Mark Bell's Power Project - Thomas Seyfried on Cancer, Ketosis, Mitochondria & the Metabolic Theory of Disease

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

In this episode, Mark Bell and Nsima talk with Professor Thomas Seyfried to discuss his metabolic theory of cancer, why he believes mitochondrial dysfunction is at the root of chronic disease, and how nutrition, exercise, and metabolic health may influence cancer risk and outcomes.Dr. Seyfried breaks down his views on glucose, glutamine, ketosis, fasting, GKI, obesity, processed foods, inflammation, and why he believes the current medical system is missing the bigger picture when it comes to prevention and management.Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!

The American Cancer Society has just come out recently with their projections for 2026, and it's the worst it's ever been. The origin of cancer comes from mitochondrial dysfunction. Once you understand what I know about cancer, you're going to look back and say, this is the greatest tragedy in the history of medicine. When your body is in a state of nutritional ketosis, these cancer-killing drugs and managing drugs work so much better. Some people would rather die than not eat sugar.

The National Cancer Institute on their website clearly says that cancer is a genetic disease. Others have clearly shown it's not a genetic disease. If we get cancer patients, like some of these pancreatic cancer patients, they're being poisoned to death. There's no question about it. All right, I'm here. It's so great to have me on the show today. We're excited.

Can you guys hear me all right? You can hear, absolutely hear you. Yes, sir. Okay. Well, thank you guys for having me today. It's a real pleasure. My name is Mark, and his name is Encema. Encema.

Nice meeting you. Were you guys on the West Coast? You're out in California somewhere? We're in Sacramento. I believe you're in Boston, right? Yeah, with snow and rain. Oh, shit. Yeah, a lot.

You got to stay in shape to be shoveling around here. That's the whole thing here. You know, my back is killing me from all the heavy snow we've been lifting. Oh, I bet. I've been friends with Ron Penna for many years. Do you know the name Ron Penna? Yeah, sure. Sanctuary and so on.

Yeah, he had the keto pet sanctuary there for a while. He was running that with Daniel and a couple other guys. Oh, yeah, Daniel O'Rego and Dominic Degistino, right? Yeah, all friends of mine. All right, well, let's just dive in. Maybe you can just tell us flat out, like, what the heck is cancer? And maybe, like, what we're misinterpreting about cancer since it seems like it's on the rise and it seems like we can't really make a dent in it quite yet.

No, you're right about that. It's really tragic at the highest levels. The American Cancer Society has just come out recently with their projections for 2026, and it's the worst it's ever been. So every year it gets worse. But this year, particularly we have had, since 2013, we've had a 7% increase in the number of dead people.

millions. And what we are projecting this year is 626,000 people will project it to die this year in 26, which comes to about interruptors for once. I apologize. I don't mean to cut you off. But I think people are immediately thinking like with the rise, like, does that have anything to do with the COVID vaccines? I'm not sure. I'll talk about that. But what we're seeing is, as I said, about 1,700 people a day, which comes out to about 70 people an hour. It's hard to predict if the COVID vaccines were responsible for this. The reason I say that is because we have direct evidence that the virus itself can damage and influence mitochondria. And, you know, a lot of people, because all the origin of cancer comes from mitochondrial dysfunction.

We've shown that. Many others have shown that. The problem is if the COVID virus itself can damage mitochondria. And many people who've taken the vaccine have also had COVID, myself included. It's hard to know if I were to get cancer, whether it would be. from the vaccine or from the COVID itself. And scientists have not yet separated those two. Yes, there are, it seems to be a rise.

It's not clear whether it's a combination of one, the other, or the two of them together. And that will have to wait to find that out later on. And what is cancer? Cancer is simply defined as cell division out of control or disregulated cell growth or division. That's the simple definition. So you have some cells in your body in a particular organ that start to grow in a dysregulated way, no longer responding to the inhibitory factors that would normally keep most normal cells under growth control. So there's a out of control, and we have clearly linked that back to a chronic disruption of the ability of our mitochondria in the cells to regulate the growth.

characteristics of the cells. And I believe a lot of your work has to do a little bit more on the metabolism side. I think it was originally thought that cancer was a little bit more of a genetic component to it. But if it is a metabolism, if it is more of a metabolic disease, how does metabolic disease show up in somebody who's so young sometimes? Yeah, well, we have, that's a good question because we have an obesity epidemic. Obesity is replacing smoking as a number one risk factor. We have an obesity epidemic even in the young people in our society. We have an emergence of these forever chemicals that are permeating through our food chains. You put that together. There's never really one thing that we have found that contributes to chronic disruption of energy

metabolism in the mitochondria. It's a combination of things. Chemicals, lack of sleep, poor diet, food, highly processed carbs, systemic inflammation. You put all that together and you become at high risk for dysregulated cell proliferation, which is cancer. You know, I know we are focused on people in the United States when it comes to this, but is there anywhere in the world currently that seems to have somewhat maybe of a flat line in terms of cancer incidence or even potentially a decrease or is it just an increase worldwide? That's a good question. It's an increase worldwide in those individuals that follow the great American diet and lifestyle.

That was our greatest contribution to world health was our diet and lifestyle. So it's right. I mean, let's be honest. But years ago and even today, the great humanitarian physician, Albert Schweitzer, studied tribes in Africa and other countries that lived according to their traditional ways and rarely did they have cancer. Cancer entered into their societies as soon as Western diets and lifestyle entered into the society. So we as a species have been around for a long time in Paleolithic hundreds of thousands a years ago. And these folks who lived according to their traditional ways, and we know that because people that do that today rarely have cancer.

it's very uncommon to find cancer, either in wild animals or people who lived according to their traditional ways. So clearly, in the old days, and I'm talking hundreds of thousands a years ago, four or five hundred thousand, the cause of death was predominantly infections and injuries. It wasn't chronic disease, diabetes and cancer and cardiovascular and all this kind of stuff that we, that we're currently experiencing today. So clearly, and it's getting worse because we have less. activity or level of activity. You think what it was to be a paleolithic man,

regardless of what continent you lived on, you had to have a lot of exercise. You were eating all organic foods, natural foods that would be very low. You didn't have access to highly processed carbs. So you put all that together in our society today. And we have this explosion not only of cancer, but also chronic diseases, diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, dementia. All of these are linked to the same root cause, which is mitochondrial dysfunction. Our mitochondria in the cell controlled the destiny of our existence on the planet. They determine when a cell should divide and when it should arrest.

When that organelle becomes corrupted, then cells start dividing out of control, fed by what we have defined as two fuels, the sugar glucose and the amino acid glutamine. As long as the cancer cells have access to those fuels, they will continue to grow. And there's no trial in the world right now that's simultaneously targeting those two fuels while transitioning the body over to nutritional ketosis, which is how we evolved in a state of nutritional ketosis. And that's kind of what you recommend, right? try to get people on like almost like a ketogenic style diet.

And then I believe some of the parasite drugs can target glutamate? Glutamine. Yeah, yeah. So, so, you know, here's the situation that the cancer cells are locked into energy without oxygen. And that's called fermentation. And both the sugar glucose and the amino acid glutamine can both be fermented. Our big, big discovery in this cancer field was the fermentation. of glutamine. The field still has not come to understand that. They think it's...

In the stomach or the gut? Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in our body. So we need glutamine for the immune system, for our gut, yes. We need that amino acid. But the cancer cell also has a rapacious appetite for that same amino acid. And they ferment it along with glucose. So these two fuels are supercharged, supercharging the abnormal growth and proliferation of the cell, of cells, cancer cells. And you have to also realize that nutritional ketosis is when glucose is low and ketone bodies are elevated. And that's how we evolved. We were always in a semi-state of ketosis, except during periods of time when fruit was ripe

and you eat a lot of berries and fruit, that would elevate blood sugar. and reduce ketones. But other than that, we were always in a semi-state of ketosis, just like Dom DiAgostino. My friend Dom is always in a semi-state of ketosis. He kills and eats alligators and squirrels. And he's actually like paleolithic man in modern society, right? So, and he measures these parameters all the time.

And so I always ask him. I said, you know, we developed this called the glucose ketone index calculator, which will eventually become the standard by which we manage all these chronic diseases and in both management and prevention. And Dom tells me, oh, I'm always in like, you know, a GKI value of about five, between five and ten. And we're coming out with a, with a big paper, it's a lead article in the journal Frontiers and Science that will allow the population to know, the world population, to know at any given time what zone of health they're in by looking at their GKI. So this paper will be coming.

You can use it to both prevent cancer and chronic disease if you don't have cancer and chronic disease. Or if you have cancer and chronic disease, you get down into a lower GKI and you can manage it. With respect to the parasite medications, we have found, through our own research here at Boston College, that M. Bendazol and Fennbendazol are targeting the same metabolic pathway that the cancer cell, uses. A lot of people make a mistake and say cancer is a parasite. No, no, no, cancer is not a parasite. Parasite is a totally different organism. But what the parasite and cancer do, they use the glutamine fermentation pathway similarly. So when I saw people, oh, we can kill parasites with these medications, I tried it on the cancer. And of course, it kills the cancer cells as well,

especially when the body is in nutritional ketosis. It's like a super, just blast these tumor cells. The problem is people don't know about this. And when you talk to people, they never heard of these kinds of things. So we know very well how to manage cancer, how to prevent cancer. It's just that it takes time for the word to get out and for the science to be understood. You just mentioned manage and prevent. So this actually makes me curious with the fendendazole and the other medication that you mentioned, along with nutritional ketosis.

Are there trials or are there studies or have these things been put into practice to help people get rid of cancer and this is already working in the field? Well, to be honest with you, they do try some of this singularly. The problem with what we have today is we've been forced by the system to do clinical trials, which is a singular agent, a double-blind crossover. When you use a singular agent like Mbendazol or a parasite medication, the probability of it having a powerful effect is not as great as it would be if the patient were in nutritional ketosis when you use the drug. That's what we're our whole big thing. Let me tell you something. We have clinics around the world that are testing all this stuff as we speak. No big clinical trials, only because we're still in the early stages of working out what we should do and how to do it.

I do all the preclinical work here at Boston College to test everything before we put it into people. But we have people in different parts of the country, world, who are using various parasite drugs together with the, once the patient is in a state of nutritional ketosis, their body is primed to have these drugs work as very powerful agents. Even chemotherapy we're finding, you can use one-half to one-third the dose of a toxic chemo. and have it work even better when the patient is in nutritional ketosis, thereby reducing toxicity, allowing the patient to survive far, far longer with a higher quality of life. So when we use some of these drugs, you know, using them by the, let me give you an example. There's a drug called divimistat, CPI-613. It was for pancreatic cancer.

It targets a metabolic pathway. But when they used it in clinical trial on humans, it was, too toxic and they had to stop the trial. So we looked at that drug in our pre-clinical models here and it was for pancreatic cancer and we used it for cancer management exactly as they said for humans and in the mouse and it was too toxic and it was killing the mice. So we got the same result and then we said, well, we never do that. We always put the mouse in a state of nutritional ketosis first and then we give the drug. And the drug was unbelievably powerful without toxicity. as long as you put the patient or the mouse in this case in nutritional ketosis.

We don't have to use the highest concentration of drug. We use just tiny amounts of these drugs. When your body is in a state of nutritional ketosis, these cancer-killing drugs and managing drugs work so much better. They're so powerful. The problem is the system doesn't allow it because they have standards of care written in granite that allow no level of flexibility. So these poor cancer patients are brutalized by a system that does not

allow flexibility to adjust dosages, timing, scheduling, or putting patients in nutritional ketosis. Many oncology clinics think diet has nothing to do with cancer. They try to feed glucose, high doses of glucose to the cancer patient, to put weight on. I'm sorry. I mean, it's tragedy. Once you understand what I know about cancer, you're going to look back and say, this is the greatest tragedy in the history of medicine. Do anabolic steroids or growth hormone or things like that, do they exacerbate cancer? Do they speed things up? I've heard people say things like that in the past.

I think only if they raise glucose or glutamine. Anything that would raise glucose or glutamine has the potential to do that. We have not yet tested or looked at that in my preclinical study, so I can't specifically answer that. All we know is that when we raise glutamine levels and we raise glucose levels, The tumors are growing very rapidly. What are things that make glutamine levels go higher? Actually, taking glutamine.

People take it from muscle building and stuff like this. Now, if you don't have cancer, there's no problem. You can build muscle by taking glutamine. I mean, if you're not suffering from cancer, then this is okay. And your gut health and all these other things. But if you were to have cancer and you were chugging down a liquid that had glutamine and glucose in it, and we've tested that. We have a paper out on it.

We show that how it can make cancers grow faster. So clearly, it depends on what level of health you're in. I mean, we don't say don't take... Glutamine is already super high in our bloodstream. It's there to protect us from infections and diseases because our immune system cells need glutamine to fight invasion of bacteria. And burn patients, when they're burned, they have to take very high levels of glutamine because the cells in our body, you're now open to.

bacteria coming into your body and the macrophages and immune cells use glutamine to kill the bacteria. So again, this metabolite must be viewed cautiously. It can either be help you or it can hurt you if you don't know what to do and how to do it. It's some of my understanding that some ways to get your mitochondria to be, you know, more efficient is through things like deuterium depletion. Have you like looked into that? much is there you know i think this on i think it can help to deplete deuterium i think we are inside way more than we used to be i think it's like almost reversed on how much time we spend inside versus outside i know there's deuterium depleted water and so on are things that you've seen to have

to move the needle at all or yeah we know we were given a bunch of detritium depleted water and we were all drinking drinking it you know and didn't have any effect uh we we we did any know noticeable effect like you would drink in any water. And we put it on some cells in culture and it had no killing capability. So the answer is I have no clue. All I know is if you're allowing the glucose and glutamine to be available, the tumor cells are going to remain growing. It's going to be hard to kill them. That's what we do know.

And we've tested that over and over again. As far as the detritium depleted water, I can't really speak to. I haven't seen anything that would draw my attention to say this was really important. You know, whenever cancer is talked about, there are some very bold people that are health influencers that will say certain things like, this prevents cancer, et cetera. And you did mention level of prevention. The question I have is that you mentioned that when people get cancer, it can be a stack of things, right? So eating a lot of sugary foods, you're sedentary, you've been doing this for a long time, maybe you're not getting good sleep, which also increases that

stress on the mitochondria and boom this happens well what would be the opposite potential cancer prevention lifestyle and nutritional stack that one would try to think about for themselves and the way that they live yeah well that's now you're going back and saying can we live like we were in paleolithic periods when you when you when you see that dog walking through your backyard he's a meal You know, I mean, the squirrels are gone and all the raccoons are gone. You know, every kind of a can of a geese, you see them all over, you know, they're gone. So, but no, to be honest with you, as I said, we're coming out with a color-coded chart that allows you to put your body into these nutritional states. and you prick your finger and you use the glucose strip and the ketone strip and a meter that

right now it's the keto mojo meter. There's a number of meters right now for measuring glucose and ketones. Only keto mojo has them incorporated into a single, you push the button and you immediately get your GKI. And it's hard to get cancer when your GKI zones are like 20 in the 20s, 10 to 20, 30, Let me just say that's a state of mitochondrial metabolic health. It's very hard to get cancer when your mitochondria are in a state of metabolic health. Before today, before our paper, there was no quantitative measure to know whether or not your mitochondria were in a state of metabolic health.

It was guesswork. People can say, oh, I'm on a ketogenic diet. I said, what's your GKI? I don't know. I never measured it. Well, we're going to allow people to measure their GKIs and know exactly where they are. Now, if you want me to tell you something, many members of our society are in the deep red zone, which is where you're damaging your mitochondria. And that's why we have the obesity epidemic, the chronic disease epidemic. And we're going to know when you're in those deep red zones and how long you want to stay in the deep red zone. All of this is personal choice.

If people want to eat large amounts of carbohydrate, process carbs, don't exercise, don't sleep well, they're going to be in the deep red zone. And how long you want to stay in that zone. And the body is unbelievable. Some people live in that zone for 20 or 30, 40 years before they get cancer. It's unbelievable. But at least you have the choice now to know, I want to leave this zone and move into one of these other zones, which I'm going to restore mitochondrial health.

Before this is papers coming out, there was no way to know that. So now the burden of health falls on the shoulders of the individual as to whether they want to measure their blood ketone, get their GK.I value and know where they stand. So if they are always in the yellow zone, which is a powerfully preventative zone, where you're doing weightlifting, exercise, you're eating good foods, you're not highly processed carbs, you're getting good sleep, you're not stressed out, You're not sitting on your damn cell phone all day long, getting freaked out by what somebody said.

You know, you're removing all the stress factors that put you at risk for chronic disease. But now it's going to come to everybody's choice. They're going to know what, and, you know, we're coming out with glucose, continuous glucose ketone monitors. It's interesting because then right on your cell phone, you'll have the color-coded chart. And all you do is pull out your cell phone and know exactly at that point in time and day what zone you're in for mitochondrial health. ill health. So, but I found out something very interesting. Some people get upset about that. When they're, when they have the continuous monitor, they're going to go out and have a nice time. And the monitor says, you're not in a bad zone. So what they do is they tear it off their arm. I don't want to know.

So, so listen, but that's why if you do, if you do, if you want to be in control of your destiny, then you prick your finger when you want to prick your finger to get the results to get your GKI, as opposed to something on your arm telling you, eh, eh, don't do that. So do you have a calculator available now, like on a website or an app or anything? Well, right, right. Yeah, right now you can go and buy this a keto mojo meter. And I don't want, I'm not pushing keto mojos. It's the only meter right now that, that does the GKI.

The other precision extra by Abbott Labs, they will give you the glucose by itself and ketone by itself. And then you have to do the mathematical conversion to get the GKI. the mojo you just push the button and it already gives you the GKI right there. So that makes it more convenient for the people who don't want to do simple mathematics. But all of them will eventually, all of these meters will eventually be incorporating a GKI in there when people realize how important it is to maintain help. How does something like lactic acid play into this?

Like I'm just thinking in my head, my meat head, I'm thinking like, I know you can go to the gym and you can like change your metabolism, like your metabolism, like your metabolism. Like your metabolism can be in one state and then you can just go from a state of fat burning and a state of being very calm and your heart rate's very low to then having your heart rate elevated quite a bit. And you can do when I was maybe like 15 or so, I remember doing these like depletion workouts. And the idea of the depletion workout was deplete your body of glucose and then you would eat some carbohydrates afterwards. But in this case, if we're trying to like fight or yield off cancer, maybe we don't replace. that with glucose, maybe we stay on the lower carb style diet. Have these things been kind of shown to cut back on cancer, reduce cancer risk?

Yeah, we've done that. Yeah, we published all those papers. First with the mouse, and then, you know, we showed that the level of glucose in the blood was directly correlated with how fast the tumor was would grow and how little time on the planet people would have to live. after we did that in the year 2003, we published a big paper on this, on the ratio of glucose and ketones in the blood. And then they started doing it in the human clinics, brain cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer. Anybody, the people who have high blood sugar levels usually die faster than those who have lower sugar levels.

As far as lactic acid is concerned, when you do a lot of exercise. As you know, you're going to increase lactic acid in the bloodstream. But that lactic acid goes to the liver and is reconverted back into glucose through what they call the Corey cycle, named for Carl and Gert Corey. But if you have lower glucose, when your brain and muscles suck up the most glucose, especially exercising muscle, muscle needs the glucose. muscle does not share glucose with other organs. So if you can keep your exercise, you're going to deprive the tumor cell of the necessary glucose,

the muscle will take that. But what our bodies do is they start mobilizing fat. And the fat goes to the liver. And it's like a wood chipper. The long chain fatty acids go to the liver, liver. And the liver chops them up into the water-soluble ketone bodies. And the brain and the heart and even muscles can transition over to fatty acids and ketones in addition to glucose, but the tumor cells can't. The tumor cell can't switch. It's locked

into this glucose-glutamine fermentation, and they can't switch. The normal cells in our body switch. Now the normal cells become direct competitors with the tumor cell. So the tumor cells are getting hammered, not only because we're putting drugs on top of them, but we're exercising the body, causing the normal cells to suck up more glucose than the tumor cells, and the tumor cells up and die. They can't compete. And, you know, this is amazing because when you go to the clinic in oncology, they give you high, high, Coca-Cola, and they give you insure. They give you everything that will keep the tumor cells alive and happy. It's just unbelievable. So, and that's the lack, it's called lack of knowledge, scientific illiteracy, basically. So you would never want to do those

things. So once you understand your body, once you understand what mitochondria can do and how they can switch from different fuels and healthy mitochondria and the tumor cells can't, people will make their own choices on how best to manage cancer, along with the advice of their physician. Why would a ketogenic diet be important rather than maybe just low carb? And the reason why I asked that is because what I've seen in my own ketogenic experiences over the years, the kind of more I stuck to lower carb and the more that I did that, the actual higher that my blood glucose would register, start to register, you know, being 90 and so on. It was higher. And when I switched back to eating like a little bit of carbohydrate, it went lower. And I realize I have maybe

different circumstances than your average person. But well, you, I think you would need to measure your GKI. You're only measuring one, you're only measuring one of the two variables. Because, you know, if you have a blood sugar of, you know, four-millimeter, and then you have a ketone of two-millimeter, I mean, you're going to have a low G-K-I, you know, you're going to have a low G-K-I, and you're going to be healthy. So you've got to take the two measures together to get the optimal dose. If you have three-millimeter glucose and three-millimeter ketone, you're at one. And sometimes you can have more ketone in the blood than glucose. because you're down below one.

And, you know, we've seen, let me tell you something. There was a study by Drenic some years ago, I think it was back in the early 80s, 1980s. And they took these obese guys, really, really obese people. And they fasted them for water only for 30 days, no food at all. And they had high ketone levels. and then they can't do these studies today. You'd be arrested and thrown in jail.

But what they did to these fat guys is they, once they got them with no food for 30 days, they injected them with insulin, which pushed their blood sugar down to barely measurable. Almost no sugar in the blood was 0.5 millimolar. Can you believe this? And normally that would kill people. These guys were walking around with no cognitive decline at all because their brains, had completely shifted over their heart, their muscle, all shifted over to ketones. So glucose is really a non-essential metabolite.

We have it only to feel good about ourselves, but you really don't need it because we can switch over to ketones. So that's why it's important to look at the GKI values to get a more global picture of your overall metabolic health. And up to this point, no one has been able to do that except us. Because we developed the thing here at Boston College. I did it for the brain cancer patients years ago. I didn't know it was going to have such incredible broad utility to manage all major chronic diseases.

But that's what it can do. I'm curious about melanomas and skin cancers because, you know, we've talked a lot about sunlight on this podcast with different experts on the sun. And obviously, it's great for mitochondrial health. A lot of people do live more lifestyle inside. and a lot of people do choose to actually avoid the sun because of scares of melanomas. So first, does the ketogenic style diet fasting, does this have the same effect on those types of cancers

than the other cancers that we've been talking about? Is that the same? Yeah, pretty much. We've looked at melanoma. They have mitochondrial defect, and they're fermenting glucose and glutamine, just like brain cancer, colon cancer. All these cancers are basically similar.

in their dependency on glucose and glutamine fermentation, and they can't switch to ketones. So, yeah, melanoma, like, if you have these disorders and you go into water-only fasting, what we always do is we, I'm not a physician, so I don't do anything, but I tell my colleagues who are practicing physicians, it goes zero-carve for 14 to 20 days, and then you walk, step into a water-only fast, and then you hit them with the parasite medications, and you can really, demolish these melanomas and these other cancers as well, because they're all dependent on the same fuels, glucose and glutamine. So we, one of the things, we're an equal opportunity killer of cancer. We don't discriminate from one kind of cancer to another kind of cancer, a non-discriminatory

killer of cancer, because they're all dependent on the same problem. They can't burn fatty acids or ketones and they're dependent on glucose and glutamine. So a follow-up question on that. because I actually, oddly enough, I know a few people who have melanoma, and in these contexts, these individuals also kind of have a family history and tendency. They also are very pale. So curious, in their sense, when it comes to their lifestyle, I know you can't, you're not, you're not necessarily giving medical advice and telling this person do this, but it would be in their best interest maybe to think about a ketogenic diet as a nutritional practice. Well, it could certainly, or you could acclimate to the sun gradually rather than going out and get you to burn the crap out of here or something like this, you know.

There's a gradual, even white skin people can gain melanin in there in there if you gradually, right? I mean, you won't have the level of melanin that you have, but you'll certainly move up there and be protected. And I agree with you. The sun is part of the health. We get a lot of vitamin D from the sun. And vitamin D makes things work a hell of a lot better, too. So avoiding the sun. And you know, it's weird, too.

Some people get melanoma on the souls of their feet. You know, I mean, they never get any sun. Are you kidding me? Unless you're walking on your hands with your feet in the air. You know. You know, so, but, you know, you have to look at it. But when you, you know, and when the tumor starts to shrink down and get smaller, and then you can come in with some low-dose chemo

as long as you're in a state of nutritional ketosis, and the low-dose chemo just wipes out any surviving tumor cells that might be there. So there's a lot of flexibility and options that people can use for the various cancers, including melanoma. Are there some people genetically that can't get cancer? Oh, well, that's, well, I don't know if it's genetic.

Like, well, it's very hard to get cancer. You have to beat the crap out of your mitochondria over a period of time. And what about all the human tribes that existed according to their traditional ways? They were out in the sun. They were doing all. As I said, Schweitzer actually was looking for cancer in tribes that lived according to their ways. A lot of them were Africans, but not always. The Eskimos, the Inuit people, the British, when they first looked at the,

health value of, health of condition of Inuitz in the Arctic Circle, they didn't have cancer either. So, and when I say didn't have it, it was so rare. It was unrecognizable. If it did, if it did happen, it wasn't something like we have today, where it's overtaking heart disease as the number one killer of people in the, in the societies. So, yeah, so we're genetically protected from cancer, most of us, unless we beat the hell out of our mitochondria through chronic abuse. And then you put yourself at risk for cancer and other chronic diseases. What about like regions?

Like what about people that live at higher altitudes and things of that nature? Have we seen or people that, you know, maybe live closer to the equator? I'm just making stuff up here. Yeah. Like I've seen different locations just have different results. And I'm sure there's probably, it's again, multi-factorial, not just one thing, but have We've seen any lower cancer rates in those areas? Well, generally there are lower cancer rates in those folks that live according to these

traditional ways. The cancer explodes. I gave a talk at Thunder Bay Medical School in Canada, which services the Inuit population, used to be some of the healthiest people on the planet, you know, 100 years ago. But now they're 50 percent have obesity, diabetes. cancer, dementia. It's unbelievable. What switching your diet from, I guess, whale meat and walruses and seals and fish to cocoa pops and fruit loops and hamburgers and Fraps and all that kind of shit.

It's unbelievable. Like in one or two generations, you go from healthy to decrepit. So clearly, we did not evolve. Listen, all of our existence on the planet was to have sweet things. Where are paleo ancestors get sweet, maybe from honey, or ripe fruits and berries during a seasonal period. So we gradually realized you could harvest sugar from sugar cane and beets and things like that. We processed it. And as soon as we have the sugar epidemic, we got all kinds of neuropsychiatric problems, cancer problems, dementia problem. We got every kind of a problem because we're taking in too much of the fuel that we've always desired to have.

And we are still paleoth... That's what I said. Biologically, we're still paleolithic men and women. But our technology has accelerated so fast that our healthy biology is overwhelmed with the toxins that we're putting into it. There are many people, especially who they work out a lot. They look like they're in very good shape. And sometimes you'll see, wow, this is... in-shape person got cancer, right?

And it makes people wonder, well, what the hell? If they look like that, how is this possible? A curiosity I have is within health and fitness, to fuel oneself, a lot of fitness folks choose to use carbohydrates as their main form of energy, right? And maybe go lower fat. And they do that chronically. You'll see this in runners. You'll see this in bodybuilders, grapplers, et cetera, because it's a very quick energy.

source, right? Is there something that these athletes should be paying attention to, even if they're physically jacked and ripped and they look at it? They should look at their G-K-I and see where it is. If they're in the red zone and they're looking like they're, you know, they're jacked and fit, and they're in the red zone, they're putting their mitochondria at risk. So, you know, that was another thing, too, my colleague Jeff Wollick from Ohio State University. He studies extreme athletes. These guys that, they don't run just marathons. They really, They run like 100 miles. Yeah, yeah.

You know, these guys? So they're all burning ketones. And, you know, one wonders about carb loading and all this kind of stuff. Because when you take a lot of carbs in, you have to store it in the form of glycogen, which are long, long chains of glucose. And when you store glycogen, you have to store a lot of water with that. Fat is really condensed, so you can get tremendous energy out of fat with much less water storage. And I never could figure out the guys who run the, because I'm here at BC, Boston College,

and we have the Boston Marathon guys run right in front of the school. And they're always in these carb tents the night before, and they're going to carry a lot of extra water around. They're going to create a lot of lactic acid that's going to seize up their muscles. But the guys who win, these Kenyans and these kinds of people, they like float. They are just unbelievable specimens of human. They don't seem to load on that stuff. I think they're all burning ketones, and they can go for hours and hours, just like these extreme athletes. Eventually, you're going to burn up all that glycogen storage, and you're going to be suffering with lactic acid accumulation, which is going to slow you down.

So, but, you know, for sumo wrestling, these guys have an explosive burst event or an offensive lineman on a football team. you know, they have an explosive burst of energy that's mostly glycolytic. And I never see, rarely do we see an offensive lineman in any major football team running down a field like a running back. They can't do it. But, you know, besides, football is an explosive burst of energy for just a short period of time. They're not running for great distances and things like this. So they might be able to use some carbs. But, you know, I've looked into this.

and Jeff Volick is the world leader on this, and he can give you a much greater discussion about the health benefits of ketones in extreme, extreme athletes. Dr. Lily Yang, I believe his name is, from UCLA, has a nunotherapy. Are you aware of this? And what are your thoughts? Some people are saying, like, I think it's really promising what he created. Well, I don't know.

I've heard that. I mean, we know what the tumor cell needs to survive, and it's the glucose and glutamine. It can't burn ketones. But that doesn't mean immunotherapies can't be successful. The problem with the immunotherapies that we have today, like Catruda, Abdevo, Carti, immunotherapy, and these things, they sometimes will not only kill tumor cells, but they'll also start blowing out your liver and kidney, and you start dying what we call hyper-progressive disease.

This is well-known, documented in the scientific literature. where the therapy will kill you faster than the cancer will. And then there are some people who respond so well to the immunotherapy that they die from tumor lysis syndrome. They kill all the tumor cells at the same time, releasing a massive amount of toxic metabolites into your bloodstream, overwhelming your immune system to accommodate. You die from that.

And then there are some people who do really respond well to those immunotherapies. So it's, and what we found is one of the things that prevents immunotherapies from really working well is the acidification of the microenvironment surrounding the tumor. And that acidification comes from the waste products of the glucose and the glutamine waste products, which are lactic acid. And that prevents some of the immunotherapies from actually working well. So if you can simultaneously target the two fuels driving the dysregulated growth, which will reduce the acidification, now you can use very low doses of immunotherapy and, chemo, to polish off these cancer cells. So it's, again, we have all the tools that we need to make huge drop in cancer deaths. We just don't, we're just not using them appropriately. We're not using them correctly. So once, once they know how to use the tools effectively, you're going to see a much,

much reduced cancer incidence. And when you have cancer, you're going to be able to manage it with much less toxicity, with a much longer overall favorable outcome. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man. It's called Good Life Protein. Okay, tell me about that. I've been doing some good life protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of Good Life Proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of of meat that you can think of lamb is another one that comes of mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm

doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat and that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80-20 grass-fed, grass finish ground beef. I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal and I can surf and turf.

You know? I could cook up some chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard for me to lock one down. but I really love the bovette steaks. Yeah. And then I also love the rib-eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rib-eyes.

So, guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, you can have to Good LifeProtines.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website. Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. So until, people realize what I am saying, because we have tested this, we know the science, we know the

differences between what normal cells and tumor cells can do, and we know how to manage cancer. We never use the term cure. Cure is an arrogant term making people think, oh, these guys can cure cancer. We have as a management strategy. It allows people to live far longer than what would have been predicted using standard of care alone, and we don't know if you're going to be cured or not. If you die from old age at 98 and he had cancer at 30 and then he was cured. We've cured one dog for sure because he died of old age. He didn't die from cancer. But we don't like to use the term cure because we don't know.

What we know is the people who do metabolic therapy correctly live far longer than those who don't. Go ahead. You know, with the information that you've put forward and all the progress that you've been able to see with the research. What is necessarily the hold up for the system kind of taking up this approach, with it also being actually a very practical approach if given to people in math? Yeah. Well, those are not scientific. The reasons are unscientific, okay? The science we have published, we based it on the work of Otto Warburg, who was one of Germany's leading scientists during the last century, a giant in the field of energy, metabolism, and cancer. We just followed his

foot, and we've cleared up a lot of where he made mistakes. So we've actually shown that ultimately he was right. It's just that he did not know about glutamine fermentation and made some assumptions that were incorrect. And we've cleared that all up. So we now know how to manage and prevent cancer very, very effectively. So the question you're saying was, why is nobody doing this? And the answer is many, there's several reasons. First of all, the National Cancer Institute on their website clearly says that cancer is a genetic disease. We and others have clearly shown it's not a genetic disease. So there's a huge power structure that's forcing a scenario, a situation that's no longer substantiated by science, and they won't change it. And it's called confirmation bias.

when everybody in the world thinks it's this, someone comes along and shows them it's not that. Well, I'm sorry, I can't believe you because everybody else says it's a genetic disease. And how could you tell us it's not? Well, I said, well, why don't you read the paper? Oh, I didn't read the paper. Why don't you read the paper?

And you'll come to know. People, I have a paper. This is really interesting. On the origin of metastatic cancer, we published it in 2013. It's one of the highest cited papers that I've ever. It's 1,700 times in the science day was this paper were cited. And almost nobody read the paper. The only thing I said in there is that metastasis is largely responsible for the deaths of most cancer patients. So they cite it because of that.

And then they go publish something saying cancer is a genetic disease, which is not. So it tells me that the people are just citing papers blindly because everybody else cited the paper blindly. It's like a bunch of sheep. And these are supposedly the smartest that are supposed to And as the result, we got 1,700 people a day dying from cancer. Institutional inertia. You know, these academics, and they've made great careers, very famous careers, and they make them look like they know everything, and they're top, top dogs on the top medical schools,

and they're basing it on an incorrect assumption that cancer is a genetic disease when it's not. So you have this inertia that's already been there, confirmation bias. People have become very rich and famous describing cancer as a genetic disease. All of a sudden, you're going to say, oh, that's my bad. I'm sorry. I made a mistake on that. You know what I'm saying? And then you got peer pressure. Some guy comes out and says, I don't think it's a genetic. Oh, no, you got to say, you want your NIH grant? You want to keep this job at this hospital and this university? you better make damn well, sure, it's a genetic disease and start hunting for genes. And of course, you know, paradigm paralysis, everybody is comfortable doing the same thing.

And as I said in my talks, even the Grim Reaper is happy with the status quo. His harvest has never been greater. So you have all of these non-scientific issues that are preventing the transition from what we are currently doing to what we should be doing. And that takes time. And that's why we have all of these folks. I get, you know, 30, 40 emails a day asking for help. And I don't tell them what to do or how to do it. I just give them all the educational material that they can read for themselves and discuss that with their primary care physicians or whoever. And, you know, we're seeing pancreatic cancer folks that usually are dead within six months to a year. And they're out four and five years. Brain cancer people. We're getting lung cancer people. And we're publishing these. And they're say, oh, that's only an end of one. Oh, that's only an end of five. You know, if I had a drug that did that did that, I'd be a billionaire. And then they say, what did you do? What did you do? I said, stop eating carbohydrates and do more exercise. Damn. Yeah. And we have the, and monitor your GKI. And then when they do that, I can't, I'm even shocked sometimes.

Usually, but if we get cancer patients, like some of these pancreatic cancer patients, they're being poisoned to death. There's no question about it. They look like these guys that came out of the concentration camps. I mean, they're just skeletons and they're walking around. And they say, you know, how did this happen? This was the poisonous chemicals these people are being given, you know, together with the cancer. But I'll tell you, these chemicals that were given these cancer patients are killing a lot of these cancer patients, making them sick. I don't know any other kind of a disease where you poison and irradiate people to try to make them healthy. Don't make any sense. We know what the sciences. We know what the cancer cells need to

survive and we know how to kill them without toxicity. The problem is the paradigm and the system right now is not able to accommodate this in the standards that we're using. So it takes time. But I said the longer we wait, the more dead cancer patients. Right now we're sacrificing 1,700 people a day that don't need to be sacrificed through the stabilization of the system. So it's the system itself and many aspects of this. That's the answer. to your question. I think it was Ray Pete that brought up the possibility that CO2 could be something that could be effective against cancer.

Is that anything that you've heard about or are you aware of CO2 being studied? Well, CO2 will cause hypoxia. You know, cancer cells thrive in hypoxia. So I don't see any scientific relevance to that. Interesting. What do you think about like, I've heard a couple of people talk about like baking soda. like you hear all this weird stuff on social media about these things that could potentially help is doing anything to the glutamine or the glucose no if you try to do you try to alkalize your body

all the enzyme systems in our body work at a certain pH they work at around around pH 7 what are you going to try to screw that up you're going to screw your whole body up we did that because we heard that too so i took one of my metastatic cancer models and we jacked them up with bacon soda and it didn't do shit i mean it was like what the hell i said we These guys got the heads up their ass for crying out loud. You know, you know, they're not doing this. It's great that you have an open mind, though, to still study it. I love that.

Yeah, well, we try that, you know, people say, oh, you got to try this, you got to try that. But they don't realize, you know, when we try to do something seriously that we want to get a scientific public cost about $80,000. You know, people say, oh, just go try that. Well, for bacon soda, we could easily do that. We didn't get anything. Same with the tritiated water. We didn't see shit with that. I mean, the idea is that we know what cancer cell needs to survive.

Why are we screwing around with things that are irrelevant? Why don't go for the throat of the cancer cell? We know what they need to survive. Why are we doing anything different than that? That's the question. Why would you want to do some baking soda? Why would you want to do the trinity in water? The damn cells are burning glucose and ketones, or glucose and glutamine,

and they can't burn ketones. So we know how to kill them. And we do dosage, timing, and schedule. I published a call press pulse steroids. therapeutic strategy, which is going to be the new standard of care once people come to understand the science of what we're talking about. Why does the cancer cell want to run off of glucose and glutamine? Because their mitochondria are defective.

We went through and looked at you, in order to burn fatty acids and ketones, you have to have a mitochondria that's healthy, structurally, and functionally. When you look under the microscope at these cancers, you look at the mitochondria, you have to look under electron microscope, ultra-structure. because it's hard to see it in light microscopy. So you see their broken cristae, they have abnormal association with other membranes. And that's the organelle that maintains order and discipline within the cells.

It tells cells when to grow, when not to grow. We constantly replace dead cells in our body, and we need to know when a cell needs to grow and replace and stop growing. For example, liver regeneration. If you lose a lobe of your liver, the liver will regenerate rapidly and replace the lobe with new cells, but they know when to stop growing. They have contact inhibition. And all that's because the healthy mitochondria in those cells dictate when a cell should stop growing, because they have calcium signals between different cells.

The cancer cell has lost the very controlling mechanism that allows them to know when to stop growing. So they continue to grow as long as the fermentable fuels. Don't forget, all the cells that, our earth first started, there was nothing, no life, no light, no nothing. But there were organisms that slowly started to form in a dark oxygen absent earth. And those cells all fermented. There was no oxygen. So the way to get energy was through non-oxidative fermentation, it called fermentation. So these cancer cells in our body are simply falling back on these ancient, ancient pathways that existed before oxygen came into the atmosphere billions of years ago. And they're driven by fermentation.

So we said, what are the, listen, we know glucose and glutamina, the two prime fuels. What we did was we grew cells in culture with nothing, just salt water, and then take a stopwatch and see how long it takes them to starve to death. And then we add specifically amino acids and carbohydrates back and see what makes them perk up and survive and grow. So we interrogated these tumor cells and asked what the hell are they using to grow. And that's how we know they can't grow without glucose and glutamine. And they need glucose and glutamine as the prime fuels.

They can't really burn other amino acids. And there are other sugars there like uridine and this stuff. There's another term called logistics. Okay. So if you have to have a significant amount of the material in the environment for the cell, so you have to have what it can burn and a large amount of it available. and that keeps the cancer cells growing rapidly and making them resistant to chemo and radiation. So we pretty much know how to manage this disease and how to keep people healthy.

But the problem is it requires some level of scientific literacy, which seems to be in short supply in the population. This might sound like a kind of a weird question in a way, but like are people willing to change their diet? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And I know that for a fact because our paper that we just published last year 2025 on brain cancer, glioblastoma, which is like the most devastating brain cancer, killed John McCain and former President Biden's son that killed Teddy Kennedy from here. But we had a group of folks in Greece who, the guys who went on the diet and stayed alive four out of six of them. And the guys who didn't want to stay on the diet, everybody died

except one guy. And several of the guys that died didn't want to give up sugar. They said, I can't live without my sugar. And I don't care if I die or not. So it's a personal choice. So yes, the answer to this, sugar is such a powerful drug in the brain. Some people would rather die than not eat sugar. And we have the direct evidence because they told us. They said, I would rather die than stop eating sugar. So there's the answer to your question. I'm curious about, you know, you've mentioned that the ketogenic diet can make things like chemo more effective. There was a certain drug you brought up that was toxic. And in the presence of a ketogenic diet, that drug in small amounts was effective.

I believe you said on mice. I don't know if you mentioned on humans or not. But it makes me wonder about other interventions that we use in the health community for mitochondria. Like red light therapy is something that's promoted for mitochondria. health. The hyperbaric oxygen is something that's promoted for mitochondrial health. I'm curious if these things, along with a ketogenic diet, have been, if there have been any type of benefits when it comes to people who have cancer. Yes. Yes, because we tested hyperbaric oxygen with Dom DiAgostino and his group. It works much better. Again, when you're in nutritional ketosis. And the other thing we have to always mention, ketogenic diets. I started all that for cancer, only because I knew water-only fasting was so powerful.

But when you tell cancer patients, oh, don't eat anything for 30 days, they're going to say, what kind of nutty you? So I worked in the epilepsy field for 30 years, and we're using ketogenic diets and little kids with epilepsy. And it was developed as a fasting, mimicking diet, which is ketogenic diets. But we're trying to change the terminology to nutritional ketosis because the term ketish, oh, nobody can do that. You've got to sit around eat a tub of lard and do all this kind of crazy shit. We do it with tomahawk ribbyes. I don't know.

Can you eat a tomahawk ribby? I can eat a tomahawk ribby. Oh, yeah. All right? So we got down at the low GKI values with tomahawk, ribbys, lamb. What else did we use? We used a lot of these carnivore things and eggs, bacon and eggs, okay? As long as you don't eat too much of it, you should see your GKI go right down,

you're in nutritional ketosis. So is it a ketogenic diet? Well, it doesn't sound like one, but when you look at it from the GKI value, the glucose ketone index, you're down in the zone for killing cancer cells or in the zone for preventing cancer, as long as you marry it with the exercise. The exercise is so, so important. So when you're in ketosis with exercise, it's hard to get cancer. And if you have it, you can kill cancer cells when you're in those zones.

You know, I know there's probably someone listening to this podcast that heard you say Tomahawk rabbi and then immediately thought carcinogens. And what are your thought? Because like there's a big part of nutritional community that still will promote the idea of meat being cancer causing. and you're mentioning this is something as a tool to help bring somebody back. Well, I guess if it's, I guess if you eat the meat with a whole bunch of rice and potatoes and bread, it might not be so good. Do you think our ancestors killing a deer? So it'll give me a big load of rice to go with that deer meat.

You know, right? Where's my, where's my baguette to go with the deer I just killed? You know, we ate meat. If we didn't eat meat, you and I wouldn't be here at this conversation. We would have never existed on the planet. It's the kind of meat you eat and what you're eating with the meat. Now, if you're eating meat that's all jacked up with hormones and chemicals and all that other crap, and you're eating big loads of potatoes and rice, I mean, just eat meat alone.

That's how we evolved. We ate meat. And we had, you know, tubers like yams and these kinds of things that are highly, that have a lot of complex carbs and you don't get much out of it either. So clearly our diets were so different. And we ate meat. If we didn't eat meat, we evolved to eat meat. We're not her before us. We're cows and sheep. We're omnivores. Our ancestors ate everything that walked, crawl, fly, swim on this planet. And that's who we are. We're omnivores. It seems like you got the passion to talk about this all day, every day. Where's this passion come from? Where's the

energy come from and like what do you do for exercise well i go to the gym every day uh i got a beautiful gym right out in front of behind my lab you know packed with uh 18 to 22 year old people the environment is quite four young four stories of swimming pools weightlifting all kinds of stuff um so we do that and i'm fortunate to have that opportunity uh you know i can every lunch time i go to the gym uh during the week And on the weekend, I ride my bike around the league. So when the weather is nice, not feet of snow. Then I worked the snowblower.

And even with the torn rotator cuff, I'm still able to do a lot of this stuff. So I'm pushing 80, you know. And what we know is what we know is that what I'm talking about will eventually become the standard of care, leading to so much less tragic pain and suffering that these people have. And what I get enjoyment out of is when I see people that are telling me they got stage four lung, colon, breast cancer, and then they do metabolic therapy the correct way under the right kind of supervision. And they feel that they've never had been healthier in their life. And that hypertension, diabetes, all this other stuff went away with the cancer. And I'm saying, yeah, it works.

And also, it's always the choice of the patient. it's the choice of the individual. Do they want chemo and radiation or do they want metabolic therapy? We're not telling them do metabolic therapy. It's their choice. But they have the opportunity to do that. And when we see success, like we're seeing it, it's unbelievable. But I only throw it out there for those people that actually want to use it.

And the educational community should know about it. And they seem to be more resistant to that. So that's what motivates me. seeing the results of your hard science, the work of Otto Werberg, the work that we've done, the work that others have done, and showing that this whole success

is based on hard biology and biochemistry to know what's going to happen. And you see it in real life and you say, oh my God, look at how powerful it is. And then people will come to know. It just takes time. Thank you so much for your time.

We really appreciate it. And thanks for the work that you're doing. Yeah, well, thank you very much. You stay healthy. know. Heck yeah.