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Cancer is a serious health condition that is responsible for millions of deaths every year. The disease starts with the development of abnormal cells. These start to halve rapidly leading to damage to healthy body tissues. To make matters worse, cancer often spreads throughout the patient’s body.
The diagnosis is obviously terrible news for anyone. The best way to deal with the challenges of the disease is to communicate about it openly and keep a healthy lifestyle.
You may have heard about the health benefits of the ketogenic diet that aims for reaching ketosis: a metabolic state where your body produces ketones for energy. With the help of the best exogenous ketones, it’s now easier than ever to reach ketosis. But what has that got to do with cancer? Get this: recent evidence suggests that pairing the keto diet with hyperbaric oxygen therapy can assist in fighting off malignant tumors. Want to know more about it? This article goes through what exactly is the ketogenic diet, what’s hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and how they can work together as an effective cancer treatment.
Let’s get started.
What Is the Ketogenic Diet for Cancer?
Simply put, the ketogenic diet is a way of eating that forces the body to use fat as the main source of energy instead of carbohydrates. More precisely, the liver starts turning the free fatty acids into ketone bodies, and these will eventually be utilized in cells for energy. How is this achieved? To reach ketosis, you need to make some pretty drastic changes to your menu. You should keep the carbohydrates low, protein-moderate, and increase your fat intake.
Using your own body fat for energy will obviously lead to rapid weight loss, but can you also fight cancer with a ketogenic diet? You can hear people recommending the ketogenic diet plan for cancer quite often. This comes from the belief that the cancer cells can only grow on carbohydrates. Technically, that’s true. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that cutting the carbohydrates will starve the cancer cells. Why not? Because at the absence of sugar, your body will start making glucose out of fat and protein.
There’s no research at the moment that would suggest a ketogenic diet for starving cancer cells. But what if you combine it with hyperbaric oxygen therapy? This is where it gets interesting. Before we go any further, let’s take a closer look at what exactly is hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
What Is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy means getting into a pressurized tube and breathing pure oxygen. The increased air pressure makes your lungs take in much more oxygen than they do in normal conditions. This stimulates healing processes in your cells. However, as of today, there’s no scientific evidence to prove the hyperbaric oxygen therapy’s effectiveness in cancer treatment. But what if you combine it with the metabolic therapy from a ketogenic diet? Let’s see.
The Ketogenic Diet and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy in Combination Against Cancer
The bottom line is this: studies have shown a significant decrease in tumors’ development when using the ketogenic diet with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. The thing is that cancer cells are not metabolically flexible. They can’t adapt to using ketones for energy the same way regular cells can. At the same time, the tumors are low in oxygen, which encourages their growth and spread. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy fills the cancer cells with oxygen, stopping their development. Together with the ketogenic diet, as cancer research shows, hyperbaric oxygen therapy creates an environment where it’s simply very hard for cancer cells to survive.
Conclusion
The ketogenic diet with hyperbaric oxygen therapy can work against further cancer cell development. Before trying these treatments, make sure to consult with your doctor. You should continue getting regular treatments for cancer. The ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen treatment should be used as additional help.
What do you think of our article for possible cancer treatment? Did we give you enough information to see the combination of a keto and hyperbaric oxygen therapy as a possible cancer treatment? Leave comments below, we’d love to hear from you.
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