by Dr. Andrew Nish, Medical Director, John Stoddard Cancer Center, Des Moines, Iowa

There is a plethora of advertisements trying to sell the latest in nutrition; low fat, high fat, no lectins, this powder, and that shake. No wonder we are all confused but it does not have to be complicated. Let’s keep it simple - eat real food, mostly plants, as close to its original form as possible. Real food, that which mother nature has provided for us, is high in fiber (feeding the 40 trillion microbes in your gut) and low in sugar. Processed food is just the opposite, low in fiber (therefore no food for the microbes in your gut) and high in sugar.

Food: A substance that is used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy.
Poison: A substance that is capable of causing illness or death of a living organism.

Real food supports growth and repair and supplies energy while processed food is a slow acting poison.

For decades we have been brainwashed (mainly by the food industry and government) that a calorie is a calorie. All calories are interchangeable. The implication is that a calorie from any food source is just a calorie, eat too many, expend too few and you become obese. The problem with this model is that it doesn’t take into account that we are complex biologic beings and that what we put into our mouths directly effects hormonal and metabolic responses telling us to either burn or store energy. Thus, the calorie in, calorie out model is an inherently flawed model. We have been told eat less and exercise more and all will be well but as we have witnessed over the past 50 years nothing can be further from the truth. All food is inherently good in its natural state, what has been done to the food is the problem (processing). It is not what you eat that is important but specifically what your body does with what you eat.

This is where insulin comes in. Insulin is a hormone that is produced by your pancreas and has 3 main functions: it lowers your blood sugar; it signals your body to store energy in the form of fat and it stimulates cell growth. Insulin is vital to life but too much promotes energy storage (fat) and cell growth (cancer). In western society it has been estimated that up to 88% of people have too much insulin and a main driver is the food we eat.

As Dr. Robert Lustig says: “the key to reducing your insulin levels is to protect the liver and feed the gut.” This means eating real food, high fiber, low sugar and eliminating processed food, low fiber, and high sugar. At this point sugar deserves a special mention. The consumption of sugar, specifically the fructose molecule in sugar drives insulin resistance (reduced response of cells to insulin) and therefore elevated levels of insulin. We are swimming in sugar. Up to 80% of all processed foods in the grocery store have added sugar. That means that most foods that are purchased have added sugar, the driver of insulin resistance.

The World Health Organization recommends that we consume not more than 6 teaspoons of added sugar per day (that is 24 grams). Unfortunately, most Americans consume 20-25 teaspoons per day. Natural sugar in fruits and vegetables do not count toward that total as long as they are eaten as their whole and not consumed as juice.

​Nutrition does not need to be complicated. Eliminate processed foods and sugary beverages and make a wide variety of plants the center piece of your meals including a rainbow of vegetables and fruits, nuts, seeds, spices, herbs, whole grains (minimize any processing) and legumes as well as healthy oils (olive) and small amounts of animal protein. Next time you make a food choice think about whether that choice is feeding your gut microbiome (those 40 trillion organisms that support your health) and protecting your liver from the ravages of sugar and processed food– high fiber and low sugar. 

by Sarah Diesburg

It was a cold day on March 6th, 2020. I was teaching two classes that day as a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, and I was trying to squeeze a well-needed hair appointment into my busy schedule. I was also entering the third trimester of my second pregnancy.

That’s when I had the seizure – the first sign that my early-stage breast cancer, treated almost five years ago, had returned, and spread to my brain. Later, after giving birth to a healthy baby girl, I was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic triple negative breast cancer at the age of 37.

A metastatic diagnosis means that cancer has spread beyond where it was originally diagnosed, and it is truly a terrifying place to be. We found my cancer had spread to three small places in my brain, lung, and chest lymph node. Average life expectancy of someone with the triple negative metastatic breast cancer subtype ranged around 2-3 years.

I had a newborn baby and a toddler at home, as well as a loving husband. I couldn’t leave them. I started on a newly approved combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy as soon as I recovered from brain surgery to remove the tumor from my brain. I also started reading everything I could about this disease, and I made a vow to myself to do everything I possibly could to stay alive. I ate a healthier diet. I started exercising a lot. I worked on my stress, even though that seemed ridiculous at the time.

As I write this article, I’m coming up on my two-year anniversary of that fateful date. And, amazingly, I have no evidence of disease (NED), which means cancer cannot be identified on current scans. I am one of the small handful of people with solid tumors for which immunotherapy, along with targeted radiation, has been able to keep me in NED status. For the last 16 months, I have been on maintenance immunotherapy alone, which luckily for me has no side effects.

Immunotherapy is so new in this space that my doctors do not know how long my NED status is likely to last, but they are getting cautiously optimistic that it could last a very long time. Maybe even a very long time. I’m also not stopping any of the healthy habits I picked up along the way to help support my body and immune system.

I wish I could send this article back to myself two years ago. I searched those first few dark months after being diagnosed stage 4, and I found very few stories of hope. I’m still here, and I’m full of hope and determination for a long and hap

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