In this interview, Lewis Cantley, Director of the Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medical College and discoverer of the phosphoinositide-3-kinase enzyme, discusses the links between diabetes and cancer's metabolic disturbances, the differences between fructose and glucose metabolization, and the brain’s response to sweeteners. Cantley concludes: “The consequence of people eating lots of sweeteners, no matter what they are — whether they’re natural or unnatural — is that it increases the addiction for the sweetness. As a consequence, at the end of the day, your brain says, 'OK, at some point I need some glucose here'. And then you eat an entire cake, because nobody can hold out in the end. The only way really to prevent this problem — to break the addiction — is to go completely cold turkey and go off all sweeteners — artificial as well as fructose. Eventually the brain resets itself and you don’t crave it as much.”