Cancer cells feed off glucose. Therefore, fasting or dramatically reducing calorie intake might be able to reverse the disease.

This is the suggestion of what appears to be a new therapy. However, the team who have brought this to the forefront of medical development have had some help from a German biochemist.

Otto Warburg died in 1970. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology, or medicine, in 1931 for his research into the respiratory systems of cells, or how they ‘breathe’.

Warburg also discovered that cancer cells do not require oxygen as they are anaerobic. Instead, they depend on an energy source from fermenting sugar or glucose. They obtain this from the carbohydrates in our diet.

At the University of Southern California, Valter Longo, a professor of gerontology and biological sciences, and his team of researchers estimate that cancers lose their primary food source if we fast for four days.

In itself, that is not enough. People who don’t eat for four days will not beat the cancer because cancer cells will then seek out new energy supplies in the form of enzymes called ‘protein kinases’.

In his earlier findings, Warburg goes on to elaborate that after fasting, the cancer patient then takes kinase inhibitors. These are drugs that have already been approved as a cancer treatment by America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These will block the final food source for all cancer cells.

At the moment this process is at an experimental stage and has only been tested in the laboratory. However, it is a theory that has also been studied by scientists in Europe who are keen to try it out on cancer patients. In the meantime, Longo is quietly confident that he has discovered a major new way to treat cancer and one that doesn’t cause the irreparable damage to the immune system that we see from chemotherapy (Oncotarget, 2015).

Cancer cells feed off glucose. Therefore, fasting or dramatically reducing calorie intake might be able to reverse the disease

Both Longo and the European scientists have all been dependent on the insights of Warburg. The cancer cell is in constant overdrive, metabolising at a rate that is eight times greater than a healthy cell. Therefore it is constantly craving glucose in a process that has been called the ‘Warburg effect’.

Cancer begins when healthy cells are deprived of oxygen, according to Warburg. This can happen when the body’s alkaline/acid balance goes out of kilter and becomes too acidic. This means that the normal pH level falls below the healthy 7.365 mark. Cancer cells thrive in a lower pH environment, often as low as level 6.

So the concept of fasting, or quite literally starving cancer cells, isn’t so different from Warburg’s concept. Longo believes that it doesn’t just starve cancer cells of glucose but could also make kinase-inhibiting drugs more effective.

The drugs are not as toxic as chemotherapy. However, they can still promote an adverse reaction in patients. Longo believes that patients who fast will not have to take the drugs for as long and yet will still achieve the same results as a non-fasting patient.

Conventional medicine agrees with Warburg – cancer cells do feed off glucose and student doctors are taught all about the Warburg effect at medical school. However, despite this acceptance, it has never changed the way cancer is treated. The reason being that the conventional view believes that the Warburg effect is a symptom of cancer and not its cause.

The prevailing theory maintains that cancer is a genetic disease. Even Warburg’s biographer (Hans Krebs) accused him of oversimplifying the problem. Other critics said Warburg’s theory failed to explain some of cancer’s other processes, such as mutations and spread.

Longo and other biologists are part of the vanguard that is putting Warbug and the theory of cancer as a metabolic disease back on the map. They argue that cancer is a metabolic disease and not a genetic one as Warburg claimed. Therefore this should change the way that cancer is treated.

Ultimately, Longo argues that a cancer has to be deprived of glucose and this is most easily achieved through dietary changes such as fasting or adopting a ketogenic diet. This is the high-fat, low-carb diet that has been successful in controlling epileptic fits (Nutr. Metab. (Lond), 2010).

Cancer also ceases to be a mysterious disease, one that has its genesis in genetic patterns. Instead, it is a disease triggered by the inability of our cells to ‘breathe’, a process brought about by radiation, chemicals, viruses and the food we eat.

Once again, as we already know, our lifestyle has a huge impact on a disease which destroys so many lives.

kathryn@maltanet.net