Barbell Shrugged - Episode 5 - Beating Cancer with Diet not Chemo w/Chris Wark

Episode Date: April 4, 2012

The Barbell Shrugged crew is joined by stage 3 colon cancer survivor Chris Wark to discuss how he beat cancer without chemotherapy.

Hey guys, this is CTP and you're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version of this podcast, check out Fitter.TV. Actually, it's interesting. I went and looked at a house to buy this week because now I'm uber rich. No. But I decided to go look at a house and stop paying rent and actually do something with my money. So I started looking at a house.

By the way, it's bullshit. You're not doing... You just give your money... It's like you're the landlord, You give it to fucking SunTrust. It's the stupidest fucking... I pay my mortgage... Well... Out of X,

10% or 5%... The key is being aggressive at paying it off that way with no penalty involved. But then, you know, you got paid for fucking... My mic just went limp. Yes, it did.

But then you got paid for daycare and health insurance and all that bullshit. There's no aggressive adding to the mortgage like that. Yeah, that did. But then you got to pay for daycare and health insurance and all that bullshit. There's no aggressive adding to the mortgage like that. Yeah, that's why you just got to make more money. I'm so used to those guys just taking care of everything. It went limp, and I was like, oh, my God. Someone come help me.

I need a producer. Yeah, so anyways, I went and looked, and I started looking at what the – I was looking at this one house in particular. My wife is begging me to put an offering on it. And I was looking at just the property taxes for the, for the city and the county. I'd be paying $8,000 a year in taxes. That means that that's like an extra three or $400. No, that's more than $400 a month on just taxes.

On top of, so I'm going to taxes. On top of... At least. Oh, yeah. On top of... So I'm going to be paying X amount of dollars on the rent, and then I'm going to be doubling that with taxes. Yeah. Now, a nice house in the city, your tax bill is like $500 a month, $600, $700 a month. It's like just in taxes.

Yeah, I think part of the problem, too, is that the houses are being appraised by the government, by the government, you know, way up here. And you're only purchasing it for this much. So I can afford a house that's this much. But the government comes in and appraises it at, you know, $100,000 more than what I'm paying for it. So now I'm having to pay, like, big boy taxes for a little boy mortgage. You know what I mean? Oh, man.

But you can get your tax appraisal lowered. You can get your taxes lowered. I've heard that. If you really liked a house and you're getting it way cheaper than the tax appraisal, you can get it down. Okay. We do it. Chris is the expert on the topic. He's got to blow the county for a living, right?

I know real estate. You just got to blow the county commissioner. I've heard that helps. That could help. All right. Let's do it. Let's kick this thing off. Barbell Shrug.

I'm Mike Bledsoe with Chris Moore, Doug Larson. We're here to interview Chris Wark. So welcome to the show. Chris has a very interesting story. He was diagnosed with colon cancer a while back as a young guy. Young fella. And he addressed it in a very interesting way. And so I want to talk about that.

I guess. I guess we can talk about it. I guess it's interesting. I'm sure you talk about it all the time. I do. So I'm sure you've got a whole spiel down already and stuff like that. So, kind of tell us,

like, tell us how you got diagnosed and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I was hoping we were going to talk about NASCAR, actually, but I guess not.

Sorry. All right, well. I don't think our listeners are going to be much interested in that. Oh, come on. I watched a movie about NASCAR.

It's an IMAX movie they put out. I made fun of NASCAR religiously, but you watch this movie and you get a real true appreciation for the sport. For NASCAR. So I had one day where I sat on a Saturday. I'm going to watch this. I got until about lap six or something.

I was peaced out. Tell you what though, I did go to Burger King and I got the Tony Stewart number six combo with double bacon or something. Terrific. Checkered flag. Pastured beef on that burger?

You know, I'm not sure. All right, I guess I'll tell my story. Okay, so when I was 26 years old, I was having abdominal pain, and it started probably around the beginning of the year. And I put it off because I thought maybe it was an ulcer and I thought maybe it would go away on its own. Typical male attitude about pain. And so I ignored it most of the year and it progressively got worse and worse. And then kind of all came to a head right around November of that year. And it was a weird pain because what was

happening is it would come and go so for example I'd get up feeling good at breakfast go to work you know working throughout the morning have lunch mid-afternoon I might get like this twinge of a weird pain kind of like oh what is that you know but then it would be gone work the rest of the day go home eat dinner after dinner i'd kind of get another little weird pain here and there so in your mind this could be gas pain or something yeah it was you know it was like what is that that's you know i didn't feel like anything i felt before you're making me really paranoid okay well now i'm like oh man i know i heard all the time. Every little pain you get. Do you think my bloody stool is a problem? It might be, yes.

I get it every day at noon. So, you know, then I go to bed, and the next morning I wake up feeling good again. So it was like I'd kind of worry about it a little bit, and then I go to bed, wake up the next morning, I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, maybe I'm fine. And then I'd feel a couple pains that day and then go to bed. So it was sort of like Groundhog Day, right? Every day, same thing. But the pain did progressively get worse over the course of that year. And then finally it was, you know, after dinner every night, man,

I'd be balled up on the couch just like, ah, you know, like, man, like something is wrong. So went to the doctor. They did x-rays. Couldn't find anything. Blood work was pretty normal. My red blood cell count was a little bit low, but nothing like off the charts weird. So they sent me to a gastroenterologist.

He did a colonoscopy and an endoscopy, which is, you know, with a colonoscopy, they go up the back and the endoscope, they go down from the top. Hopefully it's not the same scope, but I was actually unconscious. Yeah, I don't know. It reminds I was actually unconscious. Yeah. I don't know. It makes me feel like an idiocracy. Yeah. I don't know. It could have been the same scope, but, um, so they found a tumor golf ball size tumor in my large intestine, like right where it meets the small intestine, right by my appendix. And, uh, they said, look, you got a tumor. So we need to get you in surgery, get the the tumor out and what's your response right then when you hear that news i just watched the movie 50 50 oh yeah great movie there's that scene where they capture his response to the doctor throws out the word

cancer and all of a sudden it fades into distorted video and distress and he sort of zones out and you can see sort of the the thoughts would go through your mind when you hear, you know, dear Mr. Bloodstone, you have cancer XYZ. Holy shit. Yeah, it wasn't. Yeah. Is it too surreal to even register? Like, holy shit, I have cancer?

Well, it is because I'd been unconscious for the procedure, and then I was coming out of it, and I wasn't even fully, like, conscious when they told my wife and I. So you had the colonoscopy. Yeah. And they drugged you. And then when you woke up, that's when they presented you the news. Yeah.

And you're still kind of like. Yeah. I'm like in this little waiting room and they came in and he told my wife that there was a tumor. And, you know, she, I remember she started crying and the nurse was comforting her and I was just kind of like, what's happening? Yeah. I was like, you know, I was just kind of like tumor. This doesn't make sense. You know, I was just out of it, but you know, uh, didn't take long after I sobered up to, for it to really kind of hit me. And it was,

yeah, it's very surreal. And you know, when you get that kind of diagnosis, you're just like, really, I'm the cancer guy now, you know, like know like wow i just couldn't have it i couldn't imagine like this is what my life's going to be like at 26 right so at that point was there any risk of of death or was that what was going through your mind i hear cancer automatically think i'm gonna fucking die yeah yeah um i'm pretty to die. Well, we didn't know enough at that moment. All we know is it's... Actually, I'm sorry. We knew it was a tumor immediately because he told us.

Then he said, you know, we did a biopsy. We're going to send it to the lab to see if it's cancerous. So a few days later, I get the phone call. It's cancer, right? So, I mean, the tumor was freaky enough. And then, of course, then, yeah, it's cancer. That's like another blow. They scheduled me for surgery, you know, basically as quickly as they could.

They kind of just rushed me into the system. We got to get it out. You got this tumor. You got to, you know, got to get it out right away. So they rushed me into surgery. I had surgery on New Year's Eve Eve and they took out a third of my large intestine, which know it was supposed to be laparoscopic which where they put in they make some tiny incisions and put the cameras in and just a little tool and do it and you have like two or three tiny scars but when the surgeon but the camera and

started looking around he was like man this doesn't look good we got to cut him open so they cut me open and found that the tumor had spread to some lymph nodes, right? So they took out the tumor, took out a third of my large intestine, and took out a bunch of lymph nodes. So they put me back up, brought me back in the room, told my family and my wife and everybody, and I was just unconscious and split open and all sewn up. So I don't know.

I don't remember when exactly i found out that it was stage three but that's what it was so if they do three out of three three out of four three out of four okay so if you if they take out part of your intestine are you out of commission for eating for a while for a few days yeah yeah yeah i was i was in the hospital for three or four days and just recovering. I'll tell you, the craziest experience I've ever had was when they brought me in after surgery and they woke me up and I was on the stretcher, gurney, whatever they call it. And they're like, okay, we got to get you into this bed. And I was like, okay.

And I just instinctively just kind of went to move myself and immediately had this like wave of fear come over me because it felt like my guts were just going to explode out. I mean, like, you know, when that, when it's, when your stomach, no, I mean, it's been cut all the way through your muscles, you know, and it was just stitched up and I just, I made the tiniest movement and it was like, you know, this felt like it panic like like I could seriously die you got diarrhea so you shouldn't cough but instead of diarrhea it's your body yeah it can't be good trying to relate to the your bowels yes bowel explosion so anyway that's the

hardest thing I've ever had to do I mean I think was just moving from that from that you know whatever stretcher gurney or whatever to the bed I mean it was I just took everything I had and there were people helping me and stuff and I was just like you know you didn't have a better system for that man hey why don't you move after we cut you open yeah like oh like we can like ratchet you up on a little thing and slide you over they don't monolith for surgery there was no monolift, no. Yeah, it was just like kind of roll and push. For the audience, a monolift is a hydraulic apparatus

used to raise and lower a barbell during competition or training. Everybody knows what a monolift is. According to Webster's Dictionary. Well, I was hoping that'd go. Don't you all know that? I feel like they could have slid something in under you. When I dislocated my hip, I was on my side,

hips out, totally out. And they basically just slid in a stretcher from both sides, connected it under me, picked me up and took me away. Yeah. Yeah. I know.

Right. I don't know why. I don't know why they didn't do that, but you're totally right. Exactly. Exactly. I've seen them do that on TV shows. I've been on fucking ER all the time.

So yeah, I didn't eat for a couple days in there and then finally they brought the first meal they brought me in the hospital the first meal

after cutting removing a third of my large intestine haven't eaten in three days the first meal you want us to guess yeah beefaroni

that's a great guess but spaghetti is I'm going with hospital jello. For dessert. It was a sloppy joe.

It was a sloppy joe with some kind of vegetable. You gotta love those registered dieticians working in your hospital. Good job. I've got to nurse this guy back to health. They brought me the sloppy joe. People wonder why I don't have any respect for some of these people. Registered dieticians working in your hospital. Good job. Got to nurse this guy back to health. Gross. Yeah, they brought me the Sloppy Joe, and I'm like... And people wonder why I don't have any respect for some of these people.

Yeah. So I'm looking at it going, whose decision really is that, though? Huh? Whose decision is it? It wasn't my decision. They didn't bring me a menu. Right. Is it the dieticians?

Yes. They had the hospital hires, registered dieticians. Sloppy Joe. We think this is a good one this is what trips me out is hospitals hire dietitians because they have this deep understanding

of nutrition right and they're supposed to be giving people food that can heal up right but don't get me wrong that stomach dough is fucking delicious I've known some people

which is not the first thing I think of when I have my gut ripped open yeah I've known I've known people who've gone to school for that and that's where they interned

and they were under other yeah dietit dieticians and stuff like that. So, um, some of the people that were in that program, I'm like, I hope they're not nursing me back. If anything ever happens to me. Yeah. So, so yeah, that, you know, I mean, immediately just when they brought that out, I was like, uh? Should I be eating this? It seems like I need something better than this. I don't know what it was, but I figured this is probably the worst thing I could eat. This was before you

self-educated. Yeah, I didn't. I knew a little bit about nutrition. I worked at Wild Oats before it was Whole Foods. I've been into healthy stuff. Original gangster. Anyway, I ate some of it a few but i was so hungry i ate some of it and then i couldn't eat anymore i was like uh and then then what they do is they wait for you to actually have a bowel movement if you have a

bowel movement then they know like oh it worked like everything's connected properly right so how do they check for leaks yeah i'm so i'll be so paranoid about shit getting into my body yeah i know man i know but anyway it didn't and uh so this story could get really long but to condense it they um that that was the gist of the hospital stay and they they said look you got stage three the next step is a year of chemotherapy and they brought this oncologist in while i was in the hospital like this is the oncologist you're gonna you know you're gonna be working with and uh it's like here's his you know hi how are you uh when you get when you get a little bit better you'll go and you know go to his clinic i'm like okay i guess that was the recommended course of treatment

for stage three care for stage three yeah yep so i just was like all right i mean i didn't know what else to do you get your whole life well obviously you get cancer you you have to do chemotherapy yeah this is what you do right that's the assumption that's that's what you do that's what most people do and so i didn't really question at the time i just was like shrugging my shoulders going okay i guess that's what i'm gonna do went home you know recovered sobered up I had about six weeks before I had to make I don't know if it was when the chemo would start or actually when met my first appointment with the oncologist was I had about a six week period there four to six weeks to recover so you know I was just at

home like laying on the couch my buddy of mine brought me the first season of Reno 911. He was like, here you go, man. Put it on. And literally I watched five minutes of it and I had to turn it off. I was laughing so hard and it just killed. You know, I was literally like, oh, I can't laugh. I want to laugh real bad, but I can't laugh. You're going to shit yourself on the inside.

Terrible ideas. Like, your stomach's been cut open. Here's comedy. Here's some laughs. Here's a little laugh buster some laughs yeah he meant well but uh but anyway so so you know what immediately like during that period there were two like i was reminded of two verses in the bible that really really hit home with me the first one was speaking of hitting that was a mic fail um uh the the first one was um that god works all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose right and i'm like well yeah i i don't know why this is happening but i know just from

a position of faith i know god's going to work it for my good i don't know how i don't know what's going to happen but i believe it And then the other one was the righteous man may suffer many afflictions, but the Lord delivers them from them all. Okay. So those two verses were like, just, they just came to me, you know what I mean? And I'm like, is that in the Bible? Yeah. Okay. It's in there. Um, so my wife and I prayed Maybe about a week or so after I got home from the hospital, we sat down and deliberately prayed about what to do next. I was starting to get this increasing unrest about chemotherapy, and I didn't know why.

I didn't have a piece about it. I didn't feel good in my gut, no pun intended, about it. I see what you did. I mean, everybody knows Yeah. I mean, everybody knows it's poison. Everyone knows. Well, I had that thought

when I watched 50-50. I think it's the second reference to 50-50. I just watched it, okay? It's right in the front of my brain. Give me a break.

But there's a scene where he goes into chemotherapy for the first time, walks through these depressing hallways into the guts of a, you know,

of a cancer hospital. Sits down with two older gentlemen who are undergoing chemotherapy in lounge chairs with these ivs dripping and he sits there he's got a surreal look and they hook him up and he just sits there i go wow imagine the mindset of sitting down for chemotherapy knowing that this is something that's designed to poison you it poisons almost everything but it only gets to the point of being deadly for the cancer cells but everything else gets really fucked up it's just yeah it's just a deliberate poisoning of your body and you have to sit there and endure it yep i'm surprised

more people don't go what wait a minute how's this going to be treat me i'm being poisoned well i'll tell you why most people don't in a second i mean because right it's but i was like you know it's it's poison yeah it's poison like It's poison. Like, I don't know. I, like, I don't know that much about health, but at the point I was at in my life, you know, right then I was like, gosh, the idea of poisoning myself to health, like it doesn't make sense. This is something I didn't realize until I talked to you, but like, I just assumed oncologists would,

would recommend or like have all these options available to them. But after talking to you, they only do radiation and chemo. But that's like they're only two options. They have three options. Two bolts in a chamber. It's surgery, chemo, and radiation. Cut, poison, burn. And that's all they can do i mean they are strictly governed

by the american medical association which is run by the pharmaceutical industry right so it's very tightly controlled so anything that's not a drug they don't have any options to be given that option yeah they don't have any options so back to the story my wife and i prayed and i basically said god if there's another way besides chemotherapy like i just wasn't feeling good about it i didn't know why just just open the door uh if there's another way besides chemotherapy, I just wasn't feeling good about it. I didn't know why. Just open the door if there's another way besides chemotherapy. And two days later, on my doorstep arrives a book that was mailed to me from a man in Alaska who I've never met. And still never met him. But he was a friend of my dad's, business acquaintance of my dad's.

And he sent me this book called God's Way to Ultimate Health. So I started reading this book. And it was written by a man who had colon cancer. Same thing I had. Back in the 70s, he beat it without surgery or chemo using nutrition and natural therapies. So I'm like, well, geez, this is an answer to prayer. I mean, I was, you know, one chapter in and I'm sitting on the couch like by myself, like crying, you know, because I knew it was an answer to prayer. So I read the whole book. It's, it was about the raw vegan diet, the anti-cancer diet, basically, and juicing. And, uh, just a very specific, a lot of very

specifics about chemotherapy and what it does and, and about nutritional therapies and all this kind of stuff. So God's way to ultimate health, good book. So I was convinced after I read it. I was like, this is it. I'm doing it. I prayed the prayer. Here's the book. I'm doing it. It takes some balls to make a decision. Yeah, but I just knew.

I mean, at that time, it was just so clear to me that it was an easy decision to make. So I told my wife. She was not thrilled about it. She was pretty freaked out because she thought, what? No, you got to do what the doctor says you know my my mom who has always kind of been into health food was actually very supportive and turns out she had this giant library my mom's sort of a just an info freak right she just reads all the time just reads and reads and reads read loves books and just

reads constantly she had a freaking library of alternative cancer therapy books. Like every awesome alternative cancer therapy book. She already had it. Just keeping them to herself. Just had them. Did she mention it to you? Like, oh, I forgot I had all these cancer treatment books. No, not at all.

You know, it's funny. She didn't encourage me to do alternative therapy or natural therapy or anything. I got this book. I made the decision. I called her and told her what I wanted to do because I knew that she would be okay with it. And as time went on, I'd say, hey, have you ever heard of this book? She's like, oh, I've got that book. I'm like, have you heard of this? Yeah, I've got it. I'm like, what the? She had every book I ever... Sounds like an awesome mom. Yeah. Every book I came across in my little journey of research,

she already had. So it was pretty awesome. And she didn't advise you at all during this whole process or make the suggestion to follow the advice of these books? She didn't. She really didn't. I mean, she just supported me. She's just really great. She just supported me. And she would say, and I can't just be like.

I guess that shows a lot of wisdom because most people, like most of your idiot friends read one book go, hey, man, I read this book and I really think you should do what I read, even though I didn't really read any other books but i read this thing you should definitely do it yeah it's it's a it's a wise move this sort of show or yeah yeah at the same time like to advise somebody who is dealing with something that could potentially kill them like i don't know how confident i would be he's like even if i read a hundred books i'm like oh well if you do this thing if you're gonna put yourself you know i'm because then you're

taking responsibility almost. Well, put yourself. That guy did what he told me to do, and now I'm dead. You don't want to steer him wrong. Well, imagine yourself in a situation where you have big-time, heavy-hitting news, and then would you want people who think they know what's in your best interest to come up to you and tell you what they think you should be doing, or do you want space to absorb and think about it?

Well, everybody's different. Were you that kid growing up where if your mom told you to do something there was no way you were gonna do it she just knew she would chase you away you know what i wasn't uh my dad yes i was that way with my dad but my mom and i had just a different relationship like she she just wasn't like she just always kind of accepted me for who i was never like really ever criticized me or tried to tell me to do things differently she just wasn't that kind of a mom you know she was just very kind of just let me be who I was going to be and uh so so she was a tremendous ally during that time now in the meantime I had a bunch of other family members on my wife's side of the family and

people all trying to intervene and tell me I was crazy you got yeah no I've told this story plenty of times already but you know you're sick you're going on the youtube yeah you've got to do what the doctor says and there's a tremendous amount and this is answering your question of family social emotional pressure to follow the prescribed path i mean it's intense and that's why people do because it's just so ingrained that you have to go you have to get on the you know get on the train the chemo train and just do what the doctors say and you know and everybody says oh if there was natural therapies work then they would be using them that's the you know that's the argument you hear all the time but the reality is no they don't use them because natural

therapies can't be patented and they can't make any money they don't make any money the pharmaceutical industry exists to make money it's a profit you know it's a for-profit industry right and they're not going to research natural therapies they never will the only time they the only research you see on natural therapies is usually to disprove them they'll be very small studies and they're not going to spend much money on them but they're not going to spend mega millions to them. They're not going to spend mega millions to research quercetin and apple skin. They do the same thing with sports science and supplement.

In the supplement industry, they're not going to spend a lot of money on a single product. One of the ones I'm thinking about is diaspartic acid. It causes your body to produce more testosterone. There's a ton of studies by supplement companies when they throw in the proprietary blend. There's like one study on that one specific deal

and there won't be any more because there's no money to be made. You can't patent it. Right. Right. So, you know, that's the short version of why there is not one single natural therapy that's being used in conventional treatments. The only treatments that are used are patented toxic chemical drugs.

That's it. There's no natural option. And anyway, despite all the pressure to do chemotherapy, and I finally kind of caved, you know, and agreed to go meet with this oncologist. I was like, OK, like, you know, I was trying to appease some people in the family. Yeah. So I go meet with you. I was like, all right, OK, I'll go meet with him. My wife and I go meet with him. We're sitting in the waiting room of the West Clinic.

I'm looking around. There's probably 50 or 60 other people. Very nice, very nice waiting room. Lots of people. I'm the only person in there that doesn't have gray hair. Literally the only person. I mean, I looked, I scanned the whole entire room because I was actually looking for any young people in there. You're about to have no hair. And there weren't any. All right. It was my wife and I and a bunch of people in their, you know, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. So, so the TV's on. This is great. The TV's on. It's the Today Show. We're sitting there waiting to get called back. And out comes Jack LaLanne on the Today Show, right? You know who Jack LaLanne is? Of course. Yeah. Like super fitness guru.

If you don't know, you're not American. Okay. So fitness guru since like 1940 or something. And he comes out, he's on the Today Show, and he's just going off about, this is why we're sick, because we're eating processed food and it's making us sick

and you got to get back to raw fruits and vegetables and juicing and this is the way to help. You're like, fuck this guy, he's wearing short pants. Yeah. So I look at my wife and I'm like, can you believe this is on right now? Like right now we're sitting here and this is on the TV, like this moment, you know, it was like, Oh yeah. So anyway, she's like, yeah, that's kind of weird. Then we go back and talk to the oncologist. He gives me the standard spiel. You've got a 60% chance of living five years, which was a complete exaggeration because that is the average survival rate for all cancers, right?

Was not colon cancer specific. The colon cancer specific survival rate was much less. It's like 30%. But anyway, he told me the 60% number, maybe because he thought it would give me some hope or whatever. So, but as soon as he said it, I'm like, sounds like that's like a coin toss, basically. That's not very encouraging. Even 60% chance of living five years. It wasn't 60% chance of surviving, just 60% chance of getting from here to the five-year mark.

You may still have cancer in five years. I asked him what alternative therapies were available, and he said none. There are none. If you don't do chemotherapy, you're insane. Looked me dead in the eye. My wife said, what about the raw food diet? He said, no, you can't do the raw food diet. It'll fight the chemo.

So I'm like, that sounds like a pretty good idea, actually. And then he said... What does that even mean? I'll tell you what it means. It'll fight the chemo. This'm like, that sounds like a pretty good idea, actually. And then he said, what does that even mean? I'll tell you what it means. This is what it means. I didn't know what it meant at the time either. But the raw food diet is a very, very hardcore detoxification diet. And when you're on raw foods, 100% raw foods and doing a lot of juicing, your body starts detoxing very rapidly, it's burning through fat, and your body stores toxins and fat.. It's burning through fat and your body stores toxins in fat. So it's burning through fat and, um, and it's detoxing. So when they put the chemo in, your body kicks it out too fast and it can't linger and do as much damage as they want it to do. That's why you can't do the raw food diet and chemo. Right. Plus raw foods have bacteria,

right? Natural probiotic beneficial bacteria because they're not cooked and that can be very very dangerous when you're doing chemo because chemo destroys your immune system i got you and when your immune system destroyed is destroyed your body is very very susceptible to get all kinds of weird infections and bacterial infections and you know diseases and problems just from normal soil bacteria that wouldn't affect any of us here so that's the reason why he said we couldn't do it um he said and he said look and he could tell i mean yeah he sensed that i wasn't real keen on it and he said look i'm not telling this because i need your money i'm like what the why would you say that why would you

even bring that up yeah why would you even bring it up I wasn't even thinking about that at all I wasn't thinking like oh this guy's giving me a sales pitch yeah but now I am

I'm like wait a minute wait a minute hey look business is good I don't need you it's called here's the thing

I was in sales it's called the push away right it's a sales tactic he doesn't need me I need to get what he's offering I don't need your business you know let me let me just push you away. So you'll trust me or whatever.

And, uh, I got a Mercedes. So he, he basically, uh, terrified us. Like we, you know, we left, he basically, you know, convinced us that I was going to die. If I didn't do chemo, we walked out of there, sat in the car, held hands, cried and prayed. Like we were just destroyed. Like I had so much confidence going in there. And when I left, I was like this big, you know, I mean, I was completely like, what do I do? Like, ah, like, I mean, I just, he had me convinced that I was going to have to do chemo. But, um, you're upset because you didn't want to do chemo.

Yeah. I was just upset because I was really afraid. I mean, and that's what they do. They use fear to motivate you to obey, essentially. They use the fear of dying to convince you to do exactly what they want you to do, which is radiation, surgery, chemo, et cetera. You're going to die if you don't do this. There's no other way.

This is what you have to do. Right. And so I didn't do chemo, right? We, I went home, you know, I, even though I was afraid, I was more afraid after that, after hearing what he said, uh, I still knew there, there was, there were confirmations that I knew that God was leading me in the path of healing. Like I knew it, I just knew it. And it's hard to articulate. I mean, or even explained it. Some people, they just don't understand, but it's like, you know it in your knower. You know what I mean? I just knew it. So, um, I just, and I'd already converted to the raw food diet before I went to see the guy. I mean, it was, it was a hundred percent all the way.

Like how long, how long have you been on the raw food diet when you went in? Um, you know, I'm not sure. I think probably a couple weeks. A couple weeks. So you're kind of feeling the effects already? Yeah, I was feeling great. I was feeling awesome. So kind of explain what the average day of using the raw food diet is so we're all on the same page.

I went 100% raw vegan. So immediately I stopped eating all cooked food, all processed food, all, you know, if man made it, don't eat it. Right. That's like the Jack, the lane that include grains essentially. Yeah. It includes, I didn't eat grains. Uh, the, the, the, um, the raw food anti-cancer diet does not include grains. So it's basically raw fruits and vegetables, some seeds and nuts and a lot of juicing. So the average day for me for for 90 days, I was 100% raw. Excuse me.

So what I did was I got up every morning and I juiced about 64 ounces of vegetable juice, carrot, beet, celery, cucumber, a little ginger in there. I'd kind of mix it up. But the basic concoction was carrot, celery, beet. So I tried juicing for the first time last month, and I made maybe 10 ounces worth. Yeah. 10 to 12 ounces worth originally. And that would take a whole lot of vegetables to create 64 ounces.

Yeah, yeah, it does. You're going with organic. You're not going to juice down pesticides. No, no, it's got to be organic. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to cure my cancer. You don't want to juice down pesticides. No, no. It's got to be organic. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to cure my cancer. You don't want concentrated doses of pesticides. But there are people doing that, thinking that juicing is good for you.

That's right. They are. But Whole Foods sells these big bags. It's like a 50-pound bag of organic juicing carrots. It's this big. Oh, for real? Yeah. So, I mean, that's what we were buying.

And then we were buying all kinds of other stuff, too. So, I'd get up and spend about an hour juicing enough juice for the whole day so i drank about 64 ounces of juice every day how many juicers did you go through doing that none one i still have it the champion juicer i've had it for eight years you didn't you didn't have a juice tiger huh juice tiger is the way to go what's the shaman. That's the juice man, actually. Well, okay. My whole world has been robbed. So, yeah, I bought this. It's like a $250 juicer. It's got a commercial motor in it, whatever.

So, I mean, I just went for it all the way. So I juiced all the juice in the morning. Mid-morning, I'd eat like a piece of fruit, but I would just basically just drink juice throughout the morning. For lunch, I'd have a giant salad. I mean, just broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, kale, red onions, red peppers, green peppers. I mean, pretty much mushrooms. Every vegetable that I could chop up and fit in a big bowl, I would eat that. No dressing.

I actually went on your website and made that. Yeah, okay. After I discovered you actually had a website, I'm going to make that. My wife and I made it, and it's actually really good made the salad so i made a dressing that was um uh extra virgin olive oil apple cider vinegar right so it's basically oil and vinegar and then i would put um uh garlic red pepper cayenne pepper, Italian seasoning, and curry powder. So it was like this real kind of like zesty, kind of spicy oil and vinegar. And it's like, it's awesome. I mean, it's so good.

So anyway, giant salad for lunch. And then in the afternoon, I'd make the coconut fruit smoothie. I'd take a whole coconut, cut it up, put it in a blender, and then get. That's what a pain in the ass that is. I've gotten pretty good at it though. Two cups of frozen berries and a frozen banana. And what a pain in the ass that is. I'm getting pretty good at it, though. Two cups of frozen berries and a frozen banana and then drink that in the afternoon and then at dinner, another giant salad.

So that was it every day for 90 days. If I get trapped on a tropical island, I want you to be with me. Well, if we have a blender, that'll come in handy. That seems like a lot of... Is that not too much fruit? God, that's so much more fruit than I was going to say.

It's three cups of fruit. But when you mix fruit with a fat, it actually slows the absorption. And so what they found is that nine servings of fruits or vegetables per day is like a really, really optimal amount. I mean, you can really see significant health transformative effects if you consume nine servings every day. You keep that up now? Yeah. Nine servings? Yeah.

A serving, yeah, pretty close to it. A serving would be like a cup, right? A cup of anything. Fruit or vegetables? Yeah, fruit, vegetables, kale, anything. So I was having way more than nine servings, though. I mean, my salad was almost nine servings. So I was getting like nine servings in the salad.

Then the coconut fruit smoothie was another four servings of fruit, not counting the coconut, and then another salad at dinner. So, I mean, I was pushing about 20 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Okay. So, I mean, I was trying to OD on nutrition. That was my strategy, right? I'm just going to pump as much raw nutrients into my body and to the point of, you know, I just want to give my body as much as it can possibly take, more than it needs, so

that I'm not missing anything. Do you think that if you were to do that with just vegetables, not fruit, you could get, I mean, I would think that you could get more nutrition, less sugar that way. Yeah, probably. Probably. It'd be just tough to get the calories. Yeah, the coconut fruit smoothie helped me a lot with the calories. And plus it's just like, you know, I kind of have a sweet tooth and that really satisfies

the kind of like sweet craving that I would have in the afternoon. Just having that smoothie. It's just, and I drink it every day now. I mean, I still drink it every day. So you're talking about maximizing nutrition. You're definitely maximizing your vitamin, mineral, antioxidant, phytochemical, nutrient density. Yes. But was there any protein in there almost at all?

There was no protein. But here's what we did. So after 90 days, about 30 days into that process, about a month into the process, my mom had all these books and stuff. And occasionally she'd say, hey, you know, there's this one book or I saw this article you might want to read or something. She would suggest things here and there. But anyway, so one day she said, hey, there's, you know, there's a naturopath here in Memphis that I've been seeing, I've been going to. And, you know, maybe you should go see him. You might like him. And I was like, I don't know.

Okay, maybe. I don't know. I don't know anything about natural medicine or naturopaths or anything. And I just kind of like, well, okay, maybe. A couple of days later, a guy from church was like, I don't know. Okay. Maybe, I don't know. I didn't know anything about natural medicine or naturopaths or anything. And I just kind of like, well, okay, maybe a couple of days later, a guy from church was like, Hey, you know, there's a guy that maybe you should go see. And his name is John Smothers. I'm like, all right. Okay. I hear the signals, you know, like I'll go see him. You know, he doesn't know my mom.

Like these two, two, two totally random people. Right. Right. The guy from church and my mom, they've never met. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to go see this John Smothers. And I went to see him. First consultation, I said, look, I've got cancer, blah, blah, blah. Here's my story.

Here's what I'm doing. He said, great. I know the book. That's exactly what you need to be doing. And I was like, yes, number two. This is my second ally in the process. Because, and man, I wanted to cry right then. Because up to that point, I mean, literally,

I didn't have anybody that was telling me, like, you're doing the right thing. Nobody's backing you up. Nobody, you know, my mom supported me. My wife really was still freaked out and very afraid that I was going to just die, you know? And, and so, yeah, so he was the first person that really told me I was doing the right thing. And, uh, and so I started working with him and what he did was he analyzed my diet. He let me stay on the raw, raw diet for another, about 60 days. So it was like 90 days, uh, give or take a day or so. And then he did blood work. Um, he, you know, he's very comprehensive. So he looks at your blood, your saliva, your urine, your stool samples, hair analysis. He wants to get a total

picture of what's going on in your body. And after he, we did all these series of tests, he said, look, you need more protein. You need more animal protein. Your body needs it. And, and, uh, and I said, okay, you know, if, if I, if you, I mean, I'm fine not eating meat. I felt fine. Uh, I was having a hard time keeping weight. That was real skinny. I'm still skinny, but I was a lot skinnier then. Were there books, were some of the books that you'd been reading, were they advising against meat for any specific reason? Most, yeah, most, the generally accepted anti-cancer diet is a raw vegan diet, and there's a lot of books about it.

So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that reinforces that. My knowledge of physiology and nutrition, I don't really see where animal protein would come into play in regard to cancer. There's a couple, there's a couple of theories and you know, I don't know if they've ever been proven, but the kind of stuff that you read is that, um, and that I've come to understand is that, uh, one enzymes are critically important in, um, in breaking up cancer cells, right? And your body produces, uh produces proteolytic enzymes that break down protein.

When you stop ingesting protein, those proteolytic enzymes actually will turn on your body and start, like Pac-Man, right? And they'll start looking for things to digest that shouldn't be there. Right. And so that's actually what... That's why endurance athletes are very skinny.

That's what'll break down... Who don't eat much meat. That's what breaks down a tumor. When a tumor breaks down, that's proteolytic enzymes in your body actually breaking it down. So that's why taking out meat, and when you eat a lot of meat, your body is producing a lot of enzymes, and they're all devoted to digesting meat. So it'd probably be a good idea to be, if you want to avoid cancer, it might be good to eat a lot of protein

so that if there was any point where you came in, you know, you had cancer, you remove that. You could quit the protein and then turn the enzymes loose. Your body would have tons of enzymes. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know if I can endorse that. Bledsoe's new anti-cancer diet.

But you got to do it before you get cancer. I've also heard the opposite, though, from people in a similar situation where they've had cancer and they've done almost the opposite where they had zero carbohydrates because they were making the claim that all cancer cells are feeding purely on glucose. And if you can starve them of glucose, then they'll win the diet. Yes, I've heard that. No, that's true. Cancer cells do.

Well, there's a lot of different components that the cancer feeds on it actually also needs iron right and so the iron in meat like is sort of a no-no right that's one of the other reasons that they want you off meat is because they want to decrease your iron content and even further than that they want to like i took quercetin and quercetin actually is like an iron blocker and it blocks the absorption of iron so anyway there's an iron and cancer connection right and heme iron which is like iron and red meat so um so okay so there's that component and then uh then there's the sugar component cancer cells do feed on glucose normal cells respirate oxygen but but when a cell, Otto Warburg, who was a Nobel Prize winning biochemist, in 1938, his research, he basically discovered that cancer cells don't live on oxygen. They live on glucose.

That was Otto Warburg. What he found was that he could cause a tumor to go from benign to malignant by simply reducing the amount of oxygen that those cells were exposed to by 35%. So a 35% decrease in oxygen to your cells over a certain period of time, they will mutate because they want to survive. So circulation is good. Circulation is good. So again, just so I'm on the same page as you, benign means that it's not going to spread and malignant means that it could spread to the rest of your body. That it's spreading. Yeah, malignant is spreading.

So he's cutting off oxygen which means that it's more likely to get glucose and convert to the bad cancer or the bad tumor. Yeah. Essentially it's a desperation response. That's right. Think about your life force. Your cells have life force and they want to survive. If you deprive them, cells are either going to mutate or die if they're deprived of essential nutrients, oxygen and other essential nutrients. You deprive healthy cells of 35% of their required oxygen over some period of

time and they'll either mutate or die. If they mutate, they're going to mutate to survive on glucose, which is called glycolysis. And so cancer cells have a lot more glucose receptors than a normal cell. And yes, they feed on sugar. So like the big part of the answer diet was anti-cancer diet was no carbohydrates,

obviously no processed food, no sugars. Now I did have some fruits, but, and there are some hardcore people that won't even eat fruit at all when they're on an anti-cancer diet yeah everybody there's a lot of different little opinions and right in that world but I was following the recommendation of a naturopath who said having this fruit smoothie once a day was fine so he got me back on clean meat after doing all the tests, looking at my physiology, my anatomy, everything, you know, pretty much about me that he could find out. He said, look,

you need some more, you need some animal protein. So he put me back on clean meat, starting with lamb, wild caught Alaskan salmon, and then eventually like, and then eventually organic free range chicken. So clean meat meaning clean meat meaning organic. They're basically looking at you don't want cattle being fed in a bunch of corn. A feedlot. All kosher?

Are you Jewish? Any paleo person knows what I'm talking about but if you don't know anything about clean meat clean meat is meat from an animal that is raised organically any paleo person knows what I'm talking about, but if you don't know anything about clean meat, clean meat is, um, a meat from an animal that is raised, uh, organically,

uh, preferably a grass fed and does not give it any, uh, growth hormones, steroids, antibiotics, et cetera. And it's,

it's from a conscientious producer, like a local farmer, right? So your local farmer, local farm raised farmer's market type meat. So he said, look, you need this, you need a piece of clean meat about three times a week. And so I was like, okay, that's what I'll do. So I started eating clean meat again, along with the raw food diet. So I went from a hundred percent raw to about 80% raw. And he added a little bit more cooked food

in my diet for the calories. So, um, at night with dinner, I'd have the giant salad, but I'd also have a, like a baked sweet potato or I'd have some brown rice, uh, or I'd have a piece of meat with it, you know, and the, and the sweet potatoes. So, so on a raw diet, it's really hard to get enough calories to be active. Yeah. Yeah. It's difficult. And the thing about the raw vegan diet, it's a very powerful detoxification and healing diet. But I personally don't believe it's sustainable for a long-term lifestyle. But it reminds me of, if you want to talk anthropology, it's why do humans diverge from other apes? And a big reason is a bountiful diet where if you cooked meat or processed veggies instead of hanging out

underneath the tree and chewing them all day, you had excess calories to grow things like a nervous system that was finally developed and a big fatty brain. You could,

the coolest studies I've written for before is they discovered this mutation in myosin, jaw muscle of human myosin that basically allows you to downregulate and reduce the muscle size of the chewing muscles.

And if you do that, you allow space for the brain case to expand. If you look at the brain case of a gorilla, they have this big spine going down the axis of the skull, and that's where these huge jaw muscles come up and attach to chomp down with enough force to process the green roughage all day long, day in and day out, grind through heavy tubers or do whatever. But humans can cook meat and can process food, chew it quickly, get it down quickly, don't need big muscles, don't need big muscle attachments.

They can devote more resource to brain power, which is a very interesting concept. They get jived nicely with the line of conversation. Gorillas are also colon fermenters, which people say, well, anyone who has the idea that we can live on a plant-based diet alone, they'll say, well, gorillas eat green vegetation all day

and they're 400 pounds. You're not a fucking gorilla. That's the scientific answer for you. You're right. One of the big differences is their colon fermenters, they can break down cellulose in their colon. We cannot. Kind of like cows.

Cows have six stomachs. Humans cannot digest cellulose. That's what fiberulose that's what fiber is and that's why it passes through yeah and that's why juicing and blending blenderizing vegetables and juicing is such a powerful way to uh to it's it's basically like um medicinal food right it's it's not a i mean our ancestors didn't use blenders or juicers, right? But that's the way that you separate the nutrients from the fiber. Because just chewing up fruits and vegetables,

you get some of the nutrients, but you get a lot more. You wouldn't be able to digest all of it. Yeah, if you blend them up or juice them, you get about 90% of the nutrients in it you can extract. I'll tell you, the key thing that helped me up my vegetable content was putting it in smoothies like yeah i'll eat up a whole bag of kale from whole foods and a whole plastic big container of mixed greens or maybe spinach every week because of that right you can't i can't really eat it a lot of times around eat it all if i can juice up

three handfuls of spinach and drink it in 10 seconds yeah all right guys let's uh take a quick break real quick we We're 45 minutes in. So we'll take a break. You people at home. You people. Hey, what does that mean? Who are you calling you people? Who are you calling you people?

You guys are going to get a nice break. I think Chris will probably insert a cool video. So be back in a few minutes. Probably porn. All right, guys. Wait. And three, and two, and one, and one and a half. Our show's going to be so much better next time because we'll have webcams.

All right, there's Mike Bledsoe back with Doug Larson, Chris Wark, and Chris Moore. Barbell shrugged, just in case you missed it on the front end. So, subtle. We left off with talking about what clean meats were. The naturopath advised you to eat more of that. Before you do that, we talked earlier about Chris going through the process of deciding upon a treatment and his experience with his surgeon, doctor, about what he recommended and that struggle.

I will point out for the benefit of the audience, I believe it's Ken Murray, last winter or late last year, early winter, whatever, published a little article called How Doctors Choose to Die. Some people may have read it. I think I put it on Facebook. Remember that? That was a really good article. But I thought it was fascinating that

the recommendations they made to their patients were radically different than the courses of treatment they chose personally. Right. And that they recommended routinely these brutal, brutal surgeries for really serious conditions and diseases, chemotherapy, everything that is really quite torturous and destructive to these people's lives.

But when it came to them facing down pancreatic cancer, for instance, they choose to not go through any of those treatments to the effect of telling colleagues to promise them not to allow them to go down that path. So if you're interested in that article, I highly recommend you Google it. How doctors choose to die. Basically going home, spending time with family, and the quality of time

they had remaining, they wanted to maximize it. So a year of torture and pain isn't better than three months of slow decay, but happiness and dying. The bucket list, right? Food for thought. It's great.

It's amazing. If I could say a couple things about chemotherapy that I didn't mention earlier, but these played into my reasons not to do it. Everybody knows it's poison, but what they don't know is that chemotherapy, it is poison. It causes secondary cancers, right right it's carcinogenic so it's a toxic poison that causes secondary cancers and it destroys your immune system so what happens every almost every single time and believe me I know a lot of people with cancer because they contact me from

all over the world and I've had friends and family, of course, that have gone through it. But it's almost always the same story. And I bet most of the people in this room have heard this story. A person you know gets diagnosed with cancer. They have surgery. They do chemotherapy and radiation or whatever. At some point after the chemotherapy is done, the doctor says, well, there's no evidence of cancer in your body. And everybody's so excited.

And then a few months later, they have their next CAT scan or test, and like, oh, the cancer's back, but now it's in your brain, and it's in your lung, and it's in your feet. It's spread. We don't know what happened. I've heard that many times. People go out and celebrate, like, oh, my cancer's gone, I'm doing chemo, and they go out drinking. They go out partying. Like, this is so great. I mean, every time. But the reason... That just shows you the disconnect that probably exists with the majority of the population. The reason it happened is because their immune systems are destroyed and chemo has caused secondary cancers. And that's just popping up all over their body

now. It's spreading like crazy. Their their immune systems decimated and cannot fight it even if you have cancer your immune system is at work it's trying to contain it even if you have a tumor your immune system is not dead it may be suppressed and that's one thing that can lead to cancer is having a suppressed or overloaded immune system if you're super toxic but and you know again that's the these aggressive raw food diet and hardcore natural therapies address the whole body, right? They're holistic. It's about detoxifying the body and giving your body all the nutrients it needs to heal itself.

Cause ultimately the body has to heal itself. So you had surgery and you told me, you know, uh, that surgeries can actually help to spread help to spread cancer throughout other parts of your body. Do you feel like your surgery was beneficial? Are you glad you did it? Or do you feel like you could have handled this without surgery? Yeah, it's a tough question. I feel like surgery was the right thing for me because, you know, I feel like God was in control of my situation. And the way I went into surgery, you know, it worked out.

Surgery can go one of two ways. It can either kind of give you a jump start, your body a jump start towards fighting the cancer if you're removing the bulk of it. Right. Or it can cause seeding, which can cause the cancer to spread and have negative effects. And so I never tell anybody they should, they should do or not do surgery, you know, because every cancer is a little different when it comes to whether or not you should address it with surgery. So, but having said that, I have met a lot of people that have beaten cancer without surgery.

So, yeah, it's doable. I mean, the guy who wrote the book I read that was the first book I read, God's Way to Ultimate Health, he beat colon cancer without surgery. Yeah, and you don't regret the surgery. If you have a golf ball-sized tumor and you go on a raw foods diet, does that just kind of wither down and eventually it would be gone? Is that something that has happened or does it just become or stay benign and just isn't a problem anymore? It's, uh, it could be one of either. I mean, I've met a lot of people that have done natural therapies where they, they just do a hardcore transformative natural approach and their body takes care of the tumor. It just, it breaks it down, it heals and it's gone. And then sometimes it doesn't break down the tumor, but the tumor just never grows. It just

becomes benign or dormant or whatever. Like Chris Carr. Have you heard of Chris Carr? She's a pretty famous cancer celebrity. Crazy Sexy Cancer was a documentary about her. She's a couple of years older than me and she had, I think it's pancreatic, but pretty serious cancer. She did the raw vegan diet and she's been on Oprah and stuff. I mean, she's pretty well known. She has a blog, uh, crazy sexy life or something. But, uh, but the point is she still has cancer, but it just won't grow. You know, she's a hardcore raw vegan and she has been for years and she just had a, she just wrote a blog post a few months ago about, she just had another test done and it, and they're like, yeah, the spots are still there, but they haven't changed in years.

So she's got it controlled, you know. Right. Just one thought I had was how the approach must change or whether it should change depending on what your diagnosis is. Like what type of cancer? If a cancer that could have been caused by nutritional factors is best addressed by correcting that. If you had a tumor or some other condition of the gut, that's likely caused by a shitty diet.

It makes sense that it's easily treated by correcting your diet. But if you have leukemia or something. What about skin cancer or breast cancer? Melanoma, pancreatic cancer. I'm sure it's just not as easy at that point. It depends on the way you view the human body's ability to heal itself. 80% roughly of all diseases are linked to diet. So the body, if you support the body,

if you feed it the nutrients that it needs to heal itself, then it's capable of healing itself. I mean, if you rip your fingernail out at a CrossFit gym, it'll grow back. You know what I mean? And there it is, right? Tell them how you did it. And I get this question all the time, like, well, what you did, I get emails, and I think I went today literally well what you did work for um my my father-in-law has esophageal cancer i think that's how you say

it uh and i'll say yes say yes because what i did was not specific to colon cancer it was specific to the entire body it was like supporting the entire body, overdosing on nutrition, giving my body all the necessary nutrients it needs to heal itself, and taking away all the negative inputs. I feel like that would apply to leukemia and stuff like that. That makes sense to me, but the only thing that doesn't make sense to me would be skin cancer. Well, your skin can heal itself. It's similar. That's how you get too much sun exposure. Your light skin, you get too much sun exposure, and then you end up with...

Even that seems like horse shit, because I've seen the argument in the evolution prescription that this doctor laid out a case for, if you stay out of the sun, you're much worse off from the lack of vitamin D than you are from any cancer risk. The skin cancer rates are higher in countries that get less sun than in countries by the equator. So it's really not the sun. It's diet plus the sun. You know, there's a connection there between...

Right, you've got a lot of inflammation going on via diet. And steady, reasonable exposure to the light to get the adaptation to deal with the sunlight exposure, not just fucking going out and sitting in the sun for eight hours as a ginger then burning the fuck up yeah

hey I read this article that sunlight was really good if you could do vitamin D and all that shit yeah no so I mean I don't have a fucking

blistered lobster diet diet plays a part that's what people do they go oh you know paleo and they start fucking buying paleo Oreos.

People are dumb. You never get beyond the fact you always got to keep in mind that we're just fancy apes with big fucking adrenal glands. You know, we're always going to make stupid mistakes. We're smart. You know, we got some things figured out. But we're always going to. You can't shake the indelible mark of where you came from, just as a little side ramble.

Special guests continue. How often does somebody do some type of vegan-type diet, and then you've heard about them, and it didn't matter, they basically ended up dying anyway? I'm sure that has to happen. Not everything is treatable. That's right. That's right.

There's a lot more that goes into, you know, cancer is a very weird disease. I mean, it's systemic, A, but there's a lot of factors that can cause your body to become an environment where cancer could thrive, right? The diet thing is obvious, right? But there's also emotional and spiritual connections and even stress. Everybody knows that stress is toxic for you, right? I mean, you guys probably studied that in nutritional studies and stuff. Hans Selye's research. Okay, so, yeah, stress can actually break down your immune system. It can cause your immune system to not function as well.

And so anytime your immune system is suppressed, whether it's from overloaded from toxins, chemicals in the world, or it's suppressed from stress and negativity, unforgiveness, resentment, bitterness, jealousy, like all those negative emotions actually suppress your immune system. So I'm saying all that to say that there's some people don't have the will to live. And I've talked to those kind of people. And some people do. Some people have the will to live and they'll fight it and they'll survive. And you know, they'll thrive. And then some people, when they get a diagnosis of cancer, they just don't have the will to live. And some

of them will go through the motions of chemo. And, and some of them will go through the motions of chemo and radiation. And some of them will go through the motions of natural therapies, but it, um, but down in their core, like at least the ones that I've talked to and been around, I can tell they're just going through the motions. Like they're not really, they're just not really fighting to survive. And their mental and emotional and spiritual attitude is just wrong. I think they probably don't believe what they're doing is actually going to help. They're just like, oh yeah, I'm supposed to do this. Whether it be chemo or like a raw vegan diet.

It's possible. I don't believe this is going to work. And that actually plays a huge part. I think your belief in it is probably a big chunk of the success. It's like whether you exercise program or diet program, if you really believe in what you're doing, you have a really good shot at success. I tell the athletes all the time, the best program can sometimes be just the one that you believe in the best. There's lots of people who do silly shit and still are incredible.

We talk about that a lot in the happiness advantage. People who are the most optimistic always you recognize you recognize more opportunities that come your way oh yeah or more opportunities that documentary the i can't remember what it was is the uh man you had to cut this part out i was like i had undefeated um was it about happiness opt OPT actually had the DVD listed on his... The Secret? The Secret. Oh, fuck that.

Yeah, The Secret and... That's where you got to draw the line. The power of... If I throw up vibes for a new car into the universe, she will create me the new car. Yeah, it's the power of attraction. So if you really believe it, it'll happen type of thing. I thought it was really funny that it was on his website.

I was like, oh man, this must be, man, this must be a good Zen attitude. I love a good Zen attitude. I'm going to watch it. So I Netflixed it. Mike McGoldrick. I Netflixed this, and I'm watching it. I'm like, this is some cheesy stuff. That's a step beyond healthy spirituality and open attitude

and belief in yourself. That's like, if I just wish really hard for something, it'll happen. That's, I think you cross over into delusion pretty quickly.

Some restraints. That actually might be a good thing. Well, if you're saying, if Oprah's telling you, if you can dream about what you want to achieve, you will get it.

Think about that car you want and the universe will fucking give it to you. Well, she does give it to him, so.'s true well i mean you know when it comes to at least with cancer and stuff like that i mean yeah there's the the power of belief there is a there is um you know supernatural and mystical element to to your attitude and your belief about can't you know do you believe your body is can know, do you believe your body can heal itself? Do you believe your body was designed to heal itself? So there was actually a logical progression of

thought that I went through. Like, yes, A, I believe that God created me and made my body to heal itself and that he put plants and minerals and nutrients and herbs and all this stuff on the earth to support the healing, you know, mechanisms in my body. Right. So those are the fundamental beliefs that I had. So it was like, it all lined up. There weren't any contradictions in my mind. I didn't have any problem believing that, yeah, I believe my body can heal itself. I just got to make sure I give it what it needs. That's actually what attracts me me to i actually looked at going to chiropractic school at one point was that i know i'm sorry hey i love chiropractic um but but what i what i what i really liked about those guys whenever i go to see them is that they're more holistic and that they're gonna they're more concerned about

what's going on and you know in your life and stuff like that. Whereas if you go see a PT, then they're usually really focused on that one little area. You know what, Ripto thinks of PT. Classifies that as silly bullshit. I had a thought when you explained that outlook and everything. It popped in my mind to talk about some advanced scientific ideas about observation and altering what you observe. Or how you interpret what you observe. Yeah, what's the area of science that's so fucking mysterious in physics?

Physics? Is it quantum physics? Quantum physics. I was going to say the whole subject of physics. I'm talking about the power. There are certain things that humans just aren't going to grasp. There's just no guarantee that with time we'll figure it all out. Shit is really complicated.

You shouldn't assume that because you're the highest evolved specimen on one planet, you can't assume that that's as high as things can go. Are you suggesting that there's aliens? There could be anything. Why would you exclude the possibility? You need to have an open attitude about these things. But the idea is that things are actually... I bet on other planets, dolphins are the ones in charge.

I mean, things... I've heard that. Yeah. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But if you consider the fact that things are actually really, really fucking beautiful and complex, and we've only just begun to make the faintest of scratches on the body of knowledge that could be discovered.

You know, things like observing an object in an author's course, like I've talked to Scott English at work. He likes to have these kind of conversations. We talked about, you know, 18,000 people are in an arena cheering for the home team, and a guy dribbles on the court 10 seconds left and shoots a basket. Did he shoot the shot with perfect form and score the three-pointer to win the game and everybody cheers, or did the ball go in the hoop because everybody wanted it to go in the hoop?

Have you watched What the Bleep Do We Know? Did they will it? Yeah, I mean, it sounds a little hokey. Who here has seen What the Bleep Do We Know? Do they will it? Yeah, I mean, it sounds a little hokey. Who here has seen What the Bleep Do We Know? But there are studies where people shot electrons at targets and had a certain result. Well, that's exactly what the documentary was talking about. But then if you don't fucking look at the electrons, other crazy shit happens. It's like there is some evidence that when you, when you just, the act of observing,

observing, observing, and putting an intent on an outcome changes it. Yeah. And there's no, there's no bias involved.

It's just a fucking electron. Yeah. So, that's kind of shit that cannot be explained readily. Kind of like when ninjas sneak in your room and you can sense

that they're there. Oh, quit being so silly. Something, well, something he mentioned earlier about, that kind of just reminded me of,

obviously, along the lines that we're talking about. But there's a big difference that people don't understand, or some of them do, between allopathic medicine, which is conventional medicine, and naturopathic medicine. Naturopathic medicine is always about the whole body. It's holistic. They want to improve the functionality of the whole body, support all the systems in the body, the immune system, the central nervous system, the detoxification systems. We want to support the entire body and get it to optimum health so it can heal itself, right? And then

allopathic medicine or conventional medicine, they're very focused on the symptom, right? They treat the symptoms. So what you're saying is that allopathic is like you said. They would be like Keynesian economists and then the naturopath would be like an Austrian economist. Maybe so, yes. Yeah, yeah. But allopathic medicine, you go in with a backache. Perfect analogy. Right?

You go with a backache and the allopath says, okay, well, we can give you back surgery or we can give you these pills, right? Right. And that's how we fix your little back pain. And a chiropractor would say, well, your back give you back surgery or we can give you these pills, right? And that's how we fix your little back pain. And a chiropractor would say, well, your back might be actually out of alignment. Let's try to adjust it first. So that's like the example. Or Glassman. I don't like a whole lot of everything he says,

but Glassman's attitude about you go to the doctor for high cholesterol and it's like a truck speeding out of control. So you take a hammer and smash the speedometer and you've fixed the problem. So you take Lipitor. Oh this, but I'm on you. You've fixed the problem. Yeah. Well, so you take lipatory. Oh, my high cholesterol is gone.

Fuck. I got no, I got no problem no more. Well, it's only a symptom of something deep. Yeah, that's right. Well, here's a better analogy.

When you, um, you know, when you have cancer, if you have a lump or a bump, that's not your problem. The lump or the bump is not the problem. Okay.

That's a symptom of. The lump or the bump is not the problem. Okay. That's a symptom of a systemic problem, right? So you cutting out a tumor is not going to fix your problem. And I just having surgery, your body isn't an environment where cancer can thrive and taking a, taking a tumor off is just like you're going, you know, you've got a wobbly tire and you go to the tire store and you're like, my tires wobbling. And they say, oh, we'll just take the tire off. Put a new tire on. No, not a new tire. No tire at all.

We'll just take the tire. There, it doesn't rattle. Well, I was actually thinking about, well, you could fix the alignment. I know almost nothing about cars, but I was trying to sound like I did. Yeah, but that's the thing. Their approach is not necessarily fixing the problem. It's just eliminating the symptom. That's the difference. Like, oh, this thing in my engine's rattling. Oh, we's just eliminating the symptom that's the

difference like oh this thing in my engine's rattling i'll just take the thing out there no more rattle right but it's like wait but i needed that part and by the way that's going to be 125 thousand dollars that's what's like these treatments are going to run you yeah i mean that's very intuitive from from the point of view of someone who has no idea what they're talking about and it's always going to sell better. Yeah. So you can't fight against that. There's no way.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying from a sales marketing point of view, it's always going to sell better and it's always going to win. It's unfortunate, but it's kind of the way it is in the business world. Just killing the symptom. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Back on the nutrition track, so how do you eat differently today than you did right when you started the whole raw vegan natural diet?

Well, so the 90 days was raw vegan, 100% raw vegan. For the next two years after that, roughly, I was about 80% raw vegan. But he had worked in some clean meats and some grains and sweet potato and a little bit of cooked food. And today, I'm not far off of that. I still eat a lot of raw food. I eat clean meat. I drink raw milk. I eat raw pasture-raised eggs.

So I eat a little more protein now because I'm actually a train at a CrossFit gym that you guys own. So, you know, I do have a higher demand now for protein than I did before I was actually training and trying to get stronger. So I eat more protein now than I did, but it's only clean sources. How much protein are you eating now? Because I know we talked about this a while back. And I was suggesting you eat more. Yeah. But I was about me say take more

like the drug yeah but uh let me think about how much i eat he takes the advice he goes hey buzzer thanks i got fucking cancer again yeah that's what i'm like you know maybe you should try adding 15 yeah so right right now i i probably i have on a typical day i'll have two raw eggs which isn't that much in a smoothie so like i'll put them in my coconut fruit smoothie by the way you convinced me to do that and i'll do five in my smoothie in the morning look at you i like it yeah so a couple raw eggs um i take either a i drink you know a few glasses of raw milk per day usually with dinner i'll have a piece of meat i don't usually eat meat for lunch

or breakfast necessarily. Um, and then I'll take some kind of protein supplement powder, either a raw vegan powder. There's a couple that I like. Um, one of them is a sun warrior and the other one is a garden of life. And then Vega makes a good one. And, or I'll take a grass fed, uh, protein powder. It's a way grass fed, uh protein powder it's a way grass-fed protein powder defense nutrition so yeah um so i don't know how much protein i take i actually don't monitor it that closely but um so i don't know sounds like you're not getting 100 grams a day probably i may not be getting no i probably i'm've always wondered about if it's beneficial to go grass-fed for protein sources. If you have this processed macronutrient.

I'm not convinced that grass-fed is probably as good for the nutrients. I'd be more interested in getting my whey protein from a raw product versus a pasteurized milk or something like that yeah i think i'm more concerned with that than with because usually faical is eating grain or not has more to do with uh if it's got a lot of omega-6 or omega-3 fatty acids so it has more to do with the actual fatty acids than it is the protein when you're getting a whey protein you're just getting the protein so i'm it's like a distilled product. The other thing with that too is it's probably safe to go grass-fed and raw if you can because there's just stuff we don't know.

I actually quit drinking whey altogether because I had these – We assume that like fat is the issue when it comes to grass-fed versus grain-fed, but there might be some protein stuff going on that we're completely unaware of. I got to where I was getting like just a nauseated sick feeling after drinking whey protein shakes like after a year i'm like fuck i just don't think i can do it anymore you're drinking shakes with sucralose in them uh it was just a decent quality whey protein uh and then i got to where i was like you know i just got like fucking like like kind of just claiming the back of the neck.

I was getting detested by the idea of drinking whey protein. I switched to egg protein powder and it went away. I started enjoying shakes. Wonderful. Yeah. I'm not allergic to milk. I could drink all the milk in the world and I'm fine. But I just fucking,

I don't do that. It just may have been, look, it may have been just intuitive. You know, just an intuitive. I was like, fuck,

I don't want to drink this shit anymore. Let's quit. Egg protein's been really pleasant. Egg protein powder's fucking delicious if you get the right kind. You can develop allergies to anything. A lot of people have dairy allergies, and you may have just been starting to develop that or something. One thing I try to do is cut out

a lot of dairy. No, I'm trying to drop the weight a little bit. I cut out just about everything. Yeah, cutting dairy. Pretty much, if I'm trying to gain weight, I eat dairy. If I'm trying to drop the weight a little bit. I cut out just about everything. Yeah, cutting dairy. Pretty much, if I'm trying to gain weight, I eat dairy. If I'm trying to lose weight, I cut it out.

The only thing I drink, I mean, I'm going to put heavy cream or half and half of my coffee. Maybe tell me, oh, you also need to drop that.

Well, I wouldn't worry about that. I wouldn't worry about that. You're not touching my coffee habits. From what I've gathered about dairy and gaining weight or losing weight, it has more to do with the protein.

It doesn't have to do as much with the sugar or the fat. It has to do with the type of protein that has insulin growth. Well, I don't need insulin growth factors. I'm fucking 300 pounds. You're right. So you're probably eating less than 100 grams of protein a day and yeah so if you wanted to gain weight i told you a while back you'd probably need to shoot for at least a gram per pound of body weight yeah so would a suggestion like that does that kind of

scare you um honestly it doesn't scare me but i i kind of uh like eating that much as it would be a chore for me and i'm real comfortable with like you're eating nine cups of veggies for lunch no no no that's a fucking chore that's not that's not hard that's not hard for me but i mean but just eating more like i i'm i i don't like stuffing myself and like trying to gain weight it's just not fun well it's way people don't realize it myself and trying to gain weight. It's just not fun. People don't realize it's way harder to gain good quality weight than it is to lose weight. Oh, yeah. Anybody who's ever tried to gain weight knows, oh, shit, I don't want to do that. Most people have never had the experience both ways.

It's crazy, man. It's crazy. Eating like eight meals a day is just not happy and not conditions for sanity. It consumes your whole life and it's super expensive. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of why that's, I kind of have a system that I,

that I'm where I'm eating more protein and it's, it's like, you know, in the gym I'm getting stronger and I've made a lot of gains and stuff in the last year and I'm happy about it. So I don't know. I'm not against eating more protein. I'm just,

it's like kind of a chore. You're kind of in the habit of eating what you eat. Yeah. And that's good. Yeah. And why, why change? Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say on that note. It's kind of a chore. You're kind of in the habit of eating what you eat. Yeah. And that's good. Yeah. And why change? Yeah. Yeah.

I was going to say, on that note, if you've ever tried to aggressively lose weight and you have to cut your meals way, way, way down, you have all the time in the world. It's the easiest thing in the world to do. I only eat two, three times a day. Anytime I'm trying to get leaner, even if I'm eating as frequently, I'm not having to sit there and be like, all right, I got to get another spoonful in me. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember that feeling of looking at a plate of tuna and rice or something, you know, when I'm playing football or whatever, going, I would rather fucking die than finish this rice and meat concoction. I would rather just fucking die right now. That's how you know you are sick of eating. Force-fitting yourself.

I know, man. Like every bite, you have to, it comes up and down, up and down, you got to keep and hold it down and then like shake it off and then get back into the meal.

Oh, yeah. People just don't understand how hard that is. My most aggressive. It's great. You can eat whatever you want, whatever you want. It's great. I love gaining weight.

No, you just, that's complete foolishness. When my most aggressive time for gaining weight you want that's complete foolishness my most aggressive time for gaining weight was when I was in the Navy me and my buddies were all trying to gain weight together we'd stack our plates trays and make a mountain of food

and I've got probably the weakest appetite of anybody so I'm one of those hard gainers but I've pretty much narrowed down the fact that I've hung out and lived with people who are not hard gainers the only difference between me and them is they eat more like i simply people who are hard gainers that think they eat a lot they just have they don't have the appetite is what it is so i'm one of those people don't have that to have to force down so these guys would have to like cheer me on they'd be done with like their mountain of food i'm over there going you know i'm about to

i'm dry heaving even you even you now is interesting contrast to it's like me like i'm always amazed when you tell me what you eat i'm amazed when you fucking tell me what you just eat like all these vegetables i go well i just don't eat anything near that for those of you listening at home or watching uh i'm at 175 pounds and i think i eat more than chris moore does and my history my history i when i power lifted seriously competitively i was actually nationally competitive at it i was about 370 pounds at my peak and i was able to compete at a high level drug free by upping my body weight a lot i I mean, at the time, my squat was close to 1,000. I was pulling 700 and bench pressing 700 pounds.

I had to be very big. So I remember doing – I remember one of the things I did to get there was lots of shakes. And, like, one thing I did was put, like – I would go online to a beer brewing supply and get um oh it was uh i guess malto is extra powder or something i would put it in the shakes um plus banana protein heavy cream all this bullshit but that i just remember exploding in body i put on like i got through playing footballs like 285 290 um and then was up almost 100 pounds in like two years. So that, but now, right now I'm like about 300 pounds, and I might eat three to four eggs in the morning with a little bit of meat and like a half a grapefruit. I won't eat again until lunch.

I'll have a shake with spinach, two scoops of protein powder. I'll train, maybe have a shake, maybe won't. For dinner, I'll have meat and with spinach, two scoops of protein powder. I'll train, maybe have a shake, maybe won't. For dinner, I'll have meat and veggies, and that's all. I would starve to death on your diet. Yeah, but I don't lose that much. I could remain at 300 pounds, it's fine. My training volume's not super high, but I train pretty hard

three, four days a week. You tell me stories of eating a whole jar of almond butter. Fucking Christ! A whole jar of almond butter! Oh Christ. A whole jar of almond butter. Oh, yeah. And a dozen eggs a day. And a gallon of milk a day. And a package of bacon and a gallon of goat milk.

I'm like, what? That'd be 400 pounds. That's always amazing. Every time I hear that. You know, every time. For me, I go, well, half a grapefruit. I mean, way too much fruit. It's crazy. I'm a hard gainer like you yeah i could eat a ton and it wouldn't seems like the appetite's not there but yeah i'm just not that hungry i mean i eat till the protein doesn't

scare you it's just yeah i just eat till i'm satisfied and and you know it's like i've i actually did body for life when i was in college the body for life challenge yeah i took the before and after pictures genius oh yeah man they guys are brilliant but yeah i did it man i bought all their supplements i took the thing i did the three month deal and i put on about 15 pounds of muscle in three months and like you know but it all went away real fast it was all like artificial supplement gains it wasn't't really, it wasn't lasting. Well, if you wanted to gain muscle on his diet or on his program, you had to drink his shakes.

Yeah, I was drinking the shakes. But I was, you know, I was eating eight times a day. It was just like, it was one fun, you know. Yeah, well, you give up the essential balance in your life. Yeah. Yeah, if you want to gain weight and stuff like that, you have to make big swings. So, you know, I want to say I'm 175 on a weight of 185.

It's probably best for me to bump to 200, and I'll come back down to like 185. Yeah, I mean, balance is a big deal. That's why I always, I don't know why I thought of steroid use, but I ask people who, or I think about people who do it, and I go, if you're really driven to, to pursue something at the highest possible levels and especially in strength sports, or if you're a major league baseball player up until like the last two years, you're going to have to do that. Okay. You're just gonna have to do that. No questions asked some kind of performance enhancing agent, but always questions like, okay, for this, it always represents a

gross imbalance in your life though i think when you when you pursue one angle so heavily i think you have to always keep in mind the wisdom of training exercise nutrition into that if you sacrifice so much of other things to get the one thing and you overexpose one area of your life it's just not going to be sustainable you're not going to be happy in the long term yeah you're never gonna get fulfillment if you put 100 pounds your bench press from taking steroids you feel good for 10 seconds kind of like buying the new car and then you're just gonna be fucking unhappy with yourself it's like the reasons behind why you're doing something are terribly terribly important same goes for dot and everything else balance you're right man you said it whenever they do psychology studies on

on happiness people tend to be very poor at predicting what would make them happy uh two two well-known examples would be uh if you ask somebody what would make you happier getting an extra 30 grand a year or taking a 30 minute walk every day and everyone says no i want 30 grand and but whenever they do the studies on it people that take a 30 minute walk every day tend to be happier yeah with that change than the people that have the 30 grand. One thing that amazes me as you get older is you realize there's all these cliches you hear your whole life. The best one being, money doesn't equal happiness. And you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck, fuck, whatever, dude.

And the simplest things in life that are so critical are so hard to grasp and really... Didn't they basically show that money does equal happiness up to $75,000 a year? There was a study up to $75,000 per person. And people are really strange. And then it's diminishing returns. If it pulls you out of poverty, then yes. People are really strange.

And then also, if there's a guy making $500,000 at his job, he's exceptionally happy. If he knows he's making more or the same as people he works with, even if the average income in that area is $50,000 a year. But as soon as he knows his people he works with make $600,000 a year,

he's terribly unhappy. Humans are just fucking very predictable like that. It doesn't matter what it is. It's just got to be better than you, motherfucker. It's that tribe mentality. But I was also thinking about the issue of cliches and simple knowledge of balance and all that i read in this uh little book i was reading i think

the guy's name is bushido whatever like the way of the samurai um there's a little blurb in there about how the samurai fucking hated people who read too much because sometimes they Einstein was the same way they observed people who read too much were shameful because oftentimes they observed that they wouldn't assimilate what they read. They'd fucking read something and learn something and spout it off to somebody else. But didn't display the wisdom of assimilation to their life. It didn't manifest in a changed outlook. I think it's education without intuition. No action.

Yeah, you can tell somebody, oh, money doesn't equal happiness. Or X about your dot doesn't equal Z. And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, even if you're putting it to use for life. Everybody knows it's not a good idea to eat McDonald's three times a day, but they fucking do it. And everybody sees the obesity rates and figures and pictures of bellies wallowing across their screens on the nightly news. And they know, yeah, of course, being fat's bad and that I shouldn't eat McDonald's three times a day and I shouldn't smoke a pack of Marlboro. But they fucking keep doing it. One expression I like, actually, is learning is behavior change.

I think Whitewoods Small came up with that. I'm not sure about that. But basically, if you learn something and you can recite it to somebody, you didn't really learn it. If it changes your behavior on a daily basis, then you really learned it. You assimilated it into your life, and that's how you should define learning something. Yeah, yeah, and the object is not to get more and more information. It's like when people, uh,

incorporate very, very complex, overly, I'm as good as anybody, overly complicated views on training and exercise, you know, again, well,

more advanced athletes train more complicated way. If I train in a complicated way, visa V, whatever, I'll be fucking advanced. That's not what works. What works is understanding just how elegant and perfect a very simple approach to anything is. How fucking hard that is.

10,000 hours to master something. The Zen attitude. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Maybe that even applies to training. Maybe you need to do 10,000 hours worth of squats before you need to make it more complicated with bands and chains.

The cycle in my experience has been you start off very simple because you know shit. And you go through this cycle of learning more and more and more and getting more

and more complicated. You start realizing, well, I could do things a little different. Sooner or later, you arrive back at square one with all that knowledge and now you can really

get to the good parts, the gains yeah i know i know uh the black swan um i don't know i don't know if anyone else here's read that book anyway i don't know if you've read what i've read it's because i'm so so smart but uh that's a tough book you might want to go to the wikipedia page for the fucker that looks a little dry yeah you might want to read the synopsis but one thing what he cites some studies in there where he was talking about people who have

more knowledge about something specific. More knowledge equals more confusion. You're more likely to make a poor decision. Where like, the economists

that study the economy and who are on the news and all that kind of stuff, they actually have a poor... They actually have a... poor they actually have a them the pundits they score worse the fucking kids randomly picking shit right right right so they did a study where they were like they would ask taxi cab drivers in new york you know to predict the market and they were they were doing that compared to like these economists you know um and it came

to be that you'd have better luck getting your advice from a cab driver in New York than you would from whatever. And they actually talked about that in relation to doctors as well. He's talking about doctors who had all this... I forget how the study went on that one, how they actually found out,

but they were talking about doctors who were specialists are more likely to kill you than they would be to help you. Yeah think about like chris is like yeah yeah well think about um like like breast milk why is it a good idea to consume breast milk well it's a natural option and despite our our best i have a five-month-old at home mr max so this is always these issues are always at the forefront. But there's all this stuff in breast milk that we know intuitively is in there that's good for kids.

And it's perfectly designed for this kid to be consuming. And we know our best attempts to replicate breast milk, which is a $35 box of powder that is first ingredient is corn syrup solids. So, and we know,

I'm a fan of science. I think we have to entrust in it keep developing keep pushing to learn new things but i know that if we're treating something like cancer we know all the things that we're trying to throw at it to stop its progression or come up with very fancy analyses and chemical arrays of targeting and understanding what helps and what doesn't that's all essential like the work at St. Jude and everything. This is all incredibly essential. But at the same time, all of the shit that's in a leaf

or wild-caught Alaskan salmon, for instance, we know there's a certain amount of things in there. We understand that. We've worked very hard to understand that. But there's all this interaction and and and very fine detail that is way beyond our current ability to understand so that uh elegance and that complexity we we don't understand we know that just consuming it we get the benefit of it yeah so there's that that that component, that very savvy component.

I mean, you consume it, you get the benefit. It's that that's so much more effective than our best attempt at solving it. Yeah, that was actually one of the things we talked about in The Black Swan was if it works, just do it. You don't have to understand it, you know. And people go, oh, yeah, we should try it. Well, I mean, there's things that people think they understand very well. Economics or medicine.

Even things that we think are very well understood are actually just so much... Our ignorance doesn't allow us to see all the existing details that will probably go undiscovered for a long time. That was one of the main points that Michael Pollan made in Defense of Food.

He basically said that we don't even know what's, we don't know what we don't know, so we don't know what's in there that we don't know about. So if you just eat real raw food, then it'll handle the whole problem. Take a moment to think about just the history of this one planet. From the moment that plant-like cells and animal-like cells emerge from the ocean, populate it, and then go into land. Think of the advanced expanse of history.

And the amount of time that organisms battled against each other and battled against pollutants. Plants have absolutely amazing advanced chemical warfare tactics and all that stuff. So, I mean, there's been battles raging on between plants and plants, plants and animals. Bush part of that one? Bush? Yeah. Chemical warfare.

Oh, shut the fuck up. But think, absolutely hundreds of millions of years, battles have been raging. Defenses thrown up, offenses attacking those defenses. So it's all these things built into the biochemistry of a plant, for instance, to fight off other offensive agents. Your body, the things that fight off infection in your body, began this practice 100 million years ago in some simpler form. So it's that amount of time to develop very complicated defenses,

way more time and experience than the 500 years of decent science can hope to match. So that natural progression of complexity and defense mechanisms, you can take advantage of it just by eating more of it. I think it's a very very powerful concept to be aware of well that's you know it's funny because you guys are talking about simplicity and that's that's basically what my approach was because i ate the same thing every day you know like i'm a i'm a kind of i'm the kind of guy where it's like just show me what works and i'll just do that every day and you know as i researched like the phytonutrients and

bioflavonoids and and carotenoids like all these like micronutrients and food and especially the anti-cancer foods which the cruciferous family is like are some of the most powerful anti-cancer vegetables Brussels sprouts broccoli cauliflower Brussels sprouts are fucking amazing. All right, guys. So I wanted to eat those every day. That was the point. But just to follow up on that, you think, oh, there's shit in these vegetables that's good for you.

Well, think of how long it took for these vegetables to develop those chemicals. Phytonutrient is very powerful because it's been honed for a long time. So you have to take advantage of that incredible experience these plants harbor. I mean, their genetic history is vast, and you can harness it just by eating a fucking thing. have to take advantage of that incredible experience these plants harbor i mean their genetic history is vast and you can harness it just by eating the fucking thing yeah all right guys we're gonna have to wrap this up uh we'll bring chris work back again uh in the future because i think we've got several shows in there um yeah that went really quick uh yeah we spent a lot of time with really fast great conversation so we going to go around the room here and we're going to give our plugs.

I'll let Chris work go first. He's going to plug his website. I'm assuming. Yeah. Um, and I'll give a little, the brief history is about a year and a half ago. I decided, uh, I've been cancer free for eight years, which is not something I had said up until this point on this show. Um, and after seven years, uh, I was like, you know what?

I guess it's probably been long enough where I could feel comfortable sharing my story. I didn't want to put myself out there right away. Like, Hey, I'm beating cancer naturally, you know, after a year or something. Uh, you know, even though I believed it would work, there was still some doubts and I didn't want to kind of look at like an idiot. You didn't want to launch a blog about beating cancer and die of cancer. Yeah. So. Oh, oops, the cancer's back. It wouldn't be a round for it anyway, so whatever. Yeah, it wouldn't matter.

But anyway, so after seven years of being cancer free, I was like, you know what? I'm starting to feel compelled to share my story. So I started a blog called ChrisBeatCancer.com. And it has really kind of grown really fast because apparently, I mean, the whole point of the blog was just to share what I did and everything that I've learned about natural therapies and nutrition and how I beat cancer. And anyway, apparently a lot of people want to know that. So, you know, just the blog gets a lot of traffic. And what's the website name? It's chrisbeatcancer.com. chrisbeatcancer.com. And he won't say it because he's too modest, but check out his band Armistice of Credo. I really love those guys. ArmisticeofCredo dot bandcamp dot com.

Good stuff. Armistice of Credo? Yeah. I do play guitar and sing in a band. I guess Chris's band was like CTP's favorite local band or something. And then Chris had been training at the gym and then CTP

discovered it and was like, oh my gosh, I think you started bowing. Dude, we're not worthy. It was just weird because we'd been friends, but I didn't know that he was the guy in the band that I liked that whole time. Yeah, it was super small world stuff. But the band's called Arma Secreta.

It's Portuguese for secret weapon, right? Arma Secreta. Cock reference? for secret weapon. Arma Secreta. Cock reference? That's my plug. Alright, Chris Moore, what's your plug? I share some thoughts on the chrismoreplug.com.

Humble listeners. Go there and read some stuff. Alright, Dougie. TechniqueWOD.com is basically just a video blog for our member base at Faction Strength and Conditioning where we talk about basic exercise technique for any and all crossfit exercises, weightlifting, gymnastics, and the like.

TechniqueWOD.com. You can learn good stuff there. Boy, I tell you, if you want to learn how to correct your pull, go to TechniqueWOD.com. If you want good stuff there. Well, I tell you, if you want to learn how to correct your pull, go to TechniqueWide.com. If you want to see me learn stuff there, you can. All right, guys.

I'm going to plug Fitter TV. So this is Barbell Shrug. This is one of the shows that we're hosting there. You want to spell Fitter TV? I probably should. That is F-I-T-R dot TV. All right? So there's no E in there.

Kind of like Tumblr. Isn't it cool? Isn't that different and creative? I don't know who came up with that. It's pretty hip. You did. Oh, yeah. Give you credit, boss man.

Actually, I don't know. Well, maybe you didn't. I think it was me. It was Doug. Doug's the one. I was like, I'm not really sure who came up with it. Doug came up with Fitter.TV. Mike came up with Incrediblur.

Incrediblur.com. Mike fucking came up with Bar? Doug came up with fitter.tv. Mike came up with Incrediblur. Incrediblur.com. Mike fucking came up with Barbell Shrugged. And Chris Moore did come up with Barbell Shrugged. Genius. Team effort here, folks.

Peace. So, check out all the videos. Holla. See you next week. That was awesome. You just gotta get an aircon off the bench.

Yeah.