Photo courtesy of Adventist Healthcare

Here are two articles I’ve had for awhile regarding the mechanisms of cancer and cancer defense:
Why don’t we get cancer all the time?

Having the neighboring cell just split into two identical daughter cells would seem to be the simplest way to keep bodies from falling apart. However that would be a recipe for uncontrolled growth, said John W. Pepper of The University of Arizona in Tucson.
….
Instead, multicellular organisms use a seemingly inefficient process to replace lost cells, Pepper said. An organ such as the skin calls upon skin-specific stem cells to produce intermediate cells that in turn produce skin cells.

The article goes on to discuss how stem cells become skin cells, but that skin cells are dead-ends, incapable of reproduction. This keeps the daughter cells from accumulating enough mutations to become rogue versions of themselves.

So the first article was about the body defending against itself against cancer. Now let’s look at how cancer defends itself against the body: St. Jude finds link between cellular defense processes, showing how cancer cells survive

“Autophagy is a cell-survival jack-of-all-trades, and we’re trying to understand the signals that trigger its onset,” said Douglas Green, Ph.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Immunology and the paper’s senior author. “This process developed so early in the evolution of life that at least some types of microorganisms must have learned how to avoid this defensive response of the cell to being invaded. We want to know how invading microorganisms avoid being destroyed by autophagy and learn how cancer cells use autophagy to resist chemotherapy drugs before they have a chance to work.”

In the end, cancer is you, only an out-of-control version. As cancer cells look very much like the body’s cells, cancer treatments invariably destroy the body as well. The goal of chemotherapy is to manage to keep the patient alive long enough to kill off the cancer. Cancer’s purpose is to continue proliferating out of control, producing more and more of itself, consuming more of the body’s fuel, and inevitably killing off the host. It’s a struggle between the body and cancer, each side evolving mechanisms to tilt the tables in its favor.

The best cancer treatment is not to get it. And to do that requires a healthful lifestyle. Cancer loves glucose and insulin is a growth promoter, so a lifestyle that controls insulin and glucose is important. What type of lifestyle would do that? A low-carb diet with plenty of meat, vegetables, and fat. Some exercise and plenty of sleep and relaxation. Finding ways to de-stress. Ultimately, cancer is largely a disease of civilization.

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Tags: autophagy, cancer, Paleo, phagocytosis, Western disease