The Power of Boundaries & Self-Care: Dr Nasha Winters on Healing, Impact, and Cancer Prevention

Welcome to the Wellness Sherpa Podcast, where we engage with passionate leaders, holistic thinkers, and disruptors who courageously share their personal journey, mission and wisdom with you. Together, we create a safe space to empower you to live your best, most vital life. Thanks for being here. Well, hello everyone. I am with the brilliant Dr. Naysha Winters, author of the Metabolic Approach to Cancer, Mistletoe. Remind me the title of your mistletoe book.

Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology.

Ah, look at that. Also founder. Oops, there goes my crazy phone. Hold on.

They're trying to join us. Yeah.

And you've developed training, education.

Information.

Wow, what a journey you've been on. So what an honor and pleasure and also such a dear friend, a dear soul sister. And I am just so grateful to finally have you here. I think we scheduled this like in February of earlier December, a long time coming.

Did you know what's. It's what it worth the wait.

Worth the wait, the saving, the best for last.

There you go, ushering out 2025.

Yes. So thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me. It's such a joy to be with you. And I mean, my gosh, your listeners have got to been following you and all of your adventures this year. We were talking before you started recording that. I think we're neck and neck on how many trips we've been on this year. And it's just, it's. I'm in awe of watching you stepping into.

Your story, your power, your healing that you've brought to yourself but now are sharing with others. It's just a sight to behold. So it's an honor to be here with you and the community that you serve. So thanks for having me. Thank you.

So let's talk about this travel, let's talk about the, this kind of like, tension of opposites, where to get out into the world, to be in the world, to have an impact, and then also how that is impacting our bodies, our minds, our health, our sleep, all the things. So let's start there.

Well, you know, you and I, like this is. It's funny because I, I was someone who always, for my work as a naturopathic doctor, I would have to attend a certain amount of courses per year in person to get continuing medical education, to maintain my license and to maintain my malpractice insurance and those things. And just to better my knowledge. Right. And for many years, you could only do them in person. There were no online offerings. That's only really something new. So as clinicians we would have to save up an enormous amount of money and time to then organize our clinics, to get out, to go to these conferences, to get our continuing education. And so they were far and few between that. I had to do that for years. Like from the moment I graduated naturopathic school, from the moment I graduated acupuncture school. That's just something that's goes with the territory of having a board.

You know, certified education program. That's just part of what you do to maintain your, your credentials. And so it wasn't until my book came out in 2017, the metabolic approach, that I got to be invited to speak in more places. Although I've done a few here and there, but usually they coincided with my continuing education. So they were still far and few between. But now I'm invited to speak in more places and on more podcasts and next thing I know, for past eight, nine years I was averaging all the way up until Covid even. And then it picked up momentum again in 2021. An average of 35 conferences a year. Wow. Wow. And that was not even like just to go and like see family or take a little holiday if I could squeeze, managed to squeeze that in. It was a lot. And so suddenly you realize that's several times a month, if not every week on an airplane.

And it, it comes up quickly. Right. I mean you probably look at your calendar now from this past year and just go, how did I do that?

How did I do that?

Exactly. Yeah. So there's the joy, the excitement of, oh, an opportunity to share with my peers or to share with, you know, the masses. Because that's what we came here to do. Right. We had these life experiences that say, hey, it's time to share something. But man, and once I'm there, I'm fine. But it, it's really hard on my body. I really take, I really go down hard. I'm really sensitive to the lighting in hotels and conference rooms, the water quality, the food quality or lack thereof, the, the air quality, just the travel itself, the, on the damage on our DNA and the stress of missed flights and delayed flights and it just accumulates a whole pile up chaos in our circadian rhythm and our, our life rhythm in general.

Yeah. And so what do you do to support yourself beside out my scroll of things?

Right. I want to get a picture of your like travel buddies. Like we should compare and contrast notes because definitely don't you think you've accumulated, oh, sort of hacks along the way that you try on for size some Stick. Some don't, you know. Yeah.

And some evolve and some you go, okay, that's not working anymore. Yeah, it's a, it's a constant, I would say upgrade.

Yeah.

Of seeing what works and what doesn't work.

Yeah, yeah. And so for me, like one of my biggest hacks was to learn how to pack very minimalistically so I could just do carry on so I didn't have to waste time at carousels or the fear of getting something, getting lost or short connections. That was one along the way. So people are always shocked that I can go to Europe for like five or six weeks with a carry on speaking at multiple conferences and looking somewhat put together and in different environments, you know, in different climates. That was one of my superhero powers. But I've also learned to travel with certain things. Like I found a really cool water bottle that's titanium from the company Grail. That kind of push is like a French press. So instead of me plasticizing the bejesus out of myself or spending enormous amounts of money on glass bottles, I can fill up in the kitchen or the bathroom sink of my hotel and basically French press out really well. Filtered water, which is a. That was one of my favorite hacks that I now take with me everywhere. So that's great. I could actually take it to a stream and fill it and press it and drink it. It's that filtration, if that's a word. That's a good one.

It is now.

It is now. I think that's one of my big ones. And then the other one that has been my latest kind of over the last year or two is these hydrogen tablets, these molecular hydrogen water tablets which I've tried all the pills and potions. I've taken all kinds of stuff and I still try to like Vitamin C is probably a good idea. You know glutathione or high dose melatonin when you're going through multiple time zones. But the one that makes the biggest difference on how I feel are these little molecular hydrogen tabs. And I've tried millions of different ones on the market and I'm. This isn't. I don't get anything from this company, but I'm really pleased with the Axiom 2 tablet H2 tabs just because they're packed. So they're also easy and they dissolve like a lozenge instead of me having to plop them into a glass because you have to put them in glass, dissolve them in the ones that are out there. Hard to get if you're flying Coach. Yeah. And they can't put them in metal, so I couldn't put them in my water bottle. So these little.

Put it in your mouth.

Yeah. And to me it kind of does like a pop rock vibe, so I kind of love it. But I can feel the difference with those. And I can tell if I forget them, it just keeps my circulation going and keeps my. I feel like my blood flows because I get very easy lymphedema with my medical history, which we might talk about here in a moment. And so if I'm on a flight for longer than two hours, I look sexy in my compression socks and my H2 tabs and my filtered water bottles. So those are my fun things. I know.

Rocking it.

What are your favorite? Like your top three?

Well, one of my big issues is scent. You know, you walk into a hotel and they have all the artificial scent and they have windows that don't open. And so I have something I actually wear around my neck. I don't even know the brand of it that I got several years ago. So I make sure I always travel with that on the plane because you're actually getting clean air. And when I get to the hotel, I, I use a lot of Palo Santo and I use a lot of hydrosols to help clean up the space and pull that nasty artificial scent out of the air.

Oh my God, I love that you just reminded me what I travel with. It's about this big.

Okay.

Like just like bigger. Just about the size of a deck of cards, but. But about two to three cards deep. Thick wise. And it's actually a little portable ionizer and portable ozonator. Yeah. And that's what this is. Very cool. Okay.

What brand do you.

What brand is a therage?

Okay. Okay.

But there's a few on the market. But you're right that you just, just nailed that. Like, I forget even just walking on an airplane, it's like a giant scent bubble. Like people don't understand how much they're off gassing.

Yes.

Of their body care products. Their, their, you know, their clothing. What they wash their clothing with the polyester. Yeah. Awful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's. You and I were talking also this year is going to be different. I want to hear you how you're going to make it different. Yeah.

You know, I.

Just learned recently, you know, we often say I'm committing to myself and promises are stronger than commitments. So I have made a promise to myself to not travel more than six times next year, which is 10th of what I've traveled this year, and I already know three of those trips. So what that means is if anything new outside of three new trips comes into my sphere, I get to say no. And it's a good practice in boundaries and really in honoring ourselves. Right. We both teach fill your cup. Fill your cup. Put your oxygen mask on first. I once learned the saying that babies actually take an in breath when they're born, not an out breath. They have to be kind of spanked before they push air out. So we are naturally receivers. And yet, especially as women, I think we give, give, give, give, give, and the tank is empty. So for me, that is number one on my list coming into 2026, is to take my in breath, keep this promise to myself of minimal travel, sleep in my bed, get clean air. Right. All the things. All the things.

And I love that because what you also do, when you are traveling the world and making a huge impact, you are also not making a huge impact or you're making a negative impact on your health, but you're getting far away from the routines that keep you sane and keep you balanced. And it's. We do our best. Like, I still travel. I try to see sunrise, sunset. I try and do my best to keep my body and my diet as usual when I'm home. But you're at the mercy of a lot of things you can't control.

Y. You know, the bed you're sleeping in, the sheets, the. The airs, the scents.

Exactly.

All of. All of those things. So. So we're making a promise together. Yes. There you go.

Pinky swears.

Exactly. Yeah. Because I'm with you. I've got one little tiny intercontinental trip or, excuse me, January. And then I told was promising to Jen before we went online that I'm not getting on another airplane until end of June. And for me, there are also a couple consolidated trips. There's like a couple in that little window and a couple in. In September, and then one big one metabolic health day conference in October. And then I like you. That's it. So kind of. It's interesting. So my three trips are still. Some of them are. They go for weeks, but they're in.

So once on an airplane for a period of time. So that helps.

That makes a huge difference. But it's shocking how, like, I spent seven weeks abroad in eight countries this summer, and I think nine speaking engagements, and it was just never ending. Boom, boom, boom of like, by the time I'd open my eyes. Where am I now?

Yeah, you know, what country am I in?

Exactly. Exactly. So. But that's when you know it is. And that's where. How do. Like I'm asking you, but also your listeners, like, how do you bring your knowledge and your gifts to the world without wringing yourself out at the same time? And though we've made these promises to ourselves, I still want to have that same impact. And so I am trying to learn from anyone and everyone who has mastered this to be a humble student of that wisdom.

Yeah, I'm still learning to.

I have not. I have definitely not mastered it, but I also know we are meant to impact millions, not hundreds. And so it's creating some kind of balance where we can do that in the physical, but there's got to be a way to do it energetically and through tech. I mean, with the technology, it's changing all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, and you are using the medium, as am I, of writing, you know, publishing, and you have this documentary that is just incredible. Like, I feel like you get to be more in your armchair versus on the stage as your words are rippling through with these other mediums that don't involve your physical container. Yes, yes.

The documentary has been a game changer. Highly, highly recommended. And I see one in your future, too.

Okay.

Yes, that part was easy.

That part was easy. That was probably one of the easiest projects that I have ever worked on. Much easier than writing, than writing the book.

And could that be your amazing team that I get to also tap into a little bit?

Yes, it is.

Okay. I love it, I love it, I love it. So cool. So cool.

Well, let's shift gears here a little bit and let's talk about. Because I don't even know the answer to this question.

Okay.

When was it that you knew that you needed to set. Stop working one on one with so many people and to create the programs and the education platform that has just immensely expanded and grown and drawn so many beautiful, brilliant people into your sphere?

Wow, that gives me chills. I don't know if no one's ever asked me that straight out. I kind. I do know the answer. I know exactly what that was like for me, which I had started doing retreats in about 2009, which is what I think planted a seed that I could say one thing to many versus just one on one. So I think that that was percolating in there, and it was more of my goal at that time was more just getting people out of their environment for a few days to help show them another path. I didn't really think about the scalability of it or the fact that I could say something once and then move on. So that was around 2009. In 2012, I was invited to speak at a Colorado ovarian Cancer Association COCA event. And it's because. So up until 2012, nobody knew my story. I was very, very private about my story. And I had this woman who came in in a wheelchair.

End of life with ovarian cancer, who wanted just like supportive, literally supportive end of life care. And first of all, let's. I'll ruin the end of the story for everybody. She's still here doing awesome all these years later. In fact, I'm waiting for her book. I know it's been written because I've read it, but I'm waiting for her book to come out. But she. Because we didn't have an expectation of saving her, we just started working with her in her terrain. And slowly but surely she started to turn a corner. And slowly but surely things started to stabilize. And slowly but surely, over a matter of months, she's living, not dying. And in this online support group she was part of by a group called Inspire, they have like breakout rooms. So there's like the inspire breast cancer and prostate cancer. She was in the Inspire ovarian cancer room and people were surprised that she was still here and people were asking her what she was up to. And so in her conversations, she kind of put me on the map. And given that there are around 20, at that time there were 24000 women. This is back in like 2012, about 24000 women a year were diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And over 17000 of those women died every year. Wow. So when you look at the numbers that way, now it's like 28000 women and about 820000 of those. Like the stats are kind of. There's more, but they haven't really shifted the statistics. But what that means you have a.

And resourceful and resilient women looking for the answers that they can't get from standard of care alone. And not to say that there was standard of care failed them. It just wasn't enough. There needed to be more and they were hungry and looking for that. And so this support group started to churn that curiosity, which ended up having dozens of these people coming all the way a little podunk Durango, Colorado for care. And then I ended up being invited to this big event, this big Colorado event to speak. And they had me speak three different times because there were other breakout sessions Happening. But they were afraid that no one would go to the other breakout sessions because they all wanted to come and hear my breakout session. So that was an interesting thing. Which was wild, right? And this is before people even still knew they had some smattering, that I had a history. But they, they knew maybe ovarian, but they didn't know details. I was, I was being very private about it for a lot of reasons we can go into later. But it crashed their website for all the people trying to come on and watch it live. But what was even more interesting to me was that all of the doct. The typical gynecological oncologists that typically come and speak at this event boycotted the event because I was there presenting.

Wow.

And all is that did it. Of course it upset me. Like, I was like horrified. I was like, how bad? But it emboldened the ladies. Like, it basically was like, you little wieners. Like, what in the world? And so it backfired. Like, that boycott actually played out. And suddenly we're on a global stage. Suddenly there are women coming from literally all over the world. And suddenly I have a year long wait list now with stage four ovarian cancer. Yeah, that's. You don't have a year. Right. And so this is what's happening is what prompted me to realize I could not do this is that I was seeing an average of five new patients a week. And that was just ovarian cancer patients. But then it was starting to get out there that I was working with more, you know, not other cancer types, because I'm not. I don't treat cancer. I treat people that happen to have cancer. But it had been that big particular demographic that exploded me. And it became really apparent that I could not serve those people fast enough and that my own health was suffering miserably. So in order to onboard them, we started having these retreats that were basically onboarding retreats. So 2012 was the turning point of. Of a global platform, a global reach. Literally, people dying in the waiting room that said, you can't do this one on one or you won't be of service to anybody else. You will be dead if you keep up with this pace. And it launched us into these amazing retreats that we ended up doing. Gosh, from 2012 to 2016, we were doing an average of one a month. Wow. And were you doing them all from.

Colorado or were you traveling all over?

We were. We started in Colorado and we were doing in California and Mexico and Todos Santos and Hawaii and Hana in like all these places in South Carolina and like all over. So it became this amazing.

Platform and it was not my platform. It was the people who attended the retreats created a platform and they all continued to support each other and support, you know, recipes and whatnot. And it just highlighted the need for a community inspired approach to health care and health maintenance and health creation that was, especially in 2012, limited. We didn't have podcasts and social media. I mean they weren't the thing then it was just starting to come to bear and somehow these little online forums became the lifeline for so many people and it changed my life forever. This one person's story on a online.

Post changed the trajectory of my life and also pulled me out of the closet to talk more about my story, which I so was resistant to and still, still have a little bit of resistance on some level, but for pride reasons that people don't understand but, but at that time, very, very resistant to it. And so just a really cool moment of how one person can forever change your life.

Right, well, so you went from see, seeing people one on one to these retreats and then how did your education platform come in? Because you've got now multiple levels of it so you can reach more people, right?

Yeah.

So can you share a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah.

Well, you show my thought, like I'd expand into this thing saying, well that'll take care of that problem. Then it would like, it was like we found the ed of that container pretty quickly and then it would sort of demand to bust those walls off and go further. And so that's precisely what was happening. And by 2015, well, actually by 2014 I realized I did not want to run the day to day of my business and I just wanted to be a doctor and I just wanted to help patients and I wanted to empower patients. And so I ended up selling my actual practice and then stayed on sort of as a consultant for a year transition and then moved more into full on consulting, thinking I'm going to just reach people this way through retreats and through, well, even that. As I became a consultant, I booked out over a year in advance with that. And I thought, well, if I just increase my prices and really hone in my qualifiers, that will. Nope. It's almost like the more qualifiers and higher price I went, it just filled up even faster.

Yeah.

And what was happening is I was taking care of these patients who did not have doctors that could help them. So I realized very quickly in 2015 and 16 and into 2017, that the patients, and this is not meant to be disrespectful, but frankly were more savvy, more intelligent, and more resourceful than their doctors, which is the case for me being 34 years out from a terminal diagnosis. I wouldn't be here if I was just dependent on my medical team. You know, I had to do things for myself. And so I learned that patients became, when you're facing your mortality, you are like, I will do whatever it takes to live right. That's just the way it is. So the books, you know, it just kept getting booked out, booked out, booked out. And finally in 2000, the summer of 2015 and 16, I created a patient advocacy course. My first, actually two times that summer, I created a. My First Clinical Training, 2015. And it was a small. It was like a handful of 10 doctors who came and spent a weekend with me in Boulder at this event. I made this notebook for them. It's like 250 pages. I taught them everything I knew. He's like, okay, go out there. I've now, instead of giving you the fish, I'm teaching you how to fish. Now go out there and do good work. Well, that small group were also then, within a matter of months, booked out over a year in advance. And then I created these advocacy trainings for patient advocates thinking, well, they can be a concierge to support the clinicians and be a bridge between the doctor and the clinician. And then they all got like slammed. They got pulled into, like local cancer centers, they got pulled into, you know, people's clinics. And. And it was just like every time I thought I had the answers, I said it would just as the universe would say, go bigger. Yeah, go bigger, go bigger.

Millions, not thousands.

And that's where in 2020, January 2020 of all places, I had a group of 12 colleagues who said, we really want to learn it. We really want to help expand this. Because I then started, instead of educating patients, started educating doctors by just consulting for doctors on patients behalfs. So a patient would pay me and the doctor to consult with me. I would speak to the doctor, and the doctor would take that knowledge to the patient. That model also booked us out over a year in advance. And that's when these 12 doctors who had worked with me and done a lot of these with me, of patients requesting it, said, we want to be. We want you to teach us everything you know. And so what started out as 12 doctors in January of 2020, the world changed, as you know, very quickly after that brought many Other doctors out of the woodwork to realize they needed to do their practices differently. And from then until now, we are now over 1300 clinicians and allied health professionals in 46 countries.

I was just going to say how many countries? Because you have doctors from all over.

The world, everywhere now. And even that is getting ready, ready to be refined because we can't keep up with the demand. There's about an average of 30,000 hits to our directory a month of people from all over the world looking for people trained in this approach. And so when you realize that 1300 doctors and healthcare providers sounds like a big number, but they can't serve 30,000 patients a month.

Right.

And so this is where, working into like the next iteration, I've been going, I've been going deep, you know, inside and thinking of ways to, to bring this message forward faster, more scalable to more people, clinicians, allied health professionals and patient advocates as well as patients to get access to this. Because we are not improving statistics in.

This matter of fact, we're going in the wrong direction.

Exactly. And so if we're overwhelmed by the tsunami of demand now, I don't think we've even seen the height of it surface.

Yeah, yeah.

So that is the next iteration, which is part of why 2026, I will be off stages so I can be, you know, orchestrating the next iteration of this. So I've kind of watched it over a period of 13 years really evolve and each time almost like on a two year schedule, like it has to keep growing and we, the technologies and these tools are growing to actually, I think, enable this ability to reach more people.

So let's talk about these statistics. So where are we with statistics as far as number of people getting cancer? What I see in my practice, younger and younger.

You know, I don't know if this is true. I, I was taught that cancer takes eight to 10 years to really form in the body. And now it just seems like it's happening faster and faster, younger and younger. So where are we in the US In North America and you know, how do we compare to other countries as far as our stats with cancer? What the hell is going on?

Exactly. That's a great, that's a perfect question. That's really the question of the day. Right. Well, let's just take it a moment here to realize in the United States alone, in the hour that we're having this conversation, 1700 people will die of cancer.

In the world, 26,000 people will die of cancer.

And when you just kind of feel that, like that. That's not okay.

No.

And cancer historically had been considered a disease of the aged. Right, Right. So think about your nice childhood. Right. First of all, I, I so in my. Because cancer was a lot in my family, which makes sense given my own history. But, you know, my grandfather was. I was five when my grandfather died of cancer. I. When my grandmother died of cancer a couple years later, no one I knew at that time, all the way through probably even high school, died of cancer. No one. No one knew of cancer. Nothing. When I first started speaking at conferences in around 2008-2010, probably, I would ask the audience, how many of you have been touched by cancer? And in that room, maybe 20% of their hands would go up, which seemed like a big, you know, if you're in a room of 500 people, that's a pretty big number. Right. I have to ask the question differently today, just a couple, you know, a decade, two decades later, which is how many of you have not been directly in touch by cancer? You personally or someone very near and dear, a parent, a spouse, you know, a very close relative. Now, barely a hand goes up in the room. That is in a short period of time. When I left medical school in the late 90s, early 2000s, the average age of cancer was 68.

The statistic, I believe, that came out in 2022 was the average age. Today, it's 48.

Wow.

Okay. The statistic when I was in. So again, cancer's always been. It's always been. Right. We see mummies from, you know, thousands of years ago and recognize cancer was there. We couldn't tell it was likely they didn't die of cancer, they died with it type of thing. Right. Very different. So it's not like this is a new phenomenon, but the rate of which we see it is new. That is not normal. And despite what the headlines might suggest that we're making headway, we aren't. We might be diagnosing people earlier, but we're not changing overall survival rates. In fact, we're not changing outcomes. Right, Exactly. You nailed it. And so they're virtually flatlined since the 1950s. Right. When we waged war on cancer. In 1971, when we developed the NCI, the National Cancer Institute of the United States, we were running hard for the finish line of this being a genetic disorder that was first coined in 1914. Later kind of went to. Went to rest for a while, and then got picked up with the helix, you know, finding the DNA helix and moved into that arena thinking the the answer was still there. We're still chasing that answer, which we've proven over and over again and over and over again that it's not a genetic disorder. In fact, a paper in Nature came out last year showing that sort of this genetic mutation theory of cancer is dead and that we need to move on in order to make a dent. And so we haven't, because we invested bajillions into maintaining that. That industry in that environment. But to your question about the younger. So this is what's very new and very different. And it's not, as some would suggest, that we're just screening better. That's right. That's not. These. These aren't people who are coming in because they're getting a routine pap or something and finding this. These are people who are showing up with already metastatic aggressive cancers. Now, we were seeing folks get younger and younger over the years, but it's definitely the last study I showed 46% increase in cancer rates in people under the age of 40 since 2020. Wow. Okay.

Yeah.

That's huge. That's huge. We are now at the expectation of one in two of us will experience cancer in our lifetime. Globally.

Globally is that men and women, man.

And women, and up until a few years ago, it was one in two men and one in three women. And then it was one in two men and 1 in 2.4 women. I don't know how they got that stat, but this year it's one in two, period, across the board. And the World Health Organization suggests that we will double cancer rates globally by 2040. So where.

Where is all the money going? So we are spending trillions and trillions of dollars on cancer research, cancer this, cancer that. Where's all the money going?

Well, the money is going to the. To fund.

Clinical trials and clinical research and clinical questions that are long since laid to rest is not the. The questions to be asked. So we keep funding the same. Like, we're not old theories.

The outdated theories.

Exactly. The antiquated theories. We are not asking the right questions. In fact, just today, I've got a blog post that I'm pulling together here, but it's like the UN just had this big meeting and they're talking about the focus of the future of cancer care is prevention. And I get excited. I'm like, oh, this is great. The headline looks really good. Right then I read it, and then it just pisses me off because it's basically like, let's do more screening. We're just going to smash more body Parts with radiation. Put more cameras up people's buttholes. And that's what we call prevention, right? Not asking questions.

No, no conversation on lifestyle, diet, stress levels.

Oh, no, they're having a conversation on lifestyle. They're saying cigarettes are bad. Okay. We've known that for a good couple centuries, you know, a couple decades. They're also unfortunately, you know, saying red meat bad. So we just need a factory meat. You know, create factory food instead because that's a winner.

Oh my gosh.

There's like, you start to look at who's, like, peel back the layer of who's behind the industry. We're still telling the sun is terrifying. You know, it's like when you do the life calendar. The life calculators I would live with because I eat some grass fed grass, finished, pastured, red meat on occasion. And because I get out in the sunshine, I live in Mexico. I'm out in the sun every single day on purpose without sunscreen. And I'm a redhead. Okay.

With those things alone. They say I'm only going to live to be 105.

Oh, okay.

So apparently if I didn't.

Eat any red meat and I didn't get in the sunshine, I would theoretically live longer. And I will tell you from experience of, of what I see in people's labs and what I see here, that those aren't good recommendations. Those are not truly prevention material. And we're out. We're actually blaming the wrong. It's like blaming the firemen for the fire, right? It's like, so those are the types of things we keep doing. We're not telling people. Maybe your skin cancers are related to the seed oils and inflammatory processes happening internally that are making you more vulnerable to oxidative stress versus wow. When you change your diet. Like my very Irish husband who before we changed our diet would look like a lobster within minutes of being in the sun. Until we gave up our vegan diet and started to get him on a paleo diet off of greens, lots of fish oil, no more seed oils. And within two years, the man is now 50. That was in 192009 when he gave that up. He hasn't had a son burn since 2011 and he paddle boards every single day in the sun. We were just on a boat ride for two and a half hours yesterday in full on sun on the ocean. No, we're big. Like maybe little bronze, beautiful bronze. No, no sunscreen. Like these are the crazy things. We keep telling people different stories and yet we're asking the wrong questions. We're not looking at the data to back this. So to your point of where's all the money going? The money is going to promote an agenda that is not the right agenda to be promoting and an industry and industries that do not have our best interest at heart and are not data driven, they're dogma driven and they're corporate driven and so. Right. That sounds so conspiratorial and I understand that to be the case, but I'm married to a man who's a cancer drug design in grad school who really believed he was going to change the world through better living through chemistry until he. They started doing the research and they buried his. His projects. His research projects. Those same drugs that were buried over 28 years ago have now been dusted off and repurposing them again. Rasp mutation proteins and whatnot. Those. That was his area of expertise. It wasn't a blockbuster then, still not a blockbuster now. But they have nothing better to offer. So they're just pulling them out of like hiding like a box off a shelf, like see if this does anything. Like that's what we've come to. Right. And so no one's asking the questions like why. There was a paper also in, I think Scientific America and also in nature in 20, 23 and 4 about this question about younger and younger. They literally say in the article that there must be some genetic mutation. Oh my gosh.

I can't believe we're going down those pathways. So this UN article on prevention, it's all about early screening. That's not prevention, folks. And these articles about could it be genetics? That's a dead end. We know that. That 90 to 95% of all cancers are absolutely avoidable and are reversible because of diet and lifestyle choices. Excuse me.

And so I'm going to ask the question, what can our audience do? What can people do to actually prevent cancer?

Love that. Yep.

And then I want to talk about your test address. Yes. I want to talk about your methodology and why it's so important and why the terrain matters. We'll wrap up there.

I love it. Well, I mean, first of all, just even come back to why more now than ever, we, when we talk about the disease of the aged, which cancer was considered, what's happening today is even the World Health Organization stated that children born after 1980 are not expected to experience the same longevity as their parents for the first time in human history. And what that tells me and what we're understanding in the literature is that it's because we're born now with more mitochondrial damage. That is our longevity. Right. Our mitochondria are the root of our longevity and mitochondrial dysfunction is the root of all the chronic illnesses that plague us today. So basically we are.

Rearing children who are being conceived in and carried in more toxic load than any previous generations before them. Which means they're already like old people being born.

Wow.

Today. Right. I know I'm really oversimplifying that, but actually it's intuitive. Like the things that will age your mitochondria are the things that will a, will age your life and your, and your chronic illness potential and your function of your mitochondria or how you take out the garbage. Apoptosis is the very way that our body recognizes, responds and remembers when it's being exposed to something that it shouldn't be. And it helps us take out the garbage of broken down DNA damaged cells that when they're not taken out, they can flip on and basically become immortal. So what's happening is we're basically being born as little old people in ourselves at the cellular, at the organelle level, at the cellular organ level today. So that comes back to why we're, we're like having more and more cancers. I also will sound very conspiratorial, but what's happened with what we've learned about spike protein? And this is not conjecture. This is not. This is just. The reality is we've understood this very interesting spike protein that was from the natural infection or the injection that we're working on the same receptor sites, the ACE2 receptor site, so people can go and read up on this. It also has the ability to turn on this PI3K, a signaling pathway which is also related to things like MTOR, insulin, growth factor, all these other pathways that basically tell things to grow very, very quickly.

Which is just like a cancer.

It is. Exactly. And a PIK3CA finding today is involved in about 70% of all CANC. So if someone has had some dormant cells going on and you get this spike protein in a mitochondrial deranged environment, you have the potential of turning something on that was otherwise quiescence. The other thing we know about Spike protein is it sits on the complex one of our mitochondria. Again, all the things I'm telling you. PubMed, search all of these, right? This is not conjecture. You can go in there and take a look yourself and read the data. And so it suffocates basically complex one of the mitochondria, which means SARS CoV, and specifically spike Protein is a well known extreme mitochondrial toxin. That's the simplest terms I can probably give you. So between suffocating the mitochondria and turning on a signaling pathway, that is a really dangerous combination, which is likely why we are seeing folks who, historically, as you mentioned earlier, it might take 8 to 10 years or something to get big enough and loud enough to capture your attention. But if you turn the Bunsen burner on full steam ahead underneath an already vulnerable or volatile system, things may show up faster than we've expected. And as a clinician who's been at this for over 30 years, for myself and tens of thousands of patients directly, and hundreds of thousands of patients indirectly, I will tell you I have never seen anything like what I've seen clinically in the last four or five years, nor have my colleagues that I train all over the globe. This is a universal experience and we're very careful about how we talk about it for obvious reasons. But I want people to do their own homework because this is to your point of what can we do? First of all, you need to know. Know thyself.

Yes.

Right.

You hold your head out of the sand.

Yeah, yeah, welcome. Welcome back to you. Yeah. And this is where the concept of test, assess, address comes along. And when I say that test could be asking questions like, right, it. It could be blood tests, it could be imaging, it could be blood and tissue biopsies, it could be wearable dev, could be CGMs, it could be HRV devices, it could be any of these things to evaluate your current state of being in real time. Yeah, right. That's also where we audit our life. Everything and everyone we put in, on or around us impacts this container. Right? So doing a truthful audit of your life is really important. Looking in your pantries, like I tell people I come to your house for dinner. I am looking in your pantry, your fridge, your freezer, your medicine cabinet, under your kitchen sink, your garage. Garage, that's me. I walk in your house, I know immediately how toxic it is by the smells, like you talked about, like if they've got their Febreze and their plugins and their scented candles, you know, And I try really hard to be respectful, but me saying something is because I care, not because I'm an. Right, right. And it's like if I say something to you, it's because your life depends on it. And we don't know what we don't know until we know. So auditing all things you put in, on and around you, including people, places and things Is a very first starting point. So you can start evaluate your personal terrain, your vulnerabilities and your strengths and harness those strengths and diminish those vulnerabilities. And then certain testing like this is where it is important. And many of these tests may not be naturally ordered by your clinicians, but it's worth asking. So things like your blood count can tell me a lot about your immune system. Your metabolic panel can tell me a lot about your organ function, your insulin levels. They never run insulin first. They should. That tells us about kind of everything, like your vulnerability of how quickly you age because high insulin ages you very, very quickly and makes you very vulnerable to many chronic conditions. Vitamin D is about your best get out of jail free card and optimizing it can have impact of over. They talk about if we optimize our vitamin D levels today, we would probably shut down 70% of cancers from getting started.

Wow.

Seven row, it's massive. We can look at our inflammatory marker C reactive protein. We can look at how well we methylate, which is our homocysteine cysteine level. Those things. We can look at our ferritin level, like how quickly are we resting on the insides and how much inflammation is coming off of that. These are things that tell us a story about how your body is interfacing with the environment it's being exposed to on a day to day. And then if you have some extra resources, you can look deeper with functional medicine testing, with imaging, you know, with other pieces here. But you got to start by doing this internal audit, right?

You've got to know yourself, know your terrain, right?

And so people always say to me, but I was healthy until I got cancer. And I just, I. I'm always gobsmacked by that because it's literally not possible. Right? And so this isn't a to sell my book because it's doing just fine on its own. I mean, I really thought my mom and a few patients would buy my book and read it. My mom still hasn't read it. And the patients now it's like it sold over 150,000 copies, nine languages. It still continues to float up to the top 10 cancer books on Amazon. Every time I'm on a stage or a podcast or a summit, it shoots up to number one. It's as relevant today in 2025 as it was when we published it in 2017. There's like three things I would change of the book, but otherwise I would just add like hundreds of pages and hundreds of references because it's still the foundation of all that we're talking about here. So people can start with that to help them understand things they didn't know. You don't know what you don't know until you know. But once you do know, you have to become an advocate and you have a responsibility.

Right. And I believe that's part of the resistance is see this a lot in my practice is been so conditioned. Give me the pill, give me the quick fix, tell me what to do, and I'll do it. And this requires a completely different shift in our mindset of. We are the caregivers of these beautiful bodies that we've each been blessed with. And it's up to us to know ourselves and to be clear on from that state, what's. What's the true assessment? What is really going on?

Yeah.

And that's not to say we can't cheat every now and then. You know, we're humans. We're humans make mistakes.

Right.

You're like, ah, you know, when I was in Mexico, I did have a churro.

My mom just had one yesterday, so.

And that's not how I normally.

Right, right.

That is not my normal way of eating. And so it's this place of. I know, my body.

Yeah, I knew.

You know, I didn't sleep that night.

Hello. Right. You're like, oh, yeah, mass.

Amount of sugar going through. Okay, well, you know, lesson learned, learned.

But.

But I knew myself. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. You were living laboratory to the experience.

Yes, I was.

Yeah.

And that's the other thing is we've. Many of us have grown up, most of us, I believe, disconnected from our bodies. We got those messages, you know, no pain, no gain. Don't cry or I'll give you something to cry about. Right. So, yeah, part of this is shifting and saying, okay, I want to be curious. I want to know what my terrain is like, like. And then now that I know, I have a responsibility to do something with that information.

Well, and Jenna, he. This comes full circle to where we started the conversation. My passion, you know, my pain was my purpose that led to the work that I do in the world. And as that takes root and starts to seemingly make a ripple and help people just like your work, me being pulled into these environments, these stages in these places to share was absolutely like this gift and something I truly love and treasure. But I had to stop ignoring the harm I was doing to my body. And. And so for me, every time I would get on an airplane, now I understand I've literally aged and. And I did. I Did it by the way, I did a DNA, like I can do a, an age test like a DNA. I can't remember which one I used but basically it showed me my biological versus my chronological age. So when I started two years ago on one of those tests, my I'm 54 and now I was 53 at the time. The first time I ran that test early, if it just recently 53. My biological or my chronic. My, my biological age on my first test was 38 years old. And I was like it's pretty good. I was pretty pleased with myself. And I'm like, but I want as long then in my mind I start competing with. It's like I would like to be younger. So this year I redid the test in 9.47 and that humbled the out of me because I aged 10 years in one year time. I hadn't changed my diet, I hadn't changed my life. The only thing I changed was getting on an airplane almost every single week. And there was no way I could ignore that. I could not ignore the impact of that stress or other stressors in my life that were going on that were saying nation.

You'Re aging literally a decade a year right now if you don't turn this around. And so I had to have a come to Jesus with myself to say you don't know what you didn't know until you know and now you know and you can't ignore it. So you're going to have to make some big changes in all the things in your life right now in order to turn this around. And so my commitment is to myself because how good am I to anybody else if I don't start there? Right?

And I think that is a mic drop moment because that's what we all need to be doing.

Yes.

Looking at that inner place. Well, you are so amazing and I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. Thank you for making the space to be here and for sharing your wisdom and your learnings and just your. Your brilliance. You are just a brilliant and amazing, wonderful, loving human being. So thank you. Thank you, thank you.

Oh, such a joy. Thanks Jen.