Metabolic Theory of Cancer: Speculation on the Causes of Cancer (Pt.1)

Those of us who are steeped in the ancestral health paradigm sometimes get a little too big for our britches. Because we know a little more about the care and feeding of the human body than the average guy or gal on the street, we tend to think we have an explanation for just about every health-related issue there is. When someone we know is diagnosed with a chronic illness, it’s easy for us to say to ourselves, “If only he had done x, y, and z, this wouldn’t have happened.” Or, “If only she hadn’t done a, b, and c, she wouldn’t have ended up like this.”

And, sure, when it comes to things like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, difficulty conceiving, and the like, we do have plenty of answers. (Or think we do, anyway.) So we play the blame game. The afflicted individuals brought their conditions upon themselves by engaging in certain behaviors and/or not engaging in others. It’s not that we think they “deserve” whatever conditions they have; it’s just that we can readily identify things they did or did not do, that eventually brought those conditions about. (And in my opinion, in some cases, ignorant doctors hold just as much responsibility as the patients.)

But what about cancer? Anyone out there gutsy enough to say that someone with cancer had it comin’? I’m sure as heck not.

Can we honestly lay blame on anyone for actions (or inactions) that might have resulted in cancer, or is cancer the quintessential example of a situation that demands us getting off our high horses and saying that sometimes, life just throws you a rotten egg? Maybe, sometimes, despite all our best efforts, we’ll draw the short straw. Maybe, in some cases, it’s possible that something as vicious and awful as cancer can be attributed to plain ol’ “bad luck.”

A paper came out recently wherein the authors suggested something like that, and it created a bit of a firestorm in the oncology and larger medical worlds. The authors wrote:

“Only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to ‘bad luck,’ that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells.” (Tomasetti & Vogelstein, 2015)

Well, as you can imagine, this was received about as well as a rare roasted leg of lamb at a vegan picnic. (Even though it was pretty badly misinterpreted and reported in the news, as media outlets are wont to do. The authors were not saying we’re helpless in the face of cancer risk. This is what happens when journalists read the abstract and think this equips them to speak with authority about the whole paper.) People went nuts. They were quick to point out that many cancers really do have their origins in environmental and lifestyle factors that are perhaps not entirely under our control, but certainly are to some extent:

“The fact that age-adjusted cancer rates for different tissues vary substantially among countries where statistics are kept, and between workplaces or communities that differ in environmental exposures, demonstrates that a large fraction of cancers are influenced by environmental factors.” (Ashford et al. 2015) However, these same authors were slightly more forgiving in an additional comment: “Some mutations are initiated by chemical or viral exposures, and others occur without a known cause.” (Ibid)

“The role of chance underlying the onset of any individual cancer has long been recognized. However, although important for the individual, chance has little to say about the incidence rate in a population, or differences between populations. These are far better explained by exposure to environmental and lifestyle factors, allowing important opportunities for, and supporting implementation of, primary prevention.” (Wild, et al. 2015)

The authors of the paper in question responded to some of their critics with the following, which paves the way for the rest of this post:

“The idea that we cannot completely control our cancer destinies by living a perfect lifestyle in a perfect environment, even when we have no hereditary predisposition to cancer, has proved unsettling. To others, our paper had a completely different message. That a child has cancer is bad enough; that a parent may feel guilty for failing to avoid a certain life-style or environment, and thereby 'causing' that cancer, is agonizing. We chose to use the word ‘bad luck’ particularly because we were aware of the unjustified guilt felt by many patients and their families about cancers that were beyond their control.” (Tomasetti & Vogelstein, 2015)

Colin Champ, MD, a radiation oncologist, had this to say:

“This article really made me think about epigenetics. This controversial and hot topic is the mechanism that changes how genes are expressed without changing our DNA sequence. This pesky term basically means that our lifestyles can actually be incorporated into our genes, potentially in an indirect manner to put it simply. In other words, the “luck” of our genes may actually be directly from our lifestyle.” (Do click on those links from Dr. Champ if you want to see how the media’s field day with this story was unjustified. The authors did not say cancer is just a matter of chance.)

Let’s see what do our go-to experts have to say about the influence of diet, lifestyle, and environment on cancer:

“Although how the transformation of a normal cell to a tumor cell ultimately achieves this calculated uncoupling between glycolytic flux and mitochondrial respiration is not completely clear, it would seem that environmental and/or dietary factors that impact on the epigenetic regulation of HK-2 may be intimately involved.” (Mathupala, Ko, Pedersen, 2010)

“None of the hexokinases arise as a result of […] chromosomal rearrangements or deletions. This knowledge implicates epigenetic events (e.g., demethylation) and/or gene amplification as playing a significant role in the up-regulation of HK-2 gene expression during tumorigenesis.” (Ibid)

“The influence of environmental factors via epigenetic mechanisms that possibly promote or induce cancer is now coming to center stage.” (Pedersen, 2007)

With this in mind—that it really does seem like at least some cancers are driven by lifestyle and environment, but that others might arise from factors we have no control over—let’s take a look at who gets cancer:

Elderly people	Babies
Middle-aged folks	Toddlers & teenagers
Obese people	Lean people
Couch potatoes	Professional athletes
Diabetics	Non-diabetics
Omnivores	Vegetarians & vegans
Tall people	Short people
Wealthy people	Destitute people
People of every race, religion, color, creed, gender, and nationality

Cancer is an equal opportunity killer.

The great equalizer.

This is probably the only “nice” thing we can say about cancer: it doesn’t discriminate.

BUT: Just because cancer has every single one of us in its crosshairs, I don’t think this means we are powerless against it.

This post and the next few will be filled with speculation on my part. This speculation is based on the origins of cancer as outlined in this series. The mitochondrial dysfunction that is at the heart of the cellular changes associated with cancer might not be the only mechanism by which cells become cancerous, but it’s certainly the most well understood and scientifically solid. It has been our guiding principle from the very first post, and it will continue to guide us here.

If malfunctioning mitochondria underlie just about everything else about cancer cells—increased glycolysis, aerobic fermentation, DNA mutations, evasion of apoptosis, and more—then it stands to reason that anything that causes damage to mitochondria can be considered a potential cause of cancer. We will address prevention strategies in a few more posts, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that if we identify some of the causes of mitochondrial damage, then doing the opposite can probably be one part of a multi-pronged approach to prevention. (Kind of like how a low-carbohydrate diet can be therapeutic for Alzheimer’s disease, one cause of which might be a lifetime of carbohydrate abuse. And a low-carb diet might not be required for prevention, but I would argue that as much of a lifetime as possible of good glucoregulation is.)

So here’s the big question: If mitochondrial dysfunction is the underlying cause of cancer (or, more accurately, cancerous changes are a cell’s way of protecting itself in the face of dysfunctional mitochondria), WHAT CAUSES MITOCHONDRIAL DYSFUNCTION?

It’s time to revisit a few things we touched upon in previous posts. Now that we have come such a long way in our understanding of all this, the pieces will come together pretty well.

Let’s go back to what I said earlier about assigning blame. When someone leads a lifestyle that is in direct opposition to cultivating healthy mitochondria, then yeah, maybe it’s not such a mystery when they get cancer. But look at the chart again: little kids get cancer. Toddlers. Can we point a holier-than-thou finger at these cherubs and say they should have exercised more? (Or less?!) Or eaten less sugar? Or slept more? Or gotten more sunlight? If you happened to still be up on the aforementioned high horse, I sincerely hope this has just made you humbly dismount.

So what’s the deal here? Are two, three, five, or seven years of being alive on planet Earth enough time to “break” one’s mitochondria so badly that one ends up with cancer? We can see the connection between certain lifestyle habits and the development of cancer, especially in older folks, who have been engaging in theoretically damaging lifestyle habits for six, seven, or eight decades. But what about when this tragic, awful thing strikes little kids?

We can’t accuse these kids of bringing cancer upon themselves. I suppose, if we were feeling particularly evil, we could look at the mother’s and father’s diet and lifestyle pre-conception and during gestation, or possible toxic exposures in utero, and see if we could identify any possible triggers. But come on. Let’s give people a little more credit, okay? I really do think that there are cases of cancer where there is no identifiable behavior that brought the cancer about. This probably accounts for some cases in adults, and I would guess it accounts for the vast majority of them in children. So where do these cancers come from?

Where do any cancers come from?

In my speculation/opinion, there are causes we can control, and causes we can’t. (And, to be honest, somewhere deep down, for the ones we think we can’t control, we probably can; we just haven’t identified the triggers yet. Kind of like that old saying, “There are no mysteries; only answers we haven’t found yet.”) Just because we don’t know what causes certain health issues doesn’t mean causes don’t exist. But even when we do know the causes, maybe sometimes there’s no way to control for them anyway, so all knowing about them accomplishes is giving people who already need melatonin, magnesium, and inositol to calm down and fall asleep more things to worry about all night.

We’ll take a look at some potential causes of cancer next time. For now, I just wanted to make sure we all understand that not everyone who gets cancer gorges on junkfood all day while they mainline soda and sit on their rear ends indoors playing video games into the wee hours. And maybe even using only “all-natural,” non-toxic cosmetics, eating only organic produce, drinking only reverse osmosis-filtered water, eating only grassfed/pastured meats, and getting plenty of daylight and good quality sleep isn’t enough to make anyone “cancer-proof.”

When it comes to cancer, maybe there really is a tiny bit of luck of the draw. I am absolutely willing to concede that. Even if this is true, however, there’s still an awful lot we don’t need to leave to chance. Just because we can’t control everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be proactive in the ways we can be.

With that in mind, we’ll explore some potential causes of cancer and how to be proactive about them in the next couple of posts.

Continue to the next post: Part 2 of potential causes of cancer.

Remember: Amy Berger, M.S., NTP, is not a physician and Tuit Nutrition, LLC, is not a medical practice. The information contained on this site is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition.