Robin Daly: Hi! Welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of the UK charity Yes to life that supports people with cancer in finding out about and utilising integrative medicine techniques to help them regain their health and wellbeing. My guest on the show today is an author who broke into the field of cancer and cancer research with his book Tripping Over the Truth – a science detective story, looking into the mechanisms of cancer, our understanding of them and the consequences in terms of the way that cancer is treated that result from the established theories surrounding the disease. Travis Christofferson has just published his third book, so I’m keen to find out more. I’m talking to Travis over the internet in the United States. Travis – welcome to the Yes to Life show!

Travis Christofferson: Hi Robin. It’s great to be here.

Robin Daly: It’s a been couple of years since the last time you were here and you’ve certainly been very busy since then. We’ve got a lot to talk about. First, a little history. We were thrilled that you came to the UK to speak at our annual conference way back in 2016. Tripping Over the Truth was pretty hot off the press then and at that event, we also featured, amongst others, Paul Davis principal investigator at the Centre for the Convergence of Physical Science and Cancer Biology, Arizona State University, Dr Mazibuko from the Care Oncology Clinic, and making her very first public appearance talking about repurpose drugs, Jane McClelland.

So could you just tell us your experience of that trip to the UK from the American view and what was to come out of it?

Travis Christofferson: That’s a great question. There was a lot that spun out of that. Number one, after Jane gave her talk I just remember how emotional it was and you could just see this rock star in the making.

And then I think her book came out maybe a year later and it’s taken off and she’s really started the revolution, which she said to me early on, I go, “what do you want out of this?” and she said “To start the revolution.” So she definitely achieved her goal, but you could see, just the charisma, the genuineness, the patient advocacy and how broken oncology is and how she could bring something new to the table.

That was one of the amazing things for me to watch that take off. The other thing that was interesting was I met Dr Mazibuko for the first time. I had known a little bit about Care, not a lot, but we kept a dialogue. I had always been interested – in a former life, I was a businessman and ran a business, so I was struck by their model, how beautiful it was. When I came back, we kept up a dialogue and I eventually started the US version of Care Oncology with a partner. Since that time – 2016/17 – it’s grown to cover the entire United States on a telehealth network. The amount of patients we’re seeing daily has grown beyond our wildest expectations.

So that was amazing. That was another thing that spun out of there.

Another thing that was very interesting to me was meeting people in the crowd. I’ve met Dr Slocum from Turkey who was putting together combinations of all the metabolic therapies that we were talking about.

It was wonderful. To go beyond this theoretical thing that we started with to having this clinician that’s putting this all together in practice and publishing his results. The last thing was Dr Davies – I hadn’t looked into his career until after your wonderful conference, and his career was absolutely fascinating. To have that high level of an astrophysicist turned to cancer the way he did. The story is remarkable. The director of the National Cancer Institute Anna Barker was really frustrated by the lack of clinical progress around the world, especially in the United States where the death rates really have not moved a whole lot. I think everybody kind of knows that by now.

She’s this kind of disruptive thinker – she decided it was best to approach this from a totally different angle. What are we missing? And so she instituted this physical science program at the National Cancer Institute where they hired physicists to look at cancer from an entirely new lens. Dr Davies headed one of the centres there and he turned to cancer and looked at it through fresh eyes what the disease was. It was very interesting to me. He arrived at the same conclusion that I kind of arrived at in Tripping Over the Truth – that the somatic mutation theory was more or less absurd.

There is no way that the theoretical explanation of cancer holds water, that it’s a comprehensive explanation for what cancer is. And he came up with this model called the atavistic model, which really overlaps with the metabolic theory of cancer. The cancer is this epigenetic disease that gets triggered by certain events. So Robin, it was an amazing conference and it was one of those conferences where you go back and you just absorb everything for weeks and weeks. And it was amazing how many things spun out of that.

Robin Daly: Well, it’s very exciting for us to hear that because of course it was a wild idea time, just trying to pull it together. I’ve heard bits and pieces about what’s happened as a result. It’s just bringing the people together, isn’t it? They’re actually meeting people and exchanging ideas. It’s so powerful.

Travis Christofferson: Yeah, absolutely. I feel bad – in this COVID world we live in now, we’ve shifted, unfortunately. For the moment we shifted away from that. I used to kind of be jaded about conferences. You spend all this enormous amount of time and money and effort to go, but then you realise that intimate face to face meetings, that’s really where the interesting things come from.

Robin Daly: Yeah, that’s true. There’s pluses and minuses to moving online. You’re going to be featuring in an upcoming, entirely online event. The plus on that side is that the line-up is just spectacular. The 40 plus world experts we’ve managed to attract to it are absolutely stunning. And so the dialogue is going to be beyond.

Travis Christofferson: I saw that! Bravo on the line-up. Very good. It’s going to be exciting

Robin Daly: You’ll be there as expert host interviewing Jane. So that’s going to be fascinating stuff. I imagine you’re going to rather enjoy that.

Travis Christofferson: Oh, yeah. That’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to the lot.

Robin Daly: So since that visit, you actually wrote another book, Curable, and in contrast to Tripping Over the Truth, which focused in on one specific mechanism underlying cancer and other chronic disorders, Curable seemed to be a much broader look at Western health care and its chronic condition. Do you want to say what you’re trying to say in this second book?

Travis Christofferson: Curable was a very 30,000-foot view at the health care system and why it’s broken – the systemic reasons why we spend, especially in the United States where we spend about 20% of our GDP. Every two dollars out of 10 that exchanges hands goes towards healthcare. And yet our outcomes don’t reflect that expenditure there. They’re not even near the top. So what are we doing wrong? And that was the dive into the overarching question that the book asks and it really falls into two buckets. What we’re doing wrong is a ton of over-treatment and the primary driver for that in the US is we have this fee-for-service system where doctors get paid for every procedure or test, so that automatically incentivises them to do more. And the statistics are dismal when you look at it, you can assess them – just look at the number of back surgeries per county in the state of Washington; it completely correlates with the number of surgeons within that county.

It’s not like they’re being assessed about who absolutely needs a surgery. It’s just doctors are very willing to cut when they necessarily don’t have to. So that’s systemic and that’s across the board. We treat way too much. And the second thing is we treat with these treatments that are insanely expensive for what you get out of them.

And so what I look at is these very extremely undervalued treatments that we have right in front of us – very obvious things like fasting, low carbohydrate, ketogenic diets, repurposed medications that we just simply don’t utilise. We don’t have the incentive structure to do that because there’s no way for people to capture money from it. It always comes down to money.
Curable looked at those systemic problems. It really comes down to human psychology – what motivates people to do what they’re doing, why they do what they’re doing and most of the time, unfortunately, that, that circles back to money.

Robin Daly: The common factor between those two things that you’ve itemised there is of course the money, I would agree. It seems to be the thing that’s wrong with healthcare. A for-profit model is at odds with the aim of bringing about good health.

Travis Christofferson: Absolutely. Within the book, I found some brilliant examples of people that are trying to fix it and doing a good job. How do you realign the incentives structure of a group of physicians? You look at primary care physicians because they’re the front line. That’s where most of the cost savings are going to come from.

And one model was they pay physicians a bolus amount of money by the number of patients that they’re estimated to treat per year. The physicians are given this block lack of money on January 1st. And so the incentive structure all of a sudden switches for these doctors – they get to keep all the money they don’t spend so if they spend less per patient, they keep that money. If they have better outcomes for patients, they keep that money. So now their whole goal is to keep their patients healthy and to not overspend on them.

They’ve had remarkable outcomes from that model. It just there’s so much political inertia and money involved already, that I’m not highly optimistic that something like that will take over.

Robin Daly: Well, do you think that health care was ready to hear your message to any degree?

Travis Christofferson: I think that every time there’s a presidential election, the healthcare gets brought up and it’s just seems like we’ve been in this cycle where it gets brought up and nothing ever gets done. We moved to Obamacare, which is not perfect but it was a step in that direction. When I arrived at the conclusions in Curable, I really wasn’t sure what the best fix is. We have this for-profit system versus the NHS, a single-payer system, you immediately wipe out about 15% of the cost, through fraud, through all the inefficiencies, but what you lose and what we have going on in America now are these kinds of things, entrepreneurial pockets of brilliance. You want to unleash that entrepreneurial spirit. These people that are really want to change it and are looking for solutions. I feel like in a single-payer system, everything becomes homogenised and there’s no more incentive to really make these really huge imaginary leaps to make it better.

One example is a company like Virta Health, which uses a ketogenic diet for type two diabetes. It’s done online and it’s an extremely efficient system. They have nutritionists track their patients’ markers through technology, and the outcomes have been incredible. In the first year the typical weight loss is 30 pounds. Inflammatory markers, lipid markers are drastically improved.

They remove about 63% of their diabetes medications, about 93% reduction insulin use. And this is just done through diet. They can demonstrate the massive amount of savings to the system through by doing it this way. Another example is something a hospital chain in Pennsylvania instituted this thing called the Fresh Food Pharmacy. It was just a grocery store with fresh food, not carbohydrate food, just fresh produce and meats and things like that. They focus as pilot program on low income people and they gave them access to this grocery store, I think twice a day or three times a week, something like that.
And again, dramatic improvements. The cost savings were absolutely phenomenal because lot of the foods was donated by food banks. They found ways to get the food cheaper. I think in the first year the savings was something like $40,000 per type two diabetic patient, an enormous amount of money and these very creative ways of doing things.

I would hate to lose that, but I don’t know how you capture them. I don’t know if there’s a way to capture that innovative spirit of a for-profit system that really is trying to do it for-profit by saving money. We think of disruptive technologies that do things better versus just a homogenous single-payer system.

Robin Daly: No, I don’t know the answer. I completely agree with you about the different set of problems experienced on each side of the Atlantic. The only thing I’ll say is that to imagine that Britain is not for-profit is to make a mistake because fundamentally it is still for-profit.

And the single payer system is well-enrolled in the profit model. But nonetheless, you’re exactly right that the same incentive is not there, hence the lack of progress. The complete frustration that they’re trying to push forward the agenda for integration is a massive obstacle.

America is way ahead on that because of the entrepreneurial model that you’re describing.

I want to get onto the main topic for today – you’ve written another book! This time you’re heading back into the territory of Tripping Over the Truth. Do you want to tell us its title and what the overall thrust of the book is?

Travis Christofferson: This one came out of the lockdown. I was at the Metabolic Health Summit last February, and right after the summit a man named Dr Richard Veech died about two weeks after it. His family allowed me to write a short obituary for him which was posted on Medium.

That just got me interested in his life and his life’s work because it’s a truly remarkable story. And the title of the book is called Ketones, The Fourth Fuel. It’s on Amazon. It’s a look at the sweeping history of bioenergetics, which is humanity’s quest to map out how our bodies create energy and what that has meant. That historical sweep went from these brilliant scientists from number one from Otto Warburg, this brilliant German scientist who was in Tripping Over the Truth. He was a cancer scientist as well, but really his focus was energy metabolism.

Then his star student was Hans Krebs who mapped out this central intermediate metabolic cycle that we’ve all heard of – the Krebs cycle – and his star student was Richard Veech at Oxford. Richard Veech then went on this sweep, this continuum of trying to understand how energy is generated.

He went on to elucidate this auxiliary metabolism that we all have hidden within us called ketone metabolism or ketosis. It gets turned on during bouts of deprivation when someone’s fasting or eating a very low carbohydrate, higher fat diet. And it was really maligned – throughout most of the 20th century ketosis was looked at as this is pathological condition. I even dusted out my biochemistry book from 1995 and there was a paragraph on ketosis that said that it was a dangerous metabolic state that somebody entered into when they weren’t eating or eating a low calorie diet and it had to be monitored, which I thought was so funny because therapeutic fasting was the in vogue treatment for obesity in fifties and sixties.

Doctors knew that this was perfectly safe, but somehow this gets lost in translation. And of course that was the ‘fat is bad’ era that was dominating the food pyramid at the time. So it was a very confusing message about this metabolic state of ketosis, but in the 20th century, nobody was studying it. It was looked at as this terrible state. Nobody really understood what it was. And then Richard Veech, when he turned to it in the late nineties, really mapped out what it was. It was this extraordinary fourth fuel that our bodies produce when we’re fasting or in a state of deprivation.

It had these remarkable properties. Veech uncovered these remarkable properties. It’s a superior fuel. It burns with more thermodynamic energy and that results in this sweeping change of all the metabolic hubs. Thousands of reactions that comprise human metabolism are all driven to further completion.

Veech realised right away that this had incredibly far-reaching therapeutic implications, which today scientists are still mapping out. It seems like every month there’s a new publication on how ketones are the new exogenous ketones, or a ketogenic diet affects some sort of new disease state.

In fact, a month ago, there was a paper about ketogenic diets and the influenza virus where mice would on a ketogenic diet had dramatically reduced rates of death due to these changes in immune function from a ketogenic diet. This sweeps back to what we were talking about – one of the main problems we have across the globe now, it’s not just Western culture, it’s middle Eastern culture, it’s China. It’s everywhere. It is this problem with type two diabetes and prediabetes insulin resistance. This is a problem of little activity and too much carbohydrates. In American it costs about $250 billion a year.

The amazing thing about ketone metabolism is it completely bypasses all the pathologies so associated with insulin resistance. That was the take home message to me in the book. I wanted people to really understand that there is this way to not go into that state of insulin resistance.

Most of us are going to go into it. By the time we get 40 most people are showing signs of insulin resistance. I hope that’s a good synopsis.

Robin Daly: Fantastic. So to sum up, you’d say that this discovery of the fourth fuel is an extremely important one for the overall health.

Travis Christofferson: Absolutely. For sure. The main effect of ketones, and the main one is beta hydroxybutyrate, is within the brain. When you go back to the history of it, through most of the 20th century scientists thought that the brain can only burn glucose.

They knew that the rest of the body tissues could burn fatty acids, but fatty acids didn’t cross the blood brain barrier. So it was always presumed that the only fuel that the brain could burn was glucose. The brain does burn predominantly glucose when we’re at our typical state. 99% of the people in the Western culture are burning glucose in their brain, but they couldn’t explain how a fasting human, a normal human can go about two months.

When you do the math, the thermodynamic math, if the brain cannot switch from glucose, a person should only be able to live about 18 days. So George Cahill discovered in the sixties that the brain could indeed pivot to ketones. Once you’re in this fasting stage, the liver starts producing beta hydroxybutyrate, and then the brain, would transition to beta hydroxybutyrate as its primary fuel source. About two thirds of the energy was produced by this new fuel source. That would explain how a fasting human can go two months and an obese human the longest fast ever was over a year .

Robin Daly: I read that! I couldn’t believe that, incredible.

Travis Christofferson: The brain takes about 20% of our energy at any given time.

It’s this huge metabolic sink. What happens when we enter our forties, we start to develop a little bit of insulin resistance. What that means is the body cannot use glucose very well. The cellular machinery that processes glucose begins to break down. So the brain in particular, which relies most of the time on glucose, develops what we call this sort of energy gap.

Its energy requirements and the energy it’s getting is not matched up. In healthy 65 year old, even what we call healthy, there’s a gap of about 15%. Somebody that’s got pre Alzheimer’s, that gap is 20-25% even in their forties. With ketone metabolism, when you bathe the brain in this new fuel, it fills that energy gap because it bypasses all of this breaking down machinery of glucose metabolism that requires insulin and it enters the cell through a different channel. It goes into metabolism downstream of the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex, which requires insulin to work.

It’s like a clogged highway. All of a sudden you have this free lane that it’s able to access. And that is incredibly important for brain health as we age, as far as dementia or Alzheimer’s and just general cognition, fatigue, depression – all of those things depend on energy metabolism and this fourth fuel is able to sustain that as we age.

Robin Daly: It’s a great thing and there’s obviously a lot more to find out, but it does look like we’re at the beginning of something really important. One of the things I love about your writing as a non-scientist myself, is that you managed to write about science and about complex subject matter and a thoroughly accessible way.

You bring to life the story of the science, the history and above all, you’re able to capture the thrill of discovery that drives the scientists. I wonder if you could introduce to the three main characters of your story, who all feature on the cover: Warburg, Krebs, and Veatch. You’ve already mentioned Veech. Warburg, many listeners will have some familiarity with. Krebs, they’ve probably heard the Krebs cycle, but they don’t necessarily know what it’s all about. And Veech, I think as yet few will be familiar with. Would you give us an introduction to them all?

Travis Christofferson: Otto Warburg, I think he was born in 1883, a brilliant German scientist. He was born into this golden era of science, where he was a member of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, in Berlin. And if you remember this Institute, you were given unprecedented access to resources and freedom. Albert Einstein was a member and they had to deem the mind worthy of being a member of this Institute. Warburg was the youngest member ever accepted. He spent most of his career never having to worry about resources, teaching pressures, writing grants, any of that. It was a wonderful system to unleash these brilliant minds like that and unburdened them with all the problems that scientists face today. Warburg had to actually ask for money one time and he just scribbled it on a napkin and he got it.

So it gives you insight into the era he was born into, but as a consequence of that his lab was incredibly productive. He was nominated for the Nobel prize for three separate achievements. He won one Nobel prize. He should have won more, but then there were political reasons why he didn’t. He really wanted to understand why the human body produced energy.
At the time, they just didn’t have it. It was so hard. It’s like a completely unknown puzzle. You don’t even have a starting point to go from. They knew that iron was involved in bringing oxygen into haemoglobin, but they didn’t know how cells were combusting material to make energy.

So he mapped out the first step. He showed the site where combustion was happening in the cell. It was what we call cytochromes, which is an iron-containing protein where oxygen was pulled to within the cell and then substrates from food were combusted to release energy. He really planted the ice spike on the ice wall and grabbed a foothold so everybody else could start mapping out this metabolic map.

Hans Krebs entered his lab as a favour to a friend that Warburg had known and he took a chance. Warburg took a chance on Krebs. Krebs was actually a medical doctor that it just showed this really intense interest in research. He didn’t have a lot of experience.

Warburg actually trained Krebs on his own and set him free and then Krebs proved himself to be this brilliant research scientist. Krebs actually helped work with that experiment I just described, which won the Nobel prize and described exactly where combustion was occurring in the cell, where respiration was occurring.

He was only supposed to be there a year, but he ended up staying four years and then there grew to be some sort of internal tension. Warburg was extreme, he his laboratory with this authoritarian manner. And Krebs began asking questions and showing the signs of being his own investigator and Warburg didn’t like that.

So he told him it was time to leave after four years. Krebs had this deep internal tension. His father didn’t treat him well. He had a rough childhood. He needed a mentor, craved that, and he was scared to jump out on his own and be his own scientist. But he did – he went to Freiburg and got his own lab and then he exploded.

He discovered the urea cycle, which was a huge problem in biochemistry, how proteins are processed. That put him on the map as one of the top biochemists in the world. He then had to flee Germany because of World War II and he landed in the UK and eventually ended up at Oxford.

When he first landed at Cambridge, that’s where he did his work that elucidated the Krebs cycle, which is one of these central intermediate cycles where food substrates come in and they’re processed through this cycle, which spins off other substrates with them, feeding the electron transport chain, which then ultimately ends with the reaction to the oxygen, the Warburg’s cytochrome. He filled in the main chunk of the metabolic map of how humans produce energy. He won the Nobel prise in 1953 for that. When he was at Oxford, he really wasn’t into teaching students and only the most distinguished US professors taking sabbaticals were allowed in his laboratory.

But he had a friend in the US that he’d worked with in Freiburg and Richard Veech was a medical doctor from Harvard. He had just graduated. He was kind of lost like Krebs was, but he had an intense interest in research. This friend of Veech’s called up Hans Krebs, he worked with him in Freiburg and asked him the feature could enter his lab. And he said yes.

All three of them, it was just fortuitous luck that they ended up being mentored by each other. Veech flew to Oxford and entered Krebs labs. He took off and showed this brilliant capacity to do bench research and discovered the way metabolism works by the central, what we call coenzyme nucleotide couples. ATP, for example, is one of the main ones and they’re the central hubs of energy where all the food we eat and the air we breathe charges these little batteries. ATP is like a little battery that then diffuses throughout the cell and powers thousands of reactions that comprise human metabolism.

What Veech showed is there were four of these central nucleotide coenzymes, the power of metabolism and that they were all interlaced with each other. If one of them suffered, they all suffered. The take home message from this is if there was a way to supercharge these coenzyme couples, you could affect the entirety of human metabolism. At that time there was no known way to do it. It was known that insulin resistance diminished these nucleotide co-enzymes and cause all the reactions to metabolism suffer and that’s when that work he stumbled on the ketone metabolism later on about 10 years later, that was a way to charge up all these central hubs of metabolism and bring them back to the level of health.

There was this remarkable continuum to all their careers, which led to this remarkable discovery of ketone metabolism.

Robin Daly: That’s interesting. So it’s kind of a central thread which you’ve built your story around. Fascinating how they’re handing on the baton, each picking up and going forward.

One of the things that first became apparent to me on meeting Paul Davis is the way that the siloing of scientific disciplines – biology, chemistry, physics, etc – tends towards narrow thinking and blind alleys. The truly great thinkers who’ve moved science forward, they’ve often demonstrated the ability to straddle disciplines, all to apply the thinking of one discipline to another much as Paul Davis himself has.

I’m interested in the three protagonists of your story. How did they operate in this respect?

Travis Christofferson: Yeah, that’s a great question. Those were the three main characters. There was one other character named Peter Mitchell, who was a scientist in Cambridge.

At the time when Mitchell was doing his work, the first part of energy metabolism was mapped out what we call the glycolytic pathway. That’s how carbohydrates enter the cell or burned through 10 steps to generate pyruvate. Pyruvate then enters the Krebs cycle and generates these intermediate electron carriers, which feed into the electron transport chain.

It was not known how the electron transport chain operated. It was only presumed that it could operate through what we call substrate level phosphorylation. And that means ATP is generated by traditional enzyme chemistry. You bring together a phosphate group, ADP and an enzyme. They all come together in space and time and that generates ATP.

The entire field just sort of hypnotically was looking for this intermediate and they couldn’t find it. A decade passed and the field was just broken. It was in a state of crisis. Peter Mitchell came along and imagined a new way.

He imagined this electron transport chain. It would pump protons into this inner membrane space and the mitochondria, which is like an air compressor filling up with air. Then you have this potential energy of these protons in this fixed space. Then he imagined that the protons could flow back through, just like a pneumatic tool, flow through these enzymes called ATPase to then generate ATP. He had not a shred of experimental evidence to suggest this was true. But over the decades, they find enough evidence to conclude that he had been absolutely right. What you notice about those things is every single person was dogmatically stuck in this idea of the way it had to be.

Peter Mitchell was the first one that just imagined a new way. You look at all the great scientists, you look at Einstein who was ridiculed for general relativity. You look at Paul Davies and Tom Seyfried who have imagined cancer in a new way, far outside the extraordinarily dogmatic and trenched belief system and the somatic mutation theory.

To me, Robin, that’s one of the most fascinating things of science. How do these guys do that? What is this creative process? It’s not getting caught up in dogmatic thinking. It’s imagination and it’s wasting time. It’s allowing yourself to just think and not be encumbered by other problems.

Einstein was famous for that, for just walking in the woods and imagining things. To me that’s one of the most interesting parts of science. A lot of Krebs’ work was really just straightforward chemistry, but he was the first to imagine the Krebs cycle in a cycle. All the other scientists were stuck in this idea that it had to be a linear series of reactions.

The great leaps forward are just these momentary glimpses of things in a new way.

Robin Daly: It is interesting. Isn’t it? It’s a completely different thing at work, which is closer to inspiration and imagination, as you say, and not at all necessarily to do with structured thinking or any of the normal things you associate with science and research.

Travis Christofferson: And Peter Mitchell was sloppy. He didn’t do his controls right. He was not a great experimentalist, but he had this gift of a wandering mind and he was the one that solved the problem.

Robin Daly: We were referring to this relay race of science and research and overall the understandings and discoveries of one generation getting handed on along the course with all the inconsistencies, the erroneous thinking and the outright dogma.
But it seems the process of science often is less to do with an interest in forging a path into the unknown than in defending the known. This of course can lead to massive decades-long detours or unnecessary roadblocks to progress. Your story certainly seems to feature some of these.

Can you tell us some of the most shocking examples?

Travis Christofferson: To me, the most poignant example right now of that is cancer biology, and still to this day I cannot understand why the most prominent scientists have not just stood up and said, “the somatic theory is wrong”.
I think what happens, Robin, is you get careers invested in a theory. When someone’s published dozens of papers on a theory, they don’t want to go back and say, “look, I was wrong about that”. I think the revision process is a very slow process where they inch into it a certain way.

And also it’s the money. When you have millions of dollars dedicated to DNA sequencing machines, you’re probably going to keep sequencing genomes of cancer cells even though you’ve learned all you’re going to learn because there’s just too much inertia and money and grant writing involved in that.

It’s a horribly frustrating process to watch: the one that’s playing out in real time. I have no idea a hundred years from now what they’ll say about this period of time in cancer biology. But it seems to me like there is way more invested in defending this broken paradigm.

Not only the theoretical basis of what cancer is, but also spitting into clinical work, the development of new drugs. How we do that is based on the Swan paradigm. It’s money, it’s investment in people in their egos. Then you have on the outside, these scientists that are chipping away at the dogma and suggesting new theories and questioning the evidence and so forth.
In just in the short amount of time, it doesn’t happen quickly, but since 2014 when I wrote Tripping Over the Truth, it has changed a lot. There has been much more acceptance of metabolism of epigenetic changes and this chipping away at the idea that the somatic mutation theory is a comprehensive explanation of what cancer is.

Robin Daly: Well, that’s heartening and in the world of medicine, six years is the blink of an eye,

Travis Christofferson: That’s true!

Robin Daly: Just to end up, because we’re just about out of time – what are your hopes for your book and for the progress of health care?

Travis Christofferson: The main hope for my book would be to show the way we age and the way we don’t have to age. We don’t have to go into this state of insulin resistance and diminished metabolic capacity.

There is an alternative metabolism that we all have within us that offers a solution to that. That alone could change healthcare by itself because one of the most pernicious problems is prediabetes and type two diabetes. In the US over 50% of adults are either prediabetic or diabetic. We have this extraordinarily cheap solution to that right in front of all of us, it just takes willpower and education. Healthcare, it’s one of those problems of massive institution and the need for institutional change. But we just keep doing our part. I just keep trying to write these books and take this message. And Jane has done a tremendous job advocating for cancer patients and showing that there are cheap, safe other things that people can do.

Care Oncology is an innovator in that space, as well as Virta Health. There’s a lot of pockets of really good things. And I think it catches on. When social media messages spread so much faster, it seems like you see these messages being passed around much more. I’m optimistic. I think that change is happening, and we just keep all doing our part.
You’re doing your part and should be applauded for that as well.

Robin Daly: You’re right. We’ve all got to keep pushing any way we can.
Thanks very much for joining us today, Travis. Totally fascinating material to delve into, and it’s so important for understanding our own health and wellbeing.

Travis Christofferson: Yeah. It was fun. Great questions. Thanks Robin. Take care.

Robin Daly: Bye bye!

Ketones, The Fourth Fuel is available now in paperback and e-reader editions. And as you heard an interview, Travis is featured in this awesome Yes to Life online event, Your Life and Cancer 2020, in which he’ll be interviewing Jane McClelland author of How To Starve Cancer. For full details and for booking go to yourlifeandcancer.com. Thanks for listening today. Do join me again next week for another Yes to Live show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.

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Kindly written by Literary & Transcript Editor Maria Mellor