Dhru Purohit Show - Can We Starve Cancer Cells Using the Ketogenic Diet, Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, and Resistance Training?

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge and Cowboy Colostrum. For decades, we’ve been told that cancer is mostly a genetic disease—something determined by fate or random mutations. But what if that’s only part of the story? What if, instead, cancer is deeply tied to how our cells produce and use energy? ​​Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re revisiting one of our most talked-about moments with Dr. Dominic D’Agostino. He shares how and why the ketogenic diet can be therapeutic for cancer, why maintaining optimal blood glucose levels is essential before using hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and how exercise and lean muscle mass play a powerful role in both prevention and treatment. Dr. Dominic D’Agostino is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, Molecular Pharmacology & Physiology, where he develops and tests metabolic therapies, including alternative energy substrates and ketogenic agents for neurological disorders, cancer, and wound healing. While studying the effects of gases on the brains of Navy SEAL divers, he developed an approach for metabolically starving cancer cells through diet and compressed oxygen, replacing chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. D’Agostino dive into: Why a ketogenic diet can be therapeutic (2:21) Lowering blood glucose to the optimal range (13:32) Exploring the potential role of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in cancer care (15:44) The role of exercise and muscle in cancer prevention (20:01) Final thoughts and takeaways (23:18) Also mentioned: Full episode with Dominic D'Agostino Try This: How Exercise Helps Fight Cancer This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge and Cowboy Colostrum. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off. Just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use code DHRU to save 15%. Right now, Cowboy Colostrum is offering my listeners 25%. Just go to CowboyColostrum.com/DHRU and use code DHRU to save 25% today.  Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Proyd. You know, for a long time, when it came to the conversation of cancer, we've heard that it's mostly genetic. Case close, story shut, or just bad luck. But what if there's more to the story? What if there's actually more in our control than we were ever told? In today's episode, we're diving into a powerful idea that's starting to gain some real traction. The notion that cancer may actually be a disease that is heavily connected to metabolic dysfunction. This concept championed by researchers like Dr. Thomas Seafried and explored in today's segment for my conversation with Dr. Dominic DiAgostino challenges the conventional view by looking at how muscle, metabolism, and mitochondria intersect with the latest research on cancer biology

and metabolic therapies. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Dominic DiAgostino. He's an assistant professor at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, molecular pharmacology, and physiology, where he develops and tests metabolic therapies, including alternative energy substrates and ketogenic agents for neurologic disorders, cancers, and wound healing. While studying the effect of gases on the brains of Navy-sealed divers, Dr. DiAgostino also developed an approach for metabolically starving cancer cells through an experimental approach

using primarily hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Again, this is an experimental approach primarily shown in the lab, but in our conversation today, we discuss how the ketogenic diet, resistance training, and even hyperbaric oxygen therapy could play a role in changing

the metabolic environment of the body and helping us starve cancer cells of the fuel they rely on while supporting healthy cells at the same time. We also touch on the role of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in amplifying the effects of therapy, ketosis and why muscle mass is one of the most overlooked tools in improving cancer outcomes.

If you're looking to understand cancer through the lens of metabolic health and how we might empower the body to fight more intelligently in the future through these novel and experimental therapies, my conversation with Dr. DiAgostino is going to be both eye-opening and incredibly empowering. Let's jump into our featured segment from our past conversation with Dr. Dominic DiAgostino. Remind our audience, why is... it that the ketogenic diet could be potentially therapeutic in this setting of cancer in the first place? Like, what is unique about that diet and the environment that it creates or helps

avoid inside of the body that could be therapeutic when it comes to cancer specifically? Yeah, probably would have been good to start there. Yeah. But so there's multiple reasons for that. I guess I would take a step back and, like, you know, the ketogenic. Diet has been used for epilepsy. Dr. Wilder validated its use at Mayo Clinic in 1921, so over 100 years of use. We didn't know why it worked. We just, you know, mimic the physiological state of fasting and changed our metabolic physiology.

And changing metabolic physiology changes the neuropharmacology of the brain, changes the fuel that the brain uses, too. And that had a profound anti-seizure effect and still has a. the greater anti-convulsant effect than any other drug, probably, that we know of. Actually, it's, you know, when all drugs fail, kids are put on a ketogenic diet and it works. So that's sort of a validation, you know, it's work. So the ketogenic diet works. And when I met Thomas Seyreed, he was like, oh, yeah, the diet works great for epilepsy,

but it actually works better for cancer. Like if they did clinical trials for cancer, it would have better. And I think there's been five or six RCTs. on the ketogenic diet already. I heard someone mentioned 13, but maybe I need to update myself, but there's been a number of randomized controlled trials with the ketogenic diet, typically using like a shake, like a liquid ketogenic diet, like keto cal. So for cancer, what the diet does is it lowers glucose availability.

So a ketogenic diet is high fat, moderate protein, and essentially no carbohydrates. It clinically formulated. So you limit glucose availability. to the tumor where tumors have have ramped up their metabolism to use glucose as an energy source, but also to biosynthesize molecules, right? For the expanding biomass of the tumor, glucose is shuttled into biosynthetic pathways and lipids too. So you have limiting glucose availability and also you create ketones by suppressing the hormone insulin. When you fast or when you go on a ketogenic diet, your insulin levels drop.

And because insulin drops, that stimulates your body to metabolize fat. And the liver metabolizes fat at an accelerated rate and elevates acetylCoA and other metabolites that feed into the ketogenicis pathway. So the liver generates ketones, beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate, and then they go into circulation. the liver is not very good at using ketones as an energy source. It lacks succineal coate transferease. Interestingly, many cancer cells also lack this enzyme that allows for the generation of ATP.

So succinctiol coa transferase is limited in the liver because the liver is the site of ketone production. It doesn't suck up. It gets enough nutrients by other means by storing glycogen and things like that. But the ketones spill in circulation. and then the ketones are not only an energy source to the brain and peripheral tissues, but the ketones are like a hormone. So there's like a ketone receptor, right?

The GPR 109A receptor. So they have anti-inflammatory effects. They have epigenetic effects through different seretuan enzymes. They impact the levels of neurotransmitters. the beta-hydroxybutyrate, the primary ketone body, directly interacts with the histones to actually create epigenetic effects. This is called beta-hydroxibuterolation or kind of studying it in the lab. And these epigenetic effects are sort of cellular,

offer cellular protection. They have antioxidant effects when they're activated, like superoxide dysmutase and catalase get elevated in healthy cells. So a ketogenic diet, It rapidly shifts your systemic physiology to compromise growth and proliferation of the tumor. And then it elevates ketone bodies, which is a fuel source that arguably, some people may argue, is not a fuel for cancer cells. I think some cancer cells may be able to use the ketones for biosynthesis.

But because, you know, in particular, aggressive cancer that has damaged respiration, mitochondrial respiration, would just by default, because of the damaged mitochondria, would not be able to use the cancer cells efficiently as a fuel source. I think generally most people would agree with that, even people that are not super familiar with that, that cancer cells are transformed in a way where they have aberrant mitochondrial function and have more or less defaulted to a glycolytic and substrate level of phosphorylation sort of metabolism. So that's like some of the key points. And I do think the anti-inflammatory effects, too, that ketones have. And then just simply being able to protect normal tissues have an important function of someone's going through the standard of care too. And I think Dr. Adrian Sheck has shown some data where, you know, you give animals,

you know, radiation, like whole brain radiation in a state of ketosis. And it doesn't like have any negative or severely attenuates the, the consequences from radiation. So, by it's protecting the normal healthy cells. But in the context, therapeutic ketosis is cancer killing and helps to enhance the efficacy of radiation therapy and probably chemotherapy too, but I think we haven't really sufficiently studied that. And at the same time, it's protecting the normal healthy cells. So that's like an important, you know, when we view it at.

As an adjuvant therapy, I think that needs to be appreciated. But everybody that's kind of in this field once the big vision is to create a comprehensive, metabolic-based therapy that can avoid the use of toxic therapies. And I think that's going to be reality maybe in the next decade. But it's going to take some time. That's super. That's super exciting. When it comes to, again, going back to this idea, for those that haven't seen the past episodes. But Thomas Seyfrey, he broke down his press pulse protocol. Later on, we had a case study,

again, just a case study, featured of an individual that was working with the Hippocrates Research Foundation. The gentleman's name was Den Stacy. And like a lot of people that work with the Hippocrates Research Foundation, who was, you know, Thomas Seafried would often refer people to. It's a nonprofit, kind of offices based out of Texas and California, who sort of just out of the kindness of their own heart. They don't charge or anything. They kind of guiding people through this. How do you go through the press pulse protocol? Where do you find hyperbaric? You know, how do you navigate all this stuff? What questions should you be asking your doctor? That's kind of a lot of the work that they do. One of the things that they were talking about in their podcast that we all had

together is that they were saying that specifically when it comes to, you know, cancer, you are trying to use the ketogenic diet as a very sort of. of technical approach to get the blood glucose into the optimal range that Safe Freed had highlighted in his book. Because it's when the blood glucose is, I think it said, you would know better than me, but it's like 70 around 70 is where the blood glucose would be somewhere 65, 70. Is that accurate? Let's be real.

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D-H-R-U with the code D-H-R-U, Drew, that's me. And don't forget to tell them our show sent you. Yeah, in a fasting state or a mildly restricted therapeutic ketogenic diet, it'll bottom out in most people between like 65 and like 75. And then, you know, if I do some certain activities, it may dip down into the 50s. But generally speaking, there's very powerful homeostatic mechanisms that maintain normal blood glucose. So it's difficult for many people to get, especially when they're stressed out and going through cancer therapies, to get their glucose even under like 90 or 100 under certain conditions, especially if these patients are using corticosteroids like Dexamethosone or even chemotherapy will elevate blood glucose.

So this becomes a tricky scenario. So actually, we're very focused on developing easy ways to lower blood glucose. And one way to do that is exogenous ketones have a profound glucose lowering effect, like much more than something like metformin. So we develop strategies that could be. rapidly implemented to dramatically lower the glucose ketone index, which is the level of glucose over ketones in millie-muller concentrations. No, that's super helpful.

Yeah, that makes total sense. And thank you for jumping in and sharing that because just to complete what I was sharing is that when Dan was on the podcast with his team at Hippocrates Research, who are not, you know, they are medical doctors, but they were not his medical doctors. They were more just guiding and making him aware of all the research that was highlighted in Thomas Safe Foods book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease on the origin and management of cancer prevention. What I understood from their team was that to get into that like 65, 70 range right before you go into hyperbaric, which Dan was doing, again, a case study. This wasn't some big trial. three times a week, that sort of put the pressure in a way on the cancer cells that they were more,

they were more going to be. It sensitizes them. Yeah. Sysit them to hyper-haired. Is that a correct understanding in the way that I understood what they were doing? Yeah, for sure. You know, I'll actually kind of take a little bit of a step back to our lab research. And when I observed the cancer cells kind of, you know, exploding under.

high pressure oxygen. I was like, okay, let's just take rats and put them in hyperbaric oxygen with tumors and see what happens. When we did this on a standard diet, you know, in a group of like six to maybe eight to 10, we didn't see a statistically significant increase in the tumor growth. There was a trend for less tumor, like smaller tumors. You know, and if we powered it up to like 20 or 30 mice, it probably would have been statistically significant.

But a key to hyperbaric oxygen. with the standard diet alone has a very mild anti-cancer effect, at least in the model that we're working on. Actually, other people have shown in Germany and other countries have shown that hydroelectric oxygen as a standalone in different models to shrink tumors. But we did not see that. But when we coupled it, like you're saying, the ketogenic diet by virtue of limiting glucose availability, suppressing the hormone insulin, elevating ketones, and also,

I don't want to go too much into redox biochemistry because that's what I used to teach and it can get kind of technical. But there's certain pathways that are significantly attenuated that knock down the defense mechanisms of cancer cells. Like one pathway is your listeners is the pentose phosphate pathway, for example. That generates reduced glutathione. And then that is very, very robust in cancer cells. But cancer cells need a lot of glucose to ramp up that. defense mechanism. And what the ketogenic diet does is it cripples that defense mechanism and makes the tumor

selectively vulnerable to oxidative stress modalities. And that could be, you know, hyperbaric oxygen therapy at the maximum, you know, concentration ideally. And then also being in a state of ketosis makes hyperbaric oxygen therapy much safer, uh, meaning that you won't get oxygen toxicity, which can occur in the CNS as a seizure or in the pulmonary system, right? So, I mean, that's what we studied. That's actually led us down this path,

is this observation that you could increase resilience to five atmospheres of oxygen, which is like super toxic, right, up to 600%. So that was one of our first publications with a ketone ester. It was a particular ketonester was very, very effective neuroprotection, anti-seizure. Then we ultimately used that ketogenic supplement in our cancer studies.

So it had an anti-cancer effect. Yeah. So, yeah, a long-winded way of just saying that, you know, therapeutic ketosis sensitizes the tumor and also makes hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And we think the standard of care much, much safer and much more highly efficacious. Yeah, super important. And, you know, why I've been wanting to have you on and talk to a lot of people in the space and, you know, say, we highlighted this in this podcast with us is that,

I think it's very important while people are aware of these emerging modalities, these new ways, some of the research that's around them, what has been research, what has been research, what has and hasn't been researched, it's important to not walk away from some of these interviews and think, oh, just the, you know, just reducing sugar or just being on the ketogenic diet alone without knowing all the ins and alice and the technicalities could be beneficial. It may be, it may not be. The people that are talking about it are talking about really approaching this in a very technical way. And I would consider you to be one of them.

So it's not to discourage people, but it's more to say that just this idea that you're going to walk away and just go on some random ketogenic guide that you're going to piece me all together. And that's going to be how you're going to approach cancer is not what anybody is recommending, right? And that's not what you're talking. It's really talking about a more mechanistic approach and working with a team. including standard of care to approach it. You know, something you mentioned earlier that you said doesn't get enough attention, and I'd love to put a spotlight on it, is this idea of exercise and specifically exercise in the aspect of maintaining lean muscle mass

and the protective element that comes along with that for people, both who are dealing with cancer and are kind of working through the standard of care, but also in helping us potentially mitigate our risk of getting cancer in the future. Let's chat about that for a second. Why is it important and why hasn't it got as much attention as it should have got it? Should be getting. Yeah, well, I'm glad you're bringing attention to that. I do think exercise is an equal or maybe even a more powerful metabolic therapy than the ketogenic diet.

That could be a stretch because the ketogenic diet profoundly changes metabolism. but it's very powerful. And I also think that it could couple well with the ketogenic diet and even synergistic, like one in one equals three kind of scenario, right? So when you're in a state of ketosis, if you couple that with resistance training to build lean body mass that dramatically enhances your metabolic health, skeletal muscle is the most important glucose sink.

So when we have more of it and that skeletal muscle is metabolically conditioned, It essentially functions as a massive glucose sink to limit glucose availability to the tumor. It also increases insulin sensitivity. So we could essentially have far lower circulating insulin and be able to dispose of the glucose. And then there's exercise mediated glucose uptake independent of the glutford transporter or it helps to translocate the transporter. So it's a long-witted way of saying that your metabolic health significantly improves. in the direction that will dramatically improve cancer outcomes, right, when we exercise. And I think that and we don't say, you know, it's hard to get mice to like deadlift and

squat and exercise. I guess you can put them on a running wheel, right? But I mean, I guess I just gravitate towards like resistance training. But there are quite a few studies just look up exercising cancer and also human clinical, randomized, controlled studies with, for example, Breast Cancer. Just go on PubMed, look up like breast cancer, exercise, outcomes. Like, it's remarkable. I don't know why more people are not talking about this. I need to talk about it more, to be honest. I wish there was an easier way to study it, but we always, of course, we need the funding to do it. But we would love to couple metabolic-based drugs, ketogenic therapies, hyperbaric oxygen, and put these mice on exercise, you know, protocols. And I think, I think in that scenario, we could probably cure the VMM, three model of metastatic cancer when we do all this together. And also, I mean, Tom is very adamant about targeting glutamine as so glucose and glutamine can fuel cancer and I think we're

looking at different ways to do that too. But yeah, exercise, that conversation needs to happen. And we need to have more high-level funded investigators studying exercise as a metabolic therapy and also impacts the immune system too. I hope you found today's episode to be as empowering as I did, illustrating how everyday choices from what we eat to how we move and how we manage stress can help shape the metabolic environment of our body and potentially help us lower our risk or even fight cancer more effectively. And that said, it's worth repeating that nothing in this conversation is meant to replace medical advice,

especially for individuals currently undergoing cancer treatment. Rather, the goal here is to equip you with information and knowledge and hope about what's coming down the pipeline. As Dr. DiAgostino's research is helping us reframe cancer, not only as just a genetic disease, but also as a metabolic disease, one that may be vulnerable to the ways we fuel and move our bodies. And if you'd like to hear our full conversation with Dr. DiAgostino, today's segment was just a clip, but the full conversation is in the show notes. There's a link for that. That interview, which we've linked to in the show notes, also covers more on the most innovative approaches to treating cancer, as well as Dr. DiAgostino's thoughts on a low-carb diet and the

therapeutic benefits of ketosis and how to measure for it and so much more. And I've also included a link into the show notes to my try this newsletter that dives deeper into the topic of how and why exercise can help in preventing cancer. This is something that is well documented in the literature and we cover that in our newsletter and it's free and available for you in the show notes below. And as always, if there's someone in your life who could benefit from this information, please share this episode with them. Until next time, thanks so much for tuning in.