An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death


RichardH sent me The New York Times article An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death.

“I think there’s no doubt that insulin is pro-cancer,” Watson says, with respect to the link between obesity, diabetes and cancer. “It’s as good a hypothesis as we have now.” Watson takes metformin for cancer prevention; among its many effects, metformin works to lower insulin levels. Not every cancer researcher, however, is convinced of the role of insulin and IGF-1 in cancer. Robert Weinberg, a researcher at M.I.T.’s Whitehead Institute who pioneered the discovery of cancer-causing genes in the ’80s, has remained somewhat cool to certain aspects of the cancer-metabolism revival. Weinberg says that there isn’t yet enough evidence to know whether the levels of insulin and IGF-1 present in obese people are sufficient to trigger the Warburg effect. “It’s a hypothesis,” Weinberg says. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong.”

I didn’t find a better excerpt to give you a feel for what is in the article, so to amplify on this one, one of the issues was sugar in the diet.

There is one caution that we need to all keep in mind.  It is an assumption that a chemical in your body that causes trouble comes from eating that chemical.  Therefore, not eating that chemical may not be a cure for what ails you.

The low fat diet is a case in point.  The fat in your arteries that causes Atherosclerosis does not come from eating fat in your diet.  It comes from the liver processing the carbs in your diet.  So cutting out fat in the diet and replacing that with carbs was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Just because an hypothesis is plausible, doesn’t mean that it is correct.  An hypothesis needs to be experimentally verified before you should bet your life on it.

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