Nov. 2023 article from The Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal is catching on to the problems with peer review. Retractions continue to rise, with several high-profile pieces having been pulled in the last year.
“More papers than ever are being published, overloading journal editors and reviewers. The most significant papers are often the most novel—and therefore more difficult to review, because the material covers new and untested ground. And researchers under pressure to advance their careers are eager to supply the kind of notable findings that attract the attention of journals, tempting some researchers to cut corners or fabricate results.”
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Metabolic health, medical education, and the case for bringing clinicians and coaches together
At the 2026 Unbreakable Health Retreat in Miami, Emily Kaplan hosted a panel with Bob Kaplan, Professor Thomas Seyfried, and Dr. Derek Lee on what it means to treat cancer as a metabolic disease. They discussed the glucose-ketone index (GKI), nutritional ketosis, and strategies aimed at restricting the fuels cancer cells depend on while considering how metabolic therapy can fit alongside standard cancer treatment.
The conversation also addressed the practical realities patients face when trying to pursue a metabolic approach within the conventional oncology system, including questions about nutrition, repurposed drugs, inherited cancer risk, and how to evaluate different treatment options. Seyfried and Lee connected these clinical questions back to mitochondrial dysfunction, fermentation, and the metabolic vulnerabilities that may offer additional targets for cancer treatment.
An abbreviated version of this discussion is available here, for free.
At the 2026 Unbreakable Health Retreat in Miami, Professor Thomas Seyfried presented the case that cancer is fundamentally a mitochondrial metabolic disease rather than primarily a genetic one. He contrasts the dominant somatic mutation theory with a metabolic model in which impaired mitochondrial respiration drives a shift toward fermentation, dysregulated cell growth, and the mutations commonly associated with cancer.
Citing the work of Otto Warburg and research from his lab at Boston College, Seyfried explains how cancer cells rely heavily on fermentable fuels—particularly glucose and glutamine—and why mitochondrial dysfunction sits upstream of many of the genetic abnormalities seen in tumors. He also discusses reactive oxygen species, altered cellular signaling, and the role of mitochondria in regulating cell growth and behavior.
The presentation then turns to the therapeutic implications of this model. Seyfried explains strategies aimed at placing tumor cells under metabolic stress by restricting the fuels they depend on, including ketogenic metabolic therapy and approaches targeting glucose and glutamine. For Seyfried, the therapeutic target follows directly from the biology: restrict the fuels cancer cells depend on, exploit their metabolic weaknesses, and treat mitochondrial dysfunction as the central feature of the disease.
An abbreviated version of this discussion is available here, for free.
MetFix and BSI Members can view the full 54-minute video.
This is a tricky problem. A stronger, more comprehensive peer review process might stop more bad research from getting through, but it could also stifle good research. This is especially true if peer reviewers perform their own data analyses. An article here at BSI from two weeks ago, The Field of Statistics is Doomed, discussed a study by Breznau where 174 research teams analyzed the same data sets. Their results were all over the map. Strong results were found in both directions. The data sets related to birds and grass, so it’s unlikely the researchers were biased to favor one result or another.
Now imagine a peer reviewer comes across a paper against climate change, masking for Covid, or the consensus in their field. The reviewer would be more likely to perform an extra thorough analysis of the data. This is confirmation bias and we’re all susceptible to it. Some reviewers wouldn’t even be consciously aware that they are scrutinizing some papers more than others. My worry is that this would be another tool to censor controversial science.
If peer review is limited to verifying the integrity of data, as the article suggests, then that is probably a step in the right direction.