My Understanding of the Metabolic Theory of Cancer
Geeky Medical News #28
Everyone should know about this, as it will change the way we treat cancer. It will also help us to prevent cancer, if we are courageous enough to make the changes in our manufacturing and our food systems that we need to make.
Cancer is uncontrolled cell growth.
OLD THEORY:
The current paradigm underlying most treatment of cancers, is that a genetic defect (inborn, inherited DNA problem, located in the cell’s nucleus), usually aggravated by some trigger in the environment, causes a cell to begin to reproduce wildly. As the cells continue uncontrolled growth, they can progressively lose more and more normal functions while gaining other functions. Eventually, they may gain the ability to migrate to other areas of the body. This is metastasis.
Therefore, the prevailing current treatment for cancer is to try to kill all of the wildly dividing cells, hopefully before they spread.
The general name for the currently-prevailing theory of cancer is THE SOMATIC MUTATION THEORY.
NEW THEORY:
The metabolic theory of cancer posits that cancer cells are previously-normal cells that have become injured by something in the environment. While in some cases there is a genetic defect that makes such injury more likely to happen, more frequently the culprit is some poison in the environment that inhibits normal function of the cells.
ARGUMENTS FOR THE METABOLIC MUTATION THEORY:
The thinking which is creating the metabolic theory of cancer originated from looking at the problems in the old line of thinking:
a. Despite 50 years of practicing invasive and painful treatments based on the somatic theory (surgery, chemo, radiation) the survival rates for most cancers have barely improved. Pharmaceutical companies tend to rate a treatment as "successful" even when the new treatment offers only a month or two of increased survival.
b. It used to be thought that all cancer cells in a particular type of cancer are clones, identical —that they each contain the same pathological mutation(s) as the original defective cell. This would be logical if in fact the origin of cancers is some defect in DNA template of the original defective cell. This has turned out not to be true. In fact, with more advanced identifying techniques, we can see that not only do tumors from different people with the same type of cancer (i.e., breast, prostate, etc.) show many different mutations --not the same one-- but even the same tumor inside the same person can show many different types of mutations. Tumor cells are not identical reproductions of one defective cell. In fact, some tumors show NO MUTATIONS AT ALL in the cancer cells.
c. In addition to the cancer cells that we usually think of, there has been found to exist a core population of “cancer stem cells.” These cancer cells are less likely than other cells in the tumor to be affected by chemo or radiation, and actually are spurred to grow and spread by such treatments. This could be why, after lying dormant for a period following treatment, new, more treatment-resistant cancers may eventually appear, sometimes having spread to different parts of the body.
Oops.
The metabolic theory of cancer is evolving not only because of problems with the old theory. New and better methods of imaging and molecular analysis have contributed to forming ideas of a different, and potentially more healing way of viewing cancer.
It looks like the main damage seen in cancer cells is not in the DNA of the nucleus, but rather is found in the energy-producing part of the cell called the mitochondria. The mitochondria are the part of the cell where the food that we eat is finally turned into the energy that we use to live. Oxygen drives a process of the final breakdown of food components to create energy. We breathe in the oxygen, and we exhale the substance left over from the process, which is carbon dioxide. This primarily happens in the mitochondria.
Besides generating the energy that we need to survive, the mitochondria perform several other critical functions; there are probably others that we do not even know about yet.
1. In order to prevent uncontrolled cell growth in normal organs and other structures of the body, the mitochondria oversee a process of programmed cell death called apoptosis. This is why, say, your liver stays the correct size of your liver, your heart stays the corrects size, etc....instead of enveloping your whole body.
2. Mitochondria are deeply involved in the signalling among cells that keeps the whole collection of cells functioning smoothly and cooperatively as a group to create and maintain our multicellular, healthy bodies.
Injuries to the mitochondria are now becoming recognized as the causative agents in creating many diseases, from neurological problems to diabetes, and many more.
A few years ago we knew very little about mitochondria beyond their energy-producing function.
You can see how injuries to the mitochondria could produce disease, including cancer:
1. When the conversion of food energy to oxygen is injured, the cell falls back on ancient systems used by bacterial cells to survive. They start metabolizing glucose and glutamine in an evolutionarily older process called fermentation, which does not require oxygen.
The left-over oxygen in the cell, stripped of one of its hydrogen atoms, is let loose in the system as damaging reactive oxygen species. These charged molecules can further injure cells, and may cause the wide variety of mutations that are found in cancer tumors. That is, many of the mutations that were once thought to originate in defective DNA in a cell's nucleus may actually be occurring further downstream as cellular injury from injured mitochondria.
2. When the mitochondria’s function of limiting cell growth by apoptosis is impaired, cell growth proceeds unlimited. (Mutations to regulatory genes may also be caused by the reactive oxygen species mentioned above, and by other environmental poisons, even further removing limits on cell growth.)
3. When the intricate cell signalling pathways are impaired, the cell can no longer cooperate with the other cells in the body, but begins to operate on its own, more like a single-celled organism, such as a bacterium. An individual bacterium strives only to produce offspring from itself and so grows uncontrolled unless stopped by outside means. Cancer cells grow just like this.
Grasping these new understandings of how things work gives rise to a much different approach to treating cancer. These new treatments tend to be less invasive. A recent paper by Drs. Paul Marik, William Makis, and others, outlines a treatment strategy which both aims to cut off the unhealthy fermentation supply of energy for cancer cells and also attempts to heal the underlying disorder of the mitochondria. The authors suggest that their new strategy might not replace standard methods of treatment, such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, but might be used to augment these measures.
Ultimately, though, healing and preventing cancer depends on eliminating poisons in our environment. This is enormous. Think: processed foods, processed pharmaceuticals, air pollution, water pollution, plastics....virtually every component of modern conveniences are likely to contribute to cancer.
Researchers often muse about the fact that among indigenous people, prior to their exposure to modern civilization, cancer is (or was) virtually unknown. It should be obvious, now, why that is.
There are some excellent videos available for those who are interested in knowing more about the metabolic theory of cancer.
Probably the easiest to understand is one provided by nephrologist, Jason Fung, MD.
Here is an interview given by the scientist who first popularised ideas about the metabolic theory of cancer, Dr. Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D. The young man interviewing him is a very intelligent person who, however, has no scientific background. The searching questions that the interviewer asks in this video might be the ones that you would ask, too.
In this video, below, Dr. Seyfried explains his theory to a gathering of scientists:
Here is a link to the new paper published by Drs. Marik, Makis, et al, outlining their latest application of the metabolic theory of cancer to treat actual people:
Questions?
Comments?
‘Til next time, best wishes,
Haru
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Thank you for writing this article. It is stated basically enough for us non-medical types to grasp, and fully enough to spark further interest.
Dear Doctor: so I heard that Mitochondrion contain a subset of human DNA, centered around those related to metabolism. The new theory considers the varying status of cancer cells and disputes the bad-DNA-gets-cloned old theory. However, are we sure all mitochondrion modules have the same DNA to begin with. There can be a dozen or two mitochondrion modules in a cell, right? All of them are subject to various kinds of oxidization attacks by various sources. If the mitochondrion modules had also been different since cell birth, would that have introduced more complexity beyond metabolism alone?