Page 28Just to emphasize my point about the two approaches working synergistically,
I’d like to report to you a paper published only recently. It was a very significant
study which shows that fasting may improve cancer response to chemotherapy.
Fasting seems to help protect healthy cells and help them become as much as 5
times more resistant to chemo than the cancer cells.
It’s only an animal study but is nevertheless significant, because it backs up
everything we alternative doctors have said is critical about diet and cancer.
Stressful foods help the cancer; a good diet holds it back. Fasting has been
shown to be beneficial for humans with cancer.
Chemotherapy, of course, kills at least as many healthy cells as cancer cells
(including killing cells of the immune system and so paralyzing the fight-back).
But inducing temporary starvation increases the cells’ resistance to stress,
which may allow doctors to use higher doses of current cancer chemotherapy
treatments to make them more effective.
In the study, published in the March 31 2008 Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, researchers studied the effects of starvation on cancerous
and normal cells. First, they induced a starvation-related response in yeast cells,
which made them 1,000 times more protected than untreated cells.
Then, they tested the effects of fasting on human and cancer cells in a test tube
and in mice. The results showed starvation produced between a twofold and
fivefold difference in stress resistance between the normal, starvation-treated
cells and normal cells.
In tests with live mice, of 28 mice starved for 48-60 hours before chemotherapy,
only 1 died (less than 4%). Of 37 mice that were not starved prior to treatment,
20 mice died from chemotherapy toxicity (over 50%).
Why is this important? Well, there’s nothing wrong with chemo, in principle. It’s
just that it kills good cells at about the same rate as bad cells. It’s VERY toxic.
But if we could increase what is called the therapeutic margin (the difference
between the dose which cures and the dose which kills), then all of a sudden it’s
a completely different game against cancer.”
We don’t yet understand what fasting works so well. Researchers believe
genetic cues prompt starved healthy cells to go into a hibernation-like mode that
produces extreme resistance to stress (chemo is stress). But cancerous cells
don’t obey those cues and remain stuck in growth mode.