Realfoodology - Alternative Cancer Treatments + Rising Trend of Cancer in Younger Populations | Dr. Lucas

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

161: Join me with Dr. Lucas, an integrative oncologist, to understand the complex world of cancer treatment and prevention. We shed light on the dramatic rise in cancer rates, particularly among younger people, and explore the reasons behind this worrying trend. We navigate through the vast landscape of both conventional and alternative holistic therapies, with Dr. Lucas explaining the value of an individualized, integrative approach in cancer treatment. He also provides fascinating insights into the role of sugar in cancer and shares some powerful strategies to prevent reoccurrence and offer hope to those battling the disease. Topics Discussed: 0:02:05 - Understanding Cancer and Hopeful Therapies 0:07:31 - Cancer Rates Increasing in Younger People 0:10:43 - The Concept of Integrative Medicine 0:15:38 - Understanding the Causes of Cancer 0:19:39 - Detoxifying and Reducing Toxin Exposures 0:32:53 - Dangers of Artificial Sweeteners and Processed Foods 0:40:44 - Corporate Influence on Food and Health 0:47:51 - Exploring Alternative Cancer Treatments and Tests 0:49:16 - Cancer Treatment 0:59:54 - Sugar, Emotions, and Cancer Check Out Dr. Lucas: Online: doctorlucas.org Instagram: @doctorlucas Sponsored By: Honed Supplements livehoned.com  Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 15% off Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% Off Better Help Get 10% off Your First Month of Therapy by visiting: www.betterhelp.com/realfoodology Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic seed.com/realfoodology Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 30% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic LMNT Get 8 FREE packs with any order at drinkLMNT.com/realfoodology Check Out Courtney: Courtney's Instagram: @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database

On today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. I think that we've gotten to this inflection point in the last three to five years where the exposures have just become too much, especially in our country where we've done a very poor job of regulating a lot of these toxins. And we're getting them not only in the air we breathe, the water we drink, but we're getting them in our food, we're getting them in our personal care products, furniture, in our clothing. It's never ending in terms of our exposures to these things. Hi friends, welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. I am your host,

Courtney Swan, and today's guest is Dr. Lucas Timms. I have been wanting to do an episode like this for so long, and so I'm so happy that I finally got Dr. Lucas on. He is an integrative oncologist, meaning that he is a oncologist, a cancer doctor that takes a more integrative approach, meaning that he uses both alternative holistic therapies and combines them with conventional therapies like chemo, radiation. And what I love so much about what he does is he takes a more bio-individualized approach. And this is often missed in conventional medicine. Often, once someone gets a cancer diagnosis, it's lockstep.

You're in protocol. Everyone gets the same thing, no matter what. And of course, this is not always the case. But this is what I really love about integrative oncology, because the person is actually seen as an individual. The diagnosis is seen as an individual. The diagnosis is seen as an individual and your treatment plan is seen as individual. And it's not just, okay, we're just going to do X, Y, and Z because this is the protocol and we can't veer off of this. Not to mention there's a lot of amazing alternative holistic therapies that can be taken alongside

the conventional therapies and these more holistic alternative therapies, for the most part, don't really have any side effects. And all they do is offer more support and oftentimes a better outcome. So I really love this approach. And we talk all about the alternative approach as well as conventional approaches. We also talk about the rise in cancer that he's seeing and why we think this is happening. It's multifaceted. There's so many different things going on in our environment, in our food, and we kind of dive really into all of that. Also, we talk about his thoughts about sugar and its role in cancer. And God forbid, if you or someone you know that's listening gets diagnosed,

we give some amazing hope for therapies and things that can be done that are not normally talked about in a conventional setting. Oftentimes what happens in a conventional setting, someone gets a diagnosis, they have the surgery, they get the treatments, and then they're sent along their way. And there's no sort of protocol at the end about how to keep it from coming back. And again, you know, I'm making a lot of blanket statements. Of course, this is not always the case, but I'm just saying quite often this is what happens. And then unfortunately we often see a remission, a reoccurrence that comes back. And he talks about ways that we can hopefully mitigate that reoccurrence. And there are tests that can be done. There's things that can be done.

And it's pretty awesome and gives me a lot of hope because, yeah, God forbid, if any of us gets a diagnosis, there is a lot of hope for making sure that it doesn't come back. So anyways, I really, really enjoyed this episode and I hope you guys loved it as much as I did. If you could take a moment to rate and review it, it would mean so much to me. And if you love the episode, if you could share it on Instagram and tag me at real foodology, it would mean the world to me. I appreciate you guys so much. Love you. I love your support and hope you guys have a great afternoon or morning, whatever you guys are listening to this, take care. I've been consuming

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Dr. Lucas, I'm so excited to have you on today. We got connected a couple months ago through my dear friend, Christian Gonzalez. A lot of you guys listening know him as Dr. G on Instagram. And I am so excited to have someone on the podcast to talk about cancer from a more holistic naturopathic lens, because I know this is a big concern for a lot of people. We're seeing a rise in cancer right now, which I actually want to talk about, and especially in younger people, younger and younger, which is really terrifying. So first of all, thank you so much for coming on. And can you give people a little bit about your background and how you got into specializing

cancer? Yeah, thanks, Courtney. Thanks for having me on. And thanks to Dr. G for connecting us. He's connected me to a lot of great people. And so I'm happy to be on with you today and talk a little bit about kind of what my career is all about, which is integrative oncology. So my path or kind of origin story, if you will, to what I do now is I just happened to, you know, during my time in medical school

as a fresh, not yet fully trained doctor, I happened to meet the woman that I would later fall in love with. And she happened to get diagnosed with cancer very shortly after we started dating. And so that sort of set things in motion, if you will. And going through that experience and that journey with her opened my eyes and kind of pulled back the curtain on the cancer industry, if you will. And while there are some things that are done very well

in mainstream medicine, when it comes to cancer, there's a lot of things that are done very well in mainstream medicine when it comes to cancer there's a lot of gaps that are left behind and a lot of shortcomings if you will and so that sort of was how I first became interested in working in the oncology arena if you will but really seeing myself more as someone who can be a disruptor and help to fill in some of these gaps and really swing the paradigm more towards what I would consider a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach when it comes to cancer care. And so that's what the last 14 years or the time I've been in practice since have been about.

Really I've practiced in a lot of different spaces. I've practiced at conventional cancer hospitals, City of Hope, formerly known as Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I've done several nonprofit clinics. And now I'm just in the last few months venturing out on my own and hanging my own shingle and starting a private practice. And so that's kind of where we're at today. venturing out on my own and hanging my own shingle and starting a private practice. And so that's kind of where we're at today. And I'm really excited to get the word out, really, because I feel like a lot of people that are when they're either diagnosed with cancer or they are reading about, like you said, these massive increases in cancer incidents, they get frozen.

They don't know what to do. And I'm here to try to get the word out that there's so much you can do. And so, you know, that's kind of thinking about things a little more proactively. And that's kind of my main message with my patients is there are things you can control. And let's get into those things. Yeah, that's amazing. Also, I love integrative. I love the concept of integrative because for people that don't understand, I want to explain this a little bit. This is not like a black or white, we're only going to do this or we're only going to do that because I know a lot of people get scared about like, you know, when you start talking about

holistic treatments, they're like, oh no, like we're not going to do any chemo or radiation. But what I love about integrative is it seems like it's more of like a bio-individualized approach and you guys are not, and I'll let you speak to this, but it seems like you're not saying like, okay, we're only going to do like, you know, I feel like back in the day it was like, we're going to do like juice fasts and we're going to do it all this and that. And that can be really dangerous too. And I love the approach of like, okay, we're going to do the chemo, we're gonna do the radiation, or we're gonna do one, we're gonna do the other,

we're gonna see what your cancer specifically is gonna respond to the best. But we're also gonna do all of these other interventions, like the lifestyle changes, the diet changes, everything that can help mitigate the effects of the chemo and also like help your body

also heal itself while it's on these other treatments. Yeah, precisely. I mean, I tell people all the time, another one of my common messages is that you want to avoid people that are on the extremes, right? So people that think that all natural medicine or holistic medicines are garbage and contaminated and unsafe and quackery type stuff. And then on the other side, all the holistic people that say, oh, all conventional medicine is just pure evil and toxic and don't do any of that.

And so avoid those extremes, first of all. And there's good and bad on both sides. There's strengths and weaknesses on both sides. I always come at things from a place of, I think good medicine is good medicine, whether it's a medication, whether it's a procedure, whether it's an herb, whether it's a lifestyle change. If an intervention creates the desired response and it has the least amount of risk possible, that's a good intervention and that's good medicine. And you see that on both sides. But to me, it's really about helping people bridge the gap so that they understand that it doesn't have to be all or none. And that even when it comes to conventional medicine and sort of that more guideline-based treatment approaches, that you may decline to do. You know, there's some patients that, you know, go the full bore and they do everything that was recommended by their oncologist.

And that's okay sometimes too. But there's some patients that I work with and I'm like, okay, let's have surgery. Surgery makes sense. But we're going to do all this other testing that's going to help us to make a more informed decision about some of these other treatments they want you to do that they might think are just, you know, this is standard of care and these are necessary for everybody. But when you look at it, like you said, in that bio-individualized space, you can start to make more informed decisions around which treatments make sense for you versus just falling in line with what we do because you have this

type of cancer and this stage of cancer. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really helpful for people. And so I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on this. Cause I've heard both ends of the spectrum that it seems as though we're seeing a massive rise in cancer and especially in young people, which I personally believe that. And I want to hear the reasons why you think that's happening. But also when I share that, I've heard from people say like, Oh no, it, you know, it's not, it's about the same, but they're just diagnosing it better now, or we just have better ways of finding it. I'm like, that to me doesn't make sense. Yeah. I think there's the big message that's put out there by these entities, whether it's the WHO, the CDC, the National Cancer Institutes, oftentimes the

numbers they're sharing are numbers from like five years ago. Because they usually do these kind of consensus type studies of cancer rates and survivors, they do them in five year chunks usually. And so when you hear something this year that came out, it's like, oh, cancer rates are declining or treatments are improving or whatever. That's like, that's old data. And unfortunately, we don't really have a lot of the data on what's happening in real time.

But I can tell you being someone who is really on the front lines in the last three to five years, it's taken, it's gone to another level. And not only in terms of just the sheer volume, but going from the average cancer patient being in their 50s, 60s, 70s to now in their 30s, 40s, 50s, it's, people are getting cancer much younger. And this was a, what I would call a macro trend that we were seeing probably over the last 20, 30 years, but it's taken a huge jump. Again, speaking from more of an observational standpoint now, but also talking with a lot of my colleagues that are seeing the exact same thing, the last three to five years, there's been a major jump. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, I've just been hearing that personally in social

circles, as well as like through other doctors just telling me, you know, they're like, we need to be more careful than ever, do our exposures of certain things, make sure that you're filtering your water, you know, minimize your exposure to plastic, because they're all telling me that the same thing, they're seeing a rise in cancer, especially among my age group. What do you think is causing this? I know it's multifaceted, but maybe we can go over a couple of things to kind of give people peace of mind of maybe things they can do to prevent. Yeah, it is multifaceted. And this is another central theme of sort of my messaging to my patients and my audience is that, you know, cancer is not bad luck. Well, I like to say that it's not just bad luck, because I don't like patients to feel like it was their fault, obviously. Some patients,

you know, if you're a lifelong smoker, you know, you've let yourself go, you're not exercising, you're eating junk all the time. Yeah, in some ways that is your fault, but there are a lot of things that are out of our control, but that doesn't mean that it's this mystery and that we don't know that there are actually things that cause cancer and they're called carcinogens okay and so genes and genetic mutations do not cause cancer despite what the mainstream uh messaging has been and despite what their model is in terms of focusing on how they treat cancer, which is really by sort of hijacking these driver mutations or driver genes of cancer, those are real and those do exist, but those are not what cause cancer. Those are more of a downstream effect of how cells become cancerous. What actually starts that process are things that

are called carcinogens. And we have a very long list of well-known carcinogens that you can go to the IARC and look up. And what are they? They're things like toxins, okay? Which can be the top four that I, you know, kind of preach about are heavy metals, molds, plastics, and pesticides. And I think that we've gotten to this sort of critical mass, if you will, point, this inflection point in the last three to five years where it's just become too much. The exposures have just become too much, especially in our country where we've done a very poor job of regulating a lot of these toxins. And we're getting them not only in the air we breathe, the water we drink, but we're getting them in our food. We're getting them in our personal care products. We're getting them

in our furniture, in our clothing. I mean, it's never- ending in terms of our exposures to these things. And then, you know, so I think that that's kind of how we've gotten to this point in time where we're seeing this massive sort of logarithmic jump in cancer diagnosis and in much younger people. Because again, a lot of these toxins are what we call bioaccumulators, meaning that you inherit some of these from your ancestors. Okay. So when, you know, that's another wrinkle to the story that we tell people about genetics and they say, well, you know, my parents had this type of cancer and my brothers and sisters had cancer.

And so this must be a genetic thing. I would say, no, it's probably more of an environmental thing. Actually, your parents are passing down, especially your mom, are passing down toxins that have been bioaccumulated in the cord blood. This has been tested. And then of course, most people in a household are going to be exposed to similar types of toxins as well, whether it's a mold problem or lots of processed foods or, you know, poor water quality, things like that as well. So we need to really start having a bigger conversation around carcinogens and not like, oh, cancer is just bad luck and bad genetics. Yeah, I agree. You know, it's an interesting time right now because as we're being exposed

more and more to all these different chemicals and these toxins, like you said, in the air, in the water we drink, in our clothing, in our personal care products, in our food, there's this weird, almost like backlash when you talk about it online. And I don't know if you've experienced this at all, but I get a lot of people saying like, oh, come on. It's just a little bit of this in here and it's just a little bit of this in there. But I think what a lot of people are not wrapping their brain around is that like, okay, yeah, if we have like a little bit of pesticides in our food here and there, like our body is resilient and we can, you know, detoxify that, get it out eventually. But it's, we're getting it from all angles, all fronts. And at a certain point, the body is going

to be like enough, like we weren't designed to detox this much of it. And that's what I think the big concern is right now. Yes, yes. It's coming at us from too many, you know, it's like you said, if one person's, you know, shooting a gun at you, you know, you may have a chance of like dodging some bullets here and there, but if you're surrounded by,

you know, Uzis and machine guns, there's no way. I mean, it's like, it almost feels like that sometimes. And so part of the conversation is around the exposures and the inputs that are coming in. And that's a big problem. The other problem that's just as big is we're not providing, most people are not properly providing their body with the biological requirements needed to process all this stuff. And so we've got this heavy accumulation and exposure, and then we're not doing the things that help our body, like you said, detoxify and filter out a lot of this stuff so that we can maintain our homeostasis and our cells don't get damaged to the point where you start to see those DNA and those genetic mutations that lead to cancerous cells.

Yeah. Okay. So since all of that sounds a little doom and gloom, let's give some people some hope. So what are some of those methods that we can implement on a daily basis that will help? I know one of them is like sweating. So like get in the sauna, make sure you're exercising so you're getting your lymph moving. But what are some other things people can do? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it does sound kind of daunting and doom and gloom when you look at it, but you have to realize that the human body

is an amazing invention, if you will. Not sure who the inventor was, but it's an amazing piece of technology that we have. And if we give it the right things and we are meeting the biological requirements, and you don't have to be perfect, but if you're doing enough on a daily basis to help support the body, it can overcome a tremendous amount of hits, even when it comes to things like carcinogens. But yeah, sweating is one. We need

to think about things that we call the pathways of elimination. So things get in the body and then we have ways that things get out of the body. Those would be your sweat. Those would be your urine. Those would be your stool. And those would also be your breath and to a certain extent, your skin, right? And so not just sweating, but like skin that sloughs off and things like that as well. So we want to be supporting those pathways as much as possible. Unfortunately, the standard American diet and our standard American culture, you know, in terms of like sedentary lifestyle and eating lots of foods that don't promote good regular bowel movements, drinking a lot of sugary sodas, coffees, things that dehydrate you rather than rehydrate you.

And then again, just being indoors, not exposing ourselves to the sun enough, which helps us sweat, but also helps activate lots of detox pathways, doing things that overburden our liver, alcohol, other recreational drugs, and lots of refined sugars and processed foods. And so if we can start to get back to the way our body's designed to work in terms of getting enough fiber in our diet, drinking enough water and electrolyte rich fluids, moving our body on a daily basis. And it doesn't have to be that much, honestly. I think some people get sort of paralyzed with the fact that they feel like they have to be doing some sort of boot camp exercise every day, but really just walking is enough

to meet that requirement. And if you can't walk, if you have some sort of, you know, disability and you can't walk, you know, I mean, do what you can, you know, curl some weights in your chair or even yoga type breathing is enough to get blood moving. So there are some real basic things you can do. You don't need to overcomplicate it. Get out in the sun. Even if you're not sweating, being in the sun will open up your sweat pores and you will have some detoxing effects there. And then on the other side, take as many measures as you can to reduce your exposures. Everyone's going to be exposed to a

certain extent. We can't live in a bubble, but try to buy organic when possible um if you can't buy organic then wash your food really good with vinegar or baking soda or something like that that gets a lot of the residues and pesticides off of it that way um filter your water you know you can buy a berkey filter i get no free ads i'm sure on the podcast here but but I like Berkey filters. They're cheap and you can buy one for 100, 150 bucks. And those things last six, eight years, then you just got to replace the filters. But filter your water. If you can't afford an ultra HEPA filter in your home for your air, then try to keep your windows open as much as possible. Try not to track things into your home. So take your shoes off in the garage or the front porch. And then as you start to buy new products, personal care products,

cosmetics, cleaning products for the home, use some of these databases like Environmental Working Group to search for cleaner options. And as you run out of things, make that next purchase a smarter, cleaner option, you don't have to feel like you need to go raid the entire house all at once. I mean, we've, I've been doing this for years, we probably still got a few things here that we need to like switch out and swap out, you know, truth be told. So and I don't need 100% organic all the time, but I make an effort to see you have to figure out where you're going to, you know, like where you're going to make your

changes, where you're going to give yourself a little bit of grace, but realize that you don't have to be perfect on this stuff. You just need to be kind of better than average, I would say. And you're going to make a huge dent in the amount of toxins, not only that they're coming in, but making sure that more are going out as well. Yeah. And I love that you kept emphasizing on, we can't live in a bubble. We're all going to be exposed to a certain extent. We do the best we can. Because I think a lot of people get stuck in this like perfection area where they're like, I have to do everything. And they stress themselves out. And it's like, look, we can't stress about it. We just do the best we can.

And then we move on. We live our life, which I think is a really important part of this message too because stress also puts a burden on the body. A hundred percent. Yeah, stress is another one of those. I consider stress, even though it's not listed on that IARC list of carcinogens,

it is a carcinogen. I mean, and what we're talking about is chronic prolonged stress, right? I mean, we all have stress going, going for a run or a walk is a stress, uh, going to work's a stress, you know, uh, there's, there's lots of things that are stressed, but acute stress is what allows us to, when we overcome it allows us to grow and get stronger. But when you have that chronic prolonged stress where you feel like you're running from a tiger every day, that's what we're talking about. And that's what actually causes leads to chronic inflammation, which is another one of my, what I call my three root causes of cancer. So we talked about toxins.

The second one would be inflammation, which you can get, which can be caused by lots of things, your diet, your lifestyle, stress, et cetera, medications. And then the third root cause being infections or sort of chronic stealth-like infections. That would be things like parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungus, and those types of things. Oh, yeah. I feel like that doesn't get talked about enough, those infections. So, I mean, would you just recommend that if someone maybe thinks that they might have one of these, go and get a blood panel done and just check for an infection? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the chronic infections, they usually, even though that's its own category,

they usually build up because the body's immune system is not working well. Okay. And so the immune dysfunction or chronic immune suppression, which can be linked to things like stress or obesity or not getting good sleep, when your immune system suppresses these pathogens that everyone's being exposed to them, and we all have some level of, I know it's kind of nasty to think about, but we all have some parasites in our body. We all have viruses in us.

We all have fungus. But there's sort of a safe level of these things. But when they get overgrown and they become opportunistic, when the immune system suppress, you get these sort of chronic brewing infections that that can lead to biofilms in the gut, and they can lead to they can have a direct path to forming tumors. And so you know, these are things that have been listed on the IRC list of carcinogens as well. Human papillomavirus is one that we know of. About 80% of the population are HPV carriers, but we only see a small portion of those people that actually get head and neck cancer, anal cancer, cervical cancer, right?

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processed foods and therefore sodium from your diet. Now, the solution is not to reintroduce processed foods in your diet, but by not replacing that sodium, you can actually negatively impact your health and performance. If you guys listen to my episode, The Salt Fix with Dr. James Dinek, we learned that sodium is actually a really imperative mineral for the body. Sodium helps maintain fluid balance. It's an electrolyte, so it helps keeps us hydrated. It also aids in nerve impulses. It regulates blood flow and blood pressure. It's incredibly important. And if you're eating a whole real food diet, chances are you're probably not getting enough sodium. Also, this is probably going to be a shock to hear, but if you're eating a whole real food diet, chances are you're probably not getting enough sodium.

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can claim a free element sample pack. When you make a purchase through the link. The link is drink element. That's l m n t.com slash real foodology. And in the element sample pack, you're going to get one packet of every flavor so that you can try all of them and see which one is your favorite. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I do. Again, it's drink element.com slash real foodology. That's drink l m n t.com slash realfoodology. That's drinklmnt.com slash realfoodology. Another thing I want to talk about that I believe it was you that just posted about this. There was a study that just came out linking sweetened and artificially sweetened beverages to a higher incident of, was it liver cancer? Liver cancer in women. Oh, that's interesting. And also I know that the World Health

Organization is about to, may have since we've recorded this, I'm not sure, claim that aspartame or they're going to say that aspartame is a possible human carcinogen. Yeah, they labeled it as a possible carcinogen. There's kind of three main categories. There's like known carcinogen there's kind of three main categories there's like known carcinogens there's probable carcinogens and there's this lower category called possible and that's when you know there's certain criteria of studies they need but the problem with a lot of the possible carcinogens is not that there's lack of evidence. It's that there are a lot of industry-funded studies that have been done that makes the evidence very, it looks very cloudy because you've got all these studies that are funded by people who are making money on these things

to sort of offset the ones that show the danger and the caution. And so that's another dirty little secret that a lot of people don't understand. They say, well, you know, and I've seen other doctors on social media and they're like, you were blowing this aspartame thing way out of proportion. And if you have a diet Coke here and there a couple of days, just don't drink 40 a day. Right. And it's just, I'm just, I'm like, how are you as a doctor really, really sending that message out to your people? And, you know, even if, let's just say, let's just say it is, you know, truly a possible carcinogen and it warrants that classification, throwing out all these industry funded studies that show that's really why it's in that category. But let's just say it is still there. Shouldn't we still be warning people, hey, this is another drop in the bucket? Because again, we talked about all those other things that are potential carcinogens we're being exposed to, right? And it's not necessarily that one thing in a vacuum is the problem.

It's all these things. We want to make people aware that, hey, yeah, if you just had a few Diet Cokes a day, is that enough to cause cancer? I don't know, probably not. But when you add that to all the other hundreds of things you're being exposed to on a daily basis, look, if you can swap that out and do something healthier, why not? Right? And so that's the message we should be sending out there. Not this, oh, you know, these influencers are blowing this out of proportion and aspartame's only a problem. You know, if you drink, you know, a gallon of it a day kind of thing, it's just, to me, that's not the right messaging. 100%. And that's why I get so frustrated because I,

I'll share this on Instagram and I can't tell you how many messages, DMs, comments I get from people. And they're like, oh, I saw they were talking about this on the View and they were saying you have to drink like 80 a day and it's totally fine. But what the people are missing about this is exactly what you just said. It's like, okay, if you are just having one aspartame sweetened beverage a day and that's the only thing you're being exposed to, fine. I'm not that worried about it. It's the problem. Like, for example, women on average are being exposed to 168 different chemicals every day before they even take a bite of food. And then you add in, okay, the diet Coke a day. And then you add in the non-organic food that's covered in pesticides. And all of a sudden

it's adding up. And that's where I think that we have a missed opportunity for a conversation that's really being fought right now. And what's sad and scary is that there's so much influence from these industries that have a lot of money to be made or lost, depending on, you know, how the conversation is had. That's what's really frightening about it. And I wish more people understood this because I think we would have a lot, we'd have like a revolution of people pushing back on all of this stuff in our food. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. we'd have like a revolution of people pushing back on all of this stuff in our food. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And this is where we need, you know, the whole system, as you know, Courtney, it's so effed up. And we've got little to no regulatory bodies that are acting in the real interest of the public anymore. And they've all been, you know, sort of captured and bought and paid for by

by these uh big corporations you know it goes back to um i don't know have you seen the movie uh the c word no no i don't think so i'm gonna write this down it's a good one i and i'd recommend everyone watching this to go watch it it came out a few years ago. It's narrated by Morgan Freeman. So it's very well done. But a big point that's made in that is, historically speaking, around the middle of the 1980s, what we saw happen was big tobacco companies bought all the big food companies. And that's really when you go back and look at these macro trends of cancer and chronic disease really taking off and going like going, you know, vertical on that on that line is around the middle of the 1980s. And there were other things

happening around then too. And like I said, everything's multifactorial. But the fact that we've got these corporations that were initially, their biggest interest was tobacco and selling tobacco. And then all of a sudden, you put to kind of follow the money, follow the interests of these corporations and look at how much of, I mean, you do great videos when you go and you do the grocery store kind of takedowns and stuff. I love that stuff. But look at, I mean, go down those aisles and look at how much of that is actually even food anymore. I mean, that's the thing. And that's kind of my point in all those videos is to remind people that even though it's advertised to us as food, the majority of that could not even really be considered food. I joke about this all the time. I tell people, because people ask me, oh, do you ever like cheat and eat fast food? And I cheat in what I consider my own way, where I eat junkier processed foods that still are made with cleaner ingredients but to me like I haven't put fast food in my body in 20 years probably because I

literally view fast food as play-doh we do not play put play-doh in our mouth maybe kids try to but they don't know any better but like we should not be putting this kind of stuff in our food or in our bodies because I don't even consider it to be food. So, and I wish that we could, you know, have that as a general message to the public, but unfortunately, yeah, there's a lot of corporate capture that's confusing so many people. And it's so frustrating because a lot of this stuff, you know, like we've talked about in this episode, we know a lot of this. I mean, you've been doing this for, you said 14 years as a cancer doctor, you're warning people. And there's still people

that that think that you know these food companies are creating these foods with our health in mind yeah it's you know it certainly is is a tidal wave and there's days where i feel like it's you know it's like it's too much right it's too big of a burden to try to try to warn everybody and educate everybody but you do what you can i mean you've got a great a big audience and you put out great information i think that there is a a paradigm shift happening where people there are people that are waking up that people that are wanting this type of information they're wanting to sort of have more control uh there's people that are one of the good things that i think came out of COVID actually was that more people, I think, started preparing food at home. The ones, I guess, that didn't go directly to DoorDash,

but I've known more people in my circle that before they used to eat out maybe three, four days a week. And now it's like once a week because they got used to preparing foods at home. And once you get comfortable with certain recipes and go-tos and you realize how much money it saves you too. Um, I think that was one of the good things that came out of that and, you know, eating more real food and avoiding the packaged boxed and bagged stuff and the fast food. Right. Um, that's where you can, I think you can make a huge dent in your risk of getting cancer there. I mean, it's not going to be the whole puzzle, but if you're looking for one area where you can focus on eating more food that you can say, okay, that came out of the ground or off a tree or off

a bush versus reading a label that has 18 different ingredients on it, if you can start to shift more of your food consumption to those foods and less of the processed things, knowing this history and the corporations that are behind the foods in those boxes and bags, I think you can make a huge dent there. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I do want to say one more thing that I meant to say earlier that I find so fascinating about that big tobacco buying up all the big food companies. So many people have compared the tactics of big food. It was basically copy and paste from the playbook of big tobacco. And I just, you know, it's just all these connections where you look back and we knew at the time that cigarette, well, we didn't know at first, but then once we knew that we could connect tobacco and cigarettes to cancer, they fought tooth and nail to keep people from finding that out.

Yeah, that's true. And now they're just doing the same thing with big food. And once people understand that, I think they'll start to want to do better for themselves. Because for me, there's like this rebellious side that's in me that I'm like, oh, I don't want them to win. So me buying whole real foods in their natural state is almost like an FU to that industry that I don't want to win. It's a rebellious act. And it's one that we need everyone

to kind of start jumping in on. And yeah, I mean, like you said, the playbook for big tobacco has been the playbook for big corporations across the board, not just food. But they have so much of the market share and so much money that they know that they can drag things out. And once they've made their billions or trillions or however much money they're making, it's almost too late for them, right? But if we start to make these changes, one of the interesting things, if you actually look at, we talked about earlier, some of these reports that, you know, sometimes you'll see ones that

actually look good and they say, oh, you know, like these, some of these cancer rates actually are improved. You can go back and about, I mean, the overall majority, I would say 95% of the cancers that have improved over the last 20 years have been directly related to people smoking less. And so once we did get over the hump and we really educated the masses on the harms of smoking, yeah, you still see plenty of people smoking, but it's far less. And that's where we've really seen a huge drop in some of these incidences of certain cancers. So if we can repeat that and use that as our playbook on our side with food, maybe we can see an even bigger drop in some of these rates moving forward.

I've been in therapy off and on since I was eight years old. And this is why I'm super excited to bring better help on the podcast as a sponsor. Therapy changed my life. Many of you who have listened to my podcast for a while know that I went through a really traumatic event when I was eight years old. I lost my sister to a very tragic accident and therapy has helped me so immensely throughout the years that I want to tell everyone that I think therapy is so incredibly important for all of us. Life is hard. Life is really hard and regardless if you have a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety or if you're just a human who lives in this world, who's going through a hard time, or maybe you've been through something traumatic like me, therapy can give you the tools to

approach your life in a very different way. Throughout the years, it's helped me to really see my role that I play in my own suffering. And it's helped me to get out of my own way. It's helped me to see different things in a different light. And of course, it's helped me to process and deal with the trauma that I went through as a kid. But again, I really just want to reiterate that you don't even have to have any trauma in your past to have therapy help you. I honestly think everyone could benefit from being in therapy. I think it's an amazing thing that we have access to. And this is why I really love BetterHelp. Their mission is to make therapy more affordable and more accessible. And this is an important mission because finding a therapist can be really hard,

especially when you're limited to the options in your area. So it's a platform that makes finding a therapist easier because it's online, it's remote. And by filling out a few questions, BetterHelp can match you to a professional therapist in as little as a few days. And I want to tell you guys, as someone who has gone through many therapists since I was eight years old, not many, but I've gone through enough to know that finding a therapist can be kind of like, you know, finding a friendship that jives with you. So if you don't jive immediately with your first therapist, definitely make sure that you give some other therapists a chance because it really is about finding someone that you feel safe and comfortable with. It is

so simple to get signed up. All you need to do is go to betterhelp.com slash realfoodology. That's better help as an H-E-L-P dot com slash realfoodology. Clicking that link helps support this channel and it also gives you 10% off your first month of better help so you can connect with a therapist and see if it helps you i hope this helps you all right so i want to i want to talk a little bit about if someone god forbid is diagnosed with cancer i want to talk about some of these treatments that may not be very well known in the conventional realm that have been found to be really helpful. And then I also want to talk about some like tests and stuff that can be done because I know when someone just goes through the traditional conventional route, typically it looks like

surgery and then treatments and then send you on your way. And I know now from digging into this a little bit that there are other things that someone can do and it's not just surgery, treatment, okay, bye. And then oftentimes it comes back years later. I've been told that there are certain tests that you can do, there's certain things that you can do in order one, to way lower your risk of it coming back and also to give you a lot more information into what is actually happening in your body. And I know one of them that you and I talked about was the Signatera test. So can we share with people a little bit about that? Because I don't think a lot of people know that this exists.

Not enough for sure. Even though it is starting to gain more acceptance and awareness even amongst the conventional oncology community. But we're still way off. I mean, I still run into patients and other clinicians that have been in the space for years that they've never heard of it, or they say, oh yeah, well, that test isn't ready for prime time yet. We need more studies. But essentially it's a test. And I've got some posts I've done on this on my social media that go into a little more depth, but essentially it's a circulating tumor DNA test. So they take a blood sample from the patient and they match that with some, they have to request a little bit of tissue. So you have to have had either a biopsy or a surgery done where there's been actual cancerous tissue that's taken

out of the body. And these places that do the surgery, they have pathology departments that hold onto that tissue for usually 10 years. And you can request little samples of that to do testing on. And so Signature requests a sample of that. They build a personalized assay out of those, what are called the clonal mutations of your cancer, which are, even though cancer can evolve and mutate the longer it's in someone's body, it always holds onto this clonal signature of mutations. So they can track it even years down the road and match that in the bloodstream. What they're looking for the bloodstream is the circulating tumor DNA that has that same signature. And so if you've had a surgery that, you know, you, and you've been told, well, you know,

margins were clear and you had a scan afterwards and know you and you've been told well you know margins were clear and you you had a scan afterwards and there wasn't any sign of any activity we know that sometimes those people six months later they come back and they've got a recurrence so right so it's like well you told me i was clean right you said the margins were clear you got it all out i did everything i was supposed to why do we miss that so signatera tests especially done after a surgery when the there's curative intent that can tell you is there anything residual in the body on more of a microscopic level okay so it just it zooms in farther and can pick up things in a much more subtle way than a scan can or even some of these other traditional blood markers

they use and so to me number one reason to get a signetera test is if you've had surgery, to answer that question, did you truly get all the cancer out of the body? Number two reason would be if you did, let's say you did have that surgery, or you had another surgery and they didn't get it all out, and the signetera is elevated, then they'll recommend that you do some kind of treatment and that could be chemotherapy or radiation or immunotherapy or maybe some integrative therapies that we can talk about things like iv vitamin c mistletoe herbal therapies uh diet strategies anyways you can use signetera as okay we knew that after surgery, there was a signal there. Let's say it was at 15.

Every month that you start on these treatments, you start to repeat that signatera. And you know, if that's coming down, you know what you're doing is working. Versus if it's going up, you got a problem. You got to change your approach. The goal is to get that down to zero. And then the studies they've had on signateraria show that whether you start with zero right out of the gates on your first test after surgery, or whether you get it to zero through further treatment, both of those groups of people have the same long-term survival and prognosis. So it doesn't matter how you get it down, but the goal is to get it to zero and make sure you're watching it close enough to make sure what you're doing is actually getting it to zero and

then the third and final way we use it is once you've gotten it to zero then it will be likely the early if you you keep measuring it maybe every couple of months uh for a while in that survivorship phase. But if it is going to come, if there's going to be a distant recurrence, it's going to show up on that test. And some of these studies they've done with Signatera, which large scale studies, they've shown that up to 10 months earlier, it'll show up on the Signatera test before you would maybe feel a lump somewhere or before it would show up on any other type of study that your doctors would be doing, like a scan or another type of blood test.

Wow. Is this something that people could do preventatively? Like, let's just say someone's a little bit extra nervous about getting a cancer diagnosis. Could they maybe do this blood test like once a year? Unfortunately not. Like I said, you have to have had tissue taken out of the body. Oh, that's right. So you would have had to have had not only a diagnosis,

but you would have had to have had some tissue available somewhere. And sometimes we do run into these situations where, because there's other testing that's vying for some of this tissue, and sometimes there was just a small piece that was taken out and it's already been used up. So unfortunately, it's like, well, we either got to get some more tissue, or, you know, we can't run this test. But to your question, it's not a screening tool, unfortunately. So there are other screening tools out there, like the gallery test, it's called the multi detection, multi cancer detection blood tests, not quite as pinpointed as Signatera, obviously not as personalized, because you're not matching it to the tissue, but that test is more of like this screening tool for people that either are at a high risk, have a big family history of cancer, or maybe are working in an occupation

where their risk is high. Firefighters are a big one, shift workers. I think hairdressers, people like that as well. So gallery tests would be where I would say focus on more screening tool. Signatera, once you have a diagnosis and you have tissue, that's the test that I think is the best one out there. What are some of the more non-traditional type treatments that help? I know the high-d dose vitamin C drips, mistletoe. Can we go over those a little bit? Sure. Yeah. Those are, those would be the top two that I've seen in my practice. And I think are the most well studied, well established, more sort of what I would call integrative oncology therapies. And so, you know, mistletoe therapy has been around for years and years and is actually an approved therapy in most European countries, has been for a while.

But, you know, we're slow to adopt things like that over here in the U.S. You know, we tend to be very, very closed off to anything that's not a drug that was made in a lab. Do you think that's because big pharma capture, probably a lot of money? It is. I mean, you can look this up. This is completely straight facts, but you can look it up. But 70% of the FDA's budget is provided by big pharma. So tell me how that's not a conflict of interest. But anyway, so the FDA is the one that's vetting all these other therapies and saying,

well, this is approved and doctors can prescribe it and insurance has to cover it and all that. So right now you can go and look at all of the things that have been approved for cancer treatment by the FDA. There's not one vitamin, there's not one supplement, there's not one herb, there's nothing out there besides drugs and radiation, the standard of care stuff. Those are the only things that have been approved by FDA. So to me, it's like, you'd think every once in a while,

we'd sneak one in there, but it's a pretty close shop. So anyways, mistletoe is a therapy that really helps us to, we were talking about the problems with the immune system and how that kind of leaves you open to chronic infections and also the immune system itself gets rid of cancer cells. But that's not working well. How do we restore that? Mistletoe is one of the best ways you can do that. And so this is a therapy that's either given by a subcutaneous injection or IV. And it's actually starting to get some momentum here. Johns Hopkins published

a phase one study with it just a few months ago. It was a bit of a long time in the making, but they're moving on hopefully to phase two, phase three study. So I could foresee in the next five to 10 years, maybe mistletoe does become a mainstream therapy here. IV vitamin C is kind of a similar story. It's been around since the 50s and 60s, Linus Pauling. A lot of people are familiar with him being a two-time Nobel Prize winner and sort of the godfather of intravenous vitamin C. Did a lot of studies with it back in the 60s and 70s. Fell out of favor for a while when he passed away.

And then the Reardon Clinic is a former employer of mine that I used to work for. They've done a lot of studies with it in cancer patients and developed some protocols. What we're really seeing happen with IV vitamin C, the real magic is that it can kill cancer cells on its own. So it has sort of a chemotherapy-like effect, but the kicker is that it doesn't have all the collateral damage of chemotherapy. It really just selectively kills cancer cells by buildup of hydrogen peroxide in these cells,

which the cancer cells can't really deal with. And so it's a very safe therapy. It also can help, it can be used alongside most chemotherapies. It actually shows that it improves the efficacy of the chemotherapy while decreasing the side effects and toxicity. So it's a great adjunctive treatment for patients to do alongside their conventional treatments. There's very few reasons or safety considerations with IV vitamin C. Obviously, you need to go work with a doctor that knows what

they're doing, but it's a very safe treatment. So is mistletoe. And these are treatments that can only help improve patients' outcomes. They're not going to really take anything away from the conventional approach. These are more things you can do to set yourself up for success, stack the deck in your favor. The real downside to them is that not a lot of patients know about them or have access to them, and they're not covered by insurance. So there's big out-of-pocket costs for a lot of these things, which is really unfortunate. I know. That just really kills me.

It's so unfortunate because these are... What I love so much about these kind of treatments, like you said, is that there's there is not really any sort of downside, you know, like they can be taken in conjunction with their other treatments and there's no side effects. You know, all it all can do is improve. And if it doesn't do much, OK, fine. You know, like at least it doesn't have any sort of like hard side effects on the body. And so why are we not, why is the FDA not approving these? I don't, I mean, we know why. Yeah. But we kind of touched on this a little bit with the sugary beverages, but what do you think the role that sugar plays in cancer as well? Is there a pretty big role in it? Like we've heard? No doubt. I think so. I, but you know, we need to do some

sort of definitions here, right? When we say sugar, obviously, some people are going to nitpick that and say, well, glucose is the building block of everything. If you don't have glucose, then all your cells are going to die. So naturally occurring sugars, sugars you get in fruit, sugars you get in potatoes, sugars you get in rice. I mean, we're not really talking about those sugars unless you're really over- over consuming those. When we're talking about sugar, we're talking about refined or added sugars, right? These are the sugars that are cooked up in a lab. These are sugars that have been stripped, that have been refined, that have been heavily processed. And they're in such mass amounts that you wouldn't ever find that much sugar.

Our body doesn't know what to do with it. And so essentially what happens is it puts a huge load on your liver and your liver, all it can really do, unless you're like consuming the sugar while you're simultaneously running a marathon, it's going to have to get stored because it's too much for your body just to burn in the bloodstream. And so it kicks up insulin, it kicks up insulin-like growth factor, other potentially harmful growth factors that drive cancer cell growth. But more importantly, it puts a heavy burden on our liver, which is already being, again, as we talked, heavily burdened by all these other toxins we got coming in, right? And so these added sugars that the liver, all it can really do is store it. And what it does is exchange is fat for lip for for the sugar. And that's how all these people are showing up with

fatty liver. Most people that I send to go get an MRI or an ultrasound or whatever, there's always a comment about fatty liver disease, or, you knowalcoholic fatty liver disease. It's like this is another real epidemic of the standard American diet and culture that we're seeing manifest into a lot of metabolic disorders. And it all goes back to too much sugar. Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, it's really addictive too. And it's in everything right now. Well, is there anything else that we didn't cover that you think is really important for people to know

as far as cancer or anything that we talked about? You know, another theme that I talk about quite a bit is, you know, as much as we focus on the physical stuff, I think that there's also a big component when it comes to the mental emotional side of cancer. And so I think we'd be, you know, a little bit remiss not to just at least mention that. And, you know, we do see a lot of patients where, you know, it might not be the smoking gun, but a big piece of their puzzle

is working through past traumas and suppressed emotions, unresolved grief or abuse, or, you know, these, we talk about these ACEs, these adverse childhood events, you know, there's a lot of that work that needs to be done as well. And I don't think the conventional communities really set up well to deal with those things. Tend to be kind of the sweep it under the rug kind of approach.

So I think that, you know, there's a lot of... Everyone's different, but some people, that's their biggest underlying problem they need to deal with is they're mental, emotional, and they're resetting their nervous system and resolving some of those past, like I said, traumas or abuses or wrongdoings, whatever it was. But those things can be just as toxic as the plastics and the pesticides. Yeah. And I'm so glad that you brought this up because I've talked about this on a bunch of my episodes and my podcast, but I went through something super traumatic when I was eight. And I realized it wasn't until my thirties. And I won't tell the whole story here just because I've told it many times a podcast now, but basically I had

a really profound psilocybin mushroom journey that brought out so much of me. And I mean, I think I was like 32 and made me realize that I had not actually dealt with this thing that I went through when I was eight. And I went through the majority of my life thinking, oh, it's fine. I resolved it. I'm good. Like, but all I was doing was repress, repress, repress, repress, repress until finally it exploded out of me. And I was forced to face it and thank God I did. But it's just a great reminder that these things can really, really impact you even when you don't realize it. And so I do want to encourage people to, you know, if you've been through something that maybe even you think that you've resolved, but you know that it, you know, it must have had some sort of impact on you. I encourage people to

seek out help with that, whether it's EMDR, which really helped me a ton. You know, having a therapist that specializes in whatever trauma that you went through. And it doesn't even have to be like a hardcore, like, you know, capital T trauma. It can just be something that really affected you as a kid, you know, that you need to be resolved. Yeah. I know our, again, our mutual friend, Dr. G, he's doing a lot with that emotional release stuff too. And so there's lots of, whether it's psychedelics or, you know, a lot of my patients really cling to Joe Dispenza and his type of work as well. He's amazing. You know, there's lots of, I think there's lots of cling to Joe Dispenza and his type of work as well. He's amazing. You know, there's lots of, I think there's lots of pathways to that. You've got to find what

resonates with you, but, but yeah, I, that's, that's a big piece of the puzzle too. Yeah, for sure. Okay. So I have one question for you that I ask all of my guests before we go, and this is a personal one. So what are your personal health non-negotiables that you do either daily, weekly, both that are important to you to maintain your health? Well, that's a great question. I don't have any non-negotiables, but I would say that bell curve of the time, the practices I try to do would be that i do a 24-hour fast once a week i've been doing this for probably five or six years now uh and so i you know sunday night dinner i eat it as early as possible and i don't eat again until monday dinner and i've just done that and i feel

like it is just a great reset once a week a lot of you know cultures religions have that kind of thing built into them i think for good reason I try to move my body every day. I try to plant my bare feet on the ground every day. I do have a little bit of a morning ritual that I do. I won't get into it too much. But I would say the other thing that really is key for me is I've gotten into the gratitude journal practice. I use the five-minute journal. Again, not shouting them out or anything,

but I find that one really easy. There's a lot of great journals out there, but, but yeah, I think that those things are, I found to be really important for me in order to put my best self out there every day. And I mean, I, you know, there's days that I'm like, I miss things or I don't do it or whatever, But most of the time, those are kind of my routines that I think help keep me tilted, you know, sort of more towards health than disease. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I'm sure after listening to this episode, everyone was like waiting, waiting with bated breath for your non-negotiables because they're like, what does the cancer doc do? So, um, cool. Well, where can people find you if they want to reach out? So your social media, maybe your website,

all that. Yeah. Social media would mainly be on Instagram at Dr. Lucas, doctor is spelled out. And, uh, and then the website's pretty similar at www.drlucas.org. And you can request I'm doing telemedicine visit with visits with cancer patients all over the country. And we can help guide you through your journey. If God forbid you are on that journey or a loved one is, you know, check out the website, you can request a consult through there or you know, follow me on Instagram, I put out I try to put out a lot of information there. And, you know, connect there if you like as well. Amazing. Thank you so much. This was an amazing episode. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me, Courtney.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the real foodology podcast. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resonant media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team, go to resonantmediagroup.com. I love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider-patient relationship.

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