A ketogenic diet, especially when calorie-restricted, stresses cancer cells, stimulates autophagy, promotes cancer cell death, and sensitizes tumors to chemotherapy and radiation.

“So, when you give chemo, it's killing cancer cells, and then you're stimulating autophagy and tumor lysis syndrome, and then that's stimulating the immune system. So, you know, I think chemotherapy, in general, is carcinogenic, it's bad, but it's also stimulating the immune system to then attack the cancer cell. In the context of a ketogenic diet, that a ketogenic diet, especially if it's calorie restricting, is stimulating cancer, it's putting metabolic stress on cancer cells and actually stimulating autophagy sort of in cancer cells, is stimulating cancer cell death.”