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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

It's anecdotal, but a friend of mine with cancer switched to a keto diet and he had one tumor shrink, to the point where his doctor said they could (and should) now operate on it.

The large increase in sugar and starch in our diet does contribute to fast growing cancer cells and there are studies that link being overweight/obesity with cancer.

We weren't this fat decades ago. Some may blame more office work, but the biggest factor is the amount of sugar/carbs in our diets. It's grown tremendously and yet no one seems to take it seriously, discrediting things like Adkins/Keto as "fad diets" when they were closer/more consistent with American and Western European diets for several decades.

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I know a few people who have lost a lot of weight on Atkins/keto. I think they are successful diets because they provide bright-line rules for people to follow, but they are also extreme and potentially dangerous. None of them could maintain those diets long-term because they developed things like kidney pain. Caloric restriction, eating a good balance of fat/carbs/protein, laying off saturated fats, sugar, and booze, will fix 95% of people's dietary problems, but for people with weight/eating issues the middle ground is often just too difficult a path to tread.

> kidney pain

I've had trouble finding good studies on this. I don't think it's true. I've been on pretty hard keto for over two years at a time. I know other friends who have and have never heard of kidney trouble.

You occasionally have a day or two where you eat out with friends or have some fried chicken every month, and initially there is a period where you feel sick for a week as your body withdraws from sugar, but other than that I've never had kidney issues and my blood work has always come back fine.

With Adkins you do start reintroducing some carbs eventually, but you still keep it under a limit, and go back down if you start getting unhealthy.

Anecdotally: my father did have kidney issues when he went Keto, but that's because he had too high a proportion of his calories from protein. He switched to more leaves and fats and that seems to have cleared up.

I don't think you can say that they are dangerous more than you can say that for example vegan diets are extreme and dangerous. They CAN be dangerous but there are many who are successfully are eating that way and it is even a treatment against epilepsy seizures for some.

https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps....

My (very limited) understanding is that tumours need glucose to survive and grow, so presumably a keto diet or fasting could potentially stop a tumour from growing.

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