How To Starve Cancer ...without starving yourself is the culmination of much research after cancer left Jane McLelland, a qualified physiotherapist, fighting for her life. She harnessed her medical knowledge to scour medical journals to work out a strategy that would not only help to kill her cancer but that would also “starve” the cancer of what it needed to undergo its rapid proliferation. Despite the title, the book is not just about diet, it covers supplements, exercise, and importantly, the use of “cancer-starving” low toxicity drugs. In 2003 Jane put together her own rather unique cocktail to do just that, and recently a clinic opened offering a very similar cocktail (The Care Oncology Clinic), also achieving some remarkable results.

Cancer has a big appetite to enable it to undergo the numerous cell divisions, one of its key hallmarks, as cancer cells employ different methods of using nutrients to provide it with the required energy levels for this relentless proliferation. It was realizing this that enabled Jane to eventually create a “cancer-starving” strategy that even Professor Thomas Seyfried, author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease acknowledges as “monumental.” Seyfried goes further to add, “It is a strategy for surviving advanced cancer regardless of the organ or tissue involved. Jane has done a great service to mankind.”

It was only when Jane’s disease had spread to her lungs did Jane adopt these integrative strategies. Initially the purely natural approaches, including intravenous vitamin C, kept her stage 4 cervical cancer at bay for several years. But just when Jane thought she had conquered this first cancer, it roared back in the form of myelodysplasia which was fast becoming AML. This was a result of the chemotherapy and radiotherapy she had received years earlier for her cervical cancer. Faced once again with another terminal diagnosis and realizing this new cancer was more aggressive than the first, and that time was running out, Jane guinea-pigged her way back to health by adopting a completely untested and untrialed approach. After looking back through journals, some dating back to the 1980s, she persuaded several doctors to prescribe her a drug cocktail that included, amongst others, dipyridamole (an antiplatelet drug), metformin (a diabetic drug that reduces glucose) and lovastatin (which reduces low density lipoproteins). She speculated that different cancers require different nutrients and use different pathways to obtain these. Her hunch has now been proven to be correct. Jane also discusses other off label drugs, including the Care Oncology Clinic’s drugs and why these may also prove useful inclusions in every patient’s cocktail.

The book is in two parts, the first section reads like a novel; it is Jane’s compelling and page-turning story of her heart-breaking diagnosis of cervical cancer at the age of 30, just when she was preparing for motherhood. Despite this, Jane’s writing is also funny and uplifting, and to anyone who is going through a cancer diagnosis, the one thing that Jane delivers in spades is hope. Reading her story it is evident that oncology is missing a trick, a great deal more can be done for patients, even with stage 4. She cleverly weaves lots of medical information into her story as well as discussing her key diet changes, useful supplements and how she discovered the drugs and why she eventually decided to use the ones in her cocktail.

Later in the book, in Part 2, the central tenet is her creation of a remarkably simple but ingenious “Metro Map” which will help anyone with a cancer diagnosis research their own disease and work out which fuels their cancer is using. Once this is understood, readers can then determine which diet is most appropriate e.g. the ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, macrobiotic, pescatarian Paleo or perhaps a vegan diet. Jane uses the analogy of Piccadilly Circus to demonstrate how the cancer stem cell evades being destroyed, by diverting its metabolism up new fuel pipelines to sustain its constant energy needs. Jane suggests that addressing and cutting off these fuel pipelines is cancer’s Achilles’ heel, rather than the whack-a-mole approach of chasing genetic mutations. Without its fuel source, cancer simply withers up and dies.

Jane is clear she is not against traditional treatments, but she does question the dogma of using maximal doses of chemotherapy. She argues that a greater cocktail of drugs and supplements, together with much lower doses of chemotherapy, may achieve a much better and safer approach to treatment and she offers several suggestions for better ways to treat patients in the future.

Instead of constantly trying to obliterate tumors, Jane suggests putting the brakes on growth and making cancer weak before delivering the killer blow. For many patients, this book allows them the first opportunity to have a frank and open discussion with their oncologist about the value of diet, supplements and “off label” drugs, most often dismissed by their doctors as nonsense and a waste of time. Together with the oncologist, the patient can use the “Metro Map” to discuss the different “fuel pipelines” and in doing so, the book bridges the knowledge gap about cancer metabolism and shifts the balance of power back to the patient.

Released in August 2018, Jane McLelland’s book is already causing a grassroots revolution and a seismic shift in how cancer is treated. Reviews are outstanding and people have called How to Starve Cancer ...without starving yourself “the book of the century in it genre.”

This book is a must-read for doctors and patients alike.