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Starve Then Kill
Show #315 - Date: 25 Jun 2021

Jane McLelland, well known for her book How to Starve Cancer, talks about the new edition with additional material on ferroptosis

References from the show:

Jane McLelland
Categories: Author, Functional Medicine, Supportive Therapies


2 responses to “Starve Then Kill”

  1. Alfa Safaea says:

    Hi, before I listened I knew I was not going to understand it, and sure enough I did not. I don’t understand when and what is Starve Face, and when and what is Kill Face. What do I have to do?

    Having said all that, I’m still glad I listened. Thank you very much. By the way, English is a second language to me.

    • Robin Daly says:

      Hi Alfa
      Thanks for writing in. It must be very hard to understand such complex material when it’s your second language! Jane was saying ‘phase’ rather than ‘face’. My suggestions are that you order the new version of her book, and you could also join her Facebook group ‘Jane McLelland Off Label Drugs for Cancer’. She also runs a course, which is apparently easier to follow. I hope this is a help.

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Robin Daly: Hello, and welcome to the show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and Founder of Yes To Life, the UK charity helping people with cancer to learn about access to Integrative Medicine. My guest on this week’s show is Jane McLelland, author of the popular book, How To Starve Cancer, and herself a long-term survivor of terminal cancer.

If you don’t know of Jane and her work, there are some aspects of today’s show that you won’t initially understand. So if you want to find out more, then I suggest you go to Yestolife.org.uk, click the link on the homepage menu for the Radio Shows, and search for Jane McLelland by name.

This will bring up her earlier interviews that will cover a lot more of the groundwork. Also, of course, there’s Jane’s own website howtostarvecancer.com.

Meanwhile, this interview is going to look into the latest developments in Jane’s thinking. I’m speaking to Jane over the internet at her home in West London.

Jane, welcome back to the Yes To Life show

Jane McLelland: Hi Robin.

Robin Daly: It’s always a pleasure to chat. Today’s show is an opportunity to get up to speed on your latest thinking about a process called Ferroptosis. Up until now, all your focus has been on the starvation of cancer by a variety of means. You certainly had some considerable success in raising the profile of this approach. You’ve got over 40,000 members in your Facebook group at this point. But now you’re introducing something quite different. What’s made you decide to do that?

Jane McLelland: Well, you have to starve the cancer, but this time you’ll be starving it of an amino acid called cystine.
You may have heard of N-acetylcystine. That’s commonly used by a lot of people for detox and to help themselves. It’s a cellular protection, but it also helps protect the cancer cell from being killed. It stops the kill phase because it helps to create the master antioxidant, which is glutathione.

The combination of cystine and glutamate creates glutathione, and glutathione is the cellular protector, but it is the major protector for stopping a kill phase. So in order to create the kill phase, you need to stop the import of cystine, which is the cancer bringing in more of that amino acid to produce the glutathione.

It’s a chain of events trying to stop that process, stopping the cancer cell from protecting itself from radiotherapy, chemotherapy. The process of ferroptosis is specific. It’s another form of cell death. It’s not the same as Apoptosis which is just cell suicide, the cell shrinking and disappearing.

The way the ferroptosis works is that it affects the fatty membranes of the cancer cell. Not just the outside fatty membrane; it actually affects the membranes of the mitochondria as well. This creates an oxidation, or rusting if you like, of the fatty membranes. Because it’s affecting the mitochondria membranes (because they are made of fat), you get a breakdown of the mitochondria, which are then unable to make the energy. So it’s starving the cancer, but it’s doing it in a slightly different way. You’re starving it of cystine and you’re starving it of the ATP that it needs, to produce all its daughter cells. It’s the same theme of starving cancer, but this is a new approach.

Robin Daly: What actually prompted you to want to look at the new approach? Was it because you felt something additional was needed or just because you stumbled across it and you thought, wow this is amazing?

Jane McLelland: It was both actually. While I was doing my online course, when I was doing my kill phase module; the more I looked into ferroptosis, the more I thought, wow, this really is going to help those really aggressive cancers that are almost impossible to cure; like the GBM, the triple negative breast cancer, some of the really aggressive variants.

The more aggressive they are, the more they hog iron and use it for growth. And this is using iron; ferroptosis literally means death by iron. You are using this approach to kill off those really aggressive cancer cells by its own petard. You’re using its own vulnerability to kill it off. It’s quite a neat and elegant way to do it.

Robin Daly: In terms of cancer research, ferroptosis is relatively new, only about 10 years. Things don’t move very fast in this field. It seems to me that there’s quite a bit of research, but pretty much no action.

Jane McLelland: That’s exactly right. There’s only a handful of doctors that I know of at the moment who are doing anything like this. Mostly it’s not the full version. I’ve researched about 20 different salvage pathways that cancer will use in order to get round being treated by ferroptosis.

So if you just block the import of cystine or you block something called the GPX4 which is an enzyme that the cancer uses to repair its fatty membranes; it can get round those in many, many different ways. What I’ve done is a bit like my Metro Map, where it has all the escape routes. If you can’t get to it one route, you’ll kill it by blocking another route and you have to work out what those routes are.

I’ve worked through all the routes that cancer uses to escape death by ferroptosis in order to provide a synergistic protocol that includes, not only drugs and off-label drugs like Sulfasalazine, but key supplements, and a special diet, which is different to what I normally say. Because this one is a methionine-free diet, a different way of starving it. I encourage people to do a starve phase for a month and then look at doing a kill phase for maybe a month. They may only want to do it for a few days. It’s entirely up to them, or down to their doctor to decide whether they need a more intense kill phase. The more aggressive your cancer is, the more intense the kill phase you need. If it’s only growing very slowly, you can do a kill phase, which is only a few days; but if it’s very aggressive, you might want to do the full month of a kill phase and then you do a month of the starve phase. So you alternate between the two.

This fits very well with the care oncology protocol. They did a month alternating between Mebendazole, which is an anti-parasitic drug; and they did a month on Doxycycline. It varies a little bit with patients, but that is their standard protocol.

Statins, by the way, are particularly useful for ferroptosis but you can alternate Mebendazole and Doxycycline and do the ferroptosis while you’re doing the Mebendazole phase, because that is synergistic with ferroptosis. It’s disturbing because it upsets the microtubules in the cell that can assist.

Robin Daly: You said this is particularly valuable to people who’ve got aggressive cancers.

Jane McLelland: Particularly aggressive cancers but it does work for other cancers as well. It doesn’t have to be a really aggressive cancer, it can be a much slower growth, but you get much more pronounced results. That’s the exciting thing; the more aggressive it is, the more results you’ll see. I’m already seeing people doing modified versions of it getting tremendous results. So I’m really excited.

Robin Daly: You stress the importance of distinct kill and starve phases. These two have got completely different requirements. This is a new piece of learning for some people that may have got their head around the Metro Map: this is Metro Map 2!

Jane McLelland: I need to create another diagram to make things a little bit easier. I haven’t done that in my book. I will do a video of it for my online course to help people get their heads around it. Antioxidants are not what you want. You actually want oxidants. This is very much an oxidation process and there are some antioxidants that put blockers on ferroptosis. They need to avoid vitamin E for example; and vitamin E comes in all sorts of different forms. Even the gamma tocotrienols need to be avoided. Alpha tocopherol particularly needs to be avoided. CoQ10 which is a very powerful antioxidant, needs to be avoided. A lot of people don’t get that. This is where statins come in because they deplete your CoQ10. It makes your cancer vulnerable to ferroptosis. It’s really neat that it fits in with the care oncology protocol. You can starve your cancer, prepare yourself for ferroptosis by reducing your CoQ10 and make it much more vulnerable. You then go boom for ferroptosis phase, and that’s hopefully going to do the trick.

Robin Daly: Let’s talk about the massive list of things you mention in relation to ferroptosis. In amongst that, I assume there’re basic ingredients you’re going to need. Can you tell me what those different approaches are that are needed, which all together make up what you call a kill phase.

Jane McLelland: To start with, you need to block the XCT antiporter. That pulls in the cystine, the amino acid that creates the glutathione. You need to block that. One of the key things you can use to block that is a drug called Sulfasalazine. There are supplements that can help that. There’s one called Piperlongumine, which comes from long pepper. There’s also a supplement called sodium selenite. It can’t be selenium. It’s a type of selenium, but it’s a specific one because selenium is an antioxidant and you don’t want that. Sodium selenite is a slightly different selenium based compound, but that will help block the XCT antiporter.

Then blocking the GPX4, which is enzyme glutathione peroxidase 4, will help to repair the lipid, fatty membranes, and you want to stop that happening. Some of the things that will help stop that are, Dan Shen Chinese herbal supplement, PEITC, Phenethyl isothiocyanate found in watercress. You’ve got other things like Artesunate that will also help; and Dihydroartemisinin, a supplement that creates oxidation.

Oxidation is what we really want. The combination of oxidation with intravenous vitamin C that provides hydrogen peroxide, and bingo, you get the complimentary effect where they’re all working synergistically to create the ferroptosis. You need to block certain antioxidant pathways, like the NRF2 and taking fenugreek is really useful for that.

Robin Daly: Going back to Metro Map 1, you’re trying to get over cancer’s ability to find a new way of surviving by going around the back, and therefore you’re trying to block off all its options at once.

Jane McLelland: Some of them things I’ve put in this protocol are things that nobody would have heard of before, such as Roscoe Jennine which is part of butcher’s broom, lactoferrin, you need specific fats. Instead of having olive oil which contains oleic acid, you need to have flaxseed and walnut seed oil, or fish oils, DHA in particular, really useful for triggering ferroptosis.

But you’ve got to be very careful they’re not with Vitamin E. Very often you get fish oil supplements that contain tocopherols as part of their antioxidant, which means that they won’t work. You’ve got to have fish oils that don’t have Vitamin E and the best ones are cod liver oil, because they contain vitamin A and D, rather than vitamin E. It’s a completely different approach and even the diet has to be different.

Robin Daly: One of the virtues of integrative medicine, particularly with aggressive cancers, is that a lot of the methods that have come, their roots are in complimentary alternative medicine, are quite good at controlling cancers over long periods in a way that orthodox medicine is not so good.

But with an aggressive cancer, you need a kill phase because actually there’s not enough affair to deal with the momentum that the cancer has. It just simply is running away. And so the combination of the two can be particularly powerful because you can use the orthodox medicine for the kill phase and you can use complimentary alternative medicine to then give sustained relief from cancer, to hold it at bay. It seems you’ve got a plan which is rather like that.

Jane McLelland: I would say it is, because what they’re trying to do is, they are focused very much on just the fast-dividing cell with chemo and radiotherapy. Those are kill phases because they produce oxidation and free radicals. But they are not attacking the cancer stem cell. This is where ferroptosis is even better because it is getting the cancer stem cell at the same time. That’s the key. The stem cell is always left behind with chemo and radiotherapy because they don’t touch the stem cell. You really need to block these key pathways in which it feeds itself, in order to get rid of the cancer stem cells. Ferroptosis does that. In terms of a treatment option, ferroptosis is head and shoulders above chemo and radiotherapy.

But having said that, there are some chemotherapies which do assist ferroptosis. Cisplatin, for example, will help block the XCT antiporter and has the effect of assisting ferroptosis. If you’re already on cisplatin, hurrah for that, because you can then add some of these ferroptosis treatments in and you’ll make it far more effective. Methotrexate has some effect on ferroptosis. Both of these two can be made far more effective just by adding some of these supplements.

You can add sulfasalazine. But the problem with sulfasalazine is, it’s an old rheumatoid arthritis drug being used for decades. It can cause hemolytic anemia if you’re not careful. You need to have it monitored. There are rheumatoid patients who take it regularly for the long-term but it does need to be monitored. But you could also pulse it in a short phase if you’re doing ferroptosis for, say, a month and then you go back to your starve phase. So you’re not constantly on it. Or you could do for a fortnight. It really depends on how aggressive your cancer is.

This is a way to enhance what is already available and to make it much more effective. I’m really excited by it. It’s complimentary to traditional medicine. I’m not trying to say that you should do one or the other. It’s always a combination. You need to get that fast-dividing cell. You need to get the stem cell at the same time, and it’s always doing both options together that will get rid of those fast-dividing, more aggressive cells, but also get the stem cells at the same time.

Robin Daly: There’s quite a bit of research behind ferroptosis, but no action. Why do you think that is? Why is nobody picking it up and saying, hey, this looks interesting, we should try it.

Jane McLelland: Because they haven’t got expensive patented drugs for it. We’re looking at old drugs, which don’t cost an awful lot of money. The push to get this out into the clinic just isn’t there, because the pharmaceutical industry is not pushing it. We’ve got this block of getting the information down to the patient to say, hey look at this, it is really exciting.

Robin Daly: You could say that a few years ago, immunotherapy was of no interest at all to pharmaceutical companies. People were doing immunotherapy in Germany and so on, for many, many, many years, without a hint of interest from pharmaceutical companies, until they found a way of making drugs to do the same thing, and very expensive ones too. Is there no case for ferroptosis being a process to make new drugs to target cancer more effectively?

Jane McLelland: Yes, in fact, immunotherapy is much more effective if you use ferroptosis at the same time. For example, the PD-L1 inhibitors are far more effective if you do ferroptosis at the same time, because part of the way they work is to create Interferon gamma which is synergistic with ferroptosis. In fact, you could use interferon gamma on its own and not need the PD-L1 inhibitors in order to create ferroptosis. It’s a much easier way. They used to use it as a treatment, but they found it wasn’t effective enough on its own. So they’ve dropped it and gone towards the PD-L1 inhibitors. We need to go back to looking at these older drugs and use them synergistically together.

Robin Daly: But all old drugs! You’re not going to get much excitement out there among old drugs unfortunately. One of the things that’s unusual about your work is how agnostic it is in terms of substances to induce effects. Most people are usually in the camp of drugs or natural compounds, but you really give them fairly equal status and it’s down to how well  they work and what the side effects are like. Your reason for choosing a natural substance over a drug is a balance between how effective it is and how bad the side effects are of the drug. Would that be right?

Jane McLelland: That would be correct. You look at a supplement called Piperlongumine from long pepper, at blocking the XCT antiporter, and you can see it has huge effects. One of the articles I’ve cited in my text is one where it’s stopping the input of cystine for pancreatic cancer and it is hugely successful for that cancer. That’s how important it is. I have patients who’ve been taking sulfasalazine, because I had mentioned it in my first edition. How it works has so much more expanded since then. Now I can understand it in a much bigger and more thorough way. But Piperlongumine just as a supplement seems to be really important, and can really assist this process.

So I’m really keen on people using not just the drugs, but using some of these supplements as well, which means that they don’t need as much of the drug in order to get the effect if they are covering it with a supplement.

I’m trying to give people as many options as possible. Ultimately, it’s about saving lives and getting people better. It doesn’t matter quite how you do that. If you’ve got the option to take the drugs, often they’re more effective. But if you haven’t got that option, then maybe you can do maybe a modified version and you’ll still get some effect.

I see that in some of the patients whom I’ve talked to recently. They are getting the effects even though they’re not doing the full Sulfasalazine, and Lunamide is another rheumatoid arthritis drug that can help. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to have all of those drugs in order to get it to work.

Robin Daly: It’s very different to the old days when it was this treatment or that treatment. It was rather different than what you’re talking about. Because you’ve got a shopping list of options, lots of potential for varying things, depending on what you’re able to get your hands on, what you can tolerate, and which one happens to work with your current treatment you’re having. It’s quite interesting from that point of view. It’s not a narrow approach at all.

Jane McLelland: No. I do have quite a long list of supplements in there. But having said that, what I’m trying to do at the moment is, talk to some formulation companies to help me put together combination supplements, so that people can have one pill instead of four. That’s what I’m hoping for so that I can make it far easier for people to do this.

Robin Daly: For those who are waiting to get their hands on this information; you’ve written about ferroptosis and you’re about to launch a new edition of your book with additional material. Do you want to tell us what they’re going to get?

Jane McLelland: Yes. There’re about an extra 80 pages and I do have an index this time! I know a lot of people left me a one-star review for not having an index…

I’ve added a few more of these fuel pipelines into my Metro Map, for example the XCT antiporter, which is key to ferroptosis and also part of the starve protocol. So it neatly flows from one thing to the other. I’ve also got a lactate inhibitors. Lactate always used to be thought of as a byproduct or a waste product of glycolysis, the abnormal fermentation of cancer. But lactate is also a fuel; it gets taken up by neighbouring cells, converted into something called Pyruvate, which then goes into your oxphos pathway. So it’s another way of the cancer getting fuel. You need to block that lactate transport.

Fat transport. Fat is becoming much more important in the whole concept of disrupting the fat and oxidising the fat, but also stopping the uptake of bad fat is key. CD 36 is another one mentioned in my online course. Blocking the CD 36, which is a fat transporter is really important. You can do that very easily with a supplement called Dan Shen which helps with ferroptosis and helps block the GPX4 enzyme.

So it all fits together. I’m hoping people aren’t too confused by this because it’s more of the same, it’s just much more in depth. I’m talking about Nuclear factor kappa Beta, and STAT3; these are central nodes that happen before you get the abnormal metabolism and blocking both of those two pathways, Nuclear factor kappa Beta, and STAT3, key with every cancer. I focus more on that in my new book.

It’s more in depth, with a few more key pathways which I think will help people get much better results. I’m really keen that people educate themselves and learn. It’s complicated up to a point, but you can look at it in a very basic way and say, I need to block glucose, I need to block some of those amino acids, which is the protein, and I need to block some of that fat. It’s much simpler in my online course, because I’ve got more diagrams and I talk about it in a shortened version, and people prefer the short videos on each subject.

That makes it easier for people if they don’t want to buy the book. All of this information will be in the online course, but I talk about it in more depth in the book. So probably they’re symbiotic in that the combination of the book and the course will help.

Robin Daly: Does the book have a different title, or the same title?

Jane McLelland: It’s got a different subtitle. “How To Starve Cancer, and then kill it with ferroptosis”. You starve it, do it for a month, then you kill it when it’s weak. Because weakening it with starving is the key approach. With the statins, you’re blocking the CoQ10 which is that key antioxidant that will stop ferroptosis from working.

Robin Daly: When’s it going to be available?

Jane McLelland: Towards the end of July 2021. We’ve had a few hiccups with the printing. Around the 25th of July.

Robin Daly: I want to talk a little bit about this in practice. You mentioned that there’s a chap called Dr. Ahmed El Sakka doing some pioneering work in Egypt. He seems to be deeply immersed in this. What kind of success is he having?

Jane McLelland: He’s having fantastic success. I can’t give you any patient histories directly. I may try and get him to talk to me and I can then relay those on in my blog and do a video for my online course.

Robin Daly: He’s one of a handful of people that are around the world who’s is actually doing this.

Jane McLelland: He’s delved into it very deeply and I’d say more deeply than anybody else. I learned from him and he’s learned from me. I found other pathways that he didn’t know about. The combination of his knowledge and my knowledge and both our research has ended up with a far more in-depth approach to how to make this work. I’m really hoping this could be the answer for triple negative cancers for the Glioblastomas, for the pancreatic cancers, and even Rhabdomyosarcoma.

Robin Daly: Amongst those handful of practitioners, unfortunately none of them happens to be in the UK I believe.

Jane McLelland: No they’re not! Having said that, I’m talking to the Anticancer Drug Fund to get a trial off the ground. That’s what I’m hoping for. Otherwise, I’m looking for doctors who I can work with. I’d love to have my own clinic where we can deliver ferroptosis. Maybe several of these clinics. That’s what I really hope for because I really feel this is the future. It’s about getting it right. There are certain parameters which will make it easier for ferroptosis to work. You have to check the iron levels, there are various things that you need to check. The homocysteine levels are important because homocysteine can provide cystine which is that antioxidant that you don’t want. So homocysteine needs to be correct. There are a whole load of things that will need to be checked by a doctor in order to make a really effective protocol.

In a way, my book is probably directed, not just for patients, but for patients to actually give it to their doctors and say, look, I don’t understand it, can you look into this a bit more? If they don’t understand it, they can go to my online course and hopefully they’ll understand it better. It is all about blocking the antiporter, blocking the cystine and then creating oxidation of those fatty membranes. That’s really the key.

Robin Daly: We have 40,000 plus people out there, struggling to get to grips with all this for themselves. In one way, it’s a great thing because this is an opportunity being offered to them that they didn’t have before, and many of them are amazingly grateful for that, I know.

In another way, it’s not ideal that so many people are having to get to grips with the immense complexity of that. I know you’ve got the right brain for this quite clearly, you are quite naturally drawn to find out this stuff, initially for your own survival. But some people wouldn’t even do it for that, they couldn’t, it wouldn’t work for them.

Ideally this is the territory of experienced expert practitioners. So this has to be the aim; to get people up to speed who are already in the right territory, already have the whole background of understanding. This is just a new part of the puzzle that they can put in there in order to take that further step. We have to hope that there are practitioners who are going to do this.

Jane McLelland: Yes and I can train them up, Dr Ahmed El Sakka could come over, we can create a training program for people. There’s absolutely no problem with that. But I need to have a clinic where I can train a doctor to do this. Dr El Sakka would be very happy to help me train somebody up in how we do this.

Robin Daly: One last thing from your new chapter that I’d like to touch in on. You discuss combining ferroptosis with a range of other techniques. You mention PDT, photodynamic therapy, magnetic therapy which has always been majorly controversial of course, hyperbaric oxygen therapy which is fairly accepted these days, exercise and exercise with oxygen… you mention all of those. I’m interested to hear what the synergies are that you want to exploit? First of all, tell everybody who don’t understand what photodynamic therapy is in very broad terms and then why it’s good in combination.

Jane McLelland: Okay. It’s oxidation and it’s creating oxidized reactions inside the cell. It’s totally synergistic because it’s creating the oxygen for ferroptosis to occur. You can take these photosensitising drugs or supplements in 24 to 48 hours, and they settle in the cancer cells, they’re taken up by those cells. Then you fire particular lights at the cancer cells. This will create oxygen free radicals, which will then kill the cancer cells specifically. This has been used in some traditional quarters, I think it’s UCL that has a center? National Medical Laser Center. It’s available from a few places. They use it now for melanoma a little bit more than they used to.

Robin Daly: It is thought of as a conventional treatment, but they just don’t use it. The people who developed it realized that they’ve managed to get the technology so cheap and effective that it’s far too cheap for our market. So they take it to third world countries and they can set them up for £8,000 with the equipment, and £200 a time to treat cancer. It’s a great treatment, but you’re actually saying that ferroptosis is a great add-on, right? You could look at this the other way round and say that ferroptosis is a great add-on to PDT. Is that right?

Jane McLelland: Absolutely, yes. All synergistic. It’s all about oxidation. Because Cancer.Hates.Oxygen.

Robin Daly: So three of these are, hyperbaric oxygen, exercise, and exercise with oxygen, all are in the same territory, directly talking about oxygen. What about magnesium therapy?

Jane McLelland: That’s slightly different. Because we’re talking about something called the VDAC channel. We are effectively just an electrical load of channels all the time, that’s what we are. You can affect this VDAC channel with magnetic waves, with particular radio frequencies that seem to be more effective. The magnetic therapy on its own isn’t necessarily the thing to do, but you’ve got these machines called Optune machines which are now used for glioblastoma, and Bemamats may be possibly useful. There’s still a query over how useful they are, but this can affect the electrical impulses and the VDAC channel is part of something that occurs with ferroptosis where you get the opening of this channel. All these electrical simulations can help with that. It’s another assistance.

Robin Daly: Interesting. One last thing to ask as a personal interest. I’m quite aware of food quality. You actually got to know quite a bit to differentiate between something that looks good and something that actually is good these days. It’s not a simple matter to go out and get good food. I leave all the processes and the ways that my body puts this food to use. I just trust that it’s going to do a great job with it. I never give it a second thought. I’m interested to know what it’s like from your point of view, of being aware of the immense complexities involved in assimilating this food and utilising it for all the processes that we’ve been talking about along with plenty of others.

Jane McLelland: Yes, well, it is a complex situation. I’m talking about a different diet when it comes to ferroptosis. Having a methionine-free diet is essentially a vegan diet. A lot of people are doing vegan diets anyway when they’re diagnosed with cancer. In many cases, particularly with the aggressive ones, that’s the way to go.

But it is very hard to assimilate all the different aspects of it. You do have to put an awful lot of trust in your own process and knowledge of what you learn. There are a lot of foods that you can eat quite happily, which you know are going to do you good, like mushrooms. Mushrooms are particularly good. But the whole point with my approach is that you’re not starving yourself. The approach that I take is that you can do all these other things alongside, and hopefully you don’t need to be going down the extreme route of starving yourself in order to stop the cancer getting the nutrients. The supplements and the drugs will do the job, and then you oxidize with exercise as well.

So it is hard and I know people struggle a lot with the ketogenic diet. The ketogenic diet isn’t necessarily absolutely required for ferroptosis. In fact, it may be slightly more detrimental for ferroptosis to be really strict on that. We know that after 28 days, if you’re doing a ketogenic diet, it’s at its weakest. But then by 90 days, it’s learned to get round that and use other food nutrients. That’s research I came across while writing this chapter. So it’s quite important to be looking at blocking more than just the glycolysis which is what everybody focuses on.

Glycolysis is the whole focus, but we’ve moved from there to looking at blocking amino acids, particularly glutamine and fat and blocking cystine, which I did discuss in my first book, but we’ve gone down a new pathway in order to make that far more effective.

Robin Daly: On a personal level, you end up at a restaurant, and you pick something off the menu and they bring it round. Are you thinking to yourself the effect that each of these things is going to be having on this pathway and that pathway; is that actually what runs through your mind?

Jane McLelland: I don’t have active cancer right now, so no, I don’t think like that. Although sometimes I put loads chilli on my food, and I think that’s affecting my AMPK! But I’m far more relaxed these days than I used to be.

Robin Daly: Well, we’re going to leave it there, we’re out of time. Just a quick reminder of the title of your new book…

Jane McLelland: How to starve cancer, and then kill it with ferroptosis

Robin Daly: Towards the end of July. Thanks very much Jane, pleasure as always to have you on board. Thanks for time.

Jane McLelland: Pleasure to talk to you Robin.

Robin Daly: I hope you found that interesting. Jane is certainly pushing the boundaries of the thinking behind cancer treatment with her work. It’ll be very interesting to see where it all leads. A reminder that Jane’s website is Howtostarvecancer.com. Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back next week with another Yes To Life show here on UK Health Radio.