RPM Tuesday Night Live: The big C!

Some of you guys can join us. I'm, uh, we're talking the big C tonight. This is not Grimbo, this is not Christmas. Um, we're going to talk a little bit more about, um, uh, cancer, uh, just because we're just far enough away from Christmas to deal with something so serious. Hence I'm wearing the jacket, okay? Um, and yet, uh, far enough away that we've still got time to cheer you up afterwards. So, uh, I think from a point of view of this has been something that we as a team have thought about long and hard over many different cases. I know that myself and Nick see loads of cases of cancer, and we want to really sort of address this, um, so that we can, uh, speak to you guys and give you some hints and tips and things that may be going on So over this next hour or three-quarters of an hour, we're going to be going into that. So thanks for joining us, and thanks to all of you guys who've been here almost a whole year now. It's been a great journey. I think all of you have experienced us developing our ideas and reading lots of books alongside us. Um, so before we get into the main subject, uh, Conor, what have you been up to this week?

Just trying to think there because I thought it might come to me. Um, two things are leaping off my— leaping off my, uh, leaving on my radar. Two things are on my radar. I co-hosted a show there with Habib on Sunday, their Inside Scoop that they do once a week. Decker was out and Conor was in for, uh, for an hour's chat. That was good. So that was a— it was a good fun to be beside Ronnie and chatting about stuff. So that was a once-off. Um, Heidi, hi! Good to talk to the Americans for a while. But the other thing that I did was, uh, better for the soul maybe, was, uh, not that there was anything wrong with that first, uh, thing for the soul. I got lots of bird feeders and, uh, I hung them on my back wall. You know, we've got a— not a big garden, so we've got this big retaining wall near the back, and I don't like seeing a wall. I didn't grow up looking at a wall. I had a big garden. So we've painted it black and we've done as much as we can with it. Now I'm after hanging 5 birds, like 2 seeds, 1 type of fat balls. Is that literally just lard and seed? And a couple of small seeds for the birds. And within 3 days I've got finches and blue tits and great tits and all these other things. We got this piece of paper from a group that were walking around the town saying, why don't you go bird watching with your kids? And I just kind of took it and said, yeah, thanks very much. And then Holly was looking at it, looking at all the colorful birds. And I swear to God, she's just fascinated now. And she's ticking off the birds and she sees that there's a robin and that's Santa's helper. He's going to be keeping an eye on you. And there's starlings, talking to them about starlings. Hopefully we'll see some swallows, and maybe they've gone already. But so yes, I just love this. So now she knows the names of the birds. Within 2 days she's naming the birds. There's a great tit. And I was like, oh my God, it's fantastic. So that has been chicken soup for the soul, I have to say. So that's been a buzz. So I'm sure something else happened during the week, but that's what's leaping off the page. What about you, Nick? What's going on with you?

Well, yeah, a couple of announcements. First of all, Michelle Bard-Chardon, who I hope I pronounced that That's a minefield there. She sounds like she's from deepest, darkest fjords in Norway or Sweden. Not that Sweden has any fjords, but it sounds like she's from there, and she probably does have Scandinavian blood, I suspect. But she's from Woodstock near Chicago. Of course, I knew that Woodstock was near Chicago. And did you know that they filmed Groundhog Day in Woodstock? It wasn't actually in Punksatowny, Pennsylvania, or wherever Punksatowny is. They filmed it just outside Chicago, which is quite cheeky, I thought.

Blame the Cubs.

Anyway, she won. If you remember last week, we did a competition for the soap bar because we looked at all these behind and said, what can we do, and who would like to spell Pekingese? And she was quick as you like. So she actually contacted me today and said thank you very much for offering to send me some soap, but it's going to cost 3 times as much as the, the cost of the soap. So please, would you donate it to a dog charity of your choice in the UK so that we're not wasting loads of money sending it halfway across the globe? So Michelle, thank you very much. Yeah, well done.

Good.

Talking of chicken soup, chicken soup for the soul, at the weekend I got a a cow's hock from the butcher. You know, the pointy bit at the bottom of the hind leg? That is the hock. Okay. And I got a skinned one of those, so there wasn't an ounce of meat on it. And normally, you know, you would either just give it to the dog or you just throw it out in most situations. But I boiled it for 48 hours and it produced the most amazing stock. The most amazing stock.

48 hours?

48 hours.

Wow.

Yeah. And Simmered, not boiled. No, no. Well, okay, simmered. It was at very, very low. So it was just kind of just about doing this, a little bit of movement in the water. That was it. And I was very excited every morning, got up and had a look. Woo, look at this, look at this. And we tried some. It was great with a little bit of miso. Tastes fantastic. We did Brendan's fantastic idea of putting it into the muffin trays. Well done, Brendan. And then we got them out of the muffin trays and put them into plastic bags so that they're in individual breakable bits. Absolutely brilliant. And a tiny little bit was left over, so we put that into a little Tupperware and put it in the fridge. Only raw feeders, guys, could get excited about this. And it was so— it had so much gelatin in it, it was like jelly. You go like this, cut it out, and you could hold it upside down and none of it would fall out. It was Fantastic. So Ellie made bolognese for the kids yesterday, and they had a big old scoop of the bone broth. And we've been using it for the dogs and in with miso as a bone broth for us as well for the last few days. And we're feeling good.

Yeah, good, Bren.

And also, I'd like to just say before we move on any further, as well as saying thanks to Michelle, thank you very much to everyone who contributes every week to Patreon. We really appreciate it. It's the way we do stuff. And it reminds me that I've got to chase up the Reading Laboratory. I, I wrote to them a week ago and they still haven't got back to me. I'm going to chase them again to see what they're up to so that we can do some analysis. Please, could you guys say either here or if you're in Patreon, could you just tell us what foods you think we should analyze and why? Would be very, very helpful. And that, what that will give us a steer on. We've got some ideas, but But if you can contribute as well—

you mean ultra-processed products, Nick? You mean we're targeting kibbles here and canned, aren't we?

Kibbles and canned. So it's what product and why. We're going to do some raw as well, just to be safe, as some controls. So we're going to do that. Yes, definitely. Somebody suggested that, but we were on that already. And so that's as far as we've got. And we're paying Pete the sound man to create our ramblings into podcasts so that you can have them on walks as you go, taking the dog for walks over the Christmas period. So all very busy, lots coming along. So we're very grateful for Patreon to be able to fund the whole thing.

Absolutely.

Brenton, what have you been up to in your jacket?

Well, I'm— yeah, well, I can't go a week past without going on about my goats. And sure enough, I have the biggest predictor of bad weather 5 months in advance because that's how long gestation is. Billy escaped and Queen G decided that, yeah, there's snow coming in 5 months' time. She predictably always drops kids just before a snowstorm. So we've had 2 kids before Storm Arwen, 2 little boys, and now we've got 2 little girls arrived just yesterday, ready for the next storm. Okay, so we've got more goats.

That sounds nice. You had snow, I think. I'm very excited by that.

Yeah, we did. Absolutely.

Much?

Good few inches. Good few inches. I love that.

That's amazing. I used to work on a dairy, kind of the maternity unit of quite a nice dairy operation, and the woman who was in charge of all the cows when they were having calves swore that if there was a full moon coming up, they would carve either a few days before or a few— if they were due a few days before or a few days after, they would tend to carve on the full moon. Have you had any experience of the moon affecting things, Brendan?

Not with these, but yes, I mean, it is something that I do see with other pets. We've talked about, you know, for various illnesses, let alone just for, you know, parturition and that side of things. But you've got to understand We evolved from sea creatures which were, you know, effectively, you know, ovulating to the moon cycles, uh, you know, and we've got to understand it's a big part of nature.

The sea is just, uh, you can't— your divers can't see on some nights with, uh, with just the release of everything at the same time on these full moons. So there's definitely something to it. I always remember, Nick, uh, me and you were up in Finland, Annaheim Borgman, We're sitting on the patio at an ungodly hour talking stuff, and for some reason astrology came up. And then I— we end up talking a little bit. We went into the whole kind of star sign bit, and I poo-pooed it a bit. I went, ah, come on, guys. And she shot me a look, you know, this is one of my idols, like. And she goes, what do you know about what you're talking about? I know it's nonsense. And she goes, I'm very disappointed you said that. I'm like, oh no. And she goes, we just don't know. You don't know. You don't know anything about the subject. You've just read it in papers and heard some quacks talking about stuff. But she said, like, you know, she gives me 4 or 5 examples. Boom, boom, boom. Sea creatures was one, but then there was 2 or 3 which I can't remember. And it put me right back in my box. And I think that was pretty much the last time I was ever cynical about something. I thought, yeah, I need— I'm better than that. I mean, I just acted exactly how, you know, so many vets can talk to us today, which is just poo-poo it. So it was a real lesson. I don't know if you do remember that. Nick was sitting out in the cabin in the middle of Ireland. Beautiful. What a lesson. A lesson.

Such a beautiful place.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think we're going to crack on. Yeah, we've had so many people already mentioning about their individual cases. There's loads of foods on there, Nick, we're going to pick those off for the study and stuff. I've had loads of people talking about their diets and their dog's individual tumors and that their experience. We're not going to be too specific tonight. We're going to try and— this is a general view— we're going to try and deal with some more specific growth types in the next year, because we're carrying on, we love it so much. And I think tonight we're going to deal with some fairly meaty subjects, pardon the pun, to do with predisposition, because we're seeing a lot of people that may have done everything they possibly can and they're still experiencing the sadness of dealing with the big C. Something else I think I'd just like to mention, we did do a whole podcast on euthanasia and things to look at back in the winter last, back January I think it was, that long ago on euthanasia. So have a look back if you want to understand our thoughts. We'll probably do some more things on with regards to that. A little thing that we do as a practice just for those out there, so we've put up our Christmas tree. We do a little memory tree, and that is with little pictures of everybody's dog that has passed away that they want to remember them. And they come in and they can hang the little bauble picture on the tree in the practice. So it adds as a little memory to all of those pets that we've lost in this last year and beyond. So something you might want to mention as an option, or even create for your own tree just so that you remember those that were near and dear this Christmas. Create a little picture, pop it on your tree.

Sounds nice.

Let's talk about food because that's really what we really love is about nutrition and Conor, you're going to kick off with some of the big dos and don'ts with diet and some of the things that we need to really be careful of.

Yeah, if I could, if I could ease us into into it as the non-vet. And I kind of say this quite a lot, like, can you believe that dogs are 10 times more likely to suffer cancer than humans? This is in the US. 500 in 100,000 Americans are diagnosed with cancer each year. 5,300 in 100,000 dogs are each year in the US. Take from that what you will. But why is this when we know that around 5 to 10% of cancers can be explained as a genetic defect at birth. It does, it stands, and in every report you look at, the vast majority, from 66% up to about 80-90% in some reviews, are explained by environmental factors, environmental triggers. So what is it that has dogs at such a rate getting cancer at such a rate? Because it's so, so common. So listen, we know dogs are very similar to us on a genomic level, and they certainly develop cancer in a very similar way to us, and that's why we do a lot of tests and prod them and that kind of stuff. But they certainly react to carbohydrates the same way. So you're talking about a meaty subject Brendan, I'm going to first talk about carbohydrates, and I know you guys are going to come back to it, but we all know that, you know, too much sugar in the diet is very much linked to a huge lot of cancers. Okay, you, you name it, I can ping them off here as I read them: breast, ovaries, pancreas, biliary duct, lung, gallbladder, stomach, colorectal cancer in humans. They're the top sugar ones. But why is it? And we had a carbohydrate discussion a while ago, and we were saying that tumors are complete sugar junkies. The Nobel Prize in 1931 was won by Otto Warburg, who showed that cancer cells have a ferocious appetite for glucose. They perform glycolysis at a much faster rate than other cells. They love a bit of sugar. And in fact, really what they have is a huge amount of receptors for insulin. So how we find tumour cells in the body is— it's called a PET scan, isn't it? A type of PET scan where they make you drink a radioactive sugar drink and they they allow it to percolate into the cells and then they track it and the tumors light up like Christmas trees because they get the goblin. Because insulin is a growth hormone, it's an anabolic hormone. So that works out well for cancer cells, but it goes much deeper than that. Listen to this. The more sugar you consume, the more cell resistance to insulin builds, which means more insulin is released into the blood. Our body reacts by producing pro-inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, spiking inflammation. And for if you're suffering cancer, that is not something you want increasing. We know that phagocytosis, that's the engulf and destroy part of the immune system, we've known since 1971 that just 100 grams of sugar via honey or orange juice significantly reduces the effectiveness of phagocytosis in humans for up to 5 hours. So that's the part of the cell removal part of the system that can be switched off for 5 hours. So if you're a cancer cell thinking of getting up to mischief, that is wonderful news for you. Then there's more. Carbs, high-sugar diets, which is, you know, your high wheat, corn, potato, pea, sweet potato, doesn't matter, down to the body, it's rapidly digested, thump, sugar to the blood. It's a cause of obesity. I mean, it's very, very obvious. It's the same in humans, same in dogs. And listen to this from the World Cancer Research. They produced this report called The Body Fatness and Weight Gain and the Risk of Cancer. They've done 5 of them. They say that obesity leads to a greater incidence of practically every cancer you can think of. And they name about 20 of them. But the fatter you are, the more risk of those diseases you become. That was their conclusion. And last of all, just to quickly finish on the carbohydrates deal, whatever the cause, we've got 3 good studies there that show dogs with cancer have reduced tumor growth on diets containing fewer carbohydrates. So spoiler alert, I kind of think that if we have those studies, I can't believe that vets are still recommending high carbohydrate diets when you get this terrible diagnosis. If tumor growth, if these studies are showing reduce the carbohydrates as you would in humans, how that kind of hangs about. There was two other things that you might explain why there's so much cancer in dogs today. Bad fats, guys. I mean, who could think that a piece of fat sprayed on the outside of a pellet a year ago, preservative chemicals, you know, fat from a rendering vat is as good as like this sardine. You know, it's just preposterous. Nobody could possibly defend that. But the more worrying one, as Nick would love to go off on one here about, would be restaurant grease. It's multiple times, multiple cooked under very high temperature, seed oils, nut oils, vegetable oils, highly antigenic. You're allowed to use the oils for 2 weeks or so, and then they bring them to the recycling plant and you pour them into the big pot, and restaurants get rid of their grease that way. Where does the grease go? It goes to rendering plants. What do they do with it? They stew it up. The fat floats to the top for your pet food, and the gloop sinks to the bottom. So restaurant grease, multiple times cooked, very, very antigenic stuff. And then on top of that, pet foods such as canned food and dry pet food, they're so low in antioxidants, like, you know, vitamins and stuff. You could talk all day about that. Your omega-3s, we know lots of complete pet foods don't contain a whole lot of them. Some of them are completely absent in some of the crucial ones and all that. But listen to this, this recent blueberry study in 2021. And blueberries are full of antioxidants, the blackness of anthocyanins and all sorts of cool stuff. This is the conclusion of this study on blueberries recently. Lots of studies on cancer and blueberries, but this is just staggering. The researchers note blueberries contain resveratrol. Have you guys heard of that? It's a flavonoid. And flavonoids, Dr. Fang says, are chemicals that have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antibacterial properties. Wonderful little thing to have, right? The team tested blueberry extract on cancer cells, human cancer cell lines, for their latest study. The extract was tested both alone and in combination with radiation therapy. These effects were compared with those of radiation therapy alone. While radiation therapy alone reduced the number of cancer cells by 20%, the blueberry extract alone led to a 25% reduction in cancer cells, already beating the radiation. However, when the blueberry extract and radiation therapy were combined, the number of human cervical cancer cells fell by 70%. Isn't that nuts? That's blueberries. And it's like all these little token extras that we say, like, you know, we might get some curcumin or just cleanse on Q10 when you're sick. It's like this stuff is supposed to be in your diet all the time. You're nibbling all these wild foods or or a well-fed herbivore that got to nibbling these plants and you're absorbing the CBD and curcumin and all the stuff we could talk about. And we wait until the person gets sick before we give them these antioxidants when you're supposed to be consuming these fire extinguishers all the time. I've not— just my last thing here. I couldn't leave it before without mentioning seaweed. Seaweed is just a completely untapped, completely untapped resource. And there's so many studies of seaweed in cancer. I talk about it all the time. But listen to some of the top 6 or 7. Carotene and lutein are protective against breast cancer in humans and rats. Carrageenan is anti-tumor. Fucoïdan is anti-cancer, protective against neurodegenerative disorder. Fucoferulophols are chemo-preventative. Chlorotannins are anti-proliferative. Polyphenols are blah blah blah.

They're all—

it's also anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antiviral. Here's two studies to see if there's one of the two lines or not. Zoo in China screened 39 species of marine algae. They found 8 species had potent cytotoxic activities with none of the side effects more commonly associated with those compounds. And more than 30 compounds were isolated, 40 bromophenols, 1 new steroid, and 1 new carotene. That's just from 1 study alone. 7 showed vigorously selective activities against cancer cells, and they are specifically strong anti-tumor activity with low cytotoxicity to normal cells. So what they're saying is, bloody give this a go. It can work in conjunction with the stuff that you're doing, and it doesn't have any of the negative kind of kick that some of the more poisonous stuff can have that's trying to help you. I am just bowled over by that. I have all those studies up on my website. If somebody wants to go find those studies, type in kelp for cancer. Although it's many different seaweeds, people just call all seaweed kelp. That's just one of 10,000. But kelp for cancer, and you'll see the sheer volume of studies on that. So I'm blown away by all those compounds. I just think they should be in our diet all the time. And if you were to ask me what my tips would be, they would just be the stuff I'm after saying. But, um, So that was my spiel out of the way. I took those notes because I wanted to get that all out. But that's, that's what I blame this 10 times cancer. Can anybody else— what, why are dogs so susceptible? That's what's going on in your opinion.

Conor, just before we get into that, I just got to say the, the great news for the evening is, do you know what, one of the highest sources of resveratrol, as pointed out very, very wisely by Shivani, One of the, one of the greatest sources of resveratrol? Red wine, my friend.

Yes, just had a glass. That's why my cheeks are rosy. Excellent news. Never going to get cancer.

Although, do you know, the other brilliant source of resveratrol is actually Japanese knotweed, one of the biggest growing weeds.

Invasive, terribly invasive over here. We've got—

Absolutely. Yeah, we're trying to get rid of it. But it is a brilliant source of resveratrol. And actually, there are some supplements available, I think, through Amazon where you can get it by the capsule.

Yeah.

So, uh, yeah, just, uh, really interesting, uh, on those. So yeah, there's a couple of things to, to point out on, on, uh, that, that there are some great books out there. Um, I mean, the, the one that I showed, uh, a couple of weeks ago, I think it was, was the Steven Gundry Longevity Paradox. And that's— I like it and I don't. There's some things in there that I'm not too keen on. I think he is very human-focused, and there's certain reasons why he's a little bit down on some of the meat sources, just I think because of the way the farming practices— he's really against, you know, some of the, the lectin side of things, which causes a lot of he blames a lot of disease on leaky gut, from heart disease all the way through to cancer. And there's all sorts of things. And it's sort of touching on one of your points of why are we seeing so much cancer these days? And I get this question asked by lots of raw feeders because, you know, they're saying, look, we're doing everything we possibly can. We're not vaccinating, we're not giving flea and worm treatments, we're not giving you know, processed, ultra-processed diets. Why has my poor Fluffy suddenly come down with the dreaded cancer? You know, what has gone on? You know, I've not neutered, you know, all of these things that we've talked about in the past. And we have to accept, and Stephen Gundry does point this out in his book, so one, you know, tick for him, is that actually our environment has become quite oppressive with how much we've got going on with it. You know, we've got all sorts of things which affect that microbiome. Yes, all of those weed killers, Roundup, which is, you know, the dreaded glyphosate, all the way through to, you know, just some of the BPAs, which are found in plastic bottles, and all of the phthalates that come with some of the grains and all of the, the things that are found in our shampoos and things like that. I mean, even talks about you can detect some of these in as much proportion from traffic queues in the morning, not, you know, as you can from the exhaust pipe stuff, you will also get these plumes of all of those chemicals from all of the beauty products that people have used in the morning before they go to work. And they just literally— it's pumping out of their cars at the same time as their exhaust fumes. And, and you've also— there is something called an inverse square law. So I'm going to get a bit sciencey here. Okay. And for every half of your height, you double the amount of particulate matter. It's called an inverse square law because if you think about it, you're effectively squaring the amount of particles every time you go down that, that level of height. So if you half your height and you think how big your dog is, then you all of a sudden realize how much more chemical your dog is breathing in.

That's interesting.

Coming to you every time you go for a walk.

Okay, so what you're saying, Brendan, is the closer you are to the ground, the more chemicals you're gonna breathe in.

Snuffle, look at this.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, especially if you're sticking your nose into the dirt at every single opportunity. I mean, Dudley just—

well, and then there's contact alone as well on top of that. You know, you've got people running their dogs through crops that have, you know, maybe even just, you know, once it's been cropped off and you've got the stubble in the field, but all of the stuff that they create, you know, how do they ripen corn ready for cropping? At the same time they spray it off with Roundup. That's it, you know. So those aren't lovely open fields that you're going into there. They are often sprayed with all sorts of stuff for those crops. So do really think long and hard about what happens with the environment, what's happening with maybe your other products, people, what they're using for cleaning their carpets. I know we've had a chat about this in the there's somebody, you know, talking about using those organic sort of bacterial cleaners and things like that. So, which is great, but ultimately the whole thing that is going to, you know, what's happening in our environment, let alone touching on things like about our use of electronics, what's happening with blue light to us and our sleep patterns, what's happening to just EMF fields that can affect us. You know, it does get a little bit crazy. It makes you want to find a log cabin in the middle of Canada and just retire.

Yeah, yeah, flame retardants.

I don't know, do we have our famous, famous groupie from Canada? Vancouver on tonight. I just have to say, hey, who's that? Who's that? Well, I'm going to scroll through and see. No, go ahead. Anyway, so those are some bits that I would just, uh, say, um, we need to think honestly that we— there are loads of things in the environment you cannot control, and therefore some of these useful additions that Conor's talking about actually are really good, whether I would give them every single day or whether I would cycle through them. Yeah, I think there's some great mushrooms out there. There's some great additions that you can use with some of these fruits and veg. Be seasonal. Think about fruits would only come at a certain time of year. There's other ways, other things that you can do to feed your gut bacteria, to improve your gut health. You know, I love that side of things. Even bone broth that we were talking about earlier, increasing glutathione and reducing that insulin drive. Remember, it's not just about those cancer cells loving glucose, but you're actually using a growth factor. And, you know, you will generate insulin-like growth factors in this mechanism that's going to speed up the growth of anything that wants to multiply and grow quickly. So you want to cut that down. You want to try and minimize that as much as you can.

Like what you said there earlier, Brendan, when somebody mentions a compound and someone says lycopene in tomatoes, the more you cook tomatoes, the more lycopene comes out. It's amazing. So like a little bit of cooked tomato, not too bad. In fact, very beneficial for your oldies. But the danger is that people hear these things, they hear about coenzyme Q10, or they hear about— and then they just use lots of it all the time. Like the way people use huge amounts of omega-3 all the time, fight inflammation all the time. It's like, well, a lot of those processes are there to help you. It's not that it needs to be repressed constantly with this natural additions, but So that's a really important point there, Shirley. It's the fact that in normal feed, in normal way of things, these compounds come to you and they come to you in variety. And, you know, sometimes you eat some good quality blueberries, other times you eat a bit of dark greens. It's not about focusing on getting these in all the time, as you know, unless you have cancer. And then there would be an argument for making up these little kind of power cubes where you make up your little supplements once or twice every month and you mix it all up and keep them in your ice cubes. Pop into the dinner every day. So perhaps, but in normal healthy dogs, it's not something that you would be leaning on constantly. Is this Diane Jolly? Is this the one, Brandon? I missed that. What did she say?

Diane just said— I love that, Diane, thanks for shouting up. Yeah, we would love to find log cabins in all sorts of places, including Canada. But there we go, maybe explore the area next year.

What are your thoughts, Nick, on the Big C?

Well, I've been doing a lot of reading on this stuff recently, and so there's two books I'd like to raise. One that I've mentioned before is The Cancer Code by Jason Fung. Do jump in at any point, by the way, boys. And the other one is this one that I just happened to— I was listening to Josh Bush last weekend, and he was having a discussion with some guy about cancer and the new paradigm of cancer, and they mentioned this guy. Travis Christofferson, Tripping Over, Over the Truth, which is what really what they're trying to do is say, guys, we've had 30, 40 years of trying to find the genetic basis for cancer. And with one or two exceptions, we haven't found a genetic basis for cancer. And what's coming really true, and, and, uh, Conor, you were mentioning Otto Warburg Oh, back in 1931. And Otto Warburg said, you can say a lot about lots of different cancers, but what you can say about all cancers is that they will— they go to the simplest way of making energy, which is fermentation, as if they were just a yeast or something. And what our friend Jason Fung says is that when the cell is stressed and in particular the energy production, the mitochondria are stressed because of glyphosate, because of crappy oils in the food. This is where it all comes together. If you insult your mitochondria enough, they say, right, that's it, we're going to give up. They send signals to the nucleus which says, right, I'm going to throw all my toys out of the pram and go back to pretending to be a yeast because that's Throughout history, and I'm talking 2 billion years ago, that's where we used to go when we were in distress. We would go back to fermentation because it's very inefficient, but it's very, very reliable. So what a cancer cell is, and this is what Fung is telling us about, Jason Fung, he says if you push these cells enough by modern life and over vaccination and what have you, they will just go back to being baby baby cells, primordial cells, which is— and they will ferment, they will overgrow, they will move, they will metastasize and what have you. And so that's kind of the reading that I've been doing, which is really, really fascinating, which is— and when they go back to that ancient way of being, they're really, really difficult to kill. This is why you have to use heroic doses of chemotherapy. Heroic doses of radiotherapy and what have you. But and here's the really, really amazing because with the modern, the ultra-modern thought and many oncologists won't be thinking in this, this area, the thought is that cancer is a metabolic disease. It's not a disease that you've inherited 20 generations of, of, of rotting genes and that's why you've got osteosarcoma. It's because you may— you're rotty and you're more susceptible to cancer because you're metabolically more susceptible to it. You may be inherent bad mitochondria. Anyway, what they're saying is that if you— if your mitochondria are that unhappy, that's what kicks it off. And the way to get around that, very simply speaking, I've got a week's worth of notes here. So just to think very simply about it, there's two things to have a look at.

Yes, thank you.

So there is, there is a ketogenic diet, there's calorie-restricted ketogenic diets, and the quickest way to get into that, the reading of those guys, is Keto Pet Sanctuary in Texas. They do some amazing work in, in a doggy context, so that's the place to go. I've given you a couple of books there if you want to look into it from a human perspective, because let's face it's going to— 1 in 3 women is going to get a diagnosis of cancer. 1 in 2 men, boys, is going to get a diagnosis of cancer. So I think it pays to be— to do your reading here. And the 2 things that— that 2 of the key metabolic, modern metabolic researchers is a calorie-restricted ketogenic diet and also hyperbaric oxygen therapy. So you go into a chamber where you're pumping oxygen at higher pressure into the body. Now, if you've got tissues that are poorly oxygenated, they really love that. But cancer cells, when they're faced with this really higher pressure oxygen, the oxygen will get into the cancer cells and explode them. How cool is that? And this is— and it's cheap, unlike chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It's safe, yeah, because all you're doing is you're just increasing the pressure of oxygen. That's nothing.

Yeah.

And ketogenic diets cost virtually nothing because you've got to eat something anyway. All you're doing is being really careful about being, as you said, Conor, about the carbohydrates. You're just dropping the carbohydrates really, really a lot. You're concentrating on really quality proteins, really quality fats, and keep your fats at a slightly ungenerous level so that your, your body is not having an excess of calories every single day. And that combination seems to be able to, to attack every single cancer cell. Whereas what the modern, the modern approach is that if you've got a mast cell tumor, you'll use this chemical. If you've got a gliocytoma in your brain, you use this type of chemical. If you've got lymphoma, you use that type of chemical. Right. So it's like, you know, one for every, every, every disease.

Yeah.

Whereas the diet and the oxygen You can use it for the lot, and they enhance radiotherapy, they enhance chemotherapy, and they reduce the negative effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, because chemotherapy and radiotherapy are pretty heavy. Yeah, yeah, I personally expect— not me, but family members— and they're really, really very, very harsh. And using these, the oxygen and the the diet can make a significant difference.

So how many vets have them, Nick? How many vets have those oxygen chambers? How common is that?

I think in this, in the States, there may be one or two. I think Margot, what's her name, the, uh, the, the lady who does the, the poo exchanges, she, I think she does hyperbaric oxygen. Not many, if, if at all. However, however a ketogenic diet with the dog is relatively easy because you have to feed the dog something specific, whereas with us we say, oh, I just want a little chocolate cake, or oh, I just want a little biscuit, you know, or whatever. So I think that the potential there— it's very early days, it's early days in the human side, but I'm so excited in the early days within veterinary medicine. We can try these things even if your dog is going for chemo, getting into a ketogenic diet, because that's easy to do, is a great, great, great idea. But look at the hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Margo Roman, there you go.

Somebody's bringing some points on some of those things that you made there, Nick. And also there's a couple of people, Vito, there's a couple of things there. So Gundry would say, no, it's what you feed your gut bacteria is what makes not what you are, what you eat. He has a slight tweak on that. Sasha, also, I think you think, find that Rodney refers to Stephen Gundry for the mTOR pathways with, with some of that, and that's why I went back to that book to have a little read through. But it's, it's great, you know, it's great that it's making it through into the Forever Dog, you know, great book. If you haven't already got it, get for Christmas, that side of things. A couple of things to bring in as well when we're talking about ketogenic diets, and I've had a chat to some of our raw feeding clients about this, is we've got to be a wee bit careful that we, when we're talking about 80/10/10 diets or we're creating our own and, and, or we're choosing diets, that actually excess of protein can also be converted into glucose. So if you overfeed protein to a body, it doesn't engender ketogenesis. It's great that they can assimilate that protein in a raw form, but actually any excess will be utilized by the body to generate through gluconeogenesis glucose. And actually you will ultimately get a driver in insulin and all of the factors that we were concerned with before. So just be a wee bit careful about not thinking that super protein is perfectly ideal for your cancer case, just because they're becoming, you know, maybe cachexic with the cancer and you're trying to feed them up. Yeah, you do need to try and keep that ketogenesis going that Nick was talking about.

Yeah, for energy as well as the protein.

Keto Pet Sanctuary would be, as you said, Keto Pet Sanctuary are fantastic for that. The sanctuary bit in their name comes from the fact the fact that they pull dogs out of pounds that are end of life and they say, right, if they're dying of cancer, they'll say, we'll take these dogs and we'll rehabilitate them. And so they have some of the top people that you need to listen to working for them and they give information in return for your donations and your donations go to rescuing dogs out of pounds. So it's just a beautiful business setup. They're also the people that you would go to for advice on diet, but they're definitely agreeing with everything you're saying there. Like, yes, you need good quality protein, but fat content's bordering, in my opinion, quite high fat content diets in some situations. And, but they're the people to go to for that advice. But keep the fat content of good quality fat as well.

And then the very last point I just must bring in, be very careful if you are on chemotherapy or you're on radiotherapy. A lot of these are destroying the cancers through effectively creating a really harsh environment for them. You've got to be a wee bit careful about using useful additions which are antioxidants and protectives of cell health whilst they're in those throes because you may be undoing some of those therapies. So if you're going down a conventional route, then please do be aware of that. You know, there are some chemotherapeutic users out there that are concerned about people feeding raw because there is this still this thought process that there might be immune suppressing the dogs and therefore they're— or cats— and they're therefore more likely to pick up bugs from poor quality foods. And in their mind, you know, a risk factor within raw. I still have found that many of my cancer patients are far better on raw. And actually, I'm trying to engender quality of life for these patients, not quantity. However, in doing that, I'm often finding that we're giving them the same quantity as they're quoted or actually achieving with chemotherapeutic agents. So, we've got to be a wee bit, sort of, like, open-minded to how we're going to address that. Have a serious conversation about what treatment methods you're going to use in these circumstances, and is it right for the quality of life for your pet ultimately?

Very hard for clients as non-vets to decide on that though. When a vet says we need to do something, who am I to say, oh, I disagree, I think we should use the X2000 machine, and it's like, oh, come on, you know.

So it's about, well, you know, there are many clients that will make that decision that they don't want to see their dog sick from the therapy that's going to help their cancer. And I think that's a discussion. Therefore, if you put that in the mind of the vet of, look, I don't want to make my dog sick with the therapy you're going to give them, then that vet should take stock, make it— take a moment to discuss how sick they're going to make your dog feel.

Christine also up there says, you know, I'm sorry to hear that. Christine did 5 months of chemo with them and 3 different protocols. It doesn't seem to be happening for the lad, so he's back on raw for the last few weeks of his life. And look, that— there's a key point. A lot of people are afraid to feed raw bread, and you just touched on it, because there is some sort of immune suppressing effect of feeding fresh food and raw, and because there might be a higher microbiological content on it, or hazardous microbiological content. I would draw everyone's attention, or remind everyone about the ROYNE study in 2015, where they compared raw-fed dogs and dry-fed dogs at rest and they tested the amount of homocysteine, an inflammatory marker in their blood, and raw-fed dogs had 10 times less of this inflammatory marker at rest. No point in horses, whatever it was. And more to the point, when they fed the raw-fed dogs dry food, those inflammatory markers jumped by 5. I went from dry to raw, they fell by 5. If you're talking about immune protect— immunoprotective, there is a lot of arguments the other side, and you know you would wonder what the truth is to that. But, you know, that is definitely the one people bring up all the time. Can I feed raw to my dog on chemo? Can I feed dog raw? Where are you on that, Nick?

I would say that the risk of immune injury from chemotherapy is going to be a whole lot greater than the, the outside risk of infection from raw. If raw feeding was actually a risky business and we are feeding 1.5 million dogs every single day, and that's just the UK. Across the world, probably 20 million every single day. We would have queues of dogs going to the vets every single day and the vets would be, would be saying, this, this month I saw 300 dogs who were infected with raw food. That is so, so, so not the case. You might hear about something possibly once in a blue moon, but you don't see write-ups, you don't see papers, you don't see—

Very hard to find. Very hard to find in literature. Some greyhounds fed desperately poor meat in a high-stress environment. It's like, yeah, I can see that. But honest to God, 2 or 3 studies from the US, all of greyhounds. It's like, where are the family dogs that should be at risk of this? It's not in the literature. It's anecdotal worry and concern, isn't it? But, um, so that's good to hear, Nick, that you're on that page.

What I want to do therefore, guys, because we're coming to the end, we've rolled over 45 minutes, so we're going to just come to the last few minutes. We've got loads more of these to help those people that have experienced cancers of various sorts coming over the next year. But right now, yeah, this is a great question to end on, I think. You know, maybe if each of us could give our top 2 supplements that we might suggest for the cancer case that's put in front of us. So a general cancer case. So Nick, do you want to kick off, um, just as a roundup, as your best 2 supplements?

Yeah, I'm going to go with CBD. Penny van der Rohe— it's, uh, sorry, Dr. Conor Brady.

I've murdered your name. Butchered.

Van der Merwe. Van der Merwe.

CBD. CBD, yes, I do go for it nowadays. I used to just go in with like 1 milligram per kilogram. Nowadays I go 1 drop twice a day and then increase until you find your sweet spot. Give away from food and what have you. So CBD, yes, the best quality you can, broad spectrum. With THC With THC, yeah, it's vaguely illegal, but vaguely, it's about right. Is it? Well, it has to be less than 0.1% or something. So Conor didn't say THC, but some authors do mention THC. Yeah, exactly. If you don't know what that is, just go and have a little look. So CBD is fantastic. And I also like medicinal mushrooms. We use Coriolus Plus. In my practice. It's super safe. If I have any bottles that are kind of half, half used, I take them home and I take them myself. It's that safe. So, um, Conor, what are your top two go-to mushrooms?

Mushroom picking course there last year, and we were picking turkey tail off rotten tree trunks, and it looks exactly like— when you see a turkey tail, you go, oh, obviously that's it. And it's a delicacy. It's worth Fortune. It grows rapidly in Ireland and Britain, and it's highly anti-cancer. So people are mad about mushrooms. I haven't explored it a huge amount. My number one would be seaweed. Everyone check out that article. Pick the same 4 seaweeds keep coming up, 3 brown ones and a green one. So seaweed, the best quality you can, not dried or temperature, because a lot of the active components are sugars and you want to keep them up. So they don't like heat, so you want to get the good stuff. So I love a bit of seaweed, can't get enough of that into you, as well as all the vitamins and minerals that come with it that cover all those things, a bit of iodine. So lovely, lovely, lovely. So I love a bit of seaweed. And the other one, it could be a toss-up. I mean, curcumin has just a savage amount of studies behind it. And that's your turmeric prepared correctly, you know, golden turmeric paste. There's a million people talking about it, but I have an article I've written like, look how many studies I found for curcumin and cancer. I think it was cause. Like, it just— hundreds and hundreds. This is an incredibly effective compound. I heard it's so effective that you guys would probably be wary of using it alongside any conventional anti-inflammatories. Is there a bit of a clash with it? And so I'm not quite sure of where— how you would use that if my dog had cancer. I've never had to be in that situation before, but it comes up so often, that compound, that I just know that— or astaxanthin. What is that?

Astaxanthin. Okay, are you talking about artemisinin as well? Because that's another one that's really good anti-cancer. It's wormwood.

Wormwood, right.

Oh yeah, fairly punchy though, isn't it?

It is very punchy. It's very anti-angiogenic, which is the new blood vessels that the tumor like to suck in to feed them. And basically you've got to be really careful about the liver and how the liver's coping with that particular product. And definitely be super cautious if you are using any of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories that are advocated by the conventional guys for anti-angiogenesis, because you can get clotting problems and end up with a dog that bleeds out. So it is super careful with that one. But yeah, if that's not the one you were talking about—

no, what's— what are your favorite ones there, Ben? Finish us off.

So I'm definitely with you guys on the mushroom. I use actually a product called Corpet. You can get it online, you don't actually need to get it through the vet. It's Mycoplex coriolus. Reasons for that, unlike you, Conor, going picking them in the wild, I truly advocate that these things should be regrown in the lab and utilized under those conditions. One reason for this is, yes, I know that they're less effective often than grown naturally, but we are devastating some of the forests around the world of their mushroom sources, and we've just got to be careful. It's almost getting like the shark fin scenario where people are just going out and ruthlessly cropping for, you know, the sake of—

is that not what they're for though? They're a fruit, they're a fruiting body, they want us to nibble them. It's like apples.

Yeah, but it's how they, they often won't just take the fruiting body off, they'll actually rip out from the bottoms and destroy the environment that those mushrooms are growing in. So it is just a wee bit of caution there. So corpet doesn't do that, it becomes a bit more predictable, readily available. Definitely would say Mycoplex coriolus, Chinese Emperor mushroom, useful for the immune system but for cancer. And last but not least, there are lots of additions here for antioxidants, and I particularly like Pet Plus. I have no affiliations to them. You again can get it online. It's full of antioxidants. It's been one of the baselines for our cancer support patients for 20-plus years now as a useful addition. Got lots of things to help heal the gut in there, to aid digestion, to promote good bacteria, all the way through to the antioxidants, including all of the blueberry stuff that you mentioned, all of the resveratrol, all of the— it has all of these products within that. But as I said earlier, one thing I would caution about is if your dog is actually already on conventional treatment, you may have to put that on hold until you've finished those chemotherapies or radiotherapy.

Yeah. And I'll be— Nick, what are we going to say there?

Just two things. Number one, Claire Bennett says fasting for cancer. Yes, but I would go further than that. I would say fasting for health and for longevity. Fasting, even if you're doing, what's it called, everyday fasting, intermittent, intermittent fasting, look after it, look into it.

It's really, really, really good. I've got a fasting article and the Nobel Prize was handed out for that where, you know, the magic number is 16 hours and the body goes into autophagy. It's like, right, Jesus, I've digested all the food, assimilated it and packed it away, and what will I do now? Start zapping cancer cells. So yeah, the fasting thing, brilliant tip, whoever said that. And I was going to say, look, it'd be remiss of me to say that, um, that I do have a product on my website where I took the 4 seaweeds that are mentioned in those studies and we take them. 2 of them are from Japan, 1 from Norway, 1 from Ireland, because that's where they come from, and we put them in a product, but we don't talk about what that product does. So you can't be selling products that mention the big C on it too easily, certainly crossing borders. But when you read my article, you'll see that. But you can talk to me anytime, I'm happy to talk about that. But I'd just like to say again, that's Patreon again. If you like what you're hearing, please check us out on Patreon. We are Raw Pet Medics on Patreon. While we do keep on talking about the podcast, it is coming, but we have an absolute audiophile, and he's just a a freak for noises, hence we're changing our earphones all the time to make him happy and try to get the sounds right. Cheers, Pete, if you're listening. You are listening. So guys, support VetMedics on patreon.com, even price of a cup of coffee or a pint, it really helps us every month. You know, it's a small little bit of money to help us take the time off that we need to kind of practice and rehearse for this and plan. So we appreciate it. If you can afford it, great. If you can't, no sweat at all. That's just the way it goes. So thanks very much. And other than that, next week, guys, we're getting very close to some form of Christmas kind of party show, I imagine.

You're going to get shut down, aren't you, in Ireland? What's that? Nobody's allowed to visit.

Next week we've got Nikki Kamek and she's going to be coming on to talk about dilated cardiomyopathy and low-carb— is it low-carb diets? Low-carb diets. Yeah, no, grain-free, grain-free, DCM and grain-free. DCM and grain-free. Now that's controversial. That's really, really good. And also she's done a study on looking at people and dogs getting infected from feeding raw food. She's done a study, she's going to take us through both of those areas there. So that's next week, Nikki Kamek, brilliant, articulate American woman.

So Kamek on cardiology in Christmas?

Yes, the Christmas show will be— well, when I say Christmas show, we haven't really talked about this yet. I'm putting— I'm really putting you in advance, but that'll be the 21st of December, which would really be getting as close to Christmas as we could do. But 21st of December, uh, I would like to do something a bit more fun, but we'll talk about that later. Guys, you just saw Pete O'Neill's name. Should anybody be happening to be looking for an audio engineer, sound engineer of extremely high caliber, Pete is an absolute legend. You see his name just came up there. And he's fantastic. So if anybody's looking for him, get on to us and we can put you on to a good guy. So thanks very much, guys. We will then see you next week. I'll be talking to you in the meantime. Absolutely. Thanks, Pete.

You can't increase the volume for Conor on that, Pete. You've got to just make sure.

I had to put a sock on my microphone.

Cheers, guys. Take care. See you next week.