The Effect of Diets on Cancer

Studying the effects of certain diets on boosting drugs power to kill cancer has been a talking point lately. The question is how can diets contribute in making cancer treatments work better?

The new studies aim at putting the patient on a low carbohydrate diet (a ketogenic diet) with lots of meat, eggs, cheese and vegetables. Researchers think that such a diet will help cancer drugs be stronger and more effective on the patient. Lewis Cantley of Weill Cornell Medicine, a cell metabolism researcher, has recently announced that his lab mice which are on ketogenic diet responded to cancer drugs better.

Lots of researchers and experts recommended certain diets and fasting for cancer patients. This is not a new trend as people have been doing this for decades. The new thing is that many professional cancer trials are taking place in important labs now. Cantly and Vousden, two researchers, established a company to test the effect of diets on drug function. They concluded that they noticed the same results on both mice and people suffering from cancer.

Critics are against declaring this finding to the public. They said patients might think it is easy and diet or fast without adequate awareness of the plan. Putting patients on a dietary or fasting plan needs testing and continuous clinical observation.

Valter Longo, a biochemist at the University of Southern California and the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research’s Institute of Molecular Oncology, has done a lot of fasting research. He explained that fasting makes levels of glucose lower in the blood. In this case, cancer cells will start starving, as they need to keep increasing in number and growing in size. On the other hand, healthy cells will try to protect themselves. Moreover, hormones such as insulin will be less in the blood when the patient is fasting. Less insulin will limit cancer cells’ ability to grow. These are two main reasons why cancer cells and tumors will be weaker and more vulnerable and consequently less resistant to chemotherapy.

Longo first started his research on low-calorie diets and their effects not only on cancer reduction in monkeys and mice, but also on making them live longer. Later, he moved his focus to fasting: drinking only water for two or three days. Longo then started a company in 2009 called L-Nutra which sells ‘fasting-mimicking’ diets in addition to meal kits to cancer patients online. A lot of research on ‘fasting-mimicking’ diets followed and the results were all positive. It has been carried out on animals with different kinds of cancer like breast cancer. They all supported the result that says ‘fasting-mimicking’ diets are effective. The company was later criticized for selling diets to patients before they are fully approved.

A cancer patient, Carolina Sandoval from California, took part in Longo’s research. She had breast cancer and decided to try fasting intermittently for two months along with chemotherapy. Although this was ‘hard’ as she said, the trials helped her overcome some side-effects of chemotherapy such as nausea and fatigue. She said she recommended these trials to others with the same problem. When scanned, tumors got smaller and DNA damage in immune cells was less. Longo said this is ‘remarkable evidence’ that the experiment was successful.

“Generally speaking, the ketogenic diet and fasting are two roads to a similar metabolic state,” says Princeton University biochemist Joshua Rabinowitz. However, it is expected that further research is needed to specify the advantages and disadvantages of diet-drug combinations in the fight against cancer.

 
Keywords: The effect of diet on cancer, diet