What We Got Wrong About Cancer & Parasites
Cancer is a fixable power plant failure. Warburg saw it in 1924. Seyfried finished the math. Parasites proved it. The rest is economics.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical professional. The information below consists of my opinions and observations, inspired by a personal health crisis that taught me to address energy loss with natural methods.
The Wakeup Call
Everyone’s got their own unique wakeup call from modern belief systems — or none at all, in which case godspeed and good luck. When it comes to the modern medical system, the standard protocol is usually a decade of worsening results treating chronic disease with escalating pharmaceutical dependency, followed by the moment you finally step onto the rickety bridge where you start thinking for yourself in defiance of everything the experts keep insisting. Your approach belongs to the conspiracy zone, sir. You will kill yourself rapidly with the witch doctors. Et cetera. Et cetera. It took me a decade and a half of that nonsense before I started thinking for myself.
The event that flipped the switch for me, personally, was my father’s death in 2013. I sat next to his bed while he wasted away from cancer, a locked-down morphine regulator taped into his arm, fading and thinning out in real time until there was no more of him. Puff. When he took his last breath there was just an empty shell left inside a second. That experience started me seeing death as a transition rather than a passing — a belief that has only grown stronger in the decade since.
The event was also the beginning of my skepticism about experts. The doctors said there was no cure for his condition, that he was too far down the path, and that the right and humane thing to do was to sedate him out of existence on a morphine drip. Well — if you say so, after a decade of top-shelf academic rearing. What was I supposed to say? So I said nothing, and watched.
My own deteriorating health — a slow immune depletion, a steady drain — was the second gift, if I can use that word. No modern approach gave me answers. Neither did most alternative approaches. Even the latter were mostly selling symptomatic fixes, revenue-generating packaged goods that were supposedly the natural answer to pharma but were mostly just rebranded modern medicine wearing a nicer shirt. I figured it out the hard way, as you always do.
Long story short, I started doing my own research and experimenting on myself — what worked, what didn’t, what was snake oil and what was signal. The surprising answer: every single functional approach didn’t cost a penny. It was the choices we made in life, internal and external, that made all the difference. Simple enough that a seven-year-old could understand it intuitively. This has a direct bearing on the mitochondrial logic behind cancer – the suppressed logic.
The suppression that I discovered was so insane that I had to write about it just to clear it out of my system. In 2016, I summarized what I’d found about cancer in one article I didn’t expect anyone to read. To my surprise, a doctor with expertise in mitochondrial energy production — a man whose entire job was dealing with cancer — told me it was one of the best summaries he’d ever read on the subject. The real shock: he wasn’t just being nice. It was possible for a nobody who put his mind to exploring what lies beneath the surface of modern medical paradigms to suddenly have a valid voice. No PhD. Not even a master’s. All you had to do was put your mind to it and ask questions. Exhale doubt. Inhale info.
So why were there so few people doing that?
Since then, at least two dozen of my friends and family have perished from cancer. After the COVID saga, I’ve been hearing of one or two new diagnoses a month among people I actually know, many of them reaching for chemo as the only option on the menu. Which means all the mitochondrial experts out there are still mostly screaming into the void.
The basic mitochondrial approach states that cancer was actually solved in 1924 with a metabolic equation by a German biochemist named Otto Warburg. And only because of a rumor connecting cancer to parasites, a theory that turned out to be a total misunderstanding, has Warburg’s original theory landed back on the table with almost undeniable certainty.
Today, we’re looking at a huge game-changer for anyone who has cancer, or is afraid of getting it — which is basically everyone reading this so far.
How The Rumor Got Started
The “parasites cause cancer” rumor has two origins that got remixed into one. Hulda Clark, a Canadian naturopath, claimed in 1990 that a single intestinal fluke caused every cancer. She sold a nine-volt gadget called the Zapper to rid humankind of the plague. Then in 2016, an Oklahoma businessman named Joe Tippens, given three months to live with stage IV lung cancer, started taking fenbendazole — a dog dewormer — on a vet’s tip, while also quietly enrolled in an immunotherapy trial. Joe went into full remission. His blog went viral in 2019, caused a national fenbendazole shortage in South Korea, and built a Facebook subculture of 100,000 cancer patients self-experimenting in the shadows. The fuse finally lit on January 9, 2025, when Mel Gibson went on Joe Rogan and said three of his friends had cured stage IV cancer with ivermectin and fenbendazole. Eleven million views. By October, Florida was redirecting $60 million of cancer research money based partly on the podcast. The two claims collapsed into one viral narrative — if the dewormer works, cancer must be worms — because that’s how the internet compresses. Clark was wrong. Tippens was onto something.
Antiparasitics hit fermentative metabolism, and fermentative metabolism is exactly what cancer runs on. People started self-experimenting and the results were convincing enough for oncologists to start getting annoying questions from patients who’d been reading things they weren’t supposed to be reading.
The loud rumor was partially right for the wrong reasons. The quiet real story has been sitting in the literature since 1924 waiting for somebody to notice.
The bottom line: parasites don’t cause cancer — they share a metabolism with it. Both run on fermentation, breaking down glucose without oxygen, generating ATP through something called substrate-level phosphorylation, which is a fancy Latin name for the oldest and crudest energy trick on the evolutionary books.
Warburg, Seyfried, and the Century-Long Cover-Up
In 1924, a German biochemist named Otto Warburg looked through a microscope at a slide of cancer cells and saw something that should have ended the entire conversation right there, that afternoon, before lunch. The cells were fermenting sugar like drunk yeast in a basement barrel at a rural German wedding — even with oxygen sitting right there, abundant, unused, hanging around the cell like a designated driver nobody wanted to call. Normal cells don’t do that. Normal cells are oxygen snobs. They burn clean, extract thirty-six units of energy per unit of fuel, and run their chemistry like a Swiss watchmaker on his best day. Cancer cells run like a broken lawnmower in a garage full of gasoline fumes and cigarette butts.
Warburg called it what it was. A power plant failure. A metabolic disease. And then the mainstream, in its infinite and generously-funded wisdom, looked at the data, nodded politely, gave him a Nobel Prize for something else entirely so they wouldn’t have to grapple with what he’d actually found, and then spent the next hundred years building a trillion-dollar industry on a different theory that is, as far as anyone honest can tell, wrong. Flat wrong. Wrong in the way that gets people killed by the millions.
That industry is now worth north of a trillion a year, which is probably why ships this size don’t turn. They just keep steaming until they hit something.
Cancer kills around ten million people a year worldwide — call it a Hiroshima every five days. In the United States alone, north of six hundred thousand a year, which by rough math is a 9/11 every two days. And the curve keeps climbing. In the rich countries, the ones with the best hospitals and the worst food, cancer has already passed heart disease as the top killer. The more industrial the food supply, the more “modern” the environment, the higher the number goes. That is the chemical fingerprint of the civilization we built and refused to examine.
Then came Thomas Seyfried. Professor of biology at Boston College, trained at Yale, forty years deep in cancer metabolism research and occupying exactly the right amount of academic real estate to not be dismissed out of hand by the gatekeepers. His 2012 book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, became the hallmark of actual clarity in a world that prefers fog.
The oncology establishment received it the way establishments always receive anything that threatens the revenue model — with polite silence, a few grudging reviews in obscure journals read by twelve people and a bored librarian, and no meaningful change in protocol whatsoever.
Seyfried’s most devastating move wasn’t the book. It was an experiment. Take the nucleus from a cancer cell — all the mutated DNA, the great villain of the official story — and transplant it into healthy cytoplasm. What happens? Nothing. The cell behaves normally. Doing cell things, minding its own perfectly ordinary business.
Now run it the other way. Take a pristine, spotless, virgin healthy nucleus, every chromosome in factory condition, and drop it into cytoplasm with damaged mitochondria. Cancerous cytoplasm. What happens? The cell forms tumors. A perfectly normal genome becomes a cancer cell because the engine around it is broken.
The mutations are what happen to DNA when the power goes out and the cell starts running on emergency fuel and everything downstream gets corrupted in the process — like the data on a hard drive after six brownouts in a row.
This should have ended the debate in about 1987. It didn’t, because the debate stopped being scientific somewhere around the time the patent incentives clarified and the stock options vested. The pharmaceutical industry had spent hundreds of billions chasing genetic mutations — personalized medicine, immunotherapy, gene-targeted drugs with brand names that sound like lost Scrabble hands and cost more per vial than a used Honda. Except the vials don’t work.
The oncology industry built a cathedral on the wrong foundation. Attacking the mutations is like mopping the floor while the pipe is still spraying. And it is not, under any circumstances, going to admit that.
Then the antiparasitics opened the floodgates.
When Seyfried tested antiparasitics on tumor cells — not parasites, actual human cancer cells — same result. The drugs can’t tell the difference because metabolically there isn’t much of one. You’re not killing a worm. You’re killing a metabolic signature.
Here is where most of the wellness industry loses the plot and starts selling you sixty-dollar bottles of black walnut tincture.
Some parasites are genuinely bad news. Liver flukes — Clonorchis, Opisthorchis — are classified by the WHO as Group 1 carcinogens, the same tier as tobacco and asbestos, which is to say: the bad list. They cause bile duct cancer in endemic regions of Southeast Asia through decades of chronic inflammation hammering the same patch of tissue like a blacksmith on a three-shift bender. Schistosoma haematobium, a blood fluke in parts of Africa and the Middle East, does the same thing to the bladder. This is where the “parasites cause cancer” rumor has legitimate scientific traction — but the mechanism is chronic inflammation driving metabolic collapse in a specific tissue, which is Warburg’s argument all over again, just delivered by a worm with excellent job security.
Protozoa are another matter. Giardia, Cryptosporidium, Entamoeba histolytica, Blastocystis, Toxoplasma — the single-celled opportunists, the ones who show up when the neighborhood goes downhill and never leave. They hit the gut lining or the nervous system directly, drive persistent inflammation, and in a weakened host they stop being tourists and start being residents. Toxoplasma lives in roughly a third of the human population, quietly editing behavior in ways nobody asked for and most people will never know about — slower reaction times, altered risk tolerance, a statistical nudge toward getting yourself killed in stupid ways. Strongyloides can auto-infect and kill an immunocompromised person outright before anyone figures out what’s happening. These are the ones worth taking seriously.
The part the parasite-cleanse industrial complex does not want you to hear is that parasites are essential. Your gut evolved with billions of organisms, helminths included, training the immune system, dialing down inflammation, keeping tolerance in working order. Kids raised around parasites have dramatically lower rates of autoimmune disease. The immune system doesn’t just tolerate certain worms — it gets weaker when they’re gone.
The terrain argument flips the script. The same parasite that’s benign in a body with clean mitochondria, adequate stomach acid, and a calibrated immune system can be catastrophic in a body running on seed oil, chronic cortisol, and four hours of broken sleep on a mattress that’s leaching flame retardants into the lymphatic system. The organism isn’t the full story. The host is. Just like the fish that dies in an aquarium isn’t usually killed because something is wrong with it — it’s because the water has gone sideways. Indigenous populations carry parasite loads that would flatten a modern office worker, and they live to a hundred and die peacefully under the coconut tree. A modern office worker picks up Giardia from a poorly filtered camping trip to Colorado and has gut problems for five years. Same organism. Different terrain.
Aggressive parasite cleanses strip the ecosystem, crash microbial diversity, and can trigger the exact inflammatory chaos they were supposed to fix. You went to war against the wrong thing and burned down your own village and saluted the smoke on the way out.
The useful question isn’t do I have parasites. Most people have some, or they would be in serious trouble. The useful question is: is my terrain strong enough to keep them in their lane? A body that can host life without being destroyed by it. The goal is equilibrium, not sterility.
You Are a Power Plant
You’ve been lied to about this since middle-school biology class. You are not a chemistry set. You are not a bag of water with reactions in it. You are not a biological machine in the reductive Newtonian sense the textbooks keep pushing. You are an electrical system. Your cells run on voltage, and if you don’t understand that, you will be very easy to sell very bad advice.
Inside every one of your mitochondria — and you have maybe a hundred thousand trillion in your body total — is a double membrane. The inner one is folded into dense ridges called cristae, packed with protein complexes arranged like relay stations on a high-voltage transmission line strung across the smallest country in the world. Electrons enter the chain stripped off food molecules, and get passed hand to hand down a series of protein pumps like a bucket brigade at a very sophisticated house fire. At each transfer, protons get ejected across the membrane into the narrow space between the two walls. They pile up there. Building pressure. Building concentration. Building charge. A literal voltage differential — around 180 millivolts across a membrane eight nanometers thick. Roughly 30 million volts per meter. That is the strongest sustained electric field found anywhere in the known universe. Inside you, every second of every day you have been alive, which is precisely why you are alive.
That pressure — that screaming electrochemical gradient — drives the protons back through a single enzyme called ATP synthase, which spins at nine thousand RPM as they pass through it, mechanically assembling ATP like some insane molecular turbine bolting together its own fuel at jet-engine speeds. Thirty-six molecules of ATP per glucose molecule burned clean.
You, me, us — we are a power plant, and the output of that plant (the voltage, the spin rate, the proton pressure) is what we call life force.
Damage the membrane, the gradient collapses. Block the protein complexes, the electrons stop moving. Deplete the repair systems, the damage compounds faster than it clears. Do all three at once, for years, in a culture specifically engineered to do exactly that — and at some point the cell hits a threshold. It cannot run on thirty-six ATP anymore. It drops to the backup, which is fermentation, producing at best two ATP. Turning sugar into lactate sans oxygen, with a process older than the idea of oxygen itself.
In that state the cell stops listening. It cannot hear the death signals. It goes beep beep beep warning warning warning. Divide. Don’t die. Divide. Don’t die. Welcome to cancer.
Why Chemo Usually Fails — and Sometimes Doesn’t
Chemotherapy sits in this picture like a man who occasionally saves lives by burning down buildings. Sometimes the building needed to go. Usually there was a better option. In highly proliferative, metabolically uniform cancers — certain leukemias, testicular cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma — the selectivity is real enough to produce genuine remissions, at least for a short while. But unless you change the terrain, the problem remains.
Chemo is genotoxic by design. It damages DNA in every dividing cell in the body — gut lining, immune cells, bone marrow, hair follicles, the whole renewable inventory. It depletes glutathione, the primary antioxidant defense protecting mitochondrial membranes, which means it strips your cells of the shields they need right before it starts firing. It generates massive oxidative stress — the exact terrain Warburg identified as the ground condition for cancer in the first place. You are, in other words, treating mitochondrial damage with a therapy that causes mitochondrial damage. You are fighting fire with a flamethrower and calling it medicine. Patients who survive aggressive chemo emerge immunosuppressed, metabolically wrecked, gut ecosystem in ruins, hair gone, taste gone, often fertility gone, staring down a temporarily suspended survival statistic.
Then there is the selection problem. Chemo kills the weak tumor cells and leaves the hard ones. The cells that survive a cytotoxic assault are the most resistant, the most metabolically plastic, the most adapted to hostile conditions — because that is what evolutionary pressure does, even inside a tumor, even on a timescale of weeks inside a single human body. You kill the easy cells and select for the monsters. Then you tell the patient they’re in remission and send them home with a prescription and a pat on the back and a follow-up scan in six months. This is why recurrence after chemo is often more lethal than the original diagnosis. The data is there in the journals.
Seyfried’s argument isn’t that chemo is always criminal. His argument is narrower and more surgical than that. His argument is that chemo as a first-line monotherapy, without addressing the metabolic terrain that generated the cancer in the first place, is treating the symptom while feeding the disease. His press-pulse protocol starves the tumor metabolically first — fasting, ketogenic diet, antiparasitics, 2-DG, the whole arsenal of cheap unglamorous interventions — corners it, weakens it, strips it of substrate like a siege. Only then does he apply a reduced cytotoxic pulse to a cell population that is already on its knees and begging. Less collateral damage. Less selection pressure for resistant cells. Better window for immune recovery. Better outcomes in the preliminary data. Smarter and cheaper than the sledgehammer.
The oncology system does not do this at scale because the infrastructure — the clinical trial apparatus, the insurance reimbursement codes, the patent incentives, the entire rickety economic architecture of modern cancer treatment — is built around the cytotoxic model and has no mechanism for profiting from telling people to stop eating sugar and go outside and get some sunlight on their bare skin. Metabolic interventions are cheap. Unpatentable. They require patient agency and persistence and discomfort.
They require a sovereign mindset that believes it’s responsible for its own health.
Final Word: The Load Calculation
When you strip away the euphemism and the brochures and the charity walks and the pink ribbons and the solemn Instagram posts and the hashtag fundraisers and the celebrity PSAs all the way down to the bone, cancer is actually pretty simple.
Every single living person has cancer. A healthy adult generates somewhere between a few hundred and several thousand cancerous or pre-cancerous cells every single day, as a routine byproduct of the roughly 330 billion cells your body replaces every twenty-four hours. DNA replication is astonishingly accurate, but across that volume of divisions, mutations slip through. Most get caught by internal repair machinery. The ones that escape get caught by p53 and the tumor suppressor proteins. The ones that escape that get caught by the immune system — natural killer cells and cytotoxic T-cells patrolling the tissue, eliminating abnormal cells before they can establish.
What distinguishes a healthy person from a patient isn’t the absence of cancerous cells — it’s the functioning of the surveillance and cleanup machinery that catches them before they take root. A clinical tumor isn’t the moment cancer starts. It’s the moment cancer stops being caught. Which is why the interventions that matter — sleep, fasting, sunlight, stress resolution, mitochondrial support — aren’t fringe wellness advice. They’re direct inputs into the systems that have been quietly saving your life every day since you were born.
There is nothing malevolent about cancer. No enemy or DNA code hiding in your body waiting to betray you. No moral failure on your part, except the one every citizen of this civilization shares — believing the people who told us for half a century that industrial food was food, that sunlight was bad, that suppressing your emotions was maturity, that exhaustion was a badge of honor, that meat and fat were bad, that you had to eat three times a day, and that there is a special class of men who knew this better than your gut.
The good news: you know better. And you can make the right choices every day to make sure your cancer cells get caught every day. By controlling the load factor. By making the simple choices.
What adds to the load:
Refined sugar and fructose — direct substrate for fermentation, spikes insulin and IGF-1, hammers mTOR into proliferation mode, chronically suppresses mitochondrial efficiency in surrounding tissue; every gram is fuel delivered straight to the thing you’re trying to starve
Seed oils (linoleic acid) — oxidize inside the inner mitochondrial membrane, physically displace cardiolipin, collapse the proton gradient, destabilize the electron transfer architecture at the structural level; in every cell in your body right now if you’ve been eating the standard diet and trusting the commercial
Heavy metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, aluminum) — bind to sulfur groups inside the electron transport complexes and block electron flow; accumulate silently for decades; almost never tested for until the damage is done and the scan lights up
Glyphosate and pesticides — disrupt manganese-dependent mitochondrial enzymes, impair synthesis of critical cofactors, shred the gut microbiome that produces mitochondrial precursors; sprayed on everything; in almost everyone’s urine including the kids
EMF radiation — continuous oxidative load on mitochondrial DNA from devices held against your body sixteen hours a day; mtDNA has minimal repair machinery and sits adjacent to the electron transport chain producing the very damage eating it
Plastics and endocrine disruptors — disrupt mitochondrial hormone signaling, impair cardiolipin synthesis, interfere with fatty acid oxidation; in the water, the food packaging, the receipts, the air
Chronic sleep deprivation — eliminates the nightly autophagy window where damaged mitochondrial components get cleared; without clearance, dysfunction compounds without interruption
Chronic stress and unresolved trauma — sustains cortisol at levels that suppress PGC-1α and halt mitochondrial biogenesis; a nervous system on permanent emergency protocol is a body that has stopped rebuilding itself; biochemistry, not psychology
Repeated inflammatory insults — each episode generates oxidative stress that lands disproportionately on mitochondrial membranes; cumulative, largely irreversible without active intervention
Pathogenic parasite burden in a compromised host — liver flukes, schistosomes, protozoan opportunists running hot in a terrain that can’t control them; not the cause, but a driver of chronic inflammation that feeds the same fire
Immunosuppression from any source — removes the surveillance layer that catches fermentative cells before they establish; once they establish, it’s a different conversation
Slaving without purpose — the job that feels nonsensical, the social circle that feels inane, the hood that feels trite — and you know what I’m talking about.
What reduces the load:
Fasting — drops glucose and glutamine simultaneously, starving fermentative cells of both substrates while triggering autophagy to clear damaged mitochondria and recycle the parts; healthy cells pivot to ketones and thrive; tumor cells, locked in fermentation, can’t follow; targeted starvation, and it costs nothing
Ketogenic diet sustained — maintains the low-glucose, low-insulin environment without the acute stress of a full fast; forces metabolic flexibility in healthy tissue while keeping tumor substrate chronically depleted
Antiparasitics (fenbendazole, mebendazole) — direct pharmacological hit to substrate-level phosphorylation and tubulin dynamics; normal cells have alternatives; fermenting tumor cells don’t; the drug finds the vulnerability and exploits it
Sunlight — red and near-infrared wavelengths — directly photoactivate cytochrome c oxidase, the terminal enzyme in the electron transport chain; photobiomodulation at the mitochondrial level, measurable in ATP output, not a wellness metaphor
Sleep — the non-negotiable window for autophagy, membrane repair, mitochondrial regeneration; no supplement replaces it; every chronic night of deprivation is damage compounding without a receipt
Cold exposure — activates PGC-1α and drives mitochondrial biogenesis; the same pathway cortisol suppresses; rebuilds the infrastructure from the gene level up; uncomfortable, free, and extraordinarily effective
Sauna and heat therapy — hormetic stress that healthy cells adapt to via heat shock proteins; compromised cells can’t tolerate the additional load; clears heavy metals through sweat as a secondary benefit
Hyperbaric oxygen — floods tissue with oxygen that fermentative cells can’t use; healthy cells with functional OXPHOS thrive; shifts competitive advantage in the tissue microenvironment toward the functional cells
Resolving emotional load and trauma — drops baseline cortisol, re-enables PGC-1α, allows mitochondrial biogenesis to resume; a nervous system returning to baseline is the physiological precondition for physical repair; treat it accordingly, not as optional
Replacing seed oils with saturated and monounsaturated fats — restores membrane structural integrity, allows cardiolipin to anchor complexes correctly, stabilizes the proton gradient; the membrane you build from butter and olive oil is not the membrane you build from canola
Removing heavy metal burden — clears the sulfur-binding blockages in electron transport complexes; slow, requires sustained effort, measurable in urine and hair metal panels; chelation, sauna, cilantro and chlorella protocols all have evidence behind them
Pursuing truth and purpose — feeds electrons into the mitochondrial chain faster than any other mechanism. No bullshit.
Reduce the load one by one — your way. It will not just prevent cancer. It will also increase life juice. Which, at the end of the day, is the real cure for cancer.
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A brilliant article, thank you Jan.
Thank you very much