You can find many cases where in humans prolonged water fasting (30 days) or a low carb diet with cyclical ~5 to 7 day water fasting eradicated or halted some cancers.
Some links, you can find more on google/youtube (do note that youtube is heavily censoring low carb stuff since "it's not mainstream approved" lol despite people healing conditions on it that no modern medicine could).
Another one: How my Immune System beat cancer: Fasting,
Juicing, Ketogenic diet, Breathing, Exercise, Meditation and other non-toxic therapies Paperback – January 12, 2021 by Fred Evrard
https://www.youtube.com/@CancerTherapy/videos
Yes intermittent fasting sometimes is efficient against certain types of cancers since those have a different sugar metabolism , BUT nutrient deprivation in cancers can lead to a signalling cascade that triggers metastasis.
So far we only know in a few pretty stable occurring cancer types if the tradeoff is worth it.
This paper is the first step towards a possible trial in humans.
Although you can eat vegan but low-carb or even keto, so the title of this Reddit post is misleading (no, "veganism" didn't kill Steve Jobs, only the way he decided to implement it).
Skepticism isn't the knee-jerk reaction that everything you hear is false, it's the willingness to explore in good faith the possibility that those things are true.
One of the studies I saw was with respect to chemotherapy. The mechanism they were crediting is that in fasting situations, healthy tissues lock down and try to conserve existing resources, while tumors did not.
Thus the tumor cells absorb a higher load of the treatment than healthy tissues.
My simple layman's understanding of the science is that cancer cells need glucose to function while normal cells can run on ketones and glucose. The more you cut off glucose, the less opportunity the cancers cells have to grow.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, no? When we temporarily free our body from digestion activities, it has time to “house clean”, aka push toxins out, which helps the body heal.
I wasn’t specifically talking about cancer, but in general. Should’ve been more clear.
There are many doctors (Dr.Doug Graham for example) who have slowed or cured serious ailments through fasting. I am not a fan of any religion, but every big religion promotes fasting in some form, more for health reasons than religious. When animals fall sick, they are known to voluntarily and intuitively fast.
You didn't answer the question. Which toxins specifically?
Dr. Douglas Graham hasn't demonstrated that fasting is an effective cancer treatment. All he has are a few anecdotes which don't establish causality. I suspect a lot of that is around selling his books. Some cancers go into spontaneous remission with no treatment at all.
It's possible that fasting could be somewhat effective for certain forms of cancer. But we don't have enough real research on human subjects to make any definitive statements.
Calorie restriction (not necessarily fasting) has also shown some remarkable benefits to health and longevity. It seems our bodies can perhaps do some housecleaning, perhaps relearn how to function efficiently, during periods of calorie restriction.
The effect of caloric restriction on genetical pathways
> do note that youtube is heavily censoring low carb stuff since "it's not mainstream approved" lol
By "not mainstream approved" you mean it's largely discredited and confined to quacks and charlatans online. Outside of its one legitimate use—very specific cases of epilepsy—no serious medical organisation endorses keto for the general population or cancer patients.
The third video you link is of a person who thinks that they cured their cancer with, among other things, juicing, breathwork, "positive mindset", and keto. This is nonsense.
> despite people healing conditions on it that no modern medicine could
If it worked, it would become "modern medicine". The reason it's not accepted in the mainstream is that it has failed every basic test of efficacy. The reason that you will find it promoted primarily on youtube and not in major medical journals is that the youtube audience is less well-equipped to spot it as snake-oil.
“no serious medical organisation endorses keto for the general population or cancer patients” - isn’t having it be effective for the obese and diabetics enough?
as to using “medical organizations” endorsement as a sign of “truth” - it took over 10 years to go from the discovery that H Pylori caused stomach ulcers to GI medical organizations recommending antibiotic treatment, such endorsement is a lagging indicator. Or to take another example, almost every american medical organization supports widespread use of “gender-affirming care” for children, including hormonal treatment and surgery, while many european medical organizations have pulled back from their earlier enthusiastic support based on increasing data on harm. So are the european organizations correct, or are the american ones? or is human biology significantly different between europe and the united states?
or to take another recent example, were the medical organizations correct when they endorsed the CDC view that “masks didn’t work” (because the cdc wanted to ensure mask supply for medical personnel), or were they correct when they then said they were effective…. until later research showed they made no discernible difference?
There are studies, but very limited of course that show efficacy with the things you mentioned though. There's limited interest in it though because most of those things simply have no profit potential.
No there are not. There are studies in mice (like this one), studies in vitro, etc.
> There's limited interest in it though because most of those things simply have no profit potential
This is not true. There is a lot of interest in the Keto diet, it has been well-studied and has uses in treating epilepsy. The reason it's not prescribed more generally is because of those studies, which show it doesn't work. Not everything is a conspiracy.
It’s not accurate to call keto well studied wrt cancer or that it doesn’t work. It’s an active area of research and there are many studies showing positive effects, but most/all study designs are limited. It’s also true that without a clear path to making a drug, big expensive studies like large scale human trials are not likely to be funded.
Additionally, any result suggesting a new approach has profit potential. If fasting was effective then a pill giving the same benefits would have a big market.
Sort of, the time restricted eating the article is about would require something different, like a pill that stops your body from absorbing some nutrients for 12 hours or something like that.
>There's limited interest in it though because most of those things simply have no profit potential.
A cancer researcher could rely on charities, academic institutions, and government grants to fund experiments. There is a lot of cash available to cancer research. If the researcher shows a cheap and effective method to combat even a specific type of cancer, that researcher will get tenure, book deals, and fame. So that's a rich researcher.
Big pharma can be a cutthroat industry that prioritizes profit over public health. But they're not a shadowy cabal behind every bad thing in the world.
>> If it worked, it would become "modern medicine".
This is why you fail to get it: if you ever read the cases of people being harmed by their doctors advice and getting healed by going opposite to their doctors advice you would never have said such a thing.
Modern medicine is NOT patient focused: it's pharma focused. Look up statin marketing budgets.
And who do you think sponsors most of those "medicine journal" studies?
>> no serious medical organisation endorses keto for the general population or cancer patients.
Which further proves my point: if thousands of people healed their diseases which the "modern medicine" completely fails to heal using the keto diet and if, by your own admission, modern medicine disregards keto as uselss, what does this tell you about modern medicine other than that it's completely backwards?
> if you ever read the cases of people being harmed by their doctors advice and getting healed by going opposite to their doctors advice you would never have said such a thing.
There are countless cases of shoddy care from doctors. The existence of crappy doctors does not mean keto is effective.
> Modern medicine is NOT patient focused: it's pharma focused.
Again, the existence of bad incentives in medicine/corruption is not evidence of keto working.
> And who do you think sponsors most of those "medicine journal" studies?
There are serious, good-faith criticisms of modern medicine to be made. Blindly saying it's all nonsense, and instead you should do a juice cleanse with keto instead of chemo, is not a serious good-faith criticism.
> if thousands of people healed their diseases which the "modern medicine" completely fails to heal using the keto diet
This has not happened. Keto has not healed thousands of peoples' cancer. There is no evidence (and I mean real evidence, not a youtube video or podcast recounting an anecdote) of keto being effective at curing cancer.
some cancer. We already know different cancers use different 'fuel'. A keto diet would likely speed growth of cancers that can use or prefer ketones for instance. But for ones that only absorb glucose, the rats in the article indicate a maybe.
My business partner has leukemia (as you know, a form of cancer), and he has done specific fasting many times in the past 4 years, guided by a medical team in Milan. He's doing super well, all things considered.
This is outside my field of knowledge, so I could only skim the paper. It does seem that they have demonstrated an effect, based on what they say and on the graphs they show. How it translates to humans is of course an open question, but this is par for the course: cells first, animals second, humans maybe third.
It does jive a bit with my lived experience, though. If I eat at odd times then I don't sleep well. And I've found that sleeping well correlate with faster recovery from injuries and illness.
The other factor is weight loss. The mice lost weight in an amount that the authors considered small but statistically significant. I'd be interested in another study that isolated that effect. (Frankly, though, the paper was -- suitably -- a mass of acronyms and technical language that I did not try to make my eyes go over all the words. They might have discussed this.)
I think it would be more responsible to speculate a little about how, exactly, weight loss would be helpful in this case. I imagine that it is, but we need to move away from it being treated as a "regardless of what form it takes" panacea.
Not quite the same thing, but patients who lose weight as a symptom of lung cancer are more prone to toxicity from treatment and have shorter survival times overall.
And to be clear, the authors of the OP study absolutely do propose a mechanism by which the time window and reprogramming of circadian rhythms in tumor cells lead to tumor suppression. It's right there in the 'results' summary and elaborated in much greater detail in 'discussion' section:
>After TRF intervention, only timeless (TIM) gene among five lung cancer-associated clock genes was found to consistently align rhythm of tumor cells to that of tumor tissues. Further, we demonstrated that the anti-tumor effect upon TRF was partially mediated by the rhythmic downregulation of the TIM and the subsequent activation of autophagy. Combining TRF with TIM inhibition further enhanced the anti-tumor effect, comparable to treatment efficacy of chemotherapy in xenograft model.
My aunt found out she had lung cancer because her diabetes disappeared unexpectedly. Her experience definitely solidified the cancer-loves-sugar idea for me.
Many tumors are also catabolic to start with, e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-n...: "Cancer-associated malnutrition is driven by reduced dietary intake and by underlying metabolic changes (such as inflammation, anabolic resistance, proteolysis, lipolysis and futile cycling) induced by the tumour and activated immune cells."
The question is, how does a six hour fasting period in mice translate to the human body, if at all? Mice will die after four days without food, humans can go a month or longer.
Not just in mice, but how does the reduced progression compare to existing treatment? Is this is actually comparable to chemo with fewer side effects? Or a better long term prognosis? It's something to build on but clearly a preliminary finding.
Mice also don't know that a window is being introduced and will not change their feeding behavior, at least right away. Most people will binge at the end of their window.
Fasting increases autophagy, where older "senescent" cells (more likely to become cancerous if they're able to bypass the body's checkpoints) are more susceptible to being targeted for recycling than healthy cells.
Time restricted eating and a low carb diet have nearly identical effects in this regard. If you don't want to do fasting or time-restricted eating, just do low carb or keto.
I've been using ChatGPT 4.0 to summarize articles I don't have domain knowledge in, in case anyone is interested: The research looked into whether changing when and for how long mice with lung cancer could eat would affect the growth of their cancer. The idea was that sticking to a strict 6-hour window for eating each day could mess with the cancer's "body clock" and slow its growth. They tested this by allowing some mice to eat whenever they wanted and others only during a 6-hour period.
They used various tests and experiments with cancer cells and mice to see how the restricted eating schedule affected the cancer. The findings were promising: the cancer didn't grow as much in the mice with the restricted eating times. They noticed that this eating pattern seemed to disrupt the activity of a specific gene related to the cancer's internal clock, leading to an increase in a cleanup process in the cells (called autophagy), which helps to break down and recycle parts of the cell.
In simple terms, by controlling when mice ate, researchers were able to slow down the growth of lung cancer. They also think that if they combine this eating strategy with other treatments that turn off the cancer's clock gene, they might get even better results in fighting cancer.
This is a decent summary. I'd have changed the prompt to generate four bullets, personally, but this is a good use of chatgpt, as long as it aids learning rather than replaces it maybe?
The downvotes are likely because it's autogenerated content and doesn't add much to the discussion. Summary bots are a reddit thing.
Fair point on not adding much to the discussion. My reason for posting was that I found the article too jargon heavy for my taste and I thought the output was good and might be of use to someon else.
2. Yet it manages to leave out all the details mentioned in the abstract.
3. Some of the text is wrong, e.g., "The idea was that sticking to a strict 6-hour window". Instead, the idea was "circadian rhythm by dietary strategy," which follows as a logical step from the very first sentence. 6 hour TRF was an arbitrary step in this process. It also doesn't mess with the cancer's body clock, as the summary says, but with the host's.
4. The concluding remark, "by controlling when mice ate, researchers were able to slow down the growth of lung cancer," suggests hope (as does "the findings were promising", which does not have relation to the article) when in reality they found a small effect in lab cell lines and mice, and a very artificial diet. It also omits that chemically induced cancer had less chance on the diet, as well as the cautions at the end of the discussion.
5. Given the statistics, it is uncertain this can be reproduced fully.
6. And I think the last sentence "combine ... better chance" is an unnecessarily emotionally charged misinterpretation of "Combining TRF with TIM inhibition further enhanced the anti-tumor effect." The effect of this treatment is worse than chemo-therapy, and the combined effect is unknown.
It simply does not do a good job. It's as bad as superficial science journalism, i.e. click-bait, but nobody even looked at it, let alone thought about it, before pasting it on a publishing medium. Nobody is responsible for this text. It could have said the opposite, and no-one would have batted an eyelid.
Some links, you can find more on google/youtube (do note that youtube is heavily censoring low carb stuff since "it's not mainstream approved" lol despite people healing conditions on it that no modern medicine could).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhs1BB7MbHo (at 1:03:20)
Another one: How my Immune System beat cancer: Fasting, Juicing, Ketogenic diet, Breathing, Exercise, Meditation and other non-toxic therapies Paperback – January 12, 2021 by Fred Evrard https://www.youtube.com/@CancerTherapy/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJQn6WZGAQ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK0BkTPUGQY