The Dr. Hyman Show - The Surprising Science Behind Cancer Prevention

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

The Surprising Science Behind Cancer Prevention | This episode is sponsored by Pique Tea The right diet is so imperative in preventing cancer or during the healing process. This is in large part because of the role insulin plays in cancer; insulin acts as a growth factor in the body, which is one of the reasons too much insulin leads to obesity. It’s also why insulin will support the growth of cancer cells.  In this compilation episode, Dr. Mark Hyman is joined by Dr. William Li and Dr. Jason Fung to discuss how recent research is now revealing the connection between insulin resistance and cancer, what you can eat to prevent cancer, and much more. Dr. William Li is an internationally renowned physician, scientist and author of one of my favorite books, the New York Times bestseller Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. His groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and impacted care for more than 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views. Dr. Li has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, Live with Kelly & Ryan and the Dr. Oz Show, and he has been featured in USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Parade and O Magazine. He is president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and is leading research into COVID-19. 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 latest book, The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery, was just released. This episode is sponsored by Pique Tea. Right now, you can take advantage of their limited time bundle that includes two cartons of Sun Goddess Matcha and a glass beaker, along with two premium bonus gifts: a handheld frother and 7-day coffee detox book.  Plus, if you head over to piquetea.com/hyman and use code HYMAN, you’ll get an additional 5% off this exclusive bundle with gifts Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. William Li, “Why Food Is Better Than Medication To Treat Disease” at: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrLi Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Jason Fung, “Is Cancer Caused By Sugar?” at: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrJasonFung

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer. It's about our bodies taking care of itself. What you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer growth. Yeah. The stuff you don't recognize, you can't pronounce, those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria.

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gift bundle. Again, that's P-I-Q-U-E-T-E-A.com slash hyman with the code hyman. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. In today's compilation episode, Dr. Hyman interviews Dr. William Lee and Dr. Jason Fung about how to choose foods that support your immune system and gut microbiome. You'll also hear why staying away from sugar is so important when it comes to cancer prevention. Let's jump in. What are the foods that have various components that can activate health? Right.

And how do you eat more of those things well i think it makes it it's about having knowledge uh and then making it second nature right so when we heat up something on the stove we know it's going to be hot we don't burn ourselves so we actually avoid certain behaviors when we go out into the sun we know to put on sunscreen it becomes second nature i think food as medicine is something that can become second nature. You have to be exposed to the basic information. And, you know, the science is important because that's what makes it real. But at the end of the day is, you know, this is something that school teachers should be teaching kids, that coaches should be teaching athletes, that doctors

should be telling patients. And so, and I think family members should be sharing among themselves. This is the type of conversation that should be happening at every holiday meal and every schoolyard. And I think that it's not so foreign. It's informed by science and we can all do it. It's true. Now, the other thing I heard you say was at this conference was you showed a slide around immunotherapy. For those of you who don't know what immunotherapy is, it's essentially a way to get cancer by activating your immune system. Rather than giving a poison or cutting it out or burning it out, you literally give something that's going to help your immune system get into gear and be like Pac-Man and eat up the cancer.

And you showed a slide, and who would have thought of this, but you showed a slide that who would have thought of this, but you showed a slide that people who respond to this immunotherapy and these literally can erase cancers actually have a certain type of bacteria in their microbiome, in their gut that makes them respond to this immunotherapy. Whereas those who don't actually die and this bacteria is called acromancy. It's one of the, you know, thousands and thousands of species of bugs in your gut. And you shared a story, if I may, about your mom who had basically metastatic endometrial

cancer which was treated with immunotherapy and was successful, but you added certain things to the treatment to make sure that her acromantia were good, like pomegranate and cranberry and these polyphenols, which come from food that seem to be powerful growers of these great bugs in your gut. So how do we sort of begin to integrate these ideas into how we treat these diseases? Are we giving everybody like a smoothie with all these things in it and helping them with their immunotherapy? Yeah, well, let's take a step back to say, first of all, our bodies are working hard every single day from the time we're born to our last breath to defend our health. And these defense systems, and I've identified five of them in uh my book uh is androgenesis stem cells our microbiome

our ability for our dna to protect our body protect itself and our bodies and our health and our immunity and all these defense systems work together in concert they're like our security force in our body they're patrolling they're watching out they're making sure everybody's safe inside and everything is functioning smoothly And when you have a disease like cancer, for example, and it's not just cancer, it's heart disease, it's diabetes, it's Alzheimer's, it's obesity. But for specifically for cancer, it's really, you know, a few bad guys snuck in, and they figured out how to get around the security force, you know, it's sort of like, you know, TSA slip, let somebody slip by, and now we have to try to chase it. So in the old days for cancer, what we used to do is just say,SA, let somebody slip by, and now we have to try to chase it.

So in the old days for cancer, what we used to do is just say, well, let's take a drug-like chemotherapy and wipe it out. And that's a blunt instrument approach by trying to take something poison to kill something that you want to kill. By the way, the rest of you gets poisoned too. Well, that's right. And so basically it's, it's a toxic approach to, uh, uh, uh, to something that we don't really, it's one bad actor, but we don't want to poison the entire, uh, body. We've now changed our minds about this. And this is really what's making the impossible possible. We've realized that it's not about drugs, killing cancer. It's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancers. So immunotherapy, which is what you

were just bringing up, is an entirely new approach of enhancing our own body's defenses. We don't use drugs to kill the cancer. We allow our bodies. We give medicines that allow our bodies to kill the cancer so our immune systems can find the cancer and reverse the disease back to health. That's what we've always been dreaming of, and it's here. But here's a problem. Only about 20% of people actually have this incredible response

to immunotherapy. Sometimes a little fewer, sometimes a little bit more. But the response when it happens is exactly what we want. Dramatic, right? Like your mom. It just,

my mom had metastatic cancer, and in 30 days she had no cancer, okay? And never had chemotherapy. What makes the difference between somebody who responds like that and who doesn't respond like that, right? That's one of the mysteries out there. And this is exactly where we need to consider more than the typical lab tests that doctors run. We need to think more holistically. And one of the things we know is that our microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria communicates,

talks to our immune system. And we need our gut bacteria to help coach our immune system to do the right thing, including getting cancer. So a study done by a colleague of mine, Dr. Laurence Zitvogel, she's in Paris. She's an immunologist who works with cancer patients. She looked at 249 cancer patients who were receiving immune therapies and separated them into people who responded versus people who did not respond. This, by the way, was published in the journal Science, which is one of the most prestigious journals. and what she found was that the difference between people who responded

and didn't respond was one bacteria unbelievable acromancia right so well isn't that easy you can just maybe take some probiotics with acromantia except that you can't no there's no acromantia probiotic but you can feed them but you can feed it and you can actually change your gut to make your body grow acromantia and the way to do this is the food as medicine solution so turns out that pomegranates and cranberries actually have elatotannins but pomegranates especially and that natural chemical in pomegranate juice and what's been shown is that just one eight-ounce cup of real pomegranate juice, not the flavored stuff, but the real stuff, actually, over the course of a week or two, will actually help change the inside of our guts so that that bacteria likes to grow. That bacteria grows in the lining of the gut, talks to the immune system, and that makes the cancer immunotherapy work better. Yeah, and there's other things too, like you said, cranberries and green tea.

Many things can actually feed our microbiome, right? So plant-based foods, you know, I think it's completely accepted now. It's not challenged that plant-based nutrition is actually the healthy approach to life. I mean, it's kind of- Eating more plants. Eating more plants, right? But it's not just, we're not just feeding ourselves. We're feeding our bacteria, right?

So we're feeding the 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies. And after we extract all the stuff that we need on the human side, we're leaving the leftovers for the bacteria. And this is the fibers. This is the bioactives. And what's amazing is our bacteria can take some of this fiber and they digest it. So it's kind of like giving a sculptor a block of wood and say, do something with it. So the bacteria, our gut microbiome takes that block of wood and starts making sculptures.

There's like these things called short chain fatty acids or scaphas that our microbiome make. And it turns out that these short chain fatty acids or scaphas that our microbiome make and it turns out that these short chain fatty acids these little tiny particles that they make from our food that we feed them like the fats that fuel the gut lining how they do that they're anti-inflammatory they boost our immune system they help regulate our blood sugar they lower our cholesterol cancer risk they and they also suppress cancer risk and they prevent blood vessels from growing into cancer as well. All tied together. And this is, you know, at the end of the day, why we need to take our food seriously.

Yeah. Essentially, you write a little bit about, for example, how the microbiome plays roles in autism and cognitive function. And I remember recently seeing a study where there are undigestible things in breast milk that humans can't digest, called oligosaccharides, and they feed the good bacteria in the baby to develop it. Formula doesn't have those things. And the kids that are breastfed have high levels of something called butyrate, which is one of these short-chain fatty acids, which actually turns off colon cancer genes and is an incredible important anti-inflammatory and regulates the gut health.

Whereas the other formula-fed kids had something called propionic acid, another one of these short-chain fats, but actually that in animal models can induce autism. And so, it's like, whoa. Well, you know, at the end of the day, we're just at the surface of uncovering the mysteries of health. And I think that's the kind of humility and awe and wonderment we all need to have, which is, you know, we know quite a bit about different diseases, but we're just at this new frontier of understanding our health. I mean, you've been working in this field for a while and you're deeply steeped into it. And what I'm seeing from my end of the table

is that we can begin to peel back the layers of the onion. So, it's all about balance. Yeah. You know, more is not more. You need just the right amount. So, in your book, Eat to Beat Disease, you break it down into these very digestible bits and you briefly touched on it, but I want to go deep in each of these five areas. Because what you're talking about is something that is our health creation, health defense system that we can activate, but nobody talks about. And you mentioned them. It's our angiogenesis system.

It's regeneration, which is stem cells and you're really involved in the stem cell world the microbiome the dna protection how we repair and keep our dna healthy in our immune system so let's talk about each of those and how we can activate those things what are the things that harm them for example you talk about uh you know alcohol affecting stem cells and i'm thinking wow i had a tequila about, you know, alcohol affecting stem cells. And I'm thinking, wow, I had a tequila last night. Did I screw up my stem cells, you know? Or then you say, well, red wine maybe helps other areas. So, it's a little confusing. How do you break down each of these? And let's just go through. Let's start with angiogenesis. And what are those things that

are impairing the proper function of this defense system and what are those things we can use to actually activate health within it great so um angiogenesis is a term that actually talks about how the body grows blood vessels blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body that's what keeps us healthy they start there's 60 000 60 000 miles so if you pull out all the blood vessels in your body, line them up, and then you can actually form a line that would go around the earth twice. Unbelievable. So that's one of this enormous organ system, right? So you know it's going to be important. And we know when you block blood vessels, like in the heart, you wind up having big problems with cardiovascular disease.

Clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes. And if you don't have enough blood vessels you can't heal your wounds and if you actually have too many blood vessels you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration and you can grow cancer right so this is a system that is required to keep every cell and organ healthy help key it's a health defense system and if it's out of balance you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels you wind up having in trouble. So what are the things that can damage angiogenesis? Well, it turns out high-fat diets damage angiogenesis. Any fat or just?

You know what? Actually, mostly saturated fats. But I think that it's, you know, really high-fat, overall, like, high-fat diets can be damaging in hypercholesterolemia, for example. If you have a lot of cholesterol floating around your blood, like the damaging bad cholesterol, the LDL, it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels. If you have cigarette smoke, tobacco, whether people shouldn't smoke, but even secondary smoke can actually damage

your blood vessel response. And then you think about heart disease, and you think about cancer, things that are your blood vessels out of whack, out of balance. The fat thing is interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils. And it's hard to separate out.

Are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil? Or they're having trans fats and toxic fats and inflammatory so the so the the science actually says is is not actually talking about what you actually eat it's about what the net net the effect is in the body so if you wind up actually going from uh you know the researchers have studied for example in the lab animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemic these are you. These are mice whose blood is milky because it's actually so filled with fat. That's a genetic thing. For sure.

Right? And those are the subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis. So I think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good. We know that, for example, that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good um the poly unsaturated fats are good for you um but i'm i'm talking about after what the body actually processes what actually results in your body um so um what are the things that actually can help restore healthy androgenesis well think about um androgenesis. Well, think about androgenesis balance like a lawn that's growing, right? Or a garden that's growing. You want to prune the garden, you know, make sure things don't overgrow.

Pick out the weeds. And if you're mowing a lawn, you're kind of just getting everybody, all the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height. Yeah. So you don't wind up having this scraggly lawn. That's what the body does to keep angiogenesis in balance. Not too much, not too little. And so the food we eat is actually like a lawnmower.

It kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body. Not too much, not too little. So the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea, which is really good. Soy, actually, genistein is a bioactive found in soy is really good. Tomatoes are really good for helping to keep angiogenesis and balance. Many fruits and vegetables also can do that. So the brassinins are really good.

So many of the things we already know are good for us. We know actually also help our blood vessels. And now we know how. And now we know how. Yeah. Now what about stem cells and regeneration? This is a big topic that I think people are hearing about in the news,

they're confused about it, there's controversy about it, there's laws about it that prevent adequate research. I mean, it's really quite a messy area, and yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in. And it's, I don't think something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells, that there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells. And what are stem cells anyway? What do they do? And how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them?

Yeah. Well, some cells are really simple. We're made of stem cells so when our moms and dads got together and created you know uh us in the womb we started out as stem cells they actually made every single organ and sperm and egg and sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory and then pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells and after we were born a few of those stem cells um stuck around um about 700 000 of them they stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines they hide out in our body and they help us regenerate so when you and i are growing up right in grade school we learned from our teachers that starfish can regenerate salamanders can regenerate but people can't regenerate yeah right can't grow a new arm

yeah well it's true you can't grow a new arm but we do regenerate we regenerate every day we know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back our gut lining grows back our livers can grow back if you actually remove part of your liver to grow back yeah our skin grows back you know so we our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells now what can injure stem cells you know high doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells so i'm okay with the one tequila i had last night you know having a tequila every now and then is not bad having a glass of wine but you know it's it's the the the the thing is on balance what you want to do is people you know people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells diabetes is another state a metabolic state that you know it really impairs

it cripples our stem cells sugar high blood sugar cripples our stem cells so the excess of anything can be harmful including to our stem cells so what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells this is where it's really become interesting before i talk about that though let me just stress affect your stem cells stress can definitely affect our stem cells high stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells you know it's just like stunning them so they're like wait a minute what do i do now you know maybe i'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs we got to rebuild our blood vessels we got to rebuild our hearts you know our hearts turn around like we actually have um stem cells in our hearts and our brains and regrow our nerves

every single day something in our body is regenerating actually a lot of things are regenerating so what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies um that you inject into the body so you know taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them and someday that's going to wind up becoming game changing in medicine someday we're not there yet i've been involved with some of those efforts and what i've seen is very exciting but more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells and here's the research you can actually take uh it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable getting a stem cell injection like 20 grand or something right well you know i would say uh why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner

table yeah right so the mediterranean diet has it's been studied by spain looked at um uh elderly people on the mediterranean diet and those who uh were on a mediterranean diet compared to not on a better training that to not on a Mediterranean diet had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation, in their bloodstream. So again, it's not one magic food. It's the pattern of food that you're actually eating. Now, you can actually do the research on specific things as well. So for example, tea. Green tea will increase your stem cells. But what so can black tea right so here's what the surprise is japanese live forever well you know all the green tea you know people in asia

drink a lot of tea people in britain drink a lot of tea as well we used to say green tea is good black tea is fermented so it's not going to be that good for you we're changing our minds we have to keep our minds open black tea can also double the number of stem cells and then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that um there was a study at uh by ucsf in san francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease so they had kind of crappy blood flow and they gave them hot chocolate yeah i was going to say the chocolate stem cell story i want to hear about that amazing right so um the darker the chocolate the higher the flavanols these are the bioactives are naturally present in cacao yeah and they there was a study these are the food is medicine this

is the food there are literally these chemicals in food called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties they are made by mother nature they're packed in the food growing on the plant and you know um every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactive so in cacao which is a bean which then you process to actually get you know kind of the cocoa powder um if you take the really dark chocolate like 73 cacao that really dark chocolate and you make it into a high flavanol hot chocolate drink and you have it twice a day. This was a clinical study. They found in people who wound up actually having, drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month, they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate.

And so, okay, so the question is, is that important? Well, when they measured their blood flow, what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them, which kind of lowers the circulation of the blood. They didn't let it go. They found that the blood flow was much vastly improved. Wow. So here's a functional result that actually means it makes a difference. So who's going to complain about chocolate? Who's going to complain about tea? Who's going to complain about a Mediterranean diet? I mean, you go on to eat. These are the things we love. Yeah. Well, it's interesting you talk about how drugs

sort of block, interfere, inhibit some medical process, some biological process. And there's toxicity to them. There's side effects to them. You know, you can take too much, which will harm you. Whereas foods don't work like that. But you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food. So, food is medicine. What's the dose? Is it one cranberry? Is it a thousand cranberries, you know?

Right. Well, so, in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, I specifically have a chapter on food doses. It's important to me. Which nobody talks about. It's important to me. Which nobody talks about. Well, I know that because when I read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale, I'm always asking, well, how much should I actually eat? And that always struck me as something that needed an answer, right? So here's how we've approached it.

You can actually get food doses. That's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health. The best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies, these epidemiological studies. There's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times, right? So in Europe, there's something called the EPIC study. NHANES is in the United States.

Bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of patients. In Europe, they're studying 500,000 patients over 20 years, and they're tracking everything they eat, and they're asking them, how much are you eating? And then on the tail end, looking at what happens to their health, what's their cancer rate, what's their heart disease rate, what's their diabetes rate?

And when you actually combine those two, the result that we want, lower cancer, less heart disease, and you go back into the research and you figure out what foods they ate, you can actually calculate how much they ate of it. Yeah. Right? And then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this. By the way, this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well it's you know just having random amounts of stuff not going to work you got to correlate what works with what actually the amount is so smaller studies there was a study called the health professionals follow-up study done at harvard which looked at 70 000 men and

they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week that's a half a cup of cooked tomatoes not that much you have pasta right lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39 yeah right so that's a dose that's an outcome and that's a particular food and you can do that systematically you got to hunt and peck for it but it's there and it doesn't give you the exact answer it's not like a medicine like actually frankly even penicillin right you don't always get the right result right but you have a good approximation so that's the beginning of food doses i mean your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about

diet and eating healthy and reversing disease but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that i don't even know about like fish roe or razor clams or you know different kinds of chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that you know maybe haven't been studying large randomized controlled trials but have clinical studies have epidemiologic studies and and we can start to include these and there's very little downside right right unless you don't like clamps but well look uh uh what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another and my approach is really a global approach um you know i my work uh spans around the world

we're in asia and europe as, I mean, America and the Americas. And here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods no matter where you go, right? So what interests me is what are the common denominators? So, for example, you mentioned razor clams. Well, that's actually a category of seafood we know from most epidemiological studies including studies in europe and asia that people who eat more seafood you know about three times a week actually have lower all cause mortality and they just survive longer so then you sort of say well what are what could be possibly responsible for that well we don't

do know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat so if you what is the omega-3s in razor clams or something else well there's probably other things as well so uh i can tell you another example that that i was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually um not only have some omega-3 fatty acids but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune system yeah so again so it's like the mushrooms of the sea because polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms exactly anti-cancer compounds and now they're in oysters wow i didn't know and

you know by the way these are long sugar chains that's right and and your body digests them uh they've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce so you know the kind of sauce the brown sauce you see in a chinese restaurant right chinese food that they study that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system does that actually come from oysters it comes from oysters yeah they boil them down and they caramelize them so again this is where food as medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things, really. Yeah. You incorporate the culinary side, the chefs get into it. I mean, this is really, I think, us as a society coming together and saying, what do we love? And by the way, in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, it's really not about what to cut out of your life. It's about

what to add to your life. And, and what do we really enjoy? It's all about our preferences and making the right decisions. This is incredible So stem cells are not some weird thing You have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat, right? You know, maybe get it from some placenta somewhere that you can actually Activate your body's own regenerative healing power. Yeah. And you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate.

And that's so powerful. And it's a very encouraging message. 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 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, if you

don't have these spikes and insulin going up, it makes you hungry. But what's fascinating is that what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer growth. Yeah. 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 type 2 diabetes. Hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are really sort of two sides at the same point so one causes the other sort of hyperinsulinemia can cause insulin resistance insulin resistance can cause hyperinsulinemia so they're really the same thing and again uh the 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 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 of this NHANES study, which is a big sort of American survey of lots of things, but they included dietary habits. So in 1977, they found that most people ate three times a day, so breakfast, lunch and dinner. And by 2004, it was almost 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 a day, it just sort of crept in there. And I think part of it was, of deliberate, hey, there's good scientific evidence that we should eat six times a day. It just sort of crept in there. And I think part of it was, of course, the snack food companies

wanted to promote it. And, you know, people thought it was a good idea. So, then it was sort of, it became almost gospel. Oh, you have to eat six times a day, right? And I remember thinking about it a while ago and thinking, where did that suddenly sneak in? Did we have a big randomized controlled trial that I missed 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 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 dinner. 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 six o'clock, because people ate a bit earlier back then to like, say eight 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, type two 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 snack all the time, right? You see it in schools,

for example, oh, they go to school, they get a mid morning snack, then they have lunch, and then they have their after school. And then they have 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 played well jason you've written a lot about you've written a lot about fasting and 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 at 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 well over a year, and his cancer was not a great one, and let him go through the process with really no issues, 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, 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 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 shakes or whatever it is and that's generally not yeah like atkins and so high 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 adjunctive 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 so basically your body's just trying to clean house it's like 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 we all played back in the 70s yeah and pac-man is anymore you can still find them sometimes but the yeah the idea is that people think that this sort of breakdown process is really bad for you, but it's actually really good for you. And 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've recognized over the last 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. 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 out much faster. So you can't just keep revving that engine, keep redlining it. You 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, eat, eat. Well, you're going to put your body, your nutrient sensor is 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 repair mode. And it actually allows you to undergo the both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better. Because ray chemotherapy, we have a couple studies on fasting and chemotherapy, where what you do is you fast sort of just before and during and just after your chemotherapy. And what they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from the treatment. Because what you've done, of course, is taken 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. And chemotherapy, the general way it works is it kills the fastest growing cells, which are usually the cancer cells,

but it also kills like the hair follicles, because they're fast growing cells, 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 quiescent 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. And that's one of the things that might be very interesting to use as an adjunct to sort of standard treatment. I would never advise not to take the standard treatment because, of course, it's bad.

You know, there's a lot of interesting work by Dr. Mukherjee, Dr. Mukherjee and others, looking at ketogenic diets and cancer. And I've heard him present on this. It's just fascinating. He wrote The Emperor of All Maladies. It's about cancer. I'm sure you've read that. And he said that to me, he said mark you know we figured

out the solution to cancer i'm like what is it it's this big discovery it's like and the cause i'm like what is it he's like it's sugar like yeah you know i guess that's not really news but uh maybe it's good you know now and then he said we've been studying ketogenic diets and seeing incredible results with pancreatic cancer, melanoma, stage four cancers that weren't responding to anything else. They're animal models. They literally were curing cancers with ketogenic diets, and now they're doing human trials. Can you talk a little bit about some of that research and how it might be applied to people who are struggling with cancer? Yeah. So this was the sort of big discovery of Dr. Luke Cantley, who's discovered sort of this whole pathway, the PI3K pathway that links sort of insulin and growth and cancer.

So the important thing is that insulin acts as that growth factor and therefore acts as a sort of pro-growth and therefore a sort of pro-cancer agent. Sugar, of course, plays a big role in the hyperinsulinemia. And it's interesting because Dr. Lucantli in several of his, you know, articles or whatever, he goes, sugar scares me, right? Here's this guy who studies cancer for a living. And he's like, yeah, sugar just scares me. And that's the same sort of thing that Siddhartha Mukherjee is talking about, too, right. And that's the whole point is that with ketogenic diets with fasting, and of course, fasting, you have to cycle it because you can't obviously fast, you can't fast forever, right, as opposed to ketogenic diet,

which is sort of very low carbohydrate, you could sustain that for years and years, you can't fast forever, you need some some some food at some point. But the idea is the same, what you're trying to do is really reduce those insulin levels. There's of course, studying this, in terms of drugs are trying to develop these blockers to the whole pathway of PI3K and so on, I think they've they've developed a couple companies for that. But, you know, just like anything else, it's like, why would you want to do it with a drug when you can do it with your diet? You know what's so striking, Jason, is that, you know, often when people go get cancer

treatment, their doctors make sure you keep your weight up, eat ice cream, eat milkshakes, have cake, you know. And I'm like, what are you telling them that for? I mean, that is death. And yet it's, I mean, I actually had a radiation oncologist as a patient who worked at MD Anderson. And he was very aware of these studies and these issues. And he tried to tell his patients to do the right thing. And he said, all the nutritionists, and this is like the number one cancer hospital in

the world, are telling their patients to eat a lot of starch and carbohydrates and sugar to keep their weight up. And it's just such an unfortunate situation that is going on right now. So when we talk about cancer, we're clearly talking about some of the risk factors, right? Sugar. There's other risk factors. And one of the things that I think is very concerning to me is these obesogens, which are environmental chemicals that not only are

directly toxic and carcinogenic, but they're actually causing insulin resistance. So they're really creating a double whammy, pesticides, herbicides, additives, all these environmental chemicals that we're exposed to, 80,000 of them that have been developed over the last 100 years. What's your perspective on that? And how do we reduce our risks? Well, I think that stuff is really hard because they're not adequately studied. I mean, there's so many chemicals and what do we know about the effect on the

human body for most of these, like very, very little, right? I mean, you know, they, they, they have this classification as generally recognized as safe. But, you know, I mean, that just means it doesn't kill you within a month, right? I mean, that's about it. So, and all of these chemicals that, like, you know, even the ones that we eventually find out are really bad for us. I mean, they were originally approved and, you know, for use. So, you know, we trust our government to sort of keep us safe from all these sort of chemicals. Like you do it and you test the toxicology and some rats and it doesn't

kill them. And hey, nothing, you know, you get out there and it doesn't kill people right away. So, hey, you're good. That's the sort of idea that we have. But yeah, I think that unfortunately, it's hard to know exactly what to say because one there's just so many of them they're changing all the time so like the classic sort of pesticide was like ddt remember it was yeah i date myself here a little bit but ddt was this big big time pesticide was amazing killed everything right turned out like super super bad for us and causing cancer all over the place, right?

There's all kinds of stories like that. Now, of course, there's all these other chemicals in there and we don't even know what they are. I mean, they're not listed. I mean, the government did write a whole report on the environmental chemicals and how they're linked to cancer. So I think that's a big thing. And i encourage people to check out ewg.org

which is the environmental working groups website where they have guides on how to reduce your exposure through your food through household cleaning products through skin care products and many other ways to reduce your exposures household cleaning products so i think i think the more we can do to reduce our intake of these chemicals is a good idea. So let's talk about how to reduce your risk. What can people do who are listening that you talk about in your amazing book, The Cancer Code, a revolutionary understanding of the medical mystery. I encourage everybody to get a copy, The Cancer Code. It's out now because it really is a revolution in understanding of cancer that I think could help so many people. So tell us what can we do to reduce our risk of getting cancer?

Yeah, I think the most important thing is to go after the sort of hyperinsulinemia because we know it's such a big risk factor. So you can, you know, you can't always test it, but you'll know because if you are overweight, for example, then you want to try and get back to a normal weight. And there's lots of different ways to do that sort of ketogenic diets are not the only way you are overweight, for example, then you want to try and get back to a normal weight. And there's lots of different ways to do that. Sort of ketogenic diets are not the only way. You can do, you know, all kinds of different diets. And, you know, vegetarian diets and sort of paleo diets. There's all sorts of good ones.

And then the other one, of course, is the sort of reintroduction of intermittent fasting into sort of the normal schedule. And I think that's really important, because what we've lost, of course, is that balance between feeding and fasting, right, we've gone to a sort of feeding all the time model, which is not so good for growth, because we all will, you know, you're always telling your body to grow more. And of course, if you have type two diabetes, which is becoming a huge, huge problem. So if you look at pre diabetes and type two diabetes, in America, it's like just skyrocketed over the last 15 years. And that too, is a sort of massive, massive risk factor for the development of cancer. The World Health Organization actually classifies 13 different types of cancer as obesity-related

cancer, including breast and colorectal. So that's a huge- And prostate and colon. Liver, pancreas. And interestingly, if you look at the types of cancer, so we've actually been doing really well for most cancers over time as you track them through the years. Most cancers are actually slowly declining except those obesity related cancers they're actually going up to pancreatic cancer going

up liver cancer going up all of these cancers are going up and they're not rare diseases so breast cancer for example is very very common colorectal cancer very very common and i think that this is one of the things that um we't recognized. So I went to medical school in the 90s. We never talked about diet and, you know, it just wasn't even on the radar screen. It was crazy, except maybe a few people who are really into it. But for the most part, people just, we just didn't talk about it. And then it wasn't until sort of 2003 that the first large papers started to come out that said hey this is a big risk factor and then you multiply it by the millions of people

who have it and that's why it's such a big risk factor so staying to a normal weight you know which includes getting your diet in order cutting out sugar cutting out the processed foods for the most part adding back the intermittent fasting which is part of a normal sort of regimen when you when you say that what do you mean you mean time restricted eating right you mean yeah so i think or 14 hour faster 12 to 14 hours should be the your sort of baseline because that's just you know 1970s style uh eating when we didn't have so much obesity now if you're trying to lose weight, or if you have type two diabetes, and you can extend it to say 16 hours, which is time

restricted eating, or you can even go further 24 hours or even multiple days of fasting. And, you know, people always worry about that. But you know, that's, that's why I talk about a lot, because a lot of the stuff that we worry about, simply isn't true. People worry about, oh, they're going to lose muscle, they can't work, they can't concentrate. I'm like, all you're doing when you don't eat is that you're making your body rely on your body's own store of calories, which is sugar, right, or body fat. That's how your body stores calories. So you're literally using the body fat for precisely the reason that you carry it. So what could be wrong with that? What is more natural than that, if your sugar is high, and you don't eat, you're going to use up the sugar and your sugar will fall. Now, that's great news, if you have a high sugar and type two diabetes, which of course, that high sugar drives a high insulin, which drives, you know, cancer risk, and so on. So something like that is a completely natural way to get this all of this back in order. And if you're too far along the scale of,

you know, you have too much insulin, you don't have to stop at 14 hours, there's nothing to stop you from taking your fast out to, you know, a couple of days at a time. Right. And that's the thing is it's, it's a free intervention. It's a natural intervention. It's been used for thousands of years, right? Every, every culture and history has used it. It's, it's crazy that we don't use this sort of thing. Well,

what you're talking about is just something so extraordinary and effective. And the side effect is that it also prevents heart disease and diabetes and dementia and depression. And I'm like, so it's like a one-stop shop for staying healthy, which is cut out the starch and sugar and, and practice eating in a way that we're designed, which is take a break after dinner and don't eat until breakfast or a little bit later in the morning. It's so simple. It's so obvious. And it's so different than our current thinking. But if you have cancer, like if you already have cancer, and we can do this to reduce our risk, what about the screenings, the cancer interventions, the treatments that we have

now? Should we still do those? How far can this go to really have an impact? Screening is a very interesting problem because it sort of gets down to the sort of seed and soil idea. So all our cells in our body actually have the potential to become cancer, right? So your heart can get cancer, your liver can get cancer, even your placenta can get cancer, your, you know, it's crazy that every single cell in the body can become cancer. So the point is that that seed sort of lies everywhere. And that aggressive screening, we found, you know, may or may not be that useful. So So this is the reason why people are sort of backing off a little bit on sort of aggressive screening works very well in some cases like cervical cancer, for example, but taken too far,

it was useless of the thyroid cancer as an example where they screen people in South Korea for thyroid cancer found a ton of ton of thyroid it was like everywhere. So the the incidence of new thyroid cancer went up sort of 11 fold because of screening, but the mortality was still just about the same. It didn't impact it because most of those didn't need to be treated. So that's the point is that you have to, there's a limit to the screening. But, you know, there's there's well established protocols that, you know, people have studies of breast cancer, for example, mammograms have been studied, but they're rolling sort of they used to say, Oh, maybe you should start at age 40. And they've actually recently

been sort of moving it back down to maybe age 50. Same with colonoscopy, for example, one of the big successes of screening has been colonoscopy and removal of sort of early cancers has made a big difference in terms of reducing colon cancer. But they're also talking about, you know, maybe you don't need it. They actually just rolled, I think just last two weeks ago or something. They actually said we should start earlier, in part because I think that they're worried that with the obesity epidemic, they're actually getting more and more. So if you look at these obesity related cancers, we're actually finding them younger and younger, because the younger and younger populations

are getting more of this obesity. So I think they just recommended instead of age 50, they actually rolled it down to like age 45, or something to get colonoscopy. So I think it's still a good idea to do screening because one of these cautious things, but you have to be wary so certain things didn't pan out the way we thought. PSA is super controversial for prostate cancer. Thyroid cancer didn't turn out to be useful. But you pick and choose. The big ones are going to be breast and colorectal, of course so so given what you've learned about in this research that you did for the cancer code which is an amazing book and everybody needs to get it a revolutionary

understanding of a medical mystery um what what does the future look like for cancer because you know it feels to me as a doctor you know someone says i have diabetes i have alzheimer's i have heart disease, I have an autoimmune disease, I have this, I'm like, great, I got that cancer. It's like, you know, not so easy. So what does the future look like in terms of prevention and treatment of cancer? I think there's two different things. So in terms of treatment of cancer, of course, a lot of these things that we talk about are not applicable once you have the cancer, like you can't just use diet, like I would never say to somebody, you know, just use the diet or just use fasting. It's like, no, you need to get that

surgery or the radiation or the chemotherapy or whatever they're recommending for you. Because by that time, you have a high risk of other other issues, you can use it as an adjunct, but the treatments have come a long way. Because again, we've moved past now that sort of idea that we need to find the genetic cure for all these cancers. And now we're sort of moving into the age of immunotherapy, which is taking this idea that cancer is sort of this evolving sort of new species, and saying, well, let's use our immune system to try and destroy it. So we've been seeing some sort of this evolving sort of new species and saying, well, let's use our immune system to try and destroy it. So we've been seeing some sort of incredible successes from a therapeutic standpoint with these new agents, these sort of checkpoint inhibitors and CAR T and some of these other

things. So really very hopeful. Of course, that depends on a lot of research dollars or very high tech sort of stuff. Yeah. It's more exciting from a prevention standpoint because the, you know, the only real successes we have in cancer medicine are really in prevention. So stopping smoking, for example, is sort of so far ahead of anything else we do for cancer. But it's all through prevention. Same with colonoscopies and for colorectal cancer. Really, you start to see as these things, as you do more and more screening. So as you go from the 70s to the 80s, to the 90s, to the 2000s, for example, you can see that as people start, you know, to accept that they need to do this screening, that colorectal cancer mortality is slowly coming down. And that's where the sort of future lies, I'm hopeful, because we're starting to bring into sort of clear picture that, hey, all of these

things, you know, this, these dietary things that we talk about are so important, like stuff that you write about, for example, so well, that, hey, this is great news that people are paying attention to it because those are the cancers that are rising in terms of numbers, right? Those are practically the only cancers that are rising in numbers, are the obesity-related cancers. So if we can understand that, if we can make people aware of that, of the dangers of sugar, so for example, sugar intake, I think peaked at around year 2000. But prior to that was really going up very high, right? You know, yeah, we're drinking their Gatorades and stuff, you know, they were like, Oh, yeah, I just worked out. So I'm gonna have a Gatorade, it's just full of sugar, of sugar right it was people don't do that anymore like you know i look around like you know how you'd be surprised you live in canada people maybe are are better over there i think here in

america it's still sugar palooza yeah probably probably i think that plays a big role i mean look 88 of us are metabolically unhealthy, and the translation of metabolically unhealthy means you're insulin resistant. So think about that. Almost 9 out of 10 Americans are on track for these diseases caused by too much insulin, including cancer. Yeah, including cancer and all those other diseases you talked about, Alzheimer's and all that sort of stuff. And part of it, I think, is, you know, if you look at the total number, like total amount of sugar,

it has been going down, but it's still very high. I think that's, that's the big problem. There's a lot of sort of corporate interests and so on. Like, you know, a few years ago, Coca-Cola was revealed as giving like a million bucks. Remember this story? They gave a million bucks to the University of Colorado to develop a global energy balance network or something like that. I wrote about that in my book, Food Fix. That was a big scientific mess. It was, it's, it's a horrible story because here you have a university taking millions of dollars from Coca-Cola, which, you know, obviously is peddling something very unhealthy and was ready

to sort of go to war against people like you and me who keep saying, you know, look at food as medicine and what you put in your mouth is super important. Like they're, you know, the university. It's not just calories are all the same right exactly like who like this whole calories is the same like that always gets gets me all riled up because it's like you're telling me that 100 calories of cookies is the same as 100 calories of broccoli that's the dumbest thing like honestly well it's just because of of the law of thermodynamics right so the idea is that it's calorie to calorie because when you burn it, it releases the same amount of energy. And that's true. It's absolutely true in a vacuum.

Yeah. But not when you eat it. Because when you eat it, it interacts with your microbiome and your hormones and your brain chemistry and so many different factors that drive benefit or cause harm. When I look at the ingredients of any food that i actually get and i i try to do fresh food whole foods but every now and then you know you have to take something and you look at all the ingredients um the stuff you don't recognize you can't pronounce those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria yeah right you pick a mushroom and you eat it you know that the fiber in the mushroom

is going to feed us and the bacteria right um the pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria right what we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm our we are 3 000 food additives in the market that are fda approved and we don't know what most of them do very few have been. And it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect our microbiome. Well, and you know, we all know people that are super healthy, right? So they never get sick. And then we know people that seem to get sick all the time. The difference is probably in their microbiome.

In fact, it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy, super agers. You know, these are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all. And then they looked at young, healthy athletes. And they found when they compared their microbiome, they were remarkably similar. They were almost identical. So health is clearly governed by our microbiome. So what are the things that we can actually eat that can affect them? Well, we talked about this a little bit earlier. It turns out that pomegranates actually can make a big difference.

Cranberries can make a big difference. Nuts, walnuts, pecans, cashews, things that we actually know. Almonds? Almonds, yeah. I was checking because I had almonds for breakfast. I want to make sure I got it. Well, you know, we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think nuts are one of the,

one of nature's most healthful snacks. I don't know if you saw this, but about two years ago, the American society for clinical oncology, the big cancer meeting, they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer, stage three, colon cancer,

undergoing treatment, whatever the treatment might be, that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually had a 50% lower risk of death from their disease. Now, you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction, everybody's jumping up and down. It's a billion dollar blockbuster drug. And you're talking about a couple of handfuls of almonds for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost $100,000. Is it actually better?

Well, it's not an either-or. It's together. And again, this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors. Not just you and me, but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community. Because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment, if you look at that data, it's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies. I would actually strongly advise patients to have nuts if they can take it. And what do they serve in the hospitals, right?

So again, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's slow, but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine. And we're gonna be able to map this out, right? We're gonna be very soon in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence, big data analysis, is microbiome assays. We can actually look at what's growing, what's not growing,

how different things affected, check it over time in a serial way, the effects i mean it's fascinating you know wow maybe if you give this cocktail of acromantia smoothie then your acromantia grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy i mean it's this is really radical stuff and and yet there are very few people talking about it in a clinical way like you are. You're saying, okay, wait a minute. We don't know everything, but we know a lot. And we know enough to actually start to integrate these strategies. And the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because it empowers people

to say, okay, wait a minute. I don't have to wait around to get disease and hope some drug saves me or try to fix it then. But I can actually start to build the foundations of my health for my whole life by understanding and these are a little bit technical you know stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff but it's actually doable and you make it so practical in your book you have this five by five by five plan which we'll get into but let's go next to the dna thing because we talked about ingenious regeneration stem cells microbiome let's talk about the dna

because we think oh wait we wait, we got our DNA. There's nothing we can do about it. We get hits to our DNA from toxins and stress and different things. But what can we really do to help our DNA? Right. Well, so in my book, I actually talk about how most people hear about DNA these days relates to our ancestry. You know, who are we related to and how much of us is Neanderthal?

I'm about 1.5%. But in fact, you know, our DNA is our genetic blueprint. And how much of us is Neanderthal? I'm about one and a half percent. But in fact, you know, our DNA is our genetic blueprint. And that part of that blueprint is our blueprint for health. It actually is designed to keep us healthy, our DNA. We need our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health. We need the right proteins made. We need the right molecules made at the right time from the time we're born to the to our last breath really and so we know that dna can get mutated and

so some of the things that can mutate our dna is actually you know wait stop there i just want to go back a minute because what you said was really important you said our dna makes proteins that regulate all our biology and so they can actually make good proteins or if they get damaged they can make bad proteins that's right and the good proteins help you create health and the bad proteins cause the sick right exactly okay exactly and by the way you know the dna is hard as part of our hard wiring right it's it's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an autovirus system it actually checks it out, finds problems, and erases them, really just deletes them. So on average, we know that there's about 10,000 mistakes

that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day, right? So think about it. We're out there in the sunlight. Sun, ultraviolet radiation damages us. You sit in a car, in a highway, on a traffic, on a community to work. That sunshine is going right through the windshield, mutating your DNA. Secondary smoke. You're filling up your car in a gas.

I mean, some of us drive electric cars, but most people still wind up filling up their car with pump gas, right? So do you stand upwind or downwind of the fumes? I just hold my breath. Actually, I try to like stuff the cap in the thing because I have the automatic one. I run away. So here's a way to protect your DNA. When you're filling your gas, figure out which way the wind's blowing and stand upwind. Yeah.

If you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents, the gas, and you're mutating your DNA. It's like a little wood block you can just stick in and hold and then go to the end. Well, but this is the kind of situational awareness that we want to have. You know, like I was saying, when you're at the stove, you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire. These are the things that we know we should be doing at sort of the health level. So, our DNA is... And there's some things we can't do anything about, like radon coming out of the earth. Like, that just mutates our DNA as well.

So, we have to take proactive steps to protect our DNA. And some of the things that we can do are pretty simple. Like, for example, we know that an elemental vitamin, vitamin C, can actually do it. A really interesting clinical trial or clinical study that was done in people who were drinking orange juice, right? So, the scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice, and they took the blood out, and they measured how well their DNA protected itself in a lab test. And then they gave them orange juice to drink. It's one and three quarters cup so it's kind of a tall glass of orange juice and they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their dna's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by 20 is it is it the vitamin c or is it the

naringin or course we think it's vitamin c because actually they've um they've actually studied vitamin c in isolation but there's almost it's almost certain that there's other factors because you know could you i mean you get a lot of sugar with that much orange juice could you then just take the vitamin c pills so so what's interesting is that the the placebo that they gave uh to a group of people were just sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice was not the sugar we know that's know that's not good for you, but it was really the other stuff. So, vitamin C is what they were focusing on. But I think it's probably the naringenin and hesperidin and other things in orange juice as well. You know, the pulp's got a lot of good stuff in it. And, you know,

by the way, the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits, it's the peel, the rind that actually has a lot of stuff. Well, they say, you know, if you're taking statins or certain drugs, you should have grapefruit, especially the peel, like the white stuff, because it actually affects the metabolism of drugs. And so, if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit, if you're taking a statin, you you know that's pretty interesting but just a point of clarification on that so it's uh if you have uh grapefruit it um can slow down the metabolism of the liver so when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels you and your liver has to clear that yes that's when you call it toxicity right but in point of fact think about it another

way if you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods you mean raise the levels of the healthy things in your blood stream so here's another amazing food that can protect our DNA is kiwis kiwis oh my god well I just came back from New Zealand where my wife is from and I eat a lot of kiwis listen I love kiwis right kiwis used to be in the jungle i think monkeys ate them and they were grown in new zealand and then shipped to america uh and um uh i think they were called chinese gooseberries originally and they were just named kiwis so anyway um there was an interesting study done in scotland that looked at whether you ate one two or three kiwis a day

and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your dna turns out even even eating one kiwi a day can help your blood protect its the uh help your blood protect the dna from damage by 60 that's amazing one kiwi a day and what you're talking about is is is learning about in your book all the various foods you might not like razor clams but there's a lot of options right and it's not just that you're going to eat kiwis all day. You add all these different, different creative foods into your diet as much as you can. And you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about. Right. Well, I mean, look, here's the thing about most health diets, right? If you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only eat one food, you're not balancing your body.

It's not natural to do that. I think it's the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable, that's supported by real science and real evidence. And that allows you to do the things you enjoy. So in my book, my emphasis in Eat to Beat Disease is number one, look for foods that you eat, the foods that you enjoy that are good for you. And so I present a whole list of food, 203 foods actually. And you get to choose, pick the ones, circle the ones, take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off. That's your shopping list. You've started off, you've had a great start already. You're already identifying

the foods you love that are good for you. I've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good now you just choose them secondly besides doing the things you like be moderate and that's the other thing is that you know i think most researchers most research has shown that if you cut down your calories by 15 30 actually you improve survival at least in lab animals but also in people too people that eat somewhat less you know the japanese have the same hit you boo right exactly 80 percent full don't push yourself away from the tail before you're so stuffed that you can't leave the party before it's over right that's basically what it is um it's better for your body it doesn't put metabolic stress you know you're you're you

when you stuff yourself to the gills um your body is really stressed out even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress your cells um if you eat slowly and moderately um your brain will sort of say hey you know what it's enough well it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain your fault exactly right so you know here's here's and this is by the way why eating with other people which is what most of these mediterranean countries do the blue zone you know where people live a long time they eat with other people it's good for you you're talking so you can't be stuffing your mouth the whole time exactly and you're not distracted you're not watching television you're not looking at your phone it's you know eating social uh and and so

that's another important component and then finally it's got know eating social uh and and so that's another important component and then finally it's got to be sustainable you got to do something that you can do your whole life and that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can explore on you know you were talking about razor clams in my book there's a lot of foods that most people may not have heard about bitter melon bitter melon it's a you know it's kind of a staple in some asian countries but great to try i wouldn't cook it yourself for the first time because it's not that easy to go to a chinese restaurant yeah let somebody who knows i love it it tastes really bitter but it actually is

so you know diabetes it helps lower blood sugar absolutely um and you know what the interesting thing about bitter melon is again this is the culinary side right so you know here we were talking about the doctor's pharmacy but in fact fact, we could be having a chef having this conversation as well. When you have bitter melon, which is a little bitter, it actually makes other foods taste more intense. So it actually, the way it was designed in cuisine is actually to help you make you enjoy other foods even more. So again, it's not either or. It's not an extreme. And it's about different cultures and finding what we love to do. again, it's not either or, it's not an extreme, and it's about different cultures

and finding what we love to do. Well, it's fascinating. We bred food and vegetables to be more disease resistant, to be drought resistant, to be easier to be shipped without spoiling, to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols. In fact, the flavor comes from these phytochemicals. So we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables. That's why I say eat weird food because those typically haven't been screwed with.

And there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast the chef boulet from new york yes who actually uh has quit his world-class restaurant and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like curcumin and turmeric oil and various things that he's done and And Dan Barber is also going to be coming on our podcast. And he's created a new seed company to design seeds, not to be heirloom necessarily, but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor. Nobody was breeding for flavor. People were just breeding for all kinds of other things, pest resistance or GMO, whatever. Instead of saying, well, how do we create more of these medicinal foods?

And which is a whole new thing that chefs are starting to think about food as medicine. I remember when I was at Canyon Ranch years ago, probably like late 90s. And I got up in a meeting, there was the executives there, the owners, the doctors, the dietitians, the chefs. And I got up and I said, you know, we need to, this is a health resort. We need to start thinking about how to design our menus to use food as medicine. And the head chef got up and he screamed to me, this is not an effing hospital. I'm like, oh God, I guess I'm a little too early on this one.

Well, you know, listen, being ahead of the time is something that you're known for. And I think that we're now starting to appreciate it. I mean, think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food. Not only hospitals, by the way, but restaurants would be a great place. Theme parks would be a great place. Airlines would be a great place. I mean, there's so many places we can have an impact. Well, it's a frame shift. Getting people to think's so many places we can have an impact. Well, it's just a frame shift.

Getting people to think about food as not just calories, but information. Food is not just energy, but actually instructions that regulate your stem cells and your DNA and your microbiome and your immune system and your angiogenesis. I mean, these are things that are not things people think about. It's the new science of nutrition, right?

So beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff, we're now combining food science with life science you know the life science is what we learn in medical school food science you know not so much right so the average it's only like 20 of medical schools that require any nutrition yeah um you know i can tell you part of what got me into this is that i used to be a doctor at a VA hospital. And I felt a duty. A brave soul. Well, I felt a duty to really try to help people that committed their lives to help protect our country, right?

So what was interesting, and I'm sure you know this as well, the veterans that come to the hospital, they're often, they have a lot of health problems. Some of them are obese diabetes uh they got diabetes bad heart disease cancer you know that's the sort of every day in the clinic you see people that are uh really really uh dealing with a lot of illness and what i noticed was i said you know this this is odd because these people when they were in their 20s were healthy were fit they were that they couldn't get into the military if they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness right right so what happened

to them over the decades and i realized it wasn't you know uh just uh medicines it had to be their lifestyle and when i kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses, oftentimes really bad diagnoses, you know, and then they would ask me, what's the treatment? How long do I have doc? You know, how bad is it going to be? They put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door. And almost all of them would turn around and ask me one question. They said, Hey doc, what can I do for myself? What can I eat? And I didn't have the answer because I wasn't taught. We weren't taught to give that answer. And I thought that was wrong. because I wasn't taught. We weren't taught to give that answer. And I thought that was wrong. And that's what led me on this journey that led me to write

this book, Eat to Beat Disease, because I think that we need to know that people want to know that. What can we do for ourselves to eat to beat disease? And in a way, there are really no drugs that work as well when you look at the spectrum of over your lifetime inputting all these powerful foods compared to what the effect of a medication would be, right? I mean, and there's studies that have shown this, that the diet and lifestyle works better than statins, for example, for preventing heart disease. Mediterranean diet, the big study that was done, the Predimed study, which gave people

a liter of olive oil a week or a bunch of nuts every day the effects were equivalent or better than taking a drug and tastes much better and less side effects right right right well you know as we've been talking about food as medicine is very natural in most parts of the world and i think just sort of in our society we've lost touch with things you know you earlier you're talking about about chefs getting into this, you know, this whole farm to table movement. Yeah. Well, that's what it used to be for everybody. We only ate stuff that was going around us and we ate it because it tasted great because it was rich with these polyphenols and flavonoids. And by the way, you know, these bioactives that are natural chemicals and foods, what do they do?

It's really interesting when you think about health defense most of the bioactives that are found in foods evolved in the plant plant-based foods yeah to protect the plant yeah so either they were natural insecticides or they helped to attract bees and other insects so they'd pollinate so they could reproduce right so when protect them from elements or protect them from the elements of damage, make them stronger, right? So then when humans started to eat these plant-based foods, then these natural chemicals had another job description, which is they interacted with our human cells. And because they were already engineered to be protective, the ones that were useful to us and we developed this relationship with our plant-based foods also help us. And so there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view of what we're finding out what we need to do now though is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves and if you're

interested in the science it's there it's it's an evolving science yes we have health defense systems that's you know health isn't the absence absence of disease. It's our body working full steam, cranking along. And you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent, treat, or even reverse them by activating your defense systems using food. And whether you're healthy or sick, every person can take a decision three times a day to really enhance their health. And you don't need a doctor's prescription. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below.

Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor 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 health care practitioner and can help you make changes especially when it comes to your health