By Dr. Marcel Hernandez, ND
- High sugar/carbohydrate intake ramps up insulin, a nutrition pump that some cancers use to drive rapid growth.
- Acid-forming foods: salt, sugar, sodas, and meat, versus alkaline-forming foods: plants. An acidic metabolic environment reduces oxygen saturation thus inducing hypoxia. Cancers thrive in an acidic and hypoxic metabolic milieu.
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Marcel Hernandez, ND Metformin Inhibits ovarian cancer cell growth, proliferation, metastasis and increases survival time, and turns off cancer stem cells in breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancers. So do berberine, curcumin, quercetin, the EGCG in green tea extract, and resveratrol.
- Alpha lipoic acid and cancer: ALA is an antioxidant, is hypoglycemic, and has mitochondrial and epigenetic effects. It modulates cancer stem cells, chelates heavy metals, increases glutathione and immunoglobulins, and prevents and treats chemotherapy neuropathy.
- Acetyl-L-Carnitine is a fat-soluble energy source for the mitochondria and brain. It is an outstanding adjunctive therapy for chemo, brain, stroke, and head injury. It is synergistic with Alpha Lipoic Acid for neuropathies and mitochondrial rescue and protects the heart from Herceptin.
- Bone marrow suppression is life-threatening and is common with conventional oncology therapies. Mistletoe is one of the best marrow support measures (can be self-injected at home).
- Tumor pseudo-progression: Any anti-tumor immune response can create the appearance of disease progression, either as tumor growth or the appearance of new lesions. Pseudo-progression doesn’t reflect actual tumor cell growth but may be misclassified as disease progression. Tumors may appear to grow, or new lesions may appear, when immune cells infiltrate the tumor site.
- Glutathione: Proven beneficial in pre-loading doses prior to radiation. Decreases post-treatment neuropathy. Studies show that glutathione is a promising drug for the prevention of oxaliplatin-induced neuropathy, and that it does not reduce the clinical activity of oxaliplatin.
- Cancer stem cells: chemotherapy and radiation, while palliative, will engender stronger cancer stem cells that are more likely to cause a recurrence of the cancer. The only way to deal with this unfortunate fact is to treat the patient with integrative therapies that will lower the likelihood of stem cell activation.
- Finally, how fasting helps weaken cancer cells. “Fasting makes it worse for cancer cells by generating an extreme environment with low glucose and growth factors and high ketone bodies, which weakens cancer cells. Each mutation in cancer cells makes them a little better at growing under standard conditions, but a little worse at surviving under extreme environments such as that caused by fasting.” – Valter Longo, PhD, Researcher at USC Norris Cancer Center
“Various forms of reduced caloric intake such as calorie restriction (CR) or fasting demonstrate a wide range of beneficial effects able to help prevent malignancies and increase the efficacy of cancer therapies. Whereas chronic CR provides both beneficial and detrimental effects as well as major compliance challenges, periodic fasting (PF), fasting-mimicking diets (FMDs), and dietary restriction (DR) without a reduction in calories are emerging as interventions with the potential to be widely used to prevent and treat cancer. Here, we review preclinical and preliminary clinical studies on dietary restriction and fasting and their role in inducing cellular protection and chemotherapy resistance.” PMID 27557543
These findings are just a small sample of the wealth of information presented at the conference. (To be continued.)
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