Thursday, February 26, 2009

FAT AND CANCER

 

 

As some of you know, I have lately been trying to follow closely, the Dean Ornish, MD, approach to cancer lifestyle treatment, described in his new book, The Spectrum, especially after my CEA (Colon Cancer marker) started to inch up a tad two months ago. Dr. Ornish has shown conclusively, in good clinical trials, that his approach works for early prostate cancer, and he proposes that it will be equally effective for breast cancer. I think colon cancer is not all that different biologically from those other two, and so the program should work for me as well. The program includes exercise (I am going for 18METs per week--the amount shown in previous research to reduce colon cancer recurrence by 50%), meditation and stress reduction (I am aiming for an hour a day), and the diet. 

 

The diet is essentially a very low fat vegetarian diet. I have been on a pretty strict vegan diet (I have been eating some wild salmon) for the last 2 years, after reading the wonderful book The China Study by T. Collin Campbell 2 years ago, and I credit this as a big part of the reason for me having had such small and surgically available recurrences since then. I had not really been following the low fat part of the diet though, because this made the diet harder to follow, but since committing to the Ornish approach I have been doing a better job of it. So, you can imagine how excited I was when I read the following report of a new study that came out this morning. The title was: Excessive Dietary Fat Caused 300 Percent Increase in Metastasizing Tumor Cells In Animal Models. The link is: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225172639.htm  

 

Basically they found that eating a higher fat content diet caused the cancer cells to be able to separate from the herd and go wondering off for new living quarters (metastasizing), whereas on a low fat diet, they stayed put. And since it is metastasis that makes cancer so deadly, preventing this process is really a major benefit to us cancer patients. Wow!

 

Also, there has been a very positive side effect to the low fat diet that I didn't expect. Ever since all the surgeries on my colon and small bowel, I have been troubled by lots of diarrhea. This diarrhea leads to hemorrhoids and rectal fissures, and can be a literal pain in the ass! Well, that is all much better since cutting out the fat. Here is how dietary fat might be effecting this. When we eat fats, bile acids are dumped in the GI tract by the gall bladder. The bile is used to break up the fats (emulsify them) in order for them to be absorbed. The bile should then be reabsorbed back into the body in the last part of the small bowel, the terminal ileum. Unfortunately,since I have had quite a bit of that cut out every time they take more colon, and also since I have so little colon left, the bile is probably not well reabsorbed and just hangs around in the stool. This then causes more water to be pulled into the colon and leads to we docs call, osmotic diarrhea. Also, the unabsorbed bile itself is probably directly irritating to the rectal tissues. The good news is that this has gotten MUCH better since cutting back on the fat, and having this problem get better, certainly makes following this part of the diet a lot easier.

 

I wish I had started on this sooner, but, of course, that isn't possible. It is nice though to get some confirmation that what I have been doing, is actually helpful. Hopefully, when I get my next PET/CT in a month or so, we still won't be able to see any cancer spots anywhere in my body. What a lovely thought.

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