Stop Eating Cancer

Today, an estimated 40% of people will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime. That number should stop all of us in our tracks, but there's part of this that most people get wrong. They hear the number and they think, well, maybe it's just genetics, or maybe it's just bad luck, or maybe this won't happen to me, or maybe if cancer's coming for me, there's nothing I can do. And that's one of the most dangerous ideas in medicine because yes, there is some genetic factors maybe affecting 2, 5, at the most 10% of cancers, but in fact, most cancers are not inherited. They're caused by mutations that are impacted by diet and lifestyle, or epigenetics, infections, toxins. So if most cancers are not purely inherited, then what are they? They're influenced by epigenetics, and that means environment that changes your genes. These environmental factors that impacts their signals that impact your genes. You may not be able to change your genes that you were born with, but you can influence how your genes behave. And that's what we're talking about today. Many cancers are really just not genetic, they're metabolic. So metabolic flexibility plays a in here that have metabolomics involved, immune-related components. And this has to do with our food, our lifestyle, cancer-promoting terrain to the body. So today I'm going to break this down into plain English, not fear, hype, not everything causes cancer, but some of the real mechanisms and how certain foods and exposures can feed this cancer and what you can do to improve it. How sugar and insulin turn on growth signals and how inflammation weakens immune surveillance. How alcohol can damage DNA and how processed meats in certain cases can be carcinogenic. How mold toxins and toxins can damage liver and DNA, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it. 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 one of the biggest things that we've learned is that a tumor is not the whole story, but the terrain matters. The immune system, metabolism, mitochondria, cell membranes, gut microbiome, they all matter. These impact your genetics in such a way that they can change them. Before you do anything, before you make any changes, I want you to make sure you're always working with a doctor. And so let's get started. If you wanna lower your cancer risk, you need to understand the difference between genetics and epigenetics. Cancer starts when normal cells become abnormal. That can happen through DNA damage, mutation, replication errors, toxins, radiation, viruses, inflammation, oxidative stress, and other vulnerabilities, things that we still have to discover. But here's the key. Mutated cells happen more often than we think. Over 10,000 times a day, we have mutated cells that occur, and our immune system, when healthy, removes removes these mutations. Your body is constantly dealing with damaged cells. The question is not only do cells mutate, the deeper question is did your body repair it? Did it get autophagy and mitophagy, their patient repair of mitochondria, getting rid of the old ones and rogue cells and getting rid of them? And did your immune system recognize that? Did your mitochondria trigger that apoptosis, which is programmed cell death? Did inflammation resolve this? Did insulin stay in control, your metabolic flexibility work in your favor to not feed these things? And did your cells receive growth signals and repair signal? And did the brain of your body continue to improve with health, oxygen, and circulation and nutrients, so that it made it difficult for cancer cells to survive? These are the real issues that we need to ask ourselves. For a cancer cell to grow, several things really need to happen. It needs fuel, it needs growth signals, it needs inflammation, it needs immune escape, it needs blood supply, microenvironment changes that it makes around itself. And unfortunately, the modern diet and modern lifestyle can support many of those problems. Will this food give me cancer really isn't the right question. The better question is, what's What signal is the food sending to my body? See, and as we age, these things are already happening. And that's why as people get older, they have a higher risk of developing cancer because some of these systems are already not operating as good as they did when we were younger. Mitochondrial health, membranes, immunity, inflammation. So think about that. You, you get injured and you're a kid and it's like you don't even know you're injured. A few minutes later it's healed versus somebody who's older, who's lingering and their body's trying to repair and heal. And some of that is showing you how the signaling and messaging changes as we age. Now, there are things we can do with diet and lifestyle that can make a big difference. And we want to eat foods that are organic and we want to eat foods that are highly nutrient dense and we want to hydrate correctly. We want to make sure we have the right nutrients and enzymatic pathways working in our body because these things help us to stop feeding cancer cells and help our body to eliminate them. But along the way, patients can have infections. They can have low viral grade infections that are just causing huge problems with immunity. Mutations basically evade the cancer's early cell development and growth. High inflammation, not having enough muscle for metabolic flexibility or fiber for the digestion. In fact, I like patients to improve their cell membrane. Cell membranes are around your normal cells, and they're also around your mitochondria. And some of the ways to improve those— because the membranes have all the signaling for insulin, they have signaling for a number of other communication components to the body— and the way we can improve them is things like 3,000 milligrams of fish oil, high quality, doesn't have PCBs and heavy metals, phosphatidylcholine, 3,000 milligrams a day, taking these throughout the day in your meals, along with liposomal lizanthin, which can get in there and act as like rebar between the cell membrane, helping your body fight oxidative stress, help your insulin. So with Nigel's diet and lifestyle is kind of repairing, giving the body the building block like high-quality proteins, grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish, which will have some of these nutrients to repair the proteins. See, these are the building blocks of our proteins, our muscle, and we have the building blocks of our cell membranes. And so we're giving the body what it needs to refresh and repair, and we're not putting stressful foods in our body. We're eating balanced, healthy, whole food meals, and we're exercising, and we're doing some weight training and resistance, and we're moving. And all these things are going to impact our insulin metabolic flexibility. They're going our immunity, and it makes it much harder for cancer to grow and develop in that type of patient. A 2025 study showed that decreased insulin resistance as an important cancer-related metabolic factor involving insulin and IGF-1, chronic inflammation, metabolic reprogramming, and mitochondrial dysfunction were critical to a patient having great response in care. This is really a no-nonsense approach. Stop drinking the sugar, sodas, refined carbohydrates, all the, those bad foods. Start eating real healthy foods. You know, we don't need breakfast cereals and muffins and, you know, poorly created juices and these types of things and, you know, processed foods. What we need is whole foods the way God created them that are rich in minerals, polyphenols. You know, if people can digest them, like sprouted beans and lentils, vegetables, high-quality berries. These are all antioxidants. They're loaded with nutrients. Grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish, and these types of things. Foods that are rich in fiber. This is better. Sweet potatoes. We're talking about foods that are made from the earth and you're just eating them and you're exercising and you're moving and you're changing your digestion and your gut microbiome to be healthy. And we're improving insulin sensitivity, we're improving immune function, mitochondrial health, and we're taking nutrients to support ourselves. I know a lot of people don't think fiber is very sexy, but fibers help produce short-chain fatty acids and butyrate. Fiber supports bowel regularity, helps with binding up toxins, regulating blood sugar, lowering insulin. See, this is important. Fiber supports the gut barrier, and it's deeply connected to our immune system. People often obsess over superfoods, and while missing the fact that they're eating almost no fiber. And that can be backwards for some patients. The cancer prevention plate should not just be about low sugar. It should be about high-quality, nutrient-dense foods that your body responds well to. Fiber, phytonutrients, good color variation in our, uh, fruits and vegetables, polyphenols, high protein, like 1 gram of protein for every pound of the weight you want to be. Like if you've lost weight during cancer treatment, add that extra protein to the ideal weight that you want to get back to. Healthy fats, which I just talked about. Getting rid of alcohol, and we need to reduce that significantly in the diet. Alcohol Alcohol in itself has been linked to cancer in many ways as a carcinogen. And yes, the World Health Organization notes that it increases certain types of cancers, larynx, esophagus, and breast, and a number of other— liver and colorectal. And that's when people are doing lots of alcohol, drinking alcohol. But what we really want to do is instead of that, we want to look at foods that repair our DNA. If you look at alcohol metabolites, they can damage DNA, oxidative stress, folate disruption, but you can repair that with the right nutrients and foods. And so we want to use things here to improve the body. Talking about those healthy fats, the building blocks of cell membranes like phosphatidylcholine and healthy, you know, fish oils. These are all going to give you the building blocks for those membranes. And we can eliminate those alcohols out of the diet and then increase the nutrients that our body needs, B vitamins and other nutrients that are necessary to help our body detoxify and get rid of the processed food, processed meats. We want everything to be in its most natural form so that we can cook, prepare the foods, and receive the benefits. Nutrients. These play such a big role in improving total health. I'm saying things like high-quality proteins matter, muscle matter, iron, B vitamins, but I wouldn't build your diet around just processed meats. You want the good quality stuff— grass-fed, organic, high quality. Even when we eat eggs, we want pasture-raised. We want foods that are nutrient-dense and as much as farm-to-table as possible. And this can make a big difference. Bringing in the cruciferous vegetables— cauliflower and broccoli and arugula and Brussels sprouts— these are diet things you can have. Olive oil, herbs, garlic, rosemary, oregano. See, these are powerful foods that if we just start putting them into our diet, we're going to see such benefits. And this is going to make such a difference in our overall health and getting rid of the soda and getting rid of the belly fat, you know, as much as we can, improving our nutrients and our antioxidants. We're going to see a big improvement from the poor diet that a lot of people eat every day. And eventually it leads not just to cancer but other chronic diseases as well. Oftentimes in the standard American diet, we eat poor foods that are not high quality, and those really add up, and those create a big problem. So we're almost eating our cancer, right? Day by day, eating the wrong foods, ignoring them, going into poor health and hoping for the best. Improving movement, reducing stress, improving sleep, all these are going to have massive impacts on total overall health. And the best way to improve these is work with functional medicine doctor, naturopathic doctor that are skilled in these areas. So you can dial all this in and actually run tests and make these changes and get yourself moving in the right direction. When you're eating correctly and your life is moving beautifully, you have lots of energy, you're sleeping well, you have good hormone function, and your inflammation is nice and your cardiovascular, all these things are all connect. And these are the same things that help to prevent cancer. These are the same things that help you get better cancer treatment or better response to care or hold remission. It's the same health components, good immunity, good health. And it all starts with the way we eat and the way we take care of ourselves. The things that I'm thinking about here are membrane health, mitochondrial health, oxidative stress, inflammation, immunity. That's one of the big ones. Cell signaling repair. That's how Precision helps us with prevention of cancer. That's how we talk to our mitochondria to be healthy and just vibrant in health and energy. That's how we do it. That's how we regulate cell death or program cell death so we can get rid of the cancer cells, or we can get rid of cells that are old in our body. We can become healthier and stronger. This is how we influence our immune system. It all works together. This is how we repair, adapt, and make our body stronger. So this is things like mitochondria health that, you know, have to do with fatigue and cellular energy. And we can improve that. We can change the way we exercise, a little resistance training, walking, which is one of the best things you can do, eating the right quality proteins, getting our magnesium and B vitamins. All those things are really important. They're gonna play a big role in our body's ability to be healthy. Sleeping, waking up, getting that direct sunlight, setting the circadian rhythms, reducing toxic exposure, insulin sensitivity, improving our gut health and microbiome. This is really important with the key to this being our immune system, because your immune system is your first and last defense against cancer. And every day your body develops cancer cells and your immune system eliminates these precancerous cells. But if it's weak, if it's busy dealing with chronic inflammation, if it's got other messaging and signals like obesity and stuff going on, We're making it harder for our body to do what it's designed to do, to heal and to keep us healthy. That's why I get frustrated when cancer prevention advice is just eat broccoli, or here's 2 foods you need to include in your diet. It's really the whole balance that really makes a difference. It's strengthening your immune system on every front. So yes, eat cruciferous vegetables. They're important, right? Broccoli and others, but eat garlic and onions and berries and these powerful herbs like rosemary, oregano. These are powerful things that are gonna have impact. Colorful fruits and vegetables, fermented foods, very powerful. Healthy protein, organic products, almost as much as we can, everywhere we can, because the food's all contaminated all over the world. We're eating grass-fed beef and wild-caught fish, and we're just eating the key nutrients that's sending our body the right signal so we can thrive. Our mitochondria, our immune system, our liver, our gut microbiome, our epigenetics can truly thrive. This is the first thing I want people to do is change their diet and lifestyle so that they can at least have the building blocks for victory. Stop driving that high glucose, insulin, and metabolic stress. Fix that DNA repair. Remove those carcinogens that are causing cancer, alcohol, other toxins, heavy heavy metals, infections, and chemical toxins. Find what they are and get them out of the body, neutralize them, and then restrengthen the training of your body to deal with inflammation and build strong immunity. This is how we change our body, and this is how we reverse a disease-causing body to a healing body. These are the things we do, right? Minerals, right? Enzymes, right? Nutrients, all those things. And if you dial those things in, you're giving your body a better chance to heal, to restore, and to promote a powerful immune system that eradicates cancer even before it develops. So here are some low-hanging fruit that you can do. Number one, get get rid of all the energy drinks, sweet drinks, sugar products. Just take them out. You don't need that to be the core of your diet. Make sure you're eating whole foods the way the Lord created them. Make breakfast more about protein than sugar. Hydrate well. You might intermittent fast, which could be very good if you time that right within your chemotherapy windows. That can be very, very effective. Bring in clean proteins, high-quality proteins in the diet, right, that I mentioned before— organic, wild-caught, clean products into the diet. And let's get rid of all these muffins and cakes and those kinds of things. Then we want fiber, vegetables, beans fermented if your body can handle the digestion. Flaxseeds, very powerful. Cruciferous vegetables in our diet fix that gut microbiome. Fermented foods, very powerful. Avoid as much as you can products that are refined and processed. I can't repeat that enough because they're hidden everywhere we eat. And try to make sure that you're eating foods that are loaded with nutrients. They're nutrient-dense. They're not weak, they're dense. It means they have the power with protein, they have the nutrients that your body needs to heal your gut lining and to give you strength and energy throughout out today. And these are the foods that exist, and there's so many of them, I don't want to list them all here, but find what works for you. Then after you've done that, and you can put that into your any AI engine you like and build a beautiful diet program for yourself. These kinds of things, these foods and these supplements, they help with the cell membranes, and these need help for repair. And it's almost ignored by everybody, but so important for that mitochondria, for your cells' communication, the proteins to build the muscle so you're not wasting away and you've got good energy, so your immune system is not overwhelmed with allergy foods and inflammation and processed foods, and it can focus what your body needs to heal. If you like this episode, you may also like my episode on The Secret Cause of Cancer, which actually goes into more detail on the things that actually cause cancer, going way beyond diet. So you can start looking at these things and bringing these questions and testing and lifestyle changes into your life so you can improve your life. I hope you found this episode helpful, and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.