A Low Carbohydrate, High Protein Diet May Extend Your Life and Reduce Your Chances of Getting Cancer

Abstract

When glucose in our blood enters our cells it is broken down via glycolysis to pyruvate. Pyruvate can then be converted to lactic acid and secreted, ending  glycolysis, or into acetyl-CoA and broken down, with the help of oxygen (O₂), within mitochondria to carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water via oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS, i.e., the Kreb’s, Citric acid or tricarboxylic acid cycle) ¹.  In 1857 Louis Pasteur discovered that in the absence of O₂, normal cells survive by switching from OXPHOS, which generates 36 ATPs/glucose, to glycolysis, which only generates 2 ATPs/glucose. In the 1920s, Otto Warburg found that cancer (CA) cells, unlike normal cells, use glycolysis instead of OXPHOS even when O₂ is present, and this is called “aerobic glycolysis” or the ‘Warburg effect’¹. Because most tumours use this less efficient energy generating system, they have to take up more blood glucose (BG) than normal cells to survive and this is the basis for identifying human CAs using PET scans with the glucose analog, ¹⁸fluorodeoxyglucose²