This serves to sequester toxins away from normal tissue, to reduce the exposure of normal tissue to toxins.
(3) A “toxin” is defined as something that would generate large amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in normal cells. Hence cancer cells are created to store and process things that generate ROS.
A brief history of this idea
The core insight at the heart of the Toxin Sequestration Theory — that tumors serve as purposeful, protective compartments rather than random genetic disasters — has deep roots that stretch back centuries.
Traditional Chinese Medicine has long viewed tumors through a lens remarkably consistent with TST. For over two thousand years, classical texts described cancer masses as accumulations of phlegm, blood stasis, and pathogenic toxins that the body walls off when its vital energy (Qi) is too weak to
disperse them. In this ancient framework, the tumor is not a random betrayal but a localized containment strategy — the body’s attempt to isolate harmful substances and prevent them from spreading systemically. Modern TCM oncologists call this the “cancerous toxin” (ai du) theory, which closely parallels the sequestration concept at the heart of TST
The concept of tumors as protective sequestration compartments has ancient roots in Traditional Chinese Medicine and has been independently rediscovered by several modern thinkers, culminating in the comprehensive TST.
In more recent decades, several independent Western thinkers have articulated similar intuitions. Stephanie Seneff has developed one of the most detailed modern versions in the context of deuterium overload. She and her collaborators argue that cancer cells actively sequester deuterium-heavy molecules and release deuterium-depleted nutrients into the surrounding environment, functioning as a protective adaptation rather than a broken state. Dr. Tom Cowan has described tumors more generally as the body’s way of “bagging up the garbage” — isolating damaged cells, debris, and toxins in one contained place so they do not poison the rest of the organism. Even earlier, Aajonus Vonderplanitz (in his teachings on the Primal Diet in the 1990s and 2000s) portrayed cancer as the body’s attempt to solidify and isolate degenerative tissue and accumulated toxins when normal detoxification pathways are overwhelmed.
My contribution with TST is to take these important but scattered intuitions and forge them into a cohesive, systematic, and mechanistically detailed framework. By mapping specific modern toxins (glucose, fructose, ammonia, PFAS, toxic metals, microplastics, and more) to specific organs and sequestration mechanisms, I have given the idea predictive power and practical clarity. On a personal note, Dr. Seneff’s deuterium work was the key inspiration for my theory, so I am deeply grateful for her pioneering research.
The body, it seems, has been trying to tell us the same story for centuries through the observations of ancient physicians and modern pioneers. What TST does is finally connect the dots into one elegant theory: cancer is not the body making a mistake — it is the body doing what a brilliantly designed system does when pushed beyond its normal limits.
Why ROS play a central role in TST
Let’s talk, for a moment, why ROS play such a central role in my theory of cancer. (Note that ROS appear in the third principle of TST, given above.)
Many readers will have heard the term “oxidative stress” before. Well, ROS are the underlying molecular mechanism of oxidative stress. Strikingly, Dr Thomas Levy has argued that oxidative stress is the only cause of disease, which would imply that the entire chronic disease epidemic is driven by ROS. This is my view as well.
In this book, Thomas Levy argues that oxidative stress is the only cause of disease. ROS are the molecular mechanism of oxidative stress, implying that ROS are the only cause of disease.
In TST, cancer is not a disease, rather it is the body’s defense against chronic disease. If cancer’s job is to protect the body from chronic disease, then logically speaking that means that cancer’s primary goal is to reduce the body’s ROS levels. This is why ROS play such a central role in cancer: the job of the tumor is to sequester toxins that would otherwise create massive amounts of ROS in the body.