targeted therapies, including immunotherapies, have been approved for use in cancer treatment. These therapies also include hormone therapies, gene expression modulators, and apoptosis (cell death) inducers. New targeted therapies are being developed that are changing the paradigm of cancer research and providing new hope for patients.

Yet like chemotherapy, there are side effects. Although less toxic than chemotherapy, targeted therapies often cause diarrhea, liver problems (such as hepatitis), problems with skin, blood clotting and wound healing, high blood pressure, and most seriously immunosuppression (decrease in immune system function).

After decades of research, we are poised to enter a new era of medical practice where detailed genetics and other molecular information about a patient’s cancer will be routinely used to deploy effective, patient-specific remedies to treat many illnesses.

Alternative treatment:

Although almost all cancers have some form of standard of care available, many seek other options; either in addition to or instead of, standard of care. Alternative treatments for cancer have long included making changes to our diet in order to defeat cancer. Whether it is an alkaline diet or a more radical approach like the widely discredited Gerson Therapy, patients have been looking for ways to change their diet in order to improve their personal health outcomes. Some alternative cancer treatments include:

• Acupuncture
• Traditional Chinese medicine
• Homeopathy
• Naturopathic medicine
• Specific diets (such as low-fat or juicing diets)
• Vitamins and minerals
• Energy therapies
• Herbal remedies

Keeping your immune system in fighting condition is critical to prevention of diseases such as cancer, slowing down the effects of aging, and keeping you strong and healthy every day of your life. I hope to continue discussing, in more detail, some of the alternatives to standard of care in cancer treatment.

If you search diet and cancer cure you will be inundated with ways that cancer can be cured by changing or making your diet more healthy. The options include raw diet, paleo diet, macrobiotic diet, ketogenic diet and more. The concept that “sugar feeds cancer” just doesn’t hold water! Sugar is a catch-all term. It refers to a range of molecules including the simple sugars found in plants, glucose and fructose, as well as the white stuff in the bowl on your table, called sucrose and is made from glucose and fructose stuck together. All sugars are carbohydrates, commonly known as carbs — molecules made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These carbs are broken down in our digestive system to release glucose and fructose (and a little galactose). These get absorbed into the bloodstream to provide the energy needed to live.

Influence of diet:

All our cells, cancerous or not, use glucose for energy. Because cancer cells are usually growing very fast compared with healthy cells, they have a particularly high demand for this fuel. But all this doesn’t mean that sugar from cakes, sweets and other sugary foods specifically feeds cancer cells, as opposed to any other type of carbohydrate. Our body doesn’t pick and choose which cells get what fuel. The carbohydrates we eat include complex polysaccharides, which are composed of straight or branched chains of glucose molecules, and foods with disaccharides, such as sugar (sucrose), milk sugar (lactose) and malt liquor (maltose). It converts pretty much all the carbohydrates we eat to glucose, fructose and galactose, and they get taken up by tissues when they need energy.

Both the ‘acidic diet’ and ‘sugar feeds cancer’ myths distort sensible dietary advice — of course, nobody is saying that eating a healthy diet doesn’t matter when it comes to cancer. The oncologist who treated Randy believed that there was a potential that optimizing one's health risked improving the ‘health’ of cancerous cells as well as normal cells. In other words, your cancer cells are your cells. It follows that if you feed your cells you are feeding your cancer cells as well. Again, if healthy living is the key to living healthy, then surely healthy living can make you healthy, right?

But dietary advice must be based on nutritional and scientific fact. When it comes to offering diet tips to reduce cancer risk, research shows that the same boring healthy eating advice still holds true: increase your intake of fruits, vegetables, and fibre. Include complete proteins which can be found in dairy products, white meats, and fish. Too much fat, salt, table sugar, red or processed meat and alcohol are less so.

Randy’s Remedy products are in memory of Randy Strause, husband and father, and are products we believe help us to “live life to to the last drop!”