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Will a fatty diet help in cancer treatment?
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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A unique combination of radiation therapy and a high-fat diet could be a new way to fight cancer.
A team of scientists led by Adrienne Shek from the Barrow Neurological Institute at Saint Joseph's Medical Center (Phoenix, Arizona, USA) managed to cure a mouse with a malignant glioma (a type of aggressive, deadly brain tumor) using a unique combination of radiation therapy and a special diet that requires a large amount of fat, while carbohydrates are limited and proteins are almost completely excluded. This diet forces the body to use fat, rather than carbohydrates, for energy production. The researchers claim that this diet can be safely used as an additional method in the treatment of brain cancer in humans.
Adrienne Scheck and her colleagues were the first to conduct such experiments.
"We found that a high-fat diet significantly enhanced the antitumor effect of radiation. This suggests that diet could be used as an adjunct to current standard combination treatments for malignant gliomas in humans," explains Adrienne Scheck.
The high-fat diet has been used since the 1920s to treat epilepsy. It may soon help fight cancer, too.
Under normal conditions, the body uses carbohydrates, which are found in foods such as sugar, bread, and pasta, to produce glucose. Glucose is the body's main source of energy. With a high-fat diet, due to the limited consumption of carbohydrates, the body cannot use glucose, and then fats become its main source of energy. This process is known as ketosis.
When scientists tested a high-fat diet on sick mice, they found that the animals on a diet consisting mostly of fats lived an average of five days longer than their other relatives, given the same treatment. Most of the mice on the high-fat diet survived without signs of tumor recurrence for more than 200 days. Meanwhile, none of the mice on a normal diet survived longer than 33 days.
Scientists explain this effect of a fatty diet on tumor development by reducing the stimulation of growth hormones. Thus, in combination with radiation therapy, a fatty diet stops tumor growth and can also reduce inflammation and swelling around the tumor.
The next stage of the research by the team of scientists led by Adrienne Scheck should be experiments with people.
Scientists have proven that specific fatty acids that the body receives from a fatty diet can be used to make tablets that will help cure epilepsy and cancer patients without side effects such as constipation, hypoglycemia, growth retardation and brittle bones.
There is evidence to suggest that a high-fat, low-carbohydrate, low-protein diet may have beneficial effects on brain homeostasis and may have potential for treating not only cancer and epilepsy but other brain diseases as well.
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