Cancer

[PaleoPhil]

I'm making this cancer thread as a place to put studies and anecdotes relevant to the topic.

Effects of a ketogenic diet on the quality of life in 16 patients with advanced cancer: A pilot trial
Melanie Schmidt, Nadja Pfetzer, Michael Schwab, Ingrid Strauss and Ulrike Kammerer
Nutrition & Metabolism 2011, 8:54 doi:10.1186/1743-7075-8-54
Published: 27 July 2011
http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/8/1/54/abstract

"Conclusions
These pilot data suggest that a KD is suitable for even advanced cancer patients. It has no severe side effects and might improve aspects of quality of life and blood parameters in some patients with advanced metastatic tumors."

[sabertooth]

We can only assume that the results would be much better on a raw ketogenic diet.

I am sure those protein/ fat shakes used by the study patients are no where near as healing as raw grass fed fat trimmings, muscle meats and organ meats.

I also heard somewhere, that many cancer victims have a poor fat metabolism, so perhaps they may have greater trouble in adapting to a ketogenic diet, especially the cooked version that's used in the study

[PaleoPhil]

We can only assume that the results would be much better on a raw ketogenic diet.

That would be my guess. It's amazing how well even a diet that included some processed and cooked food in it did, which suggests that there really is something to the ketogenic aspect. Of course, the study subjects didn't eat just shakes, they also ate "normal groceries" with the overall diet restricted to "less than 70g CHO per day." One patient didn't tolerate the diet, maybe he was one of those people you referred to with poor fat metabolism.

This wasn't the first study showing benefits on cancer from ketogenic diets. Here are a couple more:

Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer?
By Richard Friebe Monday, Sept. 17, 2007
http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2007/09/ketogenic-diet-and-cancerold-news.html

[The study was conducted by Dr. Melanie Schmidt and biologist Ulrike Kämmerer, both at the Würzburg hospital in Germany. The diet has been called "the Würzburg diet."]

What sounds like yet another version of the Atkins craze is actually based on scientific evidence that dates back more than 80 years. In 1924, the German Nobel laureate Otto Warburg first published his observations of a common feature he saw in fast-growing tumors: unlike healthy cells, which generate energy by metabolizing sugar in their mitochondria, cancer cells appeared to fuel themselves exclusively through glycolysis, a less-efficient means of creating energy through the fermentation of sugar in the cytoplasm. Warburg believed that this metabolic switch was the primary cause of cancer, a theory that he strove, unsuccessfully, to establish until his death in 1970.

...a considerable number of patients left the study because they were unable or unwilling to renounce soft drinks, chocolate and so on. [How sad] ....

The good news is that for five patients who were able to endure three months of carb-free eating, the results were positive: the patients stayed alive, their physical condition stabilized or improved and their tumors slowed or stopped growing, or shrunk. These early findings have elicited "very positive reactions and an increased interest from colleagues...."

The calorically restricted ketogenic diet, an effective alternative therapy for malignant brain cancer
Weihua Zhou, Purna Mukherjee, Michael A Kiebish, William T Markis, John G Mantis and Thomas N Seyfried
2007
http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/4/1/5
"A dependency on glucose for energy together with defects in ketone body metabolism largely account for why the brain tumors grow minimally on either a ketogenic-restricted diet or on a standard-restricted diet."

Here are more Links on the role of sugar in cancer and low-sugar/low-carb diets as therapies:
http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/2/1/30
http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-on-low-carb-diet-as-cancer.html
http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/5/1/33
http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2009/01/sugary-diets-and-cancer.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19116885?dopt=Abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19116878?dopt=Abstract http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2010/02/sugar-and-cancer.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627603.500-cancers-sweet-tooth-becomes-a-target.html?full=true&print=true
http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2010/05/sugar-and-cancer-more-studies.html

One of the early scientists who studied the cancer - sugar link was Nobel Prize Winner Otto Heinrich Warburg, who developed the Warburg hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_hypothesis).

[Dorothy]

Phil, I belong to a local Weston A Price group and in this group is a health practitioner that is often impresses me. He wrote something I found very interesting lately on why high sugar levels reduce immune response that I'd like to share here. It's not exactly regarding a ketogenic diet, but I think it is pertinent while thinking about why a ketogenic diet works so well:

    It has been known for many decades that sugar depresses the immune system. It was only in the 70s that they found out that vitamin C was needed by white blood cells so that they could phagocytize bacteria and viruses. White blood cells require a fifty times higher concentration, at least inside the cell as outside, so they have to accumulate vitamin C.

    There is something called a phagocytic index, which tells you how rapidly a particular macrophage or lymphocyte can gobble up a virus, bacteria or cancer cell. In the 70s Linus Pauling knew that white blood cells needed a high dose of vitamin C and that is when he came up with his theory that you need high doses of vitamin C to combat the common cold.

    But if we know that vitamin C and glucose have similar chemical structure, what happens when sugar levels go up? They compete for one another upon entering the cells. And the thing that mediates the entry of vitamin C into the cells is the same thing that mediates the entry of glucose into the cells. If there is more glucose around then less vitamin C will be allowed into the cell, and it doesn‘t take much glucose to have this effect. A blood sugar value of 120 reduces the phagocytic index 75 percent.

[PaleoPhil]

Yes, that was part of the explanation I had read for why zero carbers don't get scurvy--the carbs compete with the vitamin C, so the less carbs you eat, the less vitamin C you need to consume. Another factor was that uric acid from meat may also prevent scurvy, in addition to vitamin C (Similar Functions of Uric Acid and Ascorbate in Man?, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v228/n5274/abs/228868a0.html)

[Projectile Vomit]

I believe I read in Nora Gedgaudas' recent book Primal Body, Primal Mind that cancer cells require glucose or fructose for their metabolism, and a diet that is carbohydrate poor will literally starve them. If this is correct, it might provide a rationale for the benefits of a ketogenic diet, because a low-carb diet will necessarily reduce sugar intake.

[Dorothy]

I believe I read in Nora Gedgaudas' recent book Primal Body, Primal Mind that cancer cells require glucose or fructose for their metabolism, and a diet that is carbohydrate poor will literally starve them. If this is correct, it might provide a rationale for the benefits of a ketogenic diet, because a low-carb diet will necessarily reduce sugar intake.

Hi Eric.

Cancer cells use sugars poorly at 1/10 the efficiency as regular cells. They have to ferment the sugars and produce uric acid in the process. They steal the nutrition from the rest of the cells and that is why people go into cachexia and look like skeletons even if they are eating. All the energy goes to the cancer cells. People rarely die from tumors themselves - they die from malnutrition. You are absolutely correct that a diet low in sugars starves out the cancer cells. When people are trying to fight cancer if they get rid of all carbs except the fruits that have anti-cancer properties, the cancer cells now starving readily take in the sugars along with the things that kill them. For this reason diets like the grape diet for instance work. There are quite a few fruits and vegetables with active cancer killing components. Processed sugars and grains are the first thing that any decent cancer diet removes. Cancer cells cannot survive a two week long fast like regular cells can - but when a patient is already weak the fast itself can kill the patient. Taking out all carbs though still provides nutrition to the weakened immune system and the rest of the body while starving out the cancer cells.

[PaleoPhil]

I believe I read in Nora Gedgaudas' recent book Primal Body, Primal Mind that cancer cells require glucose or fructose for their metabolism, and a diet that is carbohydrate poor will literally starve them. If this is correct, it might provide a rationale for the benefits of a ketogenic diet, because a low-carb diet will necessarily reduce sugar intake.

Yes, that's what the evidence I shared shows and it's true that fructose is also implicated and recent research suggests that cancer cells thrive even better on fructose than glucose (and thus soda pop and juice boxes laden with processed, concentrated fructose are effectively ambrosia for cancer cells and when parents give their children these drinks it's not much different than giving them cigarettes):

Cancer cells slurp up fructose, US study finds
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/08/02/cancer-fructose-idAFN0210830520100802

...though I suspect that processed fructose is much more of a problem than fructose in raw whole fruits and veg.

[Dorothy]

I'm not sure that most fruit juices are any better than other sugars except that they at least have a tiny bit of other nutrients - but what good are those nutrients if you are feeding the cancer cells more than the immune cells? When it comes to a cancer patient why take such chances except with the fruits that have been proven to have cancer killing components..... and these only work if the patient goes long enough with no sugars at all so that the cancer cells are so hungry that they are willing to take the poison with the sugar. Guess which kinds of fruits are the ones with the most scientific data backing up their anti-cancer properties -- all berries and especially raspberries. I'm sorry that I no longer have the links. The only way that these fruits become at all useful though is if the diet is otherwise devoid of other carbohydrates/sugars. If a ketogenic diet is healthy and will kill out all cancer cells anyway then with most cancers one would imagine that active cancer killing agents would not even be necessary - just the starvation of the cancer cells.

Btw - PaleoPhil is the one who first turned me onto the dangers of grains and sugars when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and what he shared was the foundation for ridding her of it. There are many cancer cures out there, but without understanding how a cancer cell feeds itself and stopping that process, any other therapy will be an uphill battle.

[Inger]

Dorothy, would you like to tell more about how your mother recovered? How was her diet, did she fasted?

The sister and father from my SIL both had cancer, ovarian cancer and prostate cancer. Quite recently. Both got cured with fasting on certain vegetablejuices for 40 days. My SIL just told me about it when they visited a week ago. So intresting! But that is like ketogenic WOE, just fasting with vege juices. They live in Yugoslavia and have no money for other cancer-treatment. My brother sent them the juices from Sweden, they don't cost much. Imagine, they was not even fresh-juiced vegejuices, just organic pure juices in bottle! Still helped so much.

Inger

[Ioanna]

so how does honey raw and/or fermented figure into this?

[PaleoPhil]

That's an excellent question. Raw honey, like certain raw whole fruits, appears to have cancer-fighting properties rather than cancer-feeding.

Honey 'could help fight cancer'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4063377.stm

So all carbs do not appear to be alike and it may also depend on the individual. If I were treating my own cancer, I would go easy on the carby foods or possibly even eliminate them for a period, and would restrict them to the best cancer-fighting carby and semi-carby foods that I tolerate relatively well, like berries, carrots and maybe a little raw fermented honey.

[Dorothy]

Dorothy, would you like to tell more about how your mother recovered? How was her diet, did she fasted?

The sister and father from my SIL both had cancer, ovarian cancer and prostate cancer. Quite recently. Both got cured with fasting on certain vegetablejuices for 40 days. My SIL just told me about it when they visited a week ago. So intresting! But that is like ketogenic WOE, just fasting with vege juices. They live in Yugoslavia and have no money for other cancer-treatment. My brother sent them the juices from Sweden, they don't cost much. Imagine, they was not even fresh-juiced vegejuices, just organic pure juices in bottle! Still helped so much.

Inger

Wow Inger, bottled juices. That's amazing.

This brings up a very important point. Every cancer patient has a compromised liver and pancreas and their bile systems are almost always backed up. That's why pancreatic cancer is the most deadly - the organ responsible for producing the enzymes to fight cancer is the organ that is ravished by cancer and unable to function. Sometimes a diet can work simply by taking some of the stress off the digestive system to let it heal. But there's a caveat.

I'll give you the example of my mother. She was very old and had had many diseases - most of which were well under control through diet having lived with me the previous 10 years. But when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the doctors did not expect her to live more than a few weeks. They would not give me appointments for 6 weeks later and..... because they did not expect her to live they gave her (without telling us) only a temporary stent in her bile duct. The procedure was very hard on her so I had to curtail her fat intake to make it so that she would not have to go through it again until I was able to get rid of the cancer and then hopefully it would be able to be taken out entirely. With this, the stent that was only supposed to last 8 weeks at the very most lasted 8 months instead. But the lack of fat had it's repercussions. My mother started to shake and stutter but none of the doctors would address it because they expected her dead very quickly. They would not let us see a neurologist until very close to the end of her life when they finally figured out that she lived so long that it was worth addressing. What was happening was that she had been misdiagnosed FIFTYYEARS earlier as having had a stroke when it was actually the start of Parkinson's Disease that had progressed very slowly. Without the good fats and with the intense immune stimulation that I was giving her with her cures (Parkinson's Disease is an auto-immune disease) her PD went into over-drive. Her central nervous system broke down. When she died a year later she had no cancer - she died because her central nervous system gave out. At the very end Phil was able to help me to bring her back from delirium. With a permanent stent in I could feed her good raw fat. She was then able to die in her senses, in no pain at all (unlike the terrible death pancreatic cancer would have been) and with no medications so that she could go peacefully in the middle of the night at home. But, if I had not removed the good fats because of the stent she would probably still be here and relatively healthy.

It is vitally important not to decrease other aspects of one's health in the process of getting rid of cancer. Cancer is as easy as pie to get rid of if you do not use the modern medical approach. The trick is to increase your general health at the same time!

The human central nervous system needs good fats..... yet..... with cancer the ability to process fats can be compromised. There are ways to support the body in being able to heal the liver/pancreas/bile system to better handle good fats.

The reason that the Budwig diet is so successful is because it takes flax oil and by-passes the liver by combining it with sulfured dairy. Another approach might be to help the liver to be able to do it's job well again. One way that many approaches use is to do liver flushes/cleanses like carrot and beet juice and other such things. The problem with these is that they can be quite a strain and would not allow the body to go into pure ketogenisis like what is being suggested in this thread. I could not do such things with my mother because with bile duct stent bile stones/slush could have gotten stuck. What I did instead was use peppermint - which literally dissolves bile stones and sludge and very very gently, but quickly and efficiently, cleanses this system and makes it stronger. Before I started it she was building up enough stones that they were contemplating taking out her gall bladder, but within a couple of months the stones and even sludge were pretty much gone. I highly recommend peppermint tea, tincture and oil to cleanse the bile. The other powerful ally could be milk thistle plant. It is a marvel at strengthening and supporting the liver. Lecithin might also be useful as it helps to break down fat.

One can avoid fat to de-stress compromised organs, one can by-pass the organs like in the Budwig protocol or one can try to rebuild and strengthen the organs. If it were me, knowing what I now know about how pivotal the central nervous system is to everything, I would choose to gently cleanse and strengthen the organs while giving the body the very best possible fats possible and not deprive the overall system of such important nutrients if at all possible. Gerson originally gave people raw liver because giving a person liver - strengthens their liver!

If you are on a ketogenic diet the cancer cells have to die. Logic dictates that it has to work because the cancer cells will have to starve. The trick is to do a ketogenic diet in a way that does the least amount of stress to the organs and supports the organs.

The last thing a cancer patient needs is poor quality meats with hormones, ingested pesticides etc. and with a compromised liver getting rid of the toxins that cooked meat produce is going to be even more of a challenge.

There are herbs that are used to fight parasite and bacteria that also fight cancer. If one is worried about eating raw meat with a compromised immune system these resources might also be used.

I'm sorry if this has gotten too long or if I didn't fully answer Inger's question - it's just that what I posted here I feel are things I learned that are most pertinent and too important to leave out for cancer sufferers that might be reading this.

[goodsamaritan]

I'll add my plumber who I coached how to cure his terminal liver cancer 6 months to live.

http://www.curemanual.com/2010/10/liver-cancer-cured-mang-bens-video-testimony/

- colon cleanse
- kidney cleanse
- liver flushing with apples and egg yolk liver flushing
- and eating some raw meat

He followed my curemanual.com best to what he can understand.

[Dorothy]

I'll add my plumber who I coached how to cure his terminal liver cancer 6 months to live.

http://www.curemanual.com/2010/10/liver-cancer-cured-mang-bens-video-testimony/

- colon cleanse
- kidney cleanse
- liver flushing with apples and egg yolk liver flushing
- and eating some raw meat

He followed my curemanual.com best to what he can understand.

I read your curemanual I think before I even arrived at the forum GS. Wonderful that you have done that for people.    That plumber must be very happy. It's ironic that the first person to ever tell me of a natural cure for cancer was a plumber. It's a beautiful thing you made and do for people.

I have helped others who ask - just about everyone will either get cancer or have a loved one with cancer in their lifetimes with the diet and environment as it is these days. It can be daunting at times how many people there are that need help, want help, but have been given such simply horrendous advice and total mis-information by their doctors.

There are so many great cures. Literally Hundreds. As long as you don't do chemo or radiation or surgery - the cure rates are phenomenal.

Cutting out fake toxic foods, grains and processed sugars is often enough just by itself for slow-growing cancers. The immune system just has to be given a chance.

If chemo or radiation were done - there are STILL highly effective methods but by that time diet to improve the immune system is no longer enough because chemo and radiation destroy the immune system and organ function. But...... if there is time and any money at all left for alternative therapies that target cancer cells directly you can still do it. So much better to just help your body to heal from the beginning and not make it harder on the body.   

There are cures that have been around from the 1950's with 90% cure rates - for all that time. How easy it is to cure cancer is a massive cover-up to preserve the big business that it is.

The ketogenic diet that we are discussing here has the added benefit of also being generally great for people with a host of other maladies as well. It is so good for the central nervous system that it is a highly successful therapy for children with seizure disorders.

Well - just wanted to put my two cents in how much hope there is and a few hints on what I would do to enhance fat metabolism if necessary. This is a great thing you are making here Phil. You might never know how many lives you save or make better with this - but a good work it most definitely is. 

[goodsamaritan]

so how does honey raw and/or fermented figure into this?

Not every cancer is a fungus.
Some cancers are metabolic.
High fat high carb will increase metabolism and get rid of cancer.
Something like the theories of 180 degree health matt stone.
My friend Vander Gaditano has mastered this art of healing metabolic cancers.

[Dorothy]

Not every cancer is a fungus.
Some cancers are metabolic.
High fat high carb will increase metabolism and get rid of cancer.
Something like the theories of 180 degree health matt stone.
My friend Vander Gaditano has mastered this art of healing metabolic cancers.

I'm sorry GS - I'm a bit confused. Who said that cancer is a fungus?

The link Phil posted regarding honey said,
But they suggest they (honey products) may cause apoptosis (cell suicide) or have direct effects which are toxic to the cells, or which help the immune system fight the development of tumours.

I thought that the question regarding honey was about the ketogenic diet and if it counted as a sugar/carb to be avoided or not???

By the way "apoptosis" in the quote above can mean the normal death process of the cell. There are cures that are based upon killing out the microbe within the cancer cell and making it back into a normal cell so that it will die a normal death. Honey is anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-fungal so part of how it might be working is by making the cells normal again by killing out the microbe. The best thing about these therapies is that they do not make for all the swelling, mess and clean up that therapies that directly kill cancer do so the process can be much faster. One of the big challenges of alternative therapies are that so many of them are so good at killing cancer cells that the detox from them can become a problem if done too fast.

Perhaps honey fits into the same category from what Phil posted as sugars linked to components that have been proven by science to have cancer cell killing properties. I have a list somewhere of all the common foods I could find like this if anyone is interested in incorporating a direct cancer-killing aspect to their ketogenic diet approach or who might not be able to get rid of all sugars/carbohydrates. 

[PaleoPhil]

I'm not convinced that the cause of cancer is ever a fungus like candida. I think it's more likely that since both drug-resistant forms of candida albicans ("Defined Anaerobic Growth Medium for Studying Candida albicans Basic Biology and Resistance to Eight Antifungal Drugs," http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC434226/) and cancer cells can survive or even thrive in low-oxygen environments, that they both tend to grow out of hand in certain people who have low-oxygen systems due to intakes of hypoxia-inducing foods, like heated refined grains and sugars, and other factors. By cancer I mean malignant neoplasms characterized by uncontrolled cell growth or division, invasiveness or metastasizes.

http://www.giveittomeraw.com/forum/topics/i-had-an-epiphany-regarding?page=24&commentId=1407416:Comment:1519184&x=1#1407416Comment1519184

Reply by Dorothy:
I want to add one more that I've been thinking about helping Mom lately:
Oxygen.

Cancer cells are actually cells that revert to primitive cells. It's like they know to go back to functioning the way they did before there was oxygen on the planet or something. The cells go back to surviving in the low oxygen, high ph environment that is what causes cells to turn into cancer cells. They replicate like primitive cells and never die.... they go back to one cell organism pre-animal status!

But - when a cell can get oxygen it turns back into a normal cell! Now, how do cells get oxygen? Through the blood of course.
 
If your blood is flowing well enough, then all the cells get the oxygen they need not to become cancer cells.
 
I've been giving Mom and Boogie cesium which binds to potassium in the blood stream and the primitive cancer cells let it in and can't get it out and then the cancer cell is oxygenated and by definition - no longer is a cancer cell. It dies or is cleaned up by the immune system.
 
Mom's oxygen levels taken with a finger monitor have gone up to my levels .... and I don't even give her much cesium yet.
 
Blood brings the breath of life.... oxygen.

Yes, I don't know anything about this cesium (chloride?) therapy, but I think you are onto something with the primitive cell idea. The most primitive cells also reproduced asexually, by splitting, as I understand it, which is what cancer cells do. So from the cell's perspective, going cancerous is not a pathology, but a survival technique in a low-oxygen, high-acid environment. Fix the environment, and you prevent or even possibly stop or reverse cancer cells. Warburg and others tried to explain some of these concepts, but when surplus mustard gas was converted into chemo drugs and were found to be quite profitable, people stopped listening to Warburg. The modern world is driven more by short-term profit than long-term health optimization, unfortunately.

The higher life forms require oxygen to live, whereas to the more primitive, ancestral microscopic life forms like cancer cells, oxygen is death. Mitochondria are descended from aerobic bacteria that were one of the earliest life forms to thrive on oxygen. An oxygen-boosting diet not only inhibits cancer cells, it promotes mitochondria biogenesis. Treat your mitochondria well and they will treat you well.

What causes low-oxygen environments? One thing is refined carbs like refined wheat flour, refined cane sugar and HFCS.

[Dorothy]

Phil - You saved that! Warms my heart. 

Even colloidal silver/dmso therapy which has been the most important for us personally is based upon how (because of the low oxygen high ph environment) the cancer cell becomes home to a microbe that can live in such an environment. Killing off the microbe changes the whole dynamic of the cell. The therapy also takes stress off of the rest of the immune system which is having to struggle in a low oxygen environment.

Remember how I did all that research on how almost all alternative therapy foods/supplements/diets had blood thinning components? I made long lists. What carries the oxygen? How do the components of the immune system get themselves to the cancer cells to fight it? Blood flow. Many green vegetables are extremely high in certain forms of k2 and thicken the blood. If someone is a bleeder they eat lots of salads to slow it down. Eating some greens will help the body to clot (which is obviously important if not overdone) - but the last thing you want to do with a cancer patient is have them clot more readily as their blood is likely already not flowing well enough. That is why 10zymes is such a valuable supplement for cancer sufferers. Not only does it have the pancreatic enzymes that are in such low supply with the compromised pancreases of cancer patients, but it also has nattokinase which is an enzyme that the pancreas makes to thin the blood when necessary. The better the blood flow - the more oxygen.

Another substance that is important when it comes to blood thinning is salicylates. Salicylates block the absorption of vitamin k and therefore have a blood thinning action. Aspirin (which is derived from white willow bark which is a cancer treatment herb) has a high concentration of salicylates. Many fruits have a high concentration as well including cherries, cranberries, blueberries, grapes, strawberries, oranges and tangerines. Honey is also high in salicylates.

Generally most meat, fish, dairy, grains and vegetables are not high in salicylates, but many types of fish do however have blood thinning properties due to their omega-3 fatty acid content. Grains however can actually thicken the blood.

Most of the longest living cultures have at least one tea that they drink that is blood thinning. Green tea would be an example. In a paleo diet the inclusion of berries would keep the blood thin and flowing and berries have many other substances that fight cancer in them - each berry has different cancer-fighting elements - but berries came up constantly during my research. Our ancestors also exercised and were outside much more than us. Exercise and vitamin D both thin the blood.

My suggestion to people using the ketogenic paleo diet to treat cancer that are not getting outdoors into the sun enough and getting exercise is to include a vitamin D supplement. Talk to your doctor about testing your vitamin D levels because they might be able to prescribe for you a much more easily absorbable form. Most doctors will test vitamin D levels if asked to. But if you can get outside into the sun and go for a walk, it is an important aspect of the diet and part of the reason why our ancestors did not get cancer. Just sitting outside on the grass and letting your bare feet touch the earth is powerful medicine.

[goodsamaritan]

Blood flow talk:

Don't forget cayenne.

Vander uses niacine full flush.

[raw-al]

GS and Dorothy,
That's great the story about the plumber.  It's so appropo that cleaning out our plumbing is the source of health. People look to eat more nutrients to solve everything, when really we just need to have an awesome "dump" 

BTW, Sorry for the length of this post but as it is I had to leave out a lot. 

Essentially this is what Ayurveda says about cancer and indeed every disease. (other than external things like car accidents or snake bites)

Ayurveda says that when you eat inappropriate foods or subject your senses to inappropriate stimuli or have improper posture you will get disease(s)

The process is referred to by one writer (Dr. Vasant Lad) as the tap, drip, bucket, empty field weed theory  I have included some of his info from his book "Ayurveda, A Complete Guide To Clinical Assessment"

In a field you hava tap on a post arranged above a bucket. The tap slowly drips into the bucket and it takes awhile to fill the bucket. All the while the field is empty of weeds. However when the bucket finally fills up, the water starts to spill over the side onto the ground and that's when the weeds start to grow. The weed varieties are endless as are the disease types.

When you eat foods or consume other sensory objects that are inappropriate, as in your body cannot digest them (for a wide variety of reasons) the undigested foods, sense objects are generally expelled out the anus/urethra/nose/belly button/lungs/skin/ears etc.

Disease stage 1 Toxin Accumulation - However some of the undigested matter (Ama) will stick around. The crap (technical term  ) will cause issues in the GI tract somewhere. May be experienced as constipation, abdominal distension, or gases in the colon, heat around the belly button, slightly yellowish discolouration of the whites of the eyes or dark yellow urine or heaviness, lethargy, fullness of the stomach and low appetite. The intelligence is still alive at this point and the person may feel an aversion to whatever caused the issue.

Disease stage 2 Provocation - The crap (Ama) starts to fill up the target area. At this point you may start to feel symptoms, such as cough cold, congestion, acid indigestion, heartburn, nausea, pain in the flanks, or mid back, hyperperistalsis gurgling and even breathlessness. At this point a dietary change will suffice to cure the issues/imbalance. Once the disease process progresses past the GI Tract and has entered the third phase it is difficult to restore balance on one's own and the advice and guidance of a health pro is usually needed.

Disease stage 3 Spread - The doshas (sort of like crap, but specific crap  ) leaves the initial spot and start out for the next place where it can continue to build up. Remember it has no use as it is undigested material. It could go anywhere causing  a wide variety of symptoms that have no relationship with the crap. Might cause dry skin, goosebumps, cold hands and feet, ringing in the ears, tingling and numbness, quivering thighs, heartburn burning eyes, acidic sweat, hives rashes, urticaria, burning sensation etc, water retention, sinus congestion, lymphatic congestion, heavy breasts, excessive salivation, a heavy feeling in the head, cold clammy skin, etc.

Disease stage 4. Deposition or Localization - Crap (dosha) moves into a spot that has a weakness or defect due to previous trauma, genetic predisposition, accumulated emotional stress, repressed emotion, or other factors. Like a pothole in a road. The characteristics of the dosha (cold dry light, heavy, etc) build up in the spot and encroach on the qualities of the Dhatu (tissue) The seeds of disease start to sprout. If the tissue is strong/mature it will not allow the dosha to enter, but if the tissue is immature it will enter into it. At this point the full blown disease has not manifested. At this point, the newly arrived, aggrivated dosha creates confusion within the celular intelligence of the weaker tissue and can overwhelm it, changing it's normal qualities. The prodromal signs and symptoms of disease are clearly seen at this stage. The disease has still not shown on the surface at this point, but can be detected by a skilled physician or recognized by imbalances in the doshas and via pulse diagnosis. An alert person can feel this stage and if not interrupted will result in a full blown disease.

Diseases 5th stage Manifestation. Changes become obvious and the cardinal symptoms of the disease become apparent. The dosha (crap) has conquered the Dhatu (Tissue) The qualities of the doshas (dry hot, cold, light heavy etc) affect the functioning of the dhatus, srotas (channels of inspiration or expiration ie blood vessels). For instance dry rough (vata) in the joints will cause cracking and deformity of the articular surface of the joint and intense pain. or Pitta hot sharp oliy sour and pungent may cause inflammation, irritation, and burning sensations, the heavy slow cool oily dense gross and cloudy qualities cause stagnation, congestion,obstruction, and swelling

Disease 6th stage Differentiation of disease, destruction, of tissues and complications. - In this stage structural changes manifest. Complications of other organs also become evident. This is the final expression of the disease process as it has manifested along with complications.  EG. vata may not only affect the joint space but also the surrounding soft tissue, leading to such problems as muscle wasting, frozen joints and deformity. The disease is most difficult to treat at this stage.

Another way to look at it is that in your cells there is an intelligence (it has a name but I cannot remember it) it is like your mother in that it wants you to live and thrive. When the toxins start to build up in the cells, it starts a fight. It fights and fights, but at some point it loses it and starts going crazy and starts gets the idea that it needs help so it starts speeding up the multiplication of cells because "guddammit" this is war. It's you or me. This crazy speeding up of cell division is called cancer.

Sooooooo in Ayurveda there are a number of methods of stopping this process in it's tracks....

1. eating the proper foods in the first place. (for your body type) Eating proper combinations of foods. Eating in proper proportions, at the proper time of day. Food prepared by someone who loves you, avoid toxic things etc. Taste is frequently the first line of defence. Raw foods are less likely to fool the taste buds in my experience. You can take some pretty disgusting food and with a bit of spices make it palatable but downstream you can have problems.

2. Be aware of your body so that if something is improper or affects you in a "not good way" you avoid eating it.

3. If you do ingest crap, know how to counteract it.

4. Periodically (typically at the end of a particular doshic season) you do a cleansing. Pancha Karma is the penultimate, comfy, pleasurable, wonderful way but any of the more barbaric methods can be used. If these methods are too barbaric they will aggravate you also making it less likely you will do them again. Pancha Karma can be learned and mothers would be well advised to massage babies regularly to help in this process of cleaning out dosha. It's not magic, it's easy and the baby will love it.

[Dorothy]

GS - the list is too long to go into here. I'm already talking too much! I just kept it to the obvious paleo blood thinners. Cayenne is tops of course. I would put tumeric in front of it for cancer though.

I really want to say something to anyone who arrived here that might be in the position of their doctors and family members trying to make them do things that they don't want to out of fear. I want to tell you what your doctor won't/can't.

Usually, tumors themselves won't kill you. Nope. Not unless they are in places where they are blocking the flow of an important fluid or in the brain or in your pancreas that you need so much to fight with. There are three things that put you in danger.

1. Metastasis. This is where the cancer spreads. This is as easy as pie to prevent. All you have to do is take a product called pectasol C. It's a modified fruit pectin that makes it so cancer cells are not able to embed anywhere when travelling through the blood and it is scientifically proven. Not even Sloan Kettering could come up with anything bad to say about it.

2. Angiogenesis: This is where the cancer makes new blood vessels so that it can grow. This still won't kill you in and of itself unless blocking something but anyway - this is usually a slow process when you stop feeding the cancer. The cancer must have food to grow which you are denying on a ketogenic diet and there are many foods that actively block angiogenesis including ...... you got it ........ berries.

3. Cachexia: This is where the tumor gets so big or spreads so much that it steals all your sugar and nutrition and you starve to death. This is really how most people die of cancer. Remember - healthy cells can use fat and the mutant throw-back ancient cells can't. Your good cells will have food to fight and your cancer cells will get weaker. If you are not already in cachexia - if you use alternative therapies - you will probably never get to this point.

What they won't tell you is that as long as you are fighting the good fight you usually have much more time. When you start starving out the cancer and start oxygenizing and changing your ph you gain more time. Their doom and gloom numbers no longer have the same meaning. If the tumor can't spread, if you are stopping it from growing, if you are still getting nutrition..... you are not dying.  

Remember - once you destroy your immune system and severely toxify your body and destroy your organs with chemo and radiation - you might get rid of the tumor, but you will still die. Everyone has cancer cells all the time. You need to get to the cause not the symptom and a tumor is a symptom... and one that is NOT usually as scary as they tell you. With allopathic treatment the tumor may be gone but now the body has ruined organs, ruined immune system and tons of toxins to deal with when the liver was already overwhelmed. Research the side affects of the treatments being offered to you before proceeding. The big question to think about is after that one tumor is gone...... what will happen with all those new cancer cells that everyone makes all the time?

Treat the cause, not the symptoms and think about your long-term survival and make yourself healthier over time. Ask your doctor what the permanent cure rate with no recurrence will be of their treatment, about the side affects, and then compare it to the permanent cure-rates of the alternative treatments. Don't be frightened into impulsive action that you might regret later.  

It's your life. Make your own decisions. Don't let yourself get bullied into being maimed or dying just to put money into someone's pocket. Don't believe me either - I'm just someone who read a bunch instead of listening to the hype. Take a deep breath, relax. There are people out there that have healed completely from the kind of cancer you have. Do your own research and THINK because nobody else is in your body but you and it is ultimately your responsibility. Your family and your doctor do not have to live in your body. You do.


I was writing this same time as you were writing your Ayurvedic lesson Raw-al. That was fabulous to read. Thank you.

[raw-al]

Thanks Dorothy,
I had no idea.

One thing I can continue on is that by the time you have gotten to the cancer stage, Ayurveda is running out of options and the physician can really just make you more comfortable. Maybe in the future as more well trained Ay. physicians are produced and they combine their knowledge with modern allopathy new methodologies can be morphed.

Ay. physicians are like any other professional, there are good ones and good schools and the opposite. When the English moved into India they did their best to destroy the Ay. schools and essentially succeeded in destroying a lot of the knowledge.

I have read about barefoot Ay. physicians living in austere places in the forests of India having successfully treated patients with what can only be described to a "modern" person as bizarre treatments. I watched videos of some of these treatments, all based on Ay. principles and they work. Funnily enough the traditional methods of preparing herbs cannot be duplicated or improved upon by modern methods and produce the same efficacy.

I think that the precursors to Ay. were the inborn knowledge that people had to prevent disease in the first place. They possibly knew that when they felt a certain way they would eat a certain thing.

[PaleoPhil]

Many green vegetables are extremely high in certain forms of k2 and thicken the blood. If someone is a bleeder they eat lots of salads to slow it down. Eating some greens will help the body to clot (which is obviously important if not overdone) - but the last thing you want to do with a cancer patient is have them clot more readily as their blood is likely already not flowing well enough.

Vitamin K reportedly is not as much of a problem in this way as previously thought, as it reportedly has "no effect on the platelet-blocking effects of aspirin or fish oil":

Vitamin K should have no effect on the platelet-blocking effects of aspirin or fish oil. The majority of blood clot inhibiting effects of aspirin and fish oil arise from their ability to keep blood platelets from "clumping" (just like the TV commercials for Plavix).

Vitamin K, on the other hand, participates in the liver production of blood clotting factors (like II, VII, IX, and X, among others for you curious ones).

Thus, vitamin K-dependent clotting factors and platelet-blocking are two separate pathways to forming blood clots. Some of us refer to the difference as "red clots" from the vitamin K pathway and "white clots" from the platelet pathway, since they really do have this different physical appearance. --Dr. William Davis, cardiologist, http://www.wellsphere.com/heart-health-article/vitamin-k2-aspirin-fish-oil-and-blood-thinning/239788

So if someone whose blood clots too readily due to platelet clumping is taking fish oil or aspirin, it may be OK to take vitamin K2 also, but they should check with their physician (though the physician may be unaware of this, so they may want to show their physician Dr. Davis' article).

[Dorothy]

Oh yes Phil - they are two completely different actions and Mom's doctors explained them to me in detail. Mom had a form of cancer that caused such extreme blood clotting that it was imperative for me to learn all I could about it.

Plavix and Coumaden work very differently from each other as well. Heads up - the tests used for viscosity for Coumaden do not work for Plavix. 

When someone is on coumaden and they change too fast how many greens they eat they can bleed to death internally. All patients taking coumaden have to be careful about eating certain vegetables and keep the amounts stable. But there are MANY other natural food blood thinners that they don't warn you about. That's not the case with Plavix. There are now new drugs that are massively dangerous blood thinners. If you are on such drugs you need to understand how all of it works.

For the cancer patient not on drugs Vitamin K and salicylates are important but not usually delicate issues. One can of course eat greens, but it has to be taken into consideration and balanced with opposing forces. 

As a cancer patient - if you are not already on blood thinners - the trick it would seem to me is to make sure that you are getting some form of natural blood thinning foods/herbs/enzymes that are also cancer fighters and not worry too much about the particular action and if you are eating a great deal of foods high in salicylates to recognize that this can also have a blood thickening affect and take it into consideration - maybe have some foods with blood thinning action too.

I think if you aren't on allopathic blood thinners or Bayer type aspirin that the details of the difference aren't going to make that much of difference. The whole idea is just to make sure that you are doing something to help your blood flow better and not doing too much to goop it up.

Not very scientific I know - but sometimes it can get just too overwhelming for the average person who is just trying to figure out how to go about fighting their cancer. It might be as easy as having a cup of peppermint tea every day. It will dissolve bile sludge, help your liver, thin your blood a little and help with digestion.

It's not usually too complicated in practice.