Calorie-restricted ketogenic diet effective at treating stage 4 lung cancer, liver cancer 熱量限制的生酮飲食有效治療4期肺癌，肝癌

Friday April 2, 2021 (jkzx.com) — Dr. Dong Tan at Shandong University Qilu Hospital and colleagues reported that a calorie-restricted ketogenic diet effectively helped get into long lasting clinical remission two cases of stage 4 cancers, one with lung cancer metastasized to the brain, and the other with liver cancer metastasized to the lungs.

ketogenic diet is a diet with mostly dietary fat and protein, and only very tiny amount of carbohydrate. This diet has been successfully used to treat some patients with brain cancer. The rational for the treatment is that cancer cells rely on glucose to grow. Limiting the availability of sugar would naturally slow down the cancer progression which can provide some opportunity to defeat the disease with help from other treatments. Or the calorie restricted ketogenic diet per se starves cancer cells and eventually kills them. The report suggests that ketogenic diet can not only help brain cancer as reported by other researchers, but also advanced stage lung cancer and liver cancer.

Both cases reported were not expected to have any good prognosis and conventional treatments did not induce any promising responses. A calorie-restricted Ketogenic diet was used for a matter of 1 to 3 months and the therapeutic effect was significant. During the treatment, tumor sizes were reduced quickly and cancer biomarkers returned to normal levels. And the treatment eventually got the stage 4 cancers into a complete remission.

One interesting observation is that in the patient with advanced lung cancer, the calorie restricted ketogenic diet did not induce an apparent ketosis nor significantly reduce the serum blood sugar concentrations during the treatments. The patient used the diet for two and half a month as she could not tolerate it for a longer term. But the therapeutic effect was significant both molecularly and clinically. Note that the ketogenic diet is not the only treatment this patient received. She was also at times treated with Crizotinib. Four years after the treatments, she was free of cancer.

The second case was a 47 year old woman who had long history hepatitis B infection. Part of the liver was surgically removed and about one month later, the cancer transferred to the lungs. The patient followed a calorie restricted ketogenic diet with 30% fat, 50 to 60% protein and 10 to 20% vegetables and cellulose only for one month because she could not tolerate it any longer. Only half a year after the treatment, did her cancer get into a complete remission. Again in this case, no ketosis and a significant reduction in blood sugar concentrations were induced by the ketogenic diet.

This case report seems to suggest that you do not have to use ketogenic diet to reduce ketosis or reduce the blood sugar to a minimal. The calorie-restricted ketogenic diet could in fact get the patients into a fasting mode. Fasting and calorie restriction along with using a vegan diet have proved to be a very effective therapy that helps many cancer patients.

Ketogenic diet is a term recently used by researchers and cancer patients to describe a diet with a tiny amount of carbohydrate.
Actually, a variant diet of this sort has been successfully used by many cancer patients to overcome their cancers and achieve a long term survival.

https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-21217/v2/25ce1a5c-7e7f-4f3f-b950-23ed0f97e5b2.pdf