I was listening to some interesting podcasts on the subject of ketosis. Few of them touched on an interesting topic of response of cancer cells to chemotherapy. There are some interesting findings which indicate that fasting prior to chemotherapy helps with effectiveness of this treatment. Patients that fast prior to chemo (for period of I think 24 to 48 hours) have a better response to the treatment in that more of the cancer cells are killed by the drug. The individuals also experience significantly less severe side effects from the treatment. This is for individuals who purely fast prior to chemo and are not necessarily following a ketogenic diet.
I link to some articles below, but here is an excerpt from one of them: “Fasting appears to protect normal cells from chemotherapy’s toxic effects by rerouting energy from growing and reproducing to internal maintenance. Cancer cells do not undergo this switch to self-repair and so continue to be susceptible to drug-induced damage—making for what the researchers call a differential stress resistance. Fasting, should enhance the power of chemotherapies without having to resort to the more typical strategy of increasing the toxicity of drugs.”
More info in this Scientific American article from which the above excerpt was taken.
And some stuff here too