Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: Warburg’s Theory and Genetics

You have to understand that having a Ph D.

in genetics and biochemistry,

understanding mammalian genetics, I was

led to believe always that cancer was a genetic disease. It was a silent assumption.

The field, the NIH,

National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute,

all say cancer is a genetic disease.

Of course, I had no reason to question that until I

started doing my own research and clearly seeing that

something was really not right with this because

we were collecting data on calorie restriction, fasting, and this kind of thing,

showing that the lowering of glucose and the

elevation of ketone bodies was strongly linked to the success of managing cancer.

And that brought us to the work of the

scientist Otto Warburg from Germany in the 20th century, leading scientist.

And I began to see through our research here at Boston

College that most of our work was supporting Otto Warburg's theory and

not the somatic mutation theory,

which is the general theory that most people think cancer is, and that's what it

says on the National Cancer Institute website. It says cancer is a genetic disease.

So as any scientist, you say, well,

how can that organization be incorrect?

But the more research that we did and the more observations

that we made in preclinical models of brain cancer and metastatic cancer,

the more and more we became convinced that

cancer was a mitochondrial metabolic disease.

So I started taking a

much deeper look into the evidence supporting the somatic mutation theory.

How is it possible that so many leading scientists and medical institutions

throughout the world are of this constant belief

with very little questioning of it?

Sonin Shinasato at Tufts University had questioned this, and I thought they

did an excellent job,

but I started to look more into it myself.

And it became more and more clear that mitochondrial energy metabolism

is at the core of the problem with cancer.