New MIT study reveals keto diets increase cancer risk

Younger Americans are driving a boom in experimentation with dietary trends. Over half of U.S. adults followed some sort of diet or eating pattern in 2024 according to an International Food Information Council survey. This health awareness has been largely driven by Gen Z and Millennials.

The ketogenic diet has become one of the most popular diet trends in the United States, topping Google search lists in recent years. This low-card, high-fat diet is designed to push the body into a state of ketosis, where the body burns fat instead of glucose for energy.

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center notes that it “can help people lose weight and better manage Type 2 diabetes.” Likewise, “it’s also recommended for some children with epilepsy because it can reduce seizures by reducing inflammation in the brain.”

However, there is cause for concern in other groups of people. “Side effects can be severe, ranging from unintended weight gain to high cholesterol, kidney complications, or heart palpitations.” Additionally, “ketosis can also be dangerous for people with Type 1 diabetes, as it can cause acid buildup in the bloodstream.”

“Because the keto diet restricts certain foods with known health benefits, such as fruit, it is not recommended as a long-term solution for anybody,” states the premier academic medical center and biomedical research institution.

There is now be another reason that some practitioners may want to think twice before they take up the keto diet trend. A recent study found that it is linked to a increased risk of developing small intestine cancer.

Cancer risk of keto diets

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expanded on other explorations into ketogenic diets, developed in the 1920s, on how it might affect aspects of health and disease which have found that it may help protect against the development of colon cancer.

Similar to when people fast or follow very low-calorie diets, the body is forced to burn fatty acids instead of carbohydrates like glucose. “Burning these lipids produces ketone bodies — primarily β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) and acetoacetate — as byproducts of fatty acid metabolism,” explains MIT News.

BHB is the most abundant ketone body and is responsible for the protective effect of keto diets against colon cancer according to a 2022 Nature study. The MIT researchers wanted to see if this type of diet had a similar effect in the small intestines.

However, with tests on mice that were genetically predisposed to developing intestinal cancer they found that those on a ketogenic diet were more likely to develop tumors in the small intestine compared to the control group. Furthermore, compared to a third group that was fed a high fat/high calorie diet, the keto diet group didn’t become obese but developed tumors are a rate similar to that group or even higher.

Their findings showed that it wasn’t the ketone bodies causing the tumor development, but by how intestinal cells burn dietary fat to produce energy. A family of proteins called PPARs were activated, signaling stem cells to multiply more quickly, in turn increasing the chance that some of them become cancerous.

“Having more stem cells means that when you injure the small intestine, it can repair itself better, but the downside is that having more active stem cells can lead to tumor formation,” said 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, in a statement.

“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,” he added.

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