Book Review: Fasting Cancer by Valter Longo, PhD

By Cancer Outside The Box

I love prologues and introductions. Sometimes a book’s first pages are a distillation of what's to come, and other times they’re a venue for messages the authors feel compelled to deliver although they stand apart from the book’s main thrust. Sometimes, they’re the same messages that have appeared in many cancer books written over many decades by many people complaining about the same problem. For at least a half-century, forward-thinking physicians and scientists have penned the same prologues and same introductions because the same problems continue unabated, i.e. the glacial pace of change from medical professionals and corporate control of our “health” “care” system, which of course has nothing to do with health and certainly doesn't care about yours. Too bad nothing changes.

Fasting Cancer, published in 2025 and authored by Valter Longo, PhD, is no exception. This forward-looking scientist voices identical complaints we’ve heard from forward-looking physicians and scientists and their peers who have been forward-looking for decades. Here we are, in 2025, and it’s the same old same old disgraceful and centralized Big Medicine system. SMH (that’s online shorthand for Shaking My Head).

I’ll return to the SMH complaints later, but first, a brief synopsis. Fasting Cancer opens with a prologue, an introduction, a few generalized chapters, and then many chapters devoted to different cancers, complete with studies and case reports on the effects of fasting. “The lion’s share of the book,” writes Longo, comprises chapters on “different cancers, their origins, and the studies conducted on various treatments in tandem with the fasting-mimicking diet and other nutrition-based interventions.”

Longo points out that fasting alone will not cure a patient but that it weakens cancer cells and makes Standard of Care therapies more effective in their kill function. (He means killing the cancer, not you. Too bad that needs to be clarified, but the sad truth is, it does.) Those well-versed with integrative medicine and the science of fasting will not find much of interest in these early chapters. But if you’re new to the cancer assembly line or if you don’t know much about lifestyle changes (and that means you too, docs, if fasting metabolism is virgin territory), read them well. Accessible to the layman but scientific enough to hold the interest of doctors, the book explains the metabolic basis for fasting and his proposed fasting-mimicking diet, which tricks the body into thinking it’s fasting while at the same time providing necessary nutrition.

Longo also stresses that his regimen is less about killing cancer than it is about promoting juventology, or the science of staying young, which is a condition that makes cancer less likely.

In the prologue, Italian physician and professor of medicine Alessandro Laviano notes that the medical profession “appeared hostile” to any discussion of fasting. “In general, we, doctors and oncologists included, receive a drug-focused training and therefore focus on administering drugs…

“We know little about the powerful metabolic effects of food and fasting, so we find it hard to admit they play a role in treating patients.”

Sound familiar? He doesn’t use the word hubris, but I will. Not only are doctors uneducated in the metabolic aspects of health, not to mention the metabolic aspects of cancer, but they’re hostile because of hubris, that bane of white-coat training. Do medical students take classes teaching them they possess the sum of all knowledge past, present and future, and any doctor who deviates is a quack?

“Everlasting dogmas,” writes Laviano, should not exist. Tell that to the oncologists at Fancy New York City Hospital where I was first treated, where doctors caused irreparable harm because of, well, precisely because of dogmas, either instilled by dogmatic training or perhaps by revenue-motivated protocols minted by C suite execs and then polished to perfection by the bean counters.

In early summer of 2022, soon after my diagnosis with Stage IIIa colorectal cancer, I arrived at Fancy NYC Hospital 48 hours fasted in preparation for my first dose of oxaliplatin, the chemo indicated for CRC. They gave me MTD, which stands for Maximum Tolerated Dose. MTD fails to account for differences in body fat and lean mass. In many cases, and in mine, the dose was overkill. The side effects were awful. My throat closed up, making me squeak like a chipmunk. The constipation, then diarrhea, were gut-wrenching and kept me home for almost a week. Bare feet on a cold floor or touching the refrigerator sent electric shocks through my body. To add insult to injury, the nurse who performed the infusion in a small vein in my hand caused infiltration, which meant that the chemo leaked out of the vein and into my forearm, which swelled up like a sausage and stayed painful for a few weeks. She denied there was infiltration, and anyway, she said it was my fault because I didn’t have a port.

The oncologist’s nurse practitioner insisted the problem was fasting and she instructed me to eat before the next infusion. So the next time I made the trek to that hospital, I had a big fat cheeseburger, and she was pleased. During that visit, I asked the oncologist to lower the dose, but he refused to reduce it as much as I wanted, even though low dose chemo has been shown to work just as well at killing the cancer and inflicts fewer side effects. So I refused the infusion, and I left that hospital’s practice soon after. I wish I’d left sooner, and in fact, I wish I’d never set foot in the place, because everything they did was by the book, and that book may be the reason CRC survival is so low. Within a few months I metastasized, meaning I became Stage IV and incurable. I’ll never know if those metastases were already there, or if the radiation and chemo they gave me had anything to do with the quick progression.

Since then, I’ve found oncologists who are less hidebound. And sure enough, lower dose oxaliplatin causes me none of the side effects, even when combined with other strongs chemos and immunotherapy.

On a personal note, and sorry if the science is wrong, my tumor has an amplified Her2/neu, which is part of the EGFR family, which sits in the tyrosine kinase receptor pathway, which in turn is an upstream activator of the AKT pathway. Longo notes on P. 18 that if you can inactivate the AKT pathway, among others, different types of organisms live longer. I hope I’m one of those organisms.

Once I got over my anger and sadness at the prologue and introduction and the memories of Fancy NYC Hospital that came rushing back, how did I handle the book? I read the general sections and then turned to the chapter on my kind of cancer. Then I felt the need to at least skim the other cancer chapters for nuggets of knowledge that could be extrapolated more generally. And there are many. But for that, you’ll have to buy the book, and chances are that’s exactly what you should do.

In case you wonder, nobody’s sponsoring me, I bought the book out of my own funds, and I don’t get a dime for what I write.

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