Saturday 14 March 2020

New Research: High fat (keto) diet accelerates glioblastoma growth

Hi all,

Just popped up on my news feed is this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.08.982116v2, which suggests that the high-fat 'keto' diet (which I know many people are taking in an attempt to limit tumour growth) may actually be counterproductive and speed glioblastoma growth. Here's the lay summary:

"Consumption of a high-fat diet (HFD) accelerates glioblastoma (GBM) by inhibiting the production and signaling of the tumor-suppressive metabolite hydrogen sulfide (H2S)"
**Note that this a 'pre-print' article that has not yet been certified by peer review.

I would be interested to hear people's opinions.

2 comments:

  1. The paper you posted is pretty off the mark. As they noted they compared 'an obesity-inducing high-fat diet (HFD) versus an energy-balanced, low-fat control diet' .

    A useful comparison would be a mild caloric restriction with a keto diet vs a mild caloric restriction in a standard diet.

    Even still this is all in mice and mice unfortunately have fairly different ketogenic metabolism capability than humans, so they don't make great metabolic models.

    Lastly, even a high fat diet that is not executed with extreme care will often not achieve deep ketosis levels and thus not put the brain into a glucose deprivation condition anyway (the brain gets first usage of glucose in the body).

    Bottom line is that while there is some evidence that combining keto and radiation may be beneficial, there is even less good evidence of its affects outside of that.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks. Appreciate another set of eyes as it can be difficult to distill out the facts from the hyperbole.

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