EXPERTS WHO THINK A HIGH-FAT DIET CAN FIGHT BRAIN TUMOURS

Raffi Kalamian Walsh was just four when a routine eye check picked up a worrying change and he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Over the next 14 months, Raffi was given weekly chemotherapy followed by 12 weeks of a different chemo drug followed by two operations to remove part of the tumour. Two months later a scan showed it was back and spreading.

‘i can’t begin to describe how devastating it was to watch our young child being taken apart, piece by precious piece,’ says Raffi’s mother Miriam, who, with her husband, Peter, had adopted Raffi when he was two.

Three years after his diagnosis Raffi began treatment with a combination of five cancer drugs. ‘Within weeks my normally cheerful little guy was nauseous, fatigued, and unable to focus,’ recalls Miriam.

‘When he opened his mouth to speak, all that came out was gibberish.’ While searching for information about Raffi’s drugs, Miriam stumbled on a radically different approach to cancer, based on the idea that a very high fat, low carbohydrate diet could slow tumour growth. it was being investigated by Professor Thomas Seyfried, a biochemistry researcher at Boston University.

Miriam explains: ‘Professor Seyfried had shown it was possible to slow the growth of brain tumours in mice.

‘i knew it was not yet tested in people, but Raffi desperately needed something different.’ Surprisingly her son’s doctors agreed.

The five cancer drugs were stopped and within three months Raffi’s tumour had shrunk by almost 15 per cent. He returned to being a talkative, energetic little boy.

The ketogenic diet involves avoiding foods containing sugar: sweets, biscuits, puddings, along with grains, pasta and bread, even wholegrain types, plus starchy vegetables such as potatoes or cooked carrots, as well as all legumes, beans and pulses.

instead the diet is built around fats including butter, cream, coconut oil, olive and avocado oils and some omega 3 oils, small portions of protein

such as meat, fish or eggs, as well as salad and non-starchy vegetables (such as broccoli and green beans).

Fruit is limited to berries, as these are low in sugar. The aim is to starve cancer cells of glucose, their preferred fuel. Lacking carbohydrates the body burns fat instead and your liver starts pumping out substances called ketones which can replace glucose as fuel for the brain and muscles.

Crucially, however, tumours can’t use ketones as fuel.

Miriam concedes that Raffi struggled with social events: ‘because there were cakes and sweets everywhere,’ she says. ‘But that was a walk in the park compared to what he had endured in terms of Raffi Kalamian Walsh: Radical treatment gruelling treatments.’ During his first nine months on the diet Raffi also received a low dose of chemotherapy drug, before relying just on the diet. The odds against Raffi were daunting — at his diagnosis doctors said he had a one in three chance of any response to treatment. ‘The first three years on the diet were phenomenal,’ says Miriam. ‘He seemed almost completely well again.’ Raffi remained on the diet for six years. ‘Much of the time he was living pretty normally,’ Miriam says. ‘In contrast, children with brain tumours following the standard protocol often undergo treatment after treatment until the end.’ Dr Nelofer Syed, a senior research fellow and lecturer in cancer biology at Imperial College London, agrees the ketogenic diet has great potential.

‘Early research shows that it can improve the effectiveness of both chemotherapy and radiotherapy and that cancers find it difficult to use ketones for energy,’ she says.

Dr Syed is the co-author of an article summarising research on the diet, published last year in the journal Frontiers In Molecular Neuroscience.

It reported on lab studies showing the diet could, among other things, reduce the ability of tumours to hook up to a blood supply and make it harder for cancer to spread. However as yet, there have been no big studies testing the diet against other therapies, and Cancer Research UK does not recommend it as an alternative to the standard healthy balanced diet.

‘We’d all love better evidence,’ says Dr Syed, ‘ but providing patients do it under the supervision of a dietitian who is trained in delivering it, I think it is worth trying.’

The ketogenic diet is already approved by NICE for children with epilepsy; a big randomised trial for childhood epilepsy showed it could reduce or even stop the seizures.

Ultimately, however, the diet couldn’t save Raffi. He died nine years after he was diagnosed, at the age of 13 in April 2013.

Not every patient will benefit as dramatically as Raffi did and his success doesn’t ‘prove’ the diet works. ‘Its value is as an add-on to what you’re already doing with your oncology team,’ says Miriam. She adds: ‘The diet kicked the can down the road for six years.

‘During a period when most people with cancer are in clinics or hospitals, Raffi was out riding his trike.’

Keto For Cancer by Miriam Kalamian ( Chelsea Green, (£18.99).