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Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. What does this mean for low carb, high protein diets heavily promoted these days (Keto)?

Reminds me of this talk on TED - William Li, Anti-Angiogenesis therapy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjkzfeJz66o

Does this research mean these diets and therapies are less effective than previously thought?

Keto is not low carb, high protein. It's high fat, low carb, moderate protein. On keto you eat the standard recommended amount of protein (depending on your athleticism, it'll be around .69-1.2g per lb of LBM). Most of your calories come from fat.

My breakfast this morning was coffee with butter and MCT oil

Aren't you just trading cancer for heart disease though?

Last time I went on a low card diet my cholesterol and triglycerides went from marginal to optimal. In 3 months. Notice that the AHA now says cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern.

When it comes to fats, the leading recommendation is to limit saturated fats, not total fat intake. And the AHA even (reluctantly) recommends an Atkins style diet, to get started for weight loss, but to discontinue after a few months.

http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/0...

Cholesterol and triglycerides will always drop in the short-term when weight is lost. 3 months is not a long enough time to make a sound judgement about your diet.

With regards to an Atkins-style diet, you need to read the facts on http://atkinsexposed.org/ and not get your information from an organization with a financial incentive to promote unhealthy foods.

So you're saying "atkinsexposed.org" is good, but the American Medical Association is "an organization with a financial incentive to promote unhealthy foods."

Yeah, good luck convincing people with that argument.

It isn't the American Medical Association which I'm referring to, but rather the American Heart Association. From the parent's source:

> The DGAC used the 2013 American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology (AHA/ACC) report on lifestyle management to reduce CVD risk for its evaluation of saturated fat intake. The DGAC concurred with the AHA/ACC report that saturated fat intake exceeds current recommendations in the United States and that lower levels of consumption would further reduce the population level risk of CVD.

The cited work is http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/129/25_suppl_2/S76.long

This page explains it well - http://www.pcrm.org/nbBlog/index.php/new-dietary-guidelines-...

> The report suggested that cholesterol in foods is not a major danger, contrasting with the Institute of Medicine, which found that cholesterol in foods does indeed raise blood cholesterol levels, especially in people whose diets are modest in cholesterol to start with. On this topic, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee did no original research and instead deferred to a 2014 report by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology. However, the American Heart Association receives substantial cash payments for certifying food products, including cholesterol-containing food products as “heart healthy,” creating a financial incentive for discounting the relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol. The Physicians Committee is concerned that exonerating dietary cholesterol will only confuse an already bewildered public. Most people do not differentiate fat from cholesterol, or dietary cholesterol from blood cholesterol. To suggest that cholesterol in foods is not a problem will lead many to imagine that fatty foods or an elevated blood cholesterol level carry no risk—two potentially disastrous notions.

> Accordingly, the Physicians Committee has petitioned the USDA and DHHS to disregard the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s findings on dietary cholesterol. The reliance on the American Heart Association document does not comply with the spirit of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which sets standards for bias among federal advisory committees.

They have filed a lawsuit against the USDA and Department of Health and Human Services:

http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/Physicians-Co...

I highly recommend reading it to understand the sad, corrupted state of affairs I had alluded to.

The PCRM hardly seems like an unbiased group solely focused on human medicine. They are a political advocacy group and who's points are just as tainted as you claim the AHA's are. Only the AHA is much more widely respected. I mean my doctor is a fan of one and not the other. And I trust him with my life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicians_Committee_for_Respo...

Please read the court document and evaluate PCRM's position on its own merit. Frankly, I find AHA and others' behavior outlined there to be morally abhorrent and worthy of discussion.

I definitely understand your skepticism, but in this case, your doctor may also be poorly informed - see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430660/

https://examine.com/faq/is-saturated-fat-bad-for-me/ "Saturated fat, as an all-inclusive category, has not yet been shown to beneficially or adversely affect heart health. That being said, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated have been shown to improve heart health. So saturated fats are worse relative to the unsaturated fats, but they are not bad at all."

I eat high fat, medium protein, low carb, and my sugar, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels have gone from bad to normal. I also exercise regularly. Your mileage may vary.

The Warburg effect is a metabolic pathway involving anaerobic burning of glucose. When cells consume fats instead of sugar it must be aerobically. Burning glucose aerobically is much more efficient than doing so without O2.

The belief is that this means that low carb diets should be a good preventative for cancers as they remove the metabolic pathway needed by the cancer cells as there isn't enough glucose for them.

EDIT: Here is an article that goes into this in a bit more depth: http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/way-exploit-metabolic-qui...

A med student told me his team found that starving cancer cells wouldn't work because they were better at sipping glucose than normal cells, meaning healthy tissue would suffer first.

Healthy tissue will metabolize ketone bodies instead of glucose, so a ketogenic diet shouldn't be affected by their observation.

Obviously, I shouldn't have posted that comment. Thanks.

I believe most of these diets promote low carb, high fat, moderate protein. In general consuming more protein than needed for cellular maintenance does little good and gets converted to energy through additional steps; since it's easier to get energy from carbs or fat it makes sense to consume only enough protein, not less, not more.

A ketogenic diet can't be high protein. A ketogenic diet is one where the body enters nutritional ketosis, and to do that it has to be somewhere around 60% fat, or more.

The effect is probably small

The body is very efficient at turning protein and fat into energy

However the issue with proteins/amino-acids is that the body actually needs them and can't convert carbs or fats into them (you actually need some of the amino-acids).

Maybe the cure is to limit your protein intake but that poses other problems

Methionine may be a key player: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22342103

Interesting!

"In humans, vegan diets, which can be low in methionine, may prove to be a useful nutritional strategy in cancer growth control."

For example, soy protein is limited by methionine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7666787

No to high protein. Too much protein gets converted into glucose, kinda defeating the purpose.

Not much - they use amino acids as building blocks. Still ferment glucose for energy.

This is not my area of expertise by any means, but wouldn't this assume that cancer would grow proportional to the amount of fuel available? Normal cells certainly don't operate this way.

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