Learning How to Starve a Tumor

Nov. 17, 2021 –The historical recommendation to “feed a cold, starve a fever” has a restricted proof base, however new analysis highlights how feeding fats and sugar to a tumor might gasoline its progress.

Pancreatic tumors in mice develop extra slowly when the animals eat a calorie-restricted weight loss plan, findings counsel. The outcomes, revealed in Nature, don’t imply that anybody with most cancers ought to embark on a particular weight loss plan, particularly given that folks aren’t mice. But extra analysis on this space might establish mixtures of specifics diets and drug therapies that improve most cancers remedies.

Scientists have lengthy recognized that most cancers cells are ravenous, consuming a great deal of glucose as they develop. The query is whether or not ravenous them of glucose would sluggish this progress with out harming the remainder of the physique. To get a solution, the researchers labored with mice carrying pancreatic tumors. They fed a low-calorie weight loss plan to 1 group, a traditional weight loss plan to 1 group, and a high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic weight loss plan to a 3rd group.

Only tumors in animals consuming the low-calorie weight loss plan confirmed slower progress, implying that the tumors wanted greater than glucose to continue to grow. Glucose ranges have been decrease with each calorie restriction and the keto weight loss plan, however lipids additionally have been decrease with calorie restriction.

All cells, together with most cancers cells, use lipids to construct their protecting outer membranes. The elevated lipid ranges within the keto weight loss plan could have given tumors all of the lipids they wanted to construct new cell membranes.

The outcomes counsel that the important thing to slowing most cancers in these mice was to starve tumors of each glucose and lipids, as solely the calorie-restricted weight loss plan did. The wholesome tissues of the physique nonetheless want these vitamins, one motive sufferers with most cancers shouldn’t change their diets with out medical steering. But the findings trace that utilizing weight loss plan or medication to limit consumption of some lipids or their use cells could possibly be a path to ravenous a tumor with out ravenous the particular person.