Sugar & Cancer

It’s been known since 1931 that sugar makes cancer cells grow.

The famous chemist, Otto Warburg, won the Nobel Prize in 1931 for his research on what makes cells grow and use energy. This is called cellular metabolism and cellular respiration.

Sugar boosts the growth of cancer > Cancer is “growth-out-of-control”.

It is this almost “immortal-like” nature of cancer, that makes it so potentially deadly.

If you get cancer, you thus, want to avoid foods that promote growth. As you now have a disease that has a nature of growth-out-of-control.

Why do cancer docs not suggest cancer patients avoid sugar?

A sugar-free diet is recommended for 48 hours before a Pet Scan. Then, when the dye is injected into the patient, it is tagged with sugar so it will attract, find, and be able to identify where cancer lurks in the body.

For example, the Weatherhead PET Center in Houston tells its patients getting Pet Scans: For 48 HOURS before your Sarcoid PET Scan, absolutely NO caffeine, sugar, or carbohydrates. NO desserts (not even desserts labeled sugar-free).

They use the physiologic fact that sugar and cancer are attracted to each other, to perform more sensitive Pet Scans. So why in the world wouldn’t a cancer doc talk to you about adopting a more sugar-free diet?

Or just talk about diet in general. As it is foundational?

They hand out meds, procedures, and scary facts. But honestly I have never heard of a cancer doctor talk about diet except for the backwards and wrong advice of avoiding soy. As it’s estrogenic. But it’s the “Good Estrogenic” in that it signals the anti-growth or second estrogen receptor, ER Beta.

I digress…

A keto diet is being looked at for cancer patients. It starves tumors of the glucose they need to grow. But many keto diets are excessively high in saturated fats, which can promote leaky gut, and red meat can be pro-inflammatory.

Foods that are high in natural growth promoters are egg yolks and dairy. As both contribute to tiny animals growing quite a bit in a short period of time.

There is an amazing book on the journey of cancer and diet, especially with the effectiveness of avoiding growth promoting dairy, by professor Dr. Janet Plant. Well worth getting: Beat Cancer: The 10-Step Plan to Help You Overcome and Prevent Cancer. Dr. Plant kept getting breast cancer over and over, until she finally gave up dairy foods.

I digress….

Diet Matters

I go into detail about diet with my cancer patients.

Why do they hand out orange juice and bars to chemo patients and never mention avoiding sugar?

Why are nutrition and hormones so continually the rabbit holes of medicine while patients miss out?

One of the reasons we recommend melatonin for cancer patients is that it “blocks” sugar being used by cancer cells to promote growth. I first learned about this at a brown bag lunch at Tulane where I was a distinguished hormone scholar. Dr. David Blask had his melatonin lab beneath our offices and labs.

Dr. Blask said melatonin fights cancer while we sleep, by blocking the growth of cancer. By blocking its fuel. Sugar.

I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. So I started on melatonin supplementation protocol immediately and didn’t look back.

Now melatonin replacement is one basic tool of “Functional Nutritional Oncology”.

If you put “melatonin” and “cancer” into the search bar of PubMed, it brings up 3,300 citations.

Yet I do not hear cancer docs recommending avoiding sugar or taking some melatonin at night.

I had the honor to lecture at A4M’s Endocrinology 2 Symposium (I also helped put the speakers together). Dr. Blask discussed his new research, with the National Cancer Association, on how all breast cancer patients have melatonin receptor issues. And that replacing melatonin before bed helps heal these issues, and also blocks cancer proliferation by blocking sugar uptake by cancer cells.

Dr. Blask also suggests that taking a high dose of fish oil at dinner the night before synergizes with all of this. We fight cancer at night through the protective multi-actions of melatonin.

There are many ways to optimize a cancer patient’s future. No one can guarantee success, but you want to make your “remission” your “mission” and avoid recurrence. That is the golden goal.

Keto Diet

Many are recommending keto diets to cancer patients now. A Keto diet causes toxic lipid byproducts to accumulate in and kill cancer cells by a process called ferroptosis. This slows tumor growth, but in severe cancer patients, like pancreatic, it can also cause early-onset cachexia.

So, if you have cancer, you should ideally work with a nutritionally oriented practitioner that understands cancer and nutrition.

Cancer is a whole-body disease. It reprograms normal biological processes to help cancer keep growing. You can use diet to enhance more “controlled growth”.

I designed my new Hormone Balance and Protect to have the highest quality “growth controlling” botanicals that also tamp down “cancer stem cells” which drive recurrence and metastases. It is based on my 3 decades of research to try not to get tumors again in my breast, kidney, and parathyroids.

Knowledge is power… especially in cancer.

Even if your cancer doctor doesn’t know all this, they are trained to use meds and procedures. Meds and procedures can be very helpful much of the time.

We find that our cancer patients that survive and thrive for years, combine the best of both worlds, Western Allopathic Medicine along with Functional/Nutritional Medicine.

We recommend surgery, to get that tumor load out! But nutrition matters, even if your doc doesn’t know this. Remember, it is human nature to be “down” on, what we are not “up” on.

When I was diagnosed with my breast cancer almost 30 years ago (and have been on hormones for almost 27 years) my doctor said “Eat all the steak and wine you want, diet does not make a difference”. They said the same thing when they took out my kidney and its tumor.

But I already had a master’s in nutrition, which was how I first started out, after my degrees in Psychoneurobiology and another in Communication from the University of Michigan. I’d been reading for decades about the role of nutrition and cancer.

I go to docs for what they know, I appreciate the ability and right to have had a lumpectomy and some chemo (that is another story, as got Ukraine, a chemo from Switzerland), but I practice nutritional smarts outside of the orthodox “lines”.

Be well.

Dr. B.

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Reference:

Ketogenic diet promotes tumor ferroptosis but induces relative corticosterone deficiency that accelerates cachexia. Cell Metabolism, 2023; DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2023.05.008