Hey, friends welcome back. So in today's show, we're going to talk more about the connections between sugar sugar consumption and cancers, specifically honing in on breast, long colon, and brain cancer, as these cancer subtypes have been linked with deranged cellular metabolism, and talk more about the warburg effect, and exactly what this is, some recent updates with regards to the warburg effect, and I just want to let you know about a book that I've been diving into a lot, called Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christofferson. I highly recommend this because we know that cancer is a second leading cause,

we know that we know that some of the therapies for cancer are non-specific, there are side effects, radiation and chemo, as is talked about in this book, is sort of relegated to slash and burn in the body. It's non-specific, and there can be consequences to these treatments. So if we can better prevent cancer, that would benefit humanity, benefit you and your friends and family. So I want you to better understand a characterization of cancer, and a new hallmark of cancer that has recently been delineated,

and that is changes in how tumors and cancerous cells derive their cellular energy to finance their unrestrained growth or proliferation, which is the defining characteristic of a cancer cell. Cancer cells and tumor cells, there's all sorts of different subtypes of cancer within a tumor in and of itself. There's different phenotypes of cancer and tumors, but the defining hallmark is unrestrained cellular growth, and that's why Otto Warburg, what he first characterized in the 1920s,

was that, hey, these cancerous cells, they're financing this unrestrained growth by using energy differently, even in the presence of oxygen, normal cells, what they will do, is they will extract energy from carbohydrates and fats, to appropriately break down those macronutrients to create ATP, cellular energy. But what's different about tumor cells and cancerous cells is in the presence of oxygen, they will ferment glucose to make pyruvate in lactate, and that lactate is used as a signaling molecule.

To further help the tumor evade, tumor suppressor proteins and so forth, evade apoptosis and invade other tissues. And so that is one of the hallmarks, again, specifically referring to colon, breast, lung, and brain cancer, and maybe pancreatic cancer is a paper that we're going to talk about today, dives further into.

So what we need to understand here, I think the big question in 2023 with regards to revisiting this Warburg effect is this, is it the genetic expression changes in the DNA mutations that are characteristic of cancer, causing this change in metabolism, or is it the latter, what's the chicken or the egg, or is it the change in metabolism and mitochondrial function, causing the change in gene expression that is leading to tumor formation.

And I think there's two schools of camps that will argue in debate within oncologic circles and so forth about what begets what, is it the DNA damage, obviously DNA damage is a problem, right?

But when there's DNA damage, is that causing the change in metabolism, or is it the latter, is it the change in metabolism that is changing gene expression? And either way, I think we can benefit by being more metabolically healthy, and that's what I want to share with you in today's session and talk more about the importance of the mitochondria.

Because the mitochondria, your cellular organelles that help you create cellular energy, they are involved in regulating apoptosis or pre-programmed cell death, and that is sort of, there's a dearth of apoptosis in tumor cells, they don't know when to die, so they keep growing and dividing and growing, and that is the problem.

So this regulated mitochondrial functioning is a problem, and in 2011, there was an interesting paper that talked a little bit more about this, and this confirms the latter hypothesis that I was referring to, and that is that deranged metabolism may foster a tumor microenvironment and create a tumor or neoplastic condition.

A paper by Schultz at all in 2011 found that when cancerous cells were given frutaxin, which is a natural, a naturally occurring compound in your body that helps to foster mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation, the normal way that cells would create cellular energy, that it had an inhibition effect on tumor genesis in the formation of cancerous cells and slowed growth.

And so this is just one of many recently published studies that helps to confirm or support the thesis created by Otto Warburg in 1920, and that is that cancerous cells will aerobically ferment glucose in the presence of oxygen.

So a few different papers that I want to share with you here on the screen, this one titled Warburg Effect in Colorado Cancer, the emerging roles in tumor microenvironment and therapeutic implications.

And again, this paper is talking specifically about colon cancer, but in this paper they do talk about how the Warburg Effect is prevalent and has implications in tumors and in brain cancer, lung cancer, I mentioned breast cancer as well as colon cancer, and there was a new paper, this was December of 2022, glucose metabolism and tumor microenvironment in pancreatic cancer, a link in cancer progression.

And so a lot of papers are finding that there's this dysregulated glucose metabolism and that is fostering a tumor microenvironment that favors expansive growth.

And I really want to hone in to the mechanisms here and give you some evidence that would link healthy dietary changes and exercise and all the strategies that we talked about on this channel with supporting a microenvironment that doesn't favor tumor growth and expansion.

And talk about the PET scan, positron emission, tomography, this is a diagnostic imaging tool that's widely used all throughout the world that uses a radioisotope glucose known as fluorodeoxyglucose FDG that helps to diagnose cancer.

Now you might be thinking, well, how does that help support the whole Warburg Effect? Well, it turns out that when individuals subjects that maybe have cancer biomarkers say CA 125, CA and 18 that are elevated or they might have lumps in their breast or they might have cognitive decline or something or memory loss or vision changes that might suggest a gluoblastoma or something or tumor in the brain, they will get this imaging to see how big the tumor is and where this tumor might be.

And again, they are using a radioisotope labeled a fluorodeoxyglucose to actually see because tumor cells are highly glucose dependent in terms of their, you know, like we talked about how they change their microenvironment and their metabolism to really thrive off glucose oxidation.

So this is the imaging, the PET scan, this is widely used for people with cancer to see if the radiation or the chemo is actually being effective and affecting those tumors or if the cancer has spread.

So isn't it quite interesting that we're using a technology that is ascertaining the glucose demand in a tumor subtype as a diagnostic imaging tool.

And so I think that that does favor, if you will, the thesis that Otto Warburg represented in the 1920s and there's also evidence about metformin.

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