LOW-CAL DIET HOPE FOR CHEMO PATIENTS

COULD a strict five-day diet help in the fight against cancer? That’s exactly what scientists across the world are trying to find out.

They are looking into the Fast Mimicking Diet – the brainchild of Professor Valter Longo, who heads the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

He created a diet where you live on about 800 calories a day for five days, then eat normally for the rest of the month.

This cycle can be repeated every one to six months, depending on your diet goals. Prof Longo believes that if you drastically reduce food – and therefore energy supply – cells go into ‘a highly protected non-growth mode’. In other words, they hunker down and wait for better times.

He believes this diet could also help patients going through chemotherapy, one of the main treatments for cancer. Chemotherapy drugs kill off cells that grow rapidly, which is what cancer cells do.

But other healthy cells – such as hair cells and those in the gut – also divide rapidly. This is why treatment can cause hair loss and nausea.

The theory is that if you could slow down the growth of normal cells by fasting prior to chemo, that might protect them during the treatment, while still leaving the tumour cells vulnerable to attack.

There are medical trials happening right now that are trying to find out if Prof Longo’s diet might do just that.

He is adamant, however, that people should not try to do this without consulting their doctor.