Diet and Cancer Video

My sister-in-law, Dawn, sent me this excellent video about diet and cancer. And not just because she has the same first name as the researcher, lol. It’s actually a very good video (a gem in a sea of terrible ones about the topic).

I recommend it for anyone interested in diet or cancer, and specifically how diet could impact cancer. (Thanks, Dawn!)

I especially like this article because it isn’t someone hyping a magic cure-all. The speaker is a doctor and researcher in the field, and she draws upon many scientific studies. And she doesn’t come to simplistic conclusions.

She carefully distinguishes when certain diets can help and when they can’t. For example, lowering carbohydrate intake can help some people with stage 3 colon cancer (which is what I have), but the positive results were found only for people who have body mass indexes (BMI) of over 25 (which I don’t).

She’s also a surprisingly entertaining speaker. It’s quite interesting. I watched it twice and I wasn’t remotely bored (of course it is a topic that is relevant to me).

My conclusion is that what would most likely be of use to me at this point is some intermittent fasting (which the speaker briefly addresses at the end of the video.) In hindsight, we probably should not have tried so hard to get me to eat frequently during the worst of my chemo treatment, when I didn’t feel like eating.

Going forward, I’m going to delay eating in the morning until close to lunchtime, in order to increase the length of time every day that I’m not eating (compressing my eating hours into a shorter length of time). I’ve done that before and it doesn’t seem to be too difficult. The only hard part is that I miss having milk and sugar in my coffee and green tea early in the morning. To have zero calorie intake, I need to drink my coffee and green tea black. Or wait until lunchtime. Bummer.

I’m also going to try occasionally doing a 24-hour fast, and see how I do with that. I haven’t tried that before.

The reasoning is that cancer cells fare much worse when faced with a lack of fuel than normal cells do. Normal cells just go into a non-dividing state and patiently wait until fuel is available again. But cancer cells continuously divide and cannot wait, and therefore have more trouble surviving in a low-fuel environment. So I’m going to starve those suckers out.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com