The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery (The Wellness Code) Dr. Jason Fung

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery (The Wellness Code) Dr. Jason Fung Author of the international bestsellers The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code Dr. Jason Fung returns with an eye-opening biography of cancer in which he offers a radical new paradigm for understanding cancer—and issues a call to action for reducing risk moving forward. Our understanding of cancer is slowly undergoing a revolution, allowing for the development of more effective treatments. For the first time ever, the death rate from cancer is showing a steady decline . . . but the “War on Cancer” has hardly been won. In The Cancer Code, Dr. Jason Fung offers a revolutionary new understanding of this invasive, often fatal disease—what it is, how it manifests, and why it is so challenging to treat. In this rousing narrative, Dr. Fung identifies the medical community’s many missteps in cancer research—in particular, its focus on genetics, or what he terms the “seed” of cancer, at the expense of examining the “soil,” or the conditions under which cancer flourishes. Dr. Fung—whose groundbreaking work in the treatment of obesity and diabetes has won him international acclaim—suggests that the primary disease pathway of cancer is caused by the dysregulation of insulin. In fact, obesity and type 2 diabetes significantly increase an individual’s risk of cancer. In this accessible read, Dr. Fung provides a new paradigm for dealing with cancer, with recommendations for what we can do to create a hostile soil for this dangerous seed. One such strategy is intermittent fasting, which reduces blood glucose, lowering insulin levels. Another, eliminating intake of insulin-stimulating foods, such as sugar and refined carbohydrates. For hundreds of years, cancer has been portrayed as a foreign invader we’ve been powerless to stop. By reshaping our view of cancer as an internal uprising of our own healthy cells, we can begin to take back control. The seed of cancer may exist in all of us, but the power to change the soil is in our hands. Author of the international bestsellers The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code Dr. Jason Fung returns with an eye-opening biography of cancer in which he offers a radical new paradigm for understanding cancer—and issues a call to action for reducing risk moving forward. Our understanding of cancer is slowly undergoing a revolution, allowing for the development of more effective treatments. For the first time ever, the death rate from cancer is showing a steady decline . . . but the “War on Cancer” has hardly been won. In The Cancer Code, Dr. Jason Fung offers a revolutionary new understanding of this invasive, often fatal disease—what it is, how it manifests, and why it is so challenging to treat. In this rousing narrative, Dr. Fung identifies the medical community’s many missteps in cancer research—in particular, its focus on genetics, or what he terms the “seed” of cancer, at the expense of examining the “soil,” or the conditions under which cancer flourishes. Dr. Fung—whose groundbreaking work in the treatment of obesity and diabetes has won him international acclaim—suggests that the primary disease pathway of cancer is caused by the dysregulation of insulin. In fact, obesity and type 2 diabetes significantly increase an individual’s risk of cancer. In this accessible read, Dr. Fung provides a new paradigm for dealing with cancer, with recommendations for what we can do to create a hostile soil for this dangerous seed. One such strategy is intermittent fasting, which reduces blood glucose, lowering insulin levels. Another, eliminating intake of insulin-stimulating foods, such as sugar and refined carbohydrates. For hundreds of years, cancer has been portrayed as a foreign invader we’ve been powerless to stop. By reshaping our view of cancer as an internal uprising of our own healthy cells, we can begin to take back control.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you tuning in. We've got our most amazing guest here today that's going to talk about intermittent fasting, cancer, diet. We're going to talk about all this amazing stuff that can probably change your life and make you feel better about yourself and maybe live longer. So we're going to get into that. If you want to watch the video version of this, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Foss. Hit that bell notification button so you get all the notifications of what we do. You can also further show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Go to thecvpn.com, see

all nine podcasts. And also, you can go to our new book club we're launching on patreon.com, 4chesschrisvoss. We're going to talk about some of the background of the authors, the books we read, all the different engagements we're having with the podcast. You kind of get like the behind-the-scenes sort of stuff. So be sure to go to patreon.com, 4chessch slash Chris Voss and check that out. Today we have an amazing author. This gentleman has written a lot of books and also co-authored a lot of books. His name is Dr. Jason Fung, M.D.

He is a Canadian nephrologist. He's a world-leading expert on intermittent fasting and low-carb, especially for treating people with type 2 diabetes. He's written three best-selling health books, and he co-founded the Intensive Dietary Management Program. Dr. Fung has his own websites at idm.health and thefastingmethod.com. And Dr. Fung graduated from the University of Toronto and completed his residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Welcome, my Canuck friend, Jason, to the show.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I love my Canadian peoples. You guys are wonderful people up there, just the nicest people in the world, really, when it comes down to it. Thanks so much. I mean, I always my my time in the united states too it can't uh i spent a couple years in los angeles had a great time yeah yeah i'll go there all the time i mean it's great yeah we might pull some a's out and pull it how's it going eh i'm a big rush fan and and uh who's the other fan that he used to like? Bob and Doug McKenzie.

Big fan of Bob and Doug McKenzie. I'm old. What can you say? Rush is classic. We're going to be talking about your new book that you have coming out in November 10, 2020. You guys can preorder this book on Amazon.com or local booksellers or, you know, whatever sort of venue you want to take and use to preorder your books. This is pretty amazing.

It's called The Cancer Code, A Revolutionary New Understanding of Medical Mystery, in parentheses, The Wellness Code. So this should be pretty interesting. You can order it for November 10, 2020. It will be released. Let's talk about this book that's coming out here, Jason. This is pretty interesting. Oh, thanks. So the whole idea is that the disease of cancer is such an important disease. It's the second sort of leading cause of death amongst Americans. And it's actually been rising very quickly. So if you look at heart disease, for example, in the 60s, it was kind

of two to three times as common as cancer in terms of cause of death. And now they're actually almost the same. So it's actually become a more and more important health problem as we go. And what's interesting about it is that if you look at the common sort of medical problems, we sort of know what causes them. So if you look at heart disease and strokes, for example, you have blood clots, which cause this. If you look at infections, for example, they're caused by bacterias or viruses or fungi. So we know what causes them. But the whole thing about cancer is that we still don't really know what is cancer. Like it's not some kind of extrinsic sort of thing. It's not like a knife or a radiation or something coming from outside.

It's actually a perversion of our own cells. And the question is, what is cancer and why does it exist? And how does this happen? Because it's not rare. It's actually very, very common. And what I talk about in this book is sort of the different ways that we look at cancer and the paradigms, how we think about cancer, because it's actually undergone a sort of radical, radical shift in the last 10 to 15 years, which is sort of bringing new hope to cancer victims. So if you look at sort of what is cancer, if you ask what is cancer, people have changed their minds over time. So initially, of course, the first sort of modern theory of cancer was basically it's a cell that grows too much. So if you have a lung cancer or a breast cancer or

whatever, it's basically a cell, a breast cell or a liver cell or a lung cell or whatever you have. And it just keeps growing and growing and growing. And then at some point it breaks off, it starts going to other areas and it starts growing and growing and growing. So that's what I sort of call the first great paradigm of cancer because it's like, it's a cell that grows too much. So therefore, if you think about treatments, then if it grows too much, then kill it. That's basically what we got. So we have surgery, we have radiation, and we have chemotherapy. And chemotherapy is essentially a selective poison. That is, it kills cells, and it kills cancer cells slightly faster than it kills normal cells. That's what it is.

It's a selective poison. But what you're doing is essentially the same. These are all ways of non-discriminately sort of killing cells. So you're cutting, you're burning, and you're poisoning. And that's not to minimize the sort of advance that happened in the 40s and 50s, because prior to that, there was no real treatment. But once you started to start to tailor these chemotherapy regimens and surgery and so on, you started to see, you know, you know, these huge advances in cancer treatment. So certain pediatric cancers, for example, they really improved their survival rates by a huge amount. And they still form the sort of basis of what we think of as modern cancer treatment.

But it doesn't answer the question. Because if the question is, what is cancer? You say, it's a cell that grows too much. So the natural next question is, why? Like, why is it growing too much? And that we didn't have an answer. So, you know, as we went through the 60s and the 70s, we started to learn more and more about genetics and the whole genetic revolution. And we looked at the causes of cancer because people say, oh, what causes cancer? People always say, we don't know. And that's actually not true.

We know a lot about what causes cancer. And these are called carcinogens. So things that cause cancer are carcinogens. So tobacco, smoke, soot, for example, asbestos, radiation, certain types of medication. These are all things that cause cancer. So we have a huge list of these things. But the question is, what is it that ties them all together? So the whole idea is that if you think about the genetics of what is happening, all of these different carcinogens, they're linked because they cause genetic mutations. So this was the big sort of advance through the 60s and the 70s is that this cancer is actually a disease of genetic mutation. And this is the theory that I learned in medical school in the 90s and so on. So that is the reason this breast cancer cell or this colorectal cell

is actually changing and turning into this sort of nonstop growth machine is that it has some kind of mutation in the growth genes. That sort of makes sense. So we started to develop these treatments that were amazing for the time. So these were genetically based treatments. So you had certain diseases like CML, which is a type of leukemia, and breast cancer. There was Herceptin, for example. And these were amazing treatments that really improved the mortality of these diseases. So by the 2000s, we were talking about curing cancer again. So we

had gone through, we thought, okay, well, this is great. All we need to do is find the one or two or three or four genetic mutations that cause cancer. And then we will target this mutation and we'll be able to cure cancer. And so in support of that, there was a huge project, if you remember the 2000s, called the Human Genome Project, which was to map out the entire genetic sequence of a human being. It was a huge deal at the time. And the thought was that, hey, if we can lay bare this whole blueprint of the human genes, we'll know where to go and we'll be able to cure cancer, no problem. Well, it sort of came and went. And the whole promise of this genetically based, precision targeted, personalized treatment sort of fizzled.

By the 2000s, there's great hope. By, you know, by the 2010s, it was clear that things were not going the way we thought they were going. So other than these first couple of hits, we never really got to it. And so they did another huge mega project called the Cancer Genome Atlas, which, you know, sequenced thousands of cancers. And what they found was sort of tough to reconcile. And that is what we found was not two or three or four genetic mutations that you could now devise a drug. At last count, there was something like 10 million different mutations.

It was huge. Was that from the Biden? I know that during Obama and Biden, they'd done some sort of thing where they were trying to get all the doctors on one page and collect the data into a centralized source. Was that from that? Well, this was through the Cancer Genome Atlas and through all the research genome atlas and okay

and through all the research in the 90s and 2000s so by the time uh they they had joe biden's cancer moonshot they're talking about trying to get this precision personalized treatment but the problem was of course if you have three or four mutations you can get three or four drugs and you have 10 million mutations you're not gonna do that's The problem was each cancer, some of these cancers had like, so one specific person would have, you know, 15 mutations. Well, you can't give them 15 drugs. But the problem was that the next person in line would have 15 completely different mutations. So those drugs were useless. So it was really, really hard. And that's one of the reasons that cancer treatment just sort of fizzled. Because we couldn't do it this whole

idea that you could just find the mutation, target it like a laser bomb sort of thing and go in and take it out. It didn't work at all. So that sent us right back to the drawing board on that. Because again, if you say, okay, well, cancer is a disease of genetic mutations that cause excessive growth. Well, you're still left with the question, what is causing these genetic mutations? And that was the sort of big, big next step, if you will. And initially, they thought it was just a random mutation. But it turns out these mutations are actually not random at all. Because if you think about how cancer develops, two people with very similar appearing breast cancers, for example, you know, a woman from the 20s and a woman, you know, from

from the last century, they will have almost identical appearing cancers, but they're living at completely different times. And if they all mutated, how did how come they look so similar? And that was the sort of next step. And that's what sort of led us to the next hurdle, which is that what is causing these mutations? And really only one force in the biological universe can produce this sort of, you know, coordinate all these genetic mutations for one specific purpose, which is evolution. So these cancers were not sort of these genetic freaks. They were actually specifically evolving towards a cancer. It's an evolutionary disease, which is a huge, huge breakthrough. So we're trying to evolve, basically?

No, it's the cancer is trying to evolve. And the question is, what is it trying to, that breast, so you take a lung cancer cell, right? Why did that lung cell, this is originally a normal cell. Why does it go and become this sort of autonomous cell that is trying to grow and will eventually kill you, right? Because it's like, okay, this came from your own cell. This came from your own self. But if it kills you, the cancer dies too. So what's the purpose, and why does it develop this way? So this is the really interesting part of the story,

is that what we've discovered is that the cancer is actually not evolving forward, if you will. It's actually evolving backwards to a more primitive state, which is what we've always described cancers as, a primitive or de-differentiated, which is less different from each other. And it's actually moving backwards in time towards a unicellular type organism. And you have to back up a little and say, okay, what's happening here? And this is what took, you know, a lot of people a lot of years to get their minds around. If you think about how life evolved on earth, we actually started as unicellular organisms. So if you think about a bacteria, there's one single cell. And basically, it has to do everything by itself. So it has to get its own food, it has

to do everything, right? And that's just like if you're to be on your own in the woods, like a survivalist in the woods, you have to do everything yourself, you have to hunt, you have to wash your clothes, you have to do everything, you have to wash your own dishes. As you become more and more, you know, together, there are certain advantages. So from a single cell, you started to evolve multicellular organisms where cells would actually band together. And that gives you a big advantage of specialization. That is, as you know, let's take the example of the survivalist in the woods. As you go into a city, for example, now you have bakers and you have, you know, traffic polic, now you have bakers and you have, you know, traffic

policemen and you have firemen and you have, you know, all these specialized things that do their one job better than the other. So same thing with a cell. As you go towards a multicellular organism, you have specialized cells. So you have a lung cell, which is specialized for breathing, and you have a liver cell, which is specialized for detoxification, and you have skin cells, which are specialized for this. But the whole sort of prime directive of that survive and to reproduce. That's it. There's nothing else. If you are in a multicellular organism, everything is sort of organized for you. There are rules. You can't go anywhere. You have to stay in your place. Everybody depends on each other. So there are lots

of rules, just like in a city, right? You can't just walk into somebody's house. You can't just, you know, throw your trash onto the street. There's lots of rules. But because you're able to become bigger, you actually dominate your environment. So same thing happened with multicellular organisms like humans. We have liver cells and lung cells and pancreas cells. But each cell now has to not compete with each other, but they actually have to cooperate. So what happened is that this sort of competitive kernel of survivalist genes, they were never erased because that's not what evolution does. Instead, what happens is that sort of this overlying playbook gets written on top.

So you suppress this old how to compete playbook, and you have a how to cooperate with each other playbook. Just like a survivalist is like, okay, you don't need to know how to compete playbook. You have a how to cooperate with each other playbook. Just like a survivalist is like, okay, you don't need to know how to shoot each other. You need to know how to be a good neighbor and you need to know how to wear pants kind of thing, right? So this whole, but that survivalist playbook never actually got erased. So when you have a lung cell, which is exposed to chronic damage, like with smoking, for example, what happens is that some cells get killed off and some cells survive, but it's put under severe stress. So in that extreme stress, it faces sort of an existential crisis that is it either has to choose to go

back to this survivalist playbook or it will die so most will just die and you'll never see it but some of these cells will turn back into this sort of survivalist mentality so instead of learning instead of uh expressing those genes which are trying to cooperate with other genes, it now turns into this survivalist, which is now trying to survive at all odds, because that's the only way it can survive when faced with this sort of chronic damage. And that's really why any type of chronic damage to the cell actually can cause cancer. And that's why every single cell in the body can become cancerous, because there's hundreds of different types of cancer.

Like there's cancers of the eyes and cancers of the skin and cancers. Everything you can think of can become a cancer. But not just that. The cancer exists in every multicellular organism in existence. That is, it doesn't exist in just humans. So if you just look at human physiology, you're not going to understand what the origin of cancer is. Because dogs get cancer, cats get cancer, rats get cancer, even hydro, which is one of the most primitive organisms that people study in high school biology, they get cancer as well. So it's because it actually exists. It actually predates everything. And that's why that sort of kernel of cancer exists in all of our cells. Every single cell in our body can become cancer. You can have cancer of the placenta and you can have cancer of everything.

And that's why, because it's actually a remnant of our own past. It's sort of like if you were to have a dancing bear, for example. So you take a bear and you train it to dance and wear a tutu, right? So that's fine. And as long as you feed it and stuff, it's fine. But when it gets mad, it goes back to being a bear right stop dancing but it still has the tutu on right that's what happens in cancer when you subject it to this extreme stress it forgets how to cooperate and starts to survive at all odds so

it's like a survivalist and i liken it in the book to like, if in a city, for example, people don't steal or kill each other. But as soon as the law and order breaks down, everybody is all of a sudden, you either kill or be killed. It's the law of the jungle, right? Yeah. So then what happens? Well, you get lawlessness, you get looting, you get stuff that people would never do. But they're forced, because that's the survivalist training in all of us, right? And that's what's happening in the cell. It's been exposed to the stress. And that's why, you know, it explains so much about what cancer is, how it develops. And now we can actually apply the entire field of evolutionary biology to say, hey, we can now bring new approaches to this cancer problem because we're not trying to treat it as if it's a genetic problem.

It's not. It's actually a problem of these sort of radical anarchist cells that have tried to survive at the expense of everybody else so what do you need to do you need to wipe them out and you do that by things like immunotherapy where you enhance your own immune system to try and wipe out these things that's amazing dude you just blew my mind i i we talked pre-show about my dog that had cancer and so you know i tried to read up as much as i could being a layman and not a professional like you are in the medical industry but i know everything now no i'm just kidding i'm not one of those people um the uh uh and yeah to me to my understanding you know from

just you know what i read obviously i read your book yeah um you know it was it was a cell that went malignant that you know somehow got damaged or whatever and just turns into like the evil cell that goes, but no, what you say makes sense. I'm an atheist and I believe in evolution. So yeah, crawling up out of the primordial soup and becoming what we became and you just look at the science of how we're built. I mean, it's still weird to sit around and go,

I'm a bunch of cells. But no, that actually really makes sense. I mean, it really does. Because you mentioned this as you were going through it, but I often wonder the same thing. You're like, why is there cancer? Because it will kill you. And when it kills you, it dies too.

So it's like this suicidal sort of mission, cell organism, whatever, that doesn't really make any sense. But I don't know, it's evil and whatever. But from what you're saying, that makes complete more sense. It basically goes rogue and stuff like that. Yeah. So if you think about the treatments of cancer, even, so things that we do, so chemotherapy, for example, is a selective poison. Almost all of them are actually carcinogens because they damage cells. Same with radiation. So if you look at, you treat somebody with radiation for their cancer, they're at much higher risk of developing a secondary malignancy. That is a cancer down the line because you've subjected that tissue to chronic damage. So it's interesting

that the actual treatments of cancer are actually carcinogens themselves. But once you sort of understand this sort of paradigm, you can understand, okay, that's the reason. And then you have to actually think about cancer, not as a sort of genetic freak mutation this is the thing that's very interesting is that we could we had considered that cancer was this sort of um you know freak genetic mistake sort of thing that's the way that we looked at it in 60s and 70s oh you had a mutation it was a mistake and it just grew up it's's like, it's no mistake. Like cancer survives better than anything else. It's no mistake that it survives the worst poison you can throw at it. It survives as much surgery as you can throw at it, and as much radiation. That's no mistake, right? We thought it was some

stupid, crazy thing, but it's like crazy like the Joker, right? It's actually a survival because that is the genes that have been activated are the survivalist genes that are inherent in every single cell. And that's why, you know, you look at all the carcinogens that we talk about. So, you know, not just the radiation and stuff, but tobacco smoke chronically damaged this lung. The asbestos chronically damaged this lung in a specific part. And it's that part of the lung that is damaged that is at risk of disease or viruses, for example. So hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, and cervical cancer, it's a human papillomavirus, when it exposes the liver to certain viruses, it's going to cause, again, this sort of existential threat, this chronic sublethal

damage, which is sort of like taking away the law and order of that, you know, that thing and forces those cells to become survivalist. So the cells are not inherently bad, just like a survivalist is not inherently bad. There are different rules that apply in the jungle as opposed to living in New York City, sort of different rules that apply. And when you go back and when these cells sort of turn back from a New York City businessman

into a survivalist, they sort of can't exist in this multicellular world, or at least we're at odds with them. So therefore, we have to try and, you know, get rid of them in that way. And when you think of that, it's no accident that cancer actually has much more in common with an infection than any other disease. Because if you look at it, you know, cancers sort of develop treatment resistance, which is that when you treat something it, it, it can, you know, over time it will resist it. So you treat it with, if you treat a bacteria with antibiotics,

it eventually develops a resistance same thing with cancer. When you treat it with chemotherapy, it eventually develops resistance. Whereas other diseases don't do that right so if you treat a kidney stone it doesn't suddenly develop resistance to your ultrasound because this is actually an organism that is living that is evolving through time and space right so this disease which um you know if you have a cancer and then five years later it recurs, it has changed in that five years. You can check the genetics. There's been, there's huge differences between that, the genetic profile of that cancer five years ago to what it is because it's

changed. And so it changes over time. And if it, if a breast cancer goes to the liver, you can check those two cancers, the breast cancer that's in the breast and the breast cancer that's in the liver. They're distinct. They're different from one another because they've undergone evolutionary change. Because as the breast cancer has gone to the liver, it's had to develop, it's had to evolve the ability to live in the liver because it can't do that at the beginning. Evolution can do that. That explains so much, man. That logically makes sense. I mean, it really does. You know, and I've had friends that have beaten cancer,

but the doctors always tell them, look, this sucker's going to come back. And that explains why it comes back even more powerful than the first time when they beat it. So you mentioned immunotherapy. Is that a best way to reinforce your cells? Well, it's a new way. So there's obviously a lot of new ways to, once you have a new paradigm of cancer, then you can sort of bring all these new weapons in and say, well, look, right now you have pro-cancer sort of effects, which is the chronic damage, which is, and you have pro-cancer sort of effects, which is the chronic damage, and you have anti-cancer defenses because your body has actually evolved a number of defenses against the dark arts sort of thing.

And the reason it's done that is because cancer has been with us from the very beginning since we sort of became multicellular organisms. So there's actually a number of ways that our body has evolved to prevent cancer from taking a hold. That is, there are essentially rules to keep you as a team. Like, you know, if you think about a football team, you want to all work on the same page, as opposed to like 10 different players. Oh, this player wants to run this way, and this guy wants to throw this way. And, you know, so we have rules to make us a team, whereas the cancer is sort of individual. So once you develop, once you understand that there's these sort of answer cancer defenses, so there's things like apoptosis and autophagy. I'll get back to those in a second. And then the

immune system is actually primed to destroy cancer cells on site. So if you think about the immune system, the immune system is essentially this, you know, all these cells. And it's very important for them to distinguish between our own cells and foreign cells, because foreign cells you want to destroy, and you want to avoid the friendly fire. You don't want to sort of kill all your own normal cells. So cancer cells are actually recognized intrinsically without ever having seen them. We have a certain natural killer cells, which are primed to destroy cancer cells on site, even if you've never seen them. So the body actually recognizes the cancer as something completely foreign. So that's one of the anti-cancer defenses. And if we

can, excuse me, if we can boost that up, then we can actually tip the scales in favor of it. The other thing that's very interesting is that if we think of cancer sort of as a separate organism, then you can say, well, what are the factors that are going to make it want to grow? So what are the growth factors that are going to favor cancerous growth? Because this is going to make it want to grow. So what are the growth factors that are going to favor cancerous growth? Because this is going to be important because if you have a lot of growth factors in your body, then you're going to favor high growth,

which is going to favor cancer. So this is where sort of obesity and fasting and insulin sort of come into the play. So I did medical school in the 1990s, and nobody recognized that obesity was actually a huge risk factor for cancer. So in 2003, there was a huge study of cancer, and what they discovered was that it turns out that it's a huge risk factor. So now if you look at obesity, it's well recognized that there's at least 13 types of cancer, which are obesity related. So breast cancer, colorectal cancer being the most prominent one. So these are really important cancers. They're like the number two and

three cancer killers overall. Lung cancer is number one, but that's mostly related to smoking. And the question is, what is it about obesity that allows these cancer seeds to grow? Because that's important because that's something that we can actually control. Like if it's just in our genes, we can't necessarily control that. And it turns out that our body uses certain things called nutrient sensors. So we sense when food is coming in and insulin is one of these nutrient sensors. So when you eat food and assuming that you eat a variety of carbohydrates and fats and proteins, your insulin will go up and that's a signal that food is available, right? So you eat, food is available. Turns out that that is actually also the exact same signal for cells to grow

because you want cells to grow when food is available. If you don't have food available, you actually don't want your cells to grow because you're going to die. I feel like I'm in an internal garden right now. So what happens is that if you have a disease where your insulin levels are always high, that is you're eating foods, for example, that are very high in insulin, refined carbohydrates. If you're eating all the time, because every time you eat, insulin goes up. If you eat six times a day, insulin is going to go up six times a day. If you eat once a day, it's only going to go up once a day. So the point is that insulin is actually not only a nutrient sensor, that is,

it goes up whenever you eat nutrients, but it's actually a very, very potent growth factor. So if you tip the scales in favor of growth, what you're going to get is cancer. So what's interesting is that there are sort of rare genetic mutants, these dwarves in Ecuador, who actually don't have any insulin growth factor. They have no insulin growth factor. They're virtually immune to cancer. They actually can't grow. And what we see is that if you look at native populations, people like the Inuit in the far north or the Native Americans before they switched their diets and so on, their rates of cancer were almost zero, which is fantastic because, you know, if you look at in the fifties, there's a university, Queen's University in Canada, which would actually send researchers

up to, you know, the Arctic circle to see why these people were immune to cancer. And it's like, they couldn't find cancer anywhere. And it's because they were eating natural foods. They're eating a lot of fat and protein, very little carbohydrates. And they didn't activate those nutrient sensors. So therefore, their growth signaling was very low, which tipped the scales in favor of no growth, which means that cancer was firstly non-existent, which is good news because again, if you can understand that, then you can say, well, how am I going to change my diet in order to minimize these growth factors in order to minimize my risk of cancer? Because cancer can, you know, for the very same person, the risk of cancer depends highly on how much growth signaling you get because it's a separate organism. So you give it growth, you're going to get more cancer. So that's where intermittent fasting comes in because,

of course, intermittent fasting is a great way to lower insulin. It lowers another nutrient sensor called mTOR. So if you don't have growth signaling, you're going to favor the development of, you're going to favor the shedding of these extra cells, which is apoptosis and autophagy, which is sort of getting rid of these other cells. And it puts you into this sort of cell maintenance mode, as opposed to a cell growth mode, so that you're actually taking care of yourselves. So that's one way that you can sort of use these sort of new understandings to say, okay, well, this is great. So what you have to do is try and achieve a normal weight, try to avoid type 2 diabetes. Intermittent fasting is one of the ways, one of the tools that we can use. There's other ones, but that's a good tool to use to do that.

That's pretty amazing. So it's mTOR, M, the lowercase T-O-R? Yeah, so that's another growth sensor. So when you eat protein, mTOR tends to go up. So if you eat beef, for example, your sugar won't go up, your insulin won't go up a lot, but your mTOR will go up. And again, it's a nutrient sensor. It tells the body that nutrients are available, puts you into cell growth mode, right?

And then it's like growth is good for cancer as opposed to cell growth mode, right? And then it's like growth is good for cancer, as opposed to cell maintenance mode. So when you turn down all of these nutrient sensors, your body actively tries to get rid of extra cells. It's like if you have too many cells and no food coming in, you're going to die. So your body's just not that stupid. So it starts getting rid of these extra cells, not just the body fat, but actual cells, it's going to slough off. And when you slough them off, they can't become cancer. And it's an interesting thought, because it's one of these things that, you know, what always blows my mind is that a lot of these sort of ancient wellness traditions, you know traditions involve fasting.

So you look at any major religion, they talk about cleanses and detoxifications. You're getting rid of all these toxins. Turns out you probably were because you're putting yourself through a stress where you're not eating food and your body's going to get rid of all these extraneous cells.

And by getting rid of all these extraneous cells, you're going to reduce your risk of cancer. That would make sense. We should probably plug your other books too, the Diabetes Code and the Obesity Code. And then you've written some books on intermittent fasting. I want to get off your new book. But I figured I'd just plug that so people, if they want to research your intermittent fasting data and some of the other things with Obesity Code and the Diabetes Code, they can as well. This is really interesting to me, what you're doing. I had an experience where I started intermittent fasting. I didn't really do it to do it, but I'd reached 350 pounds and I'd gotten completely just sick of being overweight. I felt like shit. I felt like I was just at the verge of

a heart attack. And I finally just broke. I was drinking like 10 just at the verge of a heart attack. Um, and I finally just broke, I was drinking like 10 to 15 Mountain Dews a day. Uh, lots of vodka, uh, just living, just, just, yeah, Viva La Vida, baby going out to eat all the time. And I just hit a wall one day and I went vegan. I quit the Mountain Dew. I switched from Mountain Dew because I still needed motivation. So I went to coffee. And then I went vegan. And I started eating just vegan foods. And I got rid of meat out of my diet for quite a while.

And I started losing three to four pounds a day. Like I would literally wake up every morning. And then I started intermittent fasting. My morning breakfast would be a coffee. And then I would kind of try it. I would hold out as long as I could throughout the day. And I would, I would eat either like a small lunch. I try and do like broccoli. I mean, I, I, I went from having eggs and, and, uh, bacon to broccoli for breakfast, you know, have a salad in the morning. And then, um, and then usually I'd have one kind of big meal, but it was still vegan based. Uh, and, uh, I did really good with it. I was losing three to four pounds a day. Like

I'd wake up, like people were hating me, like women were hating me online, but I, you know, I had to keep telling people, look, I was drinking 10 to 15 mountains a day i mean there's there's a lot to lose there man there's a lot you know like most women just can't go be vegans lose three or guys can lose three to four pounds a day the interesting thing about intermittent fasting and fasting in general is that it's actually been around for thousands of years so that is every major religion in the world has periods of fasting. So during Lent for Catholicism or during Ramadan or during Yom Kippur or whatever. So it's actually a practice that's been around for thousands of years. And all of a sudden, it gets this bad rap in the last sort of 20 years of, oh, you should never do it. It's like, but literally billions of people around the world have been doing it. And the point is,

and I had, you know, I started using intermittent fasting in my world have been doing it. And the point is, and I had, you know, I started using intermittent fasting in my patients about six years ago. And I'll tell you, when I started talking about it, like everybody thought I was completely nuts, right? They thought I had completely gone off the deep end. But the thing is that when I had looked at the physiology of what happens to the body when you fast, there's nothing bad about it. Because what you're doing is you're actually using your body fat for precisely the reason that you carry body fat, right? So there's nothing wrong with it. Like, if you store body fat, then you have hundreds of thousands of calories for you to use. So why should you not use that, right? And there's

actually no reason. And people came up with all these things, oh, you're going to get hungry, and you're going to get this, and you're going to get that. And there's all these interesting things that if you look at hunger, for example, the hunger actually does not keep going up. So you can do, you know, long fast. And the secret is that hunger is like a wave. So after you don't eat breakfast, it just actually just settles down. So if you skip lunch, for example, you're hungry at one o'clock. But if you don't eat by three o'clock, you'll actually be the same level of hunger as if you had eaten. And the reason is that if you don't eat, your body actually takes those calories out

of your body fat, because you've essentially fed yourself on your body fat so you're no longer hungry. When you're doing multiple day fasts, it's even more interesting because the hunger tends to go down day by day by day. So when you do a two-day fast, hunger is the most. When you get to five days, people are like, oh, I'm not hungry at all. The hunger has completely disappeared. Because your body is now fueling yourself almost purely on your body fat, but it's okay, because that's what it's supposed to do. So it's really interesting. And then people say, oh, well, you're going to go into starvation mode. And it's like, well, that's not what happens either, if you look at the metabolic rate. So this is what they're talking about. So if you go,

if you don't eat your body will start uh you know will not burn as many calories and therefore you'll eventually gain weight again and it's like that's not what happens when you uh don't eat so insulin goes down but other hormones go up so your body actually ramps up its metabolism it simply switches its fuel source from food to stored food which which is your body fat, but actually increases. So the studies looking at four days of fasting find that on day zero, they measure your metabolic rate. The fourth day of having nothing to eat, your body's actually burning 10% more calories than at the beginning. So your body is actually ramping itself up. And people say,

well, why is that? Well, it's because, think about it. If you're a caveman, and it's winter, and there's no food, and you haven't eaten for a couple of days, and you have no energy, you're going to die, because it's going to be even harder to find food. So your body is not that stupid. It simply switches the fuel source from food to body fat and then ramps you up so you actually get more energy so you can go out and hunt that woolly mammoth so it's actually really interesting people actually when when we treated thousands of people they come back and say i have so much energy it's like yeah because you've actually allowed yourself to tap into your body fat stores when you're eating all the time you can't use your body fat because remember your body fat stores. When you're eating all the time, you can't use your body fat

because remember, your body only exists in either the fed state where you're storing calories or the fasted state where you're burning calories. So if you're in the fed state, you're eating all the time, you actually can't burn your body fat. That source of calories is completely closed off to you. By fasting, you're allowing your body to now use that source of energy. And all of a sudden, your body's like, whoa, I have so much energy. It's like, I can keep out and going. And something like, oh, people say, oh, you can't concentrate. It's like, well, did you know that your level of concentration and your mental abilities actually goes up significantly when you fast? It's like, think about it this way. The last time you

had a huge meal at Thanksgiving, did you feel really mentally sharp afterwards? Or did you really want to sit down and watch some football? Right? Yeah, exactly. So your body, again, is not that stupid. If you haven't eaten for a while, your body wants you to have all your mental facilities with you so you can go out and get some food so you go out and you say which is more dangerous facing a lion that just ate or the hungry wolf because that hungry wolf is not like lethargic and ready to fall down that thing is ready to kill you and this is one of the things that we worked with uh you know we worked with some mixed martial artists so i worked with uh jean, we worked with some mixed martial artists. So I worked with Georges St-Pierre, the mixed martial artist. And he said he loved it.

When he used to fast, he felt like everything was in slow motion. And he could just fight and fight and fight. And he felt like he had this huge edge. It's like, yeah. And I said, because you're the hungry wolf. And the other guy is the lion that just ate. Like, you're going to kill him, right? So and sure enough, that's what happened.

So there's all these sort of myths about about fasting that it's not good for you that it's you know the worst thing you can do it's actually if you are overweight then that's probably one of the best things you can do for your body there's all these changes that happen in the body which are beneficial you know that was one of the things i explored when i went through this phase of intermittent fasting and and veganism and stuff. I started looking at paradigms of belief systems. You know, I'd grown up as a child where, you know, my parents, and they're good people, but, you know, my parents were like food was a reward. So I always had this, like, you know, I'd go to the store and I'd be shopping and I'd be like, I should get a bucket of, you know, licorice strips to reward myself for going to the store and I'd be shopping and I'd be like, I should get a bucket of, uh, you know, licorice strips to reward myself for going to the store. And I don't know, stupid stuff like that.

And then I started looking at fast food and what was in the quality of food and everything else. And at the same time I was going through with my dog with cancer and, and I was establishing and reading about how high sugar diets, cancer loves sugar evidently. And then high fat helps the body fight it. But, I mean, not high fat like I am, but the high fat of what you're putting in there. And so I started really looking at what was going into there. And, you know, I'd been programmed to like a lot of people had with the the you know that old 70s diamond paradigm of you gotta eat lots of cheese um and then the the the three meals a day thing i got away from that i i i realized the belief system i'm like who the hell came up with

this three meals a day and i started reading about it i'm like oh the guys who make food came up with this and uh yeah you're right i mean like i i used to live that life where i'd be like i better eat some before i go to bed because i don't want to starve and i remember once i switched over this new thing where i was losing a lot of weight and i really should go back to it um i probably will after this um is is uh i would be like no screw, screw it. You can go to bed hungry. You're going to be fine. And I'd push through those things. And sometimes I'd just keep drinking coffee. Like coffee was the thing that caught me through all of it.

Yeah. And we tell people to use coffee or tea because, you know, if you're used to eating something, you don't want to eat something. So just have some coffee by the time, and this is good for breakfast or lunch. By the time you finish it, the hunger will have passed, and if you're busy, you just keep on going with your day. And one of the great things I got was this really nice reverse osmosis water machine that we reviewed on the Chris Voss show, and that made a huge difference

because having just quality tasting water, that was big. Sorry to interrupt you. Yeah, know the whole point is that if you look at the three meals a day if you go back to the 70s because this is a time before the obesity epidemic people are eating sort of at 8 a.m breakfast and 6 p.m uh dinner and so you don't eat after 6 p.m till 8 a. That's a 14-hour fasting period every single day without even thinking about it, right? And it's like, wow, that's really the word breakfast. It's a meal that breaks your fast. So even in the English language, it sort of acknowledges that fasting is really a part

of everyday life. You feed and then you fast. When you feed, you take in energy. When you fast, you use that energy that you took in, right? Because that's the reason you don't die in your sleep every single night, because we have the ability to store that energy and then bring it back out. But if you keep putting energy in, like a one-way valve, and never using it, what's going to happen? Well, you're going to gain weight. And so in the 70s, people are eating, you know, they're eating white bread and all this other stuff, three meals a day, but no snacks, right? So if you wanted an after school snack, your mom said, No, you're going to ruin your dinner. And if you want a bedtime snack, your mom said, No, you should eat more at dinner,

right? And if you're a naughty boy, and you got sent to your room without dinner, right? And if you're a naughty boy and you got sent to your room without dinner, you went from 12 till eight, you had a 20 hour fast. And guess what? Nobody died. So it's like nobody died. There's no bad consequences. And now you look and people are eating all the time, but we're teaching our kids, right? You go to school, mid-morning snacks or breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, after-school snack, dinner, snack when you're playing soccer. It's like that's six times a day. And we tell people that that's what you're supposed to do. It's like that's what you're not supposed to do. You're not supposed to eat all the time.

You're supposed to feed and then you're supposed to fast. Because when I was a kid and I went out to play soccer, I didn't need somebody chasing me with some cookies right i didn't need to eat it right it wasn't necessary it wasn't healthy but now we we pretend that it is absolutely necessary the other like a few years ago uh the school sent back a thing and said oh you know uh you know uh we're going on a field trip please send two snacks with your son i'm like why didn't they eat lunch right i know it's like come on you know you can go more than two hours without putting a muffin in your mouth like it's okay right so that's the message that i was trying to get through it's like your body knows how to handle this stuff without like you, we're not so fragile that we have to sort of

keep looking and putting a muffin in our mouth every two hours. If we did, we would have died like, you know, 2000 years ago, right? So now if you want to lose weight, all you have to do is to increase the amount of time that you're using those calories. And it's okay, your body will be able to handle it. it's just a matter of getting around and that's what our program is the fasting method.com there's a program to really help people with fasting be part of a group and you know get some support and all that sort of stuff what was that website again it's the fasting method.com the fasting method.com i'm going to pull this up it's it's got like a programs like, you know,

there's a group fast and there's videos and there's courses and there's a forums and you know, there's an app that you can use to track and you can track all your health helpers and you can do fasting circles. You can get a bunch of friends together and do fast all together and help each other out. Right. So it's just making it, bringing it back into the sort of mainstream that, hey, if we have an obesity epidemic,

which is going to increase your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer, right? There's nothing scarier than cancer. And if you are overweight or type 2 diabetic, your risk is much higher. Then you can do something about it, right? And it's not, you know, it's apart from the diet. It's not about what you're eating. It's about when you're eating it. And you can use this treatment paradigm of fasting, which is free, right? It's simple.

It doesn't complicate your life. Itifies your life it doesn't cost money it saves money it doesn't take time it saves you time right and it's available literally to anybody right now like you can do it right now i'm not trying to make money off of you you're not trying to make money it's available to everybody and it's been used for thousands of years successfully like what more do you want from you know know, a treatment modality, right? I mean, we've been using fasting for ages. Exactly. And nobody's like, you know, it's not like people did badly. In fact, people used to call it cleanses,

detox. They felt good when they're fasting, they were, you know, empowered. They felt better about themselves. That's what people used to talk about when they're fasting. They were empowered. They felt better about themselves. That's what people used to talk about when they're fasting. Now, it's like, oh, no, you should never fast. Make sure you have a granola bar. It's like, yes, all that extra sugar will do you much good for weight loss. It's like, where do people come up with these ideas? It's like, it's probably the snack food companies, right?

I had probably hit i think i hit close to 360 or 370 i wish i'd started weighing myself when i started the vegan thing and started i i didn't really set out to do intermittent fasting i just said you know i'm gonna drink coffee as far as i can in the morning and try and just get as far as i can and then, uh, and water. And then I'm gonna like no more pop. I eventually cut out vodka. Um, and, uh, I, I'm pretty sure I had hit three 70 cause I was having problems. I, and, and so, uh, about three 50, I got with things to send us a review unit with things to send us a lot of different review stuff. Um, and I got withings to send me one of the really nice weigh machines. So that helped motivate me to continue losing weight.

But I was basically doing what you're talking about, where I was just basically have like a dinner. It wasn't over too much, but it was like, you know, it was a vegan dinner still. But I lost. I went down to 270 before i started having some issues um and i think my issues were as i wasn't keeping my vitamins up i wasn't taking vitamins to maintain stuff and then i started having some other issues that i didn't understand at the time with uh my body just got in its 50s and i uh, uh, humidity dryness issues in the desert.

And I didn't understand what was going on. And I thought it was because of what I was doing. And somehow I wasn't making stuff work, but I started really crashing hard. It turns out I needed humidifier in the house. I, for some reason, I just, I hit my fifties and my body went, fuck you. We want a humidifier. Um, but I didn't know that at the time. I couldn't figure out why I was crashing. And so I went off the diet and, of course, put on some weight. But even then, it got me really in tune with how much sugar and, like you say, insulin probably affects me. I mean, if I have a Mountain Dew, I usually have to have like a sugar, real sugar Mountain Dew. You give me one of those high fructose corn syrup things and my heart will

race like a mother. So a couple of questions for you. This is jumping back a bit, but I still question I wanted to run by you. And I just blanked it. So it'll come back. Oh, so the body's always has its own immune system. I've always heard that it's always killing cancer, but it reaches a point where finally just cancer wins. Is that true? Yeah.

So, in fact, there probably is cancer going on all the time, but the cancer cells are sort of few and the immune cells are many. So most of the time you never know about it because the immune system will wipe it out before it's even gotten there. So what happens over time is that often with age, the immune system sort of goes down. And that's maybe one of the reasons why cancer is such a disease of aging, because you see this general diminishing of all systems, but the immune system among them. If you look at immune suppressing drugs, you know, because we use immune suppressing drugs for all kinds of autoimmune diseases, they actually raise your risk of cancer significantly.

Holy crap. You know, yeah, those autoimmune drugs that we use for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and all that sort of stuff, they actually are huge, huge risks for cancer and they're well known. But that's why, because you're dampening the immune system, which is your main sort of anti-cancer defense. But yeah, the aging is probably the major cause of that. What I'm going to think of when you were talking about earlier about how our whole body goes food you know the signal goes out when you eat um i'm gonna that really makes an impression i want to stick that on my mind uh and it i think one thing i'm going to use as a

reference point of it is like when i when i announced that i have the doggy bag of treats for my dogs and how crazy they get um so i'm gonna i'm gonna start thinking that in the future like when you eat that's when the body goes but no you're right i had heard this thing uh in when i was trying to research weight loss and i was trying to you know just trying to understand what the and i was i was trying to break down my belief systems too because i started realizing there were certain belief systems i had you, like you have to eat three meals a day. You can't go to bed hungry or you'll die. You know, all this sort of crap like you mentioned.

And one of the things I read is that, like you say, back when we were cavemen, you know, we had to kind of fatten up a little bit for winter because, you know, food was slimmer. And so our bodies kind of do that naturally. And, you know, they kind of harvest and collect more food so that we can survive the winter with a little bit more fat they can ride on. But the problem we have now is, you know, we live in climate-controlled environments. We don't have a winter. I think I heard someone say the quote, we're eating for winter that never comes because our body goes hey winter's

coming we gotta fatten up a little bit so i got some extra pie but it never comes because we're 73 degrees you know year-round in our climate controlled homes we don't sitting around at winter going i wonder smith's is gonna have what you know unless it's toilet paper then you know that's out of stock sometimes according to coronavirus but uh um now what about the quality of what we there was a comment that you made and what you said about how yeah i mean is what is or not the quantity but the quality of what we eat or quant and quantity let's put those together in that question if we could like when we eat the quant the quantity of what we eat at that one setting, let's say we eat once a day, but we eat like the buffet at Caesar's Palace.

Yeah, you just cut out there for a second. Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. So I think quality is very important because the main thing that affects the quality is the processing of the food. So if you look at foods which are natural, like close to the state they exist in nature, our bodies have adapted to them over time, as opposed to foods that, you know, are sort of never existed before. And the classic example of this is butter versus margarine. So in the 1960s, of course, we thought, oh, butter's full of saturated fat. It's so bad for us. It's

causing heart disease. You should eat margarine. So we all switched to margarine. Let me guess who came with that. The margarine lobby? The margarine was just full of chemical, right? Because it was an artificial butter. So it was full of chemical and it was cheaper than butter, which is one of the reasons that it was highly promoted during World War II and stuff during butter shortages. But the whole idea was that it turned out that it was highly processed fats. They turned out to be full of trans fats.

So now, of course, we know that trans fats were causing heart disease. So the very foods that we thought were causing heart disease, butter, we told people to switch to margarine, which was actually giving them heart attacks, which is like, okay, that's really sad. So by some guesses, there's about 100,000 to 150,000 heart attacks caused by this advice to switch to margarine every year. Like that's tragic. And I grew up in that age where they're like, yeah, there's margarine. Butter is bad for you. Yeah.

So it's this thing where it's like, okay, well, what we thought we could make a better butter than real butter. Like this is the seventies, remember 60s and 70s, where we thought artificial formula is better than real breast milk and artificial orange juice is better than orange juice and artificial sugar is better than real sugar. So there was this whole idea that artificial equals good, where now we've come back and said, Oh, yeah, that was a real big mistake. Because butter wasn't that bad for you and And eggs, the same thing, right? So it's like, okay, well, we've been eating eggs and butter for thousands of years.

And then all of a sudden, since 1970, it causes heart attacks. It's like, I don't think so. But you introduce a brand new food like margarine, which is full of chemical additives and all this other stuff. It's like your body has not evolved to handle that kind of crap, right? I call it an edible tub of plastic because it's so artificial. There's nothing natural about that margarine. It's made in a chemical thing.

So eat real butter. And if you eat real food, you're going to do fine. If you eat processed foods, then you're going to have trouble. And that's true whether you eat real food, you're going to do fine. If you eat processed foods, then you're going to have trouble. And that's true, whether you eat processed carbohydrates, processed meats, or processed fats, because the same thing goes for a lot of these vegetable oils, right? So you know, everybody was sort of down on, you know, natural oils, like coconut oil, for example, and avocados were sort of really bad in the 90s, because they're full of fat. Instead, we had vegetable oil. So it's like, okay, you know, for corn oil, like, for example,

you actually have to process literally tons of corn to get that ball of corn oil, because corn is not fatty. It's not oily. So you have to process the hell out of it to get that much oil, as opposed to olive oil, which you take olives, you squish them, and you get oil, right? That's natural, very close to the natural state, as opposed to corn oil. But we said, oh, olive oil is bad for you, and corn oil is good for you. Turns out it's the exact opposite, right? Coconut oil, same thing. Everybody said it's so bad for you, right? It was used to make popcorn, and it's so bad for you. Now everybody's like, oh, it's a superfood, coconut, you should eat more coconut oil it's like okay well you know what changed in this whole time

is just this realization that eating natural food is probably good for you so that's the quality of the food so you know the two main things is one is the what you're eating the diet so eat natural foods and two when to eat is the other thing So make sure you have both a period of feeding and a period of fasting, right? And that's the whole point of the word breakfast, or in French, it's the word déjeuner. Jeuner is the verb to fast. So everywhere in the language, it tells you that you're supposed to be fasting every single day. It's a cycle, right? It's supposed to cycle back and forth, not all one and not all the other. If you're out of balance, then you can increase the fasting to sort of get back on track.

And everybody says, oh, well, you can't do that forever. It's like, you know, the world record for fasting was 382 days. Serious? Yeah. Did he have my kind of fat on him to live off of? I think it was 400 something. I was joking about how I could probably go on. It's interesting because if you think about the amount of calories that you burn in a day, it's only about a half a pound of fat. That's it. So if you're a hundred pounds overweight, you can fast for 200 days and be fine because a pound of

fat is roughly 3,500 calories. If you burn about 1,800 a day, you're talking only about a half a pound a day. If you lose more than that, it's mostly water weight. But if you're looking to do, say, a seven-day fast and you think, okay, that's great, you're going to lose three and a half pounds of fat. You'll lose more than that. You'll lose about six pounds. Some of that is water, and then you'll regain a few so that you'll be at three and a half. But that's it. So if you're if you're 100 pounds overweight, or 200 pounds overweight, then you know, that seven days is like spitting in the wind, right? It's not very much. And that's why you can do these, these longer fast and people have done

it. People have done it all through history, like, you know, and after you do a few, it's just a matter of trying it and seeing how you feel. A lot of people feel very good about it. I got used to it and I got used to pushing through when I would feel hungry. I would kind of realize that was more like my brain screwing with me to winter up as opposed to me really being hungry. And then if I started losing energy, energy uh i started listening to my body and learning more that sometimes i'm just dehydrated like a lot of people don't understand that that they're you know they're dehydrated you just need to drink some water and and and that will bring your energy level up i mean there's sometimes where i could feel just really awful and i'm just like i need to either eat something or whatever and then i realized that i'm dehydrated and i'm like i'll take a couple glasses of water and like i said i've got a i

still have a really nice reverse osmosis machine and that makes all the difference in the world just being above that quality just great tasting water like if i go to this if i go take water from the sink it feels like i'm drinking out of a soil toilet it's it's really bad and i can see why people don't like it um i even kind of modified a little bit because i i kind of like sugary drinks and so i modified it now where i take the water and i squirt in a little meal just a little bit just to flavor it take the edge off um but i can i agree with you i one of the things i started doing was was becoming pure again where uh if i ate sugar like i put sugar in my coffee i would never use those you know those weird things like the rap

they always read the diet the back of the diet drink and i'm like oh yeah wait this stuff calls is rap poison it's in here and uh i'm not drinking i'm not drinking diet stuff but i can tell you this um there's this little yellow packet when i was a little kid and i think it was sodium cyclamate and that was banned in the u.s i don't think you had it but in canada we still had it and i read it's like oh causes cancer this that i'm thinking why is it on my table so you can lose weight well if you get cancer you're gonna lose a lot of weight eventually technically um so it so basically what you put in your body is important uh the quality and and to me it made sense from everything i read it's like hey your body knows how to deal with sugar it knows a basic sugar you know normal sugar uh i watched a couple different uh movies like i think

it was food incorporated and some different things that talked about the modified genetics we did with uh corn to create this high fructose corn syrup uh you know just this crazy you know genetically whatever how do you feel let me ask you that how do you feel about that gmo stuff genetically modified food is that what do you what do you think about that GMO stuff, genetically modified food? What do you think about that? Is that good or bad? I think that it's an inevitability at this point, unfortunately. So if you look at wheat, for example. So wheat from sort of ancient Egypt is actually very different from the wheat we have today.

So in the 60s, there's the Green Revolution, where remember, there's this time that everybody thought everybody's just going to starve to death, there's this population bomb, right? And there is this whole Malthusian, sort of, we're all doomed sort of thing. But anyway, it turns out that human ingenuity is actually pretty amazing. So they came up with this way to grow wheat. So in fact, about 99% of the wheat is no longer the sort of ancestral type wheat. It's either called dwarf or semi dwarf. So dwarf wheat is much shorter, the stock is shorter, so that these giant heads of wheat don't flop over, right? And that's the big problem. So wheat is very tall and thin, has a little bit of actual stuff you can use, whereas it's genetically modified. And this has been the, since the sixties, it has this huge sort of thing that's all, you know, all wheat.

So it's been, it's basically taken over and it's increased crop yields like, you know, three, four times. And that's why we don't have a problem with feeding the world is because we increase the crop yield so much. The point is that these are genetically modified crops. So wheat is very highly genetically modified compared to what it was before. But 99% of the wheat that's grown is dwarf or semi-dwarf. So actually, it's going to be really hard to avoid that at this point. So I think it's better if you eat the sort of natural stuff, but it's not always feasible. So I avoid it when I can, but it's

not always going to be that easy to do that. Let's make some enemies. What do you think about veganism? Does veganism, does it matter that much or what do you feel about that um veganism i actually have no problem with it the point though is that i think people always have the wrong idea about veganism that is there's nothing inherently good about being a vegetable that is you can be a vegan eat french fries potato potato chips, and drink chocolate soda and Coca-Cola all day long. And that's not a healthy diet, but it's purely vegan, right? So chocolate donut, pure vegan. Yeah. It's like, that's not good for you. Nobody thinks it's good for you, right? And so there's this idea that if you stick to vegetables, you're okay. That's not right.

There's good vegetarianism and there's bad vegetarianism. So it's the processing, right? So chocolate donuts don't grow on trees. If you're to eat like, you know, just stuff that is in its natural form, you're probably fine. If you're just sticking with beans and sort of thing, that's okay. So I don't think that there's anything wrong with veganism. There are some issues with B12 deficiency, for example, and there are other people that run into protein deficiency. So there are problems, right? So the simple truth of the matter is that meat, like we're animals. So when we eat animals, we can use, you know, what we put in our mouth, we can use it in a very easy manner, as opposed to plants,

which are completely different from us. So we have to, it takes a lot of work to sort of extract what we need, and make sure that we get it. And that's why animals, because we're animals, is just more highly nourishing. So, so veganism, you know, on the one hand, I have no issue with it. You can be very healthy and be a vegan, but you have to still watch yourself very carefully. There's nothing that makes you healthy by being a vegan. It's just if you believe in it because of animal cruelty or whatever you're doing it for, that's great. But don't think that it's a healthy diet just because it's vegan. You still have to have a healthy vegan diet. And same goes for any diet, right? And that's the

problem with most veganism is that there's this sort of assumption that once you turn into a vegan, you will automatically be healthy. It's like, no, it's not. It has nothing to do with losing weight or anything. Like the most fattening foods, if weight or anything. The most fattening foods, if you're to name the most fattening foods, what are they? Well, sugar is definitely up there. Probably white bread and white potatoes. That's all vegan, right? It's not that good for you. But on the other hand, if you want to be vegan for for other reasons or because you like the taste or whatever i have no problem you can you can tweak it in ways that are good but it's extremely restrictive because now you're taking away a lot of food because you're only eating vegetables

but then you also have to take away all those other foods which are generally like highly processed so it's an extremely restricted diet that is if you start taking away all the french fries and the potato chips and the white bread and the white pasta and the donuts and, you know, all that stuff, now it's a very restrictive diet. And it's very hard to follow. But if you can, that's great for you, you know. What about the volume of the meal when you eat it?

Is there a certain volume you should maintain when you're in fasting? Like, you know, I mean, if I eat once a day, but I go to the Caesars buffet at the Caesars Palace Hotel in Vegas, I mean, is that bad? Again, if you eat natural foods, your body will know when to stop. And that's the whole point. So if you think about natural foods, there are actually a lot of hormones

called satiety hormones, which will actually tell us to stop. So you go to the buffet, say you're full and you can't, you know, and then somebody says, hey, have another pork chop. Like you can't do it. You will throw up.

And you know, those steakhouses that say, oh, eat a 60 ounce steak in an hour, we'll give it to you free. They're not giving away a lot of free steaks. I'll tell you that. I know. It's because there's very powerful signals to stop eating. And so if you eat protein, for example, it activates a hormone called peptide YY, which that tells you to stop eating. If you

eat fat, it activates another hormone called cholecystokinin, which tells you to stop. If you eat a lot of bulky foods like beans or something, it'll stretch your stomach and it'll tell you to stop. The problem with most processed foods is that it gets rid of all of these things. So if you look at white bread, for example, there's no bulk because you got rid of all the wheat. So you don't activate that. There's no protein and there's no fat. So you actually have no satiety signaling at all and same with sugar right so that's why even after you're completely full at the caesar's buffet you can still have a coca-cola because there's nothing in there that's going to make you feel full you can

still put it in same with cookies and stuff you can still keep putting it in so the point is that if you eat natural foods you will naturally know when to stop and that's that's the power of sort of just going to sort of natural foods because we've evolved to eat these foods um and and and it will you will stop at the proper point um because your body won't allow you to eat more it's only when you start eating these processed highly processed foods foods, when you take them out of the natural packaging and stuff, instead of eating apple, you have apple juice. Well, you lost all the fiber and you lost all the bulk and you lost all the vitamins and everything.

So you can keep drinking apple juice, no problem. You can't keep eating apples. So that's the point. So if you stick to natural foods you're gonna do okay if you uh if you start eating a lot of the you know the processed um carbohydrates particularly because they're very easy um then then you have this tendency to eat more than then it's good for you that makes sense because i was i was having that problem you know i go out to eat all the time single you know so i go out to eat all the time, single.

So I go out, go to McDonald's. I was eating just junk, 10 to 15 boundaries a day. And I remember there's one movie with the one guy, I forget his name and the name of the movie, but he eats like McDonald's for 30 days. And he's like, Jesus, I eat like McDonald's and I'm still hungry. And it just because, like you say, he wasn't getting the nutrients. You know, it's just Franken food there, as the judge called it,

Frankenstein food at McDonald's where there's just the nutrients aren't there. And that's what I found. And I think a large part of my weight loss was, like you said, going intermittent fasting because I was combining that with the veganism. But veganism, it wasn't so much the veganism as me just going back to pure foods. Like I would just eat vegetables and really I purify my diet to get anything away from anything that was highly chemicalized or, you know, fabricated. And that seemed to make a huge difference. Yeah, and this is where fasting is like

practical too because if it's very difficult for you to get out there and get it well you don't have to eat you can just skip breakfast or skip lunch or even skip a couple days if you need to and then say okay now that i'm home i have time and i can buy some real food i'm gonna have you know this big you know vegetable dish or steak or eggs or whatever it is that you feel you but this is real food this is food that your grandmother would have recognized sort of thing not this sort of weird concoction of chemicals that's all you know put together in a bar for you or a drink or some shake or something like that and it's like okay well i don't know's in that, but there's a whole lot of chemicals you can't read.

So that's where fasting is. It's so powerful because it's not really something that you're doing. It's something that you're not doing. So it makes it all easier for you. It doesn't make it harder. It makes things easier. You just have to get through that hunger part of things. This has been brilliantly insightful.

Any more we need to know about your book before we go? Any more we need to know about your book before we go, Dr. Fung? No, it's coming out in November, and it's basically the continuation of some of these uh you know other the the obesity code the diabetes code just talking about a different

way of looking at these diseases uh and something that you can use sort of in your in your sort of day-to-day lives to reduce your risk for these diseases awesome sauce you motivated me to go take a look at intermittent fasting. I might have had some of that B12 collapsing. There's something that went off chemically with me after about six months of being on it. Give us your plugs one more time so we can look you up on the interwebs. Yeah, so my website is thefastingmethod.com, and you can find me also. I have a number of YouTube videos, and on Twitter it's at uh dr jason fung that's dr jason fung um and you can find me there there you go guys

so order it up you may want to learn more i've experienced this and some different variations of formulas that i didn't really i was just randomly doing so i can attest to a lot of the stuff that you've spoken to here and it makes a logical sense when it comes down to it check out his book the cancer code a revolutionary new understanding of medical mystery the wellness code uh it's available november 10th 2020 i'm sure you can pre-order it on all the different formats over there you can go to amazon or your local book dealers uh check them out i really love this discussion and everything else. And you can check out his other books too, The Diabetes Code and The BC Code.

Eat better and take better care of yourself and take better care of the people around you. I appreciate my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to thecvpn.com or for your friends, neighbors, relatives, get them to listen to the podcast. If you want to watch the video version of this, you can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Foss.

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