Food Phobias

Radiation and chemotherapy start tomorrow and I must say that I am actually eager to get going with this process.  Last time around with the lymphoma the side effects were fairly unpleasant but this process, though longer in duration, is a bit more targeted.  Both the radiation and the chemotherapy are designed to disrupt DNA with the assumption that healthy cells have functional DNA repair processes while cancer cells have a limited capacity for repair.  Consequently, over time, cumulative DNA damage to cancer cells ratchets up while the DNA of healthy cells undergoes daily repair.  Still a fairly dull tool but definitely sharper than simply disrupting the cell cycle in all dividing cells.

One thing I have been thinking about since my diagnosis has been my diet.   Although I generally eat  fairly well, I know I have an occasional tendency to consume too much sugar (e.g., a half a dozen cookies over the course of an afternoon).  There is a growing body of literature linking development and progression of various cancers to elevated blood sugar levels (see, for example "Cancer's Molecular Sweet Tooth").  In light of this information, I am trying move toward a more "cancer unfriendly diet" (as advocated by the Block Center and other advocates of integrative cancer treatment).  Last week, I asked Dr. Fine about the potential benefits of a hypoglycemic diet and he cautioned that:

"The Warburg effect is real and may very well be relevant to GBM. Unfortunately, millenniums of evolution has made it relatively impossible to starve a brain tumor of glucose for our entire physiology is set up to supply the brain (and hence a tumor within the brain) with a relatively constant concentration of glucose regardless of the systemic/serum level of glucose.  In fact, starvation is the process of breaking down other tissues in the body (i.e. muscle ) to produce substrates for the production of glucose (gluconeogenesis) in order to ensure the brain has all the glucose it needs.  Thus, trying to starve yourself is unfortunately not going to impact on the tumor although you risk impacting negatively on other key systems of your body such as the immune system."

I should have remembered this from my work with effects of fish diets on life history.  After all, as Dobzhansky famously phrased it,  "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution".  Still, without starving myself, I can't help but thinking that reducing the amount of sugar in my diet might shift probabilities in my favor; perhaps not starving any recurrent tumor to death but rather slowing its rate of development and growth.   In any case, I'll need to consider potential benefits and risks more fully before heading down this path without reservation.  /dps