Could cancer cells’ iron addiction be their Achilles heel? | Hacker News Reader

Could cancer cells’ iron addiction be their Achilles heel?

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130 pointsvoisin150 comments

This makes me think of Ray Peat's ideas on iron, that an excess of iron leads to all sorts of diseases and weakening of the immune system, and aging leads to accumulation of iron in cells. In modern times since iron is added to a lot of cereals and processed foods it has exacerbated this problem.

Good discussion here:

https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/iron-dangers.shtml

I've heard similar things like that too. And the solution is relatively simple, good cause thing to do too, just donate blood one to 3 times a year.

It's just too bad that inside the agreements for blood donation for the red cross and vitalant they give themselves no-recourse, no-notice and no-further-consent needed dna testing, research rights and data storage rights to that blood. Which has stopped me from donating blood. And I can't find any other whole blood donation providers in my area other than those two. Super sketchy.

Look up Canada and Red Cross they lost the right to blood handling. The tainted blood scandal of the mid 80s(?) some blood infected with HIV and Heoatitis C. Canadian Blood Services was formed after the scandal. I'd say USA Red Cross is super aware of such a thing happening there.

Also, homophobic policies.

It was never homophobic. It was because there was a prevalent HIV epidemic amount homosexual men predominantly which influenced policy and rightly so. They couldn't reliably test the blood and promise they wouldn't spread it so they opted for the lowest risk possible. It made a lot of sense.

Maybe things look different today but those are some pretty good reasons for why it is the way it is today.

How does practicality mean that a policy isn't homophobic? This is actually one of the more clearly homophobic things I've ever seen. It's pretty clearly motivated by fear of men who have sex with men.

Most of the homophobic is used it's used to describe a situation where somebody isn't actually afraid of gay people.

It is justified fear based on the statistical disparity of HIV and sexual orientation. Why would anyone expect blood donor organizations to ignore this reality simply to accommodate someone's lifestyle and soothe their hurt feelings? I don't get what the positions is...they should ignore this and expose more people to health risk?

Yes this is essentially what the position is. Such people say that with modern testing we don’t need to filter out MSM but since all testing is fallible it’s pretty self evident this would lead to more HIV in the blood supply.

I think it actually is a legitimate argument though that the feels of the entire gay population is more important than the reals of the very small amount of HIV infections that would realistically happen just because one number is so much larger than the other and HIV is far less consequential than it was when this policy was enacted. People tend to be bias towards avoiding extreme outcomes over causing a much lesser outcome far more often. See: nuclear being perceived as more dangerous than fossil fuels.

In any case there’s so many more important issues out there than blood donation among men who have sex with men the entire dispute smacks of bikeshedding. People are both discriminated against far worse, and are killed far more often, by different issues. It matters very little if people have the wrong opinion on this issue relative to if they have the wrong opinion on different issues.

This has gotten better in the UK. I give blood regularly and the questionnaire now makes a distinction for monogamous homosexual relationships. It doesn’t impact me so I’m not sure if there’s some other hurdle to cross but I thought it was a good sign.

I've started donating blood a while ago, every time you have to fill in a questionnaire which includes questions about drug use and sex with men (or sex with women who have had sex with men who have had sex with men). I don't know the consequences of filling in a 'yes' on that one; it might just mean they will do an extra screening for STD's given a higher prevalence of STD's in the gay community (at least historically; I don't know if this is still a thing. I have heard of incidents where people go around poking people with a needle to try and intentionally give them HIV in gay clubs).

That said, you are also barred from donating blood here if you have been in the UK for 26 weeks or longer from 1980 - 1996 (e.g. you lived there or you went on vacation there for a total time of 26 weeks or more).

Why wouldn't they take appropriate cautionary action given the extreme statistical correlations of sexual orientation and HIV? They should ignore reality, and risk lives, because some people's feelings are hurt?

In many countries, you can't donate blood if you're a male homosexual (or are severely restricted for blood donation).

Sorry, how?

I think they mean the policy that many blood donation places adhere to that there is a waiting period after the last time a male/male relationship has sex (I think for red cross it is like 3 months) before specifically men who have sex with men can donate.

Personally I understand from a medical perspective why this could be a concern and I dont think it is inherently meant to be homophobic

It's a valid concern for everybody, so blood is screened for all sorts of stuff.

Someone recently infected with HIV can potentially pass it on to others whilst not being detectably infected. It makes sense to limit those who engage in high risk activities until sufficient time has passed that they will now test positive. The full criteria is here:

"You should not give blood if you have AIDS or have ever had a positive HIV test, or if you have done something that puts you at risk for becoming infected with HIV.

You are at risk for getting infected if you:

have used needles to take any drugs, steroids, or anything not prescribed by your doctor in the last 3 months

are a male who has had sexual contact with another male, in the last 3 months

have taken money, drugs or other payment for sex in the last 3 months

have had sexual contact in the past 3 months with anyone described above"

https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/how-to-donate/eli...

> It makes sense to limit those who engage in high risk activities until sufficient time has passed that they will now test positive.

Yeah, but the policy doesn't include straight people, who are by now a higher-risk group. Which shows it's based on prejudice not safety.

Not to be gross here but I think a lot of this is lost in conversation because people shy away from the particulars. Vaginal and oral sex are rather ineffective at spreading HIV. There has been a rise in recent decades of HIV in African American women in particular, however it is known that this is due to an increase in that population of unprotected anal sex with a larger number of partners than previously. If they did this simply because they hate gay people why did they not include lesbian women?

I'd say a better policy would be excluding those who engage in nonmonogamous anal sex more generally, however I don't think the public has an appetite for that discussion.

> I don't think the public has an appetite for that discussion.

Judging by the quick downvote I got, I'd consider you correct.

Any man who has had sex with another man used to be unable to give blood in the US, due to federal regulations, because of the risk of HIV. The current regulation states: “Defer for 3 months from the most recent sexual contact, a man who has had sex with another man during the past 3 months.”

https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/how-to-donate/eli...

In many jurisdictions homosexual men are barred from donating blood.

May additionally add to the explanation to the correlation between not eating meat and longevity, since vegetarian have usually lower iron in blood[0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6367879/

It's funny that there seems to be no mention of hereditary hemochromatosis.

Cereal for breakfast is not that popular in most parts of the world. Also, outside the US, cereals are not so heavily fortified.

Hemochromatosis is a relatively common condition in Irish men that has been blamed on genetics, I wonder if the Irish preference for cereal based breakfasts and stout drinking exacerbates the issue? A friends dad has recently been diagnosed and he has to have a pint of blood drawn every week.

Another good discussion on iron's link to a surprisingly wide array of diseases is here:

https://nautil.us/iron-is-the-new-cholesterol-7861/

There's also this proposition that holocaust survivors live longer. Might there be differences in their lifestyle that reduces exceed iron?

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-01-....

This is one of the largest mental jumps I've seen recently, bravo.

I wonder how many other conspiracy theories that you would subscribe to.

Gabby Galvin (the US News reporter) has only 6 years of journalistic experience. She has some flaws in her article.

Reading the actual medical white paper makes ZERO mention of iron or hemo-anything.

And you must an arm-chair quarterback and not even good at that.

I used to always hear the trope that "cancer isn't one disease, it's 1000, so there will never be a 'cure' for cancer", yet for a while now properties that are shared across a wide variety of cancers are found regularly, increasing hope that we can knock a lot of them out with a single type of treatment. In this case it's 20% of cancers but I recall seeing other findings across a wider swath.

PI at a cancer center here. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. Cancer is indeed not 1 disease but many countless ones. At the same time, cancer diagnoses are based on site of origin and histology (how it looks under a microscope). But often what drives a cell of one tissue toward pathogenesis is the same mutation or other molecular malfunction as a cell of another tissue type. In those cases, we can develop drugs that target that specific component and it may work across both cancer types.

Unfortunately, there are countless ways things can go wrong in cells. There are also rarely drugs that truly span a large swath of cancer types effectively. That's because even though two cancers from different sites may have the same driver, how they respond to treatments can differ. The difference in cell state may allow one of the two cancers to adapt to the treatment, such as by activating an alternative growth pathway, whereas the other cancer type's cell of origin may not have such an easy road to therapeutic escape.

Also, maybe, the fact that what cancer cells have in common, they tend to also have in common with cells that aren't cancer, and therefore make poor targets for therapies.

That's kinda a defining characteristic of cancer. It's your own cells, so your immune system doesn't recognize it as foreign and take care of it. Just about anything that targets cancer targets the non-cancerous cells it started in. Most chemotherapy boils down to "kill it all and hope the cancer dies before the non-cancer, and leaves enough non-cancer behind to keep you alive". There have been a lot of advances in targeted cancer treatments, but even most of them just selectively target the type of cell (healthy or not) that became cancerous, and do less collateral damage to "innocent" cells. It's incredibly hard to target an individual cancer, and so far impossible to target cancers broadly.

So, my question is why isn't fasting a partial solution?

It's kind of the same idea as chemo. (Non-selective cell stress/death)

But won't cancer cells always starve first, as they don't have a way to go dormant?

Or is that a myth?

I'm no expert, but I know cancer cells promote adding blood pathways towards them, so it might be that they have an "uneven share" of the nutrients transported to them, and thus die out later than the healthy tissue.

I don't know anything about cells going dormant as a result of fasting. That sounds questionable to me. There's been some research on fasting and cancer, but there haven't been a lot of studies, and results are inconclusive. Some of the ideas sound sensible. Cancer cells are incredibly greedy and slurp up glucose as they constantly divide. The thinking is that you can starve them and slow progression, in conjunction with chemotherapy and other treatments. It's not widely supported or practiced and more study is warranted. It's hard to find real information on it, because the idea that you can miraculously cure cancer and other diseases by changes in diet is embraced by millions of anti-science crackpots, so there's a ton of disinformation and speculation out there.

> So, my question is why isn't fasting a partial solution?

With a statement like that, it would seem that you know a thing or two!

Care to elaborate?

So what you’re summarizing is that cancer is definitely a single disease with multiple types but there are commonalities. Which makes sense. Which is why I never bought this “we can’t cure it because it’s not one disease”. We can’t cure it because we aren’t smart enough.

> Which is why I never bought this “we can’t cure it because it’s not one disease”.

Really, in an important sense, cancer isn't one disease because cancer isn't a disease at all. It's a mechanical malfunction, kind of like having a cleft palate.

On the other hand, it is more disease-like than most mechanical malfunctions.

Perhaps you have an overly narrow definition of the word disease? Cleft palate is, in my opinion, a congenital disease. A fractured bone is also a disease.

I have a cancer, a basal cell carcinoma. Like other cancers, it's a transformed cell type with dysregulated growth. But, it's likely to be completely excised surgically, unlike pancreatic adenocarcinoma, which would likely kill me in a few months.

> Perhaps you have an overly narrow definition of the word disease?

I'm intentionally highlighting here a definition of 'disease' that is much narrower than the norm, yes.

> A fractured bone is also a disease.

On the other hand, you're trying way too hard to correct that. Nobody considers a broken bone to be a disease. A broken bone in your leg is not fundamentally different from a broken rock outside your leg, and -- more importantly -- this lack of difference is easily understood by everyone.

But while e.g. diabetes is not caused by external agents, it looks from the outside just like other types of problems that are. This leads to both types of problems being called "disease", even though the radical difference in how the problem occurs means that the treatments and ways of thinking that apply to one type are not appropriate for the other type.

Diabetes is purely mechanical, and if you take measures against it, you can suppress its effects. It will never fight back or attempt to circumvent your efforts. Malaria is purely external, and if you take measures against it, it will take countermeasures.

Cancer is an intermediate phenomenon. It is not caused by external agents. But it is alive and may respond to measures taken against it -- it consists of part of yourself 'going rogue' and becoming as malicious as an external agent.

This intermediate status suggests that approaches from either end of the "disease" spectrum might be fruitful. One of the biggest problems we have in dealing with cancer is that we want to treat it as a malign external agent to be removed from the body, as would be appropriate if it were really a disease. But while there are many effective tools to do that for diseases, they all fail badly in a couple of different ways when the "disease" is indistinguishable from the rest of your self.

I think you should maybe come up with a new word. You're heavily overloading terms that have medical definitions with your own meanings, and expounding an alternative philosophy of medicine, which is fine but shouldn't depend on semantics, perhaps.

> and expounding an alternative philosophy of medicine

What?

No, they wrote:

> Cancer is indeed not 1 disease but many countless ones.

No, they do what most cancer researchers do, which is wrap the truth around so much bullshit that you can read it however you please. I’m also not an amateur, I spent most of my PhD studying cancer drugs.

This isn't going to be easy, but an alternative to molecular cures is an organismal-level cure.

Replace the whole body. All the cancerous, pre-cancerous, and worn down, aging and diseased cells wholesale.

Grow monoclonal headless human bodies in a lab. Innervate, artificially supply with hormones, and grow until puberty. No head. (Genetically or surgically stop precursor cells early on in development.) Grow the bodies artificially in pig uteruses at scale. Make it a monoclonal line that is O-, HLA neutral, etc. to avoid transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppressants.

Before these are ready for human use, they can be used for population studies and in situ experiments. They can also be used for organ transplants.

Develop and perfect human head transplantation. Try it on terminal patients, paralyzed patients, et al. Get good at it. Early results won't be good, but given time to develop, we might be able to reattach the spinal system.

Transplant recipients get a new pulmonary, cardiovascular, and circulatory systems. New thymuses with better immune systems. This could be a non-negligible boost to human lifespan.

New bodies can be genetically modified to have higher VO2 max and other stats. You could choose the height, build, and gender of your new body. Literally everything.

This is better than duct taping aging components in place. It's replacing everything but the head and brain, which is where we should be moving as a society anyway.

It won't cure brain, blood cancers, or Alzheimer's. But it'll be useful against heart disease, lung disease, liver disease. Everything else.

> It won't cure brain, blood cancers, or Alzheimer's.

Blood cancers are some of the most successfully-treated cancers. One of the effective--but risky--treatments of last resort is close to this futuristic fantasy you're imagining: there are leukemia/lymphoma patients who've been cured by destroying their bone marrow and then replacing it with healthy bone marrow. It's done using donor marrow, umbilical stem cells, or even the patient's own marrow that's been extracted, treated, and returned to the patient after they wipe everything out. It's pretty close to a full replacement.

Most of what you're suggesting isn't possible with any current or likely near-future technology, but curing blood cancers this way is already mainstream medicine. In some cases, patients that have undergone this treatment have also been cured of AIDS and other "incurable" diseases.

This is unlikely to work, as the brain regulates many bodily functions on a neurohormonal basis, so the headless body won’t develop properly. You can get abnormal heart rhythms from a stroke in certain parts of the brain for example.

Also it has an insurmountable yuck factor.

i could see science getting to a point where you could grow a human body, but I don't think we could surmount the challenge of transplanting a head and successfully integrating the brain from your "old body" onto your "new body".

More specifically, I think even if you could perfectly reattach every nerve from the brain to the spinal cord, your brain might still not know how to control the new body.

(There's my armchair scientist contribution for the month)

Phantom limb syndrome is thought to be caused by the brain adapting to changed signals from the limb's nerves. It means years of pain, itching, false sensation. I can't even begin to imagine what it would take to address phantom body syndrome.

(I'm also a total layman here)

A medication (topomax) once gave me the reverse. My left arm felt like a complete stranger. Was terrified of it. Intellectually I understood it was just the medication screwing with me. Emotionally I wanted to take a chainsaw to that arm.

Was that included in the potential side-effects list you received? That sounds horrible.

Topomax has a lot of insane side effects. Bad reputation.

Trend seems to be it either works great at fixing migraines or makes you really stupid plus weird issues.

Doctors of course want you try it for six months before next medication. Repeat every six months for multiple years.

I have to imagine months or years of physical therapy. Better than the alternative, granted, but wouldn’t seem to scale well.

You should write a screenplay. I’d watch that movie!

It sounds similar to the premise of Altered Carbon. Great book and so-so Netflix show.

There's a bad Arnold movie along these lines - The Sixth Day.

I mean, the end goal there is uploading, growing a new body, and replacing the brain with a computer running the uploaded mind.

Yes, but analogy time:

We are the ancient Greeks, we’ve invented written language and some of our famous philosophers and orators are very upset about how this is changing the human condition.

In the same way the ancient Greeks made the Aeolipile[0] and could probably imagine it doing something useful, we can bioprint tissue and imagine it doing something useful.

If full-body printing is as far off as the industrial revolution, mind uploading is as far off as the internet — while we can detect neuron firing when it happens, AFAIK we don’t have any way to read even a single synaptic connection strength, despite the OpenWorm and Neuralink projects and similar, because nobody has been willing to fund that research.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

Why have a body at that point?

It's just a cost center.

I love how geeks readily fantasize over this "no body" experience when everything we know about how our conscience is shaped is determined by our body.

You can't really separate the two without us turning into something else. Our bodies define the human experience.

I know that we really, really want to be some ethereal beings, but we're not.

I'm not even sure the "no body" situation is superior, we'd probably be psychologically very different and I'm not convinced we'd be better (not feeling pain, for example, is a pretty sure fire way to lose empathy).

Even the upload itself is just a cost center. Just tell people they’ve been uploaded and they can die in peace.

I remember hearing the same things in biology class many years ago, and thinking to myself “but we don’t know what we don’t know, this guy is overly certain about this”. The over-certainty about the present state of knowledge is unfortunate and might slow progress.

Right, and one term one I've heard for this is Overconfident Pessimism [0].

People confidently declare that cancer is "incurable" as a matter of metaphysical principle, the reason being that cancer isn't one thing and that it's really hard. The most celebrated example making this declaration that I know of is this comic from PhD comics [1].

I think you can appreciate that cancer is more than one thing, and that "curing" in all it's variations is really hard, without proceeding, punch drunk on enlightened skepticism, to declare that these mean it can't be cured.

To me it feels like a frustrating philosophy 101 mistake masquerading as profound wisdom.

0. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gvdYK8sEFqHqHLRqN/overconfid...

1. https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1162

I'm especially excited about targeted treatments though. It is not just about being shared across cancers, but how specific those properties are to cancers.

Is it possible that females have higher life expectancy than men because they menstruate?

It's going to be a lot of factors. Men are also a large majority of murder victims, are more likely to be homeless or in prison, represent a huge percentage of combat deaths, and are far more likely to be killed on the job. That's not to mention the higher likelyhood of substance abuse or involvement in automobile related fatalities. If we had a totally egalitarian society I wonder how wide the gap between men and women would be.

All of the factors you list happen mostly before retirement age, yet even the life expectancy at age 65 is three years higher for women than men (86 years vs 83 years in the US pre-Covid). That suggests biological differences rather than socially-derived ones (though it doesn't prove anything, one could make a case of body degradation accruing pre-retirement).

There's a life expectancy gap between sexes in most mammals

Most mammals have combat related deaths

People who donate blood regularly also seem to be healthier. A lot of confounding factors in this, though. It is not easy to tease out causality from a spaghetti of correlations.

People who donate blood regularly are screened for disease, so people who continue doing so have less disease by definition. And if they do have disease it's often identified earlier.

People doing some high risk activities are barred from donating blood completely, which again would have a positive effect on life-expectancy of those that donate.

It would be really hard to tease out causality here.

The 'ancient' practice of bloodletting may have been discredited as a cure for most ailments, but perhaps more research will indicate that it does have some benefits. And I do think that blood donation is beneficial for both the giver and receiver.

We (me & partner) have been playing with that idea for a while. It's like taking out the trash.

Would love to find any info on that. (Like past experiments, or find data on average life-span for regular blood-donors.)

So people were on to something with leaches...

Their Achilles heel is mtor/igf-1 and the tool we have to keep those from being activated is autophagy.

But no one wants to hear they should scale back protein intake to 0.5/g per kg of body weight or less. (which basically means being mostly vegetarian or vegan, with some exception)

No one wants to hear they should be exercising 5-6 days a week

No one wants to hear that you should be having 20g-150g of net carbs a day and thus doing without bread, pasta, cereals, and reducing starchy veggies.

No one wants to hear that they should fast semi-regularly

No one wants to hear we shouldn't be eating 3 meals a day plus snacks once we're past growing age.

No one wants to be uncomfortable.

This is likely BS, and nobody should believe claims of magic diets without proof that they actually work.

Extreme confidence, and conspiratorial thinking ("nobody wants to hear this secret knowledge I have") should downweight the likelihood of the claims, because given no actual clues to go on, they are indications that the claims are spread by such deceptions.

I presume they are talking about a plant-based keto diet rather than something they just invented.

Without evidence, doesn't make it any less BS.

plant based, yes. I think ketosis is positive, but i don't think it's necessary on a regular basis. that's why i put the 20-150g range of net carbs. Fasting alone will handle the benefits of ketosis. But moreover you just don't want to spike your blood sugar.

I LOVE thinking about how my diet/exercise impacts my body. So don’t take this as discomfort - trying new diet/exercise combos is literally a major hobby of mine.

What on EARTH do you eat to hit those macros? If I eat the minimum healthy calories (1,500) entirely in broccoli, I’d be >50g of protein (~0.6 g/kg at 160lbs). What kind of meal plan gets you low net carbs AND low protein? Are you drinking olive oil or something?

The thing to google is "therapeutic ketogenic diet". It's the super extreme form of keto, used in medical settings to treat things like epilepsy, rather than in casual settings in attempts to lose weight. It's been a while since I did reading on the topic, but IIRC, there is good evidence it's helpfully effective against some forms of cancer (but harmful against others, so research before diving in).

But yes. To answer your question, you do eat a lot of food that is 100% fat or darn close. You will see menus like "2 eggs and 2 tablespoons of butter". The vegetarian version will involve a lot of avocados and coconut oil. You don't have to eat it straight, and most meals involve combining a massive amount of fat with a small amount of protein or fiber or something.

This makes sense. The exact macros differ, I’m sure, but it seems reasonable that extreme medical situations could be helped by diets that otherwise aren’t the best for a healthy person

can't stand those filthy keto casuals /s

To be charitable, I suppose they mean getting your protein from whatever falls out of this high vegetable diet naturally.

You're right though, I think vegetables have more protein than people are led to believe, especially since the health/fitness industry make it seem like you need to be ever vigilant in getting your protein numbers up. Meanwhile, the average American accidentally eats far more than they need and certainly doesn't need to resort to supplementation.

They don't have complete amino acids profiles, so most plant based protein won't stimulate mtor and igf-1 like say... Whey protein, milk or a steak would.

I often hear that some vegetables (for example broccoli) have a lot of proteins but don't really believe it, as a vegan I find it hard to get protein.

Broccoli has only 3 grams of protein per 100g (and 7 of carbs), I don't think it is particularly high, and 1500 calories of broccoli would mean eating more than 4 kg of it.

You're quoting considerably more protein in broccoli than GP, and they certainly weren't suggesting eating it all in broccoli was actually a good idea.

I don't mean to cause personal offense by this, but taking (and by extension, giving) anonymous dietary advice is pointless. A wide array of eating disorders exist in which the the afflicted are in complete denial about their own health. In real life, I would be able to glance over your body and get a quick idea of whether or not your advice was made with a sound mind. Even then, it's hard for me to know how accurately you're actually following your claimed diet. But without even being able to see your body, there is nothing for others to go on. For all I know, you're an anorexic deep in denial, or a binge eater who weighs more than my car. Your anonymous testimony alone tells me virtually nothing. Due to the insidious nature of eating disorders, even if I assume good faith and assume you aren't consciously lying, you still might be deep in denial lying to yourself and I would have no way of knowing it.

You can't diagnose cancer by looking at someone.

I agree. However if somebody is telling me to each much less protein than most doctors and dieticians say I should, then I want to at least see if they've maintained a reasonable muscle mass under the diet they're advocating for. The proof is in the pudding, and anonymously online there is no pudding.

here's the thing

It seems that health span and lifespan are not the same goal. Maintaining muscle mass is good, even great, to a point. Especially for the eldery who need to prevent falls.

But the process that helps us grow muscles (IGF-1/mTor) is also the same pathways that makes us grow cancer.

Low protein intake is both correlated in large population studies with longevity. It's also seen in animal studies as well.

High protein is great for reproductive health, glowing skin, building muscle, hell - probably even mood and cognition.

The fundamental problem here is that since you (and I) are anonymous, there is no real way for us to communicate what we believe a "reasonable" muscle mass is. Even if we try to be specific and talk about specific numbers and mass indexes and how much we can bench, it's still futile. The nature of body disorders is such that somebody can have laughably incorrect beliefs about themselves without consciously meaning to lie. We could tell each other our BMIs but if we both stay anonymous, it's all meaningless.

I'm not sure you can say this that confidently. "Autophagy can suppress or promote tumors depending on the developmental stage and tumor type." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6257056/

The point is prevention. It promotes tumors once they already exist. It prevents them before they do.

So you have a clinical study showing cancer prevention on this extreme diet? Over what time span and how many individuals, and across what variety of geographic areas and other life experience?

Most diet tracking nutrition research is not that good, consisting of surveys that ask you what you've eaten for the past year, from memory and then doing correlations. Most people don't remember what they've eaten last week.

I think to do something really accurate nutrition wise would cost way too much money and take too long, so it mostly doesn't get done well.

So unless you do something specific with faith practice communities that are good about their strict diets and fasting, like Buddhist monks, there probably isn't much good research data for that in the first place. And then that has issues with controlling for other things, like meditating a lot, etc.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33197913/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6612215/

Its pretty well know mtor/igf-1 stimulates growth. All growth. This is great for youth. Not so much for aging.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY

Both of those papers are about the treatment of cancer, not about the avoidance. I don't have the internet connection needed to watch a video, but the video appears to be about longevity.

The only support for this point I've found is in a few studies in mice. Is there other studies I'm missing or are you making recommendations based on a few studies in mice?

"Studies on autophagy-deficient mouse models indicate that the basal levels of autophagy can suppress tumor formation at the initiation of tumor development." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6274804/

Protein intake that low is just insane if you’re doing exercise that much. Your body will accumulate injuries fast, unless you’re defining exercise as lifting 1kg “dumbbells”.

Cutting carbs that much would mean you’re getting virtually all your calories from fat. Most natural sources of fats (nuts, meat, milk) also pack in protein, and you’d quickly be over 0.5g/kg. The only other option is chugging grease.

Not sure how a high exercise, no protein, frequent fasting diet is going to work. It sounds worse than a North Korean laborer’s lifestyle.

> Not sure how a high exercise, no protein, frequent fasting diet is going to work. It sounds worse than a North Korean laborer’s lifestyle.

Can't die of cancer if you die of malnutrition first!

I'd weigh about 40kg in no time. I usually weigh 70kg but it's not easy to maintain my body weight with my existing diet (at 1.4m tall).

Following this Internet persons advice, I would literally end up in the hospital due to malnutrition / low body weight in 6-12 months.

>I usually weigh 70kg but it's not easy to maintain my body weight with my existing diet (at 1.4m tall).

That's a BMI > 35. That's morbidly obese. Why would you want to maintain that?

Getting your calories from fat virtually reduces your heart disease and diabetes type 2 risk to almost 0%.

I switched from ~150g of protein a day and high intensity workouts to mostly vegetarian and ~40g a day with high volume workouts. Any lingering injuries have disappeared and I am definitely rock climbing harder than I have before. I lost 20lbs and pretty much all non-functional muscle over 4 months. I don’t think I would do this forever but a low protein diet is definitely a tool I will be using in the future. It is amazing how much less food I need to feel satiated not carrying a bunch of deadlift and bench press muscles around.

What do you eat for satiety?

> I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30597187

Yes, a gym nut who I guarantee you ate more protein than a grown adult should.

You're throwing a lot of big claims around in this thread.

Could you provide:

1. What you eat in a day to hit those macros.

2. something to support your claims.

I’ve heard similar claims but I haven’t seen compelling research. Do you have links you’d be willing to share?

Does this really explain the very healthy populations of countries like Japan or Spain? They're certainly not vegetarian/vegan nor do they engage in frequent fasting, as far as I know.

IMO the unhealthy countries typically have a diet consisting of sugar + processed seed oil foods which lead to endless cycle of consumption and sickness. Things like cake, donuts, cereal, most american style bread that lack not only fiber but contain high PUFA oils plus unnecessary sugar lead to a constant cycle of insulin release , eventually an endless downward cycle of: inflammation, high blood sugar, insulin release, fat storage, low blood sugar, hunger, snacking on sugar + bad oils (rinse and repeat).

If you can take one of those elements out of the cycle, you break the cycle. Those cultures stop the cycle (or more accurately, don't start it, although that's changing with time as the SAD diet takes over the globe). It's just not that sugar has to be bad, or carbohydrates are always bad, but if you were raised over-eating sugar and have PUFA related inflammation, they aren't going to help you lose weight or feel better.

At the end of the day, some people just think it's all about "calories in and calories out" but it's a rather myopic look on it. At some point we need to look at the type of calories people are consuming (starting a a young age and as they get older) and try to understand that different foods and different impacts to the body and its hormones (like insulin) and that the typical standard American diet loaded with sugar, no fiber and shitty oil (causing inflamation, which causes blood sugar spikes) are causing metabolic issues and putting a ton of people into a broken state ("metabolic syndrome").

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3821664/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24555673/

Well I am pretty sure Japan and Spain both have very high seafood consumption which according to the link in the top comment contains high amounts of copper which reduce iron absorption.It's just one factor tho. It doesn't seem to affect a majority of cancers

More accurately:

The best of all worlds as far as quality of life is fluctuating between periods of high growths & high autophagy (repair).

I agree with all your points other than:

>But no one wants to hear they should scale back protein intake to 0.5/g per kg of body weight or less. (which basically means being mostly vegetarian or vegan, with some exception)

The healthiest people I've observed anywhere eat high protein diets, but balance it with fasting.

Can vouch for this diet.

It won't make you live longer, but it will feel like it.

Sounds like a pretty crappy lifestyle to adopt without any hard evidence it'll do anything useful..

I ended up on a diet like this after getting sick. Through trial and error I ended up here. There is plenty of hard evidence but maybe not in a form that has reached the masses. Sometimes you need a profit motive to really get the message out.

> There is plenty of hard evidence

Then you should have no problem linking to it.

> But no one wants to hear they should scale back protein intake to 0.5/g per kg of body weight or less.

Is there a high incidence of cancer in body builders? Recommended protein intake for people who work out is 150g+ protein per day.

I’d imagine the common steroid use would be a bit of a confounding factor

Heart and kidney problems due to steroid (ab)use is the leading cause of early death of bodybuilders. I don't think there is much data about natural bodybuilders at old age.

After going through different diets(some were successful, some not), I just learned to listen to my body.

There is really no one diet that will work for all people. People need to learn to customize their diet for their own needs.

Last time I saw this diet being promoted for cancer prevention and/or treatment, it was based on diets given to primates in captivity. It was promoted by Dr. Axe types, which leads me to believe it isn't exactly good science. I'd genuinely love to be wrong, because if it actually worked, that would be great. I haven't seen evidence to believe it, though.

What evidence do you have for the claim that such a diet would work against cancer?

Who is Dr. Axe?

This guy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Josh_Axe

I agree, though I'm curious about your thoughts on protein. My conclusion has been that protein is overall very beneficial, but there are many people claiming we should consume more or less. I'd figure that limiting refined carbs and sugars as well as fasting would counterbalance any possible negatives of protein, but I don't actually know.

The Huberman Lab podcast recently had Dr. David Sinclair [1] and talked about food causing aging due to it's relation to mTOR. I don't remember the details that well but they covered it very well. My takeaway was if your priority is anti-aging fasting and limiting protein is better, but I personally prefer wellness and that generally means consuming higher levels of protein.

[1]https://youtu.be/n9IxomBusuw

Is this something to do to stave off cancer, or something to do to keep cancer from killing you once you have it.

If the former, yeah, I'm not paying that much attention to all of that.

If it's the latter and it will keep me from dying, yeah, I'll make some changes.

It's to stave it off.

That's pretty close to true. Meat is life, eat all you can handle. 3 days per week is enough for exercise. Bread/Pasta/Cereal, no problem. Fasting is godly - do it! Stay busy, uncomfortable, sure... eat all you want q

To play devil's advocate, are there cancers that are the exception to this rule?

Ah yes. We choose chemo instead because its the comfortable option. /s

There are lots of people who prefer heart surgery over eating food that doesn't try to kill them with heart disease.

Where I live, Hong Kong, simultaneously has the highest meat consumption in the world and the highest life expectancy.

Didn’t realize too much protein was bad. So basically a mostly fat diet with fasting and exercise.

every macro is out to kill you.

fat probavly being the least bad as long as you stick to monosaturated, saturated (not in excess) and omega3s.

yeah okay whatever, I'm sure your extreme diet is the real one that solves all problems

Well this sounds awful. What am I even supposed to eat, just fat?

Vegetables, lots of vegetables.

Isn't that going to be carbs? I mean they certainly have less carbs per unit of weight but to the extent they have calories it's mostly carbs right?

If Im exercising 5-6x a week and I can't eat much protein I need calories from somewhere.

Many vegetables actually have solid protein on a protein/calorie basis. Comparable to milk. Low net carbs is not really possible with low protein, short of chugging crisco.

Yes it is.

You're not going to get the same level of protein from kale as you would from a chicken breast. You'd eat so much kale you'd be sick.

Secondly, plant proteins have incomplete amino acid profiles and won't stimulate mtor the say protein from meat and dairy will.

No, seriously, can you name 3 foods that are low net carb and low protein?

I’m not saying people find it hard; I literally can’t think of 3 foods that are both low net-carb and low protein-per-calorie.

Olive oil & butter are the two I’ve come up with so far. Any others you can think of?

ETA: someone else suggested avocados too. Any others?

Vegetables contain a lot of fiber, the soluble kind in particular tends to lock up sugars in a goop that passes through the small intestine and makes you fart.

You can graze constantly on plain intact produce and you won't get fat.

Most veggies are high in fiber. You subtract fiber from carbs to get net-carbs.

Only things like potatoes are truly high carb.

Do herbivores have lower rates of cancer than other animals?

Vegans and vegetarians do.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3565018/

Sources?? Would love to learn more

A lot of cancers have origin in virus infections. HPVs have been proven to do so. And we have finally conquer those cancers coming from HPV with HPV vaccines. Recently, MS has also been proven to originate from Epstein-Barr virus. If we wish to bring cancer under control, research into roles of virus and perhaps bacteria (e.g.stomache ulcers) will yield better results. We already have tools to tackle these vectors very effectively. The problem now is everyone is more excited to look at the cancer growth and no the tiny microorganism that cause it.

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