The intake and metabolism of carbohydrates for the generation of energy and biomass is evolutionarily conserved, down to the most primitive of cells. Although a basal rate of glucose metabolism occurs in all cells, the processing rates of glucose can become dramatically enhanced when cells acquire malignant properties, or remain undifferentiated. This article investigates the consequences of how increased glucose metabolism affects cellular physiology by altering the physicochemical properties of the whole metabolic network. As a result, enhanced lactate production in the presence of oxygen (the Warburg effect) is required, and metabolism is consequently reconfigured, through multiple mechanisms, to confer numerous physiological and possibly regulatory properties to cells.