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Comment by whb07 | Hacker News Reader

Peter Attia talks about this indirectly, where he’s been to some chemo floors and observed patients taking “healthy” drinks and supplements that are mixed as a milkshake of sugar and carbs.

Problem is a number of the cancer cells can only live on glucose. The other pathways for energy are broken/nonexistent, and so consumption of sugary drinks directly feeds fuel to these type of cells.

Strange how the field hasn’t connected the dots yet.

1. Prove the cancer cells of X type can only feed on glucose

2. If so, don’t ingest glucose.

Radical science here folks

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The field has 100% connected the dots. And there are a lot of studies on it, but trying to cure cancer through the Warburg effect isn't quite the holy Grail they hoped.

Your comment isn't relevant to this article. The study was about vitamins and antioxidants, not carbohydrates.

I think he’s referring to the method of ingestion. A lot of supplements come in different forms, including sweetened chewables and drink mixes.

It's being worked on. As with anyting in living systems, it's not simple. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6197057/

I think Otto Warburg might have beaten you to it

Not questioning you. But do you have a link to the cancer cell and glucose connection?

The Warburg hypothesis should be a good jumping off point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_hypothesis

Do you work in oncology or medicine?

This reply was downvoted, and I am a bit surprised:

I would expect that making a strong claim of naivete of an entire field of people dedicating their life to a problem (oncology) should be at least put in context of the commentator's expertise and evidence (see the other Metformin related comment).

I hope this is seen as a constructive comment: let's not abandon the respect for expertise.

I can appreciate the inquiry, but I would expect a senior biology undergrad to be able to write a comprehensive paper on a topic like this based solely on the information that's been published.

If you post a comment like that just as a one-liner, it's much too easy to interpret it as snark or personal attack. That's destructive of good conversation on the internet. If you provide more information about your intent, as you did in your second comment, that helps to prune the response tree of defensive or aggressive replies, and we all benefit.

This study mentions antioxidants rather than glucose.

Do you have evidence beyond indirect second hand anecdotes that might support your hypothesis?

I think op is only partially right.

There seems to be indirect connection trough insulin and insulin like growth factors. They can play important role in oncogenesis.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614012/

This is not new information. And it's been shown to be efficacious. The problem is patient adherence. Chemo is something that so long as the patient shows up you can administer it and they can go back home. A glucose free diet could only be adhered to on an in-patient basis. Which most patient / healthcare systems cannot afford.

There have also been studies showing efficacy of a compound which down regulates Glut1 in order to cut off glycolysis in cancer cells which rely solely on it for energy production.

>A glucose free diet could only be adhered to on an in-patient basis.

That's not true, the Keto diet is a big fad and it only works if your diet is basically glucose free.

Dieting is notoriously difficult to follow 100%. And in this case that's important. In-patient, the intake is exactly what the dietician (and indirectly the doctor) prescribes. A better outcome could be expected.

I have doubts about a couple of the assumptions implicit in this statement.

- The "Keto" diet particularly works. Last time I checked, the research suggested it worked about as well as any other elimination diet, or vanilla CR.

- The reason it works. Given that it works about as well as any other elimination diet, it's probably important for practitioners to adhere strictly, rather than continuing to consume the foods that made them fat; but successfully avoiding carbohydrate intake enough to trigger some particular level of ketosis is probably not a part of how it "works".

Neither of those assumptions were implicit in the statement. The keto diet is simply evidence that glucose elimination is possible for some people without an inpatient treatment. The context of this discussion is glucose elimination for cancer, not weight loss.

(There is a fad that people attempt to do X) + (the observable result is orthogonal to whether they successfully did X) => not very strong evidence that doing X is achievable

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