Can you kill cancer by stressing it out with a diet it does not like?
Barry Weiner
- Recent research suggests that cancer cells are prone to being “stressed out” and act in a chaotic manner when they begin their mutation towards becoming “chemo resistant.” Further, during these times of stress and chaos, diet may be an effective weapon in killing cancer cells in patients whose cancers have returned or have already become chemotherapy resistant.
Let’s start with a study that explains the chaos cancer causes in cells. Then we can get to the research on how diet can kill this chaos and the cancer cells with them.
A team of Australian researchers wrote in the journal Oncogene-(1)
“Chromosomal Instability, a hallmark of cancer, refers to cells with an increased rate of gain or loss of whole chromosomes or chromosome parts. Chromosomal Instability is linked to the progression of tumors with poor clinical outcomes such as drug resistance. Chromosomal Instability can give tumors the diversity to resist therapy, but it comes at the cost of significant stress to tumor cells. To tolerate this, cancer cells must modify their energy use to provide adaptation against genetic changes as well as to promote their survival and growth.”
What does this mean?
- Cancer has mutated cancer patient’s chromosomes so that when the cancer cells replicate, they do not replicate a copy of themselves, they replicate a mutation of themselves. This is why cancer is so difficult to treat and can make themselves resistant to cancer therapies.
- In this study we are citing, the researchers have demonstrated that Chromosomal Instability induction causes sensitivity to metabolic stress.
- In other words, the ability to mutate chromosomes comes at a significant energy cost to the cancer cells.
The researchers continue: “mild metabolic disruption (diet) that does not affect normal cells, can lead to high levels of oxidative stress and subsequent cell death in Chromosomal Instability cells because they are already managing elevated stress levels. Altered metabolism is a differential characteristic of cancer cells, so our identification of key regulators that can exploit these changes to cause cell death may provide cancer-specific potential drug targets, especially for advanced cancers that exhibit Chromosomal Instability.”
What is being suggested in this research is that doctors need to figure out how to alter the metabolism of the cancer cells by giving them more stress and causing more chaos to the norms (mutation) which requires greater cancer energy output. In other words, burning out the cancer from within. The doctors in this study suggest potential drug targets. Other doctors suggest supportive nutrition.
Exploiting Chromosomal Instability and the cancer’s stress with chemotherapy is challenging and has yet to be proven effective. Maybe the answer is diet instead of chemotherapy
In a November 2017 study in the journal Cancers,(2) doctors reported: “Unfortunately, exploiting Chromosomal Instability remains a significant challenge, as the aberrant mechanisms driving Chromosomal Instability and their causative roles in cancer have yet to be fully (understood). The development and utilization of chromosomal instability-exploiting therapies is further complicated by the associated risks for off-target effects and secondary cancers. . . exploring and exploiting Chromosomal Instability has tremendous therapeutic potential in cancer, and may represent a critical vulnerability that can be targeted to treat aggressive, drug resistant cancers, to ultimately improve the quality of life and outcomes for those living with cancer.”
What does this mean?
What we are seeing is that attacking Chromosomal Instability is a good idea, how to attack is in question as new drug combinations bring their own risks and less than hoped for results.
A change in diet and a small metabolic push may kill cancer cells during cancer’s stress times
Before you read on – it is strongly advised any dietary changes be discussed at length with your physician.
Ketogenic Diets
Above we discussed that a small metabolic push may be enough to stress out cells with chromosomal instability. Some researchers think ketogenic diets may offer that push. A study dated March 2019 and published in the journal Current opinion in clinical nutrition and metabolic care, (3) suggests:
“Altered glucose metabolism (sugar digestion and usage as glucose energy) in cancer cells is an almost ubiquitous observation, yet hardly exploited therapeutically. However, ketogenic diets have gained growing attention in recent years as a nontoxic broad-spectrum approach to target this major metabolic difference between normal and cancer cells. Although much research still needs to be done, new knowledge has been gained about the optimal utilization of ketogenic diets for cancer treatment that this review aims to summarize.
Although most preclinical studies indicate a therapeutic potential for ketogenic diets in cancer treatment, it is now becoming clear that not all tumors might respond positively. Early clinical trials have investigated ketogenic diets as a monotherapy and – while showing the safety of the approach even in advanced cancer patients – largely failed to prove survival prolonging effects. However, it gradually became clear that the greatest potential for ketogenic diets is as adjuvant treatments combined with pro-oxidative or targeted therapies initiated in early stages of the disease. Beneficial effects on body composition and quality of life have also been found.”
The researchers are saying a lot here:
- The metabolic push may be in attacking the glucose metabolism of cancer cells
- Monotherapy is not effective (observations are that there are no “magic bullet monotherapies,” you must attack cancer from various angles).
- Ketogenic diets work best as an “adjuvant treatments combined with pro-oxidative or targeted therapies initiated in early stages of the disease.”
In an earlier study, doctors at the University of Iowa wrote supported this idea of Ketogenic diet:(4)
“Despite recent advances in chemo-radiation, the prognosis for many cancer patients remains poor, and most current treatments are limited by severe adverse events. Therefore, there is a great need for complimentary approaches that have limited patient toxicity while selectively enhancing therapy responses in cancer versus normal tissues.
Ketogenic diets could represent a potential dietary manipulation that could be rapidly implemented for the purpose of exploiting inherent oxidative metabolic differences between cancer cells and normal cells to improve standard therapeutic outcomes by selectively enhancing metabolic oxidative stress in cancer cells.”
It may only take a small metabolic push.
Caloric Restriction Diet and Breast Cancer Study
A caloric restriction diet has been touted as way to help people live longer. Recent research from doctors at Thomas Jefferson University suggests that there may be other benefits, including improving outcomes for women in breast cancer.
According to a study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, the triple negative subtype of breast cancer – one of the most aggressive forms – is less likely to spread, or metastasize to new sites in the body when mice were fed a restricted diet.
Breast cancer patients are often treated with hormonal therapy to block tumor growth, and steroids to counteract the side effects of chemotherapy. However, both treatments can cause a patient to have altered metabolism which can lead to weight gain. In fact, women gain an average of 10 pounds in their first year of treatment.
Recent studies have shown that too much weight makes standard treatments for breast cancer less effective, and those who gain weight during treatment have worse cancer outcomes.
New research suggests that breast cancer survivors, particularly those who went through chemotherapy, are more prone to weight gain and agrees with the noted study above from Thomas Jefferson University. The treatment causes weight gain, the weight gain causes increased risk of cancer occurrence.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, found that breast cancer survivors gained more weight—3.6 pounds on average—than cancer-free women over a four-year period. Furthermore, survivors treated with chemotherapy were 2.1 times more likely than cancer-free women to gain at least 11 pounds during follow-up. A family predisposition for breast cancer increased that risk.
The study also linked weight gain in breast cancer survivors to other factors, including the use of cholesterol-blocking statins and the presence of invasive disease and cancer cells lacking receptors for estrogen.(5)
Caloric Restriction and cancer – the evidence mounts
In a broad review of the medical research over the past thirty years, doctors at the The University of Texas at Austin agree that calorie restriction is one of the most potent broadly acting dietary interventions for inducing weight loss and for inhibiting cancer.6
In their study, the doctors point to the following:
- Observational studies support that caloric restriction has beneficial effects on longevity and cancer risk in humans.
- Moderately reduced caloric intake decreased disease and death rates among Spanish nursing home residents.
- Inhabitants of Okinawa, Japan, who until recently consumed significantly fewer calories than residents of the main Japanese islands, have lower death rates from a broad spectrum of cancers and other chronic diseases than inhabitants of the Japanese mainland.
In more recent research from the University of California doctors show that periodically adopting a diet that mimics the effects of fasting may yield a wide range of health benefits.
Bimonthly cycles of fasting/low calorie diets that lasted four days which started at middle age mice;
- extended life span,
- reduced the incidence of cancer,
- boosted the immune system,
- reduced inflammatory diseases,
- slowed bone mineral density loss and improved the cognitive abilities of older mice tracked in the study.
In this study the diet slashed the individual’s caloric intake down to 34 to 54 percent of normal, with a specific composition of proteins, carbohydrates, fats and micronutrients.
The same research had shown that can help starve out cancer cells while protecting immune and other cells from chemotherapy toxicity.(7)
Your own research
This article is only to provide an introduction to understanding various dietary options in the treatment of cancer beyond avoiding sugars, alcohol, and junk food. I wish you the best in finding answers that may help you understand how you can fight cancer.
1. Stressed-out cancers may provide drug target. Shaukat Z, Liu D, Choo A, Hussain R, O’Keefe L, Richards R, Saint R, Gregory SL. Chromosomal instability causes sensitivity to metabolic stress. Oncogene. 2015 Jul 30;34(31):4044-55. doi: 10.1038/onc.2014.344. Epub 2014 Oct 27.
2 Boison D. New insights into the mechanisms of the ketogenic diet. Curr Opin Neurol. 2017 Jan 30.
3. Klement RJ. The emerging role of ketogenic diets in cancer treatment. Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care. 2019 Mar 1;22(2):129-34.
4. Allen, Bryan G. et al. “Ketogenic Diets as an Adjuvant Cancer Therapy: History and Potential Mechanism.” Redox Biology 2 (2014): 963–970. PMC. Web. 10 May 2016.
5. Breast Cancer Survivors Gain Weight at a Higher Rate Than Their Cancer-Free Peers
6 Hursting, Stephen D., et al. “Calorie Restriction, Aging, and Cancer Prevention: Mechanisms of Action and Applicability to Humans*.” Annual review of medicine 54.1 (2003): 131-152.
7 Diet that mimics fasting appears to slow aging. Keck School of Medicine at USC
Contact Barry@getbarry.com