What’s REALLY Causing Cancer—and What to Do About It: The Cancer Conversation That Could Save Your Life with Dr. Nasha Winters and Joe Polish

My sickest patients are my vegan athletes. My vegan athletes. And they're almost the most challenging to treat because they get very dogmatic, frankly, because their brains are starving. But they get very dogmatic about, I tell people, dogma is going to kill you, not cancer. And as someone who was in that place, it took me 10 years to stabilize my process because of my dogma. And so I had to get out of my own way. And so for me, the fix was, was moving into data. I had to stop rationalizing my choices and my behaviors, and it made a big difference for me. Over my career, I've learned that there's These sort of 10 main components of the terrain. And the terrain is just these ecosystems inside of us and how they interface with the environment in, on and around you. And that includes people, places and things. And so when I started to look in this bucket, our mitochondrial bucket and all the information it's taking in, there's sort of 10 major categories. One of them is epigenetics.

How can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network. So there's a little bit I can say about Dr. Naysha Winters. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 19 and turned that diagnosis into a global mission. She's a leading expert in integrative oncology, best selling author, podcast host, and co founder of a metabolic cancer hospital. She's here to share how we can rethink cancer care from early detection to personalized healing by treating the whole ecosystem of health, not just the symptoms. So there's going to be a lot I think you're going to get out of this. So please help me welcome my friend, Dr. Naysha Winters. Thank you.

Thank you.

Awesome. Here, let me move over some space here for you.

Room.

Yeah. So great to have you here. So what did I not say about you that would be helpful for people to hear first? So they kind of have. Because there's many layers to you.

Oh, gosh. Well, first of all, I think you did a pretty good job.

Thank you.

The nice over overlord of it all, I would say probably the thing that maybe, I mean, maybe some people got this. It was sort of alluded to, but I'm pretty scrappy, pretty resilient. You know, I've survived what a lot of people consider the unsurvivable. Not just cancer, but lots of things in life. I resonated so much. I'm a story collector. I think I'm very moved by people's experiences. And I want to know the person, not their diagnosis.

I like that. So my mother died of the same cancer that you had when I was four years old, and my father died of lung cancer. So both my parents. I lost cancer. Give us some, I guess, current stats of cancer. Because the other night when I went and saw you at that opening, it was wild. So I'd love for you to kind of just. We'll do that as, like, a flyover of what we're dealing with, and then we'll get into the cause, the treatment, and how this really conversation will be about cancer. But it's so much more than cancer.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm glad that you're appreciating that this is bigger than just saying the C word.

Right.

So it's huge. But the stats speak for themselves that cancer, for the first time in human history, has taken over the number one cause of death in 12 developed nations, ours being one of them. So that's a big one. Cardiovascular disease had that honor for a very long time. Number two, just today alone, 1700 people in the United States will die from cancer. That's just today.

Yeah. Let that one sink in. 1700 people today. Just in this country.

Just in this country. And if you want to think globally, because we have folks, you know, around the world, this does not discriminate on your age, your gender, your financial, you know, what's in your bank account. It doesn't care. But 26,500 people will die today. Yep. Oh, now he's switching into the other side. Okay, there you go. That's what I was asking.

It's all scratchy and so obvious and. Sorry, right in the middle of such an intense, like, number, too. You're talking about people.

You guys probably need a little levity after that. So.

No, say it again for globally.

Yeah. So globally, 26,500 people will die today.

Wow.

Yeah. And the World Cancer World Health Organization, love them or hate them, their stats show that the rates of cancer will double by 2030. And we are also now, the stats still show that it's 1 in 2.4 people will have cancer in their lifetime. It's actually 1 in 2. And the other thing that's really interesting is since 2019, we've had a 36, depending on some studies, to 54% depending on other studies, increase in cancers under the age of 50. So this isn't because we're doing better diagnostics. This isn't bad genes. These are things that we're not asking the right questions. About or having the right solutions for.

And the whole model of how it's currently. You know, I heard this quote years ago that they'll never find a cure for cancer because. Because four times as many people make a living off of it every year than die from it. And it's maybe more people making a living off of it than even four. But that being said, there's lots of ways to treat and prevent cancer.

Absolutely.

And that's why I wanted to have you here today, because. So one out of two people.

Yeah. So, you know, flip a coin is the place we've gotten to. And it's. I mean, I've been in this industry for personal and then professional reasons for 30. It'll be 34 years in September and actually. Yeah, 34 years in September. And I've never seen. I mean, cancer's always been in my life, right. In my own personal body and those that I've served for all these years. But I've never seen the types of things I'm seeing in the last few years, which puts a little bit of even more pressure on making a ripple, making a difference.

So, of course, my mind immediately goes to vaccines, you know, a lot. That being all kinds of stuff. But what is. If there is a way to answer the question, what causes cancer?

It's pretty simple. You just think about these. You know, what did we all learn in sixth grade biology? We learned about the mighty mitochondria, and we learned about them making ATP, and that's all we learned. And we kind of put that on a shelf and ignored it for, you know, never thought we'd ever use that in any significant way. But we've realized we're kind of dusting off a theory from the 1920s. Well, maybe let me back up a little bit. Let me tell you what we think, what we have thought cancer was for the past 110 years. 111 years. So Theodore Bovary. In 1914, Dr. Theodore Bovary came up with the concept of somatic mutation theory, gene theory of cancer. And that has been our. That was the thought process back then. Until about 1920. This other character, Dr. Otto Warburg, came along and said, actually the gene is a response to something higher upstream. Maybe we should look at that instead. Because he started to notice that every single cancer cell had malfunctioning mitochondria. And he thought there's something happening at the mitochondrial level that is then creating the issue, a shift, a metabolic shift that creates a cancerous opportunity. And that actually was the thought process for cancer, for over 30 years until good old Watson and Crick came along. Actually, it was a woman who came along and found out the helix of DNA, but they took the credit for it. But these two guys came along and put all the energy back into. It's all about the gene. And, and we have spent our resources. And you've probably heard that saying of the cop coming along to the guy looking for his keys. You know, he's looking on the ground underneath the streetlight and the cop's kind of like, what are we up to? And he's like, I lost my keys, I'm looking for him. And the cop's trying to help him. A few minutes go by and he's like, well, do you remember anything else where you dropped him? Because they had bounced. And he goes, oh, over there in the bushes. And the cop's like, what are you talking about over there in the bushes? And he goes, well, this is where the light is. Like, we have literally ignored the bushes for at least since the 1950s and keep expecting different outcomes. I mean, just one of the stats I told the other night was there was a study done that came out in 2022, I believe, of 96 drugs that have come to the market over a 19 year period for cancer. All blockbuster drugs that have come to the market. And if you put them all in a bucket and you analyze statistically their overall survival rate of what they've been able to offer for billions of dollars and decades of research, 2.8 months, that's the best we can do. And we call that success in standard of care. If you have a terminal illness and you're alive at three months after that diagnosis, the doctors are patting themselves on the back. If you were alive at five years out from your diagnosis, they call that a cure. Even if you die five years and one day out. That's just the way the statistics are based. It's the only disease process that does that.

And it's not even looking at quality of life, it's looking at how long you're going to live.

No other metrics are looked at except for overall progression free survival, overall survival and tumor bulk. That's what we look at. Oh, and sometimes we look at a white blood cell count to make sure we can give the next dose of cytotoxic therapy to make sure they can handle it. And the crazy part is then we give them a drug to boost that up so that they can handle it. But it's like a false. It's like taking the sugar for energy. It's not really a true energy. And so backing up to what is cancer, Dr. Warburg was onto something. He was the beginning thought process and that pretty much got buried. And then in 2005-2008, window this crazy character, Dr. Tom Seyfried, I think you were talking about Bartlett earlier, there's an interview with him. This pissed off Everybody in the NHS and they all called Dr. Seyfried Charlatan. And it's a really good interview. If you want to see the interview with Stephen Bartlett and Tom Seyfried, he's a passionate character out of Boston College, but he basically dusted off that research and took it a step further. He's doing technologies in his lab called the Seahorse, which is measuring, it's basically measuring the Krebs cycle. And for the non chemists in the room, it's basically checking for the complexes or the doorways within the mitochondria, how well or efficiently they're functioning or not.

Can you define mitochondria?

Yes. Mitochondria are from, depending again on the research, over 150 to 200,000 years old. They started as bacteria and somehow somewhere along the way magic happened and they started to co inhabit us or we co inhabit, you know, we co created together. And so to think about this for a moment, this is also just one of those truth bombs that's so fascinating to me. Our body composition is made up of upwards of 20% mitochondria, which is just wild. And then when you think about it, when people start to go why the why of cancer? You start to think about wolf, we've got 20% of us, or these mitochondria that were bacteria. And you start to think about all the things that can impact that, such as the invention of antibiotics, which very life saving, but also in the wrong time, place, duration, life taking. Right. The thing of let's grow food for the world, let's use glyphosate to spray crops, to kill weeds, but also to ripen crops, is now ubiquitous. It's in our rainwater, it's in our soil, it's in our air. That is an antibiotic. I don't know if you are aware of that, but it is a mega antibiotic and it's been ubiquitous in our Systems since the mid-90s. So two major hits to what we're now talking about in the medical establishment is the importance of your microbiome in the immune system and in cancer, even response to cancer treatments. So I'm planting a few seeds because we could spend days. I mean, the book goes into chapter by chapter by chapter of sections of this. But what we started to understand is the mitochondria does three major things. It's a receiver of information. Everything it's taking in everything, everything you're putting in, on and around you, especially light, especially water, air, food, nourishment, but also energy, you know, and energy from other people. So stressors, biochemical stressors, physiologic stressors, emotional stressors, all are input to the mitochondria. That's their big job, is like, I take it all in. Second job is to translate that information. So if it's doing its job well, it's translating that, making sense of all that input. So if you just think simply about the difference of input super quick. I think this is important for folks to understand. We were all hunter gatherers until about 11,000 years ago. We all had a pretty consistent experience on this planet. Then we started the Neolithic farming era, which went through the fertile crescent of the world, which is basically the Mediterranean and into the Middle East. It's also, by the way, the highest rates of celiac disease and autoimmunity. The interesting thing there is because at the time of the introduction of neolithic farming, we, we created the HLA gene. The human leukocyte antigen is when it first expressed is at that time. And that's this moment where it put us in a vulnerable state with our immune systems. We became more intolerant to certain things like molds and viruses, and we became more susceptible to autoimmunity. And it was also the first time celiac showed up. We wouldn't have another big change until about the 1850s. Someone talked today about the, like, the industrial food revolution. So seed oil, someone was saying, oh, isn't that like for your engine? Yes, Canola Canada oil was created to lubricate machines, you know, so, yeah, just kind of let that sink in. And most seed oils were created for the industry of machinery versus this machinery.

Right.

And so that started to happen in the 1850s. People like Price Pottinger, these doctors started sounding the alarm saying something's wrong, we got problems here. So we made some changes in the industrial food revolution. And we went from about 5 pounds of sugar per person per year in the early 1800s to today. Again, statistics will vary, but somewhere between 145 and 175 pounds of sugar per person per year, that's a bit of a difference in a very short period of time. So think about the input to our mitochondria that are absolutely dependent on what we fuel them with. So that was a big change in a short period of time, Very difficult to adapt to. And then World War II, next big shift. Suddenly we had all this leftover ammo and we think, gosh, do I, what do we do with all this? Do we have another war? Well, yeah, we continue to do that too. But we also created big pharma and big ag. That's what came from war. And we also created, for the first time, chemotherapy, came out of body biologic warfare, which is all the most common chemos that we still use today. So these anti folate drugs and whatnot that we were spraying in places to kill the herbage so you could see who you're killing. That's what we're doing in ourselves as well. And so thinking about even the tools we use today are death machines. And on purpose, that's their design. Not to say that there's not a time or a place, but we just need to think about where they came from and then why we're using them. So it also makes sense that by 1971 we waged war on cancer because we were living through a war time. So it was a global experience coming from World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War. That's how we knew we could collectively communicate about cancer.

Yeah. You know, I almost have to say this because when I think about like the war on drugs or the war, it's the wrong war, you know, it's not. It's a war on anything. Like cancer is a response, it is an indicator. Just like pain, it is a signal.

Exactly.

Something's going on, take a look at it. And if the whole approach is attack it, it's even what I say to people that are incarcerated. You can't punish pain out of people. And if people are doing things and they're in pain, you can't punish the pain. And oftentimes these symptoms that show up physically, mentally, emotionally are indicators of. It's a red light warning. And if you try to attack the red light or just shove it down or look at not in the bushes and somewhere else, you're not accomplishing anything.

Exactly, exactly. And I wanted to give that little walk through humanity to understand the translational part that now you understand that In a way, 11,000 years, we've had a lot more inputs in the last 200 years, even more inputs in the last 50 years, even more inputs. So those mitochondria are taking in a lot more under a lot more duress. They've survived 170,000 years. And now we're like, maybe now we're going to snuff them, right? And maybe we're doing a good job trying to take them out. And then the translation of that is because of all the new inputs. There's a lot of things that are disruptors or jamming the signals, jamming the communication and the translation of the understanding of it. So that's happening literally at the cellular or the organelles within our cell level, which is the, you know, these are mitochondria, basically the organs of your cells, Some of the organs of your cells. And it's creating confusion there, which then creates confusion, because the third major job of the mitochondria is to communicate and signal out to the rest of the world what to do. So in our world, we all think, oh, it's just about making ATP. But you also don't kill off cells that are no longer functioning when your mitochondria don't work. So you don't have programmed cell death any longer. It doesn't listen, oh, you're not working well anymore. Get out of here. It just keeps replicating into the wrong direction. And so there are. When people say, well, what is cancer? Even the American Cancer Society says that it's a collection of hundreds of diseases. They're right and they're wrong. It's a collection of hundreds of insults. If not. Some studies show that we get an average of 60,000 insults to our mitochondria every day. And our bodies are so amazingly designed to respond to that, translate that, and signal it out in a favorable way. But if you continue to feed it shit, you're going to continue. You're gonna get bad results. You can't, she says, poison yourself back into health or bomb yourself into peace. You just can't do those things. And so we went. Because of coming out of a war ethos, we've stayed in that, and we're still having wars. But that war on cancer, the outcomes are virtually flatlined. We have not made any. And of course, I will always hear people say, well, what about this headline? And this headline you're reading the headline. That is not the reality of what is actually happening out there, Especially when we're seeing cancer rates, that we're seeing the types of cancers, how historically I would see, you know, that we could tell patients your cancer has been around for at least a good decade. You know, that's the average seven to 10 years. But we're seeing something different now. We're seeing people who didn't seemingly have any signs of cancer overnight suddenly be in these turbo places. So even in the last I talked about these major changes in our human history while the next big one was Covid and none of us knew that going into it. But a lot of us are in the middle of it looking and saying, this is our glyphosate, this is our World War II, this is our industrial food revolution. This is our neolithic farming. These are the major fulcrums of when life ain't ever going to be the same that it was before. And how were we then? Instead of fighting it, how are we going to adapt to it and find solutions around it?

Well, so your book, the Metabolic approach to cancer, you know, this could be called the metabolic approach to health. However, I think it's important because you specifically your life experience and your expertise is with cancer and also helping doctors to treat it. So you. So tell. So just for context, what do you actually do now? What is your. Well, I want people to hear kind of what you do and how you do it. Then I want to talk about the terrain on what we can do so that everyone here is in a position to not be someone that gets cancer or if you have cancer and some people in the room do or have had cancer, what do you actually do with it? How many of you have a dear friend right now that or someone close to you that has cancer? Yeah, I mean, it's just so many people, right?

Yeah. In fact, I'd ask the question, how many of you don't.

Don't know someone?

Wow. That's actually more than the usual rooms I'm in. I used to ask that question at conferences. How many of you have had a direct experience with cancer? And I might get 5 to 10% of the room raise their hand. I have to ask that question differently because now maybe 5 to 10% don't raise their hand. That's a big shift in a 20 year span.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. What did I ask you?

Sorry, you were asking about who's touched by it right now and then.

Yeah, like, so you, you have a lot of people that go to you and look to you for guidance and advice on how to, not just how to treat it, but how to think about it, how to get to the core.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that's just it. So at my diagnosis when I was 19, to really condense this story, there was zero chance of survival. I mean, that was what they gave me. I, I was too sick, they'd missed it too long. I kept coming Back in saying, something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong. Cause I had a collection of other comorbidities, other health issues leading up to it. They just assumed it was more IBS or endometriosis or polystokarism.

And you were an athlete, right?

I was an athlete. Had my volleyball, like I got a volleyball scholarship. I mean I was like very athletic. I was president of my student council. I was a straight A student. I was a great achiever. And so on the outside to the world I looked healthy, but. But I was born sick. I had so many health issues, just stacked on stacked and it was so normalized. That was the conversation started today. I mean, tmi, but the doctor told my mom when I was a toddler that me pooping once a month was just normal. Cause it was my pattern, right? Like that we normalize that. So all of my conditions through my entire youth and teens were normalized. And the pharmaceutical cocktail I was on to manage those symptoms, you know, it's like everyone else is like, gosh, you did everything right. You exercised and ate. Right. I became a vegetarian when I was 16. But of course my idea, I worked at Hot Dog on a Stick, for crying out loud. So I ate the cheese sticks instead of the hot dogs. Right. And so that was, it was. Nothing about that was healthy. It was a carbitarian, a seed oil carbitarian to boot. And so. And lots of lemonade. Cherry lemonade was the best. Had really good arms because we had to make it. Do you guys ever know the Hot Dog and a Stick Girls? We were famous. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like they were a whole brand out of California. We moved all across the U.S. but anyway, I digress. But that process, my condition was so normalized that even showing up in the ER month after month or six months before my diagnosis, they just thought I was a histrionic, drug seeking teenager. And I kept saying, something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong, something's different, this isn't more of the same. And then by the time my roommate found me unconscious and rushed me to the hospital, I mean, I had a hundred percent bowel blockage. When they finally did the proper workup, a grape sized tumor in my right ovary, shutting down my ureters. I had mets throughout my entire pelvis. My liver was full of metastases, I had extreme ascites, I was extremely sarcopenic. My oxygen levels were in the 70s. I mean, they told me three months. As a doctor looking back now, I had three weeks, not even probably maybe three days. And so because of that, I didn't expect to live. Because no one gave me the expectation to live. I was uninsured. I had extreme. Came from a very, very dysfunctional background. I didn't want anybody from my background to know. What I'll tell your group here is that actually the first moment I heard the diagnosis, I was relieved because I thought it was a good exit strategy. Way sexier than taking my own life. But I think once they told me nothing could be done, that sparked my little double dog dare gene to say, well, let's do this differently. Still didn't expect to live through it, still didn't expect to survive it, didn't expect to fight it. Cause they weren't offering me anything. They sent me home to die. I just wanted to understand it. And that's where my last 34 years has been, is trying to understand it. Create a different narrative around it. Help create a methodology to understand where people are before, during and after the process and for survivorship. And then do therapies come into the conversation. Because if you're going to anybody who says they have protocols for this, I would invite you to run. Because that's what is wrong with our systems today is everything is protocol based. Whether you're a stage one or a stage four, you get the same treatment in standard of care or alternative care. They don't look at the why of your cancer or what your patterns are and what you would need to, to address it. And so that's what I've spent the last three decades really creating a methodology around understanding the n of 1. I think that was brought up this morning about doing, you know, that you really do have to look at. Because I'm a data junkie. I like a lot of information, but that data is just as much the person's story as it is the blood values or the metrics in their imaging or functional medicine testing.

Well, you know, my friend Rick Sapio, he lived longer than anyone in standard of care said he would. And at the same time, you know, it's much easier to speak outside of it than living in his life and stuff. I mean, he was throwing everything at it, which I think was a bit of the challenge too. And he wasn't really. It was all over the map. So it was one protocol to the next, all kinds of different stuff. And the reason I bring that up is that there's going to be several people in this room in the next few years that you don't know it now. But you're going to get a diagnosis and hopefully that won't happen as a result of this conversation with you. And what, we can plant a seed and then if it does, then what do you actually do with it? And when I say you, it could be someone close to you. It doesn't need to necessarily be you, but you see how many people are affected by it. So in a lot of ways, it's really hard to sell prevention. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's not sexy. You know, no one. I even tell people what I do for a living, they like, they just shut down.

Right. So what I want to have people understand here and take away because cancer will kind of be off to the side if you don't have it. But it's this whole terrain conversation. And that's what I really. Because I think this can and will change your life if you think about. So explain that, because the official question I had is the concept of an anti cancer terrain. How it challenges and supports modern preventative wellness, especially for younger generations. But that sounds kind of boring.

Just tell us about the terrain.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, first of all, I would say I can't think of a single time someone has said to me or didn't say this to me, let's phrase it that way, almost every single person that's ever come to me when I was still in private practice. And then even for the hundreds of doctors I've consulted for their patients and supported them and the thousands of doctors I've gotten to teach over the years, these patients will say to them or to me directly, but I was healthy until I got cancer. And I just, every time I hear it, I mean, someone was talking about the eye roll this morning and I was like, eye roll? It's really difficult for me because it's literally impossible. You cannot be healthy to actually quote, unquote, get. And by get. First of all, please know all of us have cancer all the time. We all have cells. Our bodies are amazing at being able to recognize, respond and remember and continue to meet that again and again and again, just thanks to immune surveillance. Like that is what we are beautifully designed to do. And there's no issues of cells moving around the building like they're not causing any problems. So when they hold up court, they call in all their friends and they have a little rave in a certain part of your body. Like that's where they can become problematic. Right.

And so that's what happened to you. And then once you had that. Because I do want to come back to Be like, what did you actually do? And all that. Which I know you'll answer that.

Yeah. So that. So just kind of be aware that, like, cancer is in all of us, every single one of us right now. So don't let that either. Like, hopefully this will leave you not being afraid of it, just to know, okay, well, it is me. It's an extension of me, so what can I do about it? So there's that piece. The other piece is people thinking they were healthy until they weren't, is that we have a lot of things in our culture that we've normalized as being healthy. So I will tell you really flat out, after doing this for so many years and gathering the metrics on this, my sickest patients are my vegan athletes. My vegan athletes, every single time. And they're almost the most challenging to treat because they get very dogmatic, frankly, because their brains are starving. But they get very dogmatic about, I tell people, dogma is going to kill you, not cancer.

Wow.

And as someone who was in that place, it took me 10 years to stabilize my process because of my dogma. And so I had to get out of my own way. And so for me, the fix was moving into data, because then I could. I had to stop rationalizing my choices and my behaviors. And it made a big difference for me. And that's just not everybody. Some people are good at that. But for me, I learned that that was really true for my process. And I seem to gravitate a lot of people who also like the data into my realm. So that was one piece here. But when I do hear people say, well, I ate this when I did this, and I did this, almost everybody leaves out something. Something. There's almost always a stone that's not turned over and looked under. So that's where over my career, I've learned that there's These sort of 10 main components of the terrain. And the terrain is just these ecosystems inside of us and how they interface with the environment in, on, and around you. And that includes people, places, and things. Okay? And so when I started to look in this bucket, our mitochondrial bucket, and all the information it's taking in, there's sort of 10 major categories. One of them is epigenetics, our single nucleotide polymorphisms. I just SNPs for simple. So when people say, well, genetics are a role, well, they're a role. But these are the genes that you can change, right? You're born with them, but you can turn on or off their expression depending on your diet and lifestyle. So even cancer, even standard of care today says cancer is 90 to 95% based on our diet and lifestyle, based on the environment and on our own.

What percent? 90.

90 to 95%. Okay, so 5. Let's see. Let's just give them. Let's be gracious and say, okay, 10% are truly genetic, meaning you're a sitting duck and there's nothing you can do about it. I don't even believe that's true from the things I've seen, and I gave an example the other night about that, and I can touch on that in a moment about lynch syndrome, for instance, which is a genetic orientation of DNA repair mechanism default in population, that folks with lynch syndrome, their offspring have a 50% chance of having the same. So it's a 50, 50 if you've got this, that you'll have cancer in your lifetime. That's a genetic roulette game on one level. But what the doctors don't understand or the researchers don't understand is you can actually change how it's expressed, prevent how it's expressed. So I take care of whole, whole groups of lynch families and ATM families and GATA families and BRCA families. I'm used to that. Like, I see that population all the time. And I have to remind them that you're not flipping a coin. You have a lot more power in overcoming that. So genetics, these epigenetics, these blueprints that we're all born with, we can give it the right information to have it function more powerfully, right? So we can suppress what needs to be suppressed and we can express what needs to express. So that's one drop in the bucket. The next is, what do we fuel it with? And now that you heard that stat that we've gone from 5 to 175lb of sugar per year, you can imagine that our little gas tanks are filled up with sugar and they don't know how to operate efficiently and effectively. So we are by nature, we are dopamine driven, right? So this morning you talked about that, like AI, what AI is doing for folks, this is why it's a tricky place. And I'm enjoying learning this new world. AI is the ultimate dopamine fix as well, right? But what will keep it real is bringing in the human connection, which is the oxytocin fix. And so that's that place, as AI will speed up our understanding of the data, what we're putting in and on around our mitochondrial bucket. But the human connection, the oxytocin is actually going to be part of the solution and of how you're going to repair it. So put that on a parking lot for a moment. So what you're fueling it with and this most of the time. So cancer, no matter what cancer is glycolytic. So it doesn't matter what stage of cancer, what kind of cancer. What if it's a solid tumor, a non solid tumor, it loves glucose. So you have to no matter what, if you have a cancering process and, and I mean that verb very intentionally. If you have a cancering process, you must carb restrict. You just have to. It's what's going to leverage your system to be able to be more able to fight it or whatever language you want to use to bring it back into balance. There are certain other nutrients that cancer cells can become dependent on which, which one of them is glutamine? So well, typically in the cancer population that can affect 30 to 40% of patients also dealing with cancer. We might have to look at also protein sparing, lowering their protein intake. So yes, MTOR is really great for growing things when you're non cancering to rebuild muscle Dr. Pompa was talking about this morning. But it's not what you want for cancer. Cancer. MTOR is a driver of cancer progression, proliferation. So tiny timing and place of all these is really important. Then there are certain nutrients like methionine or leucine that can also have some impact and certain fats, but not fats from your diet per se. Although trans fats are bad and seed oils are bad because they create inflammation, they're adding to another drop in the bucket. They themselves don't drive the cancer, but they cause imbalances that make for a hospitable cancer environment.

I was gonna say like when I and I've been with a lot of people that have in hospitals that have cancer and I don't recall any major hospital restricting carbs or lots of sugar. Lots of things available that I would not.

It's crazy. Have you ever seen like even going to the hospital looking at the diabetic plate they bring to the patient, that's three days of glucose for a healthy patient. Not even that has nothing to do with kidney. So it's the weirdest thing. You do understand that registered dietitians in hospitals are industry. They're only fed the script. They're allowed to say via the industry. They are not allowed to talk about therapeutic nutrition which is either the treatment of or prevention of disease. They're not trained in it and they're not allowed to say it. So rd. I have a lot of rd, recovering RD nutritionists in my circle that come in and they're like, my name is Lola and I'm a recovering rd, you know, because there it is. They are industry driven on this. But that fuel source is. We get into the dogma wars of vegan or carnivore or keto or paleo. I don't care what your choice is. Initially start with just glucose inhibition, insulin restriction, carb restriction, right? You will find it's virtually impossible to do that as a vegan. It is possible to do that as a vegetarian. And then you can get into the nuances of the SNPs to know. Okay, like here's an example. My husband has a few SNPs like ACSL1 and APOE2, APOA2. These are SNPs that he would love to be a carnivore. Like, it is what he craves. It's where he'd love to be. But each time he eats a steak, his ketones drop and his glucose and insulin go up. So his genes say, hey, meat is like a candy bar. I, on the other hand, would love to be a vegetarian. I was for many years, for over 20 years, but I literally. It destroys all kinds of systems in my body. And so for me, I have to work hard to energetically overcome my resistance to eating some animal protein, right? So even though we think, like, go with just your instinct, when people tell me, that's always my favorite, well, your instinct is a dopamine whore living in your brain. Okay? And so we have best light ever. And so it's like, okay, we have to manage that, right? We have to be very careful about.

That dopamine whore living in your vehicle.

That'Ll be hanging on these posters someday. So great. And then the third big drop. I mean, I can't believe that this is even a question for folks, but it's no longer a matter of if you're toxic, it's how bad is it? I mean, the planet is just so people who do all the right things, if they. And I might be talking to a room full of this right now, but do you live in an hoa? Do you live on a golf course? You guys, you're gonna be my 50 percenters. And I don't mean to scare you, but it's like I talk to my 1 percenter, high affluent clients and I'm like, you're going to have to move.

Your environment because of the pesticides.

Oh, it is if you see a pretty lawn that is not healthy for you or the planet, and that will freak people out. So I see a few, like, I feel some squirmings in here, but it's just a reality. You cannot heal in an environment in which you. That will make, that's making you sick. And so unless you really are mindful about extreme air filtration, extreme water filtration, removing your shoes and leaving them outside your house and you come in or out, it's insane, like how ubiquitous that is. So hospital campuses, college campuses, do you live near a park? Do you live on a golf? Those are huge. I can run a blood and blood or urine or hair sample and you will see glyphosate levels off the charts. And iarc, which is a third party International association of Research for Cancer, they're a third party organization that's not industry driven. They now, they absolutely qualify glyphosate as a carcinogen, as a known carcinogen, even though we're fighting over that here in the United States. Other countries are wise to this. In fact, I live in Mexico. Full time is my home base. And Mexico has been in a bullying war with the US who when they made the claim in 2020 they were going to get rid of glyphosate, no one said a word. But as they were reaching the 2024 deadline, they, the U.S. started threatening sanctions and retaliation and they stood up to it and said, nope, we're still going without.

So, yeah, you know, I have to mention this too, because I'm always, you know, to borrow a line that I first learned from Jeff Hayes, which kind of summarizes what I attempt to do is record my research, right? You know, ask questions. I'm just some dumb guy that is not a doctor, just interviews people hoping to learn and get better, right? And so me, and I'll say Dr. Ong here, we went last year and spent four days with farmers and we went on the farm and stuff. And one of the things I discovered, you know, regenerative farmers, conventional farmers, organic farmers. One of the guys that took us was trying to convince me that seed oils were not dangerous, right? And almost had me believing that, you know, Now I own seedoil.com and what we're doing there. But he was the largest seller of glyphosate in the entire country of Canada. And he took us to the, you know, toured us to the, to the facility, you know, and the challenging thing is in his mind, it's all safe. He set up a meeting. We went to Ag in Motion, which is the largest farmer convention In Canada, about 30,000 people there. And he set up a meeting with one of the heads of Monsanto. And, you know, nice place.

You mean Bear?

Yeah, Bayer owns Monsanto. And it's funny because. And then one person we met said he's like their Monsatan is what he called them. But, you know, I sat with this woman who works there, and I mean, very articulate, you know, and they don't see anything they're doing. They believe they're not doing anything wrong, and they believe they're feeding the planet, which they are. What I learned, though, is that there's feeding the planet, then there's feeding the planet in a healthy way, right? And I also learned that the doctors don't talk to the farmers, the influencers don't talk to the farmers, the farmers don't talk to the influencers. So it's like you got three groups of people all related to things with food and health, and they don't really talk to each other. And I, you know, we went and met with two PhDs that were supposedly two of the top experts in seed oils. They had a canola processing set up in the university lab at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. And, you know, we filmed it. I've got all this footage. I mean, we went out with all of them. And one of the most interesting things that I found was I was asking all the farmers, even the organic farmers, where do you shop? And not a single one of them said, they buy organic. Even the ones that made it, they're like, well, by conventional. I'm like, why? It's like, well, there's all kinds of tricks to the organic farming because you still have to use pesticides. You still have to. You know, and maybe they didn't call it that, but it's. It was the weirdest thing. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. And I still, you know, I go back and look at some of that footage, and I'm gonna edit all of it.

I'm gonna put it out there.

But it literally led me to, you know, Jeff Hayes over here, Jeff Hays Films. He introduced me to Dr. Kate Shanahan. And then I read her book Dark Calories. And there was a stat in there that she talked about at the time she wrote it, where, you know, and this explains kind of a lot to me is this Follow the money, right? And at the time she wrote the book, 18.6% of the US GDP is health care, 5.4% food, 3% military, and 1% tech. So almost $1 of every $5 in the US goes to, quote, unquote, health care. It's not health care, it's sick care. Yeah, and so that says a lot. You know, the system is. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So if people believe they're going to go someplace that is going to take care of their health or treat them, they're in for a rude awakening. And so the best thing I know how to do is just talk to people. That should be everywhere. Your message should be everywhere. But it's hidden, suppressed, and doctors are cancelled and they have to be careful about what they. It's mind blowing because there are people literally making a living killing people. I mean, that's their. They make a living killing people.

There was a documentary. It's probably almost 20 years old now. It's a French documentary, but it has subtitles called the Idiot Cycle. Anyone ever heard of it? And it literally talks about the people who create the poisons also create the solution. So pharma or Big AG or pharma, a big industry. And it shows that. And this was a movement because of that documentary. It started changing, shaking up some of that behavior in Europe. But we. Apparently, that's why it's still a documentary in French. You know, we're not watching it and paying attention here, but bare Monsanto was a perfect example of that. And it just, it perpetuates on. And so the toxicity, people don't even understand. So, you know, if you got into your Uber today or your Waymo, wherever that was. Simon, I saw him get out of that this morning. That was cool. I was like, ugh. Or a taxi, or just even your own car. Everyone has like the hanging, you know, little tree thing of scent. I mean, that is. Even IARX says fragrance is a known carcinogen. And yet I can walk into somebody's house or an Airbnb or a hotel and I can immediately get sick. Like, immediately. It'd be like the canary in the coal mine. We're bathing in this stuff. And I think the stats are now that women are putting an average of 60 different chemicals on their skin before they even walk out the door in the morning.

Wow.

Right? And we're doing this to our youth, our kids, like the young girls getting into this. And this might be tmi. But just think about. I just want you to think right now. Thank God we've got the vagina queen in the room here. But putting tampons, menstrual pads, they're dioxin, their chlorine, their pesticide. Cotton is the highest pesticide residue commodity we have. And we put that into our baby diapers, put that into our hoo ha's and we like wonder why we are having all of these issues with cervical cancers and ovarian cancers and I mean Johnson and Johnson. So I again, tmi was a major sports person. What did we do after every volleyball game? We pretty much bathed ourselves in baby powder because how dare you sweat or have a scent, you know. And so that got won a class action lawsuit. If you don't know the impact of Johnson Johnson on ovarian cancer.

Yeah, it's mind boggling and how much that still is suppressed. And Johnson Johnson had more to do with opiate addiction than Purdue ever did. I mean they're the biggest and they somehow skirted so much in the pr.

It's great. Well, mentioning Purdue, one of my Heroes and mentors, Dr. Huber, Don Huber out of Purdue, he's now a. What is it when you're way past retrace in his 90s now. But he started with making the blowing the whistle on glyphosate in the late 1960s and saying we have created something that will forever change our planet. And here we are. The man has had multiple attempts on his life over his career. Now he's like just such a hero and has had thousands of papers. We can now test for it. A lot of his products that he started using to chelate glyphosate out of the soil. We now use tequila out of humans. You probably know the company Cellcore. Those were his formulations that he was using in the regenerative farming world. They work just as well in both places. So he's become a friend and a mentor in my life. And so the environmental piece is huge. We can't ignore that today because We've got over 80,000 new chemicals on the planet today that we didn't have before World War II. So when someone's saying, oh my grandpa is in his 90s and doing well, he had a longer Runway, he had a base camp. But the stats show today if you're born after 1980, you will not have the same life expectancy as your parents.

Yeah. Which is wild. You know, I have to say this too because I want to so to go back to what I was saying about the farmers, it's so conflicting to me because I genuinely like them. I like these people. These are hard working people and they believe they're doing the right thing. And they have been. And even Kate Shanahan says it's not the farmer's fault. What happens is they produce this food, they grow it, then it goes to big, big food companies, they process it, and then it becomes toxic. And so a lot of the farmers don't even see what happens, and they don't understand what's actually, you know, it shows up in these giant fast food corporations like Canola and stuff, you know, chick fil, A, McDonald's, all this. And it's wild because I'm like, man, you know, this one individual, he said, if what I'm doing is harming people, I have to rethink the entire industry that I've been in my whole life and that my family was in. And it's like, you know, what do you say to them? You know, it's like, because they're not trying, they don't wake up with the intention of doing harm. It's just I'm realizing how propagandized everything is.

Well, and what we're seeing in Big Ag is exactly. We're seeing in Big medicine, right? And so Big Pharma. And so one of my passions are environment, Big Ag, regenerative farming, and health. And so those are the circles I've been playing in for over 30 years. So there actually is a huge organization called Acres, and this will be their 50th anniversary in December. It's basically the super bowl of regenerative farmers in December, because that's the only time farmers should get off work to go do this. And these are folks who've either already made the change or making the change from conventional farming back to regenerative farming and the dialogues happening there are incredible. So many of you probably know Joel Solitan, you know, the lunatic farmer Zachary.

From First in Food Income.

Yeah, exactly. So Zach Bush. Oh, my gosh, there's so many. I mean, there's just so many huge names in this arena, but we all get together every. So it's funny because I get to go speak to these farmers about health. And I'm like asking in rooms of hundreds of farmers, where are the doctors at these conferences for regenerative farming? And then I go to regenerative health conferences and I'm looking around like, and where are our farmers? And so this is where I'm excited about the current administration. So I'm on a lot of different focus groups. And from NCI to Health and Human Services to usda, this is the first administration that's ever been interested in having a conversation between the Farmers and the doctors or the healthcare providers. So. And one of my friends, Nina Tycoltz, a lot of people know her work. Big Fat lie. She's actually part of the USDA movement now. She's the person who's been a whistleblower on all of the bastardizing of fat when really sugar was to blame on so many of these things. There's so many people coming out of the woodworks and finding each other now. But we can't heal healthcare unless we heal our soil, unless we heal our food systems. We can't heal that unless we heal our financial systems and our education systems. And so when we talk about the terrain, which. I'll rattle through the rest of the drops here in a second.

Yeah, yeah, do that. By the way, I'm gonna send a copy of your book to everyone here. If there's any way that you have any. We can get 50 here for this room tonight, then I will. If not, I'll mail one to.

Wish I did.

But no, but I will, because I want to make sure. Because this is really important stuff. But yeah, rattle through those and then.

We'Ll do some Q and A. Yeah. Because thinking about the terrain here of being. Yes. That what we put in on and around us, you can't not think about what you're eating and how that food was raised and how it was processed. You can't think about the chemicals that you're applying to your body every day or the pharmaceuticals that you're taking. Like, you can't. They don't get separated out. They're all interwoven. All the ecosystems within you are interacting with the ecosystems outside of you. So the drops in the bucket are again, the epigenetics, the nutrients, so the metabolic, the chemicals. And then we have the microbiome. Then we have the immune system, which very intimately related between the microbiome and the immune system. Inflammation, circulation and oxygenation, hormone metabolism and just modulation, stress, circadian rhythm and mental emotional. So these 10 big drops in the bucket, most people. So it's funny, because why I talk about the 10th drop being mental emotional. If I have patients come to me and say I did everything right, and they did all the tangibles of the very physical things, and they ignored the mental, emotional. I will tell you this for being on this journey for as long as I have for myself and probably at this point, hundreds of thousands of others. If you do not deal with the emotional terrain, that mental, emotional terrain, you will not heal from cancer either.

Do you know what's her name? Dying to Be me. Author.

Oh, Anita Moorjani.

Is she a friend of yours?

Not a friend, but I've been stalking her for many years.

Okay. I have a friend who knows her really well, Steve Ozanich, the guy who I was referred to, that I could have introduced you to her.

Amazing. Yeah, her book is very powerful.

Well, you know, when I first met Gabor Mate, you know, we were having dinner and this is in 2015 in Toronto, and he said, or, I'm sorry, Vancouver. He said, you know, we're just talking in a busy restaurant and I told this story. Some people have heard me share this story because it was pretty profound to me. He said, you know, I know the cause of cancer. And then he kept. Then he said something like, hold on, back up. You know, both my parents died of cancer. I go, you know the cause of cancer? And he's like, yeah. I go, cancer in animals, you know, children with cancer. He's like, yeah, all cancer. I go, okay, what's the cause of cancer? And he's like, suppression, repression. I'm like, well, what do you mean? He said, well, he goes, I can pour a glass of water on your head and start yelling at you right now. And I would change the physiology of the surgery cells of your body. And I'm like, okay. He goes, so if I poured a glass, he said to me, he goes, if I poured a glass of water on you and started yelling at you, what would happen? And I go, I don't know, what do you mean? He goes, well, your face would get flush, your adrenaline would surge, your heart rate would go up. He goes, it would change your body instantly. He goes, so if I poured a glass of water on your head and started yelling at you, what would you do? And I'm like, well, he like, how would you respond? I said, well, I could, you know, walk out of here. He goes, yeah, you can run away. He goes, what else could you do? And I'm like, I said to him, tell you to fuck off. He goes, yeah, you could fight back. He said, what else could you do? Not those other two options. And I was sitting there thinking, what else can I do? And I'm in this restaurant with his, you know, skinny, 70 something year old, he just turned 80, you know, Hungarian doctor. He's about. And I think he was like, 71 or 70. Yeah, I think he's 71 at the time. And I said, well, I guess I could sit here while you pour water on my head and yell at me. And he goes, well, no, you could ask for help. And right when I heard him say that, I was like, wow. It never even occurred to me that here I am in a busy restaurant, I could ask for help. I would just sit there with this guy and he goes, so if you're in a situation as a kid where you can't run, or in your life where you can't run away, you can't fight back, you can't ask for help, or don't think you can ask for help, he goes, there's two ways that humans respond to it. They either develop an addiction or they develop a disease, an autoimmune condition or cancer. What I've come to believe is that cancer is caused by either emotional, internal or external toxins. I don't know what else there would be. There's lots of the categories, but those. Even the expression, you're saying of genes, but they're blaming everything on genes. But there's all this other stuff that impacts the genes.

Right, right.

But what you said is if you do not deal with the emotional stuff, you will not recover, right?

Because you can. I mean, you can. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, well, I did all the right. And people will get start to get better, or things will respond to certain nutraceuticals or alternative therapies or conventional therapies or diet, but it won't hold back the floodgates, right? And so that's the piece here, that it will keep coming back a little bit louder, a little bit louder and a little bit louder. Like, honestly, cancer is easy to kill. It is. The cells are very easy to kill, the tumors are very easy to shrink. There's a million different ways to do that. But to keep it there, that's the trick. That's where we dig deeper. That's where like, and what else? And what else? And what else are we missing? And then we start to realize, okay, maybe the environment you're in, there's something that you're being exposed to, or someone you're being exposed to, or something you're being exposed to that's contributing to this. What's the unfinished piece? There's also the part that happens with folks that maybe they have done that and they do find out and they are addressing all their terrain. But they've had so many treatments at this point, be it alternative or standard, that the mitochondria can't recover. Right. It's just we don't have. I mean, our mitochondria are our longevity and we're always looking outside of ourselves for that. But it's an inside job. And so all of the therapies, so things like Tylenol, Cipro, Adramycin or doxorubicin is the most common chemotherapy. They are the worst mitochondrial poisons there are. And yet you get cancer. You are often given. Here's your Tylenol to get you through the pain of your surgery. Oops. Now someone's telling me the story this morning. Now you have an infection from the surgery. We're going to put you on Cipro, and then we're going to put you through a dramycin for your breast cancer diagnosis. That patient will not. They might get through treatment and ring the bell, and everyone's celebrating and calling this person a warrior. They'll be dead in five years or it'll be back with a vengeance worse than ever. 10, 15 years later, and they think they're done. I tell people you're just getting started the second you ring that bell. Now you get curious as to the why. Now you go down the rabbit holes to see what else are you still exposing yourself to. What else in your life needs to change. What else in your input into the mitochondria needs to be adjusted so that you can translate it differently and signal it and communicate it differently.

Right. And by the way, so one of the things I attempt to do here at Ingenious Network is sell people what they want and give them what they need. And so part of it is sometimes we use aspirations and inspirations and big ideas. Other times it's like, let's paint a picture of some potential. Potential pain and how to avoid it. Because people will do more to avoid pain than seek pleasure. And although we're talking about the big C word, what Ned Hallowell says is vitamin C is one of the most important things, and he's referring to vitamin connect. You have to be connected. And if you're disconnected from yourself, if you don't have connection, you're in isolation. And I see a tremendous amount of mental and physical disease and loneliness and sadness and depression, and it's a different form of pain.

Well, it's. You know, the United States is the only country in the world that's losing longevity. And the scientists consistently over the last five years. So everybody else is either stable or improving. We're the only country that's actually losing longevity. And even before COVID And so what the scientists are calling out, the era of despair. And the two driving factors, although there's third now, but the two driving factors are overdose and suicide. And you speak to it, it's like, it's the pain and our attempt to do whatever we can to suppress that pain. And sometimes that pain is about suppressing it through addiction. Right? And addiction doesn't have to be drugs and alcohol. It could be sugar, it could be shopping, it could be sex, it could be whatever. Like it just. It takes different forms of just trying to self soothe, self nourish, self care in anthroposophical medicine. Good old kind of quirky Rudolf Steiner's Time that World says cancer is the ultimate disconnect. And one of my colleagues, Tina Kasor, she's a naturopathic oncologist, calls cancer cells sociopaths. And the thing is, there's still us, but they've forgotten who they belong to or they have been outed or ousted, you know, from the community. And then they might become disruptive, you know, and kind of chaotic without any concern for the whole. But when you reestablish that connection. So the connection of again, the communication, like the translation and communication is one connecting point, the connection with other people. Like Bernie Siegel and his research in the 1980s, women who were in support groups for breast cancer had better survival rates, didn't do anything treatment wise, but they lived longer because they simply reached out in community. And I always talk about, I have my own version of the cdc, so, you know, we've got our center of Disease Control. Mine is circadian rhythm, diet and community.

That's great, right?

And that is a heck of a lot more powerful than anything. And if you even just start to pay attention to those. So one of my questions for my farmers was, do you know when the full moon was? Do you know what time the sun is rising or setting? This is what's really weird is farmers don't know that information anymore, even the regenerative ones, because it's all done in AI, it's all done in machinery now. And so we've even lost touch with soil. And even the word humus, which is the very soil that is the. The degradation of all living matter into death that turns into life again. Think about it. Humus, human humanity, humility, all of that comes from that. And we are so disconnected from our soil and where it comes from that there's no chance for humanity without it. And so I get super passionate about terrain. I use that word to explain what's happening on the inside, but I use it on that bigger picture about the connection that you. That you have to reconnect to and commune with on the inside, to the outside. So the Hope to me is like an event we're hosting. And I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about this because I've spoken in all these silos, speak and go to environmental medicine conferences. Then I go over here to regenerative medicine or functional or naturopathic medicine conferences. Then I go over here to conventional medical conferences. I speak at about 40 conferences a year globally, from standard of care to alternative and everything in between. And then I go to regen ag conferences. So instead of going to all these siloed places, we're hosting our own. We're bringing all of them together, bringing all those voices, all those communities together in Tucson in October. And I would love for anybody who wants to come down 9th, 10th and 11th. But that is where we're bringing the best voices. I mean, we have. Zach Bush is one of our keynotes. Nina Tycoltz, Deborah Devra Davis, who's the whistleblower on EMFs and cell phones. She wrote the book Disconnect. Really famous there. Bob Jones is one of our keynotes. He's the chef's garden, I think. Do you know chef's garden?

Chef?

So he's one of our keynotes this year because he's talking about bringing the bridge over from conventional farming. Every step you take to regeneration is a huge boon for our health. And he serves like all of his produce. He mostly serves chefs like raises nutrient dense, high quality food for chefs who have a passion for sharing good food. We're bringing all these together in one place, including crazy scientists and clinicians and patients, because we have to all bring the good.

Is this mostly doctors or is it open to the public?

Well, the first day is all of our community, the doctors we've trained and the advocates we've trained. But the second, the second and third day are for the general public. And it'll be live streamed as well as in person. But we need to create. Oh, look at that. You guys are good. That's so cool. We haven't even announced the other big names, but we have. It's. It's gonna be huge. And so we're very excited to bring this conversation of terrain to the bigger level.

That's great.

Disruptor. Almost all these people are part of the, like, we're all in health, we're all having conversations with the RFK world and we're all like trying to be. We're trying to make something happen with this little short window we have. See what we can do.

Forward slash 33.