Fasting for Cancer

Fasting

Benefits

Starving Cancerous cells

I'll just paste the quote from this article from Cedar Sinai as it really does say it better than I can:

When patients asked Jethro Hu, MD, co-director of Neuro-Oncology at Cedars-Sinai, whether dietary changes could stall disease progression, he used to tell them that evidence is limited. But over time, he began noticing that patients who adopted a ketogenic diet of their own accord sometimes fared better.

A ketogenic diet is metabolically similar to fasting: In both cases, your body breaks down fats for fuel. But cancer cells can’t adapt as easily.

“One of the first molecular differences between cancer and normal cells is a difference in metabolism, where cancer cells have a much higher glucose uptake than healthy cells,” Hu said. “If you limit circulating glucose, healthy cells can switch to an alternate fuel source: ketones.”

Cancer cells don’t have the ability to make that same metabolic switch.

This is not the whole story as Cancer cells have also been shown to be able to utilize glutamine....which you can't fast away.  Your body will actually produce glutamine on its own during a fast.  But at least you are taking away part of the fuel source for bad cell growth.  This is going to be a later rabbit hole for me to drop into later...there is more that I just don't know and it is a deep hole.

Autophagy

So there is this very cool process that your body does when it stops getting calories.  Somehow it is triggered to stop the normal building process and switch to a cleanup / maintenance process where it cleans out the old junky / broken cells.  I actually first learned about this when I listened to the podcast Radio lab on their episode called:

"The Dirty Drug and the Ice Cream Tub" (which was a VERY good episode of Radiolab (I highly recommend the listen)).

Keto \ Insulin resistance 

Fasting also helps with reducing insulin resistance...which has a ton of negative side effects.  Originally the Keto diet came into focus for health related issues with Epilepsy as they found an interesting correlation with the Keto diet and a reduction of seizures where medication doesn't help.

Weird side effects

Smell

I was not expecting this one but my sense of smell went into overdrive towards the end of this 24 hour cycle.  In general my sense of smell was greatly enhanced.  I could smell things that were in closed containers from across the room that had been closed for hours (not an air tight seal) (Damn those Apple Cider donuts were driving me crazy....not that I would eat them b/c it would totally throw off my Keto).  Some interesting information about this interesting side effect from the NIH

Breaking the fast

Wow did this food taste amazing.  Now I didn't go on a very long fast 24 hours is the absolute minimum that might trigger Autophagy but that didn't change the extreme good taste of the food.  We went to Seasons 52 in Burlington and I was sure to break the fast but still with Keto friendly food (and I did bring my own dressing (just to be sure of the carb count)).  I got the Shrimp Skewers and the Caesar Salad (no croutons, no dressing)