According to world-science.net, researchers suggest the fasting might help because normal cells tend to put off trying to divide when nutrients are lacking—but cancer cells keep trying, and this process ultimately kills them.
Fasting, even on its own, effectively treated a majority of cancers tested in mice, including transplanted cancer tumors made of human cells, researchers said. Their study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, found that five out of eight cancer types in mice responded to fasting alone: just as with chemotherapy, fasting slowed the growth and spread of tumors. And without exception, “the combination of fasting cycles plus chemotherapy was either more or much more effective than chemo alone,” said study senior author Valter Longo of the University of Southern California.
Multiple cycles of fasting combined with chemotherapy cured 20 percent of mice with a highly aggressive type of children’s cancer that had spread throughout the body, and 40 percent of mice with a more limited spread of the same cancer, the authors added. No mice survived in either case if treated only with chemotherapy.
