'The gold standard treatment for cancer in the last few decades has been a combination of surgery – to remove tumours – and chemotherapy and radiotherapy – to kill cancer cells. With the progress of personalised medicine, where identifying specific mutations in the tumour guides treatment selection, there has been increasing success in survival rates.
But there has been little improvement in reducing side effects on healthy cells caused by chemotherapy, which also limit the dosage that can be administered.
Over the last two decades, research in animals has shown restricting calories - with alternating periods of fasting and feeding – promotes protection mechanisms for healthy cells, while increasing white blood cells that kill cancer cells.'
Veronique Chachay, Research & Teaching Academic, The University of Queensland explains: theconversation.com/fasting...
Note that while it is yet to be found whether this research finding is relevant to CLL, the article is well worth reading, for the simple reason that it explains how cancer cells prefer glucose for energy (derived from carbohydrate), whereas healthy cells can survive on muscle and fat energy reserves under fasting conditions. (Note that this is a generalisation - some cancers can switch to alternative energy sources.)
From this well known fact (discovered in the 1950's), has come the corrupted message from alternative cancer proponents that sugar feeds cancer cells. This is a fallacy, because what we eat and drink gets broken down in the digestive system and converted to carbohydrate and perhaps stored as fat, or turned into muscle mass. Our cells burn glucose derived from those digestion processed sources, NOT the sugar we ingest. (There's no denying that in general, we eat too much sugar which has been processed and added to foods, which is not good for our health, but that's a separate issue: healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo... )
Diet myths and cancer
health.qld.gov.au/nutrition...
Don’t believe the hype – 10 persistent cancer myths debunked
scienceblog.cancerresearchu...
Neil
Photo: Rainbow lorikeet having a rest from a sugar (nectar) diet from gum blossom