Tag: cancer

What’s So Bad About Sugar, Anyway?

And what does it have to do with cancer, or the risk of cancer?

There have been many theories about how cancer originates in the body.

Dr. Thomas Seyfried of Boston College published the theory that cancer begins with chronic metabolic dysfunction — that is, mitochondria within a cell not being able to create good energy for a prolonged period of time — which causes them to begin creating energy through a fermentation process rather than through oxidative phosphorylation, often called OxPhos (Seyfried & Chinopoulos, 2021).

This is the key difference between healthy cells and cancerous cells: healthy cells use oxygen to create energy, while cancerous cells have reverted to an easier, ancient way to create energy (possibly from before Earth had a proper atmosphere) through fermentation of glucose (sugar) and an amino acid called glutamine.

This difference in mitochondrial function links all cancers together, regardless of which organ it appears within.

We have known this for a while. Did you know that PET scans, widely used to seek out and image cancerous activity in the body, are taken after a person ingests a sugary dye? The sugar (glucose) goes straight to the hungry cancer cells, carrying the dye that is visible to the scanner.

Why does mitochondrial dysfunction happen?

One reason why mitochondrial dysfunction happens is simply the presence of too much sugar and simple carbohydrates in a person’s diet.

These need very little digestive breakdown and go straight to the mitochondria as glucose molecules.

The mitochondria become overwhelmed with the amount of glucose they are being asked to process. They bog down and ask for help from the pancreas and insulin. They push the remaining glucose out into the blood as a sticky residue.

Have you ever felt tired, sluggish, and slow after a big meal or too many carbs? Food coma?? That is an indication that your cells are overwhelmed. You’re in a glucose storm, and your body is suffering.

This leftover glucose in the blood sticks to your hemoglobin, or red blood cells. This is the residue measured by a Hemoglobin A1C test.

TedX Tampa Bay

Back when I was doing my deep dive into fasting, I stumbled upon this video. It caught my eye because Tampa is my home, and USF is my alma mater. Go bulls! 🤙

He cites Dr. Otto Warburg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1931 when he discovered that cancer cells create energy differently than healthy cells. Because of their damaged metabolic process, cancer cells require a lot of glucose, don’t use oxygen, and can’t switch over to using ketones (stored fat) for energy like healthy cells can. 

He also notes Dr. Thomas Seyfried of Boston College, who has continued Warburg’s work and is doing his best to shout from the rooftops, “Cancer is a metabolic disease!” … though the average oncologist probably hasn’t heard the news yet.

He goes on to discuss the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy to damage cancer cells and hasten their demise while not damaging healthy cells.

He ends with a hopeful message and challenge to other researchers: “Can we manage cancer with non-toxic strategies?”

This video was recorded 10 years ago, and sadly, I have seen many people suffer and die from cancer in that time, but I haven’t seen any of them change to a keto diet or use hyperbaric oxygen.

Have you?

Just two months ago, a new paper was published by D’Augustino, along with others. The paper cites Seyfried’s research and proposes a very different approach to cancer therapy:

Targeting the Mitochondrial-Stem Cell Connection in Cancer Treatment: A Hybrid Orthomolecular Protocol

It involves vitamins C and D, zinc, hyperbaric oxygen, a keto diet, and a couple of anti-parasitic drugs.

I fear that this paper will not be taken seriously because it includes ivermectin, a drug that has the power to divide people along political lines.

Most folks don’t know that it is currently used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. And of course, we give it to our pets in the form of heartguard every month. ❤️ 🐩 🐕 🐈‍⬛ 🐈 ❤️

Symptoms

In 2018, we moved from Florida to New York. A lot of things changed, from the water to the weather, the pollen, the food, the amount of sunlight, noise levels, stress levels … everything, really.

I started getting what I now call “6 hour colds” in the spring of 2019. I’d feel a tickle in my throat or cough or sneeze, go take a nap, and then wake up feeling fine. I wouldn’t get sick… not for more than 6 hours anyway. It was weird, but really, I didn’t think about it much. Who‘s going to complain about not getting sick?

I also started to notice that, after a lifetime of asthma, hay fever, and allergies, mine had gone away. In Florida, I could go through a jumbo box of Kleenex in a couple of days. In New York, my husband and son were having allergies, which they rarely had in Florida, and I wasn’t. Hmmm. Must be different pollen...

I mentioned earlier that I do some work for the American Lung Association, and a lot of it involves asthma training. I remember arguing over whether asthma was a chronic condition. I thought it wasn’t because, evidently, I had “outgrown” mine.

In early 2020, well, you know what happened. Covid! My family got it, but I didn’t. Hmm… I must be lucky, or maybe I’m one of those asymptomatic carriers.

In 2021, I went hiking with my kids at Letchworth Park, the “Grand Canyon of the East.”  It’s a beautiful place, and you should definitely check it out if you get a chance. We parked at the upper falls and walked down steep stone stairs to the middle falls, maybe a distance of a mile or so, mostly stairways but some flat land, too. I was fine on the way down. Getting back to the car was a real challenge, though, because those stairs were steep!

I was getting winded very easily and had to stop a few times. I had never felt like that before. When we got back up to the car, I let my daughter drive. I was too shaky and lightheaded to do it. I recovered after a bit of rest and was fine.

Later, knowing that I needed to get some exercise and build up my stamina, I joined a gym and started doing zumba and yoga regularly. Those hour-long classes never took me to that place of exhaustion I felt at Letchworth.

There were other odd occurrences, and I don’t know if they were symptoms of CLL or not.

It seemed like my hair was thinning, but then again, I was going through menopause and that’s fairly typical.

I gained weight and had less energy in the evenings, but that sounded like menopause, too.

Sometimes, usually after walking up 2 flights of stairs, I would see blue spots. When it happened, I’d just drink a big glass of water. I had never been in an environment like this before, with the heater on 5+ months of the year and a potbelly stove in constant use. It made sense to chalk it up to simple dehydration.

I smelled different, not in a gross way, but just different, more acidic. It motivated me to exercise more and sweat more. I also started going to a sauna in the cold part of the year, approximately once a month.

My armpits were puffy, which could have been from the weight gain.

In December of 2022, I got a mammogram, which revealed an enlarged lymph node in one armpit. It was monitored with ultrasound a couple of times in 2023 and seemed to be slowly growing.

So we did a biopsy, which revealed cancer markers. Then, a battery of blood tests to confirm the diagnosis.

And here I am…

What is CLL?

My cousin asked me some questions about CLL this weekend, and it took me a while to recall the answers.

I realize that I’ve been focusing on lowering my toxin load and risk factors and healing my metabolic functions (a positive thing for me, my family, and hopefully you, too) instead of focusing on my disease (a negative thing that I can’t change).

Which is actually good from a stress-management perspective. 🧘‍♀️

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is a cancer of the B cells, which are a type of white blood cell.

“Chronic” indicates that it is a lifelong condition, with no known cure.

“Lymphocytic” means that it involves a particular type of cell called the lymphocyte.

There are two main types of lymphocytes: B cells and T cells. B cells produce antibodies to attack bacteria, viruses, and toxins, while T cells destroy cells that have been taken over by viruses or become cancerous.

CLL is a dysfunction of the B cells.

“Leukemia” is a word for cancer of blood-forming tissues, including bone marrow. The word “leukemia” literally means “white blood” in Greek.

This is how CLL was explained to me by my doctor:

When a healthy person gets sick, the body sends out a variety of white blood cells to fight off the infection.

Some white blood cells are like army infantrymen — they go where they are told and do what they are told to do in order to fight the invader.

The B cell is like a Navy Seal. It goes in and locates the virus or germ, then rapidly tries a variety of ways to kill it. Once it succeeds in killing the invader, it sends a signal to the bone marrow, saying, “Make a million more cells that can kill the invader this way.” These cells are called activated B cells.

Once the invader is killed off and the virus or germ is conquered, there should be a signal that says a couple of things.

(I believe these are all sent by the B cell, but I’m not 100% sure.)

1. Thanks, bone marrow. You can stop making the activated cells now.

2. Thanks, activated cells. You can die off now. (This is called apoptosis, or “programmed cell death.”)

3. Thanks, immune system. You can relax now.

4. Let’s make some antibodies for future use.

So, in a person with CLL, these signals stop being sent. The activated B cells flood the bloodstream, and they don’t die off.

The very worst, most life-threatening part of having CLL is that those new antibodies are not being made. Thankfully, you still have the old ones that your body made when the B cells worked well.

My doctor told me that his little department of the cancer center lost the most patients during the covid pandemic, because this was a “novel” virus and most of them didn’t have antibodies similar to what was needed to fight the disease.

Another bad thing is that once you have CLL, you are more likely to develop another cancer. (It is closely correlated to skin cancer in men and women, and prostate cancer in men.)

The best thing about CLL is that it progresses very slowly. So you have a lot of time to make changes and figure things out.

You Ain’t Special

One of the first things you realize after getting diagnosed is that, unfortunately, everybody’s got something going on.

A friend of mine has Myasthenia Gravis. She just finished chemo for throat cancer. Now they’ve found a new cancer.

A neighbor is mourning the sudden loss of her husband.

A friend’s son just got married to a girl who had beaten cancer once. Now it’s back (they’re only 25!!! 😫).

Two of my coworkers have diabetes. Another just had to have her gall bladder removed. They are all younger than me (and it’s a small company, maybe 25 employees).

People used to say that “1 out of 4” people would have cancer during their lifetime. Now the rates are 1 out of every 2 men (50% 😵‍💫) and 1 out of every 3 women (33%), at least in developed countries. (In places where people eat traditional foods, the rates are much lower.)

So yeah, I’m not special. I’m just one of the gang now. The CLL gang. The cancer gang. The chronic disease gang. Dammit.

Really hoping that we reach a tipping point soon, though. A point where the average person gets angry and wants answers and results and change. Not ribbons and awareness, not a fun run, but actual results.

Maybe we could demand that farms stop spraying glyphosate.