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A combo of fasting plus vitamin C is effective for hard-to-treat cancers in mice
- cinntaile 6y agoThis was done in mice. It would be nice if they had included that in the original title. Fasting seems to always have amazing advantages in mice, but we need more studies done on humans. There seem to be advantages for humans as well but the results are usually not as impressive and we need more data.
- goda90 6y agoThe nice thing about this treatment is that testing should be a bit easier. Not really dangerous in a controlled setting, and if you find someone who is early stages of cancer then if it isn't effective you can switch to a known treatment.
- rightbyte 6y agoA strict diet might weaken you right? Many cancer patient get very thin and I guess you don't want to start the treatment like that so you miss fat reserves.
- vixen99 6y agoDepends whether it weakens 'you' or the cancer and which succumbs first! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6938162/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6938162/ Quick take from the abstract: "The vulnerability of cancer cells to nutrient deprivation and their dependency on specific metabolites are emerging hallmarks of cancer. Fasting or fasting-mimicking diets (FMDs) lead to wide alterations in growth factors and in metabolite levels, generating environments that can reduce the capability of cancer cells to adapt and survive and thus improving the effects of cancer therapies. In addition, fasting or FMDs increase resistance to chemotherapy in normal but not cancer cells and promote regeneration in normal tissues, which could help prevent detrimental and potentially life-threatening side effects of treatments. While fasting is hardly tolerated by patients, both animal and clinical studies show that cycles of low-calorie FMDs are feasible and overall safe. "
- elif 6y agoI would disagree and make the important distinction that many chemo treatment recipients get very thin. Like saying "I don't have time to take a shower, because my bath takes an hour"
- nonbel 6y agoIt's interesting that a side effect of pretty much every treatment for cancer is nausea, weight loss, etc. Almost like reduced nutrient absorption is the main mechanism by which the treatments work.
- deegles 6y agoFasting doesn't have to mean fewer calories. It could mean eating all of your daily calories in a 6 hour window, instead of 3 times per day.
- dh303 6y agoLooks like some human trials: "At least five clinical trials, including one at USC on breast cancer and prostate cancer patients, are now investigating the effects of the fasting-mimicking diets in combination with different cancer-fighting drugs."
- missosoup 6y agoIN MICE https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice
- fierarul 6y agoI immediately remembered Steve Jobs. Maybe this info was out there even years ago?
- tadhgf 6y agohttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jobs-regretted-trying-to-beat-cancer-with-alternative-medicine-for-so-long.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-J...
- jojobas 6y agoCombinations are exponentially harder to find. What if it's fasting + being cold + Vitamin F + whatever new thing your molecular simulation just suggested?
- Glench 6y agoThis is from Valter Longo, who wrote a book summarizing his really fascinating findings about fasting for health in animals and humans called The Longevity Diet: https://www.amazon.com/Longevity-Diet-Discover-Activation-Regeneration/dp/0525534075 https://www.amazon.com/Longevity-Diet-Discover-Activation-Re... Apparently when fasting (or fasting mimicing) our bodies start burning fat cells, removing old unused white blood cells, generating stem cells, and a lot more. In a study with monkeys, the group that was fed 25% fewer calories ended up living a lot longer and having fewer diseases. Longo advocates doing a fast-like diet for a week twice a year in healthy people and potentially more for people with certain health issues.
- windexh8er 6y agoDr. Longo's research and books have been very informative on fasting. I have no ties to the for profit side of his research but I've tried a few rounds of ProLon, which is a fasting mimicking diet founded from his research. I've experienced great short and more sustained results from using it. I generally approach the work week at a split of 18/6 for IF and don't eat after 8:00P anymore. It will be great to see more research into IF for longer term studies.
- pdabbadabba 6y ago> at a split of 18/6 for IF Could you please explain what this means, for the uninitiated?
- windexh8er 6y agoI try to focus eating during a 6 hour window. I'm not overly strict with myself. Sometimes it ends up 16/8, but on average I'm likely right around 18/6. So I eat most weekdays between 1:00P and 7:00P.
- PudgePacket 6y ago18 hours of the day not eating, 6 eating. It's usually called time restricted eating/feeding or an eating window with the idea being you'd do it every day. This is in contrast to extended/prolonged fasting, which is typically 24hr+. In general IF (intermittent fasting) is a catch-all phrase, and not a particularly helpful one.
- xutopia 6y agoWas this intravenous vitamin C at much higher dosage than we usually see from oral supplementation?
- sradman 6y agoFrom the Methods section of the paper [1]. > For vitamin C experiments, mice undergoing standard feeding or at the last day of the first FMD cycle started to be treated with vitamin C (4 g/kg in saline) via intraperitoneal injection twice a day, every day until the end of the experiment. At least 6–8 h have elapsed between the two administrations in each day. EDIT: 4 g/kg twice a day is about 400 grams (0.88 pounds) of Vitamin C per day for a 50 kg (110 pound) person. 1 gram per day is a good rule of thumb for the upper limit of oral supplementation. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16243-3.pdf#page=10 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16243-3.pdf#page=...
- twirlip 6y agoThank you for posting the link to Nature. From the paper, the FMD decreases the ferritin available to tumor cells which makes them more vulnerable to the hydrogen peroxide produced by the metabolism of vitamin C. Do I have that right?
- PudgePacket 6y agoFrom what I've read there's a cap on how much VitC you can absorb orally, IV VitC can give you much much more (think order of magnitude or more).
- mmargerum 6y agoYou can handle pretty large doses of oral Liposomal Vitamin C.
- firethief 6y agoReally? How many pounds of it do you think you could eat in a day?
- vegetablepotpie 6y agoThis is purely anecdotal: My friend’s dad has bladder cancer. When he found out two years ago, he fasted for a month, and is now on a high nutrient, low calorie diet. He is still alive (and he has lost weight), I don’t know what affect other treatments have had, but his diet changes certainly have not hurt him.
- deegles 6y agoHow did the doctors react to him fasting for a month?
- Havoc 6y agoThat’s going to trigger an avalanche of sketchy fad diets :(
- TaupeRanger 6y agoThe word "effective" is used in a misleading way in a huge number of cancer studies. Reducing disease progression is not a particularly good metric of "effectiveness", even less so in mice models. What you want to see is a measure of overall survival (i.e. you survived cancer but died of something else because your health declined overall, making your survival moot) and a measure of quality of life, which is often completely ignored. The gap from "tumors regressed in mice" to the measures I just listed is so astronomically huge as to make these kinds of studies almost entirely unexciting.
- newen 6y agoI imagine that would make it harder to compare against how it could potentially work for humans. Humans have many medications that they can take to fix side effects that might arise from this, including side effects that can result in death or lower quality of life. Like, inflammation can be fixed with anti-inflammation medication. Not a biologist, but probably you’re expecting too much from mice trials because it seems very much like early drug discoveries compared to human trials.
- Retric 6y agoHe’s saying treatment so someone lives another week is qualitatively different from treatment so someone lives long enough to die of something else.
- newen 6y agoYes, I get that. But actually designing experiments that measures the latter case using mice is extremely difficult and probably impossible. Especially because you are designing these experiments in order to see how these cures might work on humans.
- elif 6y agoI would encourage you to research your implication that fasting and vitamin C makes "health decline overall"
- k2xl 6y agoEver since I watched Bret Weinstein explain the problem with using today's lab mice[1], I've been more cautious about any results involving mice and cancer. [1] https://youtu.be/ve4q-1D_Ajo https://youtu.be/ve4q-1D_Ajo
- s9w 6y agoThat was most interesting, thanks.
- BlackCherry 6y agoYeah this is excellent. I wish he would produce more of this content, rather than his diet-right "mAh FrEeSpeCh" normie political commentary. I've actually heard he was an excellent evo-bio professor by former students. What a waste, but I guess it's cool he gets to hang out with Rogan now, so good for him I suppose.
- aaron695 6y ago"mAh FrEeSpeCh" is why we have the mouse problem, or more accurately why his concerns aren't addressed. I honestly don't know how this link could be explained any more, so shrug. In the same interview he explains the whole mask debacle, which it seem the USA has 100% reversed months after this interview, as he predicted. "mAh FrEeSpeCh" I guess.
- BlackCherry 6y agoThis is incoherent. He speaks on cultural/political/economic issues that he has very little actual interest or knowledge on and comes to very obtuse and banal conclusions. The IDW's schtick is to make your "common sense" feel scientific through flawed logic and appealing to your identity by saying words/phrases like "reason", "logic", and "free speech", without actually practicing the tenets of any of them. The IDW constantly touts the need for experts, who stand in the face of political correctness, while hypocritically not being experts themselves in the subjects they always want to talk about on public platforms. To relate this back to technology, it's very similar to designing apps. Everyone feels like they are an expert app designer, simply because they can identity that something feels off about an app, and because they use apps everyday. In fact, they aren't expert app designers, and they are simply identifying problems that most people can identify, and have no real solutions to offer. But because the pain of using the app is shared by many people, a lot of people latch on to loud mouth non-experts for pointing out the obvious and making them feel smart.
- dennis_jeeves 6y agoDr Linus Pauling, anyone?
- Markoff 6y agowhy should we care about mice? I mean get to me when you test it on pigs or primates at least
- vmchale 6y agoGood news for mice.
- rq1 6y agoThese kind of articles need to be nuanced or we’ll end up with conclusions such as “fasting cures cancer”. The role of cellular autophagy is not that clear: it can promote mammary and pancreatic cancerous cells survival but on the other hand its inhibition promotes the development of lymphoma for instance. Apoptosis can likely have a symmetrical role. It isn’t clear neither that this behaviour is consistent across all development stages of given cancers.
- giardini 6y agoIn his book "Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us"* David H. Freedman lists "Eleven Simple Never-Fail Rules for Not Being Misled by Experts". One is: >"It's supported by ... animal studies. ... I recommend treating as interesting fantasies any claims for human health or behavior that are based entirely on animal studies."<
- text70 6y agoThis is building on a body of research looking at KRAS mutations and the Warburg effect. http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5216991 http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5216991