Keto for Cancer: Ketogenic Metabolic Therapy as a Targeted Nutritional Strategy

A Must Read for everything Keto as it relates to Cancer. I am a ten year cancer survivor and have followed a ketogenic diet for the past seven years. I closely follow the research and resources on ketogenic diets for cancer therapy currently available. This new book is, without a doubt, the best one for patients. It is readable and personal, yet it includes specific details for using the diet with conventional treatment that have been lacking in earlier books on the subject.Miriam Kalamian strikes a good balance explaining the complex science behind how diet can impact cancer’s progression and be used therapeutically without overwhelming biochemistry or over promising its potential. She outlines the basic diet protocol and easy ways to ramp up to a ketogenic diet, while still providing important details about using the diet with certain types of cancer or chemotherapy. You will learn how to work with your cancer team to create a personalized diet plan that fits into the overall treatment plan. There is misinformation about ketogenic plans on the internet now; why this author’s extensive clinical experience and skill is so valuable to the diet’s application with cancer. Her references to studies, articles and the resource list are also helpful for readers who want to explore further. Kalamian’s website DietaryTherapies provides an introduction to the topic and her family’s story; it is a good preview to her writing and the information in the book. Keto for Cancer is the book I have wanted all these years, it is a must read for anyone in the cancer community.

An invaluable resource for professionals and patients. With “Keto for Cancer, ” Miriam Kalamian has created a comprehensive guide to using the ketogenic diet that will serve as an invaluable resource for professionals as well as cancer patients and their family members. Her graduate degree in nutrition, extensive work with hundreds of cancer patients using ketogenic therapy, and personal experience as the mother of a child with cancer have fostered her expertise in this area. Miriam provides an exceptionally well written and detailed explanation of the ketogenic diet and a balanced review of the evidence to date regarding its use as an adjunctive cancer therapy, making it clear that there is still much that remains unknown. Additionally, she shares many practical tools with the reader: customizing the diet (including vegetarian and dairy-free options); meal-planning strategies for ensuring adequate calorie, protein, and micronutrient intake during cancer treatment; supplements; ketone testing; optimizing gut health; and many more practical takeaways too numerous to list. As a registered dietitian with a strong interest in ketogenic therapies for cancer and other disease states,, I highly recommend this book for doctors, nurses, nutrition professionals, and patients with cancer and their families who want to learn more about this approach.

Excellent. This is a great book, and will be vital for many people as more and more realize dietary adjustments will complement and improve (if not replace) other interventions to treat cancer. The author details in fair depth “the metabolic approach to cancer” that was initiated by Otto Warburg nearly a century ago and has been revitalized by Thomas Seyfried.Put simply, modern humans are filling their tanks both with too much fuel and with different fuels at the wrong proportions (per evolutionary tuning). Our engines are strained, and this excessive and imbalanced intake can feed cancers. We can try to limit that by 1) restricting calories and 2) restricting carbs and proteins (that fuel cancer). That means a diet based on healthy fats, which can fuel normal cells but do not fuel the explosive growth of cancer tumors. The book goes into great detail about how to pursue this anti-cancer diet.A few thoughts on what I might like to see in the next edition:1) A little more discussion on fasting, especially of duration longer than 2-3 days. All “extended fasting” is dismissed with a sentence, but there must be some room to talk about potential benefits (and harms) of fasting for periods longer than 3 days but shorter than, say, 30 days.Similarly, there is a great appendix of resources that are listed under various headings but there is no heading for “fasting.” If the coverage of therapeutic fasting isn’t expanded in the actual text of the book, it would at least be helpful to give a comprehensive list of the best current resources on science-based fasting. A comprehensive approach to metabolic healing should thoroughly investigate and discuss potential benefits of NOT eating as well as of ketogenic eating.2) A little more clarity in the discussion on glutamine in foods. We know it is in animal protein (and obviously in glutamine supplements), but it is an amino acid that is in all kinds of things. If it plays a major role in feeding cancer, don’t we want to try to limit it more greatly? I remain confused about the fact that keto staples like nuts and cruciferous vegetables ALSO have lots of glutamine. Do we try to restrict dietary glutamine, or not? If so, how?It would seem that rather than just a low protein ketogenic diet, what we really want would be a low glutamine ketogenic diet. Am I missing something?But other than that, 98 out of 100 still equals an A+ for this book!

Prostate Cancer Patients Need Additional Resources. This book is a masterpiece by an author who earned a degree in human nutrition and who researched Professor Thomas Seyfried’s ketogenic metabolic therapy to extend the life of her son, a brain tumor patient. While this book is useful for many cancer patients, it must be supplemented by prostate cancer patients. In other cancers, the cancer cells become energy-inefficient (Warburg effect). With prostate cancer cells, they start as energy-efficient. Prostate cancer cells lose the ability to accumulate zinc and have elevated needs for amino acids (such as leucine) and for choline. These and other differences in metabolism mean that prostate cancer patients must change their diets and supplements. This requires research beyond this book.

Excellent Book. Very useful book. I’m going thru cancer and this book has been extremely helpful in my diet help fight inflammation. I would recommend this book even if not going thru cancer but want a change in diet. I’ve lost 5 pounds in one week and my BP has also gone down.