CANCER - Three Foundations of Care

Hey, it's Dr. A. Had a really great question come in, and it came from like 3 different places, really. One was somebody saw a webinar I did or a podcast about my book, Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment. We'll put a link in the comments if you want information about that, but I was talking about some of the concepts I bring up in there. And one of them that I did a recent YouTube video about was the 4 phases of cancer that people go through, and sort of attendant to that, or somewhat connected anyway, are what I consider the 3 pillars that underlie your cancer care. And this is what I consider, you know, agnostic, if you will, of how you're treating your cancer, because Everybody gets a different set of options when it comes to cancer care. So for some people, maybe there's a really clear pathway with standard therapies, and there's like a 90%, you know, success rate at 5 years with the standard therapy, and, you know, makes sense to do that. Some people, their oncologists will say, well, we have about a 5% chance with your type of cancer, you know, you might want to explore some other things here, and then some people sort of do everything, whether they'll do the standard therapy and integrative therapies and all of that. So where did this 3 pillars idea come from? Well, the 3 pillars idea came from when Dr. Stengler and I were done writing the other book over my shoulder, Outside the Box Cancer Therapies. We talked about this a bit in the book from kind of a different point of view, but the book Cancer: The Journey came about because I started to look at a couple of things. One was the, the mental emotional impact of cancer and how to handle that, which is what that book's about, but then the other thing was it caused me to sort of look back over, you know, the 3 decades I've been working with cancer patients and say, is there anything aside from the main treatments they were doing, okay, is there anything in common with people who tended to survive longer and have better quality of life Versus those who maybe didn't survive as long and didn't have as good quality of life. Now, you need to know right up front that I'm making some generalizations because obviously there's outliers on either side of this. You can do everything quote unquote right and still have cancer and still, you know, not have the outcomes you want from your treatment, and you can sometimes not do, you know, anything that seems to be the right thing and you're cancer, you know, treatment and outcome is the way you want it. So obviously there's outliers, but if you look at the mass of people over that time and look at what were those who were more quote-unquote successful doing and how were they interacting with, you know, their environment and their body and everything, there were really 3 areas that came up. And here's the idea, I call them the 3 pillars because they're like a foundation. And if you don't have a good foundation, then all the treatments that you put on top of it, whether they're from the standard world of oncology or integrative oncology or naturopathic oncologist you're working with, or maybe a Chinese medicine specialist, or any other— Ayurveda, any other thing that you're doing, or maybe one of everything, um, those therapies have to sit on something that kind of holds you together so that your body gets the best outcome with those therapies. And so those 3, uh, and I came up with this originally a number of years ago when teaching medical school students, usually 4th-year students that were about to go out into their internships and stuff, and you try and kind of boil things down to a mnemonic. And so the mnemonic was food, muscle, and brain, 3 big bricks on the bottom. Now, those are deceivingly simple. Obviously, there's a lot more to each one of them, and I just want to take a couple of minutes on each one and, uh, and develop them a little bit. I do talk about them, as I said, Mark and I talk about them from a different point of view in Outside the Box Cancer Therapies over there, and then in the new book I bring this up as well just as a way to think about, you know, where does the mind-body component fit in, but also how's it fit in with these real basic things around your physical response to cancer. So when we think of food, it's a euphemism not only for the food you're gonna eat, the fluids you drink, which is obviously very important, but food is a number of things. Food is fuel. Food fuels your body. There is concern some types of food might fuel cancer, but food also is a vehicle, as we've talked about in other videos here, a vehicle for the entry of toxins into the body, which is something that we want to minimize. We can never eliminate it, but we can minimize it, especially during cancer or cancer prevention or treatment. So when we think about that, you know, we have food as fuel, which can be maybe good, maybe bad. We have food as an entry point— food and drink is an entry point for toxins into the body. But then also there's a lot of mental, emotional, and quality of life things wrapped around And so food is a multi-dimensional thing in your world. So the first thing I think that's probably most important is looking for foods that are as low tox, bring the least amount of toxins into your system as possible. Now I'll put a link below, one of the links below will be to another YouTube video that goes a little bit more into this idea of environmental toxins and how food, you know, is a big vector of those into our bodies, but the bottom line is we want to eat and drink as clean as possible. Then the next thing is sort of the combination or the layout of your diet over time. Now, there's a lot of different strategies for eating with cancer, there's a lot that we've talked about in Outside the cancer therapies, but if you look at them, and with the caveat, I'll just say, if your healthcare provider who you're working with around your diet has you on a specific therapeutic diet, so an example of a therapeutic diet might be like a ketogenic diet, or they may have you on a low carbohydrate diet, or they might have you on a high vegetable raw food diet. Right. diet. Whatever the therapeutic diet is, you have to, of course, work this around there, but what I can tell you is, from doing this a lot with patients, that the therapeutic diets work better if they are a low toxicity type of a diet as well. So if you're doing a therapeutic diet, then this all works within whatever your therapeutic diet realm is, but most people, many people are not, and so then you have to think about, well, okay, if I've got clean food, as clean as possible from the environmental toxins, then what's going to be a good strategy for me? Well, you want to have good clean sources of vegetable. Vegetables should be the majority of your foods, again, unless you're doing particular types of dietary shifts. When you have fats, you want the fats to come from things that are clean and easy for your body to process, so fats can be from meat sources, certainly. They can be from some vegetable sources. Things like olive oil can be very, very healthy and useful in this setting. Some people will augment their diets with, say, coconut oil or medium-chain MCTs, medium-chain triglycerides, which are a smaller type of a fat that can be used for energy more quickly. And again, depending on what your macro percents are that you're looking for. There's going to be a certain amount of fat, certain amount of fiber from the vegetables, and what you'll see is vegetables, especially the colorful ones, can be very high fiber, which is also good for you and good for your digestive tract, but also can be low— lower carbohydrate because, as we're talking about, we don't want a ton of carbohydrate. Then there's fruits. Fruit, it's going to depend on how your healthcare team has told you to eat or not to eat. Sometimes some fruit is worked in, sometimes some fruit with limited, you know, inclusion is done. Some people go on, you know, diets that have a little bit more fruit, but generally speaking, you want to look at a lot of vegetables and color from the vegetable kingdom, and if you're getting fruit and fruit's part of your plan, then, you know, some fruit that again is as clean as possible, and you want to try and go for things that have lower levels of sugar, lower glycemic index. When we get to proteins, then you're going to want to have again clean sources of protein, If it's a vegetable source protein, you just want to look at where it comes from, how clean is it, what the sources are for whatever made that protein. If it is an animal protein, again, we did another talk, the environmental effect on foods talk, about animal proteins and getting cleaner versus dirtier ones, and same with fats. So again, I'll put a link in the comment box below to the environmental Food discussion, so you can get into that. So food is that, uh, food is also, you know, supports your metabolism. Again, that's why we want a lower amount of sugar in that diet, and, uh, it also is going to fuel your body. Now, you may have a therapeutic diet that limits certain amino acids or other things. If you're going to do that, that's very specialized, and obviously you're going to be working with somebody on that, but That's the basic scope. You want it as clean as possible. The other thing about food, of course, is that there's a quality of life and mental-emotional part to it, and a lot of us eat for reasons that have nothing to do with real hunger or our need for calories or energy. And so you really do have to look at that. So if your healthcare team comes in and makes this big change to your diet, and all of a sudden it's like nothing you used to eat is on your current diet, you know, That's a big change, you know, it's like trying to stop smoking, it's harder for some people as a matter of fact, so you really have to work on that. There's really 2 big groups of people with that, one are people just do it cold turkey and boom, their diet changes, and I would recommend if you have cancer you do it as quickly as possible. Other people kind of have to chunk out things one at a time, but one thing I can tell you is if you have sort of a diet that, you know, My old diet doesn't resemble this cancer diet they're giving me at all. In most cases, after you get used to the new dietary inclusions, say, you know, lots of vegetables, good clean protein and fats, etc., you'll actually feel better too. So it's— there is a payoff there in the end. Yeah. The other thing is, you know, you need to be strict, especially with aggressive cancers, with your diet. But most of the books that talk a lot about diet and cancer will talk about just the quality of life part of it. You know, if you're at a party, you know, enjoy that, just don't like have everything, you know, have something so you're, you know, connected and a part of it and you're not, you know, you're not holding yourself back from all happiness and pleasure around food, but just don't go completely the other way. Muscle is the next one. So Muscle is a euphemism really for the balance between muscle activity and fat activity. Ooh, hear it. Statistics and science tells us now that the more muscle mass you have and the less fat mass you have, the longer you will live with your cancer, the better survival your cancer is, and the less cancer you'll get. So that seems pretty compelling. Why is that? Well, if you break it down basically, and again, talked about this in the Outside the Box book, but you can look at a lot of research on muscle mass and cancer and see this. Muscle mass is telling the biology of the body, the biochemistry of the body, that we are going to shift into a pro-normal cell milieu, a pro-normal cell chemistry, and that chemistry happens to be anti-cancer for the most part. Fat mass going up and fat activity going up biologically with the chemistry involved in fat mass increases the amount of insulin response, insulin insensitivity, and a lot of inflammatory chemistry that is actually pro-cancer. So people will say, well, gee, I've, you know, I'm 65, I was just diagnosed with I'm a little bit overweight, and so obviously I think I probably have more fat mass than I ought to. Do I have to start like running marathons to make this happen? The answer is no, you don't. What the science shows is your big core muscles that move your body around, so like your leg muscles, the muscles in your trunk up through here, to a degree your upper arm and shoulder muscles, those are the muscles you want to start moving around. So we've literally had people and they've come in, you know, in the middle of chemo to start doing some, you know, integrative oncology things, and they're like, well, geez, I feel horrible, and, you know, I used to maybe be a runner or whatever. I can barely make it to the bathroom. What we do with them is something called graded exercise tolerance, where we basically just say, well, if your max energy output Yeah. Here during— between chemo rounds is getting up and going to the bathroom 3 times a day. Let's add one more trip, or let's add a walk around the living room. And then next week we might add another lap around the living room, and at some point it'll be a lap around the house, then a lap around the block. Believe it or not, that coupled with a diet that is a low glycemic diet that doesn't stimulate a lot of the insulin stuff will build up muscle mass and start sending those signals out to your body that we are in an anti-cancer chemistry, for lack of the actual long words that go along with that. Now, the other thing is that muscle metabolism, just by working your muscles and moving without being a weightlifter or anything— now, if you exercise, yes, keep exercising, that's the best thing for you— but let's say you're, you know, you're kind of not doing a lot of movement activity, then the movement of your muscles as you start to do that is the thing that triggers muscle metabolism, which is extremely anti-cancer and cancer protective in the long run. So muscle, again, is a euphemism for more muscle activity and less fat activity biologically. And the last one is brain. And brain goes into a couple of things. Now, that's what I wrote the entire book, you know, Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment, about. It's a quick read. It's made for any patient, any family member, caregiver, loved one, and this is literally— so it's the journey from being diagnosed and the shock trauma that that is to being an empowered patient, which is extremely important. Empowerment ultimately ultimately, when you are no longer a victim of whatever's happened to you, but you are realistic about the circumstances, situation, and you're on top of it, is actually also associated with better medical outcomes, better pain management, etc. We go into that somewhat in the book too. So I wrote that book because I saw that, you know, as I was mentoring other doctors and working with clinics, it's, it's a little easier to kind of target these therapeutic targets that are in the physical realm. So your food you're eating, we can give you a diet and a list. Your muscle activity, we can couple that with your diet and get you to move a little bit more and all that stuff. But brain, with the mind-body effect, you, you have to deal with that. And what I saw was that that was an area that a lot of us practitioners, it's just really hard to access and get to. A lot of times You know, if we were smart, we would work with other people who worked in that mind-body space, mental health space. But the bottom line there is that your brain has a lot to do with it. And I can't go into in a YouTube video all of what's in that book, although you can read that book in a very short amount of time. But the bottom line is you need to come to a realistic place of not only, you know, being past the shock and the trauma and the upset that is a cancer diagnosis, which is no doubt that's what it is, but then also not just accepting it and saying, oh, you know, I'm a victim, I accept that I have cancer, but to turn that acceptance into empowerment, which is to say, this is my reality, but I only have to participate in the parts of that reality really that I can control, and the things that I can control, I'm going to be very empowered with. Well, examples of things you can control might be something like, uh, maybe you've got a couple of options of healthcare groups to work with, and you pick the one that you kind of resonate the best with, or the people that sound like they have the best plan for you. Uh, you certainly have control over the diet, what you put into your mouth. Yeah. have control to some degree over your movement and all that, uh, you know, majoring on the things you can control and being, uh, you know, being engaged and empowered there is associated with better medical outcomes. And the book goes into, you know, how to do— how to get past the blocks to doing that and all, but that's a huge thing. Well, the other thing is, you know, being careful about external, uh, sources of information. So if you're, you know, floundering in a lot of negativity and a negative soup of the, you know, electronic media is full of it, you may have to, you know, put yourself on a bit of a media diet and, you know, limit the amount of updating you do because there's not a lot of good news shared in the world. You may have to be careful about certain people that you're around and that you associate with who just bring a lot of negativity because You don't— like, you're in a fight for your life and your health. You don't need a lot of other junk going into you through the mind. And that is a huge area. And of course, the book goes into a lot of, you know, strategies and ways to deal with that, ways to get help and stuff of that nature. But the bottom line here is that food, muscle, and brain are these 3 big pillars. And if people really were attendant to those, whatever therapy they did for their cancer or to support their cancer therapies work better. It's like building a building. If the foundation isn't there, it's really, really weak, you keep piling therapies on and they kind of fall through eventually, and that's what I would see. I would see people spending a lot of money on therapies and, you know, having them work for a while and then just kind of quit working was because their, their biology Their mental set, their mind-body condition, their diet—all that stuff was not there to support all that work that they were doing. And if you're wondering, by the way, and you're just trying to prevent cancer, those are three pretty important things for preventing cancer as well. All right. Well, I'm going to put some links down below in the description box. I think it's still down below, and there'll be links to that environmental medicine. Medicine talk that I did, links to the book and some other things that I mentioned as well. Again, thank you so much, you new subscribers, you old subscribers. Like, share, subscribe, use the notification bell, turn that on. Putting new content out all the time. Please comment, and in the comments you can put in questions for new videos or ideas, etc. Again, thank you so much to everybody. Really appreciate everyone's support.