Meanwhile… multiple myeloma
As I’m sure you all know (I didn’t), this is an “incurable” blood cancer affecting the bone marrow. Only it seems like it isn’t. Incurable, that is. At least, the specific precancerous blood disorder that normally progresses to the fatal disease can be stopped from progressing – by a radical intervention that has oncologists shaking their heads in horror: a high-fibre, plant-based diet.

I won’t spoil your fun in reading about this remarkable finding (see page 6), but I must share what the investigator had to say about it. Dr Urvi Shah was herself diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 2016. She thought, as a doctor who was training to treat people with cancer, she should
know what she should be eating. But of course she didn’t: “I realised that we don’t really get taught any of this in medical school”. She initially planned to research immunotherapy. But her experience being a patient with cancer changed all that. “I said to my Service Chief in 2019 that I would like to conduct a pilot study on diet and see how that goes”, Dr Shah said. “And then one study led to the next, and to the next. And soon, it became my full-time research focus”.

Kudos to Dr Shah but, as ever, let’s ask what’s taking them so long. Why are they ignorant and uninterested in our LONG (and published) history of successful cancer treatments founded on a bedrock of diet and nutrition: Issels, Gerson, Kelley, Gonzalez? They’d get “here” a lot quicker if they stopped re-inventing the wheel.

Ketones, Alzheimer’s and “new biology”
Hats off to Dr Dale Bredesen’s Buck Institute for Research on Ageing. Dr John Newman has published a true breakthrough study on the ketone BHB (widely available as a supplement, if your clients won’t fast or exercise!).

Newman is describing the findings as nothing less than “new biology” (see page 8).

While we know that ketones produced in lowcarb states, like BHB, are to do with fuel, energy and inflammation, the Buck’s collaborative teams have discovered that they also interact with damaged proteins that can then be pulled out of cells, rather than gumming up the works. This could have direct applications in brain health, Alzheimer’s and ageing.

Let’s start again
Welcome to 2025. Is it promising to be a new beginning for you? The inspirational poet David Whyte says: “Beginning well or beginning poorly,
what is important is simply to begin, but the ability to make a good beginning is almost close to a learned art form: beginning well involves a
clearing away of the confusing, the irrelevant and the complicated to find the beautiful, often hidden lineaments of the essential and the necessary”. Have fun with that over the holiday period!