[...] It seems logical that our own bodies burn our own stored fat with no ill effects. So eating that same fuel (fat) should be just dandy as well. Have you run this by a bio-chemist or such? Maybe Dr Mike Eades has a take on this. … [...]…

I found out from Richard at Free The Animal that Dr. Mary Vernon had explained the same concept some time ago — all diets are high-fat diets once you start burning your own fat.

I’m sure there are other websites to visit on the ‘net, but right now I seem to be glued to yours! I have just gone through a one-man 14 month battle with the NZ drug agencies, Pharmac and Medsafe, over the supply of Levothyroxine… so I’m hesitant to jump down their throat too quickly regarding ’statins’ - at least until their wounds have healed. I won, they lost - sh*t happens.
The statin battle will be huge. The included link is commentary from our New Zealand Medical Journal http://www.nzmj.com/journal/119-1236/2033/ I read it with total frustration and much hair pulling, then I read the “Potential conflicts of interest” near the bottom of the page… and everything fell into place. The only fair commentary can be found in paragraphs 2 and 3, under the heading, “Pharmac’s Failures”.

Again, thanks for your spirited commentaries. You provide much inspiration.
Allan Campbell
p.s. isn’t it time your show went on the road? I can almost guarantee packed houses in NZ!
I’ve thought about the lecture circuit; sounds like fun. Still waiting to see what kind of coverage we get for the film world-wide before making that plunge. Then, of course, I’ll have to figure out how to get started.

It would seem there would be precedent for such a test given the early respect for the Warburg hypothesis, though the general reluctance of funding for anything going against low fat dogma, it may be a while before we see it.

Nonetheless, it would seem that there is strong evidence of cancer restriction from carb restriction. I don’t think it can CURE cancer, though anything that halts its spread and increases the efficacy of anticancer should get investigated. It would be a relatively cheap trial to run at that, given the compliance costs of pharmaceuticals these days. While it may be unpalatable, I should think that the FDA should be much more inclined towards less paperwork for diet changes than experimental drugs.

Cool idea. But it’s hard to get funding in the U.S. for a study that won’t eventually sell something … drugs, whole-grains foods, etc. The FDA approves pharmaceutical research, but the drug companies pay for it.

Love to see it done, though.

Many of the metabolic enzymes are bound to membranes, and enzyme turnover is high. That is, enzymes are constantly broken down under normal conditions. Their synthesis is promoted under the right conditions. This is how the body makes sure it has the right amount of enzymes.

Under fasting, all of the glucose metabolising enzymes would be degraded. Presumably the body would be metaboilising fat stores so there would still be a level of fat metabolising enzymes present.

Therefore the “fasted state” would be a state in which the glucose metabolising enzymes are not present. This affects the type and rate of compound uptake into the cell. Of course cancer cells would not have the same chemistry, and gives a point of difference for partitioning in the body, resulting in higher efficacy for particular drugs that exploit this. Where I would see this working is in non-electrolytic aqueous solutes (e.g. glucose and mustard agents), so the cancer cells take up the mustard agent preferentially. Mustard gases act pretty indescriminately once inside a nucleus so I should suspect it is uptake that is affected.

So I would be interested to know the case/control diets for this study, whether they had a control diet. Furthermore it would be interesting to see whether similar results would be seen in a diet where calories come from fat.

So would carbohydrate restriction produce a similar environment, then? Reducing the activity of glucose-metabolizing enzymes, etc?

It seems incredible to me that the Warburg hypothesis, which has been around for nearing a century, hasn’t been more widely applied. How could something that makes so much sense not be more aggressively pursued and researched? But you suggest it to people, and they look at you like you’ve got three eyes or something. But this isn’t even the worst thing. Given our culture’s nutritional climate, I can understand that people might have some (misguided but honest) reservations about a high-fat diet for treating cancer. But the real shame is that no one seems to even be taking the tiniest step in that direction — in other words, no one seems even remotely concerned with even limiting sugar, at the very least. I have some friends whose 7 year old daughter died of cancer a couple years ago, and I remember how they were searching SO hard for a “cure,” yet all the while would feed her candy, cinnamon rolls, etc. And out of all the doctors and all the hospitals they visited, NOBODY said anything. Nobody said, “Don’t do that.” It’s a terrible shame.

That is a shame indeed. And coconut oil, if I remember correctly, actually has anti-cancer properties. If you search the Weston A. Price site, you’ll probably find an article or two.

http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/04/will-the-blogos.html

Also, there’s something else, and it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Chemo is a war of attrition where you hope to kill off the cancer before you kill the host. But it’s a 1-1 deal: chemo kills both cancer and healthy cells about equally.

Turns out, however, that health cells in a fasted state (like a very hungry animal that needs to be at its best) are far more resistant to the ravages of chemo and they have achieved in vitro kill ratios of upwards of 30-1 on human cells. They’ve also tested it on rats with good results.

http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/04/counterintuitiv.html

Great stuff, Richard. Thanks for digging it up.

The smoking was his own choice and therefore his own fault, but I believe bad medical advice or at least lack of good advice led to his current sorry condition.

Truly enlightening in the most hilarious way possible. I had a lengthy discussion with a dietician friend, and she 100% agreed with you. She is angry as well, because she feels like her entire industry and 6 years of school have just been a complete waste.

Further, she evaluated my diet and discovered I get nearly 50% of my calories from fat, I eat steak, eggs, cheese, nuts, olive oil and drink whole milk daily, and I’m 6′3″, weigh 185lbs and am nearly single digit in body fat %. I eat 3400 calories per day and am highy active. I eat no grains and get all my carbs from veggies, fruit, and dairy.

I’m sending this to every person I know and even some I don’t.

Keep up the incredible work! I’m so glad I found this site, and BTW, I play your movie in the waiting room of my Physical Therapy clinic.

Believe me, I get angry about it too. That’s one of the questions the books on comedy writing suggest you ask yourself: what makes me angry?

Considering I’ve sat in waiting rooms and watched one pharmaceutical commercial after another being played on the closed-circuit TV, I’m delighted you’re showing Fat Head instead.

Oh, and thanks again for the helpful comments on Dr. Eades’ site about the whole “low-carb and thin people” thing.

I appreciate the compliments on the film and the post. It’s been 20 years since I’ve written strictly for print — I was focused on standup comedy, then theater, then the film — and I’m happy to know people enjoy the blog.

On the low-carb and thin topic, my wife has been lifting weights with me this year, and she’s gone from 117 to 125 — all extra muscle, adding to her curve appeal. So even for someone whose body resists storing fat, the low-carb diet doesn’t appear to prevent a healthy weight gain.