The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Reduce Your Risk Of Cancer

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens and Eight Sleep.   An astonishing seventy percent of cancer is diet-related. When it comes to treating cancer, conventional medicine is good at cutti...ng it, burning it, and poisoning it, but many doctors fail to treat the root cause. Functional Medicine empowers patients and practitioners to optimize health by addressing the root causes of disease.   In this episode of my new Masterclass series, I am interviewed by my good friend and podcast host, Dhru Purohit, about the cancer epidemic, including the biggest cancer risks.  Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, The Dhru Purohit Podcast, is a top 50 global health podcast with over 30+ million unique downloads. His interviews focus on the inner workings of the brain and the body and feature the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens and Eight Sleep.   Right now, when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 free travel packs with your first purchase here.   Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro mattress is so smart that it adjusts your temperature and also gives you individualized recommendations on how to sleep better the next night. Save $150 at checkout and get yours here.   In this episode, we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):   Five things we can do to reduce our cancer risk (4:08 / 00:56)  The link between sugar and cancer (10:39 / 6:44)  Emerging diagnostic tests and treatment options (12:56 / 9:24)  My approach to handling a cancer diagnosis (15:35 / 12:10)  Case study of a prostate cancer patient (18:10 / 14:56)  Questions from our community on reducing risk, cancer education resources, foods to fight cancer, and more (24:20 / 19:25)  Recap of how to reduce your cancer risk (32:06 / 27:34)    Mentioned in this episode:  Environmental Working Group Dr. Ralph Moss (Cancer Decisions) The Cancer Code Eat to Beat Disease Anticancer: A New Way of Life The Longevity Diet

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. The truth is that all of us, all of us, have cancer right now in our bodies, our cells. It can become dysregulated and mutated, but we have an immune system that's designed to help manage that. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I'm all about streamlining my daily health routine to be as powerful and yet simple as possible. And that's why I love AG1 from Athletic Greens. Because when it comes to my health, I want it all. I want my gut to function great, my brain to feel sharp, my immune system
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Starting point is 00:01:04 I like it on its own mixed with water, but it also works really well in most smoothies. If you're curious about trying AG1 from Athletic Greens for yourself right now, they're offering my community 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now you probably figured out by now that I'm super passionate about getting regular deep restful sleep. It's a foundational piece for optimizing metabolism, brain function, and pretty much our health as a whole. And one
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Starting point is 00:02:20 the next day, like a sleep score and heart rate variability. I love that the Pod Pro syncs with my Oura Ring so I can get all my biometric data in one place to really understand my body's patterns day and night without having to do anything extra. If you use a Whoop band, those are also compatible with Pod Pro. And if you're in the market for an entirely new mattress, 8 Sleep Pod Pro mattress provides all these same features in a supportive bed. Whether you sleep hot or cold, the Pod Pro is so smart, it will actively activate your account for your unique needs to keep your bed just the right temperature. Eight Sleep has even found their products help people fall asleep 32% faster and reduce waking by 40%. None of us can afford to lose out on high quality sleep. And if you're
Starting point is 00:03:04 ready to take your nights to the next level, check out 8sleep.com forward slash mark, and you can save $150 at checkout. That's 8sleep, E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P.com slash mark, and you can get $150 off. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy and our special episode called Masterclass, where we dive into popular health topics including inflammation, autoimmune diseases, brain health, cancer, sleep, and lots more. And today I'm joined by my guest host, my good friend, my business partner, and the host of the Drew Pruitt Podcast, Drew Pruitt. And we are going to be talking about the things you can do on a daily basis to reduce your
Starting point is 00:03:50 risk of getting cancer. Welcome, Drew. Thanks, Mark. I know this is a hot topic. A lot of people are both super fearful of cancer, but there's a lot more that we've learned about cancer in the last decade or so. So let's jump right in. What are five, what are five of the top things that anyone can do starting today to significantly reduce their risk of getting cancer in the future?
Starting point is 00:04:18 Well, the two biggest drivers are diet and toxins. in fact, I was on a rotation in medical school for oncology and I asked my professor back in the day, this was in the eighties. I said, what percentage of cancers do you think are diet related? And I thought he'd say like 10%, 20%. I'm like, he said 70%. And I'm like, Holy crap, that's a lot. So the thing that I really focus on around diet is the starch and sugar, because we know that insulin resistance, prediabetes, diabetes, that belly fat, that is a cancer-causing factory. And the inflammation from there, the high levels of growth hormone, you know, what we call IGF-1, which is a growth hormone analog, these all will cause tremendous amounts of cancer. So we call IGF-1, which is a growth hormone analog. These all will cause
Starting point is 00:05:06 tremendous amounts of cancer. So we know pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, and others are linked to this phenomenon of insulin resistance, which comes from starch and sugar in the diet. So that's a huge one. The second is environmental toxins. We talked about briefly, but we were exposed to 80,000 new chemicals since the last uh you know century and many of these have not been tested for safety many of them are banned that are used here they're banned in europe and other countries like bhc and other things and we need to look at uh reducing our load and that's really you know why i focus a lot on detoxification of my work why i'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group. And they have a great website called ewg.org. And you can look at how do you buy household products that are
Starting point is 00:05:49 non-toxic, skin care products that are non-toxic. How do you use the right vegetables that are least contaminated with pesticides? How about meat, fish? So it really gives you a really comprehensive view of how to reduce your overall toxic burden in your home. The next thing that's really important is exercise. We know that exercise actually reduces inflammation, reduces insulin resistance, helps prevent cancer. So exercise is really important. Half an hour walk, even after dinner, just a 15, 20 minute walk after dinner can really reduce your overall risk of insulin resistance and all the things that drive cancer. Microbiome plays a huge role. You know, the gut flora really determine a lot about your health and drive inflammation. And by the way, cancer is an inflammatory disease. So anything
Starting point is 00:06:30 that causes inflammation can cause cancer. So getting your microbiome healthy, we have a whole approach toward repairing your gut. We're coming up with a new product soon called Gut Food, like a multivitamin for your gut. Last thing is your nutritional status. And in America, 90% of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency disease not the amount needed for optimal health and there are certain nutrients that are critically important in cancer one is a class of nutrients called the methylation nutrients this is b6 b12 folic acid we know that deficiencies in folate and others can lead to cancer it's really important to get those b
Starting point is 00:07:03 vitamins up the next is vitamin d vitamin D is a significant regulator of immune function and health. So it's really important to get the cancer under control by making sure you have optimal nutrients, particularly on the B vitamins, vitamin D. And of course, there's many more, but those are the ones I think of first. So Mark, to help set the context a little bit about what cancer really is and how it emerges in the body, can you discuss the seed and soil analogy of cancer? Well, I think, you know, most of traditional medicine focuses on the wrong end of the stick. They burn poison and cut. And that can be helpful in some cases. And and yes it's helped us create a lot of survivors of cancer but it's a pretty rudimentary crude way of approaching cancer which is you
Starting point is 00:07:52 use surgery chemotherapy and radiation or cut burn or poison people hope they don't die from the treatment it's basically how it works functional medicine has a very different view which is how do we create a healthy person so that the cancer can't develop? The truth is that all of us, all of us have cancer right now in our bodies, our cells can become dysregulated and mutated, but we have an immune system that's designed to help manage that and get rid of it. So many of us, you know, if we have a healthy soil, we really can't get cancer to grow. So the key, how do you create a healthy soil? What is your nutritional status? What is your immune status? What's your microbiome?
Starting point is 00:08:30 How is your toxic load? What's going on with your hormone balance? What's going on with insulin, blood sugar? So we really can look at a lot of these root cause factors and help people to optimize the health of their soil, their health for like sort of like regenerative agriculture, where you create a healthy soil and the consequences are healthy plants. Same thing with humans. We, and this is functional medicine. We create a healthy person and the disease has no place to reside. So functional medicine is really not about treating disease. It's about creating health. And when you look at the science of creating health, functional medicine is really the best model out there to do that. And it helps to really reduce the overall aspects of your risk.
Starting point is 00:09:09 I remember one patient came in, Drew, she had three cancers. She's like, over time, she had colon cancer, breast cancer, some other cancer. And each time they're like, oh, we'll treat that cancer. And then we'll do active surveillance,, doesn't mean active anything. It just means every three, six months you get a CAT scan and hope for the best. So it's not really active anything. It's just like tracking people to make sure it doesn't recur as opposed to functional medicine, which is like, well, gee, why did this woman get three cancers? And what can we do to look at the cause of that? And what is her soil like? And how do we optimize the soil so the cancer can't grow back? That's really what we do in functional medicine. And it's such a powerful model, treating the terrain and not just the underlying cancer itself.
Starting point is 00:09:55 If you go on WebMD and you look up cancer and sugar, there are a couple of prominent articles that basically say that your consumption of sugar, which also includes refined carbohydrates, has nothing to do with how cancer develops in the body. But then you have leading experts that have been on your podcast, individuals like Dr. William Lee, who is the founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation and literally researches this for a living, who are sounding the alarm that actually no, cancer can be fueled by having excess sugar in your diet. Help us understand why a trusted source like WebMD could be saying and educating people that maybe cancer and sugar don't have a link, and then other people would be saying that there is a link.
Starting point is 00:10:50 People say the more confused we are, the more opinions there are. I think it's complicated. For me, the data is not unclear. And I think the insulin resistance and cancer story is so important. And I think if you look, for example, on PubMed, looking at cancer and insulin resistance, there's 14,309 articles as of January 14th confirming that there is a link between insulin resistance and the risk of cancer. There's no doubt about it in my mind. So I think the people who are unfortunately saying that it's not an issue are probably not up to date on the science.
Starting point is 00:11:41 It's hard to ignore. It's not a couple of articles here or there. There's mechanistic articles. There's hard to ignore. It's not a couple of articles here or there. There's mechanistic articles. There's population health studies. There's just, to me, no equivocation about the role of cancer and insulin resistance. And so sugar and carbohydrates cause insulin resistance. So if you just don't believe me, go to PubMed, just Google PubMed, type in insulin resistance and cancer, and you'll find the 14,000 000 articles and you can start reading the abstracts the summaries don't take my word for it you know so i think it's important that people uh realize that there's you know
Starting point is 00:12:15 there's a lot of forces at play in the medical industrial complex and the food big food and you know it's it's disturbing. I think, I don't know what else to say about it other than yes, it's a thing. You talked a little bit about active screening, which you have shared that is, you know, not really very active at all, but that's often the best that advice that conventional medicine is giving. But as you mentioned, there's plenty of things that you can do from a functional medicine standpoint. That's what today's podcast is about. What are your thoughts on a few of the emerging areas that are starting to get more attention, like liquid biopsies and the usage of things like immunotherapy when it comes to treating cancers.
Starting point is 00:13:06 We're in a real revolution now around cancer therapy and treatment, which is very exciting because we're moving past the cut, burn, and poison phase of cancer to understand that we can use the body's own immune system and that we can even have early diagnosis. So there is a new test called the GRAIL test, which is a test that is a liquid biopsy that measures proteins from 50 different cancers and can detect things very early. The challenge of that is you might get some things that are just, you know, maybe not that significant or that would not progress to cancer. And then you have to chase it down, follow it. And it's called a red herring. So you might need a total body mri you need a pet
Starting point is 00:13:45 scan a lot of potential costs and fear that can be associated with getting a positive result however i'm going to do it because i want to know early if there's anything cooking and then i can address it and the thing about cancer is the earlier you address it the better chance you have survival so i think that's really important and that we should be looking at those things. And there are other companies that are doing this as well. Freenome, which is looking at colon cancer and Grail testing. So there's a lot of companies that are really moving forward in this space. The next thing I would say is that in terms of, you know, the immunotherapy treatments and other treatments, you know, there's a whole class of advances around how do we activate the body's own immune system
Starting point is 00:14:31 for cancer. And checkpoint inhibitors are these new class of drugs that are basically called immunotherapy that have to, that can have dramatic results. Like in stage four cancers, they can literally cure people where other things wouldn't work. There's also new personalized vaccines that type the cancer, look at the mutations, look at the proteins produced, and then create personalized vaccines against those particular proteins. So your body's own antibodies will kill that. That's a really cool thing. So it's really less side effects and it's more directed therapy. So we're seeing more and more options around how do we, how do we think differently about the treatment of cancers? And I also think there's some other, you know, things that could be helpful too, that are being used in other countries,
Starting point is 00:15:18 very different from conventional approaches. So you started to answer this and I'd love you to expand on it further. If today you were diagnosed with cancer, what steps and things would you do to begin the process of addressing it? And how would you assemble a team around you to help you get to the root of treating that cancer? That's a great question. I mean, I feel like, you know, I try to design my days in my life to actually help prevent all chronic disease, whether it's heart disease, dementia, Alzheimer's, cancer, and then, you know, it's not like you have to do different things for everything. It's like similar, similar therapies will actually help all of these. So I double down on diet every day. I really make sure I have high quality nutrient dense food, full of phytochemicals that are anti-cancer, full of good omega-3 fats, low in starch and sugar. And it actually has a lot of nutrients and things that can help my body actually handle a cancer. So diet is huge. Exercise,
Starting point is 00:16:22 I do that regularly to help get enough sleep. Stress reduction, also very important because your thoughts and feelings do affect your cancer risk too. That's for sure. And then I make sure my nutrient status is optimized with vitamin D and the B vitamins by taking the right supplements. This is sort of my daily maintenance approach. And then I do other things that I think can be very helpful. I like to do ozone quite a bit because I find it very helpful for me. And I think it can be an early treatment for, you know, just kind of boosting your immune system, helping increase your antioxidant enzymes, reducing inflammation, increasing stem cells. So it just helps the body to build a stronger terrain and be able to fight whatever is going on.
Starting point is 00:17:04 And who knows, you know, there needs to fight whatever is going on. And who knows? You know, there needs to be more research on it. I think there's some controversy about it. But I think there's some really interesting options there. There's different people using hyperthermia for cancer, raising the body temperature, and getting treatment that way. There are other therapies, you know, that are more aggressive dietary approaches. But I think it would be, you know, building a comprehensive team dietary approaches. But I think it would be,
Starting point is 00:17:28 you know, building a comprehensive team that focus on lifestyle and that also try some other modalities that could be helpful and to look at the ways in which, you know, whatever cancer, let's say I would have, what it responds to best or least. So there's some personalization involved. But I think there's a lot of options now around cancer and cancer therapy that are pretty exciting. High-dose IV vitamin C. There's people looking at compounds that are derived from marijuana plants. There are people looking at various kinds of immunotherapy and vaccines, as well as things like ozone, hyperthermia, and other things. So there's a lot of research that needs to get done for some of these things, but it's really promising in my mind that we'll be able to sort of lick this. So Mark, is there a case study that comes to mind of someone
Starting point is 00:18:08 who you were part of their cancer team? You don't work with a lot of cancer patients directly, but you might work with a team who would be helping them from a functional medicine standpoint. Is there a case study that comes to mind on the topic of cancer? Yeah. I mean, years ago I had a patient with prostate cancer and it was fairly aggressive and he needed a bunch of therapies, but we were able to really keep it under control through aggressive dietary approach, a bunch of different supplements that helped fixing his gut, getting rid of heavy metals. So we kind of cleaned up his whole terrain and he did remarkably well and lasted well over 20 years, which is a long time with cancer.
Starting point is 00:18:43 So I felt like, you know, he probably would have been dead a long time ago if we hadn't abused this functional medicine approach and create an integrated model where he, I'll know when we see regular care, but he received sort of the adjunctive care that helps support the body in its own healing and repair process. I'll have an anecdote that I'd like to toss in, which is my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. And this was about eight years ago. And after her diagnosis, we put her team together. She had a traditional oncologist through her normal insurance and hospital system. She was at a great hospital, Christiana Care in Delaware.
Starting point is 00:19:20 And as part of that, we understood the importance of making sure we had a functional medicine doctor in the mix so we had a cancer survivor herself dr liz bohm who was one of your colleagues and the medical director of the ultra wellness center was her main doctor and so with her oncologist and dr bohm who's a nutritionist a medical doctor and a cancer survivor. And then there was one other person, sometimes individuals will use, sort of like a cancer CEO. There's a gentleman named Ralph Moss. He's a PhD cancer researcher who was previously at Sloan Kettering. And he has a website called cancerdecisions.com or.org. We'll link it in the show notes. And he walks through every major cancer and talks about all the centers around the world that have had good results in treating that cancer. Some places like you've visited in the past as well, like San Aviv in Mexico and some clinics out of Germany.
Starting point is 00:20:17 So he met with my mom as well and he does consultations. They're a little pricey around like 700, $800, but well worth it. And with the combination of those three individuals, my mom's traditional oncologist, Dr. Liz Bohm, Dr. Ralph Moss, they worked together to put together a protocol for my mom, which included putting her on a ketogenic diet, getting her off of all the foods that were consistently spiking her blood sugar and making her insulin resistance, which were all the Indian vegetarian foods, unfortunately, that she had been grown up eating her insulin resistance, which were all the Indian vegetarian foods, unfortunately, that she had been grown up eating her entire life. Doing a complete oil change, getting her off of all the inflammatory oils, getting her to have high quality proteins and
Starting point is 00:20:54 things like omega-3s in her diet and a bunch of other changes. And knock on wood, we were able to catch it early. And eight, 10 years later, she's doing fantastic. And about two years into her treatment, she was officially diagnosed in remission. Obviously, every cancer is different. Every patient is different. But that's another anecdote that I just wanted to talk into mix, add into the mix about what it looks like when you have a team approach to tackle something like cancer. It's so important.
Starting point is 00:21:21 I think you mentioned something I forgot to talk about earlier, which is in terms of dietary interventions. There's a lot of research now going into ketogenic diet research and cancer. And in animal models, it's stage four pancreatic cancer, stage four melanoma, are literally being cured with ketogenic diets. And Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote The Emperor of All Maladies, who's one of the top cancer experts in the world, and won the Pulitzer Prize for that book on cancer, is doing a lot of clinical research
Starting point is 00:21:49 now with humans and ketogenic diets. Also groups like Walter Longo and his work around fasting mimicking diets or calorie restriction, which also can put people in a more of a ketogenic state, was very effective in helping chemotherapy be more effective, radiation be more effective. So it's not an either or, but it can be an adjunctive treatment. My friend Patrick Hannaway, who is the medical director with me at Cleveland Clinic, ended up getting throat cancer and he ended up being on a ketogenic diet and almost had no side effects from treatment, is doing great a few years later. And his risk was 50-50 on that cancer. So really impressive to see the work that's being used around ketogenic diets and cancer.
Starting point is 00:22:31 Fantastic. Well, Mark, let's go into some community questions that have been sent in from listeners of the podcast. The first question that we have here is, what do you think is the progression of someone setting themselves up for cancer to grow in the body? For instance, do you think there are clues in the body that show up well before a cancer diagnosis is present that are an indication of what's to come? Yeah, like I said earlier, we all have cancer growing in us. And so the question is, what are the things that you can look at that are potentially looking at your risk? And I think I always look at insulin resistance, looking at glucose tolerance test with insulin, hemoglobin A1C, look at lipids, because that tells you a lot about the blood sugar regulation, particle size,
Starting point is 00:23:18 particle number, look at CRP, which is another marker of inflammation. And there's many others. I like the liquid biopsy idea for sure. I think that, you know, we look at family history, we look at their lifestyle, we look at all their habits, exposures, and we just try to reduce all of that to create the best conditions for health. So, you know, I think for me, all of us should be living a cancer preventive lifestyle, Alzheimer's preventive lifestyle, a heart disease preventive lifestyle. And it's all the same. You know, we look at aging and all the age-related diseases, the biggest risk factor is getting older. And when you get older, it's actually because there's a lot of breakdown in the normal systems in the body that are more likely to break down if you don't put the energy into reverse or mitigate those changes.
Starting point is 00:24:03 It's really important to actually make sure you create a healthy environment in the body so that you're not, you're not prone to cancer. And we know, we know how to do all the things we just talked about, diet, exercise, supplements, lowering toxic load, nutritional status, all those things are so important. So I feel like, you know, it's an exciting moment in cancer therapy because we're beginning to understand, you know, really what are the conditions that drive cancer and how we reduce those. But I don't, you know, I think, you know, there are early detection tests like the Grail test, which can be HELP or Freenome. But, you know, those are detecting cancer after you've already had it.
Starting point is 00:24:38 There's total body MRIs that people are getting. I've had one from head to toe. That's also something you can use for screening. All those are very expensive intervention. So I think, you know, as science advances, as we start to understand more about cheaper imaging and about this grail testing, the prices will come down and people will be able to actually look and screen for stuff and then get in on the game of fixing it much earlier. Are there any experts or people who really focus in on cancer that you would recommend to their audience to look up or check out their books or to start following for more
Starting point is 00:25:10 information on this topic? Yeah, I think there's a few people who are talking about some of these issues. Jason Fung wrote Cancer Code. William Lee wrote Eat to Beat Disease. Walter Longo has written a book called Longevity Diet. All these are interesting frameworks of how to look at a different approach to preventing and treating cancer. And I think there's William Servin Schreiber also wrote a book about cancer.
Starting point is 00:25:33 I forget what it's called, All About Cancer or something. I forget the name of it. But we'll get in the show notes. And again, it's really focusing on how do we change our lifestyle environment so we reduce the risks and help improve outcomes even if we get cancer? All right, next question. This is a question about autoimmune medications. How do typical autoimmune medications play or not play a role in cancer? And should there be any cause for concern for medications in general, increasing your risk or likelihood of developing cancer in the future? So one of the class of medications that's being used increasingly to treat the
Starting point is 00:26:12 ever-growing burden about immune disease, which now affects 80 million people, are these drugs called immunosuppressants or biologics, like TNF-alpha drugs, Humira, et cetera, Enbrel, and many others that are now on the market. What they do is they stop a molecule called TNF-alpha, which is a really important immune molecule, which helps stop the inflammation in these autoimmune diseases, but at the same time, it lowers your own immunity. So you're more likely to get infections, you're more likely to get cancer. So there is a risk of these drugs in terms of long-term risk of cancer and infection. So I much more prefer treating autoimmune disease using functional medicine, getting to the root cause and getting people healthy without using all that heavy duty drugs.
Starting point is 00:26:53 But they do increase the risk of cancer and we should be aware of that. What about foods that actually help us fight or potentially even reduce our risk of cancer? Are there foods or food categories that are helpful? We talked a lot about what's harmful. What about what's helpful? So I think that's really important. So, you know, you cut all the crap, what are you gonna eat instead? It's really whole foods, anti-inflammatory foods, low glycemic foods, phytochemically rich foods, fiber rich foods. So we're talking about fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole beans, whole grains, in limited quantities, because that can be starchy for some people with metabolic issues, which is about nine to 10 Americans. And also all the phytochemicals in food. So colorful,
Starting point is 00:27:41 rainbow colored vegetables and fruits, super important. And then there's special foods like garlic and ginger and spices that are awesome to use curcumin. So including a lot of spices and it's really important. And so getting the fats right in your body is key. You talked about your mother getting an oil change, getting on more omega-3 fats, olive oil, fish oil, getting off the refined oils, super important. So I think there are so many beneficial foods out there that can help reduce the risk of cancer simply by actually getting your phytochemical richness of your diet increased. And that's just eating lots of colorful fruits and vegetables. What supplements can play a helpful role when it comes to the topic of cancer. And I mean more in the category of
Starting point is 00:28:26 helping us potentially reduce the risk factors or improve certain aspects of our biomarkers or health that downstream could impact cancer. Yeah. I mean, I think the most important ones are B-complex and a vitamin D, and then maybe some fish oil, although there's been mixed data on that. But I do think it's so important that people get their levels up. So a good multivitamin, fish oil and vitamin D will take care of 90% of it for most people. And I think that should be a basic staple for everybody. You can add probiotics in there because the microbiome plays a big role in cancer. So making sure of adequate probiotics in your diet, either prebiotic or probiotic foods or probiotic supplements, super important.
Starting point is 00:29:10 But those are the things that I really focus on when it comes to reducing the risk of cancer and helping to create a long-term viable immune system. Can intermittent fasting or some version of regular fasting be helpful in reducing our risk of cancer? Absolutely. So giving the body a chance to repair and heal every day is so important. So we talk about time-restricted eating, which is a 12, 14-hour, 16-hour fast. It sounds like a lot, but if you eat dinner at 6, you eat breakfast at 6, that's a 12-hour fast. If you eat breakfast at 8, that's a 14-hour fast. So it's not that hard. And what it does is it allows your body to go through this process of autophagy, mitophagy, waste disposal, cleaning up, recycling of old parts. It increases stem cell production, reduces inflammation,
Starting point is 00:29:54 increases antioxidant enzymes, helps your brain chemistry, bone density, muscle mass, reduces insulin resistance, increases muscle and lowers fat, body fat in the belly. I mean, there's just so many benefits to it. So I think it's an important adjunct treatment for a daily repair and maintenance. I mean, imagine like, you know, living in a house and taking the garbage out every day, but you know, eventually your garage fills up with garbage and it never gets picked up and your house starts to stink and it's like a mess. That's exactly what happens to us if we just keep eating all the time. You got to like stop, take a break, let your body do the repair and healing, and then you'll create more longevity, reduce the risk of inflammation, cancer, and many, many other things. So Mark, fantastic information,
Starting point is 00:30:33 ton of content here on the topic of cancer, something that is very scary to a lot of people, but I think that today's episode gives a lot of hope. I want to set you up for a little bit of a recap of what we covered today and some concluding thoughts. Yeah. So I think people need to kind of look squarely in the face of their lifestyle and their habits and behaviors and how they can be either promoting the increased risk of cancer or decreasing it. And we know really from the science, it's very quite simple how to reduce your risk. One, eat a diet that's a whole foods, plant-rich, phytochemically rich, fiber-rich, anti-inflammatory, low glycemic, starch and sugar diet. Two, exercise. A little bit of exercise is great. Helps reduce your risk.
Starting point is 00:31:16 Unburden yourself from toxins. Get rid of the toxins in your home, in your skincare, in your food, and use ewg.org to do that. Make sure you take a good multi-official vitamin D and, you know, make sure you take care of your gut, take probiotics, use our product Gut Food, which is coming out soon. And basically, make sure you tend your inner garden well. And those will get you a long way down the road to preventing cancer. And if you get cancer, you know, think about doing the early biopsies with Grail, think about the liquid biopsies, think about, you know, looking at a more integrated approach around diet and other modalities that we talked about if you have to get cancer treatment. So I'm excited about this new phase of cancer and our potential to rethink our ability to sort of
Starting point is 00:32:00 regulate our immune systems with the kinds of new therapies that are coming out that gets away from the sort of our barbaric cut poison and burn people. So this is it. And Drew, thank you so much for doing this interview with me. And for those of you who listen, love to hear what you're learning about cancer, how you approach it in your life and people who you love, let us know how that's going. And we'd love to hear from you leave a comment subscribe where you get your podcasts please share this with your friends and family on your social media and we'll see you next week on the doctor's pharmacy hey everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning into the doctor's pharmacy i hope you're loving
Starting point is 00:32:40 this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health.
Starting point is 00:32:59 It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter. And I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health
Starting point is 00:33:25 and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor
Starting point is 00:33:40 or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed
Starting point is 00:34:02 healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

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