One of the weapons I’m most excited about in this fight against cancer is my diet. We all know that overused quote but it sums up a lot of my approach.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Hippocrates
Luckily, real hard science supports this, too.
Healthy cells can metabolize both glucose and ketones. You guys know I’ve been a fan (but inconsistent follower) of ketogenic diets for a long time. What I only recently learned is that cancer cells can only metabolize glucose – using inefficient glycolysis, at that, even when oxygen is available for more efficient glucose metabolism. (Ah, and you thought you’d never need to use the Krebs cycle in real life.) We’ve know this since 1931 when Otto Warburg won a Nobel Prize for the discovery.
Step One, for me, is to starve my cancer cells by adopting a real ketogenic diet and keeping to less that 20g of carbohydrates per day. As an added bonus, the mere presence of ketone bodies hurts cancer.
In addition to ditching sugar and refined foods, I’ve cut out all meat (except occasional chicken stock – “bone broth” as the hipsters call it) and dairy. I’ve committed to intermittent fasting (which feels great!) and gone 90% raw (cooking improves the bio availability of anti-cancer compounds in some foods like turmeric and tomatoes). Instead, I’ve been filling my body with all kinds of good, organic, anti-inflammatory, immune boosting, anti-oxidizing foods.
A standard day consists of green tea and Chinese medicine until after work when I’ll make a yummy lemon-ginger-turmeric drink and sneak in some sauerkraut before fixing a giant salad packed full of leafy greens, raw garlic, kick-ass oils, flax seeds and nuts. Later in the evening I might have some warm stock or a mug of raw cocoa and mushroom extract. Maybe some blueberries depending on how many carbs I’ve had.
Ten days in and the feedback from my body has been overwhelmingly positive. Even Brad is enjoying the food. You know I love a good cooking challenge so it’s also been a lot of fun creating recipes where every ingredient is selected because it does something positive for my body. I’ll be sharing some here soon 🙂
1 comment
I can’t wait to see some recipes. We cook ‘keto’ every so often, so it will be interesting to see what you come up with. Dean is better at eating it than I am, but if Brad is enjoying it, maybe I can too.