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Comment by georgecmu | Hacker News Reader

> One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells

As with everything, mileage will vary.

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

Contra: https://www.cancer.columbia.edu/news/study-finds-keto-diet-c...

“We did indeed see that the ketogenic diet suppressed tumor growth — but we also saw, surprisingly, that it promoted tumor metastasis,” says Gu. “That was really a shock to us.”

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I think there's a misunderstanding here, my fault for not being clearer. I think I should have used the phrase 'when the body enters a state of ketosis' i.e. the state you get to when fasting when your body starts burning core fat. I believe the word ketogenic refers to the type of meat heavy diet. Thanks for those links, the fact that eating a lot of meat can promote tumor metastasis does not surprise me.

There are plenty of vegetarian ketogenic diets. A ketogenic diet is one that contains very few, or no carbohydrates to maintain the ketosis - just high in fats and medium in proteins. Meat is a convenient form of food with those properties, so often people maintaining such a diet eat a lot of meat.

Ketosis occurs when your body switches from consuming glucose as its primary fuel source to consuming ketones which are generated from the breakdown of fatty acids, either from the diet or endogenous.

Almost all body tissue can run on ketones instead of on glucose, except for certain important tissues like red blood cells, 30% of the brain, retina, some kidney tissue, etc.

For the rest, your body synthesizes the glucose it needs via gluconeogenesis from some protein substrates and from glycerol backbodes from triglycerides. These inputs can be either from the diet or from your fat stores.

Fasting for a few days causes your body to enter authophagy through the inhibition of mTOR in addition to ketosis, so that could account for some of the difference.

Can you comment on the efficacy of intermittent fasting (IF) to get into ketosis? Does fasting have to be undertaken in the order of days in order to be any effective, as opposed to 16 or 18 hours per day by way of IF.

For context, I've been following IF for a couple of years. I can definitely see myself losing my resident body fat, which is encouraging. I had tried keto diet before that - I found it very difficult to sustain, especially when you're away from home or are at work. So, part of my motivation to do IF instead of keto is, well, that I can achieve some level of ketosis via IF, and without following a strict keto diet.

Dr Thomas Seyfried, the guy in the Diary of a CEO interview, stated that intermittent fasting is beneficial and achieves the desired 'cell repair' effects.

You can get into ketosis on any kind of diet or eating schedule, it mostly relies on avoiding dietary carbohydrates. If you're curious you can get ketone urine sticks, ketone breath tests and even a non-FDA-approved continuous ketone monitor (SiBio). IF can help because it gives you a long period without carbs so you're naturally getting less of them in a given period, unless you then load up on like white bread.

It's mostly a function of what you eat when you do eat.

In mice. I'm not a mouse, are you?

An oncologist I know was fond of saying that we cured mice of cancer ages ago... cancer in humans is much more complicated.

Just as an aside, as a complete rat lover and obsessed fancy rat freak, I always find it somewhat sad we could probably come up with some great drugs for them (they notoriously die very easily), just, well, who cares about rats???

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