#309 The 3 Dietary Mistakes Keeping HPV Positive (And What to Do Instead)

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Doni Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body, but with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Doni Stress Recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists, and experts, along with Dr. Doni, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is How Humans Heal.

Hi and welcome to How Humans Heal. I'm Dr. Doni Wilson, and in this video, I'm going to be talking about 3 things not to do to help you to clear HPV to negative and prevent it from causing abnormal cells. I know how frustrating it is to find out that you're testing positive for HPV, to find out that there's abnormal cells potentially, and especially if you've had to have a treatment already to remove abnormal cells. It's even more frustrating to find out when those abnormal cells come back again and you feel like you're in a broken record, in a broken system, because you're on a repeat, right? You realize, oh my gosh, these procedures just remove the abnormal cells, but it doesn't remove the virus. So then the virus keeps causing abnormal cells and you're stuck in the system of having to continually go back for more procedures, biopsies in order to identify and address abnormal cells. And you're like, when does this ever end? And the fact is, is I talk to women from around the world who've been dealing with HPV and procedures for over 15 years of their lives, even have had procedures, even have had a hysterectomy, and still have abnormal cells occurring vaginally. And I've had enough of it. I just don't think that that's what it should be. That's not what women deserve. Women deserve to have support to help their bodies to clear HPV to negative and prevent the abnormal cells in the first place. And that actually is possible. It not only is it that I see that it's possible as a naturopathic doctor and professional midwife and nutritionist, but the research also shows that it's possible. And so there's no reason to think that it's not possible. It absolutely can happen. You can absolutely clear HPV and prevent it from causing abnormal cells and prevent it from causing cancer. So if you've been told otherwise, please know that whoever told you that hasn't been reading the research and hasn't tried to help women, because I find that simply by implementing what we see in the research and simply by helping women to understand what they need in order to heal, that the healing starts happening. And I understand that for some of you, maybe you've tried some things, maybe you've tried making a few diet changes, maybe you've tried taking a few supplements and you're still testing positive. And in that case, then I'm glad you found me and my videos because you're going to see that I look at things in a way broader perspective. First of all, I look at the whole body, body, mind, and spirit. You're a whole person. We have to look at all of you, not just the vagina, not just the cervix, and we need to be individualizing and we need to be using clinical doses and we need a comprehensive plan. So please know that what I'm going to be talking about today is not the only thing I recommend. It's part of a comprehensive plan, and it's when women follow my comprehensive protocol to address HPV, that's when we start seeing their results go to negative and staying negative over time, over years, even if they're re-exposed. So I want you to know that that's possible. Women are doing it and reporting back to me all the time, every day, every week. I'm hearing back from patients and cases that I've helped to achieve that. And so I want you to know that it's possible for you too. And so where I like to start is with dietary changes. Because first of all, I'm a naturopathic doctor and nutritionist by training, and so I'm always thinking about how can our food be our medicine. I mean, we have to feed ourselves every day anyway as humans. We might as well feed ourselves in a way that's going to help our bodies protect us instead of feeding ourselves mindlessly things that aren't going to help and may actually work against you. And if we can shift the way we're eating in a way that's going to help protect you, then that has a huge ripple effect for your whole health. It turns out the same dietary changes that help protect you from HPV also help protect you from many other health issues, from autoimmunity, allergies, weight gain, digestive issues, hormone imbalances, fertility issues, menopausal symptoms, all of them. It's going to get helped by. So we might as well start making these dietary changes because it's going to help your overall health and it's going to help you prevent cancer from HPV, but also cancer from any, any other causes as well. Okay, so that's why I would say start with your food as your medicine. In fact, I refer to my CARE method, which is an acronym for clean eating, adequate sleep, Recovery activities and exercise. So when I'm focusing on food as medicine, we're starting with the C in CARE, clean eating. And so I want to tell you about 3 things to avoid in your diet, 3 things to not do, because so many women come to me doing these things and they still have HPV. And when I finally say to them, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to break that pattern. We're going to— it's going to be worth it to change this about your diet. Even though you're used to it, even though it's in your daily routine, even though you enjoy it, even though you might have heard it was beneficial somewhere, if you change these patterns, you're already going to be on the path to healing from HPV. So the first one is things we consume very often that actually suppress our immune function, right? If we want our immune system to protect us from HPV, Why would we want to put something in our mouth that lowers our immune system and prevents us from being able to fend off HPV? If you think about it that way, sometimes you can like stop yourself in the pattern and say, wait a minute, what am I really doing here? Why am I putting this into my body if it's going to make me susceptible to a virus that could cause cancer? And it doesn't have to mean forever, right? Sometimes if we think about diet changes as forever, it feels overwhelming, it feels restrictive, it feels yucky, right? So I encourage you, don't think about this as forever. Think about it as until HPV goes away, right? That could take a month, that could take 3 months, maybe 6 months. So you're thinking like, this is not a forever choice. This is an until HPV goes away choice. And then it's going to be worth it. And once it goes away, then you can make different choices and decide whether you want to modify your diet again and bring some of these things back into your diet. Okay, so think about it as for now, and because you're prioritizing getting HPV off your worry list, and to me, that's a high priority. Why would you have that HPV constantly on your worry list when you can do something about it? So the first thing we want to take out of your diet and avoid because it's only working against you is alcohol and sugar. I'm talking about alcohol like, you know, drinking alcoholic drinks. Could be wine, it could be— even if it's tequila, even if it's, you know, whatever that is for you, beer. Any form of alcohol in any amount is going to decrease your immune function. So sometimes women will say to me, what about just 'One drink a day,' or 'One drink a week,' or— and I could say to you, 'Okay, you could try having a little bit and see if the HPV goes away,' but that's going to be a long process, right?

Then you're like—

and depending where you're starting from, so I would ask you, 'How much alcohol are you drinking now? Are you having one alcoholic drink per day, whether that's a glass of wine, a beer, or hard alcohol per day?' Then I would say, Let's start reducing it to every other day or once a week. If it's already once a week, then could you reduce it to once a month? Right? So you want to at least reduce it from what it is now, because whatever it is now, HPV is existing in that state, right? So whatever your alcohol consumption is at this moment in time is allowing HPV to be present. So we need to change something. So you need to at least reduce by 50%. Or, if possible, I would reduce it to 100%. I would get rid of the alcohol altogether. Just decide, "I'm taking a break from alcohol." There's plenty of other things you can drink. Even if you're at social events and it feels like you're supposed to have alcohol, that's a lot of peer pressure. Nobody can force you to have alcohol. You can always decide, "Hey, I'm going to have water. I'm going to have tea. I'm going to have something else." to drink. There's a lot of other possible things on the menu, and there's a lot of other things you could make for yourself. Green tea, for example, actually is antiviral and helps protect you from cancer. So whether it's iced green tea or hot green tea, that's a very easy fix to me. It's like, let's just switch to organic green tea, and it's going to help you fend off HPV instead of work against you. So I'm hoping that helps you just make that decision to be like, let me commit to of being alcohol-free. And it doesn't necessarily mean that your partner or your whole family has to be alcohol-free, but I'm telling you, alcohol is essentially a poison to the human body. It's going to make it harder for your liver to detoxify. It's going to make it harder for your immune system to protect you. And there's many other ways to help you relax. Most people drink alcohol to try to relax, but it's actually not stress recovery. Alcohol is just actually more stress on your body, and it just makes you kind of numb out for a little while. And instead, there's a lot of other things we can use to relax your body, like magnesium, that actually are healthy for you.

If you've recently received an abnormal Pap smear result or told that you test positive for high-risk HPV virus, I'm here to empower you. Your body is powerful and it's designed to heal even HPV. I'm Dr. Doni Wilson Wilson, and I've spent years helping women to tap into their natural healing potential. The Say Goodbye to HPV program provides you with a personalized, natural approach to support your immune system and clear HPV. This is about giving your body the boost it needs to do what it's made to do. Join the thousands of women who who've taken this journey with me and start your own path to healing.

So I can teach you how to help your body relax and recover from stress without using alcohol. And sugar is another— is probably, I believe, one of the most addictive substances that humans have access to is actually sugar. Like, I'm talking refined sugar, not— I'm not talking about fruit sugar or honey, those are different. Those in small amounts are healthy, right? It's refined white sugar, brown sugar. Those refined sugars immediately reduce your immune system for at least 8 hours. And certainly it's easy to just stop eating the sugar that's actually a spoonful of sugar, like a spoonful of sugar in your tea or coffee. Might as well just take that out. Stop, just stop doing it and your taste buds will change. Or you could use a different you could use stevia, which doesn't have sugar in it. If you really want something sweet, you could use stevia as a plant-based sweet substance if you really want something sweet tasting. But you could also just decide that you don't want something sweet tasting and completely just change it, right? It's a matter of just putting your mind to it. And any other places where sugar is that you didn't realize, like a lot of times if you order a coffee drink They add sweeteners, not just sugar, but it could be artificial sweeteners, which are also chemicals and not good for your body, but especially look for cane sugar. Look, you have to pick up any packaged food or beverage that you drink or eat, you need to look on the back and see if the other ingredients say cane sugar. In that case, you gotta switch it out, buy it, even if it's condiments. Even if it's mustard and ketchup, if it says cane sugar, then don't buy it. Buy a product that doesn't contain cane sugar. So you can literally take time and go through your refrigerator and your cabinet and your— when you go to the grocery store and instead purchase products that do not contain cane sugar. Even chocolate, you can get dark chocolate that doesn't contain cane sugar. And by doing that, you're already helping your body protect you from HPV better. Okay, so that's something not to do. Don't have alcohol, don't have refined sugar. The next thing I want you to pay attention to and to not do is to be over-fasting. So many women I talk to who have HPV report to me that they've been fasting for long hours, sometimes 15, 16 hours a day for years. And this is an issue because when we fast for too long, it's a stress on our bodies. Our bodies are thinking, "What? When is she going to eat? Do I need to make some glucose some other way? Am I starving?" Right? Am I? And so it triggers a stress response in the body. It can trigger cortisol response, adrenaline response, and gluconeogenesis, glucose production response. So it ends up working against you. So as much as anyone else might be saying, "Oh, fasting is wonderful, fasting is great," and I can tell you all the reasons and when fasting can be a good thing. I'm not saying that fasting doesn't have its benefits. Fasting can be beneficial when it's done at the right time and the right number of hours for your body. It needs to be very individualized. Before I recommend fasting longer hours, I always want to look at a person's blood work, their adrenal function, their blood sugar levels, and then we determine what is the best amount of fasting for you. And if you're going to fast for longer than 12 hours, we also need to look at your activity levels during the day. Are you exercising and working out long hours or intensely? Are you working for long hours? Are you getting enough sleep? So many factors need to come into play. I myself have times during the year when I will do a fasting-mimicking diet and I will fast for sometimes 15, 16 hours. However, I completely change my daily routine. I decrease my activity level, I increase my sleep, and I completely shift my diet during that time period, and it's for 1 or 2 or 3 weeks at a time. It's not always, every day, all the time. Okay, so we need to be thinking about fasting much more carefully. It's not intended to be long hours of fasting every day forever. Now, I also like to point out that we all fast some number of hours while we're sleeping. So if you go to sleep at 10 PM and you're asleep until, let's say, 6 or 7 AM, during that time period while you're sleeping, you're not eating, and that is considered an intermittent overnight fast. So that would be, you know, say, however long you're sleeping, 7 to 8 hours you're fasting. And then if you— what I recommend is to not eat within at least 2 or 3 hours of when you go to bed. So if you have, if you, let's say, you're sleeping for 8 hours and you're fasting for at least 2 hours before bed, that's 10 hours. And then maybe you have another hour before you eat in the morning, that's 11 hours already of a fast overnight. And that's, to me, that's a good start, right? And some people, if you've been under a lot of stress and you have adrenal dysfunction, so if your cortisol is too high or too low, You might not even feel comfortable fasting that long. You might end up finding that you have low blood sugar levels and feeling nauseous or headache when you wake up in the morning. So we need to take all of that into account and to determine then, you know, can you wait a couple hours without eating before bed? Can you wait an hour before eating in the morning? And then we can determine, okay, that may be a good amount of a fasting window for you. But if you're stopping eating by, let's say, 7 PM, and then you're not eating again until 11 or 12 the next day, that's a much longer fast. And what can happen is that can trigger a stress response that actually decreases your immune function. The other thing that happens when you're fasting 16 hours is it leaves you a smaller eating window. So you have less amount of time to consume your important nutrients from your food, including protein and nutrient-dense foods. So if you don't have as much time to get your nutrients in, you're more likely to become deficient in nutrients. And so I see this a lot of times in women who are fasting for long hours all the time, every day, every week. They end up with a lot of nutrient deficiencies, including iron deficiency, B vitamin deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, as well as protein deficiency. They're not getting enough protein. Now, vitamin D you're going to get from sun. So the best way to do that is make sure you're getting outside and get some sunlight exposure, at least 10 minutes each day. And vitamin D you can also take in a supplement, right? But the iron, B vitamins, and protein you're going to need to get from your diet. And those are going to be the foods that have high amount of iron that's highly absorbable and usable in the body is going to be from animal protein, like from chicken, beef, turkey, and that's where you're going to get protein. Also, you can get protein from fish as well and seafood, and you can also get the B vitamins from animal protein as well as grains. So we need to be thinking, how are you going to get enough of those nutrients if you have a smaller eating window. And what I find is, as soon as I encourage women to, instead of waiting till 11 or 12 during the day to eat, if you eat a little earlier, even if you shave off and you eat by 10 AM or 9 AM and notice how your body feels, and notice how it feels to get protein earlier in the morning. Don't make that first meal carbs or sugar. We already talked about avoiding sugar. Make that first meal some protein and get yourself some— if it's a protein shake or some other form of protein in the morning, then I have a feeling you're going to feel a lot better and your body is going to have a lower stress and more ability to help you heal from HPV. Now, the third thing I want you to avoid doing is going too strict on a plant-based diet. This is one of those things that I see and I've seen it in books and I hear people talking about how following a strict plant-based diet helps prevent cancer. And there are potentially some scenarios where we would consider that, especially if a person has already been diagnosed with cancer and they're following a fasting-mimicking diet, then we might do a plant-based diet fully. And I have done that at times in my life as well. However, when we're talking about someone who doesn't have cancer yet and we're trying to prevent cancer, so there's cervical dysplasia, HPV, you do not yet have cancer, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to be 100% plant-based. And I want to emphasize that I still think— I still want you to get a lot of healthy plants in your diet. I want you to be getting plants with all their nutrients, their antioxidants, their— all that's involved. So healthy green greens like arugula, kale, also vegetables like broccoli, as well as asparagus, or you name it, onions, garlic, all those plants, berries. We want the plants. Absolutely, you want to have plants in your diet. And we need to make sure you're getting enough protein, iron, and B vitamins. And it's very difficult to get enough iron, protein, and B vitamins in a whole 100% plant-based diet. It is possible, you can do it, But you have to really be on top of it. You have to be either following someone's instructions with a meal plan, or you need to be ordering plant-based meals that are being delivered to you that are paying attention to this. You need to be paying— it's not something for someone who's busy and at the last second just picking plant-based meals. You're probably not going to get enough protein, B vitamins, and iron. So it needs to be something— if you really want to stay plant-based, you've got to be, have to be really intentional about making sure you're still getting at least 20 to 30 grams of protein every meal, as well as maintaining adequate iron and B vitamin levels. And you need to do blood tests in order to determine that. And you need to be working with a practitioner who orders the correct blood tests for you so you know that you have adequate iron and B vitamins. And so what I suggest is, if it doesn't make sense for most people to try to follow a plant-based diet, so what I suggest is to do a combination. You can do, you can have meals that are 100% plant-based meals, right? You could have a protein shake that's pea protein and other nutrients in there. So you could have a plant-based protein shake. You could have some plant-based meals. Maybe it's going to be a salad with nuts and seeds and hemp seeds and so on. Maybe it's using some edamame or some soy-based protein. So you can have some meals that are fully plant-based, but I encourage you to also have at least 1 or 2 meals per day that have animal protein. And I encourage you to get healthy animal protein, right? Organic, free-range, no hormones, nothing you don't want. Get healthy animal protein. And if you're going to use fish, have wild salmon, for example, so you're getting healthy sources of protein. And you're, you're not going to just have protein, you're going to have it with your healthy plants. So you can have your vegetables, your grains, and you're going to combine that together. So you have the protein, animal protein, with healthy plant-based foods together, and you're going to eat those in regular intervals every 3 to 4 hours through the day. By doing that, you're going to ensure that you have adequate protein, iron, B vitamins, because those are essential for your immune system and protecting you from HPV. Okay, so there you go. There you have it from me. These are the things. If you were already doing them and thinking it might be helping you and yet HPV is still there, then it's obviously not working. We need to change things up. We need to start thinking more specifically about what we can change about your diet that actually helps you feed yourself better, right? Instead of restricting more and stressing you more, I want to feed you more and stress you less, right? So we need to be feeding your body at regular intervals through the day with adequate protein, adequate nutrients, and not adding in things that are going to be inflammatory and depleting your immune system. If you want to learn more, then I encourage you to watch more of my videos. I have videos on which foods to specifically avoid because there are certain foods that are more inflammatory that we should avoid. And if you want to learn more from me in terms of the rest of my comprehensive protocol, including the supplements to take, the vaginal suppositories that I formulate, and more, the mind-body approach that I use to help you to fully heal, Yes, we're going to help you heal your vagina. Yes, we're going to help you heal your cervix. Yes, we're going to help you heal from HPV, but we're going to help you do that by healing your whole body because this is a whole body situation. This is not just a vaginal situation. So I'm so glad you found me. I welcome you to subscribe and join me if you're new here, and I look forward to connecting with you at the next episode or in my next live event. I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to How Humans Heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdoni.com.