Cancer cells are different. Instead of feeding on oxygen, as healthy cells do, they thrive on glucose—the sugars in the blood that come from carbohydrates—and this also produces lactate, an acid that allows the cancer to spread.
It’s not news. The process was first observed by German physicist Otto Warburg in 1924 and was then almost completely ignored by the cancer industry, other than by a few maverick outliers who advocated a zero-carb keto diet as part of cancer therapy
With the discovery of the DNA structure in 1953, cancer theory took a different route and focused on genetic mutations. It was a false trail, and today researchers acknowledge that energy metabolism is the key to understanding cancer’s genesis and spread. It’s estimated that 80 percent of cancers are the result of the “Warburg effect,” as Warburg’s discoveries were labeled.
The one new insight into Warburg’s
