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The Wellness Blueprint: With Dr. Caleb Davis
Welcome to The Wellness Blueprint with Dr. Caleb Davis, where we uncover the secrets to living a long, active, and pain-free life. Hosted by Dr. Caleb Davis, an orthopedic surgeon and fitness enthusiast, this podcast is your ultimate guide to musculoskeletal health, injury prevention, and wellness.
Dr. Davis combines his expertise as a shoulder and elbow specialist with a passion for empowering people to take charge of their health. From deep dives into cutting-edge restorative medicine to practical tips on avoiding surgery and optimizing recovery, The Wellness Blueprint offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to preserve their body and thrive at every stage of life.
Join us each week for professional guidance, fascinating medical discussions, and actionable strategies that help you move better, feel stronger, and stay functional for years to come. Whether you're an athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone looking to age gracefully, The Wellness Blueprint provides the tools to design a healthier you.
The Wellness Blueprint: With Dr. Caleb Davis
Episode 13: Slashing Sugar and Calories: The Cancer Prevention Playbook
Can reducing your sugar intake truly impact cancer growth, or is it just another dietary myth? This week on the Wellness Blueprint Podcast, we unravel the complexities behind lifestyle choices and cancer risk, focusing on the surprising potential of caloric restriction. Join us as we tackle the bold claims surrounding the ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, and the role of sugar in cancer management. We'll reveal how sugar reduction might slow cancer cell growth and discuss the nuanced relationship between obesity, insulin resistance, and increased cancer risk.
Our conversation doesn't stop at diet alone; we also explore the fascinating science behind fasting and its potential effects on cancer cells during chemotherapy. Learn how short-term fasting might protect normal cells, while the ketogenic diet could sensitize cancer cells to treatments. These dietary strategies aren't just theories—we dive into animal studies that show slower tumor growth with calorie restriction. However, we emphasize the importance of balanced nutrition and the risks of excessive caloric intake, regardless of macronutrient composition.
Finally, your hosts guide you through practical tips for making informed dietary choices that prioritize your well-being. From keeping a food journal to understanding the impact of hyper-palatable foods, we lay out a blueprint for a healthier lifestyle.
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Hey everybody and welcome back to the Wellness Blueprint Podcast. You may remember that last week we left off. We were talking about caloric restriction and high sugar diets and ketosis and the evil sugar research foundation, and we're just going to dive right back in and talk a little bit more about caloric restriction diets and what they can do to reduce cancer risks, and we're going to talk a little bit about fasting and intermittent fasting today as well. So let's dive right in. Nicole, are you ready? I think so. Let's do it. Let's do it. So we talk about sugar and sugar reduction diets, how they may slow the growth of cancer cells, but maybe there's not really any good evidence to show that it gets rid of cancer altogether. Do you remember that from last week?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay. We also talked about excessive calories in general, how they have a number of health risks. Regardless of what your macronutrient makeup may be, whether it's high in carbs, protein or fats If you're eating excessive amounts of food, it has health consequences, no matter what that breakdown may be. We also talked a whole lot about hyper palatable foods and how that may be the big cause for our huge spike in obesity and all of the health problems that we're having, which I would love to do a whole episode just on that, because it's such a fascinating topic and it's causing us so many health problems and downstream effects. Let's discuss some lifestyle factors alone that may shrink tumors or maybe even reduce the risk of developing tumors.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is a dumb question. Are all tumors cancer?
Speaker 1:Technically no. Okay, let's get in a little bit more technical descriptions, because cancer and tumor are not really specific. You can have aggressive cancers, you can have less aggressive cancers and you can have benign tumors. When someone says the word cancer, they generally mean malignant meaning. This is a tumor that will cause you significant bodily harm and usually will kill you if left untreated. Now there's less serious ones, like squamous cell. Carcinoma of the skin generally is not going to spread quickly or cause any significant systemic damage. It can usually be cut off or removed, even in a non-urgent manner, but if you literally left it alone for long enough it could kill you.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, remind me to tell you to look at this mole I have.
Speaker 1:I love being a doctor. People just want me to look at their rashes and stuff all the time. It's great. Yeah, no one ever tells you about that part. So some of the factors that reduce tumor growth regular exercise has been shown to slow tumor growth in mice models of breast and colon cancer and in human studies in the Journal of Clinic Oncology in 2016 showed that physically active cancer patients showed better outcomes and lower recurrence rates of cancer than their counterparts who did not exercise. So there are some just lifestyle things that we can do to reduce our risk of cancer or, if we're diagnosed God forbid that we can enhance our treatment.
Speaker 1:There is one thing I forgot to mention about the ketogenic diet last week. The ketogenic diet has been shown that people who have been diagnosed with cancer who go on a ketogenic diet. There are studies that suggest that it may sensitize cancer to chemotherapy, and that means we discussed that a lot of cancer cells need glucose to reproduce and spread. Yeah, so if you're cutting off the body from glucose, you may not necessarily be shrinking the tumor or killing the tumor. However, you may make it more susceptible to chemotherapy to kill the tumor. So there may actually be a utility to the ketogenic diet if you have cancer. Now, nicole hates the ketogenic diet, so for obvious reasons, I'm going to pray that she never gets cancer, although I was already hoping she wouldn't?
Speaker 2:It's really. I just really can't imagine giving up fruit. That's the thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, nicole does love to eat fruit. You know, an apple a day does not keep the doctor away, I just throw that in here.
Speaker 1:Fasting is a hot topic in nutrition and longevity. Intermittent fasting, meaning you only eat during certain times of the day, or even long-term fasting you may not eat food for two to three days at a time or, if you want to go real extreme, I've seen people go even longer. But I don't necessarily recommend that. I don't necessarily recommend fasting. We're just going to try to objectively talk about the data. Some short fasting meaning 24 to 48 hours has been shown to also sensitize cancer cells to chemotherapy while protecting normal cells.
Speaker 2:Wait, that's short-term 24 to 48 hours.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm always thinking, like you know, by the time I go to bed and then wake up, that's fasting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's all you can muster, huh.
Speaker 2:No, I I mean to be serious. Let's say, I go to bed by 11 pm and then I wake up around 7 am. I can generally wait until noon or so before I need to eat. It's easier for me to not eat if I haven't already eaten, but but if I have eaten breakfast then I get really hangry if I try and withhold eating later on in that day. So it doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Well, you're describing as really more of an intermittent fasting, though, where you do it on a daily basis. Yeah, so intermittent fasting would generally be more like you only eat from 2 pm to 8 pm, that's it. You eat all your caloric intake in that small window. Obviously, it varies. There's different protocols, but the idea is that you are only eating for a short amount of time. There's conflicting data on this. There's studies that show that you have improved weight loss with this technique and others that show it's comparable to other diet strategies.
Speaker 1:Again, my contention, my personal opinion, is that the reason people have success with intermittent fasting is because they're at work, they're at school and they're denying themselves I'm not eating during this time. A lot of people think that they can just live in moderation, and I'm not good at this. Personally, by the way, I do better on things like the keto diet or intermittent fasting, because I'm an all or nothing kind of guy. So if I tell myself I am not eating between midnight and 2pm, I will not eat, I can do that, but if it's like, oh, I'll just have one donut hole in the break room, not so good at that, I'm going to eat five. My contention is that the reason that this diet is successful is not because there's some magic to intermittent fasting. People can just follow the structure and it's really hard to eat 3800 calories in a six-hour window. You'll make yourself sick. So you're probably going to get closer to eating your actual recommended caloric intake during that window if you follow that structure.
Speaker 2:But can we talk about zombie cells? I'd like to wait to talk about that.
Speaker 1:Well, we can talk about zombie cells. What do you want to talk about?
Speaker 2:Okay, you said some figures have waited two or three weeks with their fasting. I had watched a couple episodes of the show Limitless that stars Chris Hemsworth, you know Thor, and so one of the episodes he's pursuing longevity and one of the episodes is about fasting and this one scientist posited that you had to fast for a minimum of four days. I believe it was, and there's something magical about that number that allows your cells to be depleted of glucose, maybe, and then they destroy the bad cells and it's like they eat zombie cells.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Can you tell? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 1:Well, I think zombie cells. It's like when you get bitten by a monkey and then 28 days later you have the rage virus and go bite people, right, that's're talking about yeah, for sure, or the cranberry song yeah, no, zombie cells.
Speaker 1:I don't know where that term came up. I don't know where that they came up with that term. But yeah, senescence just refers to deterioration with age. So it's a loss of a cell's ability to divide and grow. Senescence but? But the cells don't go away. So you have this accumulation of these senescent cells that are no longer dividing and growing, and cell senescence is a naturally cancer-protective mechanism in your body.
Speaker 1:Every time a cell reproduces and mimics itself and DNA copies itself over and over again in a normal cycle, that DNA has a chance of replicating just a hair incorrectly and then, if that one little DNA strand mimics itself incorrectly, it can lose a tumor suppressing gene here. It may lose a function here that causes it to become cancerous. So having an automatic off switch in human cells is actually supposed to protect you from cancer. So these cells can just upregulate themselves and continue to grow without control, thus becoming cancer. To me this is a newer concept. I didn't learn about this until maybe a year or two ago that these cells, although they're quiet or senescent, may actually still have an endocrine function, meaning that they're actually having a hormonal effect on your body and producing hormones in your body, or I should say, inflammatory effects on your body that could be causing you chronic health problems. The proposed mechanism you're talking about is that prolonged fasting up to four days in this particular instance may reduce the bulk of senescent cells in your body, causing all of this chronic inflammation.
Speaker 2:Because they get like wiped out or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a process in your body called autophagy, where it means it's eating itself.
Speaker 2:Hence the zombie cells.
Speaker 1:Well, it's eating the zombie cells. So I don't think that analogy works Okay. I think the term zombie cells came because the cells are there and they're dead, but they're still there.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:I think that's where the term zombie cells come from.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Autophagy just means your body is really taking out the trash. The theory, the proposed mechanism here, is that if you're constantly eating food, your body says, okay, I've got food.
Speaker 1:If you don't eat food. Your body has to get fuel somewhere, right, so it'll turn into itself and consume muscle, it'll consume fat, and that it breaks all that tissue down to create food for itself, and the idea is that this is a way that your body can then go clean up these senescent cells. People have supposed that these cells can signal oncogenes, which are genes that are actually linked to increased cancer formation, and that they also cause more oxidative damage where these byproducts of these cells actually induce DNA damage.
Speaker 2:Okay, but I thought you said earlier on that you didn't necessarily think fasting was helpful, but now it sounds like everybody should be fasting for four days.
Speaker 1:It's controversial, it's controversial, it's controversial. So this is one of those topics I hadn't really intended to talk about but since you brought up yeah, thank you very much it is highly controversial. I think there's a lot of promise in the studies and I think there's a lot of people in the whole longevity field that are talking about caloric restriction and fasting in general might reduce your risks of cancer, but I just don't think it's quite entered mainstream. I think we're getting there and I think there's a lot of promising areas of research, but I have a hard time talking about it very confidently until more research is done. There's this interesting thing in science where you may look at something in a vacuum, meaning we do an experiment and show this thing happened. What's about in vivo instead of in end? We'll talk about in vivo and in vitro. Familiar with the phrases.
Speaker 1:Well, I know in vitro fertilization, but so in vitro means in a petri dish outside of the body. In vivo means in the body.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So there's all sorts of studies that shows. In vitro studies show that this compound killed cancer, meaning you took a cancer cell, put it in a petri dish and you poured this compound on that and it killed the cancer.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:It's like okay, great, can you consume that compound and get it to the cancer cell in vivo in your body to get it to kill the cancer cell? And does that compound kill all your good cells too? That's the question. So you can say, okay, your body does autophagy and kills some of these cells. If you apply that to 100 million people, does it reliably have that effect in people actually producing a meaningful result? So that's the tricky thing about science. Yeah, you have to say, does this actually apply to large population groups of as helpful information to give people? And I don't know that I have the answer to that yet, although I think, if I had to guess, I'd say that some occasional fasting would probably have health benefits. I just can't give a full hearted endorsement of it yet.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:People who are into this whole biohacking thing are really into this right now. Okay, I've even thought about trying it myself. Really, I have definitely thought about how I used to be a power lifter and used to eat sometimes 6000 calories in a day, and how that was probably really unhealthy, even though I was feeding muscle tissue, even though I was becoming very large and muscular. I think that there's still health implications for that, and you think about all these bodybuilders who have died in their 30s and 40s because of their lifestyles and excessive caloric eating, although there's probably more to it than just calories. There may be some other compounds that are going into their bodies as well, but that's what I think about, and I think that there's a lot of promise there, but we just don't know yet.
Speaker 2:You said something interesting in the last episode about how people in this day and age, if they aren't very mindful about what they're eating, then by default they're going to be overweight. Correct, that's a paraphrase of what you said, but that's how I've synthesized it in my brain.
Speaker 1:That's a good summary. That is my opinion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it really does seem to come back to mindfully eating, like being aware of what you're eating, when, and not just mindlessly chomping down on a snack, which I myself have done many times. There's something about mindfulness that needs to carry over into our food intake and drink intake, because there are a lot of empty calories in drinks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think drinks are probably one of the number one culprits. So, looking more at fasting again, I know I said short term is 24 to 48 hours of fasting, but if you look in historical fasting, in religious figures and things like that, we're talking sometimes weeks of not eating In the Journal of Science, Translational Medicine in 2012 showed that fasting slowed tumor growth and enhanced chemotherapy effects in mice and in the human trial. There's early evidence to show that there are reduced chemotherapy side effects and slower tumor progression in humans. Probably a lot of people have heard that cancer cells feed off of glucose. Have you ever heard this?
Speaker 2:Well, no, I feel like I have seen a headline here or there talking about sugar feeding cancer, but that's about as far as I've gotten with it, but you're aware of this idea floating around Sure that glucose or sugar makes cancer worse, so let's talk about that. I've also heard that sugar can decrease your ability to fight infections.
Speaker 1:Well, you probably heard that on the wellness blueprint.
Speaker 2:Well, well before, the wellness blueprint existed. I think it was your mother who first told me that if I was feeling ill I should avoid sugar, because it will decrease my body's ability to fight off colds and infections and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And I would say excessive sugar. That's probably true, one teaspoon of sugar in the day probably not going to do anything to you. But excessive amounts of sugar like eating lots of candy bars or cake or Jenny's ice cream, sorry is probably going to have an effect on your immune system, especially if done over periods of days or weeks. If you have that chronic amount of consumption of sugary sweets, it's probably going to have an effect on your immune system because it's causing chronic inflammation in your body. It's true that cancer cells do preferentially use glucose and there are even some studies that have shown that if you reduce glucose consumption or production that you may slow the growth of tumors. But there are no real compelling arguments that show that completely cutting out sugar consumption can either shrink or eliminate tumors altogether. So that really has not been shown.
Speaker 2:Who decides if it's compelling or not?
Speaker 1:I do.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:No, when I say compelling, I mean you look at a study and they look at tumors and you look at people who are dieting and eating very low carbohydrate diets and then you look at a control group, meaning the people who are eating a normal American diet, and you look at the rate of tumors and the rate at which they grow. The ones eating less sugar they grow more slowly. But there are no studies that have compiled multiple large groups of people who have been able to reverse their cancer because they don't eat sugar. That's all I mean by that.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:If you look at the American Cancer Society's website and some of their research, they do talk about how a lot of different cancers are at least associated with people who are obese, have insulin resistance or have any sort of chronic inflammation. Those are associated with increased risks of getting cancer. Before the cancer is actually there, you're at a higher risk. 13 different types of cancer are linked with obesity, including rectal or colon cancer or pancreatic cancer and breast cancer and a number of others. There are also studies that looked at people who regularly drink sugar-sweetened beverages. They call them SSBs for short in this study, but for the most part I'm thinking soda.
Speaker 1:You can even think of things like vitamin water, gatorade. I think fruit juice is a big stealthy one that people don't think about because it's got fruit in it. You're having huge dosages of sugar in a very small amount of time in a non-satiating drink, because you could drink bottles and bottles of soda or fruit juice and not get full. So this study looking at SSBs, or sugar sweetened beverages, showed a 22% increased risk of overall cancer in individuals who have a high rate of SSB consumption, and they even had up to a 52% increased risk of breast cancer. Researchers conclude that this is because you get caloric overload, leading to obesity and insulin resistance, and there are not really much nutrients associated with these beverages.
Speaker 1:We talked about that glucose cutting alone cannot eliminate cancer, but with these studies we've talked about, it does look like if you have a lower glucose in your diet you may be able to reduce your risk of getting cancer in the first place. We've also shown in some studies that the spread or growth of cancer may be slowed if you cut down your glucose intake. We're going to talk about purely from a cancer risk, so these studies I'm looking at is not saying this is the most healthy way to do this. We're just talking about caloric restriction and cancer risks. Just want to establish that In animal studies they looked at rodents who had a calorie-restricted diet.
Speaker 1:These calorie-restricted diets they varied up to 20% reduction in calories and some of them have an up to 40% reduction in the normal caloric intake. And 80% of these mice who had a caloric-restricted diet had fewer tumors prepared to an unrestricted diet, and that was out of the Cancer Preventant Research published in 2011. And then they also looked at lifelong calorie restriction, meaning from their birth to their death. Compared to other rodents and compared to their normal diet, they had a lifelong restriction and these rodents also had delayed cancer onset and slower tumor growth than their counterparts.
Speaker 2:But it didn't completely cut out their cancer.
Speaker 1:No, and a lot of these mice are destined to have tumors, because that's just the way they're bred is to have tumors, so that they can have research done on them. These are mice that are going to get tumors, but these with caloric restrictions had slower onset and slower growth of this cancer.
Speaker 2:Okay, because, I'll be honest, the first thing that popped in my head when you said that was oh man, if they're going to get cancer anyway, might as well enjoy their lives. I mean, I feel like I hear that sentiment in humans a lot, you know, even if it's about smoking or something someone's like, I'm not going to give up smoking, I'm going to die anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, I mean, there's that. I guess that's a whole philosophical question, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Wow, you, just you're like holding your head in your hands, like I just like broke your spirit.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh a little bit.
Speaker 2:I imagine you've heard that before.
Speaker 1:It's not my place to pass judgment on people and how they want to live their lives. It's only my place to give information so people can use it.
Speaker 2:I'll just say that that was the impulse brain on my side and it's not the rational brain, so I'm not going to sustain that thought, but it did pop into my head.
Speaker 1:There's multiple studies, like the one in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003, which linked to just excessive calories. They lead to weight gain, accumulation of visceral fat. This promotes inflammation and metabolic dysfunction, like diabetes and hypertension and other metabolic disorders. Visceral fat, specifically fat around the organs of your abdomen inside, increase insulin and insulin-like growth factor, which can fuel cancer cell growth. And, as we said before, obesity in general is linked to an association with increased risk of 13 different types of cancer.
Speaker 1:So it's just excessive calories in general, whether you have a low-carb diet or whatever it is, can lead to these health risks. So just because you're eating low-carb doesn't necessarily mean you're in the clear if you're exceeding your daily caloric allotment. So anyway, this idea of high sugar diets it has been well studied. There's a article out of Frontiers in Oncology in 2020 that looked at high sugar diets. It showed elevated blood sugar levels, elevated insulin levels and all of this triggered the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha or TNF alpha, which consequently, we talked about in the very first episode of the podcast.
Speaker 1:And also, it talked about chronic hyperglycemia, leading to formation of advanced glycation products which damage cells and DNA, which damaged DNA, of course, leads to cancer.
Speaker 2:Okay, but I'm giving you my confused face because you said a whole bunch of multi-syllable words that were not normal English.
Speaker 1:Advanced glycation end products. Do you listen to the podcast?
Speaker 2:Wow, I'm sorry, some of us do not have a DR degree.
Speaker 1:Oh wait, there's an MD degree. Yeah, thank you. I don't know what a DR degree is.
Speaker 2:It's just doctor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, of course I'm teasing you. I don't expect people to understand what advanced glycation end products are without someone explaining it. To keep it real simple, you've got elevated blood sugar all the time. That sugar starts to stick to stuff and it becomes permanently embedded into the tissue and it causes tissue damage.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you I think that's a real succinct way to say how that works. Just in general, all this chronic inflammation from excessive sugar creates an environment. That's a real succinct way to say how that works. Just in general, all this chronic inflammation from excessive sugar creates an environment that's friendly for tumors to proliferate and grow. It promotes angiogenesis, which is the creation and formation of new blood vessels, and it can also even suppress anti-tumor genes and anti-tumor responses by your immune system, because, as we've discussed before, your immune system's job is not just fighting off viruses and bacteria. It's actually supposed to circulate in your body and kill cells that look like they could become cancers.
Speaker 2:Do you remember that Mucinex commercial with a big mucus glob? Like moves into your lungs and it's like making itself cozy at home. It's got the hat and the whatever and that's what I'm imagining that the sugar is doing. It's just like making it real comfortable for the tumor to settle in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but that poor muesnex club had a family, you know, and we just kicked him out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's homeless.
Speaker 1:Heartless. Yeah yeah, the sugar is just getting in there and making stuff sticky. That's how I like to think about it. You just can't get around because everything is so sticky with sugar.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's how I like to think about it. You just can't get around because everything is so sticky with sugar. Coincidentally, that's what sugar does outside the body too. The real argument you're going to have is with people who are not. Low-carb fanatics are going to say if you eat excessive calories you're going to have inflammation no matter what, even if it's not with sugar. I'll counter that by saying they may be right. It might be that if you just eat your calories within normal limits of what is expected for you to be at your caloric either neutral or deficit, you might not have as much inflammation, even if you eat sugar.
Speaker 1:I actually don't know the answer to that. I'm not sure that's really concluded. It just so happens that most diets high in processed and added sugars are going to have a well above excessive caloric intake. Most people who are eating lots of sugar are not staying at their caloric recommended value. It's really hard to eat lots of added sugar while also maintaining that caloric balance, because if you're not getting a healthy fat and protein ratio, it's hard to live.
Speaker 2:It's hard to survive that way. Yeah, it's something that you said earlier did kind of sit with me. You said that if the average person is just left to their own devices without really thinking very hard and just using the food that's available to them, with the marketing that's constantly assaulting them every time they go anywhere, go into a grocery store, a CVS type place, anything like that then they're probably going to be overweight just based on that. And I can tell you from experience it's taking an enormous amount of discipline on my end and self-control, and also I'm having to restrict myself constantly just to follow what is supposed to be an average caloric intake for a woman my size, and I'm having to pay somebody to help coach me through it. So it's taking an enormous amount of time and shifting of my brain to do that and it's hard.
Speaker 1:I've recently come to this conclusion this is not something that I've thought for a long time that we are all fighting a battle that we're not even aware we're fighting. We're constantly resisting marketing, constantly resisting that bliss point food that's intentionally manufactured to make us want to consume more and more of it all the time. We don't even know we're fighting it, unless you listen to this podcast or get your information about this sort of thing from somewhere.
Speaker 2:You're not even aware. I have a feeling that in the next five years, you and I are going to become like Amish or something, just to avoid all the things we've been talking about.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, there's something to that. Avoiding processed foods, just growing our own food, eating our own cows, avoiding that 5G mind control?
Speaker 2:I don't think that I could eat my Betsy. I don't think I could do it.
Speaker 1:Who's Betsy?
Speaker 2:My cow, my pet cow.
Speaker 1:Your hypothetical pet cow. Okay, well, you, me and Betsy will all be out in the field with our tinfoil hats on, so we can avoid all the microwaves. I did want to talk about the ketogenic diet a little bit more.
Speaker 1:I know you make a sort of noise every time you talk about ketogenic diets. There's just a lot of people who swear by it and they say it's a very powerful tool. I did want to touch on it briefly. Okay, the ketogenic diet. Typically people are going to argue the finer points of this, but typically you're eating anywhere between 5 to 40 grams of carbohydrates an entire day.
Speaker 2:Which is like one banana.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:One banana.
Speaker 1:Nicole is not unbiased on this subject. I just want to warn everybody. That being said, people have had a lot of success losing weight on a ketogenic diet and you really do, if you do it correctly. Do a go into a different energy source of production in your body called ketosis, where you're producing these ketone bodies that you can use as an energy source rather than glucose, and there are types of tumors that are only able to use glucose as an energy source. So there are multiple studies in animals. A lot of these studies are looking at glioblastoma, which is a brain tumor, and it is showing very significantly reduced rate of growth. But I am not aware and I could not find any study that showed elimination of these tumors with a ketogenic diet.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I've heard about ketogenic diets from the standpoint of people with seizures. Isn't that when the diet was created?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the diet actually is decades old, maybe even the 40s or 50s. It was created with the idea of getting rid of epilepsy or controlling epilepsy, and there's some really good evidence that for certain people, in certain subsets of epilepsy, a ketogenic diet can control their epilepsy where medication has failed. So that's actually a scientific application of the ketogenic diet. That's been helpful.
Speaker 1:My conclusion about the ketogenic diet is that the reason people have weight loss with it is because if you are using a ketogenic diet, you cannot go to McDonald's, you can't go to Arby's, you can't eat Jenny's, you can't eat out of the vending machine All of these foods that are hyperpalatable and readily available to us. You can't eat them. So if you are denying yourself anything that doesn't fit in the ketogenic diet, you're probably going to lose weight. Now, if all you do is go home and eat a block of cheese wrapped in bacon and you do that 20 times a day, you're not going to lose weight. You are going to have excessive calories and you will not lose weight. So that's my two cents on the keto diet.
Speaker 2:Can I give my piece about the keto diet, please do? Oh man, I've been waiting years to do this. Okay, cause I've heard a lot of people who are casually into the ketogenic diet where they're like, oh yeah, mostly keto, just like people who are like mostly gluten intolerant, but then they'll just like eat that biscuit anyway.
Speaker 1:Um so no judgment there at all, of course not.
Speaker 2:No. But for people who are trying the keto diet, my understanding as the non-doctor in this relationship is that that diet is only effective if you make sure that you're not eating carbohydrates like 50 grams.
Speaker 1:You have to eat 50 grams or less, right I don't understand how people say oh, I'm keto today, but not keto the next day like it literally does not work.
Speaker 2:Like I'm gonna have a piece of cake today it just literally, scientifically does not work like that, and my concern is for people like me who lack discipline on average I'm working on it or people who think they can bend the rules. I look at a cookie and I'm starting to think maybe I can squeeze that in. If I just only don't eat this and this, I can enjoy those calories without it being a problem, right? So that's how my brain will function. So people function like that and they try the keto diet and they're like okay, I'm going to eat all this bacon, all this beef, all this and that, but then I'm also going to sneak in that cookie at the holiday Christmas party. Then that becomes super dangerous, because now you're combining all of these super high fat foods with protein, the carbohydrates, and that's actually going to. Isn't that going to make your like cholesterol skyrocket if it's combined with carbohydrates?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of debate on this, but the idea that if you eat no sugar but you're eating high cholesterol, high saturated fat diets, there's actually some studies to show that you may have an increase in LDL cholesterol, but it may level out over time and your triglyceride levels will typically drop. The idea of combining carbohydrates and high saturated fats and cholesterol may have more dangerous implications, just like you said. All right, let's talk a little bit more about caloric restriction and cancer reduction risk. This should be a uniting topic, because most people agree that you lose weight by cutting calories. Whether you want to be on a keto diet or a carnivore diet or a vegan diet or a Whole30 diet whatever you want it to be you can't lose weight without cutting calories to some extent.
Speaker 1:I think this is something we can all get behind if we can all unify that reducing calories may be able to help your overall health and lifestyle and reduce cancer risks. I think that'd be something that'd be useful to know. We're back to that calorie study we talked about before. Reducing caloric intake without malnutrition has been extensively studied for its potential to lower cancer risk. Now I say without malnutrition, meaning even though you're reducing your calories, you're making sure you get your proper vitamin and mineral and nutrient content even though you're cutting your calories. So make sure you get enough protein and vitamins and other things so you're not getting scurvy like you talked about before.
Speaker 2:Okay, All right, maybe.
Speaker 1:So caloric restriction decreases levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin-6 and TNF-alpha.
Speaker 2:Okay, you're going to need to just remind us normal people what that means again, because that was in like episode one.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, go back and listen to episode one again, Because that was in like episode one. Yeah Well, go back and list episode one. You know like don't people listen to this before bed every single night? Isn't that what this podcast is all about? Remember, it's a sleep aid. It helps you sleep and have a better, better, healthy lifestyle. These are different hormones that are increased in an inflammatory state that can cause cellular damage. I could list off lots of pro-inflammatory cytokines and it won't really make a difference if I talk about exactly what each one does, but that's what they do. Caloric restriction also enhances the body's ability to repair damaged DNA and maintain stability and reduce the risk of developing cancer in the first place. They've also done some observational studies of populations who have had low caloric intakes unwillingly during famines, and they showed that over that time period, during prolonged famines, these populations had reduced cancer incidence in later years in their life.
Speaker 2:So basically is food just killing us all the time.
Speaker 1:That's actually the funny thing. It's that balance of okay, if you're caloric restricted all the time, you'll live longer, but you're also not eating enough calories. It's that fine balance. So, yes, the short answer is food is killing us.
Speaker 2:But so is living.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so can caloric restriction cure cancer? We've talked about reducing the risks of developing it, we've talked about sensitizing it to chemotherapy, and we've also talked about slowing its growth. But can it cure it? Cancer cells will often adapt to low glucose conditions so that they may be able to find an alternate fuel source, like fat protein, via gluconeogenesis. So caloric restriction alone may not be selective enough to target cancer cells, as healthy cells can also be affected. As you eat less calories, all of your cells are going to shrink. All of your cells will be affected. Since we're talking about all this fasting, there are some studies that have looked at severe caloric restrictions and then you can have detrimental effects, meaning your immune system is weakened, you're malnourished and you can actually be more susceptible to death by cancer or cancer treatment. So there is a diminishing return here as you overly restrict your calories and start to limit your bodily functions.
Speaker 2:Like anorexia.
Speaker 1:Well, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That would be one example. But even if you don't have a true eating disorder and you're trying to do something for your health or for cancer treatment, it can have problems.
Speaker 2:So basically, eating food can kill you, not eating food can kill you.
Speaker 1:Not eating food will kill you.
Speaker 2:Let's just be clear on that.
Speaker 1:If you stop eating food permanently you'll die pretty quickly. The eating way too much food just kills you slowly and sometimes miserably. It's interesting to me these caloric restriction studies. Some people have voluntary practiced extreme degrees of calorie restriction over many years in the belief that it will extend their lifespan or preserve their health. So these studies on these individuals have found markedly lower levels of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. And they've also found that there are other physiologic effects where there may be a lot of long-term benefits to caloric restriction to a degree. But they also have showed that sometimes people with extreme calorie restriction have sexual dysfunction and may have trouble regulating their body temperature in extreme environments too. So it's not all a win-win. They are expanding this calorie study currently. So it's not all a win-win. They are expanding this calorie study currently. So they are continuing to look at these numbers, so we may see more interesting data coming out of this. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Wellness Blueprint with Dr Caleb Davis.
Speaker 1:Let's recap some of the actionable steps that we covered today that may help reduce your risk of cancer and overall increase your health. Probably most important of all be mindful of what you eat. Keep a food journal. Try to track everything that you eat for at least two weeks and include portion sizes and ingredients, if you can. Most importantly, I'd try to keep track of what you eat and when you're eating it and how many calories you're eating, and try to also break it down into macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates and fats if possible. Start reading labels when you eat things. If they have them. Understand the amount of calories and macronutrients that you're actually consuming. The first step is just being aware of it, because the job of the food industry is just to get you to buy it and mindlessly consume. So the more aware and mindful you can be of the food, the more smart choices that you can make. The main reason to do this is simply just to start taking ownership of what you eat and put mindful thought into what you're eating, and usually you'll see pretty big improvements right away.
Speaker 1:As a rule of thumb, I'd recommend most people reduce added sugars in their food and drinks, especially sodas, sweetened teas and even drinks that you might consider healthy, like vitamin water or sports drinks. Try to eat more whole fruits instead of drinking fruit juice. Increase your protein intake. Aim for 40 to 50 grams of protein per meal and that'll help you stay full longer. It'll also help you have more stabilized blood sugar and it might even help curb unhealthy cravings. Consider eating meat and vegetables before you eat the carbohydrate, starchy portion of your meal, as it may make you want to eat less and keep you full longer as well.
Speaker 1:Remember fats aren't necessarily the enemy either in moderation, and don't be afraid to consume whole food fats either. I don't recommend having lots of foods with added oils and fat, like ranch dressing, but natural fats found in food in their natural form can be perfectly healthy and a part of having a balanced macronutrient diet. I would definitely consider going online and finding a way to calculate your basal metabolic rate so you can have an understanding of what your caloric needs actually are. Now, there's not a really perfect way to do this online, but this at least gives you a starting point, as we've really covered on the last couple episodes about hyperpalatable food. Be mindful of the hyper-processed, hyper-palatable, pleasurable foods that you're eating and consider trying to reduce some of that in your diet, as they tend to hijack your reward system.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to give a blanket recommendation for intermittent fasting, but if you have a very stressful job and it makes it difficult for you to make good food decisions.
Speaker 1:You may want to consider just eating when you're at home and you can have more healthy prepared whole foods rather than making compromises and making poor food decisions at work. This diet choice doesn't work for everybody and it certainly is not recommended for everybody, but it can help you if you're in the right circumstance. Remember, exercise is critically important and increasing your muscle mass can certainly help your glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity as well, and increased muscle mass in general has huge health benefits. Understand that you don't have to do all of this in one big step and radically change your life overnight. I recommend starting with the food journal and cutting back sugary drinks and then building your way from there. If you got any questions, feel free to send them our way and we'd love to talk about it, but we're going to go ahead and break here. So remember, be humble, be happy and be healthy and go do some squats. We'll see you next week.
