38: Beyond Genetics: The Surprising Metabolic Truth Behind Cancer with Dr. Thomas Seyfried

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Hi there and welcome to the Keeping a Breast Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Jen Simmons, and I have an amazing person with us today. Dr. Thomas Seyfried has more accolades than I could possibly mention in the course of this podcast. He is a brilliant scientist, a brilliant researcher, and he is the author of the Metabolic Approach to Cancer and has really done the work on defining why we get cancer, how cancer grows, why cancer grows, and is working diligently to come up with solutions that we all need to hear about and embrace if we are going to make an impact on cancer going forward. So I first want to welcome you, Dr. Seyfried. I'm so delighted to have you here.

Well, thank you very much, Jen. It's really nice to be here with you.

Yeah, let's just tackle that 800 pound gorilla in the room, because your work, not intentionally, I don't think, started with the work of Dr. Otto Warburg and kind of grew from there. Although, did you know about his work when you started yours?

Not really the word. We've always heard of the word Warburg, but I never really did a deep dive into what he was actually doing until we started to do the work with epilepsy. I worked in epilepsy for years at Yale University. Initially, we were mapping genes for epilepsy, and then one of my students wanted to do some research on ketogenic diets because that's where all these ketogenic diets really started with the epilepsy field and the guys at Yale. I was in the Department of Neurology at Yale University in New Haven, and they were big on epilepsy. So that was the whole that was one of the leading departments in the, in the field of epilepsy at that time in the 70s and 80s. And I, I wrote an article, I wrote to get an internal grant on ketogenic diet at that time. And they said, no, nobody's interested in this is passe. So I dropped it. And then when I came to Boston College, I had one of my students, we were doing a lot of work on epilepsy and they wanted to go to this meeting and on the west coast with Jim Abrams who started the Charlie Foundation. Jim, Jim was a movie producer, produced these airplane movies and also with Meryl Streep doing the first do no Harm movie. So he was kind of a heavyweight. But his son had intractable episodal epilepsy in it and they were doing all kinds of things and he wasn't getting better. And then he found out that the, the Johns Hopkins University in, in Maryland was the big center of ketogenic diets. I think it was there anyway, Johns Hopkins and, and my student came back and said, oh, everybody's really excited about this ketogenic diet for epilepsy. So we started doing all this. We had all these beautiful models of epilepsy and the next thing you know we're doing restricted calorie epilepsy and all this kind of stuff. But we also had a big project on brain cancer and it was all pure biochemistry. It wasn't anything. And then it turned out that Linda Nebling at Case Western Reserve took two hopeless cases of children that had brain tumors. They, they were high grade gliomas and the CH kids were surgically mutilated and suffered brain damage. And Linda, for her PhDs in nursing, get a PhD in nursing there, decided to put these two kids on the, there was two or three kids on the ketogenic diet based on Otto Werburg's finding that cancers are driven by glucose. And we knew that. So is epileptic seizures triggered by glucose. So Linda was the one who said, let's see if we can get some therapeutic benefit from ketogenic diet with brain cancer. And that was in 1995. And when I saw that paper, there were only three citations to it. And I said, wow, this is really interesting. So I took our preclinical models of brain cancer, which are the best models for human brain cancer, high grade gliomas. And we started to treat with. Our two projects were simultaneous going together, the epilepsy and the brain cancer projects. But we realized calorie restriction would also lower glucose and elevate ketones just like a ketogenic diet. We were getting spectacular results. And it was lowering glucose and elevating ketones. And then we moved into calorie restricted ketogenic diets, which were even more, more powerful. And it all came back to what Otto Warburg said. He said that all these cancer cells have defective respiration, mitochondrial defects, and in order to survive, they must ferment. And glucose was a fermentable fuel. So then we did a deeper dive for 20, more than 20 years now, trying to ferret out mechanisms of action. Otto Werburg was 100% correct. All cancers, breast cancer, colon cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, bladder cancer, melanomas, blood cancers, they all have the same problem. They, they must ferment, they can't use respiration, Making a ketogenic, calorie restricted ketogenic diet a potential therapy for all major cancers. And we were able to show that all these cancers have defects in mitochondria, structure and function, forcing them into a fermentation. And then the big discovery was that not only glucose, but the amino acid glutamine could also be fermented. So Warburg did not know about that. So that's our major contribution. There's several contributions. Number one, Warburg tried to quantify the amount of ATP that was being produced through fermentation and respiration. Can't do that. We have clearly shown that it's not, not accurate that Warburg was saying he was 100% correct on the origin of cancer. His readouts caused a tremendous amount of controversy and led to a lot of misunderstanding. We cleared that up. He did not know about amino acid fermentation. We cleared that up. So we cleared up, connected the dots and cleared up a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation. And now we're ready to change the standard of care for cancer based on our new understanding that it's primarily a metabolic disease. It's not a genetic disease. I published many papers on that. But that concept that cancer is a genetic disease is the driving force for the entire cancer industry, which includes the academic industry, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the hospital industries, the oncology field. So they're all making drugs and therapies based on a, on a, on a incorrect theory. It's not a genetic disease. It's a mitochondrial metabolic disorder. And the reason why.

Can you talk a little bit about why they, why it's so accepted that cancer is a genetic disease? Like, what do you mean by that? And why is that theory so accepted?

It's ideological Dogma. It's not any different than a religion or a political persuasion. You're not going to get a person of Jewish religion to accept Islam any more than you're going to get someone who practices Islam to accept Judaism as. This is what we call ideological dogma. It's a solidification of the brain's thinking along certain lines. And political this. Political things that Democrats, Republicans, but, but people are, are, are, are led into these ideological states, supported by a large amount of data. Of course, when Warburg was battling this out in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the field discovered DNA and as the, as the, as the code directing protein and signaling sequences and activity. And everybody, like lemmings, ran off the cliff chasing all the code and the genes and left Warburg behind. And the controversy that was associated with the biochemistry was left behind. And then, of course, several Nobel Prizes were awarded for oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes and, and it made biology more quantitative. So everybody thought that was really cool and really exciting. And the NIH jumped into this bandwagon. And at the. Don't forget, in 1971, President Nixon declared the war on cancer pushed by Mary Lasker, who has said, we the government needs to play a bigger role in this cancer thing. So. And that was all pointed out in Sid Mukherjee's book, the Emperor of All Maladies. He has, he does a very nice job about the history of cancer. But Nixon said, we're going to cure cancer. Just, you know, a big, a big federal government project on this. And it wasn't happening as quickly as people thought because that was 1971 and, and the cures weren't coming. So the federal, the NIA and NIH National Cancer Institute made a decision in 1984 that we should invite in the pharmaceutical companies that might accelerate the development of drugs. So that was 1984. The fox came into the hen house in 1984. And then we started making all these different kinds of drugs, the genome projects. We started talking about precision medicine, personalized therapies and all these kinds of things. And people at that time felt if we can map all the different mutations and chromosomal abnormalities in tumor cells, then we can make specific drugs to kill and target those things. Well, that never happened. It never happened because cancer is not a genetic disease and it never will happen. So it's a massive detour that's unfortunately led to the inadvertent deaths of hundreds of millions of people around the world because these drugs that were built were being developed from the pharmaceutical company immunotherapies and all these kinds of things. They're all based on the somatic mutation theory. It's a genetic theory. It's not, it's not a genetic. I did nuclear transfer experiments. I did over and over. I did all kinds of experiments to show cancer cannot be a genetic disease. You have to be cognitively impaired or an, a dogmatic ideologue to think that this is the case. And yet.

But there's an entire.

Yeah.

Cancer industry based on that theory.

Yes. How's that working for us?

It's not working. But why don't people realize that it's not working?

Because it's the dogma and, and its power. And, and if you go back and look at the history of theories of science, you can see it played out over and over again. The geocentric, heliocentric theory of the solar system. Okay? That's where the people thought and pushed by mostly theologians that the Earth was the center of the solar system. And if you challenged, you could end up like Giordano Bruno, burned alive in, in one of the centers of Rome, one of the little squares in Rome for his challenge of the theologians that no, the, the, the sun is the center of the solar system based on the Copernican model. Galileo used the telescope to support Copernicus and he was house arrested. He would have been executed as well had he not had political connections. And then you had Kepler putting the, putting the, the orbits into more accurate terms. Eventually the theory that the geocentric theory that the Earth was the center of the collapsed. And now we know the sun is the center of the solar system. But it took, it took centuries for people to see the data and look at it. You can look at the germ theory of Louis Pasteur. He was brutalized by the, by the medical community to say germs that you couldn't see were responsible for all these infectious kinds of diseases brutalized. And then you have the theory, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. And even to this day, people can't even understand that. So these theories are, are, are foundational. They change. But let me tell you something. In none of those theories, whether it was the heliocentric geocentric, whether it was the germ theory or, or, or whether it was this theory of evolution, whether, whether you accepted or did not accept those theories was not responsible for over 17, over 1650 people a day dying. So as we speak here, in an hour, 70 people will be dead from cancer, and that dead from cancer because the theory under which the disease is V is Viewed is incorrect. And once you understand that it's a metabolic disease caused by mitochondrial dysfunction forcing into a fermentation metabolism, the strategies for managing cancer will be completely different, non toxic and powerfully therapeutic.

Okay, so, so let's start to break that down because I mean, I know you don't need me to agree with you, but I agree with you. Cancer is a metabolic disease. Cancer is due to metabolic dysfunction. So what does that mean to the person who didn't go to medical school, who didn't do biochemistry, who, who they, you know, that those are, that, that's a foreign language to them. So explain what is happening and why cancer is a metabolic disease.

So all cancers that we have examined have, that have abnormalities in the structure and function of the mitochondria. Now I have to be honest with you, There is some level of scientific literacy that's necessary and that's one of the things that I drive home. And the students here at Boston College, we pound out scientific literacy. You have to have some fundamental knowledge of things. I mean, today you can go to Google and you can, and you can see these things. The other thing too, I want to point out right up front, is that what I am telling you I have published in open access papers. So if anybody. Well, he didn't do this. He didn't say that. What does he mean by this? Go to the papers and read them. I mean, these are 25 years of research in those papers and I can't speak to every minutiae, detail of, of the problem, of course. But getting back to.

But, but most of my listeners have taken seventh grade biology and they know what the cell looks like and they know what the mitochondria looks like and they understand that the mitochondria is the energy producing unit of the cell. So I think that they can understand that mitochondrial dysfunction may lead to disease states.

Yeah. So, okay, the normal cells in our body, like the normal cells, we're all breathing right now. You're breathing, I'm breathing that. Hopefully oxygen. Hopefully. Unless we're zombies. Right. I always tell my students, how do you think a zombie gets energy? You know, they obviously have to be fermenting because they don't breathe. Right. They're walking dead. So they got to be fermenting. And this is the same thing with the cancer cell. You know, if you take cyanide or I take cyanide, we'd be dead in very sore very soon. Within 30 seconds with minute, we're dead, right? No, no. Cancer cells can live in cyanide. So this is a clue that Warburg had also shown many, many years ago. Wow. So in other words, every cell in our body that's using oxygen to produce energy through the mitochondria would be killed instantly if we gave them cyanide because it blocked cytochrome C oxidase the. And the. The part of the electron transport chain that allows oxygen to be reduced and us to produce ATP, which is the currency, not the cancer cell. So that tells us right off the bat there what's going on. How come the cancer cell isn't killed? Because it doesn't use oxygen. It uses very. The oxygen that a cancer cell uses is for something, but for activities other than energy production, it produces very little energy from. From. Okay, that tells us. Well then where do they get the. How is this cell able to grow if it doesn't use oxygen like the normal cells of our body? And the answer is it ferments. Well, what does that mean? It means energy without oxygen. How do we know this? Because we, life on earth evolved in the absence of oxygen in the atmosphere. All right? The cyanobacteria produced the oxygen. So we, we all, life, evolved in a hypoxic, anoxic kind of a. Of an atmosphere. And they, those cells all grew and proliferated despite the absence of oxygen. And they would grow in an unbridled, unregulated way until the fermentable fuels that they used were dissipated, and then these cells would die. What the cancer cells are doing is essentially falling back on ancient metabolic pathways that existed before oxygen came into the atmosphere. And these are called fermentation pathways. So once you know that, how do you know that? Because they produce waste products of fermentation. Large amounts of lactic acid, which is a by end product of glucose fermentation, are producing cancer cells. And this is why everybody's. Oh, the cancer has an acidic microenvironment. Yes, because it's dumping out acids from fermentation metabolism. So what did they use? And we have interrogated these tumor cell. Okay, so, yeah, we did the rec. We did the interrogation of all the different amino acids and things that the tumor cells can survive on. Yes. The sugar, glucose is the predominant sugar. It's metabolized to lactic acid and, and the lactic acid is dumped out of the. Out of the cell into the microenvironment, causing an acidification. We also found that the amino acid glutamine is the only amino acid that can also be fermented, can be used in the absence of oxygen. So what we have defined now is that the vulnerability. We now know that these tumor cells cannot live without these two fermentable fuels. We have looked at fatty acids. We've looked at, we can't find any other fuel that will allow the tumor cells to survive in the absence of glucose and glutamine. Fatty acids, ketone bodies, lactic acid, they, they can't use any other fuel except fermentable fuels. Fatty acids and ketone bodies are not fermentable. So the solution to the cancer problem is not that complicated. You have to count. You have to restrict availability of glucose and glutamine while transitioning the whole body over to ketone bodies, which can be done with calorie restricted ketogenic diets, water only fasting. Now, glutamine targeting, glucose targeting is easy. You can do that with diets and fasting and this kind of thing. But you need drugs to target the glutamine. You need drugs that there's no food. People say, oh, what can I eat? No, no, no. Glutamine is, is, is produced in our bodies. We have to use drugs to target the glutamine. We exercise can restrict glutamine somewhat, but not completely. So water only. Fasting or restricted ketogenic diets will significantly lower blood sugar. And then at that time, you need to take certain drugs. Now we have a beautiful drug called 6 Deoxynor Leucine. Don D O N. It was used in the clinics to manage children, cancer and adult cancer. It was not effective. It was a little too toxic. They, they didn't know how to use the drug. It was used as a singular entity given with glucose. Can you believe this? And then they said it didn't work.

So yet I think they've had, they've had lots of situations like that. Like vitamin C. Yeah.

Well, vitamin C you can't eat. The tumor cell can't use vitamin C as, as energy. What vitamin C does is, is creates oxidative stress. And under low glucose and low glutamine conditions, IV vitamin C can facilitate killing of tumor cells just like, just like hyperbaric oxygen can. So oxidative stress. Now you want to kill tumor cells. Yeah. Radiation and toxic drugs create oxidative stress, but they also damage significantly normal tissues.

Yeah.

Is it possible to create oxidative stress in breast cancer cells or any other cancer cell without creating collateral damage? That's the key. And the answer is absolutely. So what we do is we. When for the cancer patients that my. I'm not a physician So I can't treat anybody, but I can certainly guide physicians in treating their patients. And what we do is we get the patient into a state of nutritional ketosis. First off, make sure they get healthy. A lot of cancer patients, they have obesity, type 2 diabetes, they have hypertension, high blood pressure, sometimes parasitic infections. You can't believe how unhealthy some people are.

Oh, I believe it. I've been doing this for 25 years.

So you put your firsthand knowledge right. I wish to be honest with you, I was kind of shocked. I didn't know how sick and how people walking around could be. So full of parasites and all kinds of things, you know? Yeah, right. So we have to clean that up. Okay, step one, get. Get cleaned up, get cleaned up. And by water only. Fasting, zero carbohydrate diets. We slowly bring the body back into a new state of metabolic homeostasis. And then I at Boston College here, we developed the glucose ketone index calculator, which is a ratio of blood glucose to blood ketones in the blood, circulating level of glucose to ketone. So what we have found, and this is diet irrelevant. What we have found, if a cancer patient can get the ratio down to 2.0 or below, preferably below, the tumor cells start to get hammered, because now you're putting them under incredible metabolic stress. And that will. That will really downregulate the ability of the tumor cell to survive. But not. They can hang on because they're using some of that glutamine. So you come in with the pulse and the pulsing. Now you use glutamine targeting drugs while the patient is in nutritional ketosis under low glucose conditions. And gradually you start to tear down and break down the tumor. And as I said, also, the diabetes goes away, high blood pressure goes away, obesity goes away, all these things go away along with the cancer. And that's only because you're bringing your entire back to the body the way it should have been in the first place. And it's very hard to get cancer if your mitochondria remain healthy. We have seen this over and over again. So we're just essentially reconfiguring what metabolic health is. And we use small doses of drugs to target the glutamine. And yeah, we can use IV vitamin C. Once you're in nutritional ketosis, even conventional chemotherapies and radiation therapy will work. You can use much, much lower doses of chemo and still get a tremendous therapeutic benefit when the body is in therapeutic ketosis. So this is the future. And again, you have to restrict the two fermentable fuels with diet and drug and transition the body over to ketosis. Because the tumor cells can't burn ketone bodies. But the brain, heart, and all your other cells, muscles can all burn fatty acids and ketones, except liver. Liver burns fatty acids. So. So this is the solution to the cancer problem. But. But you're right. It's a par. It's a monster. Paradigm change. Physicians must be reeducated. The National Institutes of Health have to acknowledge this because the. Because we continue to poison and irradiate hundreds and thousands of people. Because the promise of the genetic theory failed. We were hoping that because cancer would be a genetic disease, we would use precision in medicine and all this. Then we wouldn't have to use radiation and chemo. Okay, we still use radiation and chemo because the promise of the somatic mutation theory never came, never will come. Do we understand that?

Right.

So we're not going to drop cancer death rates until we recognize that cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disorder. When the field comes to recognize this, you will see cancer death rates drop by 50% in five to 10 years.

So, I mean, do you think that's ever going to happen?

If people want to live, it's up to them.

So it's going to have to be driven by the people, the population. It's not going to be driven by industry.

There's no benefit to industry.

Well, then you're speaking on moral issues. What's the morality of the field? It's very embarrassing to say I practice immorality and what I do for a living. You know, if you're producing drugs that are very toxic and have the potential to kill a patient or harm them, this is not. This is a little bit of a strange way of doing things, but we've come to recognize that now even what we. Surgery is an important component for the eventual solution to the problem. But it has to be done in the right way. If you do metabolic therapy, you shrink down these tumors, the angiogenesis, the inflammation, everything goes way down. The whole thing becomes less angry. A surgeon now comes in and debunks and removes what's left. You don't go after the tumor with surgery when it's at its most inflamed state because you'll get inflammatory oncotaxis. Okay? Biopsies can institute inflammatory oncotaxis. This is taking a bad situation and making it worse. Shrink it down first, then surgically debulk.

So do you think the first thing that should happen with everyone is that they should go on a fast. And are we talking about a water fast? And how long are we talking about?

Well, this is, we've learned. And when I first did all this with calorie restriction in the mouse, which is comparable to water only fasting, I said the field is the humans. The population is not going to want to do this. Okay? Your brain is addicted by glucose. It's as powerful as cocaine, alcohol and nicotine. Glucose addiction is powerful. Okay. We have to walk ourselves through the glucose addiction. How do we do that? We slowly transition our diet from carbohydrate to non carbohydrates. It's, it's very low carbohydrate dieting for 10 to 14 days allows the body to slowly acclimate to the absence of carbohydrates. Then when you jump into the water only fast, it's not so draconian. Listen, I have tried that. Anybody who thinks this is easy, forget about it. It's not easy. Now I have some people say, oh no, I do it all the time. Well, that's great. I, I'm for those folks. I, I, I say, well, that's great, but when I tried it, man, I was brutal. If you go cold turkey on eating and say by the third day, I mean, you're looking at your pets in a different way, you know? So I'm telling you, I actually think.

The third, the third day is the day you feel the best.

Yeah, well, that, well, some people. That's not me. I tell you, I was, I was, I wasn't in that. And the older you get, the harder it's harder is the young kids that I work with, they can do it easier. It's your age because how long you've been addicted to the fuel that you're trying to. Yeah, yeah, but no, but I say we've seen even going zero carb for 10 days. It's, it's, you can feel it, your body can feel it. But then you start to gradually adapt. Then when you jump into the water, only fasting, it's not. So it's a small step rather than a jumping off the side of the building. So, and then your body gets, starts to get super healthy. And your tumor, your tumors are angiogenesis, inflammation, all of these things go down. We did all of the biochemical signaling stuff to, to show that inflammatory cytokines down, angiogenesis, the abnormal blood vessels down. Apoptosis, the killing of the tumor cells goes up. So we did this over decades of work. What's Happening to these tumor cells, what's happening to the micro environment as you just go to the fasting. Now, when you get to that, the tumor cells are all barely struggling to exist. Then you come in with these low doses of drugs like some of these parasite medications. It turns out that the tumor cell and the PAR use a similar pathway to get energy. Can you believe this? So cancer is not a parasite. Parasite's a totally different organism. The parasite and the cancer cells use ancient fermentation pathways to stay alive. So some of these cheap ass parasite drugs are powerful, especially when you're in therapeutic ketosis. I mean, what I'm explaining to you is the way we're going to eventually manage cancer. And everybody needs to know that. Now a lot of the burden will fall on the shoulders of the patient when people say, oh, he's battling his cancer. When you do metabolic therapy, you are actually battling your cancer. You're not sitting there as some bystander being nuked and poisoned. All right? So you're actually taking charge. And that's why we developed the glucose ketone index calculator, so patients can know exactly what they can and cannot eat. People say, what can you eat? Can I eat this? I don't care what you eat. What does it do to your gki? Yeah, I can't get my. Well, then stop eating that. I've had some people say, you know, I was never able to get into the 2.0 or below until I stopped eating. Just drank water. And I said, yeah, now you know. I said, now you know.

Yeah, but so how long are you doing that? And where does gluconeogenesis fit in? Because aren't we, aren't we designed to just make glucose if it's not introduced into our diet?

Yes, gluconeogenesis is the case, but the brain will suck up at whatever available glucose that you have. Very little goes to anywhere else. Muscles take it. Muscle and brain. Muscle does not share glucose. Muscle is, is keeps it because we needed that for our evolutionary survival. If we're being chased by a lion or a bear, we need to have the energy to run away from it. And we need that energy. It's in the muscle. The muscle then starts running. If the muscle says, oh, my liver, it doesn't need a little. This little. All of a sudden, the bear comes, we have no energy, and the bear eats. So this is not productive. So muscle does not share. So when you say gluconeogenesis, a lot of that's going to the muscle, and a lot of it's going to the brain and the cancer cell is not getting it. So it's very low.

So how long are we talking about doing these water fasts for?

Well, how do we assess whether or not you have a tumor? You have a lump, the lump goes away or gets very small. We have PET scanning, mri, we have all of these different assessments to determine blood markers. You know, CA125. We have a lot of markers to know whether or not you still have tumors in your body, tumor cells in your body. So PET scan, like the breast cancer person that my colleagues in, in Turkey did, they did metabolic therapy with very low dose chemo. I mean, this woman was lit up like a Christmas tree. She had metastatic breast cancer to her brain, lungs, bone marrow. I mean, it was just brutal when you looked at the PET imaging. And then within six months, it was clean. So, you know, this woman, we published the case. It's. People want to get the case report. We, we published it. You know, full response to metabolic therapy. This, this poor woman from Chicago, from Ohio, she had advanced. She was considered a hopeless terminal case. One month to live. They give her. She gets on a plane, goes to Istanbul to my colleagues there and she, she was in, in the ICU for two weeks. She almost died from the plane. She was so sick with the term, the cancer everywhere and the. She had a parasite. She had all kinds of horrible things. Anyway, my colleagues gradually got her out of the ICU and started metabolic therapy. And now we're getting pictures of her and her husband enjoying Hawaii. They go on vacation to Hawaii and it's like unbelievable. So it can work if you do it the right way. I'm not saying it happens to everybody like that, but we have advanced lung cancer to the brain. That guy is still alive. We have brain cancer, guys. As a matter of fact, the movie, the big documentary on this whole thing is called the cancer revolution, produced by Maggie and Brad Jones and they're cataloging now all these so called hopeless cases, stage 4 cancers, terminals, cancer patients that are all still living far beyond what was expected of them. So. And people say, well, we can't believe this unless you do a clinical trial. Okay? That's the way. That's the way. They has nothing to do with the hard science that proves what I'm saying is correct. We can't do it because you didn't do well, why don't you guys do the clinical trial and see what happens. But then, oh no, we can't do that. So all of a sudden, why can't you do the. You're always telling me to do the clinical. I'm at Boston College. We don't even have medical school. Why don't you guys do the damn clinical trial, first of all? Well, we don't have trained people to. Okay, let's get people trained like you said. Let's get them educated. Nurses, physician assistants, practitioners, physicians, oncologists, train them all. Here's what you have to do, and here's exactly how to do it. And we're working on the treatment protocol as we speak. We have one for brain cancer that'll be adaptable to all forms of cancer. That's written by both PhDs and MDs. So we put everybody together. Anybody had an issue, we corrected it and we polished it up. And it'll be the standard of care, the future standard of care for cancer. Breast cancer, colon cancer, brain cancer. It's all going to be very, very similar because they all have the same problem. They're all fermenters. So when I tell people that, they say, you must be nuts. And how can cancer that everybody says is the emperor of all maladies so incredibly complicated? Because the theory under which you looked at it was wrong. It's not a genetic disease. If you look at it as a. It's hopelessly complicated, impossible to solve as a genetic disorder, as a metabolic disorder. No, not a problem. You are. I'm not making it out to be completely. The problem is getting people to adapt to the. The on their shoulders. How can they be compliant? So it's up to you. You want to live. A lot of it has to do with your adaptation, your family's knowledge. Don't forget, this is a family. This is a group effort. You can't feel isolated from your colleagues and friends and family by adopting that family must help and participate. It's a social thing. Okay?

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. And it's not only that you have to reduce stress. You. When you get the cancer diagnosis and someone says you've got, you know, triple negative breast cancer, I mean, you get a shock, it goes through your whole body because you're looking at your. Your end of your life on the planet. Okay? And what that does is it raises glucocorticoids, stress hormone. What does that do? Makes your blood sugar go up. What does sugar do? The sugar causes the cancer to grow faster. So you don't want that. You want stress management techniques along with the metabolic therapy that's targeting the viability of the tumor cells. That's why we built the press pulse strategy published A big paper with my physician colleagues on the press. Pulse metabolic therapy to manage cancer. It's a stage process by which you bring your body from a state of unhealth to a state of health at the same time naturally degrading the tumor without toxicity. It's beautiful. It's unbelievable. It works if you do it the right way. But people are not educated. They don't know that glucose drives cancer. They never heard of mitochondrial substrate level phosphorylation, the way glutamine drives ATP synthesis in the mitochondria in the absence of oxygen. So they have to be educated in knowing the biochemistry and biology of what they're dealing with. And that's not what's happening today. Many of the oncologists are trained only to know what they do. How much dose of this chemical can I give the patient before harming them in this very significant way? How dosage and timing, how much radiation should we give? What, what series of radio, all that stuff. You don't need to do that. And if you do it, you can do it on a completely different schedule, knowing that you don't need as much. Nearly the whole key about metabolic oncology is how do we degrade tumor at the same time we're making the rest of the body super healthy. You want to emerge from cancer treatment healthier than you were when you started. There should be no baldness, there should be no mucocytosis, there should be no diarrhea, there should be no fatigue. There shouldn't be any of these kinds of things every time.

And that is a huge problem right now is that people who are already sick, and I think that there is a, a lack of recognition, there's cognitive dissonance there where people say, I mean, I have to tell you that 90%, maybe even more than that, come to me and say, I'm healthy, but I have breast cancer.

Yeah.

So there's a total disconnect around what health is and what health means. And then they get into the conventional medical system and take whatever health they.

Had and it gets destroyed.

Absolutely, absolutely. So when you get that patient up front, they say, I didn't know I had, I just went down, I found some spot lump or whatever. They're healthy at that point. Maybe not as healthy as we would consider metabolic homeostasis healthy, but they were certainly not bald. Gums, bleeding, you know, all these horrible side effects that happens after the treatments. That should never happen. Yeah, that's quackery. That tells me that if you treating patient make their hair fall out and you have all these microbiome issues. What the hell are you doing to these poor folks? You don't make somebody healthy by poisoning and irradiating them. And the new drugs, these immun opdivo, keytruda and all these crazy things that you hear about, they're all based on the somatic mutation theory, you know. Yes. Every now and then you get 20% of the folks will benefit from those. 60% will have nothing, and 20% will be killed. It's called hyper progressive disease. The drug will kill you before the tumor does. Okay. Hyper progressive disease, well known in the field. Okay. Why would you give a drug or any treatment to a patient that has a 15 to 20% chance of killing them? Blowing the liver out, destroying their kidneys? I mean, this is nuts. This tells me that the field does not understand the biology of the disease they're treating. They're not trained in medical schools. They have no clue about how the power of nutrition and diet, again, together with drugs that work synergistically, can manage all these different diseases. So, yeah, so I. And we have the science to support what we're saying. This is not like, you know, I've done 25, 30 years of the. Of the mechanistic minutiae that supports what I'm saying. And I don't expect everybody to jump into that, but they should know the outcome of what we're saying is a manageable disorder. And Otto Warburg was the first to identify cancer as a metabolic disorder. But Otto Warburg never developed a therapy that would exploit what his knowledge base was. The only way I could get into that was my years of work with epilepsy before I could see the linkages and then see that we have another fuel that could be fermented besides glucose. So once I realized that, and I've offered. I have $100 bill always in my pocket to any student that can show me a tumor cell that's doing really well without glucose and glutamine in the environment. Okay. Fatty acids or anything. They can't. We haven't found any yet, so. And people. And when you look at the research that's being done, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, they're studying all these cancer cells in vitro in the dish, the cultured dish. And they're all growing in glucose and glutamine. And then I said, well, why don't you take away the glucose and glutamine? And they said, well, we won't have anything to study. I say, well, what do you do? Do you want to resolve cancer or do you just want to study it? I mean, we've studied it now for five years.

That's the question. I mean, do they want to resolve cancer? Because. And again, I know this is cynical. I know this is cynical, but where do the pharmaceutical companies go if we solve the cancer problem?

You know, it's a disruptive technology. People just got to move forward. There's always going to be an entrepreneur that will figure out how to make a buck on some of this stuff. Unfortunately, I'm not that person. I. I have certain skills. Knowing how to make a lot of money on what I'm doing is not one of them. What I want to do and prove is that this is a manageable metabolic disorder, that we can keep people healthier a lot better for a lot longer than anything that's out there. And to me, that's gratification. If some guy can figure out how to make a billion dollars on this, my hat's off to him. But. But that's not me. I'm just happy to know that this works because I did so much science on this. We night and day, day and night, weekends, all the time thinking about how to kill cancer cells without harming the rest of the body.

Yeah.

That's its focus.

Cancer is, as a metabolic disease is part and parcel that, you know, that is the end of the line for a country that. I just heard the latest statistics and that's that 90% of Americans are not metabolically healthy.

No.

So, you know, we're talking about cancer, but cancer is the end of the spectrum of a lot of other things. Of, you know, the insulin resistance and diabetes and cardiac disease, cardiovascular disease, dementia, Alzheimer's. I mean, you know, we're talking about. All of these things fit in that bucket.

Well, that's. You're 100% right. The American diet and lifestyle is killing Americans and not. And not only killing Americans. I just read in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that's where I get most of my. Not most, but a significant amount of my understanding of cancer comes from the Wall Street Journal. That really tells you what's going on in the cancer industry. You have to know about this stuff. But I didn't realize that China has the greatest number of obese people on.

The planet because they took our lead.

Oh, yeah, they. They got the American taste.

Yep.

The flavor of America.

I don't think they had a fraction of the medical problems until the 1980s, where the fast food industry. Oh, yeah, went there.

Oh, man, I tell you, fast food, you can destroy, we're destroying ourselves. Obesity has replaced smoking as the number one risk factor for cancer. And as I said, if people were really, really concerned about preventing cancer, you would not have an obesity epidemic, period. It's not that complicated. And it's really tragic. When you see all these little kids that are obese, their lives, their lifespan is going to be significantly reduced. And you know, the parents don't know our. Everybody's running around trying to make a buck. They don't have time to sit down and make dinner, nutritious dinners. In the evening, you just throw something into the microwave, whatever's there. Sitting in traffic, no exercise, stress, no exercise, highly processed foods, Bang. Obesity, cancer, dementia, all kinds of macular degeneration, cardiovascular disease. You got it right there. But we have a great industry, the pharmaceutical industry that's right there to help us out. So by giving us drugs so we don't need to lose weight, we just have to take ozampic or some other crazy thing. And then the burden of response and people like, they don't, they don't really want it. It's hard for a lot of people to do this. It's easier.

It is hungry shot, it's way easier. And what I heard from one of my, I was speaking at an event a few years ago and I was speaking of the fact that, you know, healing, sleeping is an active process. And there are things that are happening in the body as we sleep and, you know, metabolism and cellular repair and all these kinds of things. And the truth is that without sleep, you cannot heal. And this happened to be a woman with metastatic disease. And she put up her hand afterwards and she said, you know, I've heard you speak a number of times and what you say may be true, may not be true. I don't know. All that I know is that if I listen to you, I would have to actively do all these things. And it's easier for me to blame the drug for not working.

Absolutely. Well, that's our personal attitudes about things. But that's okay. The person wants to do that, that's okay. But we know now a clear path for management. Not everybody is going to be able to do metabolic therapy. They'll be more than happy to give you radiation and poisonous chemicals if you want that. Okay, Someone says, listen, I got to have radiation and chemo. I don't want to stop eating jelly filled donuts. All right, so that's your choice. That's your personal choice. We're not depriving you, we're not going to deprive anybody of taking toxic poisons and radiation. The issue is that you have an alternative here, and every physician should tell the patient it might. It's going to be hard. You're going to have to really, you know, buckle down, take charge of your own. You're. Now. You're responsible for your. For your. Your outcome, so your soul. Ultimately, we're all responsible for our existence. But, you know, whatever path you take is the one that you can choose. We're not telling everybody to do metabolic therapy. You know, if you want radiation, chemo, fine. But. But the issue is that you should also know there are other ways to do this. And I think a lot of people, when they're diagnosed with cancer, fear the treatments as much as they fear the disease. They don't want to be surgically mutilated.

Agreed.

You know, and, you know, there's been big studies on breast cancer showing that the overall survival between lumpectomy and mastectomy is not any different. There's been several big trials on that, and yet they're taken. You know, I spoke to one terrible thing. Oncologist, breast cancer oncologist. Why don't you go do lumpectomy? And rather than do these horrific surgical mutilations, is. It's easier to remove a breast and do this. There's lumping it. She says it's. You can. It's like filleting a fish, taking someone's breast off. And I'm saying, man, it doesn't. That's not the kind of thing that you want to hear.

No, it's terrible. And we actually have a huge epidemic in this country because women make this decision out of fear.

Yeah.

And the doctors don't help them to make the right decision. And I think that if we called it what it was, things would be vastly different. So if we called it a breast amputation, which is what it is, far less people would choose that than a mastectomy. But we gave it a name that was acceptable, and people accept it. And I feel especially badly for the 40,000 women who are diagnosed with DCIS every year in this country, which is not cancer. And they are undergoing mastectomy. They are undergoing amputation of their breast for a disease that would never have threatened their life, and they are forever mutilated. Their lives will never be the same. And, in fact, we affect their quality of life and their quantity of life.

Yes.

Because if you add in aromatase inhibitors, if you add in the drugs that affect hormone balance and hormone presence, you are going to materially change Their health, you're going to change their heart health, you're going to change their brain health, you're going to change their bone health.

And this matters?

Yes. And it all contributes to entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, which is disorder and mitochondria function, maintain order in our body. So anything that would cause stress on our mitochondria over time, shorten our lifespan on the planet. So all of these things that you just mentioned are all entropic. They, they lead to disorder and quality of life goes down, overall survival goes down. Even if you don't have cancer anymore, your bodies have been toxified, if you will, and, and that creates other problems. In fact, there's here at Dana Farber, they had a branch a couple few years ago, cancer survivor medicine. So there, by the grace of God, you survive surgical mutilation, poisoning and radiation. Now you become a candidate patient for neuropsychiatric problems, hormonal problems, digestive problem, bone, bone density problems. You become a new patient for a new source of medicine. All this, all of this did not need to happen in the first place. None of this is, this is why it's one. I consider it one of the greatest tragedies in the history of medicine is this misunderstanding of what cancer is because we've unnecessarily put millions of people short in their lifespan and reduce their quality of life significantly. And all because of an ideological dogma that says that cancer is a genetic disease and therefore we have to use precision medicine and all this kind of crazy stuff that's not related to what the nature of the disease is. So, and people will say to me sometimes, well, it has to be genetic because it happened in my, my aunt, my uncle, my. They're all in the family. It's all common environment as well.

That's exactly right.

You know, so people don't understand that. And they said, well, what about BRCA1 and, and what about Li Fraumani? And we have tracked down every germline mutation linked to cancer risk damages in one way or another. The function of the mitochondria. So it's a mitochondrial metabolic disease. Whether the risk factor came in your genome, which is very rare, or it came from an environmental insult like obesity, hypertension, inflammation exposure, our environment is becoming more and more filled with these microplastic carcinogens and all these things. You put that together with an inflamed internal environment with obesity, sleep apnea creates intermittent hypoxia. All of these things together.

Metals. Metals are a huge issue all of this micro infections.

Yes, yes. So all of that. But you know, interestingly enough, there was a study done with some MAA monkeys out of South America, some, I don't know, 25, 30 years ago, where they rubbed the chemical carcinogen on the arm of the monkey and then they injected with three Bromo, it was three methylcholanthrene, which is a known carcinogen. And for 10 years they rubbed the chemicals on the monkey's arm and they injected the monkeys with this thing and none of them developed cancer. I think there was one out of, out of 500 monkeys that got some small kind of a tumor. Their conclusion was the monkey, that monkey is a bad model for cancer. But the monkeys were not eating jelly filled.

Yeah, they were not.

They were not. They were doing their natural diet and lifestyle. And this was goes back to our aboriginal folks, Albert Schweitzer, the great physician humanitarian, he didn't find cancer in 40, 000 Africans that he looked at in the early 1900s, I think it was, and Eskimos and all these kinds of people that lived according to their natural ways, they never had cancer. There's never been a documented case of breast cancer in a female chimpanzee, which are 99% similar to us in genetic and protein sequences. What's going on with that? Why all these women are getting breast cancer? It's a great American diet, lifestyle.

It is. And I mean, you know, we can look at population studies and people who live in their native country and on their native diet and then get transplanted to the United States and live and eat like Americans. And we see that their disease rates go from what their native disease rates were to ours.

Yes, purely environmental. And all those things damage mitochondria, leading to a fermentation metabolism. So. And this. And the organelle controlling the cell cycle, maintaining the differentiated state loses its grip metabolically. These cells fall back on dysregulated growth, which is cancer. Dysregulated growth. How did that happen? The organelle that was supposed to control this was damaged by any number of risk factors leading to dysregulated cell growth driven by glucose and glutamine. And they can't use ketone bodies. So there's the solution to the problem right there. Now the problem, the bigger problem, as you said, is how do you communicate that information to the public, you know.

And effectively, and get that and get them to adopt it. Because if we could, if we could live in a way that didn't promote disease, it would be a Different story. But we don't.

We don't.

And I would love a utopia where we did, but right now I don't see that happening. And it's not coming. So let's give people who are interested in taking control of their health, who are interested in escaping the highly, highly damaging therapies that are offered within the conventional medical space, even if they're going to dip their toe in and, and use them to some extent. What is the metabolic therapy? What is metabolic therapy and how do people engage in it?

Well, this is one of the. A bigger, bigger issue because I get a lot of. On Comments on the YouTubes that I do, this guy talks the talk. But where do we go? Where's the clinics? I outlined a clear plan for health and managing cancer. Where are the clinics? And this is where the people have to demand from the National Cancer Institute. Where are these clinics that should be treating us the appropriate way? Why are we, why do we not have these clinics? Right. We know what to do and how to do it. We can train people. It doesn't take that much time. We already have a protocol on hand to do this. Why are we not. Where, where do you go? Where do you get the drug? Don. Why is Don not available? Why do we have Key and Opdivo these, these terrible kinds of drugs that make. And they. And why. Why do we spend billions of dollars advertising this crap on the evening tv making people think there, these cancer drugs are, are there for you.

Yeah. And then it's going to. And then it's a solution.

Yeah. It's not a solution. And the other thing that kills me or gets me very upset is not only do we have physical and mental toxicity associated with cancer treatments, you have financial toxicity. People cannot afford these drugs. They're so expensive. I would say if you want to charge $26,000 a month for a four month schedule of one of these immunotherapies, you should only pay if you're alive after five years and in good health. Otherwise you don't pay. They should, they should pay you to do that. Right. This is the way it should. This is. But this is not the American way. You got to pay up front. Okay. So. And that if you die the privilege.

Of them poisoning you.

Yes. And then if you die, that bill can be passed on to your loved ones, crippling them. You know, a lot of folks don't have $26,000 a month, even if the insurance companies covered 80% of this, you know, and people would say, you think the insurance companies would Want to be doing this? No, their. Their premiums are based on how much money you spend.

I'm just. I'm just learning that now.

Yeah, all of this is all connected. So when I told one of my students one time, so look at the connection between the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry. Powerful interconnections.

Of course. Of course. I mean, they're feeding one another. No pun intended.

I'm not against, like any kind of a fast food. I don't think we should get rid of any of these things, but I think people should understand that this stuff can kill you, but it doesn't kill you like a cyanide pill kills you. It kills you over time. It wears it.

That's really the problem is that it doesn't kill you fast enough. And so people cannot feel the connection.

It's not.

It's not palpable to them. It's not tangible to them.

No. And, you know, basal metabolic rates. Bmi. Basal basic was a bmi indexes. That's why we developed. Listen. We developed the glucose ketone index calculator for the cancer patients. This was what I developed it for. Letting cancer patients know when they're in therapeutic ketosis so then they could make adjustments. Now, I find that so many of these young folks, health. Health gurus, kids that want to look buff, girls and guys, how tough. And look at the beautiful bodies and all this. They're all comparing their. Their glucose ketone indexes, knowing that if you keep a low gkr, you're going to look really fantastic. Yeah.

And biohackers are doing this.

Yeah. So it was made for cancer patients, but now people are using it just to stay healthy, you know, so. Which is okay with me. I didn't make it for that. And that was another thing we couldn't patent. People say, oh, bye. Look at all the people using the gki. You guys made it. I didn't get a nick. We can't patent a formula. You can't do that. So all of our research can patent.

A process, though, and you should.

Yeah, well, you know, I'm trying, but I. It doesn't. We just want to make sure that what we're saying is scientifically correct, corroborated, seen again and again, and, and, and, and it works. Okay, that's our. That's my. And then our mission to get research funds comes from private foundations and philanthropy. You know, there are people out there. It's unbelievable. Well, I shouldn't say it's unbelievable, but there are folks out there that really want to Be part of the process, this movement just because, to feel good about it because, you know, we're doing something to help millions of people stop the suffering. And, and the more we develop perfection of these diet drug combos, the more we're going to learn and make the process so much easier and healthier for people. So, and we need, you know, these mice cost money to do our preclinical studies. And then I've got the armies of physicians that would like to apply that to their, to their patients right away. We need trained people. We need people to understand why cancer develops the way it does. Why we talk about glucose and glutamine, why are they fermenting, you know, all this kind of stuff. It's not that, you know, a few coursework gets certification. I am certified to do metabolic therapy on a patient. So you would get a training and a certification that will allow you to open a clinic. Because I can tell you there are people that can, you can make money on high throughput treatment of patients with these processes as long as you know what to do and how to do it. So it's not.

Do you need a clinic or is this something that could be done virtually?

It could be done virtually. But I still think even if I were to have cancer and I wrote half of this stuff, I have friends that are treating patients every day in some of these, trying to put these patients on track. And I would like to just talk to somebody. You'd like to have some consultation? Yes, it can be done virtually. My colleague Miriam Kalamian, who has a certified to do this. Miriam has treated. She almost, I mean I gave her so many patients that she, poor thing, she almost collapsed from having so much, so many virtual things, you know. But where. Because there's too few and far between. There was only a handful of folks that really understand the full nature of glucose, how glucose and glutamine and all these things can drive the tumor. You go to some oncology clinics, they never heard that glucose drives cancer.

No, they're. They're giving them boost and ensure while they're getting their chemotherapy.

No, this, this should never happen. So clearly there's some lack of knowledge, massive gap of knowledge in this medical school education. I don't know what happened here.

What, what do you think of the work that Valter Longo is doing at usc?

Yeah, well, he, he's doing water only fasting to improve the, the.

Well, he's also doing the fasting mimicking diet, which is. I don't know if it's. It's 400, 500 calories. Something right around there.

No, that's okay.

That is a fat based macro diet.

Sure. As long as it keeps the glucose ketone index at 2.0 or below, then it's going to be therapeutically effective. We've seen this over and over again. So people want to call you want to do a Mediterranean diet, make sure it doesn't keeps your GKI down. Pescatarian diet, vegan diet, carnivore diet, that make a difference to me. As long as you get your GKI to 2.0 or below. People always ask me, can I eat this, can I eat that? I said eat it and see what it does to your gki. If it jacks it up, don't eat that. So the person knows because what's good for one person may not be good for another person. So each person is their own bomb collimiter. So they, they're burning calories, may be different from somebody else. So it's not like what I should eat or what I should not eat. Every person should test it for themselves and see what they can and cannot eat and then they'll know. So and you get the meter, the keto mojo meter is out there. You can get it on Amazon and you get the strips, the glucose strips and the ketone strips. And then, and I know you have the free Libra, which is a constant glucose monitor. I think I heard from some of my colleagues that they're trying to work a glucose ketone free Libra kind of thing. But, and other, I think the technologies are coming to so people can get a full readout on their cell phone of how they're doing. And I, when I do, when we do recommend, I don't recommend anything. But I think what, what works best for IV vitamin C and hyperbaric oxygen is, is the time of the day when the patient has the lowest GKI is when you go into the, into the chamber and do the hyperbaric oxygen because the ketones are going to protect, prevent oxidative stress in all the normal cells where the tumor cells will be maximally vulnerable during that time of the day. So that's an individual thing as well. Some people in the late morning, others the early afternoon, sometimes late afternoon. People have to know their body before they schedule some of these other procedures that will be add ons to what we're doing. So again, this is the whole package called metabolic oncology, metabolic therapy. It brings all of these things in together and the patient then takes charge. A lot of people love recording all this stuff. They like their steps every day. Oh, look at my gkis. And we published a paper on Pablo Kelly from England who had the glioblastoma. He's still alive 10 years, almost 10 years now. But. And you could see how we collected all five years of glucose ketone index data on this guy. So you can see the tables in there. This is what people can do to record this. And Pablo still has the tumor. In fact, he's just had his third debulking, but he's never taken radiation or chemo or anything for that matter. And I think at this point, he could do a good metabolic therapy with parasite drugs and Don. And if he were able to get it, to kind of put a real clamp down on this, on this tumor. So I don't know. I think people are going to live far, far, far longer at a higher quality of life. Whether it leads to a cure or not, I have no clue because we haven't been doing it long enough. But all I see right now is a lot of people that should have been dead and they're walking the planet and they still feel pretty good. And. And that's going to be the future. Once we get it into a. Into a bigger operation, this is what's going to happen.

That's really amazing. I want to ask you because you mentioned. Well, obviously, as we know that the data around exercise in people with cancer is that people even doing minimal amounts of exercise have greater survival. So do you think that that has to do with increasing oxygenation? And you also mentioned that exercise lowers glutamine.

Yeah, yeah, I think both. I think it's a combination of both. Many of these kinds of metabolic approaches work through multiple systems. So exercise brings oxygenation and reduces glutamine. Okay. So that's favorable to managing, managing the. You have to realize our ancestors, Paleolithic man, so to speak, before recorded history, they call them hunter gatherers. Okay, Hunter gather. Well, you have, you know, how much energy exercise you need to track down and kill a. Kill an animal that doesn't want to be killed.

Okay.

You have to expend a lot, and you're gathering, digging roots out of the ground and trying to do. You're constantly looking for food. And the food that we're eating over tens of thousands of years was minimally carbohydrate and minimal carbohydrates. So gluconeogenesis became the primary source of providing us with energy, glucose. And only during seasonal periods of time could you get something that was kind of Sweet. Now our whole diet, diets are filled with highly processed carbohydrates that lead to obesity rather than. And then down here at Dana Farber, they had some of these folks saying, oh, obesity is a genetic disease. Yeah. Are you kidding me?

We all heard that.

That was like nuts. I mean, these people have no clue about evolutionary biology. This is what happens when you take people that look smart doing very stupid things. They have no clue. We evolved to store energy over tens of thousands of years because we're a starving species. And all of a sudden we're now in an environment where it's everywhere. We've got obesity because our genes told us we needed to store energy because we were going to starve to death if we didn't store energy. So now we're storing energy to the point where now a chronic disease, every kind of a chronic disease we can think of is exploding because we're storing all this energy causing massive inflammation. Poor calories, poorly nutritious, highly processed carbohydrates, no exercise. Man, it's a, it's a recipe for disaster. Health disaster.

Yeah. And we're, we're on the disaster train.

We just sent it over to China and now they got the most obese people on the planet.

Yeah.

So Taste of America.

Yeah. And, you know, again, it comes down to. It's easier for people to hear, it's easier for them to believe, and they actually want to believe in the gene theory because it absolves them from responsibility. And listen, I'm not saying that no one wants to take responsibility for their health, but there is a lot of guilt and blame and shame involved in all of these disease states. And, you know, what did I do? And, and how could I have done this to myself? And so it's a lot easier. It's an easier pill to swallow. Pardon the pun.

Yeah.

That, that it's a, it's a genetic state.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it's not. And you shouldn't feel that. You, you, you just bad luck. Like some prominent scientists published in the, in the journal Science that cancer was just simply bad luck. This is the. So misinformation. And that they should, they should know better. Let's put it this way. Those kinds of people should know better to say, yes, stupid thing like that, which is not linked to evolutionary biology at all. Because, because they're saying that, oh, you know, the different organs that replace worn out cells are more likely to get cancer just because the cells replace themselves at a certain. But the chimpanzee replaces Them at the same damn state as us and they don't get the cancer, nor did our aboriginal ancestors. So, so some of these statements related to the. Makes no sense. And then we have, can listen to this. We have cancers where they can't find any mutations. All right, how do you call it a genetic disease when there aren't any mutations? Yeah, they call these driver genes. So people say, oh, it's not all mutations, just the driver. Driver gene. So now we're doing deep sequencing and we're finding all of these so called very, very hazardous driver genes in abundance in all normal cells that never become cancer. How do you explain that? This is completely nonsense. And when you do the nuclear transfer experiments, you completely eviscerate this whole gene theory. And yet we're building all these drugs based on the somatic mutation theory, all those immunotherapies you hear about, we're going to target this. I have the ERK mutation, I have the epidermal growth factor receptor mutation. This is nonsense. All of those cancer cells are fermenting. They can't live without glucose and without the damn what kind of mutation they have.

Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you. Listen, you're preaching to the choir. So I have one final question for you because we've, you've given me so much today and my audience so much today, and I'm sure that they are going to be hanging on every word you said. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I am a witch. So I'm going to wave my magic wand. And what changes in 2024 in terms of cancer care that we did not have in 2023? If I could wave my magic wand, what would I be doing for you?

For us? Well, as I said, our research must continue. And the more we can perfect metabolic therapy and get it into the clinics is going to reduce overall, I think, I think the first evidence that we're on the right path will come when you start to see lower and lower each year the number of dead people goes down. Will it be as dramatic as the AIDS drop in death when they, when they built the, the AIDS cocktail? Because don't forget it was a death sentence back in the early late 70s, of course, 80s until Ronald Reagan didn't want to hear about this, about the, the gay, the, the gay community went to Washington D.C. blocked traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue and spread the ashes of their loved ones all over the White House lawn. And within six months this was taken care of. So with a, with a non death sentence associated with it. Right. The same thing can, the same thing can happen with the cancer problem is if enough people get together. And the other thing too is they're always.

But that feels like you're saying that they're sitting on the cure. I don't think that's the case in terms of a pharmaceutical solution.

Well, don't forget the AIDS has never been cured. It's been managed. It's not a cure, it's a management. We're sitting on a management strategy that's not being implemented. That's a different. I'm not saying we cure cancer. I'm saying we have a management strategy that could be as powerful as the AIDS management strategy because you have not cured aids, you've just managed it. So can we do the same thing for the cancer problem? Can we, can we know that we've had cancer, but we can sometimes live with it in a, in a way we can continue to manage it and maybe cause resolution? I, I don't know. Okay. Because we have never cured any of our mice. We've allowed them to live far, far longer than whatever would expected. But to say we've resolved. The only thing that I published that was at resolution was with the dog with the mast cell tumor on his face. And I published that in, in Frontiers in Nutrition. You can see that paper. You can see this dog, this woman took the dog, put him on a calorie restricted ketogenic diet with fish oils and raw eggs and raw chicken. And within six months, this big, big tumor disappeared from the face of this pit bull. The dog was like 7 years old when it had the tumor. And it died at 16 and a half years, which is longer than a pit bull would live from heart failure. But the cancer never came back. So that's the only thing we know. How do you know you're cured for cancer? Well, I die. Some guy died at 98 years old from heart failure when he had cancer when, when he was 33 years old. So he never. Cancer never came back. So I mean, those are the kinds.

But aren't we all constantly living in a state of potential to develop disease?

Well, I certainly think in our, in our, in our environments for sure. But we have, you know, we have old folks that are centurions that have survived all of these kinds of things. And you know, when people die from old age, natural, what we call natural causes. It's a very interesting look at the Queen of England. I mean, she was shaking the hand of the new prime minister one day and she was dead like the next day. And what happens is the energy metabolism in your body just shuts off. It's like a whole systemic thing.

Yeah, done.

You're done. Okay. You. You. You check out.

You fulfilled your mission.

Yeah.

Moses is 120. You fulfilled your mission.

You like to know that that's the way you would go. Rather than suffering some immeasurable poison of radiation and all this kind of stuff that we. We currently put these poor folks through this medieval. Medieval medical treatment.

But that's. That's the end, the last decade of most people's lives in the United States.

Not.

I mean, not necessarily cancer alone, but cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases like this, the last 10 years of people's lives in this country are not quality lives.

Well, for some people, it is, but I agree with you. The nursing homes are filled with these poor folks. But, okay, but we're dealing with cancer here. When we. And we're seeing it younger and younger. This is the other thing that I can't see. I. I'm seeing so many people contact me in their late 20s and mid-30s, and I'm saying, what's going on with that? And child. People always ask me, what about childhood cancer? Well, you know, little kids can get this for this. All we know is that when we look at the biochemistry of the brain, tumors from little kids, they're all fermenting. How did their mitochondria become damaged in the womb or shortly after birth? What went wrong in the brains of those little kids? All we know is when we look at their tumor, they're fermenting like crazy. So that means that there was some insult, whether it happened in the wound from a chemical or a blood vessel problem, a chronic inflammatory. Whatever it was, it initiated a tumor that's very metabolically similar to that of the adult. Okay, they're fermenting. How it exactly happened, we're not sure how. Anybody's tumor. Like, for example, a breast cancer woman gets breast cancer. She may have the BRCA one. She may have been exposed to chemical carcinogen. She may have had intermittent hypoxia, chronic inflammation. All we know is that when we look under the.

Could have gotten mammograms year after year.

That could be. All we know is when the pathologist looks at it under the microscope, it looks like cancer. They die. Stage one, two, three, or four. They've been doing that for 85 years. The cells. How many. How many mitotic divisions do you see? You know, it's like. All we know is the more mitotic divisions, the More they're fermenting, the more they're dependent on glucose and glutamine. And if you take. And then people talk about turbo cancers. I don't care about a turbo. We can kill turbo cancers just as effectively as we can kill non turbo cancers. So benign cancers, they don't, you know, interestingly enough, they have a metabolic problem, but metabolic therapy doesn't kill them or shrink them as fast as it does a malignant cancer. It's really interesting. And we learned out what metastatic cancer was. I know that the metastatic cell, it's macrofresh, part of our immune system, gobbles up glutamine like there's no tomorrow. I mean, we've worked out all the, all the details on how to manage almost every kind of cancer. So it's just that the knowledge is not out there yet. Yeah, once it gets out there, people are going to have a better understanding of the whole.

Well, I hope they do and I hope that it gets out there. I do want to ask, because I meant to ask you this before. What about the people who come to the disposal disease and are underweight? What, what do you do about those people in terms of fasting or ketogenic diets? Because we know that they're often associated with weight loss.

Yes, that, well, weight loss. Yes, that's an important point. And they are also in, in metabolic, in homeostasis as well. We have to do careful blood work on those and then sometimes only a short period of, of fasting. Very little, very. You have to really be very careful with those kinds of folks. But they can be tran. They can be transitioned into a healthy body weight from having a underweight in these. There's underweight conditions that we have to be careful about. But then you raise another very important question about weight loss. So many oncologists fear weight loss because they say, oh, take as much sugar and enfamil as you possibly can. But, but it's. That's because you're poisoning and irradiating somebody or they have cachexia, which is all pathological. Weight loss, therapeutic weight loss is when you lose the weight, you get healthier and healthier. Yeah, sicker. Some guy who had a 350 pound guy with cancer, some bladder cancer, he was afraid the guy was going to lose weight. I mean, for Christ's sake, The guy weighs 350 pounds. You know, you're worried about losing 10 pounds because you're. I mean, this is nuts.

Yeah. I think that they have taken the cachexia issue and blanketed it across the cancer spectrum. But the truth is that at least in the breast cancer world, most patient. Most people who present with breast cancer.

Have.

Issues with being overweight and not underweight. But event. But occasionally I do see people with cachexia and. And I worry about the issue with them with fasting and with ketogenic.

That's why we have the drug, Don, the glutamine targeting drugs. Because cachexia is caused by the metastatic cancers mobilizing, mobilizing energy out of the muscles.

Yes, we know.

We know what kind of a cell that is. And it's extremely dependent on glutamine. So we have to go in and we pulse that and kill the cancer cells. Once you kill the cancer cells, cachexia goes down.

Yeah.

So we've looked at it to all of this. There's not many things that we have not encountered in this whole cancer field. The only problem is implementation.

Yeah.

Needs to be implemented in the clinic. Yes.

Well, my wish for you in 2024 is that you get those people who can implement into your micro environment and learn about this and start to use it with their patient population. Because this is the only way, in my opinion, that we are going to make a demonstrable change in this area. And it is not easy. I agree. I know it takes a huge commitment on behalf of the patient, but this is going to be people's choice. Do you want to live or not? Because if you want to live, this is that path.

That's right. You're absolutely right. And they, Once they're told that, then they at least have the plan, the outline in front of them, the path. Right. And the people should write to the new director of the national Cancer Institute. She was just appointed recently. I can't remember her name right now, but they should be funneling their letters to her. She's obligated as a government employee to answer your question, why are we not doing metabolic therapy? Let her tell you what the answer give us. Give me the answer. Why doesn't she tell us why they're not doing metabolic therapy? That's the government's job to do that.

Yeah, I agree. And as we both agree, this is going to have to come from the people because I don't think that industry. I don't think that conventional medicine. I don't think that they're keeping up with it in the same way. There's very little motivation for them to do that in as much as they're not trained and they would have to actively seek it. We need to change the way that we're training our physicians, without question. And, you know, that is a grassroots thing that has to happen. I know that it's happening in the integrative world, but it is not happening.

In the conventional medical. Medical world.

And, you know, I am one of those people that when I went to medical school, I had 15 hours of education with regard to nutrition and its implications, and we basically learned about scurvy and rickets, and that was about it.

Yeah, well, that's the problem right there. But, you know, since we have this conversation, we know that 70 people have died from cancer in this time we've been talking.

This time that we've been talking.

So you have to think about this happening all the time, day and night. So it's really a tragedy. And. But it doesn't have to be that way. And you're right, the people have to make a stand on this. Yep. And they. They have to notify others. They have to demand it. Otherwise it's not going to happen.

All right, well, I'm with you. We're going to change the world.

Yeah. Hopefully at least for this particular disorder.

Yes, for this particular disorder.

We're going to change the world.

Actually, it changes a lot of things. So, Dr. Seyfried, thank you so much for being here, for sharing your brilliance, for doing the work that you do, for your contributions, which are endless. And I, of course, support you and will support you in any way that I can because of the importance of.

The work that you're doing.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.

And thank you all for joining me today. I'm sure you are hanging on every word, and if you liked this, if you liked listening, please, please, please share it with your friends and your colleagues and anyone who you think needs to hear this. And I will see you again next week. It's Dr. Jen. Bye for now.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Kids Keeping a breast podcast with Dr. Chen. I hope you found the discussion informative and empowering. Remember, breast health is health. So by staying informed and taking proactive steps, you have the power to optimize your well being. My team and I encourage you to apply the knowledge gained from today's episode to make positive changes in your life and share what you've learned with others. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback and support mean the world to us and help us to reach more people who can benefit from these conversations. Stay connected with me on social media where I share additional resources, advice, updates and announcements related to breast health. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Dr. Jennsimmons and remember, my Jen has two N's. So until next time, remember to stay proactive, informed and confident in your breast health journey. The key to your health is you.