Cancer’s Ancient Achilles Heel: How to Starve Cancer Cells to Death

“The lack of knowledge in the oncology field is profound, which contributes to tremendous suffering and death…Our research at Boston College is developing the very diet-drug combinations that will eventually lead to the resolution of cancer.” Those are bold statements, and Thomas Seyfried offers no apology; just evidence. Press play to discover:

• What question every cancer patient needs to ask their oncologist
• What is stopping countless physicians across the world from implementing treatment based on the metabolic theory of cancer
• How the standard of care in cancer treatment (namely radiation and chemotherapy) actually accelerates metastasis 
• How microbes that are inside cells facilitate energy generation by cancer cells

Thomas Seyfried is a professor in the biology department at Boston College and author of over 150 peer-reviewed publications, as well as the book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer. In the world of cancer research, Seyfried's is revolutionary, but it’s not getting the attention it deserves.

The underlying message is clear, backed by evidence, and surprisingly simple: all cancers—whether brain, breast, colon, or any others—are unable to grow without glucose and glutamine, which means any therapy that disrupts the availability of these molecules to cancer cells will result in the death of those cancer cells.

Why are glucose and glutamine necessary components of cancer cell growth? It’s because cancers cannot use oxygen to generate energy, which means they cannot use the oxidative phosphorylation pathway used by other cells in the body. Instead, they rely on an ancient metabolic pathway for energy production: fermentation. And what drives fermentation? That’s right: glucose and glutamine. Without these molecules, fermentation cannot be carried out, leaving cancer cells without the ability to generate energy, which causes cancer cell death.

Taking this to be true, every known major cancer should be potentially manageable at least, and entirely resolvable at most, so long as glucose and glutamine can be targeted and restricted. This is why Siegfried’s efforts have been focused on developing a non-toxic diet and drug cocktail that does exactly this.

He is skipping the clinical trials because the diet and drug cocktail strategy is not consistent with the double-blind crossover study design used by pharmaceutical companies. Furthermore, no pharmaceutical company is going to jump on the opportunity to fund a study that tests the efficacy of diet and non-patentable drugs, because there is simply no financial incentive to do so.

Instead, Seyfried treats individual patients with these diet and drug therapies and publishes his results in the existing scientific literature. He is currently working on a paper on longitudinal studies showing the impact of diet and drug therapies on tumors, backed by MRI and PET scan images.

Seyfried dives into the details of this research and more. Tune in—it’s not an episode you want to miss.

Visit https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/biology/people/faculty-directory/thomas-seyfried.html and https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/bcnews/science-tech-and-health/biology-and-genetics/targeting-cancer.html to learn more and find out how you can help these research efforts. 

Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK