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Comment by TaupeRanger | Hacker News Reader

The word "effective" is used in a misleading way in a huge number of cancer studies. Reducing disease progression is not a particularly good metric of "effectiveness", even less so in mice models. What you want to see is a measure of overall survival (i.e. you survived cancer but died of something else because your health declined overall, making your survival moot) and a measure of quality of life, which is often completely ignored. The gap from "tumors regressed in mice" to the measures I just listed is so astronomically huge as to make these kinds of studies almost entirely unexciting.

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Another commenter pointed out that one of the paper's authors, Valter Longo, has already written a number of books on intermittent fasting. While I think it's great when scientist publish in a form that is more accessible to the public, it's important to note that he was strongly invested in promoting intermittent fasting prior to this research being done, even to the point of selling a $300 mail order diet.

I think the reason this "entirely unexciting" study is getting attention is related to one of its author's having a talent for self-promotion.

He also founded the company that sells the food for this treatment:

> Longo is the founder of and has an ownership interest in L-Nutra; the company's food products are used in studies of the fasting-mimicking diet. Longo's interest in L-Nutra was disclosed and managed per USC's conflicts-of-interest policies. USC has an ownership interest in L-Nutra and the potential to receive royalty payments from L-Nutra. USC's financial interest in the company has been disclosed and managed under USC's institutional conflict of interest policies.

He personally does not make any money from that, as he donated all his shares.

>he was strongly invested in promoting intermittent fasting prior to this research being done, even to the point of selling a $300 mail order diet.

The most ingenious business scheme ever devised: a mail-order fasting diet.

Just think of the savings in postage fees alone.

Instead of writing a snarky comment you could bother learning that the Fasting Mimicking Diet consists in something more than water and air.

Sounds like he really believes in the power of fasting. It’s possible for him to commercialize something that works, and to keep doing scientific research to build on that foundation. It doesn’t have to be shady.

Agreed. If he thinks he's figured out something that can help a lot of people, it would make sense for him to try and apply what he's learned.

You could say that about every preclinical or clinical trial. If no one good at promotion had an interest in the treatment it would never get funded.

Most treatments studied are patented drugs, I never see these types of comments about those.

He has apparently donated his shares of that company to a non-profit that funds research in nutrition. It sounds much less shady than people make it out to be.

Doesn't have to be shady. In your own research, you are the easiest person to fool.

I would encourage you to research your implication that fasting and vitamin C makes "health decline overall"

That statement was one aspect of a more general point about cancer studies at large, and the gap mentioned is still applicable to the study in the OP.

Fasting has downsides in a population at risk of muscle wasting, and vitamin C induces high oxidative stress in this dose range. What's to research?

Most likely your unfounded and uncited oversimplification.

I imagine that would make it harder to compare against how it could potentially work for humans. Humans have many medications that they can take to fix side effects that might arise from this, including side effects that can result in death or lower quality of life. Like, inflammation can be fixed with anti-inflammation medication. Not a biologist, but probably you’re expecting too much from mice trials because it seems very much like early drug discoveries compared to human trials.

He’s saying treatment so someone lives another week is qualitatively different from treatment so someone lives long enough to die of something else.

Yes, I get that. But actually designing experiments that measures the latter case using mice is extremely difficult and probably impossible. Especially because you are designing these experiments in order to see how these cures might work on humans.

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