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We do need to change the way we look at cancer and also every other disease that has an impact on people today. For too long we have held hard to dogma with no hope of changing thinking patterns to ones that might really lead to something beneficial.

In this mode it is exciting to learn of a tremendous new book that is doing just this.

Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer written by Thomas Seyfried PhD, picking up where Otto Warburg left off.

The book is about, as stated by the publisher, "...addresses controversies related to the origins of cancer and provides solutions to cancer management and prevention. It expands upon Otto Warburg's well-known theory that all cancer is a disease of energy metabolism. However, Warburg did not link his theory to the "hallmarks of cancer" and thus his theory was discredited. This book aims to provide evidence, through case studies, that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease requring metabolic solutions for its management and prevention. Support for this position is derived from critical assessment of current cancer theories. Brain cancer case studies are presented as a proof of principle for metabolic solutions to disease management, but similarities are drawn to other types of cancer, including breast and colon, due to the same cellular mutations that they demonstrate."

This is in line with the work I have been doing for many years based on the work of Dr William D Kelley.

From the Back Cover
A groundbreaking new approach to understanding, preventing, and treating cancer
Supported by evidence from more than 1,000 scientific and clinical studies, this groundbreaking book demonstrates that cancer is a metabolic disease and, more importantly, that it can be more effectively managed and prevented when it is recognized as such. Moreover, the book provides detailed evidence that the traditional view of cancer as a genetic disease has been largely responsible for the failure to develop effective therapies and preventive strategies.
Cancer as a Metabolic Disease reevaluates the origins of cancer based on the latest research findings as well as several decades of studies exploring the defects in tumor cell energy metabolism. Author Thomas Seyfried is a biochemical geneticist who has been investigating the lipid biochemistry of cancer for thirty years. In this book, he carefully establishes why approaching cancer as a metabolic disease leads to better understanding and management of all aspects of the disease, including inflammation, vascularization, cell death, drug resistance, and genomic instability. In addition, the book explores:
Origin of metastasis
New treatment strategies that target tumor cell energy metabolism, including the ketogenic diet
More effective prevention strategies in light of the metabolic origin of cancer
Case studies and perspectives from the point of view of physicians, patients, and caregivers
Throughout the book, tables, figures, and graphs summarize key information and clarify complex concepts. In addition, the renowned cancer biochemist Peter Pedersen from Johns Hopkins Medical School also provides a historical perspective on the importance of the information presented in his foreward to the book.
Cancer as a Metabolic Disease is essential reading for all cancer researchers and clinicians as well as public health professionals. By treating cancer as a metabolic disease, the book sets readers on a new, more promising path to understanding the origins of cancer and developing new, more effective strategies to treat and prevent it.

About the Author
THOMAS N. SEYFRIED, PhD, has taught and conducted research in the fields of neurogenetics, neurochemistry, and cancer for more than twenty-five years at Yale University and Boston College. He has published more than 150 scientific articles and book chapters and is on the editorial boards of Nutrition & Metabolism, Journal of Lipid Research, Neurochemical Research, and ASN Neuro.

While the book is expensive and large it must be considered a viable resource for people and practitioners alike.

Forty years into the "War on Cancer," casualties are mounting -- and we still don't know what motivates the enemy.

Please STOP the Race for the Cure and START the Race for the Cause

Breast Cancer Screening with Thermography
Keep Doing BSE or Learn to do it for others

The Experimental Generation

In June 2010, a dermatologist cut a weird growth from my left wrist. The growth was wart-sized, grape-purple and stippled black. It was sensitive to the touch and bled when scratched.

Two weeks later, the doctor told me the tumor was malignant -- melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

The doctor also told me this:

You're part of an experimental generation.

She meant that in the past 30 years, she'd seen an alarming rise in skin cancer, and not just among older people. (I was 45.) Despite the advent of sunscreen and the fact that people don't go outside as much as they used to, she'd even been seeing more moles -- possible precursors to melanoma -- on children.

One or more risk factors for melanoma, she reasoned, must have changed. My doctor's guess: the human-caused depletion of atmospheric ozone, which allows more ultraviolet light -- a leading melanoma risk factor -- to reach our skins.

But other variables have also changed in recent decades, including the chemicals we're exposed to through air, water and food. How much might exposure to these be increasing the risk for melanoma and other forms of cancer?

Mostly, the answer is: We really don't know.

And that's the experiment, in which we've become the test subjects -- without our knowledge or consent.

Less Death, More Cancer

My doctor's language, inevitably, recalled Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Writing in the years when America first went whole-hog for synthetic chemicals, Carson warned that we were subjecting humanity and nature to a vast, uncontrolled experiment.

In 1964, Carson herself died of cancer. And in a decade that saw rising cancer rates and death tolls, fear of the malady metastasized. On Dec. 23, 1971, President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, pledging to make the "conquest of cancer a national crusade."

In the next several weeks, you'll likely see 40^th-anniversary reports and pronouncements on how this epic initiative -- inevitably dubbed the "War on Cancer" -- is going. Most will gauge progress toward keeping cancer patients alive, or toward the "cancer cure" that Nixon sought. You'll likely hear disappointment that cancer remains uncured, countered with hopeful tidings of new gene-based therapies.

But here's a fact you probably won't hear much: You're actually more likely to get cancer than when the War on Cancer began.

In announcing his "conquest," Nixon noted that cancer struck one in four Americans. Four decades later -- and after hundreds of billions of dollars in research, radiation and chemotherapy -- the figure has risen to about two in five. Nearly half of all men, and more than a third of all women, will get cancer. That's about 1.6 million new diagnoses each year.

And for most major types of cancer, according to National Cancer Institute statistics, incidence remains higher than it was in the early '70s. While record-keeping in the early 1900s was less authoritative, cancer registries suggest incidence also rose steeply for most of the past century; by one estimate, it rose 85 percent between 1950 and 2001 alone.

Meanwhile, between 2003 and 2007, the incidence of liver cancer rose for men, along with thyroid cancer among women. Melanoma climbed for both genders; so did non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia and cancers of the kidney and pancreas.

The news isn't all bad: Incidence of two major types of cancer, colorectal and cervical, have dropped steeply in recent decades, largely because of improved screening. And cancer now kills less surely. Death rates for the most common forms -- lung, breast, colorectal, prostate -- have fallen in the past 20 years.

Even so, 570,000 Americans die of cancer annually -- and the overall cancer death rate is only about 6 percent lower than it was in 1950. Our boat is still leaking; we're just bailing faster.

This trend of "less death" and "more cancer" is starkest among children. Forty years ago, a child with cancer faced a virtual death sentence. (I had a sister who died of neuroblastoma, in 1971, at age 5.) Today, most child cancer victims survive, and death rates keep dropping. But incidence keeps rising -- by about 0.6 percent annually over the past 20 years, mostly driven by leukemia. An estimated 7 million American kids under age 10 are now living with cancer.

Nor is there any easy explanation for dramatic rises in cancers that strike primarily young adults, like testicular cancer. While cancer incidence is dropping in people over age 65, probably because of smoking's long decline, it's rising in people under 50 … despite smoking's long decline.

Our Chemical Romance

Cancer itself is complicated; it's really more than 100 diseases, affecting numerous parts of the body and presenting a wide range of medical challenges. But broadly, cancer happens when cells in our body grow out of control.

Human bodies make cancer cells constantly, and as far as we know, they always have. (Clinical descriptions of cancer seemingly date to ancient Egypt.) Usually, our bodies kill them off. When such cells do thrive, the causes of the disease are sometimes readily identifiable: Lung cancer is largely attributable to smoking; a small number of cancers are caused by viruses (with liver cancer, for instance, linked to hepatitis B and C). Diet and sedentary lifestyles have been implicated in some cancer. Genetics play a role, though likely much less than most people think.

Meanwhile, ever since surgeon Percival Pott observed in 18^th-century London that chimney sweeps were prone to cancers of the scrotum, we've also known that many environmental pollutants are carcinogens. Asbestos (still used in automobile brake pads) is one. So is benzene, a common pollutant in automobile and factory exhaust. Likewise formaldehyde, found in consumer products including some wooden furniture and recently designated a "known human carcinogen."

Industrial workers still often bear the brunt of the most severe exposures. The threat is also elevated for inhabitants of areas like Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," a stretch of the Mississippi River known for massive toxic releases from the petrochemical industry, and for exceptionally high cancer rates among its mostly poor, mostly black residents.

Yet the increase in cancer rates isn't confined to specific regions or occupations. Increasingly, researchers are interrogating the environment as a cause of cancer -- and suggesting that cleaning up the environment may help prevent it.

After all, the past century's rise in cancer has been paralleled by the rise in synthetic chemicals and other pollutants in everyday life. In the years following World War II, plastics took over for wood, metal and glass. And from 1950 through 1975, pesticide production -- Rachel Carson's key concern in Silent Spring -- grew sevenfold, to 1.4 billion pounds a year.

In 2008, according to an EPA inventory, there were some 84,000 synthetic chemicals on the market. (There are surely more today.) Most are made from coal, oil or natural gas. But only a handful of these substances have ever been tested for health effects. We're in contact with many of them on a daily basis. They're in diesel soot and they're in shampoo. They reach us through the packaging that contains our food, the pesticides on apples and the flame-retardant fabric woven into children's car seats.

Some of these chemicals accumulate in our bodies. Others are shed into the environment, where they may persist for decades.

A growing array of studies, for example, link cancers including breast, prostate, leukemia and multiple myeloma to pesticide exposure. I was personally intrigued that a 2007 study from Italy tied melanoma to household pesticide use.

Perhaps the most surprising survey was Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now. The April 2010 report was issued by the President's Cancer Panel, chaired by two appointees of President George W. Bush. The widely publicized report cited "a growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer."

Wrong War, Wrong Race

Cancer patients, understandably, care less about why there's cancer than how to treat theirs. And as cancer victims go, I'm lucky; I quickly learned that mine hadn't spread. My only keepsakes so far are a couple of scars (including one for the lymphectomy).

I'm glad for that, and glad that there are ways to help people sicker than me. But in this four-part series, I'm less interested in the War on Cancer everyone will be talking about. It feels like the War on Terror, or the War on Drugs: a hugely expensive effort to fix a problem whose causes we're ignoring.

What I want to know is, why are we getting sick? Why has melanoma incidence tripled since the 1970s? Why is thyroid cancer rising even faster? Why are men younger than me increasingly getting tumors in their testes? Why are babies getting more cancer?

And in a country where you can't swing a surgically excised lymph node without hitting someone's Race for the Cure, why does no one ever hold a Race for the Cause?

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We celebrate those who beat cancer ... but ignore efforts to prevent it

By Bill O'Driscoll

News cycle: Stories about Lance Armstrong's recovery ignored the fast-rising incidence of testicular cancer.

In October 1996, Lance Armstrong, then 25 and the world's seventh-ranked professional bicyclist, learned he had testicular cancer. The cancer had spread to his lungs, brain and abdomen. He was given a 40 percent chance of survival.

"I intend to beat this disease," he told reporters.

Armstrong survived, of course -- the brain surgery, the grueling rounds of chemotherapy -- and went on to seven straight Tour de France titles.

Armstrong's recovery was received joyously. Headlines like "With Each Day, a Triumph" were standard; thousands of fan letters and emails arrived weekly. In 1999, Armstrong told Bicycling magazine, "The cancer -- I owe my life to it. … I wouldn't be married. I wouldn't have a kid on the way. And I'm a [better] rider."

News accounts noted everything from testicular cancer's predilection for young men to survival tips from psychologists. But readers were rarely, if ever, informed that testicular cancer was becoming increasingly common. In the 20 years preceding Armstrong's diagnosis, its incidence in the U.S. had risen by 41 percent. And it has kept rising: By 2007, testicular cancer was 75 percent more common than in 1975. And no one knows why.

Armstrong himself seemed disinterested in what causes testicular cancer. While his Lance Armstrong Foundation, created in 1997, has distributed countless yellow "Livestrong" wristbands, like most cancer initiatives it's all about supporting cancer sufferers, not pursuing root causes.

Or, as Armstrong said shortly after his diagnosis: "I don't want to waste my time saying, ‘Why me?' I have a problem and I want to fix it."

Spinning the Wheels

It's hard to believe we'd need to argue that preventing illness is preferable to trying to cure it. It's as if we'd abandoned sewage-treatment systems because we have antibiotics for cholera.

And curing cancer is proving much harder than developing antibiotics.

Forty years into America's "war on cancer," you're 50 percent more likely to get cancer than when it began. Childhood cancer rates have grown steadily for decades, according to National Cancer Institute statistics, and cancer is rising in people under 50. Yet the Institute's own funding patterns emphasizes new treatments over prevention.

For instance, in 2010, the National Cancer Institute spent $364 million on prevention programs -- and $1.16 billion on treatment research. (Asked about research priorities, an NCI spokesperson said "grants are awarded on a competitive basis" and research categories "[don't] fully capture the complete range of research objectives" because some research applies in multiple categories.)

Treatment is likewise the focus of the vast majority of funds raised by your average "race for the cure" fundraiser.

Treatment funding has done some good: Childhood cancer and testicular cancer, for example -- both virtual death sentences as recently as the 1970s -- are now mostly treatable. And the rate at which Americans die from cancer has declined from its early-1990s peak.

However, mortality remains just 6 percent lower than in 1950. And providing cancer care is expensive. Spending on treatment has quadrupled in the past three decades. Last year, it reached $125 billion -- 5 percent of the national medical bill.

While that spending is driven largely by the aging population, caring for younger sufferers like Lance Armstrong is pricier because treatment is usually more aggressive. Science magazine recently cited the case of a young father with stomach cancer: His four months of end-of-life treatment cost $350,000.

Moreover, treating cancer is hard -- both on patients and on researchers, who've spent decades searching for a cure. Cancer cells don't mutate just once; they keep mutating, and can develop resistance to drugs.

So why not put more effort into prevention?

It's not a new question.

In his controversial 1979 book The Politics of Cancer, Samuel Epstein, a professor of environmental medicine, asserted that "cancer is caused mainly by exposure to chemicals or physical agents in the environment." If those chemicals were removed, he argued, cancer would be "essentially preventable." But he charged mainstream experts with downplaying the role of industrial carcinogens -- and with pursuing lucrative treatments for cancer at the expense of prevention. Epstein cited ties between what he called "the cancer establishment" and the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries; in the 1980s, for instance, the NCI Executive Cancer Panel was chaired by oil magnate Armand Hammer.

Epstein's attacks were roundly criticized by the medical establishment. But little has changed, says epidemiologist Devra Davis, author of The Secret History of the War on Cancer.

"The National Institutes of Health," she quips, "really should be called the National Institutes of Disease."

Why Don't We Know More?

Popular culture too prefers "beating" cancer to sussing its source: For every movie about what carcinogens do, like Erin Brockovich, there are 10 Brian's Songs or 50/50s, celebrating cancer's noble victims or plucky survivors.

Public officials follow suit. When President Richard Nixon was pushing the National Cancer Act, in 1971, he issued a 1,300-word statement. While it briefly acknowledged evidence that "human cancers can be prevented by avoiding exposure to certain chemicals," just 100 words of the statement concerned prevention. (Seven years after the surgeon general's announcement that cigarettes cause cancer, Nixon's statement didn't even mention smoking.) Nixon's repeated references to a "cancer cure," meanwhile, signaled the chief goal.

Critics say those priorities are no accident. As difficult as curing cancer might be, it could be harder to reduce the malignant growth of special interests.

More scientists are now, like Epstein, raising alarms that synthetic chemicals drive cancer. Consider testicular cancer. Studies have linked exposure to hormone-mimicking chemicals (like those found in some pesticides and plastics) to reproductive abnormalities including undescended testicles, a cancer risk factor. Meanwhile, a 2008 study suggested that a byproduct of the pesticide DDT (still found in most Americans' bloodstreams) increases the risk of testicular cancer.

And DDT is just one of at least 84,000 synthetic chemicals. Some are known carcinogens; the vast majority remain untested for health effects.

But passing laws to reduce exposure to such chemicals is difficult, partly because of the chemical industry's political influence. According to opensecrets.org, the industry employs nearly 500 federal lobbyists and regularly spends $50 million a year on lobbying; top spenders this year include Dow Chemical, the American Chemistry Council and DuPont Co.

Epidemiologist Davis says she and other researchers who confront industry face threats to their funding or careers. Her Secret History of the War on Cancer documents the derailing of several researchers who explored tobacco or industrial pollutants. She cites, for instance, Wilhelm Hueper, whose pioneering research into industrial carcinogens got him fired by DuPont; he later worked for the National Cancer Institute, where industry pressure hamstrung his efforts until he left, in 1968.

When concerns about chemicals do arise, Davis observes, business interests take a page from the tobacco industry: They tout bought-and-paid-for studies showing their products are safe, and question the science behind the alarm bells.

Consider BPA, a plastics additive that's caused cancer and reproductive problems in lab animals. For years, industry fought state-level bans on BPA in products like baby bottles and sippy cups; in 2009, the American Chemistry Council said that California's effort would "needlessly restrict consumer products deemed to be safe by scientific experts worldwide." In fact, there was some scientific concern about BPA, and a sign-off by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was later revealed to have been heavily influenced by industry input. Then, just this past October, the ACC announced that manufacturers had quietly removed BPA from such products. "[T]hese products are not on the market. There is no need for parents or consumers to worry about them," said an ACC spokesman.

Davis now runs the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Health Trust. "Our motto is ‘Making Prevention the Cure,'" she says. "No matter how much money we spend on finding and treating cancer, no matter how good we get at treating it … if we don't reduce the demand, we'll never win."

In the meantime, mystery chemicals continue to proliferate, at a clip not even Lance Armstrong could outrace.

Next week: The Toxins We Live In

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Cancer Prevention

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Runaway Growth

Forty years into the "War on Cancer," casualties are mounting -- and we still don't know what motivates the enemy.

Soft-Pedaling Cancer Prevention

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