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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Look, stop applying pseudo-science "feels-right" intuition to things that involve complicated cellular mechanisms. It doesn't work that way and you should just listen to what your doctor(s) tell you and trust them + your own due diligence.

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.

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most doctors get little to no nutritional education. It is easy to learn about any one topic and know more than your physician. Especially since most physicians dont regularly read journal articles and probably dont even really understand statistics.

Appeals to authority are a logical fallacy. I do agree that reading something on the internet and following it is a bad practice.

I believe that in this case the term starve might actually be accurate:

"... the inability of ketone bodies metabolization due to various deficiencies in mitochondrial enzymes is the major metabolic changes discovered in malignant cells"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5450454/

For what it's worth, the non-paywalled blurb seems to be saying something more specific than "fasting kills cancer", it's saying that cancers that develop resistance to cisplatin are more susceptible to fasting than cancers that aren't. So, even if cisplatin doesn't work directly, cisplatin-resistance has a beneficial side-effect that one might be able to exploit.

(This point seems to have been buried under the many posts expressing an opinion or anecdote about fasting in general.)

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