Over 100 years of animal research indicates the protective anti-cancer effects of daily continuous energy restriction (It’s not ethical to do this type of research on humans.) Feeding mice 30 – 40% fewer calories resulted in the development of about half the tumours of mice eating normal calorie diets.
This level of calorie restriction appears to take a toll over time because it causes stress on the body, resulting in other diseases and early ageing. We now know that extreme diets that reduce 20% or more calories for long periods, can negatively affect certain body processes – such as immune response, wound healing and cold-temperature tolerance, besides making a person very thin!
Extremely low calorie diets aside, we still HAVE TO become familiar and comfortable with being hungry daily. We need to plan to feel good and hungry before every meal AND go to bed with a completely empty stomach. An empty stomach means the body can switch from mostly digestion into mostly detoxification – the clean-out process.⠀
There are several healthy ways to do this (and many unhealthy ways that lead to bulimia and anorexia that I am not encouraging).
The easiest way is to use a restricted eating window of 10 – 12 hours in which you eat all your food – and no eating outside of these times – none at all. If you do this, breakfast will taste VERY VERY GOOD!! ⠀
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The second way is where you eat MEALS ONLY and no snacks! Drink water only in between.⠀
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Both ways work best if you eat real food – not junk. They both take a bit of adjustment and a few headaches to start with (drink more water).⠀
Why is this fasting important to health?
When the body is in a fasting start, it allows a process called ‘autophagy’ to begin. Every single cell in our body is designed to self-destruct – to eat itself – once it reaches a point of no longer functioning as it should. This is one of the healing miracles of creation, in my opinion. But this process doesn’t really kick in until our body is no longer digesting. That’s one reason we need sufficient sleep at night – to stop eating, allow digestion to finish up for the day and allow autophagy to start. We all know people heal better from diseases when they are getting enough sleep. Sleep allows new immune functions to kick in because, one reason being, we are no longer stuffing food into our mouths.
If we really want to keep our bodies working well with this cleanup process, we will do even better to leave good gaps between meals so our cells can stay on top of the work at hand.
The second part of the process
You may notice that this ‘cell self destruction’ process is only half of a process. There is no use removing damaged parts if they are not getting replaced. Taking a damaged tyre off your car will be of no use unless you replace it after all!
Again, our amazing body is set up with plenty of ‘spare tyres’ or ‘spare cells’ waiting and ready. From before we were born, every organ has a collection of what are called ‘stem cells’. These are undifferentiated cells that can form into any cell, as needed. After a cell has self-destructed, other cells in that organ can divide and replace the removed cell, or if a lot of cells are removed, as is necessary when a disease process has begun, these stem cells will be called out to action for the first time in their cell lives. It’s like a sleeper-spy who went about their whole spy life in another country living the good life – finally getting called into action. The stem cell differentiates into a perfect replica of the cell in the organ needed, and gets to work with the rest of the team. ‘Perfectly and wonderfully made’ barely describes it, does it!
HOWEVER – and here is the big caveat to this whole process – this ‘stem cell replacement programme’ only occurs AFTER eating resumes – AND only under certain conditions.
This is a major reason people get sick and die young.
First – they do not allow enough calorie restriction time between meals and overnight for the autophagy process to begin, and second, they do not provide the right conditions upon resuming eating for the stem cells to begin life as new cell-types. BOTH conditions must be met for health to improve.
In other words – calorie restriction on its own won’t lead to better health long-term.
The diet needed for stem cells to begin work
Over the next group of cancer-prevention posts I will look at the type of diet that meets these requirements. A massive amount of research has gone into this in the last 20 years and it is now quite well established and beginning to be used in trials in hospitals worldwide with all different types of diseases including cancer. Great results are starting to come out.
But just a tip now – the diet must be high in micronutrients and low in inflammatory factors for the stem cells to start work in their new place. A low micronutrient, inflammatory diet results in the autophagy process grinding to a halt and a person just gets sicker. Calorie restriction diets based upon the model of the Western diet (eg. Weight Watchers, Lite ‘n’ Easy) result in this exact thing happening – weight loss but health processes continue to deteriorate over time.
Summary
On the other hand, a low inflammation, high micronutrient (ie. very healthy) diet without calorie restriction won’t lead to health in the long term – although it is better than the other way around. Both factors:
- calorie restriction, and
- high micronutrient diet
must be met for your best long term health – including cancer prevention and recurrence.
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