Naturopathic Maine

When cancer patients complain of losing weight, they are told to go home and eat ice cream. But this advice doesn't work. Why? The loss of weight and muscle mass during cancer has less to do with calories and more to do with the process of fighting cancer. One of the things that happens is that the body starts to use its own muscles to provide essential amino acids for defense. The process of eating your own muscles leads to increased fatigue, less activity, and more muscle loss from inactivity. It's a downward spiral. But simply adding more calories isn't going to reverse that cycle. The body needs amino acids, not calories. Providing the body with specific amino acids, or taking a hormone that forces the body to build lean muscle, may provide more benefit than eating more. Even adding drugs may not help. Two drugs, Megace and THC were not effective at increasing quality of life. Megace did give patients more fat, and THC did help appetite, but neither significantly...

Right before I got diagnosed with colon cancer, I wrote a book on our guts, called Tending Your Internal Garden. In it, I found some pretty exciting things (like you have thousands of unique species living inside you right now).  But science marches on, and now we have research that shows why diet books and diet experts don't agree. They are all right, and they are all wrong. Why? Because you're unique. No, seriously. This isn't a "feel good" moment. This is an "Oops, that means they don't know" moment. Yep. All the diet experts out there cannot tell you what the best diet is for you because you have a unique ecosystem. Your responses to food are your own. You literally can make yourself sick eating like they tell you to if you ignore yourself. Just because it worked for "buns of steel" diet-guru-of-the-week does not mean it will work for you. Here's the TED video detailing how they found this out, with some suggestions about...