The REAL Cause of Cancer You NEED To Know

If you asked anyone what the real cause of cancer is, you'll hear genetics, smoking, diet, bad luck, and none of that's wrong, but it points to the whole conversation is in the wrong direction. It's the reason a lot of people do everything right and they still end up with the diagnosis of cancer and they never saw it coming. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of Invita Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have worked with thousands of patients that have failed some of the top cancer hospitals across the country using precision targeting. And in this video, I'm gonna walk you through what I believe is a real cause of cancer that most people don't know, why mainstream care is not routinely looking for it, and the specific things that can bring you to your own doctor to start checking for it. Now let's get started. Most people are asking the wrong question. They ask, what caused the tumor? But the better question is, what changed inside my body that allowed the tumor to grow? That's the question most people are not asking, and that's where we need to go today. Most people think cancer begins with a bad gene, and sometimes it does, but that's not commonly where cancer is caused. Yes, you can have BRCA genes and breast cancer, and you can have Lynch syndrome, and you can have all these other things, but this is not where cancers mainly come from. Inherited cancers that are truly genetic make up such a small percentage of cancer. Even people with clean family histories are getting cancer younger. But inherited genetics can only explain a very small part of the story. Most cancers are not inherited. Most cancers develop over time as damaged accumulations occur within the body. So people say cancer is genetic, and they're partly right, but they're misunderstanding what that means. Cancer involves genetic damage, especially if we're looking at the tumors and we we want to treat the cancer, then we really want to know the genetics of the cancer. Most of the cancers are caused by epigenetic changes, which have to do with diet and lifestyle. But once you get cancer, we need to know those genetics to treat it. But the damage can be influenced mainly by our body's terrain. And that's the real cause I want to talk about today. The real cause, that's not just one thing. It's not just sugar or just toxins or high stress or just maybe genetics. But the real cause is a broken terrain. The body's environment of inflammation, insulin resistance, immune suppression, toxic burden, chronic infections. That's a big one that's overlooked. A lot of people have chronic infections they don't even know that weakens their immune system. Gut microbiome problems, poor mitochondrial function, and cellular stress that's allowed to build year after year until damaged cells don't repair, mutations begin, and they don't get cleaned up. And they grow outta control. And now we have cancer because we started with one cell that was mutated and it continued to grow outta control. That's developed a ball of cells called a tumor. Cancer's not just a bad cell problem. Cancer is a bad terrain problem. And these changes are so important because if cancer is only a bad cell problem, then all we have to do is wait for the tumor, cut it out, poison it, and the hope is that it won't come back. If cancer is a terrain problem, then we have to ask a deeper question. Why did the cell become damaged in the first place? Why did the immune system miss finding this cancer? We develop pre-cancer cells 10,000 times a day, and a healthy immune system eliminates that. Why did our inflammation stay on and overgrow the cancer, help it to metastasize and spread? Why is our insulin elevated and our mitochondrial in total dysfunction? Why was our gut barrier inflamed? And we have lots of dysbiosis in the gut and microbiome problems. Why were these toxins not cleared from our bodies? Why is our autophagy or our cell cleanup or mitophagy or mitochondrial cleanup not working properly? These are the missing links to the conversation. And I believe this is one of the biggest blind spots in modern cancer care we know of today. Not because doctors are bad and not because Nobody cares, but because the system is built to find tumors, name the tumors and stage them and match them to a protocol. That's what it's designed to do because it's billable, it's insurance, it's the way it works. It's not designed to map out your entire terrain and help your body heal, looking at thousands of markers and find the right targets. That's where the gap is, both in cancer treatment and in prevention. A standard checkup may look for basic things like a blood count and blood chemistry and cholesterol. Maybe you get an A1C hemoglobin, right? Maybe you scan for something that's already suspected, but it's usually not asking, what's your fasting insulin? What are your inflammatory burdens and markers? What's your visceral fat? What's your immune system status? What's your gut microbiome? What chronic infections are you exposed to? What's your body's total toxic burden? What's your mitochondrial function look like? See, those are very different questions. Let me show you why this matters. Take insulin resistance. Most people think insulin resistance is only related to diabetes, and it's not. Insulin resistance means your cells stop responding properly to insulin, so your body has to produce more insulin to force glucose into your cells. Over time, your body gets insensitive. More sugar that can't get into your muscles, into your tissue, the higher your insulin, and you get insulin problems where you're not even sensitive to the glucose anymore. More inflammation, more belly fat, more fatty liver, more hormonal disruption, more oxidative stress. And that's not just about blood sugar. That's the cancer terrain. A 2025 review on insulin resistance and cancer explained that insulin resistance is linked to several major cancers and involved in the mechanisms like insulin, IGF-1 system, chronic inflammation, metabolic reprogramming, mitochondrial dysfunction. The author described metabolic dysfunction as a modifiable force in cancer development. That's a huge statement. A modifiable force, meaning this is not just our fate. We can change it. This is a biology that we're able to influence. Now, does that mean fixing insulin resistance guarantees you'll never get cancer? No, but it does mean resistance should be treated as a serious cancer risk signal. And yet most people never get fasting insulin checked, but they're not told how these things are related to chronic disease. But fasting insulin can be abnormal for years before your glucose is terrible. The body compensates. The lab looks fine and the patient keeps going on, and years later they get a diagnosis nobody saw coming. And this is why I tell people, do not just ask, is my blood sugar normal? Ask, how hard is my body working to keep it normal? That's the key question. Now connect that to muscle. Muscle is one of the largest glucose-clearing organs in the body. When you have more healthy muscle and you use that muscle, your body can clear the glucose faster. That improves insulin sensitivity. It lowers metabolic pressure. It lowers inflammation, it improves mitochondrial health, it creates a different terrain. A 2025 study reported— found that insulin resistance significantly mediated the relationship between physical activity and mortality, including cancer mortality. So in plain English, it improved insulin resistance and it reduced the risk of cancer. So when we tell people to lift weights and exercise, not about vanity, it's about building good quality metabolic function in the body. If the patient is metabolically broken, the immune function may be under pressure, and it too can be evading cancer cells. This is why I keep saying cancer treatment can't just be tumor mapping. It's mapping inflammation. It's mapping immune evasion, cuz 10,000 times a day in a healthy person, your immune system is eliminating cancer. So for instance, if people are overweight and have obesity and they have a lot of visceral fat, this fat is connected to inflammation and cytokines, which disrupts hormones, insulin resistance, and your immune signaling. So when someone says, I just need to lose weight, what we really want to ask is a deeper question. How do we build muscle and lose visceral fat, decrease inflammation, improve our insulin and immune function, and improve our mitochondrial health? Now, mitochondria is such an important conversation because it's not just a factory that creates energy. It's very important in elimination of cancer. Mitochondrial dysfunction may be one of the key root causes of cancer. It regulates oxidative stress, immune signaling, energy in the body, but something called apoptosis, which is known as programmed cell death. So if your mitochondria is old, meaning the membranes haven't changed out and they're— it's not getting mitophagy and clearing and becoming healthy with things like weight-bearing exercise, proper cardio, maybe like zone 2 cardio, and eating healthy, you know, these things, and fixing gut microbiome, they're going to impact that mitochondria. And it's going to have a higher risk of being dysfunctional if you don't do those things. And that signaling can increase the risk of cancer. So mitochondrial dysfunction is one of those causes of cancer that you really don't hear about in the way that I've just mentioned it. And then this brings to our gut microbiome. This is an immune organ. 70% of our body's immune system comes from our gut. So we have to fix our gut health. So a 2024 study review of gut dysbiosis and gastrointestinal cancers reported that dysbiosis can contribute to cancer's development through what? Immune dysregulation, carcinogenic metabolites, altered metabolism, genetic instability, and pro-inflammatory signaling. And this isn't just limited to the gut. In a 2025 study, the review on dysbiosis explained that gut microbiome affects the metabolism of our entire body, inflammation pathways that are linked to cancer's growth or to its disruption. So this is why we tell people that gut health is so important, not because it's trendy, but because gut is connected to immune function. If the gut's inflamed and damaged, microbiome's damaged, we have dysbiosis and we can have chronic infections. And all these are the perfect storms for cancer. We want to look at the full terrain of the body. A 2025 study reviewed the gut dysbiosis and cancer immunity and reported that gut dysbiosis can diminish the treatment efficacy of immunotherapy, causing resistance. The gut can influence how the immune system behaves. Now let's talk about toxic exposures, heavy metals, chemicals, toxins that are carcinogenic, including toxins from infection byproducts. These need to be tested for and cleaned out of the body because we have so many in our environment and they're not easy to process and they can increase the carcinogenic risk. So these toxins are so important and nobody's testing for them properly. So work with a good functional medicine doctor. This is where you can get a lot of these toxins tested for and cleaned. Improve liver, bile, kidney, lymphatic system, gut, skin, mitochondrial, antioxidants. See, this is real health, not just fad diets. If you're overloaded with these pesticides, plastic solvents, mold, heavy metals, ultra-processed food, alcohol, and poor sleep, the body's gonna have a much more difficult burden to deal with. So the goal here is not to be afraid, but to just clean these things, make the changes step by step to reduce these ultra-processed foods and toxins from your body and clean them out. Now, there's a part most people miss. Mainstream cancer care usually enters the story late. A lump appears, a scan lights up, biopsy confirms it, and then you're put into a protocol. Those protocols are more helpful if found early than late. But in the late story, the terrain was changing for years before you ever developed a cancer or the inflammation. It was developing at the cellular level, the insulin resistance level, the mitochondrial level. So we want to improve immunity, gut health, toxins, hormones, muscle building, better sleep. The tumor is often the last visible sign. It's just a symptom of other things that have occurred for years. But people didn't know what to look for because they're, oh, I'm running, I'm exercising, I'm eating healthy, but Are you really looking at those key things? I've built many videos. You can watch videos on the ones that I've built on this, and they'll walk you through that. I don't want people waiting for a diagnosis. Instead, change your diet and lifestyle now, and then do early screenings. Even with simple blood tests, we could test for almost all the cancers. We find something early, do imaging, then biopsy, and we can treat it right away. You can change your body and your lifestyle and your screening to prevent getting cancer in the first place. Now, if you have cancer and that cancer is more advanced, or let's say it was diagnosed as a tumor. Now you don't just want, in my opinion, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines, cuz we find that when we test patients, 90% of them are on the wrong treatments. So we look at the DNA, that's 500+ markers. RNA, now we're well into 1,000+ markers, immune profiling and immune spatial biology and tumor micro environment analysis, which now allows us to target the cancer specifically for that patient. Using microdoses because we know exactly what we're treating. We took the guesswork out because cancer's not just about breast cancer, colon, lung, pancreatic, or the tissue or some protocol, but it's about understanding your immune system, the genetic targets for the cancer, the environmental targets that cause the cancer, and then building the custom precision plan for each person because there is no one size fits all. Two patients can have the same exact type of cancer and completely different details of treatment, different biomarkers, different RNA expressions, different immune profiles, different spatial biology. So this makes all the difference because none of that's being looked at in the standard of care. Remember, the standard of care is not the best care. It's standard. It's what insurance covers. It's what the hospitals are doing. But it's not the best technology, the most targeted technology. That makes a big difference because we want to look at what is causing the cancer and how to restimulate the immune system so that the body can heal. So that's precision oncology. It's really taking it to the next level. A lot of the protocols that are built today are built on double-blind placebo clinical trials. And yes, those have their place. But the problem with that is we're looking for one drug to treat a certain cancer type and to do better than the placebo. The goal is not to just chase random numbers, but to be specific, both in precision and in the treatment of cancer. The goal is to ask What's going on in my body and what do I need to do to make it healthy? How do I change the terrain? And if I get cancer, how do I find it early, get rid of it? How do I find the right targets that are specific so that I'm treating it in the best way possible? These are the questions we want to ask on prevention. Do you have visceral fat? Am I losing muscle or fat? And I want to improve my gut health. I want to decrease inflammation to fix my immunity. See, all these things are gonna be super important. And helping our body treat cancer in a far more detailed way. So this is what this episode's about. It's getting to the bottom line of what's causing these cancers. And then even if we get it, how do we treat it? How do we do the right things to help our body be healthy? Now that you know the cause, most people never have explained to you about what causes cancer. The next question is, how does the body actually warn you when something is going wrong? So click this video here because I walk you through early signs of cancer that most people overlook and why they get dismissed and the moment to stop waiting and get checked. If today's video made you take this seriously, that one tells you what to actually pay attention to in your own body. I hope you found this episode helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.