Controlling What We Can, To Avoid Cancer

Every time a cell in our body is replaced, there’s a chance it will be cancerous. Exactly what that chance is depends on very many factors. Some of them we can’t control; others, we can.

Diet is a critical, modifiable factor

We can’t choose, for example, our genes. We can, for the most part, choose our diet. Why “for the most part”?

• Some people live in a food desert (the Arctic Circle is a good example where food choices are limited by supply)
• Some people have dietary restrictions (whether by health condition e.g. allergy, intolerance, etc or by personal-but-unwavering choice, e.g. vegetarian, vegan, kosher, halal, etc)

But for most of us, most of the time, we have a good control over our diet, and so that’s an area we can and should focus on.

Choose your animal protein wisely

If you are vegan, you can skip this section. If you are not, then the short version is:

• Fish: almost certainly fine
• Poultry: the jury is out; data is leaning towards fine, though
• Red meat: significantly increased cancer risk
• Processed meat: significantly increased cancer risk

For more details (and a run-down on the science behind the above super-summarized version):

• Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy? ← A mythbuster article that outlines many health properties (good and bad) of animal products
• The Whys and Hows of Cutting Meats Out Of Your Diet ← A life-hack article about acting on that information

Skip The Ultra-Processed Foods

Ok, so this one’s probably not a shocker in its simplest form:

❝Studies are showing us is that not only do the ultraprocessed foods increase the risk of cancer, but that after a cancer diagnosis such foods increase the risk of dying❞

Source: Is there a connection between ultraprocessed food and cancer?

There’s an unfortunate implication here! If you took the previous advice to heart and cut out [at least some] meat, and/but then replaced that with ultra-processed synthetic meat, then this was not a great improvement in cancer risk terms.

Ultra-processed meat is worse than unprocessed, regardless of whether it was from an animal or was synthetic.

In other words: if you buy textured soy pieces (a common synthetic meat), it pays to look at the ingredients, because there’s a difference between:

• INGREDIENTS: SOY
• INGREDIENTS: Rehydrated Textured SOY Protein (52%), Water, Rapeseed Oil, SOY Protein Concentrate, Seasoning (SULPHITES) (Dextrose, Flavourings, Salt, Onion Powder, Food Starch Modified, Yeast Extract, Colour: Red Iron Oxide), SOY Leghemoglobin, Fortified WHEAT Flour (WHEAT Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Bamboo Fibre, Methylcellulose, Tomato Purée, Salt, Raising Agent: Ammonium Carbonates

Now, most of those original base ingredients are/were harmless per se (as are/were the grapes in wine—before processing into alcohol), but it has clearly been processed to Hell and back to do all that.

Choose the one that just says “soy”. Or eat soybeans. Or other beans. Or lentils. Really there are a lot of options.

About soy, by the way…

There is (mostly in the US, mostly funded by the animal agriculture industry) a lot of fearmongering about soy. Which is ironic, given the amount of soy that is fed to livestock to be fed to humans, but it does bear addressing:

❝Soy foods are safe for all cancer patients and are an excellent source of plant protein. Studies show soy may improve survival after breast cancer❞

Source: Food risks and cancer: What to avoid

(obviously, if you have a soy allergy then you should not consume soy—for most people, the above advice stands, though)

Advanced Glycation End-Products

These (which are Very Bad™ for very many things, including cancer) occur specifically as a result of processing animal proteins and fats.

Note: not even necessarily ultra-processing, just processing can do it. But ultra-processing is worse. What’s the difference, you wonder?

The difference between “ultra-processed” and just “processed”:

• Your average hotdog has been ultra-processed. It’s not only usually been changed with many artificial additives, it’s also been through a series of processes (physical and chemical) and ends up bearing little relation to the creature it came from.
• Your bacon (that you bought fresh from your local butcher, not a supermarket brand of unknown provenance, and definitely not the kind that might come on the top of frozen supermarket pizza) has been processed. It’s undergone a couple of simple processes on its journey “from farm to table”. Remember also that when you cook it, that too is one more process (and one that results in a lot of AGEs).

Read more: What’s so bad about AGEs?

Note if you really don’t want to cut out certain foods, changing the way you cook them (i.e., the last process your food undergoes before you eat it) can also reduce AGES:

Advanced Glycation End Products in Foods and a Practical Guide to Their Reduction in the Diet

Get More Fiber

❝The American Institute for Cancer Research shows that for every 10-gram increase in fiber in the diet, you improve survival after cancer diagnosis by 13%❞

Source: Plant-based diet is encouraged for patients with cancer

Yes, that’s post-diagnosis, but as a general rule of thumb, what is good/bad for cancer when you have it is good/bad for cancer beforehand, too.

If you’re thinking that increasing your fiber intake means having to add bran to everything, happily there are better ways:

Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)

Enjoy!

Dopamine vs Alzheimer’s

One of the key hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the formation of hardened beta-amyloid plaques around neurons. The beta-amyloid peptides themselves are supposed to be in the brain, but the hardened pieces of them that form the plaques are not.

While the full nature of the relationship between those plaques and Alzheimer’s disease is not known for sure (there are likely other factors involved, and “the amyloid hypothesis” is at this stage nominally just that, a hypothesis), one thing that has been observed is that increasing or reducing the plaques increases or reduces (respectively) Alzheimer’s symptoms such as memory loss.

Neprilysin

There is an enzyme, neprilysin, that can break down those plaques.

Neprilysin is made naturally in the brain, and/but we cannot take it as a supplement or medication, because it’s too big to pass through the blood-brain barrier.

A team of researchers led by Dr. Takaomi Saido genetically manipulated mice to produce more neprilysin, and those mice resultantly experienced fewer beta-amyloid plaques and better memory in their old age.

However wonderful for the mice (and a great proof of principle) the above approach is not useful as a treatment for humans whose genomes weren’t modified at our conception in a lab.

Since (as mentioned before) we also can’t take it as a medication/supplement, that leaves one remaining option: find a way to make our already-existing brains produce more of it.

The team’s previous research allowed them to narrow this down to “there is probably a hormone made in the hypothalamus that modulates this”, so they began experimenting with making the mice produce more hormones there.

The DREADD switch

DREADDs, or Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs, were the next tool in the toolbox. The scientists attached these designer receptors to dopamine-producing neurons in the mice, so that they could be activated by the appropriate designer drugs—basically, allowing for a “make more dopamine” button, without having to literally wire up the brains with electrodes. The “button” gets triggered instead by a chemical trigger, the designer drug. You can read more about them here:

DREADDs for Neuroscientists: A Primer

The result was positive; when the mice made more dopamine, the result was that they also made more neprilysin. So far, the hypothesis is that the presence of dopamine upregulates the production of neprilysin. In other words, the increased neprilysin levels were caused by the increased dopamine levels (the alternatives would have been: they were both caused by the same thing—in this case that’d be the DREADD activation—or the increase was caused by something else entirely that hadn’t been controlled for).

As to how the causal relationship was determined…

“But I don’t have (or want) a DREADD switch in my head”

Happily for us (and probably happily for the mice too, because dopamine causes feelings of happiness), the experiments continued.

This time, instead of using the DREADD system, they tried simply supplementing the mouse food with l-dopa, a dopamine precursor. L-dopa is often used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, because the molecules are small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier, and can be converted to full dopamine inside the brain itself. So, taking l-dopa normally raises dopamine levels.

The results? The mice who were given l-dopa enjoyed:

• higher dopamine levels
• higher neprilysin levels
• lower beta-amyloid plaque levels
• better memory in tests

The next step for the researchers is to investigate how exactly dopamine regulates neprilysin in the brain, but for now, the relationship between l-dopa consumption and the reduction of Alzheimer’s symptoms seems clear.

You can read about the study here:

The dopaminergic system promotes neprilysin-mediated degradation of amyloid-β in the brain

Is there a catch?

L-dopa has common side effects that are not pleasant; the list begins with nausea and vomiting, and continues with things that one might expect from having “too much of a good thing” when it comes to dopamine, such as dyskinesia (extra movements) and hallucinations.

You can read about it more here at the Parkinson’s Foundation:

Parkinson’s Foundation | Levodopa

However! All is not lost. Rather than reaching for the heavy guns by taking l-dopa unnecessarily, there are other dopamine precursors that don’t have those side effects (and are consequently less restricted, to the point they can be purchased as supplements, or indeed, enjoyed where they occur naturally in some foods).

Top of the list of such safe* and readily-available dopamine precursors is…

N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine (NALT): The Dopamine Precursor & More

If you’d like to try that, here’s an example product on Amazon… Or you could eat fish, white beans, tofu, natto, or pumpkin seeds 😉

*Quick note on safety: “safe” is a relative term and may vary from person to person. Please speak with your own doctor to be sure, check with your pharmacist in case of any meds interactions, and be especially careful taking anything that increases dopamine levels if you have bipolar disorder or are otherwise prone to psychosis of any kind. For most people, this shouldn’t be an issue as our brains have a built-in mechanism for scrubbing excess dopamine and ensuring we don’t end up with too much, but for some people whose dopamine regulation is not so good in that regard, it can cause problems. So again, speak with your doctor to be sure, because we are not doctors, let alone your doctor.

Lastly…

If you’d like an entirely drug-free approach, that’s skipping even the “nutraceuticals”, you might enjoy:

Short On Dopamine? Science Has The Answer

Take care!