Why is cutting carbs to kill cancer a trap?

They do so much that checking PET scan“PET identifies the location of active cancer when it detects glucose, used as a marker, which increases at some point in the image,” recalls the nutritionist. This is where the cancer is, where it eats up more sugar than healthy tissue.

But be warned, it’s easy to cut out the sweets—and that’s it. “When we don’t eat a lot of carbohydrates, other nutrients, like fat and protein, are converted to glucose as well,” explains Paula. What’s different about the ketogenic diet is that, even though you’re eating, it mimics what happens to your body during fasting.

These ketone bodies and cancer

According to the oncology nutritionist, after about twelve hours of low glucose supply from food, the body has already used up all its stores of this sugar in the liver and then begins to burn lean mass – that is, muscle – and fat. After all, you can’t run out of energy. This generates ketone bodies, which fuel the cells, as if they were part of an alternative menu.

The ketogenic diet, by drastically reducing dietary carbohydrates and dramatically increasing fat portions, mimics this fasting state. Thus, the body has to deal with fat for 30 years.

“That’s it: the cancer cell is dysfunctional,” says Paula. “Unlike healthy cells, it doesn’t seem to be picking up ketone bodies to satisfy its hunger.” Hence the hypothesis: the ketogenic diet could starve cancer. It had to be tested. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.