Unlock the Cancer-Fighting Power of Your Diet

Foreign. This is open mind. Today we're getting into a topic that's incredibly important for everyone, especially younger women. How your diet can help prevent cancer. Now, with cancer rates on the rise among young people, it's crucial to understand the role that chronic inflammation and our everyday food choices play in this crazy, alarming trend. Chronic inflammation is fueled by lots of things, by factors like a poor diet, environmental toxins, even stress creates a breeding ground for cancer. We're going to explore how the standard American diet, otherwise known as a sad diet, packed with ultra processed foods and sugars, disrupts our gut microbiome and leads to inflammation and insulin resistance and ultimately a higher cancer risk. But it's not all doom and gloom. We're also going to arm you with the knowledge you need to make better food choices that support your body's natural defenses against cancer. From vibrant, colorful veggies and fiber rich whole grains and antioxidant packed spices, we're going to discuss practical, delicious ways to nourish your body and reduce your cancer. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and welcome to Health Hacks. First, let's talk about what drives cancer so we can better understand how we can use food as medicine to help prevent it. Now, there are many root causes of cancer. Depends on the person, genetics, and everything they're exposed to throughout their lifetime, something we call the exposome. But chronic inflammation is one of the most common drivers of cancer. Now, this is chronic sterile inflammation, not infection. And it could be why cancer is on the rise in younger people, the development and the progression of cancer, it happens downstream of chronic low grade inflammation. So how does that work? How does chronic inflammation drive cancer? Well, it creates a microenvironment that supports tumor development, tumor growth and tumor progression. In other words, metastasis. Inflammatory mediators, things like cytokines, they promote DNA damage. They inhibit something called apoptosis, which is basically programmed cell death, getting rid of damaged cells. So it stops the process of actually getting rid of all the cells that are going to turn into cancer. It also enhances angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels that supply tumors with blood and nutrients for growth, which they need. Otherwise they die if they have no blood supply. Inflammation processes can also cause changes to your DNA through something called epigenetic modifications. If you eat bad food and junk food and ultra processed food, you are going to be silencing something called the tumor suppressor genes, genes that suppress cancer. Or even worse, you're going to be activating genes that cause cancer called oncogenes Oncology is cancer. Oncogenes are cancer causing genes. These are genetic mutations that turn on tumors and it's caused by what we're eating and that further promotes cancer development. All right, so let's back up a little bit and go into what causes chronic inflammation. So many things. First, living in our modern world, just being alive today is an inflammatory state. We have a constant exposure to environmental toxins, things that we never had before like PFAS chemicals, bisphenol A or BPA, microplastics and the list goes on and on. We're going to get into some more of those poor diet, our ultra processed diet, our sedentary lifestyle, your the over prescribing of drugs. Just aging itself causes higher risk, leaky gut, food sensitivities, food allergies, hormone imbalances and more. All these potentially drive inflammation. Now Hippocrates once said that all disease begins in the gut. And for the purpose of this conversation, we're going to follow his advice and start in the gut. So how do imbalances in your gut microbiome lead to cancer? Now this is really fascinating stuff. It's cutting edge stuff, so you're not hearing about this everywhere, but we're going to get into it. Today, a healthy gut contains a whole diverse population of bugs of microorganisms that play key roles in your digestion, in nutrient absorption and your immune function. Why? Because 60% of your immune system lives in your gut. It's right underneath the lining of your gut. Why? Because you're exposed to the outside world and it's trying to protect you from all the bad stuff inside your gut, which is poop and food. Now, good gut bacteria make something called postbiotics. You've heard of prebiotics like fiber or probiotics like lactobacillus, but there's something called postbiotics. These are molecules, metabolites of bacteria in your gut and they can be good or bad. So they're called postbiotics and they're made by what you're eating and feeding the bacteria in your gut. Now there's a lot of them, but some of them are really important in regulating cancer. For example, butyrate is a anti cancer compound made by your microbiome when you have good bugs in there. It also make other compounds like acetate and propionate. These are metabolized that are produced by bacterial fermentation of fiber and all the polyphenols, all those colorful compounds in veggies and fruits, that supports the integrity of the Gut lining. And the gut lining is so important because without healthy gut lining, basically all that poop and food is leaking into your bloodstream and causing your immune system to go crazy. Now, these metabolites, they're called short chain fatty acids, they have anti cancer properties, they regulate our immune system, they help fight inflammation. And when there's a good balance of these microorganisms, that's great. But when that balance is disrupted, it leads to an over growth of the bad bacteria and a reduction in the beneficial bacteria. So it's like getting weeds in your garden. The good plants, they get crowded out by the bad weeds, right? And bad bacteria are bad because they release poisons, toxins. We call them endotoxins. That just means an internal toxin. And those endotoxins get into your system through a leaky gut, and they also cause a leaky gut and they cause inflammation. And the imbalances in your gut microbiome that cause this problem is called dysbiosis. Now, dysbiosis can compromise the integrity of the gut lining. It makes you have a leaky gut and leads to something called increased intestinal permeability. In the. The basic lay term is leaky gut. Now, basically think about your gut as one cell lining that protects you from the outside world. And the cells are stuck together like Legos. They have something called tight junctions. When those are damaged, which happens because of bad gut bacteria and all our processed food and emulsifiers and additives and all this crap, you separate these cells and then the food and bacteria can leak in between the cells and get into your bloodstream. And then right underneath your gut lining is your immune system. So that's why this is such a big deal. And when you have this leaky gut, it allows toxins and undigested food particles and pathogens, bacteria to enter the bloodstream. And your body's like, wow, this is not me. That leads to an overactive immune system and chronic inflammation throughout the body and affects everything, not just cancer, but everything. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, literally everything. Autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, autism, add, depression, the list goes on and on and on. We're talking about cancer here. Now, the immune system responds to these foreign substances by what? By doing what it's supposed to do. It's like, this ain't me. It triggers an inflammatory response. So it's bad when you have bad bugs. And most of us have bad bugs in our gut. So how does this standard American diet, the SAD diet, disrupt our gut microbiome? Well, it's because it's so rich in bad stuff like ultra processed foods, which are energy dense, but they contain a lot of other stuff like added sugars, sweeteners, refined grains, bad fats, toxins, actual literal toxins, chemical additives, preservatives, pfas, phthalates, things that are just poisons that damage the gut. Now this feeds and grows the bad bacteria and it reduces something called bacterial diversity. You want an ecosystem like a rainforest complex, diverse, resilient. You don't want a monocrop cornfield that can go out just like that with some adversity. And we are having a low bacterial diversity in our modern world. Now beneficial bacteria, the good ones like Bifidobacteria lactobacilli, Akkermansia fasilla bacterium and roseberia, they're lower. And you have to remember all those names by the way. I'm just telling you because it's all the bugs that are the good ones. You can get to know them if you want. They're nice actually, but they're lower in abundance when you have a western diet. So when you have all these bad foods, all the good bugs go down and you get less of these good short chain fatty acids, less of these good anti cancer compounds that your gut naturally produces. Now on the other hand, when you eat this processed diet, it increases the abundance of something called pro inflammatory bacteria. These like Ruminococcus proteobacteria, which produce pro inflammatory compounds called lps. LPS stands for lipopolysaccharides. It doesn't really matter. Basically these are like poisons and these bacteria produce these poisons and they get into the system, they leak in and they start creating an inflammatory response. Now we can look at the gut in many ways. And I've seen so many stool tests. I used to call me doctor See every poop at my old job at Canyon Ranch because I looked at every stool test and we look at a lot of different factors. We can look at levels of bacteria, we can look at levels of short chain fatty acids, we can look at ratios of good mad bacteria, but there's a ratio of something called firmicutes to bacteroides. When you have a high ratio of firmicutes to bacteroides and these are basically categories of bacteria, it is linked to obesity and diabetes and metabolic disease. But a high ratio has also been seen with breast cancer, colorectal cancer. And it's really important to consider as a broader picture of the overall microbial diversity and your individual health and genetics. Now In a study that was titled Intake of Sugar and Food, Source of Sugar and Colorectal Cancer Risk in the Multi Ethnic Cohort Study, blah, blah, blah, whatever. They like these long names. The researchers noted that total sugar, total fructose, glucose and fructose and maltose, all different kinds of sugar, were associated with an increased risk for colorectal cancer, especially in younger people. Now, this is interesting because colorectal cancer is the number one cause of cancer death among men under 50 and the number two leading cause, cancer death, in young women. Now, this isn't static. It's increasing by about 1 to 2% a year in adults under 55. There's also a strong link between type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, and risk for colorectal, hepatic, pancreatic, breast, endometrial, and lots of other cancers. Now, there's something else that's really important here, which is we're all metabolically unhealthy. And there's an enormously strong link between type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, obesity, and the risk for so many cancers that are the most common cancers like colorectal cancer, liver or hepatic cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, endometrial, uterine cancer, and many other cancers. In fact, 48% of all cancers are attributed to obesity. But I think the number is probably a lot higher. And obesity, if you're overweight is associated with a 40% greater risk of early onset colorectal cancer. That's from the Journal of Gastroenterology. 45% of adults 59 and younger are obese. So a lot of people are at risk. And studies show that diabetes significantly increases the risk of cancer and that lots of people who have cancer have a high incidence of diabetes. Now get this. Up to 80% of pancreatic cancer patients actually have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes or impaired glucose tolerance when they're diagnosed. This is a deadly cancer. It's caused by our diet. So what else do chronic diseases have in common? Well, insulin resistance. That's what we've just been talking about, and you've heard me talk about it forever. I'm going to keep talking about it because it's the cause of everything. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia. So how does insulin resistance relate to cancer? Well, insulin is responsible for keeping our blood sugar balanced and stable. Now, insulin is a growth hormone. It causes your fat cells to grow, it causes your belly to grow, but it also binds to and causes cancer cells to grow. So eating a high sugar, high starch, high glycemic, diet causes our cells to become resistant to the effects of insulin. And what does that do? Well, that leads your body to produce more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. These high levels of insulin, or what we call hyperinsulinemia, increases the production of another molecule called IGF1 that stands for insulin, like growth factor 1. It's a hormone that increases cell division, cell growth, and inhibits autophagy or cellular cleanup. Now, sometimes it's good. It's like Goldilocks. But when you have high levels of IGF1 from all the sugar, it basically causes cells to continue to grow and divide and prevents them from being killed. Okay? Now, high blood sugar is present in 39 to 99% of cancer cases. And that leads to insulin resistance, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation in the body. It also creates something called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. Now, glycation is a chemical reaction. You're familiar with it. When your chicken skin is crispy or your bread has a crust on it, or when you get that creme brulee, it's got that crispy thing on top that's called glycation. It's when sugar and proteins or other fats bind together and form this basically compound called AGEs or advanced glycation end products. When these glycated products bind to DNA, they bind to proteins and lipids. It causes something called the mallard reaction, the browning reaction. You've seen this. But the problem is these accumulate in our tissue and they bind to something called rages, receptors for advanced glycation end products. When they bind to those receptors, it activates a whole inflammatory cascade, and that accelerates not only cancer, but also aging itself. And there's lots of sources of AGEs in our diet. We actually eat them on a regular basis, right? Ultra processed food is a big source. Dry heat processing is one way. Baked goods, cooking at high temperatures, brown charred, fried, burnt foods. These ages create damage to your blood vessels, and they cause oxidative stress, they reduce blood flow, they cause damage to your DNA, to your tissue, to your mitochondria. They're just bad. Now, you can kind of measure this in the blood by something called hemoglobin A1C, which is essentially glycated hemoglobin. It's your hemoglobin, which you can measure easily in your blood and see how much sugar is bound to it. And that kind of gives you a rough idea. There's also an amazing new test called the insulin resistance score from Quest, which allows you to get a really good read on your degree of insulin resistance and how bad it is, because hemoglobin A1c is, is a late stage phenomena. And it's great that you can do this test now and through function health, the company I co founded, to allow you access to your own lab data through, you know, just going directly to a quest lab and getting your data. Very simple process. You can go to functionhealth.com mark to learn and sign up. But the insulin resistance scores are really important because it really tells you what your risk is. Now, the test we commonly use in medicine now to look at glycation is called hemoglobin A1C. And if it's 6% or higher, it's associated with a high cancer risk in both diabetics and, and non diabetics. And even a lower level may be a problem. We find that even levels down to five are probably optimal. But anything over five, you're starting to increase your risk for heart disease and other things. So the cutoffs we have in medicine are arbitrary. We say six, it's six and a half. Used to be 5.7, it's prediabetes, 5.5. I mean, it's all a moving target because, you know, we're finding that at lower and lower levels there's a problem. So basically, you want your hemoglobin A to be as low as possible. Let's look at another big factor that causes cancer. Fructose. Now, fructose is something found in fruit, which is good, but it's not fruit we're talking about here. Epidemiologic or population studies which don't prove cause and effect, but they found strong associations between high fructose intake from sources like high fructose corn syrup and increased risk of pancreatic and colon cancers. Now, you realize we never had this stuff in our food supply until the 70s. There was no high fructose corn syrup. Now it's about 50% of our calories. It's in everything. And it's got not 50, 50 fructose and glucose, like sugar. It might have 55 to 75% fructose, which has all these adverse effects. And it's free fructose. Now there's something called the fructose transporter, and this is called GLUT5. It's not about your glutes. It's called GLUTE5. And it's overexpressed in cancers like pancreatic, colorectal, breast, lung cancer. Now, when you have high glut 5 expression, it basically allows for increased in intake or uptake of fructose by cancer cells. And what does that do that makes them grow because they, they love the sugar. It causes them to migrate and move around, meaning starting to spread and invasion, meaning metastases. So where are we getting high fructose levels in our diet? It's not from fruit. It's from added sugars and sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, sucrose and fructose as sweeteners that are in all the ultra processed food we eat. 60% of our diet is ultra processed food. So fructose in high fructose corn syrup and all the food adds is bad. So what else could be causing cancer that's in our SAD diet? Well, food additives. Over 10,000 chemicals are allowed in the food we eat in the United States. 10,000. And here's what's shocking. 99% of the food chemicals that have been introduced to our food supply since 2000 were approved not by the government, not by the FDA, but approved by the food and chemical companies that made them. It's like the fox guarding the henhouse, right? Since 2000, 756 new food chemicals have been added to our food supply through a loophole in the law called grass. G R A S. It stands for generally recognized as safe. So it seems like, oh, it seems like it's safe. Well, it doesn't seem to be killing anybody right now. So let's just put in the food supply. Now this grass loophole is a big deal. Food chemical companies exploit this loophole, allowing them to make their own safety determinations for substances that they say are generally recognized as safe. Now, the 1958 Food Atoms Amendment intended for rigorous FDA review, meaning if you want to add some new chemical to the food, the FDA has to review the science on this. But this grass loophole basically has become the main approval route. You basically take the company's word for it that it's safe. How crazy is that? Right? When a company determines a substance is grasp, it means they think it's safe among qualified experts. So they get a bunch of experts, they pay and they say it's safe, and then they submit a notice to the fda. But the process is entirely voluntary. And the FDA can review these notices and issue a quote, no questions letter. But it doesn't actually approve these substances or even affirm the company's safety data. So there's all this crap on our food that got in there without any real oversight. Now, due to this loophole, harmful ingredients have been added and continue to be added to our food supply. Let me give an example. 7 Carcinogenic flavor ingredients were approved as grass by female. This is the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association. Not a government group, an industry trade group. This is a group reviews and approves nearly all flavor ingredients. But these ingredients were later banned in 2018 after a petition by the Environmental Working Group for being linked to cancer in animals. Now I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group. So I've been part of this. I get it. It's really bad now. Food additives are commonly used to enhance the flavor of baked goods, ice cream, candy, chewing gum, beverages, all kinds of stuff. And they got weird chemical names. Benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, pyridine, styrene. Do you have these in your cupboard at home that you cook with? I doubt it. The term flavor is this vague label that food manufacturers use to hide chemical names from consumers. It's deliberate, they say it's got natural flavorings, artificial flavings, blah, blah, blah. You don't even know what it is. Right. A lot of other grass substances which are not approved in other countries include bha, which is classified as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen by the National Toxicology Program. Right. BHT or butylated hydroxytoluene. Would you put that in your salad? It's in everything. And that has been determined to disrupt endocrine function by causing change to thyroid and also affects animal development and fetal development. Now BHT is in everything. It's in cereal, chewing gum, potato chips, vegetable oil, baked goods, cakes, biscuits, crackers, pastries, everywhere. And it's banned in Europe. We're going to get to that in a minute. What other common additives are there? The next up is nitrates and nitrites. These are typically in processed foods like cured meats that form these cancer causing compounds when they're cooked called nitrosamines. And these things are, you know, found in bologna, salami, things like that. And it's associated with stomach, esophageal, and maybe even brain and thyroid cancer. Basically they say it's grass now and harmful later. Right. We have, we'll talk about it in a minute. But we basically say to the food industry, you go ahead and use it and you know, you don't really show us any proof. And if it's a problem later, we'll take it off the market. But how many people in the meantime have been harmed by that policy? For decades. And here's a great example. For decades, partially hydrogen oils, trans fat, Margarine shortening. You know why they call it shortening? Right? It shortens your life. They were considered grass even though they're a major source of trans fats in the diet, which can increase cholesterol and harm the heart. We've known for 60 years that it's bad. We've known that it kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. We've known it's a toxin. It's been on the market since 1911. And when Crisco was developed over 60 years, this scientist has been dedicated to showing the harms of trans fats. He's proven it in study after study, and yet the government never acted. And they did not act until the scientist was in his 90s and he filed a lawsuit against the FDA to make them deal with the data and finally determined that it was a non grass substance. Okay? Now the FDA then revoked this grass status because of this lawsuit in 2015. And they stated that removing these oils from the food supply could prevent thousands of heart attacks and deaths every year. Now why did they wait 60 years? Because the food industry was the one who was pushing them to keep it. And they are very powerful Now. Many grass notices lack critical health data. For example, you don't just eat one additive, right? You eat many. The average American diet is 60% ultra processed food. And if you are eating ultra processed food at that level, you're eating not a little bit, but 22 pounds, 22 pounds of food additives every year. And they are working in combination with each other. It's not just a single one. And the combined effects of these chemicals with other chemicals, they're never studied. Even though both the manufacturers and the FDA are, are supposed to consider the cumulative impact as part of the safety determination. Right? They're supposed to say, well, if there's 40 different chemicals you're eating in this food, what happens when you eat them all together? Never looked at. There's something called the precautionary principle which is better safe than sorry. Here in America, it's better sorry than safe. Oops. We didn't know the trans fats were killed to a couple of million people before we got off the market. Sorry, right? It's not like that in other countries. In Europe, these compounds are banned, right? Azodicarbonamide, which is a bleaching agent in white bread, is banned. Brominated vegetable oil, or BHA and BHT or potassium bromate, all banned because they follow the precautionary principle, which we should be doing. Guilty until proven innocent. Why put something in the food supply if we don't know if it's safe or not, and wait till we then learn that it's dangerous and then take it off the market. Here we're innocent until proven guilty. It should be guilty until proven innocent, right? In the US these ingredients are innocent until proven guilty. And it takes a lot to prove a causal relationship in humans. And by the way, it's unethical, right? It's unethical to conduct randomized control trials on humans. And animal data is sometimes challenging to extrapolate to humans, but there's a lot of data that these are harmful. Let's look at another category of additives, artificial sweeteners. Last year, the iarc, which is a cancer group, I think it's basically looking at all compounds that could be potentially carcinogenic. They announced that aspartame, which is the main sweetener in artificial sweetener products, is possibly carcinogenic to humans. They call this group 2B, calling on further research between the additive and cancer. This means there's evidence linking it to cancer, but maybe it's not strong enough to say that it's 100% connected. But why should we wait? If something looks like it's got a problem and it's an additive and we don't need it and it's not necessary for survival, then why should we be even considering consuming it now? Where do you get this? Well, it's in everything. It's in diet sodas, ultra processed food that are low calorie, low sugar, keto foods, might be zero calories. Sounds all good and healthy. Don't buy it. And they have significant biological effects. Studies have shown that these artificial sweeteners also adversely affect gut health and also glucose tolerance. So they affect your blood sugar control. Even though they don't have sugar, they're still sweet, right? They trick your taste buds into wanting and craving more sugar. Actually, you know, when Pavlov's dog heard the bell, when they rang the bell, they started salivating immediately, even though there was no food, because it created this, this response in the body that is common when you think about something or when something's stimulated. Like a taste bud with an artificial sweetener, it tells the brain that sugar's coming, it gets ready, produces insulin, does all these things, and that is a problem. So I recommend 100% giving up all these artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sucralose, sugar alcohols like xylitol, melitol, erythritol. They're heavily used, they're marketed sweeteners in all the health food stuff and all the stuff in whole foods and erewhon wherever you shop that's like got healthy food, all this crap is in there. You can use a little stevia, a little monk fruit, but don't use these other sweeteners. Now what else is in our food? Actual toxins. Not just food additives, but toxins. Not things they add there, but they're there because of the processing or packaging. So for example, pfas, these are the whole class of chemicals called forever chemicals. And they're used in products like nonstick cookware, like Teflon, ultra processed food packaging. So it's in the packaging, gets in the food, it's in our water. And in 2023, the IARC, that Cancer Research Organization classified PFOA, which is one of these carcinogenic to humans, Group 1 and PFOS, another one of these compounds, possibly carcinogenic to humans, group 2B. Now based on the available evidence linking these PFAS, certain cancers, they saw that there's a link. What do these things do? What do these forever chemicals do? They're everywhere. They call them forever chemicals because they stay around forever. They suppress the immune system, they trigger chronic inflammation, they interact with cell signaling receptors involved in cancer development. And there's also a link between PFOA and breast cancer, testicular cancer and colorectal cancer. So this is another thing that's in our food supply that should be out. So packaging and all the stuff that we cook in and eat out of and it's just, it's everywhere. Also, heavy metals are a big one, right? Heavy metals are in fish, mercury, tuna. I mean with Function Health, we're testing heavy metals, we test lead in mercury. And it's shocking how many people have really high levels of metals and they have no clue that they have high levels of mercury because they're eating all this sushi and they're all poisoning themselves. What about pesticides? There's lots of pesticides in our food. There are the residues from food and there are certain ways to avoid them. And so the environmental working group has a great guide called the dirty dozen and clean 15. Go to EWG.org, you can get the guide. It says here's the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables. Here's the 15 least contaminated. So you don't have to buy those organic, but you probably want to buy the other ones organic if you can. Okay, so how do we lower our risk? How can my diet help prevent cancer? What we should be Avoiding is the first thing to look at, right? First we got to get rid of the bad stuff. Functional medicine is really easy. Get rid of the bad stuff, put in the good stuff. When I was a resident and I was doing an oncology rotation, that's a cancer rotation, I said to the attending physician, who was my attending, I said, how, how much do you think food is connected to cancer? What percent of cancers do you think are diet related? And I thought, you know, this is back in the 80s, I'm old. He was like, I thought he was going to say 10%. He said 70%. Now, I don't know where you got that number from, but based on the data, between 30 and 50% of cancers are preventable through a healthy lifestyle and diet and avoiding environmental toxins. And remember, cancer is the second leading cause of death after heart disease, and it's almost half preventable. Right. We need to have the awareness to know what to avoid. So again, this is like a broken record for me. But the good news is it's the same thing for everything. If you want to avoid depression, dementia, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, you name it, it's the same thing. Take out the bad food, put in the good food, right? Avoid any ultra processed food that comes in a package. Starch, sugar, refined grains, added fructose, sugar, fast food, fried foods, sugar, sweetened drinks, hot dogs, hamburgers, low quality meats, deli meats and dairy that is full of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, food additives. Just stay away from all that stuff. Anything that comes in a package with a long list of ingredients, you know, it takes you longer to read the ingredient list than to eat the food. For sure, don't eat it. Get rid of all artificial sweeteners. Right? The IARC classified aspartame as a group 2B carcinogen. Right, we talked about that. Equal, NutraSweet. Also fructose. Be really wary. I mean, table sugar, a little bit is fine. Like if you want to put something in your coffee, don't put in NutraSweet. Put in a tablespoon of sugar. I mean, I mean a teaspoon, don't say tablespoon, a teaspoon of sugar, but stay away from all these added sugars. High fructose, corn syrup, liquid fructose, sodas, fruit juices, a lot of green juices are full of sugar. Just be very careful. Whole fruits, okay? Has fiber, has phytonutrients, polyphenols, don't worry about that. Also, don't eat deep fried chard foods, sugary sauces, and barbecued foods. I know, they're so good. They're so yummy. I love them too. But you know, occasionally as a treat, but realize that you're harming yourself when you do that. You really want to be careful because these, these, these foods increase the ages. They also raise your A1C. Also cook more meals at home, eat out less, right? Because you don't know what you're getting. There's weird oils on there. I mean, I used to work at this place called Mother's Sandwich Shop when I was in high school and I was a delivery boy. But I also had to like clean up after at the end of the night and I would literally go, and I was shocked at this. They literally had this big vat of oil that they used to make fries in or deep fry, whatever they were making their grinders. And my job every night was to go in there and clean the oil. So I literally had to take all the oil out, I had to run it through a filter, take all the, you know, pieces of whatever food out and then to put it back in. Now when you heat oil like that and you reheat it, and you reheat it and use it for a month like that, it turns into this highly oxidized toxic compound that is very dangerous for you to eat. So don't do that. And when you're eating out, you're adding all kinds of sugar to food, flavor enhancers, weird ingredients. You don't know what they're doing, where they get it from. Okay, so what should we eat? Well, eat real food, whole real food, right? Eat food that keeps your blood sugar balanced, keep it balanced and stable with a low glycemic anti inflammatory diet. Eat a whole variety of whole colorful plant foods. Six to eight cups a day, that's a lot. But it's really what we should be doing. The majority of your plate should be plant food. I call it a plant rich diet versus a plant based diet. So by volume, most of your diet should be plants. If you put three quarters of your plate as colorful vegetables, that's what you should be doing. And 25% is protein. A little, maybe a little starch or carb, but that's it. The more color, the better, the more benefits, the more cancer fighting nutrients they have. And you want to eat non starchy veggies. Like I said, these are the non starchy veggies I'm talking about. Now you can have starchy veggies, that's okay, but we'll talk about that. But not as much quantity, but you can have unlimited refills of cruciferous vegetables. And these are anti cancer veggies. This whole family of brassica cruciferous vegetables, the broccoli family, bok choy, kale, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, dandelion greens, these are highly anti cancer compounds. Now epidemiological studies have found an inverse association between higher intake of these cruciferous veggies and a reduced risk of certain cancers like lung, colorectal and breast cancer, although the evidence is not entirely consistent. But they've seen, for example, there's a study in China where they looked at the metabolites of broccoli in the urine. And those who had the highest metabolites of the broccoli, like foods that they eat over there, had very much lower rates of cancer. So what's responsible for these anti cancer effects of these special category foods? So I want you to remember this. Every day you should have a serving or two or three from this family of vegetables. They're delicious, they're yummy. There's lots of them. And I encourage you to, when you're going shopping, focus on these veggies because they are so important for so many things. And what they contain are these phytochemicals that are like medicine. In fact, they're actually been shown by John Hopkins to be anti cancer. One of the products I use is called Oncomplex, which is basically a broccoli extract and it contains glucosinolate, sulforaphanes. These are naturally occurring compounds that are converted into cancer fighting compounds from chewing, cutting or crushing. Now when the plant tissue is damaged, it activates an enzyme called myrosinase. This myrosinase is an enzyme that's responsible for the conversion of these compounds into the anthracancer versions. Now cooking a little bit deactivates myrosinase. But glucosinolates exhibit anti cancer effects by inducing something called apoptosis or programmed cell death in cancer cells. And they inhibit angiogenesis. So just high level. When you eat broccoli, it causes the cells, cancer cells to die and also inhibits angiogenesis, which means they can't get blood flow. And they're basically you're stopping the food for the cancer. That's good. They also prevent DNA damage. So these broccoli compounds prevent DNA damage. They exhibit anti inflammatory effects, antioxidant effects. They also support detox. Right. Your liver has to detox foods and chemicals and offers protection against hormone dependent cancers. For example, one of the broccoli extracts is, or when I say broccoli, I mean this whole family is called Indole 3 Carbinol or I3C and has been shown to reduce the growth of precancerous cells in breasts. It's also been shown to help with cervical cancer and even can be helpful in reversing cervical dysplasia if you have an emerald Pap test along with some other nutrients like methylating nutrients. And I use this all the time called diindolmethane. It's a regular part of my practice. Also, whole grains and beans are quite good for you too. They're rich in fiber. They increase short chain fatty acids like butyrate. Now if you're really overweight or diabetic, you can't tolerate maybe the glycemic load. But these can be very helpfully included in a, in a healthy diet. They're anti inflammatory and they create this postbiotic when we talked about butyrate and that reduces inflammation, it helps fight cancer. So you want to eat at least 30 grams of fiber every day. That sounds like a lot, but it's not. We used to eat 150 grams of fiber every day. That's six to eight cups of veggies and that includes fiber. And that can include grains and beans and 12 to 18 servings of these foods. So really, really important. So how do you get more fiber in your diet to hit the six to eight cups? Don't overcomplicate it. You can have soups and stews. They can have lots of different veggies. You can throw bok choy, onions, garlic, carrots, leeks, celery, tomato, shallots, whatever. Smoothies are great. Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries. I actually make a veggie smoothie. Throw in avocado, you can throw in spinach, you can throw in cucumbers, you can throw in any kind of vegetable you can think of. Celery and cilantro, parsley. I like to make a different ones. I throw lemon, I throw ginger and I put in my Vitamix and I got this delicious green smoothie. And you know, if you want to take a little bit of the bitter out from some of the veggies, you can throw like a half an apple in there. But it's really quite amazing. You can also have fruit and raw veggies as snacks. Pomegranate berries, apples, carrots, bell pepper, celery, all good. You can have my big fat salad, which different types of lettuce, kale, spring mix, spinach, romaine, cucumbers, beets, carrots. Now, there are also foods, other foods besides these cruciferous vegetables that you can include in your diet, besides the fiber, that help protect against cancer. And they contain specific polyphenols, these plant phytochemicals that influence the expression of your genes. They regulate your antioxidant system, and they also regulate the detoxification of carcinogens. For example, tomatoes contain lycopene. It's a carotenoid, turns it the kind of red color, and it helps protect against prostate cancer, especially cooked tomatoes. So tomato sauce is great for you, and it's an anti prostate cancer food. It's also epigenetic effect of these foods. For example, it inhibits androgen receptor expression in prostate cancer cells. So when you have lycopene, it actually inhibits the expression of receptors for testosterone in your prostate cancer cells. So they don't actually grow. In fact, one of the treatments for prostate cancer are androgen blockers that basically lower testosterone. Soy also contains other compounds that are helpful, like isoflavones, which they call a phytoestrogen, but it's not an estrogen. It just binds to estrogen receptors. And it actually is something that can block the effect of toxic estrogens in the body from environmental toxins, because they're called xenoestrogens or foreign estrogens that are in plastics and pesticides. It also has a little bit of weak estrogenic activity, but it helps balance with lots of things. And there's different names for these phytochemicals called genestein and diadzine, which protect against breast cancer and prostate cancer. Now with beans and so forth, there's some concern about, for certain groups of people and grains that might not be helpful. And if you have a lot of gut issues, if you have autoimmunity, there's certain things that might be an issue, like lectins or saponins, but on the whole, most people can tolerate these. Make sure also that you use whole food sources that are non gmo, that are organic things like edamame, tofu, tempeh, miso, traditional fermented soy sauce. I want you to avoid all the refined oils, all the seed oils and bean oils, soybean oils, soy protein isolate, which is really weird. It's basically a science project that's a byproduct of soybean oil production, but it's hydrolyzed soybean and it actually is pro cancer, so stay away from that. This is from data from the NIH textured vegetable proteins, soy cheese or ice cream, all that fake vegan food. Just don't eat that stuff, okay? The Shanghai Breast Cancer Survival Study showed that higher soy consumption, like whole soy, like they eat in China, tofu and so forth, is associated with an approximately 30% reduced risk of breast cancer recurrence. So you'll say, oh, soy causes cancer. It doesn't. It's only the weird soy that's an industrial byproduct of ultra processed food that causes cancer. And this is a great study that was done at nih. It showed the difference between whole soy versus this industrial soy. So whole soy is different. And that showed a 30% reduction in the risk of breast cancer. It was even more protective effect. That was more dramatic for women who eat soy throughout their life, starting in childhood and adolescence. Also, there's another group of foods that you want to be eating a lot of berries. Berries contain anthocyanins, flavonoids and ellagic acid. All these are names for phytochemicals, but it's basically a whole pharmacopoeia in your food. And these neutralize free radicals, they reduce oxidative stress, and they reduce DNA damage. Another great thing to consume on a regular basis is green tea. Now why is green tea good? Because it activates tumor suppressor genes, it inhibits angiogenesis. So it basically suppresses the tumor genes and inhibits the growth of blood vessels to supply the tumor. Now, the Shanghai Men's health study followed 60,000 Chinese men aged 40 to 74 and found that non smokers who drank green tea at least three times per week for more than six months had a 46% reduction in the risk for colorectal cancer. Now that's big. Why? Because smoking causes cancer. So just having green tea was strong enough to overcome the effects of smoking. Now, I'm not saying you should smoke and drink green tea. Don't get me wrong. But just know that this is a powerful compound. Also garlic. Garlic contains something called allicin and other organosulfur compounds that supports detoxification, like glutathione production, enhances your immune system. It's antibacterial, it's anti inflammatory. And here's the one you're going to like. Coffee. Coffee. A Meta analysis of 59 prospective cohort studies found that compared to non coffee drinkers, those who were regular coffee drinkers had a lower overall cancer incidence. I like that because I like my cup of coffee every day in the morning. Each one cup a day increase in coffee consumption was associated with a 3% reduced risk of cancers. But be careful. You don't want to overdo the coffee because it causes other problems too. And the specific cancers that help are liver, breast, endometrial and colorectal cancer because it's full of all these wonderful polyphenols and antioxidants. In fact, coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet. It's not saying a lot about coffee. It's saying about how crazy crappy our diet is and how few other plant chemicals we get in our diet. Now, they reduce oxidative stress, they reduce inflammation, they might have benefits on your epigenetics and the modulation of the gut microbiome. There's compounds also that are really helpful, like cafisol k wal chlorogenic acids that may modulate various cellular pathways involving cancer growth. There are pathways like NRF2AHR and four A1 pathways. You don't have to remember all that. It's just the science is there is what I'm saying. Just take my word for it. If you want to look it up, go ahead, use chatgpt, whatever, look it up. But I'm telling you, this is real stuff. The very high intake of coffee over six and a half cups, which is not good, actually works the opposite. So it's like goldilocks. You don't want too much, you don't want too little. That six and a half cups or more will increase your risk of cancer. Okay, another category of amazing foods to include that are anti cancer and see how there's so much medicine in our diet that we can actually use to help us on a daily basis enjoy the food, love overeating and help us prevent cancer. Not bad. Mushrooms. Mushrooms are incredibly powerful, particularly for cancer. Turkey tail actually is used in Chinese medicine to strengthen the immune system and increase something called natural killer cells. What are natural killer cells? Well, they're exactly what they sound like. They're the hunt and destroy white blood cells that go out and kill cancer. They also help infection. Turkey tail is actually approved as an adjunct to standard cancer treatment in Japan. There's also a compound in turkey tail mushrooms called psk or polysaccharide K. It's the active compound that is approved to treat cancer. What else can you include that's anti cancer? Well, extra virgin olive oil. I use that every day. Dark chocolate. Also probiotic rich foods, goat or sheep, yogurt, kefir, kimchi, tempeh, natto, sauerkraut, all support a healthy gut. Also vitamin D rich foods like herring and mushrooms and Vitamin D itself is anti cancer. Lots of herbs and spices are also great antioxidant. Rich herbs and spices, they scavenge free radicals like for example turmeric, which is found in the curry, the yellow spice. It actually has curcumin that reduces inflammation. It scavenges free radicals and inhibits all the pro cancer pathways. It downplays the expression of genes involved in cancer progression. Also there's lots of other great anti cancer herbs and spices. Rosemary, oregano, thyme, basil, bay leaf, garlic, parsley. These are amazing. So just think about it. Your kitchen is your pharmacy. Your kitchen is your pharmacy. Your kitchen is your anti cancer headquarters. Okay? So just be aware of what you're buying in the grocery store. And by the way, when I go shopping, I look for all these foods. I know this stuff because I've been doing this for 40 years. But I literally hunt and gather in the grocery store for all the medicines I know are going to be the most potent medicines. So I make sure I buy the foods I just talked to you about. There's another thing we have to think about with food which are the toxins in food, pesticides and all other toxins. So how do you avoid those? Well, avoid processed and packaged foods. All that BPA is in the plastics and the cans and the packaging. Phthalates, the forever chemicals, pfas, microplastics that leach into our food from packaging, from the manufacturing processes. It's in our water, in our soil. Make sure you filter your water. In fact, Consumer Reports tested food products for phthalates, which is one of these toxic chemicals from 67 grocery stores and 18 fast food chains and found that levels vary dramatically. Some of the worst offenders for having these chemicals were Coca Cola, Fairlife, Core Power, High Protein Milkshakes, Slim Fast, Yoplait, Wendy's, Crispy Chicken Nuggets, Chipotle and Moe's, Southwest Chicken Grill, Chicken Burrito, Burger King, Whopper, Cheerios, and the list goes on. Now I'll put the link to the article in the show notes so you can read it yourself. But I'm not making this stuff. This is real science. Now lab testing can really help you better understand your risk. I recommend everyone get their lab tests regularly. And that's why I co founded and I'm the chief medical officer of Function Health. The link is functionhealth.com, and you can get access. There's 50,000 people members, but 300,000 on the waitlist. You can jump the waitlist with that code functionhealth.com, now why I created this is to give people access to their own lab data to democratize health. Over 100 plus biomarkers are tested for just $4.99 a year. Twice a year testing and you get comprehensive testing that gives you an idea of where you're headed, what your metabolic health. For example, fasting insulin is tested in less 1% of all lab tests by your doctor. But that's really important as we've just talked about. Cardiometabolic health which looks at your, your insulin resistance through, through your cholesterol test, your blood sugar, your A1C, remember the glycated hemoglobin, your white cells, your red cells, your platelets. All important in looking at cancer. Nutritional status, which plays a big role in cancer. Like vitamin D and the Omega 3s, the B vitamins like homocysteine, highly linked to cancer. Zinc, iron, Magnesium, really important B12, all these play a role in your immune system. Looking at inflammation is important. High CRP, because you can see we were seeing 46% of the population that we're testing have a high C reactive protein. That's terrifying to me. Everybody's walking around inflamed and they don't know it. And as we've talked about, inflammation is a huge driver of cancer. And we also look for other things that cause cancer like stress, cortisol levels. Uric acid is another important marker. Looking at your metabolic health, sex hormones can be linked to cancer like estrogen and so forth. Liver enzymes to show how well you're detoxifying heavy metals. We can see we're able to do other things even like pfas, chemicals, bpa. We're going to be testing all these tests. We're going to be able to show you what's going on in your body. You also may want to look at other tests like a microbiome analysis. You might want genetic testing. We do also something called the gallery test. And this is something really important to me. The Galleri cancer test we do at function and we've seen a tremendous amount, a surprising amount of cancer in a relatively young population. In fact, one of every 188 people that gets tested with the Galleri test has a positive test and there is less than half a percent false positives. And it picks up the cancers when they're often missed by regular treatments. A year or two or three before regular screening tests will pick them up and they could save your life. So personally I think this should be done every year, starting probably about 40. I'm certainly doing it. I've had two cancer deaths. My father, my sister died. So I'm definitely checking mine. And the sooner you know the better. There are other tests to do. We do for example looking at toxin load mitochondria test in Germany I use called igl. But this is really important to know what's going on in your body, to track yourself over time, to get your data and to kind of clean up your life so you can dramatically reduce your risk. So as we wrap up today's episode, it's really clear the power of food goes far beyond just nutrition. By understanding the root cause of cancer and the role of chronic inflammation, we can take proactive steps to protect our health, which is really important. Remember, making informed choices about what we eat and opting for whole nutrient dense foods and avoiding all that ultra processed crap can make a huge difference in reducing our cancer risk. So I want to thank you for joining me on this journey on this critical link between diet and cancer prevention. And I hope today's discussion empowers you to make healthier choices and take control of your well being. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate, review and follow wherever you listen to health hacks. Your support makes all the difference. So thank you. Stay healthy, stay informed and I'll catch you next Tuesday for another episode of Health Hacks.