Researchers from the United States found that the discharge diet helps to slow down the development of cancer tumors. The article about this was published in the journal Nature.
Cancer cells consume a lot of glucose. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Institute of Oncology Dana Farber suggested that the discharge or ketogenic diet may affect the tumor growth, reducing the amount of available substance. However, the initial experiments on mice with pancreatic tumors showed that the discharge diet has a much greater effect on the development of the tumor than the ketiogenic. This means that the content of glucose does not play a major role in slowing the growth of tumors.
Researchers analyzed the growth of pancreatic tumors and the content of nutrient elements in mice, which were on ordinary, discharge and ketogenic diets, respectively. At the last two, glucose levels in blood decreased in mice. However, with a unloading diet, the level of lipids also decreased – while with the ketogenic it increased. Without lipids, cancer cells cannot build their cell membranes, which causes them to deal with these substances themselves. At the same time, it is important to comply with the balance of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, for which they need stearil-co-desaturases (SCD) – an enzyme that turns the first to second.
Both diets reduced SCD activity – however, with a ketamine diet, lipids were enough cancer cells. The mouse on the unloading diet could not fill the lack of fatty acids either from food or with the help of their “production.” The growth of tumors has slowed down significantly. The study of data of 1165 patients with pancreatic cancer preliminarily showed that high fat diets and low carbohydrates can be associated with an increase in the patient’s life. At the same time, researchers do not recommend a discharge diet oncological patients – it is difficult to observe it, and it can have severe side effects. At the same time, the detection of the dependence of cancer cells from the presence of unsaturated fatty acids can be used in the development of new cancer treatment methods.