Kick Cancer’s Ass with Keto Dr Nasha Winters #528

Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is about elephants. And that's because elephants almost never get cancer, which is kind of surprising given that they grow really large and they live a long time, which ought to provide more opportunities for the cells to turn into cancer cells. And the reason for this is probably a newly described gene that was brought back from the dead that they think is now protecting them from disease. When scientists looked into the elephant's evolutionary history, they found a defunct gene called LIF6 that somehow got turned back on 59 million years ago when elephants started to get really big. And it's found only in elephants and their relatives. It's triggered by another gene called TP53, which puts cells out of commission at the first sign of damage before they turn cancerous. And the TP53 gene makes a protein that protects cellular DNA damage and signals for the cell to basically fix itself or die, which is what we want our own cells to do. Elephants have 20 copies of the TP53 gene compared to just one in humans and other mammals like us. And studies where they looked at autopsy data from the San Diego Zoo in a database of 650 elephant deaths found that just about 4, 4.8% of them get cancer. And for humans, it can go as high as 25%. What that means is that not only do I want to be part elephant because of the cancer thing, but elephants have a good memory and they live a long time. So maybe my spirit animal is the elephant, not the naked mole rat. I'm still trying to figure that one out. If you like bulletproof radio, I'd love it if you took about 10 seconds and went to bulletproof.com iTunes, which will take you straight to Apple. So you could just leave a five star review and say, hey, Dave, I laughed about your elephant joke there. Today's show, as you know, I'm mastering the art of foreshadowing very, very carefully here. Might have something to do with cancer, but not just something about cancer. We're going to be talking with a nationally board certified naturopathic doctor, a fellow of the American Board of Naturopathic Oncology, and someone who also studied acupuncture and oriental medicine and is licensed in both of them. I'm talking about none other than Dr. Nasha Winters, who is the author of the Metabolic Approach to Cancer, which was a bestseller in 2017 and really one of the great books on cancer that's worth reading. She's based in Durango, Colorado, and is the former CEO of Optimal Terrain Consulting, where she taught people about highly personalized integrative oncology care. And the reason I have her on the show today is that we're not just going to talk about cancer, although frankly, a large percentage of people are facing that sometime in their life. But we're going to be talking about ketones and metabolism. And funny enough, all of us have metabolisms. So this is a highly relevant show. Dr. Nasha, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It's a joy and honor to be here. My husband's a little bit jealous, I have to say. I told him I'd give a shout out for him to you.

Tell him I said hi. I would have come there to Durango in person to interview you, but I have PTSD around Durango. You want to know why?

Yeah.

So when I was around, I don't know, 8 or 10 or something like that, I was sleeping in a log cabin by Viocito Lake.

Oh yeah.

And I woke up with a vampire bat feeding on my neck. And I grabbed the thing and I was on the top bunk bed and I thought it was a mouse because who would think vampire bat, they don't live here. And I went to throw it on the floor, kill it or something, and it bit my thumb. And when I threw the floor, it never hit the floor. And I'm like, it's pitch dark, I don't know where my flashlight is. And I'm trying to wake up my sister. And she didn't believe me and no one believed me. I'm like, no, there was something, it bit my neck. And finally I was insistent of we got flashlights and we caught the vampire bat and we took the vampire bat to Mercy Medical Center. You know where this is, right? Cause you work right by my house. We brought it there in a plastic pitcher from the hospital actually. And it's just kind of flopping around, bat halfway injured. And we called every rabies expert in the country. They all said, pour ether in there so we can freeze the bat and look at its brain to see if it has rabies. So we're in the er. We pour ether into a plastic pitcher with a vampire bat inside it. Ether melts plastic. Oh, so what happens? You have a half dead bat covered in plastic goo on the floor, flopping around, every nurse up on chairs screaming. And I'm sitting there with two little V marks on my neck. This actually happened. I'm the only person ever to have Been bitten by a vampire bat, and it was in your hometown, and you've.

Not been back since, which I don't blame you.

I grew up backpacking in Colorado. Anyway, that's my favorite Durango story ever. Now everyone knows. Yes, I've actually been bitten by a vampire bat. And it explains so much, doesn't it?

Oh, my gosh. And funny thing is, this year, my cat brought us a vampire bat to the house a few weeks ago. An actual vampire bat, not a New Mexico vampire brat. Oh, yeah. And then my husband kept it in a little box in our bathtub, and I kept telling him, it's time to put it elsewhere. So he finally did move it into the greenhouse, and it finally took off. But we have had an outbreak of rabies and bats in our community. So I'm laughing that you're having this story, but, yeah, they're not native. I know. And it was huge. I've never seen anything so big in the bat world because we're used to seeing really cute, little, furry, like, little mice with wings. Oh, no. This guy was horrific. So you're giving me PTSD just hearing your story. And, Dave, before we go further, everyone does this. It's so common. But my name is with a long a. Naysha, I think. Echinacea.

How could I not know that? Nisha? I should have checked before the show.

Every single. Even my relatives. So you're normal.

Where is Naysha from?

Oh, my gosh. Named after an ex girlfriend of my dad's before I met my mom. It's a Turkish name. He was based in Turkey. And my mom and my dad probably never thought I would learn about the actual origin of my name. So it's pretty funny.

I was guessing Russian. That's why I did it. But anyway, Naysha, I've got it. Thank you for telling me.

Yeah, no worries.

All right, now everyone else knows how to say it, right? Which is great.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, you have an interesting background in that you've studied both Western and Eastern med. And every time I talk with someone who's studied both sides, they're always better off than someone who knows one side or the other. But generally, isn't it sort of like the mark of shame for a Western doctor to study acupuncture? Because everyone knows that's a bunch of bs, right? What drove your decision to be one of those doctors who doesn't just wear a lab coat and give out drugs?

Well, my decision to not just be one of those doctors, which is what I initially planned to do, was thanks to those doctors, sort of falling far from the pedestal in my own journey of health. I was very, very sick at a very young age. And Western medicine, despite my being enamored of it and wanting to study it and in pre med for it, failed me. And so I had to, frankly save one of my patients, calls it save your own ass university. That's what I had to do. And, and the eastern western blend for me, because I started in that scientific realm, made sense to bring them both together. And I cannot imagine a life without both in the sandbox with me.

It's a really common driver for some of the very best healers and doctors that I know who have a fully, just a broad spectrum view of healing. I'm going to do whatever works. And if I don't know why it works, if it works reliably, I'm okay. It's usually people who got really sick and I see it over and over. And a lot of doctors, whether they're from one tradition or another, if they haven't faced it themselves and had to say, oh my God, I need something from outside the box. I look at what you do as sort of the mixed martial art of medicine.

That's perfect.

I mean, it really is. And this idea of, well, I have to win because someone's going to die here if I don't win, and that someone is me, you're willing to do something. Well, that wasn't in the karate tradition. It doesn't matter, like you kick the guy in the knee, whatever. So thank you for having the courage to do it. And the courage comes from, I don't want to die, which is cool. What happened that made you so sick?

Stage four ovarian cancer. Happened at 19.

At 19, yeah.

And missed for. It was actually right around just two weeks past my 20th birthday when I got the official news that I was spending my entire 19th year on this planet in and out of ERS over and over and basically being pegged as that, you know, crazy histrionic woman that, you know, was in their ER a couple times a month for months and months on end. And so by the time I filled up with, you know, eight and a half, nine liters of ascites and was in end organ stage and looked like little stick arms and legs with a giant Buddha belly, finally someone decided they should probably do some other scanning and imaging and blood testing.

Wow. So that would definitely be a failure of Western philosophy.

Yes. Yeah.

One of the things I learned when I shot Moldy, the documentary on toxic mold, was that in medical school, they teach you that if a patient has more than maybe five symptoms, by definition, they're hypochondriac, because diseases don't do that. Is that what you were facing?

Totally. And I'd show up, and they just kept funneling me into this. Well, she's got to have just a little histrionic behavior. She's got to just have an std because I had a lot of pelvic pain. You know, they just. I was the zebra, right? No one was looking for ovarian cancer diagnosis in a 19 year old in 1991. 1990. 91. I mean, just in the last couple of months, I've seen a six year old and a nine year old with stage four ovarian cancer. Okay, so we know things have changed in the last couple of decades, but 27 years ago, that wasn't the case. So you're right. I just got kind of pegged as. And they always thought I was a drug seeker, despite me saying, I can't take these drugs. They make me terribly sick. Right? And so, like, that's even worse. And of course, years later, when we learned about epigenetics and I started learning about that and myself, it explained why every medication I could have ever taken or have ever taken has backfired horribly. So, you know, been a living experiment ever since.

The whole drug seeking thing, it's annoying. My wife is a drug and alcohol addiction emergency medicine doctor from Stockholm. She does fertility work now, but she tells me these stories. Drug seeking is real, but when you have someone who has an actual problem, it's within the doctor's necessary behavior to do that. I had the same thing. I went to a psychiatrist, and I was going to warden, my brain isn't working. Something's wrong. Like, really wrong. It turns out, yeah, I had mold and some other stuff. No blood flow in the brain, et cetera. But he thought I was just, oh, this guy wants Adderall for business school. God, I see these all the time. And when I walked in after he saw the lab data, he's like, you have the best camouflage I've ever seen. Inside your brain is total chaos. I don't even know how you're talking to me. And I'm like, there, now we give me some drugs. And the drugs you gave me made me feel like crap. Modafino worked, but it's that same story. No one believes you. And you have to sort of come in almost with. With your fists in a ball, like, all right, I'm ready to fight. But you actually have to partner with a doctor to make anything happen. So you got to find the right doctor who's going to at least believe you.

And that's huge. That's huge. And so part of the strategy for staying well today is having your team, right, Your power team of your healthcare providers. You should never lean on just one to help you get through this.

Yeah. Having a collection of people you trust who know your case is important, but it's expensive and. And it's different when you're 19 and you're dealing with, oh, my God, something's really wrong here, you're going to do it. A lot of people don't hit that till, you know, their mid-30s. But the sooner you have a couple people you really trust who are going to keep you on this, it's going to work really well.

Yeah.

So now you're 27 years after this big thing. You've written some powerful books about what's going on with metabolism and cancer. You actually gave a talk called Empowering the Biohacking Our Mitochondria at a cancer conference. And I'm like, you go. Go. Naysha, this is important stuff, because some percentage of cancer is not genetic, which we used to think it all was, and in fact, it's mitochondrial or perhaps fungal. In your clinical experience, your belief. And it's okay if you cite studies, it's okay if you say, this is what I think.

Yeah.

What percentage of cancer is caused by epigenetics or the environment around us, our bodies responding to it versus genetics versus some infectious thing?

Oh, I love that question. I've never had it quite asked that way. Most people just say, how much is genetic? Right. We kind of focus there because that's where we've been hanging out for 70 years. So really the answer. And there are studies, and I won't cite them right now, but they're in our book and other places, but we actually are able to show that probably 90 to 95% of our chronic illness, which includes cancer, is epigenetic mitochondrial damage centric in nature and not actually a genetic hiccup that is absolutely out of our control, which means that we are far more powerful than we've been led.

To believe it is. The core definition of biohacking is change the environment around you and inside of you, so you have control of your biology. And what's missing from the conversation around epigenetics is that what are the smallest parts of the body that sense the environment first? They're mitochondria. They're not Just powerhouses. They're sensors.

Exactly.

And they're driving all these other behaviors. And I agree it's gotta be 90% plus from everything I've seen. But I've had a guy on the show who says, no, it's all genetic. Here's all the data. And within five years, with just looking at our nuclear DNA, we'll be able to fix almost all cancer. I just didn't believe that. But if you believe his assumption that cancer is genetic, then what he's saying is totally true. How do we know if we're looking at the right assumptions? When you go about solving a problem, what's your thought process like when you're writing a book or when you're doing that?

Well, first, I think that one thing that came to mind when you shared the story of talking with this guy, I heard that lecture, I heard that interview, by the way. So I'm intrigued. Thanks. Because I want to hear all aspects of it that it's. I don't ever throw everything out. It's all pieces of the data. Come into the sandbox with me. But one of the things, you started the talk off today with the elephant story and you Talked about the TP53 gene, okay, this little guy is damaged in about 50% of the population, meaning it's not behaving as the best gatekeeper of our genome as it should. Already in 50% of us living on the planet today, that's on average. But when you add insult to injury, such as you had to take a round of Cipro, or you just took a massive amount of chemotherapy, or you just had a major mold, you know, or fungal toxic exposure, that poor gene gets even more shut down, it gets even more suppressed. So that little gatekeeper, you know, partially what that guy is saying is true. He's just looking one or two steps downstream. And yet what we actually are starting to find is you need to back it up a few steps to realize that our DNA, our genes will not be damaged or will not be, you know, like irreversibly damaged. If our mitochondria are healthy enough, vital enough, efficient enough, effective enough to protect that process. So, so I think that he is still in that, straddling that world that's still very gene centric because it's been a 70 plus year experiment, it's hard to let go. But ultimately we need to back it up a little bit further down to what is protecting those genes to begin with. And that comes back down to the mitochondria.

Well, we're definitely in agreement there on this mitochondrial importance. And for me, cancer is one of the many things, but I couldn't find anything when I was running head strong. Diabetes. Yep. Mitochondrial. They can't use sugar. Right. It's not an insulin receptor thing as much as it is, it's an energy use thing. And you look at Alzheimer's, you look at heart disease, you look at Parkinson's, everything is mitochondrial, even your response to an infectious disease. If your mitochondria work well, you're going to kick its ass. And if they don't work well, it's going to kick your ass.

Exactly. And what you said earlier, like the TP53, if that's not doing its job, it does not discern the unhealthy from the healthy cells. And when the unhealthy cells start to pick up momentum, it can't do anything about it. And so the mitochondria are in fact the garbage collection and removal system. They are the first line of apoptosis for any damaged cells, whether that's from an infectious nature and a chemical assault, a stressful experience. And so when you asked, how do I assess this in all my clients, I start with kind of this questionnaire. And actually the questionnaire is in the book the Metabolic Approach to cancer. But that's 20 some years of me figuring out that there's kind of 10 main patterns probably that folks are dealing with when those little mitochondria decide to go on sabbatical. Right. And that includes things that go into their mitochondrial bucket of things like stress, you know, blood sugar imbalance, hormone disruption, circadian rhythm disruption, chemical stressors, circulation issues. So angiogenesis as well as just, are you oxygenating well? Inflammation, immune system issues, microbiome, ginormous. I mean, it's all of these facets. If you ignore any one of them, chronic illness can still keep on trucking down the road. So you have to keep looking into the garden and plucking the weeds as you go and amending the soil all along the way.

One of the things that you look at in your overall, you deal with patients and I. This is on your website and it's in your books and all, but you talk about ACE scores at adverse childhood events, emotional trauma as a child related to cancer. Like, what kind of a. I mean, you're not wearing a burlap sack and you don't have dreadlocks. So, like, how can we have this conversation? You know what I mean? Like, that's considered so hippie. Walk me through the science on that. Because that's totally real, by the way.

It is, it is. And so right now, you could actually do a score for your experience with a bat in Durango all those years ago as one of your adverse childhood events. But all kidding aside, when I started, after my diagnosis, I was a biology chemistry major prepping for med school. That was my track. But after my diagnosis, I had some survival experience that made me understand that a lot of my cancer diagnosis came from a lot of trauma. I don't know how or why, but that was very intuitive for me because it was definitely in 1990, 1991. 90. Not talked about. I wasn't in dreadlocks. I didn't have a tinfoil hat. You know, I was a scientist first, but like you said, I needed to save my life. So at that time, I started running across the work of people like Bruce Lipton, people like Candace Pert. This was at a time when the concept of psychoneuroimmunology was new to the stage. Like, that conversation had never happened before. In fact, after my diagnosis, when I was sent home to die because I was too sick, they didn't even think I was well enough to take chemo or anything else. That's how shut down my organs were totally jaundiced, the whole bit. I was sent home to die. And so I went to the library and instead picked up a book called Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra in 1991. And you got to remember, I'm a kid from Kansas originally, where evolution is not allowed to be taught in the school system for years and years to come into a place where I've got this Indian doctor telling me that you can make a shift, a paradigm shift in an instant. I read that book in two hours sitting on the floor, bawling my eyes out in the library, and started to explore things that he talked about in that book and stumbled across the likes of Candace Peart, these amazing microbiologists and selmalec physiologists that are out there for people listening.

Candace Pert is the woman who discovered the opiate receptor in the brain. And just this amazing NIH doctor. I didn't get to interview her. She passed away before I had a chance to. But I did interview Bruce Lipton. And she's. I would call her the mother or grandmother of psychoneuroimmunology, which is looking at what happens in your emotional body and how it affects actual receptors on your cells. And her own life is this sort of angry scientist evolving into, yes, I do meditation. And now everything changed. And in her Book the Molecules of Emotion is something everyone who listens to the show should read.

Yeah, life changing, life changing. And so because of her, I changed my major from psychology or from chemistry biology to psychology biology. And that became kind of at that time in the early 90s, a self constructed psychoneuroimmunology major. And I have never looked back. And so that is what drew me into the realms of Eastern medicine and philosophy. That's what drew me into the realms of psychology, psychiatric issues, which just caught me on fire and frankly gave me a path to traverse through my own process.

You mentioned trauma and pelvic pain, particularly in women. And I work a lot with functional medicine doctors and people like that and a few of the more progressive ones who are dealing with things like endometriosis and just otherwise unexplained pelvic pain. Some of them off the record are saying, Dave, I think 90% plus of the time there is a history of abuse, emotional or otherwise, and that that's the missing gun. And that if I don't do something to either treat the patient or get them to treat it with some sort of trauma release thing, no matter what medical interventions I throw at this, the body won't let go. Does that match your understanding of the world?

Not only does it match it, it is precisely where I came from. It is precisely what inspired me to go into the mind body aspect of this. And it's also been my experience of working with, at this point, tens of thousands of patients over 25 years and asking that question. And I have found I could probably count on one hand of people with a history of pelvic cancers of any kind, or pelvic pain or some type of process along sort of the lower jowl. From a Chinese medicine perspective, I've only maybe found a handful that actually claim to never have had any sexual trauma. And so it really correlates very well. And to kind of come back around to the ACE score, the adverse childhood events is just a simple questionnaire of 10 questions about particular experiences had before the age of 18 that we know changes epigenetic expression and causes things like breakdown of our TP53 function. And basically for every yes you have on that 10 questionnaire, your likelihood of having a chronic illness or cancer in adulthood goes up 20%. So just, you know, with maybe a little TMI, but I had a 10 out of 10 on my ice bar and no wonder, like, that's kind of like a giant aha. In fact, learning that about myself, because this information started being studied and put out there in the 80s. So when I started looking for this in the 90s, I found it and frankly, it was a life raft for me because it helped me actually feel not so traumatized to deal with the trauma. And luckily I stumbled upon the first EMDR practitioner. No way, right? In 1991. I mean, come on, she was way ahead of her time. I mean, there's so many moments that aligned in my life. An acupuncturist, an naturopathic doctor that had brand new started in this town that everyone thought were kooky hippie. You know, folks that frankly are part of my story of health and healing.

It's awesome that you're willing able to talk about that. And what I've seen enough times too where there's people say, oh, I had nothing bad happen. But I mean, I run 40 years of Zen and people do really deep altered states work with neurofeedback and all. And I've seen at least one person there and a couple people in other similar things where they come out of this really deep meditation go, oh my God, I just remembered I was abused for five years and it was totally missing from my consciousness. So some of that happens. And so there's some people who, you know, they got an infection and they didn't have any trauma. But the trauma removal techniques today are much stronger if people know trauma exists. I mean, EMDR is a very powerful one for people listening who haven't heard of it. Eye movement, dissociative response. And this is the thing you do with a therapist and they move your eyes back and forth, put your brain in trauma reset mode and you can let go of stuff. But if you are 10 out of 10 on an ace score, you can at least. I can. Quite often you look at someone and you can sort of tell if they're, if they're carrying a lot of trauma and anxiety because it's how you sit, it's how your eyes look. It's people who do that kind of work. You just, you can tell you don't really have a lot of that going on. I mean, I'm looking at you over Skype. So you've done some if you were 10 out of 10. So you are a highly traumatized person through no fault of your own. But you've done a lot of healing work that I suspect was non medical. And you mentioned emdr. What are the other big things that let you become who you are today? Which also by the way, means removing your cancer risk. But like, just walk me through the technologies you use to just drop all that old crap that wasn't yours in the first place.

Wow, that is interesting. And I've actually been. I've touched on this in a few podcasts, but I've never been asked to kind of put it all in one container. So EMDR was critical. The other interesting thing, and I love that your wife worked or had a history in working in addictions. I put myself through college working as a cac, Drug and alcohol counselor. Right. And night shift. Right. So that should all experience. Why it took me a little while to figure that that was a problem. But interesting. In the four corners where I worked at that time, we sit on four Indian reservations. And at that time it was a residential in house drug and alcohol center as well as a psych unit.

It's a super poor part of the world with lots of drug and alcohol problems. I grew up in New Mexico, so.

Yeah, that's right, you're right. Your neighbors. So right there. But what happened though is we had a lot of shamans as part of the healing for these. So I would be invited to sweat lodge, I would be invited to ceremony, I would be invited to things that again, I'm from Kansas. Okay. My grandma said, you know, my grandma when I went to naturopathic school said I was going into witchcraft. So just to give an example here. So this was very new world for me. But because it was part of my job, I was exposed to things and had experiences and saw things that were frankly not possible. Right. And part of seeing that helped me realize I didn't have to be put into a box of possibility either, that anything was possible. So that definitely informed. And then another critical piece that landed in about the same time was an experience with psilocybin cubencies.

Mushrooms.

Exactly. And so to me, the combination of a rewiring of my brain that was critical for me to realize. The types of grooves I had built with my neurochemistry were so deep and so obstructed that without something to lift me up and see what was around me, that ability to see the possibility of my own healing was frankly impossible. The groove was so deep with my trauma history. And so those were kind of, to me, if I had to pick top three, those were it. And since then, 27 years later, I've kind of tried it all on first size. I'm fascinated by ways that we can recircuit our psychology, re express our epigenetics, you know, up regulate. And so I kind of jokingly say that, you know, naturopathic doctors were the original biohackers. And that's why I was so drawn to you. And your work is. You were taking it from like I'm taking it from old school nature, cure Eastern ways of being. You coming from the tech world, it's like we are finding a really cool common point. And actually the center point to me looks like we are landing on the science that seems to be the intersection of a lot of these pathways.

There's a lot of dogma on both sides. So there's the ultra. I don't know what it's called. Ultra hippie. I would never touch a pharmaceutical. I would never use technology. Oh, gross. Keep your cell phone away from me. And then there's the flip side, which is, well, there isn't a double blind clinical trial funded by a drug company, so clearly it can't work and therefore you're a bad person. And I came from that world, actually. But when you look at the data from either side, you end up with this fact that sometimes drugs work. There's really good things you can do with western medicine, but if you ignore all the soft stuff, the data shows it doesn't work. And your answers are, thank you for the courage to just say it. Yeah, I did emdr. I did mushrooms, and I saw a shaman and I got better right in my own path. Let's see, what did I do? I tried all the western stuff. That didn't work. I went to Tibet, learned meditation from the masters. I did ayahuasca with a shaman in Peru. I did a lot of holotropic breathing and I did a lot of neurofeedback and got to where I am today also by removing old traumatic patterns. And I see CEOs, they come through the 40 years of Zen stuff. There's no one without traumatic patterns that are affecting how they treat other people today that they're entirely unaware of. And some of them have a lot, some of them have a little. But it seems like these are things. They're not infections, but they're things that are not working well in your software instead of in your hardware. And when you fix those, the hardware works better. Do you agree?

Oh, my gosh. So beautifully said. And I think that you're spot on, that we all carry some degree of an imprint of some trauma of just, you know, like the bat in Viocido. We kind of joke about that, but you're probably a little flinchy in mountain cabins.

I've been to the bat caves in southern New Mexico there, and yeah, I Don't have a thing about bats, but I had my own set of things from being bullied and even traumatic birth. Delivered 36 babies. I've only delivered two, but I had, they were mine. But I mean, I had birth trauma. That was a core part of the way the world's a dangerous place. I didn't believe that necessarily, but my nervous system did. So until you get over that crap, you're probably gonna act like a jerk.

And it keeps putting you into same patterns over and over again. And when someone keeps saying, when I hear a patient or frankly myself say, well, why does this thing keep happening to me? Or why do I keep ending up with the same type of friendship, relationship, job situation, yada, yada, yada, that's when you have to look inward because the common denominator of that is you. And that's hard. That's a very. That is the most difficult. That's why the last chapter of our book is on the psychology side of it. Because it is often the hardest and scariest Everest to hike. Of all the things people love to do, the tangible, measure out their food macros and check their blood ketones and, you know, even take their little questionnaires. And they love that. But when we start to talk about crawling into the muck of it, that's not so easy.

That's why for me, neurofeedback worked really well. Because you have a data driven lie detector. You're like, oh, I guess I can't hide from that because the sounds get quieter. So then it forced me to face every inner demon. And at this point, if I have any of that stuff, I'm like, I'm wiring myself up. I'm going to go in there and knock that out. So I don't want to have unconscious reactions to the world just because. Why would you do that? But you mentioned something pretty powerful in there, something that I'm a huge fan of and an early supporter of, and that's ketosis. And I have noticed that when I have ketones present, even just low level ones, my ability to meditate, to do healing work on myself is much better. So that's emotional healing work. But you're talking about in your book especially how ketones are just fundamental to cancer. So let's shift gears a bit so we know emotional trauma matters and ketones also matter. Tell me about ketones, why you think they work for cancer, how you use them, and just what's your approach?

So I think when we started talking about, so a little backtrack again. In 1990, 1991, there was no Dr. Google. In fact, I worked in a library on work study. There was the Dewey Decimal system.

I remember it well.

And in my small liberal arts school, we did not have a fancy library, so we kind of got all the defects. So what I had access to were very old textbooks. And in those old textbooks, while I was leafing through what is cancer and what the heck do I do about this? Because no one else was going to save me, I stumbled across the work of Otto Warburg.

Oh, nice.

Thank you for not having modern technology so I could look at something from the 1920s that had gone out of favor after Watson and Crick got cranking with their double helix. So that being said, as I started to understand that I could manipulate the engine of my body with the fuel sources that I provided it, whether it was fasting, which was an old nature cure approach, which I was also free because that was starving, you know, medical student or undergrad student. So that was a really good way to approach it. At that time, the only information out there available to cancer was Gerson. You know, as far as kind of a raw food vegan. But when you actually look at the father Gerson approach to modern Gerson today, they are very different animals. And if we want to cover that later, we can come back to that. But ultimately, that was this place I started adopting within myself. I started bringing on fasting very early on. And it made the biggest difference of any tool that I threw at my cancering process. It stabilized things immediately in my own body. So let's fast forward all these years later that I saw.

You did that fast forward.

I went to Medical School in 1996 and decided that cancer would never be part of my practice or part of my experience. I was wanting it out of my life as much as possible. And I didn't even tell. In fact, it's only been the last couple of years. I really shared my story because of the reaction I get from doing it the way I did it. But that being said, my first week in private practice, a gentleman comes in in a wheelchair, unable to walk, unable to talk, in excruciating pain, sent to me for pain management with acupuncture. Okay. And I realized right away that his parietal lobe is bulging out. And it becomes very clear to me what I'm actually dealing with. And he had been diagnosed with terminal brain tumor, was given days to weeks to because his ventricles had closed down on his CT scan. So I thought I was just doing end of Life supportive care. Now, he was seizing, unbelievably right. Nothing was touching it. He was on every pharmaceutical you could imagine. And the only thing I knew to do, per the literature, even though I'd had my own experience with this, was a ketogenic diet. And this gentleman lived 18 more months on a ketogenic diet. Basically me pulling it out of my ass in 2000, 2001, because there was no Miriam Kalanians or Thomas Seygried's or Travis Kristofferson's in the world to guide us on this. I was petrified, you know, that I was going. But there was nothing else. I was into life care. So I thought, well, if anything, one of the things I was reading about ketones was its anti inflammatory property. And his brain was clearly inflamed. So this man, within weeks, within two weeks was out of diapers, out of a wheelchair, able to talk, able to have quality of life. In fact, the weekend before he died, he was up in the high country looking at the fall colors of his family. And he died peacefully in his bed with his three little kids and his wife next to him. Just a whole different experience than the excruciating exit he was initially taking before we met. And so the universe had a very different idea for how I was supposed to work with patients and cancer in particular, which at that time I knew if I said, I'm putting people on ketogenic diets, I would get stopped before I got started. Oh, yeah, I'm a naturopath, I'm in an unlicensed state. Ketogenic diet still today is very controversial. So all they did was talk about I put people on low carb diets, right?

Yep.

And that was the safety mechanism of what we called it. And that even then, everyone thought it was batshit crazy, saying things like, low carb diet, you know, oh, sugar has nothing to do with cancer. We still weirdly hear that, despite the mountains of evidence speaking up to that.

Otherwise that's just crazy pants at this point. Like someone who says that it's like, do you read?

Exactly. Like maybe remove head from butt to take. Drives me crazy. But ultimately, that has been kind of the foundation of the work that I've done. And what I witnessed long before Travis and Thomas and Dom d', Agostin, all these guys came to the table, was that this had an impact on many mechanisms, not just lowering sugar to starve cancer. In fact, that seems to me like the bottom of the ladder.

And cancer can eat ketones too.

Well, at least in Laboratory in cell lines. We don't really see that in humans. I do fight that one a little bit because I've been doing this for so long. There's a lot of braf patients, a lot of colorectal patients, a lot of prostate patients, breast cancer patients that I keep hearing out there saying, oh, it's not good for these patients. I'm like, then you should talk to the hundreds of mine that are still kicking on it.

The anti inflammatory stuff trumps that effect. It's not like you need to starve the cancer. You need to turn the metabolism on and ketones will do that. I'm with you there.

It's just this little change in the pedal to the metal on this. So ultimately what has happened is people like Dr. Adrienne Scheck's work are able to now show that ketones impact all 10 of the 10 hallmarks of cancer.

Walk me through the 10 hallmarks.

Well, forgive me while I pull out my book because my brain does it to my patient's population in a very basic conversation.

I get it. I pull my book out too, because it takes thousands of hours to write a book and you memorize every hour.

For me it took two decades. So there. So number one, sustained proliferation of cells. Hello there was that TP53 conversation we had in the beginning. You don't have something to turn that off. So one of the things we've noticed is that ketones upregulate TP53 activity in the way we want it to. Number two, insensitivity to anti growth signals. So you know, they become like little rogue, you know, like toddlers who just ignore anybody telling them to put their shoes on. Right? They just ignore. You forget any signals coming their way and they just do their own thing. That's a hallmark. Another hallmark is the evasion of apoptosis. Now that comes directly down to the mitochondria. The mitochondria are in charge of apoptosis.

Which is basically programmed cell death of cells that are bad for people who don't know the medical term exactly.

And then limitless replicative potential. Now we all have this sort of inner, you know, you should be able to recycle this particular cell a certain number of times before it gets worn out and dies and moves on. But with cancer cells, it doesn't do that. So they recycle, but they get weaker and weaker and more rogue and more mutated and more difficult to kill and more difficult to see. See across the board. So that's another one. Sustained angiogenesis so one of the coolest things we've learned about ketogenic diets is that it seems to cut off that vascular blood supply to the tumor. Again, another challenge we have in conventional oncology, we have about 26 different mechanisms of angiogenesis, and we have one or two drugs that we throw at it. And ironically, it's like a whack a mole game. So we might shut off one, but frankly, we wake up the other 25 sleeping tigers.

Don't you actually want angiogenesis for longevity?

Thank you. That's the trick here, is that.

Hold on, I'm just going to take a little bit of oral nicotine, speaking of which, drives angiogenesis, which is good for you, unless you have cancer, which case, maybe you ought not to use it anyway. Sorry, I'll get off my nicotine horse there.

No, but you get on that nicotine horse because the body is wise to say, these cells over here need it, these cells over here don't. But when we bring pharmaceuticals sometimes into the mix, we try and completely turn on or off a switch. And yet we are these complex, dynamic beings that sometimes we need to heal a wound and sometimes we need to let the wound know that it's healed and done. So that's a biggie. That keto kind of gives the smart bomb of you need to stay, you need to go in the process, and then a couple of others, the ability to metastasize. That's all. That's a biggie. Because once we get to the metastatic world, it's really challenging to drive this process back. Once we hit a stage three or four in western medicine, you've got an average of anywhere from 5 to 12% are still here across the board. Cancer types in five years. I like to overcome those statistics.

I'm working with a guy who, in most of the people he's worked with, can turn off all metastases within two weeks. And he has patents of drugs in his names, and he's terrified to put this stuff out in the world.

I'm sure he is. I'm sure he is, because we're not. I mean, even when we see the power of ketones on this, people get attacked and, you know, ridiculed and not to ever say, I mean, while we still have a couple more to go on this list, the ketones by themselves are the trick. They make the cancer cells and the cancer process vulnerable, so that other therapies. It's the Trojan horse. And so it carries radiation to its target. It carries aromatase Inhibitors to its target, or PARP inhibitors. It carries certain chemotherapeutic agents to its desired target with better cell death and better support of the healthy cells and marrow to keep the terrain vital so that you don't take it all out with the napalm of the cancer treatment.

Yeah, that's beautiful. Keep going on your list. This is golden.

Cool, cool. And then this is the one that everyone thinks ketones are all about, is just the reprogramming of energy metabolism that is one of the ten hallmarks of cancer. And it's a biggie, biggie, biggie, biggie. But we're all super hyper focused on that alone and on that alone as being the reason why ketones work or the reason why ketones could potentially be used as fuel for cancer. If you just simply ignore that one. The fact that it touches all other nine is pretty compelling. And so avoidance of immune destruction and immune detection, which is huge because cancer starts to cloak itself from the immune system and hide and basically evade the immune system and evade, you know, natural killer cell and dendritic T cell activity, it just can kind of wonder woman bracelet it off. And we need that to be vulnerable to our immune system, which is actually what treats the cancer, not the cytotoxic agent that we might be putting into the mix. So people might get beautiful cytotoxic reduction, but ultimately, if the immune system is not up and running, the cancer will be back bigger and bigger, louder than ever after the process. And then tumor promoting inflammation, we kind of hit off the conversation around my very first experience, Both personally, because I had massive angiogenesis and massive inflammation with ascites. That's all ascites is, is inflammation and angiogenesis. So that really helped me by fasting. I cut off supply chains to that. Same with this gentleman with the parietal lobe bulging out when he came into the clinic in a wheelchair. We quieted that inflammatory very, very quickly and very powerfully and sustainably. And then finally, genome stability mutation. This circles all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. We now understand ketones to be HDAC inhibitors, to be epigenome express. Like help help our epigenetics express better and avoid expression where they're broken, if that makes sense. That's kind of put weird. Maybe you can help me reframe that. But ultimately it has a direct impact on. Impact on our epigenetic expression.

That is an epic list of 10 things. And you're listening to this right now. You can see why you might want to Read A metabolic approach to cancer if you're dealing with it in your family. And this reminds me of something. In the very early days of Bulletproof, I had a guy reach out and I had coffee with him at the Rosewood Hotel on Sandhill Parkway. This is where all the big VCs are. This guy was just for confidence or confidentiality. He was a C level officer of a Fortune 400 company and he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The same stuff that killed Steve Jobs. Thank you. Low fat, high carb diet. Can I just say that?

Right? Mono apple fast and mono carrot fast.

Yeah, so that doesn't work very well. So we lost a great one that way. So this is a very dangerous cancer and it was too big to be operable. So I'm talking to this guy and he was very well read. He'd found my little blog at the time and he said, dave, I just want to tell you what happened. He said, the day I got the diagnosis, I didn't tell my family. I don't want my kids to worry. Didn't want my board of directors to worry. So I went full keto. I didn't eat any carbs. Carbs again. I did that for nine months. And I went in to do chemo to shrink the tumor so it could be operable. And when I did chemo, I was in ketosis the entire time. And they wouldn't do insulin potentiated therapy, which is when you inject insulin with chemo to drive it into the cancer cells further. He said, so I just told the oncologist, look away. And I shot insulin into myself to do it.

Oh God.

And in nine months, he shrunk the cancer by two thirds so it was operable. He went in for an elective procedure, had it removed. Never told his family, told anyone. But he completely saved his own life in a year from something that was a sure death painful diagnosis. And talk about, I think the technical term for that is talk about balls. He was like, I am not going down like this. And he just did everything right because the knowledge was out there. This was probably eight years ago, the knowledge was there and it's way more out there now than it was a little while ago. And it. I found your book to be pretty amazing because you got all this stuff in there including the dealing with old trauma patterns. Right. So thank you for looking at it the way you have. And I've seen this work in people where if you listen to what your chemo, only guy is going to tell you is basically you're Screwed right up your will and it's not necessary anymore. And you may die of cancer. It still happens. But you also. He used chemo and you use chemo and there's so many people out there. Well, if I had cancer, I would just eat, I would do Garrison therapy, or I would just go in ketosis and hope for the best. What do you say to people like that? I didn't know the answer, but I want to hear you say it.

Well, actually, I didn't use chemo and so I freaked people out. This is actually why I don't tell my or why I never really told my story while I was in medical practice in a brick and mortar practice is because as a naturopathic doctor, I'm already scrutinized as it is. And everybody thinks they're going to come to me and I'm going to tell them no way to conventional therapies and everyone, raw food, you know, raw juice, vegan, Right. That's what people assume I'm going to do until they sit down with me and realize I'm a scientist. First, I'm a woo woo nature doc. Second, I believe they both co. Actually, I think they're both parallel. I think they stay on the same plane. Exactly. And I look at the patient, I treat the patient and their patterns. I never treat cancer or cancer tumors. I treat the terrain imbalances. And that is what those 10 chapters are on are these each of those 10 patterns. So my process, 27 years later, still with the tumor in my right ovary, still with lesions on my liver, still with peritoneal implants and carcinomatosis, still dealing with lovely edema when I fly from lymphedema, from all that pressure buildup from years that ascites really blew out my core things. But your bible plate, which I'm standing.

On, by the way, are you really standing on the bulletproof vibe?

I'm telling you, like I said, I stand on between clients because my edema will get terrible all day long. But that's.