Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Fasting and Cancer - With Dr. Nasha Winters and Dr. Mindy Pelz

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Welcome to The Resetter Podcast, where Dr. Mindy interviews experts on everything to do with a fasting lifestyle and beyond! Dr. Nasha Winters's first experience with cancer was at the age of 19. She was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer and given only a few months to live. The metabolic approach to cancer stems from her nearly three decades of personal and professional experience in the field of integrative oncology.In this podcast we cover: Fasting and cancer Why cancer is a metabolic disease How to take care of your mighty mitochondria Low protein diet and cancer Learn more at https://www.drnasha.com/ 

You put your whole self in, you take the excuses out, you let a topagy win while stem cells grow and sprout. You cleanse detox and couple balance hormones up yourself out. That's what resetting is all. I think we are live resetters. And like I said, I have a really cool interview for you today. This is Dr. Nasha Winters. and it's so funny because when we interviewed you on women and wellness, you were like, I was like, is it nausea? Is it Nasha? And you're like, it's like Echinacea. And so it's awesome

because that's how I remember it. I have to like do it in my head like Dr. Nasha. Echinacea. I remember it. So it's all good. My own family gets it confused where I grew up. So it's all Good. Awesome. So thank you for coming on. I really, well, you can't see the 9,000 people that are watching right now, but this is my resetter tribe. And this group is really near and dear to my heart. We've been doing some really cool things in here like fasting. And we've done, in the beginning of the year, we did a 15-day metabolic reset where I did, I threw all these different kinds of fast together. I put fast mimicking. I put a 36-hour water fast. We did some keto. For 15 days, we just every couple of days we kept switching things. So, yeah.

So this group is really savvy and thirsty, really thirsty for knowledge. So you're the cancer expert on metabolism and cancer as a metabolic disease. So thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us. Thank you. And I actually think it's really important to point out to you and your tribe that you guys are far more expert at the cancer discussion than you think. You know, somehow we think they're separate, but it is exactly everything you're dealing with. It is come, it comes right down to a metabolic mitochondrial pickup. That's all it is.

And so we try and make it so much scarier and bigger than it really is. You really are the sort of the mitochondrial, like the keepers of the mitochondria. is sort of how I see this word. I love that. And you know what? For the longest time, the way I would explain cancer to patients was all a cancer cell is, is it was a healthy cell that turned into a cancer cell. So once you identify what turned it into the cancer cell,

then you can stop making cancer. And I think that's really what we're trying to do with all the fasting and the keto is really just all of us, whether you have cancers or not cancer or not, is stop making cancer. Exactly. And then remember, all of us have cancer, all of us. Right. One of us are without it.

It is part of us. And as you stated, it's sort of kept in check by other metabolic processes in the body. And it only goes haywire when enough sort of things accumulate in sort of that mitochondrial bucket until it overwhelms the system. And we basically lose sight of what keeps things in order, what keeps things in communication. And so one of my colleagues, a really well-known naturopathic oncologist, she calls cancer sort of the ultimate sociopath. So I like that because it's sort of like it goes a little cray-cray and has no regard, no remorse for what will happen. And it will eventually kill itself in the process because it will utilize all the resources until there's nothing left. we can reestablish remorse and stability anywhere along that journey.

It sometimes might be a little more difficult in certain situations than others. But I want people to always feel that sense of hopefulness that you can keep cells that are currently moving about the building, not becoming rogue. And then cells that have sort of gone off the deep end, like you said, explore and find out what might have contributed to that process and correct it and stabilize. things. And really, this becomes no different than a maintainable chronic disease process, just like osteoporosis or diabetes or cardiovascular disease, which I saw on your amazing base group page are a lot of questions with regards to other conditions, even outside of cancer. To me, it's all in the continuum of mitochondrial dysfunction. Right, which is so exciting. I posted an article this morning from Thomas Seyfried. And, you know, As we talked, if you guys haven't seen the discussion that we had on women and wellness,

I posted that podcast yesterday. Dr. Nasha is a cancer survivor. She will tell you her whole story on that podcast. And when she approached her own cancer healing process, all we knew or what she was at least smart enough to figure out was that perhaps it wasn't a genetic issue, that it was more, that there were other parts of the cell that were really strong. struggling and Safe Rade is really one of those people that has turned our vision from saying, this is genetic, so sorry, it's in your genes, there's nothing you can do to wait a second,

this is a different part of the cell that is getting sick. So before we jump into like fasting, can you talk a little bit about the mitochondria and how it plays a part in creating a cancer or cell. Sure. Now, most of us remember from just our sort of like fifth grade biology class, that little image of the organelle within the cell known as the mitochondria. We only remember it being called the mighty mitochondria, and that's about all we recall from our undergraduate or grade school biology class. So we knew it had something to do with energy. So it creates energy, but it is dependent 100% on the energy we feed it, on the input we give it, whether it's from our food, our water, our air, the environment around us, even our thoughts impact the energy distribution

from those little vulnerable cells. And I use the word vulnerable because they are kind of the least walled off and least guarded of all of our cell structures. So that's by design because they also need to be able to adapt and communicate very effortlessly with what information is around them, either directly in the cytoplasma or from other cells around the body. And even within a single cell, depending where it's located in what organ, you might have thousands and thousands of mitochondria all stacked up together that are talking to each other. But basically, those little guys can be very vulnerable in a good or a bad way to what input we give it. So, for instance, we've now learned things such as, you know, our well-meaning, let's give a Tylenol to a little one who has a

fever to break the fever and make them comfortable, we now know that that was probably one of the worst ideas we've ever had. And yet we still dish it out like Eminem's. It's an over-the-counter medication. And it's also one of the most toxic mitochondrial poisons there is. And we've even learned that it may be one of the big contributors to childhood cancers as well as to the autism spectrum disorder, which are in and of themselves mitochondrial damage disease. processes. So that's just a really good clue that we're all aware of on a daily basis, but it's so much more than that. I saw that one of your readers or one of your people in your group was asking about, well, what is sort of the right food combination for the might as I saw that. Yeah. It was a really good one. And one of the things, you know, I always, we talked about a lot in our first interview together was we were all low-carve, you guys, before the industrial food revolution. Yeah.

That was not weird. That was not trend. That was not fat. That was the way it was. Yeah. And we expended that input more readily than we do today. You know, so we didn't work hard for those carbs, and we spent them as quickly as we accumulated them.

But we also ate only about 30% of our diet as carbohydrate. At that time and today, we average about 70 to 80% of our diet is carbohydrate. That's a big change in, like, 1850s or so, and we started the industrial food processing and flour and sugar. And that's when things really took a turn, big turn. I think that's such an interesting point that you make because what I see when I sit down with a client is they'll tell me, oh, I've got an incredible sugar addiction, or you'll never be able to get me over my sugar addiction, or I can't stop eating.

And then we start to slowly move them towards a keto diet. diet, we start to teach them fasting. And there's like something miraculous that like clicks in. And all of a sudden they're like, wait a second, I can do this. And I think what's really important for people to understand is the principles around low carb, around fasting, they're innate to your body. It was once we, the industrial revolution happened, once we had access to food all the time, Once we started getting our taste buds around processed foods and grains and sugars, that's

a natural. And what you and I are really trying to get people to is to get back to what the human body was designed to eat and operate like. Exactly. And you got, you know, you guys nailed it. I mean, the whole, you know, idea behind your group is resetting everything. And it's taking it back to a place of innate wisdom of how we were meant to be as these dual hybrid engines, which takes us right back to the final component of the mitochondria,

as we understand it, is the way we process energy, you know, take information in and process it and distribute it throughout the body. But specific to cancer, when we have a healthy functioning mitochondria, it does a heck of a lot more than just create our energy sources, a lot more. In fact, one of the most under described or an overlooked concept around mitochondrial function with regards to the cancer patient is it is up to the mitochondria to create apoptosis, which is programmed cell death. So basically, you have a condition that showed up because of damaged mitochondria, and yet you can throw every chemo, radiation, surgery,

fast, although fast has some help here, but other supplements, different things at this process, and that the mitochondria are not functioning properly, or if they're too few in number, as we naturally age. I mean, aging is frankly diminishing of quality and function and quantity of our mitochondria. Then we also don't have the built-in mechanism to actually create program cell death, because when I talked about that rogue sociopathic cancer cell that our colleague Tina Kaysor discusses gives credence to is that it doesn't know how or when to die. That mechanism, that messaging system is gone in the broken down mitochondria.

And you cannot overcome a cancering process without apoptosis. So that's one of the big players in this. That's that. I've never heard it explain that way. So thank you. That makes so much sense. And one of the reasons I got on this journey of understanding where fasting and keto fits into the human body was from a dear friend who had cancer. And at 40 years old, I always tell my patients this story when I do like a live event.

I'm like at 40 years old, she was at the peak of her life. She had an amazing family, an amazing job and a really cool house. Like on paper, she was doing great. No symptoms. She went in for a routine mammogram, came out with a cancer diagnosis. And they gave her like three months to live with chemo and radiation. So it had already spread everywhere. And she turned it into 11 years.

And she threw everything out at it, really tenacious woman. But what we, what towards the end of her life, it was like the chemo wasn't working, the lifestyle wasn't working and I remember two months before she died she asked me Mindy what do you know about fasting now this was five years ago so we didn't we didn't really know me Jason Fung wasn't out there talking about fasting we didn't really have you know we didn't have I don't think even uh Dr. Osumi's work had been you know out so I didn't really know it was just emerging and your explanation explains why throwing medicine at it wasn't the solution for her and ultimately was her death.

So can you talk a little bit about where fasting fits in? And now in our group, we do all different types of fasting. So a lot of people want to know, what's the best fast? I'm just warning you now. I'm okay with that. Because there's a best fast for each situation, right? So that's why I do love the work like Dr. Fung's book that outlines a lot of different options, a lot of approaches.

And of course, he's more broad sweep. But in his one-on-one consulting or with his team, they look more at the individual and they hone in what's specific for you. So keeping that in mind when you write a book for the masses, you have to kind of keep the broad sweep. But in reality, in a one-on-one, we might take that a little further. So that being said, is frankly, any form of fasting you can do is going to be of help. Awesome.

That's a biggie right there. So I've seen people say, oh, you cannot even get into autophagy until you're seven days in or three days in or five days in or, you know, you'll hear all different realms. But I'm the person who obsessively tests everything and everyone. And I can personally watch on markers. So especially inflammatory markers, which again, will come to this because one of your reviewers wants to know some of the labs I recommend. Yeah, I saw that. I thought that was a great question. Yeah, totally.

Because you can kind of do your own little checks and balances. I hope to leave you at least a handful of juicy ones that you can all do together and learn. But basically, you can watch markers of inflammation drop. You can watch the immune system sort of wake back up. You can watch even autoimmune markers or cancer markers fluctuate in the right direction, just even from a 13 to 16 hour window. Awesome. And to remind your listeners that even the MD Anderson study that showed

that just women who fasted for 13 hours a day. And it didn't need to talk about what they were eating or not eating. It just said those who maintained a 13-hour window with no food had a 70% reduction in recurrence compared to the populations that ate in a longer feeding window throughout the day. Wow. That right there is a big, wow. That's huge.

It is. It could have been that they were sitting there eating, I don't know, like dairy queen Sundays all day long, and then went to bed and 13 hours later broke there fast. I mean, it could have been that. We don't know. But ultimately, just simply that, we've gotten so overfed and undernourished. When I hear a patient say, I get wobbly if I don't eat every two to four hours,

or I hear them say, I have to have a snack at bedtime, or I hear them say, I have to eat the second I'm out of bed or I'm in trouble, or I get the hangaries right there. That is my red flag to know that person is metabolically inflexible, and they are already onto some chronic disease process, be it cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, dementia, doesn't matter. It's all the same disease. So it just might take on a different personality and a different person.

And again, that was one of your questions. Like, what are some of the early warning signs? I think that's so well said because when people start to fast, and we have some people this week that are doing our, I call it fast training week, because I really want people to be, like, have fun with it and be curious about it and not be so rigid. So I love the fact that you're like, look at what happens in 13 to 15 hours. This is amazing. Like, one of my chronic statements is there's no such thing as a failed fast.

Like, if you go 12 hours, great. And you were going wine before. Awesome. But one thing that happens, and maybe you can touch on this a little bit, is that when people start to go fasting, they get uncomfortable. And that is the point at which those mitochondria are trying to adapt. They're trying to click into something miraculous. And yet that's usually the point we want to exit. So can you talk a little bit about how you go from metabolically inflexible to metabolically flexible? And will there be discomfort in that? Yeah, well, first of all, I love that you touch upon

that because that's so true and pretty much everything we experience today in Western world. If the temperature is slightly above 72 degrees or slightly below, we're uncomfortable. If we're having a difficult conversation with a colleague or a loved one, we're uncomfortable. If we are noticing that there's a cockroach walking across our floor in a tropical environment, we're uncomfortable. My point is that we've become incredibly sterilized in how we sense and relate to and interact with the world around us. So it's true. And it's, it's, it's, it's, there's a concept that I am,

have been in love with for 20 some years, which is the concept of hormesis. And parmesis is that idea of a little bit of stress that creates resilience, that creates adaptability, that creates kind of a, of stoking of the internal pilot light of our lives, right? And that formetic process might be, from maybe hiking above altitude and kind of really getting a little pushed on your breathing or maybe running just past the point where it's starting to hurt, you know, or maybe sleeping in a room that's just on the edge of so cold that you might be wanting

to get up to get another blanket, but you stay put. Or just I'm giving examples of places that stimulate horneesis. My joke about horneesis is every time I have to do a public speaking engagement, my blood pressure, my pulse rate, everything goes wonky. I get a hormetic injection. Every time I push myself to public speaking, it's a horrible terror fear of mine. And yet I know each time I do it, I grow a little more. You know, like, I'm working on it.

It still sucks. I'm doing it every time. So that idea is the same thing when we go a little bit without food. We were always up until, really, until refrigeration and really until with the first fast food. Food restaurants started coming out in the 50s until we started having all-night grocery stores later than that. We were uncomfortably comfortable in not having something in our lab. That is still brilliant.

And we're now so uncomfortable that people stockpile. I'm living in Mexico for the winter and we'll go to the Costco every once in a while, mostly for a social experiment to watch people stockpile. piling probably three years worth of things like toilet paper because God forbid you have to use your hand like you in the vast majority. Oh, oh no, I lost her. She was just about to say something amazing. Okay, we're going to keep chat and let me just send her a message and she'll hopefully hop back on here. So I want to I'm going to continue on with that thought process there because I think it's pretty important to think about where discomfort really fits into the fasting experience. And I love this idea around hormasas. Here she comes. She's coming back because I think that what I want to. Oh, are you there? You came back. Yay. I wasn't sure if I was here or you were so I just kept talking too. I kept talking too. I love it. Good. So someone's one of us.

That just created a formatic effect. That was uncomfortable. But that's where people like, we'll stockpile years of toilet paper where the rest of the world uses our hand. Or the fact that you have to haul your water a few extra feet versus getting it comfortably out of a faucet. I mean, these are the modern world problems we deal with today. And hunger, the majority of the world feels hunger at some point in their lives. a daily basis. And there's nothing wrong with that, but we've been sort of culturally taught, never to feel sadness, never to feel hunger, never to feel pain, never to feel loneliness,

never to feel sorrow. So we use food as a major grounding point, as a major emotional crutch. So for some of us, it's the only sweetness and the only love we get in our lives. So it's so much more than just a few hours of skipping a meal. You're looking forward to the only moment in your day that gives you peace and calm. Yeah. And so that when you're challenging your team, your tribe to try and push, what most people are actually up against in the beginning is the psychology around it. Yeah.

Like you said, I really love that you said, hey, if you can only, if you normally can only go four hours without eating and you make it to five, that's a victory. It's a total victory. So I work people that slow. Yeah. You know, we get to that point. And it's the same thing. What I have people do, I have them ask themselves, why am I hungry or am I really hungry, you know?

And then to look into what's going on around them. Because some people don't eat when they're stressed. So find out which person you are. Then the next thing is, are you hydrated? Because if you're still hungry, usually we're dehydrated, which most of us are. then if you're still hungry after drinking the word that you know checking in your emotions drinking your water then that's where I have them go and grab some fat like spoonful of coconut oil or coconut butter or even a little bite or two of avocado just

something just to kind of see that wait 15 minutes or so if you're still hungry then get a little bit of protein yeah after that you're still hungry then for the love of God go for some carbs right but most people never make it to that point right And the people who do what they'll tell me in the aftermath is that it was actually all emotional. And that's where they were like, I'm going to get there no matter what. I'm going to get that cookie, that sweet potato, that baked potato, that french fry, that whatever it was no matter what. And I'm going to sabotage myself to get there. But even that becomes a victory of self-awareness, which then next time it's up for them,

they might make some different choices and try a little different strategy. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because I just did a Facebook live last night to the, this group on the mindset of fasting. And it's so funny. Like it's like you tapped into exactly what I said that what I realized in my own journey with fasting is it was a beautiful mirror for how I use food. And I realized that a lot of times food was just a state changer for me.

It was just trying to change an emotional state. But there were a lot of other tools that I had like listening to music. I actually got this idea. maybe when we're together in Nashville, we could create this. I got this idea of what if we all put together like the most inspiring, exciting songs, and we put it on a Spotify list. And when you're like in the fasting, like, oh, I don't want to do this anymore, you put on a list of music that changes your tape.

I love it. Yes, T.M. That's so good. Yes. Okay. So maybe we can look and pull together our music. loves, because I do think it's all you're looking at when you get into that discomfort, there's an opportunity there to go, okay, how do I use food? Why am I using it? Do I use it for joy? Okay, yeah, and so I use it for joy. But gosh, there are a lot of other things you can use for joy.

And understanding that is really cool. Huge. It's so empowering. And then the other side of it is once people start to, because I'm a science geek and I like the data, once people start to recognize all of the benefits on a physiologic level. So for instance, specific to cancer, when we look at the hallmarks of cancer, there are 10 hallmarks of cancer. And you could just Google that right now and list the hallmarks of cancer. It's also a whole section in our book. But people like Adrian Schack and Thomas Seyfried and Don Dagastino and a lot of those in the cancer research realm that work with fasting and work with ketogenic diet and cancer states, what we have been learning in the research is we initially thought it was just coming in on that

glucose starvation level, which is one of the 10 hallmarks of cancer. The cancer really loves it sugar. Granted, there are some theories, at least in cell line studies, that some cancers are more metabolically active than others, meaning some are more glucose sinks than others. But ultimately, we all can do well. on a low glycemic diet, depending on what's going on. So I want to kind of throw that little side note in there, but ultimately what we found is the other nine hallmarks of cancer

are directly impacted by ketones themselves, by lack of food, so a fasted state itself, which does things like H-DAC inhibition, which is all about epigenetic expression and methylation, which does things like induce apoptosis, which does things like stop cell proliferation, which does things like increase immune cell function. I mean, just giving examples of some of the 10 hallmarks of cancer,

I don't know of a single drug. Yeah. The single drug, more than two or three of those targets at any given time. And yet a fasted state or a state of ketones will hit all 10 of those simultaneously. That's awesome. You know, Funk says the same thing with your brain. He said that when you're in ketosis, that ketones will improve 20% of your brain power. And he said it's the exact same thing that there is no drug on the planet that can do that for you.

So, and then, you know, the other person that I think of when you're saying that is Terry Walls. Did you ever read her book? Oh, yeah. And in fact, that was like the answer to a few of your folks' questions on the forum today is about autoimmunity and whatnot. This woman rebuilt her nervousness. from the brain all the way through the central nervous system, thanks to a diet rich in a plant, dense, ketogenic fasting combination diet specific to recovering from an incredibly aggressive form of MS.

Yeah. And I watched for years, like get up on the stage with a cane to no cane, moving around. I mean, I watched her recovery in real time appearing her start to share her story years ago before she became who we all know her to be today as well as getting funded research projects going and VA hospitals around the country. You know, what I love about her story is that she's a medical doctor and she went the trial route with the trial medication and was like, let me, let me go and get the best of the best in medical care.

And that's when her decline started. And the minute she let go of that and she started to go. look at the mitochondria and really look at ketosis as and ketones is healing to the mitochondria that's and then a few i mean there were obviously other things she really just started to go in the right direction so and beautiful and to see her repairing every year it's not and that's the other thing i like people to know is it's a process it's not a switch it's not you went to bed one night woke up with cancer like your friend you described at 40 with the outside world looking perfect but no one's never thought to take a look under the hood to see what's brewing today on

plan it today when half of the men and one and two point four of the women will will her western medicine statistics for the world health organization the NIH the ncii national cancer institute say that in the united states one and two men one and two point four women will have cancer in their lifetime we have to start looking under the hood yeah wait before we become symptomatic or wait before we do our quote unquote preventative breast you know mammogram what the eff is that like There's nothing preventative about smashing and radiating your boobs annually, waiting to see what type of a bad experiment that leads to. Right, right.

We need to do a whole, we need to do a whole episode on just breast cancer and women's health because, wow, agreed, totally agree. Yeah. But watching people like the Terry Walls and others, when we learned about what got us ill, and we start to work on getting us out of there, and like I said, when everyone thought she was a miracle, the first time she like crawled up on stage with two canes and barely walk and I'm like, oh, fabulous.

The woman is like biking and out there speaking no canes at all. I'm like, I've watched her even recover more. It's rarely too late. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. So one of my,

one of my taglines that I just think in my head whenever I'm talking to a patient is, it's never too late to reset your health. It's never too late. You just need the tools. And it's not going to come in the form. of one tool, it's probably going to come in the form of like 20 tools that you're going to have to put together. So I think we really, one of the other places we've really gotten off track with health care

is we think one diagnosis, one pill, one surgery. And then when we decide we don't like that anymore, we come over to natural health and we go, we use the same principles. And we go, oh, okay, well, now instead of the pill or surgery, I'm going to do the supplement or I'm going to do the fast. And one thing that we really want to emphasize is that it's a lifestyle, which is why when people ask me, how long should I fast?

How long should I be doing fasting? And what I would say is it's as long as you want to stay healthy. Totally. And it's great because specific with the cancer world, when Dr. Longo, Walter, with a V, is in Victor, when his work came out,

I don't know, several years ago, I've been watching him for a while before I started actually seeing him on the speaker circuit. And when he presented his data at the time that I heard him, I think it was like 2011, he talked about the studies, the research, because, you know, this guy was a longevity researcher. He was not a cancer researcher, but they kind of accidentally stumbled upon the fact that patients who fasted around the use of at that time, the study was with doxorubicin.

Doxyl or in the breast cancer world, often is also known as Adramycin. So in that realm, as he noted, that if you basically fast 48 hours before the day up and 48, hours after. So basically a good five solid days of fasting. You don't need the pro drug, the pre-drugs with the chemo. Your recovery, your recovery after the treatment is faster than those who didn't fast. You have much less side effects. Your recurrence rate is lower and your cardiovascular damage from that drug, which is known as the red devil and is known cardiotoxin decreases substantially. That's when everyone started going, all that's interesting. And then of course, started breaking everybody out because even some of the questions

that your listeners have posed and I have all the time is that fasting around cancer treatment, that goes in the face of every bad piece of advice we've ever been given is don't lose weight and cancer. What Roger Longo's work was able to even show is, yes, people would lose the weight, but they would bounce back up and stabilize their weight more than people who never fasted during the whole process. I have done this with thousands of patients going through the cancer process and not once seen anyone suffer dilateriously from too much weight loss. I tell you there's a difference between being skinny and losing weight versus metabolic

wasting. What your doctors are trying to avoid is metabolic wasting, but it is not a calorie-centric process. So you can throw 10,000 calories a day of crappy sonic milkshakes. and angel food cake, which is actually in the recommended eating list from the American Cancer Society. And you can throw that at people and you can throw boost shakes and insures shakes, which the only thing it ensures is an untimely death. Because what happens in a state of texia, metabolic wasting, it's not calorie sensitive,

so it doesn't matter how much you eat. And it is fueled by inflammation, angiogenesis, which is new blood flow, and carbohydrates, sugar. okay so it is actually better for a catechic patient in my personal experience too fast obviously work with someone if you're dealing with this um to fast versus feast during this process and i see it stabilize things way faster and between 40 and 70 percent of patients who die from cancer succumb to catexia and so that's the place if i can stay that process off we change things pretty drastically we're going to have an entire chapter we we allude to this in the book already in the metabolic approach to cancer, but Jess and I have another book coming out about a year and a half from now, it's part of an entire chapter on, I'm so sick and tired of having the same conversation around caccia, I could step on my eyeballs. But it's ridiculous because when you actually sit down with an oncologist,

they explain to me the biochemistry of a catexia metabolic sarcopenia process, and you watch them tell you and tell you it's non-responsive to calories, and yet they're still telling them, give them insure and boost. You're like, what happened? What disconnect happened here? And so these are the types of things that we can really change the outcomes with fasting around our chemo. And where Dr. Valter started showing it was powerful with Dr. Rubison. Then we started showing it was powerful around platinum drugs and around taxines.

And then we started realizing, wow, it actually works really nicely around Herceptin and FastLodex injections and basically all targeted therapies and hormone therapy. Right. Everything. Right. And here's the challenge I see, and then I want to get into protein in the GK index. But here's the challenge that I see is that the medical doctor world, the oncologists are just not up to speed on the research. So in this tribe, I see a lot of people say, everybody around me is so scared that I'm going to fast. They're worried about me. And I'm like, okay, take this article. This is from PubMed. Here you go. Take it. This is from the British Medical Journal.

Take this. We're trying to get this information into people's hands so that they could take it to their doctors and educate their doctors. It's ridiculous. And actually, what's really cool is in this tribe, we have a lot of holistic practitioners. We have a lot of medical doctors. We have people who run hospitals in here. We have. We know. I know that this is that there are people thirsty for the information. So again, this is why interviews like this are so important. But let's, because you and I could go off. I mean, by the way, you and I could talk for like three hours. Yeah.

But two things I really want this tribe to know. One is where does protein fit into this? And I'll give you a little bit of a background on it. We do get a lot of people in here that are weight loss resistant. We get people who have been fasting and doing keto for a while. but they're not getting the result that they want. And when I start to point out protein, we need to lower protein.

And to me, lower protein is under 20 grams of protein. You see the mitochondria respond. And you see people go to another level. So I'd love for you to explain why that happens. And then we'll talk about the GK index. Okay. Really quick on the protein piece is that, again,

this is we're talking about a road. state of cellular disease, okay? We're not talking about the average Joe trying to lose a few pounds or a diabetic patient or car. We're talking about a rogue cell specific to cancer. Okay. So this is, this conversation is very directed at the cancer population of what we're getting ready to talk about. Absolutely. What we know is that, and then also what I found to be true with very, really resistant metabolic processes, too,

which have a much higher. It was another one of your questions, has a much higher incidence of cancer among diabetics. Okay, very much so, like a three to three times, um, higher rate of cancer in the diabetes environment, so the metabolic environment. So that should also give you a clue.

The more metabolically and flexible you are, the more higher at your risk of cancer in all situations. But when we see folks who are really metabolic resistant or have this rogue cellular disease process going on, when we put in too much, protein. We do great and we get all the carbs out. We're like, yeah, but we're like steak in it three times a day. You know, I've seen on some of the forms of remember I was like, steak doesn't turn into cake. You know, and everyone goes on these whole like carnivore sense.

I'm like carnivore diet and say if we were talking about healthy cellular metabolism, that might be the case. But in unhealthy cell metabolism, rogue mitochondrial, broken down cell metabolism in a cancer patient, you were absolutely pouring gasoline on an open fire. Okay. And so what happens in these situations is they take that and they turn it into gluconeogenesis, new glucose, and they start to fuel you just as much with the protein. So we very much keep our patients at about 0.8 gram per kilogram maximum protein levels. What we do is we don't guess, okay?

We test assess address, adjust accordingly. We never guess in this realm, especially in the cancer. realm. So if we are finding that at 0.8 grams, we are getting desired insulin hemoglobin A1 CGKI's insulin growth factor rates, then fabulous. If we find that people have some extra metabolic flexibility, we can take them up as much as one, maybe 1.2 grams per kilogram. That's usually in a state where people are a little bit more metabolically flexible and are not spilling that into the sugar, but you see it immediately because we're testing regularly, blood testing folks.

You do not guess with urine here. You do not guess a breath with this population. And then the same is true when I have some patients who can't handle more than 0.4 or 0.6, any little amount will turn into sugar. So I also note there are some people out there with very, very aggressive, certain types of brain cancers, which are stating that they have some success with pure carnivore diet in these cases. What I think is happening in those cases, we're seeing something on the outwards

that it might be lowering people's seizure threshold, but I'm looking at their whole terrain. I'm looking at labs and I'm looking at things that just say, it's a matter of time before this little monkey explodes out the whole process and we're going to be dealing with something a lot worse than a seizure. Okay. So I'm a little bit resistant to hearing that, especially when we see work from people like Dr. C-Fri,

who talks about glutamine and how it needs a lot of these processes, which is going to be elevated in your hyperboats. protein-rich diets, right? So I'm really resistant to a carnivore diet in the cancer population. And until I see more evidence, I will keep saying that. I think that's really important because people think going keto means you don't look at the protein. And that's not the case. I mean, even for people who don't have a cancer diagnosis, you really have to keep that protein down. So thank you for explaining that. And it's huge because like the Atkins diet was a fabulous diet for people wanting to lose weight. But it also put a lot of people in kidney failure. It also did not take

into quality, you know, into account quality of the food. So basically all these people living on superfund sites, animal protein, things like that. Those were things that in our population, I tell people in my world, when I'm coaching on this, we talk about eating clean keto, plant-based keto. The still predominant intake of food is low glycemic above the ground plants, nine to 15 servings a day. I think my people in ketosis with that. with a proper amount of protein just enough to get their physiologic needs met with a high amount of fasting or of fat. If I have people who are fat resistant or we can't get there or they really are for whatever reason really resistant to eating a ketogenic diet, that is precisely where fasting

comes in. Yeah. We can get into a state of metabolic flexibility and even show ketones in a variety of ways without eating 90% of your diet is fat. And fasting is also the way that I, when I hear people say, oh, well, the fats could feed the cancer cells. Still, by the way, all cell line studies. Number two, that oglutamine or methionine can definitely feed this. Then that's where fasting is so gorgeous because you're taking all those concerns out. Yep.

So I always say what in doubt? Fast. When you don't know what ratio to do, just start fasting. because the body knows what to do. I mean, in the patients that I coach, we've seen some really sick people with a lot of co-infections like lime and parasites and heavy metals and EBV and like all this stuff just pulling the immune system down. And I always say, okay, when in doubt, let's let innate intelligence kick in here

and figure out what needs to be happening. and one of the major ways you tap into innate intelligence is by taking food out of the equation, which is why I love fasting. It gives so much more resource to healing the body, to doing what it needs to do in other places. And then that sort of segues into this GKI conversation. People get really locked on that. And I'm like, I don't know. Everybody should be locked on it.

And not just it is that, you know, I tell you, you know, even Miriam claiming, who's my dear friend and colleague who wrote the book, Keto for cancer who is a huge consultant with Seafreed and all their work, she and I will tell you, we're, you know, Seaprreen and those guys, they're at the bench. We're at the bedside. So what we see at the bench and what we hope to create the bedside, oftentimes don't job, don't jive, okay? It is very difficult to get a GCI below one. That's what everybody says is when I, like, put out the DK index, people are like, what? And then they get discouraged. And I think that's why it's an interesting index. But do we need to obsess on it?

Absolutely. And my feeling is probably similar to sometimes when we just fast periodically, getting that GKI marker periodically is likely having the same kind of like shaking down, you know, the thermometer, shaking down the etch of sketch of like creating a blank slate of giving us a little push, a little nudge in that metabolic flexibility. But ultimately, I have a lot of patients who work decades of high stress, estrogen dominance, poor sleep patterns, sunrise syndrome with elevated glucose in the morning. When we see those patterns, we may never get their glucose down in a range below 85 or way

lower. We may never get that GKI, but I'm watching other factors. I'm looking at scans. I'm looking at blood tests. And I am not seeing there being a problem. Even if we just work towards that number, we seem to get more flexibility. Now, to me, I've only seen evidence of this being important in the, cancer realm.

When people are pushing for other places, if you're wanting to do it, like maybe sweeps of prevention, I mean, even after C-Frey says, well, then maybe do a seven-day, five-to-seven-day water fast once or twice a year, there you go, right? There's your, there's your prevention. There's your cancer vaccine. Right. That approach maybe versus trying to daily hit that number. Because guess what happens?

When you're under stress because you're not hitting your G-K-I, your G-K-I, you never- Right. And let's go back to something you said early on is that thoughts will control the cells. I mean, Bruce Lipton taught us that. And so if you're so stressed about hitting the numbers, then you're not doing yourself any good either. So, yeah. So I think that's just a, that's a super important point. The other thing that I want to point out to the tribe is that what I've noticed when you are trying to bring your health back, whether it's from a scary diagnosis like cancer, whether it's just because you feel crummy and you want to get yourself back on track, that there are literally two things you have to look at. One is you have to look at your lifestyle, which is what we're talking about. And there are a lot of pieces in lifestyle.

There's fasting. There's keto. There's get out in nature, get sun, get exercise. I mean, we could talk about that forever. But then there's these root causes that have damaged the body. And what I see is that a lot of times people come at lifestyle trying to correct it and they missed looking at the root causes, that the two have to marry each other to get to that next level. And then this is why working with someone like you is so powerful because you can look back and say, here are all the things that we see. Now, let's apply all of these principles and then let's look at what the testing shows us.

If you want to beat cancer and you're in a cancer diagnosis, that's what it looks like. Yeah. It's not go after the tumor or the tumor cell. It's go after, you could do that. That's one piece of the tiny equation. You've got to go after everything that got you there to begin with. And you've got to change. You cannot heal from the soil in which you got sick.

So to be amending that along the way. So when you've gone through your cytoreductive therapies or your conventional therapies or even your non-comventional therapies that should have been matched to you individually, by the way. So when I see people spending $70,000, on alternative therapies that were never appropriate for the cancer type that that person had

because no one ever did their homework to assess that person's terrain to see actually what the issues were, same gripe I have in Western medicine where we have the technologies now to have truly precision medicine and yet everyone gets on standard of care, which is ridiculous.

It's like we come. Why would everybody Why would everybody get the same drug, even like blood pressure? I don't understand that. Exactly. And especially now we can run our snips. We can run our genetics. We can run a test called one-on to look at your drug metabolism processes. You can look at your tissue assays and know, hey, does this drug even respond to your, you know, does this tissue respond to that drug?

We don't have to guess in the world anymore. Right. You know, and that's one of the things that kind of segues into what, you know, a big one is what can we look at. every year as part of our physical examination to see what might be a blind side. Now, first of, I always like people to go in and take our 10 part, 10 questions for per part questionnaire at the front of our book because it helps you see some of your blind spots. It helps you look at some of the priorities within your terrain that you might have been blind to or simply ignoring, putting the one of my patients says putting the sticker over

the check engine light on your dashboard. Right, right. So we always, when I was in private practice, every year in my community, they had something called the nine health fair, nine R health fair, every year. And it basically for 60 bucks, you'd get your CBC, which is your complete blood count, with differential. You'd get your CMP, which is your metabolic count, which kind of looks to your electrolytes and your organ function. We'd get a TSA.

We'd get a C-reactive protein, CRP. We'd get a vitamin D3. And if you were a man, you got a PSA. That was always kind of added in. They never offered something. for the women. But those were the very basics then. In the last few years, they've added in a chemoglobin A1C. I'm here to tell you that those simple tests right there, I could already see the train of coming. What's going? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Way before. And this was a $60, $80 an annual

out-of-pocket test. Right? Now my patients, you can get this information. What I can tell in a basic CBC, which is a $12 out-of-pocket test if you go into a walk-in lab. I can look at a lot of your nutritional status. I can look at your methylation. I could look at your immune function. I could look at your marrow function. I can see your NLR-N-L-R-Nutri-L-Lymposite ratio

to show me prognosis. Every one of these things I'm telling me, you'd go into a PubMed search on like Nutriphil to Lymphocyte ratio and realize that if it's off, if you've got more than two to one, neutrophils to lymphocytes, you're kind of screwed. It's a bad prognosis for any condition, okay? Like, these are the first.

place is like tune up your immune system. What's causing the stress in your immune system? If you've got chronically low white blood cells, you've not taken a drug to diminish them like chemo or radiation, then you're likely dealing with a co-infection or a heavy metal or some other toxicant that's basically standing on your immune system and not allowing it to function. These are cheap, $12, you can know what you're dealing with. Right.

And people, it's like, forget spending the money on the neutral valve and the spectra cell. Agreed. Abigee. Agreed. Agreed. There are, again, I go back to like root cause tests. Like, let us look at what are some of these things that are pulling you down before you tell me you're allergic to wheat. There's a reason you're allergic to wheat and things like that.

So are those tests in your book? Yeah. Each section I kind of have is such like under the inflammation. Everyone should be looking at their C-reactive protein or high sensitivity CRP every year. It should be under one, always. If it's even 1.1, you got something brewing. if it's much higher than that, that's also prognostic in a lot of disease conditions. And by prognostic, what I mean is that it basically says, if you have this current disease state,

your likelihood of recovering from it is poor. Right. So that's a key, getting that down. My trifecta that my patients have called my trifecta, I think everyone should get this run every single year. An LDH, a lactase dehydrogenase. This used to be part of a complete metabolic panel. We threw it out about 15 years ago, which is ridiculous, because, that really is our marker of metabolic mitochondrial function.

Just think about. Why do we ask? Yeah, go look at the Krebs cycle. You guys. Right. How you're metabolically functioning. Yeah. It's one of the main markers in cancer evaluation,

especially like lymphomas, leukemia, multiple myelomas. It is the cancer marker. Anything, depending on if it's a quest or a lab core, one of them has a cut off of around 250, the other in the 600s, I want one of your below one. 75 or the other below 450. And then the third part of the trifecta is the sedimentation rate, also known as the ESR. That should be under 10.

When any of those are individually high, there can be a lot of different reasons. But when all three are high, I know that there's something like a cancer already likely growing. Okay. Say the three. Yeah, say the three again. It was LBH, ESR. And what was the third one?

CRP. CRP, yeah. Yeah. Right? And not right there. So if people pay for a CBC with diff, a CMP, and a trifecta every year, you're paying about $105 out of pocket to invest in a basic screen of your health care. The other thing is if folks get their vitamin D levels well about 50. Right there, we cut the incidence of all chronic illness across the board per the vitamin C cancel of the NIH by 70%.

Right. You'll be shocked at how many people are walking around with levels below 50. if you're dealing with autoimmune conditions or cancer, I'm wanting it between 80 and 120 typically. I will tell you this. Like if I see someone's vitamin D and it's under 30, I'm already very concerned of stuff happening. If it's under 20, I'm looking for cancer.

Okay? That's how significant this is. Ferritin, another big overlooked one. People think they're anemic all the time, but there's 26 different types of amemia, of which only one of them is iron deficiency. And the only way to qualify that and quantify that is with a ferretin, which is an iron storage, that range should be very narrow

between roughly 35 to 70, 75 max. If it's above that, you are oxidizing the crap out of your body. And you are also fueling cancer processes. And it's also a significant finding when there's other metal toxicity on board. I was just going to say, when I see ferretin off, I'm like lead. Yeah, that is binding. Same thing with things like calcium and binding. it. Nailing it. Nailing it. And we shouldn't be supplementing iron or copper or calcium. Even if

they're low, they're low for another reason. You want to go to the root cause to change the absorption of those minerals versus give the minerals because they don't metabolize the same way. And then another one we want to look at hemoglobin A1C. Everybody should be under a five. Everybody. If you're above a five, you are metabolically inflexible. If you are encroaching on 5.5, that's what we call quote unquote pre-diabetic. At 5.7 in parts of this country, you're already diabetic. Western, if you live in the southeast part of the world, southeast part of the U.S., they say you're not diabetic till after six. Please don't wait for that point. Okay. And that is, again, that's glycosulated end products.

That is also basically the browning, the oxidizing, the rusting of our inner engine. So the higher that number, the more rusted out you are, the faster you're aging, and the higher risk of all mortality and all chronic illness. So if you did nothing else, we'd get those five tests, CBC, CMP, Trifecta, the vitamin D3, the ferritin, and hemoglobin A1C every year, I will be able to tell you with that amount of testing exactly what you're, what you, like,

I don't guess your longevity. I could guess your disease condition. And these tests are nothing. And then if you want to dive deeper, we can do, like you said, go into some of the specialty tests. to find out precisely. But that's what freaks me out is all the people said I was healthy

until I was diagnosed with cancer. No possible way. Was that possible? No possible. Right. Right. Oh, my God. I have so many things to say on that.

Our time is up and I want to do one thing because you're not, you'll look at the comments. People are making some really great comments. Well, when this, when this live ends, then you can go into the resetter group and look at the comment. But here's what I want to end on because I think that it, like somebody just said,

so much good information, I don't know where to start. This is what I'm going to tell you is here's where you start. How many of you have been given your blood work by Kaiser or by some, by your medical doctor, and they say everything's fine. And then they send you your blood work and you don't know what to do with it. So let's just recap those, what you want. there was, and I'll go through the test and then you can tell me what the ranges are. And then what I would say is why don't you all go and pull up that blood work and look at that.

And if there's an imbalance, then I would say start with fasting and start with what we're teaching you all in here. And if it doesn't change, that's where you got to reach out and get help. Totally agree. That's a very safe place to start. It's hard to do the ranges on the CBC and CMP because we can take 20 minutes just going through each of individually. But basically, when you're looking at a lab range, remember the labs are based on the average of the population in the region in which they were tested. So that's why you'll see variations across the U.S.

Right? So you want to be on the inner parameters, basically. So I tell people, shave off points on either end of their range and make sure you live within that. That's kind of the simplest place. But when we talk about some of these other tests outside of CBC and CMP, I want your ferretin between, say, 35 and 75. I want your vitamin D3 at least at or above 50,

but if you're dealing with a chronic illness, really getting yourself up there closer to 80. And again, work with a functional practitioner because there's a tiny population that can have some issues with a higher level. I've seen two out of tens of thousands, so it's not that big of an issue.

A hemoglob in A1C under 5. And I should throw out, maybe an insulin is a good one to run. I like it around three. So that's good. And then, oh, the CRP, under one, you want to get a high sensitivity, CRP, under one, a sedimentation rate, also known as an ESR under 10,

and an LDH, also known as a lactase dehydrogenase, or an LD, becomes LD or LD under 175 or under 450, depending on the lab ranges. That right there gives you a place to start to look, and if you haven't had those tests run, it's time to go get to run. Yeah, and there's lots of ways you can run, on your own. I mean, you're walking labs, direct labs. Yeah, yeah. Unless you live in New York State, just go over to Connecticut.

But then we said start there and maybe take the 10 questionnaire and see what's standing out because we ask questions that people wouldn't normally think of. Okay, we try to really be hard to what are blind spots in the world today that people don't recognize or being exposed to or dealing with chronically. And then once you have that information and like you said, the fasting is a great strategy place to start. And if it doesn't alter it, usually just to give you an example, kind of a rule of thumb, I tell folks every day 13 hours, twice a week, 16 to 18 hours, once a month, three days of water fasting.

It's sort of what I push for people to get to in their general health and wellness that aren't dealing with chronic illness. Then at that point, maybe two or three sessions cycles, months of that, would be when you retest those labs and see what that's done. If you're dealing with something more aggressive, you might work with your provider to maybe do a little deeper dive into a longer fast with medical supervision and take the look at that because we can change when we would do women in cancer retreats. We would get these labs the week before, the four-day retreat.

And we'd wait a week after and retest their labs. And we saw the shift in the right direction across the board every single time with every single patient. Four days. Four days. That's awesome. Yeah. It's never too late. It's never too late. Yeah.

So, okay, let me finish with. This is her book. If you all haven't seen her book, I really recommend you get it. It's awesome. Amazon, I think, is where I got mine. You do have a Facebook group called the Metabolic Approach to Cancer. Yeah. Okay.

And you have a website. And what's that? Is that just your name? Dr.Nasha, Dr.NASHA.com. And on that, we have kind of a physician section, a patient section, a lot, a lot, a lot of great little, there's a little freebie handout. So we're like what to do if you first get diagnosed with cancer. A little freebie there, a lot of podcasts and other information.

We try to be an information hub and we try and keep the data relevant on our Facebook pages, et cetera. So people can stay current with the research that literally is exploding as you and your group know. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And then Dr. Nasha is speaking in Nashville at a conference that I'm going to be at. I actually get to speak with Dr. Pomp on the first day. So I know you, yeah, I know you were speaking. on the on Saturday, right?

Friday or Saturday, I can't recall. Yep. Okay, so what they've done, which is really cool, is they've opened it up to the public on Saturday. So I'll be posting, and it will be live streamed. So I will be posting, and hopefully, I'm pretty sure they have you in one of the public forums. Awesome. People can see you. So I will post that for everybody as well. And then people wanted to know, I'm looking at the questions.

A lot of people wanted to know if I'll post those tests that you just talked about in the ranges. I'll put that in there. And you're actually now officially a resetter because I invited you into the tribe. So. I will totally scoop through the questions and try and respond any we didn't get to and fill in any more gaps that might have come up after our talk today. But what a great group. You guys are speaking to my heart and soul. Like I said, I think you are on the cancer fighting journey with me.

And I'm grateful for all of you, for all of that. Well, we're grateful for you. And this is going to be a game changer for a lot of people. So thank you. I really appreciate it. Right on. All the best, everyone. Okay, having a great one. Toxins out. That's what it's all about. Fast cycling. Fast types out.

That's what resetting is all.