[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Gene, thanks so much for joining us on a call today.

[Gene Fine]: Oh sure. Good to be here.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: To give a better background, we spoke to Dr. Seyfried about his ideas and his work on ketogenic diets, fasting, and cancer. And what I found interesting about your work is you’ve dug into different areas, and you’ve differentiated cancers and I wanted to get up to speed about what you’ve been up to. And potentially, also, you’ve got some slightly different views on the whole thing.

So, first of all I wanted to talk about what do you see as the mechanisms of effect behind, if we’re inducing ketosis to inhibit the cell growth of some cancers. How is that working from your perspective?

[Gene Fine]: There really are three linked mechanisms, I believe, that have the potential to inhibit cancer growth. And two of them — well actually all three of them — one is that by reducing carbohydrates in a diet. And we have to realize that most of the carbohydrates we consume are sugars and starches, which digest the sugars — about 90 percent of them.

[And] that if we strictly limit carbohydrate to very low values, we’re inhibiting insulin secretion. And insulin alone is a stimulus to cancer growth. So, if you inhibit insulin you’re reducing one of the important stimuli to cancer growth through that alone. The insulin receptors on cancer cells will be inhibited, and so the growth signals will be inhibited.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Is that differentiated? Normal cells have uptake of insulin and they respond to insulin also. Is it that the cancer cells respond to a greater degree? Or what’s the difference there, if there’s any?

[Gene Fine]: No, not at all. In fact, I think the concern would be that the cancer cells may respond to a lesser degree. However, the important thing is that as adults we need some insulin. Without any insulin, we’re Type One Diabetics, but we don’t need much insulin at all.

We need insulin when we’re kids, because kids grow up when they have carbohydrates and protein and insulin helps them grow. When you’re an adult and you eat too much carbohydrates it tends to make you grow sideways. So excess insulin in an adult is not such a good thing; it contributes to obesity and to diabetes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I guess we would throw in body builders in there as well, because they’re always trying to stimulate insulin to stimulate greater muscle growth.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, well I mean if you’re extremely physically active, you probably can eat whatever you want. I’m not talking about recommendations for body builders; I haven’t studied that. I know that others have. Jeff Volek and Steve Phinney have looked at athletes, and they recommend low-carb diets for them as well.

But the main group that I’m really talking about is the average person who is, unfortunately, a little bit more sedentary than they used to be. And in this group we really don’t need very much insulin to go about our normal activities. And so carbohydrate restriction is probably safe.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. So would you put protein in there as well? Because protein also can stimulate insulin.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, that I think is an interesting and maybe more controversial area.

Protein certainly can stimulate insulin. And the question about how much protein to consume in a diet is really an important one, but an independent question which I think has not been answered. I mean, if you look in the literature recommendations for protein in the diet are all over the page; they vary from 20 grams a day to 150 grams a day.

So I don’t know that I’m really in a good position to comment on that because it hasn’t really been adequately studied by anyone, including us. In our own study we didn’t limit protein, so we might have done better than we did if we had.

But nonetheless, our human study did show that the patients that had the highest level of ketosis were the ones who did the best in terms of stable disease or partial remission of their cancers. And those who had the lowest levels of ketosis had progressive disease.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you’re talking about how insulin inhibition mechanism, are they basically opposite correlates? So when insulin goes down [it is] in response to ketosis going up? Is that basically the rough mechanism, so that you could map those to each other? That’s why with a low carbohydrate diet, ketosis goes up and insulin goes down.

[Gene Fine]: Yes. I didn’t actually clarify that. I was saying, yes, that’s the general idea.

I didn’t quite complete the thought that really there are three mechanisms by which a very low carbohydrate diet could inhibit cancer growth, and one of them is, as I say, by reducing carbohydrates in the diet and reducing insulin secretion.

Insulin by itself is a stimulus to cancer growth, but very low insulin will at least have the potential to slow that. So insulin by itself would slow the cancer growth. And there are two cellular mechanisms, so I could insulin twice.

But in addition, there are systemic effects in the whole body, and very low insulin causes mobilization from fat cells — in fact, that’s how you end up losing weight — and the fat gets broken down in the liver. And increased breakdown of fat in the liver leads to production of ketone bodies and ketosis. And ketosis independently, we’ve shown at least in metabolic studies in cell culture, that ketosis itself can cause inhibition of cancer cells. So it can inhibit cancer cells; it leaves normal cells alone. And as I say, we also showed that in our human study.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yes. Yes, thank you. So there’s three mechanisms.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah. Well two of them I consider to be insulin, because there are two different insulin pathways that could be inhibited. And the third mechanism is the systemic effect of low insulin causing ketosis in the liver.

Increased fat mobilization causes ketosis in the liver, and the ketone bodies circulate in the body. Normal tissues tolerate it very well and can use ketone bodies as a fuel, but the cancer cells — at least that we’ve shown in vitro — can be inhibited by them.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. It’s interesting to look at the mechanisms, just in case later on people discover different tactics for modifying insulin, for example. I mean, like there’s drugs and stuff. Or, for introducing additional ketones or something.

So, we were talking just before the call about the study where you were actually looking at how ketones inhibit some of the cancer cells. Could you talk a bit about that? Because I know there was some glucose and ketones involved, and it was interesting how it’s done.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah. In cell culture studies, when we started this a few years ago, we studied three different normal tissue lines that were fibroblasts, which are normal connective tissue that we have in our body. And we also studied seven different cancer lines. Five colorectal cancer line variants and two breast cancer lines.

And what we found was that all seven of the cancer lines — well we grew all of the tissues for four days in a cell culture in glucose medium. And we saw how much they grew. But in parallel with that, we also grew the same cells in glucose medium but with added ketone bodies.

And, as I mentioned before, ketone bodies are a nutrient for normal cells, so we didn’t expect there to be any problems in the fibroblasts, and in fact the fibroblasts continued to grow normally when we added another nutrient.

However, all seven cancer lines showed growth inhibition. And they had differing degrees of growth inhibition when we added the ketone bodies. And we found that the degree of inhibition of the cancer lines was proportional to how much they over-expressed a particular protein called uncoupling protein 2, which actually reduces the efficiency of the cell in producing ATP.

So it turns out that the cancer cells were producing less ATP than they ordinarily would when we added ketone bodies. So the ketone bodies were metabolically inhibiting ATP production, and in proportion to their over expression of this interesting protein.

And the degree of ATP inhibition was exactly proportional to the degree of growth inhibition, which makes a lot of sense. That it requires ATP to grow. So that seemed to be pretty good evidence that we had at that point that it could be metabolic inhibition of cancer cells by these ketone bodies.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]:Yeah, that’s interesting, because, like you said, you’re actually adding something, you didn’t change [anything else]. You’ve got the same amount of glucose, so theoretically, even if cancers couldn’t process the ketone bodies very efficiently, they have the same amount of glucose there. So, in theory they could have been okay. But you’ve actually shown that somehow the ketone bodies are inhibiting that.

Would it be fair to say that the cancer cells are trying? It’s like they’re taking in the glucose and the ketone, and that they’re trying to process that. But because of the inefficiency, they’re not able to. Because it’s kind of interesting that it’s got this inhibitory mechanism there. It’s like they’re trying to, but they’re not very successful at it.

[Gene Fine]: Right, and one of the big questions is, of course, why are the cancer cells expressing uncoupling protein 2. And this has been observed that cancer cells were expressing uncoupling protein 2, for at least 10 or 15 years. There were studies in the early 2000s that I first saw that got me clued into the fact that they were doing this. And I thought well what could uncoupling protein 2 do to a cancer cell, and why would they do that?

The general explanation that I’ve adopted is that cancer cells also overproduce, what are called reactive oxygen species. And reactive oxygen species are chemically active molecules that are produced in all tissues, normal cells as well. But they’re higher in cancer cells than they are in normal cells.

And the thing about reactive oxygen species is that they actually act as sort of a two edged sword. They’re required for normal cell signaling. They’re a signaling molecule that helps cells grow, and develop, and proliferate, and so forth. However, they also are very chemically active and can cause mutations.

And mutations are also somehow the life-blood of cancer cells. Cancer cells become cancerous on the basis of mutations, and in fact they’re sort of evolutionary masterpieces in that they continue to evolve because of mutations. If a particular cancer mutation kills a singular cancer cell, well that’s fine, that cancer cell dies. But if another mutation that happens to be caused in another cancer cell makes that cancer cell even more aggressive, well then the cancer becomes more aggressive.

So, reactive oxygen species when over-expressed in cancer cells actually provide a mechanism for continued growth and continued development as an aggressive cancer. The problem, of course, is much too high reactive oxygen species will kill a cancer cell, as they will kill any cell. In fact, it’s very high levels of reactive oxygen species that are caused by chemotherapy, and are caused by radiation therapy.

So there has to be a limit on how much reactive oxygen species a cancer cell can actually produce. And what I believe, and I can’t say that I’ve proven this at all, is that the increased expression of uncoupling protein 2 — uncoupling protein is in fact, or believed, to limit reactive oxygen species. So it makes sense to me, but without proof, that the reason — quote unquote reason — for the increased production of uncoupling protein 2 is to provide a natural limit. A higher limit than a normal cell, but a limit on the amount of reactive oxygen species that the cancer cells produce.

So that’s my my overall belief. UCP2 is there for a reason. But it happens, it just happens, that that reason, which is important for the cancer cell, may actually be exploitable in terms of diet, because it also reduces the efficiency of production of ATP. I don’t know if that exactly adds up, but that’s what I believe.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, my understanding is — I’m just trying to re-summarize from what I understand and how it fits in — mitochondria create reactive oxygen species, and they tend to do that more with glucose fuel than with ketone fuel at a higher rate. And also when they get damaged they tend to create more reactive oxygen species, so they’re not as efficient. Does that fit in with what you just said?

[Gene Fine]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, great. So, somehow it seems like when the ketone bodies are being used though, in this scenario it’s potentially creating more reactive oxygen species via ketones, because of the protein change there?

[Gene Fine]: I think that’s not really clear. I don’t believe the ketone bodies… Other people who have looked into this a little bit, I think, are somewhat ambiguous about it as well.

I don’t believe that ketone bodies cause increased reactive oxygen species, but I can’t say that I know that for certain. I do believe, from at least the mechanisms that we’ve explored, that ketone bodies provide a complementary way of inhibiting cancer growth metabolically. If they also produce increased reactive oxygen species, and therefore contribute to higher levels of reactive oxygen species that are cell killing, that would be interesting.

But I don’t have direct proof of that. I believe that’s been suggested by others. Possibly Doug Spitz who’s a radiation oncologist, and I don’t know but Colin Champ, who is also a radiation oncologist. He’s written about this, but I’m not sure he’s described increased reactive oxygen species production through ketone bodies. It’s possible.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]:Alright, so great. There are some mechanisms you’ve been looking at there.

And another that’s been interesting about your work is that you’ve been looking at the differences between the different cancers in your studies with PET scans, which is of course your background and your area. Could you talk a little bit about the PET scan and how you use it to assess the cancer?

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, sure.

Most cancers — most aggressive cancers I should say — end up becoming, well first of all they begin to outstrip their blood supply. Their blood supply becomes erratic, and instead of having blood vessels well supplying nutrients to the cancer cells, the cancer cells become relatively hypoxic; they don’t usually have enough oxygen. And hypoxia will interfere with the ability of a cell to use the Krebs cycle as a means of developing energy.

So most cancer cells actually depend on glycolysis, which is anaerobic glucose metabolism, in order to develop their ATP. Now, because they’re using so much glucose and they over express glucose transporters and glycolytic enzymes, because they’re using so much glucose, if you inject a glucose like tracer — a radio tracer — whether it’s carbon-11 glucose, or another one that we liked to use in general nuclear medicine, fluorine 18, fluorodeoxyglucose.

This is a glucose analog, and it gets taken up very avidly by cancer cells that are aggressive. These aggressive hypoxic cancer cells take up FDG very avidly. There’s also something called the Warburg effect, which Otto Warburg, famous biochemist, demonstrated 100 years ago that aggressive cancers, in fact, they may be hypoxic but that even if you expose them to normal oxygen conditions, they still retain this glucose and glycolytic dependence.

In any event, the result is the same that aggressive cancers light up on a PET scan if you inject a patient with FDG, with fluorodeoxyglucose. And a PET scan is basically a nuclear medicine study. These radioactive tracers give off emissions, which allow you to see where the radio tracer goes.

So FDG distributes through the body. Glucose is used by a lot of tissues, so you can also see the heart, you can see the brain because these are often glucose utilizing structures. However, you don’t expect to see FDG in locations where it shouldn’t be. But if you have metastatic disease, which these kinds of hypoxic glucose dependent cancers, FDG will go to those sites as well.

And in fact this one image can be used, or a total body PET scan using FDG can be thought of as a one step metastatic workup, because you can actually see the full distribution of cancer cells throughout the body.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So is this the gold standard for assessing the severity of cancer? Could you give us an idea of when you would use this kind of scan?

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, everything in medicine really is very empiric. So if it works, it works. And certain cancers are particularly avid for this kind of tracer, where they do become hypoxic glycolytic cancers. And it’s turned out to be useful in management of cancers in one way or another.

For example, in a solitary pulmonary nodule, you’re trying to determine if this is likely to be a cancer or not or if it’s a benign module. Benign nodules don’t tend to take up glucose that avidly, but the malignant ones do. So an FDG scan can be very useful in just a diagnosis of whether a lung nodule is in fact cancerous.

But PET scans are useful in the management and decision making processes of breast cancers, of uterine cancers, actually a variety of lymphomas, in particular, are usually quite avid and PET scans can be quite helpful. Esophageal cancers, gallbladder cancer, colorectal cancers, PET scans can be quite useful because they light up, and they show you not only where the tumor is, but where the metastases are.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And the other thing, I guess it would simply appear bigger if it’s getting worse? So on your PET scan, if you did one every three months with a cancer patient and it was getting worse, you’d see it getting bigger and potentially spreading to other areas of the body. Is that how it comes back?

[Gene Fine]: Yes, you can definitely see how it spreads.

And nowadays I should actually say that most PET scan devices are actually two devices in one. They’re PET and CT, CAT scans. So you actually can get even better information, because the CT scan is really a computerized three-dimensional x-ray. So you’re actually able to see exactly where in the body.

The PET scan doesn’t have a road map of the anatomy, it’s just where the fluorodeoxyglucose goes. But on the CT scan, it gives you the underlying anatomy, so you get the anatomy as well as the functional arrangement at the same time and in the same locations. So you can identify exactly where you’re seeing it. And that’s very helpful.

I should actually mention that there are certain cancers that PET scans are not useful for. For example, pretty notoriously, prostate cancer is an unusual cancer. It’s unusual in a lot of ways.

Actually 80 percent of prostate cancers are rather slow growing and indolent. And probably for at least that reason, that may be one expression of the reason why they don’t actually take up glucose that avidly. It’s usually the aggressive [cancers] that take up FDG.

But also some other cancers, such as mucinous cancers that are filled with so much mucin that you lose out the effect of what you see on a PET scan. So mucinous cancers of the colon and the of the lung often don’t take up much fluorodeoxyglucose.

Squamous cell carcinomas of the lungs of course are very avid, but these mucinous ones are not. And endocrine tumors, very functional, they’re often not as glycolytic. They often operate on oxygen and they can have a normal Krebs cycle and normal metabolism. So thyroid cancers, unless they’re extremely aggressive, are not this slow growing, and they take up much less FDG. So PET scans with FDG are not as useful for certain kinds of cancers, such as these.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s important because — tell me if this is over simplifying — anything that doesn’t show up in a PET scan, would it be less likely that any type of low carbohydrate diet or inhibition of insulin and up-regulation of ketone is going to have an impact on it, as we’ve been talking before?

[Gene Fine]: Yes, true.

In fact that’s very interesting because — I was mentioning prostate cancer before — prostate cancer actually, it’s not even approved for PET scan use, I should mention. Because they say 80 percent of prostate cancers don’t take up FDG. But in fact prostate cancer is also not associated with obesity. It’s not associated with hyperinsulinemia. It’s not associated with high glucose levels in the blood.

In fact, interestingly, there’s an inverse association of diabetes with prostate cancer. Patients with diabetes — it’s a little bit odd to use the word, because I’m not sure that it’s accurate, it may not be cause and effect, but it’s at least an association — are so called protected with diabetes against prostate cancer.

Now I don’t want to recommend getting Type 2 Diabetes to protect yourself against prostate cancer, but the point is that not all cancers would respond to a low-carb diet either. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the mechanism of that particular kind of cancer.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. The mechanism you described earlier was higher insulin would lead to more aggressive cancers, but in this case you’ve described, Diabetes 2 you’d have higher insulin, but it’s actually reducing the likeliness of getting prostate cancer. Is that correct?

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, it appears to be. As I say, at least epidemiologically, it fits the mechanism of the — I should also mention that 20 percent of prostate cancers are actually very aggressive.

So this is a distinct minority of prostate cancers. I don’t know that anyone has done much study of whether these aggressive prostate cancers, this subvariant, which grow much more rapidly, actually are glucose dependent. They may well be, but I don’t know that they’ve been studied this way. So I can’t comment on those. But they might be FDG avid.

The other thing though is that actually aggressive cancers, very aggressive ones, not uncommonly develop a taste for, not glucose, or not just glucose, but also an abundant amino acid that circulates in the blood called glutamine.

For cancers that are dependent on glutamine more than glucose, they might have even bypassed. They can be aggressive, and they may be glutamine dependent, so they may not show up on a PET scan, and they also may not be responsive to a low carbohydrate diet. So there are other subtleties here that have to be explored before knowing exactly what to do in these kinds of situations.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well I’m guessing potentially restricting glutamine might have a kind of impact there. I guess there’s no studies that have been done on that.

[Gene Fine]: That’s hard. It’s hard to do that, because glutamine is synthesized by the body, and it just comes out of ordinary metabolism.

Glutamine and Glutamate are products of protein metabolism. Glutamine can actually be synthesized, glutamate can be synthesized from alpha ketoglutarate, which is a product of ordinary metabolism. So it can actually be synthesized, and is, and then circulates in the blood steam in high concentrations. And you can’t really restrict glutamine in a diet and expect glutamine to go away; it won’t happen.

I think there are approaches that are trying to figure out how to limit glutamine in the blood, but I’m not sure how successful they are. It seems to be an important metabolite and substrate for a lot of different mechanisms. It’s actually used by the brain, indirectly at least. And so, there really are glutamine restrictions, I think, is something still for the future.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: In summary out of everything you’ve been saying, that the fasting approach or the low carbohydrate approach is, in your view, only applicable to some types of cancers, and typically the most aggressive ones.

[Gene Fine]: Yes, I would agree with that.

The other thing I should mention is that the fact that there are plausible mechanisms where cancers could be inhibited by a low carbohydrate diet, cancers of the types that we’ve been discussing, doesn’t guarantee that it would be inhibited.

And I should also mention about the PET scan, that a PET scan in the way we used it in our clinical pilot study in 2012 with 10 patients was that the PET scan indicates that we can at least identify a cancer that is glucose dependent. We can do that on a PET scan. So those, from the perspective of our hypothesis are carbohydrate, or at least have the potential to be carbohydrate restriction sensitive.

It doesn’t guarantee it, because we don’t actually know which cancers will have the appropriate characteristics and qualities. Maybe not all cancers will express uncoupling protein 2, or whatever other mechanism we were describing earlier. So we can’t guarantee it.

And in fact, if I would describe the hypothesis that I believe, it’s that — I actually have this on a slide in front of me because I like getting the wording exactly right — that large cohorts of individuals with cancer in the developed world do not experience sustained ketosis, or other features common to the insulin inhibited very low prone state. We’d expect many cancers to express a range of plausible vulnerabilities, and accidental adaptations to this unfamiliar metabolic microenvironment.

So, I think that’s the broadest statement that I feel comfortable making, that we can’t guarantee that an individual cancer is going to be responsive to this, even if it has a positive PET scan, because we don’t yet know all of the characteristics that are required. But we do believe that those kinds of cancers are at least eligible for that possibility.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. Well so it sounds like at the moment there’s nothing really concrete on this, but we think there’s a higher probability of some types of cancers, so that the most likely cancers to respond to this would be ones which tend to be more glucose dependent.

[Gene Fine]: The ones that show up on PET scans would be the ones that would have eligibility. So, we actually treated in our 10 patient study a range of patients, and there were several with lung cancers, there were several with breast, several with colorectal. There were a couple with esophageal [cancer]. So those were the ones that we actually treated.

This was a very small study, so it’s a little hard to generalize from them. But in addition, as I say, the ones that are associated with hyperinsulinemia and hyperglycemia could also be eligible, I would say; endometrial, uterine cancers, perhaps pancreatic cancers, and others have actually begun studying that as well. Possibly kidney cancers, and maybe gallbladder cancers as well.

So these are the ones that I would consider to be at least potentially eligible for this, depending on what else we learn.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great.

Particularly in those cases, if I have cancer I’d probably want to get a PET scan to see if it lights up.

I don’t know if you have an index there or if it’s just something visual you use. Do you have any kind of index you use with PET scans to understand the severity, like how much is lit up?

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, there are ways of quantitating PET scans, and you can eyeball the uptake, which is often done for purposes of saying whether the cancer has spread to a location or not. If you have a primary.

But if you have a, I like using the solitary pulmonary nodule because so many of them are benign and others are also malignant. And so people have attempted to develop quantitation, and there are a variety of different ways. One of the common ones is called the standardized uptake value.

And you compare the uptake there, essentially, to the average uptake in the whole body. And a value has been assigned by a number of investigators as a cut off that can be useful, and that’s an SUV of 2.5. That’s two and a half times the average value in the body is assigned as being a cutoff for cancers.

Now all these cutoff values have overlaps, and some of them turn out to be benign, but the frequency tends to be much higher. And the higher the SUV the higher the likelihood for cancer.

The reason that there can be uncertainty in this is that the uptake of fluorodeoxyglucose can also be seen in inflammatory tissues, and inflammatory situations, for example even in pneumonia. You can see pneumonias take up FDG. You can see benign granulomas take up FDG, although they usually take up less. But in fact you can get false positives.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Oh, so could this be any type of inflammation in the body? Basically where white blood cells are active?

[Gene Fine]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And there’s a lot of inflammatory conditions in the gut these days. Is that something that would potentially influence it?

[Gene Fine]: Yes. You do in fact. With the colon there are also patterns of uptakes, so the thing is inflammatory conditions in the intestines and the colons, for example, usually there are patterns of uptake, and you actually see an outline of the colon with FDG distributing itself throughout the colon and basically showing the shape of the colon.

Whereas cancers usually have a site of origin and they can be somewhat irregular. But they generally have a round or a spherical type of initiation and shape. And come in clumps. So there is usually quite a big difference between what you see intestines and that as well.

But these are non-invasive diagnostic tests, which are absolutely marvelous because things used to be much more invasive. But they do have false positives. Your goal in a non-invasive test is to be able to screen well, and therefore identify those patients who may have this condition.

And if it’s negative it can be extremely helpful because then the patient doesn’t have it. But if you do have it you may still have to, in some cases, go on and do a invasive biopsy in order to determine what’s actually there.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So I guess, just to be practical for anyone at home that might be related to some cancer case or perhaps working with cancer patients. So if it does come up a positive PET scan, it may be worth using a ketogenic diet, a low carbohydrate diet as one of the tools. Could you just confirm more, and tell me that that’s not correct. And then talk a little bit about your recharge trial, where you were actually looking at this.

[Gene Fine]: Sure, okay. I think that it’s hard to generalize. I have spoken, patients have found me on the internet and have called me and discussed their particular cancer situation. And I don’t consider myself explicitly an advocate for this, simply because a 10 patient study — which I’ll talk about in a minute, our recharge trial — is a very small study, and it’s pretty hard to generalize from a study of 10 patients.

But it’s not appropriate to make a scientific conclusion when generally the standard of evidence is that you have to do large, randomized controlled trials. However, that would be the direction I’d like to go to find out more information. And also the fact that it certainly is uncertain whether this works in all patients with PET positive cancers.

But I can talk a little bit about the recharge trial, as preliminary as it is. And what we did was we studied 10 patients with advanced cancers, which is to say they all had PET positive studies and they all had failed several rounds of chemotherapy and were still progressing. So they had had chemotherapy, they were therefore eligible for an experimental trial of the diet, because nothing really was working anyway.

And these patients signed informed consent and they were told that we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be, but we were going to put them on a 28 day trial diet of very low carbohydrate. And so the patients agreed to this, and for 28 days under nutritionist and dietitian guidance they were taught to change their diet.

They had a two to three day trial diet, just to see if they hated it, to make sure. If they didn’t hate it then they could go ahead, but we didn’t want to have people who were clearly not going to be able to complete the diet. We limited it to 28 days because change in diet is hard for anybody. It’s not easy. However, just about anyone can stay on a diet for a month.

So we figured that this would give all the patients a chance to succeed. And principally, the first goal we had to have was safety and feasibility. Was this actually safe? There wasn’t really a lot of reason to believe that it wasn’t safe, but you still have to try that out before you can do anything else.

And it was, there were no unsafe adverse effects. The worst effects that sometimes were reported in this, that we did see were some patients had some reversible constipation — as I say reversible — and reversible fatigue within a couple of weeks. And that’s generally the worst that happened.

So the patients were able to span the diet. Half the patients stopped a little short of 28 days, like 26 or 27 days. We considered that really a successful completion. They didn’t stop because of the diet, they stopped because these were patients with advanced cancers who had planned before they had heard about this trial to go on vacation.

They had bought tickets and thought this might be the last vacation they would be taking. So we weren’t going to interfere with that, and we got the PET scan two days earlier than we had expected and they then left the next day for vacation. So really everyone completed the trial without any adverse effects.

Now, what we did see was that, and we measured ketosis as the standard for how compliant they were. Patients would report their food intake and they would tell us what they ate, and the dietitians would record that. But food recall can be inaccurate.

The most reliable way we could determine whether they were on a ketogenic low-carb diet would be to measure ketone bodies in the blood. And we did find that all of the patients were ketotic. In fact all of them became ketotic — and we measured this weekly for four weeks, a baseline and then four weeks — patients became ketotic really by the end of the first week. So we know that they were ketotic for the period of the four week trial.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Were you measuring blood levels?

[Gene Fine]: Yes, these were blood levels. We felt that that was going to be a more accurate measure because urine levels can be influenced by hydration state. If you’re very hydrated you’ll dilute your urine, if you’re dehydrated you’ll concentrate it. So this is more accurate.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, absolutely. We discussed this with Jimmy Moore, who you know well, in a previous episode.

[Gene Fine]: Oh yeah, that’s right. And he actually interviewed me one time as well. That’s right.

So the goal, as I say, was the 28 day diet. And what we did find was that, one patient we actually had to exclude from analysis because, it took us four years to recruit 10 patients. Most patients are on chemo and they don’t really have this opportunity.

And we also didn’t want patients who were too thin because that would have trouble getting past the investigational review board. These are thought of as weight loss diets and you don’t want a cancer patient to lose too much weight. So we had to restrict our patients to patients who were normal weight or above.

Now finding patients with advanced cancer who had not lost too much weight took a long time to get this group of patients together. It took four years to recruit them, there was a lot of time in that.

So beggars can’t be choosers, and we didn’t notice that one patient had had advanced breast cancer with chest wall invasion, but she’d had it for 14 years. And this was different from all the other nine patients, who had failed multiple chemotherapies. She’d had this for 14 years and had never sought any treatment for it at all. She had no surgery, she had no radiation therapy and she’d had no chemo.

So in retrospect we realized, oh my gosh, this patient clearly has much more indolent disease. Even though it’s advanced, it’s progressing so slowly we would have to exclude this patient from analysis because in one month she wouldn’t show change.

She was stable from that point of view, so we couldn’t show progression of disease in this patient in a one month diet. And it turns out she wasn’t very compliant with the diet anyway, and she showed very little change. So the reality was we had to exclude this patient. So we really only evaluated nine patients.

Anyway, getting to the gist of that, of the nine patients the results on the face of it were really not terribly impressive; five patients showed, well four patients showed stable disease, one patient showed a partial remission on the PET scans. We had a baseline PET scan indicate the patients had glucose dependent cancers, and we had a follow up PET scan to monitor the change in the PET scan as an index of whether these patients responded in some way.

But four patients had continued progressive disease. So on the face of it, this is really not that impressive. However, the interesting thing about the difference between these patients is that the patients who had the stable disease or partial remission had three times the levels of ketosis compared to those who didn’t.

So the fact was that whether this was an issue of compliance or metabolic effect, whatever that was with the level of compliance they achieved, the reality was that the patients who showed the best responses were those who had the most ketosis. So that was also consistent with our hypothesis that the ketone bodies and the effect of low insulin levels, which would include ketosis, would have some varying on the outcome.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So did the same thing show up? The higher the inhibition of insulin the better the result?

[Gene Fine]: Yes,that’s essentially what we’re saying. That the more it was inhibited, it’s effects were best measured by measuring ketone bodies. Insulin itself varies so rapidly that unless you time it exclusively the same way, timing after a meal and so forth, you have to be very careful. So we use ketone bodies as a more robust measure of the effects on insulin inhibition.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So is that pretty concrete then? That there will always be an inverse correlation? That that’s been established very well in science?

[Gene Fine]: An inverse correlation between ketone bodies…

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Because as you say, insulin can go up and down very quickly so it’s kind of difficult to know where it is. But in scientific studies it’s been pretty well established that insulin is inverse to ketone bodies, so then it’s okay to assume that.

[Gene Fine]: Right, but they act on different time scales. Insulin spikes very rapidly after a meal, and ketone bodies gradually build up over a period of days after chronic low insulin levels.

So you can go out of ketosis fairly quickly, but not as quickly as you can spike. You can spike an insulin level pretty level and the ketone bodies will decrease over a period of hours, the insulin levels change rapidly over a period of minutes. It’s a little bit different time scales, but yes there is a general inverse relationship for chronic insulin levels and ketosis.

The other thing I wanted to mention about this is that the patients who did show progressive disease also showed evidence of, which we weren’t really looking at, we wanted patients who did haven’t coincident other diseases, particularly diabetes because we didn’t want to be treating two conditions at the same time. So we basically made sure that the patients were not diabetics and were not taking diabetic medications.

However, in retrospect we did notice that the patients who showed progressive disease had evidence of pre-diabetes. That these were patients who were the four heaviest, they actually were the four heaviest of the group of 10 patients. They also had baseline glucose levels 100 and above.

There was more evidence of pre-diabetes in this group than there was in the group that showed a response. And there were lower levels of ketosis. So, overall, we don’t know for a fact that this is the way to screen patients, whether this is actually a biomarker. I would suggest that it makes sense that in patients who have pre-diabetes, pre-diabetes is marked by high insulin levels, and it takes quite some [time].

So that in this group, a low-carb diet didn’t seem to have much benefit. In fact, it didn’t have any benefit at all, they had progressive disease.

Now of course the way you want to treat, at least the way I like to treat patients with pre-diabetes, is put them on a low-carb diet. But I think that that would take several months to improve their insulin insensitivity, and if they already have cancer that’s probably not what you want to do in this particular group. If they have cancer and they have pre-diabetes, you’d probably have to treat the cancer as a separate entity.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, because it’s going to take a longer time to have the metabolic impact that you want.

[Gene Fine]: Right, and you don’t want the cancer to be progressing during that time, so you probably have to make your choices in that case.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, from your study I remember one thing you were doing was in order to assess the better performers was you were looking at the relative ketone change.

[Gene Fine]: That’s right. And we actually, we used relative ketosis, interestingly, rather than absolute. Now, the absolute ketosis was not very different in the two groups. But I actually believe the relative ketosis is more important, mainly because — let’s see if I can describe that succinctly.

When you looked at the baseline ketosis, baseline levels of ketone bodies, absolute values.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]:: So this is before you start the low-carb diet?

[Gene Fine]: Fasting levels, right.

There were some patients who had issues of values, who had like 0.04 millimolar. And then there were others who had 0.4 millimolar. So that’s factor of 10.

Now, the absolute levels of ketosis rose in most patients to about 1.0 millimolar. A patient that only went from 0.4 to 1.0 went up by a factor of just two and a half. A patient that went from 0.04 to 1.0 went up by a factor of 25. So there is a much bigger change in the overall metabolism, and the change of the metabolism in a patient that started at a lower value.

I would propose — and this is what I actually believe — is that the patients who were living with a baseline ketone body level of 0.4 were actually acclimating their cancers to a higher level of ketosis during the period of the cancer’s growth, initiation, and development. And in fact that these cancers may be well acclimated, in other words adapted to, that they grew up in a level in which they were used to these levels.

And so that you can’t expect — well, put it this way. Whereas I do believe that people who live in environments where they eat mostly meat and fat during the year — let’s just say Inuits for example that haven’t been exposed to McDonalds and Laps living in northern Finland and live on reindeer meat all day long — that people who live under those conditions I would suggest, and I don’t know what the evidence is exactly, that they will have lower incidences of cancer.

However, should a person under those circumstances develop cancer, you know you sure as heck would not put them on a low-carb diet, because you know that they developed cancer already on a low-carb diet.

So that’s what I’m basically saying. If you have somebody who already is in a state of higher levels of ketone bodies and cancer develops in a person like that, then you certainly wouldn’t expect that patient to be as responsive to a low-carb diet.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s interesting because there’s a lot of things in biology, like somatic signals, where, like if you think about the treatment of antibiotics, right, you basically have to pulse it. You have to pulse it and do it one go has to be done effectively. If you get chronic antibiotics for a while then it stops having it’s impact, and you don’t get the benefits, and so on.

So it’s interesting that you identified this mechanism where a body could be a lot more beneficial to, let’s say do something. I mean I’m sure you’re aware that Dr. Seyfried recommends a five day fast, which is a more extreme version of what you did in your study, and potentially may be more beneficial because it is more extreme. As you said, and maybe there will be a higher therapeutic value.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, that’s right. And Dr. Seyfried is one, also Valter Longo in California has recommended calorie restriction and fasting as well. And I think that those methods may have some other unique benefits that carb restriction may not have. They also may not be as easy to implement, but I think that they’re all in the ballpark, and there may be values for all of them.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So one thing I did want to bring up is when we were talking to Dr. Seyfried he mentioned he’s using an index now, which is called the glucose ketone index. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to him about that, or come across it.

It’s simply glucose divided by ketones in millimolars. And he’s been using that to look at his approach to metabolic therapy and see if it’s effective. I’m just wondering if you could compare that to the relative ketones. Would that make sense for you, or you haven’t looked at this?

[Gene Fine]: I haven’t done that, so I really don’t feel up enough to comment on it. I didn’t do that. I actually might want to go back and calculate that as well in these patients to see if I can get those numbers and make some correlations. But I haven’t actually done that yet.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, it strikes me it just might be interesting because, as you said, some of the diabetic patients went up, potentially high glucose. So you might see something similar there. Based on it.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, that’s right. I was just thinking about that.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great.

There’s a few things I wanted to bring up here in terms of the other tactics people might use. Which I don’t know, you may not have an opinion on these. But there are other things that can change the levels of ketones in our body. You can use MCT oil, or ketone esters, exogenous ketones basically, or a high fat diet.

My personal experience with these, for instance, is I’ve been on a high fat diet for a while and in my fasting insulin tests, my insulin is pretty low compared to the average. And I understand that that’s pretty standard. So I was just wondering what you thought of these kind of approaches. Also, if you’ve seen anything that might say there would be similar impact. Because they’re basically mimicking the effects of a low carbohydrate diet.

[Gene Fine]: Well yeah, I actually don’t know what way a high fat diet is distinguished from a low-carb diet. There are three macro nutrients, and basically a low-carb diet is a high fat diet. I don’t know if a high fat diet necessarily is also a low-carb, but it must be lower in carbs because you don’t really make up the difference in protein.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, you’re right. The question is the protein. That’s the missing…

[Gene Fine]: Right. And as I say, I haven’t tested the protein values. We didn’t restrict protein in our group. I think we could have.

We were dealing with patients who, as I say, had advanced cancers, and we were getting them as through referrals from their oncologists as volunteers, and we really didn’t want to give them something too complicated to do, so we just tried to [simplify it]. But yes, protein, certainly restriction might have had further benefit.

But as far as inducing ketosis with medium chain triglycerides, coconut oils and the like, ketone esters, I think these are interesting approaches. They can certainly, possibly offer more convenience, rather than going through a low-carb diet. And that I think has value.

The other thing to note is that they don’t actually mimic the full effects of a low-carb diet because they don’t inhibit insulin. So, there is that aspect of it. While there may be value, I’m not sure that they’ll produce the full effect.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great. Thanks for the commentary.

Now the other thing I wanted to just bring up was metformin, I don’t know if you’ve looked at all at that.

[Gene Fine]: Well, yeah. I mean, I’m aware that this is being used, at least in trials, as another potential mimicker. And it has it’s own value. I think what it does for me is it illustrates the value of low-carb diets, because what it really does, metformin, is it limits glucose and thereby insulin secretion. So, it’s fine. To me it’s major mechanism is the same mechanism as a low-carb diet.

It has some independent mechanisms. It seems to up-regulate AMP kinase, which happens also to be done by low-carb diets. So metformin may have some advantages. It’s a drug. It’s a very well tolerated drug, but it’s not a universally well tolerated drug.

There are some side effects that have been reported. Not frequently, but some patients develop lactic acidosis, which can be very serious. And some patients develop hypoglycemia. So, I think overall it would be considered a very safe approach, it just has to be tested, like everything else.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. Thank you.

I was wondering if you had any opinion on calorie deficit versus high intake of calories. I could be on a high fat diet, or a low carbohydrate diet, and still have a surplus of calories versus a deficit. Do you think that’s anything that could be either affecting your results, or something to look at?

[Gene Fine]: Yes, it is something, definitely, to look at. The calorie restricted approach has been advocated…well, it’s just been advocated. I can’t say exactly whether the mechanism is the same, overlapping, or somewhat different.

But I can just say this, that in our study we actually wanted patients to not lose weight. We encouraged them to overeat. Overeat a low-carb diet, but overeat. So to eat as many calories as they needed to sustain their weight.

So the only comment I can make about this is that all the patients lost weight. We did not intend for them to lose weight, that was not our goal. We encouraged them, we would be weighing them weekly and we’d tell them, “Eat more, eat more. You’re making these shakes, add more cream to it. Add more oil to your foods. Put butter on everything.”

Well anyway, whatever it is that we encouraged them to do, all 10 of them lost weight. They lost on average about four percent of their initial body weight. The interesting thing about that, I just suppose that this is why these diets are effective as weight loss diets.

No one knows exactly why they work, but you certainly can speculate some pretty plausible mechanisms. One is that ketosis may inhibit appetite. Another is that your inhibiting insulin, and insulin, as I say, under the influence of carbohydrate makes you fat and keeps you fat. The absence of insulin does the opposite. It releases lipids from your fat cells, and metabolizes them in the liver. So the fact is that low-carb diets intrinsically may be weight loss diets.

We believed in our study that it’s possibly to defeat this. That there’s such a thing as overfeeding, and maybe if one is particularly conscious about this, one can do this. But the other interesting factor is that seven out of the 10 patients were above a body mass index of 25, which is to say they were overweight. Only three of them were in the normal weight range, between 20 and 25.

And as it happens, the patients who lost the most weight were the heaviest. Frankly they were delighted with their weight loss, even though we were trying to maintain weight just for the principles of our study.

The patients who were in the normal weight range, the two who were the higher two in the normal weight range — I should say, the heaviest patients lost about five to six percent of their body weight. The patients who were in the normal weight range, the two heavier of them — 25 BMI and 23 — lost about three percent of their body weight. And the patient who was 20 lost no body weight at all.

So what this tells us is something we all know also, which is that the closer we approach our ideal body weight, the harder it is to lose weight. I don’t know whether you’ve observed that yourself, whether you have gained, lost or are stable in terms of your body weight, but I believe that high fat diets do not necessarily cause weight loss, particularly in people who are approaching their ideal lean body weight.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I’ve been on this diet for many years, just as an n=1 experiment. I think I lost a bit of weight when it first started, but ever since I’ve been really stable, ever since. And I’ve never paid attention to the number of calories. Sometimes I’m sure I’m eating a lot of calories, and sometime I’m not eating so many, for whatever it’s worth.

[Gene Fine]: I should also mention one other thing, which is that in our study, when we calculated what the calorie intake was on the basis this is of course on the patients self-reports, that all the patients reduced their calorie intake as well. Now, we didn’t want them to, but the measured calorie intake on the basis of their self reports was reduced, in fact by about one third.

The other interesting thing though is that the stable disease effect and partial remission, those patients who showed stable disease or partial remission had three times the ketosis. But the degree of weight loss in the two groups was the same. They both lost about four percent. So although there was weight loss in all the patients, weight loss, or calorie deficit, did not appear to correlate with the effects that we saw.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well that’s a great point then.

I think the other point you illustrated, if we’re talking about your studies, is how difficult it is to set a good cancer study up, given the situation with the patients and you’re trying to control for a lot of things. So, as you say, it took you four years to recruit the patients for the last study. So I think it gives us a much better appreciation of how difficult it is to do these types of studies.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah. I think it is the fact that physicians are trained to treat with drugs and that’s very understandable. Drugs generally work well. And in cancer, it would be naive to start off with the assumption that diet is going to be a successful therapy. It has to be tested.

And so, whereas there was some reluctance, there wasn’t entirely, and many of the oncologists were very helpful and cooperative and referred patients when they were on a chemo holiday, or chemo break. That’s what was needed to get this study done. And also the fact that I didn’t want patients who were too thin and too sick.

But I think going forward, I think that we can count on, perhaps, some additional support. And we are actually aiming for human studies going forward as well. Right now, as I say, we’re also trying to couple diet with drugs in animal studies. So this combination, we hope, will lead us somewhere.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, Great. So is it the first time someone’s been trying to couple chemotherapy with diet? Or are there existing studies that you’re basing your current work on?

[Gene Fine]: Coupling a low carbohydrate diet with other therapies has been done. I know that Colin Champ and Doug Spitz, I believe, have coupled low-carb diets with radiation therapy. As far as coupling with drugs, I’m not actually immediately aware that anyone has done that. I think that we may be the ones who are looking at that right now.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. Wrapping up a bit, thanks so much for your time today.

Where could we learn more about this subject? Are there other people you would look to to learn more about this? Perhaps people you’ve worked for who are doing a lot of studies in this area. You mentioned Valter Longo, of course who was mentioned in Dr. Seyfried’s as well. Or are there any books or presentations on the subject that are good?

[Gene Fine]: I’m trying to think, other presentations. I know that there are some other people working in the area that I know have been doing good work.

Dominic D’Agostino in Florida. I think he has a website, and it would be interesting to look at some of the work that he’s done. A somewhat, I hope, accessible discussion of what we’ve talked about.

I have a couple of guest blog posts that I wrote. My colleague Richard Feinman has a generalized biochemistry and metabolism web blog, and he invited me to write some guest blog posts for his web blog. So I wrote two.

One which is on the general hypothesis, which I didn’t even discuss today. I mean, I discussed it in the broadest forms, but I didn’t discuss some of the details. And the other one is more on the clinical trial, on the recharge trial. So it gives more detail on that.

And I think Colin Champ has an interesting website as well, Caveman Doctor. I think I’d look at that. These are other resources. I think I’ve mentioned most of those that I know.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great. So, we’ll put links to all of that in the show notes, thank for those.

Well how about you? What are the best ways for people to connect with you? I mean you mentioned the blog posts, which we’ll put in. Is there anything else? Do you have a website, or are you on Twitter? Is there anywhere you are active where people could learn more about what you’re up to?

[Gene Fine]: Let’s see. The website that I have is my website at Albert Einstein. You can also, through the blog posts that I mentioned it gives other links to papers that I’ve written as well as to my website. So I think that probably the most complete portal, you can look me up just at Albert Einstein and find my website there. And that will also link me to the dietary studies and the blog posts and the papers. They all connect to each other.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great. We’ll put those on the show notes.

Something we spoke about just before the interview, your perspectives are a little bit different to Dr. Thomas Seyfried that we’ve already had on the show. Could you briefly summarize where you think you might have a different opinion?

[Gene Fine]: Well, I just think that we really are in the same camp. I think that we both believe in metabolic therapy, as do the other people that I’ve mentioned. I think that he believes that when he describes cancer as a metabolic disease, he believes that the fundamental problem is it starts as a metabolic disease in abnormal mitochondria. That may be true.

The only thing that I think that I would differ is that that abnormality in the mitochondria, I believe, is a genetic abnormality, even in the mitochondria. That you still have, what’s happening in the mitochondria is that, to me the fundamental problem in cancer is actually a genetic mutation that leads the cells to increased proliferation and growth and unlimited growth and immortality, and so forth.

The source of these mutations, I believe, could certainly be in the mitochondria, but in fact if it is, and that would make sense to me, it would be increased reactive oxygen species. And increased reactive oxygen species can cause mutations in the genetic portions of the mitochondria, and that would cause abnormal mitochondria. Or it could cause mutations in the DNA of the cell. Certainly hydrogen peroxide, peroxide can migrate over distances and can migrate into the nucleus.

So, I actually believe that the fundamental problem that leads to the cancer may initiate in the mitochondria with reactive oxygen species, but nonetheless results in the fundamental change of cancer is in a mutation. So I think that [in a] certain sense we’re describing the same phenomenon, but we have a different emphasis on which syllable we’re emphasizing.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. Potentially where it starts and where it finishes, and so on.

[Gene Fine]: Yeah, yeah.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. Great, thanks for that clarification.

Before you go, I just wanted to look at a bit of what you do on a personal level with your body data. I was just wondering if you track any metrics at all for your own health, biomarkers, or anything like that on a routine basis. Maybe yearly, or more so?

[Gene Fine]: When I started studying this in, around 2003, and I got interested in it, by the way, from my friend and colleague Richard Feinman. He’s a biochemist, and he’s been interested in this principally from the point of view of the effects on metabolic syndrome, diabetes, lipid disorders, and so forth.

However, I came in from the nuclear medicine background, and PET scanning and Warburg effect, and hypoxic cells. For me it was attractive for the possibility that this may have some effect, low-carb diets in inhibiting glycolosis, and as I mentioned earlier through the uncoupling protein 2 having a unique inhibitory effect on cancers while sparing normal cells.

So in 2003 when I got interested in this, and I decided that — you know, I never really had a weight problem, but I had gradually put on a few pounds over the years. And I have a small frame, so I’m about five foot nine, and 165 pounds. For me that was carrying excess fat.

So I figured well, you know, if I’m going to study this in others I might as well experience what it’s like for myself. And maybe I’ll even have some benefit in terms of overall body composition.

To make a long story short, I’ve been on a low-carb diet of various degrees of strictness over the years. In some cases I’ve been ketogenic, I’ve been very strict. In other cases, I’ve just been low-carb, but not likely ketogenic. I haven’t been under 50 grams a day, I’m not quite sure.

But the short story is that over a period of now, what 2003, really 2004, about 11 to 12 years, I’ve lost 33 pounds. Sometimes it’s been in fits and starts, but I’m very, very happy and comfortable with my weight right now. I like myself at 132. I have a small frame. I feel that for me I am lean and fit, and that’s a good thing.

There’s that aspect of it. In terms of other biomarkers, the numbers that I like to look at, in particular, are those that have risk profiles for, well my glucose and my hemoglobin A1C has dropped. In addition, my fasting blood glucose.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So if you remember, where did they start and where are you at now? And are you happy with the numbers now?

[Gene Fine]: Well yeah. I mean, I think I’ve been stricter lately and more consistent, so I’ve only been monitoring them really. I don’t think I’ve really been taking very close watch of them.

But I think over the past year or two my blood glucose, a couple of years ago had actually been at 100, and my hemoglobin A1C I think at one time was around 5.7. I’m sorry, this was only about one year ago.

The hemoglobin A1C changes slowly, but in two successive measurements, I’m about to come up with a third, it’s dropped to 5.7 to 5.6 now to 5.5, and I’m expecting it will continue to be going down because I’m doing this. And my fasting blood glucose is now about 94. So it’s dropping, and I’m satisfied with that.

I used to eat what was recommended. I used to eat a low fat diet, which of course means a high-carb diet, and I think I suffered the consequences. But little by little that has been reversing.

From the point of view of my lipid profile, the things that I’m most interested in are those that are atherogenic, that contribute to risk of cardiovascular disease. And I think the current thinking, which makes some sense to me, is that it’s not so much LDL which is targeted by the cardiologist, because LDL is a mixed bag.

Low density lipoproteins really consist of two major fractions. One of the light, buoyant LDL, which is really not harmful, and the other is the small dense LDL, which is. And what happens on a low-carb diet is you reverse the ratio. You reduce the amount of small dense LDL.

And the good measure of that, because it’s hard to get that measurement directly. There are only a few labs in the world that actually measure small dense LDL directly. You have to send away to specialized testing for them. However, there’s a good index of it and it’s the ratio of your triglycerides over your HDL.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So there’s a proxy?

[Gene Fine]: There’s a proxy for small dense LDL, yeah.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Oh, great.

[Gene Fine]: And so when I started, I guess when I first measured my triglycerides to small dense LDL when I had been not very compliant at all, my triglycerides at one point were about 150, and my HDL was about 50. So the ratio was about three. And since going on a low-carb diet, my triglycerides fell in half, to 74, and my HDL went from 50 to 75. So basically my ratio is now one.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s pretty high.

[Gene Fine]: So all the things went in the right direction. I’m very pleased that the HDL went up, without any major increase in exercise, just the diet alone. And my triglycerides fell in half. So those are both just exactly what you would expect on a low-carb diet, and what you want.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, thanks for those.

They’re very useful, especially the triglyceride HDL ratio. Because it is difficult to get the, I guess you were talking about the NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance. We spoke about that in a previous episode. And then there’s the LDLP to get the number of particles. But as you say, there’s only a few specialized labs, so it’s not as accessible. So it’s great to know that there’s a proxy to use also.

Last question here. What would be your number one recommendation to someone trying to use some kind of data to track, whether it’s biomarkers or something else, to make better decisions about their own health?

[Gene Fine]: Yes, well I mean it depends on what aspect of the health you’re talking about. But I don’t know if ketosis is necessary.

As I mentioned, any change of diet can be difficult to sustain over the long term. I don’t even know what it takes. Willpower is something that, what is it. So, it’s hard to know how to do that.

And by and large the reason I would say it’s hard to change diet is people eat what they like. And you want to eat what you like, and so changing your diet means you’re, by definition, changing it to something that you didn’t prefer. So it seems as though there’s a fundamental issue there.

On the other hand, I think that if you have a weight issue that you’re not happy with, or your doctor reports blood lipid markers or glucose markers that you’re not happy with and evidence of pre-diabetes or diabetes, and you’re on meds, so forth — let’s not consider meds yet. Let’s just talk about without being on meds. Because low-carb diets, if you can actually go on them and you’re also on meds, you have to do that under supervision because you might actually become hypoglycemic, and you have to be careful about that.

But without considering meds if you just want to, say, improve your health in terms of obesity or aspects of metabolic syndrome, lipid disorders, blood glucose levels, pre-diabetes. Without going on a strict low-carb ketogenic diet it’s not as hard, I think anyway, to reduce the quantity of carbohydrates that you eat.

You can have a breakfast where, you can cut out, well cut in half the size of the desserts that you eat. You can cut in half the amount of mashed potatoes that you eat. You can eat one slice of bread instead of two, or you can not eat bread. Although that sometimes is hard for people, but if you eat the bread and don’t eat the mashed potatoes, you’ve reduced the number of carbs that you eat.

So if you just start by reducing certain portions of carbohydrates. And I actually found I still have carbohydrates a little bit now. I have a sort of modified Atkins Plus, I call it, or South Beach Plus. I have a little ice cream at night. It’s my treat.

Overall, I probably eat about 60 grams of carbs a day. But, I treat myself to a little bit of ice cream at night. I’ll find out what that’s done to my lipid profile, by the way. But I don’t think it’s going to have a major effect. I think that overall it’s going to be still pretty good.

So the idea of reducing the overall quantity of carbs, I think, is actually important. I think that with the average American diet, I don’t know if the same is true in UK but probably, that overall consumption of carbs is 300 to 400 grams a day. And that’s really quite a lot. And if that could be cut in half to 150, that would be a big improvement.

So, I think that that would be lower stimulation of insulin secretion. Yeah, I think that that would be my principle recommendation in terms of health.

Now as far as exercise is concerned, exercise is also something that many people do but can’t stick to an exercise regime. And overall, I think that even if you look at the overall impact on insulin sensitivity and improving metabolic profile, there’s no question that exercise helps. But it really comes a distant second to diet in terms of having a dramatic impact on insulin sensitivity and these other biomarkers of lipids and glucose and so forth.

So that, while you’ll never hear me discourage anyone from wanting to do exercise, I think that if you want to have an immediate and more dramatic effect, the thing to do would be to reduce carbohydrates in the diet somehow.

And that’s probably the best I can say at the present time, because as I say, I don’t think anyone has a magic bullet as to how to help someone go on a diet. It’s never easy, but if you can find a way to reduce carbohydrates, you’re off to a start.

And if you feel encouraged by the results that you see, you tend to continue it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up, because we’re introducing changes here, new habits. And as you say, it’s super difficult.

I feel one of the things that helps people is making it clearer how helpful it can be in different areas of their life. Once you’ve heard it 10, 20 times from different people who are studying these things, like yourself, in different areas. I think it makes it easier for people, just because of the repetition, for the clarity in their heads.

I think part of the problem is the mystery and the misunderstanding, especially in the media and the press. The more times you’ve heard five different stories, the less you feel like taking action against any one of them, because you’re just not sure, you’re hesitant.

So thank you for your time today, because it’s certainly helping with these type of things.

[Gene Fine]: Thank you. I’m glad that you have this program, really, to spread the word through interviewing people who are active in the field.