The notion that cancer is an immune system failure never sat well with me, as I saw the outcomes of some early research into cancer immunotherapies. This notion is a vestige of the dominant “adaptive immunity” paradigm (the same paradigm that brought us vaccines), as if all the immune system could be made to do is to keep developing antibodies and T cells that chase after ever-changing neo-antigens, but could never really catch up even in theory, leaving us victims of clever cancers and our life’s savings—victim to expensive but less clever immunotherapies.
I had a hunch that carcinogenesis is instead due to a problem in the innate immune system. More specifically, that cancers could grow only under the conditions of chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation can arise due to unresolved infections or dysbiosis/leaky gut (leaking pro-inflammatory bacterial toxins, such as LPS). It can also be due to chronic stress even in people with impeccable nutrition and gut health.
Stress upregulates those very same pro-inflammatory cytokines that vaccines, infections, and gut endotoxins do. So, if you are stressing out about all the evils in the world, it is not a fact that those evils will get you and not your own stress about them.
I find the contribution of stress to ill health, via chronically-induced inflammation, so huge that I now predominantly write on Stress Transformation rather than on the immune system itself. You can read and subscribe to my new substack HERE, if you haven’t yet.
New directions in cancer research describe cancer as a metabolic problem. And inflammation happens to be key to affecting the central metabolic switch regulator mTOR. I was thrilled to find studies, such as HERE and HERE, that put inflammation front and center in dysregulation of mTOR and spell out the consequences to both autoimmunity and carcinogenesis. The good news is that knowing the real nature of carcinogenesis puts your health back into your own hands rather than the hands of mad scientists.
This summer, my Monday evenings will be spent with the BBCH study group, where we will be Mastering Our Own Metabolic Regulation. We will study mTOR, inflammation and carcinogenesis, and we will each develop our own individual ways of metabolic regulation via readily available lifestyle strategies that cost nothing. Sounds exciting? If you are not yet a member, you are invited to join BBCH and start coming to our weekly (very friendly) study groups.
Here’s the description of the Monday group’s study objectives for Mastering Your Metabolic Regulation (starts on June 19, 2023): https://bbch.community/bb/meetings
It is well known that inflammatory cytokines like TNF and IL-6 block insulin resistance factor in adipose tissue which leads to the Warburg Effect and cancer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLtYSoxjZPE