Whether you’ve had cancer, have cancer, or know someone with cancer, I bet this thought has crossed your mind: Is cancer just code word for death sentence? I mean seriously. Billions of dollars, the most brilliant minds, decades of research, and honestly, who’s actually winning the battle against cancer?
Part 1: The War on Cancer
As of 2024, it is conservatively estimated that over 18 million Americans have been diagnosed with cancer. That number is projected to increase to 23 million by 2032. Every day close to 1700 Americans die from cancer. More than 40% of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lives – and that’s based on data from 2019. Don’t get me started on post 2021 cancer cases because I’d prefer those numbers be fictional.
Turbo cancer.
Dormant for 20 years now reactivated cancer.
Cancer no one has ever even seen before but suddenly has a name for cancer.
Cancer in babies.
Cancer in your 22-year-old pilates instructor.
Cancer in the healthiest neighbors you have cancer.
-Ethical Skeptic, “X”, May 14, 2024
Pay attention, folks. There’s a tsunami coming.
I hate fear mongering for the sake of fear mongering. This is not that. This is simply that graph – that graph right there showing a literal explosion in cancer rates starting in 2021. Not that things looked great before then, but wow. This isn’t political. It isn’t left versus right. This is right versus wrong. It was bad then, but I’m not sure I have words for today. As of the time of this writing, cancer diagnoses, and the costs incurred with treating them, are at an ALL TIME HIGH. Not just here in the United States – this is a global nightmare. Despite the whistles and bells, the fancy new drugs, the radiotherapies and surgeries, more people today are dead from cancer than at any other recorded time in history. We’ve made some progress here, but only in the arena of profitable drug development. Don’t believe the media spin on all the ‘lives saved’. The death rates for cancer are the same today as they were in the 1950s.
Let that sink in.
There aren’t many words that drive a harder punch to the gut than ‘cancer’. One in three women and one in every two men will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime. It’s not like scientists aren’t trying here. The National Institutes of Health pours more money into funding cancer research than any other disease. Every major pharmaceutical company on the planet is investigating cancer in one way or another. But despite our efforts, the forest fire that is cancer continues to devastate. In fact, it appears to be hotter and wilder now than ever before. Cancer remains the same evasive, baffling, shapeshifting, boogeyman today, as it was more than 70 years ago.
Why is There an Explosion in Cancer?
Well, let’s see...I can come up with a few ideas:
We eat fake food.
We drink water with microplastics.
We breathe chemicals sprayed into our air.
We buy carcinogenic oils to fragrance our homes.
We don’t exercise.
We drink too much alcohol.
We smoke.
We don’t sleep.
We are too f*cking stressed out.
We don’t get enough sunlight.
We don’t get enough nutrients from our diet.
We are radiated with dangerous EMFs everywhere – cell phones, Air Pods, microwaves, 5G cellular networks.
We were exposed to a bioweapon, now largely agreed to have been engineered in a laboratory, that is doing God only knows what to our immune systems.
Pick your reason – there are plenty to choose from.
Conventional medicine is a sick care system. We wait until you are sick before doing a damn thing about it. This nonsense about ‘preventative care’ is a complete joke. How many cancers are you routinely screened for? Three. Breast cancer (which advocates for routine exposure to radiation which causes cancer), colon cancer (colonoscopy preps disrupt the gut microbiome which impairs immune system function – which you need to fight cancer), and maybe prostate cancer if your doctor thinks it’s a good idea. Two out of three of our routine cancer screenings open the door for cancer.
If you feel like a sitting duck just waiting to be next in line, you’re not alone. For most Americans, the outlook seems grim. It feels hopeless. It doesn’t seem like a matter of if we will get cancer, just a matter of when.
What Causes Cancer?
You’d think the answer to this question had been settled by now. Google says it is. So do the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
“Cancer is caused by certain changes to genes, the basic physical units of inheritance. Cancer is a genetic disease—that is, it is caused by changes to genes that control the way our cells function, especially how they grow and divide.” - NIH.gov
“Cancer is a genetic disease—that is, it is caused by changes to genes that control the way our cells function, especially how they grow and divide.” -NCI.gov
“According to the CDC, cancer is a genetic disease caused by changes to genes that control how cells grow and divide.” - CDC.gov
Almost sounds like our three letter agencies are using the same AI software to populate their sites –or could be total coincidence. I’m sure the latter.
The Somatic Mutation Theory
The ‘SMT’ or ‘Somatic Mutation Theory’ of cancer has been the central dogma explaining the etiology of cancer for decades. It postulates that cancer begins with gene mutations, or “oncogenes”. Something bad happens to our DNA and the genetically corrupted data turns on uncontrolled cellular growth. This mutation is then passed on to its offspring, creating a whole mass of malignant cells. The theory was first proposed by German biologist, Theodor Boveri, in 1914 and - evidence to the contrary be dammed - it stuck.
Theodor Heinrich Boveri (12 October 1862 – 15 October 1915), German zoologist, comparative anatomist and co-founder of modern cytology.
The SMT has formed the fundamental framework of our understanding of cancer for decades. We spend more money funding cancer research than any other research. We spend more money treating cancer than any other disease state. So, you’d assume our theory on what causes cancer in the first place is correct. Right?
Well...Dogmas are dogmas for a reason. If a fact is believed so firmly that it can no longer be refuted, it becomes dogma. The problem is science simply doesn’t work this way. Religion works this way, and science is not that. We’re still arguing with the flat earthers for God’s sake. Everything we believe to be true in science is up for debate. That’s what makes science so cool. Central ideas and theories only make it to textbooks if they can stand the rigorous test of time. If you can’t poke holes in a theory after decades and decades, well then, it becomes dogma.
The SMT has so many holes in it, it’s hard to count. If it was a glass of water, it would long be empty. Do cancers have gene mutations? Sure, they do. Some don’t - so don’t you dare mention those – but most do. The problem is there are so many mutations – which ones cause cancer? You’ll read about driver mutations and passenger mutations, ones implicated at the crime scene, others just innocent bystanders – so many different mutations. In fact, if you look at some cancers, every cell present has different genes that are mutated. Oncogenes are certainly found in cancer cells, but they are found in healthy cells as well. Well, that’s not convenient. That's more like whack a mole. How do you go about treating a genetic cause of cancer if we can’t sort out which genes are responsible?
Regardless of the massive flaws in the SMT, all physicians and scientists were taught in college and graduate school that cancer is a genetic disease. Period.
The Metabolic Theory of Cancer
There’s another theory on what causes cancer – one which completely and utterly refutes the SMT. Sadly it lost the media popularity contest, so unless you can read scientific studies, you won’t hear about it on the news or even the websites of the NIH, NCI, or CDC. Funny how politics, I mean ‘science’, works. The Metabolic Theory of Cancer was proposed by Otto Warburg almost a hundred years ago in 1930. (Basically, at the same time we discovered negative gravity and free energy. I’ll cover those when they take me off the government watch list.) The Metabolic Theory of Cancer focused not on genetic aberrations found in malignancies, but on cancer metabolism.
Metabolism refers to energy production. And everything is energy. Without energy, nothing works. Healthy cells make energy, cancer cells make energy. The observation made by Warburg was the difference between how health cells and cancer cells produce that energy. Cancer cells go about this process in a completely bizzaro fashion – all of them. Doesn’t matter if those cells are from breast cancer, colon cancer, or brain cancer, all cancer cells make energy through a process called fermentation. Something now coined, ‘The Warburg Effect’.
Energy Production: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Where do we get most of the energy for our cells? Through breathing – Oxygen. In healthy cells, most of the energy is produced using a strategy I’ll refer to as ‘the good way’. This baking of the cake takes place in structures called mitochondria through a process called oxidative phosphorylation. In this kitchen, cells convert oxygen into sugar (glucose) which results in gobs of buttercream frosting called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which all cells need to function. One round of oxidative phosphorylation bakes up about 34 molecules of ATP from one molecule of glucose. Fire.
When there’s not enough oxygen, our cells need to hatch another plan. This is called anaerobic glycolysis. This is ‘the bad’ way of making energy. The cooks have only one egg, half a cup of flour, and a campfire. Since there’s no oxygen, glucose gets sent down a different conveyer belt – first to pyruvate (sorry about all the words and BioChem flashbacks), then to ATP. Two problems here. First, each molecule of glucose can only make 2 molecules of ATP in this situation. The second problem is that lactic acid gets made as a painful byproduct. You got your ATP, but you didn’t get much, and it came with a big bucket of acid.
In total, we average 36 molecules of ATP from one molecule of glucose: 34 from oxidative phosphorylation and 2 from anaerobic glycolysis.
You never think about your body working like this because you’re not completely insane. But I am, so welcome to my brain for a moment.
Imagine you leave a restaurant late at night and start walking down a side street to your car. Alone. In downtown Chicago. During the riots. Out of the corner of your eye you see an image of someone you don’t recognize. And stereotypes be dammed, he’s running right at you. Fast. What the...?? In a fraction of a second you locate your phone and wallet in your pocket. Probably not a good Samaritan tracking you down to get your name and number for a date request. Now what? You. Haul. Ass. You run like your life depends on it because well, it just might. Adrenaline kicks in and you are mother fucking Superman. Shoes on fire, sucking in all the oxygen possible, you clear 3 city blocks in 3 seconds. You can see your car up ahead – it's just one block away. So close. And then it happens. Your ‘good’ oxidative phosphorylation runs outta oxygen and BAM - not Jesus, but anaerobic glycolysis takes the wheel. Oh Lord. The Mercedes you were running in was getting 36 miles of ATP to the glucose gallon. Now what? You’re immediately transported into a gas guzzling piece of shit. Fuel efficiency drops from 36 ATPs/glucose to TWO ATPs/glucose. Talk about slamming on the breaks. Plus, a boat load of lactic acid gets dumped into circulation. Ever hit the wall like this? Your legs haven't forgotten. Feel that burn? Now they weigh 200 pounds each. Ooooo – it's bad. You don’t care. Burnt legs versus bullet, I’m taking the leg burn.
So healthy cells can switch back and forth between ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ way of making energy. We prefer the good, but when Jack the Ripper comes a runnin’, sometimes you need to bad ass your way to safety with fast but inefficient, anerobic glycolysis.
The Warburg Effect (‘the Ugly’)
So, there’s a third way cells can make energy: the ugly way. The ugly way is also called aerobic glycolysis or fermentation. In biology speak, this is known as “The Warburg Effect”. In the 1920s, a German physiologist by the name of Otto Warburg observed that cancer cells tend to use glucose to produce energy even when there is plenty of oxygen lying about. Let me restate: cancer cells willfully ignore the presence of oxygen and shuttle glucose to pyruvate to ATP + lactic acid even in the presence of abundant oxygen.
This should be renamed the Kardashian Effect. I mean, why sleep on cotton sheets when you can sleep on Benjamins? Seriously.
This is an utterly debaucherours way to use sugar – a total waste. Or so it seems. Although aerobic glycolysis still only produces ATP at 2 miles per gallon compared to the above mentioned 36 with oxidative phosphorylation, those 2 molecules come out fast. The equivalent of a gas guzzling Lamborghini. Efficient? Hell. No. Fiery fast? Oh, yes. Cancer cells are reproducing hand over fist. They need gas and they need it now. The lactic acid being dumped overboard just liquidizes healthy cells in the way – killing them quietly, making it easier to metastasize into nearby tissues.
Warburg's theory had a missing piece that we now know about today. He thought cancerous cells could only ferment sugar or glucose. That was the Achille’s heel of the theory. But since his death, it was discovered they can ferment amino acids as well – namely an amino acid called glutamine. This suggests that cancer is, at its core, a disease of altered metabolism rather than a genetic one. This shift in how cells produce energy is a fundamental change that supports cancer development and growth. If cancer cells rely heavily on fermentation of sugar and glutamine, then targeting this metabolic pathway could be a strategy to treat cancer. For example, interventions that block fermentation or reduce glucose and glutamine availability might slow down cancer growth.
In simple terms, Warburg’s Metabolic Theory of Cancer suggests that cancer cells switch to a less efficient way of producing energy even when oxygen is available. This switch helps them grow rapidly and survive in low-oxygen environments, making it a fundamental change in cancer development. Understanding this process offers new potential ways to target and treat cancer.
Otto Heinrich Warburg (October 1883 – August 1970), German physiologist, medical doctor, and Nobel laureate. He was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931. In total, he was nominated for the award 47 times over his career.
Ok so back to the original question – How the hell do we get cancer? Something has to start the fire and that can be just about anything. Smoking, chemtrails, spiky proteins, radiation, inflammation, insulin resistance – lots of things are walking around with a match to light cancer out there. The way they cause cancer, however, is by damaging cellular respiration. Damaged respiration is derived from damage to the mitochondria. Damaged mitochondria ferment glucose and glutamine. Damaged mitochondria then go on to create inflammatory molecules called reactive oxygen species. Reactive oxygen species cause damage to the DNA inside our cells. Damaged cells grow out of control and refuse to die. Cells fermenting glucose and glutamine dump lactic acid into the blood stream, effectively destroying surrounding tissues. Damaged tissue paves the way for metastasis and tumor progression.
Seyfried, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, 2012 John Wiley Press; Seyfried et al., 2004 Carcinogenesis
A series of fascinating studies were done in the early 2000s to further investigate the question of what’s really causing cancer’ by an American professor of biology, Dr. Thomas Seyfried. Was it damaged DNA? Or was it damage to the mitochondria which control cell respiration? So, this is what they did. They took some normal cells (far left) and some cancer cells (mid left). They removed the damaged mitochondria from the cancer cells and put them into the cells with healthy DNA (mid right). Then they took DNA from the healthy cells and put them into the cells with the damaged mitochondria (far right).
Guess what happened?
You got it. The cells with the healthy mitochondria were able to fix the damaged DNA. The cells with the sick mitochondria caused mutations to the healthy DNA, just like those in cancer cells.
This should have settled it. Debate over. But when you go up against dogma, dogma has a history of winning. These two camps – the SMT and Metabolic Theory of Cancer have been at odds with one another for more than 50 years. The proponents of the SMT have been using the same playbook used by Big Tobacco and Big Pharma to discredit the Metabolic Theory. ‘Those people are crazy.’ ‘There’s no evidence here.’ The usual name calling and gaslighting tactics used before you could just call your opponent a conspiracy theorist and deplatform them entirely. Thank God for Elon Musk. At least there’s one place where people can have a two-sided argument. I digress...
Say what they will, the science has been settled for years. Cancer is not a genetic disease. It is a disease of damaged cellular energy production due to damaged mitochondria. Everything else we see wrong with cancer – the gene changes, the abnormal cellular activity, the angiogenesis – is all downstream of the abnormal metabolic changes observed in every single kind of cancer cell. You have a gene that increases your risk for cancer? You need that metabolic kill switch to turn it on, or it will never become cancer. Dysfunctional cell metabolism in the form of fermentation instead of oxidative phosphorylation is THE only common thread in the genesis of cancer. End of story.
Gaslighting 101
Science likes to put things in boxes – make things black and white. There are very few accepted gray areas in science. Remember this? You might – it was yesterday:
“The safety of COVID-19 vaccines has been rigorously monitored and evaluated since their emergency use authorization (EUA) in December 2020. COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.” - CDC.gov, Nov 3, 2023
“Kansas sues Pfizer over 'misrepresentations' and 'adverse events' of COVID-19 vaccine. Kansas AG Kris Kobach alleges Pfizer violated the state's Consumer Protection Act” - Fox Business, June 17, 2024
Seriously. Is nuance simply dead? To use a more cancer applicable, less triggering example than the above-mentioned open wound, let me use something else entirely to illustrate how difficult it is to ‘change scientific dogma’:
Stomach cancer.
Up until 1984 the cause of stomach ulcers and gastric cancer was unequivocally determined to be...STRESS. Yes, stress. Your kid failing math, your husband’s complete lack of ability to close the toilet seat. That was it.
Stress caused stomach cancer.
And then there was a hand from the back of the class. It was from that of an Australian scientist, Dr. Barry Marshall. Yes, Dr. Marshall? Do you have something to say? Yes, ma’am. I, um, I think something else might be causing stomach ulcers. Something other than stress? Yes – I, um. I think stomach ulcers and cancers are actually caused by bacterium. A bacteria called Helicobacter Pylori.
***crickets***
Followed by exuberant laughter from the scientific community.
Bacteria? Causing cancer? Lols from the crowd. Well, that’s just plain ludicrous. Impossible! The stomach is full of acid – mounds and mounds of boiling acid. Bacteria could never survive in acid!
While studying internal medicine, Dr. Marshall and his colleague in crime, Dr. Robin Warren, studied gastritis at the Royal Perth Hospital. After being literally laughed at for even proposing the idea that a bacteria could live in stomach acid, Marshall decided to do something rash. He and Dr. Warren started to brew a culture jam packed with H. Pylori in their lab. And to prove a point – I imagine a very painful point – He drank it. Yep. No lie. That beaker full of disgusting fermenting H. Pylori over there on the countertop? Yes. He drank the whole damn thing.
"Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right".
And, well, he was. What ensued was a raging case of painful stomach ulceration which took God only knows how long to clear. But he was vindicated. The scientific community turned on its heel – as it so often does – from its character assassination on Dr. Barry Marshall, to awarding him a Nobel Prize in medicine.
Funny little world, isn’t it?
Barry Marshall, born September 30, 1951, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine .
What we think is true in science today is most likely not. Well, I imagine part of it is, but certainly not all. And nothing you read on mainstream media is – that’s the worst. Seriously people stop listening to mainstream news. It’s 100% a propagandized garbage echochamber of mostly lies and half-truths designed to keep even rational people just screaming and yelling at one another. Look at how misled we were about a global pandemic just two years ago. Don’t even get me started on what happened with physics and string theory. Bahh.
Treating Cancer as a Metabolic Disease
So according to the metabolic theory of cancer, the first, easy, no brainer strategy to fix cancer should be pretty straightforward: STOP EATING SUGAR! What do you see when you go to your local cancer infusion center? Cookies. Candy. Ice cream. What are we doing here?? No wonder we’ve made absolutely no headway in the death rate.
We need to completely revamp the current oncology system from how we view cancer, diagnose cancer, and treat cancer. That is no small task. What does it cost to change your diet? Take old, off-patent medications and supplements to block cellular fermentation? Measure ketones? Measure your blood sugar? Basically nothing. What does it cost to treat cancer using the current paradigm? Oooo – here's where things get dicey. The sick care model is the meal ticket for an entire industry accustomed to champagne for breakfast and caviar for lunch. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually treating cancer using an approach targeted at a flawed understanding of the disease and a strategy that almost universally fails.
There is an extremely exciting message in this mess. I wouldn’t write all of this to simply wreck your day. I’m a glass half full kind of girl. We know what underpins cancer and we know what needs to be done to treat it. The next sections outline what’s being done in cancer care today and how we can pivot in a better direction. One that keeps the good, leaves the bad, and adds in the missing pieces that truly target the real causes and drivers of cancer. We have better screening tools, superior diagnostics, and non-toxic treatment options available to us right now – today. They say knowledge is power, so if a cancer free life sounds good to you, let’s keep going:)
Part 2 drops tomorrow xo.
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