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bratwurst3000yesterday at 3:44 PM1 replyview on HN

in all respect sorry this is wrong. this is a broad misinformation. It can enhance but also supresse cancer dependig of soo much we dont know yet enough to know if fasting is beneficial or dangerous.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cam4.5577

edit:// and the article has imho nothinh to do with autophagy. Its about beige fat cells eating stuff away from cancer not autophagy wich happened in the innercell. And if you go into caloric deficit you could burn away those beige fat cells that "heal" the cancer.


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UniverseHackeryesterday at 3:54 PM

The paper you posted is just a review on autophagy and cancer that doesn’t contradict anything I stated. It is a mistake to conflate autophagy, calorie restriction, and cold exposure as necessarily biologically identical, which your comment seems to imply.

I was only raising questions this research and discussion made me curious about, not making any concrete claims.

Although the idea of calorie restriction as a cancer treatment is something still actively debated and researched, I personally doubt it is very useful, or likely to be the main mechanism here in the connection between beige fat and cancer, but it is a possibility to at least be ruled out experimentally in the context of the comment I replied to, which is why I mentioned it anyways. One major concern with calorie restriction in humans but not rodents is that it shuts down your metabolism by limiting t3 thyroid hormone production whereas cold exposure ramps up metabolism by uncoupling mitochondria to produce heat. You are correct that the body can shut down processes and systems that might be important for fighting cancer, in response to calorie restriction.

I am a researcher that studies metabolism, and actually think the prominent focus on fasting and calorie restriction as a potential medical cure-all has been mostly a dead end, that people were mistakenly led down largely as a result of these fundamental differences between rodent and human metabolism.

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