A Second Look: What Really Causes Diabetes and Cancer?

This Second Look episode combines two AHS talks by Dr. Ron Rosedale:  His 2012 talk at Harvard on Diabetes and his 2019 talk in San Diego on Cancer.   

Dr. Rosedale was an early pioneer of the low carb movement, and one of the first to focus on the metabolic value of increasing dietary fat rather than dietary protein.  Based on a deeper understanding the roles of insulin, leptin, and mTOR in human metabolism, he crafted his Rosedale Diet, not just for weight loss, but for preventing or treating heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other metabolic disorders that are on the increase in the industrialized world.

These two talks may seem to be about entirely different diseases.  But if you watch and listen carefully, you'll appreciate how Dr. Rosedale applies a unified framework to understand metabolic diseases on a fundamental level -- as revealing an underlying problem in communication between different parts of an organism - problems stemming from aberrations in hormone signaling, growth factors, and nutrient sensors.

Modern medicine often goes down the wrong road in misconceiving diseases in terms of a lack or excess or some particular chemical, gene activity, or mitochondrial dysfunction.  So diabetes is thought of as a disease of too much glucose, cardiovascular disease - too much cholesterol, osteoporosis -- too little calcium.  And similarly, cancer has been though of as a disease stemming from too much glucose, or activation or damage to certain genes, or to mitochondria.

Dr. Rosedale's reframing of diabetes and cancer leads to practical approaches to treating these diseases. 

The first talk presents a challenge to the way we conventionally think about diabetes as a diesease of "too much glucose". It gets to that conclusion only in the second part of the talk, after a deep discussion of how organisms evolved to sense nutrient availability. In the case of diabetes, he focuses on the hormonal signaling, in particular the need to keep insulin and leptin signaling in check by avoiding not just too much processed carbohydrates, but too much protein in the diet.

The second talk by Dr. Rosedale was delivered at the Ancestral Health Symposium in San Diego in 2019.  The title is "Was Otto Warburg Wrong?"  Otto Warburg was an Nobel Prize winning  German physiologist of the early twentieth century, who noticed that cancer cells are adept at burning glucose thought cancer could be starved by denying it glucose.  This view has been recently revived in light of failures of the genetic and free radical theories of cancer. But as you'll hear, Dr. Rosedale pokes holes in all those theories,In the second talk on cancer, he focuses on restraining the potential of cells to grow unchecked by controlling the insulin, leptin and mTOR signaling pathways.  These are the hormones and pathways that facilitate healthy growth when we are young, but can cause problems like cancer particularly as we age. Finally, Dr. Rosedale suggests how a diet low in protein reduces cancer risk and can promote longer lifespan.

Besides the above talks, you can learn more by reading Dr. Rosedale's book, The Rosedale Diet.

Here is a guide to topics discussed in this podcast episode:

Time     Topic

00:00     Todd's introduction to the two talks by Dr. Rosedale

03:36     Talk #1 (AHS 2012): "The Deeper Roots of Health and Diet"

04:45     The common chemistry and metabolism of early life forms

06:44     Glucose as the first fuel for early single-cell organisms

08:47     The origins of mitochondria and fat-burning mitochondria

13:58     Nutrient sensors 

14:50     How Insulin, mTOR, leptin sense glucose, protein and fat

16:10     Insulin and leptin resistance and miscommunication

16:42     Diabetes is not a disease of glucose, but of miscommunication 

18:10     How fasting and ketogenic diets promote longevity

19:54     Q&A: FIber, brain nutrition, dietary protein

25:17     Todd's intro to Talk #2

26:17     Talk #2 (AHS 2019): "Was Otto Warburg Wrong?"

28:05     Critique of the genetic theory of cancer

29:09     Critique of the metabolic (glycolytic) theory of cancer

39:29     How cancer can use multiple sources of fuel

45:22     Cancer is a cause, not an effect, of mitochondrial damage

55:44     Cancer is not a disease of glucose and mitochondria

57:03     Cancer is a disease of uncontrolled growth...

59:12     promoted by growth factor like IGF, HGH, leptin and mTOR

1:03:32  Elevated mTOR promotes mitochondrial damage

1:04:54  A low protein diet suppresses cancer and extends lifespan

1:05:30  Recommendations for dietary protein limitation