Prevent Cancer by Becoming Metabolically Healthy, with Dr. Nasha Winters

the somatic mutation theory of cancer assumes a very hopeless narrative. It's like, uh, you're a sitting duck. It's just bad luck. You know, it's a Russian roulette game. But when you look at more of this metabolic construct and this mitochondrial construct, you start to recognize that there is a lot more power that you have. And again, most people tell me, I eat healthier, I don't eat sugar. But when we really look under the hood, You realize that people don't even recognize how much they're sneaking into their diet in other ways or what's snuck into condiments or other pieces.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel freaking amazing, you're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCP.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan, MD, MBA, IFMCP.

Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast, where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives. Hold on to your hats. Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendie Trubow, Ed's with us today, Ed Levitan, and we have one of my favorite people on today. Her name is Dr. Nasha Winters.

She's going to be our favorite people. Thank you very much.

One of our favorite people. Nasha Winters is a naturopathic doctor. FABNO is one of her certifications, and she's a leading expert in integrative oncology and the author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. She's also a pioneer, truly, in the integration of conventional treatments with metabolic therapies in cancer care. And she's transformed the way we understand and treat disease. And just as a note, we have a sister podcast where we recorded her story and we'll release that adjacent to this. So if you want to hear her story and how she got here, listen to that. So anyway, Nasha, without talking too much more, thank you so much for being here.

I am so thrilled to be here, you guys. Thanks for having me. It's a delight.

So, okay, so, so can you set the stage for why do you say that the metabolic system is the core for how you approach cancer?

Well, I think our world around the oncology space has really been quite myopic. And, you know, we just kind of look at the, the, the sort of intruder or the invader as this single cell or this single tumor. And that's where we've put all of our attention. For since 1914, when Theodore Bovary called cancer a disease of the genetics, a somatic mutation. And we hyperfocused on the cells and the tumor that those cells created through a genetic lens. And so that is how we still— that's still the predominant paradigm in oncology today, despite even a paper coming out 2 years ago now that basically said it's time to put the nail in the coffin of this somatic mutation theory of cancer, because really it's a downstream effect, not an upstream effect. So, what we started learning shortly after Dr. Bovary in the 1914s is another character came along, Dr. Otto Warburg, who also saw cancer through a different lens, which was one of more of a metabolic mitochondrial dysfunction. And interestingly enough, at that time, biochemistry was the reigning, you know, badass of the time. And so everyone kind of pivoted into his camp and really got excited about this metabolic mitochondrial aspect of health in general and cancer in particular. And he was really popular in that theory up until the 1950s when the DNA helix was discovered. And we basically pendulumed hard all the way back to Bovary's time and basically buried all of the really interesting information that Otto Warburg was stumbling across. And we basically put that away in a nice little bucket you know, on a shelf in a corner somewhere for a very long time. And so fast forward, we have the 1971 War on Cancer where we were sure we were going to find the single cause and the single treatment for this. And we just thought of war concept coming out of multiple wars from World War I to Korea and at that time Vietnam. We still had a collective understanding of cancer as something to be warred upon, to wage war on. And we were doing so through this genetic lens. We have not won any wars. We have not won even any battles in this area. And in fact, if, if you really look at the literature, cancer is growing more and more at younger and younger ages today than ever in human history. So why I say that cancer is more of a metabolic mitochondrial disease is because the way we've approached it from standard of care has not gotten us very far. We've not moved that needle very far. We, We mapped the entire genome that got us virtually nowhere. We've found all these hallmarks of cancer and these oncogenes that turn on and off cancers, but even targeting those with meaningful therapies has not had really good outcomes. And so, what has been interesting is that people like Dr. Thomas Seafried kind of picked up and dusted off the information of Otto Warburg and carried it into the new technologies we have today. Various testing, various—

we have—

we can actually see the cell and the mitochondria in a different way, and we can test it in a different way and build upon the theory that was started in the 1920s. But even that falls a little bit short because it's still going down a very myopic path of what's wrong with that single cell or that single cellular pathway or that tumor. And yet no one is asking about what made those cells or those metabolic pathways or those tumors even exist or express to begin with. And that's where I come in. And so, even though I may be using the same language and lingo as people like Dr. Otto Warburg or Dr. Tom Seyfried, I believe that we are underestimating the power of the environment that those tumors, those tumor cells, and those tumor pathways live in, that we've actually almost— we look at it through such a myopic lens at a, you know, a bedside or at a cellular study. That we completely forget to ask what may— what conditions allowed this tumor to arise. And that's where I spent my work for 30, 35 years. As I was reading more and more, I stumbled across the Warburg work in the early '90s. I then stumbled across the work of a doctor named Mina Bissell, who's still a researcher in oncology, who— she coined the concept of the extracellular matrix. So basically the swimming pool that all of these things are happening in. And she realized in the lab that the medium in which we were trying to grow or kill cancer cells made a difference. Why that was ignored back as far as the 1980s is beyond me, but her work really inspired me. People like Dr. Bruce Lipton, who— the first time I read about his work and the idea of how our thoughts can impact our chemistry and our epigenetic expression, he was writing about these things in the 1980s and 1990s, and his book would not be made public till 2011. And so I look at these concepts that have actually been around for such a long time, and they made sense to me intuitively. They made sense to what I was finding in the literature of the time, back when I was an undergrad looking through microfiche and Dewey Decimal System medical book reviews to find information that we are still, you know, 40, 30, 40 years later, barely acknowledging in standard of care oncology today.

Misha, I have a question for you. So when you're talking about metabolically unhealthy, can— for the listeners, can you distinguish what does that mean to you? If they're going to go to their doctor and say, I think I'm metabolically unhealthy because 94% of us are, what are the markers that they're going to want to look at? And, and are you comfortable giving ranges like, hey, aim for this range?

I am very comfortable because remember, our labs today are based on the average of the population, and we are not a healthy population. So please don't be average. So I would like to give you more of the parameters that are more about health creation and disease prevention versus average. So I want the little precursor with that, but standard of care even defines metabolic health as a few parameters that are things that you achieve without medication. So blood sugar is one of them. Now they qualify glucose and they say a glucose under 100 is healthy. I'm gonna tell you right now, um, that's not healthy. You need it to be much lower than that. Under 80, 85 tops is really the, the angle you want to go with. But even blood sugars are very precarious. You could have just had a, a fright or a scare, or maybe you have sunrise syndrome. So your cortisol spikes in the morning, your blood sugars are higher in the morning when you go and have your labs drawn. There's a lot of variables that make glucose behave the way it behaves. So even though standard of care says a glucose under 100 without medication is a good glucose, we really need to look deeper. So things like a C-peptide, insulin, hemoglobin A1c, which look at different angles, windows into how your body utilizes carbohydrates, utilizes sugar, and whether you are rusting rapidly inside your body because of that burden of sugar. So a hemoglobin A1c is measuring something called glycosylated end products, which I call it sort of internal rusting, right? And you don't really want to rust. You can start to feel that as well. So I like those parameters more like an A1C. So I have kind of a rule of 5. If your uric acid is under 5, if your hemoglobin A1C is under 5, if your glucose from European or Canadian standards is under 5, which is about 80, 85, if your GKI, your glucose ketone index, is under 5, and I can't— oh, and if your insulin is under 5, you are really— it's hard to— it's hard to make you metabolically broken when all of those are under 5. And so the person who taught me this, I want to say— I can't believe I can't think of Graham's last name right now. I want to say Dr. Graham, Dr. Graham Smith. He's who taught me the power of 5s. And so I would like to give credit to him. And I'll also get that link for you to go and read up what he did. But when he shared that with me, it clicked so much because it was so simple. Because people are like, what do I aim for? And when you aim for that, and if you're sitting at 5.8, if you still get to 5.6, you're still moving in the right direction. That's still— you're heading in the right direction. If you do nothing to change that, it will only go the wrong direction. Right? And so that power of 5 helps you get that agency to do something about it. Right? So I think that's a really cool piece here. The other thing that standard of care qualifies as metabolic metrics is just blood pressure. Now, we put a lot of, of emphasis on high blood pressure, but we also ignore low blood pressure, which in my world is just as detrimental, if not more so, because we need to get oxygen moved to those tissues, right? And if you're low oxygen, you have a much higher risk of cancer. So we often overmedicate people into even too low blood pressure. So we swing the pendulum too far. So too high or too low blood pressure is a problem. Standard of care says 120 over 80. You know, there's a little bit of a range, like a 130 over 90 is about as high as I like to go, and about a 110 over 70 is about as low as I'd like to go. So it's kind of a narrow window, and it's often much more about your stress response or your kidney health or your arterial flexibility, your endothelial flexibility that's going on versus that it being something wrong with your heart. And so we often blame the heart where it's all these other down or upstream effects. The other one is the hip-to-waist ratio. So that, you know, the old kind of like Dunlap. Do you have like your belly Dunlapped over your belt? We want our waist smaller than our hips, right? I'm a Kansas girl. Those are what they would say all the time. But we want that, you know, ultimately, because the real issue is that the visceral fat is much more problematic than just that inner tube that you may have around you. But that is often a sign that there's an inner tube of fat around your organs as well. And then lipids. Lipids is another big one that we look at and— I won't even go into that rabbit hole, but you guys could talk to people like Dr. David Diamond. You could talk to people like Dr. Phil Ovadia and others in the sort of functional cardiology world that will tell you you've probably really done disservice to many, many patients by having the lipid conversation. For me, I personally look at triglycerides and HDL. More than anything else. And if my triglycerides are under 90, I know my liver is happy. And if my HDL is somewhere between around 70 up to 90, then I'm really happy because that's a bit protective. Higher HDL can allude to autoimmunity. Lower HDL can allude to methylation issues. And then the triglyceride band, you can even get those too low. So a lot of patients on various medications, when your lipids drop below, say, 60 or 65, you don't have the precursors to make hormones. So there's these little parameters that standard of care, like, is always looking at what's too high, let's suppress it. But they often suppress our patients into the other side of the curve. And then the big other one for metabolic health is just about your stamina, right? How do you feel? Do you feel rested when you wake up in the morning? How do you feel after a workout? Invigorated or crashing? Those are the clues. And then my other clue that I ask patients is how do you feel if you go more than 4 hours without a meal? Like, do you— are you fine? Do you start to panic? Do you get hangry? What happens for you? Can you finish dinner at 6 p.m. and not have to eat again of any kind until 7 a.m.? What happens for you? Those are the things I look at to let me know how metabolically healthy they are. So if they're able to keep their blood sugar around 80, their insulin under 5, their A1C around 5, their lipid, you know, their triglycerides like right around 90 to 100 max, their HDL maybe in the 70 range, their hip-to-waist ratio really optimized. I don't see people having a lot of metabolic issues anymore. It's like those kind of dissolve. They kind of go by the wayside. So that's a really simple thing for your listeners to just kind of pay attention to for themselves to make sure that they are not part of that 94% that are considered metabolically unhealthy.

Okay. So what are the core principles of this approach then?

Yeah, well, for me, it's simple. So I'll start really quickly. The approach, knowing that the foundation of this is mitochondrial, which is how we then express our metabolic health, is that the mitochondrial is sort of the fulcrum or the ground, the ground zero of all of this is the mitochondria. We all thought just does ATP production, right? We were all taught that in our 6th grade biology. But I simplify it a little bit further because it really has 3 major heavy lifting jobs. The mitochondria are actually much more than just energy producers. They are primarily receivers of information from the environment in, on, and around them, including people, places, and things. So they're taking in all that information, right? And we co-evolved with these little buggers for upwards of 170,000 years, that there are these bacterium that merged with us. And can take up upwards of 20% of our body composition. So we have a lot of observers on board. The second job these little guys do is they translate that information. So they're like, they're trying to make sense of the world that they're being exposed to. And then their third job is to then communicate back out into the world, whether it's an adjacent mitochondria, an adjacent cell tissue, organ structure, or even outside. Interestingly enough, because we can actually still have communication of our maternal DNA mitochondria, of the maternal DNA communicating with our offspring after they've left our bodies. Like, how freaking cool is that? We can actually—

we're like trees. Wait, how do you do that? We're like trees. Wait, wait, whoa, whoa.

Yeah. So see, we were talking about how to do that earlier. Maybe we can start to have conversations with our children.

I'd like to communicate with my offspring in some ways at some time.

This is where some really compelling— and I'm trying to remember the research, or I'll try and get it for the show notes when you guys publish this— but there has been— well, I mean, you've heard all the stories about even heart transplants and whatnot, that we can actually take tissue and cells from other beings, and suddenly those beings are experiencing personality quirks or memories that came from a totally another, another individual. So I was actually on a boat ride the other day with a woman who just had a bone marrow transplant in August. She was talking about that now she even has a different blood type because it fully, fully, it was deep, a complete transplant. She's like, "I have dreams and skills and memories and beliefs that I did not have before August." She was just volunteering this information to me willy-nilly in a very social environment. I just wanted to grabber and like, let's tell me more, tell me more. But there are actual studies that our, our maternal DNA cells can communicate to those of our offspring in faraway places. And it's quantifiable and measurable, which is fascinating to me.

Is there any way to turn that off?

Yeah. Yes, possibly, because this is the power we have. What you're asking about is this puts the emphasis back on us that we actually have the power to to observe, to translate, and to communicate the information in, on, and around us in very unique ways. And that's what I just get excited about, is that on one level, the somatic mutation theory of cancer assumes a very hopeless narrative. It's like, uh, you're a sitting duck. It's just bad luck. You know, it's a Russian roulette game. There are still scientists out there today saying this to patients. That is not the way I want to live my life. Right. But when you look at more of this metabolic construct and this mitochondrial construct, you start to recognize that there is a lot more power that you have to change the environment and therefore change the ability for those mitochondria to observe differently, translate differently, and communicate differently. And if we know we have the power to change that, that means the source or the root cause or the root expression of disease and cancer in particular, we can manipulate that environment at the core level of the mitochondria. And so when we talk about that, that's important to know what the mitochondria does, but what affects the mitochondria, what makes them behave. And so over my career, I found sort of like 10 buckets, 10 drops in the bucket that can impact the mitochondria. Historically, In my book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, I had them ordered. The original order was epigenetics and its impact, its drop in the mitochondrial bucket. So that generational piece we were just talking about, these patterns that come down generations before us and impact the way our body can handle what it's being exposed to on a daily basis. And epigenetics being above the gene means it's something you have a little bit more control over. In fact, it's very predominantly related like leans on what's going on in the diet and the lifestyle to help it express or suppress whatever those genes are.

Wait, Anisha, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but let's pause. Can we pause there for a moment? Because yes, on one hand, you have some input and control over the epigenetics. On the other hand, sometimes you're born with those epigenetic changes already have occurred. And so you are the the nebulous or questionable recipient of those epigenetic changes. Like, I think I— we were in two cars when I heard this report. I think it was Sweden, I think, where the two epigeneticists went back and looked— epidemiologists went back and looked at the genes and found that if your grandfather had a feast when he went through puberty, It was in Ireland that 2 generations down, they were more likely to be obese and have heart disease. And if it was the opposite, where your grandfather had a famine when he went through puberty, 2 generations down, they were more likely to be of normal weight with less cardiovascular disease. And the spread in their lifespan was 31 years on average between the feast group and the famine group. So yes. So on one hand, you're born screwed. And on the other hand, you have a lot of agency to make a difference in the things that haven't already been impacted.

I love this. And it's so— and it's kind of just to simplify, because some people still think that that epigenetic, you know, oh my God, my grandfather was born in a, in a feast phase, I'm screwed and this is how it's going to be. We, we do need that autonomy or that agency to realize Because of that, you may have to work a little bit harder to overcome some of those metabolic derangements.

Deranged.

I think I'm going to say to some of my patients, you're metabolically—

you're just deranged.

You're deranged. It's a very easy way to— I think—

I'm not sure you two should be in the same room.

Such a great word, deranged. Sorry, Neisha, keep going. You were going for bucket 2 and I got distracted. Affected by the epigenetic things.

That one is such a cool— because I remember reading that study, it was fascinating coming out. And, and that, that place still says to me, when you can look back, and when I'm asking patients questions, I am asking, do you know your family lineage? Like, can you tell me how far back you know? And what was the conditions of their world or their lives or their traumas? Makes a huge difference.

Well, I was just going to say, I mean, the traumas, there's such work with trauma that have generational trauma that gets passed down. And we know it's, it's in the epigenetics and it's just not acknowledged by society these days.

Well, this gives me chills because that's where I'm going to come full circle to of what you're saying, Ed, because you just said the most important thing I think of this whole discussion. So I'm really pleased to hear that. And so that epigenetics is huge, you know, and that's where Passion, too. I mean, that, that was such a game changer in my practice because it helped me understand why certain patients would respond in certain ways and others wouldn't. And it would help me understand why this diet wasn't good for everybody or this supplement wasn't good for everybody. It helped me personalize my practice to such a degree that it was a massive game changer. And I helped so many more patients with the knowledge that epigenetics brought, brought forward to us. The second drop in the bucket is metabolic health, and that is truly what are the fuel sources that your cells are preferentially using? And so broken down simply, carbs, fats, proteins. We all even need a little different cocktail of that at different times in our lives, different cycles of our lives, different stressors in our lives. And then we're even geographically or even genetically, like epigenetically, you know, like I'm probably not supposed to be living on a bunch of you know, miso and seaweed because my body didn't grow up in Japan. Like, that's not where my body came from. And so just those types of things to consider. And then now that 94% of us are metabolically unhealthy, most of us can start by looking at that particular drop in the bucket and see if maybe you've got some blind spots there. And again, most people tell me, I eat healthier, I don't eat sugar. But when we really look under the hood, you realize that people don't even recognize how much they're sneaking into their diet in other ways or what's snuck into condiments or other pieces.

So when we're in the metabolic, you know, because the whole thing is about metabolic health. So when we're in the metabolic conversation, can you— do you have like a top 3 tips of, hey, to get better flexibility metabolically, here are 3 things that you either do want to do or don't want to do, and then we can move on to bucket number 3.

I love it. Well, and even mentioning what I would do to help stabilize or optimize the metabolic drop in the bucket, they actually cross-pollinate with some of the other drops in the bucket. And so one of those is going to be sleep optimization. All right. So in the circadian rhythm section, I will— I'll bring this up again, but circadian rhythm sleep makes a difference. So just even a few nights bad sleep can spike your insulin unbelievably. So we want to really optimize that. So a lot of people They're eating perfectly and their glucose is still elevated. I'll start asking questions about sleep. The other question I'll ask them about is stress, because cortisol will spike glucose and spike insulin. I'll ask about pain. That will also, which might land in the inflammatory bucket. And then I'll ask about even just like sex hormones in general, like thyroid dysfunction. Where are they in their cycle? You know, where are they in their phase of cycle of life? Cycle of the month. So those play a role. But one of the simplest places we can start to chip away, which can kind of hit all of those targets, is around food, like the timing of our, of our meals, meal timing. And so time-restricted eating. So really, there's so many studies coming out, but just simply eating within a 13-hour window— or excuse me, fasting a 13-hour window every day— is probably what most of us across the globe would benefit from, right? That just that simple thing, finishing dinner at 6 and breaking a fast at 7 in the morning. You would be shocked at how many people cannot do that. Absolutely shocked. Just shocked. And so that is that 94% that's like, wait, what? I have to have a snack or I don't fall asleep. Not being able to fall asleep is a sign of metabolic syndrome. Okay. Or they say, I have to get up and eat something in the middle of the night because I wake up. And then I can't go back to sleep. That is a sign of adrenal issues and cortisol issues. So that tells us other components of the terrain that's going on that's creating difficulty in their metabolic health. So if it's difficult to fall asleep or difficult to stay asleep, that might show you where you want to focus your attention. So the time-restricted eating can help. And then also making sure you've given— like, that's where I love the— oh gosh, the author Satchin Panda's work in The Circadian Code, his book. I love it because he even talks about It may even be more important about when you eat versus what. Now, I'm still— I still am very— please eat good stuff, right? Like, please don't go and like live on McDonald's. But it is important of the timing of things as well. So I really do like people to do those little hacks of taking a little walk after dinner. We're talking 10, 15 minutes or after breakfast or after lunch. It's a small one. Or even just finishing your meal a little bit longer from the time you go to bed. So finishing that last meal at 6 PM is really Great, because most of us should be aiming to go to bed around 9, maybe 10 at the latest. So that's a really great way that really helps your blood sugar stabilize faster than any pill, any potion, any supplement, any tea out there. And then exercise. Exercise is like your way to discharge a lot of that pent-up energy and to burn off that excess glucose that may be wreaking havoc and rusting your innards. So— and it doesn't have to be because actually, ironically, the more like heavy-duty and like endurance exercise is actually one of the biggest robbers of metabolic health. And that often really freaks people out. My most difficult patients were my vegan, my vegan endurance athletes. I'm like, okay, it's like torture because they're super malnourished and they're super oxidized. And just there was just so much we had to recover. In that arena. So those are kind of the things I think that people could start to consider of just maybe playing with their food timing. I even like Satchin Panda's kind of recommendation of eat when it's light out. Right. And so maybe that even shows seasonally you eat really short windows in the winter and you eat longer windows in the summer. Like even moving with the seasonality of that allows your body to remember what it was divinely designed to do.

I love that line. Okay, now we can go to bucket 3. Sorry, thank you for indulging me.

We went through some buckets.

We can touch some. I'm trying not to go into as much detail, but the third bucket is really toxicity. Now, my teacher, my mentor, Dr. William, William Ray, who then was the teacher for Dr. Walter Crinion— these, this was my lineage of education in the environmental medicine space— both of them were saying it's no longer a matter if you have toxicity, it's how bad is it? How does it play with your epigenetic blueprint. There's entire fields of environmental medicine out there, and yet they just get kind of shoved into the corner of the last thing you want to look at. And so in that audit that we talked about, the mitochondrial, it's so much about what we're putting in, on, and around them, including people, places, and things. But knowing that our skin is our largest organ of absorption and elimination, the things we breathe, our air quality is one of the biggest known carcinogens. Out there, our water quality, like the fundamentals that generations ago we didn't have to worry about, we have to worry about today. There are so many chemicals now on the, on the market that were not around before the 1960s. Right. That there's— and it's just growing by the day. And we've done very little studies. In fact, I can only think of two that have actually looked at how these interact with each other. And so, you know, the— it's just crazy. I mean, I show— I do conferences on this where I'll show a sign of like, why do we have more cancer now? More than ever. And I'll pop up this slide of sort of like the top 30 known carcinogens, and I highlight the ones that each and every one of us are being exposed to on a daily basis.

Yeah, just don't say the G word, that's all.

The G word, glyphosate. It's one of my hot buttons.

It's a—

and, and because you're— you know it's a problem, or that you don't think it's a problem?

Okay, no, it's a massive problem.

Thank you, because I was about to say, I actually think it's probably one of the biggest. And my teacher, Dr. Huber, who was whistleblowing on this in the late 1960s. He's now in his 90s and he's still like, I can't die until we get this dealt with, you know, and just precious. Like he was saying while it was still in the lab, saying this is a massive desiccant, this is a massive antibiotic, and it will wipe out all life. Right. And he was right. And it's doing that on a global scale now that you literally get a drop of rain without glyphosate. And the saddest part, because this kind of ties into the metabolic piece as well, is that the things in our food source that sequester it the most are our grains and our legumes. And we have been sharing for God knows how long until just very recently on the good old dietary guidelines to get your 5 to 15 7 servings a day of grains and legumes, which means you're getting 5 to 15 servings a day of glyphosate. And so it's massive. It's an endocrine disruptor. It's a— I mean, there's class lawsuits won against it for lymphoma. So one of my questions, whenever I screen for a lymphoma patient, I'm asking them about where they live. Are they living on a golf course or near a park or a campus or a university? Do they spray their gardens? Do they eat non-organic foods? Do they like— just, you have to go through this inventory. And then of course, I test the glyphosate on every person, and the highest are in my patients who are still very standard of American diet and living on golf courses. But the second highest are my vegans and vegetarians. And so they're doing what they think is right for their health, but they're— it's like we jump from one frying pan into another. And so this is where we have to keep having these conversations. So the environmental piece is huge. And then the 4th bucket, which ties into the glyphosate conversation, is the microbiome. And now it's like the hot topic. Everyone's talking about the microbiome, even in standard of care, which I'm like, hello, Hippocrates was chatting about this. So were the Ayurvedic doctors, the Chinese medicine doctors, the naturopathic doctors. We've all been really hip to the microbiome in the gut, and we were all poo-pooed. I mean that pun. Right, right. But now that we can kind of monetize it by developing really expensive tests and really expensive treatments and really expensive poop, you know, input, we've got— now we can talk about it. So that's a really big one. And of course, the microbiome spoons right into how our immune system is functioning. We finally are talking about that, of how important that is. So, in the cancer space, We don't even respond to various therapies if our microbiome isn't intact. So to various chemotherapies, specifically to immune therapies. And yet we even, we even have literature on this showing if you've had an antibiotic within 6 months of your treatment, you likely won't have a good response to your treatment. How is this not screened for and dealt with in every medical system in the world? We have so much data around this now. And then, of course, our microbiome is such a command center, and likely because of this little mitochondrial discussion we've had, right? Here's the, the bugs that make up 20% of us. They are important players. All of the commensals in our bodies are important players, and we've done a grand job of decimating them since, you know, good old Fleming found, you know, lifesaving, mind you, antibiotics that we then started to pour into our food systems. We started to pour into our animal feed and whatnot just to prophylactically prevent infection. And then it started landing in, you know, all the food that we're eating. And then it started becoming that we just willy-nilly throw out an antibiotic for any issue from acne to a cough, you know, or an ear infection. And so we've really done a number on ourselves around that. And then the big kind of final— we've touched on these already— is inflammation. I mean, that's huge. And inflammation, interestingly enough, can also be kicked off by stress. So you really can't separate these. And then the circulation and blood pressure, we've talked about that. And then hormone metabolism and just hormone modulation, because it's really not an on or off switch. And there's a lot of— I mean, hormones are communicators, right? So they're important to have them communicating correctly. And we have a lot of jammed up communication lines with hormones today because of a lot of the things in the environment that are jamming up that communication really effectively. And then the circadian rhythm and stress response. And the big, big drop in the bucket is the mental-emotional. And so now I've kind of covered the 10 drops. My flip that I've come around for the next 10 years discussion about the metabolic approach to cancer is I've literally swapped Epigenetics with Mental Emotional. And so, Ed, where you get your big gold star. Yes. And that is because when I wrote the book originally, I knew that's where I started for myself. But it's also where I knew the patients I serve need to start. But I also knew if I put that out there, I told them, we're going to deal with all the trauma in your life first, that book would have been closed and put into the garbage can. So it was like I had to walk them through the tangibles. And even Dr. Kelly Turner, Wendie Trubow in her book Radical Remission and then Radical Healing. She talks about these 10 factors, started out as 9, and then she added exercise to make it a 10th factor of people who survive. But only 3 are tangible, and that's exercise, diet, and supplements. The other 7 are exactly where Ed and I have come into alignment with it. If you don't deal with a mental, emotional trauma field, if you don't deal with a the vagal nerve issues, if you don't deal with the sympathetic overdrive, no amount of healing can even land. No. If you have the perfect protocol but you're still running from the saber-toothed tiger, that therapy has no place to land on. So when I hear patients tell me, I did everything, I did everything right, I took the best, I saw the best of the best oncologists, the best of the best integrative oncologists, and yet I'm still progressing. And I'm like, are you now ready to deal with what you actually need to deal with?

That's a really hard statement. You know, like, Neisha, that sounds really gentle, but that is a really hard statement to deliver because that just sort of cuts right to it.

It's not only that, I'm just thinking of just— I get meeting people where they're at, and majority of people can hear it. But can't— don't have access to, to doing, to getting deep into it. Like, they just, they don't have access.

Like, well, that delivery, what you're saying, it's like people, people have heard me on lectures and stuff enough, and they've read my— you know, it's like people get that I have a— I can have a soft delivery. But what people are honestly paying me for, or people coming to seek someone that I've trained, or coming to me to have a consultation with, They're not paying me to say, okay, we're going to landy pandy jelly go down. They don't have fucking time. They don't have the time. And so at that point, I'm like, especially when they've done all the things, they've spent $100K at this integrative center here, they've done this, they've done this. And now literally the time is ticking. The clock is ticking and they're like, it's time. That is where it's like the doorway in that I'm like, we have to walk through this doorway together. And I will tell you, in all honesty, I've had patients who've literally said, I cannot and I will not walk through that door. And there is zero failure in that. It is absolutely not a failure. It's that they— it was just not something they could metabolize in this lifetime. And, and that there is— that's okay.

It's the choice, right? This is the choice.

It is. And there's not— it's not even that it's right or wrong, but the reality is, is I have, I have never seen someone really at the brink of facing their mortality after doing everything possible in standard of care come through the other side successfully without dealing with some of this. And then the other side of that is that I've had people who were so sick that finally dealt with this component, this mental, emotional, or this trauma component. That did end up dying. But the words they shared with me and that they share with their loved ones and that their loved ones shared with me is that they healed into dying. Yeah, we could all be so lucky.

So, Nisha, I think we're gonna have to do a part 3.

So we just have—

let's talk about part 3 where we talk about the treatments that you have found to be helpful. So we'll have you back on. We're going to release the 2 episodes. We'll put in the show notes how to reach you if you have a list of qualified providers, the references that you, you put to— we'll put everything in the show notes. Okay, can you just tell people before we sign off, what is the website? And then we'll make sure that goes—

or the best place to—

best place to contact you, to find you.

Go check out drnasha.com, D-R-N-A-S-H-A dot com, and, um, that's, that's going to get you in wherever you can find me. So I appreciate it.

This has been a total pleasure, and for the listeners, we hope that this has been valuable for you. Nasha, Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Filthy Vegan Amazing Podcast. We'll have you back.

I got so many questions.

I know, we got to do part 3.

I'm in, guys.

I'm in.

Thank you so much.

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