Mitochondria

Back in 1931 the preeminent German researcher Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that cancer is a metabolic disease. Very simply, Warburg realised that cancer develops when the body’s metabolism is starved of the energy it needs and cells instead produce energy through fermentation of sugar. This process is very inefficient compared to the normal process using oxygen and points to the need to keep the body well fuelled, oxygenated and watered so that the energy generating mitochondria in every cell can perform optimally. Cancer cells can be seen to have severely reduced numbers of mitochondria organelles. Tragically the thrust of most cancer research initiatives is to uncover some genetic cause for the disease for which a targeted, and patentable, drug can be developed. After decades cracking the human genome we’re as far away as ever from finding a drug based cure. Today’s standards of care require that we submit ourselves to ‘High Tech’ and expensive ‘slash, poison or burn’ protocols rather than invest in fundamental self-care. My mother frequently told us that her father’s favourite saying was ‘The best way to keep a place clean is to stop it getting dirty in the first place’. It was usually the state of my bedroom that started her off but the message stuck and today I find myself using the same principle when relating to health – “The best way to stay healthy is not to get sick”. This fits perfectly with another saying that emerged during Ty Bollinger’s excellent 2015 series of documentaries – ‘The Truth About Cancer – A Global Quest’. One of his contributors reminded us – “You don’t get sick because you have cancer; you get cancer because you are sick”. In other words, cancer results when the body’s defences have been depleted by a systematic neglect brought on by an inappropriate lifestyle. This realisation shows that Epigenetics (above genetics), or lifestyle factors, rather than genes, are the primary determinants of who gets cancer. It’s much easier to tell an unsuspecting public that a magic bullet cure can be found than to try and suggest they can avoid it altogether by changing lifestyle. At a social level the same illness is at work. Local cottage industries and ‘peasant’ farming methods once gainfully employed labourers in communities all across the world. Times were hard but people were frugal and lived modestly. The principle threats to existence were poor sanitation, inadequate shelter and war. These subsistence methods distributed opportunity evenly across populations. There was minimal waste. (Nature has no waste.) Today however, with our greed based focus always looking for the best way to exploit resources – human or natural, we find ourselves caught up in an endless spiral of growth and concentration of wealth so that the ‘have nots’ are even less able to cope. In developing countries they may find themselves working themselves to death as sweat-shop labourers whereas in developed countries they are kept alive as consumers and ultimately converted into patients to feed the grossly inefficient medical industry. All the time sneered at as no-good spongers or malingerers. In the name of progress we have created an industrial environment which concentrates rather than distributes wealth. Our social mitochondria have been starved of necessary nutrition, our society is sick, social cancer is inevitable. A change of perception is possible. As many chronic diseases and even cancer can be cured by restoring the body’s nutrition needs, so whole communities and populations can live healthily when their basic needs are met. Tom Shadyack says it eloquently in his ‘I Am’ movie – “The pursuit of wealth beyond one’s needs is a mental illness”. Labourers are the mitochondria of humanity. If only we would try living as a true single humanity looking to serve the interests of the whole rather than the few we would all have enough. And, at the end of the day, enough is plenty.