Are Cancer Cells Hijacking Your Metabolism?

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. I was recently reviewing the journal Cancer Cell and came across a very interesting article. The title of the article is Subversion of Systemic Glucose Metabolism as a Mechanism to Support the Growth of Leukemia Cells. And this is a study that was carried out at multiple institutions, primarily the University of Colorado. And what these researchers did was they wanted to look at what is the effect of leukemia cells in terms of their ability to change metabolism. We know that cancer cells, by and large, seem to require glucose for their metabolism. It's the reason that, for example, for imaging some cancer— cancerous tumors, we use PET scanning. That is a labeled glucose, a radioactive glucose, because Cancer cells will take that in preferentially and then can be imaged. And you may recall that we've had the opportunity to interview Dr. Thomas Seyfried, who actually wrote a book called The Metabolic Basis of Cancer. So these researchers looked at leukemia cells and came up with some really incredible findings. I'm going to read to you part of their abstract. Abstract. From an organismal perspective, Cancer cell populations can be considered analogous to parasites that compete with the host for essential systemic resources such as glucose. These researchers then employed leukemia cells and tried to determine how it is that leukemia cells can in fact give themselves more glucose. They came up with some findings I think that were really quite incredible, quite intriguing. I'll continue. Leukemia-induced gut dysbiosis— I'll explain— serotonin loss and incretin inactivation combined to suppress insulin secretion. Importantly, attenuated disease progression and prolonged survival are achieved through disruption of the leukemia-induced adaptive homeostasis. Our studies provide a paradigm for systemic management of leukemic disease. What does it mean? It means that through 3 different mechanisms, these researchers were able to describe how leukemia cells were able to increase their availability of— the availability of glucose. Leukemia cells actually induce insulin resistance, cause the body to be less responsive to insulin. There is a loss of serotonin. There is inactivation of incretin. But primarily, what was really intriguing was their discovery that the leukemia cells were able to alter the gut bacteria in such a way as to cause insulin resistance and therefore higher levels of blood sugar, because leukemia cells require blood sugar in order to survive and do all the terrible things. that leukemia cells can do. I'd like to further read the section of the report that talks about the significance of this work. Previous studies have shown that cell intrinsic mechanism for glucose uptake and utilization are critical for the growth of many cancer cell types. In other words, we've known for quite some time that cancer cells, as I mentioned, require Adequate, if not elevated levels of sugar, of glucose, in order to survive and continue to reproduce and do all the horrible things that cancer cells do. Further, our studies demonstrate that restoration of normal glucose regulation may be a feasible strategy to suppress the growth, systemic growth of malignant cell types. In other words, these authors along with Dr. Thomas Seyfried, indicate that by controlling sugar, by controlling blood glucose, and in fact lowering blood glucose, that might, at least with respect to leukemia-derived cells, but they said growth of malignant cell types, might be a key to gaining a better control over cancer cell populations. The incredible part of the story is that cancer cells, in this case leukemia cells, were able to change the gut bacteria in such a way as to increase blood sugar. That's pretty incredible information. We know that other things that can alter the gut microbiome and ultimately lead to metabolic changes, including elevation of blood sugar, include, oddly enough, the consumption of artificial sweeteners, sugar-free beverages, to the extent that there are investigations going on now looking at actually changing the gut bacteria to improve sugar control. Getting back to this research, again, how malignant cells are able to change the gut bacteria in such a way as to elevate blood sugar because that's what they need. Very interesting information, especially in the conclusions where they discuss the ideas of lowering a blood sugar as being an adjunctive way to gain control over malignant cells, very similar to what Dr. Seyfried has talked about in terms of placing cancer patients on a ketogenic diet, reducing their blood sugar, and basically starving cancer cells by depriving them of blood sugar, whereby the rest of the body can be energized or supplied its energy needs through the provision of ketones by having people on a Much lower carbohydrate, higher fat diet. Interesting information. I would encourage you to watch the interview we recently did with Dr. Thomas Seyfried. Very interesting as well. Thanks for listening. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter.