A close relative was recently diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. I tried to read up on cancer research and therapies and stumbled on several youtubers interviewing Thomas Seyfried [1], a researcher who thinks cancer is caused by damage to cell mitochondria that provides energy, and not by damage to cell DNA. His theory is that cancer cells get energy by fermentation instead of oxidation (burning). Taking away suitable energy sources for this process (glucose and glutamine) would make cancer cells very vulnerable and enable treatment with much lower doses of chemicals. His advise is to attack cancer foremost by fasting and then chemicals. I think he also mentions / uses the DON chemical this article touts as a way to inhibit glutamine getting to the cancer cells.
This theory seems very persuasive to me. The more research articles I read, the more they seem to confirm this theory. This article is yet another one.
My relative undergoing therapy was given the advise by the doctor to eat as much as possible during chemo treatment, to stay strong and feed the immune system. Which is completely counter to this research. I am not a doctor, but I worry!
Cancer cells getting their energy more through fermentation has been known since the 1920s, it's called the Warburg effect, and Otto Warburg even got a nobel prize for it.
Plenty of cancers have been linked to very specific combinations mutations in non-mitochrondrial DNA, IIRC p53 mutations alone are prevalent in ~50% of cancer cases.
About the not eating thing: maybe you can starve the tumor, but who starves first?
> The more research articles I read, the more they seem to confirm this theory. This article is yet another one.
But this article doesn't provide any support for the theory that fasting is effective against cancer. It says you can poison cancers with something that looks like an important chemical, but isn't. That general mechanism has long been known. (Not just against cancer - it's a fundamental way for poison to work. If you block receptors by binding them to molecules that don't function, whatever function those receptors served will stop.)
The theory behind chemotherapy is that you take a cocktail of poisons that kills everything, but that is more damaging to the cancer (because it does more cell division) than it is to the correctly-functioning parts of you.
Fasting looks like applying that theory in reverse; starvation seems likely to do more damage to you than it will to a cancer, because the cancer already draws its nutrition from you. If you stop eating, it can still do that, but you'll be getting even less than you were.
Isn't the idea that fasting is not starving the non-cancer cells, it if forcing them to switch over to fat ketone bodies as their fuel source, rather than glucose? Plus that the suggested fasting for chemo is intermittent, say a day or two before treatment, and during. Then eat again after treatment (when no longer nauseous).
So as long as one has some body fat, and the metabolic flexibility to access it, fasting should not cause wasting, as those normal cells are not starving?
> So as long as one has some body fat, and the metabolic flexibility to access it, fasting should not cause wasting, as those normal cells are not starving?
Wasting occurs in cancer patients whether they're fasting or not! The nutrients the patients need are drawn off by the cancer.
I see no reason to believe that cancer patients would experience less wasting if they stopped eating...?
Agree. Ask your doc if you can fast during chemo roughly 1 day before until 1 day after chemo (depends on chemo drugs). Fasting mitigates somewhat chemo side effects like water retention, vomit and damage to healthy cells. During fasting fat burning / ketosis at least stresses cancer cells.
I’m a cancer survivor (lymphoma), and one of the things I learned during treatment was that wasting disease is one of the big things that actually kills patients.
My calf atrophied substantially toward the end of treatment — enough that I was a bit worried. Almost three years later and it’s still noticeably smaller than the other. I ate a ton, and gained quite a bit of weight overall (100mg of prednisone * 5 * 6 lmao).
I never tried extended fasting before treatment. There really wasn’t time, but there’s at least one documented case out there of someone curing their lymphoma with fasting.
I’m also not a doctor, but I don’t think fasting on chemo is the play. They know about those drugs and what they do. When it’s treatment time, they calculate the drug amounts on your body surface area (you weigh in when you get there) and mix them on the spot. I’d trust what they say about those drugs, while on those drugs!
> I’m also not a doctor, but I don’t think fasting on chemo is the play.
I'm not a doctor either, but it looks like there's been some promising studies regarding combining fasting and chemotherapy:
> Preclinical studies in rodents strongly support the implementation of these dietary interventions and a small number of clinical trials begin to provide encouraging results for cancer patients and cancer survivors.
I highly recommend the book Life Over Cancer by Keith Block and reaching out to his cancer treatment center. They combine traditional chemo with complimentary medicine techniques that are in line with what you’re talking about here (low glycogenic diet, exercise, supplements). They are amazing.
My mom died of pancreatic cancer, and followed the typical timing mentioned in the article - diagnosed and passed away 5 months later. It's a terrible disease, I'm glad to see they're making progress treating it.
>> DON was tested as chemotherapeutic agent in different clinical studies, but was never approved. In 2019, DON was shown to kill tumor cells while reversing disease symptoms and improve overall survival in late-stage experimental glioblastoma in mice, when combined with calorie-restricted ketogenic diet.
>Polyphenols: Various polyphenols found in fruits, vegetables, and *teas* have been examined for their potential to affect glutamine metabolism and inhibit cancer cell growth.
I wonder if this is part of why Captain Picard lived to such a healthy old age.
You shouldn’t be downvoted for this. These are all examples of supplements that a complimentary medicine specialist at a cancer center could or would recommend for a patient in addition to chemo.
Different studies show different efficacies but these things are recommended to patients.
Yea it’s a chatgpt output, when it comes to this type of information Google search results are good for finding definitions of glutamine for example but harder to get specific lists of things
This theory seems very persuasive to me. The more research articles I read, the more they seem to confirm this theory. This article is yet another one.
My relative undergoing therapy was given the advise by the doctor to eat as much as possible during chemo treatment, to stay strong and feed the immune system. Which is completely counter to this research. I am not a doctor, but I worry!
[1] https://youtu.be/MakS2iRkj1Q?si=IXgad6xzJIMEckfg