Starve tumors to death -- and live longer -- with Paleo!
Sometimes, even I think I sound like a broken record.
I believe so strongly in the ability for the Paleo diet to revolutionize your health that I take the opportunity to bring it up at every turn. But that's just because there's SO MUCH it can do for SO MANY different processes.
But with so many virtues worth extolling, I do find that Paleo's naysayers are always looking for something MORE... something it can do that's BIGGER.
"Come on," they say. "Can it cure cancer?"
Well, based on a new study on mice, the answer just might be: Maybe.
Researchers from the University of Florida have shown that a significantly limited carb intake is linked to slowing down the growth of glioblastoma -- a particularly aggressive, malignant tumor in the brain.
In fact, eating a low-carb, high-fat diet not only slowed the mice's brain tumor progression... it also DOUBLED their lifespan.
And that's pretty BIG news.
Because it's considered incurable, the five-year survival rate with a glioblastoma is, at best, 17 percent -- and that's when you're in your 20s and otherwise healthy. By age 50, the survival rate drops to just about 5 percent.
But based on this mouse study, it appears that a reduction in carbs can work to improve the prognosis and extend life expectancy because of how it drastically reduces glucose consumption.
As I've mentioned before, tumors LOVE sugar, and they need it to grow. And sugar (in the form of glucose) doesn't just fuel tumors of the brain
-- because it can rev the engines of other cancers, too.
But what if there were a way to deprive a tumor of that glucose... and literally starve it to death?
The results of this animal study has very interesting implications for future studies on humans, because the researchers didn't remove ALL sugars and carbohydrates altogether -- they merely limited them to an amount they thought a person would be able to maintain (around 10 percent). They also supplemented the missing carbs with good fats and high-quality proteins, which meant that although the tumor might be starving, the rest of the body wouldn't be.
Imagine how much more you'd be able to fight off those ravenous tumors if you eliminated carbs and sugars entirely!
And that's what going Paleo can do. Now, if you've been carbing it up for decades, trying to go "cold turkey" might be too big a leap for you -- and that's OK.
