Weekend News

A Nobel for Cancer and Sugar

In 1931, Otto Warburg proved that cancer cells compulsively consume glucose (sugar). He won the Nobel Prize.

We've known this for 95 years.

And yet — the dessert menu in the hospital is jelly, ice cream, fruit juice, and biscuits. Served directly to the oncology ward.

The Nobel committee has not yet responded.

Let's go back to those days.

1931: Dr. Otto Warburg, biochemist and physiologist, wins the Nobel Prize for discovering that cancer cells can't survive without glucose. They depend on it. This implies that depriving cancer cells of glucose might treat the disease.

Warburg proposed examining therapeutic ketosis (a glucose-free diet): cancer cells need glucose; healthy cells run on ketones — a clean alternative fuel the liver produces from fat to supply energy to the body and brain when sugar is scarce.

The hypothesis is brilliant.

Clinical trials should have started immediately.

They didn't.

Why?

Chemotherapy research was taking off. Drug companies could patent chemotherapy drugs.

Chemo-therapy = treatment with chemicals.

Synthetic chemicals are among the sources of cancer.

You can't patent "stop eating sugar."

Through the 60s and 70s, individual researchers examined ketogenic diets for cancer. Small studies showed promising results.

Cancer cells really do shrink when glucose is restricted. The studies got published in secondary journals.

No major institution picked up the gauntlet. No pharma company funded larger trials.

Dr. Thomas Seyfried at Boston College rediscovers Warburg's work in the 2000s.

After 15 years of research on cancer metabolism, his conclusion: cancer is a metabolic disease, not primarily a genetic one.

Ketogenic diets should be a first-line treatment.

He publishes Cancer as a Metabolic Disease in 2012 — a comprehensive book, carefully evidence-based.

The oncology establishment completely ignores him.

When Seyfried lectures at medical schools, oncologists walk out of the room.

They call his work "dangerous" — not because the science is wrong, but because the suggestion that a diet could treat cancer threatens the entire chemotherapy industry.

The current standard of cancer care: poison the patient with chemotherapy, then send them home with advice to eat "healthy whole grains" that feed the cancer.

Current funding for metabolic cancer treatment research: essentially zero.

Warburg won the Nobel 95 years ago.

We've known cancer depends on glucose since 1962.

We're still feeding cancer patients sugar and calling it supportive care… because you can't patent a ketogenic protocol or a fast.

Now look —

I'm not saying every cancer can be healed with fasting or a ketogenic diet.

But — if we know what we know, why aren't we turning this into the biggest campaign ever created? Instead of creating more and more awareness days for different types of cancer?

P.S. You can really enjoy life without processed sugar and massive amounts of empty carbs.

If you haven't taken the Gut Rules course yet — it's waiting for you.

So you can be healthy forever. The world today steers us toward illness, and we have to act the opposite way.

---

I'm currently in Sri Lanka, and most of you are in Israel.

I won't tell you my heart is with you — because I know you remember you're sovereign beings, and that this is just another challenge (we've passed many) within the hundreds of thousands of years your soul has been wandering here.

I will tell you that there's a "shortage" of fuel in Sri Lanka because of the war. It's interesting to discover scarcity — to see hundreds of people standing in line for gas. It's an experience in itself.

Especially when you're one of them.

From conversations with my family and friends, it sounds like the situation is very difficult.

That makes me want to hear from you — what would you want from me in a time like this? What content would help? What options? Anything that comes to mind.

I'd love to try and do whatever I can.

Reply to this email with any suggestion you have. I read everything and I'm waiting to hear from you.

→ Home → Podcast → Academy