A low-carb keto diet can starve pancreatic and colorectal cancer tumours—but there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even when it comes to keto.
The diet can also speed up cachexia, a lethal wasting disease, in the cancer patient, new research suggests.
Cachexia is common in people with advanced cancers, and it can make them weak and unable to withstand the rigours of chemotherapy.
And the keto diet that’s high in fats and low in carbohydrates can quicken cachexia’s progress even as it’s starving tumours of the sugars they need to grow, researchers from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have discovered.
While a keto diet can help healthy people lose some weight, the cancer patient just keeps on losing more and more weight. “Healthy people lose weight on keto, but their metabolism adapts, and they plateau. But people with cancer can’t adapt because they can’t make enough of a hormone called corticosterone that helps regulate keto’s effects. They don’t stop losing weight,” Tobias Janowitz, one of the researchers, explained.
But the worst effects of a keto diet could be countered by giving the cancer patient a corticosteroid drug, the researchers found.
Thus far, the research has been on laboratory mice and the researchers say they can’t be sure the same effects would be seen in people.
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