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Oct 26Liked by Robyn Chuter

Sample size of one, but I personally know someone who had stage 4 cancer who went into remission with a ketogenic diet. Thanks for bursting my bubble that it may not be the cure for all types of cancer for every individual! Haha. But I guess of course it’s going to be more complex than that

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Yep, and I personally know people who had stage 4 cancer that went into remission on the opposite of a ketogenic diet i.e. a low fat diet high in carbohydrates from unprocessed plant foods. The interwebz abound with anecdotes of people who are still alive years after they got a terminal diagnosis, and they credit their survival to all manner of diets, supplements, spiritual practices, energy therapies - you name it. The purpose of the scientific method is to help us move us ever closer to grasping the truth about these claims, while acknowledging that we will never have perfect knowledge of that truth. People who follow the scientific method are cautious in the claims that they make; they don't claim that they are the One True Bearer of the Truth.

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So, it seems to me that keeping your mitochondria healthy is likely to reduce your chances of developing cancer, unless you have the unfortunate phenotype that is able to steal mitochondria from other cell types, in which case the healthier your mitochondria, the quicker the cancer will grow. But not all people have cancers who can do that, and having healthy mitochondria will reduce your risk of a zillion other diseases and make you feel better, so it’s generally a good thing to try and do, IMO.

I think your naturopathic bias towards loving fruits and veggies has biased you a little too, in this article. I don’t think you can take much from nutritional studies about cancer risk etc because of the inherent confounders in those type of studies. I think it ultimately depends on your bioindividuality and what combinations of food you eat. For instance, if you eat a lot of carbs/sugars AND a lot of fat, things go a bit pear shaped. If you do mostly one or the other, things tend to go better.

Even if Ketogenic and carnivore diets are truly likely to increase cancer risk (which I think is debatable), they probably do so if the person eats a lot of processed meat, or cooks it at too high a heat. But these diets are really helpful for many other diseases, so they still have benefit for many individuals.

I’m pretty convinced by the science of those diets, though my palette personally struggles with the idea of not having some fresh fruits and vegetables.

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The way that you frame this i.e. "keeping your mitochondria healthy" is somewhat bizarre to me, as if the health of your mitochondria is somehow distinct from the health of the rest of the body. We're not a collection of organs and organelles, each of which has different requirements for health; we're an integrated biological entity that has fundamental requirements for health. These requirements for health are what I write about all the time - clean air, pure water, species-appropriate diet, sufficient and appropriate exercise, adequate rest and sleep, fulfilling social relationships and a sense of purpose. Myopically focusing on "keeping your mitochondria healthy" is typical of the reductionism that plagues both orthodox medicine and most of the so-called alternative healing modalitites.

I don't have a "naturopathic bias" towards fruits and vegetables; I have a recognition that there are multiple lines of evidence converging on their centrality to human health, ranging from the evolutionary argument to the epidemiological data (which, contrary to your assertion, is adjusted for confounds) to the clinical data. Also, your failure to distinguish between foods rich in unprocessed carbohydrates and processed foods - lumping them all in as "carbs", which is a ridiculous term popularised by charlatans with absolutely zero knowledge of nutrition - is a fatal flaw in your reasoning. It's perfectly possible to construct a healthy diet rich in both fats and unrefined carbohydrates - in fact, Mediterranean-style diets follow exactly this pattern.

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I usually really appreciate your work and I agree with most of what you said in your response (despite not appreciating the snippy/admonishing tone). I was just adding my thoughts and pointing out where you might have a source of bias. The massive success of the carnivore diet for many people who are plagued with autoimmune and mental health issues (even things like schizophrenia), suggests that the nutritional status quo is not the full story (just like in allopathic medicine). And let’s not forget the historical Innuit diet - mostly animal meat and fat. According to nutritional research they should be full of heart disease, but those that eat their ancestral diet are not at all. I posit that what is good for one is not necessarily good for another, and one individual’s ideal diet may vary over time, given other parameters.

I totally agree we are integrated body mind systems, and nothing should be thought of in total isolation. That said, we don’t usually admonish people for trying to get enough calcium for their bones, for example, so why is it wrong to be concerned with the specific requirements of mitochondria? Very recent science is finding just how harmed these essential organelles are by our modern lifestyles (including spike protein), and how mitochondrial dysfunction is at the root of many diseases.

I agree with the requirements for health you mentioned. One thing I would add though is the importance of natural light - important for our natural biorhythms, our fascia, and yes - our mitochondria!

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The accusation of bias is one of the most serious that a person can make and I'm annoyed by it because it's utterly baseless. I repeat, my position is not based on "bias" but on the weight of scientific evidence, converging from multiple data points and multiple types of studies. The carnivore diet does appear to give symptom relief to people with food sensitivities, but there are no studies demonstrating the long-term healthfulness of this way of eating and it's vanishingly unlikely that there ever will be, because it is so out of step with human evolution and with the aforementioned weight of evidence.

Citing the Inuit diet as an example of how eating nothing but animal products promotes human health reveals the fact that you have never looked into this subject for yourself, but are relying on secondhand sources. If you had investigated this subject, you would know that the claim that the Inuit did not suffer from heart disease is completely baseless. A detailed review conducted by Fodor et al in 2014 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25064579/) found that the prevalence of coronary artery disease in the Inuit was historically as high as, or higher than, in the Caucasian population. A quote from this review:

"Although the studies of these two Danish investigators [Band and Dyerberg] are routinely quoted in connection with the alleged low occurrence of CAD in Greenland Eskimos, the fact is that Bang and Dyerberg did not examine the cardiovascular status of Greenland Eskimos or those living in and around the small community of UmanaK. Instead, they relied mainly on Annual Reports produced by the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) in Greenland for the years 1963-1967 and 1973-1976. As we will discuss later in this paper, these reports have limited validity [primarily due to lack of autopsies and a large percentage of 'garbage codes' for cause of death].

Thus, the first question is whether the incidence and/or prevalence of CAD among Greenland Eskimos is indeed low? Notably, in 1940, A. Bertelsen, a Danish doctor that practiced for many years in Greenland, described frequent occurrence of CAD in this Inuit population. Bertelsen’s report, which was written in Danish and published in a book with limited circulation, was largely ignored.

More recently, a number of studies have confirmed what Bertelsen ascertained more than 70 years ago, i.e. that the prevalence of CAD among Eskimos in Greenland and other Inuit populations in Canada and the US is similar or higher compared to that of non-Eskimo/Caucasian populations. Nevertheless,it seems that most researchers and clinicians have accepted the notion of low prevalence of CAD at face value and continue to refer to the studies of Bang and Dyerberg."

With respect to your claim that "we don’t usually admonish people for trying to get enough calcium for their bones" I do, indeed, discourage people from trying to increase their calcium intake because there's no evidence that a high calcium intake is protective of bone health or prevents fractures and some evidence that it may increase the risk. If you're getting insufficient calcium for bone health (around 700 mg per day) then your diet is utterly crap and has a lot more that's wrong with it than a lack of calcium.

The point that I'm trying to convey is that every organ and function in your body is affected by an unhealthy diet and lifestyle, and it's foolish to single out one organelle as your focal point.

And yes, sunlight exposure is vitally important to light and definitely should have been on my list of requirements for health.

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Oops, I posted my response too early, unfinished. Hold please

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I’m detecting a somewhat aggressive tone here, which I don’t really appreciate.

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Really? What do you interpret as an "aggressive tone"? I don't see it.

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I think you are both looking at this the wrong way. In western medicine, we look at the symptom and we treat the symptom. Cancer is a symptom of something that has gone very wrong with the way our body is working, but it is still only a symptom, it is not the disease. We do not need to treat cancer, or at least we only need to treat it enough to buy us time, while we work out what conditions in the body led to our body growing cancer/s in the first place.

I have been diagnosed with 2 different cancers this year, had both excised, and have been left waiting for the next one or two or more to grow, given we have done nothing to change the body in which those cancers chose to grow.

That led me on a quest deeper and deeper, via the neuroendochrine system, and via the cells and mitochondria, to the genetics. And now I am coming back up for air, one slow step at a time, in my quest to turn off whatever turned on the cancer in the first place. And I think we must all do it this way, but at the very least, it is right for me.

So first I have to understand my genes, understand which genes might have led to my body developing the pre-conditions for cancer. By understanding my genes I can tailor lifestyle factors and eating habits to suit my unique genetic makeup. I do not have to choose between keto and paleo, or vegan or some other form of torture, I can find out what my body actually wants and needs and feed it that. And if, no matter how well I feed it, it is going to be short of something because my body was not designed for this world I am currently living in, then I can supplement to support it. My first priority is to maximise the function of my genes.

At the same time, I can make sure that I feed every cell in my body, and particularly the mitochondria. If every cell in my body is starved for something, of course I am going to get sick, and that sickness will show up according to my genetics as one disease or another, based on what function or system collapses first. So my second priority is to maximise the health of my mitochondria, by giving them the food they need to heal and function at maximum capacity.

Neither of these is targeted to stop the next cancer, or bring my blood sugar or blood pressure down, but without my genes functioning properly and without my mitochondria functioning properly, my neuro-endochrine system cannot function properly and anything or everything can go wrong from there.

As one simple example, I started taking one particular vitamin B to support my MTHFR gene, and my systolic blood pressure instantly dropped 30 points.. I was treating my genes, and somehow ended up treating my blood pressure, who knows how many cascading processes down the line. It does take a lot of faith to work this way, to feed the body exactly what it wants, and let it prioritise how it uses it. But is there a better way? If there is, I have not found it.

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Your approach seems very reductionist to me. Back when I was completing my undergraduate degree in health science, the Human Genome Project was part-way through, and everyone (including my university lecturers) believed that once the human genome had been sequenced, disease treatment would be revolutionised. It turned out very differently. The human genome only contains about 23,000 genes (not the 120,000 which were anticipated), and it's abundantly clear that the regulation of those genes is incredibly complex. To quote George Bray, “Genes load the gun, the environment pulls the trigger.”

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Reductionist? Maybe that is how my few words came across, but it is anything but reductionist. Nutrigenomics is so inexpressibly expansionist that we need the help of AI to understand all the connections and ramifications and complexities. The weakness of nutrigenomics is its complexity.

We are at the threshold of an entirely new mental approach to health, which, if we can deal with it, can lead us to an amazing future. But it does have its limitations, of which the major one is the capacity of even the most genius level human intellect to grasp the enormity of it.

And of course, the field of nutrigenomics is very early in its development, but some genes are already well known and well understood, and we can work with them. I think that just the MTHFR gene (and friends), and the methylation cycle, warrants a lifetime of study on it's own, and I would bet that if we had the technology, we could find a cascade of downstream effects from that one gene to every set of disease symptoms known to man. I am not yet sure in my own mind whether recovery from all those diseases will result from fixing the source. We will probably need more than that to heal, which is why I am also working on the mitochondria, but one thing is for sure, that we cannot heal without accommodating our genes.

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The human body is a complex system, and all attempts to intervene in its function through supplementation or diets that supposedly optimise gene function end up having unintended consequences because humans mistakenly believe that the same management approach that we take to complicated systems (i.e. human-engineered systems) can also be applied to complex systems, and that all we need is better AI and we'll master complex systems. I highly recommend reading T. Colin Campbell's book 'Whole' which explains why nutrition research - including nutrigenomics - is so badly off-track.

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Do you think the whole idea is wrong or might it just be badly applied?

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That's a thought-provoking question. I think that - just like Seyfried's metabolic theory of cancer - there are elements of it that have value but the overall concept is wrong. It's the very height of hubris to imagine that we will ever be able to exert control over the activity of our genes, given that each gene codes for multiple proteins, and the signalling cascades that toggle these multiple expressions of genes are themselves part of interlocking systems of unfathomable complexity.

I think H. L. Mencken's quote, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" is really apt here. Humans have an over-confidence in our ability to understand and manipulate complex systems. I'm all for continuing to study the fascinating processes that occur in our bodies - in case you haven't noticed, I'm a nerd girl - but the idea that we can ever understand these processes well enough to manipulate them through supplements or drugs or any other blunt-force intervention, without suffering unintended consequences, is implausible to me.

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Is there a difference between “exert control over” and “support”? If our car is old and damaged, we can support it to keep running by various ruses and maybe even make it feel better to ride in for a while. Should we scrap it because some part is failing and so damaging downstream functions, or should we shore it up, so it does no further downstream damage and keeps running strongly till its inevitable end?

As I understand it, that is what working with genes is all about. So a person got a bum steer at birth - some design fault for the environment in which the body has to function, that can either destroy their health over time, or that they can “workaround” so it does less downstream damage.

It seems to me that you are blaming the tool for the poor understanding that many are bringing to the use of the tool. People who have a fundamentalist mind set will always treat it as “all or nothing”, and will always over-react. That is the way they approach everything. They do it with drugs, they do it with vitamins, they do it with faddish diets and they will do it with any therapies that are arising from supporting the genes. I am watching them doing it on the MTHFR support groups now where they cannot wrap their heads around the complexities of methylation. They have no grasp of nuance and cannot manage complex thought.

But because they are too stupid to use the tools available with discretion, does not mean I am too stupid to use the tools available with discretion. The science and particularly the database is in its very early days, but it cannot be damned for that. We can either help drive it in a helpful direction - as I am doing - or we can back out because many humans are not capable of working with it intelligently. I don’t intend to be denied health because most of the world is too dumb to use the system I am choosing to use.

I am 74 years old and have been into alternative medicine since my late teens. I trained in a number of modalities and used even more modalities to help me manage my own health. And not one of them, not one practitioner from any modality has managed my health better than I have. They have all failed me one way or another, because they all base their “treatments” on unfounded beliefs and fail to take my unique physiology into account. I would rather work with my genes between now and my death, rather than listen to the beliefs of a small minded therapist who thinks everyone else has the same body they have and will respond to the same treatments they respond to.

I CAN digest milk. I can digest nightshades. How many years have we been told we must give both up? An entirely elementary understanding of our genes, can give us, at the very least, a likely healthy diet for ourselves, and free us from a lifetime of dietary bullying, to eat what is good for someone else! Giving foods I enjoy up in response to someone else’s belief was NEVER going to do me any good! If we get nothing else from understanding our genes, knowing there are still a few foods we can enjoy eating, is enough to make that understanding worthwhile!

Genetics, for the first time in my 74 years, gives me chance to be the centre of my own story, rather than an accessory dangling off the ego of a “therapist”. And gives me the chance to enjoy the remaining years of my life.

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