Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Breast Cancer Prevention, Food Sensitivities, And More

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Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Ask Mark Anything. My name is Hershel Perth. I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager. and I'm joined by Darcy Gross, who is one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Hi, Darcy.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

And of course, we are here with our expert, Dr. Mark Hyman. Hi, Dr. Hyman.

Hi, everybody.

Thanks for joining us today and answering the Ask Mark Anything questions. So let's go ahead and get started. So our first question comes from our community and they want to know what is the best way to prevent breast cancer or prevent it from reoccurring. And also, do you recommend thermography or mammograms for early detection?

All right, thanks. Well, that's a great question. Well, breast cancer is a big problem and it affects so many women. It's so common, but it didn't used to be. And I think part of the reason is one, our diet and two, environmental toxins. So the two things I think you can do, and there's many, many things we'll go through, but the two things I think that are most important to do are one, to address your diet, insulin resistance, sugar, starch is driving high levels of insulin and that drives inflammation and the whole process of cancer is fueled by sugar and starch. So if you really want to address the risk for breast cancer, the key is to really deal with the visceral belly fat and that it's following all the guidelines I've put out for all these years around, for example, low glycemic diets, low starch sugar diets, higher good quality fats. And I think I encourage people to actually if they're really struggling with weight or metabolism or have high blood sugar insulin, to do a 10 day detox diet, which is basically my 10 day detox, but you can do it for longer. The 10 days was sort of a trick. You want to get people in and try it. They'll feel great. They'll stay on it until you get to your ideal weight and metabolism. So that's really important. Second thing is to really focus on reducing exposure to environmental toxins. A lot of toxins are called xenobiotics or xenoestrogens. They're essentially foreign molecules that mimic estrogen and they're highly synergistic and toxic. So pesticides, plastics, cystics, phthalates, all the stuff that we're exposed to in cosmetics and our water and our air and our food, in our household cleaning products. These are all things that we're constantly exposed to and there's just lots of them. So the best way to reduce them is to reduce your exposures by changing what you're using in terms of what you're eating. So organic food, ideally filtered water, filtered air in your house, having the the reduction in your household cleaning products with toxins and skincare products. And the great resource for that is the Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, and they have great guides on Skin Deep, what are the best skincare products that have no toxins, household cleaning products, food, and so forth. So it's really important to reduce your overall exposures. Sometimes people need to address like toxic burden. So maybe different detoxification programs can help. The other thing I really focus on is the gut. You know, the gut plays a huge role in the, the, cancer process. Uh, and, and it's, it's, it's quite interesting. There's, there's various bacteria in the gut that can actually cause your body to recirculate estrogen. So when you detoxify estrogen and you get it through your liver, it essentially can be, excreted and pooped out essentially, or, there's these enzymes called beta-glucuronidase, which comes from kind of nasty bacteria in your gut that can unpack the estrogens from their package and then you reabsorb them and this causes this recirculation of estrogens. And we see, you know, women for example, who take antibiotics of high risk of breast cancer because it changes the gut bacteria. So keeping your gut healthy, we have something called gut food, which is like a multivitamin for your gut, probiotics, prebiotics, all that is really helpful polyphenols to keep your gut healthy. So keeping your gut healthy is really important. The other thing that's really important is look at your methylation status. This is B vitamins, B6, folate, B12. And what we really now understand is that there are various estrogen metabolites. Some of them are pro-cancer some of them are anti-cancer for example, your, your body, when it produces estrogen, it gets detoxified. And there's no such thing as estrogen, by the way. There are estrogens, estradiol, estrone, estriol. And estradiol is the main one that you produce for most of your reproductive life. And that gets broken down by the liver into two estrogens or 16, called two hydroxy or 16 hydroxy or four methoxy, all these different breakdown products. So the the 2:16 ratio is something you can actually measure in the urine. You can look at the breakdown products in your urine. You see this high level levels of two, that's great. That's protective anticancer, high levels of 16, not so much. So you look at the ratio of that. And the good news is the two you can increase by increasing cruciferous vegetables and broccoli, organic and non-GMO soy foods like tempeh, tofu. You can increase it by reducing increasing the amount of exercise you do. So all the, there's a lot of things you can do to actually boost to hydroxy estrone, estradiol, sorry, to hydroxy estrone. But if you, if you actually want to, to reduce 16, you have to deal with this insulin resistance stuff and toxins. So environmental toxins in the whole insulin problem, that, that actually causes the 16 to go up, which is the more dangerous carcinogenic form. So you can actually measure these in your urine and you can change your diet and your lifestyle. For example, there's a broccoli extract called diindol methane or OncoPlex is one brand of sulforaphane glucosinolates that actually boost this 2, which is basically important for reducing your risk of cancer. And these products have been really well studied in terms of cervical cancer, breast cancer. And one of them is made by Johns Hopkins. The brand is a xymogen and OncoPlex is the product, but it's basically glucosinolates and so fluorophanes that actually help with this detoxification process. Obviously, exercise also helps, obviously, stress reduction helps. And I think there's some really interesting data around trauma and, and expression of feelings and anger. There has been some pretty interesting studies looking at, you know, women who have breast cancer. They tend to kind of repress their feelings, repress anger, not really have sort of fully dealt with trauma, be more people Pleasers. So not being fully expressed also seems to be a risk. And there's, you know, obviously many ways to work through that through therapy or coaching or even novel therapies that are now being used to deal with trauma such as psilocybin MDMA, which I think soon will be legalized. So that's sort of a big overarching view of taking B vitamins B6, folate, B12, making sure you've got vitamin D, all these are really important in terms of reduction of cancer risk. So that's sort of high level in terms of mammogram or thermography. I think they both have their role, but I think, you know, it's important to get checked regularly. That's the main main take home.

Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for that detailed information. And that was really interesting information about the supplement from John Hopkins. We'll make sure we get that as well. So thank you. Darcy, over to you for the next one.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you for all that. So kind of switching gears a little. The next question has to do with food sensitivities. So it would be helpful to kind of give an introduction into what a food sensitivity sensitivity is versus like an allergy. But the question is also what food sensitivity test would you recommend? And of the ones that exist, like how do you decide which one is.

The best for you? This is a wormhole, a rabbit hole. First of all, let's just sort of distinguish two things. One is the fact that there are food sensitivities and they're real and they exist. And then the testing for them. They're two really two separate questions. So I'm going to sort of address them separately. The first thing is that we're all familiar with food allergy. That's, you know, a peanut allergy, shellfish allergy. That is when you get anaphylaxis, hives, you know, tongue swells up and you can't breathe. That's life-threatening and dangerous. Those people know they have it. It happens immediately. It's called an IgE reaction, which is one type of antibody called IgE that your body makes. And you have different antibodies for different things. So you have anybody to deal with acute infection, you have anybody to deal with chronic immunity, you know, long-term immunity. like IgG, you have IgE, which is actually for allergy or, or dealing with sort of parasite stuff in the gut. You know, IgM, which is more of the acute infection. IgA, which lines the, the epithelial lining of your respiratory tract, your digestive tract, the kind of first line defense. So there are all these different divisions of your immune system. Most doctors, when they think of a food sensitivity or allergy, talk about IgE and they'll do skin testing, they can do blood testing, and you can measure that and that's fine. That's really unusual. rare compared to food sensitivities, which are not true allergies, but they may be, we call them type three reaction or delayed hypersensitivity reaction. So it's a IgG usually, but it could also be IgA. And what happens essentially is that, your gut and your immune system all are connected. 60 to 70% of your immune system is in your gut. And when that, lining in your gut breaks down, we call it leaky gut. or the little, like the cells sort of come apart and the, the little tight Junctions, like Lego connections start to break down. Food and bacterial food particles or partially digest food and bacterial products tend to leak out and cause, you know, significant problems. And, and they leak into your bloodstream, which is right underneath your gut, and that's where your immune system is. So all the, the foreign particles are not supposed to be there. Your body goes, what is this? It starts creating antibodies against them. This is called IgG, and that creates low grade sensitivity reactions that can be, you know, fatigue, brain fog, headaches, digestive issues, congestion. I mean, I had a woman the other day, she said, one, every time I have dairy, I immediately start eating dairy and my nose runs. Well, that's, that's an igg reaction, likely, but it's probably a chronic igg. Most igg reactions, you might not even know. You might eat something on Monday and on Tuesday, you have a reaction or your legs swell, your joints hurt, or you feel a little tired or your headachy or you're achy or you get a rash or pimple. Like, you just obviously can't tell. And so that's, that's why an elimination diet is the to the most powerful test. If you look at what is the best allergy test or food sensitivity test, it's an elimination diet, eliminating foods for a period of time and then reintroducing them one by one to see what happens. That is the best and it's the cheapest and it works. And the 10-day detox is a great model for that. I've wrote that book a long time ago, about eight years ago, and that has a lot of information about how to actually do an elimination diet, how to add things back in, how to watch for symptoms, how to track your symptoms. That's really the best because the tests are really unreliable. There are some that I do use, but I use them in the context of understanding the overall picture. Because people sometimes will see a food sensitivity test. Well, I'm allergic to that food. I can never have that. No, that's not the case. Your, your, your body is telling you that you have a leaky gut. So the key is to fix your gut. And then you can start to tolerate more food. So I used to have a terrible leaky gut and I fixed it. And then, you know, before I could barely tolerate anything and now I can eat pretty much anything. So when you fix your gut, you create resilience and then you're not reactive to everything. Now, some things might be more permanent, like dairy or gluten or certain things people react to. You have to watch out for that. but the main thing is to do elimination diet reintroduction and tend to detox is really a very simple way to do that. As far as testing goes, I do use certain labs. I use Cyrex testing a fair bit, which is looking at IgG and IgA reactions to a whole bunch of wheat and gluten antigens. So we get antibodies to all of those antigens and we see what's going on. And then we also do cross-reactive foods like dairy and all their grains and soy and rice and eggs and so forth. So those can be pretty common. So I do like Cyrex, Labs is pretty good. I've used that for years. But again, it's, it's, it's, it's more of a sense of, like, when you see 30 reactions, it's not that they're really reactive to all those Foods, is that they essentially have a leaky gut. And so the key is to fix the gut. And that's really the take-home message here is that, that food sensitivities are common, they cause delayed symptoms. They are, they're real. And, and there's been some good clinical trials looking at this for, about ADD, removing those Foods from tests and people get better. So I think There's a lot more to learn about it and there's a lot of controversy about it, but I think the main thing is the tests are a guide, not like gospel. But if you, for example, if you have a peanut allergy and it shows up in your blood, well then you have a peanut allergy, like a true allergy. But this food sensitivity test is a little bit different. And I think just people need to be a little bit more sort of understanding of the context of it all, which is that, you know, they really mean to tell you about how your gut is and not so much that you're truly allergic or having a solid fixed reaction that can change over time. And I, for example, I had this one kid who was severe ADD, like 30 different food reactions. And we fixed his gut and we checked him again. He had like six mild reactions. So the body will heal and repair and those antibodies will come down over time. Yeah.

Wow.

That's a, that's an incredible example. And thank you so much for all that information. I think that's super, super helpful. And over to you, Herschel, for the next question.

All right, so our next question comes from a practitioner. So obviously we have some members of the Dr. Hyman Plus community that are practitioners and some members that are not. And so this one is from a practitioner and I'm gonna have to read it off because it's kind of long and obviously this is something you would understand. So I so she says, I recently ordered a Neural Zoomer Plus lab from Vibrant Clinical Laboratories. It resulted in a positive HHV-6 antibody and group A strep antibody. Has Simon addressed treatment for either of these in the past?

Yeah, of course. So first of all, what the question is about is about a test that looks at antibodies or reactions to different viruses or bacteria. And a lot of people have latent infections and many viruses out there. HHV-6 is one, CMV, EBV, you know, there's a whole range of these viruses that tend to, you know, be something we live with but don't cause problems. For example, if you get a cold, it goes away. You don't care, you don't carry the virus, but you'll carry antibodies to the virus. But for example, if you get chickenpox when you're younger, it probably, it doesn't really go away. It hides. And then you get shingles when you're older, or let's say you get you know, a herpes simplex virus. Well, it stays in your body and so maybe it doesn't ever show up as a cold sore, but when you're stressed or when you're tired or, you know, something goes wrong, you get a cold sore. So that's where the virus sort of hides in the body. So we manage this very well most of the time, but sometimes it can cause chronic fatigue or other symptoms and it needs to be treated. Group B strep's a little bit different. that tends to be a, some infection that can cause various kinds of problems with, you know, at time of birth, or they can cause other issues around strep related to pandas and other things, which is a, a pediatric neurologic condition that can be causing OCD that comes from chronic strep infections. Uh, so that's, that's kind of, I'm very cautious about how I use it and it really take, take it carefully with the clinical picture. But the real question is how do you support someone's immune system? So it, it's the usual lifestyle stuff, diet, exercise, sleep, stress reduction, and and then we kind of go deeper with immune support. There's various kinds of herbs. I like transfer factor, multi-immune, which is essentially a colostrum-like product that really helps to boost immunity. I also like using antivirals sometimes that are herbal antivirals. I'll use byromite formulas or olive leaf extract or other antivirals that are herbal. Rarely will use prescription antibiotics, but sometimes that can be helpful and depending on the case, what can really be helpful is ozone therapy. So intravenous ozone, rectal ozone can be done either directly, directly, directly at home, easily by a machine you can buy for like under a thousand dollars and it's pretty inexpensive for, you know, considering how long you can continue to use the treatment. Also, there's 10 pass ozone, which is very effective. There's also peptides, which can be very effective in immunity like thymosin alpha 1 and others, LL-37 that can help with infections, exosomes help who are another kind of more advanced therapy that have to do with providing stem cell-like products in the body that help immunity. So there's a lot of strategy we use. Sometimes hyperthermia is being used in some countries to deal with chronic infections where they heat your body up to 107 degrees, like in Mexico and Germany, they have a lot of this. And I've had patients who have chronic Lyme or tick infections that can be a last resort sometimes. so there's a lot of things we, we use to support the immunity to be antimicrobial and to help, kind of sort through it all.

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