144. Cancer Should Be Starved Away – Thomas Seyfried

“You see bald-headed people who have been treated for cancer. ‘You're trying to kill cancer cells, why the hell are you going bald?’

”The provocative rhetorical question is asked by professor Thomas Seyfried, whose research at Boston College will revolutionize our understanding of cancer and other chronic diseases.

“Metabolic therapy kills cancer cells and keeps your hair”, he says.

“People are being brutalized by the system. They’re being treated by people who don’t know the biology and biochemistry behind the disease.”

“Cancer is not a genetic disease, it’s a metabolic problem. The reason everybody says it’s a genetic disease is confirmation bias. It’s been hammered into everybody’s brain”, Seyfried says.

We can see that conventional oncology is not addressing the right problem, because the death rates aren't dropping the way they should, he points out.

"The promise of the gene theory has not come to fruition, nor will it ever do. Meanwhile, thousands of people are dying every day. It’s the greatest tragedy in the history of medicine."

Thomas Seyfried does not dismiss conventional methods like radiation and chemo, but the problem is that those are being employed first, when they should be employed last.

Seyfried contends that cancer is “a remarkably simple disorder” when you understand the biology. But we have made it complicated and mysterious by focusing on downstream phenomena instead of the actual cause, metabolic dysfunction.

“You really have to work hard to get your body to get cancer”, he says.

“Our paleolithic ancestors and those who live according to traditional ways rarely have cancer. Animals in nature rarely have cancer.”

“Before antibiotics and orthopedic surgeons we died from injuries and infections. What’s killing us now, whether it’s dementia, cancer, cardiovascular disease or diabetes, is civilization itself.”

Which means: Not exercising, being under stress, having poor sleep and eating ultra-processed food (sometimes food-like substances).

Our bodies become less and less capable of using oxygen to generate energy. Cells resort to fermentation, like cells in primitive life forms once did. This is the crux of the matter. When cells switch from oxygen to glucose (a sugar) and glutamine (an amino acid) to generate energy, they become cancer cells.

The solution? Starving the tumor.

German doctor Otto Warburg discovered the metabolic mechanism behind dysregulated cell growth already a century ago. But other theories outmaneuvered his findings.

Before rediscovering Warburg’s theory and improving it, Thomas Seyfried was “just as indoctrinated as everybody else”, he says.

Seyfried and his colleagues developed a diet-drug combination to destroy tumors by doing away with the detrimental fuels glucose and glutamine.

A low-carb, high fat diet plus fasting targets glucose (healthy cells can burn fatty acids and ketone bodies, cancer cells cannot), and a “press-pulse” method including certain repurposed anti-parasite drugs targets glutamine. Add exercise.

Patients can keep track of the levels of glucose and ketones in their blood with a simple device.

“We’re getting longer and longer survivors for the so-called terminal cancers.”

One big obstacle to getting established medicine to rethink is that there is no money in metabolic therapy. There’s no pill or shot for Big Pharma to sell. But Seyfried is optimistic:

“When you educate people in certain ways and make certain products that will keep the entire body healthy, this will be a new industry. It’s coming.”

Seyfried's research at Boston College

IHMC Lecture by Seyfried