How does cancer act like an infection? How is the immune system constantly fighting cancer?
There are cases where a person’s melanoma is removed and it is thought to be gone, says “The Cancer Code’s” author, Dr. Jason Fung.
Twenty years later, that person dies in a car accident and their lung is transplanted to someone else; and later that person develops rampant melanoma, he says, “because the cancer was still there, it was just being kept in check so efficiently by the immune system.”
Hundreds or even thousands of cells are constantly mutating toward cancer, says Dr. Fung.
Dr. Fung is a nephrologist—a kidney health specialist—and an expert in intermittent fasting and low-carb dietary means to counter disease, including obesity and type 2 diabetes.
He joins Vital Signs with Brendon Fallon to reveal how our bodies naturally fight cancer and how this aligns with a new concept of cancer as an infectious disease, as seen with lung cancer, for example.
“That lung cell … has transformed into a sort of survivalist lung cell, it’s trying to survive at all costs against this chronic smoking damage,” says Dr. Fung.
“Now, it actually behaves exactly like a single-celled organism, or, for example, an infection.”
We probe what drives cells to become cancerous and why cancer often persists despite immune system surveillance, for “Cancer Code PART 1” on Vital Signs.
Watch “Cancer Code PART 2” here soon (bit.ly/VitalSignsB) on the cancer-obesity link and on improving the “soil” that allows cancer to grow.