Decrease in oxygen and increase of sugar encourages cancer….Tell me more Otto..

After writing the last post about Otto Warburg’s theories about cancer growth, I was pondering the current predicament of the prevalence of cancer and the way we live in the United States. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 40.35% or 1 out of every 2 people will develop some type of cancer in their lifetime. Wow! Those are devastating statistics. Think about it – if you are sitting in a roomful of people – at a café, office, movie theater – almost half of the people you see will develop some form of cancer at some time.

If there is truth to Otto Warburg’s theories about what encourages cancers, then it is no small wonder that the NCI U.S. cancer statistics are so high. As a country we suffer from an epidemic of a decrease of oxygen coupled with a gross intake of sugar.

Between plain old sugar and high fructose corn syrup (have you watched the film King Corn yet?) the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that each person in America consumes 92 lbs!! of sugar-substances (sugar, corn syrup, honey) annually. That is almost my weight in sweeteners a year!

And barring the recent spike in the price of gasoline, which made people less eager to hop in their cars, Americans tend not to walk or bike, but rather drive, drive, drive. Our whole shopping culture is built around the automobile, intrinsically less healthy for our bodies, our communities and our planet.

So unlike our counterparts in other cultures that tend to walk and bicycle for their daily transport, we decrease our oxygen intake by driving, while increasing our sugar intake. Sounds like Otto’s cancer recipe to me.

I consider myself to be health conscious, and am a health practitioner educated about nutrition and health issues, yet I spend inordinate amounts of time in my car, not only generating greenhouse gases, but drastically limiting my personal O2 intake by being IN the car and not physically moving! While I clock between 25,000 to 30,000 miles a year on my car living in “healthy” Vermont, my friends in Germany commute via bike to work riding a comparable 33,000 miles a year each on their bicycles and putting only 750 miles! annually on their shared car. If I translate my driving miles into hours I come to somewhere in the vicinity of 750 HOURS a year - that's like driving 7.5 hours a day for 100 days. No wonder I get cranky.

So even if we don’t consider all the other factors that contribute to cancer and other disease – toxins, smoking, heavy metals, to name a few – if we could increase our oxygen and decrease our sugar intake significantly we would be somewhat ahead of the game as it were. Hmmm….sounds to me like an argument for bike and foot paths.

What Doctors Don't Tell You

Well, we know that there are many things that doctors don't tell us, but happily you can discover many of them at the informative, UK-based, website, What Doctors Don’t Tell You (WDDTY). Since 1989, journalist Lynne McTaggart, author of numerous books including The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, has coordinated the WDDTY website, a virtual warren of articles and data about health and alternative options. Recognized as a responsible, credible source of information and resources, WDDTY is helpful to all practitioners and laypeople interested in the real scoop behind any number of health and science issues.

Here are two examples of unrelated but interesting articles. The first demonstrates yet another reason to be cautious about purchasing items made in China, whether containing high lead, melamine, or other contaminants. In Europe, sofas made in China were found to contain sachets of dimethyl fumarate, a fungicide used to inhibit mold. Unsuspecting sofa-sitters came down with eczema-like allergic reactions and one man suffered heart failure.

The second is about how present day researchers in Europe and the United States are re-examining some of the theories of Otto Warburg, a biochemist who in 1924 (!) made interesting discoveries about the cause of cancer having to do with fermentation of sugar in cells and a lack of oxygen. Dr. Otto Warburg (1883-1970) won the 1931 Nobel Prize in Medicine. He found that cancer cells cannot survive with high levels of oxygen and that cancer occurs when there is a lack of oxygen at the cellular level.
• Oxygen inhibits the growth of cancer.
• Healing potential is increased when oxygen is available to cells & tissues
• Oxygen sensitizes the body to medications so the body needs less
• Oxygen produces energy for healthy cell activity

There is so much information on the WDDTY website, it can seem overwhelming, but there is much to learn and it is worth the effort to wade through it.

Explore at: www.wddty.com