Personal Experience with Diet and Exercise

What you say, Billybob , makes sense. One question, why do you minimize iron intake and how do you reconcile it with steak.?

Pratoman said...
What you say, Billybob , makes sense. One question, why do you minimize iron intake and how do you reconcile it with steak.?

I actually don't do anything specifically to minimize iron, though I think it is probably smart to do so, unless you are prone to anemia. I see that reducing iron is one of CC's mainstays, maybe you meant to ask him? However, I have indeed read in many different places over the years how any excess iron, best measured by looking at Ferritin, or so I am told, can cause a lot of different problems with many different diseases, including with some cancers. And of course a nice medium rare steak is loaded with iron.

Some claim that "An ideal level for adult men and non-menstruating women is somewhere between 40 and 60 ng/mL. You do not want to be below 20 ng/mL or above 80 ng/mL. ". EXCESS can cause all kinds of havoc. There is an old saying "The iron man rusteth".

But with your being prone to anemia it sounds like excess iron is not likely a problem. If it is, donating blood a couple of times a year will take care of almost all problems with excess. Or if you have a friend that can draw blood, just get rid of 2 to 4 ozs a month, no shock to the system like donating a larger amount. Of course, some processed foods are
are fortified with iron, probably want to avoid that and supplements(unless of course you actually need it!). Vit C with foods increases iron absorption.

In my case, I have probably had black tea with every meal of my life, and turns out that decreases absorption. Black tea(and only black, surprisingly) cuts iron absorption a whole lot. Most alcohols increase absorption, but again luckily my fav with a steak, red wine, cuts the iron a lot, as does coffee. As does exercise. And finally, low dose aspirin!

Since several of those items in the above paragraph are reputed to be great for health- both CV and cancer prevention- it could make you wonder if their real benefit is in the cutting of iron absorption. Same with cutting animal protein and meat- maybe it is really the iron cut that gives the benefits? I don't know of course, just thinking out loud.

Pratoman said...
I must have been thinking of CC

Funny you should mention Ferritin. While a year ago I was anemic, about a month ago, I was shown to have high ferritin. I believe it was 437. Referred to hematologist who did CBC everything else was normal, said just come back and retest in a month or so

437! So did you retest in a month and it was way, way lower hopefully? And haven't you cut way back on red meat? Just my opinion, but I would be looking into that if it was me. CC is likely right to be paying attention to that factor relative to his PC diet, but the CV issues might be even more concern for you. The thing about it is, unlike most of our problems, this one is easily solved(donate blood).

/www.webmd.com/men/features/too-much-iron-in-your-blood#1

Somebody said...
Proof won't come until researchers conduct large and well-controlled studies that compare the heart disease risk of men who regularly give blood with that of men who don't. Already several small studies have been done, however, offering tantalizing evidence that donating blood might be a very good idea.

Take, for example, a study of 2,682 men in Finland reported in the September 1998 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. Men who donated blood at least once a year had an 88% lower risk of heart attacks than nondonors. Another study published in the August 1997 issue of Heart found that men who donated blood were less likely than nondonors to show signs of cardiovascular disease.

Critics are quick to point out that people who donate blood may simply be healthier to start with. Yet a 1995 study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine found that the use of bleeding to lower iron levels in a group of 14 patients did reduce cholesterol oxidation. It's another small piece of evidence in support of the benefits of donating blood. By now, Sullivan insists, "there is abundant evidence that favors a public health recommendation to lower iron stores." What's more, he says, there is no risk to a healthy person donating blood, and potentially significant benefit.

Post Edited (BillyBob@388) : 11/21/2017 7:55:52 AM (GMT-7)

cashlessclay said...
Billybob and Pratoman, some info on iron you may find interesting.



/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036554/

/www.researchgate.net/publication/21466731_Elevated_Transferrin_Receptor_Content_in_Human_Prostate_Cancer_Cell_Lines_Assessed_in_Vitro_and_in_Vivo

Cashless

So, based on those, iron is implicated in PC as well as all those other cancers. Sometimes it seems like PC is an exception to whatever apples to most cancers. Sometimes, but certainly not always.

I realize I'm predictable Prato, BUT the last thing you need is "more to worry about." ;)

Great thread thanks. I have a couple questions for those on the Cashless diet or something similar. It occurs to me that these diets are also very in line with diabetic diets - which seem to be the best diets for almost all disease prevention and wellness. The big keys to the diabetic diets are the ratios of each meals fat/carb/protein as well as the type of each eaten (good vs bad carbs, good vs bad fats). Further the quantity of calories and of course amount of veggies playing a big part.

That said, Im curious about some of the small changes made to your diet Cashless - and if you think those changes negatively impacting PSA are due to the actual foods or the potentially different insulin responses. For example, you said you tried a switch from almond milk to cows milk with your steel cut oats/walnuts/fruit - and that resulted in a higher PSA. Do you have any idea/guess if the increased carbs in the cows milk (vs almond milk) resulted in a higher insulin response (due to a higher carb to fat/protein ratio) or if it was actually the cows milk (assuming you kept your ratios the same)? Of course, an equal amount of carbs in cows milk would spike blood sugars more than unsoaked steel cut oats so perhaps even if the ratios were kept the same it would not be a fair comparison.

I ask not because Im looking to introduce more dairy to my diet, but more because Im interested if certain foods are actually worse for our cancers or if its more that eating certain ways keeps our insulin responses lower/inflammation lower and therefore its better due to that.

Note - Im fully aware there is a lot of trial and error/guesswork/personal experience going on here due to the fact large studies have lots of issues in this space. Im just looking for best guesses and opinions thanks.

KevC said...
Great thread thanks. I have a couple questions for those on the Cashless diet or something similar. It occurs to me that these diets are also very in line with diabetic diets - which seem to be the best diets for almost all disease prevention and wellness. The big keys to the diabetic diets are the ratios of each meals fat/carb/protein as well as the type of each eaten (good vs bad carbs, good vs bad fats). Further the quantity of calories and of course amount of veggies playing a big part.

That said, Im curious about some of the small changes made to your diet Cashless - and if you think those changes negatively impacting PSA are due to the actual foods or the potentially different insulin responses. For example, you said you tried a switch from almond milk to cows milk with your steel cut oats/walnuts/fruit - and that resulted in a higher PSA. Do you have any idea/guess if the increased carbs in the cows milk (vs almond milk) resulted in a higher insulin response (due to a higher carb to fat/protein ratio) or if it was actually the cows milk (assuming you kept your ratios the same)? Of course, an equal amount of carbs in cows milk would spike blood sugars more than unsoaked steel cut oats so perhaps even if the ratios were kept the same it would not be a fair comparison.

I ask not because Im looking to introduce more dairy to my diet, but more because Im interested if certain foods are actually worse for our cancers or if its more that eating certain ways keeps our insulin responses lower/inflammation lower and therefore its better due to that.

Note - Im fully aware there is a lot of trial and error/guesswork/personal experience going on here due to the fact large studies have lots of issues in this space. Im just looking for best guesses and opinions thanks.

I am not Cashless, but if you don't mind my best guess and opinion: insulin is BIG. Someday this will be proven, is my guess. It is big concerning your heart health, hardening of the arteries, your blood pressure, your waistline, non-alcoholic fatty liver, many other health related things, many cancers and some day we will know that it is very important relative to aggressive PCs as well.

This of course is all just me wildly speculating and telling the future, though I do feel there is significant evidence(not proof), some of which I have presented previously. But excess insulin, produced in response to excess net(low fiber) carbs/sugar will someday be shown to be the underlying monster that has many heads that can be regrown, like that mythical multi-headed monster, Hydra. You chop off one head, and the underlying beast grows a couple of more. So, for example, in this analogy high blood pressure is one of the heads. We chop it off with drugs that lower blood pressure, but the underlying beast of excess insulin and insulin resistance is still working away against general health under the surface, untouched by the blood pressure med.

I speculate that it is even the reason that evil diabetes, which harms us in such a multiple of ways, and is associate with much higher rates of most other cancers, has been associated with lower rates of PC. Why? Because these days, after 40+ years of the authorities pushing more carb and less fat, even our children are being diagnosed with what was called, not long ago, adult onset diabetes, aka type 2 diabetes(T2D), aka(in the earlier stages of this progressive disease, non-insulin dependent diabetes. So people are diagnosed with T2D- which is preceded by years of high blood insulin and insulin resistance- far earlier on average than with PC. So what happens when you get this diagnoses? Treatment. Depending on severity at diagnosis, the very 1st thing tried is often dietary changes that will hopefully drop blood insulin. Which can work spectacularly well if carbs are severely cut, not so much just cutting fat and calories.

What follows when diet doesn't cut it? Drugs, usually such as metformin, which improves insulin sensitivity. Improve sensitivity to insulin leads to less insulin in the blood. Who here has heard of metformin as a PC treatment used by some practitioners, even when diabetes has not yet been diagnosed? Why? Lowering excess insulin is for the most part good for whatever ails us. Bottom line is that diabetics, as a group, are under aggressive treatments attempting to lower both their excess blood sugar and insulin. And low and behold, they seem to be protected from PC. And the longer they have been diabetic- and thus the longer they have been working on controlling their sugar/insulin(these 2 go hand in hand, more of one usually = more of the other), the more protection they seem to have from a PC diagnoses. Even though supposedly PC is the one cancer that does not seem to love sugar, still when diabetics try to control their blood sugar, they appear to be protected from PC. So if lowering their blood sugar is not supposed to help with PC, what is left that may well account for the protection? As with so many other diseases, lowered blood insulin certainly seems like a possibility.

I have read studies(sorry, don't have links/remember where) where very aggressive blood sugar control was attempted with whatever amount of injected insulin was needed. But they had to stop the studies because of all of the other health issues that were arising, despite the excellent blood sugar numbers.

So, you ask "because Im interested if certain foods are actually worse for our cancers or if its more that eating certain ways keeps our insulin responses lower/inflammation lower and therefore its better due to that.". I don't know what CC's info is, but I doubt he has much more proof than I do one way or another. Just as I have no proof by way of double blinded RCTs that a baseball bat to the head, or smoking, is bad for me. But I personally speculate that anything done to lower blood insulin from very high to pretty low levels- and assuming that this does not allow skyrocketing blood sugars caused by not enough insulin- will someday be proven to be very, very good for our overall health, including our battle against PC. It is the insulin more than it is anyparticular food. Of course, some foods naturally lead to much more insulin than other foods.

Cashless,

Do you think that eating the majority of your vegetables raw makes a difference in slowing down the progression of your cancer? I have read about the theory that cooking destroys enzymes in food, but never considered going raw. Except for salads, all of the vegetables that I prepare are cooked. I make my husband and occasional glass of vegetable juice (using a juicer) with greens, a carrot, and half a green apple (I keep it from getting too sugary).

Cashless,
You mentioned you do not eat potatoes. Is that because of the Glycemic load? Also, is there a particular reason you use almond milk as compared to soy?
Mr. Bill

<< Cashless, You mentioned you do not eat potatoes. Is that because of the Glycemic load?
Also, is there a particular reason you use almond milk as compared to soy?
Mr. Bill >>

Bill, regarding potatoes, yes. Potatoes are fast carbs which can result in an insulin spike
and kill a good "low growth cancer" diet. I would think that you could have a small amount
that is buried within a meal without harm. Think of fast carbs as a very sharp kitchen knife,
always be aware of its presence and use it carefully.

I have used soy milk without any problems.

Cashless

Pratoman, I have come across that Mayo Clinic piece and find it lacking. It's
declarative, offering no supportive evidence.

I'm not saying that glucose is bad. My fasting glucose levels are not that low.
I'm saying that when I have a repetitive insulin spike in a meal, the diet crashes,
and when I remove it, the diet returns to good performance.

Meanwhile, here is some reading concerning sugar and cancer.

/www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171013103623.htm


/www.medpagetoday.com/endocrinology/obesity/40920?pop=0&ba=1&xid=tmd-md&hr=trendMD

Cashless

I have beat the drum as an advocate for lower sugar and more importantly for lower insulin, and for more or less of certain nutrients, so much over the years that I feel I should also repeat a caveat that I have posted a few times before. Heck, I may have even already said it in this long thread, if not certainly in a similar thread:

More or less sugar, insulin, fats of various types, and nutrients in food or supplements, or even harder to control things like the toxins in our environment, might indeed influence how likely we are to get various cancers, or how successful we will be in slowing down(curing?) a given cancer once it occurs. Or not. Proof from unbiased sources in the form of large enough RCTs are not likely to appear, and nothing less will be accepted as proof by some folks.

However, I also feel that, particularly on the subject of sugar, and even insulin, that there are other factors that dwarf even those factors into insignificance. Even the doctor we have been quoting, the one with brain cancer who lived about 20 years after being given just a short time once all traditional treatments had failed and was told nothing he could do mattered, he still died from brain cancer. It was impressive how long he lived, but he still was unable to stop it in the end. But the point I have made before is more personal: nothing whatsoever was of any apparent help when my 40 year old daughter in law died of Mesothelioma. The chemo added lots of misery, but can you really go much faster than 6 months after diagnoses? ( But there is probably proof that it helps and is worth the SEs and cost). However, she was also in ketosis at least until she ran out of body fat, and probably had almost no sugar input and produced little to know insulin not only after diagnoses, but probably for the year or so before diagnoses. Diagnoses with the disease most often seen with older men who worked with asbestos. (She was a social worker, had recently gone back to school for her masters degree) We knew she was in Ketosis before diagnoses because I got her to check it when she lost such rapid weight after weight loss surgery. It occurred to me that since she was only able to eat such tiny amounts of food, and did not seem to want it or ever be hungry after the surgery, that this probably led to and indicated ketosis. If she was eating so little, and that was balanced, it had to mean she was also eating far less carbs than required to maintain a normal blood sugar, and all body stores of glycogen had been used up, so she had to be in ketosis, and she was. That also almost surely meant her blood insulin was very low, as low as it gets.

But all of that(and the best, most expensive medical treatment) made no apparent difference in her clinical course. Unless you want to say that if she had been eating a lot of sugar ( or maybe not had chemo) she would have only lived 4 miserable months, instead of 6.

So though I advocate for less blood insulin( which goes hand in hand with less sugar/carbs) being maybe a good thing in the fight against various cancers, probably including PC, and almost certainly being the main factor in the fight against diabetes and all the evils(including cancers) that it leads to, still, it is obviously almost a worthless concept when it comes to some situations. Maybe worthless when it comes to lowering odds of getting certain specific cancers? Or maybe worthless for any and all cancers at some certain stage? Because, after all, don't most people who die of cancer, often die of(and certainly have) cachexia, and just stop eating? Which is very likely accompanied by very low blood sugar and insulin. So don't many(if not all?) folks dying from cancer end up on a low insulin, low sugar, ketosis diet at some point, even if not on purpose?

So, it seems to me that if low blood insulin, lower blood sugars and/or ketosis is of any benefit in the cancer war(I think it is), it still, at the very least, has it's limits.