The “secret” cancer culprit that’s been ignored for 50 years

If there’s any New Year’s resolution you should make—and keep—it’s to break your sugar habit.

After decades of misdirection, most everyone finally recognizes that sugar consumption is a major contributor to obesity and diabetes—as well as all of the complications associated with diabetes in the blood vessels, brain, nerves, eyes, heart, and kidneys (none of which new diabetes drugs have been shown to prevent).  

And, of course, sugar consumption is also associated with cardiometabolic heart disease, the leading cause of cardiovascular disease today—and the nation’s number one killer.   

Not to mention the growing epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia has been called “type 3 diabetes,” caused by—you guessed it—sugar.

And then there’s cancer. For decades, sugar has been given a “free pass” when it comes to cancer-causing agents—until now.  

Belgian scientists say they’ve made a research breakthrough regarding the connection between sugar and cancer. I’ll tell you more about that in a moment. 

But first, let’s take a look at why the kinds of conclusions in this research are far from new… but have been ignored for decades.

The great cover-up about sugar’s role in cancer

I vividly recall when I first arrived as a young research scientist in the new intramural Diet and Cancer Research program at the National Cancer Institute. The U.S. Congress had directed the National Institutes of Health to finally start looking at the role of diet in nutrition in chronic disease. What’s more, Congress had also directed the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Food and Nutrition Board to compile all of the research documenting the role of nutrition in cancer.

I was astounded that there was virtually nothing in the NAS report about sugar and cancer. After all, I remembered when sugar was considered “bad” for your health—before the “sugar coating” in the 1970s of all the evidence against sugar. 

In fact, as I wrote in an October 2016 Daily Dispatch titled, “How big sugar got such a sweet deal for so long,” there was a secret campaign by the sugar industry to deflect the blame for heart disease from sugar onto dietary cholesterol and fats—without any evidence.

So in retrospect, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the only mention of sugar in the NAS report was to dismiss its role in cancer. I remember asking the political-science bureaucrats who ran NCI about this oversight and being told we wouldn’t be researching sugar and carbs’ relation to cancer.

Instead, NCI wasted decades and billions of dollars running after fats, and even protein, as the macronutrients that supposedly cause cancer—while ignoring mounds of evidence on the ability of vitamins, herbs, and other plants to prevent and even reverse cancer (for more info, see the sidebar on page 3).

A metabolic toxin’s influence on a metabolic disease 

Not surprisingly, none of these government decisions made sense to me. After all, cancer is a neoplastic disease, meaning it results from new growth of abnormal cells. And cells need energy (namely sugar) to grow—especially if they are growing rapidly like cancer. And it’s also a metabolic disease, resulting in disruptions to metabolism in all cells and tissues at every level.  

Since sugar is a metabolic toxin, basic cancer biology should tell us that sugar has an important role in cancer—since cancer is also a metabolic disease.   

There’s an important metabolic difference between cancer cells and normal cells. Cancer cells grow faster than normal cells, and require more blood, oxygen, and energy in order to keep growing. 

Cells face a choice about how they make more energy from breaking down food. Cells can continue healthy energy production by using oxygen to combust (completely burn) glucose, yielding energy, and water for cellular hydration. Or, they can shift to the unhealthy energy production characteristic of cancer cells, which includes relying less on oxygen and more on glucose. 

Cancer cells still need extra blood vessels so they can grow off the body’s blood supply—but it’s the glucose carried in blood, rather than the oxygen, that actually becomes more important to these cells. In essence, cancer cells become ravenous for more sugar. 

Modern scanning techniques like PET (positive emission tomography) show which cells in the body are consuming more sugar. In most cases, the more sugar a cancerous tumor consumes, the worse the prognosis for the patient. In other words, the more sugar in the cells, the deadlier the cancer. 

And yet, oncologists actually advise patients in the latter stages of cancer (when a metabolic condition called cachexia sets in, where patients experience rapid weight loss and muscle atrophy) to consume more sugar!

What a Nobel laureate told us about cancer… nearly a century ago

There’s simply no excuse for this ignorance about sugar’s role in cancer. Especially in light of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Otto Warburg’s discoveries on this topic back in 1924. 

Warburg, who lived from1883 to 1970, was a German physician and physiologist, and the son of a prominent physicist. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize 47 times, and became the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1931 (in his case, it was for medicine and physiology). 

As director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology, Warburg studied the respiration, metabolism, and physiology of cancer cells. 

Warburg served in the German Cavalry in World War I, and was awarded the Iron Cross. Albert Einstein, who knew Warburg’s father, wrote to encourage Otto to leave the Army and return to research. Einstein’s work in physics had great influence on Warburg’s understanding of cell physiology (and because of this, we now know cells rely on quantum effects).

Warburg was half-Jewish, and when the Nazis came to power, he was forced to give up teaching. But Warburg’s research was so critical to the Nazi War on Cancer (which competed with the British Empire Cancer Campaign), that Herman Goring, a highly-ranked Nazi official, personally issued a special permit so Warburg could continue his research and avoid persecution as a Jew under the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.   

All of his work led Warburg to conclude the following about cancer:

“Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.”1

This is now known as the Warburg Effect. But the medical establishment basically overlooked it when it was discovered. 

Warburg was regularly frustrated by lack of acceptance of his theory, and often shared a quote attributed to Max Planck: “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

Even 45 years later, a handful of minions at the National Academy of Sciences decided to set aside the work and warning of this pioneer, and pointedly ignored sugar in the new multibillion NCI effort to finally study diet and cancer. 

What you need to know about the genetic effects on cancer

So why was the Warburg Effect essentially ignored? One reason is because scientists instead became infatuated with the discovery of DNA by American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick in 1953, the year I was born.

DNA became the new fashion in medical research, and it soon was possible to detect the genetic abnormalities of DNA in cancer cells. Genetics became the hallmark for diagnosing cancer cells, and scientists embraced the “explanation” that abnormal genes were responsible for the higher growth, invasiveness, and aggressiveness of cancer cells.

The idea of looking at cancer cell metabolism and sugar, and all of the Nobel-prize winning work of Warburg, was kicked to the wayside.  

And yet, there’s an undeniable link between genetics, cancer, and excess sugar metabolism. A number of genes that “cause” cancer and were known for their role in creating more cancer cells, have now been seen to also regulate the consumption of nutrients, such as sugar, by cancer cells.

These abnormal “cancer genes” simply represent a breakdown of normal cellular control, by telling cancer cells to consume more sugar than they should. As I mentioned earlier, cancer cells become addicted to sugar and eat as much as they can—growing, and making as many copies of themselves as possible.  

Today, most medical textbooks on cancer biology don’t focus on cancer metabolism.  As in all of modern medicine, it’s all about “molecular genetics” and the false promise of “genetic therapies.” But there is yet to be a single gene therapy offered up for cancer, or any other common chronic disease. 

New research may revive the Warburg Effect

Finally, the Warburg Effect may be getting its due, thanks to a group of Belgian researchers that started investigating sugar’s link to cancer in 2008. 

In October 2017, they published a study showing, in part, how the Warburg Effect works. The researchers discovered that yeast with high levels of glucose causes overstimulation of the same proteins that are mutated inside human cancerous tumors—making cancer cells grow faster.3

Of course, an American Cancer Society representative made it all sound very complicated in a USA Today story, saying while the study shows one way the Warburg effect could occur, the researchers “are a long way away from saying this could actually happen.”4

But it’s not very complicated to understand that fast-growing cancer cells need more blood and energy (sugar) to keep growing.  

A final note: Warburg located the metabolic dysfunction in cancer (involving extra energy production from sugar) in the cellular mitochondria. Mitochondria are the critical parts of the cells poisoned by statin drugs.  

We’ve seen statins increase the rate of complications throughout the body, including the metabolic disease of diabetes. 

Early studies on statins (which showed only their ability to reduce blood cholesterol, but not to reduce actual heart disease) weren’t conducted long enough to reveal the long-term complication of diabetes. But now, studies are showing that statins can indeed cause diabetes.  

All research has shown that cancer is also a result of a very long process. Are we going to find out next that cancer is a long-term complication of statin drugs?

Bottom line: After considering the influences the government health agencies’ have regarding diet, nutrition, and cancer and other chronic diseases, it’s easy to pinpoint the culprit: sugar.

How to naturally reverse cancer at the cellular level

I recently released an extensive online learning tool, my Authentic Anti-Cancer Protocol, which is the culmination of 40 years’ worth of research and medical training. 

Along with avoiding sugar, my anti-cancer protocol discusses other natural, simple ways to actually reverse cancer at the cellular level. Below are a few go-to strategies:

Botanical solutions. There has been scientific evidence for decades about the ability of certain plants and herbal remedies to actually reverse cancer. Ancient Ayurvedic remedies from India and herbal remedies from China can cause cells to “re-differentiate” from cancer, and essentially go back to normal. 

There are also natural constituents, such as vitamins and herbal remedies, which have been shown in studies to prevent or slow the growth of new blood vessels that feed cancer tumors—thereby starving the tumors. This process is called “anti-angiogenesis.”  

Meanwhile, Western biomedicine is searching the plant kingdom for cancer “cures.” However, researchers only look for one property in so-called “anti-cancer” plants—their ability to kill cancer cells outright. They pay little attention to the plants I mentioned above that “re-differentiate” these cancer cells back to normal cells… without killing them.

So, basically, Western biomedicine ignores the healing properties of plants, and instead looks only for those that contain poisons that can kill cells. In this way, scientists are making potential potent plant remedies into another version of chemotherapy or radiation. Of course, you have to hope these poisons kill more cancer cells than they kill normal, healthy cells.  And, unfortunately, that’s not usually the way oncology works…

Metformin. This “natural” drug, which is derived from French lilac, is widely prescribed to tens of millions of people to decrease blood sugar.  

But an important “side effect” is that Metformin also reduces the risk of cancer, including breast, colon, and pancreatic cancer—and also reduces the risk of death if you do get cancer. Of course, this makes perfect sense if you take into account glucose’s (sugar’s) role in cancer cell growth.

For more natural, cutting edge treatments, you can enroll in my Authentic Anti-Cancer Protocol by calling 1-866-747-9421. Just ask for order code EOV3U101).