Keto Clarity: Your Definitive Guide to the Benefits of a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet (50 page)

Ketones are excellent fuel for our mitochondria, and for most of human history we were in ketosis for much of the year. Certainly every winter we were in ketosis. Our diet was also much lower in carbs. Therefore we were consuming either more protein or more fat in the diet, or both. We did not have high-glycemic food in our diet. We were eating low-glycemic green, leafy vegetables, tubers (most often raw), only occasional fruit, and more meat, and fat in the meat.

– Dr. Terry Wahls

In the last two chapters, we’ve looked at conditions for which there is strong evidence and good evidence that a ketogenic lifestyle may be beneficial. But just because there isn’t any research to speak of on other conditions in relation to ketosis doesn’t mean ketones won’t benefit these health problems as well. There is hope for people dealing with many other health issues that a natural, nutritional solution may exist for their conditions.

We want to explore with you some emerging areas of research and how a low-carb, high-fat diet could be used to improve health. No solid claims have been made for treating any of the health conditions in this chapter with a ketogenic diet, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see a major paradigm shift in the way these diseases are treated in the near future. Are you ready to see what’s coming down the pipeline?

Cancer

A ketogenic approach is the single most effective dietary treatment for any and all forms of cancer and other immune-related illnesses. By robbing cancer of its needed fuel source (sugar) and relying on ketones and free fatty acids instead (which cancer cannot make use of), you can create an internal and epigenetic environment conducive to keeping cancers under control or even preventing them from being able to get a foothold in the first place. With a growing level of environmental toxicity and skyrocketing cancer rates, this particular way of eating could just be the best preventative foundational approach of all.

– Nora Gedgaudas

Cancer cells like to use glucose as a fuel; in fact, doctors inject tagged glucose into cancer patients to find the exact location of tumors. Shouldn’t it tell you something that doctors look for cancerous tumors by using sugar to make PET scans light up like a Christmas tree? The theory behind using the ketogenic diet to treat and prevent cancer is that cutting out glucose starves the cancer cells, and it has been shown to produce benefits in animal studies. Unfortunately there have not been any human clinical studies yet.

However, a story published in
Time
magazine on September 17, 2007, entitled “Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer?” examined the idea. Featuring researchers Dr. Melanie Schmidt and Dr. Ulrike Kammerer, both from the University of Wurzburg in Germany, the article discusses the work of a German Nobel Prize–winning scientist named Otto Warburg, who in 1924 posited that “the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.”

I’ve worked with a woman who had stage IV cancer. She was told to go see her family and friends right away, because she had less than three months to live. That was six months ago, and now she has a clean bill of health and is planning a two-month vacation in Europe. The power of ketogenic diets is simply astonishing. More accurately, it’s astonishing to see how poisonous carbohydrates can be.

– John Kiefer

Warburg’s hypothesis goes like this: remove the sugar (and the carbohydrates that turn to sugar in the body), replace it with more fat, and the cancer cells will die. It was a brilliant idea that was lauded by the scientists and health advocates of his day, but somehow today it has been largely forgotten and is often ridiculed as too extreme.

Not by Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Kammerer, though.

They’ve taken Warburg’s lifetime of work and run with it. By removing sugar from the diet of cancer patients, can they stop the cancer from spreading? The results of their preliminary research treating five patients over a three-month period with a ketogenic diet were promising: all of them survived, their cancer either stabilized or improved, and the tumors either grew slower, stopped, or even shrank. With these results, Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Kammerer expanded their research, which we will be hearing more about in the coming years.

In a second study, published in the July 27, 2011, issue of
Nutrition & Metabolism,
they treated sixteen patients with advanced cancer with a ketogenic diet. Eight had to drop out of the study for a variety of reasons, but of the remaining eight, six saw improvements in their quality of life and a slowdown in the progression of their tumors. We need more curious researchers who are willing to use a high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet with cancer patients who have run out of other treatment options. Thankfully there are a few.

Neurologist Dr. Thomas Seyfried from Boston College has been doing some extraordinary work looking into a calorie-restricted ketogenic diet as a treatment for brain tumors. Although his research has only been in mice, he sees this as a “non-toxic approach to the management of cancer” for humans. His 2012 book,
Cancer as a Metabolic Disease,
should be required reading for anyone interested in the impact of nutrition on cancer. Dr. Seyfried’s work is paving the way for human research on a much wider scale.

Dr. Eugene Fine’s paper on treating advanced cancer patients received such a good reception because everybody intuitively understood its value and the study should have been done twenty years ago. Dr. Fine’s hypothesis was that if we think of cancer in terms of genetics, we can think of cancer cells as having evolved through the life of the individual, an individual whose system, in a modern setting, would be unlikely to have any significant level of ketosis. It would be highly unlikely to provide any selective pressure for adaptation to the use of ketone bodies as a fuel source. Incidentally, the patients who became stable or showed partial remission in his experiment had the highest level of ketone bodies.

– Dr. Richard Feinman

Another researcher looking at using a low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet with cancer patients is Dr. Eugene Fine from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. His RECHARGE (Reduced Carbohydrates Against Resistant Growth Tumors) trial examined the safety and feasibility of a twenty-eight-day ketogenic diet in ten cancer patients who had exhausted every other treatment option. Changes were monitored with PET scans at the beginning and end of the trial. The results of this small study were published in the October 2012 issue of the journal
Nutrition
. Four of the patients continued to have progressive disease on the diet, five stabilized and had no further progression, and one had a partial remission. Those who had the best metabolic results—their insulin went down the most and ketones went up the most—saw the best improvements in their disease progression.

Other researchers looking at this issue include Dr. Colin Champ, from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute in Pittsburgh, and Dr. Dominic D’Agostino from the University of South Florida. I wouldn’t be surprised to see even more researchers in the future look further into the ketogenic diet for treating what is arguably one of the most horrific diseases of our time. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the cure for cancer was right under our noses the entire time—a low-carb, high-fat nutritional approach?

Autism

Some children with autism seem to respond to a low-carb, high-fat and/or high–MCT oil diet.

– Dr. Mary Newport

A pilot study published in the February 2003 issue of the
Journal of Child Neurology
examined thirty children between the ages of four and ten who exhibited autistic behavior. They were put on the ketogenic diet intermittently for six months, with four weeks on and two weeks off. While not all of the children did well tolerating the low-carb, high-fat diet (seven of the patients dropped out immediately and another five discontinued after one to two months), most of those who stuck with it saw improvements in the parameters set out by the Childhood Autism Rating Scale. This study wasn’t spectacular by any means, but it did show some promise in using a ketogenic diet to treat autism.

Fibromyalgia, Chronic Pain, and Migraines

We have a grant pending to study a nutrient-dense, low-glycemic diet and a ketogenic diet for treating fibromyalgia.