Understanding Cancer as a Metabolic disease
In 1931, a doctor discovered the real root of cancer, and the world ignored him. His name was Dr. Otto Warburg. He won the Nobel Prize for a discovery that should have revolutionized cancer treatment forever. Cancer doesn’t begin with bad genes. It begins when cells can no longer use oxygen to make energy. Warburg discovered that cancer cells ferment sugar even when oxygen is available. This is known as the Warburg Effect, and here's the kicker: We’re still treating cancer today as if it were only genetic, but Warburg was right: Cancer is a metabolic disease. The big obstacle to getting established medicine to rethink cancer is that there is no money in metabolic therapy. There’s no pill or shot for Big Pharma to sell.
The origin of the disease stems from damage to the mitochondria of the cells, forcing them to ferment and generate energy without oxygen. The mitochondria regulate cellular energy metabolism. When the mitochondria become dysfunctional, they revert to fermentation, fuels that don’t require oxygen, such as glucose and glutamine. Cancer’s energy comes from two primary fuels, glucose and glutamine, and it can’t utilize fatty acids or ketone bodies. So you have to deprive them of their fuels glucose and glutamine.
It is vitally Important to move patients into ketosis, as ketosis deprives the cancer of its energy source, glucose. Therefore, you must deprive them of their fuels, glucose, and glutamine. Often, I start with a water fast, fasting triggers autophagy, a cellular process where cells break down and recycle damaged or unnecessary components. Autophagy typically ramps up significantly after 12–24 hours of fasting. The process helps clear damaged proteins, organelles, and pathogens, supporting cellular health and stress resilience. Then come in with drugs that target glucose and glutamine. When the patient is in ketosis, we use glutamine-blocking drugs spaced throughout the day. Depriving the cancer of its two vital fuels, glucose and glutamine.
As you slowly degrade the tumor by restricting glucose, your other cells become healthier by utilizing fatty acids. Normal cells are highly adaptable in the types of fuel they can use. The cancer cells are massively inflexible because their oxidative phosphorylation system is corrupted. They must rely on fermentation, with the two predominant fuels being sugar and glutamine. You can maintain the body's health while treating the tumor.
Once you understand the origin of the disease or disorder, you can manage it without toxicity. Remove the two fuels that drive fermentation metabolism while changing the body over to fatty acids and ketones.
Cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disease in which fermentation gradually replaces respiration as the primary source of cellular energy.
Glucose and glutamine are the primary fermentable fuels for driving cancer growth
Ketone bodies can replace glucose in normal cells, but not in tumor cells
ROS production is greater in tumor cells than in normal cells
Cancer mutations arise in effect, not as a cause, of destabilized energy metabolism
Cancer mutations make tumor cells more vulnerable to energy stress than normal cells
The glutamine addicted neoplastic macrophage is the origin of the metastatic cancer cell
Links:
Seyfried Cancer as a metabolic disease:
Watch Cancer as a Metabolic Disease // Cognitum Episode 9
Watch New Presentation by Dr. Thomas Seyfried - Cancer as a Mitochondrial Metabolic Disease