I had a question from someone that wanted to know can a ketone feed cancer
okay we know about glucose and glutamine but what about ketones okay so I
basically contacted professor Seyfried Thomas Seyfried and I asked him this
question and I'm going to be doing this video based on what he told me which is
some very interesting data if you if you don't know anything about professor
Seyfried he is the top expert on cancer and if you haven't seen the video I put
the link down below where I interviewed him this guy is super super smart he
does research on cancer and he knows probably more about ketones than anyone
that I've ever met especially in the research department knows as much as he
does about cancer and ketosis and fasting and the research on a low-carb
diet and what it can do for your immune system and what it does for cancer so
I'm gonna try to keep this very simple but I want to explain what he said and I
want to also give you a link to the article that he posted about this topic
so the first thing he said was ketones and fatty acids might be used in some
slow-growing tumor cells that have retained some level of respiratory
capacity now I have to explain what the heck that means starting with this right
here respiratory capacity when you look at the difference between a cancer cell
and a normal cell there's one big difference it's how that cancer cell is
using its fuel or metabolizing its fuel and we're talking about inside the
mitochondria that's the energy factory in the cell so the difference between a
cancer cell and a normal cell in a normal cell you have this mechanism this
machine called the respiratory chain there's other words for two and it's a
series of biochemical reactions that basically take food or fuel with the
help of oxygen and burn it energy and turns into the body's energy
currency which is ATP okay so we're taking fuel and turning it into
something the body can use to run all the different metabolic processes so
oxygen is the is the key thing right here that's why it's called respiratory
as in breathing right so there's all these different biochemical reactions
that occur in this thing called the Krebs cycle when this system is damaged
okay then there's no oxygen then how would the cell is going to turn fuel
into energy well they have a plan B they can convert over into a different
mechanism where they ferment glucose and glutamine which is a specific type of an
amino acid so cancer cells ferment glucose and glutamine and normal cells
go through the respiratory chain using oxygen okay
this system does not need oxygen all right that would be the difference
so ketones and fatty acids might be used in some that's the key word there
slow-growing tumor cells that have retained some level of respiratory
capacity so in other words unless that cancer cell has retained some of this
function it potentially could use some ketones and fatty acids okay so that's
what that means and he also mentioned this from all of his research without
exception all tumors show this pattern right here damage respiratory chain so
it goes on the safe fatty acids and ketones can support this plan B okay
hear me out because this is going to be really important next point he talked
about fatty acids cannot support in vitro that means outside the body tumor
or cell growth in the absence of glucose and glutamine talk about
fermentation so if you were to raise your carbohydrate level and provide
glucose or even this glutamine which is an amino acid okay
and you also were burning ketones or taking ketones that cancer cell or some
tumor cells could potentially use ketones or fatty acids as part of the
fuel but if you keep this very very low okay
the cancer cells cannot support the tumor growth I hope I explained that
pretty simply so it's a bit of a complex answer to a question I put a link to his
paper down below for you to dissect if you're really interested it's
fascinating he'll explain this in much more detail
there just make sure you have a medical dictionary to look up the words because
there's quite a few thanks for watching