Part 35 - Dr. Thomas Seyfried on Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, More Effective Therapies, and Treating it Without Toxicity

(Music) All right, everybody, we did it! The Indiegogo campaign was a success as of last night at midnight. We hit the goal with about two hours of spare. I just really want to say how much I appreciate everyone who pre-ordered or got one of the bigger perks or even just through in 10 bucks. It really was a group effort and I loved that people shared about the film even if they couldn't support it themselves. I know I have nothing to plug on this podcast, but I should let people know that you can still pre-order a copy from the same Indiegogo page now that we hit the goal. It will stay there until we finish the film in "In the Man" status. This is very needed as we continue the expensive post-production process. You should also check out the new highlight videos we've been putting out on YouTube. Really great 5 minute videos with some of the experts interviewed for the film. Now on to the guest today. Dr. Thomas Sayfreed is a professor of biology at Boston College and receives his PhD in genetics and biochemistry from the University of Illinois. He then worked as a professor in the neurology department at the Yale School of Medicine. He has over 180 peer-reviewed publications and is author of the book Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. He recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Complementary and Integrative Medicine. I got a chance to meet and interview him at the Metabolic Health Summit earlier this year. You'll notice we did this podcast shortly after the Super Bowl. In case people aren't familiar with American football, the New England Patriots had just beats in the LA Rams. I hope people look up the paper he recently published that we mentioned and watch his presentation I linked to in the show notes and go deeper on this topic. Very surprising to learn of this completely new view of cancer if you haven't heard it before. This really shouldn't be very surprising to anyone, however. Because of course our modern diet and lifestyle would have the biggest effect on the rising cancer rates. And of course fixing these things would also be a major part of the treatment. He's really doing legendary work. So without further ado, here's Professor Sayfreed. Well, Professor Thomas Sayfreed, thanks for spending some time with me today. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I guess you're over there in Boston. I know when we were in Long Beach, you talked about the Patriots, but you're kind of happy. Yeah, well, I told you that, you know, they were in there almost every year and they win most of the time. So the Rams were like a lamb to the slaughter. Well, luckily I'm from Hawaii and I don't care about the Rams, even though I live here. Well, let's jump in here. So your main thesis is that cancer is a metabolic disease. And so for a lot of people, this is not what they've heard. They think it's a genetic disease. They haven't heard of you. Maybe they haven't heard of this work. So if we started the very top level, can you explain to someone, you know, pretends their fifth grader is with them. How would you explain this to them? The cancer is a metabolic disease as opposed to a genetic disease. Well, if you look inside the cell of any biological organ, any tissue preparation, they're composed of cells. And the cells are the basic unit of structure in biology. So inside the cell, you have a nucleus and you have other organelles besides the nucleus. You have mitochondria. You have Golgi. You have lysosomes. You have different kinds of things. But according to the genetic theory, the origin of cancer starts from a mutation in the nucleus. According to the mitochondrial metabolic theory, the origin of the disease starts in the mitochondria. These are another organelle, a bean-shaped organelle in the cell cytoplasm that generate energy for the cell. So mitochondria make energy and they also control ionic fluxes in the cell. They do a lot of different things. But basically they make energy, ATP. Without energy, nothing can live or grow. So you have two types of energy that you can have. You can have ancient energy, which is a fermentation metabolism, which means that you can generate energy without oxygen. Or you can have respiration where you get energy from breathing air. So cancer cells ferment. They don't breathe oxygen. They can live in areas where there is no oxygen. So they ferment. All cancer cells ferment. Not all cancer cells have genetic mutations, but all cancer cells ferment. So the origin of the disease, according to the mitochondrial metabolic theory, is that the little organelle that makes energy from respiration is defective, forcing the cell to ferment. And when the cell from ends, mutations collect in the nucleus. So the genetic mutations seen in cancer cells come as a downstream effect of disruption of energy metabolism. Thus, the cancer cells have to consume large amounts of glucose and the amino acid glutamine in order to survive based on a fermentation metabolism, whereas normal cells use oxygen and very little amounts of glucose. So this is the basic difference between normal cells and cancer cells. Yeah. So I think that makes sense to people out there. Because most people have heard that cancer runs on a lot of glucose. If you can starve the cell of glucose, that the cancer cells might die. Well, that's because the energy from glucose is converted into ATP, which is the currency of energy inside the cell. So if you can't breathe and make energy from respiration, then you'll die. But if you can make energy through ancient fermentation, ATP from a different source, then the cell will live. And cancer cells live on glucose, which is converted into ATP, and they live on the amino acid glutamine, which is also converted into ATP without oxygen. So these are fermentation pathways and all cancer cells use these two fuels to grow. Yeah. And so I want to just hit on the downstream effect, because a lot of people don't understand that it's the DNA damage occurs later. What's kind of re-emphasize that point is people are going around talking about, oh, well, wheelchairs. All these people in wheelchairs have broken legs and they're paralyzed. That's what causes it. No, that's a downstream effect. They got that wheelchair because they couldn't walk. Yeah. Well, the DNA damage comes as an effect of dysfunctional mitochondria. So the mitochondria, because they were supposed to be making ATP, they actually make reactive oxygen species. But oxidative stress and oxidative stress underlies a lot of different diseases. In the neurons die from oxidative stress and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, kidney, a lot of the cells in our body that get sick and die die from oxidative stress. And what happens is the cells that become cancer cells suffer this oxidative stress and their mitochondria become damaged. And they start to ferment glucose and glutamine, but the oxidative stress also causes damage to the nucleus and the genome. So many, many cancer cells have defects in the genome and genes from the oxidative stress coming from the mitochondria. So the mitochondria damage precedes the nuclear damage for the majority of cancers. So that means that nuclear mutations are not the cause, they're an effect. So the field of cancer studies effects rather than causes. And this misunderstanding in my mind is related to why we have over 1,600 people a day dying from cancer because people that treat the disease do not understand the biology of the disease. They're not looking at the root cause. It's like a lot of medicine where we're treating it without knowing or sometimes we don't know or don't care about the root cause. We just treat the symptoms or treat the end result. Yeah, but in cancer, as the result of this, you have all these four people dying, over 1,600 according to the American Cancer Society. So, you know, we understand what causes cancer and based on a mitochondrial metabolic origin, knowing that the cells can't live without two fuels, glucose and the amino acid glutamine. You know that massive evidence supports that from thousands of research papers. So the logical approach would be to deprive cancer cells of glucose and glutamine while transitioning the entire body over to ketone bodies which normal cells can use to survive under low glucose, but tumor cells cannot use. So it becomes clear you can transition your whole body over to an alternative fuel that cancer cells can't use and then you can then progressively degrade the viability of the tumor cells slowly without harming the normal cells of the body. It's a very elegant way to treat the disease without causing significant or any toxicity at all to the patient. Absolutely. So this is what we talked, you talked about at the conference that I saw your presentation, but it's ketogenic metabolic therapies. People listening to this podcast know this by now, but talk about more about the shifting the body into burning ketones. Well, that's what we evolved to be a starved creature. We as a species of human beings were not always surrounded by high coloric foods everywhere we turn in our environment. So our ancestors evolved in environments where food was not always abundant. So we have a very unique physiology to live for long periods of time, as long as we have water, we can go long periods of time without eating much. So we have evolved to burn fat. But the fat is taken from fat stores on the body and mobilized into fatty acids. The fatty acids go to the liver and the liver breaks down the fatty acids just like a wood chipper. When you put a branch into the wood chipper it comes out in small pieces. Well the liver chops up these chains of fatty acids, these long carbon chains into small two and three carbon molecules and then they are water soluble fuel for the majority of our cells in our body. So our body can burn these ketone bodies which are made from fatty acids but the tumor cells can't burn the ketone bodies for energy because they have the organelle needed to convert those ketone bodies into ATP or energy is broken. So they become dependent only on glucose, the sugar and the amino acid glutamine. So it's easy to target glucose by just stop eating or taking diets that will lower blood sugar and elevate ketones. It becomes a little bit more difficult to restrict the glutamine. You cannot do it with any dietary, it has to be done with drugs. There are certain drugs that will stop glutamine from entering into the tumor cells and when you shut down both glucose and glutamine, the tumor cells will die. So it's a very simple strategy. The problem is nobody's, nobody that I know of anywhere in the world is doing it. Yeah, there's so many things I want to get into. So for one, why are people resisting this, why are people thinking of as a genetic disease? Well, I think it's an indoctrination, it's a dogmatic view. If your federal government puts out a website through the National Cancer Institute and tells the general population that cancer is a genetic disease, why should the guy on the street question this? If the guy on the street goes down to his local cancer clinic, wherever city happens to be in, usually it's a major hospital in somebody's city and they go in and ask the people who treat their disease, yeah, I'll tell you cancer is a genetic disease. So the guy on the street would say, well, it has to be a genetic disease. Our federal government told us it was a genetic disease. The medical school trained physicians to say it's a genetic disease. And when I go and have cancer, I get treated with radiation and chemo and immunotherapies based on the fact that cancer is a genetic disease and everybody seems to be happy except the poor people, this 1,600 people who would die each day from the fact that their treatment is based on a theory that is not supported by the large amount of scientific evidence that apparently very few people at the medical schools read or understand, or if they do understand it, it becomes too unsettling to accept it based on what they have been doing through their training and practice. Yeah, pretty hard to kind of admit that everything you studied or your mentors told you were wrong. So it's just an entrenched beliefs or why are people looking at this literature? Well, I think they're not looking at it because many of the physicians are so overwhelmed with their patients. They don't have time to read the literature. Many of the scientists that are working in the labs get massive money, research grant money from pharmaceutical companies and the federal government to chase genes, mutations and things like this. So there's no incentive other than saving lives that seems to motivate the institutions to adapt therapies based on the real understanding of what the disease is. I mean, think about it. When patients go to the hospitals to get treated for cancer, they usually have perhaps a needle biopsy that is used to determine what kind of mutations are in the tumor or what stage of disease the tumor is, and then they're either given a surgical resection or possibly radiation or possibly a chemotherapy or even one of the new immunotherapies. And they go through with it because the people that they're seeing are supposed to be experts and they're supposed to know what's best for the patient. But all of those therapies, radiation, chemo and immunotherapy, are all based on the dogmatic view that cancer is a genetic disease. And if that's not true, and there's serious questions about that, then they have to ask, well, why are you treating me with therapies not based on the actual origin? Now, you have to realize that it's not to say that radiation, chemo and surgery won't remove a tumor or won't possibly cure you because we have a lot of cancer survivors out there that have received standard of care, which is surgery, radiation and chemo and they're alive. And the problem is, of course, is that to be alive, they've had to have their body subjected to very great physical, physiological hostility. Most people who have any kind of ailment in their body don't generally go to be treated with radiation and toxic chemicals to make them healthy. Yeah, for like so. Yeah, right. I mean, you could have a stomach, a digestive problem and they don't say, well, we're going to irradiate you and give you toxic poisons to help your stomach, you know. But for cancer patients, I mean, why do we take healthy people and irradiate in poison in them to make them healthy? Well, we have to stop the proliferation of these cells that are growing out of control. That's the reason. So we have to irradiate, incinerate the area, and then we have to poison the body to stop these cells that are growing out of control. Yeah, but they can't grow without energy. So if I pull their fuel for energy, they will die. And you can do that. You can kill those cancer cells just as easily with metabolic therapy as you can with the toxic radiation and chemo, and it doesn't harm the rest of the body like toxic radiation and chemo. I'm not saying you can't try to cure cancer with toxic radiation and chemo. I'm just saying there's other ways to do it without the toxicity. Exactly. Yeah, it seems like a crazy approach, but it seems like this is like the barbaric approach that we had hundreds of years ago when we didn't know how to treat things. And we just like yank out teeth and just get a saw and chop things off. And it's soon that if we go down the correct path that you, it's research and people before you like auto-warburg that we have this new idea of how this actually works, we can come up with better therapies. And we have come up with better therapies. Yeah. And I think that as slowly, but surely people that understand the literature, understand the concepts and look at the actual evidence from scientific papers, it's hard to deny what we're saying here when you actually have the chance to sit down and look at this stuff. So if it becomes so clear that when you look at tumor tissue under the electron microscope and you can see these little organelles very clearly at this high, very high magnification and you can see the mitochondria are clearly abnormal in structure and function and number. Then you know that they can't respire. They can't get energy from respiration if the very organelle needed for that is damaged. Structure determines function. So people say, well, I've never seen that. Well, when was the last time you looked at a paper looking at an electron micrograph of a tumor, a bladder cancer, colon cancer, a breast cancer, a brain cancer, if you look at the mitochondria under the electron microscope, you see them damaged, missing and all kinds of abnormalities. And you say, well, what are they doing? I say, well, they're sucking down a lot of glucose. Well, why would they suck down a lot of glucose because they can't respire and therefore they have to ferment. And if you're going to replace respiration with fermentation, you better make damn well sure you have a butt load of that fuel around, which is a lot of glucose and a lot of glutamine, which is always around the tumor cells. And to make matters worse, if you irradiate and surgically resect these tumors, you free up massive amounts of glucose and glutamine in a very practice of trying to get rid of the tumor. In some cases, that works, you can bulk the whole tumor, the patient is completely cured. But in some cases, it makes the thing worse, the tumor cells start spreading into the blood vessels by the very practices you're trying to do to remove the tumor. And then they come back and they say, oh, it's in your lymph nodes now, oh, you got a spot in your lung, your liver, wherever the hell else you have it. And now the horse is out of the barn and now you have to go through massive amounts of poisonous chemicals and radiation, and thereby the grace of God you might survive. And if you do survive, then you're plagued with all kinds of ailments for the rest of your life trying to recover from being irradiated and poisoned in a first place. It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy beyond comprehension. It really is. And if these guys' ideas were so correct, then wouldn't we have gotten some progress by now and not have 1000 people dying every day? Yeah, it's getting worse every year and trying to 8,100 a day are dying. So obviously, something's wrong. Now if you've made all this progress over all these hundreds of years in looking at different diseases, and then you see cancer, the death rate goes up every year, more and more people dying every year. And listen, the pharmaceutical companies have plans. Their progress reports show that in 10 or 15 years, the amount of money generated from cancer drugs is going to be enormous. So that tells you right there there's no plan to correct this disease. If their progress reports show that we're going to make massive money in 10 more years on this cancer drugs, do you think they, if they're going to do something that's going to cure the disease, they should say, listen, if 5 or 10 years there's going to be no money here because our new therapies are going to cure this disease. So they're already making plans that this is going to be a massive industry for pharmaceutical companies in the next 10 or 15 years because they know the drugs aren't going to work, but it's based on a false theory of what the disease is. If you understand what the biology of the disease is, you can drop the death rate by 50% in 10 years. Then you have less drugs. Neil Leonard. Yeah, there's no incentive for them to study all this stuff. Why would someone just study something and try to put money at something? Who should have the incentive? Why should someone, you know, why should someone without the disease be the one telling you who has the disease, what you should be doing, you know, why it's unbelievable. It's really a tragedy. And you know, sometimes it's not their fault, the physicians and the trenches. They're only doing what they were trained to do in medical school, you know, they treat cancer. So they were ready at you. They have to know that patients can't take too much radiation, otherwise it will kill them. They know that if you give them too much chemotherapy, it'll kill them. So they have to learn how to treat the patient without killing them. So, you know, this is, if you give them too much of this and they're not trained to know that you don't need to do that in the first place. And that's the problem. And they don't believe. They, well, why are you poisoning and radiating people? Well, because we have to stop the proliferation of the cells and this is the only way, and that's not the only way. You pull the plug on their energy and they'll die just as well. And you don't have to do all this other stuff. But the other stuff, radiation and chemo and grants the study genes and all the stuff that we're doing keeps in a massive industry afloat, right? What are all these people going to do if 50% of the people don't have cancer anymore? And you can start managing the disease in a very logical way. What are these, what are these people going to do? They have to find something else to do, maybe work on Alzheimer's or something. Yeah. And a lot of these systems are like that in anything. It's like, well, fossil fuels or electric cars. There's so many things that the way we have been doing things determine they keep going this direction. It's hard to reverse it. So you're talking about the proliferation of cancer these days. So what's changed? Right? It's not the genetics. Right? If it was just a genetic disease, why are all these people all of a sudden getting so much more cancer? And when did cancer start ramping up and what changed in our society? Well, I think cancer has always been part of human history. I mean, even animals in the wild will occasionally get a rare cancer. But cancer is the result of our industrialization as a society. Because primitive peoples that live in jungles and eskimos and these kinds of people that before civilization came, the idea of having nobody even knew what cancer was, it was very, very rare. Albert Schweitzer mentioned that when he was visiting African tribes, they didn't have any cancer. And then they didn't have the word for cancer? No, I don't even think there was no word in a dictionary there, well, whatever language they had, they don't have a dictionary. They had a language, but there was no word for cancer. Not to say that cancer didn't exist. It's just that it was so rare that there wasn't a word for it. But as those civilizations, as those populations became industrialized, the disease came. So you get cancer from pollutants in the environment. You get cancer from virus infections, exposure to different chemicals, systemic inflammation, hypoxia, rare inherited mutations will cause cancer only if the mutation damages the mitochondria and respiration. Like Braco1, which you hear a lot about because of Angelina Jolie having breasts and ovaries removed. She's a superstar and whatever they do, they, people, you know, listen to what goes on. You know, you have a 50% chance your risk factor is about 50 or 55% if you inherit Braco1. That means 45, 50 or 45% of women who have the mutation never develop cancer. So that means that Braco1 is not a cause, it's a risk factor. It increases your risk for cancer, but doesn't guarantee that you will get cancer. So if you know that if you keep your body healthy, the Braco1 mutation, the risk can go way down significantly, because you don't, if you don't damage your mitochondria, then you can protect yourself against those things. But again, they're secondary. So the only primary cause of cancer is damage to the respiration. All the other provocative agents, chemicals, radiation, hypoxia, viruses, they're all what they call secondary, secondary causes. They put you at risk for mitochondrial damage and if you get the damage and the cells can then ferment, then you're on the path to getting cancer. So you can avoid cancer by avoiding those lifestyles and diets that would put you at risk for damage to the mitochondria. So this is why you see cancer as high or no beast people. Many not all, many obese people have, they have inflammation. If you look at sea reactive protein in their bloodstream, which is a marker for inflammation. Many people who are obese have elevated levels of sea reactive protein. That's a marker for systemic inflammation. It damages mitochondria in certain cells in certain tissues. So therefore, obesity puts you at risk for cancer because obesity causes inflammation, which is a risk factor for the origin of cancer. So if you're constantly exposed to toxic chemicals that could damage your mitochondria and a population of cells, then those toxic chemicals put you at risk for getting cancer. They're often called carcinogens and they call carcinogens because they put you at risk for cancer through damage to the mitochondria. So you can go right through the entire list of cancer and say, how did I get cancer? Well, you were obviously exposed to something that damaged your mitochondria in a population of cells and there you go. You smoked, you ate all this toxic food, it was crap in the food, you don't know, it could be anything. A little cut that doesn't heal, an occluded milk duct, a little broken blood vessel that causes a hypoxia, damages the respiration there, there you go again. So you could get it from it, but everything is linked back to the mitochondria. Talk about the breast cancer. Yeah, breast cancer in the macluid milk duct for a second. Yeah. So what happens? You kill the milk duct, you cause a systemically inflammatory lesion. Now, most of the time the body will heal it, you know, if the body heals it, then you're free and clear. But if the body for some reason doesn't heal, the lesion, the damage, whatever you want to call it, microscopic damage, if it doesn't heal it, then you are at risk. Those cells in that region become at risk for damaging respiration. And if the respiration is chronically damaged, the cell gradually shifts away from respiration to fermentation. And then you're on the fast track for developing a neoplasm, which is a group of cells growing out of control using fermentation energy as the result of some insult to their respiration. It's not that complicated. So you just have to know, well, how do I prevent myself from getting cancer? Well, keep your body as healthy as you possibly can by avoiding diets and lifestyles that put you at risk for damaging mitochondria. But you know, to be honest with you, a lot of people don't want to do that. Yeah. Well, that seems like the main problem is that people just want to pill for all their diseases and they don't want to change the way they eat. They don't want to exercise. They don't want to do all these things. No. But that's okay. That's okay. Let them myself include it. I'm not saying I live in a pristine environment here. I put myself at risk for different things. But the thing of it is, is if you get the disease, at least you should have options to treat it. Now, I'm not saying that everybody should do metabolic therapy. I don't think people have to come to want to do that. And if the doctor says, physician says, listen, you can take radiation in chemo or you can do this metabolic therapy. And the person says, well, I don't want to do metabolic therapy. I want the radiation in the chemo. Well, that should be available. If people want radiation in chemo, which they should be have radiation in chemo, but if people don't want that, they should be given alternative choices and say, listen, there's something else out there. But many of the poor physicians, they never trained. They don't know how to use it. They don't know about it. So they only give radiation in chemo because they don't know the other thing. But I think all cancer patients should be given the choice, at least they can try to find somebody that will administer metabolic therapy rather than radiation in chemo if they want it. Yeah, I love that. Just make it an option. I think that's a lot of what we're fighting for in the diet world, too, or just let ketogenic diets or low carb diets, you know, treat type 2 diabetes or at least let them be an option. Realize that there is safe option that literature says they're safe, they're effective. Why not just allow it to exist? And then you can choose. Well, you have to know, yeah, but you have to know ketogenic diet, it's not, it's therapeutic ketosis. That's the issue. Therapeutic ketosis is a medicine. You might be able to get into therapeutic ketosis if you use a specific diet or different approaches, but the word diet is a turn off for the medical establishment because most diets are ambiguous at best as how they work or the mechanisms of action. Therapeutic ketosis is an alternative to radiation in chemo. So, you know, it's not considered a diet, it's considered a medicine and people have to need to know, it's like if I treat somebody with radiation in chemo, I have to be trained to know how to use these medicines to not, to kill cancer without harming or reducing as much damage as possible. Well, the same thing is with therapeutic ketosis. If you don't know how to use it, it may not be as effective. Generally, it's not as toxic as radiation chemo under any conditions, but still it could be not effective at all if not used correctly. So again, you have to have trained individuals to know how to apply metabolic therapy, which can be done with specific drugs and procedures like hyperbaric oxygen and drugs that target ludamine. But again, you're talking about a knowledge base that's not there. So the people that need to be doing this are not trained, in other words, we have a massive gap that lacks, there's a field that lacks training and understanding of how to treat patients using this alternative therapy. So, and there's, we have another issue, why aren't we doing this because there's very few people trained to know about it, and that's one of the problems. Yeah. And yeah, we jumped into the mainstream. diets compared to metabolic therapies. So there's a big difference and you corrected me when we were in Long Beach. There's a big difference between a keto diet that you see on the news or in a magazine and you know your cousin tried and actual metabolic therapies and we need to differentiate those. Yeah I think that's very important. It's a medicine. It's a medical procedure. Now you do sometimes yeah you lose weight doing this but you know we call it therapeutic weight loss. So a lot of people who do metabolic therapy do in fact lose weight but we call it's as I said therapeutic weight loss as opposed to toxic weight loss. Like for example if I were to get a lot of radiation you know you feel like crap you're sick your vomit your hair falls out you have a lot of issues. I lose weight because I just don't feel like eating them so sick. Well that's because you're sick most people who are really sick don't eat and they lose weight and if I'm taking a toxic poison you know you're really get sick and you lose your appetite completely and you lose weight. So metabolic therapy you definitely lose weight but it's called therapeutic weight loss. Your body is getting super healthy while you're losing weight or you have toxic weight loss where you're losing weight but you're because you're being poisoned and irradiated. Yeah so there's a big difference and that's why they call it a well formulated ketogenic diet sometimes where they're getting the correct feel so your body can still preserve its muscle mass you're still getting protein and micronutrients and stuff like that. Yeah you want to make sure you are not in any kind of imbalance nutrient wise while your cancer is being gradually eliminated so you want to stay as healthy as you possibly can and what we're seeing in the people who are able to do these therapies and are able to be treated by individuals that know we find that many of their other ailments also seem to be resolved or significantly improved like cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes you know these kinds of other chronic diseases that many cancer patients have you know they have type 2 diabetes they may have cardiovascular oh by the way they got cancer too so now you're going to be treated with a toxic approach radiation a chemo which can exacerbate the other conditions type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease you're not really helping those other diseases by treating your cancer you could potentially make those other diseases actually worse so with metabolic therapy you're not only target and kill the tumor cells but you're also reducing those other factors that are contributing to your cardiovascular disease your high blood pressure and your obesity and type 2 diabetes so you know it's it should be a no brainer yeah but unfortunately there's no there's so few people that understand the concepts or even trained to administer these things and this is where we have to have an aggressive retraining so that cancer patients can be treated with a more logical therapy based on the actual understanding of the biology of their disease absolutely and Dominic the Agistinos is working on some hyperbaric oxygen stuff so you only talk about the other suite of therapies that's not sure yeah you're absolutely right so once you have to say you know everybody should know that they say well my cancer became resistant to the treatment it came back my cancer came back my cancer is no longer susceptible to the treatments it's become resistant you hear that a lot and the question is why why is your cancer no longer well we don't know but they they're tough in their hearty well what we find is the cancer cells that are resistant to radiation and chemo are fermenting like crazy they're using massive amounts of glucose and glutamine and that makes radiation and chemo ineffective the fact that they are fermenting makes radiation and chemo ineffective so you say well you know how am I going to deal with this well again you pull the plug on their fuels that they need to ferment and you can manage them so you've got to know the strategy that we need to do on this so you know you go down these these rabbit holes into treatments and so you want your cancer to be susceptible now I'm not saying that you can throw out all radiation and chemo I think that there may be a place for these once the patient is brought back into a state now so why we use hyperbaric oxygen is because once you pull the plug on their fermentable fuels that protect them against oxidative stress because you have to realize that many of these cancer cells from radiation and chemo die from oxidative stress but at the same time you damage your normal cells so if you pull the plug on glucose and ketones it removes the protective shield and now hyperbaric oxygen which creates reactive oxygen species only in the cancer cells they die from oxidative stress but the normal cells which are burning ketone bodies are protected against oxidative stress so it's a beautiful elegant system of selectively killing tumor cells while protecting the normal cells some believe them so but you got to have people trained to know how to do this you have to know that when a patient goes into a hyperbaric chamber they are in a state of therapeutic ketosis and you need to know the blood measurements to say yes this patient is now in therapeutic ketosis yes this patient can now sit in the hyperbaric chamber because we will know now this chamber will in fact kill their tumor cells non-toxically because the patient is in therapeutic ketosis so if you stick patients in there through a hyperbaric chamber that are not in therapeutic ketosis you could potentially harm them or make the tumor grow faster so again you have to know what to do and how to do it otherwise you're not going to get the full benefits of what we're doing absolutely and talking more about reactive oxygen species because I know people talk about this is why some everyday people like to eat a ketogenic diet because there's less of these ROS that when you're well it's not that there's less of ROS is that when you burn ketones you produce less ROS so it's the ketones in the individual cells that produce less ROS so reactive oxygen species because what happens is when you have a calorie restricted ketogenic diet or fats that can be converted into ketone bodies your body then elevates blood ketone bodies and reduces sugar and then when the cells start to burn ketone bodies as an alternative to glucose the amount of ROS produced is less now don't forget just part of energy metabolism in our bodies we produce reactive oxygen species and we have antioxidant systems in place to reduce these little reactive oxygen species which are reactive oxygen reactive nitrogen species and these kinds of things they damage tissues and that's why you age you age because you collect these things over a long period of time and your skin gets wrinkled and things like this but that's all because of accumulation of small amounts of ROS over time ketones reduce that so if you're in therapeutic ketosis you're not your cells aren't going to be producing as much reactive oxygen species and therefore you stay very very healthy tumor cells can't use the ketone bodies so they become at a competitive disadvantage and if you put them in react in hyperbaric oxygen you selectively kill the tumor cells because they collect so much ROS while the normal cells are protected by the ketone bodies yeah so this is why a lot of people choose to just eat this way normally even though they're healthy just to stay healthy and that yeah yeah so it's not that everyone needs to be doing it all the time but this is why people do it and yeah I mean I do it most of the time and then I'm not crazy about it but no but I but I think that you and then that's why we developed the glucose ketone index calculator which we published it was for the cancer patients to know when they were in therapeutic ketosis so that they would then be able to take certain drugs and procedures knowing that it would be beneficial but it also turns out that many normal young healthy people in our society are also using the same glucose ketone index to know that they're in a state if they're therapeutic ketosis and therefore their body is going to be in a much healthier physiological state even if they don't have cancer they're going to be able to get into these states and the only way to know that is through the GKI the glucose ketone index so if people are bragging about them doing this diet or that diet they're in this that well yes then what's your GKI and if they say I don't know then they have no idea what state they're in how do you measure that they might you but they pay goes you know if you're not eating a lot in your starving fill well I'm doing this it must be working but you don't know that until you actually get your number and then after you get your number you'll know whether you're in mild ketosis moderate ketosis or really high ketosis and those all can be determined by the glucose ketone index so you know when people talk about it they should know that if they're in therapeutic ketosis oh yeah great what's your GKI wow how do you measure your GKI well you just take the meter there's only two meters that are available right now that's the precision extra from Abbott labs or the keto mojo which you can get on Amazon and these are meters that will measure both blood sugar and blood ketones so you've got to prick your finger and take your blood and you take the blood and you put it on a stick just like somebody with a diet who has diabetes would know what their blood sugar is and then you get your blood sugar and then you take another stick and put it in there squeeze your finger again and get another drop of blood from the same finger and then you've got a ketone measurement with the other stick and then you take the two measurements you convert blood sugar into that goes from milligram to a deck of liter and the index converts that into millimole and then you divide the millimole with glucose by the millimole of ketones and you get a single number what that number is is your index which is your ratio of blood sugar and millimole to blood ketones in millimole and that's why we developed a ratio so it could be added to these meters so the patients don't have to sit and grab a pencil and do a division example they just want to push the button and get a number exactly at least what's your number I push the button oh my number is like you know 1.1 well that's pretty good you're you're in moderate ketosis if you get into like oh I'm 0.98 oh that's moderate ketosis like I says oh I'm 0.75 oh you're you're in you're in high ketosis so you know right right away when you get the number what level of ketosis you're in so usually people just do one or the other but you just really need to do both to really know. Oh yeah can't how you gonna know you can't know can't - No, people miss things, right? Doctors, if they're just taking your blood glucose, or they're not looking at fasting insulin, then maybe they're missing a lot of people that could be diabetic. - Well, yeah, fasting insulin, you know, that if you have a low GKI, glucose ketone index, usually your fasting insulin would be really low as well. So, you know, as insulin follows glucose. So if my glucose is low, generally my insulin is low. And if you have insulin in sensitivity, like a lot of type two diabetics have, a lot of people with obesity have this. I mean, you can manage obesity and type two diabetes very easily with ketogenic metabolic therapy. I mean, that's, you bring the whole body back into a pristine state. It doesn't happen overnight. I mean, it might take six or eight months to go through this process, but you get back on track without any chemical, without any drugs, and you don't have to, you don't need to exercise that much. Just a little bit, you know, diet and exercise. It does do diet and exercise. What's your GKI? That's what that'll tell you with a staker. - Yeah, well, I'm talking to Dr. Jeff Volic tomorrow about all that stuff, but I was kind of trying to make the point that some people couldn't have what looks like a normal blood glucose, but they're actually just pumping out so much insulin to make that normal, that doctors are missing, that they might be pre-diabetic. - Is what I'm saying. - Yeah, well, that's true. You know, what we do, you know, for the cancer patients, we measure all those metabolites. You know, we measure insulin, HDL, LDL, we measure glucose and ketones. We get a whole battery of markers, just to know where we stand. So then we begin the metabolic therapy, and you start to see the markers all shifting in a very healthy direction, as you start going through the therapy, which is really exciting. But for simplicity, like when you send the patient home, you know, oh my god, you know, what am I doing now? Well, you know, keep your GKI as low as you possibly can, and you're in good shape. Again, patients have to also be in charge to some degree of their management. This is not the kind of management that's completely given to the health professionals. The health professionals are there as a guide, if they know what they're doing and how to do things, but also the patients have to be compliant. And it's amazing, I find this shocking, because I'm not a physician. When I talk to people and they actually cheat on themselves, they'll tell, oh yeah, my GKI is really good. Well, let me see though, well, I didn't measure the number. And then you measure the number and you say, what is horrible? I could just say, you know why? I thought I was, I said, what the hell are you doing, man? What's wrong with you? You cheat, I don't give a, I could care less if you're feeling on yourself, it's unbelievable. People, 'cause they want the doctor to feel good, oh yeah. Oh, the doctor's gonna think I'm really great. Well, who, the doctor doesn't care? He was, it's you that you should care. And I said, you know, the boy is in the patient's, in the ballpark patient, so they have to realize that. Now, some people can't do this. I'm not saying everybody, this is like, well, I don't wanna do this too much. Oh, then go do the standard of care. Don't feel compelled that you have to do one or the other. Yeah, you know? Well, let me make their own choice. Yeah, some people would rather eat cookies and cake and just do the chemo, but no, it is hard for people. So, you don't give out dietary advice and you're not in the nutrition business. But basically, people know, listen, you can't be eating these refined sugars and grains and all these kind of things that cause these blood sugar to go up. And so, that goes back to what happens with civilization. Why do we have so much of these cancers now? And like you said, these Inuit people or African tribes didn't. Well, there's a lot going on, you know, environmental factors, but what comes in contact with your body most through the day? Well, the food you eat, right? Yeah, but look at what you eat in the morning. Get up in the morning and people have a big bowl of cereal. A lot of people, you know, what are you eating? Well, they'll say I had some frosted flakes or I had some oranges. I mean, those orange juice that's processed with sugar in it. Did you go and pick the oranges off the tree and squeeze them yourself? Oranges have been genetically selectively, like most plants and vegetables to have a lot of sugar in them anyway. I mean, apples were originally a little bitter thing like crab apples, and we've made that with sugar. So sugar is something that the human species has always wanted. This is why we were able to domesticate bees so they can produce honey for us because we love honey, honey is sweet, right? I mean, the bear doesn't know how to do that. He'll accept the thousands things on his face just so he can get the sweet honey. You know, humans are a little smarter. They learned how to collect honey without getting the hell stung out of them. So, you know, and we put honey in a lot of different things because it's sweet. Now we mask and mask produce high fructose corn syrup. We now can produce a sugar canes that have a lot more sugar in it, sugar beets. And we can proof fry the sugar and we can put them in all kinds of foods and drinks. I fructose corn syrup. And all that puts us at risk for all these chronic diseases. But they taste so good. I mean, let's be honest, man. I mean, I like a bowl of frosted flakes like anybody does, but I love them. You can't make a tremble white. But I said, man, these damn things are great. But, you know, I know if I eat them every day, I'm gonna be dead from all kinds of stuff. So I choose not to eat them. But, you know, I'm not saying to never eat them, but it's like anything. You get a big jelly-filled donut or something, a crispy cream. You kid me, cup of coffee, some believable. So, I mean, you know, you have to realize that that should be a treat that only happens rarely, not every day. You know, and then people get obese and diabetes and they get cancer and they get all these things. Dementia is another big one. You know, people get depended from all this stuff. - Type 3 diabetes. - Type 3 diabetes. - Yeah, so I mean, there you go. But it's because the food industry has been so successful in capturing the very flavors that we have craved for tens of thousands of years. And now we've packaged them, made them cheap and available for everyone. And we suffer from all these chronic diseases as the result of it. Not a mystery, not a mystery at all. - Exactly, it's so obvious. But can we go back for a second to Otto Warburg? Some people may have heard that name. Can you just tell us a little bit about him? - Well, Otto Warburg studied cancer cells and tissues. And he made a fundamental observation that cancer cells throw out a large amount of lactic acid, which is a waste product of glucose fermentation. And what's more important, Warburg showed that you could grow cancer cells or slices of cancer tissue in 100% oxygen, because our normal environment is 21% oxygen. Most of the air that we all breathe is 21% oxygen. But they, he would take cancer cells and put them in 100% oxygen. And they would still ferment glucose. In other words, making lactic acid from glucose. They shouldn't do that. It's called a pasture effect from Lewis Pasteur's observation, from yeast, yeast and the absence of oxygen will ferment glucose making lactic acid. But if yeast cells are exposed to oxygen, they stop making lactic acid and they respire. Cancer cells have a defective pasture effect. They continue to ferment and make lactic acid even in the presence of 100% oxygen. He linked that. Why would a cancer cell continue to ferment in 100% oxygen? And he found out that because their mitochondria are defective, they can't switch back to oxidative phosphorylation. So they're locked into a fermentation metabolism because their mitochondria are defective. And that has been a stumbling lock because a lot of people said that up to this day until our paper just came out a couple of about a month ago, well, Otto Warburg was wrong because these cancer cells are taking in oxygen and they're making ATP, but at the same time, they're fermenting. Well, it turns out that they're taken in glutamine and they're fermenting glutamine out of a fermentation metabolism. So the other missing link and Otto Warburg's theory, which he didn't know about, was they've not only ferment lactic acid from glucose, they also ferment succs in the acid from glutamine. And that was the missing link and we have now identified that. And now we know to kill cancer cells, you must remove their fermentable fuels if you want to have complete success. And that's why people who go on ketogenic diets or metabolic therapies that don't target glutamine can have some success, but may not likely get a complete resolution of their disease, unless they also target the second fermentable fuel, which is glutamine. - Yeah, so first of all, Otto Warburg was a scientist in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s and did a bunch of awesome research, but yeah, I didn't have all the tools and you know, I didn't have everything we have today that now that you're doing some great research to figure this stuff out. - Yeah, but he was right. - He was right. - He was right. - Yes, he was right. So that's awesome. You guys just kind of confirmed he was right. And then I want to know more about glutamine and how to target that. You said earlier, we have some drugs now that can target glutamine, but the diet. - Yeah, glutamine is, unfortunately, there's no diet approach that you can do to remove glutamine can be synthesized from other molecules in the body. Glutamine is loaded in our muscles. This is one of the reasons why one of the reasons why cancer patients waste away from the cakexia. They seem to be, they're eating food, but they seem to be looking like they're starving. And that's because the cancer cells signal the muscles to release proteins, proteins have broken down to amino acids and glutamine is one of the major amino acids in muscle protein. And it's used directly by the tumor cells for energy through a fermentation mechanism. So you have to use a drug to prevent glutamine from entering the cancer cell and being used as an energy source. So there are some, there's a lot of steps in the glutamine pathway that can be targeted effectively. But there are drugs and there's a big industry right now trying to figure out which drugs are the best. We used an old drug called 6.5 diesone or lucine, Dawn, D-O-N for short, which blocks the metabolism of glutamine to glutamate inside the cell. And that kills that sloters these cells. You know, the drug had been used in the past, but never in conjunction with targeting glucose. So now we target glucose and glutamine and we get much, much better success. You have to be careful, though, because you can need to know that our immune system also uses the same fuel. so if I kill a lot. a tumor cells in somebody's body, I have to have an undertake or system to come in and pick up the corpses. It's like anything. If you slaughter a whole bunch, otherwise you get infections and disease just from dead bodies laying around. Well, the cells can do the same thing. If you kill a lot of cells quick, you know, they're laying around. They can cause an infection and you could die indirectly from other things. So you have an immune system that moves in and picks up dead corpses and does albs them, you know, naturally. This is the way our body works. So those same cells need the same fuel that the tumor cells need. So that's why you have to pulse the glutamine. You can't press it. You got to be very strategic in knowing how to target glutamine. Otherwise, you impair your own immune system and you could create an infection or a situation where you're not going to get full therapeutic benefit. Yeah. I've pressed pulse. What is that? We developed that as a strategy for annihilating tumor cells gradually over time without harm to the rest of the body. So we can press glucose really big because we can transition the body over to ketones. So we can push blood sugars down really, really low without harming the brain or the rest of the body. But then to target glutamine, once you're in the press on glucose, then you pulse the drugs to target glutamine because you want to kill and then you want to have your immune system come in and heal and then you want to kill again, but you want to do it with killing tumor cells, but you want to do it without paralyzing or immune system. So you got to know how to pulse and therefore we're working on this. This is called doses timing and scheduling. And once we figure that out, we'll have the pathway to resolution. We'll know exactly what we need to do and how to do it. Just requires some funds and it's hard to get money. As I said, it's very hard to get money to try to resolve the disease. You get massive amounts of money to study it, but you know, you know, what mutation is this and they're all relevant stuff, but you get a lot of money to do that. But if you say I have a strategy that can get rid of it, oh, well, it's such a complicated disease. You know, you can't do it. Not that complicated, it made it complicated. So all cancers are the same disease, whether you're a breast colon, brain, blood, whatever. They're all fermenting. There's no cancer cell that doesn't ferment. So you know, they're all the same disease and you can use the same strategy against all types of cancers. And this is another thing that holds back the field because people have the breast cancer foundations, the Susan Coleman, you have the brain cancer foundations, you have the colon cancer foundations, the lung cancer foundations. The problem is all the same disease. So we've separated cancer into a multitude of diseases because people think it's all different. No, it's all the same. So foundations ever got together. I call it the United Foundations of Cancer. They should all get together and say, listen, we're all suffering from the same biological problem. We need to all unite and we need to tell the federal government that this is a singular disease of energy metabolism. And it can be managed very effectively if people know that. And then I'm telling you, you're going to get the same kind of response that happened in the AIDS community when the gay population got together and demanded a resolution for their disease. And within a few short years, their age is no longer a life threatening condition. Absolutely. How do we do this? How do we help? I'm going to put this in the film. We got some footage with you, but we'd spread the word. We got to, well, people have to know, you know, and I know a little of a sudden you go out and say, hey, listen, your breast cancer foundation is no different from your brain cancer. Oh, well. People have built little communities around their particular disease. And you're telling them that, hey, your disease is no different than the other guys. And that also requires some unique thing. But I think you have somebody that knows how to talk to these people. You bring them all together and say, listen, guys, you know, get together. You want that you want a resolution to your disease. You've got to work together as as into move, move all the foundations together under a united foundation. They can all still have breast and colon and brain and all as others, but they all have to now work together because they have the same disease. Then you're going to start to see big changes because it's going to come from the grassroots. It's not going to come from the top medical schools. Yeah. So you think the most important resource we can do is on glutamine. Is that what's needed next? I think it's a combination of both because we're just entering the new world of how many ways you can kill cancer cells without harming the body. When you're locked into only toxic therapies like immunotherapy, a radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, you're not thinking that there is a total new world of ways to kill tumor cells that you don't have to use this because they're all based on cancer being a genetic disease. And once you realize that it's not a genetic disease, oh my stars, there's so many nifty and unique ways that you can deprive glucose and glutamine to these cells without harming the rest of the body. And that's where the new future is going to be. It's going to be in these really exciting non-toxic ways to kill cancer cells. But nothing is a panacea. You're going to have to realize people are going to have to take charge of their own health. They're going to have to participate significantly in the management of their disease. And it's going to have to be a change in the culture of how you view this disease and the ways you can use to both prevent and manage the disease. And that's the future. That's where it's going to be. Otherwise, we're going to be sitting here. There'll be some other guy sitting here talking to you. Not you talking at 100 years about the same crap that we've been listening through for the last 75 or 80 years. So something has to happen. If people are comfortable with 1,600 people a day dying from cancer, if they're comfortable with that, then stay the course. Don't do anything different there. Stay with the radiation chemo. And now we have this immunotherapy everybody's getting excited. They don't know that many people taking this are killed or get autoimmune diseases or you know, flat out killing people and causing financial toxicity, $400,000 to be treated with an immunotherapy. This is despicable. It's absolutely immoral be doing this kind of stuff. Yet this is where the field you go to any top medical school, immunotherapy, immunotherapy, PD1 inhibitors, CART, immunotherapy. This is all based on the gene theory. If the gene theory is wrong, then most of that stuff is not going to work. And you're going to pay all this money to be treated for cancer that doesn't, you don't have to, it's just nuts, it's phenomenal. And the poor people are the pawns in this whole thing. The cancer patients and their families are simply pawns in this whole, in this ridiculous absurdity that's going on in this field. That's sad. I wish they would just have these options. But being of the genetic theory being wrong, I just pulled up your paper from 2015, cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disease. And you did an experiment showing that it's not, it's a mitochondrial damage, not the tumor nucleus, the DNA. So can you explain that? It's pretty hard to explain. I'm looking at an image of four different cells. And can you please try to? Yeah, well, so it wasn't me who did these experiments. It was some of the most brilliant and distinguished developmental biologists in the field of science. I mean, these guys were all publishing in top scientific journals. They were the leaders, they are and still are the leaders in the field of developmental biology. It's just that they were not interpreting their results in light of two competing theories. Do my results better support the gene theory or do my results better support the mitochondrial metabolic theory? All I did was reevaluate their results in terms of two competing theories, which they never did. And they were struggling trying, some of the people who actually were looking at this and saying, "Hey, this is not consistent with the gene theory, but we don't know how to interpret the data." They had never heard about a warberg or didn't even know what he said. So I just reinterpreted the data in light of warberg's theory and in light of the somatic mutation theory. And when you do that, the results come out massively in support of the mitochondrial metabolic theory. So if you take the nucleus out of a cancer cell with all the mutations and put it into a new cytoplasm with normal mitochondria, you don't get cancer cells, even though you have the mutation still there. And then on the other hand, if I take the nucleus of a normal cell and put it into the cytoplasm of a tumor cell, I get cancer from the abnormal cytoplasm in the mitochondria. So this strongly shows and all different kinds of cancer cells, all kinds of colon cancer, breast cancer, all these different kinds of cancers. The results were coming out the same over and over again done in different labs by all kinds of different people across the world and they're coming out with the same kind of conclusion. So when you look at the data in that light, it just throws the whole somatic mutation theory under the bus. It can't, it's not, it cannot account. There was only one group at Harvard that said these findings are consistent without a warberg's central theory. But that was the only group. None of the other people even knew who warberg was or what he said. It's unbelievable, absolutely astonishingly unbelievable. So all I did was take the work of other people and reinterpret them in light of two competing theories because everybody thought cancer was a genetic disease, that was the only theory, that was the only explanation. And therefore their data didn't fit that theory and they didn't know what to say. So when you now throw the other theory in there, oh, my data completely support what out of warberg were saying, wow, wow, hey. So that's a hard pill to swallow for people in the thinking and what they don't even look at, they don't even want to talk about those data. Nobody talks about those data. You've got to ignore them. If you want to keep your job doing what you're doing, you ignore things like that because it's going to be too destabilizing to say that what I'm doing is not as is wrong. Yeah. Wow. I hope people could picture that what he was talking about, replacing the cells. Maybe you can hit that one more time. Just I always want to make sure people understand what you did and that's showing that it's a mitochondria. Oh, sorry, sorry. I keep saying that. Sorry. It's my fault. Yeah. What I did was take those same findings from law from a very broad range of investigators and evaluate them in light of an alternative explanation. And I allow the reader to ask themselves, what do they think about the results from these experiments in light of the two competing theories for the origin of the disease? Okay. In the past, they were never they were the results from those experiments were never evaluated in light of two competing theories. So you have a dramatic mutation theory which says cancer is derived from mutations in the nucleus. versus the mitochondrial metabolic theory, which says cancer is derived from abnormalities in the mitochondria and the respiratory energy control of the cell. So those are the two competing theories. And then you evaluate those nuclear transfer, mitochondrial transfer experiments, in light of the two competing theories. And most people who are logical and understand will say, no, the results more strongly support mitochondrial metabolic origin of cancer than a somatic nuclear gene mutation origin of cancer. And now, okay, so once you come to realize that, then it becomes clear why, indirectly, we have 1,600 people a day dying from cancer because they're being treated for a disease they think is coming from nuclear genetic damage when it's not. - Yeah, so here, let me try to this analogy with that wheelchair thing I was talking about earlier. So I'm looking at this diagram. I'll put it in the show notes, but there's four cells. So you have a normal cell. Let's say that that's someone who can walk. They have working legs, working mitochondria, the legs of the mitochondria, and then the chair is DNA nucleus. - Yeah, you have a normal nucleus and a normal mitochondria. And it's, so it's green, that's number one. - It's a normal person. - So normal cells get more green cells. Green cells get more green cells. - Number two, you have tumor cells, and they'd be get more tumor cells. So it's someone with damaged legs say, and then we'll say that the nucleus is the wheelchair. So they're in a wheelchair. They're still in a wheelchair a week later. Then you, number three, you take a healthy person, healthy mitochondria, healthy legs, you put them in a wheelchair. Okay, a week later, they can still walk, right? The wheelchair doesn't make them not walk. Okay, number four, now you have the damaged legs. So you have the paralyzed person, but you put them in a normal chair. Well, a week later, they still have damaged legs and they're still not walking and moving around because the chair wasn't the thing. It was the damage to their legs. - Yes, yes. - So that, I hope that makes a little clear. - Yeah, well, you can use that kind of an analogy. Other people use different kinds of analogies, but the bottom line is what's ultimately responsible for the dysregulated cell growth is that the abnormality in the mitochondria is that the abnormality in the nucleus because that's ultimately testing the theory. - Exactly. - And when you look at the results from those kinds of experiments, they support the idea that the disease is originating from the cytoplasm, mitochondria in the cytoplasm, or not from the mutations in the nucleus. - Exactly. It's a downstream effect. It's the wheelchair. - Yes. - Doesn't cause. - So this is even more disturbing because when you take people, you do punch biopsies of their tissue, needle biopsy. They get a gene readout, thinking that those genes are important for the diagnosis or therapy of your disease. Doesn't mean anything. It's complete waste of time and energy and you put that patient at risk by doing needle biopsy on them to get information that's largely irrelevant. So when you start to think of the implications of what those nuclear cytoplasm experiments actually mean, then you become shocked at what the field is actually doing in not knowing that information. So you put people at massive numbers of people at risk for spreading their cancer and treating them for things that they shouldn't poisoning them and radiate them, doing all these kind of crazy things because you don't understand the basic biology of the disease that you're treating. - It's insane. Well, okay. It's not only insane, it's the greatest tragedy in the history of medicine. Nothing before this has ever been as tragic as what we're dealing with right now. - I mean, I couldn't agree more. So before we go here, can you tell me what you mentioned caloric restriction as part of the ketogenic therapy? So what role does that play? - Well, that lowers blood sugar down big and allows your tissues to take up ketones in a big way. So all it does is a facilitator of therapeutic ketosis. And when you haven't eaten for several days, of course, it's very hard because people are addicted to glucose and removing your brain from glucose is just as hard as removing your brain from cocaine or nicotine or any of these addictive substances. But, you know, it's hard, but calorie, it's not calorie restriction. Calorie restriction in the mouse is not the same as calorie restriction in human. And notice to get the full benefit, you have to do water only, water only, therapeutic fasting, which means you drink only water. It's easier to do that after you've done a little keto for a while, get into therapeutic ketosis using fats, medium chain triglycerides, coconut oil, just a little bit. And then go water only, the transition. - Get fat adapted first. - Yeah, get a little fat adapted at first and the transition is not so rocky. Like, I tried going water only fasting for three days, man, I was, you know, I was getting a little, you know, I felt, I felt, it wasn't friend, it wasn't good. It's not great. Oh, I've 24 hours as long as I've ever done it. I have horrible, yeah. So it's not, it's not, it's no fun. It's uncomfortable. It's not fun, okay? I mean, it's, but it's here, that's good. (laughing) How do you do anything for several days? That's not good. But you know, at the end of the road, it's gonna be very healthy. But man, it's hard. It's like walking over a lane of hot rocks just so that when you get to the other side, you know, your bottoms, the soles of your feet are gonna be harder. I mean, it's just like, give me a break. So, yeah, it's hard. It's not, I'm not saying, it's easy, it's hard. But what is it about? Because you can restrict calories in many ways. Some people just eat it, they want to eat a normal diet and just eat less. But that is not the same. That the ketones, what's the difference? Yeah, well, you got to get into therapy. You got to use the GKI to know if you got to the promised land. Otherwise, you just don't know. So you can, you know, you can supplement with maybe some ketone esters or some medium chain triglyceride oils or some of these things. It might get you into a therapeutic ketosis better or faster. But you have to do the GKI and that could differ from one person to the next. I don't know what's good for you, may not be good for me and vice versa. I don't know. Everybody's a unique physiological entity. Otherwise, we'd all be exactly the same and we're not. And we're similar in a lot of ways, but we're not identical in every way. Even identical twins are not identical in some ways they view things. One's like, yeah, come in. I got a student. Are you sure? You're Jordan? Okay, I'll be with you in about a couple of minutes. Oh, yeah, do you have to go? I'll sit by the side. Yeah, yeah, I'll come and get you. So anyway, I have to go. I have students that are coming here today. Yeah, you're an active professor. Yeah, I mean, I have classes and students and all this. Well, so they come, they come here and get information. They need you. I've taken up your time. So the last thing, just to be sort of balanced on all this, what are people saying who are against this theory? Is there any holes in your theories? Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we have a phenomenon in the world. It's called a merchants of doubt and it was a very nice book written on that about the oil industry and the climate change. You know, these are people from the field like the American Medical Association or from, you know, different organizations that create doubt. So they'll say, well, you know, he's not right about certain things and these ketogenic diets could be harmful. You know, I'm not saying they can't. Yeah, if you pound down, nobody's gonna sit down and eat a tub of lard. Mm-hmm. You know, that might not be healthy, but you create doubt in the minds of others. And usually they're not scientific arguments. And if they are scientific arguments, then you have to show them the papers that they actually missed in building their argument. Like, fats, cancer cells live on fats. No, they don't. If you have to have a good mitochondria to burn fat. So if I look under the microscope and I look at a hundred different kinds of tumors and they all have defects in the mitochondria and you need a good mitochondria to burn fat, how in the hell is that cell gonna be able to burn fat when the very organelle is broken? That's supposed to burn the fat. Oh, I didn't see those papers. Well, if a crying out loud, you're supposed to be an expert in this field that you don't know the background material. So then you have to be able to have the answers. Now, I can't answer people who say that the things that I'm saying can't be right because there's no clinical trial. And there's not attacking the very foundation of what we're saying about the metabolic theory and the gene theory. There are targeting things that, well, if we're so right, how come everybody's not doing it? Well, that's not a logic. That's not a, that's just, that's something different than asking about the nuances of the science supporting what I'm saying. You know what I'm saying? So you have to have, yeah. So there are people who say everything I'm saying is erroneous and it could harm people. Put them at risk. I said, for what? Risk for what? You're telling me that a metabolic therapy is gonna be more risky than being nuked and poisoned? I mean, let's put, let's do it. Why would some wealthy people go into to have their cancer treatment and they die in two weeks from the therapy? That's what I call, that's what I call risk. But nobody's saying anything about that because they're using an immunotherapy and therefore the field has sanctioned immunotherapy as being the new treatments and yet people are being killed by an immunotherapy. That's inconscionable. You should never put anybody at risk for a therapy that could cause them their life and yet they're doing that. And then, right, look at these people that are being killed by immunotherapies and nobody's talking about that 'cause they don't read the literature. And that's the new panacea for cancer, right? Immunotherapies. That is gonna go down in a crash burn in the next several years anyway when they realize people can't afford it and those who do afford it end up dying sooner. Not all, of course there's gonna be some like a Jimmy Carter who's alive and you get a couple of guys that hype profile people do really well and say, oh, I'm gonna do that. Yeah, so people, just because they don't understand, they raised doubt, they wanna create doubt because God forbid we have to change the paradigm that we're using right now, which is extremely profitable for hospitals and industry. So there's gonna be a number of people that are gonna come out to raise doubt about all the stuff that I just told you. My argument is, okay, bring the science to me and we'll have a discussion, open discussion, let people come to their own decision about who can defend their turf better. So that's what we have to do, you know, and we'll continue to do that. I'm doing these experiments all the time. We get money from different private foundations [BLANK_AUDIO] us going, and the more money we get from private foundations and individual donors, the more we solidify our position and move the field in the right direction that it should be in, not in the direction that we're going right now, which is leading to 600 people a day dying every day from cancer. Yeah, let's support these foundations. We can find you. Yeah, so you can the Travis Christopherson's Metabolic Therapy Foundation. Travis, he's wrote the book "Tripping over the Truth." Yeah, yeah. The very popular book that outlines the tragedy and the misdirection of the cancer field. You know, George U, Dr. U, he's an oncologist, the George U Foundation, why you. He has a foundation that supports us. So, you know, we get different individuals CrossFit, Greg Glassman and his outfit there. They're very excited about this kind of stuff because they want to dovetail exercise into metabolic therapy, which will help large numbers of people stay healthy. That's correct. So, we get we're getting funds from from those kinds of organizations. And I think if people want to stay healthy and they think we're right, then they should, you know, support the foundations that support us. And we get grants through the university. I don't get money personally, it comes through the university. So, that keeps us going. Awesome. And that's where we're going. Awesome. We're not going. We're going to continue to. I believe, and I believe this is a feature. And yeah, I think your work will go down in history. This is it. This is the sort of cure for cancer that we've been looking for. Well, I don't want to use the word healers. I was hesitant to use the word cure too. Yeah, no, it's I would call it a logical management based on the biological underpinnings of the disease. Yes. Whether it cure somebody or not, I don't know. But it's not going to harm them. And it's going to probably give them longer life and a higher quality of the overall survival and progression free survival will be better. Whether it ultimately leads to a complete resolution is anyone's guess. But if you die at 90 years old from old age, and you had cancer when you were 35, you obviously probably were resolved. But, you know, we don't know that. And I don't make claims that we can cure cancer. All I can say is that our approach can give patients a better chance of living longer with a higher quality of life. And I'm convinced of that. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so much. I'm going to link to any presentations you've done and other stuff that people want to learn more and keep up to good work. And thank you. All right. Take it easy. No. Have you rated or reviewed this podcast on iTunes or your podcast app yet? If not, it's the freest and easiest way to support me. You can still get a copy of the food lives film on any go-go. And you can still follow food lives on social media where a lot is going on daily. Check out all the new highlight pieces on some of the experts interviewed for the film on YouTube. And until next time, eat densely and move intensely in my friends.