You should probably try reading the article, since the entire thing deals with the science of fasting and starvation and they talk about everything from intermittent fasting to multi-week starvation diets. 72 hour fasts, alternate day fasting, and IF provide the greatest return for the least physiological cost (in that order).
To get a quick therapeutic effect of starvation, the starvation has to endure several days. During that time the patient drinks water and doesn't ingest any calories at all. There are no exact rules, but after about 4 days the therapeutic effects kick into action, and about 7 days is the maximum. After that the starvation starts to make more harm than good.
This is not easy for a normal person accustomed to a western diet, let alone for someone going through chemotherapy. For someone who already eats correctly (see my other comment in this thread) it's not such a big deal. But then again, you don't see those people on cancer wards as patients too often.
As the saying goes, the best way to beat cancer is not to get one. And for that intermittent fasting is outstanding. In practice it means you eat one or two large portions of food a day. Between the last one of today and the first one of tomorrow should be about 16 hours, give or take. This gives you constant daily beneficial effects of fasting, and once you get accustomed to it and eat the right food, it feels great.
Some recommend a couple of 4-6 days fastings a year on top of this. It's a piece of cake for someone who has practiced such eating habits for some time.
There are plenty of people on cancer wards who had perfectly healthy diets. Most of them are old, because cancer and cardiovascular disease are both primarily diseases of age. There are also cancers like brain cancer, most of which just show up because you were unlucky, not because of any environmental or genetic risk factor. Finally there are plenty of cancers that run in the family like, oh, breast cancer.
So there are tons of people on cancer wards who ate perfectly healthy diets.
Yours, with codial loathing
I also disagree with you that cancer is primarily a disease of age (or ageing). Age is a contributing factor because the longer one lives, the larger the integral of the contributing effects are. Cancer usually takes quite a long time to form and develop so bad that it starts to cause symptoms.
I agree with you that my tone was too harsh. This is a dear subject for me, and I seldom argue about it, because it's so frustrating. I really have no clue why so much hostility arises around this and dieting in general. Maybe because it's so personal and important for all of us. And so, so hard to study by changing only one variable at a time.
So sorry about my harsh tone. Didn't mean to guilt any cancer patients.
This comment makes it seem like you believe the majority, maybe even the large majority, of cancers are caused exclusively by poor diet.
"Exclusively" is a tad too strong, but other than that what you said is exactly what I believe. And it's not only a belief, it's based on research and evidence that's publicly available.
To my best knowledge cancer reasearch by and large is off tracks, and it's the aberrant metabolism of cancer cells (which has been known for decades and is not controversial, even PET scanners operate on that principle) that should be studied more. And that's highly linked to diet as well.
I'm more interested in not getting cancer in the first place, and here I believe diet is the key. I know there are many people who died of cancer and thought the same way, but then again, I operate on the logic I stated in the first paragraph. I expect more evidence starts popping up during the years and decades ahead. The results of mainstream ideology are not at all convincing, and to me it seems hard evidence supports the metabolic theory.