On the topic of ketogenic diet and cancer, specifically for the focus which seems to be on glucose rather than anything else, whether it's by proponents or opponents. I'd like to shift this focus to a much more pertinent aspect instead.

A while ago, Feinman did a pilot experiment with a ketogenic diet and cancer. The premise was insulin signaling inhibition. No consideration for glucose downstream. I believe this is the more appropriate focus.

To illustrate, a very similar parallel - growth hormone disorders, specifically excess growth hormone. Without knowing the cause, let's look at the treatments. Let's say we believe growth is a function of energy, the obvious solution is to restrict energy for this growth. Would that work? No. Energy is not the cause of growth, though energy is used to realize this growth. The cause of growth is growth hormone. The only effective treatment for excess growth hormone is to restrict growth hormone directly through some means. From there, independently of energy intake or quality (i.e. fat or glucose or whatever), excess growth ceases because the cause has been treated.

With cancer, just like with growth hormone disorders, the cause is not [excess] energy - glucose in this case - it's another hormone, insulin. Cancer grows because of excess insulin. We call this hyperinsulinemia. We create hyperinsulinemia primarily with an on-going high-carb diet. It follows therefore that a low-carb diet would mitigate the creation of hyperinsulinemia, thus treating the cause of cancer growth.

The fact that the treatment itself focuses on carbs (and glucose) leads to confusion, and also allows strawman discussion and obfuscation whether intentional or not. It doesn't help that there was an expert - Warburg - who developed a theory blaming glucose directly. But it's easy to dismantle this strawman. The methods used to discover the apparent culprit only looked at glucose, nothing else. Let's do an experiment with insulin only, then see if the Warburg effect appears anyways. I bet it will, it's inevitable in my opinion, just like growth is inevitable with excess growth hormone.

Feinman is on the right track.

p.s. I'm making the same basic argument Taubes often makes to illustrate the cause of excess fat accumulation, i.e. excess calories vs excess insulin.

p.p.s. The discussion of Feinman's pilot experiment: http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=447278