31: Is Cancer Really a Genetic Disease? – The Metabolic Truth with Dr. Thomas Seyfried

Everybody is a different metabolic entity. You can't have one shoe fit all. You got gender differences, you got age differences, you got body weight differences, you got all kinds of differences. You have to work with each patient as a separate entity, know what they can and cannot deal with and usually the blood work, non invasive imaging and tell you whether you're moving in the right direction. And most importantly, how do you feel? It's a very simple question.

Well, I'm so excited today to have have a world class metabolic cancer researcher expert with me today, Dr. Thomas Seyfried. We're going to be spending the next hour or so talking about cancer as a metabolic disease in comparison to as a genetic disease and other things. The thinking about cancer has changed radically in the last 20 years. Dr. Seyfried has been the cutting edge of this change. So after a brief introduction, we're going to hop into it and learn how the thinking about cancer is changing and how this applies to you and can affect you. So again, I'm excited to welcome Dr. Seyfried, a pioneer figure in the field of cancer research whose work has profoundly changed our understanding of the disease. Dr. Seyfried is a professor of biology at Boston College where he has spent decades studying the intricate mechanisms underlying cancer and other metabolic diseases. His academic journey began with a PhD in genetics and biochemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana, followed by postdoctoral research at Yale University's Department of Neurology. Dr. Seyfried's lamer book Cancer is a metabolic disease, which I read probably five years ago and really profoundly affected how I deal with some of my patients as I come alongside them with helping them with their cancers. Was a cornerstone ongoing re evaluation of cancer's causes and treatment. His research challenges the traditional view of cancer as a genetic disorder, proposing instead that it's fundamentally disease of metabolic dysfunction, specifically the mitochondria. There we go. Related to mitochondrial damage. This revolutionary perspective has opened the door to novel, none toxic therapeutic approaches such as ketogenic diets and other metabolic therapies. And so I'm really excited to have you today and to kind of dive into this whole topic.

Well, thank you very much, Dr. Hartman. It's a real pleasure to be here today and address some of the issues and questions you might have. Thank you.

Yeah, so I want to start with a brief history because I feel like if you don't know the past, it's kind of hard to know where you're at and where you're going. And so could you briefly, as an expert in the field of this kind of research Give us a historical overview of the development and understanding of cancer, maybe going back to the 1940s and 50s today, where we're seeing this massive paradigm shift.

Yeah, well, it goes back even further. It goes back to the 1920s. Actually. I have papers from 1935 by Dr. Lewis, who actually identified some of the key issues at that time on cancer. He wrote out, you know, different. It was. The paper was on differences between normal cells and cancer cells, and those differences persist today. The issues of what has transpired from those earlier times was the what.

What.

What explained differences. Okay, And. And that's where the theories come in to explain facts. You observe things, you observe a phenomenon, and then you try to explain it Based on the way you observe and do experiments. And actually, otto warburg in the 1920s said that from his quantitative biochemical experiments of oxygen consumption and lactic acid production, he felt that all cancers, Regardless of where they came from, Had a problem in the way they generated energy, which is ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is the chemical metabolite of energy in our body. Without energy, we die. So how we get energy is very important. And most of our cells in our body, with the exception of red blood cells, get energy through oxidative phosphorylation. And people say, well, what is that? Well, everybody, mom's breathing, you're breathing. We take in oxygen with our breath, and oxygen accepts electrons in the mitochondria, which is the organelle that generates the majority of our energy in our cells. And the waste.

Every.

Every breath that I take, I'm bringing in oxygen. And every exhale, I blow out CO2 and water vapor. CO2 and water vapor are the end products of the digestion of the foods that we eat.

So let's look at this way.

Everything on the planet is derived from some activity of the sun through photosynthesis. And the sun creates carbon hydrogen bonds. You know, when we burn wood, it's an entropic release of energy. And all we're doing is breaking the bonds that created by the energy of the sun, and we're releasing back the heat. Well, we eat food, and that food consists of carbon hydrogen bonds. If it's a sugar or a protein, a fat or whatever, they have carbon hydrogen bonds. And our bodies break those carbon hydrogen bonds down, Recapturing the energy of the sun in our body so that we can be alive. And most of the energy in every cell has ionic gradients across the membrane, and that ionic gradient allows that cell to be alive and Perform its daily functions, Whether it's a liver cell, A colon cell, A breast cell, A lung cell, A brain cell, Whatever, skin cell, they're all living on oxidative energy, and that's the way most of the cells in our body live. What Otto warburg said he discovered that cancer cells are very different from normal cells. They depend a lot more on energy without oxygen. And energy without oxygen is what we call fermentation. And you can identify that by the waste product, and they call it lactic acid fermentation. And lactic acid is an end product of the fermentation. Now, what's interesting is lactic acid contains carbon hydrogen bonds, so it's a wasteful form of energy. Like, let me give you an example. If you run a sprint real fast, the muscles generate so much energy so quickly, it overwhelms the ability to produce energy through oxygen because the muscle is working so hard, and you end up building up some lactic acid. Interestingly enough, the muscle contains a lot of sugar in the form of glycogen, and it's there evolutionarily because we needed to run away from the bear or the lion that was chasing us. That energy had to be there in quick form, Otherwise we would be killed. But we build up lactic acid, but then as soon as you start breathing, the lactic acid disappears. Warburg noticed that even in the presence of 100% oxygen, pure oxygen, Cancer cells still produce lactic acid. How is that possible? What's going on? It's very, very different from normal cells. So he looked, and he said it had to come from some damage to the organelle that generates energy, which is the mitochondrion, predominantly. And then he did some tests by looking at the consumption of oxygen in slices of cancer cells and cancer tissues, and noticed in every case, Oxygen consumption in cancer was lower than the oxygen consumption in normal tissues, and that cancer continued to produce lactic acid Even in the presence of oxygen. So he said this is a foundational principle of all cancer cells and claimed that all cancer was some sort of a metabolic problem Driven by a fermentation metabolism. Then he went on to say, how did this happen? And he did some beautiful experiments, because if you take a toxic drug and stop oxygen production, Stop energy through respiration, quickly, the cell would. And he would say, well, obviously we can't. Cancer cells cannot arise From a quick suspension of oxidative phosphorylation. So then he said that it must take some time. Cancer can't happen overnight. So he said cells that eventually become dysregulated in their growth, which is cancer. It has to be a chronic replacement of oxidative phosphorylation with this lactic acid fermentation. So it takes a long time, maybe years, for some cells in a human body to become cancerous. Because if you acutely disrupt oxidative phosphorylation, the cell will die and never become a cancer cell. But if there's some process by which a cell can upregulate fermentation over time, then it loses its growth, quiescence, its differentiation, and then becomes a cancer, a dysregulated growth dependent on a fermentation. And he said that the fuel for the fermentation is glucose. So glucose would normally be fully oxidized in a normal cell with CO2 and water being produced. But in a cancer cell, there's something wrong with that organelle and it doesn't get fully oxidized. But in order for the cancer to grow, you have to have a lot of supply of glucose in the environment to drive life and growth without oxygen. And he even demonstrated this by showing if you consume cyanide, which is a toxic poison, everybody knows, I use the example that, you know, the kool aid, that Jonestown, that all those poor folks drank kool aid with cyanide, they're all dead quick because they shut down oxidative phosphorylation. Cancer cells can live in cyanide. They can live without oxygen. See, Warburg knew there was some fundamental problem in their ability to generate energy. So that's where the field stood for many, many years. Warburg did more and more experiments and of course, he was attacked in some of his. And I know what the problem was. Now we can resolve all of the problems that Warburg had. And his hypothesis, it was called the Warburg hypothesis on the origin of cancer. What happened was the field realized that there were broken chromosomes and there were mutations. At 1953, when Watson and Cricket came out with their structure of DNA and then they knew that some cancer cells had broken chromosomes and DNA abnormalities. The entire cancer field, like lemmings over the cliff, all ran off chasing genes and then threw Warburg under the bus, Basically saying that, you know, that was passe. This metabolism stuff was passe. You guys were never able to really figure out all the details of the metabolism. We think the genetic problems are the real important issues. And the multi billion dollar cancer genome atlas was initiated in the 1980s. People winning Nobel prizes for their work on cancer genes. The national cancer institute says cancer is a genetic disease consisting of 100 different diseases, all with different mutations. Now we find millions and millions of mutations. No two cancer cells have the same mutation. But we think that eventually we'll solve this cancer problem by analyzing more and more gene mutations and then developing therapies like precision medicines, personalized therapy, targeting mutations. And we're gonna solve the cancer problem with immunotherapies. All of this is the result of the shift away from cancer, recognizing it as a metabolic problem to recognizing it as a genetic problem. So when the national cancer institute spends six or seven billion dollars of our taxpayers a year funding grants, largely tracking down genes or trying to figure out targeted therapies based on the somatic mutation, and the pharmaceutical industries are constantly building drugs, and we're treating patients with therapies based on the somatic mutation theory, that is that cancer is a genetic disease and we're not. And right now, we have over 1700 people a day dying from cancer. That's about 70 an hour. And they keep throwing more and more of this stuff out. The reason why we're not dropping the death rate, the reason why we have all of these dead people, Is basically cancer is not a genetic disease. And much of what we have done over the last 75 years has been in the wrong direction. And when you take away the fermentable fuels that are driving the dysregulated growth, which is glucose, of course. And now we found the second major fuel, fermentable fuel. Everybody knew glutamine was driving this beast as well, but we've shown that it's a fermentable fuel. So fermentation energy is driving the dysregulated growth. The gene mutations are all secondary downstream effects. They're not the. They're not the cause of this problem. As long as you keep targeting effects, you're not going to drop the death rate in any significant way. You got to get to the origin of what's going on. And that is a metabolic disturbance. Just as warburg said, we've cleaned up a lot of mess. We've identified where he made his mistakes, where he was right, where he was incorrect, and the situation. Now we're at a tipping point in realizing that in order to manage cancer, we have to re evaluate it and consider it as a metabolic disorder driven by fermentation. And it can't burn fatty acids or ketones. So the solution to the cancer problem is simultaneously target the only two major fuels that can drive the dysregulated growth while transitioning the whole body off to fatty acids and ketones. Which the tumor cells can't break use for energy because the organelle needed to do that is dysfunctional. So we now know how to solve or at least, at least manage the disease. Recognizing cancer as a metabolic disease is a form of non toxic management. If it leads to cure, that's. We don't know that. All we know is that we know how to now manage it without toxicity. And that's what will be the future.

Now you mentioned two fermentable foods, glucose. Now I think you briefly mentioned glutamine. So those are the two major molecules that are fermented metabolically in this process, as you understand, is that those are two fuels you're referring to.

Yeah, they're two metabolic.

Right.

And people know glucose, it's sugar, it's basically table sugar is fructose and glucose. And when you take table sugar in, you break it down to these two molecules, 1/2 of which is glucose and the other half of which is fructose. It's sweet.

Okay.

So the glucose is fully oxidized in the mitochondria to produce CO2 and water in our normal cells. But in the cancer cell it's taken in and produces large amounts of lactic acid. So but it gets the energy. ATP is generated in the cytoplasm of the cell using glucose. It's called lactic acid fermentation with glucose as the predominant fuel. And the other fuel, of course is glutamine. Now glutamine is very interesting. It's the highest. It's all of us, if we do a blood work, we find in our blood, Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in our bloodstream. And it's used for the health of our gut. It's used predominantly for our immune system uses glutamine and the urea cycle. And it's a very, very valuable and important amino acid. What we have discovered that it in cancer cells, it's fermented in the mitochondria. This is what has confused the field for so long because they say they always thought there are only two forms of energy, which was cytoplasmic fermentation in the glycolysis pathway in the cytoplasm and the mitochondria. Oxidative phosphorylation in the mitochondria. Working with my colleague and friend, Christos Chianopoulos, the world expert on mitochondria fermentation, he and I have shown that glutamine is fermented in the very organelle that should be doing oxidative phosphorylation. This is the new thing. So a fuel that was formerly thought to be oxidized is actually fermented in the very organelle that should be doing oxidative phosphorylation. This has been a conundrum in the field for century now, 100 years. So we have cleared this up and now we know that this second fuel, together with glucose, are powerfully synergistic. They drive all of the metabolic necessities for the cancer cell. And once you know that, now you know what the beast eats and now.

You know how to kill it.

And the problem is nobody's using this. Nobody even understands basically what I just said.

Yeah. So I'm going to dive into the, the fasting and the glucose stuff here a little bit because that's been really popular in the media between interval fasting and water fasting and elite athletes and biohacking and stuff. But the glutamine thing is a relatively new concept. How do you actually address that since you need glutamine to make glutathione, you need it for your gut lining, you need it for so many important things. How do you actually focus on decreasing the body's. How do you address that since that's something you absolutely need versus glucose you don't absolutely need?

That's why we developed the press pulse therapeutic strategy for cancer management, which addresses exactly what you just asked, because we know how important glutamine is. You can't go after glutamine like a bull in a china shop.

You're going to hurt the patient.

So you have to understand biology and you really have to understand evolutionary biology and you have to understand biochemistry and.

You have to understand physiology.

And you got to put all those disciplines together to really understand how we strategically manage cancer, knowing what it needs to survive. And you're 100% right. We can't just go in there and pour glutamine targeting drugs on a cancer patient because first of all, the cancer will now switch to glucose and bypass that.

And now you're harming the gut, you're.

Harming the immune system, and you're damaging the body by being overly aggressive on targeting glutamine. So that's why we developed the pulse strategy.

Press pulse.

You can press glucose down to almost non existence in the body. I tell you, man, I've seen papers, it's unbelievable by the work of Drenick and others. So listen, when you push glucose down to really low levels, yes, you have gluconeogenesis, your liver can make some small amount of glucose when you need it. Who's the hog taking the glucose from the rest of the cells?

It's the brain.

The brain will take whatever little glucose you might have. And the muscle, the muscle, if you exercise, you deplete glycogen in the muscle. The muscle will then take glucose out of the bloodstream and re make glycogen. And muscle does not share its glucose with other organs because it's evolution. We need it to run away from the beast that's chasing us, the lion, the tiger, or some other member of our species. So muscle's not going to say, oh, that, you know, we have to share. No, no. Muscle keeps glucose. Brain burns glucose, but it will also burn ketones. So if you can elevate ketones, the brain's need for glucose goes down. But what little it takes, the cancer cell absolutely must have this glucose to survive. So it's in direct competition now with organs in the body that absolutely evolutionarily take it away. So the cancer cell now becomes marginalized. However, even taking away the glucose, that glutamine fermentation Will keep those cancer cells semi, semi, semi viable. So you have to now target the glutamine, but you have to do it in a way that kills the cancer cells without harming your gut and your immune system. So that's why we develop the pulse. So you restrict glucose as well as you can transition the body over to fatty acids and ketones. So the normal cells now switch their energy from glucose. And normal cells don't, except the immune system don't need too much glutamine. So now we come in with the drugs like 6 deoxy nor leucine. Don a beautiful drug. And it will. You put it on for a short period of time and you take it off. And then you slaughter a large number of these tumor cells because they can't switch the glucose because the glucose is now restricted. And you pull it back and let the immune system come in. And now using the glutamine, we take away the glutamine targeting drug. Immune system comes in, picks up dead corpse from the cancer. Cells are being slaughtered.

So you can't let the dead bodies.

Hang around in the organ that's being targeted or the tumor that's being targeted. Let the immune system do its job and clean up the mess. And then they clean it up and.

You come back and you hit them again.

And you keep the chokehold on the glucose and you pulse the glutamine and let the body recover Kill, let the body recover. Kill, let the body recover. The rest of your cells are getting healthier and healthier because they're burning the ketone bodies. So as you slowly degrade the tumor, the rest of your body is getting more and more healthy because you're switching the fuels. And this is what you got to know. Normal cells are extremely flexible in the fuels they can use. The cancer cells are massively inflexible because their oxidative phosphorylation system is corrupted, so they have to depend on fermentation. The two predominant fuels are glucose and glutamine. There are other fuels in there, but they're in tiny amounts, and the cancer cell will go through that real quick. So then it becomes a battle for how you can continue to restrict glucose and glutamine simultaneously with holding one a constant restriction and the other one a pulsed restriction, and then you can keep the body healthy while slowly degrading the tumor. It's unbelievable. I mean, when you finally understand what I'm talking about, the elegance and the beauty of how we're going to kill cancer cells without harming the rest of the body, it's just really unbelievable. But it takes a long time for people to understand this.

Well, I think what's interesting about this concept is that it's actually seen in different spectrums. For example, like in the biohacking world, people are doing fasting to actually turn over senescent cells, cells that have become dysfunctional in a proliferative stage. Like doing fasting actually helps your body turn those over. In the Alzheimer's world, with some of the training I've done with Dr. Dale Bredens, the Buck Institute, UCLA, doing the same concept for Alzheimer's patients to improve brain function. It's kind of interesting because also in the chronic inflammatory response world, we've seen that people with mold or biotoxin illness, their cells, because of mitochondrial dysfunction, get stuck in this proliferative phase as well, where the cells are being inefficient, energy utilization, and even, like Dr. N, work with a cell danger response. So it really sounds like we're hearing the same story by different experts, that ultimately the mitochondria potentially are at the root cause of all chronic diseases and especially for cancer, we now have a therapeutic where we can actually manipulate knowing that science starve the cells and then pulse the glutamine and actually have a profound impact on people's outcomes. Would that be a. Yeah, I. I.

Think, you know, it's a. It's a stage strategy. People need to Know, you know what's going on. We have found that we can't find any tumor under for years of examining that can survive without glucose and glutamine or can survive on fatty acids or ketone bodies. So that clearly tells us what the.

Bottom what the problem is.

Then you, once you understand the problem, then you develop strategies to deal with the problem, how to manage it. That's the key, so you can understand what the needs are of the tumor cell. Okay, let's develop a therapy based on that understanding. And the evidence that you might know what you're talking about is when you have these many stage four guys that are terminally ill. I have terminal cancer, you know, I'm stage four, blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. And then you see these folks alive, doing well. Well, you should have been dead. Why? Why are you still alive and here? And many that didn't do this strategy are dead. The answer is that's the evidence that will eventually be. What will shift the field is when you demonstrate outcome based on your knowledge of what the problem is. What we see, unfortunately, is so many people try to do metabolic therapy after they've been horrifically poisoned and they're radiated, surgically mutilated, and already the cells in their body are already brutalized. A lot of these chemotherapies and radiation will damage mitochondria horrifically. So the very cells, the normal, healthy cells in your body, they don't have the power in many cases because they have been poisoned. So when you are identified with cancer, first of all, and you're generally fairly healthy, other than you have some problem, that's the time when metabolic therapy will have its greatest advantage. And I'm not saying that you can't use immunotherapies and radiation and chemo, they are tools that could be effective at the very end, at the cleanup stage, when your body is super healthy and there might be a few holdout cells, and you could come in with a dab of radiation, even a minor surgical procedure, or even a toxic chemical, but it would be used in very low doses. And the surviving tumor cells are now on themselves, on death. They have a terminal illness.

They're not surviving.

You come in and you finish them off. What we have is, as I keep telling everybody, we have all the tools in the tool chest to manage cancer effectively without toxicity. The problem is people just don't know that. And I'm talking about the establishment is yet to fully understand this. And if you think cancer is a genetic disease targeting genes and hunting for genes. You're not in the right zone here, folks. You want to manage cancer, you got.

To understand its metabolism and then go.

After it that way. And until that happens, we're not going to get a major drop in death rate as long as we keep doing things that are hurting people and chasing downstream effects. And we see it every day, 1700 people a day. It comes from. The american cancer society catalogs the dead. They catalog how many people are dying from all these different cancers. And they're the ones telling us that it's 1700 people a day dying from cancer at 70 an hour, which is horrific.

Well, I think if you also look at the new treatments as they come out, the different chemotherapeutics, Whether they're the metals or nitrogen based or some of the biologics, and you look at how much time they add to people's lives, you look at successful medication, three months, six months. They're not making a person with a one month sentence survive five and 10 years. And so when you look at this study, Even the outcomes of those are not impressive. This was the end all, be all. Then we have multiple therapies that literally are revolutionizing how we're treating cancer. And that's not the case. And I think we're still stuck in the genetic paradigm. You know, I was in medical school, I was told 90% of all diseases were genetic. And now we're thinking it's 5%. It's the environment, it's mitochondrial inefficiency, it's all this stuff.

How do you see that?

Well, here's the situation.

The United states federal government and their scientific advisors made a decision in the 1970s and 80s that we were going to go full throttle into the genetic underpinning of cancer. So you were awarding research grants to folks in all the different medical schools doing cancer research. And once you understood all of the different kinds of mutations that you would find in cancer, we should then be able to develop targeted therapies, precision medicine, so we would not have to poison and irradiate patients, because the novelty of the outcome of the gene theory would provide us with precision drugs that would kill only the cancer cell and not harm the rest of the body. So the reason why we're still poisoning and irradiating people Is because the promise of the gene revolution has not come to pass. And nor will it ever come to pass, because it's the wrong theory. And when you understand theories in science, you understand when you have the correct theory, outcomes are dramatically different, Just like the heliocentric geocentric theory. As soon as astronomers realized that the earth was simply another planet like the others revolving around the sun, the sun was the center of the solar system. 1800 years of thinking the earth was the center of the solar system immediately changed. And now we were able to move forward with our knowledge of celestial body movements. Once we realize that cancer is a mitochondrial, metabolic disease, not a genetic disease, we will be able to move forward with therapies that are based on a rational understanding of what the disease actually is. And the outcome will be dramatic once people know what to do and how to do it. Be trained. Now we have to have a retraining program. Physicians, oncologists, they need to know how to do this. What's the nuts and bolts in the clinic where patient comes in, okay, what is the plan? And we already have a big program underway here that we're writing a detailed treatment protocol for achieving this. So this is going to happen. It's just going to take a little bit of time. But you're absolutely right. I mean, the therapies that we're giving to cancer patients today are horrific. You know, it almost goes back to the time of the spanish inquisition on how they were torturing heretics. I mean, it's just what we do to these poor human beings in these clinics is just nobody would want to go down to take any kind of a cancer therapy just to say, oh, I'm going to a cancer clinic to get healthy. Are you kidding me? I mean, if you don't have cancer and you were to take all these terrible things, you might die from the treatments rather than you didn't have cancer. And a lot of cancer patients, unfortunately, are dying from the treatments as much as they're dying from the disease itself. This is nuts. How are you, as members of our species, treating another member with any therapy that has a remote possibility of killing them? And every night on the tv, you hear all these keytruda opdivo. They spend more time telling you how the drug will kill you than how it's going to help you. This is nuts. This is absolutely nuts.

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So let me take a step back with the foundational thing of the concept of mitochondrial dysfunction. You know, uncoupling the electron chamber support chain, I think, is the terminology used in your book as a cause. Like one of the things I try to wrap my brain around. In 1900, the average 1 in 100Americans got cancer. 1990, it was 1 in 3. Now it's 1 and 2. If you had the BRCA gene in 1950, your risk for breast cancer was about 20%. Now it's 80%. So even with our limited knowledge, we see with the genes, you know, massive increases in cancer rates. So my question to you is, you know, with mitochondrial inefficiency dysfunction being part of this cancer thing, does it make sense that things that disrupt the mitochondria, environmental toxins, chemicals, foods, blah, blah, blah, might be part of the reason why we're seeing an increased incidence of cancers in modern times that are unparalleled in history? And if so, what are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, well, that's, you know, it's called the great western diet and lifestyle. Our aboriginal ancestors did not have Dunkin donuts on every corner. They did not have the kinds of foods that were eating. They had a lot more exercise. Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian physician, studied these tribes of people on our planet and looked at cancer was extremely rare in people who lived according to their traditional ways. You know, we call it the Paleolithic kind of a. Don't forget, as a human, we've been a species for about 1 1/2 million years. Most of that time was in a Paleolithic state of fasting and tremendous exercise.

Okay?

What killed those folks was infections and injuries, okay? They weren't dying from cancer and these kinds of things. People said, well, they didn't live long. Even if they lived long, they weren't dying from cancer. Cancer emerges with technology and our food science and technology has advanced so much faster than has our biology. We're still basically physiologically a paleolithic Organism driven on, eating anything that walks, crawls, swims or flies on the planet. And a lot of exercise. Today we're sitting in traffic jams, we're sitting in front of computers getting all freaked out by which creating a lot of anxiety, emotional stress, bad food that's highly processed. In other words, we evolved to store energy. That was our goal. Because if we didn't store energy in the form of fat, we would not survive as a species. So energy storage became part of our evolutionary biology. We have that kind of energy every night on tv, every corner of the grocery, dunk, Dunkin Donuts, you name it. It's all over the place. We're getting fat. And that's exactly evolution in action. People say, well, I don't understand biological evolution. Well, you understand the obesity epidemic, right? Oh yeah, I can just see all.

That all over the place.

That's evolution in action. That's our evolutionary past telling us that we're in a new environment now. And that environment is putting us at risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, all of the different chronic diseases as a result of our energy balance changing. Yes. Mitochondria becoming damaged.

Why?

Because they're being overwhelmed by a large amount of fuel that's creating reactive oxygen species and this causing a level of dysfunction. And you're right, intermittent fasting brings the body back into energy homeostatic state. But it's very hard for people to do water only fasting. But you know, now we're realizing it's not if you. And that's why we developed at Boston College the glucose ketone index calculator, which lets people know quantitatively whether they're in nutritional ketosis, similar to way our ancestrals in the paper ancestors were in the Paleolithic period where injury and infections were. Now we have very great hospitals and we can fix a lot of broken hips and knees and all this kind of stuff. We have a lot of antibiotics and we have a lot of ways to manage infections and injury. But our diet and lifestyle is putting us at risk for chronic diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease and these kinds of things. So to manage that, you have to keep your mitochondria healthy. It's very hard to get cancer if your mitochondria remain healthy. How do you allow mitochondria to remain healthy? You have to have them burn ketones. Ketone bodies are breakdown products of fat. When you mobilize, fat goes to the liver. Liver makes water soluble ketone bodies. Our brains burn ketone bodies. Our muscle heart can burn ketone bodies. Our cells get super healthy when you're burning ketone bodies. Cancer cells can't burn ketone bodies. So the whole concept of managing cancer as a metabolic disease is bringing the body back into a paleolithic state and then starving tumor cells of their fermentable fuels. And you're absolutely right. You can manage many different diseases using the same strategy. The problem is not easy. Okay, let's be honest. Every night on tv, we're blistered by commercials telling us how good the pizza tastes, how good the donut tastes. You know, all the sweet drinks, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, you can name the. Go up and down, name them all. Not that these are bad. In small amounts, they're probably good and very tasty and all this kind of stuff. But if you do it all the time, you get obese, you don't have exercise, you have a lot of stress, bad sleep apnea, all kinds of stuff. You put yourself at risk for all these chronic diseases, but that's prevention.

Okay?

Most people, let's be honest, we have an obesity epidemic. People really were concerned about what I'm talking about, what you're talking about. You wouldn't have these. This kind of. So people say, okay, now I have cancer. What are you going to do for me now? We're going to poison and irradiate you, or are we going to bring you back into a new state of health and slowly degrade your tumor? That's the question you have before us now.

So a couple things you said that I want to just clarify just for the audience, because you said a whole lot. So you mentioned reactive oxygen species being made, which basically is a way of saying inflammation. So if I was to understand you correctly, inflammation by itself, however it occurs, whether it's high sugar consumption or processed foods or toxic fats, but that inflammation can lead to this mitochondrial dysfunction, which can lead to cancer. Correct. So inflammation, things that lead to inflammation, whether it's stress, not sleeping, sleep apnea.

So let's look at that inflammation. It's called chronic inflammation. And you can measure that by C reactive protein. Just do blood work so people can. When I go to the physician, I don't know, once a year, twice a year, whatever. I tell them exactly what they should be looking at. I don't allow them to tell me.

I tell them, here are all my.

Ferritins, I have my vitamin Ds. I have all PSA test, A, H1C, all the different things. So I know how my body is doing on that day that they took that blood work. And I Monitor those things over time. Triglycerides, you know, hdl, all the different things that one could. One could look at. You put it together and you look at. And that those blood. The blood work tells you whether or not you're in metabolic homeostasis. So it's not hard to do. So everybody can do this. But you're right. Chronic inflammation creates damage. Reactive ros. This is the reactive anion and the oxygen and this kind of thing. They are carcinogenic and mutagenic, so they damage mitochondrial function and they also cause the mutations in the nucleus. So a lot of the cancer cells have bad mitochondria throwing out reactive oxygen species, which are carcinogenic and mutagenic, causing the chromosomal and genetic abnormalities that you see in the nucleus. So that's why we know all the genetic stuff is downstream. It's the energy metabolism that's the ultimate cause. Dysregulated cell growth. So, yes, chronic inflammation is one. Viral infections. You have oncogenic viruses like hepatitis, papilloma, They've damaged mitochondria. Carcinogen. What do you call something a carcinogen? It's a chemical that causes cancer. How does it cause cancer? It actually damages oxidative phosphorylation, creating oxygen radicals, leading to a fermentation metabolism.

Right.

Sleep apnea, intermittent hypoxia. I noticed that when I was going to one of these dental meetings, I was watching these films of people sleeping who had sleep apnea. I said, oh, my God, this guy hasn't. He hasn't taken a breath in 35 seconds. And then all of a sudden, the body, you know, he has. Warburg clearly said intermittent hypoxia damages oxidative phosphorylation leading to cancer. So, I mean, we see it every day. What's causing it, and we just go through the list. Radiation people. You know, when the Fukushima plant over in Japan went out, people in Seattle would dig in foxholes or bomb shelters to protect them from the radiation coming from the plant across the ocean.

Why?

Because radiation causes cancer. Because it damages oxidative phosphor, leading to dysregulated cell growth. Oh, okay. So you can put all this together and you're 100% right. You know, every one of these things that we've looked at that damages oxidative phosphorylation chronically can put someone at risk for mitochondrial damage, which may present itself in the form of cancer or some other chronic disorder. Complicated.

I remember reading an article about the concept of the genes a couple of years ago. And I was talking about typical breast cancer. There's up to 80 different genetic mutations. There's probably 80 different kinds of breast cancer. And we focus on BRCA1, BRCA2, HER2 positive, HER2 negative, PR positive, all these small things, but literally just breast cancer by itself. There's probably 80 different genetic plus perturbations of that. And reading that, I was like, wait a second. So that makes me think it's really not ultimately a primarily genetic thing for this one disease. If 80 different plus mutations are associated, what could be under the hood? And sounds like what you're saying is what's under the hood is mitochondrial, you know, electron transport, chain uncoupling, resulting, which. You haven't used this phrase yet, but I think it was in your book genetic instability. Genetic instability gives you mutations and over time you eventually get one of these things that makes the cells go growth.

No, you're absolutely right. But it's the Ross reactive oxygen species that are ultimately causing the genetic instability and all the things. Warburg said it. And we all know there's two things to get cancer. Number one, you have to damage oxidative phosphorylation chronically, not acutely, because the cell will die. Number two, that cell.

Listen to this.

Very important. That cell must have the capacity intrinsically to upregulate the fermentation metabolism. Because if the cell cannot replace energy from oxidative phosphorylation with energy from fermentation, it won't become a cancer cell. So there are a couple of cells in our body where cancer is extremely rare, Mainly because they can't upregulate fermentation chronically. And that's cardiac myocytes. You rarely see cancers in cardiac myocytes and neurons of the brain. The neurons can't switch chronically to fermentation. They can do it acutely. If you have an epileptic seizure or you have a heart attack where everything turns, it becomes ferment. The whole body ferments for a short period of time, but it cannot readily adapt to a fermentation. So you have to have cells that can gradually regulate fermentation chronically. Like liver, kidney, bladder, breast. Yes, there's hundreds of millions of mutations in breast. Every breast cancer cell is fermenting, regardless of what its genetic composition is. That's the underlying common pathophysiological problem of all cancers. Brain, colon, breast. That's why I'm saying cancer is one singular type of disease of energy metabolism. The mutations are all different, but the underlying problem is the same they are fermenters, depending on a fermentation metabolism, regardless of what their genetic composition is. So we know that now when you switch from efficient oxidative phosphorylation to inefficient oxidative phosphorylation, you have to change the parameters of the cell. This is oncogenes. People love to talk about oncogenes like HIF1, Alpha, Myc and these different kinds of terminologies they use. These are facilitators of opening the floodgates on the cell to get in the fermentable fuels. Because if you're switching from an efficient system to an inefficient system, you have to have a large stockpile of fuel to make up for the efficiency. Now you're inefficient. So floodgates for glucose and glutamine open up on the surface of the cell to bring in these two fuels. Glutamine is already the most abundant fuel in our body, and the glucose is already in our diet. So the glucose from the diet and the glutamine from the blood pouring in, driven oncogenes, opening up the transporters on the surface of the cell and the exhaust system, so they blow out lactic acid and succinic acid as waste products. And we see that, and that's why we know all the cancer cells are fermenting on glucose and glutamine, because they're all blowing out lactic acid and succinic acid. Clear as the day. You know, it's just so clear what these cancer cells are doing and how they are living.

So two quick questions in regards to that. First question is I'm really big into fatty acids. Part of what I do with people with mitochondrial issues and neur issues is work on re regulating their fatty acid synthesis. But our dietary, our food system is filled mainly with processed rancid fatty acids, long chain fatty acids, trans fats. In your understanding? Because it makes sense to me, but I'm just kind of curious, in your understanding, does it make sense if we're consuming these dysfunctional lipids that make up the cell membranes of the mitochondria and mitochondrial function that these, that the infiltration of our dietary system with these dysfunctional fats could be a precursor for reactive oxygen species increasing and ultimately lead to an increased risk for cancer, does that make metabolic sense?

It could do that again. You know, most cancer cells synthesize their.

Own fatty acids, and most of them.

Are saturated fatty acids. They use glucose. We've tested all we published A couple of big papers on this. I mean, the glucose carbons make. The cancer cells make a lot of fat. They synthesize their own fat. So they make that. They can, yeah, you can take it up from the environment. But the bottom line is, in order to grow, you, have to synthesize fatty.

Acids, proteins, and nucleic acids.

These are the building blocks of cells. You have fatty acids in the membranes. You have proteins which are amino acids. So you need carbon and nitrogen to build all these things For a cancer cell to grow. It synthesizes. Now, what it can't synthesize, it also sucks up stuff from the microenvironment so bad. Fatty acids from the diet could in fact contribute. They're not contributing to energy, but they could damage further the mitochondria for sure. So. But the cancer cell is also synthesizing a tremendous amount of these things from its own ability to synthesize as long as it has the energy. Energy number one and metabolites number two. So glucose and glutamine provide both the energy and the metabolites for these cancer cells to continue to grow out of control. And that's why I said if you take away the two fuels giving them both energy and metabolites, they ain't going to grow very well. So that's the strategy. And yeah, I think that the consumption of provocative fatty acids and other things as well that could damage oxidative phosphorylation may contribute to the gradual degradation of the ability of the cell to generate efficient energy through oxidative phosphorylation. It's a little bit more complicated, and there's a lot of factors that I'm not going to address. But our goal is to we got a person with cancer, let's get rid of it. And how do we do that? And we can do that. Then after we do that, I think we'll. We can start focusing on all other issues that may not be as acutely important as keeping somebody alive.

And just another side question real quick from what you said. Can you use ldh lactate dehydrogenase as a surrogate marker for lactic acid Increased production of lactic acid depends if whether.

It'S ldha or l D, h, b. L, d, h A brings in ketone bodies and lactate into cells. Sorry, ldh, B, LDHA is the exhaust when you create a tremendous amount of.

Lactic acid in the cell.

Ldha, there's actually five different forms of lactic acid dehydrogenase, But l d, h a is the one that's upregulated massively. So it's in run by HIF1 Alpha, the oncogene. So what happens when oxygen is deprived? Glycolysis is upregulated tremendously and lactic acid is dumped out and. And you have to upregulate the activity of ldha, lactic acid dehydrogenase A. So most aggressive cancers have very high LDHA, and that's controlled by HIF1alpha, the transcription factor, which is one of the oncogenes that we talked about. So, yeah, most cancers. But, you know, people, there's a lot of work going on. Oh, let's target l. DHA why target ldha? Just have to pull the plug on the glucose. If the glucose goes down, it damps the glycolics. The glycolytic pathway is. And the amount of lactic acid coming out is downrated and the cell can't get energy and dies. So this is why it's so incredibly simple to do this. People are always wondering something. They always want to go to some level of complexity. You don't have to go to just to make it look like they know what they're talking about. You know, the idea here is, are we going to kill cancer cells? And we want to do it, and we want to do it quickly. You got to pull the plug on their fuels and transition to something they can't use. All other issues become secondary.

Gotcha. Let's make a slight transition from the science, because I feel like we could talk about the science for like, you know, hours, the practicality. Because ultimately people, you know, either want to prevent cancer. I mean, you know, one in two people in our country getting cancer is a crazy number, or they know someone who's had cancer. So I guess my first question with this little transition is, you know, how are, you know, first of all, with your research, what kind of outcomes have you seen? You know, because you hear about people going to clinics in Mexico or over United patients go to Germany. It sounds like you're doing research up in Boston. Could you give us some examples of patients in your research and what kind of research is going on using this modality as a way to come alongside and help people with a diagnosis of cancer?

Yeah, well, we publish papers on it and we describe what we've done now. And of course, they're singular cases. We're not running clinical trials only because people don't know how to do this and nobody wants to support it anyway. But so you take individuals and we have a lung cancer patient from Greece, who went on a keto Mediterranean diet, got into a lower GKI with a lung cancer that metastasized to his brain. We published the paper in the Jordan Kuros and people can read the details of what was done by my good physician colleague Athanasis, even Julio and his staff in Greece. And then we had one out of Turkey, advanced breast cancer that metastasized to the brain. The person was lit up like a Christmas tree on PET scan. And we used a combination of keto metabolic therapy with reduced chemotherapy. So we were able to get very good outcome from that person. She's still alive. These were stage four cancer patients that.

Weren'T expected to live.

And of course there's Pablo Kelly with the glioblastoma, who's out now 10 years and he's alive. We published the paper, exactly what we did. We have five years of his dietary glucose ketone metabolites in the blood and we published that the journal Frontiers in Nutrition. We did one on a dog, actually. That's our only thing we ever cured was the dog had a mast cell on his face. We cured him. The other guys are still alive. So I don't know if they're going to be cured or not. All I know is they're living a hell of a lot longer than they were now. Brad and Maggie Jones are doing a big documentary and they are forming a registry and interviewing all the folks that were stage four terminal cancer patients that are still alive and everyone telling their story of what they did. So they're not published case because the field doesn't believe in all this stuff. Right. Oh, they don't want to listen. If you had a drug, any drug that would do what metabolic therapy do, there'd be a stampede for it. Like, like there would be no tomorrow. Oh, no. It comes from a diet kind of manipulation, using off to off patented drugs.

Yeah.

You know, cheap drugs that are used, you know, oh, no, we can't have that. That doesn't work. But a, any kind of a new patented drug which would do metabolic therapy would. Oh, they'd say this is the greatest thing. This would be unbelievable. But it's not happening. So what you have to do is you have to see the people I published case reports and then they say, oh, N of one. Oh, we can't believe it's just an N of one. If I had a drug that did what that N of one did, oh, they would be all over it because it wasn't a patentable drug or a patentable strategy. Don't Want to know about it but yet look at the data, look at the individual who's alive, how does he feel? You know, what's his quality of life?

That's the key thing. And like you said at the beginning.

They did a big study on the 92 drugs developed from the somatic mutation theory and they only improved overall survival by two and a half months, spending billions and billions of dollars. And the off target effects of these drugs were horrific. And some of the drugs cause hyper progressive disease where the drug will kill you faster than the cancer metabolic. We have not ever seen a situation where metabolic therapy accelerated the growth of a tumor and killed a patient faster than the tumor would never happens, but it happens significantly in these new cancer drugs.

How many people have come through that and just with you alone that you worked with, how many patients have you have come through and worked with the physicians you've trained or whatnot, or your experience with that?

Well, it's a work in progress. A lot of it is doing things on the go. And don't forget when we treat. I don't, I'm not a physician, I can't treat anybody. But I write the protocols and my colleagues and I write the treatment protocols by which patients should be treated by licensed practitioners. And we're seeing, when a patient, we think we're doing too much of this, pull it off. Everybody is a different metabolic entity. You can't have one shoe fit all. You got a gender differences, you got age differences, you got body weight differences, you got all kinds of different. You have to work with each patient as a separate entity, know what they can and cannot deal with and use the blood work non invasive imaging and tell you whether you're moving in the right direction. And most importantly, how do you feel? It's a very simple question. Ask the cancer patient, how do you feel? Oh, I spent all day on the toilet. No, you don't feel good. Okay, right away. I'm telling you this way, you shouldn't, you shouldn't have to be doing any of that. But if the guy says oh geez, I feel like a million bucks, I never felt better and my cancer's got. Okay, that tells you you're on the right path.

So what I'm hearing you say is that you're individualizing the metabolic strategy per the person, not giving them a protocol for the diagnosis that you just replicate for 100 or 200 people, but you're actually individualizing based on the patient's response metabolic markers and they're getting a personalized intervention plan.

Yes. Personalized nutrition drug diapers.

Absolutely. It's a novel concept.

Yeah. And you know, that's what every physician should want to do. That's what we call practicing the. They say up here in Boston that makes the guy feel good because then he's not following some scripted standard of care, he's following his own intuition with markers that are telling him and the patient's telling him. So it's a very feed forward feedback between the physician and the patient. And together they work as a team. And metabolic therapy puts a lot of burden on the shoulders of the patient. The patient's going to have to be the participant in their healing process. They're not going to just sit there like some bystander and be nuked and poisoned. They actually have to play a major role. So this idea of battling your cancer when you do metabolic therapy, you are absolutely battling your cancer because you are understanding what you're doing and why you're doing what you're doing.

Yeah. Now I think one thing as well to just go back to what you said before. I have a clinical research company, I've been in a principal investigator for over 70 clinical trials. And I just think people don't really realize like how clinical research works where you have to have one outcome, you limit the change. You can't change things based on patient symptoms. And people aren't compliant, they get kicked out, you know, of the studies. So once you touch up, briefly touch about the actual process of doing clinical research, I think a lot of people just don't realize. They say something has to be double blind, placebo controlled standard of care. It really eliminates the majority of patients. When we were intake patients to our clinical trials, most people wouldn't get in because they were too overweight or the sugar number, their A1C was too high or they couldn't be compliant enough. And so we almost create this false population of patients in clinical trials to get outcomes on a singular intervention. And that's not really quite how the real world works. So I'd be curious if you could just like dive into that concept.

Yeah, well, I think that that was put in there as a strategy to eliminate any other opportunities that might be effective. Double blind crossover. A singular approach eliminates metabolic therapy as being a strategy for doing the traditional standard trials clinical trial. Oh, where's the clinical trial? Well, our kind of clinical trial is based on how long we can keep people alive. We have in glioblastoma, many other cancers. We have what we call historic controls. All right. We know that Person with a glioblastoma, the probability of surviving to five years is about 1 or 2%. You know, it's very, very low. And we can see how beautifully the survival curves are overlapped all over the world. I went through and looked at all the survival curves. They almost copy. And that's because they all irradiate and poison the patients the same way. It's almost like taking away any possible advantage that poor patient would have. You took it away because when you irradiate the brain, you free up massive amounts of glutamine, and then you give high dose steroids, sugar and glutamine, and then you wonder why your patients are dying. Yeah, it's just nuts. So, so you do historic controls and you look at each person. What's the probability of me keeping that guy alive five years? Well, really low. If you do standard of care. What If I have 50% of the people that I did metabolic therapy on who made five years? Oh, my God, that's unbelievable. What are you doing? Well, let me tell you what we're doing. Here's the way we do it.

Okay?

Then things begin to change. Because bottom line, people want to live.

Yeah.

They want to be lived.

And if.

And I'm telling you another thing, they're dragging these poor cancer patients into these clinical trials day in day. Oh, we got a new clinical trial. Those number one patients should ask, how is that clinical trial going to target simultaneously my glucose and glutamine, and how is it going to make the rest of the cells in my body healthy? If they don't have an answer for that, I wouldn't do that trial.

Well, I think it's interesting because glioblastoma multiforme, which is like almost one of the most horrendous tumors to get diagnosed with brain cancer. It's almost uniformly lethal. Yet as far as, like this whole metabolic thing, the literature on that goes back 50, 60 years. I think it's one of the first cancers. If I'm correct, they actually used ketogenic metabolic like diets to actually treat with patients having these. If you make it five years without cancer, that's unheard of.

The first one was nebulae, so actually was 1995 before it went. There might have been unpublished case reports, but Linda published 1995.

I felt like I read something from before that, which it probably was unpublished, but it was in the book of talking about glio. I was also using ketogenic diets for kids with seizure disorders, I think Alzheimer's back in the 20s. And 30s. This concept of using your metabolism to treat untreatable things is actually not Wilder.

At the Mayo Clinic in 1921, used the ketogenic diet first to manage epilepsy. That's how I worked in the field of epilepsy at Yale University. That's how I got into it, working on managing epileptic seizures using metabolic therapy. And then we jumped into the cancer thing based on what Werburg was showing. But the bottom line is that while he knew that he would water only fast, the epilepsy patients and get tremendous success. You can only do that for so long before the patient dies from starvation. So he developed the ketogenic diet, which blocked epileptic seizures. They threw ketogenic diet for epilepsy under the bus in the 1930s when they developed these chemicals that could stop epileptic seizures. Then it was Jim Abrams, the movie producer, the movies Airplane and those kinds. When his son Charlie developed intractable seizures, he found John Freeman at Johns Hopkins University, and they developed keto and kept Charlie alive. Jim said, what the hell is going on? He got Meryl Streep to do first do no harm movie. All of a sudden, ketogenic diets for epilepsy started to explode all over again. And then I came in with the cancer part of this whole thing. And because nobody had been talking about managing cancer using metabolic therapy, nobody was switching to metabolic therapies for managing cancer. That's what we started with. So which is actually going to be the future standard of care? It's just a matter of time. So we're seeing how science and clinical practice and outcomes have all overlapped at one point or another during the past. And we're starting to now develop therapies based on these understandings.

So one thing you mentioned before is like a retraining for physicians. And you mentioned putting protocols together. So if someone. I see a lot of patients that come, I come alongside in their cancer journey, they want different options. They want integrative choices, whatever that term means. If a practitioner wanted to try or refer a patient, how's that work if someone's actually like, they want to try something different than chemotherapy, radiation, they want to try integrative. How does that work for an actual patient or provider or doctor if they want to provide this option for their patients?

Well, this is a real tricky, slippery slope, as they say, because if you start practicing treatments that are not dictated by the standard of care, you could be reprimanded or lose your license. And a lot of physicians fear that they do what they do because they're required to do that. And when they say, geez, you know, I know metabolic therapy will help my patients so much, can I do that?

No.

And they'll say, why? Because there's no clinical trial. Well, the clinical trials are designed not to have you do that. So it's a very paralytic kind of a thing. But occasionally we find physicians. Now, I just understand that Arizona had passed a right to try where we're beginning to see some states are starting.

To open up a little bit more.

Where physicians will be able to practice some of these approaches without being reprimanded in such a way. And I think that once we can get these kinds of things off the ground and show published clinical evidence that this stuff works, we have a paper in review right now, very comprehensive treatment protocol for glioblastoma. In other words, an actual how to do this. And when this happens, you do this, and when that happens, you switch to this and always be aware of everything that could possibly go wrong and how to address it. So it's a very comprehensive treatment protocol for the physician. And, you know, once, once that would get out, published, there, there's your tool. Then you go and treat the patients, you collect the data and you publish the case report. You publish the outcome for glioblastoma, and you can tweak it for any cancer. Be honest with you. Because they're all the same. They all need fermentation to target fermentation. So this is going to happen. The problem is we have so many obstacles in the way to prevent us from doing this. These rigid standards of care, the superficial statements. Well, I don't believe that.

What the hell, man?

What do you. What's what part of the science. What number do you not believe you know? Which pathway are you not familiar with? So you don't. You have all these superficial reasons why you can't do what you're supposed to do, but it all break down because you know why people want to live.

They do.

Yes. That's your motivation. People want to live.

Yeah. I remind people when they ask about, you know, it's not standard of care. There's. What's the evidence? I just remind people that, you know, vitamin D per Medicare, vitamin D testing for screening is still considered experimental or controversial. And screening for an A1C for patients for pre diabetes by Medicare is still considered experimental. And so if something that as basic as vitamin D and A1C is still considered experimental by one of the biggest covers in the country, then obviously anything more complex than that is gonna be even more controversial.

Yeah, well, you know, the bottom line here is if you don't take vitamin D, you're not gonna be dead in six months. You know, you can live. You can just walk out in the sunshine, you know, diabetes isn't gonna kill you. You got diabetes today, and, oh, you're terminal now.

No, no.

When you have cancer, man, it's altogether different. You're dealing with a different beast here. It puts the fear of God into the soul. When you're told that you have cancer, you want to live and you want to do what's going to keep you alive. And if there's something out there that's. That's legitimate and based on hard science, and it becomes scientific. One of the things I do here at Boston College, teaching biology is called scientific literacy. We have to become scientifically literate. We are responsible for the existence of our soul on this planet. And when it comes to these kinds of things, you can learn. I wish my students could become this smart. It's the motivation. You know why? Because his life is on the line. He wants to leave better. He better understand scientific literacy real quick. And the other thing, too is we don't. We don't deny anyone who would like to take a toxic poison or be surgically mutilated or irradiated. We're not stopping any of these folks from wanting to do that. You know, that's their choice. And some people say, listen, I love Hershey bars. I. I love chalupas and Big Macs and soft drinks, and I prefer radiation and chemo. I say, I mean, it's not my problem. That's your problem.

So, Dr. Savory, this is a great conversation. I've loved it. We could go on for quite some time. I probably would recommend as a practice. I have a lot of practitioners that follow me as well. I'd recommend for practitioners, if they want to learn more, to read your book, A Male Bach Approach to Cancer, which I feel like is the tome that actually dives into this. But for everybody else out there, if they want to learn more about what you're doing or these concepts, if they're still not curious about what recommendation would you have or even follow what you're doing, would you have any recommendations for those individuals?

Well, yeah, because we published most of the stuff I've mentioned with you today in this conversation on open access publications. So everybody can read it. And don't forget, the case reports are all open access. Even the dog report is open access. Just put my name Thomas Seyfried, what did he publish? Okay, and you'll see publications and then you can read open Access. If you have Google or you're on the Internet, you can get. And don't forget, all of our research currently is supported by philanthropy and private foundations. You know, it's unbelievable. There are folks on this planet who just want to be part of the paradigm change. They want to feel good that they're going to do something for mankind. And they throw us some money into Travis Christofferson's foundation, into Boston College Cancer Fund so people can donate directly to our research through the university, Boston College, or through Travis Christofferson's foundation and some other small foundations that support our work. Don't forget, we do everything pre clinically. We have model systems that tell us what works and what doesn't work. And I immediately share that information with my clinical colleagues who then start to test it on the patients and their feedback. We develop doses, timing and scheduling. And then our goal is to keep animals, mice alive for as long as possible, just like we do it. The bottom line is how long you can keep a terminal subject alive. Far longer than would be predicted. And boy, humans do so much better than these poor mice, you know, oh my God. Humans are the ultimate example of success, if you really want to know it. So that's what keeps us going. And yeah, we're publishing, we have a couple of coming down the pike here that are going to shake the foundations of the entire establishment where they're in the works right now. Treatment protocols, new information on the science behind what I'm saying, you know, tough papers written, so observation, diet, drug combinations that are really spectacular. So all this stuff is going to come down and eventually it will filter into clinical practice and ultimately you're going to see people walking the planet for far longer than they ever imagined. So this is going to have. It's just a matter of time. That's all.

I got you. Dr. Seifert, I really, really appreciate your time taking your time away from your job just to come talk to us and share this information and it's been great. Hopefully this is information is helpful to people that are listening to give them hope, but also realize there's other things out there and there's brilliant people working at well established organizations. Boston College are doing great things. Most cool things are happening now are happening outside of the standard of care, not within the standard of care in our country.

Yeah.

Well, thank you very much, it was a real pleasure and have a nice day.

Take care.