The Surprising Science Behind Cancer Prevention

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

We've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer, it's about our bodies taking care of itself.

What you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer growth.

Yeah, the stuff you don't recognize you can't pronounce, those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria.

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The producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

In today's compilation episode, Dr. Hymen interviews Dr. William Lee and Dr. Jason Fung about how to choose foods that support your immune system and gut microbiome. You'll also hear why staying away from sugar is so important when it comes to cancer prevention.

Let's jump in.

What are the foods that have various components that can activate health?

Right.

And how do you eat more of those things?

Well, I think it makes it's about having knowledge and then making it second nature, right? So, when we heat up something on the stove, we know it's going to be hot, we don't burn ourselves. So, we actually avoid certain behaviors. When we go out into the sun, we know to put on sunscreen. become second nature. I think food as medicine is something that can become second nature. You have to be exposed to the basic information. And, you know, the science is important because that's what makes it real. But at the end of the day is, you know, this is something that school teachers should be teaching kids, that coaches should be teaching athletes, that doctors should be telling patients. And so, and I think family members should be sharing among themselves. This is the type of conversation that should be happening at every holiday meal. in every schoolyard. And I think that it's not so foreign, it's informed by science and we can all do it.

It's true. Now, the other thing I heard you say was at this conference was you showed a slide around immunotherapy. For those who don't know what immunotherapy is, it's essentially a way to.

Get.

Cancer by activating your immune system rather than giving a poison or cutting it out or burning it out. You literally give something that's going to help your immune system get into gear and be like Pac-Man and eat up the cancer. And, you showed a slide and who would have thought of this, but you showed a slide that people who respond to this immunotherapy and these can erase cancers actually have a certain type of bacteria in their microbiome in their gut that makes them respond to this immunotherapy, whereas those who don't actually die. and this bacteria is called akkermansia. It's one of the, you know, thousands and thousands of species of bugs in your gut. And you shared a story, if I may, about your mom.

Yeah.

Who had basically metastatic endometrial cancer, which was treated with immunotherapy and was successful. But you added certain things to the treatment to make sure that her akkermansia were good, like pomegranate and cranberry and these polyphenols, which come from food that seem to be powerful growers of these. great bugs in your gut. So how do we sort of begin to integrate these ideas into how we treat these diseases? Are we giving everybody a smoothie with all these things in it and helping them with immunotherapy?

Yeah, well let's take a step back to say, first of all, our bodies are working hard every single day from the time we're born to our last breath to defend our health. And these defense systems, and I've identified five of them, in my book is angiogenesis, stem cells, our microbiome, our ability for our DNA to protect our body, protect itself and our bodies and our health and our immunity. And all these defense systems work together in concert. They're like our security force in our body. They're patrolling, they're watching out, they're making sure everybody's safe inside and everything is functioning smoothly. And when you have a disease like cancer, for example, and it's not just cancer, it's heart disease, it's diabetes, it's Alzheimer's, it's obesity, but specifically for cancer, It's really, you know, a few bad guys snuck in and they figured out how to get around the security force. You know, it's sort of like, you know, TSA slip, let somebody slip by, and now we have to try to chase it. So, in the old days for cancer, what we used to do is just say, well, let's, you know, take a drug like chemotherapy and wipe it out. And, you know, that's a blunt instrument approach by trying to take something poison to kill something that you want to kill.

By the way, the rest of you gets poisoned too.

Well, that's right. And so basically, it's a toxic approach to something that we don't really, it's one bad actor, but we don't want to poison the entire body. We've now changed our minds about this, and this is really what's making the impossible possible. We've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer, it's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancers. So immunotherapy, which is what you were just bringing up, is an entirely new approach of enhancing our own body's defenses. We don't use drugs to kill the cancer. We allow our bodies. We give medicines that allow our bodies to kill the cancer so our immune systems can find the cancer and reverse the disease back to health. That's what we've always been dreaming of and it's here. But here's the problem. Only about 20% of people actually have this incredible response to immunotherapy. Sometimes a little fewer, sometimes a little bit more. But the response when it happens, It's exactly what we want. Dramatic, right?

Like your mom, it just... My mom.

Had cancer, and in 30 days she had no cancer, and never had chemotherapy. What makes the difference between somebody who responds like that and who doesn't respond like that? That's one of the mysteries out there. And, this is exactly where we need to consider more than the typical lab tests that doctors run. We need to think more holistically. one of the things we know is that our microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria, communicates, talks to our immune system, and we need our gut bacteria to help coach our immune system to do the right thing, including getting cancer. So, a study done by a colleague of mine, Dr. Laurence Zitvogel, she's in Paris, she's an immunologist who works with cancer patients, she looked at 245 49 cancer patients who were receiving immune therapies and separated them into people who responded versus people who did not respond. This, by the way, was published in the journal Science, which is one of the most prestigious journals. And what she found was that the difference between people who responded and didn't respond was one bacteria. Unbelievable. Akkermansia, right? So, well, isn't that easy? You can just maybe take some probiotics with Akkermansia, except that you can't.

No. There's no akkermansia probiotics.

But you can feed them.

But you can feed it and you.

Can actually change your gut to make your body grow akkermansia. And the way to do this is the food as medicine solution. So, turns out that pomegranates and cranberries actually have ellagic tannins, but pomegranates especially. And that natural chemical in pomegranate juice and what's been shown is that just one eight ounce cup of real pomegranate juice, not the flavored stuff, but the real stuff actually over the course of a week or two will actually help change the inside of our guts so that that bacteria likes to grow. That bacteria grows in the lining of the gut, talks to the immune system, and that makes the cancer immunotherapy work better.

Yeah.

And then there's other things too, like you said cranberries and and green tea.

Many things can actually feed our microbiome, right? So plant based foods have, you know, I think it's completely accepted now. It's not challenged that plant-based nutrition is actually the healthy approach to life. I mean, it's kind of- Eating more plants.

Eating more percent.

Right? But it's not just, we're not just feeding ourselves, we're feeding our bacteria. Yeah.

Right?

So we're feeding the, you know, 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies. And after we extract all the stuff that we need on the human side, we're leaving, you know, the leftovers for the bacteria. And this is the fibers, this is the bioactive. and what's amazing is our bacteria can take some of this fiber and they digest it. So, it's kind of like giving a sculptor a block of wood and say, do something with it. So, the bacteria, our gut microbiome takes up a block of wood and starts making sculptures. There's these things called short-chain fatty acids or SCFAs that our microbiome make and it turns out that these short-chain fatty acids, these little tiny particles that they.

Make from our food that we feed.

Them, they're like the fats that fuel the gut lining. They do that. They're anti-inflammatory. They boost our immune system. They help regulate our blood sugar. They lower our cholesterol. They also suppress cancer risk and they prevent blood vessels from growing into cancer as well, all tied together. And this is, you know, at the end of the day, why we need to take our food seriously.

Yeah, essentially, you write a little bit about, for example, how the microbiome plays roles in autism. and cognitive function. And I remember recently seeing a study where there are undigestible things in breast milk that humans can't digest called oligosaccharides, and they feed the good bacteria in the baby to develop it. Formula doesn't have those things. And the kids that have breastfed have high levels of something called butyrate, which is one of these short-chain fatty acids, which actually turns off colon cancer genes. and is an incredible important anti-inflammatory and regulates the gut health, whereas the other formula fed kids had something called propionic acid, another one of these short chain fats, but actually that in animal models can induce autism. And so what?

It's like, whoa, well, you know, it's at the end of the day, we're just at the surface of uncovering the mysteries of health. And I think that's the kind of humility and awe and wonderment we all need to have, which is, you know, we know quite a bit about different diseases, but we're just at this new frontier of understanding our health. I mean, you've been working in this field for a while and you're deeply steeped into it. And what I'm seeing from my end of the table is that we can begin to peel back the layers of the onion. So, it's all about balance. Yeah. You know, more is not more. You need just the right amount.

So, in your book, eat to beat disease. You break it down into these very digestible bits. And you briefly touched on it, but I want to go deep in each of these five areas because what you're talking about is something that is our health creation, health defense system that we can activate, but nobody talks about. And you mentioned them, it's our angiogenesis system. It's regeneration, which is stem cells, and you're really involved in the stem cell world. The microbiome, the DNA protection, how we repair and keep our DNA healthy in our immune system. So let's talk about each of those and how we can activate those things. What are the things that harm them? For example, you talk about alcohol affecting stem cells, and I'm thinking, wow, I had a tequila last night, did I screw up my stem cells? or then you say, well, red wine maybe helps other areas. So, it's a little confusing. How do you break down each of these? And, let's just go through them. Let's start with angiogenesis. And, what are those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system? And, what are those things we can.

Use to actually activate health within it? Great. So, angiogenesis is a term that actually talks about how the body grows blood vessels. Blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to.

Every cell in our body.

That's what keeps us healthy. But, there's 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. So, if you pull out all the blood vessels in your body, line them up and then you can actually form a line that would go around the Earth twice. Unbelievable. So, that's one of this enormous organ system. So, you know it's going to be important. And, we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart, you wind up having big problems with cardiovascular disease. Clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes. And, if you don't have enough blood vessels, you can't heal your wounds. and if you actually have too many blood vessels, you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration and you can grow cancer. So, this is a system that is required to keep every cell in organ healthy. It's a health defense system. And, if it's out of balance, you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels, you wind up having in trouble. So, what are the things that can damage angiogenesis? Well, it turns out high fat diets damage androgen receptors. Any fat or just- you- know what? Actually mostly saturated fats, but I think that it's really high fat, overall high fat diets can be damaging. And hypercholesterolemia, for example. If you have a lot of cholesterol floating around your blood, like the damaging bad cholesterol, LDL, it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels. If you have second cigarette smoke, tobacco, whether people shouldn't smoke, but even secondary smoke, can actually damage your blood vessel response. And then you think about heart disease, you think about cancer, things that are your blood vessels out of whack, out of balance.

The fat thing is interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils. And it's hard to separate out, are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil, or they're having trans fats and toxic fats and inflammatory.

So, the science actually says is not actually talking about what you actually eat. It's about what the net net, the effect is in the body. So, if you wind up actually going from, the researchers have studied, for example, in the lab, animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemic. These are mice whose blood is milky. because it's actually so filled with fat. That's a genetic thing for sure. Right? And those are the subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis. So I think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good. We know that, for example, that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good, the polyunsaturated fats are good for you. But I'm talking about after what the body actually processes it, what actually results your body can be. So, what are the things that actually can help restore healthy androgenesis? Well, think about androgenesis balance like a lawn that's growing, right? Or a garden that's growing. You want to prune the garden, make sure things don't overgrow, pick out the weeds, and if you're mowing a lawn, you're kind of just getting everybody all the the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height.

Yeah.

So you don't wind up having the scraggly lawn. That's what the body does to keep angiogenesis in balance. Not too much, not too little. And so the food we eat is actually like a lawn mower. It kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body. Not too much, not too little. So the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea, which is really good soy. Actually, genistein is a bioactive found in soy. It's really good. Tomatoes are really good for helping to keep angiogenesis in balance. Many fruits and vegetables also can do that. So the brassinins are really good. So many of the things we already know are good for us, we know actually also help our blood vessels.

And now we know how.

And now we know how.

Yeah. Now what about stem cells and regeneration? This is a big topic that I think People are hearing about the news, they're confused about it, there's controversy about it, there's laws about it that prevent adequate research. I mean, it's really quite a messy area and yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in. And it's, I don't think something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells. That there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells. And what are stem cells anyway? What do they do? how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them?

Yeah, well, stem cells are really simple. We're made of stem cells. So, when our moms and dads got together and created, you know, us in the womb, we started out as stem cells. They actually made every single one of us. And, then, the sperm. And, then, the sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory. And, then, pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells. And, after we, were born, a few of those stem cells stuck around, about 700,000 of them. They stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines. They hide out in our body and they help us regenerate. So, when you and I were growing up, right, in grade school, we learned from our teachers that starfish can regenerate, salamanders can regenerate, but people can't regenerate, right? Yeah.

You can't grow a new arm.

Yeah, well, it's true. You can't grow a new arm. but we do regenerate. We regenerate every day. We know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back. Our gut lining grows back. Our livers can grow back. If you actually remove part of your liver, it'll grow back. Yeah, our skin grows back, you know, so we our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells. Now, what can injure stem cells? You know, high doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells. So I'm okay with the one tequila I had last night. You know, having a tequila every now and then is not bad. Having a glass of wine. But, you know, the thing is on balance, what you want to do is people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells. Diabetes is another state, a metabolic state that it really impairs, it cripples our stem cells.

Sugar.

High blood sugar cripples our stem cells. So, the excess of anything can be harmful, including to our stem cells. So, what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells. This is where it's really become interesting. Before I talk about that, though, let me just. Stress affect your stem cells. Stress can definitely affect our stems. High stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells. You know, it's just like stunning them. So they're like, wait a minute, what do I do now? You know, maybe I'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs. We got to rebuild our blood vessels. We got to rebuild our hearts, you know, our hearts turn around. Like, we actually have stem cells in our hearts and our brains and re-grow our nerves. Every single day, something in our body is regenerating. Actually, a lot of things are regenerating. So what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies that you inject into the body. So, you know, taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them. And someday that's going to wind up becoming game changing in medicine. someday. We're not there yet. I've been involved with some of those efforts and what I've seen is very exciting. But more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells. And, here's the research. You can actually take-- and it's a lot cheaper. And, it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable.

Getting a stem cell injection is like.

20 grand or something, right? Well, you know, I would say, why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table?

Yeah.

Right.

So the Mediterranean diet, it's been studied by Spain, looked at elderly people on the Mediterranean diet, and those who were on a Mediterranean diet compared to not on a Mediterranean diet had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation, in their bloodstream. So again, it's not one magic food, it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating. Now, when you can actually do the research on specific things as well. So, for example, tea. Green tea will increase your stem cells. But guess what? So can black tea.

Right?

So, here's what the Japanese live forever.

All the green tea? You know, people in Asia drink a lot of tea.

People in Britain drink a lot of tea as well. We used to say green tea is good, black tea is fermented, so it's not going that could be, we're changing our minds. We have to keep our minds open. Black tea can also double the number of stem cells. And then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study by UCSF in San Francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease, so they had kind of crappy blood flow and they gave them hot chocolate.

Yeah, I was gonna say the chocolate stem cell story.

I wanna hear about that. It's amazing, right? The darker the chocolate, the higher the flavonoids. These are the bioactives that are naturally present in cacao. And, there was a study done- this.

Is the food is medicine. This is the food is medicine. There are literally these chemicals in food.

Called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties. They are made by Mother Nature, they're packed in the food, growing on a plant, and, you know, every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactives. So, in cacao, which is a bean, which then you process to actually get, you know, kind of the cocoa powder. If you take the really dark chocolate, like 73% cacao, the really dark chocolate, and you make it into a high flavanol hot chocolate drink, and you have it twice a day, this was a clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month, they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate.

Right.

And so, okay, so the question is, is that important? When they measured their blood flow, what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which, you know, kind of like lowers the circulation of the blood, they let it go. They found that the blood flow was much vastly improved.

Wow.

So here's a functional results that actually means it makes a difference. So. who's going to complain about chocolate, who's going to complain about tea, who's going to complain about a Mediterranean diet? I mean, you go out to eat, these are the things we love. Yeah.

Well, it's interesting you talk about how drugs sort of block, interfere, inhibit some medical process, some biological process. And there's toxicity to them, there's side effects to them. You can take too much, which will harm you, whereas foods don't work like that. But you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food. So, food is medicine. What's the dose? Is it one cranberry? Is it a thousand cranberries?

Right. Well, so my book Eat to Beat Disease, I specifically have a chapter on food doses. It's important to me.

Because nobody talks about it.

Well, I know that because when I read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale, I'm always asking, well, how much should I actually eat? and that always struck me as something that needed an answer. So here's how we've approached it. You can actually get food doses. That's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health. The best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies, these epidemiological studies. There's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times. So in Europe, there's something called the EPIC study. Epic study and Haines is in the United States. Bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of patients in Europe. They're studying 500,000 patients over 20 years and they're tracking everything they eat and they're asking them how much are you eating and then on the tail end looking at what happens to their health. What's their cancer rate? What's their heart disease rate? What's their diabetes rate? And when you actually combine those two, the result that we want, lower cancer, less heart disease. And, you go back into the research and you figure out what foods they ate, you can actually calculate how much they ate of it.

Yeah.

Right? So, and then, you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this. By the way, this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well. It's, you know, just having random amounts of stuff not gonna work. You get a correlate what works with what actually the amount is. So smaller studies, there was a study called the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study done at Harvard, which looked at 70,000 men, and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week, that's a half a cup of cooked tomato sauce, not that much, you have pasta, lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39%. So that's a dose, that's an outcome. and that's a particular food. And you can do that systematically. You've got to hunt and peck for it, but it's there. And it doesn't give you the exact answer. It's not like a medicine, like actually, frankly, even penicillin. You don't always get the right result, but you have a good approximation.

So that's the beginning of food doses. I mean, your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about the diet and eating healthy and reversing disease, but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that I didn't even know about fish roe or razor clams or different kinds of Chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that maybe haven't been studied in large randomized controlled trials but have clinical studies, have epidemiologic studies, and we can start to include these and there's very little downside, right? Unless you don't like clams.

Well, look, what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another. And my approach is really a global approach. My work spans around the world. We're in Asia, Europe, Asia, America, and Americas. And here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods, and no matter where you go. So what interests me is what are the common denominators? So, for example, you mentioned razor clams. Well, that's actually a category of seafood. We know from most epidemiological studies, including studies in Europe and Asia, that people who eat more seafood, about three times a week, actually have lower all-cause mortality and they just survive longer. So then you sort of say, well, what could be possibly responsible for that? Well, we do know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acid, that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat. So if you- But is it the.

Omega-3S in razor clams or something else?

Well, there's probably other things as well. So, I can tell you another example that I was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually not only have some omega-3 fatty acids, but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune immune system. Yeah.

So again, so it's like the mushrooms of the sea because polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms. Exactly. Anti-cancer compounds. And now they're in oysters. Wow.

I didn't know. And, you know, by the way, these are long sugar chains. That's right. And, and your body digests them. They've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce. So, you know, the kind of sauce, the brown sauce you see in a Chinese restaurant, right?

Chinese food, that they've studied that in.

Research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system. Does that actually come from oysters? It comes from oysters. It comes from oysters. Yeah, they boil them down and they caramelize them. So again, this is where food as medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things, really. You incorporate the culinary side, the chefs get into it. I mean, this is really, I think, us as a society coming together and saying, what do we love? And by the way, in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, it's really not about what to cut out of your life. It's about what to add to your life. And what do we really enjoy? It's all about our preferences. and making the right decisions.

So this is incredible. So stem cells are not some weird thing. You have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat. You know, maybe get it from some placenta somewhere. You can actually activate your body's own regenerative healing power. And you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate them. That's so powerful. And it's a very encouraging message. So you're talking about what is the problem, which is the incredibly high amount of starch and sugar we consume. And you've talked about this in the diabetes code, the obesity code. This is a central driver of almost all chronic Western diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, high blood pressure are caused by this phenomena of insulin resistance or too much insulin, which is driven from our diet, basically a highly refined processed carbohydrate diet. and also this constant eating pattern, this thing called snacking, which I think is a modern invention. We have a snack food industry. But I mean, I don't snack. If you eat properly, you're never hungry. I mean, if you don't have these spikes and insulin going up makes you hungry. But what's fascinating is that what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer growth.

Yeah.

So all of these diseases are actually diseases of too much insulin. So if you look at obesity, for example, if you were to measure the levels of insulin, people who are more overweight tend to have higher insulin. Same with type 2 diabetes, hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are really sort of two sides of the same coin. So one causes the other sort of hyperinsulinemia can cause insulin resistance, insulin resistance can cause hyperinsulinemia. So they're really the same thing. And again, the same thing applies to sort of cancer. And this is the pattern that was noticed so many years ago that there are these diseases of sort of too much insulin, which is that sort of they all go together, the heart disease, and you don't see that in people eating traditional diets because they're not eating all the time. So I remember there was a study, this NHANES study, which is a big sort of American survey of lots of things, but they included dietary habits. So in 1977, they found that most people ate three times a day, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And by 2004, it was almost up six times a day, right? So it's like, wow, that's crazy. And it was never this sort of deliberate, hey, there's good scientific evidence that we should eat six times a day. It just sort of crept in there. And I think part of it was, of course, the snack food companies wanted to promote it. And, you know, people thought it was a good idea. So then it was sort of, it became almost gospel. Oh, you have to eat six times a day, right? And I remember thinking about it a while ago and thinking, Where did that suddenly sneak in? Did we have a big randomized control trial that I missed somehow? Because I don't think so. It was just this gradual change in attitudes. And you saw it because I start to think back to my upbringing in the 70s, right? So I grew up in the 70s. And, you know, if you wanted a sort of after-school snack, your mom said, no, you're gonna ruin your dinner, right? And if you wanted a bedtime snack, Your mom would say, no, you should have ate more at dinner. And it's like, that's just the way it was. And of course, people would have this sort of natural fasting period from after dinner, which was, say, 6:00, because people ate a bit earlier back then to, like, say, 8:00. So 14 hours of fasting every single day without even- We call that breakfast. Yeah, exactly.

Breaking the fast.

Breaking the fast. That is the word that we use. and it's like somehow we went from that where people didn't have the obesity problems, type 2 diabetes problems, because they have this natural fasting period built in that has always been there. It's even built into the English language. And then it's like, oh, you got to eat all the time. And it's like, oh, you can't ever skip your breakfast. You got to snack all the time.

Right.

You see it in schools, for example. Oh, they go to school, they get a mid-morning snack, then they have a lunch, and then they have their after school snack, and then they have a dinner, then, you know, you're playing soccer and They think that they need to have a snack in between the halves of soccer. You know, I played Jason, you've written.

A lot about, you've written a lot about fasting and, and the effects of either time restricted eating, which is, you know, 12, 14, 16 hour fasts every day or taking a 24, 36 hour fast a week or even longer fast for diabetes. And, and, and I'd love you to sort of share why around cancer this is so important. And, on my podcast soon we're going to have, of Dr. Patrick Hanaway, who is my colleague and friend, was the medical director at Cleveland Clinic who had cancer and used fasting as an approach to his cancer treatment. He still got radiation, but he also did it in a way that actually reduced all the side effects to almost none, has kept him healthy now for well over a year, and his cancer was not a great one. And let him go through the process with really no issues, which was really staggering and really went on a ketogenic diet in order to do that, which is both using fasting and ketogenic diets to drop insulin levels to almost undetectable. So can you talk about this whole idea of fasting, cancer, ketogenic diets, why it's so important and how it connects to this whole idea of insulin resistance and insulin high insulin levels?

Yeah, so both fasting and ketogenic diets have the same sort of goal. goal at the end, which is trying to lower insulin, because the difference between a ketogenic diet, say, and a low carb diet is that, you know, you're sort of low carb, Ultra low carb for the keto, but sort of moderate protein, because protein can also stimulate insulin, whereas some of the older low carb diets were, like, very high in protein. You take protein shapes or whatever it is. Yeah, like Atkins. And so high protein is not always the best idea because you can get high insulin, but you also get this high mTOR, which is sometimes not so good for cancer as well. But the idea is to really drop your insulin levels. And if these are diseases of too much insulin, then that's going to be a very useful adjunctive treatment. So fasting is actually fascinating because there's all these different things we're discovering. So one of the things is sort of autophagy. So as you fast, of course, Your nutrient sensors go down, so mTOR, insulin go down, and then you activate this process called autophagy, where you actually start to break down some of your subcellular organelles and stuff. So, basically, your body's just trying to clean house.

It's like Pac-Man coming around and cleaning up all the garbage.

Yeah, exactly. People think it's a bad thing.

Maybe people know who Pac-Man was, but that was the original video game that we all played back in the '70s. 20s. Pretty simple. Very exciting though. Yeah, Pacman is anymore.

You can still find them sometimes. But yeah, the idea is that people think that this sort of breakdown process is really bad for you, but it's actually really good for you. And in fact, it's sort of one of the keys to rejuvenating the body. That is, you want to break down all your old stuff and then sort of rebuild the stuff that you need. So the whole idea of fasting is you're trying to put the body into this sort of regenerative maintenance mode. Because what we've recognized over the last little bit is that your body sort of has sort of, you know, you can go into growth mode or you can go into sort of the cell maintenance repair mode. And it really depends on your nutrients availability. When when nutrients are available, you want to grow. When nutrients are not available, you don't want to grow and you want to go into this sort of maintenance repair mode. And everybody thinks growth is good, but growth is not always good, especially as an adult. So I always say think about a car. Like if you have a sports car and you rev that engine and you're running it fast all the time, you're going to go fast, which is great, but it's going to burn out much faster. So you can't just keep revving that engine, keep redlining it, you've got to sometimes bring it to the shop, put it in the garage, let it rest and all this stuff.

A pit stop.

Yeah, exactly. A little pit stop. So that's the point of the human body, too. You can either go for growth or you can go for longevity or cellular maintenance repair. But you gotta have a bit of both. It's a balance there. It's not all growth. And this is where you say, oh, E-D-D-D-D. Well, you're gonna put your body, your nutrient sensor is gonna go up, your growth factors are gonna go up, you're gonna put yourself in growth mode, but you don't want to do that, especially for a disease such as cancer, which is a disease where cells are growing too much, you're basically feeding into that growth and that's going to be very, very bad for you. So what you do instead is you do the fasting and you put yourselves into this sort of maintenance repair mode. And it actually allows you to undergo the both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better because chemotherapy, we have a couple of studies on fasting and chemotherapy where what you do is you fast sort of just before and during and just after your chemotherapy. and what they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from the treatment because what you've done of course is taking the cells of your normal body and you've sort of put them into a more quiescent state. They're not trying to grow, they're actually trying to slow down. And chemotherapy, the general way it works is it kills the fastest growing cells, which are usually the cancer cells, but it also kills like the hair follicles because they're fast growing cells, it kills the lining of the GI tract so you get nausea and your hair falls out. So if you can put those cells into sort of a quiescent sort of repair mode, it's not gonna sustain as much damage from the chemotherapy. And instead, the cancer cells, which can't stop their growth, they're always trying to grow, they can't do that. So therefore they're going to sustain full damage from the chemotherapy while your body is relatively protected. And that's one of the things that might be very interesting to use as an adjunct to sort of standard treatment. I would never advise not to take the standard treatment because of course we spend- you- know, there's a lot of.

Interesting work by Dr. Mukherjee, Siddhartha Mukherjee and others looking at ketogenic diets and cancer. And I've heard him present on this. It's just fascinating. He wrote the Emperor of All Maladies. It's about cancer. I'm sure you've read that. And he said that to me, he said, Mark, you know, we figured out the solution to cancer. I'm like, what is it? It's this big discovery. And the cause and like, what is it? He's like, It's sugar. I'm like, yeah, you know, I guess that's not really news, but, maybe it's good you know that now. And then he said, we've been studying ketogenic diets and seeing incredible results with pancreatic cancer, melanoma, stage four cancers that weren't responding to anything else. And animal models, they literally were curing cancers with ketogenic diets, and now they're doing human trials. Can you talk a little bit about some of that research and how, how.

It might be applied to people who are struggling with cancer? Yeah, so this was the big discovery of Dr. Lou Cantley who's discovered this whole pathway, the PI3 pathway that links insulin and growth and cancer. The important thing is that insulin acts as that growth factor and therefore acts as a pro-growth and therefore a pro-cancer agent. Sugar, of course, plays a big role in the hyperinsulinemia. And it's interesting because Dr. Luke Cantley in several of his articles or whatever, he goes, Sugar scares me. Here's this guy who studies cancer for a living and he's like, yeah, sugar just scares me. And that's the same sort of thing that Siddhartha Mukherjee is talking about too. And that's the whole point is that with ketogenic diets with fasting, Of course, fasting, you have to cycle it because you can't obviously fast. You can't fast forever, right? As opposed to ketogenic diet, which is sort of very low carbohydrate, you could sustain that for years and years. You can't fast forever. You need some food at some point. But the idea is the same. What you're trying to do is really reduce those insulin levels. They're, of course, studying this in terms of drugs or trying to develop the these blockers to the whole pathway of PI3K and so on. I think they've developed a couple companies for that. But, you know, just like anything else, it's like, why would you want to do it with a drug when you can do it with your diet?

You know what's so striking, Jason, is that, you know, often when people go get cancer treatment, their doctors make sure you keep your weight up, eat ice cream, eat milkshakes, have cake, you know? And I'm like, why are you telling them that for? I mean, that is death. and yet it's, it's, it's, I mean, I actually had a radiation oncologist as a patient who worked at MD Anderson, and he was very aware of these studies and these issues, and he tried to tell his patients, do the right things. He said, all the nutritionists, this is like the number one cancer Hospital in the world, are telling their patients to eat a lot of starch and carbohydrates and sugar to keep their weight up. And it's just such a unfortunate situation that, that is going on right now. So, so when, when we talk about cancer. We're clearly talking about some of the risk factors, right? Sugar. There's other risk factors. And one of the, one of the things that I think is very concerning to me is these, these obesogens, which are environmental chemicals that not only are directly toxic and carcinogenic, but they're actually causing insulin resistance. So they're really creating a double whammy. Pesticides, herbicides, additives, all these environmental chemicals that we're exposed to, 80, 000 of them that have developed over the last 100 years. What's your perspective on that and how do we reduce our risks?

Well, I think that stuff is really hard because they're not adequately studied. I mean, there's so many chemicals and what do we know about the effect on the human body for most of these? Like very, very little, right? I mean, you know, they have this classification as generally recognized as safe, but you know, I mean, that just means it doesn't kill you within a month, right? I mean, that's about it. so, and all of these chemicals, like the, you know, even the ones that we eventually find out are really bad for us. I mean, they were originally approved and, you know, for you. So, you know, we trust our government to sort of keep us safe from all these sort of chemicals. Very rudimentary, like you do it in a, you test the toxicology in some rats and it doesn't kill them and, hey, nothing, you know, you get out there and it doesn't kill people right away. So, hey, you're good. that's the sort of idea that we have. But, yeah, I think that, unfortunately, it's hard to know exactly what to say because, one, there's just so many of them. They're changing all the time. I'm okay.

Yeah.

So, like, the classic sort of pesticide was like DDT. Remember it was. Yeah, I date myself here a little bit, but DDT was this big, big time pesticide was amazing.

Killed everything.

Right. Turned out it was, like. super, super bad for us and, you know, causing cancer all over the place. Right. There's all kinds of stories like that. Now, of course, there's all these other chemicals in there, and we don't even know what they are. I mean, they're not.

I mean, the government did write, the government did write a whole report on the environmental chemicals and how they're linked to cancer. So I think that's a big thing. And I, I encourage people to check out ewg.org, which is the environmental working groups website, where they have guides on how to reduce your exposure through your food, through household cleaning products, through skincare products, and many other ways to reduce your exposures, household cleaning products. So I think I think the more we can do to reduce our intake of these chemicals is a good idea. So so let's talk about how to reduce your risk. What can people do who are listening that you talk about in your amazing book, the Cancer Code, a revolutionary understanding of the medical mystery. I encourage everybody to get a copy of the Cancer Code. It's out now. because it really is a revolution and understanding of cancer that I think could help so many people. So tell us, what can we do to reduce our risk of getting cancer?

Yeah, I think the most important thing is to go after the sort of hyperinsulinemia because we know it's such a big risk factor. So you can't always test it, but you'll know because if you are overweight, for example, then you want to try and get back to a normal weight. And there's lots of different ways to do that. Sort of ketogenic diets are not the only way. to do, you know, all kinds of different diets and, and, and, you know, vegetarian diets and sort of paleo diets. There's all sorts of good ones. And then the other one, of course, is the sort of reintroduction of intermittent fasting into sort of the normal schedule. And I think that's really important because what, what we've lost, of course, is that balance between feeding and fasting.

Right.

We've gone to a sort of feeding all the time model, which is not so good for growth because we all, you know, you're always telling your body to grow more. And of course, if you have type 2 diabetes, which is becoming a huge, huge problem. So if you look at pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes in America, it's like it just skyrocketed over the last 15 years. And that, too, is a sort of massive, massive risk factor for the development of cancer. The World Health Organization actually classified qualifies 13 different types of cancer as obesity related cancer, so including breast and colorectal. So that's a huge- and prostate and colon, liver, pancreas. And interestingly, if you look at the types of cancer, so we've actually been doing really well for most cancers over time as you track them through the years, most cancers are actually slowly declining, except those obesity related cancers. They're actually going up. So pancreatic cancer going up, liver cancer going up, all of these cancers are going up. And they're not rare diseases. So breast cancer, for example, is very, very common. Colorectal cancer, very, very common. And I think that this is one of the things that we hadn't recognized. So I went to medical school in the 90s. We never talked about diet and, you know, cancer. It just wasn't even on the radar screen. It was crazy, except maybe a few people who are really into it. But for the most part, people just, We just didn't talk about it. And then it wasn't until sort of 2003 that the first large papers started to come out that said, Hey, this is a big risk factor. And then you multiply it by the millions of people who have it, and that's why it's such a big risk factor. So staying to a normal weight, you know, which includes getting your diet in order, cutting out sugar, cutting out the processed foods for the most part, adding back the intermittent fasting, which is part of a normal sort of Regimen.

When you say that, what do you mean? You mean time-restricted eating, right? You mean 14 hour fast?

Yeah, up to 14 hours should be your sort of baseline because that's just 1970s style eating when we didn't have so much obesity. Now, if you're trying to lose weight or if you have type 2 diabetes and you can extend it to say 16 hours, which is time-restricted eating, or you can even go further, 24 four hours or even multiple days of fasting. And, you know, people always worry about that. But, you know, that's, that's why I talk about a lot, because a lot of the stuff that we worry about simply isn't true. People worry about, oh, they're going to lose muscle. They can't work, they can't concentrate. I'm like, all you're doing when you don't eat is that you're making your body rely on your body's own store of calories. which is sugar, right, or body fat. That's how your body stores calories. So you're literally using the body fat for precisely the reason that you carry it. So what could be wrong with that? What is more natural than that? If your sugar is high and you don't eat, you're going to use up the sugar and your sugar will fall. Now, that's great news if you have a high sugar and type 2 diabetes, which, of course, that high sugar drives a high insulin, which drives You know, cancer risk and so on. So something like that is a completely natural way to get this, all of this back in order. And if you're too far along the scale of, you know, you have too much insulin, you don't have to stop at 14 hours. There's nothing to stop you from taking your fast out to, you know, a couple of days at a time.

Right.

And that's the thing is, it's a free intervention. It's a natural intervention. it's been used for thousands of years, right? Every culture and history has used it. It's crazy that we don't use this sort of thing.

Well, what you're talking about is just something so extraordinary and effective. And the side effect is that it also prevents heart disease and diabetes and dementia and depression. And I'm like, pretty much everything. So it's like a one-stop shop. for staying healthy, which is cut out the starch and sugar and practice eating in a way that we're designed, which is take a break after dinner and don't eat till breakfast or a little bit later in the morning. It's so simple, it's so obvious, and it's so different than our current thinking. But if you have cancer, like if you already have cancer, we can do this to reduce our risk. What about the screenings, the cancer interventions, the treatments? that we have now? Should we still do those? How far can this go to really have an impact?

Screening is a very interesting problem because it sort of gets down to the sort of seed and soil idea. All our cells in our body actually have the potential to become cancer, right? So your heart can get cancer, your liver can get cancer, even your placenta can get cancer. It's crazy that every single cell in the body can become cancerous. the point is that that seed sort of lies everywhere and that aggressive screening we found, you know, may or may not be that useful. So, so this is the reason why people are sort of backing off a little bit on sort of aggressive screening. Works very well in some cases, like cervical cancer, for example, but taken too far, it was useless of the thyroid cancer as an example, where they screen people and so Korea for thyroid cancer found a ton of ton of thyroid cancer. It was like everywhere. So the the the the incidence of new thyroid cancer went up sort of 11 fold because of screening. But the mortality was still just about the same. It didn't impact it because most of those didn't need to be treated. So that's the point is that you have to there's a limit to the screening. But, you know, there's there's well established protocols that, you know, people have studies of breast cancer for example, mammograms have been studied, but they're rolling sort of, they used to say, oh, maybe you should start at age 40. And they've actually recently been sort of moving it back down to maybe age 50. Same with colonoscopy, for example. One of the big successes of screening has been colonoscopy and removal of sort of early cancers has made a big difference in terms of reducing colon cancer. But they're also talking about, you know, maybe, you don't need it. They actually just rolled, I think just last two weeks ago or something. They actually said we should start earlier in part because I think that they're worried that with the obesity epidemic, they're actually getting more and more. So if you look at these obesity-related cancers, we're actually finding them younger and younger because the younger and younger populations are getting more of this obesity. So I think they just recommended instead of age 50, they actually you rolled it down to like age 45 or something to get colonoscopy. So I think it's still a good idea to do screening because one of these cautious things, but you have to be wary. So certain things didn't pan out the way we thought. PSA is super controversial for prostate cancer. Thyroid cancer didn't turn out to be useful. So, but you pick and choose. The big ones are going to be breast and colorectal, of course.

So given what you've learned about in this, research that you did for the Cancer Code, which is an amazing book and everybody needs to get it, a revolutionary understanding of a medical mystery. What does the future look like for cancer? Because it feels to me as a doctor, someone says, I have diabetes, I have Alzheimer's, I have heart disease, I have an autoimmune disease, I have this, I'm like, great, I got that cancer. It's like, not so easy. So what is the future look like in terms of prevention and treatment of cancer?

I think there's two different things. In terms of treatment of cancer, of course, a lot of these things that we talk about are not applicable once you have the cancer. Like, you can't just use diet. Like, I would never say to somebody, you know, just use the diet or just use fasting. It's like, no, you need to get that surgery or the radiation or the chemotherapy or whatever they're recommending for you, because by that time, you have a high risk of other issues. You can use it as an adjunct. But the treatments have come a long way because again, we've moved past now that sort of idea that we need to find the genetic cure for all these cancers. And now we're sort of moving into the age of immunotherapy, which is taking this idea that cancer is sort of this evolving sort of new species and saying, well, let's use our immune system to try destroy it. So we've been seeing some sort of incredible successes from a therapeutic standpoint with these new agents, these sort of checkpoint inhibitors and CAR T and some of these other things. So really very hopeful. Of course, that depends on a lot of research dollars, a very high tech sort of stuff.

Yeah.

It's more exciting from a prevention standpoint because the, you know, the only real successes we have in cancer medicine are really in prevention. So stopping smoking, for example, is sort of so far ahead of anything else we do for cancer. But it's all through prevention. Same with colonoscopies and for colorectal cancer, really you start to see as these things, as you do more and more screening. So as you go from the 70s to the 80s, to the 90s to the 2000s, for example, you can see that as people start to accept that they need to do the screening, that colorectal cancer mortality is slowly coming down. And that's where the future lies, I'm hopeful, because we're starting to bring into a clearer picture that, hey, all of.

These.

Dietary things that we talk about are so important, like stuff that you write about, for example, so well that, hey, this is great news that people are paying attention to it because those are the cancers that are rising in terms of numbers, right? Those are practically the only cancers that are rising in numbers.

Yeah.

Are the obesity-related cancers. So, if we can understand that, if we can make people aware of that, of the dangers of sugar, so, for example, sugar intake, I think I think peaked at around year 2000. But prior to that was really going up very high, right? You know, we're drinking their Gatorade and stuff, you know, they were like, oh yeah, I just worked out, so I'm gonna have a Gatorade. We didn't just full of sugar, right? It was, people don't do that anymore. Like, you know, I look around, like, you know, how- you-'d be surprised.

You live in Canada, people maybe are better over there. I think you're in America, it's still sugar palooza.

Yeah, probably. Probably. I think that plays a big role.

I mean, look, 88 of us are metabolically unhealthy, and, and the translation of metabolically unhealthy means you're insulin resistant. So think about that. Almost nine out of 10 Americans are on track for these diseases caused by too much insulin, including cancer.

Yeah, including cancer and all those other diseases you talked about, Alzheimer's and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, and part of it, I think, is, you know, if you look at the total number, like total amount of sugar, it has been going down, but it's still very high. I think that's the big problem. There's a lot of sort of corporate interests and so on. Like, you know, a few years ago, Coca-Cola was revealed as giving like a million bucks. Remember this story? They gave a million bucks to the University of Colorado to develop this global energy balance network or something like that.

Yeah, I wrote about that in my book, Food Fix. Yeah, it was a big scientific mess.

It was like a- It's a horrible story because here you have a university taking millions of dollars from Coca-Cola, which obviously is peddling something very unhealthy, and was ready to go to war against people like you and me who keep saying, Look at food as medicine and what you put in your mouth is super important. Like, they're, you know, the university- It's.

Not just calories are all the same, right?

Exactly. Like, who, like this whole calories is the same. Like, that always gets, gets me all riled up because it's like you're telling me that a hundred calories of cookies is the same as a hundred calories of broccoli. That's the dumbest thing, like, honestly.

Well, it's just because of the law of thermodynamics, right? So the idea is that it It's calories a calorie because when you burn it, it releases the same amount of energy. And that's true. It's absolutely true in a vacuum. But now when you eat it, because when you eat it, it interacts with your microbiome and your hormones and your brain chemistry and so many different factors.

That drive benefit or cause harm. When I look at the ingredients of any food that I actually get, and I try to do fresh food, whole foods, but every now and then, you know, you have to take something and you look at all the ingredients, the stuff you don't recognize, you can't pronounce. Those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria.

Yeah.

Right?

You pick a mushroom and you eat it, you know that the fiber in the mushroom is going to feed us and the bacteria, right? The pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria. Right. What we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting.

In that can actually harm our- you- know 3,000 food additives in the market that are FDA approved. And we don't know what most of them do. Very few have been tested. And it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect our microbiome.

Well, and you know, the, what they, we all know people that are super healthy, right? So they never get sick. And then we know people that seem to get sick all the time. The difference is probably in their microbiome. In fact, it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy super agers. These are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all. And then they looked at young healthy athletes and they found when they compared their microbiome, they were remarkably similar. They were almost identical.

Amazing.

So health is clearly governed by our microbiome. So what are the things that we can actually eat that can affect them? Well, we talked about this a little bit earlier. It turns out that pomegranates actually make a big difference. Cranberries can make a big difference. Nuts, walnuts, pecans, cashews, things that we actually know. Almonds.

Almonds, yeah. Okay.

And so, you know, I had almonds for breakfast. I want to make sure I got it. Well, you know, we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think nuts are one of nature's most healthful snacks. I don't know if you saw this, but about two years ago, the American Society for Clinical Oncology the big cancer meeting, they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer, stage three colon cancer, undergoing treatment, whatever the treatment might be, that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually had a 50% lower risk of death from their disease.

Now, you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction, everybody's jumping up and down, it's a billion dollar blockbuster drug, and you're talking about a couple handfuls of swamans for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost $100,000 is actually better?

Well, it's not an either or, it's together. And again, this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors. Not just you and me, but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment If you look at that data, it's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies, I would actually strongly advise patients to have nuts if they can take it. And what do they serve in the hospitals? Again, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's slow but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine.

And we're going to be able to map this out. very soon in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence, big data analysis, microbiome assays, we can actually look at what's growing, what's not growing, how different things affect it, check it over time in a serial way, monitor the effects. I mean, it's fascinating. You know, wow, maybe if you give this cocktail of akkermansia smoothie, then your akkermansia grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy. I mean, this is really radical. clinical stuff. And yet, there are very few people talking about it in a clinical way like you are. You're saying, okay, wait a minute. We don't know everything, but we know a lot. And we know enough to actually start to integrate these strategies. And the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because it empowers people to say, okay, wait a minute. I don't have to set a wait around to get disease then hope some drug saves me or try to fix it then. But I can actually start to build the foundations of health for my whole life by understanding. And, these are a little bit technical, you know, stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff, but it's actually doable and you make it so practical in your book. You have this five by five by five plan, which we'll get into, but let's go next to the DNA thing because we talked about in genetics, regeneration, stem cells, microbiome. Let's talk about the DNA because we think, oh wait, we got our DNA. There's nothing we can do about it.

We get hits to our DNA from toxins and stress and different things, but what can really do to help our DNA?

Right.

Well, so in my book, I should talk about how most people hear about DNA these days as relates to our ancestry. Who are we related to and how much of us is Neanderthal?

I'm about 1.5%.

But in fact, our DNA is our genetic blueprint and part of that blueprint is our blueprint for health. It actually is designed to keep us healthy, our DNA. We need our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health. We need the right proteins made, we need the right molecules made at the right time from the time we're born to our last breath, really. And so we know that DNA can get mutated and so some of the things that can mutate our DNA is actually, you know.

Hey, wait, stop there. I just wanna go back a minute 'cause what you said was really important. You said our DNA makes proteins that regulate all of our biology. And so, they can actually make good proteins or if they get damaged, they make bad proteins. Bad proteins. That's right. And the good proteins help you create.

Health and the bad proteins cause the sickness. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. And by the way, the DNA is part of our hardwiring, right? It's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an auto virus system. It actually checks it out, finds problems and erases them, really just deletes them. so on average, we know that there's about 10, 000 mistakes that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day.

Right?

So think about it. Where's there in the sunlight? Sun ultraviolet radiation damages us. You sit in a car, in a highway, on a traffic, on a community to work. That sun shines going right through the windshield, mutating your DNA, secondary smoke. You're filling up your car and a gas. I mean, some of us drive electric cars, but most people still wind up filling up their cars, pump gas, right? So do you stand upwind or downwind of the fumes?

I just hold my breath. Actually, I try to like stuff the cap in the thing because they have the automatic ones, I run away.

So here's a way to protect your DNA. When you're filling your gas, figure out which way the wind's blowing and stand upwind. If you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents, the gas, and you're mutating your DNA.

You need a little wood block, you can just stick in and hold and.

Then go to... Well, but this is the kind of situational awareness that we want to have. Like I was saying, when you're at the stove, you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire. These are the things that we know we should be doing at sort of the health level. So, our DNA is... And there's some things we can't do anything about, like radon coming out of the earth. That just mutates our DNA as well. so we have to take proactive steps to protect our DNA. And some of the things that, that we can do are pretty simple. Like, for example, we know that an elemental vitamin, vitamin C can actually do it. A really interesting clinical trial or clinical study that was done in people who were drinking orange juice.

Right.

So their scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice and they took the blood out and they measured how well their DNA protected itself in a lab test. And then they gave them orange juice to drink. It's one and three quarters cup. So it's kind of a tall glass of orange juice. And they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their DNA's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by 20%.

Is it the vitamin C or is it the naringenin or quercetin?

We think it's vitamin C because actually they've actually studied vitamin C in isolation but it's almost certain that there's other factors in orange juice.

I mean, you're getting a lot of sugar with that much orange juice. Could you then just take the vitamin C pills?

So, what's interesting is that the placebo that they gave to a group of people were just sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice. this is not the sugar. We know that's not good for you, but it was really the other stuff. So vitamin C is what they were focusing on. But I think it's probably the narigenin and hesperidin and other things in orange juice as well. You know, the pulp's got a lot of good stuff in it. And, you know, by the way, the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits, it's the peel, the rind that actually has a lot of the stuff.

Well, they say, you know, if you're taking statins or certain drugs, you should have grapefruit, especially the the peel, like the white stuff, because it actually affects the metabolism of drugs. Exactly. And so, if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit if you're taking a statin.

Well, so, you know, that's pretty interesting. But just a point of clarification on that. So, it's, if you have grapefruit, it can slow down the metabolism the liver. So when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels and the liver has to clear that, that's when you call it toxicity. But in point of fact, think about it another way. If you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods, you raise the levels of the healthy things in your bloodstream. So here's another amazing food that can protect our DNA, it's kiwis. Kiwis.

Oh my God, I just came back from New Zealand where my wife is from and I ate a lot of kiwis.

Listen, I love kiwis, right? Kiwis used to be in the jungle. I think monkeys ate them and they were grown in New Zealand and then shipped to America. And, I think they were called Chinese gooseberries originally, and they were just named kiwis. So, anyway, there was an interesting study done in Scotland that looked at whether you ate one, two, or three kiwis a day and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your DNA. Turns out even and even eating one kiwi a day can help your blood protect the DNA from damage by 60%.

That's amazing.

One kiwi a day.

And what you're talking about is learning about in your book all the various foods. You might not like razor clams, but there's a lot of options. And it's not just that you're going to eat kiwis all day. It's you add all these different creative foods into your diet. as much as you can and you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about.

Right.

Well, I mean, look, here's the thing about most health diets, right? If you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only eat one food, you're not balancing your body. It's not natural to do that. I think it's the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable, that's supported by real science and real evidence, and that allows you to do the things you enjoy. So in my book, my emphasis, you need to beat diseases. Number one, look for foods that you eat, the foods that you enjoy that are good for you. And so I present a whole list of food, 203 foods actually, and you get to choose. Pick the ones, circle the ones, take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off. That's your shopping list. You've started off, you've had a great start already. You're already identifying foods you love that.

Are good for you.

I've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good. Now you just choose them. Secondly, besides doing the things you like, be moderate. And that's the other thing is that, you know, I think most researchers, most research has shown that if you cut down your calories by 15%, 30%, actually you improve survival, at least in lab animals, but also in people too. People that eat somewhat less, you know, the Japanese have the same. Ari Hitoshi Boo, right? Exactly. 80% full.

Don't push yourself away from the table before you're so stuffed that you can't.

Leave the party before it's over. That's basically what it is. It's better for your body. It doesn't put metabolic stress. When you stuff yourself to the gills, your body is really stressed out. Even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress your cells, if you eat slowly and moderately, your brain will sort of say, Hey, you know what? It's enough.

Well, it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain you're full.

Exactly. And this is, by the way, why eating with other people, which is what most of these Mediterranean countries do, the blue zone, where people live a long time, they eat with other people. It's good for you.

And you're talking so you can't be stuffing your mouth the whole time.

Exactly. And you're not distracted, you're not watching television, you're not looking at your phone. It's eating social. And so, that's another important component. finally it's got to be sustainable. You got to do something that you can do your whole life. And, that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can explore on. You were talking about razor clams. In my book, there's a lot of.

Foods that most people may not have heard about.

Bitter melon. Bitter melon, it's kind of a staple in some Asian countries but great to try. I wouldn't cook it yourself for the.

First time because it's not that easy to cook. Go to a Chinese restaurant. Yeah, let somebody who knows how to cook it. I love it. It tastes really bitter, but it actually is for diabetes, it helps lower blood sugar.

Absolutely. And you know what the interesting thing about bitter melon is, again, this is the culinary side, right? So, you know, here we were talking about the doctor's pharmacy, but in fact, we could be having a chef having this conversation as well. When you have bitter melon, which is a little bitter, it actually makes other foods taste more intense. So it actually, the way it was designed in cuisine, is actually help you make you enjoy other foods even more. So again, it's not either or, it's not an extreme, and it's about different cultures and finding what we love to do.

Well, it's fascinating. We bred food and vegetables to be more disease resistant, to be drought resistant, to be easier to be shipped without spoiling, to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols. In fact, the flavor comes from these phytochemicals.

Exactly.

So, we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables. That's why I say eat weird food because those typically haven't been screwed with. And, there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast, Chef Boulay from New York, who actually has quit his world-class restaurant and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like curcumin and turmeric oil and various things that he's done. And Dan Barber is also going to be coming on our podcast and he's created a new seed company to design seeds, not to be heirloom necessarily, but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor. Nobody was breeding for flavor. People were just breeding for all kinds of other things, pest resistance or GMO, whatever, instead of saying, well, how do we create more of these medicinal foods? And which is a whole new thing that chefs are starting to think about food as medicine. I remember when I was at Canyon Ranch years ago, probably like late 90s, and I got up in a meeting. There was the executives there, the owners, the doctors, the dieticians, the chefs. And I got up and I said, you know, we need to, this is a health resort. We need to start thinking about how to design are menus to use food as medicine. And the head chef got up and he screamed to me, this is not a effing hospital. I'm like, oh God, I guess I'm a little too early on this one.

Well, you know, listen, being ahead of the time is something that you're known for. And I think that we're now starting to appreciate it. I mean, think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food. Not only hospitals, by the way, but restaurants would be a great place. Theme parks would be a great place. Airlines would be a great place. I mean, there's so many places we can have an impact.

Well, it's just frame shift. Getting people to think about food as not just calories but information, not just energy but actually instructions that regulate your stem cells and your DNA and your microbiome and your immune system and your angiogenesis. I mean, these are things that are.

Not It's the new science of nutrition, right? So beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff, we're now combining food science with life science. The life science is what we learn in medical school. Food science, not so much, right? So the average, it's only like 20% of medical schools that require any nutrition. I can tell you part of what got me into this is that I used to be a doctor at a VA hospital and I felt a brave soul. well, I felt the duty to really try to help people that committed their lives to help protect our country.

Right.

So what was interesting, and I'm sure you know this as well, the veterans that come to the hospital, they're often, they have a lot of health problems. Some of them are obese, diabetes, they got diabetes, bad heart disease, cancer. You know, that's the sort of every day in the clinic. you see people that are really, really dealing with a lot of illness. And what I noticed was I said, you know, this is odd because these people, when they were in their 20s.

Were healthy, were fit.

They couldn't even get into the military if they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness, right? So what happened to them over the decades? And I realized it wasn't, you know, just medicines. It had to be their lifestyle. And when I kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses, oftentimes really bad diagnoses, you know, and then they would ask me, what's the treatment? How long do I have, Doc? You know, how bad is it going to be? They put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door and almost all of them would turn around and ask me one question. They said, Hey, Doc, what can I do for myself? What can I eat? And I didn't have the answer because I wasn't taught. We weren't taught to give that answer. and I thought that was wrong. And that's what led me on this journey that led me to write this book, Eat to Beat Disease, because I think that we need to know that people want to know that. What can we do for ourselves to eat to beat disease?

And in a way, there are really no drugs that work as well when you look at the spectrum of over your lifetime inputting all these powerful foods compared to what the effect of a medication would right? I mean, and there's studies have shown this, that the diet and lifestyle works better than statins, for example, for preventing heart disease. Mediterranean diet, the, the big study that was done, the prediMed study, which gave people a liter of olive oil a week or a bunch of nuts every day, the effects were equivalent or better than taking a drug and tastes much.

Better and less side effects. Right, right.

Right.

Well, you know, as we've been talking about, food as medicine is very natural in most parts of the world. And I think just sort of in our society, we've lost touch with things. You know, earlier we were talking about chefs getting into this, you know, this whole farm to table movement. Well, that's what it used to be for everybody. We only ate stuff that was going around us and we ate it because it tasted great because it was rich with these polyphenols and flavonoids. And by the way, you know, these bioactives that are natural chemicals and foods, what do they do? It's really interesting when you think about health defense. Most of the bioactives that are found in foods evolved in the plant, plant-based foods, to protect the plant. So either they were natural insecticides or they helped to attract bees and other insects so they'd pollinate so they could reproduce. Or protect them from elements. Or protect them from the elements of damage, make them stronger. So then when humans started to eat these plant-based foods, then these natural chemicals had another job description, which is they interacted with our human cells. And because they were already engineered to be protective, the ones that were useful to us and we developed this relationship with our plant-based foods also help us. And so there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view of what we're finding out. What we need to do now, though, is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves. and if you're interested in the science, it's there. It's an evolving science. Yes, we have health defense systems. Health isn't the absence of disease. It's our body working full steam, cranking along, and you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent, treat, or even reverse them by activating your defense systems using food. And whether you're healthy or sick, every person can take a decision three times a day. to really enhance their health and you don't need a doctor's prescription.

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