Lifestyle optimizations are implementable changes that can have an impact on health and disease. Nutrition is a lifestyle optimization that has been shown to be of great importance in cancer initiation, progression, and metastasis. Dozens of clinical trials are currently in progress that focus on the nutritional modifications that cancer patients can make prior to and during medical care that increase the efficacy of treatment. In this review, we discuss various nutritional inventions for cancer patients and the analytical approaches to characterize the downstream molecular effects. We first begin by briefly explaining the many different forms of nutritional intervention currently being used in cancer treatment as well as their motivating biology. The forms of nutrient modulation described in this review include calorie restriction, the different practices of fasting, and carbohydrate restriction. The review then shifts to explain how proteomics is used to determine biomarkers of cancer and how it can be utilized in the future to determine the metabolic phenotype of a tumor, and inform physicians if nutritional intervention should be recommended for a cancer patient. Nutrigenomics aims to understand the relationship of nutrients and gene expression and can be used to understand the downstream molecular effects of nutrition restriction, partially through proteomic analysis. Proteomics is just beginning to be used as cancer diagnostic and predictive tools. However, these approaches have not been used to their full potential to understand nutritional intervention in cancer. Graphical abstract ᅟ.
Keywords: Cancer; Fasting; Mass spectrometry; Nutrition; Nutritional proteomics.