161–170 of 219 posts
Interesting. Though cancers that force you to fast, like stomach or esophageal cancer don't have great 5 year survival rates.
How could we know if this was survivorship bias? What if the folks who can best comply with the calorie restrictions are those who are already in a good state?
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A young biology researcher pitched in to explain the warburg factor in tumors, he made a long paragraph explaining the oh so twisted metabolysm of cancerous cells. The amount of counter intuitive disruptions that mechanically benefited the tumoral tissue was .. almost impressive.
Could you give examples?
- cancerous cells often break the mitochondria forcing cell into a secondary respiration mode
- they also trigger vascular growth but chaotically
- since the cell is in this alternative respiration, they don't need normal arteries to get energy so the chaotic arterial network they grow is not a problem
- IIRC this network also impedes chemotoxins to reach the cell as fast as normal cells
- if you starve your body from sugar, you'll hurt the normal cells (which are in full respiration mode) while the cancerous will keep their metabolysm
It was a bunch of things like this but when you take distance, you have a dysfunctional cell that somehow is setup to construct a near perfect bed of survival in his own destructive processes.. it's almost smart.
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I always find it funny that fasting comes up so often, but a ctrl-f almost never turns up someone mentioning Ramadan. Nearly 25% of the world population fasts for an entire month, but it's almost invisible to the western world. While I don't agree with all of the details of the fast (I drink water), I think it is an admirable holiday, it's way healthier for the world than Christmas or Thanksgiving.
@zhynn, Buddhists monks eat one meal a day throughout their lives. Even lay Buddhists who maintain 8 precepts do not eat after noon throughout their lives. As a practicing Buddhist I eat during a 4-5 hour window everyday of the year. Why make a big deal about one religion?
In reading about Christian monastics I've found that their fasting practices are, and were even in the middle ages, much less dramatic than they seem at first glance, except in relatively rare cases. For one thing, many fasts aren't so much "don't eat" but "eat somewhat less, but still quite a bit", and there are tons of feast days to counter-balance that. And even those rules are thrown out for older monks and any who are ill, of course. You look at their calendar and think "damn, that's a lot of fasting!" but then you read accounts by actual monks and more detailed sets of rules and find they did very little actual no-eating fasting, in the typical case, and many "fast days" still involve a lot of eating.
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My wife is Stage 3, ++- (43 yo) and half way through the taxol phase of an ACT regimen; she is progressing well but I know she has the discipline to do a fasting diet if we thought it would help. Any thoughts on starting this mid-way through the treatment?
Try it. My mom (she left us last year at only 53, unfortunately) and I did intermittent fasting (>=16 hours), and ate a super clean and mainly ovolactovegetarian diet for most of her illness. Her life expectancy was only six months, with breast cancer and methastasis; she endured six years . Do anything you can to help her be healthy. Diet is of extreme impoortance.
If there were ever a panacea, it would be fasting. The more tight and widespread the research becomes, the more that we prove what humanity has known anecdotally throughout civilisation. From being a Roman cure for epileptic seizures, through the integral practice in most religions, and to the 21st century where we start to prove that it increases both healthspan and lifespan. I find it quite interesting that somethi…
while on fasts, you get an energy level and mental clarity that has to be felt to be believed. everyone should try it at least once.
It makes sense biologically you would get some heightened awareness mixed with periods of extreme lethargy as your body tried to preserve itself.
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Yes. But there are alternative healing ideas that fasting and juicing in themselves can cure cancer.
Wouldn't that be relatively easy to find evidence for? We could look at the change in cancer of Muslim communities during Ramadan?
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Hello! Long time faster here (lost over 80lbs in about 9 months with basically zero exercise). One potential downside to steady regimented fasting _when combined_ with caloric restriction, is a decrease in your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Our bodies are very good at adapting to "the new normal" and will optimize itself to function on the fuel you give it. This is true in both directions. If you eat less, your body wi…
> One potential downside to steady regimented fasting _when combined_ with caloric restriction, is a decrease in your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Check out The Complete Guide to Intermittent Fasting. The research he cites shows that the effect you describe occurs in caloric restriction diets, not fasting. Fasting increases HGH and maintains BMR. Perhaps what you are describing is the early days of fasting when your b…
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Please provide your extraordinary evidence. Ideally in the form of multiple strong, well-vetted and well respected studies in peer-reviewed journals. Otherwise I'll presume you're full of it.
Absolutely. Let's look at the claims. What is the first claim though? Is it that extraordinary evidence needs to be provided for the claim that a poison (chemotherapy) is a cure for cancer? You will likely say that there is evidence in "multiple strong, well-vetted and well respected studies in peer-reviewed journals". But then I would question the authority of peer-reviewed journals. Do know about replication crisis…
Let's start by not conflating all kinds of cancer and all kinds of chemotherapy, because it's not a single disease, and the outcomes vary greatly.
But, for instance, survival rates for testicular cancer have risen significantly (or even dramatically) since the invention and introduction of the chemotherapy treatment that is being used for it today. If detection isn't overly delayed, the cure rate in the developed world today is around 95 to 100 percent.
So let's please, please, please, not go for cheap "chemotherapy = poison" rhetoric. I have first-hand experience with the adverse effects, but you can't dismiss a nearly 100% cure rate.
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Regarding what you more generally wrote, it's true that financial interests affect and direct the pharma industry. There are several adverse effects from that, such as research not being directed at areas with potential health benefits but low profitability, and also over-marketing (and thus possibly over-prescription) in other areas. It would also be great if medical research were less tightly bound to funding from the industry and rather got its funding from public sources instead. (That wouldn't make it non-politicized, but direct financial interests might not be as significantly involved.)
But it would be rather misguided to think that there aren't actual working treatments coming out of the industry and research as well. Sometimes those treatments are the difference between life and death. Let's not discount that.
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The significantly improved survival rates for TC are pretty well-known, but a couple of sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testicular_cancer#Prognosis
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/181433
https://ascopubs.org/doi/full/10.1200/JCO.2014.56.0896
edit: line breaks between URLs
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I’m by no means an expert, but I think there’s some amount of adaptation that occurs. I feel like I had to “train” my body to fast. I had a similar problem and it was really unpleasant the first time I tried a fast, but recently did a three day fast with no discomfort right until the end. The end was weird because I told myself I was going to break my fast, and my stomach kicked into action too early, making me sick.…
I had a similar experience with my first extended fast. I was just going to do three days, but I felt really good and not at all hungry at that point, so I extended it a day. But when went to break the fast, as soon as I started eating the light salad and broth I had made, I became instantly ravenous and no longer had any self control. So what started as a light salad ended with mozzarella sticks and a whole pack of…
Almost no one reads these papers when stuff like this gets posted on HN.
And there is shameful statistical fuckery afoot in this paper. People are only repeating the hype statistics at the top of the paper.
Their "pathological response" rates touted at the top of paper only come from the 1/3 of women able to actually carry out the diet. This is the "per-protocol" language in the abstract. An honest evaluation here would be "intention to treat" and analyze chemo responses in every assigned to each arm.
And they do that evaulation, but bury it later in their paper. Turns out when you account for the 2/3 of women who can't do that fasting, there's NO DIFFERENCE in response rate:
"The overall pCR rate was 11.7% and did not differ between the two groups (10.8% in FMD group versus 12.7% in control group; OR 0.830, 95% CI 0.282–2.442, P = 0.735."