Cancer and Diet
I’ve been thinking about food and diet recently and bumped into this article from The Diet Channel: Guidelines for Effective Weight Loss and Weight Gain During Cancer Treatment.
According to the article, maintaining a healthy body weight is crucial when preparing for cancer treatment.
While a thin underweight body may not be able to tolerate cancer treatment, being overweight could increase the chance of cancer recurrence.
More than anybody else, a cancer patient’s nutritional and diet needs are complicated - it’s like walking on a very thin thread.
Lifted from Women and Cancer Magazine, the article discusses weight-can guidelines, tips and food choices specifically for cancer patients.
Tags: cancer-patient, cancer-treatment, diet-and-nutritionRelated Stories
POSTED IN: general commentary
2 opinions for Cancer and Diet
Making A Public Declaration
May 22, 2007 at 10:42 am
[…] not because of Gloria’s post about cancer and diet (though it could be). It’s just time for me to get back on the right track with what I eat […]
Gregory D. Pawelski
May 27, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Johns Hopkins says Epigenetics is proving orthodox oncology wrong about supplements
Research on epigenetics at Johns Hopkins is proving orthodox oncology wrong about supplements. Evidence from their research suggests that the epigenome can be influenced by the environment which means that epigenetic modifications that lead to carcinogenesis may be reversible by changing the environment.
What is meant by environment? The environment is the totality of surrounding conditions - the milieu of the cell. What affects the milieu of the cell? Toxins, viruses, carcinogens, diet, essentially everything that our cells are exposed to. Detoxification followed by the creation of a healthy milieu with appropriate diet and supplements benefits cancer patients.
Such a concept is heresy to the orthodoxy within the oncology community that determines research priorities. The viability of detoxification (removing toxins, viruses, carcinogens and other biological contaminants from the body) followed by improving what a patient consumes (organic, whole, vegetarian foods, vitamin supplements, etc.) as a cancer therapy has been summarily rejected by the cancer establishment for decades (most cancer patients are offered artificially colored, sugared and preserved foods during their hospital stays).
Despite the growing empiric and anecdotal data that demonstrate that these factors do play a role in distinguishing long-term cancer survivors, the orthodoxy within the oncology community has rejected such treatment approaches as worthless. Part of their reasoning has included that there are no biological mechanisms to support such a modality. However, epigenetics is providing a plausible biological mechanism.
Is detoxification and diet a viable cancer modality by itself or in combination with other approaches? There are many long-term survivors who swear it is and offer their existence as proof. What is clear is that our body and the environment are one, as epigenetics proves, the environment can effect how our genes work within our cells.
As epigenetics has become an accepted science perhaps it is time researchers took the next step and asked what role epigenetics may play in reversing cancer and what lifestyle decisions and exposures may impact such a role. Perhaps some resources focused on the mechanistic, reductionist and overwhelmingly failed gene therapies can be redirected.
Ting AH, et all., The cancer epigenome, components and functional correlates. Genes Dev. 2006 Dec 1;20(23):3215-31
Szyf M., Targeting DNA methylation in cancer. Bull Cancer. 2006 Sep 1;93(9):961-72
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