No BS Advice to Avoid Cancer in 21-Minutes

Most of the advice you hear about avoiding cancer is technically correct, but too vague to actually change anything. It's the same recycled advice everyone has heard for years, and I'm firmly convinced that it's exactly why it changes almost nothing. So today I'm gonna give you the advice that I would give my own family, and I'm gonna rank them in order to actually give you the impact to help, not the advice that's the safest to say. Not the advice that sounds good on social media, but the advice that changes the terrain of the cancer and how it grows. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of Invita Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have worked to help thousands of cancer patients that have failed some of the top cancer hospitals across the country, and we did it using precision targeting. One thing I have to say before I get started is make sure you're working with a doctor before you change anything. Here's the key. There is no 100% foolproof way to prevent cancer, but that doesn't mean we're powerless. We can lower risks, we can change the terrain, we can detect it earlier, and we can stop pretending vague advice is good enough so we can get into how to really help you. Number 1, stop feeding the metabolic fire. If I could get people to understand this one thing about cancer prevention, it would be this. You can't ignore insulin resistance. You can't ignore belly fat and you can't ignore blood sugar and you can't ignore fatty liver and you can't ignore metabolic terrain. You can't ignore the lack of metabolic flexibility. This lack of metabolic flexibility is so linked to cancer, but also heart disease, diabetes, and so many of the chronic diseases and those things that can make ourselves worse or more difficult, like environments of high insulin, high glucose, high inflammation, high visceral fat, and low muscle. That's the modern American terrain, or like they call the SAD, the Standard American Diet. People are overfed and undernourished and under-exercised, and they're not eating the right quality of foods. Their cells are starving for real nutrients like proteins, high-quality foods. They're carrying extra weight but losing muscle, which also impacts aging and anti-aging. They're drinking sugar in almost all these products, or eating processed carbohydrates. Snacking all day, and sleeping poorly. And they're being told everything looks normal because of their basic lab works aren't terrible yet. That's early metabolic breakdown. A 2025 study in the Scientific Report found that insulin resistance significantly mediated the relationship between physical activity and mortality, including cancer mortality. So in plain English, this means that its life-saving benefits of physical activity appear to come from improving insulin insensitivity. Specifically, things like weight-bearing exercise, muscle lifting, or walking and staying active. These open up those GLUT-4 receptors and bring the glucose into the muscle, into the body, instead of staying around in your circulation and causing insulin problems. So here is the no BS version. If your waist is growing and your fasting insulin is high and your blood sugar is creeping up, your triglycerides are too high, your HDL is way too low, and your liver enzymes are elevated, and your energy's crashing after your meals, Your body's telling you something. Listen before you get a diagnosis. The everyday version is simple. Stop making breakfast dessert. Stop drinking sugar. Stop ultra-processed foods. Stop pretending fruit juice, cereal, muffins, granola bars, and all these health foods that are disguised as health foods that are loaded with sugar are part of your daily intake because these cause these flexibility problems with your metabolism. And they don't help with the prevention of cancer. They make it worse. Here's the easy but powerful facts. Build your meals around high-quality proteins, grass-fed beef, high-quality wild-caught fish, fiber, real foods, healthy fats, omega-3 fatty acids. Walk and stay active after meals. Strength train. Get good sleep. And then when you go to the doctor, track your insulin, your A1C hemoglobin, your fructosamine, your triglycerides. Track your HDL, and most importantly, your waist circumference, your liver markers, on your body composition, your energy, your metabolism, your morning erections. These are all circulatory signs that you can track at home. Prevention starts with this metabolic honesty. Number 2, build muscle like your life depends on it. Muscle is not vanity. Muscle is not just for bodybuilders that are taking hormones. Muscle is one of the largest glucose-clearing organs in your body, and the biggest muscles you have are in your legs. So things like squats and working and walking and biking All these things are gonna help you. Muscle helps regulate insulin. Muscle helps control inflammation. Muscle supports mitochondrial density. Muscle releases myokines, which are these chemical signals that communicate with your immune system, your liver, your fat tissue, and your brain. And in cancer patients, muscle and fitness are not small details. They're survival biology. A 2025 study, systematic review of a meta-analysis In the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at nearly 47,000 cancer patients and found that higher muscle strength and cardiorespiratory fitness were associated with 31 to 46% lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to those with lower strength and fitness levels. That's not about looking good in the mirror. That's about energy and reserves. And when a cancer patient loses muscle, they get these loss of muscle from the cancer, or as you're aging, sarcopenia. They lose appetite, they lose strength, they become frail. And that's not just a side effect. That's a warning sign that the body's losing reserves. The immune system is under pressure. The mitochondria are under pressure. The patient's ability to tolerate treatment may be under pressure. If I'm talking to a family member or a patient, or our doctors are, we're gonna talk about this in plain English. Lift weights, do resistant training. Build muscle, preserve muscle, track your strength, and do not wait until you're sick to build these reserves. You can start them as young as in your teens and use it throughout your life. You can start older in your 60s and 70s and still build muscle. A 2025 study out of the UK Biobank study found that higher grip strength and muscle mass were associated with lower pancreatic cancer risks. Pancreatic cancer is tightly connected to metabolic function. Our pancreas makes insulin. Insulin resistance is linked to this. Diabetes, inflammation, all to the organ of the pancreas. So the advice is not just about exercise. The advice is do resistance training 3 to 4 days a week, 4 to 5 times a week if you can. Focus on big muscle groups— legs, your glutes, back, chest, shoulders— push and pull exercises, squats, hinges, carrying things, walking daily. And if you're going to do some cardio and weights on the same day, lift first and then do your cardio. You're telling your body, keep the muscle, build the mitochondria, to clear the glucose and give me metabolic flexibility. So number 3, stop losing weight the wrong way. Everybody wants to scale down and lose weight, but not all weight loss is good. To lose fat is great, but to lose visceral fat is even better. But if you lose muscle, you crash your hormones, you under-eat your proteins, you overdo the cardio, and you become weaker. And that's not healthy. That's especially important with these aggressive diets and people that are using the GLP-1 medications. These GLP-1s can be powerful tools used correctly in microdoses. But if someone uses them and does not eat enough protein and build enough muscle strength and have enough hormones and growth hormone, that doesn't change your body's composition the way we like it. We don't want to lose muscle. We want to quickly build muscle and we want to improve our metabolism. We want to bring the fat down and we want to build the muscle reserves, increase strength, improve insulin sensitivity, decrease inflammation. And that's the target, both for the prevention of cancer and even to help if you're in the middle of treatment. So the scale is not your best marker. It's fat mass and muscle mass and strengths are better indicators of whether your body's actually moving in the right direction. So the no BS advice is stop worshiping the scale. Measure what matters: body fat, waist, muscle, grip strength, fasting insulin, A1C, hemoglobin, triglycerides. You can look at your HDL, your C-reactive protein for inflammation, liver enzymes. Check your sleep quality, your movement, and your strength. Tracking that are gonna make a big difference because what gets measured gets managed. Number 4, eat protein like you're rebuilding a body, not decorating a plate. If resistance training is the signal, protein is the building material. You cannot preserve lean tissue with coffee for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and a tiny dinner. And that's where a lot of people over 40 are in trouble. They're not eating enough quality protein. They're not getting the right building materials that their bodies need, especially if they're trying to lose weight, especially if they're fasting too aggressively. For many people trying to build or preserve muscle, a target of around 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight is a good place to start. Some may need a little less, some more, but that gives you a good place to start. And if you have kidney disease or cancer, cachexia, digestive issues, Work with a doctor to coordinate these things. Maybe a good high-quality nutritionist or a functional medicine doctor would be even better. But the principles are the same. We want muscle and we need protein to build that muscle. Most people do better spreading their protein across the day. So you try 30 to 40 grams, maybe 4 times a day. You get it from things like eggs, wild fish, organic poultry, grass-fed beef, bison, wild-caught meats, organic Greek yogurts, clean protein powders. Bone broth, and even plant protein that's of high quality. If you're trying to prevent disease by starving the body, that's not the way to go. The key is to build strong muscle. So number 5, fix the mitochondria. This is the powerhouse of the body. Mitochondria are not just energy factories. They're decision-making centers. They help regulate oxidative stress. They control apoptosis, which is programmed cell death, telling cancer cells to just die off. They help determine whether damaged cells are cleaned up, or they're allowed to stick around and survive. They influence immune function and inflammation. They influence repair. And in cancer prevention, mitochondrial health matters so deeply. Now, the no BS version is this: you do not fix mitochondria with one magic supplement. You fix mitochondria with signals, resistance training, walking, high-quality protein, sleep, gut microbiome health, where you're eating a lot of quality of fruits and vegetables, particularly vegetables and different things your body can digest to help your gut microbiome, nutrient-dense foods, healthy fats, reducing toxins and improving insulin sensitivity. And this will support the membranes of the mitochondria. In a 2025 review on physical activity and cancer incidence and mortality summarized the mechanism that may explain the cancer protective effects of physical activity, including lower body fat. Improved insulin resistance and hormone regulation, improved redox balancing and stronger antioxidant defense, and reduced oxidative stress. That's the bridge. Muscle. That's the key. So muscle activity improves these things, improves insulin sensitivity. It improves the terrain. It reduces inflammation. It supports chronic disease and cancer progression in a big way. So that's why I want people to think about it differently. Not just calories, not weight loss only, but terrain. Not just vanity, but biology. Number 6, rebuild the membranes. This is one of the things that I think is overlooked by almost everybody. And one of my personal favorites that people really need to add, and I think it's so important. Every cell in your body, including your mitochondria, they have membranes and those membranes need building blocks so that they can repair and heal because they handle communication. It helps determine what gets in and out of the cells, including things like glucose, insulin receptors. It deals with inflammation signaling. Energy production, the membranes are stiff and old and inflamed and oxidized, they're damaged, they're gonna be a higher risk for cancer. If your membranes are supported and healthy, they have high omega-3 fatty acids like high-quality fish oils that are free from heavy metals and toxins or wild-caught fish, antioxidants like axanthins, liposomal, which are like the rebarb inside of those membrane walls, things like phosphatidylcholine, these healthy fats. This is part of that clean nutrition with food. That's gonna make a big difference and replacing those cell membranes. That's why I like phosphatidylcholine. It's one of the major phospholipids involved in the cell membrane. So I think about the membranes because they're overlooked by everybody. But if you have the right building blocks, just like you will with protein for your muscles, you're going to rebuild these membranes and give your body new cellular membranes for better flexibility, mobility, improves the signaling that currently might be poor because they're old. See, poor healing creates vulnerability. Then I like to think of things like fish oil, around 3,000 milligrams per day, like EPA, DHA, They're appropriate because they help with the cell membranes. They help with inflammation. Be careful if you're already on blood thinners, make sure you're working with a doctor, cuz these things will help your blood be thinner, but thinner blood is great for cancer patients cuz it reduces metastases. And when you add it with liposomal lizanthins that are fat soluble, it adds like a unique lipid membrane with rebarb. And so anytime you have oxidative stress that causes cancer, sometimes these reactive oxygen species, that can cause oncogenes to turn on, you're shutting them down before they become a problem. So now just imagine you're exercising, your inflammation is under control, you're getting the toxins out of your diet, you're helping with the antioxidants, the cell membranes. You've changed the game. So my prevention stack includes the phosphatidylcholine, that fish oil, and the liposomal astaxanthins, because these play an important part of health and energy at the cell membrane for the mitochondria and the rest of the body. Then we supercharge our metabolism and our mitochondria with resistance training and protein to build muscles. And then we add sleep to help with repair. And then we add precision testing to know what's actually happening. That's prevention at a very high level. Number 7, understand that muscle talks to cancer biology. The muscle contracts and releases signal molecules that are called myokines. Think of myokines as a chemical text message released by your muscle during exercise. They communicate with your immune system. They communicate with fat tissue. They communicate with your liver and your brain and your metabolism. And some of these myokines appear to have anti-cancer signals. In a 2025 study in breast cancer survivors found that a single session of resistance training or high-intensity interval training increased anti-cancer myokines and reduced the growth of breast cancer cells in vitro. Exercise is not just about burning calories, it's about changing signaling, changing those myokines, those signals from our muscle, like 600+ of those, changing insulin, changing mitochondria, and inflammation all in our favor. So our internal terrain is healthy. And that's exactly how I want you to think. Not just calories, but not just weight loss, not just vanity, but putting all these things together to improve the biology of your body. Number 8, stop obsessing over this low-level stuff. We want to go after the important stuff. This is where I want to be a bit direct. People will spend hours debating the perfect mushroom powder, the perfect detox tea, the perfect red light device, the perfect biohacking gadget, while they're sleeping like 5 hours a night, carrying belly fat, eating processed foods, drinking alcohol, avoiding resistance training, and never checking their insulin levels. That's backwards. I'm not saying those tools aren't helpful. They're great. But some may be more useful than others. You need to get these basics down before you add anything else to your protocol. Some of these things are supportive, but the foundations like don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, you know that. But fixing insulin resistance is one of those foundations. Building healthy muscle, eating high-quality protein, eating real foods that are non-processed, that don't have the chemicals, sleeping better, staying active, lowering that visceral fat. So whether you're walking or cycling, you're trying to stay in that zone 2 to build up mitochondria for your exercise, reducing toxins. And getting the appropriate screenings, like early cancer detection tests. Now you're moving at a whole different level. Knowing your family history is helpful, but most cancers are not genetic. They're epigenetic. They're from changes of our diet and lifestyle. So here's the rule. Do not use advanced tools to avoid basic discipline. Number 9, stop poisoning the terrain. I'm going to say this in plain English. No smoking, no vaping, no drinking heavy alcohol. Processed foods. Try to avoid pesticides as much as you can. Plastic solvents, mold, endocrine disruptors that are in our environment. It's hard to get rid of all of them, but just reduce that. So it's not overwhelmed every day and you have low sleep and feel fatigued, or you have lots of inflammation. You need to overcome these things. This is not about fear. This is about reducing the burdens of these toxic foods and eating the healthier ones. And you've heard this over and over again. It's common sense, but putting it all together and majoring in the majors and not in the minors. Number 10, take sleep seriously. Go to bed on time. You're just going to feel better. It's even great to take naps. Anything you can do to help you get rest is going to be so good for your body and heal. Our body needs these things. These are just fundamentals to health, and there are no medications as good as these fundamentals. So the no BS here is go to bed, get morning sunlight, cut the caffeine, keep the room cold and dark, and don't eat giant meals at night. Maybe a little protein so your glucose doesn't drop. That's going to help you with prevention. Sleep is so important, and often they ignored by so many. It's a repair window for our bodies and for our health. Number 11, detect early. Now we have these multi-early cancer detection tests where we can look at almost all the cancers with a simple blood test. If it's positive, we run imaging. If we see imaging, then we biopsy it and we can diagnose it. We find it early, we remove it, and we're done. We change diet, lifestyle, exercise, and people move on with their life. Yes, it's good to know family history, but to be honest, people even outside of family history are getting cancers earlier. Statistically, almost half of all the population will get cancer. So we all need to be testing. If somebody finds they have cancer and it's already spreading, now we want to do precision oncology. That's where this matters. DNA testing for next generation sequencing, RNA transcriptomics, immune profiling, and immune spatial biology. So we know the tumor microenvironment and we're not falling to the one size fits all standard of care. I'm talking about using 1,000+ markers instead of like 24. A biopsy, a tumor marker, and imaging. Because cancer is not just about breast, colon, lung, pancreas, you name it. It's about immunity. It's about proper targets. It's about terrain. And that's the focus of the work we do. And that's why I believe that's so important, because in our published paper, it shows to improve outcomes by 35 times. When you have the data, we can map it out deeper and create the custom treatment plan for the patients who need that. Everybody needs to be looking at those dietary and lifestyle changes that I'm talking about because they're simple to incorporate. They're focusing on the right things. And they're helping our body heal. Now, if you had to compress the whole episode into the advice I would like to give to family members and our patients, don't smoke, don't drink heavily, do not live metabolically broken, build muscle, walk every day, stay active, resistant training, eat high-quality protein, fix that insulin resistance, support mitochondrial health, support the membranes, the healthy fats, phosphatidylcholine, omega-3s, antioxidants, and liposomal health, that's gonna make a big difference. Things like axanthins and antioxidants are very powerful. Get plenty of sleep, reduce your toxins, get rid of the refined carbohydrates, and test intelligently and screen intelligently and appropriately. And if cancer appears, you don't have to worry 'cause you'll find it in a small size that you can remove and move on with your life. And that's the no BS version. Not because it's flashy, but because it's the bottom line. It's what I've seen and what I can tell you I think is the way forward. A simple way to do this is just to pick one of these things and change these every week. Go lift weights 3 to 4 times a week. That might be what you want to start with. Walk after every meal. Get rid of all the refined carbohydrates and sugar products and get your fasting insulin checked and schedule your screenings. Stop drinking soda beverages and you're already on the right track. So you can just add these in and slowly build these into your routine until you optimize your body feeling great. There's so much advice out there that leads you in the wrong direction. All these programs are telling you how to eat, what not to eat, and I'm telling you these are the basics. You incorporate these things, they're going to see true changes, and you don't have to be pushed around by all the nuances out there, but you can follow good sound advice that's gonna help you. So now that you've got my list and you can put it to work and lower your risks, that's really important. Now the flip side of this is just as useful, knowing the things that actually increase your risk of cancer. So you can click on this video here to help you with that because I walk you through what I'd call the fastest way to get cancer in 2026, the everyday lifestyle factors and the strongest evidence behind them. And where the real risk actually sits. If today's video made you want to do something, that one tells you exactly what to stop doing. I hope you found this episode helpful and it gave you a lot of tools that you can implement quickly into your life. And may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.