The Dr. Hyman Show - Starving Cancer: The Hidden Power of Food, Fasting, and the Body’s Inner Terrain

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Cancer can be seen as a seed that only sprouts in the right soil—the body’s inner landscape. Today, that soil is changing fast, and cancer rates are climbing, especially among young people. Our modern diet—packed with sugar, processed foods, and nonstop snacking—keeps the body flooded with signals to grow, not heal. But there’s good news: by eating real, colorful foods and giving the body time to rest between meals, we can calm inflammation, balance our gut, and make our inner soil far less welcoming to disease. The power to shift the story lies in every bite and every pause we take. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Jason Fung and Dr. Thomas Seyfried, how modern diets and constant eating create a fertile soil for disease. Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, author, and researcher. His groundbreaking science-based books about diabetes and obesity, The Diabetes Code, The Obesity Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting have sold over one million copies and challenged the conventional wisdom that diabetics should be treated with insulin. Dr. Fung is also the co-founder of The Fasting Method, a program to help people lose weight and reverse Type 2 Diabetes naturally with fasting. His work on fasting has been cited by CNN, Time, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Toronto Star, and many other media outlets. His latest book is The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery. Dr. Thomas Seyfried is an American professor of biology, genetics, and biochemistry at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Seyfried has over 150 peer-reviewed publications, and his research focuses primarily on the mechanisms driving cancer, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative diseases and calorie-restricted ketogenic diets in their prevention and treatment. He is the author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer and presently serves on the Nutrition & Metabolism, Neurochemical Research, Journal of Lipid Research, and ASN Neuro editorial boards. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here:Is Cancer Caused By Sugar? How Can My Diet Help Prevent Cancer? A Radical New Dietary Approach To Cancer Treatment

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. The most important thing we need to focus on is not the genetics of the problem. It's the soil problem. Modern life makes it surprisingly easy to run low on magnesium. Stress, screens, sugar, they all deplete this essential mineral. Magnesium supports over 300 functions in your body, from stress and sleep to recovery and energy. That's why I take magnesium breakthrough. The only supplement with all seven forms your body needs.

Most formulas, just one or two. Bioptimizers has increased their discount for my audience. Go to buyoptimizers.com slash hymen and use code hymen to get 15% off your order today. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I've built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive for live Q&A's exclusive content and direct connection.

real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at Dr.hyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget, you can enjoy every episode of this podcast, add free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven-day free trial. When you think about functional medicine and the approach you're taking, it's a very different model of thinking about cancer. So yes, if you have a tumor or something, you might need to to get it cut out, or you might need radiation, or you might need some chemo at some point. But the question that never really gets asked is one, why do the cancer develop in the first

place and how do I change those conditions? And two, how do I actually create a healthy immune system and a healthy soil and to actually make sure that the cancer can't grow? And as a functional medicine doctor often say, we're very much like regenerative farmers where we focus on soil health as opposed to industrial farmers, which use a lot of chemicals, pesticides, basically antibiotics, and glyphosate and herbicides to make the plant healthy. And I remember being at this conference on nutrition. I don't know why they invited me. It was all the big food companies, the big ag companies, and I was invited to give a talk, which I did, and I didn't hold back anything. I'm sitting next to this guy at dinner.

I'm like, so, you know, what do you do? He says, well, I mean, plant medicine. Like plant medicine? And I said, what is that? He said, well, we make pesticides. So I think, okay, got it. So I think, you know, this whole idea that you're bringing forth is so important. So talk about this analogy of the seed and the soil and cancer and why we're ignoring soil conditions in the body and the environmental issues and diet and also lifestyle and stress and environmental chemicals, all those factors.

So the idea of the seed and the soil actually goes way back. I mean, it was written about sort of like 60, 70 years ago, but then, of course, I forgot about it because the point is that, you know, genetics, this whole focus we had on finding mutations in genetics really talks about the seed, right? It doesn't talk about the environment that you're in. And if you have a seed, of course, it has the ability to grow, but it needs the right conditions, the proper soil to grow. And what we always seem to not talk about, is how certain populations that live a sort of traditional lifestyle almost never get cancer, like other than the ones that we know that are, say, virally caused. But if you go back, so Dennis Burkett was this sort of legendary Irish surgeon. And he went to Africa and, you know, he discovered Berkish phoma and stuff. And it's a very interesting story. But, you know, he looked at these Africans who were eating a traditional.

traditional diet, living a traditional lifestyle. And he said, boy, these people just don't get cancer. And the whites, of course, were getting colorectal cancer at the same rate as they were in the UK, for example. Yeah. And so they called these things diseases of civilization. So obesity, type two diabetes, and cancer would come as people change their lifestyle. But you see this actually all over the world. So the Inoui, in the far north, they assume. people used to call them Eskimos. So again, eating a traditional diet, very high in, say, you know, animals, you know, whale meat and seal blumber and stuff, that's a traditional diet. They never get those cancers that we get. I mean, they get some viral cancers, but they don't get

like colorectal cancer, breast cancer. In fact, the university in Ontario, Canada, used to send an expedition to the Arctic Circle sort of every year to find out why these people were immune. But of course, they weren't actually immune because as soon as in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they changed their lifestyle to Western sort of lifestyles with the sort of bread and sugar and all that sort of processed foods that we ate. Then you started to see all the cancers. So clearly it wasn't a genetic problem because the gene pool of these Africans or these inmate were not changing.

But it was the soil that, and it comes back, of course, to diet and lifestyle. which is the most important thing, because that's the main thing that's changing and these people come over. That is what is the biggest determinant of cancer. You know, these ALE go from being considered immune to cancer to high rates of cancer. Of course, they're eating sugar all the time, right?

There's tons of smoking, all this other stuff. And you see this everywhere. So you see this, say, in Japan, where you can look at a Japanese woman in Japan compared to a Japanese woman in San Francisco. And, of course, the person in San Francisco has about double or triple the rate of breast cancer compared to the Japanese women in Japan. So it's like, so this is clear evidence that the most important thing we need to focus on

is not the genetics of the problem. It's the soil problem, right? Yeah, my favorite story is the Polish women who are from Poland, eat 30 pounds of sauerkraut a year. And they have almost no breast cancer, and it affects their microbiome, because it's a pre-probiotic food, plus cabbage has all sorts of phytochemicals that fight cancer. And though when they move to the United States, they get cancer at the same rates as American women because they stop eating all the sourcrown.

Yeah, absolutely. And these are the things that are really important, because if you can figure it out, of course, then you have the ability to do the opposite. and you could take a woman in San Francisco and, you know, cut her risk of breast cancer by a factor of two or three. Imagine how amazing that would be. I mean, with genetics and all this stuff, we're talking about, like, you know,

you're making progress in inches compared to diet and lifestyle where you're talking about huge leaps and jumps. Like, they're not talking about, like, 10% higher risk. You know, in medicine, how it's, oh, it's statistically significant. There's a 10% lower risk. It's like, oh, you know, these people never get cancer, right? It's like, it's crazy the magnitude of when personally you can get on the other hand.

Because I have 10% is 200 or 300%, right? It's like a totally different, yeah. It's a totally different order of magnitude. And yet we focus all of our sort of resources on saying, oh, let's figure out, you know, this genetic condition, which might affect like 1% of these cancer patients and science. It's like, okay, let's let's let's let's do. Let's try and figure out the other stuff. Like, what is it?

Is it sugar? Is it fermented foods? Is it processed foods? Like, what is that? Because that's so important. But unfortunately, it gets so little sort of research money. And, you know, we start talking. If people want the other stuff, right?

So people are listening and wondering, okay, this whole soil thing makes sense, right? You want to create a hostile environment for cancer to grow. How do we build that hostile environment instead of a fertile one that most of us got for a kid? Yeah, that's a great question. And so I talk about in the book about like what is it that makes cells grow? It was really important is sort of growth factors or a body contains natural growth factors that increase the rate of growth. And one of the big things of the last sort of 15, 20 years has been the realization that, that our body entails nutrient sensors, which are hormones that go up when you eat,

but they also are precisely the same hormones that our body uses as true factors. So the most important one is insulin. So insulin, of course, is a well-known, you know, metabolic hormone. So you eat and insulin goes up, you know, assuming you're eating carbohydrates and protein sort of a mixed meal, you eat insulin goes up. But more importantly, what it is, it's a nutrient sensor. It tells your body that food is available. And the reason that's important is because your body only wants to grow when nutrients are available, right?

So you don't want to, you're saying you don't want more cells to continue to grow if there's no food available. That's not a good survival strategy. So the body links them. In fact, if you look back in evolutionary times, insulin was not any metabolic hormone. It was actually a growth factor. So as we evolved, we actually used the same molecule that we use the same molecule that we use, as a growth factor for nutrient signaling as well. So we know that insulin is a very prone growth factor.

There's this thing called insulin-like growth factor or IGF-1. And Walter Longo actually described this group of Ecuadorian dwarves, the Laron dwarves, who actually have almost no IGF-1, so they're very short. Turns out they're also immune to cancer, because if you don't have that growth signaling, then the cells can't grow and the cells that are going to be the most affected are those cancer cells. So what you have to do, of course, is say that, okay, if we have too much insulin, then that's going to be a signal to our body that we need to grow. So what can you do to sort of reduce that insulin signaling in the body by reducing nutrient

availability, which is two things. One is getting rid of the hyper-processed foods, which tends to really amplify. the insulin response. So sugar, for examples, especially because it causes all this insulin resistance, which causes hyperinsulinia. A lot of the refined foods are very bad because they sort of take away at all the other natural components and you're left with this big spike of insulin. Like if you eat cookies, for example, well, you know, it's just going to, your insulin is just going to spike up. And the other thing, of course, is if you eat very, very frequently, you're going to keep insulin high all the time. So intermittent fast,

is another strategy that you could use to reduce insulin. So it's when you eat and when you eat. Yeah, exactly. So it's what you eat and when you eat, because if you eat a high carbohydrate diet, which people did, like people in China, for example, you eat a ton of white rice, but almost zero sugar, and they were okay. So it's not necessarily just the carbohydrates. Well, they, they, I lived in China for a while.

You're a Chinese. I mean, I traveled around, remember in 1984. I mean, they had no accoutrements of modern living. I mean, they had to cut a board. They would use a saw to create boards. They would, to grind the flour, they would like literally walk in circles for hours with the grain in between two giant stones.

They would work in the fields for 14 hours a day with hard labor. And yeah, you can eat a lot of rice if you do the cuts. Yeah, that's true. And it's also like, it was very, it was like rice and vegetables. Like every day, it was just rice and vegetables, right, for vegetables.

Well, the land of milk and honey, the Chinese phrase for it, is the land of fish and rice. It's really what I think of. Yeah. So you're talking about what is the problem, which is the incredibly high amount of starch and sugar we consume. And you've talked about this in the diabetes code, the obesity code. This is a central driver of almost all chronic Western diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, high blood pressure, are caused by the, you.

this phenomena of insulin resistance or too much insulin, which is driven from our diet, basically a highly refined processed carbohydrate diet, and also this constant eating pattern, this thing called snacking, which I think is a modern invention. We have a snack food industry, but I mean, I don't snack. If you eat properly, you're never hungry. I mean, you don't have these spikes in insulin going up makes you hungry. But what's fascinating is that what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuel as a cancer growth.

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It's the only supplement I've found with all seven essential forms of magnesium your body needs in one formula. Most magnesium supplements only give you one or two forms. That's not enough to make a difference. If you feel burnout or constantly on edge, your body's likely needing more magnesium. Try magnesium breakthrough and feel the difference in your sleep, your mood, and your energy. Bioptimizers has increased their discount for my audience. Just go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code hymen for 15% off your order. So all of these diseases are actually diseases of too much insulin.

So if you look at obesity, for example, if you were to measure the levels of insulin, people who are more overweight tend to have higher insulin, same with like two diabetes, hyperinsulinia and insulin resistance are really sort of two sides of the same point. So one causes the other sort of hyperinsulin they can cause insulin resistance, insulin and cause hyperinsulinia. So they're really the same thing. And again, the same thing applies to sort of cancer. And this is the pattern that was noticed so many years ago

that there are these diseases of sort of too much insulin, which is that sort of they all go together, the heart disease. And you don't see that in people eating traditional diets because they're not eating all the time. So I remember there was a study, this Enhain study, which is a big sort of American survey of lots, of things that they included dietary habits. So in 1977, they found that most people ate three times a day, so breakfast lunch and didn't.

And by 2004, it was on and it was up to six times a day, right? So it's like, wow, that's crazy. And it was never this sort of deliberate, hey, there's good scientific evidence that we should eat six times in day. It just sort of crept in there. And I think part of it was, of course, the stack companies wanted to promote it. And, you know, people thought it was a good idea. So Ben, it was this sort of, it became almost gospel.

Oh, you have to eat six months a day, right? And I remember thinking about it a while ago, I'm thinking, where did that suddenly meet the house? Did we have a thing, randomized, controlled child that I miss somehow? Because I don't think so. It was just this gradual change in attitudes. And you saw it because I start to think back to my upbringing in the 70s, right? So I grew up in the 70s.

And, you know, if you want, wanted a sort of after school snack, your mom said, no, you're going to ruin your dinner, right? And if you wanted a bedtime snack, your mom would say, no, you should have ate more at the and it's like, that's just the way it was. And of course, people would have this sort of natural fasting period from after dinner, which was say 6 o'clock because people ate a bit earlier back then to like say 8 o'clock. So 14 hours of fasting every single day without even... We call that breakfast.

Yeah, exactly. Breaking the fast. Breaking the fast. That is the word that we use. And it's like somehow we went from that where people didn't have the obesity problems, such your diabetes problems because they have this natural fasting period built in that has always been there. It's even built into the English language. And then it's like, oh, you got to eat all the time.

And it's like, oh, you can't ever skip your breakfast. You got to snap all the time. You get in schools, for example. Oh, they go to school. a mid-morning snack. Then they have lunch, and then they have their after-year-olds, and then they have the dinner. Then, you know, you're playing soccer, and they think that they need to have a snack in between the halves of soccer.

You know, I play. Well, Jason, you've written a lot about fasting and the effects of either time-restricted eating, which is, you know, 12, 14, 16-hour fast every day or taking a 24 or 36-hour fast a week or even longer fast for diabetes. And I'd love you to sort of share why around cancer this is so important. And on my podcast soon, we're going to have Dr. Patrick Hannaway, who is my colleague and friend, was the medical director of Cleveland Clinic, who had cancer and used fasting as an approach to his cancer treatment.

He still got radiation, but he also did it in a way that actually reduced all the side effects to almost none, has kept him healthy now for a well over year, and this cancer was not a great one, and let him go through the process with really no issue. which was really staggering and really went on a ketogenic diet in order to do that, which is both using fasting and ketogenic diets to drop insulin levels to almost undetectable. So can you talk about this whole idea of fasting cancer or ketogenic diets, why it's so important and how it connects to this whole idea of insulin resistance and insulin high insulin levels? Yeah, so both fasting and ketogenic diets have the same sort of goal at the end,

which is trying to lower insulin because the difference between a ketogenic diet. diet, say, and a low-carb diet is that, you know, you're sort of low-carb, ultra-low-carb for the keto, but sort of moderate protein, because protein can also stimulate insulin, whereas some of the older low-carb diets were, like, very high in protein, you take protein shapes or whatever. Unless I don't know. Yeah, like Atkins. And so how the protein is not always the best idea, because you can get high insulin,

but you also get this high mTOR, which is sometimes not so good for cancer as well. But the idea is to really drop your insulin levels. And if these are diseases of too much insulin, then that's going to be a very useful ad-jump treatment. So fasting is, it's actually fascinating because there's all these different things we're discovering. So one of the things is sort of autophagy. So as you fast, of course, your nutrient sensors go down. So mTOR insulin go down. And then you activate this process called autophagy, where you actually start to break down some of your subcellular organelles and stuff.

stuff. So basically your body is just trying to clean house. Pac-Man coming around and cleaning up all the garbage. Yeah, exactly. People think it's a bad thing. Maybe don't people know who Pac-Man was, but that was the original video game that Bell played back in the 70s. And it's pretty exciting, though. I don't know what Pac-Man is anymore.

People still find them in some size. But, yeah, the idea is that people think that this sort of, of breakdown process is very bad for you, but it's actually really good for you. In fact, it's sort of one of the keys to rejuvenating the body. That is, you want to break down all your old stuff and then sort of rebuild the stuff that you need. So the whole idea of fasting is you're trying to put the body into this sort of regenerative maintenance mode. Because what we recognized over the last eight bit is that your body sort of has sort of, you know, you can go into growth mode or you can go into sort of the cell maintenance repair mode and it really depends on

your nutrients availability when nutrients are available you want to grow when nutrients are not available you don't want to grow and you want to go into this sort of maintenance repair mode and everybody thinks growth is good but growth is not always good especially as an adult so I always say think about a car it's like if you have a sports car and you rev that engine and you're running it fast all the time you're going to go fast which is great but it's going to burn much faster. So you can't just keep revving that engine, keep redlining it. You've got to sometimes bring it to the shop, put it in the garage, let it rest and all this stuff. A pit stop. Yeah, exactly, a little pit stop. So that's the point of the human body, too. You can either go for growth or

you can go for longevity or cellular maintenance repair. But you got to have a bit of both. It's a balance there. It's not all growth. And this is where you say, oh, eat, eat, eat, deed, deed. Well, you're going to put your body, your nutrient sense are going to go up, your growth factors are going to go up, you're going to put yourself in growth mode. But you don't want to do that, especially for a disease such as cancer, which is a disease where cells are growing too much. You're basically feeding into that growth. And that's going to be very, very bad for you.

So what you do instead is you do the fasting and you put your cells into this sort of maintenance for care mode. And that actually allows you to undergo both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better because chemotherapy, we have a couple studies on fasting a chemotherapy where what you do is you fast sort of just before and during and just after and during your chemotherapy. And what they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from treatment because what you've done, of course, is taking the cells of your normal body and you

sort of put them into a more quiescent state. They're not trying to grow. They're actually trying to slow down. chemotherapy, the general way it works is it kills the fastest-flowing cells, which are usually the cancer cells. But it also kills like the hair follicles because they're a fast-growing cell. It kills the lining of the GI tract, so you get nausea and your hair falls out. So if you can put those cells into sort of a quiescence sort of repair mode, it's not going to sustain as much damage from the chemotherapy. And instead, the cancer cells, which can't stop

their growth, they're always trying to grow. They can't do that. So therefore, they're going to sustain full damage from the chemotherapy while your body is relatively protected. Now, there are many root causes of cancer. It depends on the person, genetics, and everything they're exposed to throughout their lifetime, something we call the exosome. But chronic inflammation is one of the most common drivers of cancer. Now, this is chronic sterile inflammation, not an infection.

And it could be why cancer is on the rise in younger people. The development and the progression of cancer, it happens downstream. of chronic low-grade inflammation. So how does that work? How does chronic inflammation drive cancer? Well, it creates a microenvironment that supports tumor development, tumor growth, and tumor progression.

In other words, metastasis, inflammatory mediators, things like cytokines, they promote DNA damage. They inhibit something called apoptosis, which is basically programmed cell death, getting rid of damaged cells. So it stops the process of actually getting rid of all the cells

that are going to turn to cancer. also enhances angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels that supply tumors with blood and nutrients for growth, which they need, otherwise they die if they have no blood supply. Inflammation processes can also cause changes to your DNA through something called epigenetic modifications. If you eat bad food and junk food and ultra-process food, you are going to be silencing something called the tumor suppressor genes, genes that suppress cancer. Or even worse, you're going to be activating genes that cause cancer called oncogenes. Oncology is cancer, oncogenes or oncogenes or cancer causing genes.

These are genetic mutations that turn on tumors and it's caused by what we're eating. And that further promotes cancer development. All right, so let's back up a little bit and go into what causes chronic inflammation. So many things. First, living in our modern world, just being alive today is an inflammatory state. We have a constant exposure to environmental toxins, things that we never had before, like P-FAS chemicals, bisphenol A or BPA, microplastics, and the list goes on and on. We're going to eat in some more of those.

Poor diet or ultra-processed diet or sedentary lifestyle. The open prescribing of drugs, just aging itself causes higher risk, leaky gut, food sensitivities, food allergies, hormone imbalances, and more, all these potentially drive inflammation. Now, Hippocrates once said that all disease begins in the gun. And for the purpose of this conversation, we're going to follow his advice and start in the gut. So how do imbalances do your gut microbiome lead to cancer? Now, this is really fascinating stuff. It's cutting-edge stuff.

So you're not hearing about this everywhere, but we're going to get into it today. Healthy gut contains a whole diverse population of bugs of microorganisms that play key roles in your digestion, in a nutrient absorption, and your immune function. Why? Because 60% of your immune system lives in your gut. It's right underneath the lining of your gut. Why? Because you're exposed to the outside world and is trying to protect you from all the bad stuff inside your gut, which is poop and food. Now, good gut bacteria make something called postbiotics.

You've heard of prebiotics like, you know, fiber or probiotics like Lactobacillus, but there's something called postbiotics. These are molecules, metabolites, of bacteria in your gut. And they can be good or bad. So they're called postbiotics. And they're made by what you're eating and feeding the bacteria in your gut. Now, there's a lot of them, but some of them are really important in regulating cancer. For example, butyrate is a anti-cancer complex.

made by your microbiome when you have good bugs in there. You also make other compounds like acetate and propionate. These are metabolized that are produced by bacterial fermentation of fiber and all the polyphenols, all those colorful compounds and veggies and fruits that supports the integrity of the gut lighting. And the gut lining is so important because without healthy gut lighting, basically all that poop and food is leaking into your bloodstream and causing your immune system to go crazy. Now, these metabolites, they're called short chain fatty acids. They have anti-cancer properties.

They regulate our immune system, they help plant inflammation, and when there's a good balance of these microorganisms, that's great. But when that balance is disrupted, it leads to an overgrowth of the bad bacteria and a reduction in the beneficial bacteria. So it's like getting weeds in your garden, the good plants, they get crowded out by the bad weeds, right? And bad bacteria are bad because they release poisons, toxins. We call them endotoxins.

that just means an internal toxin. And those endotoxins get into your system through a leaky gut, and they also cause a leaky gut, and they cause inflammation. And the imbalances in your gut microbiome that cause this problem is called dysbiosis. Now, dysbiosis can compromise the integrity of the gut lining. It makes you have a leaky gut, and leads to something called increased intestinal permeability in the basic late term is leaky gut.

Now, basically, think about your gut as one cell lining that protects you from the outside world. And the cell they're stuck together like Legos. They have something called tight junctions. When those are damaged, which happens because of bad gut bacteria and all our processed food and emulsifiers and additives and all this crap, you separate these cells and then the food and bacteria can leak in between the cells and get into your bloodstream and then right underneath your gut lining is your immune system. So that's why this is such a big deal.

And when you have this leaky gut, it allows toxins and undigested food particles and pathogens, bacteria, to enter the bloodstream. And your body is like, wow, this is not me. That leads to an overactive immune system and chronic inflammation throughout the body. And it affects everything, not just cancer, but everything. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, literally everything. Outimmune disease, asthma, allergies, autism, ADD, depression, the list goes on and on and on. We're talking about cancer here.

Now, the immune system responds to these foreign substances by what? By doing what it's supposed to do? It's like, this ain't me. It triggers an inflammatory response. So it's bad when you have bad bugs. And most of us have bad bugs in our gut. So how does this standard American diet, the sad diet, disrupt our gut microbiome? Well, it's because it's so rich in bad stuff, like ultra-processed foods, which are energy

dense, but they contain a lot of other stuff, like added sugars, sweeteners, refined grains, bad fats, toxins, actual literal toxins, chemical additives, preservatives, PFS, thallites, things that are just poisons, the damage they got. Now, this feeds and grows the bad bacteria, and it reduces something called bacterial diversity. You want an ecosystem like a rainforest, complex, diverse, resilient. You don't want a monocrop cornfield that can go out just like that with some adversity. And we are having a low bacterial diversity in our modern world. Now, beneficial bacteria, the good ones, like bifidobacteria, lactobacillia, acromanceia, baccala bacterium, and rosaburia. They're lower. I mean, you have to remember all those names, by the way. I'm just

telling you because it's all the bugs that are the good ones. You can get to know if you want. They're nice, actually. But they're lower in abundance when you have a Western diet. So when you have all these bad foods, you all the good bugs go down. And you get less of these good short chain fatty acids, less of these good anti-cancer compounds that your gut naturally produces. Now, in the other hand, when you eat this processed diet, it increases the abundance of something called pro-inflammatory bacteria, these like ruminococcus, proteobacteria, which produce pro-inflammatory compounds called LPS. LPS stands for lipopolysaccharides, it doesn't really matter.

Basically, these are like poisons. And these bacteria produce these poisons, and they get into the system, they leak in, and they start creating an inflammatory response. Now, we can look at the gun in many ways, and I've seen so many stool tests. I used to call me Dr. C, every poop in my old job at Canyon Ranch, because I looked at every stool test. We look at a lot of different factors. We can look at levels of bacteria.

We can look at levels of short-chain fatty acids. We can look at ratios of good and bad bacteria. But there's a ratio of something called fermicities to bacteriides. When you have a high ratio of formicudies to bacteriotees, these are basically categories of bacteria, it is linked to obesity and diabetes and medical. the metabolic disease. But a high ratio has also been seen with breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and it's really important to consider as a broader picture of the overall microbial diversity and your individual health and genetics. Now, in a study that was titled

intake of sugar and food source of sugar and colorectal cancer risk in the multi-ethnic color art study, blah, blah, blah, whatever, they're like these long names. The researchers noted that total sugar, total fructose, glucose, and fructose, and maltose. all different kinds of sugar, were associated with an increased risk for colorectal cancer, especially younger people. Now, this is interesting because colorectal cancer is the number one cause of cancer death among men under 50 and the number two leading cause of cancer death in young women. Now, this isn't static. It's increasing by about 1 to 2% a year in adults under 55. There's also a strong link between type of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, and

for colorectal, hepatic, pancreatic, breast, and demetriol, and lots of other cancers. Now, there's something else that's really important here, which is we're all metabolically unhealthy. And there's an enormously strong link between type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes, obesity, and there is for so many cancers that are most common cancers, like colorectal cancer, liver or hepatic cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, endometrial or urinary cancer, and many other cancers. In fact, 48% of all cancers are attributed to obesity, but I think the number is probably a lot higher. And obesity, if you're overweight, is associated with a 40% greater risk of early onset colorectal cancer.

That's from the Journal of Gastronology. 45% of adults, 59, and younger are obese. So a lot of people are at risk. And studies show that diabetes significantly increases the risk of cancer and that lots of people who have cancer have a high incidence of that. diabetes. Now get this, up to 80% of pancreatic cancer patients actually have type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance when they're diagnosed. This is a deadly cancer. It's caused by our diet. So what else do chronic diseases have in common? Well, insulin resistance. That's what we've just been talking about. And you've heard me talk about it forever. I'm going to

keep talking about it because it's the cause of everything. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia. So how does insulin resistance relate to cancer? Well, insulin is responsible for keeping our blood sugar balanced and stable. Now, insulin is a growth hormone. It causes your fat cells to grow. It causes your belly to grow, but it also binds to and causes cancer cells to grow. So eating a high sugar, high starch, high glycemic diet causes our cells to become resistant to the effects of insulin. And what does that do? Well, that leads your body to produce more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. These high levels of insulin are what we call hyperinsulinia increases the production of another molecule called IGF1. That sounds for insulin-like growth factor

one. It's a hormone that increases cell division, cell growth, and inhibits autophagy or cellular clean. Now, sometimes it's good. It's like Goldilocks. But when you have high levels of IGF1 from all the sugar, it basically causes cells to continue to grow and divide and prevents them from being killed. Okay. Now, high blood sugar is present in 39 to 99% of cancer cases. Now, that leads to insulin resistance, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation of the body. It also creates something called advanced glycation end products or ages. Now, glycation is a chemical reaction. You're familiar with it when your chicken skin is crispy or your bread has a crust on it or when you get that creme brulee thing. It's got that crispy thing on top. That's called glycation. It's when sugar and

proteins or other fats bind together and form this basically compound called ages or advanced glycation end products. When these glycated products bind the DNA, they bind the proteins and lipids, it causes something called the mallard reaction, the browning reaction. You've seen this. But the problem is these accumulated our tissue. And they bind us something called rages, receptors. for advanced glycation end products. When they bind to those receptors, it activates a whole inflammatory cascade, and that accelerates not only cancer,

but also aging itself. And there's lots of sources of ages in our diet. We actually eat them on a regular basis, right? Ultra-processed food is a big source. Dry heat processing is one way. Bake goods, cooking at high temperatures, brown, charred, fried, burnt foods. These ages create damage to your blood vessels.

cause oxidative stress, they reduce blood flow, they cause damage to your DNA, to your tissue, to your mitochondria. They're just bad. Now, you can kind of measure this in the blood by something called hemoglobin A1C, which is essentially glycated hemoglobin. It's your hemoglobin which you can measure easily in your blood and see how much sugar is bound to it. And that kind of gives you a rough idea. There's also an amazing new test called the insulin resistance score from Quest, which allows you to get a really good read on your degree of insulin resistance and how bad it's because hemoglobin A1C is a late-stage phenomena. And it's great that you can do this test now.

And through Function Health, the company I co-founded to allow you access to your own lab data through just going directly to a Quest Lab and getting your data very simple process, you can go to FunctionHealth.com forward slash mark to learn and sign up. But the insulin system scores are really important because it really tells you what your risk is.

Now, the test we commonly use in medicine now to look at glycation is called hemoglobin A1C. And if it's 6% or higher, it's associated with a high cancer risk. from both diabetics and non-diabetics. And even a lower level may be a problem. We find that even levels down to five are probably optimal, but anything over five,

you're starting to increase your risk for heart disease and other things. So the cutoffs we have in medicine are arbitrary. We say six, it's six and a half. It used to be five point seven. It's pre-diabetes, five point five. I mean, it's all a moving target because, you know, we're finding that at lower and lower levels, there's a problem.

So basically, you want your hemoglos to see as low as possible. Let's look at another big factor that causes, cancer. Fructose. Now, fructose is something found in fruit, which is good, but it's not fruit we're talking about here. Epidemiologic or population studies, which don't prove cause and effect, but they found strong associations between high fructose intake from sources like high fructose corn syrup and increased risk of pancreatic and colon cancers. Now, you have to realize we never had this stuff in our food supply until the 70s. There was no high fructose corn syrup. Now it's about 50% of our calories. It's in everything. It's got not 50-50 fructose and glucose like

sugar, it might have 55 to 75% fructose, which has all these adverse effects and it's free fructose. Now, there's something called the fructose transporter, and this is called glute five. And thought about your glutes, it's called glute five. And it's overexpressed in cancers like pancreatic, colorectal, breast, lung cancer. Now, when you have high glute five expression, it basically allows for increased intake or uptake of fructose by cancer cells. And what does that do? that makes them grow because they love the sugar.

It caused them to migrate and move around, meaning starting to spread and invasion, meaning metastases. So where are we getting high fructose levels in our diet? It's not from fruit. It's from added sugars and sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, sucrose and fructose as sweeteners that are in all the ultra-processed food we eat. I mean, it's 60% of our diet is ultra-processed food. So fructose in high-fructose corn syrup and all the food is bad.

So what else could be causing? cancer that's in our sad diet. Well, food additives. Over 10,000 chemicals are allowed in the food we eat in the United States. 10,000. And here's what's shocking. Ninety-nine percent of the food chemicals that have been introduced to our food supply since 2000 were approved not by the government, not by the FDA, but approved by the food and chemical companies that made them. It's like the fox guarding the henhouse, right? Since 2000. 7756 new food chemicals have been added to our food supply to a loophole in the law called grass. G-R-A-S. It stands for generally recognizes safe. So it seems like, oh, it seems like

it's safe. Well, it doesn't seem to be killing anybody right now. So let's just put in the food supply. Now, this grass loophole is a big deal. Food chemical companies exploit this loophole, allowing them to make their own safety determinations for substances that they say are generally recognized as safe. Now, the 1958 Food Adams Amendment intended for rigorous FDA review, meaning if you want to add some new chemical to the food, the FDA has to review the science on this. But this grass loophole basically has become the main approval route. You basically take the company's word for it that it's safe. How crazy is that, right? When a company determines the substances grass, it means they think it's safe among, quote, qualified experts. So they get

a bunch of experts they pay or they say it's safe and then they submit a notice to the FDA, but the process is entirely voluntary. And the FDA can review these notices and issue a, quote, no question's letter, but it doesn't actually approve these substances or even affirm the company's safety data. So there's all this crap on our food that got in there without any real oversight. Now, due to this loophole, harmful ingredients have been asked. added and continue to be added to our food supply. Let me get an example. Seven carcinogenic flavor ingredients were approved as grass by FEMA. This is the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, not a government group, an industry trade group. This is a group that reviews and

approved nearly all flavor ingredients. But these ingredients were later banned in 2018 after a tradition by the environmental working group for being linked to cancer in animals. Now, I'm on, I'm on the board of the environmental working group, so I'm in part of this. I get it. It's really bad. Now, food additives are commonly used to enhance a flavor of baked goods, ice cream, candy, chewing gum, beverages, all kinds of stuff. And they got weird chemical names, benzophenone, ethylacrylate, pyridine, styrene.

Do you have these in your company at home that you cook with? I doubt it, right? The term flavor is this vague label that food, manufacturers use to hide chemical names from consumers. It's deliberate. And say it's got natural flavorings, artificial frailings, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't even know what it is, right? A lot of other grass substances, which are not approved in other countries, include BHA, which is classified as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen by the National Toxicology Program, right? B.HT. or butylated hydroxytaliene. When you put that in your salad? It's in everything. And that

has been determined to disrupt endocrine function by causing change to thyroid and it also affects animal development and fetal development. Now, B.HT. isn't everything. It's in cereal, chewing them, potato chips, vegetables, vegetables, everywhere. And it's banned in Europe. We're going to get to that minute. There's another thing we have to think about with food, which are the toxins in food, pesticides, and all other toxins. So how do you avoid those? Well, avoid process and packaged foods. All that BPA is in the plastics, in the cans, and the packaging, thallates, the forever chemicals, PFS, microplastics that leach into our food from packaging, from the manufacturing processes, it's in our water and our soil, make sure you filter your water. In fact, consumer reports

tested food products for phthalates, which is one of these toxic chemicals, from 67 grocery stores and 18 fast food chains, and found that levels vary dramatically. Some of the worst defenders for having these chemicals were Coca-Cola, Fair Life, Core Power, high-protein milkshakes, Slim Fast, You'll Play, Wendy's Krispy Chicken Nuggets, Chipotle, and Moes Southwest Chicken Grilled Chicken Burrito, Burger King Wopper, Cheerios, and the list goes on. In cancer, there is some defect in the ability of the mitochondrian in the cell to produce energy, which is the way most of our cells get energy. We breathe oxygen, and oxygen is a form of serves as the final common acceptor of electrons in our mitochondria to generate energy

through oxidative phosphorylation. And he said that's broken in cancer. And what we basically said was in order for us to produce energy in ourselves, most of us combine oxygen with sugar in this kind of chemical reaction down an assembly line called oxidative phosphorylation. It's kind of the normal way you produce energy from food. And it's through glucose primarily and oxygen. So that's what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we bring glucose into the cell or other foods that would be broken down either into glucose or acetylcoa, which is the end product of the glycolytic pathway. So the cell brings in glucose. There's a 10-step pathway called glycolysis, the old Emden Meyerhoff-Parns pathway. And then the pyruvate, which is

this three-carbon derivative of glucose, is then enters into the mitochondria and is fully oxidized to produce significant amounts of energy with the key waste products being water and CO2. So every time we exhale, we're exhaling the waste products of food metabolism, which is CO2 and the moisture water. We can develop urine from combining with amino acid breakdown products. So it's a very highly efficient, highly, highly energy efficient system. But Warburg was saying that cancer cells have a defect in their mitochondria, and that defect is compensated for by a upregulation of these ancient glycolytic fermentation. So glycolysis is present in all of our cells. the problem is when the mitochondria become defective, the end product of glycolysis, pyruvic

acid, is no longer entering the mitochondria, but is being diverted to lactic acid, a waste product of the glycolytic pathway, and that acidifies the cancer microenvironment. So cancer then becomes a disease of cells that proliferate with, instead of producing oxygen CO2 in water, they're producing lactic acid as a waste product. So, and Warburg noticed that all the major cancers that he studied were blowing out large amounts of this lactic acid. And he said that, just kind of what accumulates in your muscles when you overexercise it causes.

Exactly. Exactly. But then that deficit is made up as soon as the oxygen can be, the muscles can be reoxygenated. They go back to respiring. So the muscles have a capacity that when oxygen becomes deficient from overuse of muscles, the muscle will then use the local glucose to produce massive amounts of quick energy with the waste product of lactic acid, which goes back into the bloodstream in exercised folks, and the lactic acid goes to the liver and is created back to glucose, and that's the chloe cycle.

and Saul and Gertie Corey received the Nobel Prize for their recognition of how lactic acid from muscles can be reconverted back into glucose for the body. I think that what you just said was so important, I want to make sure everybody gets it, and then we can kind of continue on how it's related to cancer. So everybody, basically, from my understanding, is that when we eat our food is primarily into glucose, glucose then has to go from this process of breakdown in terms of byproduct we call pyruva. And then there's a whole bunch of steps, then turns that into energy in the body. With cancer cells, that basically processes and is kind of effective. And so

it turns, instead of turning into a easy form of energy from glucose, it creates lactic acid, which changes the whole environment itself. And basically, the other sort of point, I think it's important people realize, is that your body is like a hybrid car. It can run on gas air electric. Your cancer cells and the gas is sugar and the electric is fat. Okay. In cancer cells, they don't run well on fat and it basically stars them. They only can run on sugar, which is gas. It's kind of a dirty burning fuel. And that ends up with all this linkage of cancer to things like diabetes and insulin resistance and all these very factors. So that's all how it ties together. Now, then take this down on this process of the secondary pathway, which is fermentation,

instead of what we call the primary pathway, burning energy, which is oxygen and phosphorylation, essentially the Krebs cycle, is how we break down sugar and energy. So I think that I just sort of want to, like, reinforce that. There was a lot in there. No, no, you're 100% correct, Mark. This sometimes can be a little overwhelming. I mean, even most doctors, by the way, like, you know, we remember biochemistry for just enough for our exams, then we forget it all, including a question.

CREB cycle, which is what you're talking about, which is how we turn food and oxygen. It's one of the most important things we do to enter my idea. You know, it's really an interesting thing because, you know, most of us when we had to study the CREB cycle as a requirement, only because it was tortuous to try to memorize all the stuff. You know, and it was no pleasure in doing that other than the fact that you say, oh, if you memorize it, you'd regurgitate it on a test, and then you wouldn't have to worry about it again. So, but when, when, when, you know, when we are in a different sphere now where we really need to understand that in order to manage a very devastating disease. So you have it, I take, I took a completely different view

of these tortuous biochemical pathways when I said I needed to know this in order to manage the cancer, in order to have an effective non-toxic management of the tumor. So now it becomes a process. It becomes part of your soul to understand. understand these processes because you're going to be able to wield the power of your knowledge to manage a disease because you finally understand what all this crap meant. And so now we realize that, as Warburg said, cancer cells don't need oxygen for their growth. And he showed data that, you know, he can take all the oxygen out of the system. and these tumor cells were still growing fine.

And his argument was they replaced their oxidative phosphorylation or energy through respiration with energy through fermentation. Fermentation is energy without oxygen. And he said that they were getting their... Wine or beer, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, as a byproduct, that's alcoholic fermentation, resinvolactic acid fermentation.

There's an extra step that the yeast use to convert the lactate into ethanol. But that's another step. Our muscles and our cancer cells are producing lactic acid as a waste product of the fermentation process. So as a result, but what Warburg was saying that you have to replace energy. So without energy, nothing will grow, period. That's the key basis of all of our life existence. Without energy, we die real quick. And you want to know how fast we can die?

If people drink cyanide, you die real, real fast. As I said, that is the mitochondria. Yeah, it poises complex four of the mitochondria shuts down electron transport, prevents oxygen from binding to electrons, and your whole body just shuts down instantly. So you can't make energy if you drink cyanide. You just can't make energy. No, and then you die. They don't make energy.

Your brain dies, your heart dies, everything dies. Anything that's linked to oxidative phosphorylation dies real quick, except the cancer cell. So that's the, so Warburg said, yeah, cancer cells are resistant to cyanide. I said, whoa, this is, so they don't need, they don't need oxygen, and they can live in cyanide. And I said, whoa, what the hell is this? But he said a long time ago, in the 1920s, they were showing this kind of thing. They would take a rat that had a tumor, and they would inject the rat with cyanide, and the rat would die instantly, but not the tumor. He could take the tumor out and grow the cells and culture was fine.

The tumor was resistant to the cyanide. And he said, that's because they're oxidative phosphorylation. They have replaced oxidative phosphorylation with fermentation, which is energy without oxygen. So that became very clear from his hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers and analyses. So I went back and I looked at all that stuff really, really carefully and confirmed in no uncertain terms that Otto Warburg was 100% correct in his knowledge of the origin of cancer. He was not correct in the readouts, and I'll explain that in a minute, because we've cleared that all up, the misinformation regarding the readouts of dysfunctional respiration. But he claimed that cancer starts with a chronic disruption of oxidative phosphor energy through oxidative respiration. then the cell will gradually over time transition to this ancient process of fermentation.

And he also clearly said that if you damage respiration too acutely, the cell will die, and you will not get a cancer cell from a dead cell. And that's exactly what happens with the cyanide. You can never get, if the whole body is dead, there's no way you're going to get a cancer cell. But if you have a cancer cell in there, it's not going to die from cyanide. So, as I said, so people with cancer take drink cyanide to kill themselves. Well, they'll kill their body, but the tumor cells in their body will still remain alive. So as long as they have the fermentable fuels in the microenvironment.

And at that time, Warburg figured that the major fermentable fuel was the sugar glucose. So glucose can either be completely respired in the mitochondria of the cell, or it can be fermented if the mitochondria are not functional or the individual would be in an. a low-oxygen environment. So it became clear to Warburg that the release of large amounts of lactic acid from tumor cells was the result of a defect in oxidative phosphorylation. And this then could explain the origin of cancer. Problem is, in the 1950s, Sydney Whitehouse and others, who was the head of the National Cancer Institute, and rightly so reported that there were some cancer cells that took in as much oxygen

as some normal cells. So he said, Warburg must be wrong because the oxygen can, we're seeing cancer cells that are taking in oxygen as avidly as normal cells, and yet the cancer cell is still blowing out a lactic acid. What's going on with this? So they said then, oh, the cancer cell needs so much energy, it both respires and produces lactic acid at the same time. So this major controversy in battle went on for years and is still going on for many people today in the papers that they publish showing that cancer cells consume oxygen just as readily as normal cells in culture, and therefore cancer cells are using oxidative phosphorylation wrong. We've shown that's not the case. It turns out that the tumor cells do, in fact, consume oxygen, but they're

not using it for ATP synthesis. They're not using the consumed oxygen for generating energy through oxidative phosphorylation. They are using it to produce reactive oxygen species, ROS. ROS are carcinogenic and mutagenic. These radicals, oxygen radicals, damage DNA, RNA, and proteins. They cause the mutations that you see in the nucleus of the tumor cells. So the oxygen consumed by cancer cells is producing DNA damage as a downstream epiphenomenon of the damage to oxidative phosphorylation. So the cancer field today is focusing on mutations and targeting mutations. These are all effects. They're not the cause of cancer. And this goes back to the argument with Sydney Winehouse and Warburg in the 1950s, except the folks today absolutely

do not understand, do not appreciate, or cannot accept the fact that the oxygen consumption and cancer cell is not used for oxidative phosphorylation. It's used for reactive oxygen species and other reactions not involving ATP. So you have to put the story, you have to put the story together. So when you mentioned CAR-T immunotherapy, all these immunotherapies, they're based on the somatic mutation theory. So now Warburg's, Warburg was the initiator of the mitochondrial metabolic theory of cancer. I will explain more because he did not know about glutamine fermentation, which we now know about. He did not, he also assumed that the oxygen consumed by cancer cells, even though it was low, was still linked to oxfas. Okay, that's in

misunderstanding on Warburg's part. He's going to credit. He was over 100 years ago. Oh, yeah. It was 100 years ago, and because the pathway for glutamine fermentation was not yet developed. So he did not know about the second major fermentable fuel. So we got he was absolutely right on the origin of cancer. He was incorrect on assuming that lactic acid production equalled a certain amount of ATP. We now know that that calculation is somewhat in error. We also know that oxygen, consumption is in error. So we can put it all together. Warburg was 100% correct in the knowledge

of how cancer started. His readouts were incorrect, and we're polishing it all up. So this is the mitochondrial, metabolic. Let me take up on your first. So basically what you're saying is that most oncology today is focused on the idea that cancer results from genetic mutations in the cancer. However, what we're allowing learning at the same time is that you can take 100 cases of breast cancer and they may be all genetically very different or colon cancer or prostate cancer or pancreatic cancer and so even they have the same name the same pathology on a microscope the underlying genetics are quite different and so we're playing a little bit of whack-a-mole now there may be some ways of improving cancer response to chemotherapy by identifying which genetic

mutations there are and which drugs work better for which ones and it's sort of an incremental improvement. But it's not a kind of cataclysmic shift in our thinking around cancer, which is moving from a genetic theory to a metabolic theory. And I think the metabolic theory is quite interesting. I think it clearly needs to be slashed out more, but it looks like it's holding promise to deal with things like stage four melanoma, stage four pancreatic cancer, stage four breast cancer. Cancer that are really death sentences are responding, even glioblastoma, which is brain cancer very well the ketogenic diets. So you kind of have to be able to sort of navigate this new landscape where certain cancers are really responding to a metabolic approach. And so we can't

just sort of relegate it to some crazy whack job theory. This is actually now becoming more mainstream thinking. Well, going back to what you said about the breast cancer, you know, when you look at individual breast tumors, you know, they have different stage ones for, you know, all the different kinds of, you know, her two and, yeah, the staging and the type, you know, which actually may be less important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but you're 100% correct when you look at the genetic profiles of all these different tumors.

They're all essentially different from each other. I mean, there's some commonalities in mutations, of course, but many of them, many studies have shown if we take all the individual cells, many individual cells out of a tumor and do a full genomic sequence, no, no two cells. cells in the tumor have the exact same kinds of mutations. Yet, yet, every cell in that breast tumor has dependency on fermentation as a source of energy. So the common metabolic problem, all the cells have one major common problem or phenotype or observation. They're all fermenting, regardless of what their mutations are. So the common pathological phenotype is

fermentation. Okay. So then the simple question is, where do they, how do they get their energy from fermentation? And the two fuels that drive fermentation are glucose, the sugar, and what we have shown is the amino acid glutamine. Now, glutamine for the cancer field, people will say, oh, we all knew glutamine was a big, big role in cancer. You guys in the field thought it was being respired. No, because the oxygen, no, it's not respired. It's fermented, just like the glucose. But it's also fermented in the mitochondria. So the mitochondria, the pathway is called glutaminalysis, and it's a fermentation pathway in the mitochondria. So you have a fermentation pathway in the cytoplasm, and you have a fermentation pathway in the mitochondria, which makes

it look like the mitochondria are respiring, especially when they're taken in oxygen. So we had to parse out all this stuff and clearly define what the actual biomedical, biochemical mechanisms are that are driving the beast. And the beast is driven by fermentation. And you're right, Mark, the cells in a glioblastoma, the cells in colon lung, they're all fermenters. So they all have different. That's why when you take CART immunotherapy, if you're not hitting the fermentation pathway, you're essentially missing the target. So nothing could be like when you say, oh, we have a targeted therapies, precision medicine.

These guys, these targets, I mean, they're missing the target. And you pay a lot of money for a missed target. And then you say, and then you say, oh, you know, I have, we're going to use precision medicine. You know, well, if it's so precise, how come you blew out my liver when you were trying to cure my lung cancer? Exactly. You know, it's a problem.

You know, most of the treatments we have. now are really toxic, radiation, chemotherapy, surgeries a bit crude. And what's amazing about metabolic oncology is that therapy is diet and maybe some other compounds and block them these fermentation pathways that really have not only no side effect, but it have a ton of beneficial effect in terms of overall metabolic health, in terms of reducing inflammation, improving stem cell function, causing DNA repair, and helping you know, the oxidative stress. I mean, it's just the list goes on about how this works.

You're already imaging. No, it is. It's remarkable. And because you're all, we're going back to the origin of many of the diseases that we have. And, you know, a lot of this is systemic inflammation, you know, chronic exposure to different chemicals. You put all that together. And you end up with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia. You end up with all these kinds of chronic diseases.

And a lot of it has to. do with disturbed energy. Metabolic homostasis is disturbed in many of these chronic diseases. The issue for us, though, is, you know, ferreting out the mechanisms of how cells grow, cancer cells grow in a dysregulated way. And I think, you know, I don't want to become too diffuse and say, okay, let me jump now into Alzheimer's and show you how this works. jump into type 2 diabetes and show me and show you how that works. The major focus we have right now is correcting massive misinformation on how cancer cells express this dysregulated growth, because ultimately that's what the disease is. It's cell division out of control,

and these cells are dividing out of control because they have lost their ability to use energy through respiration, have fallen back on ancient fermentation pathways, and the organelle, the organelle inside the cell that controls the cell cycle and regulated growth is the mitochondrian. And Warburg clearly showed many years ago, and I have, in my own work, validated everything that Warburg said with respect to mitochondrial dysfunction, that the organelle controlling the differentiated state and regulated growth is dysfunctional, and therefore the cells are falling back on ancient fermentation pathways and are dysregulated in their cell growth. So what's the best way to manage cancer is pull the plug on their fermentation fuels? And there's only two fuels

that can drive this beast, and it's glucose and glutamine. So, and then they can't, as you mentioned earlier, they can't burn fats or ketone bodies because you need a good mitochondria oxidative phosphorylation system to generate energy from fats and ketone bodies. So the fats and ketone bodies, though, help the heart, help the brain, especially for ketone bodies. So you mentioned, as you said, all of these different chronic diseases can be improved significantly by this metabolic approach, because when you burn ketones, you essentially increase the metabolic homeostasis of normal cells. So, and the cancer cell is marginalized, it can't use the ketone body or the fat. So you really put them in a very compromised position, and they will gradually be eliminated.

And not only that in our, in our paper, in my book, and in the paper we just showed for managing cancer in the dog using purely metabolic therapy, when you cut the calories down, we have this process called autolytic cannibalism. It's very interesting. So, All cells in the body must carry their weight when food restriction. So there has to be a coordinated interaction among all the cells in our body. And when you have a cancer, a group of cells that are using energy in a very inefficient way and not contributing to the society of the cells, the body will turn on those cancer cells and use them as fuel, eat them, and supply their metabolites for the rest,

call autolytic cannibalism. And in order to get into that stage, you have to lower blood sugars, and you have to increase ketones, and then the body starts turning on these cancer cells and dissolving. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest, and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity, and effectiveness.

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