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[Music] Welcome to the Hunger for Change podcast, where we explore fresh perspectives with leading voices in health and science. I'm your host, Nas Gustafson, and today I'm honored to welcome Professor Thomas C. D., a prestigious biologist and a pioneer in the study of cancer and metabolic therapy. Professor C. D. earned his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, enriching his expertise during his postdoctoral years at Yale University School of Medicine. At Boston College, he teaches biology, genetics, and biochemistry, shaping the minds of countless students with his insights into how diseases like cancer, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative disorders can be managed and prevented through specialized protocols like the keto diet. He's the author of "Cancer as a Metabolic Disease" and a contributor to several leading scientific journals. So let's get ready for a fascinating conversation with one of the most prominent cancer biologists there is. Welcome, Professor C. D.
Well, thank you, Nicholas. It's nice to be here today. There is so much I want to know about this topic. First of all, what does health mean to you?
Well, I think health is the absence of illness. It's that simple, right? Pretty much.
What's your story, and how did your passion for medicine and science all start?
Well, I came to it by many different roads. It's not, you know, you get a degree in classical genetics, and then you work in biochemistry, and one thing leads to another as you begin to explore parts of nature. It only became clear to us maybe 25 or 30 years ago on this cancer metabolism, but before that, it was purely basic science. It wasn't really linking to any disease that people have, although we were working on TX disease, a lipid storage disease, for many years. I'm still working on that, but you know, there's no straight path to any of this kind of stuff. You just have to follow where the science leads you and what your own interests are.
Why do people get cancer?
For many reasons. I've written about this—how cancer can be initiated. Most of it has to do with the advance of our diet, lifestyle, and technology as the origin. But how does that happen in one person versus another, or in one tissue versus another? I broke that all down in resolving what we call the oncogenic paradox. That term, oncogenic paradox, was first mentioned by Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won a Nobel Prize, a Hungarian for his work on vitamin C. He raised the question: how is it possible that you could have so many things that have been associated with cancer, and no one could figure out the common pathophysiological mechanism by which some guy smokes, some guy gets exposed to chemical carcinogens, some guy gets systemic inflammation, somebody inherits some kind of a gene, some people get exposed to viruses, and some people just get older? How is it possible that all these conditions can be linked to a disregulated growth of cells in a particular tissue, which is cancer? All of it involves chronic disruption of energy through oxidative phosphorylation, which is what Otto Warburg originally said and which we have absolutely confirmed as the origin of cancer.
So any of those provocative agents can elicit a chronic disruption of energy through oxidative phosphorylation, leading to disregulated cell growth and what we call cancer. It can happen anytime, in any place, in any kind of an individual. But I would certainly say that our diet and lifestyle today in the Western world is a contributor towards damaging oxidative phosphorylation in some tissue or cell group.
Could you share what initially led you to investigate cancer as a metabolic disease rather than a genetic one?
Because in Europe, we can read and hear that cancer is a genetic disease, and I know that in the U.S. there is something similar.
Well, according to the National Cancer Institute— is that what it's called in the U.S.? We have something very similar here, and in, for example, Sweden, it's called the National Board of Health and Welfare. That's what you can read there. As you might know, in Europe, there are 3,500 people per day that die of cancer. I think the number in the U.S. is 1,700, something like that.
That's true, that's correct. So what led you to actually investigate cancer as a metabolic disease, not a genetic one?
Well, I think like most people, when I started my career, it was clear that for everyone who read books and textbooks, cancer was considered a genetic disease. I never questioned that; it was a silent assumption. You know, I have a degree in genetics, and when it came to the section about somatic mutations and germline mutations and things like this, they would discuss various forms of cancer that seemed to be associated with various kinds of mutations, and we would study that and transmit that information to students. But it didn't occur to me that that whole understanding was incorrect until you actually do the kind of research that would seriously question the foundational principles of the theory. I started to do that, but I didn't do it purposefully. I did it because I was seeing things that were completely inconsistent with the dogmatic theory of cancer as a genetic disease—completely inconsistent.
Because I started to—don't forget, I worked in epilepsy for many years, and we were doing metabolic therapy on little kids with seizures. We began to look at the physiological changes that happen to the human body under fasting and therapeutic conditions. Everything—glucose goes down, ketones go up. This is an evolutionarily conserved adaptation in our species. During the Paleolithic period of human existence on the planet, our ancestors were always in a state of ketosis because they didn't have a lot of high-carb processed foods in their diet, and they had a lot of exercise—all of which put together a physiological condition that was a semi-starved state. That's how we evolved.
We were studying how epileptic seizures could be managed by these diets, and we noticed that when glucose was lower and ketones were elevated, many children would stop seizing. Well, we had a parallel experiment going on in the lab in brain cancer because we were interested in the biochemistry of brain cancer in the form of glycolipids. Do glycolipids play some sort of a role in brain cancer? It became clear, as the two fields were parallel but not overlapping, that I was getting research grants for studying the biochemistry of brain cancer, and I was getting research grants to study metabolic therapy for epilepsy.
So we had two parallel programs that were independent of each other. It only became clear when we started to look at a drug that was supposedly blocking glycolipid biosynthesis. It did, but it also shrunk tumors, and we were very excited about that. The company that gave me this drug to study—we were all very excited. But then we learned that the mechanism of action of the drug was blocking sugars in the gut, preventing the animal from obtaining energy from the food they were eating. We noticed that the blood sugar went down and the ketones went up, just like the epileptic managing seizures.
Then when I put the control group of mice in there, because the animals ate the drug, their body weight became smaller, and their blood sugar went down. We said we have to put in a controlled body weight group with no drug, just restrict the calories of food so their body weight would be the same as the guys eating the drug. Lo and behold, the tumor shrunk to the exact same degree, whether as long as you cut the calories. It wasn't the drug attacking the biochemistry; it was the drug preventing the animal from getting energy from the food that it ate.
So then we started to realize that calorie restriction—how did that block seizures? How did that block brain tumor growth? It elevated the lower glucose and elevated the ketones. We noticed that a group from Case Western Reserve was treating little kids with brain cancer with ketogenic diets because it was lowering glucose and elevating ketones. I said, "Wow, that seems to be why would they do that?" It turns out they linked their findings to Otto Warburg. I had always heard of Otto Warburg; I didn't know what he did.
Because Otto Warburg said cancer cells can't grow unless they have a significant amount of sugar—glucose. I said, "Wow, it seems very similar to the epilepsy thing. What's going on with that?" These little kids had high-grade gliomas, and she clearly showed that the shrinkage of the tumor was correlated with how low the blood sugar would go and how high the ketones went. I said, "It's the same thing we're looking at in epilepsy because we can manage just the same thing."
So, calorie restriction—I did a lot of work on epilepsy, published some of the seminal papers on how calorie restriction and ketogenic diets might stop seizures, but we really don't know the mechanism. So I started to shift over more towards brain cancer because it looked like we had a clear mechanism by which the same therapy that we use in epilepsy could work even better in cancer.
Then I started doing a deep dive on Warburg. Who the hell is this guy, this German from the 20th century? He is a fascinating character himself—half-Jewish. Why did Hitler keep him alive during the Holocaust? Because Hitler feared cancer, and he knew Otto Warburg was the leader in the world at the time. If anybody was going to cure cancer, it would be Otto Warburg. So Hitler said he should not be touched.
Then I started looking into what Warburg's research was all about. He said cancer comes as the result of chronic disruption of oxidative phosphorylation. That means the cancer cells don't use oxygen for disregulated growth; they use a fermentation mechanism, which is energy without oxygen. I said, "Wow, that's really interesting. How come nobody knows this?" They said, "Well, because cancer is a genetic disease," and they knew nothing about Otto Warburg.
So I said, "Well, I mean, he seems to have some interesting things here." We did work on brain cancer, and we were able to show unambiguously that the lower the sugar, the slower the tumor went; the higher the sugar, the faster the tumor went. Tumor cells can't burn ketones because the oxidative phosphorylation system is defective. So I immediately said, "Well, this is going to be the way we're going to manage cancer because the tumor cell can't burn ketones or fatty acids like normal cells can."
So we can shift the entire body over to nutritional ketosis and bring down glucose further. Then we published all the mechanisms by which this happens—anti-angiogenic, pro-inflammatory, pro-apoptotic. We were finding we could kill cancer cells by all of the standard mechanisms that drugs would do, but without toxicity. This was really an eye-opener to us, and I thought, "Wow, this is like the greatest thing. How come the cancer field does not know about this?"
I said, "Well, everybody knows cancer is a genetic disease; everything else doesn't make any sense." So as a geneticist, I started going in, looking at the mutations and where they come from. It turns out that the defective mitochondria produce reactive oxygen species, which are carcinogenic and mutagenic. So it became clear to me that all these mutations that people thought were causing cancer were not; they were the effects. They weren't the cause; they were the effects.
So I said, "Wow, the whole field is studying effects. No wonder we have 1,700 people a day dying from cancer because they're not studying the right thing." Then, of course, you look at the criticisms of Otto Warburg, and they said Warburg was wrong because cancer cells use oxygen just as effectively as normal cells. So I said, "Really?"
I started doing a deep dive on that. It turns out that the cancer cells take in oxygen, but they don't use it for energy; they use it for making reactive oxygen species, which cause the mutations in the nucleus. So you've got to know what's going on here. You have to be a good biologist and understand evolution to know what I'm talking about. It became more and more clear to me that almost the entire cancer field had almost no clue about the disease they were studying. They were not able to make evolutionary connections.
So I started to look at evidence from nuclear mitochondrial transfer experiments done by the world's leading developmental biologists. They weren't even studying cancer; they were just looking at whether a nucleus from a tumor cell could direct normal development. That was their question. I looked at frog experiments, mouse experiments, human experiments—all these different kinds of experiments where the nucleus of the tumor cell was placed into a normal cytoplasm, and it was turned cancerous. The nucleus can direct normal development up until a certain stage, and then development would abort.
On the other hand, when the nucleus of the normal cell was put into a tumor cytoplasm, what was found was either dead cells or neoplastic tumor cells. I said, "My God, this is clear evidence that cancer cannot be a genetic disease. It's something in the cytoplasm." What is in the cytoplasm that might be responsible for disregulated cell growth? The mitochondria. Did anyone ever say the mitochondria might be involved? Yeah, Otto Warburg said it a long time ago.
So I started doing a deep dive on mitochondria structure and function in all these different cancer cells. You have to do electron microscopy work, and I just went back in the literature and said, "Look at every major cancer that we know of in humans and mice and rats and all kinds of animals. They all have defective oxidative phosphorylation, and they're all fermenting." This is the simplest thing; all you have to do is connect the dots.
Now we're realizing that all major cancers in the clinic are known to grow much faster with the higher blood sugar the person has. They all know that if you lower the blood sugar, the cancers grow much, much slower. So this became very clear. Why? Because the mitochondria are defective. Not only that, we now know that mitochondria control the cell cycle. In other words, the regulation of growth is controlled by the organelle that makes the energy in the cell.
So when that organelle becomes kaput or dysfunctional, the cell falls back on ancient pathways of fermentation that were responsible for life on the planet before oxygen came into the atmosphere 2.5 billion years ago. These cancer cells are doing nothing more than fermenting the way all organisms did before because they grow in the absence of oxygen. Otto Warburg received his Nobel Prize for work by discovering cytochrome c oxidase, which is the respiratory enzyme. He showed that cancer cells, if you pour cyanide on a cancer cell, they live.
Cyanide will kill us real fast, but it doesn't kill a cancer cell because they're not using oxygen; they're fermenters. So once you know they can't live, we said, "What do they ferment?" Otto Warburg clearly said that they ferment glucose. That was his big thing: glucose, glucose, glucose. But in my book, I entertained the idea for the first time that cancer cells may also ferment an amino acid called glutamine. Everybody in the cancer field knows that glutamine is a prime fuel for cancer cells.
The big problem is they all thought it was respired, and I said, "You can't." They said, "Oh, it's a respiratory fuel." But the cancer cells can't respire anything. So I said, "Well, that's not respiration; it has to be fermentation." I started to look into this, and then I got a hold of the top guy in the world on this, Dr. Shapiro from Simo Wise. I brought this to his attention that glutamine is fermented. He looked at the data and clearly said, "Yes, this is a fermentation mitochondrial fermentation metabolism."
So you have fermentation in the cytoplasm, according to what Warburg said, and what we discovered is you have fermentation in the mitochondria. Mitochondrial substrate-level phosphorylation is a mitochondrial fermentation metabolism that can work in the absence of oxygen. This fooled everybody, so they all thought glutamine was being respired because it's coming out of the mitochondria. They were taking in oxygen. I showed that the oxygen is not being used for oxidative phosphorylation; it's being used for reactive oxygen species production, and that the energy coming out of the mitochondria was coming through a fermentation metabolism.
It's unbelievable. This clearly shows Otto Warburg was correct. A lot of the mess, and now present the way cancer cells are getting their energy through a novel fermentation mechanism. So now we know what cancer is, we know where it comes from, and we know how to manage it. The problem is the rest of the world has never heard of this, so you're stuck in this void.
To shut off the supply of glucose, that's easy, right? You can just be on a ketogenic diet. But to shut off the supply of glutamine, that's harder, right?
Yeah, once you know what you need to do, then the strategies become clear. So that's why we developed the press-pulse therapeutic strategy, where we pulse glutamine. Targeting glutamine is an essential amino acid for many functions of the body.
If you go in—and I said glutamate, glutamine—sorry, glutamine. Yes, glutamine is metabolized to glutamate. Glutamate is then transaminated to alpha-ketoglutarate, which is part of the TCA Krebs cycle.
Now that succinyl-CoA contains a phosphate group on histidine 226, I believe, which is then transferred to ADP or GTP to make energy. Cancer cells dump out succinic acid; normal cells keep succinic acid, which is metabolized to fumarate and then malate, and around.
So the difference between normal cells and cancer cells is they respire, and they keep succinic acid in the TCA cycle to be used for reducing equivalents to do energy through oxidative phosphorylation. Cancer cells dump out succinic acid into the media.
Let me give you an example, and this is how we draw information from different fields of science. I always use this when people have a heart attack or cardiac arrest. Two fuels immediately appear in the bloodstream, and that's lactic acid and succinic acid. They immediately appear in the bloodstream because no more oxygen is coming into the system; the heart stops beating.
So in order for the cells to survive, they have to ferment. What do they ferment? They ferment glucose and glutamine. Okay, so immediately you see the waste products of these inefficient fermentation pathways arise in the bloodstream. As soon as the person starts breathing again, the lactic acid and the succinic acid go back down to baseline levels because fermentation is shut off.
The difference between a temporary heart attack and a cancer cell is the cancer cell is locked into the fermentation metabolism all the time. So you always see lactic acid and succinic acid coming out of the tumor cells. Why? Because the mitochondria are intrinsically inefficient in generating energy from oxidative phosphorylation.
In the heart attack, the mitochondria were just inhibited because there was no oxygen. As soon as the oxygen came back, they started to respire again, thereby not needing fermentation metabolism. But when the cancer cell has permanent damage to the mitochondria, it's locked into a fermentation metabolism and therefore can only grow with the two fermentable fuels: glucose and glutamine.
This now tells us exactly how we're going to manage the disease. We just have to restrict glucose and glutamine. You said it's very easy to do glucose, which it is, but it requires some knowledge of not damaging the immune system, gut, and all the things that glutamine does. That's why we pulse the glutamine; it's a strategy.
Well, it's going to eventually become the standard of care. I mean, because it's based on hard science; it's based on a complete understanding of what's going on in the cancer cell. Enough to know that you can manage all forms of cancer by simultaneously restricting glucose and glutamine while the body is transitioned to nutritional ketosis.
I just told you the solution to the cancer problem. We can manage the cancer much more effectively without toxicity, and overall survival and quality of life will be significantly improved once people know that this is how to do it. It's a mitochondrial metabolic disorder driven by fermentation metabolism, and the only two fermented fuels—how do we know that? Because we did the experiments ourselves.
We threw cancer cells into saline solution, which is no food, nothing, and then we took a stopwatch and saw how long it takes them to die. Okay? They die in 24 hours; they're all dead. So then you start adding fuel back and say, "What keeps them alive?" Oh, boom, boom, you see glutamine. Wow, they just jump up a little bit. Then you add the glucose, and boom! Even in saline solution, they will grow.
They grow even better if you throw in little micronutrients from the serum and everything. So you know exactly what these cells need. We can't find another amino acid as powerful as glutamine. We've interrogated these cells. It's not like, "Oh, we can substitute a different amino acid." They can, but very poorly.
Then they ask, "Well, if you're going to drive a beast with inefficient energy, you have to have pathways that are going to allow that to come into the cell, and you're going to have to have a logistic supply of these inefficient fuels in the microenvironment." The most abundant amino acid in the body is glutamine, and glucose is taken in from almost every meal that we eat.
So the fuels for driving the disregulated growth are abundant. We know because, yeah, they can burn a little bit of asparagine, but there's just a minuscule amount in the environment, so it goes through that real quick. You've got to have a sustained amount of logistical supply of fermentable fuels to keep this regulated growth of the cancer cell.
So we give radiation and chemo, which makes the body make glucose. It's just incredible. Most of the stuff that we do contributes to the demise of the patients by damaging their normal mitochondria and by doing all these other kinds of things that are not targeting the necessity of fermentation.
So everything that I see in the cancer industry, I can explain based on the misunderstanding of what the nature of the disease is—understanding and misunderstanding of why we get what we have.
Okay, so this way you can not only prevent a cancer patient, but you can also cure.
I don't like to use the term "cure" because it's an arrogant term. We have no clue. If you have cancer now, you're a young guy, and we do metabolic therapy, and you die at 97 years old and cancer never came back, then we could say that metabolic therapy cured you. But I can't be sure. You might be managed for 10, 15 years, and all of a sudden something comes back.
They say, "See, you didn't cure cancer." Well, we don't know. I mean, nobody does anyway. So I mean, anything you give somebody, they're not curing anything. I mean, there might be people that are living longer, and yes, there are some people we call cancer survivors.
Yeah, there are many, many cancer survivors throughout the world whose bodies tolerated massive poisoning and radiation, but they pay a price. Oftentimes, cancers come back in different organs, and they die prematurely from heart disease, liver failure, kidney failure. They die from all these other things because they were poisoned and irradiated by the ineptness of the system.
So, you know, it's called management. We like to use the term, "Can we manage cancer?" And the answer is yes, we can manage cancer.
So my father actually died of a kind of cancer called myeloma, a kind of blood cancer, and he had it for seven years before he eventually died of it. Of course, you could see the cancer treatments were really hard on him. You know, the typical—you lose your hair, your immune system gets weak. It's horrible to see for someone that is near.
Absolutely. It's hard to see for every kind of these cancers, whether it's glioblastoma, liver cancer, colon cancer, bladder cancer, breast cancer. They all have these horrible treatments. And we know myeloma is also—are mitochondria damaged in myeloma?
All right, okay. So what does the myeloma need to survive? Glucose and glutamine. Why was your father not—if they didn't take glucose and glutamine away, he would have done much better. He would not have suffered like that.
And that's another weird thing. You say, "Well, I'm treated, and my hair is falling out." Why? Why does your hair fall out? You're trying to kill cancer cells, aren't you? Why would you go bald? What does the cancer—cancer cells don't live inside the hair follicles.
Yeah, this tells us they have no clue understanding of killing. We can kill cancer cells by taking away their glucose and glutamine and transitioning the normal body over to ketones. That means you don't have to lose your hair; you don't have to suffer all these horrible side effects because you know you're specifically targeting the tumor cells for their incapability of doing anything other than fermentation.
So the strategy that we will develop eventually that will become the standard of care will involve managing cancer without toxicity because we know how to kill them, and the science is solid.
And I've done all the experiments, and many others have done these experiments. Sometimes they just didn't know what they were looking at, but they were getting the same kind of results.
Yeah, it makes sense what you're telling me because I think that my father had diabetes, and we didn't know. But I mean, this was 17 years ago, and I came to realize now after that he probably—because he had a clear sugar addiction. He loved sugar. Everything with sugar, he just loved it. So I think that he had diabetes, and this makes sense what you're telling me.
So what are the primary risk factors for cancer?
Well, I think you just said diabetes. Elevated sugar creates systemic inflammation, and inflammation will damage oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria in some cells. You know, your dad got myeloma, but other people with type 2 diabetes get colon cancer. Sometimes they get breast cancer. It can be very individual kinds of whatever cell is damaged by this, and sometimes it's a combination of damage.
You know, obesity is now replacing smoking as a major cause of cancer, but that's often associated with type 2 diabetes. So you have diabetes, obesity, lack of exercise. You have a whole variety of exposure to chemical carcinogens. Any combination of these risk factors together can damage oxidative phosphorylation in some population of cells and some tissue.
But we all know they're all linked to a common pathophysiological mechanism, which is dysfunctional oxidative phosphorylation coupled to a compensatory fermentation of glucose and glutamine. No matter where they come from, no matter where they are, they all have a common phenotype. But they're all genetically different.
So when you do genetic analysis, you know the mutations that you see in myeloma may be different from colon cancer, may be different from breast cancer. As a matter of fact, if you look at any—if you take a tumor out of someone's body, a solid tumor, or even blood cells, blood cancers, and you look at each cell, and then you do an expansion of the genome in that cell and do a complete genomic sequence of all the different kinds of genetic alterations, every—there's no two cells in a tumor. Despite the hundreds of millions of cells in the tumor, there's no two cells that have the same genetic mutations. Yet every cell in the tumor is fermenting.
So what the cancer field, because they're locked into the incorrect theory, they think it's a genetic disease, and therefore they're going to try to target genetic mutations and try to manage the disease that way. You hear them all talking about what kind of mutation this guy has or that guy has. They might have that for sure, but not every cell in their tumor has the same mutation.
Now here's the situation: every cell in that tumor is fermenting. So what they failed to realize is that I could do a much better job at killing all the tumor cells if I target the common problem that all the cells have rather than some of the unique problems that only a few of the cells have.
Now, as what I just said to you, does that seem complicated?
No, it doesn't seem complicated.
Well, how in the hell is all the major cancer centers in the world not know that?
So what is the answer? The answer is, in fact, I don't know. It's perplexing. I sometimes think I'm talking to plug sockets and things. I have no idea what I think is a dogma; it's an ideology. I think they have been so brainwashed, indoctrinated to think this is a genetic disease, they can't think of anything else.
Actually, Leo Tolstoy said the same thing, the Russian author. He said it's sometimes easier to explain a complicated thing to a simple person than a simple thing to a guy who's already made up his mind about what he thinks he knows.
I think the ideological dogma is more so powerful on the brain. You can't think outside your dogmatic view. It's like a religion, a dogma. You're indoctrinated, brainwashed into a way of thinking, and no matter what someone says, you cannot transition from one dogmatic view to another. It's a lockhold on rational thinking, and the cancer industry has come to realize that cancer is a genetic disease, and it's a lockhold on their brain. They can't think outside that.
Then, of course, you have the revenue generation system. People make billions of dollars on treating cancer. That might be one of the explanations, right? The economic interests behind it?
Yeah, you can't get a man to recognize something when his salary depends on him not recognizing it. So you put all that together, and you have a complete resistance to moving the field forward for a variety of different reasons.
So what do you think has to happen for these health professionals to open their minds outside of that imposed dogma?
I think when you start to see people who were given terminal diagnoses walking around living far longer with healthier quality of life, eventually there's enough of these people who are going to walk around, and they're going to say to the doctor, "I want to be like that guy. Can you treat me like that guy who's alive over there?"
Yeah, and you know, so I think it's the evidence that eventually comes from seeing people who were given terminal diagnoses who are not terminal or alive far longer than their diagnosis. You know, they always say, "Oh, he's got nine months to live," or "he's got maybe a year left." Who are these people to say that?
You know, but do you see this happening anytime soon? I mean, working with future generations of health professionals, are things looking brighter?
I think so because the word is starting to get out, and you can only deny the science for so long. I mean, I go back and look at how long it took the Catholic Church to accept the fact that the sun was the center of the solar system. You know, back in those days, they burned Bruno Gano at the stake in Rome for crying out loud. They burned his ass up for when he challenged the dogma, and then Galileo was house arrested.
It took the scientists—they didn't even want to look in the microscope or the telescope to prove that Galileo was supporting Copernican theory. The clerics didn't even want to look in the telescope to prove what they were saying. So it took centuries for the church to accept this fact.
Now we know, of course, the sun is the center of the solar system, but there was a time when that was not accepted because you were challenging the power to be, and the power to be was that humans—we were the center, and the church was the center of our existence. When you found out that was not the case, you were challenging power.
When you challenge power, you can get a backlash. In those days, they burned you up or house arrested you. So today they ignore you; they just ignore it. But I mean, look what happened with the fearing saturated fat. That was something that people thought for 60, 70 years, but now it's been debunked.
That was recently.
Which one was that? I mean, animal fats, butter, and you know, we evolved on animal fats. I mean, you're killing an elephant; you don't think there's any fat on his body? I mean, we lived to kill animals. But I mean, it took us 60, 70 years to debunk that.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, for the nutrition guys, they're all messed up anyway. You know, when you have upside-down food pyramids and all this kind of stuff. But you know, I try to select what I do. I mean, right now we've got people dying—1,700 people a day in the United States, like you said, 3,000 in Europe, and because of incorrect theory.
So they're dying as the result of an incorrect theory of the nature of the disease. So if your job is to bring the attention that the theory of cancer—it's called a mitochondrial metabolic disorder; it's not a genetic disorder.
So you have two competing theories: the mutation theory, which says that cancer is caused by somatic mutations that lead to disregulated cell growth, or the mitochondrial metabolic theory, saying that the disregulated cell growth is the result of a transition from oxidative phosphorylation to fermentation, and the mutations which are there are secondary downstream effects, not the cause.
So this is the whole thing, right? Once the science becomes clear, you operate under a theory, and if the theory is correct, the outcomes will be better because you understand the situation better. Right now, the field persists with toxic chemicals and radiation and immunotherapies, which are all based on the somatic mutation theory.
So they're not going to be optimal in managing cancer for the majority of people on the planet. You realize it's a metabolic disorder; you will get management and greater capability.
So your question is, how do we get the field to know that? Why don't you read the damn literature and understand it for yourself? Because they don't do that; they rely on some other guy telling them what to think.
So it's hard for people to think. We have mostly followers in this world; there are only a few thinkers, and that can be very good or very bad for certain things.
We were talking about nutrition, and you mentioned the food pyramid being turned upside down, right? Does meat cause cancer?
No, of course not. You know, what the hell, man? How is meat going to damage mitochondria? We have all eaten meat, for Christ's sake. You know, and we look at the Paleolithic men; we look at Aboriginal tribes that follow their standard diet lifestyles—cancer is unheard of, right?
So, I mean, we evolved to eat meat. If we didn't eat meat, you and I would never have this conversation; we would have been extinct.
Of course, we eat meat. We didn't evolve to eat grass or vegetables. I mean, we would have been dead, extinct. And yes, sweet things—as a species, we love sweet things because sweet was so rare in Paleolithic times. Where are you going to get something sweet? You think there's a doughnut shop on every corner?
You know, no. You know, where are we going to get cakes and pastries and all this kind of stuff? We didn't have it. So we would have honey, and we'd have to learn how to make the bees indolent while we could get the honey.
So I always wanted to know who was the first guy to smoke bees so they wouldn't sting you while you could collect the honey because the dumbass bear has to get his face all stung because he's not smart enough to know how to make the bees indolent.
What about obesity? Would you say that obesity is a disease?
No, of course not. I mean, who—there's so many jackasses, people who have no functional brain cells. I mean, stupid stuff like that. You know, we evolved to store energy. If we didn't store energy, we would have not existed on the planet.
All of a sudden, we're put into an environment where all of the things we've always craved are now at our fingertips, and all of a sudden we become obese. As a matter of fact, those people who don't understand evolution, they don't understand biological evolution—obesity is evolution in action.
This is what happens when we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in the absence of high-carbohydrate foods, and then all of a sudden you put that same organism in an environment with an abundance of high-carbohydrate foods. Our natural ability to store energy is there, and you get very, very fat because the fattest people are the great descendants of those that survived the hardest times hundreds of thousands of years ago.
So obesity is evolution in action, and that's what it is. We evolved to store energy; that was the way we could survive. Human beings are remarkably able to go for long periods of time without food because we have this incredible capability.
Because we moved out of our original space in Africa, we survived ice ages, and we survived movement all over the planet because we can go—we move and we store energy. And now, all of a sudden, we're in environments where we no longer move; we're sedentary, and we're eating highly processed carbohydrate foods, and we get fat.
When I hear what you say, you mean that we have a significant amount of control when it comes to whether we develop cancer in our lifetimes? Is that right?
Absolutely. But the problem is that that knowledge is not generally known. You can't believe how many people do not know that obesity is linked to cancer. They don't have any—oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know. Well, you don't read anything.
You know, you've got to—I spent a lot of time in scientific literacy at my university. It could save your life. Most people have no—they have no scientific literacy. They don't know how to interpret data; they don't look at things. They have no clue how their body works.
But you're absolutely 100% right—most cancers can be prevented. The problem is when you tell people, "How do I prevent cancer?" Well, you've got to really restrict your ability to eat highly processed carbohydrates, and you have to exercise a lot more, just like our Paleolithic ancestors that didn't have cancer.
"Well, I'm not sure I want to do that." Well, then that's your choice.
Now, the problem, of course, is that smoking was very common everywhere, at least in the United States. Maybe in Europe, I don't know what they—Europe as well. You know, and everybody knew smoking cigarettes would put you at risk for cancer and all kinds of other diseases, you know, lung diseases and all kinds of stuff.
But people continued to smoke even though they knew the risk factor. But it only became changed when your smoking habit puts someone else at risk for health.
So secondhand smoke—you're bothering me; you're hurting my child with your smoking. Then society said, "Oh, we can't smoke inside anymore; you have to go outside." It became a societal peer pressure kind of restriction because your habit was putting my health at risk.
The obesity problem is not doing that directly. That fat guy sitting on the bench is not affecting my personal health, right?
Another problem, sorry, is that children—they have sugar since they are one or two years old, and children at that age never smoke, right? And now we're getting children that are obese.
Yeah, and what's happening is that when I was a kid eating sugar cereals, we were outside running and jumping and climbing all the time.
Yeah, we weren't sitting in front of computers and cell phones. We didn't have any of that stuff.
So now you eat all the sugar cereals, and you go to the next room, and you work on your cell phone all day long or chat or whatever. And that's lack of exercise, lack of sun exposure, lack of fresh air, lack of grounding—being separated from nature completely, 100%.
Absolutely. And you put all that together, and you create an environment that's going to contribute to a broad range of chronic diseases.
Yeah, that society now must spend more and more money on expensive therapies that are draining the wealth of nations into treating a preventable condition. That's basically what it is.
So, you know, it makes jobs and makes money for a lot of industries. A lot of people get rich doing this stuff. So maybe it's good for the economy; I don't know.
You know, I mean, if you say to a cancer patient, "You have a very valuable function; your sickness is generating a large revenue-generating industry keeping major Western societies functional," so be thankful that you have this contribution. You can't say that to a person with cancer.
No, it's insensitive, but that's the truth. Their sickness is driving huge industries.
And I'm coming along saying, "Maybe we can live longer." Oh no, can't do that; we don't want that.
So talking about living longer, Professor C. D., how—could you explain the relationship between aging and cancer risk? Do you believe that cancer is inevitable if we just live long enough?
No, I don't believe it's inevitable. I mean, we have people that are centenarians that are dying from basically old age and would never have cancer. If you continue diet lifestyles that put you at risk, then for sure cancer becomes more common in older folks.
What I'm seeing now, though, which is really shocking, is the younger and younger people getting cancer. It's unbelievable. I mean, in their 20s and 30s with colon cancer and breast cancer and this kind of thing—this is like something's going on here.
Yeah, in society, something is going on.
Is this a change that you've seen recently?
Yes, absolutely. I would say within the last 10 years, we're seeing much—really, yeah, much more. And it's all linked to our diet and lifestyle issues.
But as far as longevity, don't forget there's the mitochondrial theory of aging. It's called the second entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which is disorder.
So eventually, our bodies give out, and we die because of disorder. We reach equilibrium where the energy efficiency in our body is no longer capable of preventing us from reaching equilibrium, and that's usually a generalized failure in mitochondrial energy.
I always like to look at Queen Elizabeth from England, who passed away not long ago. I mean, one day, I always say she's healthy and shaking the hand of the new British prime minister. That only lasted a week or so; I can't remember how long it was. But then two days later, the poor woman's dead.
And I'm saying—and she died of old age. This is the way people are supposed to die. You're supposed to be healthy right up until your body realizes that the second law of thermodynamics has overtaken your ability to remain away from equilibrium.
That's the natural way of things. Cancer is accelerated entropy. So essentially, your body is aging faster through a variety of pressures on the thermodynamic system. In other words, you're accelerating the second law of thermodynamics.
To be exposed to radiation and chemicals damages mitochondria and healthy tissue, thereby enhancing the second law of thermodynamics—entropy—putting you at risk for dying earlier than someone who was not exposed to these mitochondrial damaging agents.
So you can put it all together. If you understand evolutionary biology and biochemistry, you can kind of make sense out of what's happening in most folks.
So you already mentioned how we can prevent cancer. Could you go a little into how we can use fasting as targeting? I mean, targeting cancer cells—is that a way you...?
It's very difficult to get cancer in healthy mitochondria. So if the mitochondria are respiring, that cell is not fermenting because respiration is efficient.
What we have found through bioenergetic studies with my late colleague Richard Vich from the NIH is that when you burn ketones, you produce less reactive oxygen species. You maximize the energy efficiency of mitochondria.
How do you elevate ketones? Well, you're in nutritional ketosis. It will keep your mitochondria super healthy, thereby preventing cancer from developing and many other chronic diseases for that matter.
And that's the way we evolved as a species. The nutritional ketosis—now, of course, our ancestors during the Paleolithic period would die from infections, and they would die from broken bones, and they would die from things that we now can correct with modern medicine.
But at the same time, we can correct some things, and then we put ourselves at risk for other things. So mitochondrial health is ultimately responsible for how long you can live on the planet in a healthy or diseased state.
So, yeah, cancer prevention. But as I said, it doesn't seem like most people are interested in prevention because we have an obesity epidemic.
Then, of course, if you have cancer, then the way to target that is to remove the fermentable fuels while allowing the rest of the cells of the body to be healthy by burning ketones. So you protect the normal cells while simultaneously targeting the tumor cells.
We published this in the press-pulse. I published a big paper on this. This is the framework by which we're going to manage all cancers. That will eventually be the standard of care.
Now we're working out dosage, timing, and scheduling of the various drugs and procedures that will all work together in a unified whole, enhancing the health of the normal cells while restricting the viability of the tumor cells. It's all based on evolutionary biology and biochemistry that was not all connected together like we've done.
What about plastic pollution? Does microplastics impact our health when it comes to cancer?
Yeah, because what happens is the microplastics are collected in cells. This is the way asbestos was—another kind of a non-degradable kind of molecule. Asbestos is considered a carcinogen because it creates systemic inflammation in cells that would take up the asbestos particles, thereby creating oxidative stress on mitochondria, leading to reduced oxidative phosphorylation with a compensatory fermentation.
It's possible that the accumulation of plastics in various cells will have the same kind of effect as asbestos—maybe not as acutely, for sure. But you put that in an environment where blood sugars are high and exercise is low, and you put yourself at higher risk.
Yeah, we can explain most of these things because we thought about them. The questions you ask me, we talk about all the time, and we think about it. We look at the scientific literature to see if there's any evidence to support these to get more clear answers to these things, and the answer is yes.
When it comes to different kinds of cancer, we mentioned myeloma. It could be skin cancer, lung cancer. Are there different cures, or you didn't want to use the name "cure"? You said management, right? Or how to deal with the cancer—is that different when it comes to each kind of cancer?
Yeah, well, this is the big thing. Everybody thinks all these cancers are different from each other. They're not. How do I know that? Because I went through the scientific literature over years and looked at all the different kinds of cancers, and they all have the same kind of problem.
Lung cancer, colon cancer, bladder cancer—they have damaged oxidative phosphorylation. The other thing that's very interesting that we just—we have a paper under review now—all these cancers, regardless of what kind they are, they have these lipid droplets in the cytoplasm. You're going to love this.
If you look at them under the microscope, you see all these vacuoles in the cancer cells—myeloma, bladder, breast—it doesn't make any difference. They got all these vacuoles. So the field thinks that the cancer cell needs so much energy that they're using lipids so fast that they need to store them for energy.
Just the—in fact, we have shown it's just the opposite. They store the fatty acids because the mitochondria are defective, and they can't burn them. So we see lipid droplets in the cytoplasm of all major cancers, and we see mitochondrial abnormalities in all major cancers.
They're the same damn disease; it just happens in different cells. This is a hard pill to swallow for the entire cancer industry, where they're saying, "Oh, we have the therapy for your cancer," or "We have a different therapy." This is absurd.
These people have no clue. I should say these people should understand the real—how is it possible that they don't know the biology of the disease they're working with? Is it possible that we have people treating other human beings on this planet, and the person treating the patient and the treater—neither of them have any knowledge about the biology of what's being treated?
The blind leading the blind in this kind of situation—it's an embarrassment to our species. I can't believe we allowed ourselves, as a rational-thinking species, to become so clueless when it comes to any of the stuff that I'm speaking about.
Is there anything that you would like to add? Something that you think that I missed that our listeners need to know?
Yeah, I think that the field will change dramatically once people realize that cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disorder and not a genetic disorder. You want to see how fast you're going to get slapped down? Go to all your top cancer clinics and tell them that, and they'll throw you out, saying you're some sort of a nut—some sort of a psychopathic guy.
This guy's running—and you see, so you listen to what I say; it makes perfect sense. I have all the scientific evidence to support it. It's in the scientific literature. And then when you go to the oncology clinic, they've never heard of anything I mean.
Let people—let your listeners go and try it and see what they think. Let them go and see. They'll say glucose is—no, no, not a problem; glucose is good for cancer. Get your glucose as high as you can. I mean, it's like nuts.
So you're living in two different worlds here. And that's the evidence you want to know. Just go and know that. But I tell you, we can't make any major progress in managing cancer until people realize, and the field comes to realize, it's a mitochondrial metabolic disorder and it's not a genetic disorder.
Once we make that, we'll drop the death rate significantly.
Let's hope that this changes soon. Are there any exciting new projects that you're working on?
Well, I think we're working on diet-drug combos where we can—some of these cancer drugs that have been thrown in the can for a lack of efficacy, we're pulling back out of the can, and we're showing that they're extremely powerful when used under the right dietary conditions.
So we're going to open up a whole new field of research by reexamining many drugs that were thought to be ineffective or too toxic and show that under the right use, under the right dietary conditions, in certain dosages, some of these drugs that were so-called promising are actually very, very therapeutic.
It's just that you need to know how to use them in the right conditions. So we've thrown so many different drugs into the can because they were causing too much toxicity and killing people. We're finding we're resurrecting some of these drugs and showing, "Oh my God, they're extremely powerful when you have a patient in nutritional ketosis."
Why? Why are we throwing them all away? So we're going to reinvigorate the drug industry when they realize that their drugs can have new power when placed in a patient under the right dietary metabolic condition.
Professor C. D., where can people find you?
All of the major papers that we have published are on the web—open access. So anybody who would like to—because I can't do a thorough deep discussion on the biochemistry in a short period of time, so you have to see the evidence for yourselves.
Breast cancer, brain cancer—we've done all these different kinds of things. Yeah, open access. Anyone with a computer can go out to Google and pull up our scientific papers, and they can read them for themselves.
Then if they think we're right, they can make donations to my research at Boston College right on my faculty webpage, or they can support the foundation. Don't forget, all of our research is coming from private foundations and philanthropy, really.
So philanthropy—there are guys I keep telling. There are rich people who want to be a part of this transitional change, and they're willing to support our research because we're moving forward faster than any of the other avenues of research, even though most of the people ignore what we're saying.
But we should be correct because we have the science behind us.
Is there a message that you would like to send to the younger generations that will be the future of science and health advancements?
That's a good point because they have not yet been indoctrinated, and they can have an open mind, and they can test what I'm saying themselves.
Also, in animals—dogs—our evidence is really strong when you see these dogs that are all dying from cancer, and you're reversing their cancer or destroying the tumors by transitioning the diets of the dogs. I published a big paper on that—metabolic therapy for mast cell cancer in the dog.
So the dogs respond just as well as the humans. Humans respond the best; mice are not the—I use mice to get the work done, but the mice don't respond nearly as well as dogs or humans.
So just something for people to recognize. But I think, yeah, you've asked a lot of very, very good questions, and I think that my answers could be—the way I deliver my answers—but that people can get the deep science if they go right to the papers and see this.
We will add some links to the—when we post this discussion, this podcast. If they have scientific literacy, they're willing to open their minds, they'll see the evidence for what I'm saying.
Professor C. D., thank you so much. This has been really fascinating. It's been very interesting, and I appreciate very much that you took your time to share your wisdom with us.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you very much too. Nice speaking with you.
Thank you so much for listening to the Hunger for Change podcast. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I also wanted to take a moment to talk about Naturally, my brand of healthy food products. At Naturally, we are on a mission to change the world through what we eat. This is why we worked so hard to make products that are delicious and also good for you. They're all gluten-free, have no refined sugars, no sweeteners, and no additives.
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