Does intermittent fasting increase or decrease our risk of cancer?
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Research over the years has suggested intermittent fasting has the potential to improve our health and reduce the likelihood of developing cancer.
So what should we make of a new study in mice suggesting fasting increases the risk of cancer?
What is intermittent fasting?
Intermittent fasting means switching between times of eating and not eating. Unlike traditional diets that focus on what to eat, this approach focuses on when to eat.
There are lots of commonly used intermittent fasting schedules. The 16/8 plan means you only eat within an eight-hour window, then fast for the remaining 16 hours. Another popular option is the 5:2 diet, where you eat normally for five days then restrict calories for two days.
In Australia, poor diet contributes to 7% of all cases of disease, including coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cancers of the bowel and lung. Globally, poor diet is linked to 22% of deaths in adults over the age of 25.
Intermittent fasting has gained a lot of attention in recent years for its potential health benefits. Fasting influences metabolism, which is how your body processes food and energy. It can affect how the body absorbs nutrients from food and burns energy from sugar and fat.
What did the new study find?
The new study, published in Nature, found when mice ate again after fasting, their gut stem cells, which help repair the intestine, became more active. The stem cells were better at regenerating compared with those of mice who were either totally fasting or eating normally.
This suggests the body might be better at healing itself when eating after fasting.
However, this could also have a downside. If there are genetic mutations present, the burst of stem cell-driven regeneration after eating again might make it easier for cancer to develop.
Polyamines – small molecules important for cell growth – drive this regeneration after refeeding. These polyamines can be produced by the body, influenced by diet, or come from gut bacteria.
The findings suggest that while fasting and refeeding can improve stem cell function and regeneration, there might be a tradeoff with an increased risk of cancer, especially if fasting and refeeding cycles are repeated over time.
While this has been shown in mice, the link between intermittent fasting and cancer risk in humans is more complicated and not yet fully understood.
What has other research found?
Studies in animals have found intermittent fasting can help with weight loss, improve blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and subsequently reduce the risks of diabetes and heart disease.
Research in humans suggests intermittent fasting can reduce body weight, improve metabolic health, reduce inflammation, and enhance cellular repair processes, which remove damaged cells that could potentially turn cancerous.
However, other studies warn that the benefits of intermittent fasting are the same as what can be achieved through calorie restriction, and that there isn’t enough evidence to confirm it reduces cancer risk in humans.
What about in people with cancer?
In studies of people who have cancer, fasting has been reported to protect against the side effects of chemotherapy and improve the effectiveness of cancer treatments, while decreasing damage to healthy cells.
Prolonged fasting in some patients who have cancer has been shown to be safe and may potentially be able to decrease tumour growth.
On the other hand, some experts advise caution. Studies in mice show intermittent fasting could weaken the immune system and make the body less able to fight infection, potentially leading to worse health outcomes in people who are unwell. However, there is currently no evidence that fasting increases the risk of bacterial infections in humans.
So is it OK to try intermittent fasting?
The current view on intermittent fasting is that it can be beneficial, but experts agree more research is needed. Short-term benefits such as weight loss and better overall health are well supported. But we don’t fully understand the long-term effects, especially when it comes to cancer risk and other immune-related issues.
Since there are many different methods of intermittent fasting and people react to them differently, it’s hard to give advice that works for everyone. And because most people who participated in the studies were overweight, or had diabetes or other health problems, we don’t know how the results apply to the broader population.
For healthy people, intermittent fasting is generally considered safe. But it’s not suitable for everyone, particularly those with certain medical conditions, pregnant or breastfeeding women, and people with a history of eating disorders. So consult your health-care provider before starting any fasting program.
Amali Cooray, PhD Candidate in Genetic Engineering and Cancer, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Smart Sex – by Dr. Emily Morse
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First, what this isn’t: this isn’t a mere book of sex positions and party tricks, nor is it a book of Cosmo-style “drive your man wild by using hot sauce as lube” advice.
What it offers instead, is a refreshingly mature take on sex, free from the “teehee” titillations and blushes that many books of the genre go for.
Dr. Emily Morse outlines five pillars of sex:
- Embodiment
- Health
- Collaboration
- Self-knowledge
- Self-acceptance
…and talks about each of them in detail, and how we can bring them together. And, of course, how we or our partner(s) could accidentally sabotage ourselves or each other, and the conversations we can (and should!) have, to work past that.
She also, critically, and this is a big source of value in the book, looks at “pleasure thieves”: stress, trauma, and shame. The advice for overcoming these is not “don’t worry; be happy” but rather is actual practical steps one can take.
The style throughout is direct and unpatronizing. Since the advice within pertains to everyone who has and/or wants an active sex life, very little is divided by gender etc.
There is some attention given to anatomy and physiology, complete with clear diagrams. Honestly, most people could benefit from these, because most people’s knowledge of the relevant anatomy stopped with a very basic high school text book diagram that missed a lot out.
Bottom line: this book spends more time on what’s between your ears than what’s between your legs, and yet is very comprehensive in all areas. Everyone has something to gain from this one.
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Overcoming Gravity – by Steven Low
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The author, a professional gymnast and coach with a background in the sciences, knows his stuff here. This is what it says on the tin: it’s rigorously systematic. It’s also the most science-based calisthenics book this reviewer has read to date.
If you just wanted to know how to do some exercises, then this book would be very much overkill, but if you want to be able to go from no knowledge to expert knowledge, then the nearly 600 pages of this weighty tome will do that for you.
This is a textbook, it’s a “the bible of…” style book, it’s the one that if you’re serious, will engage you thoroughly and enable you to craft the calisthenics-forged body you want, head to toe.
As if it weren’t already overdelivering, it also has plenty of information on injury avoidance (or injury/condition management if you have some existing injury or chronic condition), and building routines in a dynamic fashion that avoids becoming a grind, because it’s going from strength to strength while cycling through different body parts.
Bottom line: if you’d like to get serious about calisthenics, then this is the book for you.
Click here to check out Overcoming Gravity, and do just that!
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Ear Candling: Is It Safe & Does It Work?
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Does This Practice Really Hold A Candle To Evidence-Based Medicine?
In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you your opinion of ear candling, and got the above-depicted, below-described set of responses:
- Exactly 50% said “Under no circumstances should you put things in your ear and set fire to them”
- About 38% said “It is a safe, drug-free way to keep the ears free from earwax and pathogens”
- About 13% said “Done correctly, thermal-auricular therapy is harmless and potentially beneficial”
This means that if we add the two positive-to-candling answers together, it’s a perfect 50:50 split between “do it” and “don’t do it”.
(Yes, 38%+13%=51%, but that’s because we round to the nearest integer in these reports, and more precisely it was 37.5% and 12.5%)
So, with the vote split, what does the science say?
First, a quick bit of background: nobody seems keen to admit to having invented this. One of the major manufacturers of ear candles refers to them as “Hopi” candles, which the actual Hopi tribe has spent a long time asking them not to do, as it is not and never has been used by the Hopi people. Other proposed origins offered by advocates of ear candling include Traditional Chinese Medicine (not used), Ancient Egypt (no evidence of such whatsoever), and Atlantis:
Quackwatch | Why Ear Candling Is Not A Good Idea
It is a safe, drug-free way to keep the ears free from earwax and pathogens: True or False?
False! In a lot of cases of alternative therapy claims, there’s an absence of evidence that doesn’t necessarily disprove the treatment. In this case, however, it’s not even an open matter; its claims have been actively disproven by experimentation:
- It doesn’t remove earwax; on the contrary, experimentation “showed no removal of cerumen from the external auditory canal. Candle wax was actually deposited in some“
- It doesn’t remove pathogens, and the proposed mechanism of action for removing pathogens, that of the “chimney effect”: the idea that the burning candle creates a vacuum that draws wax out of the ear along with debris and bacteria, simply does not work; on the contrary, “Tympanometric measurements in an ear canal model demonstrated that ear candles do not produce negative pressure”.
- It isn’t safe; on the contrary, “Ear candles have no benefit in the management of cerumen and may result in serious injury”
In a medium-sized survey (n=122), the following injuries were reported:
- 13 x burns
- 7 x occlusion of the ear canal
- 6 x temporary hearing loss
- 3 x otitis externa (this also called “swimmer’s ear”, and is an inflammation of the ear, accompanied by pain and swelling)
- 1 x tympanic membrane perforation
Indeed, authors of one paper concluded:
❝Ear candling appears to be popular and is heavily advertised with claims that could seem scientific to lay people. However, its claimed mechanism of action has not been verified, no positive clinical effect has been reliably recorded, and it is associated with considerable risk.
No evidence suggests that ear candling is an effective treatment for any condition. On this basis, we believe it can do more harm than good and we recommend that GPs discourage its use❞
Source: Canadian Family Physician | Ear Candling
Under no circumstances should you put things in your ear and set fire to them: True or False?
True! It’s generally considered good advice to not put objects in general in your ears.
Inserting flaming objects is a definite no-no. Please leave that for the Cirque du Soleil.
You may be thinking, “but I have done this and suffered no ill effects”, which seems reasonable, but is an example of survivorship bias in action—it doesn’t make the thing in question any safer, it just means you were one of the one of the ones who got away unscathed.
If you’re wondering what to do instead… Ear oils can help with the removal of earwax (if you don’t want to go get it sucked out at a clinic—the industry standard is to use a suction device, which actually does what ear candles claim to do). For information on safely getting rid of earwax, see our previous article:
Take care!
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The Good Skin Solution – by Shann Jones
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Not everyone knows that eczema is not just a skin condition; it’s an autoimmune condition. And thus to heal one’s skin, the gut is a good place to start.
This is not your average gut health book though, because it is focused on optimizing things for one’s skin… Although the author herself learned about this while helping her husband to battle an MRSA infection. In other words, a multi-fronted battle for sure.
The advices in this book are good for, as the subtitle promises, an assortment of other skin conditions too, including psoriasis, rosacea, and acne. She covers the usual bases, and recommends probiotics, of which she’s particularly keen to praise kefir, while advising against the use of antibiotics unless absolutely necessary—something we’ve talked about from time to time at 10almonds, too.
Not content to merely cover those things, she also talks allergies, and walking the fine line between avoiding triggers and developing hypersensitivity by treating to live in a perfectly clean bubble.
Ultimately, she offers “7 daily habits”, 3 of which involve goat’s milk kefir, that’s how keen on it she is. So if you’re vegan, probably this book isn’t as good value, however much it discusses the health woes that can be caused and/or exacerbated by drinking cow’s milk.
The style is very light and personable, which makes for easy reading, more like one friend talking to another, than a scientific textbook.
Bottom line: if you’d like healthier skin, are interested in dietary tweaks and homemade soaps, and have no aversion to goat’s milk and/or kefir, then this book is full of fascinating pointers.
Click here to check out The Good Skin Solution, and who knows, maybe you’ll find it’s the G.O.A.T!
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Bone on Bone – by Dr. Meredith Warner
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What this is not: a book about one specific condition, injury, or surgery.
What this is: a guide to dealing with the common factors of many musculoskeletal conditions, inflammatory diseases, and their consequences.
Dr. Warner takes the opportunity to address the whole patient—presumably: the reader, though it could equally be a reader’s loved one, or even a reader’s patient, insofar as this book will probably be read by doctors also.
She takes an “inside-out and outside-in” approach; that is to say, addressing the problem from as many vectors as reasonably possible—including supplements, diet, dietary habits (things like intermittent fasting etc), exercise, and even sleep. And yes, she knows how difficult those latter items can be, and addresses them not merely with a “but it’s important” but also with practical advice.
As an orthopedic surgeon, she’s not a fan of surgery, and counsels the reader to avoid that if reasonably possible. She also talks about how many people in the US are encouraged to have MRI scans for financial reasons (as in, they can be profitable for the doctor/institution), and then any abnormality is used as justification for surgery, to backwards-justify the use of the MRI, even if the abnormality is not actually the cause of the pain.
Noteworthily, humans in general are a typically a pile of abnormalities in a trenchcoat. Our propensity to mutation has made us one of the most adaptable species on the planet, yet many would have us pretend that the insides of people look like they do in textbooks, or else are wrong. The reality is not so, and Dr. Warner rightly shows this for what it is.
Bottom line: if you or a loved one are suffering from, or at risk of, musculoskeletal and/or inflammatory conditions, this is a top-tier book for having a much easier time of it.
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Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
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When Bitter Is Better
A good general rule of thumb for “does this food contain a lot of healthy polyphenols?” is:
“is this (edible) plant bitter/astringent/pungent”?
If it is, it’s probably rich in polyphenols:
Deciphering the role of bitter and astringent polyphenols in promoting well-being
…which is why it’s no surprise that black coffee and bitter chocolate score highly, as do hot peppers and even garlic.
See also: Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
Even fruits, generally considered something sweet to eat, often contain more polyphenols when they are bitter—many berries are great examples of this!
Read more: Goji Berries: Which Benefits Do They Really Have?
You can read more about the science of this here:
Sensory Nutrition and Bitterness and Astringency of Polyphenols
Important for multiple reasons (including heart and brain health)
Polyphenols have many benefits, and they’re most well known for their heart-healthy properties, but their antioxidant effect (and other mechanisms) also means these foods are generally neuroprotectants too:
The science of this is not all as obvious as you might think!
It is reasonable to expect “ok, this has antioxidant effect, so it will reduce oxidative damage to brain cells too”, and while that is true (and yes, polyphenols do cross the blood-brain barrier), they also help in other ways, including through the gut:
What if I don’t like bitter/astringent/pungent foods?
If you do not have a medical condition that proscribes them (do check with your doctor if unsure), the best advice is to simply eat them anyway, and your tastes will adapt.
It will also help if you avoid sweet foods (though this too is also a good general rule of thumb!), as this will move the balance of where your brain’s “set range” is for “good taste”.
Bonus tip: dark chocolate (80%+ cocoa if possible, 95% if you can get it) and chilli peppers go great with each other. Here’s an example of a chilli chocolate product on Amazon; it’s 70% cocoa (which is not bad, but could be better). You might be able to get a higher percentage locally, especially if you ask your local chocolatière, or make it yourself!
Enjoy!
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