If you notice more men sprouting facial hair above their lips, it’s probably because this is the month of Movember. The mustache movement is designed to draw attention to men’s health concerns, particularly prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mental health, and suicide prevention. 

Movember began in Australia in 2003 and has grown to include more than 20 countries.

Get a Move On for Men's Health

In the US, men’s fitness has become a hallmark of the movement. You can register on the Movember website to set a 30-day exercise challenge (such as running a race or learning to rock climb), track your progress, and raise funds for a men’s health initiative. 

Physical inactivity is a risk factor for many diseases, including certain cancers. Exercise is an easy, cost-effective strategy, but more than 40 percent of men in “high-income countries” don’t exercise enough, according to Movember staff.

Movember has funded more than 1,250 men’s health projects worldwide. “We’re independent of government funding, so we can challenge the status quo and invest quicker in what works,” states the organization’s website. “By 2030 we’ll reduce the number of men dying prematurely by 25 percent.”

No-Shave November

A similar organization called No-Shave November suggests that men skip their usual hair-grooming expenses this month and donate the savings toward cancer research. 

“Since 2009, No-Shavers have helped raise over $12,000,000 for cancer awareness, research and prevention,” according to the organization’s website, which lists Fans for the Cure, American Cancer Fund, and National Foundation for Cancer Research among the beneficiaries of donations.

Lynn Tryba: How did you come to learn about the keto diet for cancer?

Miriam Kalamian: In December, 2004, my husband, Peter, and I found out our 4-year-old son, Raffi, had a brain tumor the size of an orange. They said it was inoperable, told us what we had to do, and warned us not to go online. I went online.

Tryba: What did you see?

Kalamian: It was a horrible shock—it was all bad, nothing positive, nothing to give us hope. We went along with the standard of care, which was chemotherapy every week for 14 months. Three months later at his post-treatment MRI, they said, “It’s lit up like a Christmas tree. We have to radiate.” He wasn’t even 6. They don’t usually do radiation to kids that young because it impairs cognition. We were on the edge of agreeing to this, but then they said they couldn't do it because the tumor was diffuse and infiltrated, the same reason they couldn't operate. We did the unthinkable and had surgeries done by the only doctor who would agree to it. He did it in a two-part surgery. The first part was fairly successful in that it stopped the tumor growth, but it impaired a lot of my son’s executive functioning. The second surgery was not successful. It grew back in they hypothalamus within a few weeks and started invading new areas as well.

Tryba: What did you do next?

Kalamian: We enrolled Raffi in a clinical trial, but it didn't take long to learn that it wasn't working. At this point, they were out of treatment options and were going to move Raffi to palliative care. I was looking online at one of the drugs in the palliative protocol. The drug had a lot of awful side effects so I wanted to print this out to review it with his doctor. I was staying with my mom at the time because my son’s trial was in New York. Her printer wouldn’t work, so I bookmarked the page. A few days later, when I was at a spot with a working printer, I went back to the bookmark. Except it wasn’t the article about the chemo drug anymore. It was an article by Dr. Tom Seyfried involving a diet he had used in a mouse model of glioma, a type of brain tumor. I had brought up mouse model studies to my son’s medical team in the past and they would say it was going to be years before the research can be done in people, if they were tried at all, and years more before a treatment was approved. But Dr. Seyfried’s paper also included a reference to a case study with two children with advanced brain tumors who had been put on a ketogenic diet for eight weeks. The tumors had responded in both cases. I emailed Dr. Seyfried’s lab. A couple of hours later, he emailed me back, sending me a paper by Linda Nebeling PhD, MPH, RD, FAND. He also told me about The Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies. Although he's not a medical doctor, he was passionate and excited to help. I’m looking at this information and thinking, “Well, why wouldn’t we want to try it?” One of the kids was still alive more than a decade after the treatment. And we could still do the chemo alongside of the diet if that’s what we decided to do.

Tryba: You stumbled across the ketogenic diet by serendipity.

Kalamian: The other serendipitous thing was that the team of epileptologists at Johns Hopkins hospital, led by John Freeman, MD, had just put out their fourth edition of The Ketogenic Diet: A Treatment for Children and Others with Epilepsy. This was the first time they offered any speculation on the use of it in brain tumors. It was just one paragraph buried in a short section on speculation near the end of the book, but it was the first glimmer of hope we'd had in ages. Keto diets had been used as a treatment for epilepsy since the 1920s. And here it was, a protocol for kids that we could use with Raffi.

Tryba: Did you put Raffi on a ketogenic diet after that?

Kalamian: Yes, and I was terrified to take this on without medical support from his brain tumor team, but we had no choice. When you’re dealing with kids, doctors are even more reluctant to stray from the norms than they are with adults. We had local support from his pediatrician, general oversight from his local oncologist, and two moms in a support group for kids with epilepsy who were following the modified Atkins diet. That was enough of a start. I fasted Raffi like they were doing at the time for kids with epilepsy, but this was trickier to do outside of a hospital setting. Kids shift quickly into ketosis and by by night time, that poor kid was ketotic. That’s how quick kids can make that switch to ketosis. The book had warned this could happen and we followed the protocol to reverse it, and just kept going. We had started it right after an MRI showing progression had formally kicked him out of the trial. Three months later, his next MRI showed the tumor had shrunk. The only other treatment he'd received was a reduced dose of a chemo drug that Raffi had already failed. We had to go along with that because the local oncologist had to stay within the good graces of his profession, but he was clear that this is not what had caused the shrinkage. After Raffi’s next good MRI, the oncologist started skipping treatments. He gave us a three-week holiday and finally said, “We’re just damaging him with this stuff. Let’s not do this anymore to him.”

Tryba: How were you feeling at that point?

Kalamian: It’s what put me on the path to get my degree in nutrition. I was hoping for anything, just a few more months with Raffi, anything. When we were told the tumor had shrunk, we sent the MRI scan to two other centers, the one that had conducted the clinical trial and another center where he had been treated. Both concurred there had been tumor shrinkage, between 10 to 15 percent. But nobody was going to say it had anything to do with the diet. I literally begged the consultant nutritionist for The Charlie Foundation to have a call with me. She was resistant due to the liability. I said, “Listen, I’ll sign any waiver you want. I know I’m doing this wrong, and I’m afraid I'm going to harm him.” That’s what got her to work with me. She has a heart, and the thought of damaging a kid . . . She spent an hour and a half on the phone with me, and cleared up the things I was doing wrong. The good MRI was June. My talk with the nutritionist was July. By August, I was enrolled in a program leading to a Master’s degree in human nutrition.

Tryba: How was Raffi by then?

Kalamian: My son was doing great! He was getting stronger and healthier and back to school and enjoying life. Peter and I were enjoying this extra time with him. I got my degree from Eastern Michigan University in 2010. To become a Certified Nutrition Specialist took another couple of years. My son died in 2013, a year after I got my certification. If we could have gotten the tumor to shrink before his surgery, if we had known then what we do now, we could have avoided a lot of the damage. One of the main benefits in initiating a ketogenic diet early on is you can get a better tumor resection. But most people are not finding out about this until after surgery because they’re rushed into surgery being told it’s an emergency. In many cases, it’s not.

Tryba: Does the keto diet help with all cancers?

Kalamian:. There’s a standard of care therapy for brain cancer, and it has a standard outcome, which is piss-poor. When you combine the diet with it, you can get another year. I have clients who are four, six, eight years out from diagnosis. I work with one that’s 10 years out. The ketogenic diet’s positive effects are clear on brain cancer, not so clear on other cancers. I still think reducing inflammation and lowering glucose and insulin impacts the tumor or just the cancer, in general, and makes the other therapies you’re doing more impactful. If you can compromise the metabolic needs of the cancer cells while nourishing the rest of the body with the right kinds of nutrition, with ketones to replace the sugar you’ve pulled out, then you’re going to get a better outcome, even if it's just an improved quality of life. That alone is huge!

Tryba: Why don’t doctors start using food in conjunction with standard of care medicine?

Kalamian: Because they don’t understand the power of food and nutrition. They just see food as something that provides enough calories so you don’t lose weight. But the type of fuel you put in the body makes a difference in what the cancer can utilize and what compromises it. When it’s compromised and you hit it with therapy, it’s going to be more impactful.

Tryba: How do we change the perception that nutrition doesn’t matter?

Kalamian: Change is happening, but most oncologists are so stuck in the nutrition paradigm. You could hand them all the evidence on diet, but their bias prevents them from believing it. Then you have the ones who say, “It looks like maybe nutrition does have an influence,” but they often end up suggesting a plant-based diet as though there was evidence for it, which there's not. There's this fear that their patients will lose weight, which is often the case with keto. Thankfully, recent research has shown that the weight loss with keto is more likely be from fat, not muscle. There also seems to be some benefit from fasting around chemotherapy. I have a modified fasting protocol that includes broth that people drink for a little bit of protein and gut protection. It provides calories but keeps you in a fasting mimicking state during chemo treatments, which lessens GI side effects and makes infusions more impactful. The fasting state sensitizes cancer cells, making them easier to kill.

Tryba: What clinical evidence shows following a ketogenic diet offers therapeutic potential for people with cancer?

Kalamian: There’s been some beautiful work with women with breast cancer showing that the body composition is better in women who are able to follow even a modified low-carb ketogenic diet and that their biomarkers are better than women on a control diet. You may have seen an explosion of information about a new preclinical pancreatic cancer study that came out showing people on the ketogenic diet were doing better than those who were not. They’re organizing an official clinical trial. A few years ago, Memorial Sloan Kettering, a very reputable center, started a trial for ketogenic diet for newly diagnosed endometrial cancer. Almost 100 percent of women who develop endometrial cancer are obese and insulin resistant. There are some high-level people involved in this research, like Lewis Cantley, he’s the one who discovered a pathway that promotes cancer called P13K. That pathway is very active in a lot of cancers, like ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers. Cantley spent the majority of his career working with pharmaceutical companies to develop P13K inhibitors for that pathway. Sorry to get technical. These inhibitors block phosphorylation of the insulin receptor on cancer cells.When you do that, then glucose and the insulin stay in circulation instead of going to feed the cancer cell. But this can turn people into diabetics, which results in poor cancer outcomes.

Tryba: Wow.

Kalamian: The next level of that was, “Now they're diabetics, and this drug is failing, so what should we do?” They knew from earlier research that women on Metformin because of high blood glucose had a better outcome in cancer. Then, it became, “Well, what if we combined it with a ketogenic diet?” since that also lowers blood glucose. They spent all this time and research money on a drug with horrible side effects of hyperglycemia and other issues. And here’s this diet that also inhibits that pathway because the body is perceived to be in a starvation state so Cantley began to suggest putting these women on keto diets alongside the drug. In a starvation state, activity in these pathways associated with growth slows down.

Tryba: Could you explain that a little more?

Kalamian: I call it abundance and austerity. When there’s abundance, the body goes, “Oh yeah, let’s grow, grow, grow. Hey, you cells over there, we don’t know what you’re about, but here, take some of this, we got plenty.” But when you’re fasting or when you’re calorie restricting or you’re carb restricting, when you’re limiting those nutrients the body is used to getting, then the body goes, “Wait a minute, we’ve got to keep the essentials up and running. But you cells over there, you're not helping us at all so you’re not getting any of this supply.” It has a major impact on those pathways. Everybody that’s even studied a little bit of cancer biology understands this but they don’t make the mental leap needed to of put it into practice. I mean, think about it. Oncologists have spent a fortune on medical school. Protocols replace curiosity. They have an algorithm they’re going to work with. They're in a clinical practice where they are respected by their colleagues.

Tryba: It’s perverse though.

Kalamian: It is perverse. It’s not in the best interest of the patient. But they don’t have the time, number one. They don't make a move without evidence from clinical trials, which are so much more challenging in diet research. They’re also worried about losing their standing in their profession. There’s a few of them out there. There’s Dr. Jethro Hu at Cedars-Sinai. He’s running a clinical trial on the effects of a ketogenic diet on newly diagnosed glioblastoma. After he was about year into that study, he said to me, “I was blown away. I expected there to be some impact on the tumor. But I didn't expect to see this much improvement in quality of life.”

Tryba: What was he seeing in the trial?

Kalamian: His clients were generally sailing through the radiation and chemo intensive protocol, whereas the people who continued eating standard diets were experiencing more profound side effects. For the most part, if you’re not reducing the inflammation caused by the treatment, you’re having to take a steroid drug called dexamethasone. It reduces inflammation yes, but one of its many side effects is that it raises glucose. In most cancers, but especially in brain cancer, this is associated with a much poorer prognosis.

Tryba: Some oncologists are kept in place by their financial dependency or fear of losing their status where they are working?

Kalamian: Yes. One example is Colin Champ, a radiation oncologist. He’s a Paleo guy, goes by Caveman Doctor. You look at what he was putting out there 10 years ago, and you’re thinking, “Oh great, a whole new wave of people who are going to make a difference.” And then he gets dismissed because of his blog posts. He's now started his own clinic in Florida.

Tryba: I feel bad for the people who might not find a person like you to work with.

Kalamian: Or the people being fed this misinformation about how unpalatable, dangerous, or impractical keto is. In my practice, we meet with people, collect information about their food preferences, and make beautiful meal plans or recipe books for them based on what they want to eat, not on what we think they should eat. We take people’s desires into account, but if they desire Entenmann’s pastry, well that’s definitely not going to work. Keto is about 5 to 10 percent carb. When you have fat and carb in combination, like an Entenmann’s pastry, that’s where you’re doing the most damage. But there are replacements for those things. If you’re a packaged food addict and you want to do keto, there are packaged foods you can buy. Of course, that's not ideal, so we steer people toward the better quality ones if that’s what they need to do to get up to speed with the diet. But we’re always working on moving them to the next step of using whole foods and tracking their nutrient intake for themselves. My son’s endocrinologist told me that the diet was not possible for most people. He said it was too difficult. I explained to him that difficult was sitting in the waiting room when my kid’s having his third surgery. That’s difficult. The diet’s a walk in the park.

Tryba: I don’t understand the disconnect. When you have someone you love who’s going through treatments, especially radiation, or if you read about the possible side effects from drugs, it’s endless. You have to get your blood and organ function monitored to make sure that the treatments are not pushing them into organ failure. It’s strange to me that doctors will say, “Oh, but asking someone to change their diet will be too hard for them.” Not only that, if you get away from packaged simple carbs, you feel better, even if you don’t have a cancer diagnosis. I have a friend who has multiple sclerosis. She found the Wahls Protocol. And just recently there has been some exciting new published research showing that keto is slowing progression of MS.

Kalamian: Absolutely. Good choice.

Tryba: Her doctor said the same thing, “Diet doesn’t do anything.” Really? Because it dropped her inflammation significantly. She lost the extra weight she was carrying. She has had no disease progression for years and has not had to use any of the MS drugs.

Kalamian: Isn’t that amazing? It’s food and supplements and exercise and improving sleep. I saw somebody took a photo of something on a doctor’s wall, and it said, “Don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree.” It was up next to his medical degree on the wall. It’s this hubris. It’s this arrogance about their position in life because there’s that reverence for doctors. You go to other countries where doctors don’t have that status, where it may be easier to get your degree because you don’t have to have all that money for med school, you don’t have the status either. You’re there to help the family figure out what to do because they don’t have the resources to do a $100,000 treatment.

Tryba: The hubris is weird because there are advances in some cancer statistics but so many of them remain horrendous.

Kalamian: Peter Attia has a podcast called The Drive. He’s a medical doctor interested in healthy aging. He has interviewed doctors about this exact thing. I saw it early on when people said a miracle drug had come out for brain cancer called Temodar. It moved the needle on the median survival by just 10 weeks. That makes it a breakthrough drug, 10 weeks. The ketogenic diet alongside the standard of care often gives people at least an additional year, maybe a year and a half. They’re not going to get a dime for the diet. That’s the other part of it, the funding for the research. Pharmaceutical is not going to fund a diet study. Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote a book called The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He posted at one point, “We’ve got the funding for the drug. But now we need $300,000 for the ketogenic part. Does anybody have any idea of how we can find the funding?” That’s Siddhartha Mukherjee. Nobody’s handing him $300,000. Dr. Jethro Hu at Cedars-Sinai also needed to get companies to donate equipment and food for his clinical trial on the effects of a ketogenic diet on glioblastoma.

Tryba: Why doesn’t the government provide more funding for studies?

Kalamian: It’s the government’s ties with the pharmaceutical industry. They want to support the institutions. Institutions get some of their money from the government. But they get the major part from pharmaceutical companies. The more clinical trials they’re running, the higher their prestige. Mass General and Dana-Farber are constantly pumping out all these clinical trials where all they’re doing is using people to gather data so they can move to another part of the clinical trial. They’re getting these tiny little incremental benefits. A couple of doctors are understanding of that and are more supportive of the diet option now. If somebody brings up that they want to do a ketogenic diet, the doctors will say, “Yes, that’s a really good plan.” But they never bring it up because it’s not a part of the standard care. It’s not an approved therapy. They don’t feel it’s within their wheelhouse to discuss diet unless they're asked to.

Tryba: How do you do this work of educating people about the power of keto for cancer without feeling crushed?

Kalamian: Because of my son. Any time somebody wants to put their foot on my head, I say, “No, I’m fighting for my kid right here. I’m fighting for the families, not just kids anymore. I’m fighting for the families that have a dog in this fight.” That’s what keeps me going. I have always looked at what I do as leaving a legacy for my son. I attribute that legacy to Dr. Tom Seyfried's efforts. A change in diet won't appeal to everyone with cancer, but it should be an option for those who want to make the effort. I want other people to be successful without having to cobble bits of info together like I had to do.

I don’t blame you for not knowing about oligomeric proanthocyanins. Say that three times fast—what a mouthful! It is a lot easier to call them by their abbreviation: OPCs. These tongue-twister polyphenols are special compounds found in just a few places that, with proper dosages, have incredible benefits for heart disease, cancer, liver problems, and more. In fact, one could argue for their place in just about any health protocol for any health condition because they work at such a foundational level.

What Are OPCs?

OPCs are a specific type of plant compounds called polyphenols. There are some amazing plant medicines that are polyphenols. Red wine, green tea, coffee, and dark chocolate contain polyphenols, and are all personal favorites of mine! Turmeric contains curcumin, which is itself a polyphenol. Polyphenols provide various medicinal health benefits, and are powerful antioxidants.

But like cousins in a big family who share some similarities, they also have individual characteristics that differentiate them from their kin. One cousin might be amazing at playing the clarinet, another might paint beautiful portraits, and yet a third hit the bull’s-eye with an arrow every time. This is also true of polyphenols—their individual characteristics allow them to shine.

Health Benefits of OPCs

OPCs are powerful medicine and can be a part of virtually any health protocol. However, they especially shine for:

• heart disease
• lowering blood pressure
• stabilizing blood sugar
• liver disease
• cancer

Don’t be afraid to combine OPCs with other polyphenols, such as ECGC from green tea or curcumin from turmeric, for even more powerful benefits.

As you may have already guessed, OPCs are a group of polyphenols that have been found in three plants: grape seeds, pine tree bark, and the red outer skins of peanuts. We have to go back some decades to understand how these natural medicines came to be, since none of these sources have been commonly consumed as part of the diet.

How Were OPCs Discovered?

Dr. Jacques (Jack) Masquelier, a French scientist, was working on the isolation and description of a nutrient we now know of as OPCs as early as his doctoral research in 1948. He spent many years exploring the understanding of these unique nutrients and the health benefits they confer.

Some of his earlier findings were that OPCs can strengthen blood vessels and vascular function, which impacts every health system in the body.

The applications for prevention and treatment of heart disease followed, and, in the 1980s, the incredible antioxidant potential for OPCs was defined, making them useful for nearly every degenerative disease, and even for slowing the aging process.

Supplements with OPCs

Today, there are OPCs in two different kinds of supplements: Grape seed extract and French Maritime pine bark extract.

Two of the branded raw materials mentioned in studies are Leukoselect and VX1.

No one works with peanut skins, but remember that mention, because we will be talking about peanuts more later.

Types of OPC Supplements

• Pine Bark Extract

  French Maritime pine bark (Pinus pinaster) has been on the market a few decades, and has clinical research in many health conditions, including issues with blood vessel health, such as hypertension, chronic venous insufficiency, hemorrhoids, blood vessel diseases of the eye, Reynaud’s disease, erectile dysfunction, and blood clot prevention.

  The branded raw material used in most of the research is called Pycnogenol, though there are other bark extracts available as well. One downside of sourcing trees for supplements is the sustainability issue, as trees grow more slowly than other crops.

  Two recent colorectal cancer studies focused on the pathways by which French grape seed VX1 works to downregulate tumor formation pathways. They found that these OPCs affect several key cancer-associated genes and can reduce tumor formation by 65 percent in an animal model of colorectal cancer.

• Grape Seed Extract

  The other major source of OPCs is grape seed. Grape seeds are harvested annually for food and wine. Though red wine may contain grape seed elements, white wine does not.

  For the most part, we don’t have grape seeds in our diet. There is an enormous amount of clinical data for the OPCs delivered in grape seed extract, including cardiovascular issues, cancer care, diabetes, and inflammation.

Choosing an OPC Supplement

• Pine Bark or Grape Seed?

  What distinguishes OPCs from pine bark from OPCs from grape seed? It turns out that these OPCs are the same but in somewhat different ratios. There has not yet been research to understand these factors as they relate to disease. Both have published human trials proving their effectiveness, and both have a great deal of supporting science. Therefore, either source is good and legitimate medicine. However, the amount of OPCs in an extract can vary greatly. The best have more than 99 percent polyphenols, of which at least 80 percent are actually OPCs. Unstandardized extracts may have no OPCs at all.

• Absorption and Bioavailability

  OPCs are like dogs. They come in all sizes. Some are Great Danes and some are Chihuahuas. They are both dogs, but only the Chihuahua can squeeze through a tiny doggy door, while the Great Dane is left outside.

  Likewise, very large OPCs cannot squeeze through the doors in our intestines and are not absorbable. The largest OPCs are tannins, which are not dangerous, but are not medically useful, either.

  In order to get consistent health benefits, OPC size should be standardized for only small, absorbable OPCs and be tannin free.

• Product Adulteration

  Unfortunately, with the increased popularity of OPCs, there is a great deal of adulteration of these products.

  In 2015, independent researchers analyzed 21 grape seed extracts. Their results were surprising. Of the 21 products they evaluated, 15 had significant quality challenges and 6 were adulterated with high levels of peanut skin!

  This is problematic on many levels, especially for people with peanut allergies. It is important to work with quality companies that verify the authenticity of their grape seed or pine bark extracts.

I grew up in the Summer of Love. Tie-dyed shirts, headbands, love beads, Woodstock, peace signs and, if you are going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Many of you will not know what I am talking about, but suffice it was an interesting time to be alive.

There was also an explosion of marijuana use. Its use was linked to the hippies and dreamers and musicians. It was cool.

There was also an explosion of prosecutions in the 1960s of people using marijuana, and it was deemed a dangerous addictive drug and was a controlled substance, illegal to use in any form for any reason. The demon weed. Would that saner thinkers had prevailed, because perhaps then this wonderfully medicinal plant, Cannabis sativa, might not have languished for decades, neglected by researchers and practitioners alike.

Marijuana & Hemp, From Misfit to Medicine

Medical marijuana is now accepted in many states, but it requires a prescription. However, the cannabis product I’d like to discuss is hemp, sometimes called industrial or commercial hemp. Yes, it too is Cannabis sativa, but it is very different from marijuana. Historically, marijuana has been bred for higher levels of a compound called THC, which is responsible for getting high... and maybe craving brownies, too.

Hemp, on the other hand, has been valued for thousands of years for the fibrous stalk, which can be used for fabric and building materials, and so much more. Thomas Jefferson grew hemp on his plantation. Henry Ford used hemp in the construction of the first car bodies. Hemp has been bred for taller and thicker stalks, not for THC. Therefore, the federal government does not consider hemp to be a controlled substance or drug, just as long as the THC is less than 0.3% of the product.

CBD vs. Full-Spectrum Hemp Oil

Cannabis sativa is the richest source of compounds called phytocannabinoids. These compounds work in the body by connecting to and modulating the activity of cannabinoid receptors. THC is certainly one such compound, but there are over 100 more members of this powerful family.

The other famous phytocannabinoid is CBD, and if you have not heard of CBD, you must have recently returned from a trip to the moon. It is everywhere—candy, drinks, soap, lotions, dog treats, coffee, hamburgers, and supplements. I am sure that list is not all-inclusive.

CBD (cannabidiol) is the dominant phytocannabinoid in hemp stalk oil. It has been sold on its own as isolated CBD, which is not approved by the FDA. The FDA has approved two isolated CBD-based drugs, Sativex and Epidiolex, for rare seizure disorders, and therefore it considers selling CBD or calling out CBD as selling a prescription drug without a license or prescription.

That hasn’t stopped hundreds of companies from jumping on the CBD bandwagon, though, but I digress.

CBD occurs naturally in hemp stalk oil and hemp stalk oil is legal to sell in the United States as long as the CBD is not called out. Quite the bizarre set of rules, don’t you think?

The Powerful Phytocannabinoid Family

Stepping away from the confusing legal discussion, full-spectrum hemp oil, which includes CBD and more than 100 of CBD’s brothers and sister phytocannabinoids can be a powerful medicine. Researchers are finding that full-spectrum hemp oil works better because of the entourage effect, which is defined as all the phytocannabinoids working together synergistically.

Hemp oil is well known for its benefits in relieving anxiety. However, there are three other areas in which we see a great deal of interest in the medicinal use of full-spectrum hemp oil: pain, cancer, and seizure disorders.

Pain Relief with Full-Spectrum Phytocannabinoids

The full-spectrum phytocannabinoids in hemp oil are natural pain relievers, in part because of their ability to reduce inflammation and modulate the brain’s response to pain.

Since hemp oil cannabinoids help preserve the endocannabinoids made in the body, British research may have demonstrated at least part of the mechanism of action for pain relief. They found that patients with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis have higher levels of endocannabinoids present in their synovial tissue within their joints compared to those who do not have these painful conditions. It appears that the body floods these areas with endocannabinoids to relieve pain.

Full-spectrum hemp oil can also help people with neuropathic (nerve) pain caused by chemotherapy, which can be very hard to treat because it doesn’t respond well to medications. A small double-blind, placebo-controlled trial showed that phytocannabinoids decreased pain by an average of 24% or more as opposed to placebo, which reduced it less than 6% on a clinically validated 11-point pain intensity scale. Other studies consistently show pain-relieving benefits for the phytocannabinoids in hemp oil.

Cancer Treatment with CBD

Research has found that phytocannabinoids from hemp both kill cancer cells and inhibit the spread of tumors—without causing any negative impact on healthy cells.

In experimental research on glioblastoma, a difficult-to-treat form of brain tumor, CBD was found to be beneficial. It inhibited the spread of cancer cells, and improved the activity of other cancer treatments in this scientific study. Though more human research is needed, there may

come a day when full-spectrum hemp oil will be used with other cancer therapies for improved outcomes.

Other scientific research discovered that CBD is very effective against leukemia cells, while additional studies found that the full spectrum of cannabinoids from hemp oil inhibited prostate cancer cells, highlighting the value of a complete entourage of phytocannabinoids instead of focusing on only one.

CBD & Symptom Relief for Seizure Disorders

One of the most dramatic uses of hemp oil is to help people with seizure disorders. Though more research is needed, CBD has already been proven effective in certain seizure disorders, and has shown benefits on its own and when used in conjunction with antiseizure medication.

In a human clinical study, patients stayed on their antiseizure medication (although the authors mentioned that it was no longer controlling symptoms) and took either CBD or a placebo. Half of those using the hemp oil compound were almost symptom free during the course of the trial, and three others noted a significant reduction in symptoms. There were no improvements in the placebo group. This was a high-dose study, with patients using 200 to 300 milligrams (mg) a day.

A recent study from Israel found that a CBD-enriched hemp oil reduced the frequency of seizures in 89 percent of the children in the trial. In fact, there was an elimination of seizures in some of the children. Researchers noted improved language and motor skills, behavior, and sleep. The children included in this study had a type of epilepsy that was resistant to standard medications, so seeing positive results from hemp oil is even more powerful.

Some practitioners comment that combining hemp oil with a ketogenic diet, which has also been shown to reduce seizures could make a remarkable difference for those with epilepsy.

Selecting Quality Hemp Oil

Full-spectrum hemp oil is a powerful natural medicine, but it is important to focus on quality. The best hemp oil provides a full entourage of phytocannabinoids from the stalk because the entourage effect makes all these compounds more powerful than any one on its own.

Hemp seed oil is sometimes used as a healthy carrier, but make sure the product is not 100 percent hemp seed oil, because there are no phytocannabinoids in hemp SEED oil. It’s a great source of plant omega 3s, though.

Also, using hemp oil with meals may significantly improve absorption. Though it is safe to be used on an empty stomach, it may be more effective taken with food.