Nutrition in Cancer Treatment

As fearsome as cancer may seem, it has important metabolic vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of for successful treatment.

First and foremost, cancer cells make energy anaerobically and as such, can only use glucose as the energy making substrate. This is why people are always instructed to eliminate sugar or carbs from their diet as part of their treatment. Cancer cells do not metabolize fat because that requires oxidative metabolism, which can only be conducted by mitochondria. In cancer, mitochondria get sick or die, and the cancer cells are dedicated to anaerobic metabolism. This makes them, “sugar hungry”, and they become avid in the uptake of any molecule that contains glucose. Otto Warburg, the Nobel prize winning German biochemist discovered this fact. He also noted that bacteria, viruses, fungi, candida, and parasite infected cells also are anaerobic.

Thus, many alternative cancer treatments take advantage of this principle. Some treatments are based on anti-oxidant and pro-oxidant action such as peroxide and high dose Vitamin C.

So in cancer treatments there are substances that are glucose mimics, which contain glucose plus other entities. These molecules are readily taken up by cancer cells but once the glucose is released inside the cell, the remaining portion of the molecule is poisonous to the cancer cell and its energy metabolism and will cause the cell to starve and or pop and die (apoptosis).

The second thing that has been established, is that cancer cells are iron avid. They require 400 times the amount of iron needed as a co-factor in DNA replication. Since cancer cells do not obey the normal laws of cell cycling, they divide “out of turn” orders of magnitude faster than a normal cell, which requires iron in very high amounts. There are compounds that have been developed that mimic iron in the metabolism which can be introduced by mouth or IV. These compounds are freely taken up by the cancer cells because they look like iron, but once inside the cell, they are not iron, and they do not function as a cofactor for DNA replication, and in fact, poison the activity of ribosomes that are responsible for the production of proteins and so once the ribosomes are poisoned the cell cannot function and the cells will die.