The Cancer Cocktail: Gut Dysbiosis, Inflammation and Poor Immune Function

Hello and welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I have on the show Dr. Nasha Winters. Dr. Nasha is a naturopathic doctor who has become a global healthcare authority in integrative cancer research after working as a family practitioner for 14 years. She bridges ancient therapies with advancements in modern medicine in the digital Dr. Nasha consults with some of the most prestigious cancer centers in the US on projects such as developing the clinical protocol for the current FDA-approved clinical trial using intravenous application of viscum album extract, aka mistletoe, to treat advanced cancer. She also consults on hypothermia, cannabis, the ketogenic diet, IV vitamin C, and more. Dr. Nasha is the bestselling co-author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. And finally, if you're not yet subscribed to the show, don't forget to press subscribe so you get each new episode downloaded to your automatically. Now onto the show.

Welcome, Dr. Nasha.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Thank you for coming on. So tell me, how did you get interested in the topic of cancer and further cancer in the microbiome?

Such a good question. I mean, I think most of us who work in the realm of healthcare have our own personal journey, whether it was through us, you know, individually or through someone we deeply love or care about. And I'm no exception to that rule. And so going on nearly 20 years 29 years of surviving what was considered the unsurvivable of a stage 4 ovarian cancer diagnosis.

Wow.

Right? At the ripe young age of 19, moving into my 20th year on this planet, I was sort of set off on a journey to figure it out for myself. A lot of my patients have called it the SYAU, the Save Your Ass University. I feel like I've got doctorates in that. I was so sick by the time they figured out what was going on that really they— there were no choices for me. And that has what has continued into nearly a 3-decade exploration of what makes a cancering process either wake up or go dormant. And that, of course, inevitably over all of these decades of my own self-study and that of what I've learned from thousands and thousands of patients I've been blessed to support in this journey. We cannot start to talk about how to address cancer without knowing the fundamental imbalances that underlie it. And we learned, at least for millennia, many healthcare models as far back as Hippocrates and before, even into Ayurveda, understood the gut is the center of our health and wellbeing. And yet it's really only been in about the last decade or so that Western medicine has caught up. With millennia-old ancient wisdom of the importance of the microbiome in all of this. So in my own studies, I've been running across some very interesting research in the connection between our microbiome and our cancer diagnosis, as well as our response to any therapies in the treatment of cancer.

So I wanna back up a little bit and ask you, when you, so when you were 19 and were diagnosed with stage 4, ovarian cancer, were you already studying medicine or heading in that direction, or did this turn your career around?

Such a good question. I was actually pre-med. I had every intention. I was in my sophomore year of college. I had every intention of going to standard of care, conventional medical school. I was very, very interested in the sciences. I was a biology chemistry major. And thanks to the rigor of having a dual science education, I also worked more than full-time. I was also one of the first person in my family to go to college. So there was another level of kind of pressure on me to break out of certain ideologies. So I had to work very hard, did not come from any financial support. So I had to work very hard to financially pay my way, as well as take out lots of grants and student loans in order just to go to school. And so because I was investing in my own education, I also took my education very, very seriously. And so my illness was a wake-up call and a shock, as well as a realization that I could not maintain the 27, 28 hours course load per semester on top of what came out to be about 60 hours a week of work.

I've never heard of a course load that big. Right.

It's like, somehow I was like, oh, I guess that makes sense. And interestingly, side note here, cause we'll be talking about this in a moment, but I also was working graveyard shifts in order to fit it all in. So I worked as a nurse CNA, a nursing assistant, in a nursing home environment. And I also worked as a detox counselor, as a state-certified addictions counselor.

That's pretty impressive jobs for a 19-year-old.

Yeah, I don't really do anything half-assed, uh, my family and friends will tell you. So I was definitely in sort of the medical world of my career. I also waited tables and cocktailed because that's actually where the money was. But I also wanted to do things that were going to feed into my education and feed into my learning curve. So I learned a lot in that process, but I was definitely in the medical field. I was definitely interested in the medical field. And so the irony of this is to be diagnosed, I fully expected the medical field to take care of me. And it was in that experience that made me realize that really I had to take care of myself and had to learn how to do it very, very quickly in order to be standing here almost 29 years later having this discussion with you.

And so did you, launch into research on alternative treatments at that time, or did you go the conventional route or some combo?

Great question. In 1991, this is October '91, mind you, I'd been having symptoms for over 10 months in and out of the ER. It was missed over and over again, misdiagnosed and sort of frankly blown off. I was treated as the histrionic teenager drama queen, despite me explaining to them that something was really amiss. The irony was that I'd had an entire— up to the 19 years of that, I'd already had horrible health. But, it was to the point where it was just my norm, so I never thought of it as horrible health. It wasn't weird to me that I had to start on birth control pills under the age of 10 to regulate hormones. It wasn't weird to me that I had bowel movements maybe a couple times a month at max. It wasn't weird to me that I was covered in cystic acne and had unbelievable IBS symptoms and digestive issues and upset and horrible ongoing extremely heavy endometriosis-driven pain and bleeding every single month. That was my life. So I didn't know that it was— something was wrong with that. So by the time they figured out what was going on, they were like— they always kept writing off, oh, it's just your PCOS, it's just your endometriosis. So maybe it's pelvic inflammatory disease, or maybe it's anxiety or depression or a big flare of IBS. Everyone had an excuse of what it could be, which filled the gaps. You know, it made sense. It was a good differential diagnosis in 1991 of what they were thinking. And yet when I finally landed in the ER almost unconscious with an oxygen level in the 70s, fluid built up around my heart and my lungs, all over my abdomen. I had massive ascites. I was terribly sarcopenic, cachexia, you know, cachexia, very malnourished.

Massive what? Ascites?

Ascites, which is a fluid buildup in the abdomen outside of where it should be, right? Fluid should be in the cells and in the vasculature, but it leaked and it created this like big water balloon belly and being not severely malnourished. And unfortunately, by the time I arrived in the ER on this go, I was also in end-stage organ failure. My kidneys and my liver had decided to leave the building and my heart was not far behind. So I was too ill to even get a single dose of chemotherapy. And so for them, the only option was basically hospice. And they told me I had a few months to live even with treatment. Now, as a doctor looking back, I likely was days away from where I was. And unfortunately, when they pulled a bunch of the fluid from my abdomen, I almost died then because of major electrolyte imbalance and issues with that. But it's almost like ignorance was bliss at, you know, the 19, 20-year-old me of not understanding what was going on because I was in just my undergraduate science training. I was not any clinical training outside of what I learned as a certified nursing assistant, etc. So the long story short is I was given zero options in Western medicine. So I had to forego outside of blood testing, scans, and biopsies as I kept living. That's— they were not offering me anything else. So I did have to look completely alternatively. And that set me on what is now nearly a 3-decade journey of vetting therapies from around the world that have shown some level of success in supporting patients with cancer, whether it was a standalone treatment or as an adjuvant to standard of care. And learning how to apply that to myself in turn taught me how to apply it to these patients I've had the privilege of working with over the years. And then luckily, of me just surviving as long as I have, new information's coming out all the time, which makes me have that hindsight 20/20 process to look back and go, well, that explains why this worked or didn't work. But we didn't have that then. We didn't have Dr. Google, but a Dewey Decimal System and some microfiche for my research. And I went to a poor liberal arts school that had outdated textbooks, but that was to my benefit. That's how I ran across the work of people like Otto Warburg and the work of people like Beauchamp instead of Louis Pasteur. So I was learning about things outside of germ theory. I was learning out of things outside of the DNA driver of cancer. I was learning about things like our metabolic syndrome, our microbiome, our immune system, people running across the work of people like Coley, Dr. Coley and Coley's toxins. These were the things that I was reading about in these outdated 1920s, through 1940s medical journals, and that's where the real juice was. And we got far away from that in the last 50 to 70 years in oncology. And luckily for me, I've stumbled upon those things, and I believe some of those old thought processes are what have kept me alive to this day.

Wow. And so do you still consider yourself a cancer patient, or are you fully— do you feel fully recovered and not in danger?

That's a really good question. I personally don't believe that there is a cure for cancer. I believe cancer is in all of us, and the studies, research supports that fact. And I believe that we have the ability to turn the signaling in those pathways off or to keep them, you know, kind of quiet and dormant, or we have the ability to set them on fire and turn them on wildly, right? So I feel where I am today, per Western medical standards, it would likely not show that I'm cancer-free. Okay. However, per my standards, especially since about mid-2010, I've stopped cancering, if that makes sense. So everything is stabilized and my body is completely in harmony and balance with all of this. And I know how to check under the hood to adjust, assess, address, you know, test, assess, and address my process. And that's what I've learned for myself, what I've taught other patients, and now what I'm teaching other physicians to learn is exactly how to manage this disease process and really understand where it's come from, why it's so individualized, and how to best support the person through the process. And one of the coolest key foundations for making that be— have, like, have the better outcomes is based on the health and diversity of the microbiome.

Well, that's exactly where I was heading. So let's talk more about that.

Well, first of all, one of the things I love, and you being the poo goddess microbiome, you know, diva that you are, I'm not saying anything that you're not aware of, nor— it's probably also things that your listeners have heard over and over. But I love how we consider the microbiome today the forgotten organ. And I don't know if you've come across that term or that concept, but as I said early on in our discussion a moment ago, we've known since Ayurvedic medicine, which is the sort of great-grandmother of medicine that we know of today, and Chinese medicine in Hippocrates' time. So we're talking anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 years of old information saying that our health is based on the health of our gut. You know, we didn't quite know what that exactly meant, but we now know today when we started really looking at studies in 2005 and really started placing more emphasis on our GI tract, we certainly were validating thousands of year ideology and theory. So that's the one thing that even as a naturopathic doctor, since, you know, my medical school training in the mid-'90s, we were like, the gut, the gut, the gut, and everyone just basically said, you're crazy in standard of care. And yet today it's where we're investing so much of our resources for research and treatment. So yeah, until they could monetize it, it didn't mean anything. But once they were able to really monetize it, now we're paying attention. That's unfortunately the way it happens a lot in our medical system. But I just think this is really a powerful thing to think about. It's the forgotten organ. It's always been there. We've always known it played a role. And now we are paying for the research to really explain why. The other cool thing, you know, for your listeners specific to cancer and the microbiome is that it's estimated that 20% of all tumors, of all tumors worldwide are microbially driven. Let that sink in.

And would that be bacteria, fungi, viruses?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

And parasites.

Yes, you're nailing them all. You hit them all. And there's a great quote that showed up in a cancer journal back, golly, January 2019. The article was titled Gut Microbiome and Cancer Immunotherapy. And this simple quote says, "A healthy body is inseparable from an integrated gut epithelium with specific function and gut microbiome, immune cells, and mucosal barriers together that maintain epithelial homeostasis." And so in short, what that says is that what those crazy Ayurvedic doctors have been saying for 5,000 years was spot on. Our health comes down to the function and flora of our microbiome. And I just think it's very interesting that it took us until 2019 to really state that fact with much more certainty in the standard of care model.

So let me dig a little bit more into what you were saying about 20% of cancers having a microbial origin. Is the implication there that the microbe is somehow setting off the, the tumor process?

Yes, you're nailing it. So basically what we have learned is that the microecology of our microbiome, the changes there are where if, if you're going in the wrong direction, that's where we will rapidly proliferate rogue bacteria or viruses or parasites. Okay. And then those little creatures will then interact with the lining of our gut, the epithelial cells, and these other cells, which are kind of known as the structure of holding our inner world into sort of a matrix or into sort of a scaffolding of which we wrap around known as the stromal cells. What happens when that ecology gets tweaked in any way, those epithelial and stromal cells are altered in their function and their response systemically. And even more specifically, what's happening is that rapid shift in the microbiome and those specific cells result in what's known as toxic metabolites that trigger off distal, what we call carcinogenesis. So new cancer cells that can grow anywhere in the body, not just in the gut. And then that happens even further, putting a cascade on things like inflammation and immunosuppression. And these are sort of what I call the trifecta. In my mind, the trifecta today of cancer is gut dysbiosis with inflammation and poor immune function is the perfect combination for a cancer storm.

Okay, so now when you said toxic metabolites, are we talking— is that the same as the endotoxins or LPS?

Yes. Yes. All of those pieces. So endotoxins that the individual organism can shed, but also perforation to the lining, that LPS, that lipopolysaccharide coating that goes across our whole tube. I always tell people we're just a tube with a body wrapped around it. And so that piece happens. But then also when we trigger, because you and your listeners obviously know that about depending on who you talk to, 70 to 80% of our immune cells and our immune function is happening at the GI tract level, the microbiome level. And so then we also set up a cascade of cellular responses such as natural killer cells, cytokines, which are inflammatory molecules. We can create a little cacophony, a little orchestra of all types of things that are triggered that not only impact what's happening at the tube level, but send out all kinds of signals throughout the rest of the body.

And so they're sending those signals and as a result, a tumor forms. I'm having trouble taking the one part and making it connect to the other part.

Well, so here's the thing is in Western medicine, you're not having problems. Your discomfort around really grappling this is because we have frankly blown smoke up people's asses for 70 years with regards to what cancer is. So when I'm talking about blows people's minds, because we sort of think of cancer as this exogenous invader. That somehow enters us from outside of us and we have to then kill it or fully eradicate it. And we've given it unbelievable power that it's driven by our genetics, by it, that it's a genetic disease and that we're powerless in dealing with it. However, what we have learned in the last— well, what we've relearned, let's put it that way, because we knew this back in the early 1900s, but We took a little different turn when Watson and Crick came along, you know, with their focus on genetics and DNA. But what we've since learned is that really cancer is a metabolic disease. And by that, it's a disease on the energies that we take into the body. It's a disease at the mitochondrial level, at the little powerhouse cellular structures that each of our cells carry of turning on or off. Energy performance throughout our tissues, throughout our organs, throughout our whole body. But it also is the signaling pathways. It tells things to grow. The mitochondria tell things to die. They tell things to stall, to hold off. They tell things to regenerate. They tell things to increase inflammation where you need it or to decrease inflammation when you need it. So basically all of these cell pathways start to communicate to each other, to the rest of the body. And then over time, time, on average, somewhere between 7 and 10 years, enough cells start to congregate and clump up and hang out based on the inflammation we talked about at the level of those epithelial cells that not only line our gut but line our vasculature and line our cells and line our organs to the level of our stromal cells that offer this structure, which are the types of things that's like the— think of it as the sort of jungle gyms that those cells walk around on, like travel around on to migrate throughout the building and metastasize. And so when you said, okay, I'm trying to understand where the bridge comes together that suddenly you have a tumor from this, it is a long-standing ongoing process that can take years to solidify for it to be big enough and loud enough and clumped together in such a way that we recognize it as a tumor or a cancer diagnosis. And so what I'm trying to help your listeners understand is that we have the power to turn this around way before it's big enough and loud enough to capture our attention by changing things down at that cellular level and preventing things from getting on the move and congregating and clumping up to make what we know today as a tumor.

Well, I'm really excited to talk about how to do that, but I wanna ask a couple more questions before we delve into that. So you mentioned that the view of cancer now, or the view that you have, is that it's a metabolic— not a genetic disease, but there are some genetic cancers or where there's a proclivity towards the cancer because of genetics, no?

Yeah, less than 5%. And so it's amazing when we talk about— we put all kinds of energy and resources into that 5%. And yet when you think about it, if there is a true less than 5% potential for cancer, wouldn't it make more sense to put your energy in prevention in the 95% that doesn't have that problem?

Absolutely. I'm fully behind this. I just wanted to, cuz I know people are gonna be thinking that.

Right. I love it. And so it's like we're putting the lion's share of our financial resources and our research dollars into less than 5% of the population. And even that is not a guarantee that the types of drugs and treatments we're coming up with to treat that 5% will even be effective. In fact, it falls quite short of that. And so interesting, a lot of people think of things like the BRCA gene, like the Angelina Jolie gene, gene. We think of that as a, as a static genetic malformation that basically makes, makes us a sitting duck for cancer. What I want your listeners to take home from this is that first of all, that is less than 5% of all cancers.

Okay.

And that's even not in that overall. So it's sort of like you have the genetics of 5% and then you have the BRCA gene hiccup, which is less than 5% of that. It gets really minimal when you really look at it. And the irony of that is that that is not static. It's actually quite dynamic, and it is incredibly responsive to the information we choose to put in, on, and around our bodies in every given moment. It's actually more of a what we call an epigenetic hiccup. And epigenetics means above the gene, meaning we actually have the ability to change the outcomes. And these epigenetic changes are actually 100% linked to our diet and lifestyle modifiers.

Awesome.

Pardon the brief interruption, but if you're struggling with your gut health or have an autoimmune condition, would like to get back to great health in a natural way, I offer free 1-hour health restoration breakthrough sessions to anyone who's interested to hear about what you're struggling with, understand what's been keeping you from getting better, and to explain whether health coaching may be a helpful tool in restoring your health. We can meet by phone or video chat from anywhere in the US. Typical gut or autoimmune health packages involve 5 to 12 coaching sessions over an extended period of time, recommendations for gut testing that you can order yourself whose results I can help you understand, and education and support on supplements, diet changes, and lifestyle changes that will help or even reverse your condition. You can read more about my coaching program and set up a breakthrough session by going to HighDesertHealthCoaching.com and looking under Work With Me health coaching, or by clicking the links in the show notes. Now back to our conversation.

So I know you've sort of already answered this in some sense, but I just, maybe if you could spell it out really clearly. So I know that there's an increased risk of cancer for people who have autoimmune disease, which I have. And so I'm interested in hearing why and what you can do about it.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

I always tell people, think of your immune system as a teeter-totter. I always think very simply and I'm very visual, so this helps me. So imagine a teeter-totter. Now what I'm about to articulate is not 100% set in stone every time, but but it's the vast majority of the time. So humor me and I'll walk you through the analogy. So we have one end of the teeter-totter is Th1. This is the T helper cell, one side of the teeter-totter that is, if it's provoked, that's where you see autoimmunity, Hashimoto's, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, right? We see that end of the spectrum. On the other end of the teeter-totter is something known as Th2. T helper cell 2 status. That is when it is exacerbated, where we often see cancering.

Okay.

So that's a pretty interesting place here. We also see in that same category allergies and weirdly we see things like psoriasis, which psoriasis, by the way, is like a rapid proliferating plaque of this skin cells, which acts very much like a cancer, right? It's, it doesn't really shut off. So interestingly enough, we have these two ends of the teeter-totter spectrum., and then in the center of the teeter-totter, we have this thing called T helper cell 3, and it's the mediator, the moderator. It's that center post. Now, in Western medicine, our job is we turn on or off each end of that teeter-totter depending what the patient's dealing with. So for instance, for you, if you're dealing with autoimmunity, your doctors like to come in and turn off your immune system. With drugs like steroids or drugs like what they call biological mediators. Okay, so things like Humira, methotrexate, but basically they're immunosuppressive drugs. So when folks get put on immunosuppressive therapies for their flaring autoimmune condition, you will turn off Th1 and you do so by stimulating Th2. That is why on all of these drug inserts, you will see a black box warning of cancer as a side effect of treating your autoimmune condition. So it's not necessarily directly related that, oops, you have an autoimmune condition, therefore you have a higher risk of cancer. What you do allude to is you have a broken immune system that needs modulated. But if you're someone who's getting treatment for your autoimmune condition, your risk of cancer goes up exponentially simply because you're pushing down one end of the teeter-totter and pushing up the other.

Well, that's a relief because I've reversed my autoimmune conditions naturally, so I don't have to worry about that. I've never taken any of those drugs.

And you know how beautiful is— you nailed it because guess what? You treating that autoimmunity likely is because you went after what we call the center post, the Th3. So what I tell my patients, because I'm one of those folks who have both Th1 and Th2 dominance, so it's like my teeter-totter floats through space. My bladder is like a magic carpet ride. And so, both are stimulated. So, I can be having an autoimmune flare at the same time of having a cancering flare. That is another weird possibility. But either way, the way to really balance that out is to go into the center point. And the irony of that center point is so much of it is dependent on the microbiome, which I love because it ties right back into all of this. But just to throw a couple of things out to your listeners, when we increase our vitamin D levels, when we increase essential fatty acids through fish oil, when we bring on particular probiotics based on what we need and our microbiome, we hit and modulate that center point of the teeter-totter and balance both cancer and autoimmune patterns simultaneously. So I always tell doctors and friends and patients and colleagues you don't have to worry about which end of the teeter-totter you're messing with when you go after the center. And so that's what's really encouraging to me is it's actually in some ways far easier to treat the center of the teeter-totter than either end of the spectrum. And then we don't have to worry. For instance, when a patient has cancer, they're put on chemotherapeutics and other cytotoxic therapies that strongly suppress Th2. Guess what they do? They wake up and overly stimulate Th1. So for instance, today, the treatment, the biggest place where we're funneling all of our treatment dollars is into immune therapies. And they work. I should say patients respond less than 20% of the time. I would not— when I say respond, that does not mean cure. Okay. Western medicine makes patients believe that's what they're getting, but response means, hey, are we able to push that tumor back at all? Even a tiny amount. That's a response. But the irony is these medications, more than 80% of the time, stimulate such god-awful autoimmune Th1 dominant processes that I've lost more patients in the last 10 years since immune therapies came on the market than I lost collectively in all of the thousands of patients I'd treated before, because these drugs are shooting people into end organ stage failure secondary to the treatment for their cancer that stimulates an autoimmune destruction of their organs. So here's wherein lies the issue. And in fact, most of the research that's come out in the last few years is helping us understand why this is the case. And these patients and the reason why they have such crappy response to these medications is because their microbiomes are a hot friggin mess, especially if they had been on any previous standard of care therapies prior to initiating therapy with immune therapies.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I had a friend who went through cancer and, and eventually passed away and she went through traditional therapies and came to stay at my house for a time in between. And I thought, I'm gonna boost her microbiome whether she knows it or not. And I was giving her like raw milk, you know, yogurt and mixed in a smoothie and stuff. And sure enough, she was better for a good while, but then hit the immunotherapies and and they worked the first round, but then the itching started and she said, I can't take it anymore. My entire body's itching.

And what she witnessed, what you witnessed in her experience, that itching was liver failing. So that type of a mad itch is liver failure. And so you don't, it's, it's the, the most common sites that it's attacked by these, these immune therapies are the thyroid, the liver, the lungs, and the kidney. And so, you know, when people— and in the GI tract. So ulcerative colitis is another one, which is ironic given everything we just started our whole conversation about, right? It's all about the tube. And if you destroy that, you're really screwed. I mean, this is what's so fascinating to me is really even as recent as last March in the Smithsonian Magazine, you know, pretty common thread magazine here. They, they did a great short article. So if you go back to March 2019, Smithsonian Magazine, they did a great article about the effectiveness of standard of care from chemotherapy, even down to the immune therapies with the help of immune system support by changing the microbiome. And what they're finding is all of our standard of care therapies will be much more effective depending on what's going on with their gut microbiome. So a couple of studies I heard presented this year at a huge cancer symposium, there were 2 or 3 talks specific to this, that if patients have utilized even a single course of antibiotics within 6 months of initiating standard of care, whether that's radiation, whether that's hormone blockade therapies, whether that's chemotherapy, targeted therapies, or whether that's an immune therapy, they will either, one, not respond at all, two, have horrible drug resistance, or three, you know, have an initial good response like your friend did, and then it comes back with a vengeance. And so what they started doing in this article is they started taking the stool samples of breast and lung cancer patients and realized that those patients with the worst outcomes had very low Firmicutes. As just an example. And they realized if they basically made those patients either put it through their nose or had them take it, swallow a pill, or put it up rectally, they basically gave them a poop, you know, transplant of hypermucidase, their bodies started to respond to the therapies much more potently had they not been given that therapy.

Right.

That's what I'm talking about. It's fascinating where we're learning. And that's a pretty pretty basic starting point. It's like, wouldn't it be cool if we did a microbiome assessment on every single patient that came through our office before we decide exactly what treatment to start them on or how to prep them for whatever treatment is appropriate? And guess what? That's what I do in my practice.

Tell me about what you like. Which stool test do you use?

I've used a lot of different ones over the years. I use Biome a lot now. I've used, you know, some of the ones from like Genova through some of their GI profiles and GI maps. But there's a company, this woman, Stephanie Kuller, C-U-L-L-E-R, she actually has a really cool TED Talk, but she started a company called Persephone Biome. And literally that's precisely what they're looking at is the studies of relationships between cancer and the microbiome. And they'll take mouth swabs as well as stool tests. And I love, she calls it Poop for the Cure is a website that she's launched and she basically wants your poop to study. So we can literally make poop sampling just as routine as a blood test is her mission. And this is thanks to a woman who watched two of her loved ones die of cancer unnecessarily, who quote unquote were doing everything right per what our standards of eating healthy and living healthfully today, and yet still succumbed to the disease. And what I think is so interesting is on the planet today, we have there's so many assaults on our microbiome. And I'm sure you and all of your guests have tackled this to some degree. But that's what we started to realize is that on just living on the planet today, we are destroying our microbiome. Our, you know, we are destroying our immune system and we've become monocropped just like we've monocropped our food supply in the last 100 years. And when you get rid of diversity, you get rid of resilience. And you get rid of the ability to kind of overcome and deal with whatever you're faced with. And so we've all become much more vulnerable to the things around us today simply because of how weakened and loss of diversity our microbiome has become.

And so what do you recommend short of a fecal transplant to replace that diversity as a preventive measure?

Such a great question, because that's one of the things I think that people like Dr. Kuller and her team, you know, they're of course they're coming from the medical pharmaceutical model of let's create something we can sell. And there is actually a time and a place where a fecal transplant may be very required. So here's a really good example. I'm actually teaching a group of doctors right now how to deal with integrative oncology with their patients. And one of the questions is how to contend with, say, bone marrow transplants and also how to contend with the graft versus host disease, host disease, that is that extreme reaction to getting new cells in your body. It's like a rejection. Process, which is a Th1 dominant process. And they can be very life-threatening. In fact, most people might survive the initial disease that caused them to get the transplant that then later led to, you know, graft versus host disease. And they will wish, like your friend with the itching, for death. You know, they're like, cancer was easy compared to what I'm dealing with now and the side effects of this. It's in that population where we're finding that a tissue, you know, a fecal transplant can be incredibly powerful to stop that. And even, you know, people like maybe what we're learning today with what your friend experienced, we might be able to actually take the microbiome of a relatively healthy person and implant it into somebody having a terrible reaction to, say, their immunotherapy and quench that fire. So there is a medical time and place for, you know, basically the poop pill. Okay. But Examples of how we can change that in our day to day. I mean, first of all, we eat very differently than we do from our ancestors. We ate so many more diverse foods and plants for millennia. And as I said, we've really monocropped. So you then have to take it upon yourself to branch out your diet and bring in foods you don't normally eat. So things like I tell people, start playing with things like Jerusalem artichoke, leeks, you know, plantains, like things that you would probably not normally eat a little bit of. In your diet that bring in the prebiotics and the inulin and the types of fibers that are the food and fuel for your microbiome. And then diversify your portfolio with your digest— you know, your predigested soil-rich foods. Like, don't be too clean with your foods. Grow your own. Eat the dirt off your carrot. And then also, you mentioned about to your friend, like, the fermentation. You were basically inoculating her system. Them by mixing it up. And in the West, we're not really keen on our ferments, but most cultures have some type of ferment, you know, like borscht, you know, like the kvass, you know, in some parts of the world and the kimchi and others or the sauerkraut and, you know, and others or pickled vegetables and others. It's now becoming kind of hipster and cool in the US thanks to things like Portlandia. You can pickle that, right? But ultimately, like, that's the place is trying to encourage people to eat eat some serving of a, of a fermented food on a daily basis. But if you have really terrible things like FODMAPs or small intestine bowel overgrowth issues, even those foods can backfire. So you have to work with a trained professional to help get the inner garden more ready to accept those foods. So that's a big one. Another big one is sugar. We are a bunch of sugar junkies and sugar is really a beast in feeding these little wrong directional microbes and organisms in our gut. They will vie for that fuel and basically starve us of our other nutrients. And then fiber, we tend to have a very low fiber dietary intake in the West. We just don't do our veggies. We want to be telling our patients to take their 9 to 15 servings of vegetables in a day, which is what I have my patients do, above-the-ground, leafy green, low-carbohydrate-rich foods. But ultimately, most people can barely get 3 servings in a day.

That's— I'm always telling my children, 5 servings a day at least. And they think I'm just like this crazy, outdated— because no one on earth they know eats anything near that.

Good job, Mom. You're planting seeds literally and figuratively in their bodies. These things like hand sanitizers. You get on an airplane and everyone's wiping down the entire chair and—

oh my gosh, I sat next to this— I sat next to this woman in an airplane. Who said she was afraid of herpes, and she was sanitizing literally every single, every single piece of that. And she's like, do you want some? I'm like, no, crazy lady, I don't.

Someone has not given her the memo that you do not cap, you know, catch herpes.

I think the problem is she had been listening to some conspiracy theories that said that's how you do catch it.

And so anyway, I, um, my God, you, so you've got to see, like, kids, don't do it like this at home. And then, you know, sleep, having good sleep hygiene, having good hydration, being out in nature, get dirty, you know, avoiding antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, hanging out with your pets. You know, they talk about kids with healthier immune systems live on farms and ranches or out in nature. We're so terrified of dirtiness, and that's natural. Intermittent fasting is another way to really change up your microbiome. You know, any change in your diet can change your microbiome within a matter of days. And so if the way you've been doing it isn't working, try something for 3 days. You know, maybe you go kind of hog wild for 3 days on vegetables, or maybe you go hog wild for 3 days on a water fast, or maybe even hog wild for 3 days on just a carnivore diet, which can be really interesting for folks with extreme, extreme, extreme lipopolysaccharide leaky gut patterns. So there's so many ways you have to kind of be a living laboratory to see what works for you. But honestly, here's another one that I tell my, my patients and I tell my friends and family. You must hang out with people with healthy microbiome. You know, we talk about energetically, you are the energy of the 5 closest people you hang out with. Well, that's true of our microbiome as well. So it's interesting that our microbiome is much closer to our dogs than it is to say someone you work with a couple of days a week, because who you live or spend the most of your time with, you are in their sort of microbiome field. It sounds so esoteric and woo-woo, but it's ultimately nature versus nurture concept. You're ultimately eating and sharing skin cells and maybe spittle and whatever bodily fluids and just general contact within breathing and inhaling each other's bits and pieces, right? That, that is impacting yours. So if you are literally living with someone who chooses absolutely not to take care of themselves and just has a shit lifestyle and microbiome, guess what? You're getting that as well.

Yeah.

And of course your dog's licking you, but your coworkers aren't. So hopefully.

I'm very careful about how my dogs eat. They don't eat Purina. There's the dogs today, they are dying of the same diseases we are. They are. And it's what is more of the natural diet and lifestyle for my dog? So in helping them live their best, they're helping me live my best.

Now you're making me think I need to invest in better cat food. Right?

You're like, ooh.

It's so expensive.

Exactly. I just think it's so fascinating. And in fact, there's a Dr. Wargo, W-A-R-G-O. She's out of MD Anderson and she is able to— like, she has been really nailing down the literature on patients' response to these expensive immune therapies, CAR-T, CTLA-4, PD-1 inhibitors, checkpoint inhibitors. And she's the one who said, you know, why are we getting less than a 20% response rate? And so she's also that person that recognized The difference is in the microbiome. And so, I think it's so cool we have huge cancer center, unbelievable academia recognizing the value of this. And, one of the things I think is really cool, there's a couple of studies, I'm happy to give them to you to post for your listeners on this piece here, but there's a few examples. For instance, like H. pylori. Here's a gut infection that is well connected with gastric cancers and lymphomas., right? And it does so by creating inflammation and genetic instability and toxic metabolites. And then we have things like elevated Fusobacterium nucleatum, which is very, very significant in colorectal cancer patients. And the way it works is it accelerates tumorigenesis and it modulates something known as E-cadherin. And E-cadherin is basically how things metastasize. It's like, think about this sort of sticking to the next surface and then burrowing in. That's kind of the job of this E-cadherin molecule. And that same bacterium or that same microbiome, you know, inhibits our natural killer cells. So it kind of turns off, it dismantles our immune system. And then we made mention to earlier viruses. Epstein-Barr virus alone causes over 200,000 cancer cases worldwide a year.

And what are those, those particular types?

Mostly, mostly with Epstein-Barr, we're seeing things in the lymphoma. The Burkitt lymphoma, the lymphoma, a lot of the blood cancers. So Epstein-Barr is also very associated with a lot of even breast cancers, colorectal cancers. We see it in a lot of populations, but you see it mostly in the, in the arena of the blood cancers.

And what can you do for, to, to suppress that?

Well, again, if we don't wanna suppress, we wanna address, we wanna overcome. And so when, for instance, a really good example is our best antiviral is optimized vitamin D3. Okay. And the time when our Epstein-Barr gets the best of us is usually in the winter months during viral season when we're all cooped up indoors, when we're eating like absolute utter shit. I call it the sugar season from basically, you know, Halloween till, till hello, Valentine's Day that we just got through here. And we then are indoors and out of the sunshine and our vitamin D levels plummet about 50% of what they are in the summertime. So that's pretty amazing. So between the increased sugar, which feeds the virus, and the decreased vitamin D, which is sort of the viral birth control pill, okay, you kind of get the double whammy. So when I have folks who've had a history of mono or known Epstein-Barr, we optimize and make sure their vitamin D levels are at a therapeutic level, not just a let's-prevent-rickets level.

What do you consider that optimal level? Because I've seen different numbers in my world.

I like it, I like it around 80. That's a lot. That's pretty high for people. I want it up there. And that's just the nature of the world I work with. Everything is through a kind of a cancer filter. So I want everyone to be at a very optimized level. But, you know, just a couple others, like we know CMV, cytomegalovirus, very associated with brain cancer. In fact, we're now doing treatments by injecting anti— we're targeting cytomegalovirus in the tumors in the brain by injecting vaccines to this in the brain. Things like HPV, all, you know, most of about 80 to 90% of all head and neck, anal cancers, and cervical cancers are HPV-related. So in our world, we say, oh, you just need a vaccine and that'll stop it. But there's dozens and dozens and dozens of different forms of HPV. And yet what HPV is really responsive to is not smoking. So people with HPV have a higher, higher incidence of it if they're smokers or exposed to a lot of second and thirdhand smoke, to low levels of vitamin A, low levels of vitamin D, low levels of vitamin K, or fat-soluble vitamins. So I usually see my, my kind of low-fat vegan athletes have some of the highest rates of these types of cancers. And so those are some things that, again, the virus takes over. We have the same treatment when we talked about the vitamin D is quite helpful. And then things like HHV HPV-6, which is a herpes virus, that's really associated with a lot of childhood leukemias. And yet we see these types of viruses in kids all the time, and it's in the kids whose parents suppress them with Tylenol, which destroyed their glutathione levels and their antioxidant levels, that we have the highest rate of these cancers, and especially if they had some antibiotics. Well, now hopefully you'll reflect back on what we were saying a few minutes ago. Antibiotics will dismantle the immune system. At the microbiome level. So here's these very vulnerable populations of children that we're like suppressing their fevers or letting them live on tons of sugar. We don't want them to be uncomfortable, so we quickly put them on things like Tylenol and ibuprofen, and we are then terrified and putting them on preemptive antibiotics for things like viruses, which is never appropriate. And suddenly we're seeing spikes in leukemias again in childhood that were on the down— downward trend. Trend, but we're back to where we were kind of on the upward trend again. And there's like kind of a last quick one, like things like high Bacteroidetes. We see that a lot in our ulcerative colitis patients, our inflammatory bowel disease folks, Crohn's, and that population has a much higher risk of colorectal cancer simply from the inflammatory side of things. So it's just kind of interesting place here, as I said earlier, kind of that trifecta, that triad of gut dysbiosis leading to inflammation, leading to with poor immune function is a really nice cocktail to make a cancer more likely. And given that 1 in 2 Americans will have cancer in their lifetime, I want folks to be tidying up their microbiome.

So I assume that from what you've said, that your patients will often be going the standard of care as well as doing some natural things on the side. What, what do you advocate when you see a patient? Do you sort of leave it up to them whether they're going to do that or, Good question.

It's funny, for probably the first chunk of my career, people came to me just saying, hey, can you help me offset the side effects of my standard of care therapy? And that's where I did my thing for a very long time. What's happened in like the last decade is people realize that overall there's about a 3% response rate to chemotherapy, about a 12% response rate to, uh, radiation, and about a 50% response rate to surgery. So a lot of people are realizing that in order for them to overcome the statistics of getting over the cancer, but also overcoming the statistic of it recurring, which happens in more than 70% of the time, they're not interested in doing that dance again, which is how it should be. Cancer should be our wake-up call, our call to action to change everything in our lives that got us to the cancering place to begin with, right? So luckily the type of patient I get today are a lot more interested in saying, I wanna understand why I got here. I want to understand how to completely get out of here, and I want to make my therapies work better for me if I choose a standard of care approach, because they're realizing that their options are relatively limited, especially with what the research shows. So it's funny that I'm even in a position now where I have a lot of patients who refuse standard of care, and I'm, I'm the one, I'm the crazy naturopath saying, you know, let's explore all of your options because standard of care may be your best bet, but let's look under the hood. Let's test, assess, address. Let's look at and increase things like your microbiome diversity, your vitamin D level status. Let's get your sugar levels down, which are big drivers of proliferation. And let's make these therapies work better for you with less toxicity and better outcomes in a way that you don't ever have to come back and do this again. That's appealing.

And are there particular probiotics that you recommend to people Or do you look at a stool test and say, based on that, this is the probiotic?

Yes and yes and yes. So sometimes I'm lucky enough that people come in with that data already. Sometimes we just look at the tissue type and make some guesses just given, for instance, their history. So if they had like an ulcerative colitis history, we likely know they've got elevated Bacteroidetes, especially if they're, there's, if we're dealing with some obesity things, we'll see some shifts of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. There's some things we can kind of guess based on their their personal history, even how they look, even how they respond to previous cancer treatments. Because a lot of the times, like tests like Viome and whatnot, they're also just a drop in the bucket. We're taking a slice in time moment. It changes very quickly. So it's tough unless someone can really afford to keep investing in those tests every few months to take a look, to utilize them the best way we can. My hope is in a couple of years we will have people like the, the Poop for the Cure gal and others who will make this much more like, hey, let's take a look at this every 2 months, you know, and adjust accordingly. Because where we got excited for a period of time is let's just get everybody on probiotics. And that kind of backfired. Okay. What we are now seeing in the research is that we actually may be hindering some cancer processes or even feeding some cancer processes by the wrong use of probiotics. And so this is the place where I always caution colleagues and patients, like, don't just get out there and start willy-nilly throw things at this. Have at least a general understanding of maybe what could be out of balance. And if you can have the resources to look exactly what's out of balance, then we can address it accordingly. When in doubt, I like to use food, as we talked about. That's my favorite. Or fasting, that's my favorite. And then we may— like, for instance, we know that checkpoint inhibitors work much better with, with enough bifidomax, you know, bifido, um, count. So I often use things from my colleague Dr. Grace Liu's, Bifidomaximus, because it's a really high dose, it's low histamine response, so it tends to be quite well tolerated in patients. And I might titrate them up on that in preparation for the treatment with the immune therapy. So there are times and places where I will use things, or definitely they've taken a certain, you know, particular treatment that really I know wiped out their microbiome, for instance, like a colonoscopy prep. Is a really good example. It eliminates almost 100% of your microbiome. So the irony is, if you're diagnosed with colorectal cancer, you've likely just had a colonoscopy to help you make that determination you had cancer. And then we immediately throw those people into standard of care therapy. Guess what? It's not going to work as well unless we inoculate that person's colon. And so these are the types of things where I'm interested. I don't have the answers yet, but I know that we will get there, that we will be able to look exactly and say, you know, that person just had their colonoscopy. Let's give them a little, you know, re-inoculation post-colonoscopy to help them along the way, to help kind of reseed the field. So start right into treatment and have a better response because we know if we left them to their own devices within a few months, they're right back to where they should be. But most have to jump right into treatment and then that further prevents them from getting back where they need to be. And it further creates dysbiosis, which further creates inflammation problems and immune problems, etc.

Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you mentioned the colonoscopy because I was just having a conversation with my sister about this, like, do we do the colonoscopy or not? Because she's, she's a couple of years past 50 and I'm just, I just turned 50 this year and I'm not inclined to do it because I'm like, I've worked so hard to get my gut into good shape and it finally is in good shape. Idea of getting rid of everything that's in it for this test, not to mention, you know, the potential of, you know, being perforated or whatever.

Exactly.

What is your feeling on Cologuard versus colonoscopy?

First of all, I love, like, if you have a strong family history, Cologuard is a really good way to go. Or a personal, like, a lot of health issues, like you had Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, we can look at things like Calprotectin is one. We can look at alpha, uh, pheto— I can't believe I can't get this word out right now. It's another fecal test that I'll do to look for kind of protein patterns in the stool. But the other thing that we have folks do is, is maybe not forego the colonoscopy, but forego the Go Lightly that they offer. And instead, we basically flush their body with a ton of magnesium. So that is— you can't use things like vitamin C, which would definitely flush your colon, but it also alters and gives you false positives or false negatives depending on the patient on your colonoscopy. So things like that. And you can't use things like, say, Cascara Sagrada or Senna because they actually stain and sort of flatten the villi and give you some really weird findings on your colonoscopy. But we can use things like magnesium citrate in high doses. Let's say your colonoscopy is at 10 a.m. on Thursday morning. On Tuesday night before, I start having patients take, you know, 250 to 500 milligrams of magnesium. If they're magnesium naive, a little bit less. If they've been using it with no problem, a little bit more, and basically have them take it every 4 hours until they're basically pouring water out of their bums and cursing me, right? That's where I know happy spot. And then they go and it's usually enough to clear the whistle. I think I've only had one patient where they didn't clear everything, but this was also a patient who taking the Go Lightly didn't clear everything. But the main function why the treatment or the prep for colonoscopy is so bad is it's basically radiation or radiator fluid. So it's, it's nasty stuff and it's incredibly disruptive to the microbiome and basically pulls everything on out. But you can flush it with bringing all the water into the stool, which is what magnesium does, or into the colon and flush. It's like my Chinese medicine professor, Dr. Deng, always said, float the boat, like bring in enough water into the colon to help float the turds right out of there.

And are you fasting too during that whole day then, the Wednesday?

I do. And then afterwards I have the patient then take a bunch of C and everything just to help those epithelial cells get their tonicity back again afterwards and things like that. But yeah, so if people are inclined to do a colonoscopy or they just really have someone who won't let them do the Cologuard, that's our sort of still doing your due diligence to get these screenings done without destroying your microbiome at the same time.

Okay. So are there maybe 3 or 4 supplements that you would say are at the top of your list for someone undergoing cancer treatment that are just generally anti-cancer?

That's a really great question. First of all, optimize your vitamin D levels. I think that's so, so, so key. And if someone's interested in an actual herb or a supplement that I find is quite well tolerated across the board, that has multiple effects, especially specific to what we're talking about, the microbiome. But also specific to the metabolic processes that cancer does, as well as the immune processes and the inflammatory processes, I would look at berberine. Okay. Berberine is an Ayurvedic and a Chinese herb that is very good for— we actually use it to treat gut infections, but it also is considered nature's metformin. So it's very powerful to lower insulin, insulin growth factors, and create better metabolic tone. Especially if someone's coming off of a standard American diet of high carbohydrate, high sugar intake. And then it also is very strongly anti-inflammatory. So it's in that same polyphenol field that's really good for you to use in that, that arena. So vitamin D, berberine would be two safe ones. Also, because most of us are driven by stress, another typically well-tolerated— probably for every cancer patient and every patient I've ever come in contact with could use some magnesium. Okay, magnesium helps you sleep, it helps you poop, it helps you relax, it lowers catecholamines, which is your stress response, helps clear them out of the system. A lot of us who are dealing with cancer have what we call COMT SNPs, catecholamine SNPs. That means that when we're exposed to stress, it basically provokes cancer proliferation in a pretty powerful way. And magnesium is one of the best ways to change the expression of that epigenetic. And those three are so well tolerated. By the vast majority of patients, that there's also a lot of good preventative things in day-to-day, not just for the cancer patient. Then from that point on, it will vary so wildly. I'm always hesitant to recommend things. And I know a lot of my colleagues would jump right in, but those would be an interesting place to start because as one of my colleagues says, you'd feed several birds with one seed.

I know that you have some other things in the works. Can you talk about those? Yeah.

So I went from having a brick-and-mortar clinical practice for many, many years to facilitating cancer retreats for patients and providers and their caregivers, which I really love. And I hope to get back to end of this year and on into 2021 and beyond. I have two more books coming out this next year, specific to really individualizing dietary and supplement intake for the cancer patient based on extreme specific metrics around their epigenetics. Genetics and their tissue genomics and their blood tests. So it's going to be a little bit heady and clinical, but I'm really tired of everyone's dogma of saying which diet, you know, everyone should eat this way or everyone should not eat this way or everyone should take this or not take this. I really want to help people find the nuances that fits best for them. And so that's what I've become really good at doing in my own learning curve for myself and my patients. So putting that into a book format as well as a format on mistletoe and how to use mistletoe as an adjuvant support for the whole patient going through a cancer process, whether they're using it with standard of care or other therapies. And then the big, big thing now is I'm training doctors. I now work with doctors on how to work with their patients, and I'm even in a beta course of 12 physicians from around the world who are becoming really good at testing, assessing, and addressing each patient as an individual and really applying precision medicine techniques in a metabolic paradigm kind of way. And that is all leading into the bigger vision of creating the first and only residential research institute in clinical integrative oncology here in the United States, where the best all worlds will be in one, under one roof. All of our cancer patients have to patchwork it all together in all these different institutes with all these different providers just to get awareness of what is going to be best for them. And we're going to be having it all housed under one roof here. And in fact, I go this— I leave Friday to go check out land where we hope to build this institute.

How exciting.

And this is in Arizona, actually.

Oh, are you in Arizona?

I am not. I live my— I spend my winters down in Mexico. So I'm speaking to you just outside of Puerto Vallarta. Oh, and here till May. So my Colorado is my sort of summer gig and Mexico is my winter gig.

And where in Arizona are you looking to put the—

looking at very southeast Arizona. We need it to be sort of off the grid. We need it to be relatively proximity to Mexico in case the FDA gets little bugs up their butts. We don't want to have patients' care compromised. So we do want to have kind of a sister clinic available to us. But ultimately, the whole institute will be under a research arm, a big IRB, so patients know they're coming in a research environment for this. But Why we chose Arizona is it has one of the most broad scopes of practice. So, I mean, naturopaths have prescription rights, and MDs can practice homeopathy and functional medicine, and DOs— we all play quite well together there. And the laws around building a hospital and the— there's really 3 states that have a pretty broad scope, and that's Arizona, California, and Nevada. And I can't really compel people to want to move to Nevada, and California has has too many flaming hoops of bureaucracy to dig through, plus the cost of living and whatnot is really prohibitive. And this area of Arizona, we also hope to change a kind of a very poor socioeconomic region and bring, bring something really powerful and positive and healing, not just to the community but to the land and the region.

Well, that's really exciting. I didn't realize right here in my backyard—

I'm in Tucson, so I know, I saw, I was like, we might be seeing more of each other.

Well, that would be awesome. Well, I have an Airbnb here in my place, so you're welcome to come through and stay.

Love that idea. Definitely will be in touch on that.

So I know you have a free gift on your website. You wanna tell people about that?

Sure. In fact, I've got two options.

Okay.

So you're welcome to come back twice, but the first one is this free little download of 5 Steps If You're Diagnosed With Cancer. And it's so above and beyond what most folks are thinking when they're first diagnosed, you know? So I really think that's a good tool for yourself, even if you aren't facing a cancer diagnosis. This is good just for you to have to just think to yourself, what would I do if this situation ever came up? So there's that. But if that doesn't appeal to you, or you already have it, or you feel like you've got this under, under control, I also have a great little freebie on creating metabolic flexibility. By that I mean that studies show that less than 12% of Americans have what's known as metabolic flexibility, the ability to burn sugar or fat as needed depending on the fuel sources at hand. And when I say that, that's also the scourge of what we die from today is metabolic inflexibility. So diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, dementia, and cancer are what kill us today. And they're all metabolic diseases. And so I'm helping— I show people that there's a variety of roads to Rome and how to get there, plus the research that backs it on how to start to institute metabolic flexibility into your own life.

So we're talking about ketogenic diets here, fasting, this kind of stuff, presumably, right?

Ketogenic diets, even exogenous ketones, even pharmaceutical interventions were appropriate. So wanting folks to realize there's multiple ways of achieving this and pushing your body, as I said earlier, kind of being a living laboratory and seeing what works for you.

Okay.

Yeah, and I, I realize now there's so much to talk about with regard to cancer that we didn't even talk about like, you know, fasting before and after treatments and ketogenic diets and stuff. Can you gimme a two-sentence thought about those things?

Well, it's interesting because now we're trying to understand is likely why these therapies work. So like fasting around your chemo, say chemo's Wednesday, you start fasting on Monday night, you don't eat at all on Sunday or Monday night, you don't eat at all outside of water through Friday, basically. And that's basically a 5-day fast based on people like Dr. Valter Longo's work. For those who are getting more regular chemo, we might just fast the night before, day of, and break the fast the day, you know, the lunch after the day after for folks. They aren't just constantly living in a fasted state. But one of the reasons why we think it's helping is because it's changing the microbiome, which is upregulating the immune system. So that's pretty compelling. So we can look at these therapies that are free, they're very easy to bring on board, and that are impacting inflammation, immune function, nausea, side effects, enhancing outcomes, overcoming drug resistance. Because these are what they're about. And it's funny, people like Longo and others who've done the research, they feel like maybe chemo even has the benefit that it does because people feel frankly so crummy they don't want to eat. And so they're sort of naturally fasting, just like animals in nature. When they don't feel well, they don't eat. So it's the same type of thing that really the main medicine of chemo might just be the very fact we don't eat. So it's interesting that we're kind of coming full circle into encouraging people to fast either completely with water or with something like Prolon, which is Dr. Valter Longo's sort of MediFood, you know, mimicking fasting diet approach that can do this with their chemo and radiation.

Oh, Prolon, did you say?

P-R-O-L-O-N. And so it's like a fasting mimicking diet that still lets people have kind of little powders and potions.

So sort of like elemental diet or something like that?

Yeah, you know, it's a lot of people are a little scared. It's a little intense to want to forego food. It brings up a lot of psychology.

Oh, I've been contemplating a long fast for years, but I just can't bring myself to not eat because I enjoy food so much and I hate hunger pangs so much.

Here you will use your gateway drug. Maybe try a ProLon.

I like the sound of that. There's so much here. I would love to have you back on sometime to dig deeper, but I'm going to respect your time and let you get off. So thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and expertise with us. Us, and I wish you well.

I am so grateful. This was a lot of fun. You asked fantastic questions. And if you ever feel like you or your listeners want to dig in a little deeper in any other topic, just give me a holler.

Okay.

And your website is drnasha.com, D-R-N-A-S-H-A dot com.

Okay.

And I'll have that all in the show notes. Well, thank you so much.

All the best.

Thank you.

Ciao.

Bye.

I know that was a lot of information, so I just want to say that if you're struggling with a cancer diagnosis and want to make sure that your gut and general health is in order, and you have anything other than 1 to 3, say, bowel movements a day that are numbers 3 or 4 on the Bristol stool chart, please see a naturopath or an integrative or functional medicine practitioner to get that aspect of your health in order. And I've got a link to Dr. Nash's book in the show notes as well so that you can see all of her recommendations on dealing with cancer. And please give me a quick rating to the show if you're on Apple Podcasts. And if you're not already, you can follow my High Desert Health page on Facebook or join my gut healing group on Facebook. And I'm also on all the other social medias. You can find me there and links in the show notes to all that so that you hear about each new episode as they come out. And don't forget to press subscribe. And thanks for listening. And here's wishing you all perfect stool.