“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!”
