I was flipping through a medical journal just skimming things when this article popped up: Ketogenic Diet Aids Cancer Patient’s Sensitivity to Radiation, Chemotherapy.
Folks at Iowa University are looking into the effect of a ketogenic diet on patients with pancreatic cancer or lung cancer to see if it improves outcomes after radiation and chemotherapy.
They discuss the idea that cancer cells prefer to run on glucose as fuel and in the setting of a ketogenic diet, when they are deprived of glucose, they become weakened and more susceptible to therapy.
The fact that they’ve moved on from animal trials and are now completing Phase 1 trials and are looking for funding to begin Phase 2 trials suggest that there is a positive effect. Their actual research paper is currently being reviewed in the Clinical Cancer Research Journal, so we’ll have to wait until it’s published before looking over the data.
Here is a link to the entire article.
Colin Champ, The Caveman Doctor, wrote a nice introduction on ketogenic diets and cancer a while back that I’ll link to here for more reading.