A recent study found the drug Metformin to be effective against thyroid cancer in the absence of glucose. More importantly, a ketogenic diet may improve the effectiveness of your treatment with Metformin.
What is Metformin?
Metformin is a drug used to lower blood sugar, typically in patients with type 2 diabetes. It’s also known to inhibit thyroid cancer cell growth. In recent years, the newest approach to tackling cancer is targeting cancer cell metabolism.1 With Metformin as the weapon of choice, studies have focused on Metformin in the treating of breast, ovarian, lung, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. However, research shows that it doesn’t act the same in everyone.
Improve Effectiveness of Metformin
Bikas et. al. considered how Metformin might act differently among patients with thyroid cancer in the presence of glucose. They found that thyroid cancer cells grown in environments with high glucose did not continue to grow when placed in low glucose environments; in fact, thyroid cancer cells died. Essentially, the effectiveness of Metformin was improved by a lack of glucose.
How it Works
Why does this work? Well, cancer cells have to basically reprogram their environments so that they can get the things they need to metabolize in order to produce energy. The way Metformin works is that it inhibits something called mTORC1 or mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1.2 That complicated term basically refers to a specific pathway that is responsible for metabolism, growth and spreading of cancer cells. Metformin is thought to inhibit that pathway. Its effect on your body is to lower your circulating insulin levels and something called insulin-like growth factor 1 or IGF-1. IGF-1 is released from your liver. Insulin is released from your pancreas. Both insulin and IGF-1 function to help your cells take up glucose.
Insulin and IGF-1
One indicator of a cancerous environment is increased levels of insulin and IGF-1 in the blood, along with an increase in their associated pathway which is to basically take up glucose.3 This makes sense because cancer cells like glucose. They alter their entire microenvironments to thrive off of glucose. It’s not surprising that when they’re present, the stuff that’s needed for them to use the sugar (IGF-1 and insulin) are high.
Putting it All Together
Metformin shuts all of that down. Putting it all together, if Metformin blocks the pathway critical to the release of the stuff necessary to getting glucose into your cells that cancer needs to survive, the cancer cells die. So, Metformin in treating thyroid cancer is not such a bad idea.
Ticket to Success
On the topic of lowering blood glucose, The ketogenic diet is the way to go to achieve this. A keto diet essentially adjusts your body’s metabolism so that it breaks down fatty acids and protein for your cells to use for energy opposed to glucose. In the keto diet, you do not consume carbs which are full of glucose.
How it Helps
What does this mean for you? If you’re a thyroid cancer patient or know someone that is, the drug Metformin might not be a bad idea for treatment, especially coupled with a lifestyle change in favor of a keto diet. Speak to your doctor about using keto to starve your cancer cells and improve your health!
NUTRITIONAL DISCLAIMER
The content on this website should not be taken as medical advice and you should ALWAYS consult with your doctor before starting any diet or exercise program. We provide nutritional data for our recipes as a courtesy to our readers. We use Total Keto Diet app software to calculate the nutrition and we remove fiber and sugar alcohols, like erythritol, from the total carbohydrate count to get to the net carb count, as they do not affect your blood glucose levels. You should independently calculate nutritional information on your own and not rely on our data. The website or content herein is not intended to cure, prevent, diagnose or treat any disease. This website shall not be liable for adverse reactions or any other outcome resulting from the use of recipes or recommendations on the Website or actions you take as a result. Any action you take is strictly at your own risk.
Dr. Rosmy Barrios, MD is an aesthetic medicine specialist whose work focuses on patients who are treated for obesity, metabolic syndrome, and other weight-related issues through nutritional analysis, keto diet programs, and supporting medications.
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