The problem with (NOT) giving medical advice in the Incestral Health Community

Just about every major blogger and guru in the IHC has a lengthy medical disclaimer page.  They are not providing medical advice on the internet because if they are an MD it's illegal (my understanding of the law, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here),  and if they are not, it's illegal to practice without a license.  Same goes for nutritional advice and all that.  

Right after the medical disclaimer, where you've usually been given the "I have no special training in what I'm about to convey" spiel, or, the flipside, the disclaimer is signed with a name and a litany of letters after it.  And from time to time, you get nothing more than a telling of someone's story on how they cured themselves.  The IHC is big on this.  One of the more recent trends in the IHC is the promotion of ketogenic diets for curing cancer.  I consider this to be wholly irresponsible unless there is a focus on using the diet in conjunction with medical therapies that have been proven effective.  I don't see enough of that in this community, rather too much of the opposite of doctor bashing.  

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The Latest LC Beats Other Diets Study

I'm hesitant to discuss this one, because we don't even have an abstract of a published paper.  But since it's going to be bantied about the LC web anyway, I might as well comment on what information we have.

Here's the press release from the conference at which it was presented:

Intermittent, Low-Carbohydrate Diets More Successful Than Standard Dieting, Present Possible Intervention for Breast Cancer Prevention

Here's an article that provides some additional info:  Cutting carbs just 2 days a week can spur weight loss

Piecing together the information provided together it appears that they compared weight loss and changes in biomarkers for breast cancer risk in women over a four month period.  The diet details are sketchy, but it seems they compared the following diets:

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Ketones Fuel Cancer?!

Ketones and lactate “fuel” tumor growth and metastasis

Previously, we proposed a new model for understanding the “Warburg effect” in tumor metabolism. In this scheme, cancer-associated fibroblasts undergo aerobic glycolysis and the resulting energy-rich metabolites are then transferred to epithelial cancer cells, where they enter the TCA cycle, resulting in high ATP production via oxidative phosphorylation. We have termed this new paradigm “the Reverse Warburg effect.” 

Here, we directly evaluate whether the end-products of aerobic glycolysis (3-hydroxy-butyrate and L-lactate) can stimulate tumor growth and metastasis, using MDA-MB-231 breast cancer xenografts as a model system. More specifically, we show that administration of 3-hydroxy-butyrate (a ketone body) increases tumor growth by ~2.5-fold, without any measurable increases in tumor vascularization/angiogenesis. Both 3-hydroxy-butyrate and L-lactate functioned as chemo-attractants, stimulating the migration of epithelial cancer cells.  Although L-lactate did not increase primary tumor growth, it stimulated the formation of lung metastases by ~10-fold.  thus, we conclude that ketones and lactate fuel tumor growth and metastasis, providing functional evidence to support the “reverse Warburg effect.” 

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