52: Cancer Isn’t Just Genetic – The Best Root-Cause Approach to Prevention with Dr. Aaron Hartman

So cancer does appear to be more of a metabolic disease than actually a genetic disease. And so what are some things we have that would actually show that to be true? One thing that actually is really highly suggestive, that actually goes one BRCA2 gene. In the 1950s, if you had that gene, you had about a 20% chance of getting breast cancer. Today, it's 80%. So if it's purely genetic, you would not expect to see a 400% increase risk. So that means there's some external, some environmental component to this cancer. Is cancer a metabolic disease or is it a genetic disease? This is a debate that's kind of undercurrent right now between individuals in the integrative and the functional health world, personalized medicine world, whatever term you want to use it that's kind of out there currently. I want to say raging, because that's a little. It's not quite raging, but it's a debate. I think we should have the debate. So I want to talk about the differences between a genetic concept of cancer and a metabolic concept of cancer. First and foremost, where did we get the concept that genes were or are going to be a primary cause for disease? And actually comes back to Watson and crick in the 50s when they discovered the DNA. Before that, the cancer. You know, Otto Warburg was doing research and found out that in cancers, cancers actually are anabolic. They don't like oxygen. They lose the ability to use mitochondria to make energy. So they actually make lactic acid, lactic acidosis. So lots of research, lots of stuff going on. But like many things, all of a sudden, the new fancy kid came around. The shiny object came around when we discovered DNA. And all of a sudden people like, oh, my gosh, this is the new thing. This is the cause for all disease. If those of you all that are old enough will remember in the early 90s, when the human Genome Project happened, it was lauded. We're going to discover all this human DNA. We're going to cure cancer disease. You know, we'll live to be a million years old, whatever the claim was. And in 2000, actually due to, I think, Greg Venter, his work, his money, basically, we actually did get the complete human DNA. And that was supposed to change. That's supposed to be a game changer, right? Took maybe it was over a billion dollars, the expense to do the whole entire DNA genome. And now you can actually get it tested for less than $1,000, which is kind of cool. That technology takes something ridiculously expensive and makes it affordable But. But that's a side note. Another cop topic, maybe, but the gist was in 25 years, there have been through CRISPR technology, actually, which is a newer technology doing gene splicing and actually some muscular dystrophy. Some really rare and really serious diseases have been actually cured in newborn kids. But you've not seen a change in the landscape of cancer or disease in general. Just making sure I'm still recording. So anyway, but what we did describe realized there's this thing called the epigenome, or the genes on top of the genes, which are the. You know, we have about 23,000 human genes, and there's over. There's about a million bacterial genes. You know, you have about 23,000. This number, depending on what article I read, it can range like 22, 23, 24 ish thousand genes in the human genome. There are species of frogs, there are species of nematodes or worms that have, you know, 20,000 genes. So you're no more complicated than a frog. Okay, but you are different than a frog. Why? Because you have a million of these bacterial genes. And we've realized that your gut, which houses the vast majority, is a big. The second brain, the enteric nervous system. And so what makes humans different from nematodes, from worms and frogs is not our genes per se. It's the epigenome. It's all this other stuff that we have. And so again, have we used genes to like, cure cancer? No. And so then the next question is, well, let's look at some cancers, like breast cancer. There are over 80 different types of breast cancer. You know, that's not commonly talked about. They'll talk about, you know, BRCA1, BRCA2 as being the genetic breast cancer, which we'll talk about in a second. Or, you know, HER2 positive, HER2 negative, estrogen positive, progesterone positive or negative cancers. That's just describing different aspects of it. But genetically, there's over 80 different types of breast cancer. So all of a sudden, our understanding of human genome has. We realized that it's why there's so many different kinds of breast cancer. And this kind of goes back to Otto Wergberg's research. When. When you get in this anabolic state, genes become unstable and they actually will rearrange. And this is actually related to energy production, the mitochondria. You get uncoupling of the electron transport chain, and you get genetic instability. And then that leads to, ultimately to cancer. So cancer does appear to be more of a metabolic disease than actually A genetic disease. And so what are some proofs, what are some things we have that would actually show that to be true? Well, actually, one thing that actually is really highly suggestive, that actually goes back to the BRCA1, BRCA2 gene. In the 1950s, if you have that gene, you had about a 20% chance of getting breast cancer. Today it's 80%. So if it's purely genetic, you would not expect to see a 400% increase risk. So that means there's some external, some environmental component to this cancer. So all of a sudden you have to ask yourself, is cancer primarily metabolic or is it primarily genetic? And once you understand how metabolism works, you can understand how metabolism is an underlying cause that can be expressed in the genes. Oh, okay. So what, what do I mean by that? Well, when you get. Ultimately, one of the things we're learning is mitochondria, or foundational mitochondria, which are the powerhouse themselves, actually underline all chronic illnesses. You know, I always hate to say the one thing that causes, you know, one ring to rule them all. What's the one thing? But ultimately you are realizing that the mitochondria are the underlying cause for basically all chronic illnesses. It's really kind of cool, actually, when you get into the mitochondrial science of things. But what happens when your mitochondria become dysfunctional? They don't make energy quite as well. And your mitochondria, they actually make, they create probably 80 to 100% of your body's weight. They recycle that often every day. And so if you have insufficiency or inability of them to actually replicate, to create energy, to repair all that kind of jazz on a daily basis, then all of a sudden what happens is just a 10% reduction in mitochondrial efficiency can lead to diseases. And so what happens when you have a problem with your mitochondria? They don't create energy quite as well. That creates an uncoupling of the electron transport chain, which is where energy is made. It's complex. 1, 2, 3, 4. Won't dive into that now, but the point is that it just creates dysfunction instability in the DNA in that cell. And when you have instability, if things break and come together, become unstable, eventually you'll get big enough gene changes that you can get cancer.

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So what are things? And this is where I think it becomes pertinent to the conversation we're having right now. What are things that actually cause mitochondrial instability? Nutrient deficiencies, toxins like heavy metals, environmental chemicals, petroleum products, radiation. Okay. Which is an external factor. So those are three big factors, which is interesting because we've seen, you know, an uptick in a huge uptake in cancer in our country. The incidence of cancer in 1900 is about 1 in 100 people get it 1990s, 1 in 3 now 1 in 2. 15% of population is expected to get cancer in their life. So massive explosion in cancer, if it was genetic, you wouldn't expect to see that. Some people would argue, you know, we can diagnose cancer better. But I'm like, are we diagnosing metastatic breast cancer better? Are we diagnosing metastatic, you know, we diagnosing cancers in young people, breast cancer in 20 year olds, you know, no, we're seeing more of it. And why? Well, we're seeing more toxins in the environment. There's about 80,000 plus chemicals that currently are recognized and only maybe 2,000 have been said. They're safe, quote, unquote. And a lot of these are actually in our food system, which is one of the big debates now. Should we pull them out of our food system? Short answer, yes. Heavy metals. You know, it was really interesting. Lead was, you know, lead levels were proliferative in our environment until basically 91 was when the last amount of it was kind of pulled out of gasoline. They stopped putting it in paint in the 70s. But if you're born before 1991, you will have lead in your bones because you know, that was, it was in the environment. Mercury was super common. You know, think about heavy metals, how common they are in the environment. We used to use mercurial arsenate, which is mercury and arsenic as a herbicide and pesticide. And even now today it's still used a lot in agribusiness. So if you have your water supply, actually arsenic, according to the US atsdr, which is, it's a branch of the epa, they actually test the environment. Currently, arsenic is the number one heavy metal toxin in our country. Why? Because it's still out There and then radiation, which, you know, radiation is a lot of things. There's natural background radiation, but there's also the question of whether EMF plays into this as well. The point is that it's. I want you to understand how more chemicals in the environment and the nutrient deficiencies, one of the things that makes our cells able to deal with heavy metals, you can actually block the toxicity of lead with curcumin and vitamin C. You know, nutrients being nutrient sufficient actually helps protect against the toxic effects of heavy metals and things like that. So now we can understand why we're seeing an uptick in cancers because we're seeing nutrient deficiencies and chemicals. Yes, there's a genetic component to them and yes, there are some therapies that can address that. But underlying it's actually a metabolic issue. This is important to understand because there are things you can do about it before you get cancer to help prevent it. Even if you have cancer it, and even if you have the BRCA1 BRCA2 gene, what if you could lower your risk from 80% to 20% would that change what you do? If you're in your 30s and 40s or even 20s and you know you have the BRCA1 BRCA2 gene, for some it would, you know. And if you knew on top of that you could do primitive things like hyperbaric oxygen, high dose vitamin C, mistletoe. It's interesting, they actually use mistletoe therapy. I think in Switzerland up to 80% of cancer therapies include some form mistletoe in their therapy. Know other things you could do, you know, fasting, you know, things. One of the parts of metabolic instability is you create these things called senescent cells or zombie cells. What if you could actually make your body preferentially remove these through fasting, Cold plunges, sauna. It's strange actually. Some of these stressors to your body stress dysfunctional cells and take them, take them off. Once they become eternal immortalized cells that have no checks and balances in their growth, that's when you get tumors and cancer. So. So if the point is like understanding the metabolic approach to cancer versus the genetic approach, one's deterministic, which again is the old reductionistic Darwinian reductionist that you're nothing but a big machine, lots of cogs in the wheel. And if we can understand that, we can fix things. Realizing that you are an infinite interconnection of. It's a web of web of webs. It's a 3D web. And once you realize that it Takes a lot of dysfunction to get cancer. It takes a lot of dysfunction in your body. Your body has a lot of built in redundancy. You are not complicated. You're complex. What's the difference? The space shuttle has one O ring that cracks. The whole thing blows up. I think it was 1987. Yet for you, requires error upon error upon error upon error before you develop diabetes or heart disease or cancer. Realizing that there's a metabolic component to all these, you know, we talk about the four horsemen. Cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological issues, and metabolic disease. You know, when you realize ultimately metabolism, how you make energy underlines cancer and heart disease and neurological issues, then you can, it's really easy to understand how the mitochondria can be at the root cause of all these things. So maybe I'll do another things talking about, specifically about mitochondrial health and what you can do for mitochondrial health because ultimately you want to love your mitochondria and take care of them because that's how you prevent the four horsemen. So hopefully this helps, helps you all who are kind of wondering the difference between metabolic and genetic theories behind cancer. These are part of our, you know, weekly, you know, deep dives in the topics. If this is helpful, please like share, subscribe and let us know what you'd like to take a deep dive in. And we'll talk to y' all soon.

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