How to Starve Cancer: The Discovery of a Metabolic Cocktail that could Transform the Lives of Millions

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Nutrients or vitamins are not simply good or bad, cancer-causing or cancer-fighting. If a book or blog recommends a single “cancer diet”—or even a supplement that promises to fight cancer—beware. It could end up making things worse. Especially if there is a person on the cover in a white coat with arms folded, and with teeth that look like they have never been used.

And a breast cancer patient who was told by her oncologist she was going to die is still alive and well, going to the gym, working as a nurse, and living a full life—all as a result of following McLelland’s approach to starving her cancer. Jane McLelland McLelland was reluctant about writing her book, but she felt she had a duty to share with the world what she had discovered—and what had saved her life. I recognized that Life Extension was ahead of its time. It was providing information that nobody else seemed to be providing, and piecing together research and reporting on it before anybody else did,” said McLelland. “ Life Extension really was instrumental in helping me survive.”This book will answer all the burning questions you face when you begin to explore integrative treatments. Which ‘off-label’ drugs and supplements should you take? Should you try the ketogenic diet? Should you fast? Is fat safe? How much and when should you exercise? Jane explains why each patient needs a personalised approach and, importantly, how to work this out. I didn’t even think I was going to be alive, and I certainly didn’t expect to have a family,” said McLelland. “I have to pinch myself to believe it sometimes.” The importance of nutrition has long been accepted for conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, diagnoses that come with well-known dietary prescriptions. Even the most commonly used drug in type 2 diabetes, metformin, has been found in clinical trials to be inferior to diet and exercise. Cell biologists like Locasale see extending that line of thinking to cancer as a logical step, because at the cellular level, cancer is also a disease of metabolic pathways.

McLelland underwent surgery to remove the tumor in her lung, and she endured six months of chemo (at a much lower dose than that recommended by her oncologist). But this time, she also employed a strategy to starve the cancer’s stem cells. A cancer diagnosis was terrifying enough, but what McLelland struggled with most was the fact that she would never be able to have her own biological children. This book will answer all the burning questions you face when you begin to explore complementary cancer care. Which 'off-label' drugs and supplements should you take? Should you try the ketogenic diet? Should you fast? Is fat safe? How much and when should you exercise? Jane explains why each patient needs a personalised approach and, importantly, how to work this out. But McLelland refused to go down without a fight. Taking matters into her own hands, she dug through medical journals, poring over long-forgotten research and overlooked evidence, looking for clues to overcoming her cancer.

When Jane McLelland first heard the devastating news, she was only 30 years old. Just three days later, she underwent a complete, radical hysterectomy, followed by months of chemotherapy and radiation. What made the diagnosis even more tragic was the fact that McLelland’s doctor had misdiagnosed her for years. Since cervical cancer is highly treatable in its early stages, her tragedy could have been avoided. In the early stages of her research, McLelland first learned that glucose feeds most cancers and that IGF-1 (an insulin-like growth factor hormone found in high levels in dairy and meat) also helped to drive its growth. I already knew that statins would be potentially useful against cervical cancer. But research had also shown that they caused apoptosis in acute myeloid leukemias. I also had overlooked the fact that NSAIDs could cause cell death (apoptosis),” said McLelland. “What I learned from the Life Extension article was that there was a synergy between the two drugs, making them far more potent when taken together.” While the sugar-and-insulin angle has shown promise, more of the research has focused on dietary protein—or, specifically, individual amino acids that make up that protein. Studies have shown that the restriction of the amino acids serine and glycine can modulate cancer outcomes. According to a 2018 study in Nature, the chemotherapy drug methotrexate is affected by the amino acid histidine. Another, asparagine, is involved in the progression of breast cancer metastasis.

Now, 18 years later, after suffering from cervical cancer, secondary lung cancer, and treatment-related myelodysplasia, she is alive, well, and cancer-free.

I couldn’t understand why I was controlling one cancer without controlling the other,” said McLelland. “But it’s all about metabolism. The metabolism of my leukemia was totally different from that of my cervical cancer. So, with my low glycemic index diet, I was controlling the cervical cancer, but I wasn’t controlling the leukemia, which instead thrives on proteins.” Another key, off-label drug McLelland learned about from reading Life Extension was the diabetes drug, metformin. Metformin is critical for starving cancer because it cuts off cancer’s supply to glucose and insulin, and reduces IGF-1.

Because cancer is a term that encapsulates many different diseases—with different changes in different metabolic pathways in different cells in different parts of the body—no single metabolic therapy is right for every person. What makes one cancer grow more slowly could conceivably hasten another. Just as avoiding excessive sugar is crucial for people with diabetes, lest they lose their vision and feet, sugar can save the life of a person with critical hypoglycemia. To her doctor’s utter amazement, it appeared that McLelland had beaten the odds once again. Nine months later, she was not only alive, but her cancer blood markers were good.

Strike Two

After intensive research, McLelland concluded that all of these drugs would starve the cancer from different angles: dipyridamole cut off cancer’s access to protein, metformin cut off access to glucose, and the statin cut off access to fat. Once the cancer cells were in their weakened state, the addition of etodolac could help finish them off. McLelland created a diagram depicting her approach to starving cancer that she calls the “Metro Map,” based on an analogy of an underground metro system. The first big gun was a cardiovascular drug called dipyridamole, which stops protein from getting into the cancer cell, a key factor in starving leukemia, according to McLelland. All of these drugs are cheap and off-patent, which is why they have largely been ignored by the pharmaceutical industry, despite research supporting their effectiveness against cancer,” said McLelland. Just like the cervical cancer, Jane’s lung cancer was initially misdiagnosed (this time as a chest infection). But the benefit of having the improperly read X-ray from four months prior—along with the properly diagnosed X-ray—was the ability to see the rate at which the cancer was growing.