A major key to a long and healthy life: fasting or a ketogenic diet

[ThePythonicCow]

Almost two years ago, Hervé posted the thread Ketogenic Diet Beats Chemo For Almost All Cancers.

The research continues to roll in. A ketogenic (high fat, low carb) diet is not just for cancer; it's also for most other chronic diseases that are our major killers, including heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. Our grain and carb based diet is the major cause of our poor health. Such a diet may be "good business", lots of cheap food with long shelf life, and lots of sick patients to keep the medical and drug companies profitable. But the evidence is becoming well known and compelling: Cut the grains and carbs way back if you want a good chance of living a long and healthy and mentally alert life. Switch to a high fat (various healthy fats) for one's main energy source.

It's time for a thread covering this topic again, from a wider perspective beyond just cancer.

I encourage you to listen to Dr Mercola interview Travis Christofferson on this topic:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=l5T25tJvFTI

[ P.S. - Dr Mercola's Youtube channel has been terminated in subsequent years. You can find the audio for his interview with Travis Christofferson at various websites, such as at: https://shows.acast.com/5eb9615d964d...99a5335aec0e29 . -- ThePythoniccow, 7 Sep 2023 ].

I am quite sure that Travis Christofferson, and probably Dr Mercola too, are on a ketogenic diet. They are good examples that one can be healthy and mentally sharp on such a diet <grin>.

Notice toward the end of this Mercola interview that Travis Christofferson says that excess glucose can directly damage cell mitochondria. It's the damaged mitochondria that switch to generating the enzyme hexokinase II form of hexokinase. Travis quoting Young Hee Ko at 1:05:27:

"If you give too much sugar to cells, they start exhibiting all the phenotypes of cancer."

Travis then goes on to describe his reaction to Young's (apparently not yet published) results

"So I was very surprised that glucose by itself, at least within that model, can start to shift the cell towards ... what it does is it upregulates the expression of this super important enzyme called "hexokinase II" which by itself is responsible for the Warburg effect and responsible for a large degree of the immortalization of the cancer cell."

As type 1 diabetics learn the hard way, controlling glucose levels in the blood is essential to health. If they do not methodically manage their blood glucose levels, then they suffer all manner of ailments, including blindness, circulation failing leading to limb amputations, cancer and heart disease.

I encourage you to read Travis Christofferson's important and readable book, Tripping Over the Truth: The Return of the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Illuminates a New and Hopeful Path to a Cure. This book is currently Number One in Amazon's Oncology section.

I also recommend David Perlmutter's two books Grain Brain and Brain Maker. Perlmutter goes into considerable detail of the importance of using some means, such as exercise, fasting and/or a low carb, high fat, diet to keep the body more ketonic, and avoid the wide variety of chronic illnesses caused by high glucose levels in the body. These two books are currently Number One and Two in Amazon's Nervous System Diseases section .

My summation of the science behind this:

Almost all cancers are caused by a metabolic, not a genetic, disorder. By that I mean, they are not caused by some damage to your DNA; they are caused by too much damage to your mitochondria, which are the cell's primary energy generator, converting glucose or ketones to the cell's primary fuel, ATP. The usual DNA damage comes later in the process.

It is well established that the cells in cancer tumors have significantly fewer, seriously damaged, mitochondria. It has also been suspected since Nobel laureate Otto Heinrich Warburg postulated what's called the Warburg effect in 1926, that cancer cells are voracious consumers of glucose, and that they produce lactic acid in large amounts. Studies in the last decade have demonstrated that the Warburg effect manifests in more or less all cancers. The common cause of cancer is metabolic, and manifests these metabolic changes.

The form (isozyme) of the hexokinase enzyme called "hexokinase II", which damaged cells start to generate, is the key initial indicator of a cell turned cancerous. "Hexokinase II" by itself causes a chain reaction of changes that convert the cell to an "immortal" (cell aptosis, aka cell death, disabled) glucose fermenting, lactic acid generating (which kills neighboring healthy cells or turns them cancerous too) cell. Healthy cells use other forms of the hexokinase enzyme, not the "hexokinase II" form.

That one variant of the hexokinase enzyme radically changes the cells metabolism ... the sequence of chemical reactions by which it carries out its essential operations. Healthy cells use other forms of the hexokinase enzyme; cancer cells use the "hexokinase II" form

Too much sugar, for too long, weakens the cell's mitochondria, causing the cell to convert its metabolish to generating the "hexokinase II" isozyme of hexokinase enzyme, which turns that cell cancerous.

Once a cell's metabolism has converted from using oxidation (whether ketones or glucose) to using fermentation, then this causes a cascade of other internal damage to the cell, including DNA mutations. The DNA mutations found in cancer cells are a side-effect, not the cause, in most cases.

If it's just a few such cells, and the body is healthy enough, that cancerous cell will be destroyed. We all likely have thousands of such cells in our body. But if some tissue of the body is weakened perhaps by some other injury or toxin, then the cancerous cells start to win the battle..

Ways to maintain the body's ability to manage its glucose levels:

• Intense exercise to burn off excess glucose
• Fasting, which periodically draws down existing glucose stores in the body (and therefore, in my estimation, thereby enables the body to continue to manage it's blood glucose levels better.)
• Ketogenic diet, which switches diet to fat/ketone combustion instead of carbohydrate/glucose combustion
• Caloric restriction ... chronic near-starvation

All the major chronic illnesses afflicting humans on a "modern" diet are significantly or substantially healed or impacted by this, including ,most cancers, heart and cardio-vascular diseases, hypertension, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, epilepsy, diabetes, ...

My personal immediate plans to adapt my diet:

Personally, I intend to do a one time fast of perhaps 5 to 7 days (I've never done a fast for more than a day before), and then switch to a ketogenic diet. Currently I am figuring out what foods I enjoy eating that fit in a ketogenic diet and acquiring them. I will already be comfortable with and accustomed to a high fat diet, before starting the fast. I am also about to get some blood tests done, so that I can get some before and after metrics. Life Extension Institute, lef.com, sells blood tests for those in the US who don't have their own regular doctor, which is my situation. I will also start tracking my weight, waist size, blood glucose (many economical means to do so, sold to a large market of diabetics), and blood ketones (more expensive ... but doable with good accuracy at home for about $5/test with a Precision Xtra meter and test strips.) The initial fast is supposed to be a good way to get one's body transitioning from carbohydrate/glucose based energy to fat/ketone based energy, except for a few places where the body still needs to use glucose. My diet will still have 10 or 20 % of its calories from carbs (difficult to get lower than that), and the liver will convert fat to glucose, when needed by some tissue that requires glucose. Apparently the brain runs just fine on ketones, once it has converted. The conversion process takes 3 or 4 weeks, but apparently once one gets through the first few days of the week long fast, the rest is easier.

As Dr Mercola points out in the above Youtube video interview of Travis Christofferson, ketones are much cleaner burning than glucose. When mitochondria burns glucose to make ATP, the reaction creates various Reactive Oxidative Species (ROS), which are harmful to the cell, and require anti-oxidants in ample supply to neutralize. Ketone burning has no such harmful by-products.

Here's a good article that explains in more detail why ketones are better than glucose for our primary fuel: A Metabolic Paradigm Shift, or Why Fat is the Preferred Fuel for Human Metabolism. As noted in one of the comments to this article, our heart actually prefers ketones over glucose, so long as it has a choice. I guess that's why, when I was a long distance running in my youth (long, long ago), even if I ran so far and hard that my leg muscles could barely walk, tired from the lactic acid built up, I never had to worry that my heart would get too tired to beat.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Paul (here)
The form (isozyme) of the hexokinase enzyme called "hexokinase II", which damaged cells start to generate, is the key initial indicator of a cell turned cancerous.

Here's the Abstract from the 2006 paper Hexokinase II: Cancer's double-edged sword acting as both facilitator and gatekeeper of malignancy when bound to mitochondria" by three key researchers in this area that provide more detail of this:

A key hallmark of many cancers, particularly the most aggressive, is the capacity to metabolize glucose at an elevated rate, a phenotype detected clinically using positron emission tomography (PET). This phenotype provides cancer cells, including those that participate in metastasis, a distinct competitive edge over normal cells.

Specifically, after rapid entry of glucose into cancer cells on the glucose transporter, the highly glycolytic phenotype is supported by hexokinase (primarily HK II) that is overexpressed and bound to the outer mitochondrial membrane via the porin-like protein voltage-dependent anion channel (VDAC). This protein and the adenine nucleotide transporter move ATP, newly synthesized by the inner membrane located ATP synthase, to active sites on HK II.

The abundant amounts of HK II bind both the ATP and the incoming glucose producing the product glucose-6-phosphate, also at an elevated rate. This critical metabolite then serves both as a biosynthetic precursor to support cell proliferation and as a precursor for lactic acid, the latter exiting cancer cells causing an unfavorable environment for normal cells.

Although helping facilitate this chemical warfare, HK II via its mitochondrial location also suppresses the death of cancer cells, thus increasing their possibility for metastasis and the ultimate death of the human host.

For these reasons, targeting this key enzyme is currently being investigated in several laboratories in a strategy to develop novel therapies that may turn the tide on the continuing struggle to find effective cures for cancer. One such candidate is 3-bromopyruvate that has been shown recently to eradicate advanced stage, PET positive hepatocellular carcinomas in an animal model without apparent harm to the animals.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Paul (here)
My summation of the science behind this:

Here's a talk by Thomas Seyfried with more detail into this science. Travis Christofferson, mentioned above, writes more for a wider audience, whereas Thomas Seyfried is more focused on the research details, especially in brain cancer. Christofferson gives much credit to Seyfried for the science behind his work.

Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D. presenting at the 2nd Annual Ancestral Health Symposium, January 2013: Targeting Energy Metabolism in Brain Cancer

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sBjnWfT8HbQ

Here's a Dr Mercola article, explaining Dr Seyfried's work to a wider audience: The Benefits of a Ketogenic Diet and Its Role in Cancer Treatment

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Paul (here)
I encourage you to read Travis Christofferson's important and readable book, Tripping Over the Truth: The Return of the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Illuminates a New and Hopeful Path to a Cure. This book is currently Number One in Amazon's Oncology section.

Here are couple of articles by Travis Christofferson that covers some of the same material as his book, that can be read far more quickly than his book:

• What Is The Origin of Cancer?
• Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

[ThePythonicCow]

This website explains how ketogenic diets address a number of major chronic illnesses and goes into details and recipes for such a diet: Ketogenic Diet Resource. The site is the work of Ellen Davis. She has a Master's degree in Applied Clinical Nutrition,

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Paul (here)
As Dr Mercola points out in the above Youtube video interview of Travis Christofferson, ketones are much cleaner burning than glucose. When mitochondria burns glucose to make ATP, the reaction creates various Reactive Oxidative Species (ROS), which are harmful to the cell, and require anti-oxidants in ample supply to neutralize. Ketone burning has no such harmful by-products.

A research paper from 2003 further highlights the harm caused by burning glucose, rather than ketones, as the body's primary source of energy. Glucose burning generates various harmful Reactive Oxidative Species (ROS), which may be the common cause of both diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as the other chronic illnesses that I have further documented above, such as cancer and various brain diseases, for example epilepsy and Alzheimer's. The paper is Is Oxidative Stress the Pathogenic Mechanism Underlying Insulin Resistance, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease? The Common Soil Hypothesis Revisited.

All those anti-oxidants that we've been encouraged to eat ... apparently the main oxidizers they have to counter-act are the ROS by-products of burning glucose.

A major cause of aging ... reduced mitochondria capacity ... may be caused by the ROS by-products of burning glucose, harming the mitochondria doing the burning.

Burning ketones instead, from a predominantly fat based diet, may avoid these problems. Ketone burning doesn't have toxic oxidizing by-products,

[ThePythonicCow]

Here's another paper, this one from 2014, that comes to similar conclusions. The paper is Long-term models of oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage in insulin resistance progression..

It's abstract reads in part:

=========

Oxidative stress, which develops through an accumulation of toxic reactive oxygen species generated by mitochondria, is believed to contribute to insulin resistance in certain tissues. We develop mathematical models of feedback between reactive oxygen species production and dysfunction in mitochondria to provide insight into the role of oxidative stress in insulin resistance. Our models indicate that oxidative stress generated by glucose overload accelerates irreversible mitochondrial dysfunction.

=========

Notice the part I marked with bold: "... oxidative stress generated by glucose overload accelerates irreversible mitochondrial dysfunction."

[thunder24]

what is everyone trying to extend life for?

[ThePythonicCow]

So ... the main cancer sequence is this:

1. When mitochondria burn glucose to make ATP, they create toxic ROS (oxidative) by-products.
2. These ROS by-products eventually destroy the mitochondria.
3. The cell then switches to the hexokinase enzyme called "hexokinase II", which in turn switches the cell to using fermentation to make ATP. Mitochondria are not needed for that. A cell without functioning mitochondria must switch to fermentation, or die for lack of its essential fuel, ATP.
4. Fermenting cells, using the enzyme called "hexokinase II", change into cancerous cells (multiply rapidly, never die, greedy for glucose to feed the fermentation, and killing healthy neighboring cells with the lactic acid produced by the fermentation.)
5. The random DNA damage seen in some cancerous cells is just part of the damage caused by the fermentation and its toxic by-products, such as lactic acid.

The main sequence for most other major chronic diseases starts with the same first three steps.

Burning ketones, which most cells in the body can adapt to just fine, stops this sequence at the first step - no toxic by-products.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by thunder24 (here)
what is everyone trying to extend life for?

This is not just about how many years we live, but how many years we are healthy, of clear mind and able to tend to our own affairs.

This is not just about my personal life, but is about working with others to understand how to live better, and to resist the toxic medical practices of the bastards currently in charge of main stream "medicine"

[thunder24]

dealing with someone who is dying of lung, liver and brain cancer at the moment i can tell you...goodluck, and quit breathing the air its toxic, that might help extend it...

[Calz]

I can chime in that I'm about 90% certain I cured myself of (male) breast cancer by this method.

I say 90% because I never confirmed getting or ridding myself of it ... why bother with western medicine as far as "maintenance"?

Couple years back I had pain and lumps in both breasts lasting several months.

I started with a 2 week fast (lemonade diet) and followed the advice in the book "The Cantin Ketogenic Diet" by Elaine Cantin.

After about 4 months I was fine. Have not noticed any reoccurrence since.

[Napping]

Some seriously shaky research trying to link carbs with cancer, I'm not buying that. I do certainly agree that our propensity to eat too much carbs and being sedentary slobs is highly correlated with a number of chronic diseases.

I've suffered chronic fatigue syndrome or something of its variety for many years and since reducing processed carbohydrate and commencing intermittent fasting I've noted remarkable improvements including improved clarity of thought, improved sleep patterns, refreshed sleep, marked increase in energy and labido and improved ability to tolerate exercise of any type.

I simply skip breakfast, drink a black coffee for morning tea, lime favoured soda water around midday followed by a protein and salad based lunch and a protein and salad based dinner. Limiting the processed carbs means I have no craving for them and are no longer ruled by them. I also do heavy weights as bouts of high intensity exercise, but only a couple of times per week.

At the end of the day if a fear of processed carbs causing cancer helps you to reduce their intake and gets you off the lounge, then great. I just see flawed evidence depicting that link. There's plenty of other worthwhile reasons to do it. Eg increased abdominal fat is directly correlated with cancer, as is being sedentary.

Matt

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Napping (here)
Some seriously shaky research trying to link carbs with cancer, I'm not buying that. I do certainly agree that our propensity to eat too much carbs and being sedentary slobs is highly correlated with a number of chronic diseases.

... chronic fatigue syndrome ... increased abdominal fat ... sedentary.

Yes, chronic fatigue syndrome and the similar "metabolic syndrome" are two of the many chronic illnesses mentioned in the material I linked above.

Yes, abdominal fat is also a symptom of this. The body deals for a long time with excess carb intake by storing it as fat. Like bears fattening up for their long hibernation, this can be a useful means of surviving cold winters. This is why I will "start tracking my weight, waist size" (as I noted in the opening Post #1, above).

Yes, intense exercise is one way to handle a high carb intake, that burns off the carbs, instead of storing them. Such does cause tissue damage, both from the physical activity itself, and from burning glucose in the tissues of the joints and muscles doing the exercise. But one can remain quite healthy and alert for a long time this way, as the rest of one's body, not directly involved in the activity, enjoys a low carb, more ketogenic, environment.

If however we don't exercise enough to burn off the carbs we eat, we then store the carbs in our cells. Eventually our fat stores become full, our insulin mechanism that enables this storage becomes overworked even as our cells become resistant to the increasing levels of insulin, and the burning of glucose (from carbs) rather than ketones (from fats, especially healthy saturated fats) has caused massive damage to our mitochondria.

Cells switch to fermentation when their mitochondria have become too devastated from burning glucose to continue producing (whether by burning glucose or burning ketones) the ATP our cells require.

As Otto Warburg observed almost a century ago, and as has been closely validated by research over the last decade, cell fermentation is a hallmark of almost all cancers.

In other words, everything that you report from your personal experience, as best as I understand your post, is entirely consistent with what I've been reporting in this thread.

Just add in a wee bit of research that has been well demonstrated over the last decade, and you can see where that leads to cancer, in (more or less) all its variant forms.

As best as I can tell, that wee bit of research, repeated by multiple researchers in multiple ways around the world, is not "seriously shaky" ... not even a wee bit shaky <grin>.

[Baby Steps]

THIS IS REALLY EXCELLENT

1. If one is over weight, then by definition we have excess insulin (due to insulin resistance) that stimulates excess fat deposition. The insulin resistance is partly a chromium/vanadium deficiency, and partly that the cells cannot import glucose due to the receptors being clogged with fat. The body's response is to make more insulin, but due to the resistance, blood glucose is over the top. I believe ketosis is the key to reversing this as it gets us off the glucose/fat merry-go-round and increases glucose sensitivity.
2. Excessive blood glucose helps cancer cells to thrive, it may give them the edge over the immune system.Any strategy to maintain lower blood glucose will assist, so any weight loss/anti diabetes regime may help. Metformin is being looked at:

https://www.mdanderson.org/publicati...in-cancer.html

Cinnamon is cyto-toxic to cancer cells & assists with glucose uptake (I wonder if that is a coincidence?)

3. There has been research indicating that a crash diet for a brief time can reverse type 2 diabetes, because fatty deposits around the liver and pancreas are implicated

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/heal...in-a-week.html

4. I believe that oxygen is part of the complex. If the cells are drowning they resort to anoxic fermentation of glucose.

http://drsircus.com/medicine/cancer/...cer-growth-are

So strategies to get tissue oxygen levels up, starting with a brisk walk might be good.

5. Research suggests that cancerous cells can revert if the mitochondria can be re-activated.

PQQ with coenzyme Q10 are very good for mitochondria.

http://doctormurray.com/pqq-the-next...ent-superstar/

6. A brief fast stimulates the body to replace/reproduce its mitochondria:

http://www.lmreview.com/articles/vie...e-up-part-III/

7. If you take in a glucose analogue molecule-that cells cannot use to metabolise - but recognise as glucose - this may be cyto toxic to cancer:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02618247

8. Insulin Potentiation Therapy is well established. You take insulin, blood glucose falls, healthy cells switch to ketosis, whereas cancer cells starve and are more vulnerable to the chemo (or any other cytotoxic agent)

http://www.euro-med.us/cancer-treatm...on-therapy.cfm

God bless

[ThePythonicCow]

On a side note ... one might wonder if we went heavily ketogenic in our diet and metabolism, then why could we not live forever?

There's at least one other, separate, process that limits our body's lifetime. As explained in Can Science Make Us Immortal? and Are Telomeres The Key To Aging And Cancer?, the telomeres which protect the ends of our DNA get shorter each time a cell divides. Eventually, the telomeres get too short, and too much DNA is lost.

(Though I disagree with the implications of the "and Cancer" part of that second article's title ... cancer is primarily a metabolic disease, not a genetic disease ... cancer causes more rapid shortening of our telomeres, and other random genetic damage due to the highly toxic environment within and around a cancerous cell. In other words, usually cancer causes damage to DNA, not the other way around. Actually, if you read what that second article says about telomeres and cancer, you'll see that it agrees with me.)

[TargeT]

Posted by thunder24 (here)
what is everyone trying to extend life for?

quality of life & life extension are two very different things


FWIW: I practice caloric restriction, for the past 8 months or so (since I was injured and not burning many calories) I've eaten once a day with maybe a light snack mixed in... I've slowly been loosing weight (fat for sure, but probably some muscle mass as well). And for me this works perfectly fine, plus it's a hell of a lot cheaper since I like to eat out... I just had a full panel blood test; my testosterone was a touch low (I tribute this to head trauma, not diet), but other than that my numbers were great (though at 36, this isn't too much of a surprise).

Logically 3 meals a day makes no sense to me if our body is designed to be a (or functions as a) hunter/gather consumer; ie periodic influxes of food, not consistent influxes; so I started periodically fasting & found it was easy to go a couple of days with out food once I got used to the "hunger discomfort" and now that I've set this pattern I don't even get very hungry at all & am satisfied VERY quickly when eating.



who ever said breakfast is the most important meal of they day was crazy.. I haven't eaten breakfast for years, and now I'm skipping lunch or dinner too (I avoid sugar as much as possible, and grain... well grains are really hard to avoid, I'm not the best at that).

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Baby Steps (here)
Metformin is being looked at

Here's another article on metformin (which I found in the footnotes of Travis Christofferson's "Tripping over the truth" book): Metformin and Cancer.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Baby Steps (here)
3. There has been research indicating that a crash diet for a brief time can reverse type 2 diabetes, because fatty deposits around the liver and pancreas are implicated

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/heal...in-a-week.html

That article says they are reversing type 2 diabetes by restricting calories to 600 ... which is a very low level and would be difficult for most patients to sustain over a long time.

I wonder if they could get similar results by restricting calories from carbohydrates to 600, but allowing unlimited, high quality, saturated fat calories. That would be much easier to sustain over a long time.

[Baby Steps]

Posted by Paul (here)

Posted by Baby Steps (here)
3. There has been research indicating that a crash diet for a brief time can reverse type 2 diabetes, because fatty deposits around the liver and pancreas are implicated

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/heal...in-a-week.html

That article says they are reversing type 2 diabetes by restricting calories to 600 ... which is a very low level and would be difficult for most patients to sustain over a long time.

I wonder if they could get similar results by restricting calories from carbohydrates to 600, but allowing unlimited, high quality, saturated fat calories. That would be much easier to sustain over a long time.

Hi, I have to fall back on personal experience there, I started getting high morning sugar readings 5 years ago. I have been killing the carb cravings off with fat, & it has done the trick. Touch wood.