Specific diets for cancer patients have the potential to offer an adjuvant modality to conventional anticancer therapy. If the concept of starving cancer cells from nutrients to inhibit tumor growth is quite simple, the translation into the clinics is not straightforward. Several diets have been described including the Calorie-restricted diet based on a reduction in carbohydrate intake and the Ketogenic diet wherein the low carbohydrate content is compensated by a high fat intake. As for other diets that deviate from normal composition only by one or two amino acids, these diets most often revealed a reduction in tumor growth in mice, in particular when associated with chemo- or radiotherapy. By contrast, in cancer patients, the interest of these diets is almost exclusively supported by case reports precluding any conclusions on their real capacity to influence disease outcome. In parallel, the field of tumor lipid metabolism has emerged in the last decade offering a better understanding of how fatty acids are captured, synthesized or stored as lipid droplets in cancers. Fatty acids participate to cancer cell survival in the hypoxic and acidic tumor microenvironment and also support proliferation and invasiveness. Interestingly, while such addiction for fatty acids may account for cancer progression associated with high fat diet, it could also represent an Achilles heel for tumors. In particular n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids represent a class of lipids that can exert potent cytotoxic effects in tumors and therefore represent an attractive diet supplementation to improve cancer patient outcomes.

针对癌症患者的特殊饮食有可能为常规抗癌治疗提供辅助手段。如果用营养使癌细胞饿死以抑制肿瘤生长的概念很简单，那么将其转化为临床药物就不那么容易了。已经描述了几种饮食，包括基于碳水化合物摄入减少的热量限制饮食和生酮饮食其中低碳水化合物含量被高脂肪摄入所补偿。至于其他只偏离正常组成一个或两个氨基酸的饮食，这些饮食通常会显示出小鼠肿瘤生长的减少，特别是与化学疗法或放射疗法结合时。相比之下，在癌症患者中，这些饮食的兴趣几乎完全由病例报告支持，这些病例报告排除了有关其影响疾病结果的实际能力的任何结论。同时，在最近十年中出现了肿瘤脂质代谢领域，从而使人们更好地了解了如何在癌症中捕获，合成或以脂质小滴形式存储脂肪酸。脂肪酸在缺氧和酸性肿瘤微环境中参与癌细胞的存活，并且还支持增殖和侵袭性。有趣的是高脂饮食，也可能代表肿瘤的致命弱点。特别地，n-3多不饱和脂肪酸代表一类脂质，可以在肿瘤中发挥有效的细胞毒性作用，因此代表一种有吸引力的饮食补充品，可以改善癌症患者的预后。