Ketogenic diet and cancer Thomas Seyfried, PhD is widely regarded as one of the leaders in the world in the research field of ketogenic diets and cancer. Below is a link to a very recent interview where he shares some of his current views. Some interesting points to remember. http://www.townsendletter.com/Jan2014/warburg0114.html The current view now, without any question, is that cancer is a genetic disease. If you go on the National Cancer Institute website or you read any of the major articles published in Nature and Science, often the articles will start with, "Cancer is a genetic disease." I think that this has become dogma. It turns out that the oncogenes are responding to the abnormal metabolism of the cell and we were able to show this. It is actually the abnormal metabolism of the cell that's dictating the genetic mutations. This is where my book challenges the field. It provides credible scientific evidence that seriously questions the notion that cancer is a genetic disease. And I think you are not going to make major advances in the field of cancer until this becomes more widely recognized. We gave animals unrestricted ketogenic diets and the tumor cells grew just as fast, or even faster sometimes, than a standard high-carbohydrate diet. So we said, what's going on here? There's a diet with zero carbohydrate and the animals are eating as much as they want and when we looked at their blood, their blood sugars were very high. So it turns out if you eat large amounts of fat in a ketogenic diet you get insulin insensitivity, which then increases the level of sugar, and the cancer cells are fat and happy using this. So you have to restrict the diet. There are some people out there, like any media thing, they'll say, "Oh, the ketogenic diet cures cancer." We know there's no evidence for that. We haven't used it long enough to know if anybody is going to be cured from cancer using a ketogenic diet. All we can say is that the ketogenic diet has the potential to arrest the growth of the tumor.
