A combo of fasting plus vitamin C is effective for hard-to-treat cancers in mice (opens in new tab)

The word "effective" is used in a misleading way in a huge number of cancer studies. Reducing disease progression is not a particularly good metric of "effectiveness", even less so in mice models. What you want to see is a measure of overall survival (i.e. you survived cancer but died of something else because your health declined overall, making your survival moot) and a measure of quality of life, which is often completely ignored. The gap from "tumors regressed in mice" to the measures I just listed is so astronomically huge as to make these kinds of studies almost entirely unexciting.

Was this intravenous vitamin C at much higher dosage than we usually see from oral supplementation?

Ever since I watched Bret Weinstein explain the problem with using today's lab mice[1], I've been more cautious about any results involving mice and cancer.

[1] https://youtu.be/ve4q-1D_Ajo

This is from Valter Longo, who wrote a book summarizing his really fascinating findings about fasting for health in animals and humans called The Longevity Diet: https://www.amazon.com/Longevity-Diet-Discover-Activation-Re...

Apparently when fasting (or fasting mimicing) our bodies start burning fat cells, removing old unused white blood cells, generating stem cells, and a lot more. In a study with monkeys, the group that was fed 25% fewer calories ended up living a lot longer and having fewer diseases. Longo advocates doing a fast-like diet for a week twice a year in healthy people and potentially more for people with certain health issues.

This was done in mice. It would be nice if they had included that in the original title. Fasting seems to always have amazing advantages in mice, but we need more studies done on humans. There seem to be advantages for humans as well but the results are usually not as impressive and we need more data.

These kind of articles need to be nuanced or we’ll end up with conclusions such as “fasting cures cancer”.

The role of cellular autophagy is not that clear: it can promote mammary and pancreatic cancerous cells survival but on the other hand its inhibition promotes the development of lymphoma for instance.

Apoptosis can likely have a symmetrical role.

It isn’t clear neither that this behaviour is consistent across all development stages of given cancers.

That’s going to trigger an avalanche of sketchy fad diets :(

This is purely anecdotal: My friend’s dad has bladder cancer. When he found out two years ago, he fasted for a month, and is now on a high nutrient, low calorie diet. He is still alive (and he has lost weight), I don’t know what affect other treatments have had, but his diet changes certainly have not hurt him.

I immediately remembered Steve Jobs. Maybe this info was out there even years ago?

Combinations are exponentially harder to find.

What if it's fasting + being cold + Vitamin F + whatever new thing your molecular simulation just suggested?

In his book

"Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us"*

David H. Freedman lists "Eleven Simple Never-Fail Rules for Not Being Misled by Experts". One is:

>"It's supported by ... animal studies. ... I recommend treating as interesting fantasies any claims for human health or behavior that are based entirely on animal studies."<

Good news for mice.

This is building on a body of research looking at KRAS mutations and the Warburg effect. http://europepmc.org/article/PMC/5216991

Dr Linus Pauling, anyone?

IN MICE

https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice

why should we care about mice? I mean get to me when you test it on pigs or primates at least