Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
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Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#2> Nguyen moved to UT Austin to start his own lab in January 2024 but passed away suddenly in November before he could finish the final experiments. The paper, of which he is the first author, is dedicated to him.
That's sad. I hope someone picks up the torch. The research sounds very promising.
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#3This is fascinating and sounds really promising.
However, this article also seems to imply that frequent cold exposure that converts your own white fat cells into beige fat cells could be effective at both treating and preventing cancer.
They state without explanation that cold therapy cannot be done by cancer patients, but I don’t see why not. I take an ice bath every morning as it helps with my mental health, and its really not that shocking or difficult when you’re used to it as the very adaptation they’re talking about here eventually makes it easy to tolerate cold- your body adapts to be able to keep you warm. I can and do still do it when I’m sick, fatigued, or slept poorly.
Moreover, before modern climate controlled environments and low cost warm clothing humans naturally experienced cold a lot more often and were probably already cold adapted, even in warm climates. Could modern heating systems be predisposing us to cancer by making our metabolism work abnormally?
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#4[flagged]
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#5This is fascinating and sounds really promising. However, this article also seems to imply that frequent cold exposure that converts your own white fat cells into beige fat cells could be effective at both treating and preventing cancer. They state without explanation that cold therapy cannot be done by cancer patients, but I don’t see why not. I take an ice bath every morning as it helps with my mental health, and i…
The problem with chronic cold exposure is that it makes one very hungry, a lot hungrier than usual, with the compensatory calorie consumption risking negating the intended benefit.
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#6This is fascinating and sounds really promising. However, this article also seems to imply that frequent cold exposure that converts your own white fat cells into beige fat cells could be effective at both treating and preventing cancer. They state without explanation that cold therapy cannot be done by cancer patients, but I don’t see why not. I take an ice bath every morning as it helps with my mental health, and i…
The problem with chronic cold exposure is that it makes one very hungry, a lot hungrier than usual, with the compensatory calorie consumption risking negating the intended benefit.
If white fat converts to beige fat, it is going to be burning a lot more calories, so you ultimately would have to eat more to maintain a stable body weight. It’s not clear to me that this would negate the benefit.
If it does negate the benefit than that would suggest that the entire benefit from the beige fat is from putting the body in a calorie deficit, and you would then expect the exact same effectiveness from calorie restriction. A quick search shows that there does seem to be an anti cancer therapeutic benefit from calorie restriction, so this seems at least plausible.
So this raises the research question of if increasing calorie intake to keep weight stable completely negates the anti-cancer benefits of increased beige fat or not. I’m curious if that has been investigated yet.
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with chronic cold exposure is that it makes one very hungry, a lot hungrier than usual, with the compensatory calorie consumption risking negating the intended benefit.
If white fat converts to beige fat, it is going to be burning a lot more calories, so you ultimately would have to eat more to maintain a stable body weight. It’s not clear to me that this would negate the benefit. If it does negate the benefit than that would suggest that the entire benefit from the beige fat is from putting the body in a calorie deficit, and you would then expect the exact same effectiveness from c…
in all respect sorry this is wrong. this is a broad misinformation. It can enhance but also supresse cancer dependig of soo much we dont know yet enough to know if fasting is beneficial or dangerous.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cam4.5577
edit:// and the article has imho nothinh to do with autophagy. Its about beige fat cells eating stuff away from cancer not autophagy wich happened in the innercell. And if you go into caloric deficit you could burn away those beige fat cells that "heal" the cancer.
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#8This is fascinating and sounds really promising. However, this article also seems to imply that frequent cold exposure that converts your own white fat cells into beige fat cells could be effective at both treating and preventing cancer. They state without explanation that cold therapy cannot be done by cancer patients, but I don’t see why not. I take an ice bath every morning as it helps with my mental health, and i…
The problem with chronic cold exposure is that it makes one very hungry, a lot hungrier than usual, with the compensatory calorie consumption risking negating the intended benefit.
Hunger, like cold exposure, is an uncomfortable but transient signal. In many cases it peaks and subsides without requiring immediate action, especially once the body adapts.
Anecdotally, my first 72-hour fast was revealing. Around the 48-hour mark my body aggressively signaled hunger, esp. for sugary foods. By the third day, however, hunger largely subsided, and at break I wasn’t hungry at all. For the following week the usual sugary suspects in my life went untouched. Subsequent 72-hour fasts were far more manageable, suggesting at least some component of adaptation.
My understanding is that this ability to adapt exists because intermittent hunger and cold were regular aspects of human life for much of our history, particularly in environments without reliable food access (pre-agrarian) or thermal protection.
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
If white fat converts to beige fat, it is going to be burning a lot more calories, so you ultimately would have to eat more to maintain a stable body weight. It’s not clear to me that this would negate the benefit. If it does negate the benefit than that would suggest that the entire benefit from the beige fat is from putting the body in a calorie deficit, and you would then expect the exact same effectiveness from c…
in all respect sorry this is wrong. this is a broad misinformation. It can enhance but also supresse cancer dependig of soo much we dont know yet enough to know if fasting is beneficial or dangerous. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cam4.5577 edit:// and the article has imho nothinh to do with autophagy. Its about beige fat cells eating stuff away from cancer not autophagy wich happened in the innerce…
The paper you posted is just a review on autophagy and cancer that doesn’t contradict anything I stated. It is a mistake to conflate autophagy, calorie restriction, and cold exposure as necessarily biologically identical, which your comment seems to imply.
I was only raising questions this research and discussion made me curious about, not making any concrete claims.
Although the idea of calorie restriction as a cancer treatment is something still actively debated and researched, I personally doubt it is very useful, or likely to be the main mechanism here in the connection between beige fat and cancer, but it is a possibility to at least be ruled out experimentally in the context of the comment I replied to, which is why I mentioned it anyways. One major concern with calorie restriction in humans but not rodents is that it shuts down your metabolism by limiting t3 thyroid hormone production whereas cold exposure ramps up metabolism by uncoupling mitochondria to produce heat. You are correct that the body can shut down processes and systems that might be important for fighting cancer, in response to calorie restriction.
I am a researcher that studies metabolism, and actually think the prominent focus on fasting and calorie restriction as a potential medical cure-all has been mostly a dead end, that people were mistakenly led down largely as a result of these fundamental differences between rodent and human metabolism.
Re: Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer
#10[flagged]
> I can't wait to be downvoted for sharing something useful, which pretty much is par for the course on this site, i.e. altogether shallow people voting only on the basis of what they already believe in.
If you really wanted to fend off the downvotes, I probably would have linked at least a handful of well-designed studies with outcomes supporting your claims.
Also, Occam's Razor would suggest that if it truly worked, surely the very smart people trying to solve this problem would have known about + adopted it.