Carbohydrates are addictive
You think carbohydrates aren’t addictive? You think it’s easy to give them up? You don’t think it possible that people might prefer carbs to life?
Think again.
A story appeared in the online version of Time Magazine last year that I read when it came out, put aside to blog about later, then got sidetracked. A reader sent me a link to it a few days ago, which brought it back to the front of my mind.
The article discusses a study being done in Germany using a carb-restricted diet to fight cancer. In pre-WWII days, a German scientist, Otto Warburg, received a Nobel Prize for his work in sussing out the fact that cancer cells don’t generate energy the same way that normal cells do. Cancer cells get their energy, not like normal cells, from the mitochondrial oxidation of fat, but from glycolysis, the breakdown of glucose withing the cytoplasm (the liquid part of the cell). This different metabolism of cancer cells that sets them apart from normal cells is called the Warburg effect. Warburg thought until his dying day that this difference is what causes cancer, and although it is true that people with elevated levels of insulin and glucose do develop more cancers, most scientists in the field don’t believe that the Warburg effect is the driving force behind the development of cancer.
But it stands to reason that it can be used to treat cancer that is already growing. Since cancers can’t really get nourishment from anything but glucose, it stands to reason that cutting off this supply would, at the very least, slow down tumor growth, especially in aggressive, fast-growing cancers requiring a lot of glucose to fuel their rapid growth.

