Cancers Are Sugar Junkies

It's now more than 70 years since Otto Warburg, Ph.D. won the 1931 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering that cancer cells have a fundamentally different energy metabolism compared to healthy cells. The crux of his Nobel thesis was that malignant tumours frequently exhibit an increase in anaerobic metabolism compared to normal tissues. In other words, they don't like oxygen.

The significance of this is that fat and ketone bodies as a source of energy require oxygen while glucose doesn't. And that in turn which means that cancer cells are dependent on glucose for growth. All cells can use glucose, but cancer cells consume as much as 4 or 5 times more than normal, healthy cells. In fact, cancer cells seem to have great difficulty surviving without glucose. A study carried out by Johns Hopkins researchers found evidence that some cancer cells are such incredible sugar junkies that they'll self-destruct when deprived of glucose.

{Read More...}