Diet discovered over 90 years ago can halt the growth of brain tumors
If you, or someone you love has cancer, you try and learn everything you can about how to beat it.
And that’s especially true when it comes to aggressive, deadly cancers.
But for over 90 years there’s been a treatment that has been proven again and again to be extraordinarily effective in treating difficult cancers, especially of the brain. Yet for all practical purposes it’s been ignored by the mainstream.
Now, a group of researchers from the University of Florida have taken this amazing treatment out from behind the shadows, given it a bit of a twist, and are telling the world about it.
It’s not hype, it’s not snake oil, and it’s not magic.
It’s pure and simple metabolic biology.
Fighting cancer with fat
“There is no financial incentive” and “no drug company that will help support this (research).”
Dr. Adrienne Scheck, a professor of neurobiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, is talking about the ketogenic diet.
That’s right, the high-fat, low-carb diet that Dr. Robert Atkins helped put on the map for losing weight.
This year, Dr. Scheck hopes to start a trial with 40 brain-cancer patients, who, in addition to standard therapies, will also start up on a highly supervised version of the diet.
The ketogenic diet isn’t new, but then neither is the knowledge that tumors need glucose to grow. In fact, when doctors want to pinpoint cancerous tumors in a PET scan, they give patients dye mixed with glucose to track where in the body the highest amounts are being taken up.
Brain tumors especially need lots energy from glucose. So it makes a lot of sense that “starving” them with this type of low-carb diet has produced some remarkable success stories.
And the latest one is coming from a team at the University of Florida.
Using mice who had a particularly fast-growing and deadly kind of brain tumor, called a gioblastoma, they were able to both slow the growth of the tumors and extend the rodents’ lives by 50 percent!
And they did that by simply feeding the mice a diet in which only 10 percent of their calories came from carbohydrates – and that included plenty of healthy fats like coconut oil.
The Florida team hopes to start up a trial for this modified high-fat, low-carb diet in people with gioblastomas shortly. And while that may make their findings more “official,” brain-tumor patients have been seeing remarkable results from similar diets for some time now.
Take 15-year-old Adam Sorenson, for example.
The Canadian teen was found to have an advanced and aggressive gioblastoma, which has an average survival time of around a year.
With few options left following surgery, his father’s research led him to a dietician who started the boy up on a ketogenic diet with 80 percent fat, 15 percent protein and only 5 percent carbs.
That was over two and a half years ago, and his latest brain scan showed the tumor has not returned!
Adam is just one example of a long list of patients around the world who have been helped and even gone into remission on this diet after being told there was nothing else that could be done for them.
Believe me, if Big Pharma had a treatment with this kind of success rate, the news would have gone around the world — and back — already!
Just remember, a medical ketogenic diet is extremely low in carbs, and should be done only under expert supervision.
But with all we know about the benefits of eating this way, there’s no reason not to start ditching some of those carbs from your plate right now, along with adding back plenty of good fats to your diet.
