Life as a cancer patient: ‘it feels like dying from the drugs meant to save me’

No. They can make use of glucose or ketone bodies. I recommend a biology textbook before commenting on fairly basic and long-established facts.

However, even if they only metabolised glucose, the brain's requirement is for a constant but low level supply. It doesn't need to be provided by a dietary source; the body will synthesise it on demand from its energy stores. The cancer will need to compete for that small quantity with the rest of the body, which will limit its growth.

When you eat sugar, the body can't immediately store it since it takes time to do so, and blood sugar levels spike for a period before reducing back to baseline levels. During this time sugar is in great excess in the bloodstream and tissues, and the cancer is able to utilise as much of it as it can, which can result in its survival and growth.

The survival and growth of a cancer is largely based upon various kinetics, proliferation rates vs death rates, and the evolution of a cancer through selective pressure over time. One of the key switches is to anaerobic metabolism. It lets them switch to lactate production to survive a lack of oxygen. But it comes with a limitation: they are restricted to glucose and other simple sugars to survive. By strictly limiting their availability, it can have a significant effect upon tumour viability. Until it undergoes another change under selective pressure, of course, but it's a simple and potentially very effective course of action, without any great risk of harm.

Visual loss is a very rare side effect of chemotherapy, and permanent visual loss even rarer. The more common and no less serious side effects of heart muscle damage and secondary leukemia are not mentioned in the tagline, being ill-suited as click bait I presume.

I have given the chemotherapy described here to many patients. There is wide variation in how patients experience chemotherapy. Some finish and tell me it wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm quite sure they only tell me things like this in the privacy of the consulting room. They would never say this to another patient in the waiting room. They feel bad for not having had the kind of widely publicised terrible experience.

Beyond the tagline, the account is reasonably accurate, although at times indulges in melodrama, about mitochondria of all things. It also doesn't do a good job of talking about the cognitive dysfunction associated with chemotherapy. This is a complex issue. In randomised trials, patients receiving placebo cancer treatments tend to report high rates of some cognitive problems. That chemotherapy itself is causal in every case is certainly in doubt. The mere experience of being diagnosed with cancer as you might imagine can have profound cognitive effects.

I am not quibbling for the sake of it. There are patients who decide not to have chemotherapy, and sometimes what they have heard about the experience from 'alternate' channels (such as newspaper taglines) has an out-sized influence on their decision. This is why a responsible editorial team would have had this article reviewed by medical professionals and patient advocates, and taken their advice about more judicious highlighting of potential side-effects. The article also doesn't quite deal with the fact that triple negative breast cancer is a really bad disease to have. Metastatic disease has a median overall survival of 18 months. If chemotherapy had not completely eradicated the cancer as it did in her case (the chances are about 50-50), 40% of patients develop metastatic disease in 3 years.

Same experience with me, except that the one who said no to chemo died, and the other who said yes is still alive and has recovered (yes, after hair loss and other side effects).

"Do the research" - research is what scientists do, not what is achieved by Googling. No medical treatment is 100% perfect, unfortunately, but I and others I know prefer to play the odds rather than not.

I have a lot of admiration towards your “obsession”; it way more meaningful than any of mine, so respect! May I ask, in your opinion, what can I do to lower my chances of getting cancer. So far, I monitor grilled meat consumption, do yearly fasts and watch my carbs. I’d appreciate any advice :)

It's been debunked. See this post explaining why.

https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2017/05/15/sugar-an...