Starving Cancer: The Hidden Power of Food, Fasting, and the Body’s Inner Terrain - Transcript
Dr. Jason Fung
The most important thing we need to focus on is not the genetics of the problem. It's the soil problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive, for live q and a's exclusive content and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health.
You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. When you think about functional medicine and the approach you're taking, it's a very different model of thinking about cancer. So, yes, if you have a tumor or something, you might need to get it cut out or you might need radiation or you might need some chemo at some point.
But the question that never really gets asked is one, why did the cancer develop in the first place and how do I change those conditions? And two, how do I actually create a healthy immune system and a healthy soil to actually make sure that the cancer can't grow? And I and as a functional medicine doctor, I often say, we're very much like regenerative farmers where we focus on soil health Yeah. As opposed to industrial farmers, which use a lot of chemicals, pesticides, basically antibiotics, and any and glyphosate and herbicides to make the plant healthy. And I I remember being at this conference on nutrition.
I don't know why they invited me. It was all the big food companies, the big ag companies. I I was invited to give a talk, which I did, and I didn't hold back anything. Just but I'm sitting next to this guy at dinner. I'm like, so, you know, what do you do?
He says, well, I'm in plant medicine. Like plant medicine? I said, what is that? He said, well, we make pesticides.
Dr. Jason Fung
So Okay. Got it. So I think,
Dr. Mark Hyman
you know, this whole idea that you're bringing forth is so important. So talk about this analogy of the seed and the soil and cancer and why we're ignoring the soil conditions in the body and the environmental issues and diet and also lifestyle and stress and and environmental chemicals, all those factors.
Dr. Jason Fung
So the the idea of the seed in the soil actually goes way back. I mean, it was written about sort of, like, sixty, seventy years ago, but then, of course, somebody forgot about it because the point is that, you know, genetics, you know, this whole focus we had on finding mutations in genetics really talks about the seed. Right? It doesn't talk about the environment that you're in. And the if you have a seed, of course, it it has the ability to grow, but it needs the right conditions, the proper soil to grow.
And what we always seem to not talk about is how certain populations that live a sort of traditional lifestyle almost never get cancer, like, other than the ones that we know that are, say, virally caused. But if you go back so Dennis Burkett was this sort of legendary Irish surgeon, and he went down to Africa and, you know, he discovered Burkett's lymphoma and stuff. And it's a very interesting story, but, you know, he looked at these, Africans who were eating a traditional diet, living a traditional lifestyle, and he said, boy, these people just don't get cancer. And the whites, of course, were getting colorectal cancer at the same rate as they were in The UK, for example.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Dr. Jason Fung
And so they called these things diseases of civilization. So obesity, type two diabetes, and cancer would come as people change their lifestyle. And you see this actually all over the world. So the Inuit in the Far North, they some people used to call them Eskimos. So, again, eating a traditional diet, very high in, say, you know, animals, you know, whale meat and seal blubber and stuff.
That's their traditional diet. They never get those cancers that we get. I mean, they get some viral cancers, but they don't get, like, colorectal cancer, breast cancer. In fact, the university in Ontario, Canada, used to send an expedition to the Arctic Circle sort of every year to find out why these people were immune. But, of course, they weren't actually immune because as soon as in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, they changed their lifestyle to Western sort of lifestyles with the sort of bread and sugar and all that sort of processed foods that we ate, then you started to see all the cancer.
So clearly, it wasn't a genetic problem because the gene pool of these Africans or these NMA were not changing, but it was the soil that and and it comes back, of course, to diet and lifestyle, which is the most important thing because that's the main thing that's changing and these people come over. That is what is the the biggest determinant of cancer. You know, these they go from being considered immune to cancer Yeah. To high rates of cancer. Of course, they're eating sugar all the time.
Right? There's tons of smoking, all this other stuff. And and you see this everywhere. So you see this, say, in Japan where you can look at a Japanese woman in Japan compared to a Japanese woman in San Francisco. And, of course, the person in San Francisco has about double or triple the rate of breast cancer compared to Japanese women in Japan.
So it's like so this is clear evidence that the most important thing we need to focus on is not the genetics of the problem. It's the soil problem. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
The Yeah. And I love my favorite story is the Polish women who are from Poland eat 30 pounds of sauerkraut a year, and they have almost no breast cancer. And it affects their microbiome because it's a pre pre probiotic food. Plus cabbage has all sorts of phytochemicals that fight cancer. And though when they move to United States, they get cancer at the same rates as American women because they stop eating all the sauerkraut.
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. Absolutely. And these are the things that are really important because if you can figure it out, of course, then you have the ability to do the opposite. You could take a woman in San Francisco and cut her risk of breast cancer by a factor of two or three. Imagine how amazing that would be.
I mean, with genetics and all this stuff, we're talking about, you know, you're making progress in inches compared to diet and lifestyle where you're talking about huge leaps and jumps. Like, they're not talking about ten percent higher risk. In medicine, how we go, Oh, it's statistically significant. There's a ten percent lower risk. It's like, Oh, these people never get cancer.
Right? It's crazy the magnitude of them correctly you can get. What? On the other hand
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like ten percent is two hundred or three hundred percent. Right? It's like a totally different yeah.
Dr. Jason Fung
It's a totally different order of magnitude, and yet we focus all of our sort of resources on saying, oh, let's figure out, you know, this genetic condition, which might affect, like, one percent of these cancer patients and science. It's like, Let's let's let's let's try and figure out the other stuff. Like, what is it? Is it sugar? Is it pro is it, you know, fermented foods?
Is it processed foods? Like, what is that? Because that's so important, but unfortunately, it gets so little sort of research money and, you know, you you we start talking if people people want the other stuff. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
So people are listening and wondering, okay. This whole soil thing makes sense. Right? You wanna create a hostile environment for cancer to grow. How do we build that hostile environment instead of a fertile one that most of us got for cancer?
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. That's a great question. And so I talk about in the book about, like, what is it that makes cells grow? And what's really important is sort of growth factors, or our body contains natural growth factors that increase the rate of growth. And one of the big things of the last sort of fifteen, twenty years has been the realization that our body contains nutrient sensors, which are hormones that go up when you eat, but they also are precisely the same hormones that our body uses as growth factors.
So the most important one is insulin. Insulin, of course, is a well known, you know, metabolic hormone. So you eat and insulin goes up. You know, assuming you're eating carbohydrates and protein sort of a mixed meal, you eat insulin goes up. But more importantly, what it is, it's a nutrient sensor.
It tells your body that food is available. And the reason that's important is because your body only wants to grow when nutrients are available. Right? So you don't want more cells to continue to grow if there's no food available. That's not a good survival strategy.
So the body links them. In fact, if you look back in evolutionary times, insulin was not a metabolic hormone. It was actually a growth factor. When as we evolved, we actually used the same molecule that we use as a growth factor for nutrient signaling as well. So we know that insulin is a very common growth factor.
There's this thing called insulin like growth factor or IGF-one. Walter Longo actually described this this group of Ecuadorian dwarfs, the Laron dwarfs, who actually have almost no IGF one, so they're very short. Turns out they're also immune to cancer because if you don't have that growth signaling, then the cells can't grow, and the cells that are gonna be the most affected are those cancer cells. So what you have to do, course, is say that, okay, if we have too much insulin, then that's going to be a signal to our body that we need to grow. So what can you do to sort of reduce that insulin signaling in the body by reducing nutrient availability?
Which is two things. One is getting rid of the hyper processed foods, which tends to really amplify the insulin response. So sugar, for example, is especially because it causes all this insulin resistance, which causes hyperinsulinemia. A lot of the refined foods are very bad because they sort of take away all the other natural components, you're left with this big spike of insulin. Like if you eat cookies, for example, well, your insulin is just going to spike up.
And the other thing, of course, is if you eat very, very frequently, you're going to keep insulin high all the time. So intermittent fasting is another strategy that you could use to produce insulin.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's- So it's what you
Dr. Jason Fung
eat and when you eat. Yeah, exactly. So it's what you eat and when you eat, because if you eat a high carbohydrate diet, which people did, like people in China, for example, used to eat a ton of white rice, but almost zero sugar, and they were okay. So it's not necessarily just the carbohydrates.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, they they I I lived in China for a while. You're a Chinese I mean, I traveled around I remember 1984. I mean, they they they had no accoutrements of modern living. I mean, they they had to cut a board. They would use a saw to create boards.
They they would to grind the flour, they would, like, literally walk in circles for hours with the grain in between two giant stones. They would work in the fields for fourteen hours a day with hard labor. And, yeah, you can eat a lot of rice if you do the cuts.
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. That's true. And and it's also, like, it was very it was like rice and vegetables. Like, every day, it was just rice and vegetables, rice and vegetables. And then
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, the the the land of milk and honey, the Chinese phrase for it, is the land of fish and rice. So it's really what they think of. Yeah. Yeah. So so so you're talking about what is the problem, which is the incredibly high amount of starch and sugar we consume, and you've talked about this in the diabetes code, the obesity code.
This is a central driver of almost all chronic Western diseases. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, high blood pressure are caused by this phenomena of insulin resistance or too much insulin, which is driven from our diet, basically a highly refined processed carbohydrate diet, and also this constant eating pattern, this thing called snacking, which I think is a modern invention. We can have a snack food industry. But, I mean, I don't snack. If you eat properly, you're never hungry.
I mean, you don't have these spikes and insulin going up makes you hungry. But what's fascinating is that what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer growth.
Dr. Jason Fung
So all of these diseases are actually diseases of too much insulin. So if you look at obesity, for example, and if you were to measure the levels of insulin, people who are more overweight tend to have higher insulin, same with type two diabetes. Hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are really sort of two sides of the same coin. So one causes the other, sort of hyperinsulinemia can cause insulin resistance, insulin resistance can cause hyperinsulinemia. So they're really the same thing.
And again, the same thing applies to sort of cancer. And this is the pattern that was noticed so many years ago, that there are these diseases of sort of too much insulin, which is that sort of they all go together, the heart disease, and you don't see that in people eating traditional diets because they're not eating all the time. So I remember there was a study, this NHANES study, which is a big sort of American survey of lots of things that they included dietary habits. So in 1977, they found that most people ate three times a day, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And by 2004, was on was up to six times a day.
Right? So it's like, wow. That's crazy. And it was never this sort of deliberate, hey. There's good scientific evidence that we should eat six times a day.
It just sort of crept in there. And I think part of it was, of course, the stack of companies wanting to promote it, and, you know, people thought it was a good idea. So then there was this sort of it became almost gospel. Oh, you have to eat six months a day. Right?
And and I remember thinking about it a while ago and thinking, where did that sun feast music? Did we have a big randomized controlled trial that I miss so hell? Because I don't It think was just this gradual change in attitudes. And you saw it because I start to think back to my upbringing in the seventies. Right?
So I grew up in the seventies. And, you know, if you wanted a sort of after school snack, your mom said, no. You're gonna ruin your dinner. Right? And if you want a bedtime snack, your mom would say, no.
You shoulda ate more at this. And it's like, that's just the way it was. And, of course, people would have this sort of natural fasting period from after dinner, which was, say, 06:00, because people ate a bit earlier back then, to, like, say, 08:00. So fourteen hours of fasting every single day without even
Dr. Mark Hyman
We call that breakfast.
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. Exactly.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Breaking the fast.
Dr. Jason Fung
Breaking the fast. That is the word that we use, and it's like somehow we sweat from that where people didn't have the obesity problems, like your diabetes problems, because they have this natural fasting period built in that has always been there. It's even built into the English language, and then it's like, oh, you gotta eat all the time. And it's like, oh, you can't ever skip your breakfast. You gotta snack all the time.
Right? You see it in schools, for example. Oh, they go to school. They get a mid morning snack. Then they have a lunch, and then they have their after meals, and then they have their dinner.
Then, you know, you're playing soccer and they think that they need to have a snack in between the halves of soccer. You know, I play
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, Jason, you've written a lot about you've written a lot about fasting and and the effects of either time restricted eating, which is, you know, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hour fast every day, or taking a twenty four, thirty six hour fast a week or even longer fast for diabetes. And and and I'd love you to sort of share why around cancer this is so important. And, on my podcast soon, we're gonna have doctor Patrick Hanaway, who's my colleague and friend, who was the medical director at Cleveland Clinic, who had cancer and used fasting as an approach to his cancer treatment. He still got radiation, but he also did it in a way that actually reduced all the side effects to almost none, has kept him healthy now for well over a year, his cancer was not a great one, and let him go through the process with really no issues, which was really staggering and and really went on a ketogenic diet in order to do that, which is both using fasting and ketogenic diets to drop insulin levels to almost undetectable. So can you talk about this whole idea of fasting cancer or ketogenic diets, why it's so important, and how it connects to this whole idea of insulin resistance and insulin high insulin levels?
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. So both fasting and ketogenic diets have the same sort of goal at the end, which is trying to lower insulin. Because the difference between a ketogenic diet, say, and a low carb diet is that you're sort of low carb, ultra low carb for the keto, but sort of moderate protein because protein can also stimulate insulin, whereas some of the older low carb diets were very high in protein. You take protein shakes or whatever. Is.
That's why don't know. Yeah. Like Atkins. And so That's a good idea. Protein is not always the best idea because you can get high insulin, but you also get this high mTOR, which is sometimes not so good for cancer as well.
But the idea is to really drop your insulin levels. If these are diseases of too much insulin, then that's going to be a very useful adjunct treatment. So fasting is actually fascinating because there's all these different things we're discovering. So one of the things is sort of autophagy. So as you fast, of course, your nutrient sensors go down, so mTOR insulin go down, and then you activate this process called autophagy where you actually start to break down some of your subcellular organelles and stuff.
So, basically, your your body is just trying to clean house. Well, and
Dr. Mark Hyman
Pac Man coming around and cleaning up all the garbage.
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. Exactly. So it's and people think it's a bad thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Maybe don't people know who Pac Man was, but that was the original video game that Bell played back in the seventies, and it's pretty simple. Awesome. Exciting, though.
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. And
Dr. Mark Hyman
we know what Pac Man is anymore.
Dr. Jason Fung
People still find themselves. But the yeah. The idea is that people think that this sort of breakdown process is really bad for you, but it's actually really good for you. And in fact, it's sort of one of the keys to rejuvenating the body, that is you want to break down all your old stuff and then sort of rebuild the old stuff that you need. So the whole idea of fasting is you're trying to put the body into this sort of regenerative maintenance mode.
Because what we've recognized over the last day a bit is that your body sort of has sort of you know, you can go into growth mode or you can go into sort of the cell maintenance repair mode, and it really depends on your nutrients availability. When nutrients are available, you want to grow. When nutrients are not available, you don't wanna grow, and you wanna go into this sort of maintenance repair mode. And everybody thinks growth is good, but growth is not always good, especially as an adult. So I always say, think about a car.
It's like if you have a sports car and you rev that engine and you're running it fast all the time, you're gonna go fast, which is great, but it's gonna burn out much faster. So you can't just keep revving that engine, keep redlining it. You've got to sometimes bring it to the shop, put it in the garage, let it rest, and all this stuff.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Pit stop.
Dr. Jason Fung
Yeah. Exactly. A little pit stop. So so that's the point of the human body too. You can either go for growth or you can go for longevity or cellular maintenance repair, but you gotta you gotta have a bit of both.
It's a it's a balance there. It's not all growth, and this is where you say, oh, Well, you're gonna put your body, your nutrient sets are gonna go up, your growth factors are gonna go up. You're gonna put yourself in growth mode, but you don't wanna do that, especially for a disease such as cancer, which is a disease where cells are growing too much. You're basically feeding into that growth, and that's gonna be very, very bad for you. What you do instead is you do the fasting and you put your cells into this sort of maintenance care mode.
And that actually allows you to undergo both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better. Because chemotherapy, we have a couple studies on fasting and chemotherapy where what you do is you fast sort of just before and during and just after your chemotherapy. And what they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from treatment because what you've done, of course, is taken the cells of your normal body and you sort of put them into a more quiescent state. They're not trying to grow. They're actually trying to slow down.
And chemotherapy, the general way it works is it kills the fastest growing cells, which are usually the cancer cells. But it also kills, like, the hair follicles because they're fast growing cells. It kills the lining of the GI tract, so you get nausea and your hair falls out. So if you can put those cells into sort of a quiescent sort of repair mode, it's not gonna sustain as much damage from the chemotherapy. And instead, these cancer cells, which can't stop their growth, they're always trying to grow, they can't do that.
So therefore, they're going to sustain full damage from the chemotherapy while your body is relatively protected. Now there are many root causes of cancer. Depends on the person, genetics, and everything they're exposed to throughout their lifetime. Something called
Dr. Mark Hyman
we call the exposome. But chronic inflammation is one of the most common drivers of cancer. Now this is chronic sterile inflammation, not infection. And it could be why cancer is on the rise in younger people. The development and the progression of cancer, it happens downstream of chronic low grade inflammation.
So how does that work? How does chronic inflammation drive cancer? Well, it creates a microenvironment that supports tumor development, tumor growth, and tumor progression. In other words, metastasis. Inflammatory mediators, things like cytokines, they promote DNA damage.
They inhibit something called apoptosis, which is basically programmed cell death, getting rid of damaged cells. So it stops the process of actually getting rid of all the cells that are gonna turn to cancer. It also enhances angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels that supply tumors with blood and nutrients for growth, which they need. Otherwise, they die if they have no blood supply. Inflammation processes can also cause changes to your DNA through something called epigenetic modifications.
If you eat bad food and junk food and ultra processed food, you're going to be silencing something called the tumor suppressor genes. Genes that suppress cancer. Or even worse, you're gonna be activating genes that cause cancer called oncogenes. Oncology is cancer. Oncogenes are cancer causing genes.
These are genetic mutations that turn on tumors, and it's caused by what we're eating. And that further promotes cancer development. Alright. So let's back up a little bit and go into what causes chronic inflammation. So many things.
First, living in our modern world, just being alive today is an inflammatory state. We have a constant exposure to environmental toxins, things that we never had before, like PFAS chemicals, bisphenol A or BPA, microplastics, and the list goes on and on. We're gonna get into some more of those. Poor diet or ultra processed diet or sedentary lifestyle. The open prescribing of drugs, just aging itself causes higher risk, leaky gut, food sensitivities, food allergies, hormone imbalances, and more all these potentially drive inflammation.
Now Hippocrates once said that all disease begins in the gut. And for the purpose of this conversation, we're gonna follow his advice and start in the gut. So how do imbalances in your gut microbiome lead to cancer? Now this is really fascinating stuff. It's cutting edge stuff.
So you're not hearing about this everywhere, but we're gonna get into it A healthy gut contains a whole diverse population of bugs, of microorganisms that play key roles in your digestion, in a nutrient absorption, and your immune function. Why? Because 60% of your immune system lives in your gut. It's right underneath the lining of your gut. Why?
Because you're exposed to the outside world and it's trying to protect you from all the bad stuff inside your gut, which is poop and food. Now good gut bacteria make something called postbiotics. You've heard of prebiotics like fiber or probiotics like lactobacillus, but there's something called postbiotics. These are molecules, metabolites of bacteria in your gut, and they can be good or bad. So they're called postbiotics, and they're made by what you're eating and feeding the bacteria in your gut.
Now there's a lot of them, but some of them are really important in regulating cancer. For example, butyrate is a anticancer compound made by your microbiome when you have good bugs in there. It also make other compounds like acetate and propionate. These are metabolized that are produced by bacterial fermentation of fiber and all the polyphenols, all those colorful compounds in veggies and fruits that supports the integrity of the gut lining. And the gut lining is so important because without healthy gut lining, basically, all that poop and food is leaking into your bloodstream and causing your immune system to go crazy.
Now these are metabolites. They're called short chain fatty acids. They have anticancer properties. They regulate our immune system. They help fight inflammation.
And when there's a good balance of these microorganisms, that's great. But when that balance is disrupted, it leads to an overgrowth of the bad bacteria and a reduction in the beneficial bacteria. So it's like getting weeds in your garden. The good plants, they get crowded out by the bad weeds. Right?
And bad bacteria are bad because they release poisons, toxins. We call them endotoxins. That just means an internal toxin. And those endotoxins get into your system through a leaky gut, and they also cause a leaky gut, and they cause inflammation. And the imbalances in your gut microbiome that cause this problem is called dysbiosis.
Now dysbiosis can compromise the integrity of the gut lining. It makes you have a leaky gut and leads to something called increased intestinal permeability, and the the basic lay term is leaky gut. Now, basically, think about your gut as one cell lining that protects you from the outside world. And the cells are stuck together like Legos. They're they have something called tight junctions.
When those are damaged, which happens because of bad gut bacteria and all our processed food and emulsifiers and additives and all this crap, you separate these cells, and and then the food and bacteria can leak in between the cells and get into your bloodstream. And then right underneath your gut lining is your immune system. So that's why this is such a big deal. And when you have this leaky gut, it allows toxins and undigested food particles and and and pathogens, bacteria to enter the bloodstream, and your body is like, wow. This is not me.
That leads to an overactive immune system and chronic inflammation throughout the body. It affects everything, not just cancer, but everything. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, literally everything. Autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, autism, ADD, depression, the list goes on and on and on. And we're talking about cancer here.
Now the immune system responds to these foreign substances by what? By doing what it's supposed to do. It's like, this ain't me. It triggers an inflammatory response. So it's bad when you have bad bugs.
And most of us have bad bugs in our gut. So how does this standard American diet, the SAD diet, disrupt our gut microbiome? Well, it's because it's so rich in bad stuff like ultra processed foods, which are energy dense, and they but they contain a lot of other stuff like added sugars, sweeteners, refined grains, bad fats, toxins, actual literal toxins, chemical additives, preservatives, PFAS, phthalates, things that are just poisons that damage the gut. Now this feeds and grows the bad bacteria, and it reduces something called bacterial diversity. You want an ecosystem like a rainforest, complex, diverse, resilient.
You don't want a monocrop cornfield that can go out just like that with some adversity, and we are having a low bacterial diversity in our modern world. Now beneficial bacteria, the good ones, like bifidobacteria, lactobacilli, achromanxia, bacilli bacterium, and rosuberia, They're lower. I mean, you have to remember all those names, by the way. I'm just telling you because it's all the bugs that are the good ones. You can get to know them if you want.
They're nice, actually. But they're lower in abundance when you have a Western diet. So when you have all these bad foods, you all the good bugs go down, and you get less of these good short chain fatty acids, less of these good anticancer compounds that your gut naturally produces. Now in in the other hand, when you eat this processed diet, it increases the abundance of something called pro inflammatory bacteria. These like ruminococcus, proteobacteria, which produce pro inflammatory compounds called LPS.
LPS stands for lipopolysaccharides. Doesn't really matter. Basically, these are like poisons. And these bacteria produce these poisons, and they get into the system. They leak in, and they start creating an inflammatory response.
Now we can look at the gut in many ways, and I've seen so many stool tests. They used to call me doctor c every poop at my old job at Canyon Ranch because I looked at every stool test. And we look at a lot of different factors. We can look at levels of bacteria. We can look at levels of short chain fatty acids.
We can look at ratios of good and bad bacteria. But there's a ratio of something called Firmicutes to Bacteroides. When you have a high ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroides in the these are basically categories of bacteria. It is is linked to obesity and diabetes and metabolic disease. But a high ratio has also been seen with breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and it's really important to consider as a broader picture of the overall microbial diversity and the your individual health and genetics.
Now in a study that was titled intake of sugar and food source of sugar and colorectal cancer risk in the multiethnic cohort study, blah blah blah, whatever. They like these long names. The researchers noted that total sugar, total fructose, glucose, and fructose, and maltose, all different kinds of sugar, were associated with an increased risk for colorectal cancer, especially younger people. Now this is interesting because colorectal cancer is the number one cause of cancer death among men 50 and the number two leading cause of cancer death in young women. Now this isn't static.
It's increasing by about one to two percent a year in adults 55. There's also a strong link between type two diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, and risk for colorectal, hepatic, pancreatic, breast, endometrial, and lots of other cancers. Now there's something else that's really important here, which is we're all metabolically unhealthy. And there's an enormously strong link between type two diabetes, prediabetes, obesity, and the risk for so many cancers that are most common cancers, like colorectal cancer, liver or hepatic cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, endometrial or uterine cancer, and many other cancers. In fact, forty eight percent of all cancers are attributed to obesity, but I think the the number is probably a lot higher.
And obesity, if you're overweight, is a search for the forty percent greater risk of early onset colorectal cancer. That's from the Journal of Gastroenterology. Forty five percent of adults 59 and younger are obese. So a lot of people are at risk. And studies show that diabetes significantly increases the risk of cancer and that lots of people who have cancer have a high incidence of diabetes.
Now get this. Up to eighty percent of pancreatic cancer patients actually have type two diabetes or prediabetes or impaired glucose tolerance when they're diagnosed. This is a deadly cancer. It's caused by our diet. So what else do chronic diseases have in common?
Well, insulin resistance. That's what we've just been talking about. And you've heard me talk about it forever. I'm going keep talking about it because it's the cause of everything. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia.
So how does insulin resistance relate to cancer? Well, insulin is responsible for keeping our blood sugar balanced and stable. Now insulin is a growth hormone. It causes your fat cells to grow. It causes your belly to grow, but it also binds to and causes cancer cells to grow.
So eating a high sugar, high starch, high glycemic diet causes our cells to become resistant to the effects of insulin. And what does that do? Well, that leads your it produces more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. Now these high levels of insulin or what we call hyperinsulinemia increases the production of another molecule called IGF one. That sounds for insulin like growth factor one.
And it's a hormone that increases cell division, cell growth, and inhibits autophagy or cellular cleanup. Now sometimes it's good. It's like Goldilocks. But when you have high levels of I g f one from all this sugar, it basically causes cells to continue to grow and divide and prevents them from being killed. Okay?
Now high blood sugar is present in thirty nine to ninety nine percent of cancer cases. And that leads to insulin resistance, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation of the body. It also creates something called advanced glycation end products or AGES. Now glycation is a chemical reaction. You're familiar with it.
When your chicken skin is crispy or your bread has a crust on it or when you get that creme brulee thing, it's got that crispy thing on top. That's called glycation. It's when sugar and proteins or other fats bind together and form this basically compound called AGES or advanced glycation end products. When these glycated products bind to DNA, they bind to proteins and lipids, it causes something called the Mallard reaction, the browning reaction. You've seen this.
But the problem is these accumulate in our tissue, and they when they bind to something called RADS receptors for advanced glycation end products, when they bind to those receptors, it activates a whole inflammatory cascade, and that accelerates not only cancer, but also aging itself. And there's lots of sources of ages in our diet. We actually eat them on a regular basis. Right? Ultra processed food is a big source.
Dry heat processing is is a one way. Baked goods, cooking at high temperatures, brown, charred, fried, burnt foods. These ages create damage to your blood vessels. They cause oxidative stress. They reduce blood flow.
They cause damage to your DNA, to your tissue, to your mitochondria. They're just bad. Now you can kind of measure this in the blood by something called hemoglobin a one c, which is essentially glycated hemoglobin. It's it's your hemoglobin which you can measure easily in your blood and see how much sugar is bound to it. And that kind of gives you a rough idea.
There's also an amazing new test called the insulin resistance score from Quest, which allows you to get a really good read on your degree of insulin resistance and how bad it is because hemoglobin A1c is is a late stage phenomenon. And it's great that you can do this test now. And through Function Health, the company I cofounded to allow you access to your own lab data through, you know, just going directly to a Quest lab and getting your data, Very simple process. You can go to functionhealth.com forward /mark to learn and sign up. But the insulin resistance score is really important because it really tells you what your risk is.
Now the the test we commonly use in medicine now to look at glycation is called hemoglobin a one c. And if it's 6% or higher, it's associated with a high cancer risk in both diabetics and nondiabetics. And even a lower level may be a problem. We find that even levels down to five are probably optimal, but anything over five, you're starting to increase your risk for heart disease and other things. So the cutoffs we have in medicine are arbitrary.
We say six, it's six and a half, used to be 5.7, this prediabetes, 5.5. I mean, it's it's all a moving target because, you know, we're finding that at lower and lower levels, there's a problem. So, basically, you want your hemoglobin a c as low as possible. Let's look at another big factor that causes cancer, fructose. Now fructose is something found in fruit, which is good, but it's not fruit we're talking about here.
Epidemologic or population studies, which don't prove cause and effect, but they found strong associations between high fructose intake from sources like high fructose corn syrup and increased risk of pancreatic and colon cancers. You have to realize we never had this stuff in our food supply until the seventies. There was no high fructose corn syrup. Now it's about 50% of our calories. It's in everything, and it's got not fifty fifty fructose and glucose like sugar.
It might have 55 to 75% fructose, which has all these adverse effects, and it's free fructose. Now there's something called the fructose transporter, and this is called GLUT five. You thought about your glutes. It's called GLUT five. And it's overexpressed in cancers like pancreatic, colorectal, breast lung cancer.
Now when you have high GLUT five expression, it basically allows for increased in intake or uptake of fructose by cancer cells. And what does that do? That makes them grow because they they love the sugar. It caused them to move migrate and move around, meaning starting to spread and invasion, meaning metastases. So where are we getting high fructose levels in our diet?
It's not from fruit. It's from added sugars and sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and fructose as sweeteners that are in all the ultra processed food we eat. I mean, it's 60% of our diet is ultra processed food. So fructose in high fructose corn syrup in all food ads is bad. So what else could be causing cancer that's in our sad diet?
Well, food additives. Over 10,000 chemicals are allowed in the food we eat in The United States. 10,000. And here's what's shocking. 99% of the food chemicals that have been introduced to our food supply since 2000 were approved not by the government, not by the FDA, but approved by the food and chemical companies that made them.
It's like the fox guarding the henhouse. Right? Since 2000, 756 new food chemicals have been added to our food supply to a loophole in the law called GRAS, g r a s. It stands for generally recognized as safe. So it seems like, oh, it seems like it's safe.
Well, it doesn't seem to be killing anybody right now, so let's just put in the food supply. Now this grass loophole is a big deal. Food chemical companies exploit this loophole, allowing them to make their own safety determinations for substances that they say they say are generally recognized as safe. Now the 1958 Food Addams Amendment intended for rigorous FDA review. Meaning, if you wanna add some new chemicals to the food, the FDA has to review the science on this.
But this GRAS loophole basically has become the main approval route. You basically take the company's word for it that it's safe. How crazy is that? Right? When a company determines a substance is GRAS, it means they think it's safe among, quote, qualified experts.
So they get a gotcha experts they pay or they say it's safe, and then they submit a notice to the FDA. But the process is entirely voluntary. And the FDA can review these notices and issue a, quote, no questions letter, but it doesn't actually approve these substances or even affirm the company's safety data. So there's all this crap on our food that got in there without any real oversight. Now due to this loophole, harmful ingredients have been added and continue to be added to our food supply.
Let me give an example. Seven carcinogenic flavor ingredients were approved as GRAS by FEMA. This is the flavor and extract manufacturers association, not a government group, an industry trade group. This is a group that reviews and approved nearly all flavor ingredients. But these ingredients were later banned in 2018 after a petition by the environmental working group for being linked to cancer in animals.
Now I'm on I'm on the board of the environmental working group, so I've been part of this. I get it. It's really bad. Now food additives are commonly used to enhance the flavor of baked goods, ice cream, candy, chewing gum, beverages, all kinds of stuff. And they got weird chemical names, benzophenone, ethylacrylate, pyridine, styrene.
Do you have these in your company at home that you cook with? I doubt it. Right? The term flavor is this vague label that food manufacturers use to hide chemical names from consumers. It's deliberate.
And say it's got natural flavorings, artificial flavorings, blah blah blah. You don't even know what it is. Right? A lot of other grass substances which are not approved in other countries include BHA, which is classified as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen by the National Toxicology Program. Right?
BHT or butylated hydroxytyloin. Would you put that in your salad? It's in everything. And that has been determined to disrupt endocrine function by causing change to thyroid and also affects animal development and fetal development. Now BHT is in everything.
It's in cereal, chewing gum, potato chips, vegetable oil, baked goods, cakes, biscuits, crackers, pastries, everywhere. And it's banned in Europe. We're gonna get to that in minute. There's another thing we have to think about with food, which are the toxins in food, pesticides. So and all other toxins.
So how do you avoid those? Well, avoid processed and packaged foods. All that BPA is in the plastics, in the cans, in the packaging, phthalates, the forever chemicals, PFAS, microplastics that leach into our food from packaging, from the manufacturing processes. It's in our water, in our soil. Make sure you filter your water.
In fact, Consumer Reports tested food products for phthalates, which is one of these toxic chemicals, from 67 grocery stores and 18 fast food chains and found that levels vary dramatically. Some of the worst offenders for having these chemicals were Coca Cola, Fairlife, Core Power, high protein milkshakes, SlimFast, Yoplait, Wendy's crispy chicken nuggets, Chipotle, and Moe's Southwest chicken grilled chicken burrito, Burger King Whopper, Cheerios, and the list goes on.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
In cancer, there is some defect in the ability of the mitochondrion in the cell to produce energy, which is the way most of our cells get energy. I mean, we breathe oxygen, and oxygen is a form of serves as the final common acceptor of electrons in our mitochondria to generate energy through oxidative phosphorylation. And he said that's broken in cancer. And in order for me to just
Dr. Mark Hyman
hold on for a sec. What he basically said was in order for us to produce energy in ourselves, most of us combine oxygen with sugar in this kind of chemical reaction down assembly line called oxidative phosphorylation. It's kind of the normal way you produce energy from food, and it's through glucose primarily and and oxygen. So that's what that's what you're talking about. Yeah.
Yeah.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
So so we we we bring we bring glucose into the cell or or other foods that would be broken down into either into glucose or acetyl CoA, which is the end product of the glycolytic pathway. Pyru so the the cell brings in glucose. There's a 10 step pathway called glycolysis, the old Emden Meyerhof Porent's pathway. And then the pyruvate, which is this three carbon derivative of glucose, is then enters into the mitochondria and is fully oxidized to produce significant amounts of energy with the key waste products being water and c o two. So every time we exhale, we're exhaling the waste products of food metabolism, which are which is c o two and and and the moisture water.
We can develop urine from combining with amino acid breakdown products. So it's a very highly efficient highly highly energy efficient system. But Warburg was saying that cancer cells have a defect in their mitochondria, and that defect is compensated for by a upregulation of these ancient glycolytic fermentation. So glycolysis is present in all of our cells. The problem is when the mitochondria become defective, the end product of glycolysis, pyruvic acid, is no longer entering the mitochondria, but is being diverted to lactic acid, a waste product of the glycolytic pathway, and that acidifies the cancer microenvironment.
So cancer then becomes a a a a a a disease of cells that proliferate with instead of producing oxygen o two and water, they're producing lactic acid as a waste product. So and and Warburg noticed that all the major cancers that he studied were blowing out large amounts of this lactic acid. And and he said I
Dr. Mark Hyman
just add on what accumulates in your muscles when you overexercise. It causes
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
Exactly. Exactly. But they but that then that deficit is made up as soon as the oxygen can be the muscles can be oxygenated, they go back to respiring. So the muscles have a a capacity that when oxygen becomes deficient from overuse of muscles, the muscle will then use the local glucose to produce massive amounts of quick energy with the waste product of lactic acid, which goes back into the bloodstream in exercised folks, and the lactic acid goes to the liver and is created back to glucose, and that's the Chlori cycle. And Sol and Gertie Corie received the Nobel Prize for their for their recognition of how lactic acid from muscles can be reconverted back into glucose for the body.
So hold
Dr. Mark Hyman
on one sec. Hold on one sec. I I I think that what you just said was so important. I wanna make sure everybody gets it, and then we can kinda continue without how they feel like the cancer. So everybody basically, from my understanding is that when we eat, our food is primarily turned into glucose.
Glucose then has to go through this process and break down into byproduct we call pyruvate. And then the whole bunch of steps that then turn that into energy in the body. With cancer cells, that basically processes and is is kind of defective. And so it turns instead of turning into, easy form energy from glucose, it creates lactic acid, which changes the whole environment itself. And, basically, the other sort of point I think it's important people realize is that your your body is like a hybrid car.
It can run on gas or electric. Your cancer cells and the gas is sugar and the electric is fat. Okay? In cancer cells, they don't run well on fat, and it basically stars them. They only can run on sugar, which is gas.
So it's kind of the dirty burning fuel. And that ends up with all this this linkage of cancer to things like diabetes and insulin resistance and and all these various factors. So that's all how it ties together. Now I've taken then take us down to this process of the secondary pathway, which is fermentation instead of what we call the primary pathway burning energy, which is oxygen and phosphorylation, essentially the Krebs cycle. It's how we break down sugar and energy.
So so I think that I just sort of wanna, like, reinforce that. There was a lot in
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
there. No. No. You're you're you're a 100% correct, Mark. It it this sometimes can be a little overwhelming.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Besides I mean, most doctors, by the way, like, you know, we remember biochemistry for just enough for our exams that we forget it all, including the Krebs cycle, which is what you're talking about, which is how we turn food and oxygen into energy. That's one of the most important things we do in our mind. You
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
know, it's it's really an interesting thing because, you know, most of us when we had to study the Krebs cycle as as a requirement only because it was torturous to try to memorize all the stuff. You know? And it was no pleasure in in doing that other than the fact that you say, oh, if you memorize it, you regurgitate it on a test, and then you wouldn't have to worry about it again. Right. But when when when when when we are in a different in a different sphere now where we really need to understand that in order to manage a very devastating disease.
So you have you I take I I took a completely different view of these tortuous biochemical pathways when I said I needed to know this in order to manage the cancer, not in order to have an effective nontoxic management of the tumor. So now it becomes a process. It becomes part of your soul to understand these processes. Yeah. Because because you're going to be able to wield the power of your knowledge to manage a disease because you finally understand what all this crap meant.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
right. And so now we realize that as Warburg said, cancer cells don't need oxygen for their growth. And he showed data that he can take all the oxygen out of the system, and these tumor cells were still growing fine. And his argument was they replaced their oxidative phosphorylation or energy through respiration with energy through fermentation. Fermentation is energy without oxygen.
And he was he said that they were getting their wine
Dr. Mark Hyman
or beer. Right?
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the as a pie the byproduct, that that's a alcohol that's alcoholic fermentation, rather than lactic acid fermentation. There's an extra step by that the yeast use to to to convert the the the lactate into ethanol.
So but that's a that's another step. Our muscles and our cancer cells are producing lactic acid as a waste product of the fermentation process. So so as a result but what Warburg was saying that the you have to replace energy. So without energy, nothing will grow. Period.
That's the key basis of all of our life existence. Without energy, we die real quick. And you wanna know how fast we can die? If people drink cyanide, you die real, real fast. As I said, that the mitochondria.
Yeah. It poises complex four of the mitochondria, shuts down electron transport, prevents oxygen from binding to electrons, and your whole body just shuts down instantly. So you can't make energy. You don't
Dr. Mark Hyman
drink cyanide. You just can't make energy No. And then you die.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
Can't make energy. Your brain dies. Your heart dies. Everything dies. Anything that's linked to oxidative phosphorylation dies real quick except a cancer cell.
So that's the so Warburg said, yeah. Cancer cells are resistant to cyanide. I said, woah. This is so they don't need they don't need oxygen, and they don't and they can live in cyanide. And I said, woah.
What the hell is this? But he said a long time ago, the nineteen twenties, they they were showing this kind of thing. They would take a rat that had a a tumor, and they would inject the rat with cyanide, and the rat would die instantly, but not the tumor. You could take the tumor out and grow the cells and culture was fine. The tumor was resistant to the cyanide.
And he said that's because they're oxidative phosphorylation. They have replaced oxidative phosphorylation with fermentation, which is energy without oxygen. So what what that became very clear from his hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers and analyses. And so I went back and I looked at all that stuff really, really carefully and confirmed in no uncertain terms that Otto Warburg was a 100% correct in his knowledge of the origin of cancer. He was not correct in the readouts, and I'll explain that in a minute because we've clear we've cleared that all up, the misinformation regarding the readouts of of dysfunctional respiration.
But he claimed that cancer starts with a chronic disruption of oxidative phosphor energy through rest oxidative respiration. Then the cell will gradually over time transition to this ancient process of fermentation. And he also clearly said that if you damage respiration too acutely, the cell will die, and you will not get a cancer cell from a dead cell. And that's exactly what happens with the cyanide. You can never get if your the whole body is dead, there's no way you're gonna get a cancer cell.
But if you have a cancer cell in there, it's not gonna die from cyanide. So as I said, so people with cancer take drink cyanide to kill themselves, well, they'll kill their body, but the tumor cells in their body will still remain alive. So as long as they have the fermentable fuels in the microenvironment. And at that time, Warburg figured that the major fermentable fuel was the sugar glucose. So glucose can either be completely respired in the mitochondria of the cell, or it can be fermented if the mitochondria are not functional or the individual would be in a low oxygen environment.
So so it became clear to Warburg that the release of large amounts of lactic acid from tumor cells was the result of a defect in oxidative phosphorylation, and this then could explain the origin of cancer. Problem is in the nineteen fifties, Sydney White house and others, who was the the the head of the National Cancer Institute, and rightly so, reported that there were some cancer cells that took in as much oxygen as some normal cells. So he said Warburg must be wrong because the oxygen can we're seeing cancer cells that are taking in oxygen as as avidly as normal cells, and yet the cancer cell is still blowing out lactic acid. What's going on with this? So they said then, oh, the cancer cell needs so much energy, it both respires and produces lactic acid at the same time.
So this major controversy and battle went on for years and is still going on for many people today in the papers that they publish showing that cancer cells consume oxygen just as readily as normal cells in culture, and therefore cancer cells are using oxidative phosphorylation. Wrong. We've shown that's not the case. It turns out that the tumor cells do in fact consume oxygen, but they're not using it for ATP synthesis. They're not using the consumed oxygen for generating energy through oxidative phosphorylation.
They are using it to produce reactive oxygen species, ROS. ROS are carcinogenic and mutagenic. These radicals, oxygen radicals damage DNA, RNA, and proteins. They cause the mutations that you see in the nucleus of the tumor cells. So the oxygen consumed by cancer cells is producing DNA damage as a downstream epiphenomenon of the damage to oxidative phosphorylation.
So the cancer field today is focusing on mutations and targeting mutations. These are all effects. They're not the cause of cancer. And this goes back to the argument with Sydney Winehouse and Warburg in the nineteen fifties, except the folks today absolutely do not understand, do not appreciate, or cannot accept the fact that the oxygen consumption in cancer cell is not used for oxidative phosphorylation. It it's used for reactive oxygen species and other reactions not involving ATP.
So you have to put the store you have to put the story together. So you when you mentioned CAR T immunotherapy, all these immunotherapies, they're based on the somatic mutation theory. So now Warburg's Warburg was the initiator of the mitochondrial metabolic theory of cancer. I will explain more because he did not know about glutamine fermentation, which we now know about. He did not he also assumed that the oxygen consumed by cancer cells, even though it was low, was still linked to oxphos.
Okay. That's a misunderstanding on Warburg's part. He's getting credit. He was
Dr. Mark Hyman
that was over a 100 years ago.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
Oh, yeah. It was a 100 years ago. And I and and because the the pathway for glutamine fermentation was not yet developed. So he did not know about the second major fermentable fuel. So we got he was absolutely right on the origin of cancer.
He was incorrect on assuming that lactic acid production equaled a certain amount of ATP. We now know that that calculation is is somewhat in error. We also know that oxygen consumption is in error. So we can put it all together. Warburg was a 100% correct in the knowledge of how cancer started.
His readouts were were were were incorrect, and we're we're polishing it all up. How's system the mitochondrial metabolic
Dr. Mark Hyman
Let me take a pause there for a sec. So, basically, what you're saying is that most oncology today is focused on the idea that cancer results from genetic mutations in the cancer. However, what we're allowed learning at the same time is that you can take a 100 cases of breast cancer and they may be all genetically very different or colon cancer or prostate cancer or pancreatic cancer. And so even they have the same name, the same pathology on a microscope, the underlying genetics are quite different. And so we're playing a little bit of whack a mole.
Now there may be some ways of improving cancer response to chemotherapy by identifying which genetic mutations there are and which drugs work better for which ones, and it's it's sort of a incremental improvement. But it's not a it's not a kind of cataclysmic shift in our thinking around cancer, which is moving from a genetic theory to a metabolic theory. And I think the metabolic theory is quite interesting. I think it clearly needs to be sliced out more, but it looks like it's holding promise to deal with things like stage four melanoma, stage four pancreatic cancer, stage four breast cancer. Cancers that are really death senses are responding even glioblastoma, is brain cancer, very well to ketogenic diets.
So you kinda have to be able to sort of navigate this new landscape where certain cancers are really responding to a metabolic approach. And so we can't just sort of relegate it to some crazy whack job theory. This is actually now becoming more mainstream thinking.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
Well, going back to what you said about the breast cancer. You know, when you look at individual breast tumors, you know, they have different stage ones for, you know, all the different kinds of
Dr. Mark Hyman
HER two and Yeah. The staging and the typing.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
You know? It's actually maybe less important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So so but you're you're a 100% correct when you look at the genetic profiles of all these different tumors. They're all essentially different from each other. I mean, there's some commonalities in mutations, of course, but many of them many studies have have shown if we take all the individual cell, many individual cells out of a tumor and do a full genomic sequence, no no two cells in the in the tumor exact have the exact same kinds of mutations. Yet, yet, every cell in that breast tumor has dependency on fermentation as a source of energy. So the common metabolic problem all the cells have one major common problem or or phenotype or or observation.
They're all fermenting regardless of what their mutations are. So the common pathological phenotype is fermentation. Okay. So then the simple question is, where did how do they get their energy from fermentation? And the two fuels that drive fermentation are glucose, the sugar, and what we have shown is the amino acid glutamine.
Now glutamine for the cancer field, people will say, oh, we all knew glutamine was a big big role in cancer. You guys in the field thought it was being respired. No. Because the oxygen no. It's not respired.
It's fermented just like the glucose. So but it's also fermented in the mitochondria. So the mitochondria, they call the pathway is called glutaminolysis, and it's a fermentation pathway in the mitochondria. So you have a fermentation pathway in the cytoplasm, and you have a fermentation pathway in the mitochondria, which makes it look like the mitochondria are respiring, especially when they're taken in oxygen. So we had to parse out all this stuff and clearly define what the actual biomedical biochemical mechanisms are that are driving the beast.
And the beast the beast is driven by fermentation. And you're you're right, Mark. The cells in the glioblastoma, the cells in colon, lung, they're all fermenters. So they all have diff that's why when you take CAR T immunotherapy, if you're not hitting the fermentation pathway, you're essentially missing missing the target. So nothing could be like when you say, oh, we have a targeted therapies, precision medicine.
These guy these targets I mean, they're missing the target. And you're and you pay a lot of money for a missed target. And then you say and then you say, oh, you know, I have we're gonna use precision medicine. Yeah. Well, if it's so precise, how come you blew out my liver when you were trying to cure my lung cancer?
Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly. You
Dr. Jason Fung
know? I mean, it's a problem.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, most of the treatments we have now are really toxic. Radiation, chemotherapy, surgeries have been crude. And and and what's amazing about metabolic oncology is the therapy is diet and maybe some other compounds that block some of these fermentation pathways that really have not only no side effects, but they have a ton of beneficial effects in terms of overall metabolic health, in terms of reducing inflammation, improving stem cell function, causing DNA repair, and and helping deal with oxidative stress. I mean, it's just it's just the list goes on about how this works. You're already amazing.
No.
Dr. Thomas Seyfried
It is May it is it's remarkable. And because you're all you're going we're going back to the origin of of many of the diseases that we have. And, you know, a lot of this is systemic inflammation, you know, chronic exposure to different chemicals. You put all that together, and you end up with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia. You end up with all these kinds of chronic diseases, and, a lot of it has to do with disturbed energy.
Bio, metabolic homeostasis is disturbed in many of these chronic diseases. The issue for us though is, you know, ferreting out the mechanisms of how cells grow cancer cells grow in a in a dysregulated dysregulated way. And and I think, you know, we're I I don't wanna become too diffuse and say, okay. Let me jump now into Alzheimer's and show you how this works. Let me jump into type two diabetes and show me and and show you how that works.
The the the major focus we have right now is correcting massive misinformation on how the dis how cancer cells express this dysregulated growth. Because ultimately, that's what the disease is. It's cell division out of control. And they these cells are dividing out of control because they have lost their ability to use energy through respiration, have fallen back on on ancient fermentation pathways, and and the organelle the organelle inside the cell that controls the cell cycle and regulated growth is the mitochondrion. And Warburg clearly showed many years ago, and I have in my own work doc validated everything that Warburg said with respect to mitochondrial dysfunction, that the organelle controlling the differentiated state and regulated growth is dysfunctional, and therefore the cells are falling back on ancient fermentation pathways and are dysregulated in their cell growth.
So, you know, so what's the best way to manage cancer is pull the plug pull the plug on their fermentation fuels. And there's only two fuels that can drive this beast, and it's glucose and glutamine. So and then they can't as you mentioned earlier, they can't burn fats or ketone bodies because you need a good mitochondria oxidative phosphorylation system to generate energy from fats and ketone bodies. So the fats and ketone bodies, though, help the heart, help the the brain, especially for ketone bodies. So you mentioned, as you said, you can all of these different chronic diseases can be improved significantly by this metabolic approach because when you burn ketones, you essentially increase the metabolic homeostasis of normal cells.
So and the cancer cell is marginalized. It can't use the ketone body or the sac. So you really put them in a very compromised position, and they will gradually be eliminated. And not only that, in our our paper in my book and in the paper we just showed for managing cancer in a dog using purely metabolic therapy, when you cut the calories down, we have this process called autolytic cannibalism. It's very interesting.
So, all cells in the body must carry their weight when food restriction. So there has to be a coordinated interaction among all the cells in our body. And when you have a cancer, a group of cells that are using energy in a very inefficient way and not contributing to the society of the cells, the body will turn on those cancer cells and use them as fuel, eat them, and supply their their metabolites for the rest called autolytic cannibalism. And in order to get in order to get into that stage, have to lower blood sugars and you have to, increase ketones, and then the body starts turning on these cancer cells and dissolving them.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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