Does High Insulin Make Cancer Resist Treatment?

Siddhartha Mukherjee says chronic insulinemic tone has the capacity to make cancers grow and to leave them resistant to some forms of therapy. Removing chronic insulinemic tone is what lets the cancers become vulnerable. He presents the treatment results as facts.

Peter Attia cites a paper Mitch Lazar wrote at Penn about 15 years ago on cardiometabolic disease. Lazar built a two-by-two of obesity and metabolic health. Lean people can be metabolically unhealthy, and obese people can be metabolically healthy. The paper looked at cardiovascular disease. Disease prevalence tracked with hyperinsulinemia and the changes that accompany it. Disease prevalence did not track with adiposity. Attia says the finding makes the same link plausible for cancer, while the two diseases remain different.

Mukherjee says his group's work is now a full clinical trial and has focused on treatment. He treats the next claim as an extrapolation: chronic insulinemic tone also sustains cancerous cells that have mutations and keeps them growing, in the same way inflammation does. He would be glad if someone ran an experiment on the idea, and he says the experiment is doable.