Metabolic Cancer Therapy: Starving Tumors Through Diet & Metabolism

“If you are stage IV, and you know that they haven't got the answer, what are you going to do?

When you are diagnosed with cancer, you will probably be confused and frightened. Most newly diagnosed cancer patients are unlikely to do much research. You probably lack the ability to figure out what is going on, much less non-standard approaches to your care. But suppose you are an exceptionally active and engaged patient. What should you do? Where could you look to get advice on lifestyle factors?

You may look around for every edge you can find to enhance your immune system and general health to fight your disease. In a diagnosis that can arrive “out of the blue”, it is important to have agency and make a difference in things you can do, such as follow a healthy diet, reduce stress, get sleep, and exercise. But what is the science that shows the potential impact of these and other lifestyle factors on your possible outcomes?

Your medical team is usually focused on testing and conventional treatment options like surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. Your doctor may have no opinion or be opposed to potentially complementary treatments like supplements. You may be scared by the toxic effects of conventional treatment and be looking for less toxic options. Jane McLelland is uniquely qualified to provide guidance on things you can do.

After being given a terminal cancer diagnosis with only a few weeks to live, Jane dug up research, some decades old, in her quest to survive. Formerly a chartered physiotherapist, Jane had the medical background to dive into her diagnosis and treatment. Rather than aiming to cure cancer, which in many cases is unachievable, Jane’s approach was to stop it growing.

Remarkably, her approach not only stopped it from growing, but it disappeared altogether. There are now clinics following her protocol, achieving successes. Her book "How to Starve Cancer" is a new approach to the treatment of cancer. This inspirational read is updated with a new "Metro Map", Jane’s unique and revolutionary route map to starving cancer.

Jane intertwines her remarkable life story of terminal cancer to full recovery, describing how she discovered a unique cocktail of off-label drugs (drugs usually prescribed for other conditions) and supplements that effectively starve the cancer stem cell, the cell left behind by conventional treatment. Treatment for the stem cell is hailed as the Holy Grail, so this book plugs the missing piece into why we do not have a cure for cancer.

Lead cancer researchers at top oncology centers are now using this book as a guide, and Jane has a huge following of tens of thousands on Facebook and other social media. Testimonials abound from happy and delighted recovered patients and from oncologists who use her methods. Why might you want to better understand how cancer metabolism can be used to treat your cancer?

Cancer treatments attempt to identify something that is different about cancer cells from normal cells, then target those cells or processes to hinder or kill the cancer cells. For example, chemotherapies attack cells that grow faster.

Understanding cancer “metabolism” – how cancer cells use carbohydrates, fats, and proteins from food to get the energy they need to grow and spread – and how it is different from the metabolism of normal cells can lead to additional treatment options.

Compared to healthy cells, cancer cells use more glucose, produce less energy when making what they need to multiply and spread, and favor fermentation over breaking down glucose in the presence of oxygen. Unlike surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation, metabolic therapies don’t immediately remove or kill cancer cells. Instead, they keep cancer cells from growing by changing or slowing the cancer metabolism. The tumor eventually may shrink and die.

Researchers are looking for ways to block the unique metabolic processes of cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone by reducing the food supply to the cancer cells and disrupting the messaging systems (“pathways”) used by cancer cells. For example, inhibiting “glycolysis” – the process of breaking down glucose to release energy – may help stop the development of cancer cells.

What can you do to address your cancer using a metabolic approach? Metabolic approaches to treating cancer are in the early stages of research. They are not part of the standard of care, but show much promise.

Cancer oncologists are not taught about the metabolic pathways beyond the “Warburg effect” (a “hallmark” of cancer cells – cancer cells preferentially break down sugar using glycolysis to produce energy, rather than using the more efficient approach of normal cells). There are multiple pathways that cancer can use to increase its nutrient uptake. Blocking those pathways can weaken the cancer.

Brad Power This is our weekly session of the Cancer Patient Lab. Today, we're honored to have with us Jane McLelland, who's a pioneer and thought leader in the area of metabolic approaches, starving cancer, and nutrition. We've been looking forward to this conversation for some time. Let me cover a quick few quick housekeeping notes that we have at the beginning of every session. This is for information purposes only. This is not medical advice.

What we try to do is arm patients with information that they can take to their medical team. We are a nonprofit patient-led volunteer organization. We always appreciate donations, which you can do through our website. I don't know if Will Lavalley introduced me to Jane. Many people have introduced me. Bapcha Murthy made one of the connections. She is well known as a leader in the field. We're very interested in hearing what she has to say.

We've had a number of sessions about integrative oncology, nutrition, complementary therapies, from Donald Abrams at the UCSF Osher Center, to Nigel Brockton at AACR, to Bapcha on scams. Many of the people here have a good understanding of your work and are looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Jane McLelland 2:34 This is my disclaimer.

It's important to make sure that people know I am not a doctor; I'm not a pharmacist; and these are suggestions and things that I have done for myself. This is me, a former chartered physiotherapist. I haven't worked as a physio for a long time. I’m a Stage IV cancer survivor. It came back multiple times. Patient advocate, educator, and author of How to Starve Cancer, which looks like some of you have read. I also have an online course.

I'm going to do a special discount for you, BRAD. I'll do that straight after. I'll put that as a discount code if anybody hasn't seen my online course. I don't know whether that's something I'm allowed to do, but I've just done it. I'm most known for my “Metro Map”, which is a metabolic, quick look at what is happening in the cancer cell. It's essentially looking at the three macros in the diet.

You've got glucose on one side, glutamine and other amino acids on the left, and then along the bottom there are fatty acids. That's a very quick snapshot. I can't say I’m famous, but people recognize me for the Metro Map. That's what people know me for. This a more up-to-date one. It's got some more pathways on there. I updated my book in 2021. I put some transport on there, for example, lactate transport.

I've also got glutamine and other transporters, amino acid transporters, like the XCT. I do a full chapter on ferroptosis In my second edition as well. And fat transport as well. There are a few other things going on in there, which hopefully paint the picture of what's going on with the metabolism of cancer. People don't really know this section of what I talk about, which is cancer's progression, or my precis of the hallmarks of cancer.

There are about 18 or 20 different hallmarks, with emerging hallmarks, including the microbiome. I've chopped it down to these as my approach to try to look at how they all fit into cancer progression. Because when you look at the hallmarks, they're always noted as a round circle. There's no start and no finish to it. But I've tried to break it down into what actually happens. We start with the abnormal microenvironment.

That's what is going to cause cancer. Cancer starts in the cell membrane. This is something that people don't know. This is my theory. You can challenge me on this afterwards, if you like. But cancer starts in the cell membrane. You can't suddenly get mutations in the nucleus without it passing through the cell membrane. The cell membrane is affected by the abnormal microenvironment and everything that happens with that.

I'll go into more detail about that in a minute. That'll fire up these two key pathways, nuclear factor-kappa beta and Stat3. They then switch on and make some of the pathways in the cancer more active, so the glycolysis and the OXPHOS. This is another bit of my metabolic map here. Once you have the glycolysis happening, you have a secretion of lactate. This is very acidic.

The environment doesn't like it, and you then grow lots of excess blood vessels in order to take away the lactic acid. You get these growth factors, and also MMPs, which tend to be a little bit forgotten with general oncology. Once you've got all of that going on, this switches off the environment. The acidic environment switches off the immune cells. It switches the macrophages from being anti-cancer to being pro-cancer.

You have m2 macrophages, and you also get the shift in the balance of the Th2, which is more of your humoral response to more of your cellular response, which is anti-cancer. Once that's happened, you then get this fast cell division. That's a very quick precis of what happens. The beginning bit is really key, though. ” We may go backwards and look at what happens more before we get all these changes. We don't have a cure for cancer.

Stage IV is still deemed to be incurable. I'm going to discuss my thoughts on why I survived. I had a quick chat about the metabolic Metro Map. We'll go into that maybe a little bit more. And the undruggable cancer stem cell. It is druggable.