Life plays within a carbon to nitrogen ratio. Healthy soil, like compost, is 30 to 1, 30 parts carbon to one part nitrogen. Bacteria are 5 to 1. They are the life with the lowest C:N ratio. Protozoa, the microbe that gobbles up bacteria, is again 30:1. That means for every six bacteria eaten the protozoa can poop 5 units of nitrogen. Photosynthesis uses sunlight energy to turn carbon dioxide into sugars. Plants build themselves out of sugars. The healthier the plant the higher the percent of total sugar produced that goes into the soil to feed microbes. This number is actually 2.3 times higher than the total amount of carbon the plant uses to build itself! Root sugars combine with soil nitrogen to create the conditions for microbial soil life. The microbes then go out and find the plant other minerals to keep the whole show going.
Chemical nitrogen has no carbon. So something like calcium nitrate is 15% nitrogen by weight. That is a 0:15 ratio. That means every free bit of nitrogen that falls off the fertilizer has to find at least 5 times as much carbon. Where does that carbon come from? It comes from the soil. The soil eats itself out of house and housemates, carbon and microbes, to balance that biologically unheard high nitrogen. Corn growers use 200 units of nitrogen per acre. That is 1,300 pounds of calcium nitrate per acre. There are 200 pounds of nitrogen that needs to find 5 times as much carbon, 1,000 pounds per acre. Since these operations build little carbon and don’t have healthy plants the carbon is coming from the soil. The less carbon the less resilient a soil is, the sicker it is likely to become.
What, might, happen with cancer? Cancer, like bacteria, has a low C:N ratio. The inside of a body has limited outside access. So within it there must be balance. Too much of something can’t always be dumped out the next available vent. Simple sugars are the most reactive form of carbon. They incite a microbial riot. Anyone fermenting knows this. Sugar and warm temperatures can make brewing alcohol go wild. On the other hand, too much sugar preserves. There is a point at which the sugar concentration almost entirely shuts down biology. This is how fish sauce is made. Layer sugar and fish and in a few months you have sweet smelling sauce that never went bubbling mad.
The standard American diet is generous in sugar and things that turn quickly to sugar in the gut. This is refined sugar, grains, breads, pastas, potatoes and alcohol. Obese people are lucky because they can store some of the extra sugar, carbon, glucose, as palmitic acid, saturated fat. However, skinny sugar eating people are more at a risk of cancer. Sugar flows through them too quickly to be processed properly. It ends up as reactive sugar in a mostly water filled 98 degree vessel, the human body. Ask any fermenter what is going to happen to that sugar! It is either going to preserve the body from the inside out, which never happens because, to my knowledge, it is physically impossible to eat enough sugar to do that or it is going to grow something. It is going to grow something with a high nitrogen content to get back to a recognizable biological ratio (5:1 to 30:1). It can’t ferment the sugar because the body can handle free oxygen in that environment. It is too reactive and would cause untold damage. That is why we have antioxidants! There is no free oxygen allowed in places that aren’t designed to react with it. So the body can’t ferment the free sugar, it can’t produce alcohol because any fermenting reaction is oxygen producing, so what does it do?! It buys time with cancer! Cancer is a way of oxygen free fermenting! It is a beautiful design to control reactive carbon without producing oxygen!! It is just a glob of protein, carbon and nitrogen!
The only problem is cancer doesn’t buy much time if the ship is constantly taking on sugar. Cancer is a mop. And since there is limited space in the body any new object affects the performance of all the other parts. It is like putting a steak inside a lawn mower. The steak will likely affect the performance of the lawn mower unless the lawn mower can digest it and get back to normal. Maybe in a few years the lawn mower will have had generations of flies and maggots come clear away the steak. As long as we aren’t feeding more steak into the lawn mower then the mower will run again! How long does the body take to digest cancer? Ask a cancer recoverer who didn’t use invasive western medicine how long. Probably pretty long because what process can the body use to digest it without producing oxygen? It is already in the system. That is the process of cancer digestion is in us. We are just learning how to express it. It requires us to live in such balance, such inner and out beauty that the subtle microbial crew can be born to clean-up the steak in the mower. We can’t just call flies in! And this leads to the second and last reason cancer is beautiful. It presents us with the hero’s journey to live more beautifully! It is like the scene from the Never Ending Story where the boy has to pass through the giant statues that could kill him. Cancer recovery takes that kind of oneness and spirit along with the best performing physiology!
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