In recent years, scientists have been exploring how this type of diet might affect other aspects of health and disease, including cancer. While some research has shown that the diet may protect against the development of colon cancer, a new study by MIT researchers suggests that in the small intestine, a ketogenic diet may increase the risk of cancer. 'Ketogenic diets have distinct effects on different tissues even within the gastrointestinal tract. I think the message here is that we need to be very careful in generalizing the effects that these diets can have, because what might be beneficial for one tissue may be detrimental for another tissue,' says Omer Yilmaz, director of the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, an associate professor of biology at MIT, and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Yilmaz is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature. MIT postdocs Jessica Shay and Fangtao Chi are the lead authors of the paper. Researchers from...
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