Cancer is one of the most vicious and difficult-to-treat diseases we know of. Even using combinations of the newest surgical approaches, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy, doctors are often unable to effectively combat the progression of the disease. But what if I told you that by doing something as simple as changing our diets, we might be able to starve cancer and thus outlive it.
Now this might seem like a crazy idea, but let’s think about it. Cancer cells, just like any other cells, require energy to survive. For example, if we tried to culture them in a solution without any energy supply, they would quickly die. Or if one were to starve oneself to death, one’s cancer would quickly follow suit. Of course, starving oneself to fight one’s cancer is… counterproductive to say the least. We want to live longer and better, so starvation is out of the question. Even so, these examples illustrate an interesting angle of attack against cancer.
Cancer cells need energy to stay alive and replicate. Without energy, they stagnate and die.
That means, that if we could somehow selectively cut off the energy supply to the cancer, whilst maintaining nourishment for the rest of our body, cancer cells would slowly die, and the cancer would vanish, whilst we would continue to thrive. But is that even possibly? Since cancers reside within our bodies, they have access to anything our healthy cells have access to as well, and we can’t exactly build a fence around them to isolate them, either.
If we want to find an answer to this question, we must look at how cells produce energy and how that metabolism might differ between healthy cells and cancerous cells, but don’t worry, I’ll dive just deep enough, so that everyone can understand it, and no deeper.
ATP is a molecule used by our cells as a sort of energy storage unit. It can be produced during the breakdown of energy sources, such as fat or sugar, and then later used to drive energy intensive processes, such as the contraction of our muscles (1). In healthy cells, most ATP is produced in various pathways, which together fall under the umbrella term of ‘cellular respiration’. The common factor between all these pathways is their requirement of oxygen, thus the ‘respiration’ part of the name. Whilst there is variation depending on the fuel used, our cells are capable of metabolising fats and sugars using this process (2).
Should oxygen not be available, cells are able to instead switch to something called anaerobic fermentation, where sugar can be broken down without the use of oxygen. This process is for example used in our muscles during high intensity work, when the blood does not supply enough oxygen (2).
