Gut Microbiome WARRIORS - Fighting Cancer Naturally

If 70% of your immune system lives in your gut, what's your microbiome doing for your cancer plan right now? That's what we're going to cover in this episode. It's so important. Some patients respond to immunotherapy better than others and some don't respond at all. A surprising predictor can sit in our intestinal walls called our microbiome. We're going to get into that chemo. Yes, it can help patients, but it can also scorch the gut and increase gut bacteria. That's unhealthy, inflame the gut lining and kill our healthy bacteria. Today we're going to talk about how to rebuild that. I'm Dr. Dino Prado. For the last two decade, my team and I have helped patients who have failed the top cancer hospitals across the country. Getting out of guesswork, getting into precision care. We're going to focus today on gut microbiome, boost immunity. Also helping immunotherapy help patients recover from chemotherapy. That's going to be what we're going to cover. So about 70 to 80% of our immune cells are stationed along our gut wall. That's called Galt, a living training ground where food microbes and immune cells talk to each other every day. When the ecosystem is balanced, it makes short chain fatty acids like buty calm the inflammation and prime the T cells. When it's wrecked, inflammation spikes and defense stumbles. In melanoma, for example, and other cancers, patients with diverse gut microbiome respond better to PD1 inhibitors, which is a type of immunotherapy. Akkermansia, bifidobacteria keep showing up as important responders for immunotherapy. So we want to get our gut in order, our gut health and has a lot to do with the things we eat. I'm going to talk about that here briefly. I've done other episodes on this. But we want to eat fermented foods. We want our fats to come from like, you know, grass fed butter, which builds that butyrate. We want to eat things like olive oil. We don't want to eat seed oils that destroy gut lining. We want foods that are fermented. The unsweetened yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, etc. And there's a lot of these foods we want to get into the diet. But we also want to decrease the inflammation and include healthy grains like fonio, which are gluten free, easy to digest. It's almost like a cream of wheat, really easy to Cook and add some, you know, nice things to it that give it some flavor. And now you're starting to help that gut wall. That prebiotic, probiotic. You can take Akkermansia as a dietary supplement. These are some simple tools to really help your immune system. Chemo induced dysbiosis, it's a thing. So just like if we take antibiotics, we can destroy that microbial balance in our gut lining. So we don't want it to be weak, we don't want to weaken that gut barrier. So we can use things like collagen proteins, we can use things like prebiotics, probiotics, the prebiotics that feed the healthy bacteria to grow, the probiotics that we put in the fermented foods, as I just went over. But the key here is inflammatory cytokines. There's a TNF Alpha Alpha and IL6. And exactly what we don't want during treatment, this causes gut inflammation. And when you have gut inflammation, you're going to have joint inflammation and other symptoms because it's really similar to what we see in autoimmune disease patients as well. They'll have gut lining problems, which reflects issues on their skin joints. And you can basically see that gut lining is so important. One of the fundamental studies, when you study naturopathic medicine, it's about gut health. Gut is the center. You have good gut health, you're gonna have good immunity, good brain health, it's like the second brain. So it's so important that we focus on this gut health. So what is a SC and say about Akkermansia, one of these probiotics, it repeatedly is linked to better outcomes whenever people are doing immunotherapy. So I want you to think of it this way. Even if you're not on an immunotherapy right now, every cancer treatment essentially is immunotherapy because it's going to require your immune system to do the work. So you need to get that Akkermansia, bifidobacteria to go up. So it's good to take them as probiotics, but also take other probiotics, get diversity in the gut lining and decrease the inflammation and we can enhance that anti tumor immunity and we can improve check point immunotherapy and other immunotherapies that we design, like ait, which is an autologous adoptive immunotherapy or other therapies that we build in our facilities that help stimulate the immune system to fight cancer. When we're doing precision oncology. So these Small chain fatty acids. These are important, like butyrate. They regulate the T cells and the dendritic cell functions, nudging the immune system away from chronic inflammation and focusing on cancer care. Now, one of the best ways to fix gut immunity is eliminating food allergies out of our gut. Everybody has them, can be gl, soy, peanuts, you name it, corn. Some people have problems with these things and these micro inflammatory issues, they slow our body away from fighting and they focus our body into inflammation. That's why chronic inflammation is one of the biggest things we want to fight against when we're fighting cancer. It's the same thing. Interestingly, when we're dealing with heart disease and other chronic conditions, we want to shut that inflammation down. So some of the ways to do that is by getting rid of the grains and refined sugars and carbohydrates that are so dangerous. You know, when you go to the grocery store, all the stuff that's in the middle of the aisles, all the processed foods, you need to get those out of the diet. So how can you help? By increasing healthy starches, like resistant starches. One of my favorite ones is fonio, that's spelled F O N I o and it's an African grain, easy to cook, it's in the family of millet and it works so easy. It's like a cream of wheat. And a lot of people haven't even heard of this, but it has pretty much a neutral flavor. You can add almost anything to it to sweeten it. Use a healthy sweetener, a non toxic sweetener and you're going to find that all of a sudden you'll have this resistant starch in the gu, which helps feed the probiotics. And it's really easy to do. You can have it in the morning, in the evening you can add polyphenols, matcha, green tea, pomegranate, other things to help gut microbiome, which is really important. Those foods are critical. I mentioned them briefly. But pomegranate is great for gut microbiome and cancer fighting. Blueberries are great for cancer fighting. Green tea, matcha, green tea or just green tea itself, great for cancer fighting dark chocolates like the cacao that are unsweetened. And you can use things like stevia, monk fruit to sweeten. But what you're going to do here is now you're going to give your body all of these, these beautiful abilities to be anti inflammatory and polyphenol rich. So you kind of want to get rid of the refined carbohydrates and start moving to these superfoods which you can easily incorporate into your diet. Fonio can be like a couscous. It can also be like a morning porridge. It can be used in multiple areas and it can help complement after you've eaten some protein in your diet to get some of these healthy undigestible starches into the diet so we can promote gut health and anti inflammatory. So I'm going to talk a little bit about green tea, one of my favorite drinks. Start the morning with and the afternoon and it's got egcg. You can actually get tinctures of EGCG that are organic. And those are great to add too because at this point you want to supercharge your body's ability to fight cancer. EGCG has immunotherapy properties very similar to PD1 inhibitors. Many of these will come in forms where we need to give them intravenously and really nanoparticles to get them at the higher concentrations we need so we can get the medicinal benefit. But we should be doing these things if we're healthy or we have cancer or heart disease or diabetes because it's going to help us across the entire platform. We want to support that butyrate production. And we can see that when people drink these types of foods like green tea or even cacao, without all of the sweeteners, you're going to get effects to the brain which are great, like theobromine. You're also getting anti cancer properties, immune modulatory properties and many others. So these are great general dietary lifestyle moves that are going to help everybody. The berries, the onions that have quercetin in them. Garlic is powerful. One of the most powerful herbs is garlic. Fights infection, fights cancer, helps keep the blood thin. Preventing strokes and heart attacks, has so many benefits. Olive oil, high quality olive oil where you have polyphenol contents closer to a thousand. These are medicinal. And taking these helps decrease inflammation in the gut and decrease a lot of the problems that people can have with chronic disease. We see this really common in the Mediterranean diet. You to have that benefit that they see in the Mediterranean diet. And some of the benefits you need olive oil that is high in polyphenol, organic and not mixed products. Because there's a lot of problems with olive oil in the world. People will say it comes from Spain or Italy or whatever. And it's really just mixing all these different products that are poor quality and selling at a high price. So you need to get high, high quality olive oils that are medicinal you can taste them, you can see the quality. They have to have high polyphenol content. The fermented foods are really important here. For the gut. Yogurt, you can make your own. There's a lot of great YouTube channels that teach you how to make your own yogurt. Kefir, you can get kefir, which is great. This is going to help your gut. Microbiome. Kimchi, sauerkraut. This can increase your microbial diversity of your gut and may lower your GI symptoms. And this can make a big differ. Now if you take any of these things and you feel like you get mental fogginess. Yeah, that may not be the right probiotic for you. Shift to one where you don't. For example, I've taken kefir and I don't like the way that feels, but I do just fine if I have like a fermented vegetable like a kimchi or a sauerkraut, those work better. Also, I think it's critically important that we remove those inflammatory foods out of our diets and we start focusing on a diet that's very clean. Whole foods, non processed foods. Those can help greatly. Also we can combine those with some of the dietary supplements that I mentioned that make a big difference, like the probiotics. And you can give butyrate supplements which helps increase the butyrate in the gut. Obviously things like grass fed butter does that well. And then we want to hydrate, increase the minerals in the diet. Zinc, very important for immunity. And by the way, those are found in the grain. Fonio. Again, you can find zinc in there that also can act as a great prebiotic for the gut and helps with gut tolerance and anti inflammatory effects. Start slow when you're starting to include these things into the diet. Why? Because your body's shifting. Don't shift all at once. Make small changes. Give yourself like a week to slowly migrate that diet over so you don't have too much gas and bloating and discomfort because you've been eating maybe one way for your whole life and you just need to slowly incorporate these foods. Don't do what I do, which get really excited about new data and shift my diet within 24 hours to add something new and it causes gas bloating. You don't want to do that. Start slow, add these little things in, play with them until you find just what's right for you and this will help you build your immune system. I have to mention beta glucans. These are one of the powerhouses for the immune System. These are mushrooms. You can get them in dietary supplements everywhere. Make sure they're organic, high quality. You want the broad range of these beta glucans. And they will also help not just the gut, but natural killer cells, dendritic cells. Again, helping immunotherapy and recovery with patients when they have cancer. Critically important random probiotic supplements during checkpoint therapy. Observational data shows lower gut diversity in probiotic users. Diversity is good for response. Food first, right? Is our number one thing, is the food diversity. The colorful fruits and vegetables we can take in, also these grains that I'm mentioning, but also add a probiotic to give us a little boost as a supplement. That's the key word, supplement. It doesn't replace the healthy diet if you're eating lots of inflammatory foods, processed foods, and then taking a probiotic. That's why these things that we see in these data tells us it's not that helpful because it has to be a change in the diet. The main thing that we can do in our diet that makes a world of difference is eliminate the irritants. I always think it's so funny. We talk about diet and getting nutrition right, but the key to nutrition is just removing all the things that are irritating us and slowly bringing in the healthier foods and also rotating. Rotating food. Food rotation is important. If you start eating one thing all the time, your body can get used to it. You may even build an allergy to it. So it's good to have a little bit of food rotation when we're dealing with food allergies, inflammation and irritation in the gut lining. Of course, rotating through whole, healthy foods that your body does, you know, naturally digests very well. Okay, let's talk about neutropenia. Low white blood cells. This is important for cancer patients. It's important that we boost the immune system. We give the immune system the things that it needs. So gut health, things like Akkermansia can help us. But health is so important, and we don't want to overdo the chemotherapy. I go back to this where if you're using standard chemotherapy, you're not using precision. You're using high doses, which are going to wipe out your immune system, cause neutropenia, cause other side effects, brain fog, neurological problems. We can avoid that with precision oncology because we have the right targets and we can be at 10% the dose, microdose it, make it immune centric, and you don't have those side effects. But if that's what you're doing, be careful, because after the half life of that chemotherapy, which could be several days depending on your regimen. You want to recover with antioxidants, liquid, liquid vitamins, IV nutrients, get that body moving to recover and heal. So this is why it's so important that we go after cancer. Not just from the perspective of treatment, but also from the gut as the second brain or 70% of your immune system. So important. But most doctors totally ignore it. They might go to a couple of conferences where finally gut microbiome is brought up and we've been talking about it for over two and a half decades. It's important that we look at food from the perspective of improving gut microbiome. Colorful vegetables, diversity in food resistant starches. I mention fonio, you're going to look it up. It's pretty interesting and exciting. It does do a lot of good things. Olive oil that's high quality. Using those types of foods. Grass fed butters, eating foods that are non processed, you can eat grass fed organic meats. Everything's organic. So we want to get all the chemicals and toxins out of our food. We want to add superfoods like pomegranate, which are important. Matcha or green tea. Rotate blue types of berries, raspberries, blackberries in small amounts. These are going to have great impact for the gut. Include those fermented foods, yogurt, kefir, these will help. These will give you an advantage to give you stronger immune to respond to care. So if you're having a hard time eating to begin with, just start with small changes. Make some of these small little concoctions of these superfoods and then maybe a tablespoon here and there in between the foods slowly help the gut get the immune system it needs so it can respond better. Because microbiome shifts are so important to immunity. We're just in the beginning of the microbiome. We're going to learn so much more for the years to come and we're going to find out that it's important that we have great diversity in our diet. These resistant starches. Now you're going to wonder why didn't I mention oats? Oh, we love oats. Oats are delicious. But oats can have lectins and other things that can cause inflammation. I prefer fonio and things like, you know, if you can digest brown rice, these are better grains. But some people can handle things like Ezekiel bread. And some of these other foods that are have wheat in them but they are already fermented, easier to digest. So these are some of the grains that you can consider in small amounts. Again, we're being careful here not to have refined carbohydrates, but good fermented foods, good healthy grains. Diversity in the diet and reduce the mucus, reduce the inflammation and improve the immunity. That's the key. So I hope this was helpful, giving you an idea that gut immune link is so important. This is a key. The higher the diversity and the bugs in the gut that are healthy, the better we're going to do. And these foods make a difference. And the nutrients help us decrease things like tumor necrosis factor alpha, Illinois 6, cut down on gut inflammation and improve in our systemic immunity of natural killer cells and dendritic cells, which ultimately helps us fight cancer. It helps every other treatment work better. When our immune system is better, all the other treatments, even chemo and radiation are going to work better. Integrative care is going to work 10 times better when we get immunity in check. So this really should be a diet that everybody should be aiming for is to have good gut health and good immunity. I hope this was helpful. And may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.