#2669: Travis Christofferson

The internet is saturated with delusional kooks, quacks and conspiracy theorists, and Travis Christofferson and his website Single Cause, Single Cure should not be particularly notable. But yes, Christofferson is a quack, and as his website’s name makes clear, he claims that there is a single cause of cancer. Cancer, as Christofferson imagines it, is a metabolic disorder caused by your bad diet, and he is there to sell you the cure. Christofferson has, of course, no background in medicine; he has a “Pre-Medical undergraduate degree and a Master’s degree in Materials Engineering and Science” (a “Pre-Medical undergraduate degree” means “no degree, but did at some point state an intention to pursue medical studies”), and he fancies himself a “science journalist” His scam is predicated on a common cancer quack trope, appeal to the Warburg effect and his regimen to treat cancer involves, apparently, targeting the Warburg effect with a ketogenic diet. If that doesn’t tell you that you’re dealing with fraudulent nonsense, you probably shouldn’t seek medical advice on the Internet.

 

Christofferson is also founder of something called the Foundation for Metabolic Cancer Therapies, and his ideas are laid out in the book Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine’s Most Entrenched Paradigms. As suggested by the title, his ideas are in direct conflict with current science and evidence – and as so many other quacks, Christofferson tries to pitch that as a good thing. The book, of course, has nothing to do with truth.

 

Christofferson’s nonsense would probably have been quickly lost to internet noise were it not for the fact that it was endorsed by supreme quack Joseph Mercola, who promoted Christofferson with “Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were a simple dietary tweak that could not only prevent but treat the vast majority of these cancers?” Yes, Joe, it would.

 

Diagnosis: Silly git, and though his influence is probably limited, he is indeed a part of the festering malignant tumor that is cancer quackery on the internet.

 

Hat-tip: Pharyngula