Digest №8: How Ancestral Dietary Patterns and Modern Science Converge on Anti-Cancer Nutrition

Bless!

What is the optimal human diet? And what is the optimal anti-cancer diet? Those are certainly difficult questions to answer, but that shouldn't dissuade us from trying.

The available data by and large indicate, that our ancestors – hunter-gatherers (henceforth ‘HG’) – nigh on never experienced cancer.¹ Let me nuance that a bit. Cancer is exceedingly common in Western populations older than 60 years of age.² If HGs make it past the age of 60, we must thus expect them to exhibit cancer at least in some cases. The thing, is they do make it past 60.³ This means, the dearth of cancer occurrence in HGs can’t be explained alone by them simply dying too young to ever get it.

So, what could be the reason for their low cancer incidence?

HGs eat a diet comprised of wild game, fish, tubers, herbs, roots, berries, nuts, and fruits. Mind, that the wild tubers, herbs, roots, berries, and fruits they eat are vastly different from the high-carbohydrate cultivars we use. The most obvious difference to the modern Western diet is, that such HGs never eat cereal grains or lentils.^4–5 Whilst fat and carbohydrate consumption does change with the environment, stimulation of insulin secretion is exceedingly limited either way and hyperglycaemia is unheard of.

This doesn’t mean, that the Palaeolithic diets eaten by HGs is perfect by any means, but our physiology is far more evolved to handle them. And the fact, that cancer is practically absent amongst HGs, should inform us, that their diets are simply superior to ours. Keep in mind, though, that the Inuit eat nigh on 100% of their calories in the form of animals, and that the Hadzabe would probably do something similar, if not prevented from hunting their traditional preys of Giraffe, Buffalo, and Elephant by Tanzanian law.^6–8

But why are they superior in terms of generating cancer? And is there perhaps a modern diet we can use to garner similar effects?

To answer that, let’s look at one study of cancer patients – 37 of which were eligible for inclusion in the study results – where adherence to a ketogenic diet, led to markedly improved average survival duration and rate of complete remission.⁹ A ketogenic diet is a dietary pattern, which puts the user in the metabolic state of ketosis, where the liver produces and releases ketones, glucose, and free fatty acids into the blood to supply the cells of the body with energy.

Patients were hereby split into two groups by the duration of their adherence to a ketogenic diet. If they adhered to a ketogenic diet for shorter than 12 months, they were put in one group (‘short group’), and if they adhered to a ketogenic diet for 12 months or longer, they were put in another group (‘long group’) for analysis purposes.

After three and a half years, the entire short group had perished, safe for one patient, who made it far longer (Figure 1, red line.). In the long group 47.6% of the patients were still alive and well at the eight-year mark (Figure 1, blue line). And even those of the long group, who were lost to this world, lived far longer on average than those in the short group.

Far longer.

These results held true, even when adjusting via inverse propensity score–weighting (which attempts to correct for Simpson’s Paradox, whereby population trends of an intervention can be obscured or even inverted by the arbitrary choice of research subject groupings).¹⁰

The beneficial effect of a ketogenic diet for cancer patient survival is further supported by a host of other data.^11–12 Keep in mind, that this by no means makes a ketogenic diet anything close to curative for cancer patients. A ketogenic diet alone doesn’t necessarily hold therapeutic weight, simply because it doesn’t actively attack cancer, but simply creates a less cancer-friendly body-internal environment. 

This means, that other measure must be taken aside from establishing a ketogenic diet, if you want to have any hope of a longer and better life. Nonetheless, a ketogenic diet seems to empower other therapeutics to work more effectively and efficiently in dispatching cancer cells.

This is its major benefit. It doesn’t make you entirely inhospitable to cancer, but it does make you less hospitable to them, which is already a great benefit.

Furthermore, it needs to be said, that a ketogenic diet doesn’t help all patients.¹³ In the cited study, cancer cells, which could utilise ketones, were able to proliferate in low-glucose medium, when the medium was supplemented with the ketone β-hydroxy butyrate. Nonetheless, even in these ketone-utilising cancer cells, their rate of proliferation was lower in a ketone-supplemented low-glucose medium than in a normal high-glucose medium. Non-ketone-utilising cancer cells, on the other hand showed no increase in proliferative rate upon supplementation of low-glucose medium with β-hydroxy butyrate.

For us this means, that whilst a ketogenic diet isn’t perfect, low glucose status and ketone availability lead to lower proliferative rates in cancer cells across the board, when compared to high glucose status.

What’s more, a ketogenic diet has also been found to broadly increases metabolic health, wellbeing, and general quality of life, whether you’re a cancer patient or not.^14–15 Furthermore, ketogenic diets improve autophagy induction and mitochondrial glutathione levels.^16–18 Both are essential to health, as autophagy breaks down and recycles old and damaged cellular components, whilst glutathione acts as a powerful cellular anti-oxidant.^19–21

This should make it obvious just how powerful a ketogenic diet is in supporting the health and longevity of cancer patients and healthy individuals alike.

I don't think we've yet arrived at a definitive answer of what the optimal diet is – neither for general human health, nor for anti-cancer effects –, but what we do know is that a ketogenic diet is monstrously outperforming the grain-based standard Western diet.

And for the time being that shall be enough. Every improvement one step at a time.

God bless, Merlin L. Marquard

P.S.: Should you ever need help, you know where to reach us.