this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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What were the mice fed? Is this like a vegetarian low carb diet where the fats come from factory fats - seed oils?
Does "susceptible mice" mean mice that are highly prone to cancer?
Were they also fed carcinogens?
There is reason to think that high meat, high animal fat diets are protective against cancer, as cancer depends on sugar
this was the diet used https://researchdiets.com/en/formulas/d06040601 sucrose, corn starch, soybean oil, food dyes... you know... keto stuff.... 6% daily energy from soybean oil
the mice were genetically engineered to develop tumors, so not fed, designed.
This study isn't about keto, its about the pathway of tumor growth in genetically engineered tumor laden mice in a high fat diet.... unless your a mouse engineered to develop tumors genetically this doesn't apply to you.
So these mice were on a high carb diet with exogenous ketones? 6% energy from fat isn't ketogenic
6% from soybean oil, total energy from fat was about 80%, except they didn't count fibre in the diet as carbohydrates... if you do that its a 15% carb diet.
I don't tolerate sugar or fibre well, and I'll avoid plant oils in general
Ok so I'm not a mouse, I'm not from a line deliberately bred for cancer, and my diet has none of those things; my 80% energy from fat is from beef fat. I think I'm not going to worry about this
also 50g of fibre in the feed diet, maybe the tumors are responding to fibre?
i'm just skimming right now, but the papers studies each used 2-4 mice, and are not powered at all. it's hard to say even if you WERE a PPAR-CPT1A engineered mouse that these results are relevant... they knocked out ketogenesis in a few of the mice and still saw tumor growth.... let's not forget the genetic engineering here not only induces tumors, but also suppresses bhb production... so maybe these tumors respond well to fatty acids, but would be suppressed by healthy bhb production and ketone metabolism... this paper doesn't know. it's possible the net effect of a healthy ketogenic metabolism would be enough in non-genetically engineered mice to reduce the tumors.... they didn't test that.
plus...... they didn't measure all cause mortality! so we just know tumor growth for a window... why not actually get all cause mortality data? nothing ruins short term results like long term data.
the fact we have human interventional studies directly linking tumor growth to glucose intake, and in this mice study we see the opposite only in their genetically engineered tumors.... i'm not sure we can make any meaningful conclusions from that.
They conclude the cancers are triggered by the fats not ketones based on the study title (I haven't had time to read the study yet)
the study isn't open access, I'm pretty sure nobody has read the study including the nature "article" author.
it's pretty bad form, and intellectually dishonest, to share a paywalled article on a paywalled paper, just because you like the title... ensuring nobody will read what is actually said is pretty anti-science.