This 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.
The 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.
A 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.
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. "
It'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.
Since most cancer treatments target fast-replicating cells and the gut is lined with such cells I think you have the arrow of causality backwards in this case.
Looks 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."
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.
Dr. 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.
I 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.
18 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.
> 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.
Thank 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?
> Figure3 shows plasma levels following a 36g dose of liposomal vitamin C, for both subjects. This resulted in peak plasma levels, in the region of 400mML21. A 95% interfractile range (34–114), which contains 95% of the distribution with a mean of 74 corresponds to a calculated standard deviation of 17.4. We note that, under these conditions, an outlier measurement of 400mML21 would correspond to a deviation of 10.3 s with a theoretical p-value of 1.6610213 (i.e. p,0.0000000000001). With this high dose, both subjects exceeded their bowel tolerance, leading to diarrhoea. This intolerance presumably arose from the high intake of phospholipid, without food buffering, in fasting individuals. However, our observations using hourly doses suggest that daily intakes of this magnitude are tolerable without bowel effects, as long as the dose is spread throughout the day.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1359084080230542...
This 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Yes, 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.
Another commenter pointed out that one of the paper's authors, Valter Longo, has already written a number of books on intermittent fasting. While I think it's great when scientist publish in a form that is more accessible to the public, it's important to note that he was strongly invested in promoting intermittent fasting prior to this research being done, even to the point of selling a $300 mail order diet.
I think the reason this "entirely unexciting" study is getting attention is related to one of its author's having a talent for self-promotion.
He also founded the company that sells the food for this treatment:
> Longo is the founder of and has an ownership interest in L-Nutra; the company's food products are used in studies of the fasting-mimicking diet. Longo's interest in L-Nutra was disclosed and managed per USC's conflicts-of-interest policies. USC has an ownership interest in L-Nutra and the potential to receive royalty payments from L-Nutra. USC's financial interest in the company has been disclosed and managed under USC's institutional conflict of interest policies.
Sounds like he really believes in the power of fasting. It’s possible for him to commercialize something that works, and to keep doing scientific research to build on that foundation. It doesn’t have to be shady.
He has apparently donated his shares of that company to a non-profit that funds research in nutrition. It sounds much less shady than people make it out to be.
Ever 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.
Yeah 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.
"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.
This 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.
These 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.
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."<
67 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadhttps://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. "
Like saying "I don't have time to take a shower, because my bath takes an hour"
https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice
What if it's fasting + being cold + Vitamin F + whatever new thing your molecular simulation just suggested?
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.
Could you please explain what this means, for the uninitiated?
In general IF (intermittent fasting) is a catch-all phrase, and not a particularly helpful one.
> 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=...
I think the reason this "entirely unexciting" study is getting attention is related to one of its author's having a talent for self-promotion.
> Longo is the founder of and has an ownership interest in L-Nutra; the company's food products are used in studies of the fasting-mimicking diet. Longo's interest in L-Nutra was disclosed and managed per USC's conflicts-of-interest policies. USC has an ownership interest in L-Nutra and the potential to receive royalty payments from L-Nutra. USC's financial interest in the company has been disclosed and managed under USC's institutional conflict of interest policies.
The most ingenious business scheme ever devised: a mail-order fasting diet.
Most treatments studied are patented drugs, I never see these types of comments about those.
[1] https://youtu.be/ve4q-1D_Ajo
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.
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.
I've been politically engaged for decades and this is the first time I've been terrified about the outcome of an election.
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.
What?
"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."<