Cancer as a Metabolic Disease

“With 19 billion capillaries in our bodies, on average, virtually 100% of us have microscopic cancers by the time we’re 70 years old, more than 40% of us by age 40. There’s a good chance you have pinhead-size cancers in your body right now. These “cancers without disease” aren’t typically a problem, as they can’t grow larger than 0.5 mm without a blood supply.

Dr Dominic D'Agostino talks about the potential for ketones to protect against radiation in space as well as in cancer treatments. Adrienne Scheck at the Barrow Neurological Institute has done animal studies on glioblastoma showing that; "If animals are in a state of nutritional ketosis, that sensitizes tumors to radiation, and makes the radiation much more lethal because ketones have an anti-cancer effect."

Basic science supports idea that nutritional ketosis could preserve cognitive and physical functions under conditions of hypoxia (shortage of oxygen in body tissues); and also preserve the cellular, tissue and physiology of people exposed to radiation. This is especially important for astronauts, who may suffer long-term from cancer.

Estimates are that there will be a 70% increase in cancers over the next 20 years especially in developing nations; there is already a 3% increase in children’s cancers per annum. One in two men and one in three women will develop cancer.

The genetic model doesn’t make sense. It raises the question: is cancer a problem of chromosomal damage as we’ve been taught?

What if the chromosomal damage is just a marker, not the cause. What if the model is wrong, if we are doing things the wrong way when treating cancer? If we have been going down the wrong road for 90 years?

This opens up a whole new way of managing cancer, based on a nutritional approach that is cheaper and doesn’t have the bad side effects of conventional treatment.

This is not a new idea. It is based on the Warburg effect – the work of  German physiologist, doctor and Nobel laureate Otto Warburg. It could lie in a message he has given us since 1924, when he described aerobic glycolysis – a defect in mitochondrial glucose metabolism that causes fermentation of glucose and diverts glucose away from energy production to cell growth.

The problem with modern oncology  is that it ignores the glucose metabolism. There is growing evidence to show that the future of cancer management is about how to use nutritional ketosis in management – starving cancer of glucose and insulin. Nutritional ketosis is bad for cancer protective of cells around cancer.

“In 1924 a scientist named Otto Warburg happened upon a counterintuitive finding.

Cancer cells, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, underwent a type of metabolism cells reserved for rapid energy demand – anaerobic metabolism. In fact, even when cancer cells were given additional oxygen, they still defaulted into using only glucose to make ATP via the anaerobic pathway. This is counterintuitive because this way of making ATP is typically a last resort for cells, not a default, due to the relatively poor yield of ATP.

This observation begs a logical question: Do cancer cells do this because it’s all they can do? Or do they deliberately ‘choose’ to do this?

The first place to look is at the mitochondria of the cancer cells. Though not uniformly the case, many cancers do indeed appear to have defects in their mitochondria that prevent them from carrying out oxidative phosphorylation.”

How can we capitalize on these apparent defects?

Researchers will continue to debate the causes of cancer and best treatments, but–in the meantime–there appear to be promising dietary interventions we can use with little to no downside. I’m no doctor, nor do I play one on the Internet, but that’s my current conclusion.

With respect to his hypothesis that cancer begins with a problem of oxygen consumption, the mainstream scientific community has concluded that Otto Warburg was wrong. But in his recognition that cancer is deeply rooted in how our cells obtain and use energy, Warburg has been redeemed. Or, as Thomas Seyfried of Boston College puts it, “We found out that the son of a bitch is right!”

Prof. Thomas N Seyfried

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Seyfried published a groundbreaking treatise entitled, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer (Wiley, 1st ed., 2012). The treatise provides extensive information showing that cancer can be best defined as a mitochondrial metabolic disease rather than as a genetic disease. This new concept has implications for the development of new non-toxic cancer therapies including the ketogenic diet. Experts in the cancer research field have praised this comprehensive study as one of science's hottest topics.

Emerging evidence indicates that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease involving disturbances in energy production through respiration and fermentation. Cancer is suppressed following transfer of the nucleus from the tumor cell to cytoplasm of normal cells containing normal mitochondria. These findings indicate that nuclear genetic abnormalities cannot be responsible for cancer despite commonly held beliefs in the cancer field. The genomic instability observed in tumor cells and all other recognized hallmarks of cancer are considered downstream epiphenomena of the initial disturbance of cellular energy metabolism. The disturbances in tumor cell energy metabolism can be linked to abnormalities in the structure and function of the mitochondria. Cancer growth and progression can be managed following a whole-body transition from fermentable metabolites, primarily glucose and glutamine, to respiratory metabolites, primarily ketone bodies. This transition will reduce tumor vascularity and inflammation while enhancing tumor cell death. A novel “press-pulse” therapeutic strategy is in development for the non-toxic metabolic management of cancer. Malignant brain cancer in preclinical models and humans will be used to illustrate general concepts. As each individual is a unique metabolic entity, personalization of metabolic therapy as a broadbased cancer treatment strategy will require fine-tuning to match the therapy to an individual’s unique physiology.

Recommended Research Papers

Tumor Metabolism, the Ketogenic Diet and ß-Hydroxybutyrate: Novel Approaches to Adjuvant Brain Tumor Therapy

A new therapeutic arena is the metabolic dysregulation that results in an increased need for glucose in tumor cells. This phenomenon suggests that a reduction in tumor growth could be achieved by decreasing glucose availability, which can be accomplished through pharmacological means or through the use of a high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet (KD).

Dr. Sophia Lunt began her training in metabolism at Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. As a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, she focused on cancer metabolism. She currently runs a research lab focused on cancer metabolism at Michigan State University.