The Most Powerful Medicine
I just finished my breakfast of a grass-fed groundbeef burger and half a plate of cooked spinach. Seems pretty odd, doesn't it? Until recently, I hadn't eaten beef for 10 years unless it was put in front of me at Christmas. Yet here I am, eating it for any meal of the day, almost every day of the week.
So here's why. Anemia (low iron) is common with cancer and cancer treatments which basically means that the red blood cells have less oxygen-carrying capacity. Not good since most every cell in the body depends on oxygen.
After my surgery last summer where I lost a lot of blood and became anemic, my surgeon (rightly) told me to take iron supplements for a month. Which I dutifully did and even extended it another month just for good measure. I didn't know then that iron feeds cancer cells and I'll never know whether all that iron helped the cancer progress in the fall.
I wish there were some sort of clearing house for all this information. But there isn't. We who want to use nutritional, integrative, or alternative therapies to help ourselves have to find it. One way or another.
So, with all the volumes of research I've done so far on cancer nutrition, three things stand out as being really good sources of fuel for cancer cells:
Well, yes, except that sugar is the only one that can truly be eliminated (via not eating any type of sugar or starches - all carbs essentially) because our body doesn't need to eat carbs. We can make sugar (glucose) just fine without eating it.
Which means there's still a blood glucose issue because our bodies will work tirelessly at keeping our blood glucose as steady as possible -- especially for the brain's benefit. Since cancer cells have access to our blood supply, they have access to our blood glucose. This means that the sugar-eating cancer cells can't really be kept from eating sugar, but maybe can be controlled by keeping blood sugar steady with no insulin spikes at all. So as not to provide an extra little feast to those hungry cancer cells.
With iron and glutamine however it's a bit trickier. We need iron for the oxygen-carrying purpose (to live, in otherwords) and we need glutamine for muscle function, as a brain neurotransmitter, and to replace fast-growing intestinal cells -- just to mention a few of its important functions. We also absolutely need protein for just about everything in the body, and eating protein is where we get glutamine (one of the amino acids of proteins). The highest sources of glutamine are meat and dairy, but even plant sources contain glutamine.
So...how to cut out the cancer feeders iron and glutamine -- without cutting them out. This has been a recent quandry as I keep fine-tuning my anti-cancer diet. (More on the actual diet later.)
The answer (so far as I know now)....is to only eat them in food sources, in real food. With iron, for example, beef has the highest amount of "absorbable" iron. And spinach has the highest plant source of iron, even though not nearly as absorbable as from beef.
Heck, I learned this back in college getting my nutrition science degree. So when my hemoglobin dropped low back in December just before starting chemo, I started eating beef and spinach -- a lot of it. Before the next bloodwork (2 weeks), my iron was back up in the normal range.
Who says what we eat doesn't matter?
After that, I started monitoring my own labs (bloodwork) for everything that might possibly be helped nutrionally.
There was the potassium a couple months ago. It commonly drops low with cancer and during chemo (as do other electrolyes and minerals) and lots of people require potassium IV's. If the sodium(salt)/potassium ratio gets too messed up then fluids can accumulate in the wrong places (like abdomen and lungs). That's "malignant ascites" and it's only one of the bad things that could happen.
So there's no way I'm going to let my potassium drop. Although it started to. So my nurse told me to "eat a couple bananas every day". Bananas are one of the highest sources of potassium (also of starch and sugar, alas) and while I appreciated that she offered me some actual nutritional advice, I figured I could do better than that. So I started taking capsules of potassium. When it threatens to get into the low range, I take more, and it comes right back up. It's almost magical. Except it's not. It's just biochemistry.
Of course there are situations where one could take too much of something and upset the balance of something else, unknowingly. And that's exactly why, in many people's minds, food sources are the best sources. It keeps everything kind of balanced in a good way (most of the time). Turns out, vegetables and all plant sources are full of potassium so it's no secret, or shouldn't be, why many people with cancer heal themselves with lots of plant-based foods (like vegetable juices and vegan diets).
Coincidentally or not, a plant-based diet also does not provide a huge amount of protein, thereby further depriving cancer cells of another one of its favorite food sources (glutamine).
The only reason I'm not eating a vegan diet is because I have a blood cancer. Turns out, there's a metabolic difference between blood cancers (like lymphoma and leukemia) and tumor-type cancers (like prostate, uterine, breast, and lung cancers). Maybe I'll talk about this in a future post but for now I"ll just say that blood cancers do better with eating meat. Which I do, but everything else is pretty much vegetables!
"My oncologist says I can eat whatever I want" is a common statement from those with cancer. Yeah, mine says that too. Unfortunately, he doesn't know much about cancer nutrition. Why should he, he wasn't trained that way. As he was reviewing all the supplements I take a few months ago, he asked: "What does Vitamin C do?" I like the fact that he wasn't too arrogant to admit he had no knowledge of basic nutrition science or alternative nutritional therapies (e.g., that Vitamin C infusions kill cancer).
But not as much as I like the fact that my oncologist is an expert at treating lymphoma and leukemia, an expert on chemo drugs, and an expert with other cancer treatments like bone marrow transplants -- all things that could come in handy for me one day. Those are the things I depend on him for.
For all the rest, I depend on myself and others who have sought other ways to be helped even more. Afterall, if the medical world had all the answers, a lot more people would be healing (and surviving) from cancer, wouldn't they? And I'd happily do as little as my oncologist recommends.
I write all this because these are the things I've been wrestling with. I read cancer-survivor blogs, medical research papers (of which there are many on the topics of cancer and sugar, iron, and L-glutamine), lymphoma-survivor websites, and on and on. A vast amount of knowledge and experience is out there - and not all of it is useful so it has to be sifted through. I apply what I can to what I know about the body and how it works, and then what's doable for me. And then try some things.
Of course, diet is not the only important thing in healing cancer. The top four (in my way of thinking) are nutrition, optimized Vitamin D, daily exercise, and sleep/rest (which includes de-stressing and the relaxation response). More on these other things later.
If nothing else, my dietary interventions have kept me from needing any potassium or magnesium infusions, or being hospitalized, my nausea and other symptoms are fairly minimal in the scheme of things, and I've done pretty well so far during these treatments (so I'm told). Not that they've been easy.
Could it be true that what we put on the end of our forks matters most? "Food is the most powerful medicine we have", says Mark Hyman, M.D. I think I tend to agree. But then I would, wouldn't I, since I believe in the power of nutrition.
Aside from all of that, it's been a long month. I got the chest port put in (surgically) the day before the last round. I don't like it, but it's useful. I've had a fair amount of immune-activated body aching on top of the usual nausea, fatigue, and fuzzy brain. And my next infusion session is already this Thursday and Friday, March 20th and 21st. Alas, the long month is already over.
Thanks for reading,
Adele
I just finished my breakfast of a grass-fed groundbeef burger and half a plate of cooked spinach. Seems pretty odd, doesn't it? Until recently, I hadn't eaten beef for 10 years unless it was put in front of me at Christmas. Yet here I am, eating it for any meal of the day, almost every day of the week.
 |
| I snapped a pic of these UC Davis grass-fed cows last spring. They're probably part of an experiment. |
After my surgery last summer where I lost a lot of blood and became anemic, my surgeon (rightly) told me to take iron supplements for a month. Which I dutifully did and even extended it another month just for good measure. I didn't know then that iron feeds cancer cells and I'll never know whether all that iron helped the cancer progress in the fall.
I wish there were some sort of clearing house for all this information. But there isn't. We who want to use nutritional, integrative, or alternative therapies to help ourselves have to find it. One way or another.
So, with all the volumes of research I've done so far on cancer nutrition, three things stand out as being really good sources of fuel for cancer cells:
- Iron
- Sugar (in all its forms including fruits, and starches that digest quickly to sugar)
- Glutamine (an amino acid we normally need a lot of, found in protein)
Well, yes, except that sugar is the only one that can truly be eliminated (via not eating any type of sugar or starches - all carbs essentially) because our body doesn't need to eat carbs. We can make sugar (glucose) just fine without eating it.
 |
| Pumpkin pie, my favorite. No sugar of course. |
With iron and glutamine however it's a bit trickier. We need iron for the oxygen-carrying purpose (to live, in otherwords) and we need glutamine for muscle function, as a brain neurotransmitter, and to replace fast-growing intestinal cells -- just to mention a few of its important functions. We also absolutely need protein for just about everything in the body, and eating protein is where we get glutamine (one of the amino acids of proteins). The highest sources of glutamine are meat and dairy, but even plant sources contain glutamine.
So...how to cut out the cancer feeders iron and glutamine -- without cutting them out. This has been a recent quandry as I keep fine-tuning my anti-cancer diet. (More on the actual diet later.)
The answer (so far as I know now)....is to only eat them in food sources, in real food. With iron, for example, beef has the highest amount of "absorbable" iron. And spinach has the highest plant source of iron, even though not nearly as absorbable as from beef.
Heck, I learned this back in college getting my nutrition science degree. So when my hemoglobin dropped low back in December just before starting chemo, I started eating beef and spinach -- a lot of it. Before the next bloodwork (2 weeks), my iron was back up in the normal range.
Who says what we eat doesn't matter?
After that, I started monitoring my own labs (bloodwork) for everything that might possibly be helped nutrionally.
There was the potassium a couple months ago. It commonly drops low with cancer and during chemo (as do other electrolyes and minerals) and lots of people require potassium IV's. If the sodium(salt)/potassium ratio gets too messed up then fluids can accumulate in the wrong places (like abdomen and lungs). That's "malignant ascites" and it's only one of the bad things that could happen.
So there's no way I'm going to let my potassium drop. Although it started to. So my nurse told me to "eat a couple bananas every day". Bananas are one of the highest sources of potassium (also of starch and sugar, alas) and while I appreciated that she offered me some actual nutritional advice, I figured I could do better than that. So I started taking capsules of potassium. When it threatens to get into the low range, I take more, and it comes right back up. It's almost magical. Except it's not. It's just biochemistry.
Of course there are situations where one could take too much of something and upset the balance of something else, unknowingly. And that's exactly why, in many people's minds, food sources are the best sources. It keeps everything kind of balanced in a good way (most of the time). Turns out, vegetables and all plant sources are full of potassium so it's no secret, or shouldn't be, why many people with cancer heal themselves with lots of plant-based foods (like vegetable juices and vegan diets).
Coincidentally or not, a plant-based diet also does not provide a huge amount of protein, thereby further depriving cancer cells of another one of its favorite food sources (glutamine).
The only reason I'm not eating a vegan diet is because I have a blood cancer. Turns out, there's a metabolic difference between blood cancers (like lymphoma and leukemia) and tumor-type cancers (like prostate, uterine, breast, and lung cancers). Maybe I'll talk about this in a future post but for now I"ll just say that blood cancers do better with eating meat. Which I do, but everything else is pretty much vegetables!
 |
| Here's my take on one of the above grass-fed cows (a watercolor by me). |
But not as much as I like the fact that my oncologist is an expert at treating lymphoma and leukemia, an expert on chemo drugs, and an expert with other cancer treatments like bone marrow transplants -- all things that could come in handy for me one day. Those are the things I depend on him for.
For all the rest, I depend on myself and others who have sought other ways to be helped even more. Afterall, if the medical world had all the answers, a lot more people would be healing (and surviving) from cancer, wouldn't they? And I'd happily do as little as my oncologist recommends.
I write all this because these are the things I've been wrestling with. I read cancer-survivor blogs, medical research papers (of which there are many on the topics of cancer and sugar, iron, and L-glutamine), lymphoma-survivor websites, and on and on. A vast amount of knowledge and experience is out there - and not all of it is useful so it has to be sifted through. I apply what I can to what I know about the body and how it works, and then what's doable for me. And then try some things.
 |
| Haven't tried this yet. I don't think it's recommended as part of an anti-cancer diet. |
If nothing else, my dietary interventions have kept me from needing any potassium or magnesium infusions, or being hospitalized, my nausea and other symptoms are fairly minimal in the scheme of things, and I've done pretty well so far during these treatments (so I'm told). Not that they've been easy.
Could it be true that what we put on the end of our forks matters most? "Food is the most powerful medicine we have", says Mark Hyman, M.D. I think I tend to agree. But then I would, wouldn't I, since I believe in the power of nutrition.
Aside from all of that, it's been a long month. I got the chest port put in (surgically) the day before the last round. I don't like it, but it's useful. I've had a fair amount of immune-activated body aching on top of the usual nausea, fatigue, and fuzzy brain. And my next infusion session is already this Thursday and Friday, March 20th and 21st. Alas, the long month is already over.
Thanks for reading,
Adele
