Travis Christofferson > Quotes

“Ketosis is a normal physiological state. I would argue it is the normal state of man. It’s not normal to have a McDonald’s and a delicatessen around every corner. It’s normal to starve.” Maybe many modern diseases are an artifact of civilization, and maybe, as Veech suggested, a little deprivation would do us a ton of good.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms

“Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms

“Many of these drugs were doing nothing but making the mice lose their appetites. It was the reduced calories that had the anti-tumor effect.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“when Schaeffer’s group proved irrefutably that the cytoplasm of a tumor cell could initiate and drive cancer, it was impossible to ignore the results.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“ketone bodies dramatically tilted the ratio of armed glutathione (the antioxidant form) to unarmed glutathione, beefing up the cellular defense of healthy cells as they transitioned to ketone body metabolism.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“A recent TCGA follow-up study attempting to identify the mutations driving Weinberg’s sixth hallmark of metastasis found none. “Comprehensive sequencing was unable to find a single mutation responsible for the most important quality of cancer, the single feature of cancer responsible for 90 percent of all cancer deaths.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“no patients with solid tumors have been cured by targeted therapies over that time period. Zero [is] the number of targeted therapies that have prolonged survival by one year, when compared to a conventional treatment.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“Twelve minutes into the talk, he did something uncharacteristic. The humble scientist “called out” Weinberg for omitting the Warburg effect from his list of hallmarks. He said, The hallmarks of cancer have been listed in a very well-known book now by Bob Weinberg of MIT, and he lists six hallmarks of cancer. One of these, the first and most important one, he omitted. This broadcast I understand is being broadcast throughout the world, so he’ll get this probably in the mail tomorrow…many of us are aware of the list, but the one he omitted from this list is the Warburg effect. It is the oldest known property of cancer, and it is a characteristic of every cancer.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“One consistent feature stood out: The samples all displayed a striking depletion of white blood cells within the lymph nodes and bone marrow, precisely the tissues that become packed with the feverishly dividing cells of lymphoma patients. Two Yale pharmacologists, Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, who had contracted to study the therapeutic effects of nitrogen mustard, made the connection. In a burst of imagination they entertained the possibility that the war gas possessed a dual nature, that it was a strange Jekyll-and-Hyde compound that could exist both on the battlefield and within a physician’s clinic.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms

“In summary, the origin of carcinogenesis resides with the mitochondria in the cytoplasm, not with the genome in the nucleus.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms

“The most important statistic, the one that told the story with the most unbiased clarity, was that the current death rate from cancer was still the same as it was in 1950.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“The high degree of intertumoral heterogeneity revealed by TCGA shocked everyone. No single mutation could be identified that was required for the disease to start. No combination of mutations that initiated the disease could be found. Other than a few commonly mutated oncogenes, there was a frightening degree of randomness. The studies sequenced the tumors from eleven individuals with breast cancer and eleven individuals with colon cancer. Over eighteen thousand genes were sequenced, almost forty times the number in the initial studies and the most exhaustive sequencing to date. Vogelstein was stunned by the seeming random nature of the cancer genome seen two years into the project. He posed the question on everybody’s mind: “Is it possible to make sense out of this complexity?”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“In one day, mitochondria turn over the body’s weight equivalent in ATP, an astonishing degree of chemical churn.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“Because they believe in the metabolic theory of cancer, Seyfried and D’Agostino approach cancer therapy from a different angle. Their vision is almost utopian—a therapeutic approach less like combat and more like a gentle rehabilitation and restoration of health. They envision treating patients with a “synergistic combination of nutritional ketosis, cancer metabolic drugs (like 3BP, DCA, and 2DG) and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT).”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms

“If cancer is driven by the retrograde response, it could explain how mutations varied wildly from patient to patient and how samples with one or two mutations could exist. It implied that rather than driving cancer, mutations were just features of its personality. According to Seyfried, the mutations at the heart of the SMT of cancer were downstream to the true cause: damaged mitochondria. They are a side effect, an epiphenomenon. The upshot is that mutations to DNA “arise as effects rather than as causes of tumorigenesis,” Seyfried said.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“A typical metastatic lesion can have up to twenty mutations not shared by other metastatic sites within the same patient.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer

“Once the first chemotherapeutic agent was successfully administered to lymphoma patients across the country, a new era of oncology was ushered in. The context of its birth was heavy with metaphor. The world’s first chemotherapeutic agent was conceived from a substance designed to maim and break the will of enemies in a cloud of slow-moving death. Its therapeutic potential was discovered because of a terrible accident during some of humanity’s darkest years.”
― Travis Christofferson, Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms