Valter Longo, PhD has been studying an aspect of fasting and autophagy that is fascinating enough, I wanted to include it in it’s own section. One area of his research focuses on how fasting induces differential stress resistance to make chemotherapy far more effective. In a food scarce environment, normal cells become more resistant to oxidative stress, but cancer cells don’t. Remember, cancer cells are broken cells. Something went wrong with them and they are replicating out of control. Being broken means they don’t retain all the typical functions and protective mechanisms of normal cells, like antioxidant generation. That’s one of the reasons cancer cells switch their metabolism from oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis even in the presence of oxygen. It’s known as the Warburg effect. There are many theories on why this happens, but one is because cancer cells are more sensitive to the reactive oxygen species created during normal metabolism. Eating creates an environment where cancer cells thrive and normal cells are stressed. Cancer cells need an environment rich with sugar, growth factors (like IGF-1) and amino acids like glutamine. For normal cells, metabolism creates reactive oxygen species and triggers an immune response to deal with all the pathogens riding along on top of your meals. However, when you fast, normal cells become 1000 times more resistant to reactive oxygen species, but cancer cells do not. This same starvation-protection also makes normal cells far more resistant to chemotherapy drugs.