Adam Li Khan: 2025

What is Metabolic Therapy for Cancer?

Metabolic therapy is a way of treating cancer. It’s based on the idea that cancer is originally caused by damage to mitochondria. The mitochondria inside each cell generates energy for the cell.

Something damages the mitochondria — something like carcinogens, insulin overload, radiation from X-rays, inflammation, viruses, etc. — so the mitochondria are not able to make enough energy to sustain the cell using the normal method, so the cell reverts to an ancient method of generating energy: fermentation.

Generating energy from fermentation takes a lot more glucose because it’s less efficient. A lot less efficient. And when a cell reverts to the ancient pathway for generating energy, it alters the expression of some genes, causing the cell to proliferate without the normal restraint of a healthy cell.

This way of looking at cancer has accumulated a huge amount of evidence. And it also makes cancer’s weakness very obvious: Cancer requires a lot of sugar to survive.

Metabolic therapy cuts off the fuel supply of cancer cells, weakening them and even killing them.

The treatment involves a combination of fasting, a very-low-carb, high-fat diet with barely adequate protein, and sometimes drugs. It has proven to be effective at shrinking tumors, and it is far less damaging to the body than other cancer therapies. In fact, it usually improves a patient’s health.

Learn more about it here:

Book: Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christofferson
Textbook: Cancer as a Metabolic Disease by Thomas Seyfried
Book: The Metabolic Approach to Cancer by Nasha Winters

Video: Cancer's Hidden Weakness Revealed
Video: The Cancer Doctor: "This Common Food Is Making Cancer Worse!" (long interview with Thomas Friedman)
Video: New study reveals specific insights on ketosis as a cancer therapy
Video: Cancer Breakthrough: How Metabolic Therapy is Changing Lives (a Zoom call with several cancer survivors who used metabolic therapy)
Very Short Video: Treating Cancer With Metabolic Therapy (Seyfried explaining the whole thing in one minute)

Scientific paper: Roles of caloric restriction, ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting during initiation, progression and metastasis of cancer in animal models: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Scientific paper: Successful application of dietary ketogenic metabolic therapy in patients with glioblastoma: a clinical study
Scientific paper: Clinical research framework proposal for ketogenic metabolic therapy in glioblastoma

Documentary: Cancer Evolution (an four-part docu-series on the metabolic theory of cancer and emerging associated therapies)

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Subscribe to his blog here. You can email him here.

Finding Common Ground On Political Matters

Are you having any political disagreements lately? If that means uncomfortable conversations, or strife between you and family members or people you work with, or even just frustration at how members of the "opposing party" could possibly be so stupid, I've been doing something I'd like to share with you that creates a feeling of common ground rather than division.

It comes from an article in Scientific American Mind on the differences between liberals and conservatives, mostly about research by Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind. It seems counterintuitive that delving into the differences between liberals and conservatives would bring people together, but that's exactly what happens.

Several times now, when I've gotten into conversations with people about politics and when the conversation started feeling divisive, I brought up some of Haidt's findings, and it shifted the conversation because his discoveries point to an important fact: Conservatives and liberals have a lot of common ground, and often share values. The priority of those values may be different, but they often both recognize that those values are important.

For example, in one study, when they showed people collages of photographs, conservatives' eyes spent more time looking at the more disturbing or unpleasant images in the collage. Many studies have demonstrated, in one way or another, that conservatives are more alert to threats, but that doesn't mean liberals are necessarily cavalier about safety and security. They may differ on their thresholds — differ on how bad it has to be before they are alarmed enough to do something about it — but they still care about it.

Conservatives are more anxious than liberals, generally speaking. That's one of the reasons they resist change. They want things to stay stable because change can be scary, and sometimes things change for the worse, not the better. Again, this is a sliding scale, not a black-and-white (or should I say "blue-and-red") division. Liberals also feel anxiety, just not as strongly as conservatives. And the feeling of safety versus anxiety is not fixed in any given person. In the SciAmMind article, the author writes:

When people feel safe and secure, they become more liberal; when they feel threatened, they become more conservative. Research conducted by Nail and his colleague in the weeks after September 11, 2001, showed that people of all political persuasions became more conservative in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

Haidt's work suggests that we all share six basic, inborn moral values, which are then influenced by culture and experience. The six values are:

1. Care for others.
2. Fairness and justice.
3. Liberty and freedom from oppression.
4. Loyalty and freedom from betrayal.
5. Respect for legitimate authority.
6. Aversion to harmful, disgusting things, foods, or actions.

Liberals tend to care more about some of these than conservatives, and less about others. What I think you'll find when you look at the studies is that the point of view of both right and left are necessary, rather than one being right and one being wrong, and that is an insight that can help bring us together.

So that's my recommendation for improving your mood during trying political times. When the conversation starts to feel divisive — even if you're talking to someone you agree with, but it starts feeling like "us versus them" — bring up some of this research. Just say something like, "I was reading an interesting article," and share some of the research findings. I think you'll find it improves your mood and the person's mood you're talking to. Maybe we can build more bridges between us this way.

Read the Scientific American Mind article here: Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives.

Explore your own moral values here: Test Your Morals.

Watch a TEDtalk with Jonathan Haidt: The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives.

And here's another video, this one of Bill Moyers talking with Haidt: How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World?

The Righteous Mind: Why We Are Politically Divided - Season 1, Episode 14 of the Adam Bomb Podcast

Why can't liberals and conservatives get along? Has something changed? Can something be done about it? Jonathan Haidt's book, "The Righteous Mind," provides the best answers I think we'll find. I discuss the book in this podcast.

Listen to The Adam Bomb podcast here:

Also, check this out:

What Could Stop Our Divisiveness

It's an interview with Jonathan Haidt on TED.

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcasts, The Adam Bomb and Talk to Klassy. You can email him here.

Don't Tempt Yourself

Roy Baumeister is a researcher. In one of his experiments, he discovered an important fact: Exerting willpower to resist temptation reduces your ability to persevere on a goal, at least in the short term.

The experiment was simple: Subjects walked into a room that smelled like baking cookies. There was a table in the room with a bowl of radishes and a plate of cookies.

Some subjects were asked to eat radishes, some were asked to eat cookies. Then they were all told to try to do a difficult puzzle. The researchers timed how long it took people to give up trying to solve the puzzle.

Those who resisted eating the cookies gave up after EIGHT minutes. Those who didn't resist (who ate the cookies) persisted for NINETEEN minutes.

Resisting a temptation depleted some kind of perseverance energy.

So to whatever degree you can, try to make your environment less tempting. Don't keep candy in your house, for example, because if you eat the candy, you lose. But if you resist eating the candy, you also lose.

Look around in your life for sources of temptation and see if you can remove them. This can give you more energy and perseverance to accomplish what you want in your life.