Cancer Treatments: Is a Ketogenic Diet Better?

It's been known since 1923 that tumor cells thrive on glycolysis, the anaerobic process of breaking down glucose for energy. In other words, cancer cells feed on fermented sugar.

In contrast, healthy cells generate energy from the oxidative breakdown of pyruvate within the mitochondria. Otto Warburg, one of the twentieth century's leading biochemists, wrote that cancer was a consequence of mitochondrial dysfunction.

Recent research is supporting Dr. Warburg's hypothesis. This author of a 2010 paper Cancer as a metabolic disease writes: "Emerging evidence indicates that impaired cellular energy metabolism is the defining characteristic of nearly all cancers regardless of cellular or tissue origin.

The idea driving the use of a ketogenic diet to treat cancer is to deprive the cancer cells of the glucose they need to survive, and support healthy mitochondrial respiration processes.

This treatment is non-toxic to the rest of the body because when glucose isn't available, normal cells can switch to burning fats for fuel (a process called ketosis) and survive quite nicely, while the cancer cells are starved of the food they need to grow.

Does Ketosis Beat Cancer?

It isn't always successful, but as the newest research is showing, ketosis can be beneficial for many cancer cases. And as an added benefit, using ketogenic diets in cancer treatments doesn't kill the patient.

In the Times Magazine article cited above, the author gives information about the results of the research, writing:

"The good news is that for five patients who were able to endure three months of carb-free eating, the results were positive: the patients stayed alive, their physical condition stabilized or improved and their tumors slowed or stopped growing, or shrunk."

And in this paper titled "Targeting energy metabolism in brain cancer with calorically restricted ketogenic diets" the authors conclude:

"The CRKD is effective in managing brain tumor growth in animal models and in patients, and appears to act through antiangiogenic, anti-inflammatory, and proapoptotic mechanisms."

Translation: Calorie restricted ketogenic diets were effective in stopping the growth of brain tumor in both animals and humans, and they seem to work by stopping the tumor from creating new arteries for supplying itself with blood, reducing inflammation, and restoring the normal cell death mechanisms. (Cancer cells are known to avoid the normal mechanisms by which damaged cells die).

Just recently, an article in the Treatment Strategies in Oncology discussed using a Restricted Ketogenic Diet (RKD) to successfully treat brain cancers. Dr Robert Su mentions and links to the article from this post.

Moreover, in this paper, Dr. Eugene Fine of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine theorizes that ketone bodies stop cancers by changing the availability of energy processes in cancer cells. His team is in the process of testing his theory with cancer patients in the RECHARGE Study.

Here is Dr. Fine speaking about this subject at the 2010 Nutrition and Metabolism Society Meeting:

Carbohydrate Restriction and Cancer - Part 1

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

More Information

An article titled "Can A High Fat Diet Beat Cancer?" published in Time Magazine explores the concept:

"In 1924, the German Nobel laureate Otto Warburg first published his observations of a common feature he saw in fast-growing tumors: unlike healthy cells, which generate energy by metabolizing sugar in their mitochondria, cancer cells appeared to fuel themselves exclusively through glycolysis, a less-efficient means of creating energy through the fermentation of sugar in the cytoplasm. Warburg believed that this metabolic switch was the primary cause of cancer, a theory that he strove, unsuccessfully, to establish until his death in 1970.

To the two researchers in Würzburg, the theoretical debate about what is now known as the Warburg effect — whether it is the primary cause of cancer or a mere metabolic side effect — is irrelevant. What they believe is that it can be therapeutically exploited. The theory is simple: If most aggressive cancers rely on the fermentation of sugar for growing and dividing, then take away the sugar and they should stop spreading. Meanwhile, normal body and brain cells should be able to handle the sugar starvation; they can switch to generating energy from fatty molecules called ketone bodies — the body's main source of energy on a fat-rich diet — an ability that some or most fast-growing and invasive cancers seem to lack...

For more information about other research being done on cancer treatments using ketogenic diets, here's the results of a search on cancer treatments that I did on PUBMED using the terms "ketogenic and cancer". As you can see, there are over 7 pages of studies listed.

Done with Cancer Treatments, back to What Causes Cancer