Copycat nutrient leaves pancreatic tumors starving, may inform cancer treatment
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
This theory seems very persuasive to me. The more research articles I read, the more they seem to confirm this theory. This article is yet another one.
My relative undergoing therapy was given the advise by the doctor to eat as much as possible during chemo treatment, to stay strong and feed the immune system. Which is completely counter to this research. I am not a doctor, but I worry!
What you’re saying is nonsense.
All major cancer centers have a department of Integrative or Complementary medicine.
Here is Stanford’s: https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-clinics/integrative-m...
And the supplements are scams, at least.
Normal medicine includes diet and exercise.
My calf atrophied substantially toward the end of treatment — enough that I was a bit worried. Almost three years later and it’s still noticeably smaller than the other. I ate a ton, and gained quite a bit of weight overall (100mg of prednisone * 5 * 6 lmao).
I never tried extended fasting before treatment. There really wasn’t time, but there’s at least one documented case out there of someone curing their lymphoma with fasting.
I’m also not a doctor, but I don’t think fasting on chemo is the play. They know about those drugs and what they do. When it’s treatment time, they calculate the drug amounts on your body surface area (you weigh in when you get there) and mix them on the spot. I’d trust what they say about those drugs, while on those drugs!
I'm not a doctor either, but it looks like there's been some promising studies regarding combining fasting and chemotherapy:
> Preclinical studies in rodents strongly support the implementation of these dietary interventions and a small number of clinical trials begin to provide encouraging results for cancer patients and cancer survivors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8190229/
And the "TLDR" graph and explanation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8190229/figure/...
Basically, the claim is that fasting makes normal cells more resistant to the chemotherapy, and cancer cells more vulnerable to the chemotherapy.
Granted thats "...in mice". But it's worth trying.
About the not eating thing: maybe you can starve the tumor, but who starves first?
But this article doesn't provide any support for the theory that fasting is effective against cancer. It says you can poison cancers with something that looks like an important chemical, but isn't. That general mechanism has long been known. (Not just against cancer - it's a fundamental way for poison to work. If you block receptors by binding them to molecules that don't function, whatever function those receptors served will stop.)
The theory behind chemotherapy is that you take a cocktail of poisons that kills everything, but that is more damaging to the cancer (because it does more cell division) than it is to the correctly-functioning parts of you.
Fasting looks like applying that theory in reverse; starvation seems likely to do more damage to you than it will to a cancer, because the cancer already draws its nutrition from you. If you stop eating, it can still do that, but you'll be getting even less than you were.
So as long as one has some body fat, and the metabolic flexibility to access it, fasting should not cause wasting, as those normal cells are not starving?
Wasting occurs in cancer patients whether they're fasting or not! The nutrients the patients need are drawn off by the cancer.
I see no reason to believe that cancer patients would experience less wasting if they stopped eating...?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-Diazo-5-oxo-L-norleucine
>> DON was tested as chemotherapeutic agent in different clinical studies, but was never approved. In 2019, DON was shown to kill tumor cells while reversing disease symptoms and improve overall survival in late-stage experimental glioblastoma in mice, when combined with calorie-restricted ketogenic diet.