Current Issue

The current standard-of-care treatment regimens for cancer frequently have serious and irreversible adverse effects. Ideally, therapeutic modalities should help control symptoms and improve the patient’s quality of life while causing minimal or no toxic effects. In this regard, it is worth examining cannabidiol (CBD) for its potential anticancer properties. CBD may possess antitumor activity through several mechanisms, including regulating reactive oxygen species, endoplasmic reticulum stress, inflammation, and immune modulation. In addition, pre-clinical studies indicate that CBD is a potential modulator of growth factors and induces apoptosis in tumor cells. This review summarizes the evidence regarding the effects of CBD as a non-toxic adjuvant in cancer care.

Nutrition research has been pivotal in establishing causality between dietary (nutrient) intake and health outcome measures. Nutrition is also relevant in the determination of dietary requirements and levels of supplementation to achieve specific physiological outcomes. Careful nutritional research led to the conclusion that food products considered the same or equivalent may have significant differences due to soil quality, agricultural methods, contaminants, food processing, additives, and cooking methods. We propose the concept of the net micronutrient balance value (NMBV), which refers to the actual micronutrient content of the food product minus the portion not absorbed and the amount depleted in metabolic processes due to additives, contaminants, medication, and faulty metabolism. Diet quality over time determines physical growth, mental development, and numerous health risks, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and many other chronic conditions. Therefore, research in nutrition needs to identify and consider the specific variables that determine NMBV to provide better uniformity in nutrition research and produce more significant and meaningful findings.

Intermittent fasting (IF) has been shown to confer several physiological benefits, such as improved glucose regulation, stress resilience, suppression of inflammation, and in relation to cancer, tumor growth inhibition. These benefits can be accomplished through several mechanisms, such as induction of autophagy, mitophagy, autophagic cell death, and changes in the cellular metabolic environment. The nutritional restriction is a promising protocol to modulate autophagy and enhance the efficacy of anticancer therapies while protecting normal cells. IF may offer cancer patients an effective and less toxic adjuvant treatment for cancer. In addition, IF has shown benefits when combined with the use of chemotherapeutic drugs resulting in a decrease in side effects and an increase in the effectiveness of the drugs. This article discusses the evidence in support of dietary restriction, specifically IF, as a tool that may provide physiological and epigenetic benefits in the management of cancer.

This case study demonstrates the ability of thyroid-hormone therapy to help resolve eating disorders by fundamentally addressing motility, hunger, eating patterns, and hormone-associated psychological disturbance.