Realfoodology - Detect Cancer Early + Disease Prediction | Andrew Lacy of Prenuvo

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

167: This episode is a must-listen as we're joined by Andrew Lacy, the inspiring founder and CEO of Prenuvo. Andrew brings us inside the high-tech world of Prenuvo, a game-changing full-body MRI screening service that detects a stunning 500 conditions – all with a strong focus on early cancer detection. If you want to get scanned, you can get $300 off of a whole body scan by going to http://Prenuvo.com/Courtney Topics Discussed: 0:01:22 - Exploring the Benefits of Prenuvo Scans 0:07:59 - Discussion on Early Detection of Aneurysms 0:11:31 - Diagnosing Cancer and Blood-Borne Cancers 0:14:49 - Positive Medical Scan and Follow-Up 0:17:50 - Healthcare Systems and Disease Progression 0:25:35 - The Importance of Environmental Awareness 0:32:31 - Response to Prenuvo's Medical Technology 0:40:05 - Understanding Ovarian Cancer and Early Detection 0:50:41 - Promoting Early Disease Diagnosis and Treatment Check Out Prenuvo: For $300 off go to http://Prenuvo.com/Courtney Sponsored By: BTR Nation www.btrnation.com Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 20% off site-wide Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% Off LMNT Get 8 FREE packs with any order at drinkLMNT.com/realfoodology ARMRA Colostrum tryarmra.com/realfoodology enter REALFOODOLOGY to get 15% off your first order 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 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... Why do we have that fear? That fear is there because we have a health system that's so reactive. So that when you think about being diagnosed with something, you automatically think that that's expensive, life-threatening, going to be difficult to overcome. The world that we're trying to create is one where disease is diagnosed early, and it's easy to treat or can be treated just through lifestyle changes. It's inexpensive. It's more about maintenance. For those people that come to us routinely, that's the way that they see disease. And I think that's the world that we're trying to create for everyone. Hi friends, welcome back to another episode of The Real Foodology Podcast.

I am your host, Courtney Swan. And today's episode is with Andrew Lacey, the founder and CEO of Pernuvo. Pernuvo is a full-body MRI screening service that can detect 500 conditions. We go over a few of those conditions. Most notably, they can detect really early-stage cancers, like stage 0 and stage 1. We talk about the importance of detecting these cancers really early and the survivability rate of certain cancers. For example, pancreatic cancer

has a very high survivability rate if it's caught early. However, sadly enough, pancreatic cancer is often not found until it's too late, like stage four. This is an incredible technology that is expanding at a rapid rate. I actually had the privilege of going and getting a scan there last October. And I share a little bit about my experience in the podcast episode, but we mostly talked about different cancers that

they've been finding, the trends that they've been seeing as far as diagnosing specific things. We talk a little bit about what might be causing some of these cancers and just overall the importance of detecting these conditions early. And we of course dive into Prenuvo, what exactly it is, and if there are any health concerns when doing a Prenuvo scan and just really everything that you would want to know about this scan. This is a incredible technology that I am so excited is out there now. And I'm really, really hoping and praying that it becomes more accessible for more people. We talk a little bit about insurance around that and what people can do as far as if they can't afford it. So this is a really amazing episode and I hope you guys love it.

And as always, if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review for the podcast, if you're enjoying it, it would mean so much. If you love this episode, take a moment to tag me on Instagram, share about it on Instagram. I appreciate your support. Thank you guys so much. Hope you enjoy the episode. BTR Nation is on a mission to help fix our broken food system one snack at a time. If that is not music to my ears, I don't know what is. I love these snack bars. Most snacks on the market are filled with tons of added sugar additives like maltodextrin, gums, natural flavors, which are so deceiving, by the way, because there's nothing natural about natural flavors. BTR Nation strives to deliver on nutrition, clean ingredients, and taste, which is really hard to do. You guys know I'm not normally a fan of food bars because I find that the majority of them

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They're really, really good. I actually recently had the founder, Ashley Nicholson, on the podcast to talk all about natural flavors, and it was such a great, really eye-opening podcast. If you guys want to go back and listen to that, I really love Ashley's story and how she started the company. Unfortunately, it's a very sad story. She started the company after her parents passed away from rare forms of cancer. And she was making her snack bars for them in the hospital because she was so

disgusted by hospital vending machine snacks and cafeteria food because they were spending a lot of time in the hospital, unfortunately. And she brought this mission to life to honor them. BTR actually stands for their family mantra, which is be bold, tenacious, and resilient. And you can use code realfoodology for 20% off site-wide when you go to eatbtrbar.com. Again, that's eatbtrbar.com and use code realfoodology. Do you drink filtered water? Hopefully you do. And hopefully by now you know that tap water is loaded with all sorts of pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, heavy metals, fluoride, chlorine, et cetera. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is if you are filtering your water,

you've got to make sure that you're replenishing the electrolytes and the minerals back in your water. One of the ways that I love to do this is with Element. It's spelled L-M-N-T. And by looking at the package, you may initially feel a little bit of a shock with the amount of sodium in there. But if you go back and listen to my episode with Dr. James DeNick, who wrote a book called The Salt Fix, he talks all about how we, for the most part, are actually not getting enough salt. We forget that sodium is an imperative part of our fluid and electrolyte balance.

We actually need sodium. It's imperative to have it in certain levels. And the majority of Americans are getting most of their salt from processed packaged foods and fast foods and from eating out. So if you are not eating out a lot, which hopefully you're not, but that's a discussion for another day, most likely you're probably actually not getting enough salt. So this is one thing that I love about Element is it has a really high sodium level and then it also has potassium and magnesium in there. So it's replenishing your electrolytes. Also, I love the saltiness of it. There's a couple of different flavors that I love the most. The

grapefruit is hands down my favorite. I also really love the raspberry and the watermelon. And if you're concerned about the natural flavors, they also just have a raw unflavored as well that has no flavors in it. It just has the sodium, potassium, and magnesium in there. Element gave me a deal to share with you guys, which I love them so much for this. If you guys go to drinkelement.com slash realfoodology,

that's D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T.com slash realfoodology. You're going to get a free sample pack after you make a purchase. So you get one packet of every flavor, so you can try all the different flavors and then see which one you like the best. So again, that is www.drinklement.com slash realfoodology. Element is spelled L-M-N-T. Andrew, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. For any of my listeners that are unaware of what Prenuvo is, I want to just dive right into it because our main focus today is to talk about the Prenuvo scan. And I would love for my listeners to hear more about it and what it is. Yeah, well, Courtney, it's great to be here. So, PRONIVO is a clinical diagnostic quality screening exam using MRI. So, this is an exam that doesn't involve any radiation. It doesn't involve any use of contrast. And we essentially go through every

organ of the body from your head down to your ankles and put together a detailed report on what we see and what we don't see. And for what we see, how significant it is and what we think you should do about it. And the test is sensitive for solid tumors at stage one in most cases and 500 other conditions that we can see with MRI. So it really is a sort of 500 point check about your health. Yeah. I think another one to point out that's really fascinating because I've seen you guys post about this a few times. You guys can catch aneurysms early on, which is incredible. Yeah, 100%. In fact, we find aneurysms in about 1%

of people. So that's larger than what folks might expect. Now, if we see an aneurysm, it doesn't mean that it's going to rupture. And in fact, we have a risk stratification approach where we look at the size of the aneurysm, the position of the aneurysm, and then risk factors like smoking or blood pressure. And we can calculate a five-year risk based on all of these characteristics. And then we can advise patients on what they might want to do about it, which can range anywhere from just keep checking in every year or two to see if it's changed to some relatively simple these days surgeries to put a little coil in the aneurysm so that it's never going to burst. Wow. That's really incredible because I feel like we're

hearing about a lot of aneurysms and like strokes and stuff happening. And so if we can catch those early, I mean, that's life-saving. Yeah, 100%. I mean, that's really the principle behind the scan, which is we have a very reactive medical system and let's reimagine something, an approach that's perhaps a lot more proactive. Yeah. Yeah. One of my hopes is that this type of scan will be more accessible to everyone because I think this is really the future of the way that we treat these medical conditions, anywhere from aneurysms to strokes to tumors like cancer. Because let's dive into the importance of why it can be life-saving when you find cancer this early on. Sure. So obviously some very basic high school level sort of background

about cancer. Obviously, here we have a collection of cells that are dividing rapidly because they have some mutations that inhibit the ability of the body to fight that cancerous growth. And cancer, therefore, is growing somewhat geometrically. It starts with one cell, then two cells, then four cells, eight cells, 12 cells, whatever. And over time, it acquires mutations to evade more of the immune system of our body so it can metastasize. And what's really fascinating is that the average age of a cancer in our bodies oftentimes can be measured in a decade. And of course, in the very early days, it's not really detectable by any diagnostic approach. But we believe that most cancers are diagnosable at stage one with screening like PRONUVO for a period of about two to four years.

And that really opens up the possibility of finding most solid tumors really early at a time when you can intervene much more successfully. And a really perfect case of this is pancreatic cancer. The average age of a pancreatic cancer at time of death, unfortunately, is between seven and eight years. So again, we believe there's going to be three or four years where we can diagnose these when they're still localized to the pancreas. And in fact, the vast majority of pancreatic cancers that we have identified through prenuvo scans are localized to pancreas and actually resectable. And we send them to specialists. And the first thing they often will say is, holy cow, I've been doing this for a long time. And it's so rare that I have an opportunity to actually perform lifesaving surgery in the context of pancreatic cancer.

Wow. God, that is so incredible. I mean, that just gave me chills. What you guys are doing is absolutely amazing. What are some trends that you guys are seeing right now as far as diagnoses go? Well, the starting point here is our health system does not have a lot of preventative screening exams. So in fact, only 14% of cancers are diagnosed through a routine screening exam, which is very low. The other 86 are either cancers in organs that we have screening, but either the screening misses the cancer, or patients don't necessarily do the screening, or there are so many other organs of the body where we have no screening approach. Ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, bladder. I mean, there are many, many organs where we just have no screening. And so really this is an adjunct to sort of the existing screening techniques that are out there,

but in some ways is a way to screen a primary screening approach for parts of the body where there are no screenings available. Yeah. Is there anything that the prenuvoScan can't screen for? As it relates to cancer, there's really just one category of cancers that we can't screen for early, which is blood-borne cancers, so leukemias, for example. We'll see them at stage three,

where we see marrow expansion, so red blood cells, generation expanding into the legs, but that's obviously a bit too late. But the good news is leukemia usually can be picked up with a routine blood test. I want to walk people through the prenuvo process a little bit because, so I, for my listeners who don't know this, I went and got a prenuvo scan last October. And I obviously going in had no idea what to expect. I was a little bit scared. And my first thought was, am I going to be exposed to radiation? And I was really concerned about that. So can we answer that first of all for

people? No ionizing radiation whatsoever. So in the old days, 20 or 30 years ago, there were a couple of companies that actually offered CT screening in shopping malls around the US. And it eventually got shut down. And one of the reasons was that there was a lot of concern about radiation in the context of a screening exam. Now, if you have a car accident or some diagnostic reason, your risk calculation changes. But the fundamental principle here that we have at Prenuvo is if we were to screen you every year or two for the rest of your life, we don't want to increase your risk of cancer or

disease in the act of actually screening you. So that's why our modality that we use is MRI, which has no radiation whatsoever. Okay. So that was my biggest concern when I went in. And then when I got into the actual machine, so I don't consider myself to be a claustrophobic person, but when they first, so they strap you down on this bed and then they insert you into the machine and at first I was like, ooh, I have to be in here for an hour.

I might get a little freaked out here, but a beautiful thing that you guys did was you installed a TV on the ceiling and put headphones on me and I was able to watch a movie while I was doing it. And granted, I will say, because I really want to give people a full picture here just so you can go in fully informed. The machine gets really loud at certain points. And there are a couple of times where they talk you through and they're like, hey, you need to

hold your breath for a certain amount of seconds. You're not gonna be able to move for a little bit of the time, but those go by very quickly. There's also subtitles on the TV and you can just, you know, put on your favorite movie or favorite TV show. And it goes by pretty quickly. When the hour came, I was like, oh wow, that was not really as bad as I expected at all. And you get used to it. You kind of also talk yourself through like, okay, this is good for me. We're going to get a lot of good information from it. All in all, I had a really amazing experience from it all. And what was really cool is, you know, afterwards I got a full diagnostic report afterwards. You get to see the pictures and you get to see the full report of everything that they find. And what's cool is a nurse called me afterwards, went over all the findings with me and they were like, hey, we saw this. This is probably not really a concern.

We saw this. This is more like genetic related and nothing really to be concerned of. And then they were like, you know, there's this thing that you probably just want to go like follow up with another doctor, which I think is also important for people to know because I see a lot of questions about this. So after you get the scan, if there are things that come up, people don't go back to Prenuvo for it. You go to a specialist in whatever part of the body that thing showed up and then you get further testing done. Yeah, that's correct. That's the approach. I mean, it really comes from... And thank you for describing the process, by the way. I thought that was a great description.

Thank you. It's really the fundamental difference between what we're doing at Pranuvo and what you get in the health system fundamentally is that for us, I want to design a process that I as a customer could get a lot of value out of and could take control of my own health. And so in some ways, it boils down to the fact that you are our customer. And in the health system, usually the insurance company is the customer. And so they're more interested in getting you in and out as fast as possible, in not creating a comfortable environment. You won't find televisions in a regular imaging clinic. And so we do all this because we want to create a great experience for you. And part of that is giving you access to all of your images and being thoughtful about not just telling you

what we see, but also what we think you should do about it. So you can then advocate for your own care when you go back into the health system. Yeah, I think that there's a rising trend of this happening right now because unfortunately, the way that our medical system is set up right now, I mean, you just put that so perfectly, is that the insurance company is the customer, not the person themselves that's actually going through the experience, which is really unfortunate. And then, you know, you tackle on, you tack on top of that, that we're not practicing preventatively. Oftentimes it's, you know, we're going in afterwards after we've already found something. And so that's, again, what's so beautiful about this Prenuvo machine is that it,

it goes in line with everything that I've been talking about on this podcast, which is, you know, we, we want to do, we want to prevent because once you actually have the issue, it is so much harder to treat. And this goes the same for even if you, you know, if you find it very, very early on, I would still consider that maybe a subset of prevention because if you can get it early on enough, you're not going to have to go through all the, or hopefully you will not have to go through all the crazy aggressive measures that you normally would have to go through if you find it like stage three, stage four, and it potentially saves your life too. Well, the way I think about it is there's sort of two categories of findings.

So the category that people maybe focus on a lot and understandably are things like cancer or aneurysms. And here, to be honest, in the US, we have probably one of the best health care systems in the world for dealing with problems once they're diagnosed. The problem really there is speeding up the time to diagnosis and that's where PreneurVu can be really helpful. So armed with the right information, we have a great health system to then go and solve that problem. And of course, in the case of cancer, treating stage one cancer versus treating stage three or stage four cancer is a totally different thing. Stage one breast cancer is an outpatient procedure. Stage three breast cancer, most people quit their job and their job is now trying to overcome that. And the same is true for most any cancer.

The second thing really, and this is what in some ways I'm most excited about what we're seeing at Preneurvo is we're learning that we can actually, you know, in a health system, we go from being healthy to being unhealthy. And it's sort of like a huge jump. You go from having no cancer to having, you know, sometimes advanced cancer. And we know that this is not sort of a binary step, this is a progression. And the same is true for any condition that we have, almost every condition that we can see. So to give you an example, we do a very detailed examination of the spine. And here, even in young

people, we can start to see the very early effects of age-related degeneration in the spine. Now, why is this important if you don't feel any pain? Well, as young people, our job really is to make sure that we have tremendous mobility in our 60s and 70s and 80s because we know that longevity is so closely linked to mobility. And so given that information really early in our lives, the good news is we can make these very tiny lifestyle

course corrections and you may never arrive at a moment where the healthcare system ever has to treat you for anything to do with your spine. So that saves you and the healthcare system money and obviously increases your health span and lifespan as well. Mm, I'm so glad you brought that up.

That's such a great point. Because I talk about this sometimes on the podcast from a totally different lens. Like just let's say, for example, if someone is starting to show rising levels of glucose levels and they're starting to see pre-diabetes, oftentimes in the allopathic conventional system, they won't even flag it until you are full-blown diabetic. And this is what I love so much about the functional space is that they flag it very early on so that you can have an intervention in order to keep it from going all the way to

diabetes. Because like you said, our body is presenting symptoms, but in the case of like the Pernuvo scan, you may not notice those symptoms until it's gotten past a certain point past a certain stage to where then you're going to have to really deal with it in an aggressive way versus if you can catch that like in the spine really early on someone can do physical therapy or do stretches and yoga or whatever it is that they need in order to prevent that from going to that stage yeah and it's actually sort of the good and bad of our bodies. Our bodies or most of our organs have a lot of redundancy built in. So, you know, your liver can be reasonably damaged and still can just, it just sort of rises the challenge

and works harder and harder. The same we can start to see age-related degeneration of the brain and you don't notice. And what we're seeing is people kind of reach a tipping point and then all of a sudden they go from being like feeling like they're normal to you know having a clinically diagnosed condition that then needs treatment in a hospital or medical facility. So that's you know that's that oftentimes are some of the insights that patients get when they come in,

particularly because they might be living a good life, but they may have genetics that predispose them to something. You mentioned diabetes. Golly, I've seen so many patients, particularly in our Silicon Valley clinic. These are people that ride bikes all the time. They're doing triathlons. They are carb loading because they're exercising a lot. And they have a genetic predisposition to fatty liver. And then we'll get this very skinny, otherwise very fit person in the machine and we diagnose severe fatty liver and they have absolutely no idea. And so I think that sort of insight into what's going on under the skin really is priceless.

Wow, that's really interesting. I'm curious, I asked you this earlier, but I'm really wondering just from a Pernuvo standpoint, what are you guys really seeing a lot of diagnoses of right now? Because I actually read that you guys have been seeing a lot of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is really interesting because I've also been seeing reports of it being on the rise. I also read something the other day that there is a rise in lung cancer in women, specifically non-smokers, which is very interesting. Yeah, this one is, we've seen it. We've diagnosed, thankfully, stage one lung cancer in non-smoking women, typically out of the age of

40. We're seeing this around the world. We don't actually... The unfortunate thing is we don't quite know what's causing this. There's a lot of speculation that it's linked to environmental toxins. And in fact, a lot of speculation that the rise in cancer in general is linked to a lot of what's going on in our environment. But unfortunately, we just don't know. And of course, the downside of this rise is you're not thinking about lung cancer screening if you're a non-smoker. And in fact, in our healthcare system, you have to have smoked a certain number of pack years before you even get a lung cancer screening test. And so hopefully, in the coming years, we're going to learn more about

what's driving this. But right now we're absolutely seeing this increase. I actually just posted about this on my story today on Instagram. I wonder, I really want to emphasize, this is my speculation, if the lung cancer in women is being connected to the fragrance that we're spraying on our bodies. Because you think about women use a lot of beauty products. So like fragrance, makeup sprays, hair sprays, shampoo, conditioner, and also cleaning products. I actually just saw Newsweek reported about a study coming out that they are connecting a lot of the cleaning sprays that we use around our house to lung cancer. And you think about just, I will say it because I'm a woman, typically the woman tends to be more the one that's doing the cleaning. I'm just curious about that. It's very frightening.

Yeah, I haven't found answers, but there's some really interesting studies. There was a study that was conducted in 2016. It was published in Nature actually, where they were trying to tease out the effect of environment versus just bad luck or genetics in what might drive cancer. And that study showed that actually the majority of the impact on cancer rates was largely driven by environment. And by environment, I don't mean just the houses that we live in or the air that touches us, but also what we put inside our bodies. And obviously, one of the most interesting insights was that if you take a person from a country where there's a low incidence of a

type of cancer and move them to a country with a high incidence of the cancer, they acquire the higher incidence. So their risk goes up, which leads us to believe that environment actually plays, you know, how we, the environment we're in, the food that we eat, the way we sort of treat our bodies actually is a pretty important determinant in our likelihood of getting cancer. Yeah, I think this is an incredibly important thing to sound the alarm on for people right now. I had an integrative oncologist on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he was also talking about this too and why more than ever, we just need to be very aware of the things that we are not only putting into our body, but also on our body and around it. So the things we're spraying around us, like the cleaning products, obviously, of course,

the foods that we're eating. And I always like to remind people when I talk about this conversation, it is not about being perfect. You don't have to live in a bubble. You also don't have to live in fear and anxiety, but just being aware and making those conscious choices of cleaning up your cleaning products and get some that are cleaner and more non-toxic. Also making sure that you're sweating on a daily basis just to really work on those detoxification pathways of the body because that can help at least get some of it out of the body as well. But yeah, it's a big concern right now, I think, for all of us. Yeah. By the way, I'm not an expert. I would say probably you know more about this space than I do. The unfortunate reality is there's just not a lot of really high-powered clinical studies that

investigate the impact of environmental diet, lifestyle factors. And I think some part of that is because these studies are expensive to run. And if you can't sort of patent a drug at the end of one of those studies, there's not often a lot of people that want to pay for them. And then secondly, our medical system, I think on average, physicians spend like two or three weeks of their entire medical degree actually talking about environment and lifestyle factors. So it's not really been a focus of the

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back and listen to that episode, it was absolutely fascinating and all about what really makes seed stand out from the rest. You can hear all about the systemic benefits. One of them specifically is their proprietary engineered two-in-one capsule that protects the probiotics through the whole digestion process to ensure that these probiotics actually get to your gut and help populate your gut. Some of the side effects that you might see when you start taking a good probiotic like seed include gastrointestinal or GI function, skin health, so improvement in your skin, whether you're dealing with acne or maybe psoriasis or eczema. It also helps with heart health, gut immune function, gut barrier integrity, and micronutrient synthesis of vitamins B9 and B12. So you may even see an

improvement in energy as well. It's also known to really help with improving digestion as well. So that could look like better, healthier poops too. And who doesn't want that, right? Finally, last but not least, their compostable packaging is one of my favorite things about this product. So when you first get your first seed package, package comes with a glass jar it's a really beautiful green glass jar that looks beautiful on your counter which is also something that i just it's a little added bonus and it also comes with a little travel case so you hold on to that jar and every month you get a biocompostable bag that holds your new monthly supplements in there and then you just dump the supplements in the jar. So it's also environmental friendly and we're not putting more plastic than landfills, which is also a huge, huge issue right

now. So if you guys want to start and try Seed today, go to seed.com slash realfoodology and use code realfoodology to redeem 30% off your first month of Seed's DS01 daily symbiotic. Again, that is seed, S-E-E-D.com slash realfoodology and use code realfoodology. We briefly, I briefly brought this up before we started recording, but I'm really curious to see what the overall response is going to be to Prenuvo as it becomes bigger, just from the medical standpoint. And I'm making these claims, I'm not making these claims on behalf to Prenuvo as it becomes bigger. Just from the medical standpoint, and I'm making these claims, I'm not making these claims on behalf of Prenuvo, but I am just curious to see the pushback that you guys might see from the medical community, because unfortunately,

no one wants to talk about this, but cancer and these other horrible diseases and health implications make a lot of money, especially when they are further along like stage three, stage four. And I hate to sound so doom and gloom about it, but I am just curious to see kind of how the medical community is going to respond overall to this form of detecting it sooner. Yeah, there's been a lot of press about us recently. So definitely a lot of people have, I mean... It's great for raising awareness that these technologies exist. But also, a lot of physicians have been expressing opinions. I have three comments to make maybe. The first would be, I don't think anyone has spoken out against Prenuvo who actually has first-hand knowledge about what we do. And so whenever a physician comes in and experiences us firsthand, typically the first

person they bring in is their partner, and then they start referring patients. So a lot of the opinions that you see out there are from people that maybe are reflecting on the category of preventative screening, may even be thinking about this CT screening from 30 years ago, and don't really fundamentally understand what it is that we're doing. Screening itself really is a qualitative modality. What do I mean by that? If you need to go and get brain surgery, you're probably going to study and learn which are the hospitals that are very good at brain surgery and which physicians there are the ones that have the lowest complication rates. And ideally, you want that surgery to be conducted by that surgeon. Imaging in some ways is the same way. The hardware that you use, the image acquisition protocols that are employed on

the machine, the skill and training and approach that the radiologist uses, and increasingly AI, all contribute to boosting the accuracy and reducing the false positives of any approach. And for us, I have a company that's full of sort of geeks in some ways. And the only thing we do as a business is these whole body screening exams. So we're not an imaging clinic that's trying to do this on the side. This is the only thing that we do. And we've handpicked our hardware, we've written our own acquisition protocols, we've trained our own radiologists to be able to be very accurate. And then maybe the

third observation is that a lot of physicians really ask for clinical evidence. And the way they define that is, you know, an evidence of a reduction in all causes mortality. Now, that's actually, it's a totally reasonable thing to ask for but it's also really important to understand that to actually run that clinical trial probably would take decades. So in some ways we may not be around to see the outcome of that trial and this was in some ways the case also with mammogram and breast cancer screening where it was available in clinics in the 60s. There are a lot of people that spoke out against that screening becoming more widespread.

And it took 20 or 30 years for it to be proven at population scale and for it to be covered by insurance. Now, the question you might ask is, well, what happened to all the people that were diagnosed with breast cancer between the 60s and the late 80s, early 90s? I mean, what do we have to say about those people as well? So, you know, we ask physicians to have an open mind and we are constantly running seminars for them to learn more about what we're doing and inviting them into experiencing it firsthand. I want to dive a little into breast cancer because I know breast cancer, it seems as though, I don't know the specific stats and maybe you do, it seems like more and more women are getting diagnosed with breast cancer and it does seem like there's a rise in it younger and younger as well in women. Are you guys seeing that with Pernuvo?

Yeah, it's both. We're seeing a rise in the overall diagnosis of breast cancer and then also, you're right, a rise in younger people being diagnosed. It's hard to really tease out the factors here. So some people believe that there's some environmental factors that are contributing to that rise. And again, if you look cross-country, we see significant differences up to an order of, I think, a magnitude of five between countries where there are very low incidences of breast cancer and other countries like typically Western countries and in particular the US where you have quite high rates. The second thing is mammogram unfortunately although it saved a lot of lives it struggles

with imaging of breasts that are dense. And for your listeners that may not understand what that means, so dense breasts are essentially breasts that are full of glandular tissue, which describes most women that are premenopausal. And in fact, when the US Preventive Task Force put in place criteria for mammogram, and they said that mammograms should be available originally, I think it was over the age of 50, and now it's 45. It wasn't because people under 45 weren't getting breast cancer, but it was because mammography wasn't working as well for women under 45. So Prenuvo offers an alternative to this. We do a non-contrast breast MRI as part of our full body. There's also ultrasounds.

And I think with breasts, unfortunately, it's both a very common cancer and it's quite a hard cancer to diagnose because of that glands or tissue. So we generally recommend most people obviously continue to do mammograms and then complement that with other modalities in the intervening years. So that it's been covered by more than one modality. So that if it's missed on one, it's caught on the other. Yeah. So I've been hearing this too, actually. I've also been hearing a lot about thermography and they're saying that you should get all

of them done. Okay. So I'm getting confused on all the different scans. So Prenuvo is an MRI, right? Without contrast. And then thermography is something different where essentially they pick up heat in different areas. Is that what it is? Do you know?

I don't know too much about it. And I definitely don't know much about the clinical evidence behind thermography. I would say like in the mainstream health community, generally speaking, there are three modalities. There's a mammogram. Mammogram is an x-ray. And so what x-ray is very good at is picking up calcification. And typically, a lot of breast cancers have calcified sort of tissue there. What MRI is quite good at picking up is areas of density inside a breast, particularly inside solar breasts.

And then what ultrasound is really good at picking up is blood flow that as cancers grow, they promote the growth of blood vessels around the cancer to deliver energy to the tumor itself. And ultrasound is really good at that. So you have these three different approaches. And I think a lot of forward-thinking physicians now, in some cases for all women, but definitely for women that might have BRCA or have a family history of breast cancer, that they sort of rotate between these modalities relatively routinely so they won't get missed. Yeah. Yeah. This is really helpful. Another one that I think we should definitely talk about is ovarian cancer because I read that it's three times more lethal than breast cancer. But is ovarian cancer one similar to breast cancer

where if you catch it really early on, you have a pretty good chance of surviving? What's the rates on that? Sure. So yeah, ovarian cancer is, unlike breast cancer, tends to be caught quite late. And at the average stage of diagnosis, which I think is between stage three and stage four, I believe the five-year survival rate is below 30%. For ovarian cancer that is caught, that's localized to the ovary, the survival rates are 70, 80%. So there's a massive difference in catching that cancer early. Why is it not caught early? Well, first of all, there's no real screening exam for this. Secondly, the sort of pain that might be associated with ovarian cancer is often mistaken by women for just regular menstrual pain.

And then sometimes it may not be ignored by the woman, but may be ignored by the physician who systemically may well underemphasize or sort of under work up women that are feeling pain. And unfortunately with the varian cancer, what happens when it spreads is it tends to spread to the abdominal cavity. So it can kind of go everywhere really fast. And so early diagnosis is a really important way to reduce the death rate from ovarian cancer. And it's now the fifth

highest cancer. It causes the fifth highest set of cancer deaths in women. And it's been growing over the recent decades. I mean, it's scary that I mentioned earlier, I had this integrated oncologist on the podcast and he was saying just in general, the rise in cancer lately has been significantly more than what we've seen before. And we also talked about, because there's a lot of people debating right now,

is it because we're detecting more or is there actually a real rise? And he believes there's actually a real rise in cancer for various reasons that we've talked about in this episode. So it's so, that's what's so amazing. I want everyone to get this prenuvo scan because this, you know, what we keep talking about is a lot of these things don't show symptoms until they're so far progressed that, you know, it can be potentially life threatening, but if you can get them early enough, early enough and you don't have any symptoms yet, how incredible that we can detect that so early on.

Yeah. And I just take my notes actually, ovarian cancer caught at stage one is 94% survival for over five years. So it's just a massive boost to the average. It's basically five times more survival than the average ovarian cancer at stage of diagnosis. So it's pretty huge. We're seeing, I think a lot of, there's a lot of questions about cancer. Obviously it's great to have the new tests. We don't know why sometimes cancer rates are increasing, but to some extent that's really the value proposition of screening like Pruniva offers which is let's not necessarily spend too much time thinking about whether I have a bigger risk or low risk or whether my body today

versus if I was alive 20 years ago has a bigger risk or a smaller risk or whether or not I'm feeling symptoms is important information or not. The philosophy of the company really is to do with your entire body sort of what you do when you go to the dentist every six months, which is just get a checkup. And if you do that routinely, the likelihood that you will ever be diagnosed with something that's advanced, or to use that dental analogy, if you go to the dentist every six months, the likelihood you'll need a root canal sort of goes to zero. And the same is true for the types of things that we can see at Pranivo. So I'm curious, let's say someone gets diagnosed with something,

like let's say a cancer, for example, with the Pranivo scan. A lot of concern for people is their cancer coming back. So let's say they get a free, they get through the cancer, and then they get a clear scan. What is the likelihood of if someone goes, let's say, to Pranivo once a free, they get through the cancer and then they get a clear scan. What is the likelihood of if someone goes, let's say to Pranuva once a year, of them being able to catch it early on if it metastasizes or is there, do you know what I'm trying to say? Is that something you guys are able to scan for as well? Yes. And I want to distinguish here between immediately post-treatment and then let's say after the time at which the health system says you are cancer-free.

And the regular diagnostic screening stops. So while someone is still being treated for cancer, we tend to want to be very deferential to the oncology team that they work with. And of course, for example, coming in and getting a prenuptial scan after someone has had cancer treatment, there can be a lot of inflammation, there can be disruption in the case of surgery. And it may well be that a prenuptial scan is not the right modality at that point in time for measuring either treatment response or whether there's any cancer load still in the body for someone who's just treated. But once they're given the all clear, and this is generally what happens in the health system is you're followed for a certain period of time and then the health system says, okay, you're done.

But most people who have gone through an episode of cancer are always looking over their shoulder. And for them, not knowing what's going on inside their body is actually negatively affecting their quality of life. And so we have a lot of people actually that come into us post getting an all clear, who then come in every year, oftentimes, just to see that there's nothing new that's come up that's concerning. And even when we look inside the body and we see, we might see some lesions in an organ, we risk stratify them differently depending on whether the person has had cancer or not. So we also change the way that we start to assess people to ensure that if there's something that we're not 100% certain of, in the case of someone that hasn't had cancer, we might say, we're just going to check again next year and see if it's changed. But if someone has had cancer, we might want to

do another test because we're always a little bit concerned that there might be the possibility of a metastasis to another organ. I've been consuming collagen for about six years now. I like to put it in my morning drink, whether that's coffee or matcha. I usually prefer coffee, but lately I've actually been doing coffee and then having a matcha a little matcha. I usually prefer coffee, but lately I've actually been doing coffee and then having a matcha a little bit later. I love to mix the collagen in with my nut milk that I put in my coffee. It's usually almond milk or coconut milk. And I'm so excited to announce that Organifi has their own collagen now. As with all Organifi products, it's glyphosate residue free, really high quality. It has

hydrolyzed bovine hide collagen peptides that are derived from pasture raised cows. It also has eggshell membrane collagen. It's taken from the thin layer between the egg and the shell. And this is collagen rich, and it may be beneficial for strong joint health. It also has hydrolyzed fish collagen peptides derived from wild caught fish. Because this collagen source is of a small particle size, it makes it easier to digest and more absorbable. And then there's also chicken bone broth protein concentrate in there. This collagen type is actually found in your gut joints and cartilage, and it helps support greater health both inside and out.

Collagen is really good for lubricating the joints. It's also great for healing and sealing the gut. Often now because of our diets, people are dealing with leaky gut syndrome, and collagen actually goes in there and helps to seal the gut. So if you're having any sort of leaky gut syndrome symptoms, collagen may be your best bet. It's also great for just replenishing collagen stores that diminish as we age and may help with wrinkles and keeping supple skin because collagen also is what keeps our skin elastic. So this is why I consume collagen. I love Organifi. I love all of their products. If you guys want to try any of the Organifi products for 20% off, you can use code realfoodology or go to organifi.com slash realfoodology. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I dot com slash realfoodology. When I posted about Pernuvo, I posted about it a bunch on my Instagram.

And one of the comments and questions I've gotten about it is the topic of accessibility. Is it covered by insurance? Is there of accessibility. Is it covered by insurance? Is there a way to get it covered by insurance? What's the protocol there? Well, you can use a HSA or an FSA plan to pay for this. So for people, and oftentimes, by the way, these are young people that have these high deductible plans. A lot of them just let that money expire at the end of the year.

And it's a good opportunity to use all or part of that to subsidize a preventive health exam that wouldn't be otherwise covered by insurance. It's not yet covered by regular health insurance plans. We're working pretty hard to, just as we're working hard to educate physicians, we're having similar conversations with insurers. I don't know that that's going to be a short process.

I think it will take time, unfortunately. And in the meantime, we introduced a scan for $999 that just looks at cancer. And we also have financing available for people if they need that sort of help in order to pay for the procedure. But at the end of the day, sometimes even people with insurance that are going to get an MRI scan of a single part of their body, oftentimes their out-of-pocket is not that different to what we charge for the entire body. So we're working really hard to bring the cost down and make it more and more accessible. And hopefully, frankly, that these techniques can become

standard of care of a transformed and much more proactive preventive healthcare system. I have to share one little interesting fact, to be honest. Even that torso cancer scan that we offer for $1,000, I think to cover everyone in the US to do one of those scans every two years is less than half of what we pay in the US for late stage cancer drugs. So these numbers are obviously quite big, but also our healthcare system is ginormous and 97% reactive. So the fundamental belief that we have at Prrenuvo is if we were able to rebuild this from the ground up as a preventive healthcare system, not only would we save a lot of lives and make

people generally healthier and happier, but we could also save a tremendous amount of money from the healthcare system. God, I'm hoping for a preventative medical system like that. I think I will say Big Pharma is not going to go down without fighting tooth and nail. So, because what you just mentioned is that we spend a lot of money on those drugs, which is an unfortunate reality, but I'm a very hopeful person and I'm incredibly hopeful and I believe in the goodness of people. And I think that, you know, if we can really turn this around with our medical system, it would be just absolutely amazing. And I think that if we can really turn this around with our medical system, it would be just absolutely amazing.

And I believe that we can. It's just going to be, I think it's going to be a bit of a fight. Well, I also believe as an entrepreneur, I believe in creative destruction. So to some extent, pharmaceutical companies behave the way they do because of the incentives in a healthcare system. There are so many, I would say, promising drugs that are never commercialized because when they're tested on advanced disease, they don't work. The interesting question is, well, what if you were able to test those drugs that may be way less systemic, more targeted,

have less collateral damage to the person that's taking them? What if you could actually target them against early stage disease? So it may well be that there are whole new classes of drugs that could be approved that would be much more easily tolerated. And the problem we've had as a healthcare system is, unfortunately, we just haven't had patients with early enough disease that we could actually effectively target them. Actually, that's a great point. And by you guys having these early diagnostics and we're having more people that are learning, you know, that they're getting these diagnoses a lot earlier,

this may shift the whole way that we do the system. So that'd be amazing. A great example is dementia, actually. So, I mean, there's just been so many drugs that have been tried and failed to reverse Alzheimer's. And when you came in for your scan actually we did a sequence on your brain that is typically only done on Alzheimer's patients. So it's a highly detailed what we call volumetric brain sequence so that we can measure the volume of all the

different regions of your brain. And all of our brains are unique just like the you know our hat sizes so it's hard to tell too much from any one scan but the idea is then you come in a second time or a third time and we can start to understand how the trajectory of your brain volume is changing as you age. And we believe that this is going to make it a lot easier to identify the really early stages of cognitive decline. And who knows, many of those drugs that might have been very interesting biological vectors may work much more effectively on early stage brain volume loss than they do on late stage Alzheimer's. So I think there's tremendous promise. And even some pharma

companies have sort of expressed optimism that were things to be diagnosed earlier, they may well take some of these drugs that were shelved and actually reassess them to see if they have efficacy against early disease. Well, this is fascinating. I also, I really love your positive outlook on all of this because it gives me hope too that we can shift all of this.

And how cool is it that you guys are going to have, this is almost in a way too, how would I put it, like a social experiment where we're able to see brains as they age and you guys will have this whole database that hopefully we can use to study the brain and study all these different diseases as they start to progress in the body.

And I really, God, just the things that you guys are doing with Pernuvo are just absolutely incredible. Well, and I mean, I don't want it to sound like everyone is part of an experiment, but to some extent, the way that radiology works is

that a radiologist can look at your images and bring to the assessment of your images all of the experience they've had from looking at other images. So absolutely, we are identifying things and we're like, okay, that maybe that's early stage X. You know, we're not 100% certain, but as we get enough people going through longitudinally, we can start really bringing back the clock.

And so everyone is really helping us in some ways redefine what disease is. And I think that's awesome for us as individuals. And I think it's awesome for us as a society. And we've already seen, we published or presented over 20 papers in the last year on things that we're seeing in the scans that is completely new medicine. It's a really exciting project to be a part of to really change the, work to possibly change some of these well-had assumptions about how our bodies age

and how disease sort of begins. Yeah. Ooh, this is so cool. I'm so excited about all of this to see where this goes. Before we go, I'm curious, is there anything that we haven't gone over that you think is really important

for people to know about Prenuvo or about any of the diseases we were talking about? Maybe even just to double click on this last point. So you mentioned when you came in, you said you were a little bit scared. I remember before I got my scan, I went out for a nice meal and I'm like, well, maybe tomorrow life is going to change.

And I think that's a really understandable thing. Most people feel a certain level of anxiety. It is really, to go back to our dentist, it's like you're going to change. And I think that's a really understandable thing. Most people feel a certain level of anxiety. It is really, to go back to our dentist, it's like you're going to the dentist not having been for five years. Again, the chance of something unusual being found is obviously a lot higher. When you come back for your next scan, Courtney, the chance of something unexpected is going to be much lower. But the really interesting thing is like, why do we have that fear? And I would put it to you and your listeners that that fear is there because we have a health system that's so reactive. So that when you think about being diagnosed with something,

you automatically think that a health system has trained us to understand that that's advanced, expensive, life-threatening, going to be difficult to overcome. And the world that we're trying to create is one where disease is diagnosed early, and it's easy to treat or can be treated just through lifestyle changes. It's inexpensive. It's more about maintenance. And I think for those people that come to us routinely every year or two, that's the way that they see disease. And I think that's the world that we're trying to create for everyone. Yeah. Oh, I'm really glad that you ended on that. That's a great, it was a great way to end the episode, I think.

I do want to ask you a personal question just that I ask all of my guests, because this is a podcast based on health and healthy eating and things that people do for their own health. And so I'm curious what your personal health non-negotiables are. So these are things that you do either daily or maybe weekly to prioritize your own health. Sure. There's really two things I do. The first, I'm actually talking to you from a standing treadmill desk right now. Amazing. I need to get one of those. I'm not working because that's a bit difficult to follow during a podcast. But I started to see very small... In my first scan, I saw the early age-related slippages in my cervical spine, probably because I spent too

much time on computers. So now my computer is up here. And I can walk... Sometimes I walk a half marathon every day and not even realize that I'm doing it. So that's the first thing. The second is, if you spend a lot of time around cancer to some extent, you start to understand just how important diet is for not only inhibiting the growth of cancer for someone that might have it, but also reducing the likelihood that you have clinically diagnosable cancer. And that's really trying to avoid sugar, especially processed sugar. And so I try as much as possible to have a somewhat ketogenic diet because there's a lot of evidence there that shows that that inhibits growth cancer. So those are my two.

I love it. Those are good. Well, please let everyone know where they can find you, where they can find Prenuvo. And yeah, if they want to sign up for a scan, where should they go? Sure. So they can actually book their own scan on Prenuvo.com. And you can see the availability there and all of our clinics and pick a slot that works for you. We are opened in eight locations right now. So we have San Francisco, LA, Dallas, Boca Raton just north of Miami, New York, Chicago, Vancouver, and Minneapolis. And we're just about to open also in Maryland. So for Washington DC. And

we'll open a few other locations in the next six months. So hopefully there's going to be a location there most all the people that are listening. Great. Also, you know what? I just remembered when I went last year, they shared a code with me to share with people. I don't get any money.

Just so you guys know, there's no compensation for me. It's just a gift to you. Can I share that code? I think it's still working. Okay, so if you guys want to use code Courtney, it will save you $300 on the scan. Yeah, we have some for, you know,

and just to reiterate, so this is a scan that reduces the cost for people that listen to the pod, but nothing goes back to you because we want to make sure that, obviously, your advice is unbiased. Exactly. I'm not getting commissioned here. This is just my gift to my listeners because I want to make this as accessible

to people as possible. So awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was such a great episode and loved having you on. It's been awesome being here, Courtney. Thank you. Thank you. 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. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor

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Wednesday. Produced by Drake Peterson and Resonant Media.