70% of Your Immune System Is Dying—And You Don't Even Know It

Every day, you're unknowingly feeding the invisible enemy of trillions of organisms inside your body. It's not a virus, and it's not genetics. It's a microscopic war occurring in your gut and your gut lining. And its ultimate outcome can play an important role in determining if you get cancer, or even more importantly, if you're able to fight cancer with good immunity. So why is this so important? Your first and last defense against cancer is your immune system, no matter what treatment you select. In this powerful episode, I'll reveal the secret key, A single crucial element that's being completely missed by the vast majority of cancer patients and many physicians. This is the biological truth you need to know to unlock cancer immunity and to block the dangerous inflammation that can fuel cancer and countless other chronic diseases. Stick with me. If you want a massive health advantage and the power to truly fight and prevent cancer. I encourage you to watch every second of this episode. I'm Dr. Dino Prado, founder of Envita Medical centers. And for the last 25 years, my team and I have helped patients that have failed some of the top hospitals across the country using precision targeted cancer treatments. 70% of your immune system is in your gut. You heard that? And as part of any cancer treatment and prevention, we need to turn the immune system on correctly, Specifically in the gut associated lymph node tissue called galt, making gut health crucial for overall immunity as microbes train the immune cells to distinguish from friend and foe. In the last five years, the science has unequivocally pointed to one central, powerful command center for your health, your metabolism and your immune system. And it's your gut. So this is so crit. Before you start changing all your diets, let's understand gut and gut immunity. Standard chemotherapy, particularly at the maximum therapeutic doses, which is what you'll get at all the top cancer hospitals across the country, is known to severely disrupt and often destroy gut health, resulting in a significant dysbiosis. It's an imbalance of gut microbiomes. This is primarily the cause of severe gastrointestinal toxicities, and patients will get symptoms of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, all kinds of things. But for this reason, I strongly favor precision targeted, metronomically dosed chemotherapy, called genetically targeted fractionated chemotherapy, because it significantly supports overall immunity. And we're using thousand plus data points, not just 24. In standard oncology, we're using DNA next generation sequencing, RNA transcriptomics and immune spatial biology to custom target and then micro dose the treatments that are on label, off label, phytotherapeutic and immune modulatory, like cancer cell vaccines, essentially, to support step by step building the immune system, because at the end of the day, that's the most important thing and to calm meta inflammation alongside targeted multi omics testing. So that's the key of precision oncology. That's what we're going to talk about in this episode, is how to get our gut healthy. Let me give you an overview. Number one, you're going to stop dieting and start building a defense system. I call it gourmet immunity. You don't just eat for energy, you eat to feed the trillions of soldiers in your gut. If you starve them, then you invite chronic gut inflammation. And this inflammation contributes to getting cancer and it also contributes to the progression and spread of cancer if you already have it. We're going to also talk about the leaky barrier called leaky gut, something integrative doctors have talked about for decades. And now we have the proven science to back it. And we're going to talk about how this is so important. It's not some fringe theory. It's a scientifically documented trigger that floods your system with bacterial toxins, turning off your cancer cell genes. This is something integrative doctors have been working on for years. And now we can correct this by correcting the immune system, improve the correct immunity and switch. We'll reveal how some probiotics like akkermansia, play an important role whenever you're doing canc cancer immunotherapy, giving your body a better chance to respond. Today we're taking the complex concepts of meta inflammation of the gut and dysbiosis of the gut and linking it directly to cancer prevention and cancer immunity so that you can get more effective care. This isn't about just feeling better, because you will, but this is about teaching your body how to heal and how to boost your immune system so you have the best chance of fighting. Before we dive into this, I want to discuss something that I think is also missed. The microbiome is, has a really important connection here. So it's crucial to recognize that there's significant link between cancer and infections. These infections can have profound effects like runaway inflammation and immunity that goes down and gets suppressed, which can basically cause the cancer to progress and become resistant despite the best oncology treatments in the world. So we want to get our gut moving so we can help heal. And most cancer patients never get tested for infections. In our last 25 years, testing patients and working with late stage and complex cancers, we've also Been working with patients with infections, and we find that a lot of cancer patients have some sort of infections going on. So how does this connect to treating advanced cancers? You might be asking, well, here's the connection. Understanding inflammation from these chronic infections and these inflammatory networks have the exact same networks that fuel cancer. So we know that inflammation from a simple bacteria like Borrelia, that's known as Lyme disease, uses the exact same shutdown switch that cancer uses to hide. So we've worked to try to master how to rebuild the immune system and let the body heal itself. Even when you're fixing gut immunity, you also want to test for infection. Bacterial, viral, fungal, parasitic, mycotoxin, all of them. To see how this overall infectious load is suppressing the immune system and driving inflammation. Many patients never get this tested, and they don't know that these complications are occurring alongside their cancer. In fact, some infections are the very cause of cancer. The gut is kind of like a rainforest. It's the home of trillions of tiny living organisms, mostly bacteria. Think of them as a massive, complex rainforest. When combined with targeted precision cancer treatment, patients can gain a huge advantage by fixing all these organisms in the gut to work in your favor. The average human adult has roughly 30 to 37 trillion human cells and about 40 trillion bacteria cells, meaning the ratio is nearly one to one, with bacteria slightly outnumbering human cells, especially in the gut. Most of this bacteria resides in the colon, and some estimates place around 39 trillion of the total 40 trillion bacteria cells are in the large intestine. So our colon health is so important in a healthy state. This rainforest of our gut, it's balanced, it has good bacteria, produces essential molecul chain fatty acids and things like butyrate. You'll hear a lot about this if you study gut health. These short chain fatty acids, particularly butyrate, are noted in the research for their role for helping the colon cells and giving them energy and affecting their genetics and epigenetic regulations for cancer cell growth. So these short chain fatty acids are super important. First, they're primarily the fuel to the gut lining, making the wall of the intestine stronger and less premiable. For things to get in that we don't want to get in, keep the bad guys out. And second, they act as a powerful anti inflamma signal. Now listen to this. If you've never studied naturopathic or integrative medicine, when the gut is inflamed, the rest of the body is inflamed. We've learned this over decades. If you have gut inflammation. It can affect everything from joints, muscles, blood vessels to the skin. So gut inflammation is such an important part of health now. That's why we're studying the gut microbiome, because it affects your immune system, your brain, all kinds of things. And this inflammation can become a very bad driver. So if we want to control that, we want to affect gut health. So these short chain fatty acids are primarily produced in the gut when bacteria ferments from fiber and plant based foods like fruits and veggies, legumes, nuts, things that we eat. So the dysbiosis state when this gut gets out of balance is when you eat a diet that's full of processed foods, chemical additives, environmental toxins, you know what I'm talking about, all this fast food, fried foods. So a loss of this diverse protective army in our gut means weak immunity, it means inflammation. That's why clean eating is so important. Probably more important than being just ketogenic or more important than just being plant based is organic foods that are whole food that are feeding the gut and correcting this dysbiosis, improving the microbial balance in our gut. So highly processed foods, sugars, unhealthy fats, trans fats, refined carbohydrates, artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, packaged foods, sugary drinks, and we just don't want this. These are the bad actors. This is why we tell people to get off of that diet. It's a consensus right now, no matter what type of diet you're following, that those are bad actors. And they feed things like gram negative bacteria and they allow them to thrive. And so here's what happens when they thrive. The outer shell of this bacteria cont contains a toxin called a liposaccharide or lps. And here's where leaky gut comes in. Here's the connection. The short chain fatty acid defense is all gone. Now the wall of the gut breaks down and this is called leaky gut. And this is when the lipopolysaccharides leak out of the gut and into your bloodstream and your immune system sees it as a massive emergency. Here's where we get autoimmune diseases, here's where we get a dysregulation of the immune system. But in cancer, we get often runaway inflammation. So in a healthy gut where we have good lipopolysaccharides, it helps to main maintain balance. But when we have leaky gut or dysbiosis of the gut with all these bad organisms and these lipopolysaccharides that get into the circulation. Now we get a metabolic endotoxemia or toxins everywhere. And this triggers inflammation from your joints to your skin to anywhere in your body and in and around cancer cells. So we see this common in patients that have obesity or diabetes or inflammatory bowel, all these things that affect also insulin sensitivity and cardiovascular health. It's all here in the gut. This is why this episode is so important. This not just about cancer, but it's also about total health. And most patients are totally missing this. Lipopolysaccharides from the gut bacteria significantly impact gut immunity and cancer. Acting like a double edged sword. Certain forms like the hexa acilated lipopolysaccharide, I don't want to get too technical here, but they'll boost anti tumor immunity. So you can have a good kind and immune responsiveness by activating something called TLR4 while others can drive chronic inflammation, gut barrier damage and promote the progression of of cancer through NF Kappa beta pathways. So understanding these specific lipopolysaccharide structures, it really gives us a great understanding into the window of the gut lining and health and cancer immunity. So these lipopolysaccharides now that are being released by the outer shell of the bacteria, they can go uncontrolled and cause dangerous levels of inflammation. And there are four ways in our diet that we can impact this. So I'm going to give you some things we can do here. Number one, you know, increase the healthy fiber from vegetables, organic, they're so important. Veggies will help us get us a diverse gut microbio, strengthen the gut barrier. Oftentimes you can't start with this if your gut is highly destroyed, but you can start getting these into the diet with fermented vegetables. They're going to play a role in helping to lower this inflammation and this is going to help decrease risk of certain cancers. Things like colorectal and others can, can really be helped by doing some of these things. This is the prebiotic fiber, the things that feed the probiotics and it can lower the lipopolysaccharide related markers that are harmful. So we want to reduce foods that are processed and they're full of sugars and unhealthy fats and promote inflammation. Seed oils and kinds of things that really can damage the gut lining. And if we can do that, we can now give our bodies better health. Things like olive oil and nuts and wild caught fish, sardines, salmon, all these healthy fats support a Healthier microbiome where the Omega 3s are and they decrease inflammation. And on the side of probiotics, we can use special supplements like akkermansia so that we can actually give the healthy probiotic to the body. While general probiotics may help, research is ongoing. Some supplements, for example, certain fibers show promise in reducing the lipopolysis polysaccharide. This is so important related to inflammation. So let's keep going. This is what's called meta inflammation and this impacts all the cancer networks. If I were to draw this right now, there'd be all these lines going everywhere, all these markers that are showing cancer linked to all this gut inflammation. The system spills over to these lipid polysaccharides and bacterial toxins and it drives a systemic fire of inflammation in the body. So if you don't calm this down and then you're going out there trying to do immunotherapy or any kind of cancer treatment, you got to put this fire out. This is part of getting the diet right. We need to fix our diet. It activates these dangerous networks that push inflammation. And chronic inflammation is involved in every chronic disease. We want to take them out like a firefighter would. So these TLR4, these receptors of the immune system, they can trigger in our favor instead of being against us because they can be a two edged sword like I mentioned earlier. So here's why. These TLR4 are very important to cancer networks in our immune system. They play a role by promoting inflammation and immune evasion while sometimes triggering anti cancer immunity. So it can have a benefit or a harm. It is often activated by chemotherapy therapy drugs like Plaxitaxel leading to increased spread and metastasis. So it can harm. So when we do high dose chemotherapy, we could be harming our gut lining and pushing the signaling to actually make the cancer worse. The signaling can influence cancer progression, angiogenesis, immune suppression, making it hard for targeted therapies to work. So we want to get the gut under control. And now we're going to talk about tumor necrosis factor alpha and IL6, these inflammatory networks that you can test for. And oftentimes you'll see these very elevated in patients immune cells like macrophages. And these, all these inflammat pathways just throw off the cancer signaling so it can grow quickly. And these are critical for fighting cancer. So we want to get this meta inflammation under control. And this brings me to important phytotherapeutics like adjuvants that can be used alongside care like Nanoparticle, IV curcumin, and other plants that can work adjuvantly along with chemotherapy that's targeted for you. That's one of the powers of using the combination of phytotherapeutics and fixing the gut microbiome to bring these stress signals down, particularly when they're pushing cancer pathways and they're moving past the regulatory pathway so that you get resistant to treatment. We don't want that to happen. So we do that by helping with gut immunity, which is ultimately going to help us with systemic immunity. So this is so important. There are a number of pathways here that push these inflammatory pathways, or what we call inflammazone, these complex protein machines inside your immune cells and they can activate and churn out the most potent inflammatory cytokines like interleukin 1 beta. And this constant activation causes inflammation and it promotes cancer's resistance, growth, spread. This is why it's so powerful to combine improving gut health with phytotherapeutic adjuvants. Everything is working in your favor. We're using a thousand plus data points to look at all of this information, including gut microbiome to balance it. So it's not just as simple as changing the diet. Yes, that can help a lot. But sometimes we need to intervene with aggressive therapies, especially if somebody has a later stage or complex cancer that has gone refractory to care. So this is the complexity and so something like curcumin in studies has shown to help these pathways and it could be of assistance to, to a patient alongside care. It has to be adjuvantly and all working in favor if you have the right targets. So here's some of the key takeaways. These networks will destroy your gut lining. So you need to fix it. Get off of all the refined carbohydrates and all that food that's harming your gut lining. Start eating a healthy diet that is going to promote gut healthy microbiome. That's a great step. Then supplement with probiotics like Akkermansia to get your gut immunity really moving. Then test systemically to see if we have IL1, IL6, TNF, so et cetera, we have all of these, these elevated inflammatory markers that are disrupting the immune system. And consider the adjuvant of phytotherapeutic nanoparticles to work alongside the targeted on label and off label medications that are needed to help you. This is how we build proper immunotherapy. It's a really critical part now before we get into building for example, a cancer cell vaccine where we'll teach your natural killer cells, dendritic cells, to fight cancer and train them through damage associated molecular patterns and all these other beautiful things to target cancer. We want to get this gut inflammation in control. So you've got this fire in your stomach that's going to your joints, to your immune system and to your cancer cells, making the cancer spread. We don't want that. We want to teach our T cells to go after cancer. Even if you are on an immunotherapy like a PD1 inhibitor, this gut microbiome has shown to enhance the immunotherapy. Things like akkermansia in the gut and gut immunity has shown to enhance all immunotherapy, all chemotherapy, all radiation therapy. Because like I've said before, the immune system is the first and last defense against cancer. So want to keep focused on getting strong immunity so we can get the world class therapy we need and get our body to heal. This isn't a theory, this is systemic mapping of inflammation that can start in the gut and be in other parts of our body. So this is so important, some of you may have already done immunotherapy and has found that you've exhausted the immunotherapy. Because in frontiers of oncology we know that PD1 inhibitors may only work long term for 19% of the patients. So what happens is part of it is the fact that you have systemic immunity that's inflamed and it needs to be calmed down so your immune system can be put back to work. So gut lining, gut microbiome, biome is part of that puzzle. Along with that is testing and phytotherapeutics and adjuvants that go along the right targeted, on label, off label medications to help the patients. This process is not guesswork, it's targeted. We can target the microbiome, we can target immunity, we can target the on and off labels using thousands of markers so we can get the right connection to get the immune system back in the game. To me, the key to long term responses has everything to do with immunity. So yes, we can fix leaky gut, yes, we can shut down inflammation, yes, we can turn the immune system on, we, we can fix the diet, we can help our bodies get healthy. Now some of the simple things you can do instead of me reading off green tea, dark chocolate, you know, apples, nuts, all these great foods that are out there, use your AI, you can use Gemini, you can use chat, you can use Grok whatever you like. Go in there and actually say build me a diet program that's going to help me improve my gut microbiome and specifically focus on giving me strong immunity with akkermansia so that I can fight cancer better or prevent cancer. And you will get a diet program that AI can put together for you very quickly that's anti cancer involving gut immunity and then follow it. It'll give you great directions. But if you're in the middle of cancer treatment or you have cancer, you need testing to find these inflammatory pathways and you need targets and you want to use a thousand plus markers both to look at on label off label integrative agents to shut down the inflammation and improve immunity. Sometimes if you're just using standard of care chemotherapy, you're going to wipe your immune system out and cause further inflammation in the gut. So I hope this was helpful. You get a better picture of how important gut immunity is for our entire health prevention of dise and if you're healthy, you can still use the same tools to stay healthy by having strong gut diverse microbiome. No matter what diet people follow, this is the key to better immunity and better overall health. I hope this was helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing. Sam.