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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

I am reading a bit about this. It is amazing how I keep seeing ketones, insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome in general - even more so when it comes to newer research. I got into this rabbit hole when trying to fix my own health.

There are many papers referencing glioblastoma as having a metabolic component. And incidence seems to be increasing, as would be expected if that was the case. And many cancers seem very energy hungry, so it makes sense.

Purely speculative, but now I wonder if cultures that have a tradition of fasting actually had a reason to do that, and if doing so would be a proactive approach. I am not finding studies that look specifically in glioblastoma incidence in such populations.

EDIT: There's also a counterpoint - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-017-0242-x

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If fasting truly worked, then as people starved in their final days, the cancer would slow. I don't think that's the case.

It does slow. It just... slows along with the rest of your body.

The problem with all of these pseudoscience leaps at ketogenic treatments for cancer is that they see an obvious fact - that cancer hijacks your metabolic system to fuel its own growth - and believe the solution is to kneecap that system, without also taking into account that you still need that system to keep your own organs functioning.

Without a way of controlling the metabolic system on the level of fantasy nano machines, you can only starve it to death only by starving yourself to death.

There's a ton of emerging evidence that lowering blood glucose via ketosis starves cancer cells without killing the patient. Here's a good read for you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375425/

I don't know anything about medicine, ketosis or cancer, but this author has 9 publications, including 5 as sole author.

Not a good read.

>> The VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System safety that trial enrolled 17 patients, 11 of whom were evaluated. Mean weight loss was significant, and weight loss of ≥ 10% was noted in responders (stable or improved disease) compared with nonresponders. Three patients dieted longer than 16 weeks (survival, 80–116 weeks). One of these patients was alive at 121 weeks.

Maybe you know something particular about metabolic treatments. But if this is just a structural argument from more or less first principles, I think it's structurally weak. There's no reason to assume that your body's tolerance to starvation is the same as, or poorer than, the cancer's tolerance to starvation.

For example, chemotherapy is poison, just poison that is hoped to poison the cancer much more strongly than the patient. But it always hurts the patient.

Another broader example, fevers are bad for you. But in many situations, they're worse for a pathogen that has infected you, so your body tries a fever in response to some immune observations. This is why you should generally not treat a mild fever, unlike a too-intense fever. Not medical advice, I'm not a doctor.

But maybe, unlike me, you have specific knowledge of the medical issues and you have more-specific reasons to argue that metabolic attacks can't work on cancer?

Normal fevers have no side effects and mainly cost a lot of energy, so comparing it to chemotherapy is rediculus.

>There's no reason to assume that your body's tolerance to starvation is the same as, or poorer than, the cancer's tolerance to starvation

It's not an assumption, it is knowledge based on a general understanding of how cancer functions.

Even without that knowledge, you should be able to observe that people dying of cancer eat less than is needed to sustain their bodies, and such behavior does not slow down the progression of cancer.

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