Fred’s Story

It was early 2012 when Fred H. was diagnosed with skeletal cancer. After being given three months to live, he happened to hear about a metabolic diet therapy that might help his body to heal. With nothing to lose, Fred decided to give it a try and was shocked when it actually worked. “The cancer was gone!” he exclaimed. “Completely. To this day there’s no trace of it. And it’s been over a year.”

Cancer cells love glucose and need it so badly that if you stop giving it to them they will literally starve to death- Although Fred says that it wasn’t easy, he stopped eating carbohydrates because they are easily converted into glucose by the body. All cells are fueled by glucose, but when you deprive normal cells of glucose they will automatically switch over to using ketone bodies and an alternate fuel source. A defect in cancer cells prevents them from making this conversion so they die.

Dr Dominic D’Agostino explains it like this, “Your normal cells have the metabolic flexibility to adapt from using glucose to using ketone bodies, but cancer cells lack this metabolic flexibility. So we use the ketogenic diet to exploit that defect.” He adds. “It just absolutely amazes me that medical science is just now finding this out.” Hatfield’s cancer recovery was not a surprise to Dr. D’Agostino. When he and his team of scientists at the University of South Florida removed carbohydrates from the diets of lab mice, they survived highly aggressive metastatic cancer even better than if treated with chemotherapy. “We have dramatically increased survival with metabolic therapy. So we think it’s important to get this information out.” This diet is not just successful with mice in the lab, Dr. D’Agostino has also seen similar results with people. “I’ve been in correspondence with a number of people, at least a dozen over the last year-and-a-half to two years, and all of them are still alive, despite the odds. So this is very encouraging.”