Fasting and Chemotherapy
I’ve been going through chemotherapy (a combination of carboplatin and pemetrexed, now continuing with pemetrexed for maintenance) for several months, and so far, things are going well. The cancer is under control, and I’ve experienced only a few side effects.
One of the things I do alongside my chemo infusions is follow a fasting-mimicking diet (FMD). I start the FMD two days before the infusion and continue for two days afterward.
I decided to try FMD after watching some educational videos and reading papers about cancer. One paper that really stood out to me, and that’s often cited, is:
The study looked at the safety and effects of a five-day cyclic FMD through a clinical trial involving 101 cancer patients. It found that FMD was safe, well-tolerated, and caused changes in the immune system, both in the blood and within tumors. The findings suggest that FMD could be a useful tool in combination with other therapies, including chemotherapy.
What I liked most about this paper is the detailed figures and tables, which are really helpful for anyone interested in trying this regimen. For example, the figure below (Figure 1A) shows the FMD schedule used in their clinical trial, illustrating the 5-day fasting and re-feeding periods.
Supplementary Table S1 shows exactly what the patients ate during the FMD, which is mostly small servings of salad and nuts with very low protein—pretty similar to what I eat every day anyway!
While the study doesn’t focus specifically on lung cancer, the population does include lung cancer patients. There’s also another study on FMD combined with chemotherapy specifically for lung cancer patients by the same first author (Vernieri et al., 2019).
I’ll continue to share updates about my journey with chemo and FMD here on the blog, so stay tuned for more!