The Cancer Code Quotes

“In almost all human disease, treating the root cause, not the proximate cause, is the key to success.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“A carcinogen causes cancer because it is mutagenic—that is, it increases the rate of gene mutation. Given that mutations accumulate randomly, more mutations increase the risk of cancer,”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“fairly”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Cancer cells love eating glucose, but not exclusively. The metabolic pathways of the amino acid glutamine are also disrupted in cancer. 11 Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in the blood. Some cancer cells consumed more than ten times the normal amount of glutamine. 12 Some cancers, such as neuroblastoma, lymphoma, and kidney and pancreatic cancer, appeared so “addicted” to glutamine that they simply couldn’t survive without it. 13”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Which growth factors prevent apoptosis? The best-studied anti-apoptotic factor is insulin/ IGF-1, through the PI3K pathway. 8 High levels of insulin/ IGF-1, as seen in obesity and type 2 diabetes, not only encourage cell growth but also block the natural running of the apoptosis program, powerfully increasing growth signaling. High insulin/ IGF-1 thus forms part of a fertile soil for the cancer seed.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Drugs that activate AMPK (mimicking low cellular energy stores) are known for promoting health. Examples include the diabetes drug metformin; resveratrol, from grapes and red wine; epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), from green tea and chocolate; capsaicin from peppers; turmeric, garlic, and the traditional Chinese medical herb berberine. Calorie restriction also activates AMPK, which may explain some of its purported benefits with regard to aging.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Too much insulin/ IGF-1 means too much growth, which tilts us toward cancer, such as breast, endometrial, 20 prostate, and colorectal cancers.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Our understanding of insulin’s surprising link to cancer began in 1985, with Dr. Lewis Cantley’s discovery of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway. Cantley, a professor at Harvard and Tufts and now director of the Meyer Cancer Center of the Weill Cornell Medical College, did not study metabolism or cancer, but the rather arcane field of cell signaling.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“In the United Kingdom’s General Practice Research Database 2000–2010, insulin treatment increased the risk of cancer by 44 percent compared to metformin, a treatment for type 2 diabetes that did not raise insulin levels.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) database from 1999 to 2010 suggest that high insulin levels more than double the risk of cancer regardless of weight status.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“As cells evolve toward cancer, they lose specialized features and begin to look more and more alike. They become more primitive and dedifferentiated, two pathologic terms often describing cancers. Conceptually, cancers evolve toward the same unicellular destination: the stem cell. 8 This reversion toward a stem cell allows a lung cell to change sufficiently to live in the liver, because the primordial lung cell shares some common features with the liver.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“The atavist theory suggests that unicellular organisms contain an original kernel of core genetic programming that allows growth, immortality, movement, and glycolysis. This kernel exists in multicell organisms as a remnant of the organism’s evolutionary past as a single-cell organism. New genetic programming is layered over the old core to change the old competitive behavior to cooperative behavior. If these more recently added genetic controls are damaged, then the ancestral traits reassert themselves.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“A single targeted treatment is unlikely to be successful. Cancers can evolve to be resistant to treatment.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Single-cell organisms are selfish creatures; they live, grow, breed, and pretty much do everything else by themselves. There is nobody for them to help out and nobody to help them. Their prime directive is their own survival and reproduction. To be successful, a single-cell organism competes with surrounding cells for resources. But cells working together have a huge advantage over cells working alone. Multicell organisms evolved about 1.7 billion years ago, likely beginning as simple aggregates or colonies of single-cell eukaryotes. Over time, mutually beneficial collaboration between cells permitted specialization, which then led to true multicellular organisms. Specialization, division of labor, and intercellular communication made these organisms bigger, more complex, and more capable than simpler single-cell organisms.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“cancer is found in almost all multicellular organisms, suggesting its origins stretch back hundreds of millions of years.” 8 Dogs get cancer. Cats get cancer. Rats get cancer. Even the most primitive multicellular organisms develop cancer. In 2014, cancer was discovered in two species of hydra. You may recall from high school biology class that hydra are simple, small aquatic organisms that evolved very early on from single-cell organisms. 9”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“The ability to become cancerous is an innate capability of every cell in the body, almost without exception. Sure, some cells become cancer more frequently than others, but virtually no cell cannot become cancer.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Medical research insists that all new articles in scientific journals be reviewed by other scientists, who can demand changes before publication or refuse to publish outright. Radical new ideas are often rejected immediately, never seeing the light of day.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Medical science, by contrast, laboriously moves a single step at a time. This is how we spent decades vilifying all forms of dietary fat before spending millions of research dollars to show that some natural fats, like nuts and olive oil, are good for us after all.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“In nutrition, guidelines established in the 1970s advised Americans to severely restrict all dietary fat and to eat more carbohydrates. The original 1992 Food Guide Pyramid published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) advised Americans to eat six to eleven servings every day from the bread, cereal, rice, and pasta group. The images used included pictures of such “healthy” foods as white bread, pasta, and crackers. The USDA also advised Americans to eat sparing amounts of foods such as avocados, salmon, nuts, and olive oil, due to misplaced fears about fat.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Instead, as I’ve argued, we must acknowledge that obesity is a hormonal imbalance rather than a caloric one. Let’s embrace the truth and move forward so that we can develop interventions that actually work.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Rather than restricting all calories, another strategy may be to reduce the most insulin-stimulating foods, such as sugar and refined carbohydrates.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“For the most part, dietary prevention of cancer boils down to one key strategy: avoiding diseases of hyperinsulinemia, including obesity and type 2 diabetes.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“This is largely because metastasis is an early, not a late, step in oncogenesis.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“metastasis as “The spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body.”1 This single distinguishing feature makes cancer more lethal than virtually any other disease in existence.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Cancer cells secrete the noxious lactic acid to impede nearby cells.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“OxPhos is advantageous only when glucose is scarce, but given the recent obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics, glucose levels tend to run high, not low. So, the OxPhos “advantage” of energy efficiency is largely illusory in this current environment.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Active cancer cells guzzle the glucose much faster than normal surrounding cells, and the PET scan picks up these hot spots.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“This surprising process is now referred to as the Warburg effect.”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

“Warburg noticed with some amazement that fast-growing rat tumor cells used no more oxygen than regular cells. The cancer cells were instead using ten times more glucose and producing lactic acid at seventy times the rate of normal tissues (see Figure 18.1).1 Warburg calculated that tumor cells converted an astounding 66 percent of the glucose they took up to lactate.2”
― Jason Fung, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery