Health

A ketogenic diet—high in fats and low in carbohydrates, or sugars—could slow the growth, and possibly even reverse, brain tumours. 

Brain tumours are some of the toughest to treat and have a very low survival rate—but a radical change of diet, including occasional fasting, could see all that change.

The tumours feed off glucose for their growth, so it makes sense to starve them of their fuel by dramatically cutting back on carbohydrates, which are the source of sugars or glucose.  Once the glucose supply is shut off, the brain can still feed off ketones, which replace glucose, but tumours can’t adapt, and so die—or that’s how the theory goes.

A ketogenic diet, with its emphasis on fats, fits the bill—but can people eat just fats for any length of time, and does the diet have any unexpected side effects?

To find out, researchers from the Wake Forest School of Medicine put 25 people with astrocytomas, a type of brain tumour, on the diet for eight weeks.  They had all completed their conventional treatment, which included radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

The diet consisted exclusively of bacon, eggs, heavy cream, butter, leafy green vegetables and fish, and this was interrupted with a fast two days a week.

Most of the participants completed the course, and nearly half followed the diet completely.  But even those who were less strict had still changed their body’s metabolism to use fats, or protein, for their fuel.

As expected, this also produced changes in the brain and the tumours.  Brain scans revealed an increase in ketones—the replacement fuel for glucose—which could also slow the growth of the tumours given time.

That will be the next step in the research project.  The first thing was to ensure a keto diet could be tolerated, and it seemed to pass with flying colours, the researcher said.

(Source: Neurology, 2021; 10.1212/WNL.000000000000012386)

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