The Deadly Side Effect of Keto for Cancer Patients: Cachexia and How Researchers Are Working to Solve It

You hear the term keto diet more and more. People who want to lose weight choose food that contains a lot of fat and as few carbohydrates as possible. In addition, keto has also emerged as a new weapon against various types of cancer. There is only one problem…

According to dietitians, it is possible to lose 10 percent of your body weight by following a keto diet. The idea is to encourage the body to use its fat reserves due to the lack of sugars in the diet. Cancer patients nowadays also choose more often to leave the sugars alone, so that tumors have problems with their energy supply and slowly starve. The majority of tumor cells need a continuous supply of glucose in order to continue growing. Also, keto causes toxic by-products of fats to build up in the cancer cells and kill them. This process is called ferroptosis.

Cachexia
A keto diet therefore seems to be an ideal part of the treatment for people with cancer, but unfortunately it is not. American research shows that the low-carbohydrate diet has a deadly side effect, which annually contributes to the (accelerated) death of about two million people worldwide. This condition is called cachexia. It is a complex metabolic syndrome manifested by extreme thinness that occurs in the advanced stages of diseases such as cancer, TB and AIDS, as well as extreme old age, heavy drug abuse and anorexia nervosa. Cachexia causes extreme weight loss, muscle breakdown, a total lack of appetite, severe fatigue, and deterioration of the immune system.

Extremely thin and fatigued
New York researchers discovered that mice with pancreatic and colon cancer that are put on a keto diet are much more likely to suffer from cachexia and its deadly consequences. “Cachexia results from a wound that won’t heal,” says Professor Tobias Janowitz. “It is very common in patients with progressive cancer. They become so weak that they are no longer eligible for cancer treatments. Simple daily activities turn into enormous labor for these people. In the end, they hardly manage to get out of bed.”

The balance is lost
Janowitz is therefore working with a colleague to come up with a solution for cachexia in cancer patients. They managed to prolong the anti-cancer effects of the keto diet in the lab mice by using corticosteroids, while avoiding cachexia. The tumors shrank and the mice lived longer. “Healthy mice also lose weight on the keto diet, but their metabolism adjusts, after which a balance is established,” Janowitz explains. “Mice with cancer cannot adapt because they produce too little of the hormone corticosterone. They fail to adapt to the effect of the keto diet, so the weight loss continues.” The administration of corticosteroids to supplement the body’s own corticosterone gave excellent results in the mice.

Timing a dosage
“Cancer is a disease that affects the entire body. It reprograms normal biological processes to keep growing,” says Ferrer. “As a result, the sick mice are no longer able to use the nutrients from the keto diet and they languish. But after taking the steroids things went much better. They lived longer than any other treatment we tried.” The team is now fine-tuning the timing and dosage of the artificial hormone and making the move to treat human cancer patients. In this way, they hope to increase the period in which effective cancer treatments can be used in combination with the keto diet.

“We are doing everything we can to limit the growth of tumors and reduce cancer. We are clearly on the right track now that we seem to have found an answer to cachexia,” said Janowitz. “If we succeed in increasing this effect and we make the package of treatments even more efficient, millions of cancer patients will be able to reap the benefits in the near future. That is our main motivation.”