The Dr. Hyman Show - Longevity Roadmap: The Functional Medicine Approach To Cancer

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

In this special episode, you will hear a sneak peek into episode 3 of my new docu-series, Longevity Roadmap. In this episode, we delve into cancer. While conventional medicine is critical in cancer treatment, there is so much more that can be done to grow a healthy inner garden and prevent disease. Learn more and sign up to watch the Longevity Roadmap docu-series at longevityfilm.com In the Longevity Roadmap docuseries, we will walk you through the latest research on longevity, healthspan, and how to live better, longer. We also dive into the science behind preventing the most prevalent diseases of aging, and we’ll talk about what it means to build a resilient body. Each episode will take on a specific focus to help you understand the diseases of aging and what Functional Medicine teaches us about prevention, testing, nutrition, and more. 

Hi everyone, my name is Kea Paroit. I'm one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast and the director of Dr. Mark Hyman's new Longevity Roadmap docuseries, which is now live. Today we wanted to give you a sneak peek of episode three of this docuseries. In today's episode, Dr. Mark Hyman and his team at the Ultra Wellness Center discuss the functional medicine approach to cancer and why it's important to focus on the soil or the terrain in which cancer grows. They discuss how genetics might load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger. Here's the first 15 minutes of episode three, the functional medicine approach to cancer. Cancer is scary. I can't think of anyone who hasn't been affected by this disease in some shape or form or way. In my family, my sister and my father both die from cancer. I see so many

patients who are recovering from cancer and they don't want it to recur. And I see patients who are worried about their genetic risk for cancer. But there are two parts to cancer, the cancer itself and the host in which the cancer grows. And that, my friends, you can do a lot to influence. I don't want you to feel helpless when it comes to this disease, which so, so many people often feel.

When it comes to prevention and even how to improve outcomes from treatment, functional medicine takes a very specific approach to cancer. And don't get me wrong, conventional medicine is absolutely necessary. And once you have cancer, an integrated approach of chemo, radiation, and surgery combined with boosting your immune system and making your body an unfriendly place for cancer to grow or come back is really essential. The problem is that most patients don't get taught how to do the second part. I remember one patient, she had three different cancers. Her doctors just wanted her to do what we call active surveillance, which is just doing

scans and tests to see if it comes back. There's nothing active about that. It's passive. Just wait and see and hope it doesn't come back. And hopefully we catch it early. And it's terrifying for most people who are looking for some way to prevent it. That is where functional medicine shines. Finding the underlying root causes and optimizing your biology, making it an unwelcome place for cancer to grow or come back. The American Society of Clinical Oncology has estimated that obesity is going to overtake smoking as the number one cause of cancer worldwide. And unfortunately, we are seeing a way increased risk of obesity, an increased rate of obesity. We know that two-thirds of adults and a third of our children are obese. This is a driver for many causes of cancer, not all cancer, but definitely obesity increases inflammation in the

body, increases insulin resistance, and is a driver for many types of cancer in the body. We are also seeing an increased rate of colon cancer in our younger population, which is very concerning. And I think that, of course, obesity and toxins and inflammation are triggers for colon cancer as well, but we also know that a shift in our microbiome has an impact on our risk of cancer. And unfortunately, there's a high number of antibiotics in our food supply that may be contributing

to this shift in our microbiome. I think that when we're looking at cancer, it's really important that we take a functional medicine approach. We wanna look at all the systems in the body and how they're impacting a person's risk of getting cancer. So we really focus on the terrain. It's important to pay attention to the cancer cell,

but I think it's also important to pay attention to the terrain in somebody's body. The terrain is like the soil. It's everything surrounding that cancer cell. And it can influence whether a cancer cell is gonna grow and proliferate or if a cancer cell is not gonna grow and proliferate. if a cancer cell is not going to grow and proliferate. So we can have an impact on the terrain in our body

by working to lower inflammation in the body. We know that cancer likes to grow in the face of inflammation. So whenever we work to lower inflammation in the body, we're creating a terrain where cancer is less likely to grow. We know that not all precancerous cells go on to become cancerous cells. In the United Kingdom, they did a study on 40 to 50 year old women. And they noted that over 40% of those young women who died of some other reason, they died of another accident or another disease, over 40% had precancerous cells when they looked in their breast tissue. That's precancerous cells

like called DCIS or LCIS, the stage zero cancer that we're often treating to prevent it from going into full-blown cancer. So we know that 40%, that if those women were able to live longer, that 40% of them would not get an invasive cancer. So what we realize is that we're always producing these precancerous cells in our body. And not all of them go on to become invasive cancer. And that's where our lifestyle has a big impact on whether those cells become invasive cancer or not. We know our diet can have a big impact on whether those cells become invasive cancer or not. The first steps that I take in treating a patient that comes to me is establishing a relationship, especially when a person has cancer. Because as you can imagine, it's a very, very vulnerable place to be. It's a very scary and uncertain place

to be. And when your doctor or healthcare provider can enter into that space in that place with you and show you empathy, it makes all the difference in the world. That empathy and that compassion actually is part of the healing process. That's where I start. Then the hard work begins. I want to find out everything I can about that patient. I want to know the mood their mother was in the night they were conceived, all the way up to the last symptom they had the moment they walked into my office.

When I get all that information, I'm able to find the triggers that may possibly have started the cascade of events that threw their system out of balance that resulted in a cancer forming. That trigger may be the root cause or maybe one of several causes to their cancer. And that's how we go looking for it, with a really, really strong history. Now, as I gather that information, I plot it out on something called the functional medicine matrix. That matrix has, it's like a wheel with seven spokes. And I take the symptoms and I put them into the physiologic spokes. So we have one spoke that is the gut and the digestive processes. We have another spoke, which are the immune processes and another spoke, which is energy, mitochondrial function. We have another one that is toxins and we have another spoke that is the cardiovascular system and the transport system within the body. We have another spoke that's going to be the hormones and neurotransmitters that communicate throughout the body.

And then we have our last spoke, which is the structures. The structures, everything from the mitochondrial membrane all the way up to a bone. They're all structures. The symptoms that they have represent some type of imbalance or malfunction in one of those system pieces. Now, all those system pieces are interdependent and integrated, and they're working together to maintain your health, to regulate your health, and to actually heal you. And once I've put all that information on that wheel, and it's actually on paper, but it's also in my brain and the gears are turning, I can begin

to find those root causes that we need to work on. By the time I'm done getting that history, using the matrix, I usually have a really good understanding of where we're going to need to go. But I often do still have some of the puzzle pieces missing. And that's where I do some testing. The three most important tests that I do are a complete nutritional analysis, a digestive system microbiome analysis, and a DNA analysis. Why these three tests? We know that oxidation, inflammation, infection, toxins are all part of the chronic illness and cancer cascade. These three tests provide the first really good look under the hood and help me begin to understand physiologically where some of the problems may be. The first test I do

is a nutritional analysis. The nutritional analysis that I do looks for 125 nutritional markers. It also looks for biomarkers of metabolic dysregulation, inflammation, oxidation, and toxins. The second test I do is a gut slash digestion slash microbiome test. Almost every patient that walks into my office has gut issues. The test that I do will look for markers of inflammation and imbalance of important bacteria, the presence of infection, and even toxins in the stool. The third test I do is a genetic test. The way I explain it to patients is that we're looking for not mutations, but small variations in your gene blueprint that will possibly predispose you to physiologic abnormalities that lead to chronic disease and cancers. I can explain it like this.

You're a contractor, so you're going to be building bathrooms for all types of people. And so when a person comes to you, you want to be prepared for whatever the budget is. So you have one blueprint for a cheap bathroom. You get a toilet, you get a sink, and you get a light bulb. Then you have a more moderate budget. That person gets a nicer sink, a nicer bathtub, they get a nice fixture, and they get a linen closet. And then you have the really high budget one with the jacuzzi and the waterfall shower and the marble. They're all different, but they're all labeled bathrooms. And you look at the blueprint, and at the top of each blueprint, it's going to say bathroom. But each one of those is going to function

differently. It's the same thing with the genes that we're looking for. They're called single nucleotide polymorphisms. They're the gene blueprints that have one mild variance, like the variances we saw in those bathrooms, that will result in the protein that they make having a different type of function. It might function too fast. It might function too slow. It might not function at all. And if we can identify that, we can then help you change your lifestyle, give you a nutritional plan, and even targeted supplements that account for that variation so that it doesn't have that long-term impact and lead possibly to chronic disease or cancer. So it's a really important test. The test that I use looks at five

critical physiologic pathways and the possible variations and blueprints that make those pathways work. Those pathways include oxidation, inflammation, methylation, and detoxification. Variances in any one of those can be fairly critical. As an example, there are genes that make proteins that are responsible for detoxifying and removing estrogen. One's called the CYP1A1 and one's called the COMT. If you have single variations in those genes, you're not going to be able to appropriately remove estrogen out of your system once it's done its job and it needs to be removed once estrogen has done its job it's going to be metabolized and some of those those intermediate metabolites are actually inflammatory and if you can't move them out of your system appropriately because you have variations in those two genes, they recycle. And now you have recycling inflammatory estrogen compounds, which

increase your risk for breast cancer. If we can identify 20, when you're 20 years old, we can identify that you have those genes and they have those variances, then we can actually give you a lifestyle, a nutrition plan, and targeted supplements that will upregulate the detoxification and removal of estrogen. And instead of worrying about whether you need to get a mammogram or thermography, you've taken care of removing your cancer-causing, you created for yourself a cancer-free zone, and you've created, instead of a cancer, a cancer-generating zone. And that's what I really worry about. I want to create that type of environment.

Now, what's fascinating is that scientists have been discovering a whole new pathway that may be generating cancer and using diet to treat it. One of the leading cancer doctors in the world, Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote the book Emperor of All Maladies, came up to me once in a conference. He says, Mark, we've discovered one of the keys to cancer. He said, you know what it is? I looked at him and I said, yeah, sugar. He's like, how did you know? And I was like, well, yeah, I've been paying attention. He says, we're doing studies on mice and animals where we're reversing, literally reversing cancers that don't have

good treatments like pancreatic cancer. That's a death sentence. Melanoma, often a death sentence. We're reversing these cancers in animal models using a ketogenic diet. That is a diet that's 70% fat and less than 5% carbohydrate. Turns out that cancer cells love sugar. So insulin promotes the growth of cancer cells. It doesn't just promote the growth of belly fat, right?

It promotes the growth of cancer cells. It doesn't just promote the growth of belly fat, right? It promotes the growth of cancer cells. And cancer cells need carbohydrates and sugar to grow. If you shut off that supply, they can't grow. Humans have sort of like a hybrid car. We have electric and we have gasoline, right? The gasoline, let's say, is the sugar pathway. And the electric, let's say, is the fat pathway. So we can live just on fat. We don't need carbohydrates. There's no essential carbohydrates. But we turn our metabolism from processing carbs to processing fat. And all of a sudden, it turns on all these anti-aging mechanisms, these anti-inflammatory mechanisms. They shut down cancer growth.

You just heard the first 15 minutes of episode three of Dr. Hyman's brand new Longevity Roadmap docuseries. To watch this full episode, visit longevityfilm.com and sign up for this free event. Between January 13th and January 24th, we'll be airing the Longevity Roadmap episodes for free, and you can also catch the entire docu-series for free on the weekend of the 22nd. Again, to watch this docu-series, visit longevityfilm.com so you can take back your health today. Until next time.