Muscle is Medicine

What if one of the most powerful cancer prevention tools was not sitting in a hospital, not hiding inside a billion-dollar drug, not locked away in some futuristic medicine, but sitting inside your own body right now? Your muscle. And here's the part almost no one is talking about. Muscle is not just about looking good or having more strength. Muscle is a mitochondrial organ where you get your energy and many of that ATP that you need for your body. And the more healthy muscle you carry, the more your body can regulate blood sugar, reduce inflammation, support hormones, protect your brain and your risk for cancer. See, this is the part I want to really get across here today. Now listen carefully. I'm not saying that lifting weights cures cancer. I'm not saying that protein powders cure cancer. I'm not saying that supplements replace medical care. But what I'm saying is this: if cancer loves inflammation and insulin resistance and immune weakness and broken mitochondria, then muscle is one of the most powerful ways to push the body into the opposite direction. Because cancer does not grow in isolation. Cancer grows in the body. It grows in a terrain. That terrain is inflamed, insulin resistance, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, low in muscle, low in mitochondrial function, and immune exhaustion. That's a very different internal environment than a body that is strong, insulin sensitive, metabolically flexible, mitochondrially strong, and immune ready. This is why today's episode may change the way you think about prevention forever, because for decades people were told prevention is just about early screening. And yes, that's important, but prevention is not just about finding disease early. Real prevention is making the body less hospitable to disease in the first place. And one of the most overlooked pieces of prevention is muscle. In 2025, a systematic review and meta-analysis of the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at nearly 47,000 cancer patients and found that patients with higher muscle strength or better cardiorespiratory fitness had a 31 to 46% lower risk of death from any cause compared to patients who had lower strength and fitness. Did you hear This isn't cosmetic. This is the survival of biology. And that's where this conversation begins. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of Invito Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have worked to help thousands of patients with complex cancers, including patients who have already failed some of the top cancer hospitals across the country. Using precision targeting, some of the best technology from around the world, we've been able to help patients, and we've done it with precision. So I want you to know that before we get started, make sure you're working with a doctor, and let's get going here. And One of the things that we see over and over again in our clinical experience, all of our team, is this basic idea that I want you to grasp. The body's not just a tumor. The body is a terrain. The body is a metabolism. The body has mitochondria and has important immune function, and the body deals with inflammation, and the body deals with insulin sensitivity. And when the terrain of your body is broken, disease has a much easier place to grow. That's why I really want you to understand what we're talking about today. For decades, the fitness world gave people the same outdated message: if If you want to gain muscle, bulk. If you want to lose muscle, cut. If you want to lose weight, eat less and do more cardio. But here's the problem: the advice has made millions of people smaller, weaker, metabolically slower, and more inflamed because it's the wrong advice. Because losing weight is not the same thing as getting healthy. You can lose weight and become frail. You can lose weight and still be insulin resistant. You can lose all the weight you want and still have visceral fat, belly fat over your liver, and inflammation and poor mitochondrial function. This is why we need to stop talking about it in manner. The real questions we need to ask beyond how much do you weigh, the better question is how much healthy muscle do you have? If you lose 30 pounds, but 10 and 12 of those pounds are muscle, that's not good for prevention. That may be a metabolic damage. The goal is not to become smaller. The goal is to become stronger, leaner, more insulin sensitive, more mitochondrial health, more immune ready, and more resilient. This is called recomposition. It means that you can lose fat and build and preserve muscle at the same time. And this is huge for cancer patients. And when this is done correctly, you're not just changing your appearance, you're changing your biology. Instead of focusing on weight, you want to focus on fat mass going down and muscle mass going up. That's the real body recomposition target. So now let's talk about why this matters specifically for cancer patients. Skeletal muscle is one of the largest glucose-clearing organs in the body. When your muscles are metabolically active, it'll take the sugar in into the muscle and doesn't leave it around so it can glycosylate and cause other problems. When you eat carbohydrates, glucose enters the bloodstream. Insulin tells the body where to put the glucose, and one of the primary places glucose should go is into your muscles. But if you have low muscle and high visceral fat, the system begins to break. Glucose stays elevated, insulin stays elevated, inflammation rises, fatty liver now develops, hormones become disrupted, and the metabolic state can promote cancer-related pathways. You see that? It's about metabolic flexibility. A 2025 review on insulin resistance and cancer risk emphasized that this metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance played an important role in tumor development and cancer prognosis. This is a really interesting study. So when I say muscle is medicine, I don't mean muscle replaces medicine. I mean muscle changes the terrain of how your body handles sugar, insulin, inflammation, and cancer grows in a terrain that has poor metabolic flexibility, insulin resistance, and inflammation. So here, this brings us right into resistance training. Resistance training is a metabolic signal. It tells your body, clear glucose better, build more mitochondria, preserve lean tissue, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce visceral fat, and release myokines. These hundreds of messengers involve both at the local level of the muscle and throughout your body. And so this becomes really important. That's a total different way to think about exercise. This is not just about beach muscles or about the survival of physiology. Now here we're talking about a shift a metabolic shift for your body. Stop obsessing over weight loss and let's start tracking 3 more important numbers. Number 1, body fat. Is your fat mass going down? Number 2, muscle. Is your lean mass going up and being preserved as you age? And number 3, do you have better strength? Are you getting stronger? Because strength is one of the most powerful markers of aging and resilience. For example, grip strength is especially interesting because it's not just about your hands. Grip strength is a window into your nervous system, your muscle quality, your mitochondrial mitochondrial function, your fragility, and your overall biological reserve. And in cancer patients, those reserves matter. If a patient is stronger, that's always better. But if a patient's losing strength, their muscles, losing their appetite, and becoming frail, that's not a good sign. That's a warning sign. That's why every serious strategy with cancer works around preserving muscle, improving protein status, improving insulin sensitivity, protecting and improving the mitochondria, and keeping the patient strong enough to fight because the scan is not the whole body. The tumor marker is not the whole patient. The patient's terrain matters. So now let's look at a little deeper study. In 2025, in the UK, Biobank study looking at muscle strength, muscle mass, and pancreatic cancer risk. Research found that higher grip strength was associated with lower pancreatic cancer risks, and the higher muscle mass was associated with lower pancreatic cancer risk. So by having stronger muscle, it helps prevent cancer. Think about that. We're not just talking about people who already have cancer. We're talking about the risk of getting cancer, the prevention. We're talking about the possibility to preserve the muscle mass and strengthen your body so that it has a prevention strategy right built into your exercise. But if we really want to help our body metabolically, we want to put on muscle. We want to affect that biology, that metabolic health, and it'll help us decrease a lot of disease risks. And you know what's exciting? There's something we can do to change that. We can exercise, do muscle-resistant training. It lowers your insulin resistance, reduces your visceral fat, improves muscle mass, improves mitochondrial density and immunity and immune surveillance and inflammation and on and on. That's the power of using your muscles as part of your plan to prevention. So I want you to think about your muscle as an anti-cancer organ. So now let's talk about these myokines, these important signals. Muscle does not just move your bones. Muscle talks. It has messaging. And when muscle contracts, it releases signals. And these signals are called myokines. Think of a myokine as a chemical text message that's released during your muscle's exercise, and it communicates to your immune system. It communicates to your tissue, communicates to your liver, to your brain, to your metabolism. And that's why these myokines are important. So when you're lifting weights and you're doing the contraction, you're releasing them. And having these has anti-cancer signaling effects. A 2025 study in breast cancer survivors found that a single session, a single session of resistant training or high-intensity interval training increased anti-cancer myokines, these messengers, and reduced the growth of breast cancer cells in vitro. So it wasn't in their body, but this interesting how these signals play a role in cancer. Now we have to be careful because this doesn't prove that it's a cure for cancer, but it is pretty interesting. That means that there's laboratory data and we know why it's working because of all the reasons I just mentioned— inflammation, metabolic function, immunity. So contracting the muscle is so important. So you want to have some of that. And that's a really powerful way of thinking about treatment because exercise is not just about burning calories. It's about changing signaling, getting these myokine signals expressed to your body, improving insulin, inflammation, mitochondrial health, and all these important factors that changes your internal terrain of your body. And that's exactly how I want you to think about it. Not calories. I want you to think about signals. Not weight loss. Terrain of your body. Not vanity, though it's nice to have muscles, but the biology. So now we have a stronger framework of thinking of exercise. Muscle helps with insulin sensitivity. Muscle helps with glucose disposal. Muscle releases myokines. Muscle supports mitochondria. It helps reduce inflammation and it helps the overall body composition. Muscle gives the body its reserves it needs when you're fighting cancer or you want to prevent it. It can help cancer survivors as well because these reserves matter. So now let's connect it with the mitochondria. Mitochondria are not just energy factories, they're decision-making centers. They help regulate oxidative stress, they help control apoptosis, which is a programmed cell death, they help determine whether damaged cells get cleaned up or they survive, they influence immune function, inflammation, cellular repair, cancer prevention. Healthy mitochondrial signaling is huge. You want the cells to know how to produce energy. You want the cells to know how to repair. And you want the cells to know when to die and get out of the way because they're damaged. This is all part of the anti-cancer strategy you want. Now here's the beautiful part. Resistance training helps stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis and mitochondrial function. So in simple terms, if you do like zone 2 exercise, like walking, it helps improve the mitochondrial efficiency. Protein provides the building blocks. Sleep allows repair and reducing insulin resistance. A 2025 study in the Scientific Report found that insulin resistance was an important factor to overall mortality, including cancer and other diseases. So one of the greatest tools to help with that is building muscle and improving it. That's the bridge. Now let's make this a little more practical, and there are 4 pillars of training: protein, membranes and mitochondria recovery. And so I'm going to walk you through these. Pillar number 1, it's training. Muscle grows because of signals. The signal is resistance, mechanical tension. The body has to push and pull and lift and carry and squat and row and climb. And all these things are very important. They create the load. Cardio is also valuable. Walking is also valuable. When you look at the mitochondria and you're doing that at, let's say, 100 to 120 beats per minute in zone 2, or somebody who's around 50 years old or so, but cardio does not send the same muscle building signals as resistance training. So you need both if you want to build and preserve muscle. Resistance training is not optional. It's the foundation. Think about muscle like a biological bank, and you make the mitochondria stronger, push mitophagy, which is the clearing of old mitochondria. It helps to clean the mitochondria by weightlifting. So every decade after midlife, if you're not disposing of this old mitochondria, it's building up and the body starts to withdraw. You lose muscle, you lose power, you lose glucose control, you lose balance, you lose hormone resilience. You lose mitochondrial density. So it's so important that we see weightlifting as a powerful way to help the body. For most people, a great target is resistance training about 3 to 4 days a week, some sort of retreat— machines, bands, body weights, trainers, physical therapists, whatever you need to do. It doesn't have to be complicated, but it does have to be consistent. Focus on the big muscle groups— legs, glutes, back, chest, shoulders. Those big muscles are metabolically expensive. That means they're going to burn the glucose, they're going to get rid of the glycogen stores, and they're going to improve insulin sensitivity, and they're going to put the demands on the mitochondria that you want. They're going to tell the body, we are not dying, we're building, and in fact, we're rebuilding. Real Prevention says let's build, repair, and restore, and that's the signal you want to send to your body. Now, for most people, the sweet spot is about 8 to 12 reps per set, so 2 to 4 sets, progressive overload over time. And that means gradually lifting a little bit more and challenging your body, and then fewer reps and improving your form and improving control and increasing the difficulty— not ego lifting, not destroying your joints, not training like you're 20 if you're 55, because you don't want to push inflammation. You want to slowly improve. Smart resistance, controlled movements, little by little, good form, progress. Now you're making a difference. You'll see here that your body responds better. A lot of people do cardio first and then weight lift later, but if your goal is recomposition like we're talking about here, do your strength training first and then do your cardio because this preserves your muscle. So here's a simple weekly structure. Now of course Weightlifting can be anything from kettlebells to the gym or weights or bands or you name it. There's a lot. So here's what we're thinking. 3 to 4 days a week you're doing resistance training and you're walking daily, 8,000 to 12,000 steps a day that you can handle, slowly growing to that. 1 to 2 days per week you might do some interval training. If you want to do sprints, you can use an assault bike or do cycling where you sprint and stop. Maybe do some of those, but you don't need to push it because if you do these things, your body metabolism will kick in, your muscles will build, you'll lose visceral fat along along with eating the right diet. Sometimes more cardio can harm us because if we push too hard with like big-time exercises, we can elevate the cortisol levels and stress and affect the thyroid and actually make our body weaker. So we want to use these pillars in the right way. In the same way, we want to eat the right protein. So we have the building blocks— organic foods, grass-fed beef, etc., wild-caught, you know, fish— and maybe 1 pound, if we're a pound of weight, a gram of protein a day. And that should be the central part of all of our meals, maybe eating 3-4 times day and getting that 30 to 40 grams of protein. Because you can't rebuild the house without the wood, the stone, the wiring, and the tools. If you don't have the building blocks, and that's what protein is to your muscles, you can't rebuild it if you don't have, but you want good quality protein. So it's pretty easy to rebuild it if you're eating right and exercising. And that's what I want to encourage here is that if you're building the muscle, you're giving your body a huge advantage. And you may want to watch my other videos on diets for cancer or ways to eat to combine with your exercising. And I hope you found this helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to