Periodic fasting starves cisplatin‐resistant cancers to death
emboj.embopress.org
emboj.embopress.org
The curve looks quite similar: https://imgur.com/a/H4pKkNv
What I find interesting is your mention of a metabolic set point. Wanted to lose a bit more weight (since I still have visceral fat), but couldn't manage to do so. It seems I hit a hard barrier - any caloric deficit during fasting days was magically compensated exactly on non-fasting days; I tried to reduce caloric intake on non-fasting days, but while fasting a whole day isn't that difficult for me, restricting calories while eating seems to only work when my body has met a magical internal quota.
It seems indeed to be a set point. The small uptick beginning of June was when I skipped a fast day once. I'm a bit scared what would happen if I stopped fasting altogether now.
Would be interesting to understand more about the set point - however, some research on the net didn't yield much substantial info. It seems it exists, but how it works exactly and how it can be moved is unclear. And even if trying to move it makes sense. Maybe the set point is ideal health-wise, and is overridden on unhealthy caloric surplus diets...?
Maybe keeping your insulin levels relatively low, you can reduce the effect of the insulin cycle on your appetite
One dirty trick to try is, just after eating, to drink about two tablespoons of staight "extra-light" olive oil. It's a bit foul, but makes for a effective way of ruining your appetite. Other "bland food diet" tricks might also work.
(I'd like to mention that I do not support healthy diets, but my design to work against anything nature intends takes priority.)
Edit: two tablespoons, not eight, and apparently they make low-fat olive oil now.
It's also a very effective way of getting 1000 kcal.
0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-... # middle of section IV
kudos for your fasting and thanks for the comment
It's just $ f(x_n) = f(x_{n-1}) * (1 - alpha) + x_n * alpha , f(x_0) = x_0 $ where 0 < alpha < 1 (lower values give a smoother graph but lags more)
Here's a quick sketch of how to do it in gnuplot without having to preprocess the data:
# Getting previous values via https://stackoverflow.com/a/25753509/5921362
alpha = 0.1
prev = 0
shift(x) = (prev = x)
ewma(prev, cur) = shift(prev * (1 - alpha) + cur * alpha)
plot data using 1:2 with p,\
data using 1:(prev < 1 ? shift($2) : ewma(prev, $2)) with l* [How It's Made - Canola Oil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omjWmLG0EAs)
Detrimental health effects:
* [Canola oil linked to worsened memory and learning ability in Alzheimer's](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171207141624.h...)
* [Effect of canola oil consumption on memory, synapse and neuropathology in the triple transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17373-3)
Edit: thank you for the plotting comments (I heart these: I love all things tech, programmatic, bio*); I just wanted a quick way to see my overall progress over time. I enter my morning weight (digital scale) daily, and occasionally plot it (Ctrl-Alt-T shortcut to terminal; "gp" bashrc alias to run that plot command, "qq" to quit the terminal). ;-)
I've been intermittent fasting for the last 2 months. I eat breakfast around 7:30 (protein shake I make at home with some healthy things tossed in), eat an orange or apple around 10AM, a large salad I make at work without any dressing at noonish, and a handful of cashews and almonds at 2:00PM. That's it. Nothing after that. I'll drink some unsweetened herbal tea or a carbonated water around 7pm sometimes when I'm winding down.
It's by far the best diet I've ever been on. It's hard sometimes when work events offer food/drinks after my eating window closes but not that hard. If I have to do work drinks I'll do a vodka soda to minimize my caloric intake.
Now I walk around at the weight that I wrestled at in college, I don't feel hungry often, and I feel great during the day.
I'm trying to get my family to try it for a few weeks to spur a lifestyle / eating change but it's been difficult. Most people are locked into the three meals a day (and likely a few snacks) mindset.
No one should ever feel forced to imbibe. I'm guessing you know that and don't want to preach or nanny, but wanted to mention it just in case.
I try to live by a whole set of self-imposed rules because I think they are beneficial to my health and well-being, but for me these are not dogma's. By default, I don't drink during weekdays for example, but if there's a special occasion once or twice a month, I don't feel guilty deviating and/or making up for it some other day. As long as you feel comfortable with it yourself.
Basically drinking is joining smoking, and I don't think it's particularly smart to occasionally smoke a cigarette.
After reading this [1] I hugely cut down on my alcohol consumption. I'd prefer to never drink, but my current social circle doesn't seem to operate as a group without involving alcohol.
"I quickly discovered that way back in 1988, the World Health Organization declared alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning that it’s been proved to cause cancer. There is no known safe dosage in humans, according to the WHO. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, but it kills more women from breast cancer than from any other. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that for every drink consumed daily, the risk of breast cancer goes up 7 percent." - [1]
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-gi...
That's also been my baseline wrt alcohol, but just today, this hit my newsfeed...:
"six pints of beer or glasses of wine a week may help protect against dementia" https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-08/b-blt073018....
This is very true and valid, my concern was/is more that peer pressure was resulting in someone feeling like that have to drink. People should be free to do whatever they like with their own self. Including not drinking if they don't want to.
However, it's incredibly common for just about anything to "work" for a three to four months. The key is finding something that is sustainable for a lifetime. It's also noteworthy that you're a former wrestler - a sport where careful control of eating and weight is of paramount importance so you presumably have a lot of experience with modulating nutrition and weight within narrow bounds. Given your experience what works for you may very well not work at all for others.
In my case, hunger is one of the few things that can cause almost complete insomnia (like, lie awake actually all night, not just fitful wakeups), which means it works much better for me if I'm hungry in the daytime, instead of in the evening.
I wonder if I could adapt just as easily to the reverse, like gp.
I figure that if my appetite spikes while I'm sleeping, I'm very unlikely to act on it.
If I eat breakfast at 5:30 PM, I generally want another meal around 10 PM, which is about the same interval as breakfast at 8:30 AM, lunch at 1 PM. But with the latter, I also want another meal at 5:30 PM, then maybe a snack at 10 PM. For the delayed meal schedule, that would probably put increases in appetite around 2:30 AM and 7 AM, which are easy enough to ignore if I'm not awake.
So my stomach timer runs at about 4.5 hours. If I'm awake, it's difficult to ignore when it times out, and it takes about 12 hours for the "eat now" alarm to stop screaming so loudly. So skipping a morning breakfast (with some effort) and midday lunch (easily) is about the only way I can manage to skip any meals without driving myself crazy from attempting to ignore the constant "eat now" appetite signaling. It then takes maybe 20 hours before the hunger signals start, which is not so much an "eat now" imperative as "get really irritable and impatient, be more stupid, and stop enjoying whatever it is you're doing". And that seems like a good a time as any to eat. If I ever push past 24 hours, I'm just not fit for participation in civilized society for a while.
I think flipping it around to skip breakfast is far easier, both in terms of self-control and socially. Food is really important to most cultures, and an incredible amount of social cohesion is built around sharing meals together, primarily dinner, but also lunch. But for most people's lifestyle, if you start skipping breakfast, many people won't even notice.
I suspect survivor bias is at work here.
So, it depends on how social are you and what other activities you schedule around the fasting.
In particular, note the observation about acetic acid being excreted in urine rather than completing energy metabolism in this Wikipedia write-up, and the resulting massive difference in caloric energy output:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism#Discussion_...
I suspect that discard-rather-than-use pathway may be prevalent in a fasting (or other low-sugars) metabolic condition.
That is, a bottle of wine has ~600 Cal in ethanol alone, but to actually get those calories out of it, you would need to drink it slowly, one glass at a time—you won’t actually get 600 Cal out of it if you drink it in one sitting.
Anecdotally: when I used to drink quite heavily a few years ago, I was consuming 500–1000 Cal of ethanol a day, yet still eating a normal ~2000 Cal diet, with ~2 hours a day of moderate physical activity, and losing weight.
But how much actual energy is available to the human body is very different. And alcohol specifically is very hard for the human body to efficiently turn into eneegy.
In addition alcohol make the mitochondria more inefficient leading to greater energy usage.
Most studies that add alcohol to animals diet find no change in weight.
Are you referring to the word calorie used? For food calorie is shortened from kilocalorie.
A calorie is a unit of measure of energy right? But you can release different amounts of energy depending on the chemical reaction you use.
Well the chemical reaction they use to measure energy in macronutrients is not the same chemical reaction that is used by the human body, they burn it instead. Now for most macronutrients this doesn't matter because the amount of calories released by the human body is pretty close to the amount released by burning.
But this isn't true of ethanol which is very efficiently burned, but very inefficiently consumed by the human body. So the 7 Cal/gram is very misleading.
However, muscle loss and the risk for other deficiencies is reduced.
As one of my XFit friends say "you can't outtrain a bad diet."
p.s. I too prefer vodka and soda. I like it. But I also know I'm better off with V&S than a beer. One look at the waistlines of my beer drinking friends and I'm happy with plain and boring V&S.
Anyone have more information about this?
Fasting seems to be a common practice, though. I wonder what variations in fasting (how long to go without eating, how often to fast, etc.) maximizes fasting time while keeping the risk of getting an ulcer to a minimum.
EDIT: Changed "increases or decreases risk" as of course fasting is not going to decrease the risk as opposed to not fasting.
Some say that fasting activates "autophagy" which has great health benefits, supposedly being great for preventing the remission of cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy — but note that I could not find any concrete study or proof of it, this being anecdotal evidence from some clinics that advise their patients to do fasting instead of chemotherapy.
I practice fasting for 36 hours, 3 times per week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I don't eat or drink anything other than water and coffee. You can go shorter, like one meal per day in some days or longer, e.g. 5 days is easy once you get used to it.
As a tip: eating high fat, low carbs meals before fasting helps. Also if you get dizzy or if you get cramps, you probably have an electrolytes imbalance and you need to stop your fast. If that happens to you, make sure to take salt (sodium) and possibly magnesium supplements. Once I started doing that, the dizziness and the cramps stopped. But document yourself first and consulting a doctor and doing some blood work might be good ideas.
This is a pretty good book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-A...
Try eating oats (no sugar, just yogurt and fruit for sweetening, don't get tricked into thinking honey or brown sugar is healthy sugar ;) I personally like strawberry or pomegranate but the latter is pretty expensive even in-season). Or try heavy whole wheat bread (with something like peanut-only peanut butter) and see how much longer it takes before you get hungry again, compare it to breakfast cereals or white bread. I really notice the difference. If you like sweet, try backing a cake from oats and banana (and some flour, pancakes of oat and banana are also very nice by the way), perhaps add some nuts as well. Works great for me (results of delayed hunger in the day are immediate, which is motivating). Oats are cheap, bananas generally as well.
"If you're lactose intolerant and looking for yogurt, go Greek. Greek yogurt, which is thicker because much of the whey, the watery part of milk, has been strained out in processing. This also removes much of the lactose. Greek yogurt supplies less than 6.8 grams of lactose per 6-ounce serving, compared to less than 8.5 grams in whole-fat yogurt or 14 grams in non-fat yogurt. Hard cheeses such as cheddar have even less lactose, between 0 to 2 grams per ounce. Milk, in comparison, has approximately 11 grams in one cup." (from https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/can-lactose-intolerant-eat-...)
That's bullshit, but yes, proteins do provoke an insulin response, which can be unhealthy with enough proteins. Note however that proteins != fat and fat does not provoke an insulin response.
And yes, for diabetics fat meat is healthier than lean meat.
Also note that fat and proteins keep you satisfied for longer, so you end up eating less meals per day. This is not about calories, but about the insulin response.
If you keep eating, the insulin does not go down.
It's fine to disagree; but do so based on the strength of your argument and facts.
As the husband of a type-1 diabetic I can assure you this is absolutely wrong. Fats and proteins are practically insignificant to carbohydrates, essentially they are inconsequential when calculating insulin injections.
I can, quite literally, eat 2000+ calories of potatoes and not be full. I make a damned good loaded baked potato, and good mashed potatoes for that matter. Are they talking about a plain boiled potato with nothing on it or something? (even then, boiled red potatoes are good... :) )
Or oranges for that matter. Give me a 2lb bag of satsuma oranges and I'll give you back an empty bag a short time later.
Listing beef as lower than oranges is incredibly weird to me. Apparently the average satsuma is 4oz, realistically compare two of those tiny mandarin oranges to an 8oz steak, the steak will satiate more and for a longer period of time. No study is needed to prove that.
Unless they were comparing by "equivalent calorie consumption" in which case the chart is useless, but sure, 1 mandarin orange is probably better than 1oz of steak. (~64 calories in 1 mandarin orange, ~77 calories in 1oz of steak).
Trying to make an actual meal out of the oranges would be, naturally, quite pointless, where as the steak scales up to a meal quite well.
And this is why a huge % of nutritional studies are useless for day to day living.
Naturally YMMV and I know people who are satiated off of small portion of high carb foods, but people who can eat a small bowl of ice cream and be full are the minority, with my evidence of that assertion being America's waistline (and the average serving size of ice cream).
But I can make one hell of a loaded baked potato.
Or cheesy mashed potatoes.
Pretty much no one eats just a regular potato.
Which is where the table falls apart. You can cook up a steak with some salt and pepper, or a good steak with nothing at all on it, and eat it just like that.
A regular boiled potato? Meh.
Myself I’d rather eat 15 potatoes than a steak any day. I like them with a lot of herbs and spices which add a lot of other nutrients.
I regularly check my blood sugar levels and protein doesn't affect them at all, whereas eating a bowl of spaghetti will raise it a lot.
Type 2 diabetes is defined by insulin resistance. The only way to "beat" type 2 diabetes is to lower your insulin resistance and thus to lower your insulin response. At the moment you can only lower your insulin with lifestyle changes that implies fasting + eating a diet that triggers a low insulin response.
The vegan lifestyle is high in carbs. What many people don't understand is that there are only 3 macro-nutrients: proteins, fats and carbs. You cannot do a low carbs diet without at least eggs and diary. And carbs stimulate insulin.
Note that there are clinics that have successfully treated people of diabetes via fasting. Here's one: https://idmprogram.com/
N.B. carbohydrates are not the enemy, but _refined carbohydrates_ are and unfortunately for a type 2 diabetic it's too late to switch to healthy carbs.
Yes, a potato is healthy, however for a diabetic it is basically poison.
Sorry, this is just a pet-peeve about how the Fitness/bodybuilding community talk about "macros".
I imagine it is the most boring diet in the world though. :)
From what I've heard vegetarian Keto isn't too bad.
I'd worry about getting healthy oils on a vegan keto diet, healthy vegetable oils get expensive very fast. Most keto diets don't pay much attention to fat sources, but while lots of canola oil technically meets the macros, it'd not be healthy at all...
Now i do keto, and my cholesterol is happy. Diabetes wasn't my direct concern but i find it interesting how eating a ton of eggs every day has improved my balance.
The high carb / low fat diet isn't one of the ways to beat type 2, though, and it's still the one pushed by many dieticians.
1. the diet of Okinawans is irrelevant because they are not eating the refined carbohydrates that we do and
2. that fasting is easier if you eat high fat, low carbs meals just before is a fact known for thousands of years, because fasting isn't new ... all major religions that practice water fasting allow meat just before a water fast
I think you missed the point the parent was making. No one is forcing you to eat refined carbohydrates. People conflate carbohydrates with "refined carbohydrates" and end up thinking that eating a bowl of brow rice, lentils and veggies will make you diabetic because "carbs".
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/15-incredibly-filling-f...
Legumes are high in carbohydrates and protein and are extremely nutritious and filling.
I have reactive hypoglycemia, and potatoes are something I strongly avoid for this reason (they will cause me to hypo as soon as 30 mins after eating them).
Eating potatoes causes your blood sugar to rise rapidly. When it falls, it invokes a feeling of hunger. Blood glucose can be measured directly in the blood, and isn't a matter of opinion or anecdote :P
I was suspicious of the results, so I just downloaded the paper that your link refers to - low and behold, it has this at the end:
"This study was supported by a competitive investigator-initiated grant from the US Potato Board"
Well, what a surprise!
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hara_hachi_bun_me
I'm actually surprised that Wikipedia says they consume 1800 calories a day. When I am doing intermittent fasting I am around 1400-1600.
> 36 hours, 3 times per week
If you sleep for 8 hours and don't snack before bed, you would probably "fast" for 12 hours in a day incidentally
Which is why that next meal is called "break fast".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cancer_ra...
I was pointing out Islam is the only TOTAL fasting (food+water) major religion, versus food-only fasting happening elsewhere.
Dietary wise it's closest to intermittent fasting, as you normally wont eat for 8-14 hours of the day, then have a big dinner. I had a bodybuilder friend who used it as an enforced time to cut weight.
And of course, it's a combination of multiple factors (cultural, climate, and people dying by other means before being affected by cancer)
Our modern diet and lifestyle leads to a massive hormonal imbalance. E.g. many have started to blame insulin resistance for many cancers, which is also the leading cause for type 2 diabetes and obesity.
I suspect that countries with low cancer rates or low rates of type 2 diabetes simply haven't adopted the western diet.
1. high in refined carbohydrates
2. snacks between meals
Yes, there are Asian cultures with diets high in carbs that don't suffer from our epidemic. But those diets aren't high in refined carbohydrates or other crap we've been told to eat to lower the fat intake (e.g. margarine).
Where is it written that thou shall only eat three meals a day? This is in itself a Western cultural bias.
The obesity crisis started in approx 1977. If you look at the the eating patterns from 1950, people ate less meals per day back then, an average of 3.
There's also a scientific explanation for it: when you snack, insulin goes up. By having 6 meals per day, like the average American now does, the insulin never goes down during the day. The body then develops insulin resistance, leptin resistance (satiety hormone) and it's all downhill from there.
In fact, ACTUAL studies show that the number of meals doesn’t affect weight loss, only the amount of calories[0].
How you eat, how many times and how that affects your weight loss is totally up to the individuals preference, and what they feel is easier for them to maintain in their daily life.
And you did not address his main point: that when one snacks, insulin goes up. It's a contributor to obesity, and as I understand it, is not controversial.
It’s probably safe to say it is high sugar, high carb, high fat, high protein, high preservatives, high in toxins, highly inflammatory, high in calories... yet low in micro nutritional value (vitamins and minerals). When you have all that, it explains why we focus on sugar and carbs, because when you combine all that with insulin spikes/high blood sugar levels it becomes deadly, and in that environment removing the sugar/carbs (insulin spikes) it is going to result in significant improvements in health and weight.
Those factors also explain high incidents of chronic diseases (heart disease, fatty liver, type 2 diabetes) and obesity.
Walk only around the outside of the store and you'll be fine. Don't go down any aisle except for spices.
Most people just don’t understand/know what is and isn’t crap as you call it. But I think understanding what foods lead to metabolic disorders and chronic diseases, people would look at American grocers as peddlers of poison (of course they have a small percentage of healthy foods too).
1) produce aisle
2) butcher
3) some dairy
4) a few dried base foods like oats, rice, and maybe beans.
The entire rest of the grocery store is tasty poison.
Is this an indirect way of saying people are eating high calories? Because most people use these terms in a relative manner. i.e. high carbs compared to fat and protein, or high fat and protein with fewer carbs.
So for counter example you could eat a calorie surplus (like body builders bulking phase or maybe an endurance athlete refueling and preparing for another event) but that doesn’t necessarily mean the macros are all high (above daily recommended or above the amount to maintain body weight).
Curious, is insulin resistance the leading cause of type 2? I thought insulin resistance was the definition of type 2.
Also, it doesn't say that 40% of cancer is due to diet. It says that 40% of cancer diagnoses are types of cancer that are associated with being overweight or obese. This does not mean that 40% of cancers are due to diet for several reasons.
Being overweight or obese is not always due to diet. You could become overweight for other reasons and still suffer many of the negative health consequences.
Correlation is not causation. Just because a cancer is associated with being overweight doesn't necessarily mean that being overweight causes the cancer. Perhaps some cancers cause you to become overweight. Perhaps there are some third factors that cause both. Maybe one of those factors is diet for some cancers but not others.
Having a cancer that is caused by with being overweight or obese doesn't mean that it was a cause or the cause of your particular cancer. Just as there are nonsmokers with lung cancer, there will be a lot of skinny people in that 40%.
1. http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2010/iaea_forum_20100921/en/
Here's a world map showing population cancer rate: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-... Definitely cancer is positively correlated with wealth, but there is clearly another factor as well.
1/5th the old people generally means ~1/5th the cancer rates.
PS: This also explains much of the increase in cancer rates globally: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO.ZS
Muslim people do not fast at night time. On average, they tend to eat much more during Ramadan what with the vast array of seasonal sweets.
The true difficulty of fasting during Ramadan is not being allowed to drink water during the day.
My friends here have told me that the main problem is to eat enough during the night because after fasting for 18 hours your body get used to it. I assume similar to my issues eating a bkg breakfast in the morning directly after waking up.
Not eating food for 12 hours isn't very hard at all.
What?! To hell with that. That's just dangerous.
Still, I don't care for dietary guidelines mandated by religious bodies.
As a fasting schedule, it is rather self-defeating. Even not drinking water during the day is not such a big problem, if you go about it smartly. On the other hand, complaining about Ramadan seems to be as big a part of the tradition as the eating after dark.
If you want to know why there's a health problem in some developed countries, the confidence of all the factions in the back and forth in this thread is a shining example. Unless you can afford professional guidance (and know how to tell if they know what they're talking about), you don't have much hope unless you stumble on to something that works for you.
The average person/animal/cell doesn't exist, and focusing on that has been a huge mistake in my opinion.
Finding someone with a similar age, height, weight, race, ancestry, metabolism, activity level, sleep level, gut flora, etc. to take advice from would be nearly impossible.
A dozen "it worked for me" stories without any form of control is effectively useless.
Also throughout the thread you see people saying "that's what worked for me, everyone is different". The underlying point is to eat a diet that satisfies your hunger to the point you feel comfortable without consuming more calories than you need for your daily activities.
People with a sweet tooth may need to avoid high fat, high salt stuff. People who enjoy fat more may need to avoid carbs. People who enjoy exercise may just need to exercise a bit more, etc.
At least anecdotes represent something vaguely real.
I wouldn't. As noted in my response to falcolas' response to you I would assume everyone can have different approaches to the same problem. Breaking it down to subgroups doesn't really help that you are still going to be studying an average person that doesn't exist.
I think there's considerable evidence that human physiologies vary enough that different and contradictory regimens can seem to wonderfully for different individuals.
On the current topic, fasting might indeed work great for some but I stay close to underweight regardless of my diet or exercise regime so any serious, multi-day fasting probably wouldn't be healthy for me.
Edit: Also problematic is how the topic jumps from the topic of cancer and fasting, which is very specific, to the healthiness of fasting is problematic (coming before the jump you note, fasting-in-general to "here's a my fasting anecdote and pet-theory").
1. Sugar bad
2. Eat less
3. Find good eating-habits that you can maintain indefinitely
Point three is where people will naturally have different outlooks. I don't read that as disagreement as much as diversity.
Instead of being bored on a couch watching channels, spend time with people gathering fruits and making your own meals as a fun thing to do. It may first feel dull at first but I think it's a good blend of social, physical and nutritional health.
We should let the body tell us what, and how to, eat. My body is allergic to a variety of food groups, so I'm eating only meat. Normally I eat two meals a day; but at times, depending on what my body wants, I may eat just one or three meals during the day.
I think you might be extrapolating from your experience with your own social class. I can assure you that armchair nutritionistism is not the biggest problem for the majority of the country. Nutrition isn't on most people's minds--even people whose lives are imminently threatened by their nutritional habits.
You don't know anything about my social class. I'm not HN typical. People without much think about health too, and receive plenty of conflicting advice.
highlight:
A549 CDDP-resistant cancer cells showed reduced tumor growth and longer survival in response to periodic fasting cycles (24 hours of water only twice a week). In contrast, CDDP-sensitive tumors were not affected by these 24-hour fasting cycles. Because previous results indicated that 2–3 consecutive days of fasting were effective against a wide range of cancers, particularly in combination with chemotherapy (Lee et al, 2012; Bianchi et al, 2015), it would be important to test these longer fasting periods on A549 and other CDDP-resistant cancer
In there, they did work on A549 cell lines and showed that removing nutrients from the media decreased their growth rate. They also showed that putting these human cell lines into immune deficient mice and doing a couple 24hr fasts per week had a small (p=0.03) effect on the tumor growth rate (Fig 2). But in the in vivo study, it appears they didn't directly compare A549 vs cisplatin resistant A549 - they seemed to have run 2 studies both vs control.
There are literally thousands of papers showing drugs or treatments which can cure lab mice of "cancer" and many more which can kill cell lines in vivo, but only a tiny percentage of those work in patients. There is a reason this is not in a higher profile journal.
You're trying to put your body in a state where it no longer has the resources to support extraneous energy consumers so a too-short fast will not work if you don't cross that threshold of bodily parsimony. I personally would hope that 16 hour IF-style fasts would be enough (because that's what I typically do), but I bet they're not ...
But my parents question is a bit different: can one speed up the clock on the fast by burning through a lot of bodily resources through physical work. I suspect the answer is yes, to a degree - but I'll bet cancer cells are not in the same category of energy consumers as your muscles are - I'll bet there is a reserve of energy for them that doesn't get touched for a while, even if you do the big hike.
It would be nice if there were some kind of threshold indicator that you could test for to see when your body as in a state of parsimony with regard to cancer cells ...
Its not exactly the same. One is caloric restriction, and the other is caloric exhaustion. If your entire body worked as a single unit it might be that simple, but:
1. IF helps cull gut-bacteria which can only survive on simple foods. e.g. Bacteria which are inefficient and would happily produce toxins because it knows with enough of its simple foods it can outlive other populations and its own toxins.
2. IF helps turn off the digestive system. When this happens your stomach will stop "growling", and you will feel energetic even tho you haven't eated food for 16+ hours. Allowing the digestive system to relax, and flush/hopefully clean itself up, and won't happen because you went for a run.
3. Senesent/Cancerous cells may still be starved by exhausting all calories quickly, but it really depends on how those cells die(it might just take time), and how the body allocates resources. You can imagine a tumor sitting on a major blood vessel will continue to eat before any muscles are. The only way to starve it is to not eat.
All that said, exercise is always good. Just be careful. Try to do it in the first half rather than the second half of your fast. Fainting is never good.
So when you start running/biking, your body is in a similar state to just after hitting the wall in a marathon or several hours into a long bike race or triathlon without eating. Since you have insufficient glycogen, you just can't do more than 70% your max heart rate. It is reputed to produce advantageous training adaptations when done in addition to normal training.
But if you aren't on a keto diet already, that sounds like a great way to simulate the worst tortures of Hell. You probably won't even be able to push yourself hard enough to faint, but you will wish you had. There's a good reason racers down that glycogen gel stuff during their endurance races now.
Though, I speculate that running in the beginning of your fasting window will increase the time of glucose depletion and maaaybe make the fasting more efficient. Though, repairing exercise induced injuries probably won't be efficient.
To your question: I doubt it's the same as many speculated mechanisms of fasting benefits are tied to your body's usual maintenance workings which just require some time. I suspect that some mechanisms are tied to a "low glucose signal", but the majority are things which are always present, but get interrupted or are less efficient when digestion is triggered and nutrients flood the blood stream.
Example 1: Glucose and complete (animal/soy isolate) protein trigger steady, increased IGF-1 secretion, which translates to "oh boy this is good, grow everything, store everything, who knows when we get something like this again. Noo, no maintenance! Build!". Higher IGF-1 levels are linked to cancer. Less nutritional "efficient" diets, like plant based, vegan diets are linked to an decreased cancer risk.
Example 2: Autophagy is always done (although increased when fasting), it's not hard to imagine the results to be much more protective when the garbage collection comes out ahead of the trash production from time to time. Mind that one problem with cancerous cells is the cloaking, hiding from the immune system, which might be done by accumulation of extracellular trash through increased cellular metabolism. Cleaning this up, might help the immune cells to target and kill cancer and precancerous cells.
Since eating became always accessible pleasure, I speculate some metabolic expectations of the body to be not met and humans tend to be in constant celebration mode. It's worth noting that cancer is naturally a rare event and absolutely linked to life style changes in humans and toxic byproducts of human civilization for all animals.
As an example, a diet high in fat is generally considered by most people to be unhealthy.
You see people doing Keto and you start wondering if it’s really unhealthy.
Eating red meat is considered to be the unhealthy. You see people doing ZeroCarb diets and they (at least) look extremely good/healthy.
Fasting is generally considered unhealthy. You have people doing intermittent fasting, ADF or extended fasting at it works exceptionally well for them.
Vegan? It works really well for some people.
IMHO there isn’t one thing that works for everyone as far as diet goes. There are also the theoretical and the practical aspects of what we eat and when we it it.
I think everyone should try different things and figure out something that works for them, long term. It should not be a “diet”. It should be just something that blends into your lifestyle and gives you results for the investment you’re making.
For me, if I eat anything significant for breakfast (lets say > 400 calories), I am STARVING by the time lunch rolls around at noon. Like, stomach in pain, I need food now, I'll have 2 pounds of wings and a side of macaroni, thanks. But that overindulging doesn't carry over to dinner, which is pretty typical.
So, the synthesis of all of that is eating breakfast significantly increases my caloric intake for the day, despite having no measurable difference on energy, mood, etc.
If there are any rules that have worked for me, it's: Eat less, Eat less often, and Avoid carbs.
https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo
https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo-2
I've quite enjoyed Rhonda's work.
Another good medical/biology/health podcast that recently appeared and that I'd enjoying a lot is Peter Attia's podcast. His interview with Dom D'Agostino is particularly good and includes discussion of the metabolic theory of cancer, but they're all good (he has one with Rhonda Patrick). He covers intermittent fasting among other things (also the health impacts/use of ketones, etc):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mattson#Intermittent_Fast...
Fasting doesn't "starve" cancer cells. Drinking only juice for a week doesn't "cleanse" your body.
Stop making up your own medical diagnoses fueled by internet bullshit. Listen to experts and trust them for a change.
Appeals to authority are a logical fallacy. I do agree that reading something on the internet and following it is a bad practice.
(This point seems to have been buried under the many posts expressing an opinion or anecdote about fasting in general.)
"... the inability of ketone bodies metabolization due to various deficiencies in mitochondrial enzymes is the major metabolic changes discovered in malignant cells"
Remember, fasting didn't work out so well for Jobs.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fasting-might-boo...
This same diet landed Ashton Kutcher in the hospital when he tried to go method for Jobs.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/naughty-nutrition/20...
The lack of protein or fat in the juice means that it cannot help the rest of the body rebuild itself as the tumor is sucking up all available resources. Shipments of essential fats or amino acids are being hijacked by piratical cancer cells, and never reach their intended destinations. If there were an oversupply, some might still get through.
It seems that the best parallel we can do is cancer == DNA "software" bugs.
Software debugging is a complex art and what works in one case definitely doesn't work in all cases.
Not to be super contrarian, but AFAIU nutritional treatment of cancer actually is a very big surprise for traditional cancer treatment/oncologists.
E.g. a podcast I listened to with Dominic D’Agostino mentioned walking through a cancer ward and most/all patients were being fed Ensure, a sugary "protein" drink (ingredient list starts with water, maltodextrin, sugar), to keep them from losing weight.
Which is a valid traditional concern, but ends up supporting the cancer's glucose-based metabolism (disclaimer IANAE) vs. triggering what this article cites (for the subset of cancers that are susceptible to it).
I don't think that is the model ...
I think the idea is that the cancer cells are a luxury that your body supports because external queues indicate that it's living in the land of plenty. Why not support the energy needs of these extraneous cells ? There's plenty to go around ...
The fasting forces your body to act in a miserly fashion and like someone forced onto a budget, the extraneous luxuries are the first thing to go.
It's your body that starves the cancer cells.
In doing so, they make themselves more sensitive to the resource supply. The "good citizen" cells will put themselves into a low-energy resting state or commit apoptosis to return resources for the common good when the energy supply gets low, as the cancer cells continue selfish business as usual, perhaps by growing more blood vessels into their tumor.
While fasting, many of your "good citizen" cells will stop dividing. Chemotherapy drugs or radiation treatments have greater impact on rapidly-dividing cells, like those in hair follicles, so the damage will then be more focused than ever on cancer cells, who disobey any signals to slow down, and keep dividing anyway. If you could send out a signal that says, "all cells should stay in their homes and shelter-in-place for the next 72 hours" then the cancer cells will ignore it and be the only ones out partying in the streets, and your attack helicopter drugs can be flying around, shooting at anything that moves. Then the immune cell cops can come out, and finish off the stragglers if they can.
It isn't the weakness of individual cells, it's the weakness of the intercell relationships in a tumor. "Good citizen" cells will commit apoptosis on demand in order to spare cells that are more important to the whole body. Cancerous cells have generally already ignored their suicide orders, and bluffed past or warded off the macrophages, in order to continue existing. That greed can be used against the cancer. They indiscriminately consume resources, so ordering the villagers to stop drinking water until further notice, and then poisoning the well, will kill or weaken anyone that disobeys. Even just poisoning the well without the prior protective order will tend to disproportionately kill more cancer cells, just because they drink as much as they can while the other cells are taking just what they need.
But when you can issue that protective order, by means of fasting, you get higher survival rates for obedient cells. If, for some reason, the cancer cells are resistant to the treatment, they will still hedonistically party themselves to death once the food is gone, as all the normal cells have either gone into brumation or killed themselves to lessen the burden.
I did it via intermittent fasting (no breakfast, or lunch, black coffee/water only, and a normal dinner)
Chart: https://imgur.com/a/rzckgMi
Basic routine was this
Monday, fast, overhead press at gym Tuesday, normal eating, deadlifts Wednesday, fast, rowing/kettlebells Thursday, normal eating, bench press Friday, normal eating, squats Saturday, fast, cardio/hiit Sunday, normal eating
came in under the target (needed 15kg, ended up losing 18kg) and won myself $2000 because the guy I had the wager with didn't hit his target.
Fasting really works, it doesn't cost you anything, and you save money.
Fasting OTOH actually increases your metabolic rate [1], stimulates HGH production [4, 5], your brain switches to primarily consuming ketones instead of glucose and your body begins consuming damaged proteins via autophagy. Interestingly enough, studies show weight lost during fasting is better kept off than the equivalent loss with calorie restriction. Your body also resets what it considers 'low' levels of insulin, leptin, etc which can reverse Type II [2, 3]. That can't happen as effectively if you eat.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10837292
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15640462
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16051710
Further, there's a string of evidence that alternate day fasting yields substantially improved biomarkers of health (triglycerides, insulin, etc) even if total caloric intake averaged over the two days remains the same (i.e. every second day you eat 2x what you need) and weight does not change.
Weight watchers is an abject failure by their own metrics in a study they published. Their calorie restricted diets are less effective than doing nothing, but being generous, they work for 0.2% of participants who have clearly demonstrated an intent to change their bodies [3]. On the other hand, eat nothing for 36 hours and you're down 1 pound of fat, and it's not likely to come back.
That's what all that talk of yoyo dieting is, and a case can be made that its why the Minnesota Starvation Experiment led to such bad outcomes. They weren't fasting, they were eating a reduced calorie diet - they may have been much better off eating nothing. Contrast that outcome to this, albeit single data point, of a man who ate nothing for 382 days, felt great, wasn't hungry (?!) and lost 275lbs AND kept it all off 5 years later [4].
What I'm getting at here is the science is leaning towards what you're saying not being correct - that how often you eat may be more important than how much, that your body reacts very differently to 6 snacks a day than it does to 1 giant meal every 2 days even if the caloric content is the same. And further that people just aren't built for long-term calorie restriction and to recommend something like that isn't productive.
[1] https://betterhumans.coach.me/why-caloric-restriction-fails-...
[2] https://alivebynature.com/fast-weight-loss-does-not-promote-...
[3] https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/pdf/pos...
(Each of these should link through to NCBI papers)
ADF succeeds in the reduction of insulin resistance/type II: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15640462
Fasting increases metabolic rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14066725 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10837292
Fasting dramatically increase HGH production: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3127426 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1548337
IF (1 meal per day) improves body composition even when the caloric intake remains unchanged: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17413096
Body composition is better after fasting than caloric restriction even in the event of equal amount of mass re-gain (i.e. regain after CR is fat, after ADF is muscle/lean): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5042570/
And here's the mouse study I mentioned (I think I cited rats) showing ADF improves metabolic markers without change in caloric intake, but of course, it's mice, so YMMV: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5872764/
In case you hadn't figured it out, I fasted for a while out of personal curiosity and in the spirit of self-experimentation (a few 5-day fasts) and wanted to learn all about what I was getting myself into. Honestly, for the record, it was quite easy; after day 2 I just wasn't hungry anymore. In fact I felt quite energized and focused, which from the studies above, is likely due to increased noradrenaline levels.
Articles like this, and most others that deal with health and medicine, present a problem for me that is somewhat hard to describe. The research for this one appears to be built upon prior research (which is hopefully validated with these findings) and the two headliners appear to have some credentials, so let us skip the question of whether or not the reporting itself can be trusted, as that is not what this is about. The first thing that I notice is that the trials mentioned in the article do not seem capable of proving the claim made in the title, but let us assume that they instead ran a trial involving humans fasting (which could be incited by a study like this) and had the same results. I would like to believe that this is a breakthrough, but how is it to be reconciled with the other 400 breakthroughs we find for various cancers each month? If even a small percentage of them were as valuable as they are expressed to be (and we ignore the contradicting evidence), I would expect cancer, diabetes, and obesity (at least!) to be solved problems by now. I suppose that what I am saying is that with there being so much FUD and so many actual unknowns about what determines the well-being of humans that I find most studies to be hard to believe, especially without being able to test most of it myself. It might be a given that nothing you read can be fully trusted, but it is becoming difficult for me to trust at all, and that is without even considering the fact that some people are reporting findings for studies that never happened. It seems to me that the two most common strategies are to either believe one thing and reject all new information that contradicts it, or to believe most of the new information. Overall, I am left feeling hopeful that the people to who articles like this would make the greatest difference to have found a logical and efficient way to handle this sort of situation.
Any thoughts?
https://news.usc.edu/118758/fasting-during-chemotherapy-may-...
The China Study - by T. Colin Campbell : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Colin_Campbell
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - by Michael Pollan : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan
The China Study is notably a retrospective of primary research on diet, nutrition, and disease spanning nearly a century. There are many breadcrumbs for further reading. Campbell was a top-tier government/academic researcher for several decades. The summary conclusion is that western diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer, heart ...) are strongly correlated with increased ratio of animal product consumption, especially in presence of environmental toxins - a binary poison cocktail one might say. Genetics are a factor, he says, but not so pervasively as the other two.
Michael Pollan is iconically known for the phrase, "Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much". A prolific author and journalist, he is on about many of the same things Campbell is: cautioning about a) over-reliance on reductive analysis of food nutrient components, and about b) over-indulgence in foodstuffs that passed through some industrial process on way from earth to earthling.
Edit: formatting
Like the fasting mimicking diets they came up with https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-...
That later turned into a startup https://prolonfmd.com/ of 5 day fasting at different monthly intervals depending on your weight, but you can read the orig paper to see what the calorie restrictions were and just make/measure your own food.
Because healthy cells are less active, they take less damage from chemo. So they were looking at intermittent fasting before chemo to reduce the collateral damage.
Currently I try to loose weight by shooting for two weeks fasting, one week not. About 10kg gone, 40 left to go.
Personally I'm interested in longer fasts but I'm under my goal weight. I would also be interested in more research about how to gain muscle while fasting.
I currently maintain a 2.3x bodyweight deadlift and 1.5x bench press while working a relatively tame & laid-back salaried dev job.
Can't do IF (multi-day, anyways) without losing lean mass anymore. Used to be able to until I started plateauing on my lifts.
My guess is as you gain more and more lean muscle mass, there's some arbitrary threshold (which differs person to person) at which your TDEE begins to exceed viable intake within a limited timeframe.
I specify "viable intake" because your body's nutrient uptake rate per hour has some given limit - anything over that limit usually just gets pooped out later.
Restricting timeframe for eating during the day (break my fast after work) seems to work out okay though.
Cancer sometimes becomes resistant to chemotherapy, but we did a study that shows a certain type of lung cancer is highly dependent on a certain amino acid and when you fast intermittently it deprives the cancer of that amino acid and causes the cancer cells to die.
they show if you starve cells in a dish in a way that might mimic what happens when you fast, you can kill the cells. I didn't see any mention of even mouse studies in there, so I don't know what their in vivo model was but it mostly looks like cell culture to me (apologies if I've missed that). Extrapolating that to humans is extremely hard.
For sure a promising result but its pretty preliminary.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29875130
Apparently efforts similar to these go back to at least six years. "Metabolic reprogramming: A new paradigm for targeting cisplatin resistant cells" describes a recurring research program that began in 2012 which seeks to impede cancer via restraining oxidative metabolism, though I think their method of blocking cancer cell metabolism may be more selective than starving ALL of the patient's cells.
Thank you =)
Due to my unpopular opinions about how some countries and companies are often targetted in US media, even on unrelated articles, this happens to me. I like taking breaks on HN, but the more it happens, the more I am going to other places instead.
This is not about being true or being right - just whether your conversation is following the mainstream opinion or not.
If later it proves to be right? Too bad for you. This is the case on most forums with up and downvoting, and it forces dissent out.
I am interested in conversation for learning and sharing. The post I read the more carefully are greyed out or dead. Most are ads or crankpots, but in 1% of the time I get gems.
Sinple example: would you have preferred to learn about intermittent fasting now, or 5 years ago? Me: 5 years ago, but too many downvotes may have pushed out of the community people like the parent poster.
[1] - https://github.com/
[2] - http://n-gate.com/
Not my sites, just an example. You can make the text as big, bold and readable as you wish. I prefer really simple stylesheets.
Thanks a lot for the gate suggestion, after checking it it seems to post a contrarian analysis - basically singling out the post I will be interested in reading!
I sometimes will get into a heated discussion w/ other on hn or reddit or you_name it. And maybe lose "virtual points" for this. At the end of the day the way I look at it is this: if the other person learns something or finds out something new, even if they don't agree, or I learn or find something new it's a win.