20 ms·

Periodic fasting starves cisplatin‐resistant cancers to death

493 points by sjcsjc 8y ago

StriverGuy 8y ago
Anyone have a link without a paywall?
- astrodev 8y ago
  https://sci-hub.tw/10.15252/embj.201899815 https://sci-hub.tw/10.15252/embj.201899815
  - arisAlexis 8y ago
    I seriously seriously thank you. I have a family history of this specific cancer and wanted to read about it.
  - avbor 8y ago
    It blows my mind that the original link wants to charge 35 dollars for one day of access for this.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sandworm101 8y ago
Not much of a suprise really. It fits the model that cancer cells are weaker, that any stress to the entire body might see them die off first. That is the basis of non-targeted chemo and radiation treatment. You apply the stress and hope it kills the cancer before the patient. So here we starve the patient and see the hungry cancer cells suffer the most. But just dont go so far that the immune system suffers too. That wont end well.
- Nae3Au5x 8y ago
  In this case it also relies on the resistant cancer cells having altered metabolic pathways compared to your average cancer. It's not an universally applicable strategy. Remember, fasting didn't work out so well for Jobs.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Each cancer is different and might respond to different treatments. I was speaking very generally. This paticular cancer reacts because of its unique properties, but the principal may work on others too.
  - melling 8y ago
    Perhaps it should be tried with regular treatments? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fasting-might-boost-chemo/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fasting-might-boo...
  - eganist 8y ago
    He also made himself a fruitarian, so the stress on his body was from a lot more than just fasting. This same diet landed Ashton Kutcher in the hospital when he tried to go method for Jobs.
    - akuji1993 8y ago
      "Hm, this guy died and one highly likely reason was his diet. In order to play him correctly, I'm gonna try that diet too."
      - SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago
        Ashton Kutcher is not diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
    - ojosilva 8y ago
      Jobs was a fruitarian in the 80s or earlier, back when he named his company "Apple". AFAIK he was neither fasting or being a fruitarian to fight his cancer, but overall he was a finicky eater all his life, a (sometimes lax) vegetarian with bouts that resembled a true eating disorder.
- atrexler 8y ago
  this isn't how chemotherapy works. traditional chemo targets rapidly dividing cells in the body: cancer, hair/skin, intestinal lining cells. That's why you get those side-effects.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Targets all deviding cells, with the faster-deviding cancer cells more affected.
    - atrexler 8y ago
      right
- stephen 8y ago
  > Not much of a suprise really Not to be super contrarian, but AFAIU nutritional treatment of cancer actually is a very big surprise for traditional cancer treatment/oncologists. E.g. a podcast I listened to with Dominic D’Agostino mentioned walking through a cancer ward and most/all patients were being fed Ensure, a sugary "protein" drink (ingredient list starts with water, maltodextrin, sugar), to keep them from losing weight. Which is a valid traditional concern, but ends up supporting the cancer's glucose-based metabolism (disclaimer IANAE) vs. triggering what this article cites (for the subset of cancers that are susceptible to it).
- rsync 8y ago
  "Not much of a suprise really. It fits the model that cancer cells are weaker, that any stress to the entire body might see them die off first" I don't think that is the model ... I think the idea is that the cancer cells are a luxury that your body supports because external queues indicate that it's living in the land of plenty. Why not support the energy needs of these extraneous cells ? There's plenty to go around ... The fasting forces your body to act in a miserly fashion and like someone forced onto a budget, the extraneous luxuries are the first thing to go. It's your body that starves the cancer cells.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  It's isn't that they're weaker, they are more greedy and less eusocial. They abandon the mechanisms that keep ordinary cells as "good citizens" of the body and overconsume the available resources. In doing so, they make themselves more sensitive to the resource supply. The "good citizen" cells will put themselves into a low-energy resting state or commit apoptosis to return resources for the common good when the energy supply gets low, as the cancer cells continue selfish business as usual, perhaps by growing more blood vessels into their tumor. While fasting, many of your "good citizen" cells will stop dividing. Chemotherapy drugs or radiation treatments have greater impact on rapidly-dividing cells, like those in hair follicles, so the damage will then be more focused than ever on cancer cells, who disobey any signals to slow down, and keep dividing anyway. If you could send out a signal that says, "all cells should stay in their homes and shelter-in-place for the next 72 hours" then the cancer cells will ignore it and be the only ones out partying in the streets, and your attack helicopter drugs can be flying around, shooting at anything that moves. Then the immune cell cops can come out, and finish off the stragglers if they can. It isn't the weakness of individual cells, it's the weakness of the intercell relationships in a tumor. "Good citizen" cells will commit apoptosis on demand in order to spare cells that are more important to the whole body. Cancerous cells have generally already ignored their suicide orders, and bluffed past or warded off the macrophages, in order to continue existing. That greed can be used against the cancer. They indiscriminately consume resources, so ordering the villagers to stop drinking water until further notice, and then poisoning the well, will kill or weaken anyone that disobeys. Even just poisoning the well without the prior protective order will tend to disproportionately kill more cancer cells, just because they drink as much as they can while the other cells are taking just what they need. But when you can issue that protective order, by means of fasting, you get higher survival rates for obedient cells. If, for some reason, the cancer cells are resistant to the treatment, they will still hedonistically party themselves to death once the food is gone, as all the normal cells have either gone into brumation or killed themselves to lessen the burden.
noelwelsh 8y ago
The fasts are only a few days long, which is fairly easy to do. It's not clear to me if these results have been shown in humans or just mice. Anyway, interesting result suggesting that occasional fasts might be a good preventative measure. It would be interesting to know if 16 hour fasts, which are common in intermittent fasting, would have the same effect.
bad_user 8y ago
Fasting is great for weight loss and for lowering your insulin resistance, which is now considered by many the main cause of obesity and of course type 2 diabetes. This has been shown by studies. Some say that fasting activates "autophagy" which has great health benefits, supposedly being great for preventing the remission of cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy — but note that I could not find any concrete study or proof of it, this being anecdotal evidence from some clinics that advise their patients to do fasting instead of chemotherapy. I practice fasting for 36 hours, 3 times per week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I don't eat or drink anything other than water and coffee. You can go shorter, like one meal per day in some days or longer, e.g. 5 days is easy once you get used to it. As a tip: eating high fat, low carbs meals before fasting helps. Also if you get dizzy or if you get cramps, you probably have an electrolytes imbalance and you need to stop your fast. If that happens to you, make sure to take salt (sodium) and possibly magnesium supplements. Once I started doing that, the dizziness and the cramps stopped. But document yourself first and consulting a doctor and doing some blood work might be good ideas. This is a pretty good book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-Alternate-Day/dp/1628600012 https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-A...
- user9182031 8y ago
  It seems like every day somebody has figured out how to beat type 2 diabetes. I just read Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis who advocates a vegan lifestyle (while telling you that carbs are not the enemy) to cure diabetes.
  - teekert 8y ago
    Carbohydrates come in many forms, simple ones like sugar make your blood sugar spike and this is widely considered bad (and what leads to diabetes type 2). Complex ones take very long to digest, some can even only be digested by your microbiome, deep in your gut, those carbohydrates make for a consistent, stable, small flow of sugar to the blood. Which is considered a good thing. Try eating oats (no sugar, just yogurt and fruit for sweetening, don't get tricked into thinking honey or brown sugar is healthy sugar ;) I personally like strawberry or pomegranate but the latter is pretty expensive even in-season). Or try heavy whole wheat bread (with something like peanut-only peanut butter) and see how much longer it takes before you get hungry again, compare it to breakfast cereals or white bread. I really notice the difference. If you like sweet, try backing a cake from oats and banana (and some flour, pancakes of oat and banana are also very nice by the way), perhaps add some nuts as well. Works great for me (results of delayed hunger in the day are immediate, which is motivating). Oats are cheap, bananas generally as well.
al_ramich 8y ago
Obviously, it would be speculative given many factors that contribute to cancer like healthy eating, drinking, smoking... but it is interesting that in the top 50 countries with the highest rate of cancer, there are no Muslim countries. Fasting could be a factor that contributes to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cancer_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cancer_ra...
- jinder 8y ago
  Perhaps - but it's mostly rich countries on that list. If you die of malnutrition, preventable disease etc you might not live long enough to die of cancer.
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    But there are many absurdly wealthy Muslim countries.
    - RandallBrown 8y ago
      But is the whole country absurdly wealthy? A rich ruling class might not be large enough to offset the numbers.
      - carlmr 8y ago
        In the cases I can think of the whole country is rich, but they have a large number of slave-workers. Not sure if the slave-workers are counted in their health statistics or just seen as property anyway.
        baud147258 8y ago
        Or the slave-worker are foreigner, from Philipines or India, so are not counted in the national health statistics
        8y ago
camelNotation 8y ago
Rewritten for normal people: Cancer sometimes becomes resistant to chemotherapy, but we did a study that shows a certain type of lung cancer is highly dependent on a certain amino acid and when you fast intermittently it deprives the cancer of that amino acid and causes the cancer cells to die.
- atrexler 8y ago
  Well, to be precise- this study shows no evidence of a fasting effect. they show if you starve cells in a dish in a way that might mimic what happens when you fast, you can kill the cells. I didn't see any mention of even mouse studies in there, so I don't know what their in vivo model was but it mostly looks like cell culture to me (apologies if I've missed that). Extrapolating that to humans is extremely hard. For sure a promising result but its pretty preliminary.
  - randcraw 8y ago
    The Guidi and Longo paper isn't a study at all. They're summarizing the work of Obrist et al, 2018: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29875130 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29875130 Apparently efforts similar to these go back to at least six years. "Metabolic reprogramming: A new paradigm for targeting cisplatin resistant cells" describes a recurring research program that began in 2012 which seeks to impede cancer via restraining oxidative metabolism, though I think their method of blocking cancer cell metabolism may be more selective than starving ALL of the patient's cells. http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/IK2-BX001289-03 http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/IK2-BX001289-03
- varunpant 8y ago
  Fast for how long ? Few days a week ?
  - atrexler 8y ago
    I've no idea about the fasting stuff. Just thought its important to make clear this particular study is all about doing stuff to cells or lumps of cells in dishes (again sorry if I missed more involved model system in the paper). Whether thats a good model for cancer in people and how fasting interacts with that I honestly have no idea.
peter_retief 8y ago
There is a lot of evidence that high fat low carbohydrate diets, also know as fasting diets have enormous health benefits, completely at odds with the dietary recommendation here https://www.choosemyplate.gov/dietary-guidelines https://www.choosemyplate.gov/dietary-guidelines is one of the drivers of obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome which in includes heart disease and high blood pressure
- cageface 8y ago
  Calorie restrictions in general are healthy. You can accomplish the same things with high carb diets provided you eat unprocessed complex carbs and reduce total calories.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Studies show that calorie restriction and fasting are actually different - during calorie restriction your body reduces energy consumption and metabolism, and while you can lose weight, it's proven hard to stick to and most people put that weight back on. Fasting OTOH actually increases your metabolic rate [1], stimulates HGH production [4, 5], your brain switches to primarily consuming ketones instead of glucose and your body begins consuming damaged proteins via autophagy. Interestingly enough, studies show weight lost during fasting is better kept off than the equivalent loss with calorie restriction. Your body also resets what it considers 'low' levels of insulin, leptin, etc which can reverse Type II [2, 3]. That can't happen as effectively if you eat. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10837292 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10837292 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15640462 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15640462 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16051710 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16051710 [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1548337 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1548337 [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3127426 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3127426
    - cageface 8y ago
      Yeah I understand that they are different but it's also true that restricting calories overall and losing weight is beneficial no matter what diet you use to do it. So the question is which of the many diets that can do this is the best for your long term health.
13years 8y ago
Fasting also seems to be protective to your health cells from being damaged. https://news.usc.edu/118758/fasting-during-chemotherapy-may-offset-spikes-in-blood-sugar-caused-by-cancer-fighting-drugs/ https://news.usc.edu/118758/fasting-during-chemotherapy-may-...
buzzdenver 8y ago
Is fasting supposed to work just due to going into a caloric hole, or is there also a time component to it? In other words: does a 6 hour run/hike on an empty stomach where I burn 4000 Calories have the same effect as fasting for 36 hours?
- rsync 8y ago
  This is a good question - and it is not exactly the same question as "how long should I fast". You're trying to put your body in a state where it no longer has the resources to support extraneous energy consumers so a too-short fast will not work if you don't cross that threshold of bodily parsimony. I personally would hope that 16 hour IF-style fasts would be enough (because that's what I typically do), but I bet they're not ... But my parents question is a bit different: can one speed up the clock on the fast by burning through a lot of bodily resources through physical work. I suspect the answer is yes, to a degree - but I'll bet cancer cells are not in the same category of energy consumers as your muscles are - I'll bet there is a reserve of energy for them that doesn't get touched for a while, even if you do the big hike. It would be nice if there were some kind of threshold indicator that you could test for to see when your body as in a state of parsimony with regard to cancer cells ...
  - 738472527784 8y ago
    A nightly fasting window of at least 13h has been shown to reduce recurrence of breast cancer in women.
- yazaddaruvala 8y ago
  Disclaimer: This is all speculation based on anecdata from the internets. Noone really knows if/why IF helps. Its not exactly the same. One is caloric restriction, and the other is caloric exhaustion. If your entire body worked as a single unit it might be that simple, but: 1. IF helps cull gut-bacteria which can only survive on simple foods. e.g. Bacteria which are inefficient and would happily produce toxins because it knows with enough of its simple foods it can outlive other populations and its own toxins. 2. IF helps turn off the digestive system. When this happens your stomach will stop "growling", and you will feel energetic even tho you haven't eated food for 16+ hours. Allowing the digestive system to relax, and flush/hopefully clean itself up, and won't happen because you went for a run. 3. Senesent/Cancerous cells may still be starved by exhausting all calories quickly, but it really depends on how those cells die(it might just take time), and how the body allocates resources. You can imagine a tumor sitting on a major blood vessel will continue to eat before any muscles are. The only way to starve it is to not eat. All that said, exercise is always good. Just be careful. Try to do it in the first half rather than the second half of your fast. Fainting is never good.
aviv 8y ago
Do I get back the 3,000 HN Karma points I lost to downvotes after years of suggesting fasting as a viable treatment for a whole host of "diseases"? One day people will see it as obvious as "smoking is bad for you". One day.
- mirceal 8y ago
  Why do you care about karma so much? Express your opinion and forget about “internet points”.
  - 1996 8y ago
    Because you want to join in the conversation, and with lower amounts of magical points you get more often messages telling you to "slow down" AFTER you have carefully written a message in 5 to to 10 minutes. This is infuriating when english is not your native language and writing understandable language is slow, especially to communicate complex thought that may be not evident. Due to my unpopular opinions about how some countries and companies are often targetted in US media, even on unrelated articles, this happens to me. I like taking breaks on HN, but the more it happens, the more I am going to other places instead. This is not about being true or being right - just whether your conversation is following the mainstream opinion or not. If later it proves to be right? Too bad for you. This is the case on most forums with up and downvoting, and it forces dissent out. I am interested in conversation for learning and sharing. The post I read the more carefully are greyed out or dead. Most are ads or crankpots, but in 1% of the time I get gems. Sinple example: would you have preferred to learn about intermittent fasting now, or 5 years ago? Me: 5 years ago, but too many downvotes may have pushed out of the community people like the parent poster.
    - LinuxBender 8y ago
      I find it useful to take notes on discussions that seem illogical, unscientific, dogmatic, etc. Later on, one can always post their counter arguments on github [1] or their own site [2] where it won't be grey text. You could even start your own forum, where you can set the guidelines. [1] - https://github.com/ https://github.com/ [2] - http://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/ Not my sites, just an example. You can make the text as big, bold and readable as you wish. I prefer really simple stylesheets.
IB885588 8y ago
For those interested in intermittent fasting, Valter Longo, the co-author of this paper, has done a few good interviews with Rhonda Patrick on her podcast and youtube: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo-2 https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo-2 I've quite enjoyed Rhonda's work. Another good medical/biology/health podcast that recently appeared and that I'd enjoying a lot is Peter Attia's podcast. His interview with Dom D'Agostino is particularly good and includes discussion of the metabolic theory of cancer, but they're all good (he has one with Rhonda Patrick). He covers intermittent fasting among other things (also the health impacts/use of ketones, etc): https://peterattiamd.com/domdagostino/ https://peterattiamd.com/domdagostino/ https://peterattiamd.com/rhondapatrick/ https://peterattiamd.com/rhondapatrick/
- sjcsjc 8y ago
  You might also want to look at Mark Mattson's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mattson#Intermittent_Fasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mattson#Intermittent_Fast...
mbroshi 8y ago
Somewhat perpendicular, but intermittent fasting has been a great recent lifehack for me. I skip breakfast every day, and sometimes skip lunch. Gives me back at least an hour every day. And gorging for dinner is a lot of fun.
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  Skipping lunches is also a good method of spending less time at work and more time outside enjoying life. I only take 15 minutes noon breaks now.
  - elyobo 8y ago
    I eat lunch and it still only takes 15 minutes :D
    - antoineMoPa 8y ago
      Either way, that's fast ;)
- rc_bhg 8y ago
  That is not a healthy diet. You should be eating smaller meal more often. If you are going to fast, do it for at least a 24 hour period.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    Eating more deals in a day (whether small or large) = more insulin spikes throughout the day = less of a chance to heal your insulin resistance.
  - laiden_swallow 8y ago
    I mean intermittent fasting where you fast for ~16 hours and then eat larger meals during the remaining 8 is pretty popular.
  - mirceal 8y ago
    I think it’s worth considering what a healthy diet really is. Is it really healthy or are we just used to thinking it’s healthy? As an example, a diet high in fat is generally considered by most people to be unhealthy. You see people doing Keto and you start wondering if it’s really unhealthy. Eating red meat is considered to be the unhealthy. You see people doing ZeroCarb diets and they (at least) look extremely good/healthy. Fasting is generally considered unhealthy. You have people doing intermittent fasting, ADF or extended fasting at it works exceptionally well for them. Vegan? It works really well for some people. IMHO there isn’t one thing that works for everyone as far as diet goes. There are also the theoretical and the practical aspects of what we eat and when we it it. I think everyone should try different things and figure out something that works for them, long term. It should not be a “diet”. It should be just something that blends into your lifestyle and gives you results for the investment you’re making.
bitL 8y ago
So, how long should we fast? I was thinking about doing 24h fasts every Friday instead of 3-day fasts every two months. Which one would be better from the article's point of view (as a preventive measure)?
- ldiracdelta 8y ago
  How long does the article suggest? I can't read the whole thing.
- hackermailman 8y ago
  There's many articles on the University of Southern California site https://news.usc.edu/?s=fasting https://news.usc.edu/?s=fasting most have been posted here over time. Like the fasting mimicking diets they came up with https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-to-slow-aging/ https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-... That later turned into a startup https://prolonfmd.com/ https://prolonfmd.com/ of 5 day fasting at different monthly intervals depending on your weight, but you can read the orig paper to see what the calorie restrictions were and just make/measure your own food.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
For many months last year I would do a 5 day water fast the third week of every month. I enjoyed it but my mental performance at work suffered during the end of the fast. I've been intermittent fasting for the last 2 months. I eat breakfast around 7:30 (protein shake I make at home with some healthy things tossed in), eat an orange or apple around 10AM, a large salad I make at work without any dressing at noonish, and a handful of cashews and almonds at 2:00PM. That's it. Nothing after that. I'll drink some unsweetened herbal tea or a carbonated water around 7pm sometimes when I'm winding down. It's by far the best diet I've ever been on. It's hard sometimes when work events offer food/drinks after my eating window closes but not that hard. If I have to do work drinks I'll do a vodka soda to minimize my caloric intake. Now I walk around at the weight that I wrestled at in college, I don't feel hungry often, and I feel great during the day. I'm trying to get my family to try it for a few weeks to spur a lifestyle / eating change but it's been difficult. Most people are locked into the three meals a day (and likely a few snacks) mindset.
- alex_hitchins 8y ago
  > If I have to do work drinks... No one should ever feel forced to imbibe. I'm guessing you know that and don't want to preach or nanny, but wanted to mention it just in case.
  - w0utert 8y ago
    On the other hand, I also feel that it doesn't hurt to if you deviate from your own rules sometimes, instead of being all fundamentalist about it. I try to live by a whole set of self-imposed rules because I think they are beneficial to my health and well-being, but for me these are not dogma's. By default, I don't drink during weekdays for example, but if there's a special occasion once or twice a month, I don't feel guilty deviating and/or making up for it some other day. As long as you feel comfortable with it yourself.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      Generally I agree with your sentiments as stated, but it's becoming increasingly clear that any amount of alcohol consumption is carcinogenic due to the acetaldehyde it produces. Basically drinking is joining smoking, and I don't think it's particularly smart to occasionally smoke a cigarette. After reading this [1] I hugely cut down on my alcohol consumption. I'd prefer to never drink, but my current social circle doesn't seem to operate as a group without involving alcohol. "I quickly discovered that way back in 1988, the World Health Organization declared alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning that it’s been proved to cause cancer. There is no known safe dosage in humans, according to the WHO. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, but it kills more women from breast cancer than from any other. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that for every drink consumed daily, the risk of breast cancer goes up 7 percent." - [1] [1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-give-me-breast-cancer/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-gi...
alokitr 8y ago
I adhere to a eat nothing diet. Then after I have starved, I am awakened and I gouge myself to death. The cycle then restarts. The powers that be make sure I don't die cause who's gonna do a quickening on the highlander if I do ?
supernova87a 8y ago
Look, stop applying pseudo-science "feels-right" intuition to things that involve complicated cellular mechanisms. It doesn't work that way and you should just listen to what your doctor(s) tell you and trust them + your own due diligence. Fasting doesn't "starve" cancer cells. Drinking only juice for a week doesn't "cleanse" your body. Stop making up your own medical diagnoses fueled by internet bullshit. Listen to experts and trust them for a change.
- triviatise 8y ago
  most doctors get little to no nutritional education. It is easy to learn about any one topic and know more than your physician. Especially since most physicians dont regularly read journal articles and probably dont even really understand statistics. Appeals to authority are a logical fallacy. I do agree that reading something on the internet and following it is a bad practice.
- elihu 8y ago
  For what it's worth, the non-paywalled blurb seems to be saying something more specific than "fasting kills cancer", it's saying that cancers that develop resistance to cisplatin are more susceptible to fasting than cancers that aren't. So, even if cisplatin doesn't work directly, cisplatin-resistance has a beneficial side-effect that one might be able to exploit. (This point seems to have been buried under the many posts expressing an opinion or anecdote about fasting in general.)
- sjcsjc 8y ago
  I believe that in this case the term starve might actually be accurate: "... the inability of ketone bodies metabolization due to various deficiencies in mitochondrial enzymes is the major metabolic changes discovered in malignant cells" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5450454/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5450454/
rainbowmverse 8y ago
The main thing I got out of this thread is that everyone thinks they know the right way to health, that everyone else disagrees with them, and I have no idea how to tell who's actually right. If you want to know why there's a health problem in some developed countries, the confidence of all the factions in the back and forth in this thread is a shining example. Unless you can afford professional guidance (and know how to tell if they know what they're talking about), you don't have much hope unless you stumble on to something that works for you.
- falcolas 8y ago
  Or the huge reliance on personal anecdote and web sites/studies that agree with those anecdotes. It's stunning how quickly the dialog shifts from reasoned arguments about programming to "I'm right and you're wrong" in nutritional articles.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    Personally, I find a collection of anecdotal data (ideally from a wide variety of people) is worth much more to me than these studies that just report average results that apply to the average person/animal/cell in their sample. The average person/animal/cell doesn't exist, and focusing on that has been a huge mistake in my opinion.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      How would you approach trying to determine a good approach to healthy eating for most people then? Even breaking it down into 27 different groups requires an average of each particular group.
      - falcolas 8y ago
        I'd expand that a bit - how can you find a good approach for anybody based solely off anecdotes? Finding someone with a similar age, height, weight, race, ancestry, metabolism, activity level, sleep level, gut flora, etc. to take advice from would be nearly impossible. A dozen "it worked for me" stories without any form of control is effectively useless.
farresito 8y ago
Anyone doing weight lifting has any experience with fasting? I'm not so interested in doing weight lifting while fasting (doesn't sound too good) as in the muscle gain/loss after a fast.
- cvaidya1986 8y ago
  Look up fasting effect on HGH
- theatraine 8y ago
  Time restricted eating is probably the most compatible with weight lifting. Personally I'm interested in longer fasts but I'm under my goal weight. I would also be interested in more research about how to gain muscle while fasting.
- plausibilities 8y ago
  Me. I currently maintain a 2.3x bodyweight deadlift and 1.5x bench press while working a relatively tame & laid-back salaried dev job. Can't do IF (multi-day, anyways) without losing lean mass anymore. Used to be able to until I started plateauing on my lifts. My guess is as you gain more and more lean muscle mass, there's some arbitrary threshold (which differs person to person) at which your TDEE begins to exceed viable intake within a limited timeframe. I specify "viable intake" because your body's nutrient uptake rate per hour has some given limit - anything over that limit usually just gets pooped out later. Restricting timeframe for eating during the day (break my fast after work) seems to work out okay though.
Skrillex 8y ago
Off-topic: Articles like this, and most others that deal with health and medicine, present a problem for me that is somewhat hard to describe. The research for this one appears to be built upon prior research (which is hopefully validated with these findings) and the two headliners appear to have some credentials, so let us skip the question of whether or not the reporting itself can be trusted, as that is not what this is about. The first thing that I notice is that the trials mentioned in the article do not seem capable of proving the claim made in the title, but let us assume that they instead ran a trial involving humans fasting (which could be incited by a study like this) and had the same results. I would like to believe that this is a breakthrough, but how is it to be reconciled with the other 400 breakthroughs we find for various cancers each month? If even a small percentage of them were as valuable as they are expressed to be (and we ignore the contradicting evidence), I would expect cancer, diabetes, and obesity (at least!) to be solved problems by now. I suppose that what I am saying is that with there being so much FUD and so many actual unknowns about what determines the well-being of humans that I find most studies to be hard to believe, especially without being able to test most of it myself. It might be a given that nothing you read can be fully trusted, but it is becoming difficult for me to trust at all, and that is without even considering the fact that some people are reporting findings for studies that never happened. It seems to me that the two most common strategies are to either believe one thing and reject all new information that contradicts it, or to believe most of the new information. Overall, I am left feeling hopeful that the people to who articles like this would make the greatest difference to have found a logical and efficient way to handle this sort of situation. Any thoughts?
barking 8y ago
In Gaelic the words for Wednesday mean "First Fast day", those for Thursday "day between fasts" and for Friday "Fast day". So the 5:2 diet is nothing new.
kolbe 8y ago
I thought this applied to all diets that induce ketogenesis.
abledon 8y ago
Combine that with 30s+ mayurasana for a total intestinal workout. (Work towards 5 minutes)
yogiwannabe 8y ago
Here is ancient wisdom on this: https://youtu.be/tkuF1VmLoRs https://youtu.be/tkuF1VmLoRs If you are looking for scientific data, you will not got any but WISDOM, a plenty :-). This is from an Enlightened Living Master.
olivermarks 8y ago
Not happy with the certainty of the headline. A very close friend of mine who died of cancer chose dietary treatment over western medicine, and had a very grueling, unpleasant death in a remote place.
hinkley 8y ago
This reminds me of a paper maybe ten years back where they found that normal cells go into a holding pattern (I hesitate to use the word hibernation) when resources are scarce, but cancer cells do not. Because healthy cells are less active, they take less damage from chemo. So they were looking at intermittent fasting before chemo to reduce the collateral damage.
dagoat 8y ago
Non pay walled: http://sci-hub.tw/http://emboj.embopress.org/content/early/2018/06/06/embj.201899815# http://sci-hub.tw/http://emboj.embopress.org/content/early/2... highlight: A549 CDDP-resistant cancer cells showed reduced tumor growth and longer survival in response to periodic fasting cycles (24 hours of water only twice a week). In contrast, CDDP-sensitive tumors were not affected by these 24-hour fasting cycles. Because previous results indicated that 2–3 consecutive days of fasting were effective against a wide range of cancers, particularly in combination with chemotherapy (Lee et al, 2012; Bianchi et al, 2015), it would be important to test these longer fasting periods on A549 and other CDDP-resistant cancer
- brfox 8y ago
  That paper is a mini review of this paper which actually has the data in it: http://emboj.embopress.org/content/37/14/e98597 http://emboj.embopress.org/content/37/14/e98597 In there, they did work on A549 cell lines and showed that removing nutrients from the media decreased their growth rate. They also showed that putting these human cell lines into immune deficient mice and doing a couple 24hr fasts per week had a small (p=0.03) effect on the tumor growth rate (Fig 2). But in the in vivo study, it appears they didn't directly compare A549 vs cisplatin resistant A549 - they seemed to have run 2 studies both vs control. There are literally thousands of papers showing drugs or treatments which can cure lab mice of "cancer" and many more which can kill cell lines in vivo, but only a tiny percentage of those work in patients. There is a reason this is not in a higher profile journal.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
Most intermittent fasting works on a 1-3 day fasting schedule. It doesn't really work for me, maybe because of decision fatigue, maybe I just lack the discipline. Currently I try to loose weight by shooting for two weeks fasting, one week not. About 10kg gone, 40 left to go.
vstuart 8y ago
Very interesting! I (female; 57 y.o.) have been doing an intermittent fast (2 days/week: typically Tue/Thu) for >2.5 years now. I picked those days as they don't interfere with social events, weekends, long weekends. I initially did 500 calories on those days, but for more than a year now I simply don't eat at all on those days (but I drink coffee, tea). I find that much easier, as the hunger pangs are largely absent. Benefits from this fasting include an epigenetic reprogramming (perhaps?) of some stem cells, as from the outset I've seen a few of the very few gray hairs that I have revert back to brown (white further out; brown more recently to root). That could be triggered (or entirely due to) e.g. by autophagy of the old, weakened cells and their replacement by rejuvenated cells. Interesting, nonetheless. Body weight is stabilized around the new metabolic set point (I record this daily in a tab-delimited file, that I can easily plot with a simple linux command (alias gp='echo "gnuplot -p /mnt/Vancouver/Programming/scripts/gnuplot/plot.gp')! On non-diet days I eat whatever I want (I ashould add, pretty sensible: mostly home-made food, meals), ad libitum. ;-) Plot: https://imgur.com/a/e3ahbtQ https://imgur.com/a/e3ahbtQ
- andreareina 8y ago
  Good progress! I understand blurring the y-axis, though I'm curious about how large those up/down swings are. Have you considered using an exponentially-weighted average to smooth out the noise in the measurements? It's just $ f(x_n) = f(x_{n-1}) * (1 - alpha) + x_n * alpha , f(x_0) = x_0 $ where 0 < alpha < 1 (lower values give a smoother graph but lags more) Here's a quick sketch of how to do it in gnuplot without having to preprocess the data: # Getting previous values via https://stackoverflow.com/a/25753509/5921362 alpha = 0.1 prev = 0 shift(x) = (prev = x) ewma(prev, cur) = shift(prev * (1 - alpha) + cur * alpha) plot data using 1:2 with p,\ data using 1:(prev < 1 ? shift($2) : ewma(prev, $2)) with l
  - vstuart 8y ago
    Since I'm really not that careful during non-diet days (some foods such as home-made chicken pot pies or pizzas etc.) can result in "significant" gains (2-3%) and other items my gf sometimes brings over (potato chips; ice cream; ...). Short answer: that week-to-week swing ranges ~4.5% of overall body weight. I try to limit (within reason) processed synthetic fake foods like margarine, Canola (lifeless, NaOH/heat-treated, hexane-extracted, bleached, deoderized "food") in favor of known-sourced, i.e. non-fake EVOO (look for the oleocanthal-induced burn at the back of the throat: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110118180514.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110118180514.ht...), butter, etc. I make my own bread, yogurt -- again for control of what goes into them. But overall, not obsessed with any of that. I like to keep it simple; those preparations take minutes not hours ... :-p * [How It's Made - Canola Oil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omjWmLG0EAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omjWmLG0EAs) Detrimental health effects: * [Canola oil linked to worsened memory and learning ability in Alzheimer's](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171207141624.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171207141624.h...) * [Effect of canola oil consumption on memory, synapse and neuropathology in the triple transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17373-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17373-3) Edit: thank you for the plotting comments (I heart these: I love all things tech, programmatic, bio*); I just wanted a quick way to see my overall progress over time. I enter my morning weight (digital scale) daily, and occasionally plot it (Ctrl-Alt-T shortcut to terminal; "gp" bashrc alias to run that plot command, "qq" to quit the terminal). ;-)
deleted 8y ago
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diogenescynic 8y ago
People without cancer already don’t eat, or hardly as they often lose their appetite due to cancer treatments. Why is that different than this?
deleted 8y ago
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barftransit 8y ago
"I've found that I feel so good when I fast and I don't know why, but please listen to me about myself" - HN
fredliu 8y ago
There's a documentary: The Science of Fasting ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1b08X-GvRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1b08X-GvRs) which talks about fascinating effects of fasting therapy, and interesting effects of fasting on cancer treatment. Looks like it's inline with what's discussed here and in the comment section. On the flip side, I feel like fasting has the potential of becoming the new "meditation", but with more potential danger than just an over-hyped hip practice.
malbs 8y ago
so I just completed 4 months of fasting (I had a friendly wager going, where I had to lose 15kg in 16 weeks, or pay $2000) I did it via intermittent fasting (no breakfast, or lunch, black coffee/water only, and a normal dinner) Chart: https://imgur.com/a/rzckgMi https://imgur.com/a/rzckgMi Basic routine was this Monday, fast, overhead press at gym Tuesday, normal eating, deadlifts Wednesday, fast, rowing/kettlebells Thursday, normal eating, bench press Friday, normal eating, squats Saturday, fast, cardio/hiit Sunday, normal eating came in under the target (needed 15kg, ended up losing 18kg) and won myself $2000 because the guy I had the wager with didn't hit his target. Fasting really works, it doesn't cost you anything, and you save money.
- FieryTransition 8y ago
  Do you have any data on your muscle mass or lean body mass? Did you have a gain or loss in muscle mass? Or was it the same? thanks.
runeks 8y ago
For someone with access to the article: what was the duration and frequency of the fasting that was shown to cure certain cancer types?
sigvirt 8y ago
To feed everyone's inquiry/discussion of diet, nutrition, and western disease (though not fasting per se): two particular researchers/authors had much mindshare and influence in Bay Area circles a decade ago. They've not been mentioned on HN in several years, so this will bring forward and tie in the references and discussions for newcomers. The China Study - by T. Colin Campbell : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Colin_Campbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Colin_Campbell In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - by Michael Pollan : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan The China Study is notably a retrospective of primary research on diet, nutrition, and disease spanning nearly a century. There are many breadcrumbs for further reading. Campbell was a top-tier government/academic researcher for several decades. The summary conclusion is that western diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer, heart ...) are strongly correlated with increased ratio of animal product consumption, especially in presence of environmental toxins - a binary poison cocktail one might say. Genetics are a factor, he says, but not so pervasively as the other two. Michael Pollan is iconically known for the phrase, "Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much". A prolific author and journalist, he is on about many of the same things Campbell is: cautioning about a) over-reliance on reductive analysis of food nutrient components, and about b) over-indulgence in foodstuffs that passed through some industrial process on way from earth to earthling. Edit: formatting

493 points by sjcsjc 8y ago

StriverGuy 8y ago

Anyone have a link without a paywall?

astrodev 8y ago
https://sci-hub.tw/10.15252/embj.201899815 https://sci-hub.tw/10.15252/embj.201899815
- arisAlexis 8y ago
  I seriously seriously thank you. I have a family history of this specific cancer and wanted to read about it.
- avbor 8y ago
  It blows my mind that the original link wants to charge 35 dollars for one day of access for this.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sandworm101 8y ago

Not much of a suprise really. It fits the model that cancer cells are weaker, that any stress to the entire body might see them die off first. That is the basis of non-targeted chemo and radiation treatment. You apply the stress and hope it kills the cancer before the patient. So here we starve the patient and see the hungry cancer cells suffer the most. But just dont go so far that the immune system suffers too. That wont end well.

Nae3Au5x 8y ago
In this case it also relies on the resistant cancer cells having altered metabolic pathways compared to your average cancer. It's not an universally applicable strategy. Remember, fasting didn't work out so well for Jobs.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Each cancer is different and might respond to different treatments. I was speaking very generally. This paticular cancer reacts because of its unique properties, but the principal may work on others too.
- melling 8y ago
  Perhaps it should be tried with regular treatments? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fasting-might-boost-chemo/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fasting-might-boo...
- eganist 8y ago
  He also made himself a fruitarian, so the stress on his body was from a lot more than just fasting. This same diet landed Ashton Kutcher in the hospital when he tried to go method for Jobs.
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    "Hm, this guy died and one highly likely reason was his diet. In order to play him correctly, I'm gonna try that diet too."
    - SaulOfTheJungle 8y ago
      Ashton Kutcher is not diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
  - ojosilva 8y ago
    Jobs was a fruitarian in the 80s or earlier, back when he named his company "Apple". AFAIK he was neither fasting or being a fruitarian to fight his cancer, but overall he was a finicky eater all his life, a (sometimes lax) vegetarian with bouts that resembled a true eating disorder.
atrexler 8y ago
this isn't how chemotherapy works. traditional chemo targets rapidly dividing cells in the body: cancer, hair/skin, intestinal lining cells. That's why you get those side-effects.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Targets all deviding cells, with the faster-deviding cancer cells more affected.
  - atrexler 8y ago
    right
stephen 8y ago
> Not much of a suprise really Not to be super contrarian, but AFAIU nutritional treatment of cancer actually is a very big surprise for traditional cancer treatment/oncologists. E.g. a podcast I listened to with Dominic D’Agostino mentioned walking through a cancer ward and most/all patients were being fed Ensure, a sugary "protein" drink (ingredient list starts with water, maltodextrin, sugar), to keep them from losing weight. Which is a valid traditional concern, but ends up supporting the cancer's glucose-based metabolism (disclaimer IANAE) vs. triggering what this article cites (for the subset of cancers that are susceptible to it).
rsync 8y ago
"Not much of a suprise really. It fits the model that cancer cells are weaker, that any stress to the entire body might see them die off first" I don't think that is the model ... I think the idea is that the cancer cells are a luxury that your body supports because external queues indicate that it's living in the land of plenty. Why not support the energy needs of these extraneous cells ? There's plenty to go around ... The fasting forces your body to act in a miserly fashion and like someone forced onto a budget, the extraneous luxuries are the first thing to go. It's your body that starves the cancer cells.
logfromblammo 8y ago
It's isn't that they're weaker, they are more greedy and less eusocial. They abandon the mechanisms that keep ordinary cells as "good citizens" of the body and overconsume the available resources. In doing so, they make themselves more sensitive to the resource supply. The "good citizen" cells will put themselves into a low-energy resting state or commit apoptosis to return resources for the common good when the energy supply gets low, as the cancer cells continue selfish business as usual, perhaps by growing more blood vessels into their tumor. While fasting, many of your "good citizen" cells will stop dividing. Chemotherapy drugs or radiation treatments have greater impact on rapidly-dividing cells, like those in hair follicles, so the damage will then be more focused than ever on cancer cells, who disobey any signals to slow down, and keep dividing anyway. If you could send out a signal that says, "all cells should stay in their homes and shelter-in-place for the next 72 hours" then the cancer cells will ignore it and be the only ones out partying in the streets, and your attack helicopter drugs can be flying around, shooting at anything that moves. Then the immune cell cops can come out, and finish off the stragglers if they can. It isn't the weakness of individual cells, it's the weakness of the intercell relationships in a tumor. "Good citizen" cells will commit apoptosis on demand in order to spare cells that are more important to the whole body. Cancerous cells have generally already ignored their suicide orders, and bluffed past or warded off the macrophages, in order to continue existing. That greed can be used against the cancer. They indiscriminately consume resources, so ordering the villagers to stop drinking water until further notice, and then poisoning the well, will kill or weaken anyone that disobeys. Even just poisoning the well without the prior protective order will tend to disproportionately kill more cancer cells, just because they drink as much as they can while the other cells are taking just what they need. But when you can issue that protective order, by means of fasting, you get higher survival rates for obedient cells. If, for some reason, the cancer cells are resistant to the treatment, they will still hedonistically party themselves to death once the food is gone, as all the normal cells have either gone into brumation or killed themselves to lessen the burden.

noelwelsh 8y ago

The fasts are only a few days long, which is fairly easy to do. It's not clear to me if these results have been shown in humans or just mice. Anyway, interesting result suggesting that occasional fasts might be a good preventative measure. It would be interesting to know if 16 hour fasts, which are common in intermittent fasting, would have the same effect.

bad_user 8y ago

Fasting is great for weight loss and for lowering your insulin resistance, which is now considered by many the main cause of obesity and of course type 2 diabetes. This has been shown by studies. Some say that fasting activates "autophagy" which has great health benefits, supposedly being great for preventing the remission of cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy — but note that I could not find any concrete study or proof of it, this being anecdotal evidence from some clinics that advise their patients to do fasting instead of chemotherapy. I practice fasting for 36 hours, 3 times per week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I don't eat or drink anything other than water and coffee. You can go shorter, like one meal per day in some days or longer, e.g. 5 days is easy once you get used to it. As a tip: eating high fat, low carbs meals before fasting helps. Also if you get dizzy or if you get cramps, you probably have an electrolytes imbalance and you need to stop your fast. If that happens to you, make sure to take salt (sodium) and possibly magnesium supplements. Once I started doing that, the dizziness and the cramps stopped. But document yourself first and consulting a doctor and doing some blood work might be good ideas. This is a pretty good book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-Alternate-Day/dp/1628600012 https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-A...

user9182031 8y ago
It seems like every day somebody has figured out how to beat type 2 diabetes. I just read Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis who advocates a vegan lifestyle (while telling you that carbs are not the enemy) to cure diabetes.
- teekert 8y ago
  Carbohydrates come in many forms, simple ones like sugar make your blood sugar spike and this is widely considered bad (and what leads to diabetes type 2). Complex ones take very long to digest, some can even only be digested by your microbiome, deep in your gut, those carbohydrates make for a consistent, stable, small flow of sugar to the blood. Which is considered a good thing. Try eating oats (no sugar, just yogurt and fruit for sweetening, don't get tricked into thinking honey or brown sugar is healthy sugar ;) I personally like strawberry or pomegranate but the latter is pretty expensive even in-season). Or try heavy whole wheat bread (with something like peanut-only peanut butter) and see how much longer it takes before you get hungry again, compare it to breakfast cereals or white bread. I really notice the difference. If you like sweet, try backing a cake from oats and banana (and some flour, pancakes of oat and banana are also very nice by the way), perhaps add some nuts as well. Works great for me (results of delayed hunger in the day are immediate, which is motivating). Oats are cheap, bananas generally as well.

al_ramich 8y ago

Obviously, it would be speculative given many factors that contribute to cancer like healthy eating, drinking, smoking... but it is interesting that in the top 50 countries with the highest rate of cancer, there are no Muslim countries. Fasting could be a factor that contributes to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cancer_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cancer_ra...

jinder 8y ago
Perhaps - but it's mostly rich countries on that list. If you die of malnutrition, preventable disease etc you might not live long enough to die of cancer.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  But there are many absurdly wealthy Muslim countries.
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    But is the whole country absurdly wealthy? A rich ruling class might not be large enough to offset the numbers.
    - carlmr 8y ago
      In the cases I can think of the whole country is rich, but they have a large number of slave-workers. Not sure if the slave-workers are counted in their health statistics or just seen as property anyway.
      - baud147258 8y ago
        Or the slave-worker are foreigner, from Philipines or India, so are not counted in the national health statistics
        8y ago

camelNotation 8y ago

Rewritten for normal people: Cancer sometimes becomes resistant to chemotherapy, but we did a study that shows a certain type of lung cancer is highly dependent on a certain amino acid and when you fast intermittently it deprives the cancer of that amino acid and causes the cancer cells to die.

atrexler 8y ago
Well, to be precise- this study shows no evidence of a fasting effect. they show if you starve cells in a dish in a way that might mimic what happens when you fast, you can kill the cells. I didn't see any mention of even mouse studies in there, so I don't know what their in vivo model was but it mostly looks like cell culture to me (apologies if I've missed that). Extrapolating that to humans is extremely hard. For sure a promising result but its pretty preliminary.
- randcraw 8y ago
  The Guidi and Longo paper isn't a study at all. They're summarizing the work of Obrist et al, 2018: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29875130 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29875130 Apparently efforts similar to these go back to at least six years. "Metabolic reprogramming: A new paradigm for targeting cisplatin resistant cells" describes a recurring research program that began in 2012 which seeks to impede cancer via restraining oxidative metabolism, though I think their method of blocking cancer cell metabolism may be more selective than starving ALL of the patient's cells. http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/IK2-BX001289-03 http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/IK2-BX001289-03
varunpant 8y ago
Fast for how long ? Few days a week ?
- atrexler 8y ago
  I've no idea about the fasting stuff. Just thought its important to make clear this particular study is all about doing stuff to cells or lumps of cells in dishes (again sorry if I missed more involved model system in the paper). Whether thats a good model for cancer in people and how fasting interacts with that I honestly have no idea.

peter_retief 8y ago

There is a lot of evidence that high fat low carbohydrate diets, also know as fasting diets have enormous health benefits, completely at odds with the dietary recommendation here https://www.choosemyplate.gov/dietary-guidelines https://www.choosemyplate.gov/dietary-guidelines is one of the drivers of obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome which in includes heart disease and high blood pressure

cageface 8y ago
Calorie restrictions in general are healthy. You can accomplish the same things with high carb diets provided you eat unprocessed complex carbs and reduce total calories.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  Studies show that calorie restriction and fasting are actually different - during calorie restriction your body reduces energy consumption and metabolism, and while you can lose weight, it's proven hard to stick to and most people put that weight back on. Fasting OTOH actually increases your metabolic rate [1], stimulates HGH production [4, 5], your brain switches to primarily consuming ketones instead of glucose and your body begins consuming damaged proteins via autophagy. Interestingly enough, studies show weight lost during fasting is better kept off than the equivalent loss with calorie restriction. Your body also resets what it considers 'low' levels of insulin, leptin, etc which can reverse Type II [2, 3]. That can't happen as effectively if you eat. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10837292 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10837292 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15640462 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15640462 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16051710 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16051710 [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1548337 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1548337 [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3127426 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3127426
  - cageface 8y ago
    Yeah I understand that they are different but it's also true that restricting calories overall and losing weight is beneficial no matter what diet you use to do it. So the question is which of the many diets that can do this is the best for your long term health.

13years 8y ago

Fasting also seems to be protective to your health cells from being damaged. https://news.usc.edu/118758/fasting-during-chemotherapy-may-offset-spikes-in-blood-sugar-caused-by-cancer-fighting-drugs/ https://news.usc.edu/118758/fasting-during-chemotherapy-may-...

buzzdenver 8y ago

Is fasting supposed to work just due to going into a caloric hole, or is there also a time component to it? In other words: does a 6 hour run/hike on an empty stomach where I burn 4000 Calories have the same effect as fasting for 36 hours?

rsync 8y ago
This is a good question - and it is not exactly the same question as "how long should I fast". You're trying to put your body in a state where it no longer has the resources to support extraneous energy consumers so a too-short fast will not work if you don't cross that threshold of bodily parsimony. I personally would hope that 16 hour IF-style fasts would be enough (because that's what I typically do), but I bet they're not ... But my parents question is a bit different: can one speed up the clock on the fast by burning through a lot of bodily resources through physical work. I suspect the answer is yes, to a degree - but I'll bet cancer cells are not in the same category of energy consumers as your muscles are - I'll bet there is a reserve of energy for them that doesn't get touched for a while, even if you do the big hike. It would be nice if there were some kind of threshold indicator that you could test for to see when your body as in a state of parsimony with regard to cancer cells ...
- 738472527784 8y ago
  A nightly fasting window of at least 13h has been shown to reduce recurrence of breast cancer in women.
yazaddaruvala 8y ago
Disclaimer: This is all speculation based on anecdata from the internets. Noone really knows if/why IF helps. Its not exactly the same. One is caloric restriction, and the other is caloric exhaustion. If your entire body worked as a single unit it might be that simple, but: 1. IF helps cull gut-bacteria which can only survive on simple foods. e.g. Bacteria which are inefficient and would happily produce toxins because it knows with enough of its simple foods it can outlive other populations and its own toxins. 2. IF helps turn off the digestive system. When this happens your stomach will stop "growling", and you will feel energetic even tho you haven't eated food for 16+ hours. Allowing the digestive system to relax, and flush/hopefully clean itself up, and won't happen because you went for a run. 3. Senesent/Cancerous cells may still be starved by exhausting all calories quickly, but it really depends on how those cells die(it might just take time), and how the body allocates resources. You can imagine a tumor sitting on a major blood vessel will continue to eat before any muscles are. The only way to starve it is to not eat. All that said, exercise is always good. Just be careful. Try to do it in the first half rather than the second half of your fast. Fainting is never good.

aviv 8y ago

Do I get back the 3,000 HN Karma points I lost to downvotes after years of suggesting fasting as a viable treatment for a whole host of "diseases"? One day people will see it as obvious as "smoking is bad for you". One day.

mirceal 8y ago
Why do you care about karma so much? Express your opinion and forget about “internet points”.
- 1996 8y ago
  Because you want to join in the conversation, and with lower amounts of magical points you get more often messages telling you to "slow down" AFTER you have carefully written a message in 5 to to 10 minutes. This is infuriating when english is not your native language and writing understandable language is slow, especially to communicate complex thought that may be not evident. Due to my unpopular opinions about how some countries and companies are often targetted in US media, even on unrelated articles, this happens to me. I like taking breaks on HN, but the more it happens, the more I am going to other places instead. This is not about being true or being right - just whether your conversation is following the mainstream opinion or not. If later it proves to be right? Too bad for you. This is the case on most forums with up and downvoting, and it forces dissent out. I am interested in conversation for learning and sharing. The post I read the more carefully are greyed out or dead. Most are ads or crankpots, but in 1% of the time I get gems. Sinple example: would you have preferred to learn about intermittent fasting now, or 5 years ago? Me: 5 years ago, but too many downvotes may have pushed out of the community people like the parent poster.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    I find it useful to take notes on discussions that seem illogical, unscientific, dogmatic, etc. Later on, one can always post their counter arguments on github [1] or their own site [2] where it won't be grey text. You could even start your own forum, where you can set the guidelines. [1] - https://github.com/ https://github.com/ [2] - http://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/ Not my sites, just an example. You can make the text as big, bold and readable as you wish. I prefer really simple stylesheets.

IB885588 8y ago

For those interested in intermittent fasting, Valter Longo, the co-author of this paper, has done a few good interviews with Rhonda Patrick on her podcast and youtube: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo-2 https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo-2 I've quite enjoyed Rhonda's work. Another good medical/biology/health podcast that recently appeared and that I'd enjoying a lot is Peter Attia's podcast. His interview with Dom D'Agostino is particularly good and includes discussion of the metabolic theory of cancer, but they're all good (he has one with Rhonda Patrick). He covers intermittent fasting among other things (also the health impacts/use of ketones, etc): https://peterattiamd.com/domdagostino/ https://peterattiamd.com/domdagostino/ https://peterattiamd.com/rhondapatrick/ https://peterattiamd.com/rhondapatrick/

sjcsjc 8y ago
You might also want to look at Mark Mattson's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mattson#Intermittent_Fasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mattson#Intermittent_Fast...

mbroshi 8y ago

Somewhat perpendicular, but intermittent fasting has been a great recent lifehack for me. I skip breakfast every day, and sometimes skip lunch. Gives me back at least an hour every day. And gorging for dinner is a lot of fun.

antoineMoPa 8y ago
Skipping lunches is also a good method of spending less time at work and more time outside enjoying life. I only take 15 minutes noon breaks now.
- elyobo 8y ago
  I eat lunch and it still only takes 15 minutes :D
  - antoineMoPa 8y ago
    Either way, that's fast ;)
rc_bhg 8y ago
That is not a healthy diet. You should be eating smaller meal more often. If you are going to fast, do it for at least a 24 hour period.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Eating more deals in a day (whether small or large) = more insulin spikes throughout the day = less of a chance to heal your insulin resistance.
- laiden_swallow 8y ago
  I mean intermittent fasting where you fast for ~16 hours and then eat larger meals during the remaining 8 is pretty popular.
- mirceal 8y ago
  I think it’s worth considering what a healthy diet really is. Is it really healthy or are we just used to thinking it’s healthy? As an example, a diet high in fat is generally considered by most people to be unhealthy. You see people doing Keto and you start wondering if it’s really unhealthy. Eating red meat is considered to be the unhealthy. You see people doing ZeroCarb diets and they (at least) look extremely good/healthy. Fasting is generally considered unhealthy. You have people doing intermittent fasting, ADF or extended fasting at it works exceptionally well for them. Vegan? It works really well for some people. IMHO there isn’t one thing that works for everyone as far as diet goes. There are also the theoretical and the practical aspects of what we eat and when we it it. I think everyone should try different things and figure out something that works for them, long term. It should not be a “diet”. It should be just something that blends into your lifestyle and gives you results for the investment you’re making.

bitL 8y ago

So, how long should we fast? I was thinking about doing 24h fasts every Friday instead of 3-day fasts every two months. Which one would be better from the article's point of view (as a preventive measure)?

ldiracdelta 8y ago
How long does the article suggest? I can't read the whole thing.
hackermailman 8y ago
There's many articles on the University of Southern California site https://news.usc.edu/?s=fasting https://news.usc.edu/?s=fasting most have been posted here over time. Like the fasting mimicking diets they came up with https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-to-slow-aging/ https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-... That later turned into a startup https://prolonfmd.com/ https://prolonfmd.com/ of 5 day fasting at different monthly intervals depending on your weight, but you can read the orig paper to see what the calorie restrictions were and just make/measure your own food.

Taylor_OD 8y ago

For many months last year I would do a 5 day water fast the third week of every month. I enjoyed it but my mental performance at work suffered during the end of the fast. I've been intermittent fasting for the last 2 months. I eat breakfast around 7:30 (protein shake I make at home with some healthy things tossed in), eat an orange or apple around 10AM, a large salad I make at work without any dressing at noonish, and a handful of cashews and almonds at 2:00PM. That's it. Nothing after that. I'll drink some unsweetened herbal tea or a carbonated water around 7pm sometimes when I'm winding down. It's by far the best diet I've ever been on. It's hard sometimes when work events offer food/drinks after my eating window closes but not that hard. If I have to do work drinks I'll do a vodka soda to minimize my caloric intake. Now I walk around at the weight that I wrestled at in college, I don't feel hungry often, and I feel great during the day. I'm trying to get my family to try it for a few weeks to spur a lifestyle / eating change but it's been difficult. Most people are locked into the three meals a day (and likely a few snacks) mindset.

alex_hitchins 8y ago
> If I have to do work drinks... No one should ever feel forced to imbibe. I'm guessing you know that and don't want to preach or nanny, but wanted to mention it just in case.
- w0utert 8y ago
  On the other hand, I also feel that it doesn't hurt to if you deviate from your own rules sometimes, instead of being all fundamentalist about it. I try to live by a whole set of self-imposed rules because I think they are beneficial to my health and well-being, but for me these are not dogma's. By default, I don't drink during weekdays for example, but if there's a special occasion once or twice a month, I don't feel guilty deviating and/or making up for it some other day. As long as you feel comfortable with it yourself.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Generally I agree with your sentiments as stated, but it's becoming increasingly clear that any amount of alcohol consumption is carcinogenic due to the acetaldehyde it produces. Basically drinking is joining smoking, and I don't think it's particularly smart to occasionally smoke a cigarette. After reading this [1] I hugely cut down on my alcohol consumption. I'd prefer to never drink, but my current social circle doesn't seem to operate as a group without involving alcohol. "I quickly discovered that way back in 1988, the World Health Organization declared alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning that it’s been proved to cause cancer. There is no known safe dosage in humans, according to the WHO. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, but it kills more women from breast cancer than from any other. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that for every drink consumed daily, the risk of breast cancer goes up 7 percent." - [1] [1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-give-me-breast-cancer/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/did-drinking-gi...

alokitr 8y ago

I adhere to a eat nothing diet. Then after I have starved, I am awakened and I gouge myself to death. The cycle then restarts. The powers that be make sure I don't die cause who's gonna do a quickening on the highlander if I do ?

supernova87a 8y ago

Look, stop applying pseudo-science "feels-right" intuition to things that involve complicated cellular mechanisms. It doesn't work that way and you should just listen to what your doctor(s) tell you and trust them + your own due diligence. Fasting doesn't "starve" cancer cells. Drinking only juice for a week doesn't "cleanse" your body. Stop making up your own medical diagnoses fueled by internet bullshit. Listen to experts and trust them for a change.

triviatise 8y ago
most doctors get little to no nutritional education. It is easy to learn about any one topic and know more than your physician. Especially since most physicians dont regularly read journal articles and probably dont even really understand statistics. Appeals to authority are a logical fallacy. I do agree that reading something on the internet and following it is a bad practice.
elihu 8y ago
For what it's worth, the non-paywalled blurb seems to be saying something more specific than "fasting kills cancer", it's saying that cancers that develop resistance to cisplatin are more susceptible to fasting than cancers that aren't. So, even if cisplatin doesn't work directly, cisplatin-resistance has a beneficial side-effect that one might be able to exploit. (This point seems to have been buried under the many posts expressing an opinion or anecdote about fasting in general.)
sjcsjc 8y ago
I believe that in this case the term starve might actually be accurate: "... the inability of ketone bodies metabolization due to various deficiencies in mitochondrial enzymes is the major metabolic changes discovered in malignant cells" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5450454/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5450454/

rainbowmverse 8y ago

The main thing I got out of this thread is that everyone thinks they know the right way to health, that everyone else disagrees with them, and I have no idea how to tell who's actually right. If you want to know why there's a health problem in some developed countries, the confidence of all the factions in the back and forth in this thread is a shining example. Unless you can afford professional guidance (and know how to tell if they know what they're talking about), you don't have much hope unless you stumble on to something that works for you.

falcolas 8y ago
Or the huge reliance on personal anecdote and web sites/studies that agree with those anecdotes. It's stunning how quickly the dialog shifts from reasoned arguments about programming to "I'm right and you're wrong" in nutritional articles.
- nonbel 8y ago
  Personally, I find a collection of anecdotal data (ideally from a wide variety of people) is worth much more to me than these studies that just report average results that apply to the average person/animal/cell in their sample. The average person/animal/cell doesn't exist, and focusing on that has been a huge mistake in my opinion.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    How would you approach trying to determine a good approach to healthy eating for most people then? Even breaking it down into 27 different groups requires an average of each particular group.
    - falcolas 8y ago
      I'd expand that a bit - how can you find a good approach for anybody based solely off anecdotes? Finding someone with a similar age, height, weight, race, ancestry, metabolism, activity level, sleep level, gut flora, etc. to take advice from would be nearly impossible. A dozen "it worked for me" stories without any form of control is effectively useless.

farresito 8y ago

Anyone doing weight lifting has any experience with fasting? I'm not so interested in doing weight lifting while fasting (doesn't sound too good) as in the muscle gain/loss after a fast.

cvaidya1986 8y ago
Look up fasting effect on HGH
theatraine 8y ago
Time restricted eating is probably the most compatible with weight lifting. Personally I'm interested in longer fasts but I'm under my goal weight. I would also be interested in more research about how to gain muscle while fasting.
plausibilities 8y ago
Me. I currently maintain a 2.3x bodyweight deadlift and 1.5x bench press while working a relatively tame & laid-back salaried dev job. Can't do IF (multi-day, anyways) without losing lean mass anymore. Used to be able to until I started plateauing on my lifts. My guess is as you gain more and more lean muscle mass, there's some arbitrary threshold (which differs person to person) at which your TDEE begins to exceed viable intake within a limited timeframe. I specify "viable intake" because your body's nutrient uptake rate per hour has some given limit - anything over that limit usually just gets pooped out later. Restricting timeframe for eating during the day (break my fast after work) seems to work out okay though.

Skrillex 8y ago

Off-topic: Articles like this, and most others that deal with health and medicine, present a problem for me that is somewhat hard to describe. The research for this one appears to be built upon prior research (which is hopefully validated with these findings) and the two headliners appear to have some credentials, so let us skip the question of whether or not the reporting itself can be trusted, as that is not what this is about. The first thing that I notice is that the trials mentioned in the article do not seem capable of proving the claim made in the title, but let us assume that they instead ran a trial involving humans fasting (which could be incited by a study like this) and had the same results. I would like to believe that this is a breakthrough, but how is it to be reconciled with the other 400 breakthroughs we find for various cancers each month? If even a small percentage of them were as valuable as they are expressed to be (and we ignore the contradicting evidence), I would expect cancer, diabetes, and obesity (at least!) to be solved problems by now. I suppose that what I am saying is that with there being so much FUD and so many actual unknowns about what determines the well-being of humans that I find most studies to be hard to believe, especially without being able to test most of it myself. It might be a given that nothing you read can be fully trusted, but it is becoming difficult for me to trust at all, and that is without even considering the fact that some people are reporting findings for studies that never happened. It seems to me that the two most common strategies are to either believe one thing and reject all new information that contradicts it, or to believe most of the new information. Overall, I am left feeling hopeful that the people to who articles like this would make the greatest difference to have found a logical and efficient way to handle this sort of situation. Any thoughts?

barking 8y ago

In Gaelic the words for Wednesday mean "First Fast day", those for Thursday "day between fasts" and for Friday "Fast day". So the 5:2 diet is nothing new.

kolbe 8y ago

I thought this applied to all diets that induce ketogenesis.

abledon 8y ago

Combine that with 30s+ mayurasana for a total intestinal workout. (Work towards 5 minutes)

yogiwannabe 8y ago

Here is ancient wisdom on this: https://youtu.be/tkuF1VmLoRs https://youtu.be/tkuF1VmLoRs If you are looking for scientific data, you will not got any but WISDOM, a plenty :-). This is from an Enlightened Living Master.

olivermarks 8y ago

Not happy with the certainty of the headline. A very close friend of mine who died of cancer chose dietary treatment over western medicine, and had a very grueling, unpleasant death in a remote place.

hinkley 8y ago

This reminds me of a paper maybe ten years back where they found that normal cells go into a holding pattern (I hesitate to use the word hibernation) when resources are scarce, but cancer cells do not. Because healthy cells are less active, they take less damage from chemo. So they were looking at intermittent fasting before chemo to reduce the collateral damage.

dagoat 8y ago

Non pay walled: http://sci-hub.tw/http://emboj.embopress.org/content/early/2018/06/06/embj.201899815# http://sci-hub.tw/http://emboj.embopress.org/content/early/2... highlight: A549 CDDP-resistant cancer cells showed reduced tumor growth and longer survival in response to periodic fasting cycles (24 hours of water only twice a week). In contrast, CDDP-sensitive tumors were not affected by these 24-hour fasting cycles. Because previous results indicated that 2–3 consecutive days of fasting were effective against a wide range of cancers, particularly in combination with chemotherapy (Lee et al, 2012; Bianchi et al, 2015), it would be important to test these longer fasting periods on A549 and other CDDP-resistant cancer

brfox 8y ago
That paper is a mini review of this paper which actually has the data in it: http://emboj.embopress.org/content/37/14/e98597 http://emboj.embopress.org/content/37/14/e98597 In there, they did work on A549 cell lines and showed that removing nutrients from the media decreased their growth rate. They also showed that putting these human cell lines into immune deficient mice and doing a couple 24hr fasts per week had a small (p=0.03) effect on the tumor growth rate (Fig 2). But in the in vivo study, it appears they didn't directly compare A549 vs cisplatin resistant A549 - they seemed to have run 2 studies both vs control. There are literally thousands of papers showing drugs or treatments which can cure lab mice of "cancer" and many more which can kill cell lines in vivo, but only a tiny percentage of those work in patients. There is a reason this is not in a higher profile journal.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

Most intermittent fasting works on a 1-3 day fasting schedule. It doesn't really work for me, maybe because of decision fatigue, maybe I just lack the discipline. Currently I try to loose weight by shooting for two weeks fasting, one week not. About 10kg gone, 40 left to go.

vstuart 8y ago

Very interesting! I (female; 57 y.o.) have been doing an intermittent fast (2 days/week: typically Tue/Thu) for >2.5 years now. I picked those days as they don't interfere with social events, weekends, long weekends. I initially did 500 calories on those days, but for more than a year now I simply don't eat at all on those days (but I drink coffee, tea). I find that much easier, as the hunger pangs are largely absent. Benefits from this fasting include an epigenetic reprogramming (perhaps?) of some stem cells, as from the outset I've seen a few of the very few gray hairs that I have revert back to brown (white further out; brown more recently to root). That could be triggered (or entirely due to) e.g. by autophagy of the old, weakened cells and their replacement by rejuvenated cells. Interesting, nonetheless. Body weight is stabilized around the new metabolic set point (I record this daily in a tab-delimited file, that I can easily plot with a simple linux command (alias gp='echo "gnuplot -p /mnt/Vancouver/Programming/scripts/gnuplot/plot.gp')! On non-diet days I eat whatever I want (I ashould add, pretty sensible: mostly home-made food, meals), ad libitum. ;-) Plot: https://imgur.com/a/e3ahbtQ https://imgur.com/a/e3ahbtQ

andreareina 8y ago
Good progress! I understand blurring the y-axis, though I'm curious about how large those up/down swings are. Have you considered using an exponentially-weighted average to smooth out the noise in the measurements? It's just $ f(x_n) = f(x_{n-1}) * (1 - alpha) + x_n * alpha , f(x_0) = x_0 $ where 0 < alpha < 1 (lower values give a smoother graph but lags more) Here's a quick sketch of how to do it in gnuplot without having to preprocess the data: # Getting previous values via https://stackoverflow.com/a/25753509/5921362 alpha = 0.1 prev = 0 shift(x) = (prev = x) ewma(prev, cur) = shift(prev * (1 - alpha) + cur * alpha) plot data using 1:2 with p,\ data using 1:(prev < 1 ? shift($2) : ewma(prev, $2)) with l
- vstuart 8y ago
  Since I'm really not that careful during non-diet days (some foods such as home-made chicken pot pies or pizzas etc.) can result in "significant" gains (2-3%) and other items my gf sometimes brings over (potato chips; ice cream; ...). Short answer: that week-to-week swing ranges ~4.5% of overall body weight. I try to limit (within reason) processed synthetic fake foods like margarine, Canola (lifeless, NaOH/heat-treated, hexane-extracted, bleached, deoderized "food") in favor of known-sourced, i.e. non-fake EVOO (look for the oleocanthal-induced burn at the back of the throat: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110118180514.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110118180514.ht...), butter, etc. I make my own bread, yogurt -- again for control of what goes into them. But overall, not obsessed with any of that. I like to keep it simple; those preparations take minutes not hours ... :-p * [How It's Made - Canola Oil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omjWmLG0EAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omjWmLG0EAs) Detrimental health effects: * [Canola oil linked to worsened memory and learning ability in Alzheimer's](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171207141624.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171207141624.h...) * [Effect of canola oil consumption on memory, synapse and neuropathology in the triple transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17373-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17373-3) Edit: thank you for the plotting comments (I heart these: I love all things tech, programmatic, bio*); I just wanted a quick way to see my overall progress over time. I enter my morning weight (digital scale) daily, and occasionally plot it (Ctrl-Alt-T shortcut to terminal; "gp" bashrc alias to run that plot command, "qq" to quit the terminal). ;-)

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diogenescynic 8y ago

People without cancer already don’t eat, or hardly as they often lose their appetite due to cancer treatments. Why is that different than this?

deleted 8y ago

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barftransit 8y ago

"I've found that I feel so good when I fast and I don't know why, but please listen to me about myself" - HN

fredliu 8y ago

There's a documentary: The Science of Fasting ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1b08X-GvRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1b08X-GvRs) which talks about fascinating effects of fasting therapy, and interesting effects of fasting on cancer treatment. Looks like it's inline with what's discussed here and in the comment section. On the flip side, I feel like fasting has the potential of becoming the new "meditation", but with more potential danger than just an over-hyped hip practice.

malbs 8y ago

so I just completed 4 months of fasting (I had a friendly wager going, where I had to lose 15kg in 16 weeks, or pay $2000) I did it via intermittent fasting (no breakfast, or lunch, black coffee/water only, and a normal dinner) Chart: https://imgur.com/a/rzckgMi https://imgur.com/a/rzckgMi Basic routine was this Monday, fast, overhead press at gym Tuesday, normal eating, deadlifts Wednesday, fast, rowing/kettlebells Thursday, normal eating, bench press Friday, normal eating, squats Saturday, fast, cardio/hiit Sunday, normal eating came in under the target (needed 15kg, ended up losing 18kg) and won myself $2000 because the guy I had the wager with didn't hit his target. Fasting really works, it doesn't cost you anything, and you save money.

FieryTransition 8y ago
Do you have any data on your muscle mass or lean body mass? Did you have a gain or loss in muscle mass? Or was it the same? thanks.

runeks 8y ago

For someone with access to the article: what was the duration and frequency of the fasting that was shown to cure certain cancer types?

sigvirt 8y ago

To feed everyone's inquiry/discussion of diet, nutrition, and western disease (though not fasting per se): two particular researchers/authors had much mindshare and influence in Bay Area circles a decade ago. They've not been mentioned on HN in several years, so this will bring forward and tie in the references and discussions for newcomers. The China Study - by T. Colin Campbell : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Colin_Campbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Colin_Campbell In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - by Michael Pollan : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan The China Study is notably a retrospective of primary research on diet, nutrition, and disease spanning nearly a century. There are many breadcrumbs for further reading. Campbell was a top-tier government/academic researcher for several decades. The summary conclusion is that western diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer, heart ...) are strongly correlated with increased ratio of animal product consumption, especially in presence of environmental toxins - a binary poison cocktail one might say. Genetics are a factor, he says, but not so pervasively as the other two. Michael Pollan is iconically known for the phrase, "Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much". A prolific author and journalist, he is on about many of the same things Campbell is: cautioning about a) over-reliance on reductive analysis of food nutrient components, and about b) over-indulgence in foodstuffs that passed through some industrial process on way from earth to earthling. Edit: formatting