Transcription
You have mastered a new menu. Congratulations. You healed a lot of things, but the reason you're stuck is you're still making five times the amount of insulin you need to. Two bololises of food are going to be a better one than three. Most adults don't need three meals a day. Two bololises is enough. And then as you get used to eating two meals a day now, we squeeze them together within a 6-hour period. Then the next step we do is we slide those towards sunrise. Your first meal being around 10:00 in the morning. The second one should be done by 2:00 in the afternoon. And then watch how many days in a row you can do that. 10 bites of food before noon equal one bite of food after 3:00.
Today's guest is Dr. Annette Bosworth, better known as Dr. Bos. She is an internal medicine physician who has spent decades helping people reverse severe insulin resistance, obesity, and chronic disease using therapeutic ketogenic strategies. She is known for not being afraid to challenge popular advice, even within the carnivore and keto communities, and I love her for that. Today we are getting into the controversial stuff within the keto and carnivore world like the biggest mistakes she sees and questions that some people are too afraid to ask. So grab a coffee, get comfy, and let's dive in.
Dr. Bos, thank you so much for joining me today. We met briefly a few months ago in Tampa, and it was so nice to meet you, but I cannot wait to ask you all of the questions today.
Well, thanks for having me on your show, Lauren. I really appreciate the different uh audiences that happen when I get invited. So, thank you. Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely. Now, you have helped thousands of people reverse metabolic disease. You're also known for some pretty controversial strategies, which I'm all about. I love that. Uh, so today, I want to get into some of these with you. U, let's start with a big one. Something I've been dying to ask you. I see you recommend it all of the time. Sardine fasts. So, coming from someone that does carnivore, that doesn't freak me out. But to a lot of people, it might sound a little bit um unappetizing and kind of crazy, like, "What do you mean just eat sardines for a few days? Why would someone want to do that?"
Well, so I think one of the best parts of the seat that I sit in is for 25 years I've taken care of chronic diseases, diseases that get worse over time. Period. That's what's supposed to happen. And when I look at the place that um my company has really found a a place to serve the patients uh to counteract that statement that has it is stamped in the medical books. Chronic diseases get worse. Chronic diseases get worse. And when you look at the um options for reversing um them 10 years ago, I mean I didn't think it would reverse them. I was just as skeptical as probably any other doctor who hasn't really leaned in to what a carnivore diet could do, what a ketogenic diet could do. And so, as I took care of the first few years of patients, certainly when they would hit wonderful metabolic numbers, I could see problems reverse. But for every, you know, three or four success stories, there was about seven to 10 that couldn't see a breakthrough. that their disease was so advanced and the grime inside their cells. That's what I tell patients. It's like you you've been doing this a long time to undo the problem. We need to be perfect when it comes to some of the the metrics. So, when I've tried to help people do that, we talk about you can't count net carbs. You need to count total carbs. You need to check blood numbers, not urine numbers. You need to prick in your finger first thing in the morning, not at 3:00 in the afternoon. all the things to say, I need to see what's going on in your metabolism in order to tell you correctly. And when I would look at the most difficult to treat patients, I would have them going zero carbohydrate, even carnivore, and they would be 10 days into that diet and not produce a ketone. That's not normal. That's very abnormal. I've even had patients go, you know, 15 days with nothing. I mean, a water fast, you should be making buckets of ketones in that in that patient. And they didn't. Their their bodies were so broken. Their metabolisms were so um you could say rusted, they could not churn out ketones. It was too high of an ask, especially when you cut calories all the way to zero. So, I started, you know, leaning into the experts and um my good friend Dom Dagustinino said, "Yeah, when you know, this is one of the little hacks he used." And then I had a few patients write in saying, "I just ate mackerel or sardines or anchovies for three or four days." And I'm thinking, "All right, tell me what happened." And then almost all of them would be these engineering brains and they'd send me spreadsheets of here's my glucose and here's my ketones and here's the ounces and the timing of all of the the fatty fish that they had eaten. And by golly, these folks were also in that category where I wasn't expecting them to see much results that quickly. And they just had an eruption of success. I mean this the ketones would spike, the glucose would finally go down. In other words, they were dropping the total production of insulin and this would unlock the repair process needed to undo, you know, some of the health problems found in these chronic diseases like autoimmune disorders, cancers, obesity, pre-diabetes, diabetes, heart disease, uh, heart failure. You know, all these things that when you get one, they stack on another. We don't ever erase them. And these patients were erasing blood pressure. or they were erasing edema or joint pain or even these autoimmune disorders. That's unheard of when I first started in this space. Um, and so then the my first time where I really tested this was probably four and a half years ago where I did the first of my um I do a twice a year I do a really high touch uh class where I consult with 200 students at once as I I take them through a ketogenic diet that would be for a cancer patient or a seizure patient or a severely ill patient. And so this is the protocol you need to succeed. If you have if you want to see the most advanced ketogenic diet, I'll do it with you. And in that process, I get them on the first week. We get them down 20 total carbs. I get them pricking their finger. First thing in the morning, everybody gets all the things. And then on the seventh day, we say the menu only has sardines. And Lauren, I can remember the first time I've got all of these patients hooked up to a dashboard. So it it is a much different scenario than seeing a you know a patient one at a time then one at a time then one at a time and over the course of a year trying to kind of bring this constellation of data to say what's the trend that I'm seeing when you're seeing 200 patients at once tell you I you're my last hope. I I need your ketogenic I need the numbers to be great. They have terrible numbers on days one two three four five and six. I mean, we're making ketones of 0.5 and celebrating. And then they go on a sardine challenge. And again, the rules of the sardines are you must eat this highfat fishy or high fat uh fish. Um that's the first bite. It begins your 72 hours. And then I don't care. There's no eating window for it. It's any hour of the day. Um you can have as much as you want. Um we want it in oil, not in water. And so that okay, we started this and I'm watching these numbers on that first time where like half of the class had ketones north of one by 48 hours and by 72 hours it ends on the 72nd hour. You eat a can of sardines. So now you have three days of this high fat fish. And um what what I didn't appreciate the first time, but I definitely will confirm is that it's really difficult to overeat this little fish. There is not a lot of gluttony associated with eating sardines. And so the food volume was certainly down from what would be normal in these patients. Uh but that high quantity of or high quality of fat and protein um it flipped a switch. In fact, the best numbers um were not at the end of the 72 hours. They were the next morning. I have goosebumps because every time I think about it, I remember thinking, "Oh, look at what we just unlocked." I mean, these patients were going to be at a ketone of 0.5 or 0.7. That was what I was expecting. and to watch them hit a ketone number that got closer to like three and a half or four on that fourth day, the day after the sardine challenge and their glucoses had clearly um they gone down, but especially in your really sick patients. Uh what you what you see first when you're doing the right thing is you see a lift of that and you can see a slight drop in the glucose, but it's really subtle. It's the lift in ketones that you start to unlock this untapped energy resource for these chronically ill patients. And uh since then um so we've done that class eight times now. We just finished up about two weeks ago. And one of the things I teach as I'm doing the sardine with I do it with them. All the coaches do it with them. Everybody does sardines for three days. And we all watch these numbers. Uh and I tell them you're making new mitochondria. That's what's happening inside those cells. The reason that patient couldn't get good numbers, the reason that carnivore uh couldn't get good numbers wasn't because they weren't following the rules or was it because they weren't disciplined. It's that their their body was so ill, so had such poor health at a subcellular level that their mitochondria kind of were crippled. They were limping along. And the signal to replace those mitochondria comes from a drop in insulin and a spike in ketones. And um you you you can't unlock that in most patients when they're that sick. Um I I recently wrote a story of one of the most remarkable um I mean I've had several great stories, but this guy had evidence. He had the numbers to prove what happened. Um and he in his like um you know late mid50s he was told by his doctor you know you've got pre-diabetes and really he had diabetes and A1C is 6.5 and this was like 2017 18 um and he said and I don't want to go on your medicine so he gets the book by Dr. Jason Fun, uh, a great friend and colleague, and he says, "Jason Fun says I can fast my way out of this." And, uh, I'm just going to not eat anything for the first eight days of a month. And, uh, he's a, you know, very disciplined. He does that. He fasts seven days for the first at the first of every month. He does it for 18 consecutive months, and he gets the problem to go away. And he's his A1C is down, his blood pressure is down, his weight's down. He's winning. And then he falls off of uh a scaffolding and breaks both legs. So he's immobile and it takes him a couple years to get everything back to going. And now he's been surrounded by traditional medicine. Nobody's telling him anything that fasting is at all possible. His A1C's back up to 6.5. And he asks the doctor, "What what can you help me?"
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And this is just in time for that for Trosepide, the GLP1 GIP agonist to be available. And the doctor says, "We're going to give you the best drug on the market." And they start them out on trespathide 2.5 milligrams every week. Every week, ah, it's not doing anything. Go up to five milligrams every week. Every week, oh, it's not doing anything. Go up to 10. Go up to 15 milligrams. the highest dose possible. He stays on that dose for two years while he gains weight, while he takes an A1C all the way up to 10. That's like an average blood sugar of like 280. And the guy is so frustrated because he's doing everything the doctors are telling him. And but what I want you to imagine is his his cells are really broken. They were kind of broken when he um you know, he was immobile for that long. Um, but they have continued to decline and to deteriorate for now two years. And when the traepide stopped him from eating so much, but it was like a constant fast, he couldn't hardly make a ketone. I mean, he wasn't he didn't make any ketones. So, he gets all ticked off. He throws the wind the medicine out the window and says, "I'm just going to go back to doing what I did before." But, he's a very sick man now. So he says, "I'm going to I I I he fasted like a knucklehead, which means he got to the end of 72 hours, didn't have any results. So now he's going to fast. Well, let's just go for 7 days, but he gets to the end of 72 days and his blood sugars are still high and hardly a ketone. He fasts for 21 days of water and salt only. And his blood sugars are still above 100 and his ketones are 0.7. I mean, that's like what mine are before, you know, breakfast. I mean, that's there's unbelievably poor response of his metabolism. And what I want patients or people to appreciate is inside his cells, the mitochondria were broken. So, he shows up for this class and he he's he's very fatalistic. If this doesn't work, I'm you know, I'm I'm going to die, you know. And he was pretty grumpy that I could we were, you know, he went through the class. He gets to the sardines and he's making, you know, 2.5 ketones, 3.0 ketones, but his blood sugars are still in the high, like 150s by the end of the second week. Gets to the end of the third week of the class and now we do a water fast. His ketones go up to like 5.0 and his blood sugar comes down, but it's still not below 100. And and he's kind of a grump grump. So he's like, "See, everybody else in my class is better than me." And I all I can see is do you know what's happening during a time where the ketones have gone up like that and the glucose has gone down is that you're replacing mitochondria you it's mphagy and that's what he wasn't doing when he was just denying food on tresepide for two years uh and then well then he denied food another way just said I'm just going to make disciplined and fast for 21 days again no replacement of mitochondria when we put them in a place where sardines might rescue him and that is what rescued him. It's that they're eating the protein and fat, specifically the fat. Uh he can't unlock the fat till he lowers his insulin. And his insulin is so far off the charts that he he will have a met he he'll have a a metabolic shutdown like he will waste muscle cells before he'll open his fat cells. uh unless you use a food like high fat, easy accessible fat and volume of food is low and well that's what those little fish deliver. So I think of them as the unlock especially for the sickest of the sick patients.
That is amazing and I wish I met you years ago because I was I was so sick. So this I I wish I had this. I mean it sounds like the best healing hack ever. you take you eat sardines for three days and then you can go into carnivore or whatever it is that you know ketogenic diet and keep you know your ketones in check and your blood sugar in check. Why is this not more recognized? Like I think this needs to be shared scream from the rooftops. Anyone that's sick should try it and you know see how you feel after that.
Well, I I'm really happy to hear you see see the beauty of it because, you know, I look at when I'm trying to show patients like, hey, I there's not a lot for me to gain on this, you know, this place. I don't have a prescription that's going to make you as better as this way of eating is. And so, I I I really feel the empathy for patients trying to find answers. And the ones that go to the top of the advertisement, the ones with the highest budgets are a supplement or a or a prescription medication. And although they may have some benefit, it's like you are majoring in the minor leagues, if you want to see the massive change, change the chemistry of what your body is doing first thing in the morning. And although there are little hacks out there that can make it a little easier, um some people eat sardines for three days and it is such a shift of their body's chemistry that they drop their blood pressure, they diarice, I mean they pee out a bunch of extra fluid and they can get laded, they can feel really lousy. Uh so even if we say maybe you're not healthy enough for a true strict sardine um challenge, you know, the three days of only sardines, I tell them put in a high carnivore breakfast and then the only thing on the menu after 12:00 noon is sardines. And that is it's a gentler way to get this unlock of the processes that I mean you you don't have to trust me. Measure your numbers first thing in the morning. You will see it. And to me that's been one of the best ways to say I one of the curses that I have in my company is it sounds like snake oil. It sounds like I'm selling you something that's going to cure everything. And well that's exactly what's in the supplemental advertisement. That's exactly what's on Amazon when they say, you know, eat the zasa e berry and you're going to feel all goo good inside. Um but that's exactly what um the advertisement for for semaglutide or ompic is too. And I contend that story is an excellent example that when you put these really highowered medications on board, but the the parts inside their cells are so crippled, uh you're not going to get you will not get a good outcome. You will get that muscle wasting. You may get loss of weight, but to restore health, you miss the boat. You really need to have ketones and circulation before you do that. And sardines for the win, man.
Yeah, I'm going to start incorporating them more into my diet. I really like your your tip of just sardines afternoon because that's way more easy to handle than sardines only for three days. I mean, especially for someone that's coming from a standard American diet that wants to try, you know, carnivore or something to heal because that's what I did and that's really hard already. So, it's like, no, you can't even have a burger. You have to eat sardines, these little slimy things in a can.
It's crazy. The best part about that is one of the one of the um dis dysfunctional parts about trying to just say people, oh just go have a ketogenic diet or go on carnivore is there is a lot of emotional um and baggage associated with what we think about food, how often we think about food, what we use food for in our lives. And I am not that I'm I've been working with addicts for 25 years. Uh it's not a little thing when you just say no, you can't have that. you must have this. Uh they're going to go through some withdrawal from their food and giving them variability for that first meal of the day. You know, they'll say, "I don't like breakfast." I'm like, "You will if the only thing after lunch is sardines. Give me three days."
Oh, I love it.
Yeah, that's so funny.
So, that leads me to my next topic is carnivore. Now, I know you uh you recommend carnivore as well as keto, just depending on the patient, I'm sure. But, it's not always that simple, right? It's not always just to eat meat, salt, water, you know, eggs, whatever it is. Eat until you're full. There's some kind of nuances with it. There's some things that can go wrong. Especially with me, I had I didn't really know what carnivore was. We just we just like did trial by fire, bought all the meat and eggs at Costco, and just went with it. But what are some of the biggest carnivore mistakes that you see coming from your patients? What What are they doing that could go wrong?
Well, first of all, it is the easiest first step to the ketogenic diet is separating out the menu. When when and I go back to 2015, 2016 while I was trying to teach the ketogenic diet and my husband kept saying, "You can't say that word keto. It just sounds like off-putting. Like it sounds clinical." And I'm like, "I don't know what else to call it. They're making ketones." So when the words carnivore kind of surfaced about four or five years later and now is a much easier way to introduce that your menu is going to have fat and protein on it. Uh and I do agree with the onset of how most carnivores are are introduced saying eat as much eat till you're full. Satiety is a hormonal feeling. Uh if you have any uh argument against that click on semiglutide or chepatide and watch to say why are they so successful. They're mimicking hormones of satiety. When you look at a carnivore menu, those first weeks of just feeling satiated. That brain hasn't felt that in years. So, beginning on a carnivore diet is exactly what um you just said. Have them eat till they're full. Uh enjoy the food again. Find the foods that give you pleasure. Keep that high fat, high protein in the place. Where I try to turn up the volume of saying you might want to do things differently is when they stall. So do what works, ride the wave for the first part. And if you don't need my help, God bless you. But if they stall and say your diseases got better when you lowered the first part of that insulin, that's what happened when they ate less carbohydrates. Um, well now I have usually about a third of the people that come to my channel um uh are carnivore stuck. uh they are on carnivore, they are used to the menu, but they haven't lost a pound. Their blood pressure is still high. We talk a lot about the thumb shin where they push on the shin bone um about two inches above their ankle and they can bury their thumb with swelling. That's not fat. That's swelling. That is water that shouldn't be in their body. And when I look at those carnivore stuck, they that's the profile. Their blood pressure doesn't do exactly what I want it to do. Uh and they're they've got swelling in their ankles. When I wrote the book Keto Continuum, it was because I had used keto for helping folks with cancer and I was, you know, uh, especially helping my mother who was my first patient, uh, and, uh, looking at other autoimmune, severely autoimmune patients, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, um, advanced medical problems where the ketogenic diet was doing things I had never seen documented in a in a medical journal, in a in a textbook, any of that. Um, and then I had too many people trying to come see me. So I said, "Well, I'm just going to take the instructions that I use for my patients and write a book about it." So Hedo continuum is a story of a patient uh who made every mistake possible. You great teachable story, but it walks through that there are steps that not everybody needs to go all the way through the 12 steps. Uh how hard do you need to push your metabolism, but if you walk through and say, "Why did that carnivore get stuck?" um insulin is made um much more robustly after three o'clock in the afternoon. Specifically, it spikes after sunset. So, when patients were saying, I eat all I want. I've now eat, you know, eat maybe two meals a day or maybe they're OMAD and eat one meal a day, but it's in the darkest hours of the night and they're sick coming into me. So, now this uh carnivore mistake that you know, who are the people that land in my universe? It's all right, you have mastered a new menu. Congratulations. you healed a lot of things, but the reason you're stuck is you're still making five times the amount of insulin you need to. Uh, and we talk about two bololises of food are going to be a better one than three. Most adults don't need three meals a day. Two bololises is enough. Uh, and then as you get used to eating two meals a day, now we squeeze them together within a 6-hour period. Um, then the next step we do is we slide those towards sunrise. uh your first meal being around 10 o'clock in the morning, the second one should be done by two o'clock in the afternoon and then watch how many days in a row you can do that. And this is really where those social things come into play that it's your kids baseball, it's this, you know, the family reunion happened. Oh, my husband wanted to go out for annivers. So when those things are always outranking the meal after 3:00, you're going to fail as an as a carnivore with high insulin. So when I look at the biggest mistake they make is they ride the wave and they do feel better and they are zealots. They love their carnivore diet. They the menu of of um is just satisfying. In fact, their brain is healthier because of what has been their autoimmune problems are even if they didn't know they had one, they're they're less symptomatic. But to completely reverse it, um you're going to have to lower the insulin more. a recent little video I put out that um 10 bites of food before noon equal one bite of food after 3:00.
Wow.
Yeah. So, when you're looking at volume of food and how much that impacts an insulin resistant carnivore, uh the timing of their food becomes really important. And getting used to a nothing burger. Like that means I I talk about no mastication, no chewing of anything. So, I have a lot of gum chewers that say, "This is how I get through of not eating. I chew a bunch of gum." And in a healthy young teenage, you know, 20-year-old, there's no problem. But this is an obese 50-year-old male or female that uses gum to kind of not eat. But the mastication stimulates their insulin in a pathologic way. That's not Oh, that's not normal.
Yeah, no kidding. It's also not normal for you to be this insulin resistant and overweight. So looking at other ways that um you know they they trigger the production of insulin. Uh volume of food is one thing. Timing of the food is the most important.
That's really interesting. I I need to pay attention more of what time I eat because that's I've noticed um so another question I had was highfat carnivore. I tried it pretty heavily for a few months. You know I ate all the you know fattier meat, the fattier ground beef, the ribe eyes. Um, I'm very lactose intolerant, so I can't do butter. So, I did some extra tallow and I noticed that I gained a little bit of weight. I still had a little bit of healing to do, so I didn't know if it had anything to do with that, but what is your thought on gaining weight on the carnivore diet? Like, can you have too much fat?
Well, let's just take your example. So, um, can you tell me the symptoms that were still smoldering that you were trying to take care of with that higher fat setting?
Yeah. So, I had MCCAST, so I had like severe histamine intolerance and I would get more sensitivity to light and sounds and smells. Um, I'd get headaches. I can tell exactly when it's coming, exactly what it is. Um, stomach off a little bit, but most of the severe symptoms were gone. But every once in a while, I'll start getting, you know, a bad headache where I have to go lay in bed for a few hours, and that's the main one. Sometimes I'll get joint pain, mostly in my fingers. But yeah, I noticed a little bit of that and a little bit of weight gain.
Well, I'll tell you that I've seen that case many times, right? This is a chronic disease that grows over time. On a carnivore diet, it gets much better. But when you're trying to say, can you get it to stop? Um, you do need the replication of those cells that make histamine to happen for multiple generations of those cells in an advanced ketogenic state. So you do you prick your finger and look at glucose and ketones ever?
No, I have, but I haven't been consistent with it.
So it's not forever, but it is a season where you say, I'm going to be committed to the the best um you know, eosinaphils, which is what holds histamine, eosinaphils in my system. Uh we're going to we're going to see if we can keep them. Uh we need about five generations for sure, but we need really perfect production of those five generations. White blood cells are pretty quick to recover. I mean to replicate. I mean so when I look at the treatment plan for multiple sclerosis that is a brain cell and igodendrite is the enemy. Uh it's being attacked by your immune system. It's on the other side of a bloodb brain barrier. I'm going to and the lifespan for that cell is much longer months. So I need my multiple sclerosis patients to be in an advanced ketogenic state for 9 to 12 months. No messing up. 9 to 12 months. In somebody with a histamine issue related to mass cells, I need you to be in an advanced ketogenic state for six weeks. Now, that means prick your finger and prove to me that you have a Dr. Bos ratio of less than 40 for six consecutive weeks. What happens then is you now replicate those cells um into a um you know, they're going to do their thing. They're going to do live out their lifespan, recycle, live out their lifespan, live out their lifespan. And now you get the end of six weeks for a case like this. And now I want you to trigger them and see what happens. But I want you to trigger them in a ketogenic state. So having the replication of those cells over time is a great beginning story. You don't need to see a doctor to do this. You do need a meter. Um and you need to be checking first thing in the morning. I I call it to t test on the toilet. Don't mess around. I don't want you running and making coffee and then checking your numbers. I need to be able to predict what was what were your numbers while you were sleeping two hours ago. So, the closer I can get them to first awakening numbers, the better understanding I'll have of what they did overnight. And Lauren, it's not um it's not a secret. It's a they needed it. A doctor's ratio is the glucose divided by the ketones. It's dirty math, meaning the the mill moles per liter and the milligrams per deciliter do not match, but it's you take the big number divided by the little number. And if you're trying to reset an autoimmune disorder, you really want those numbers below 40 first thing in the morning.
And you're young. You should be able to do this with one really committed trial of it. And then I want you like, do you know what would trigger um a headache for you?
Oh, yeah. Uh bacon, sausages,
any kind of smoked meats. Even on a carnivore diet, I still have to be careful. So, I could do that. That would keep me in ketosis. and see
different triggers. So, uh here here's just a fun fact. You have an antidote when it starts
besides going
sometimes. Sometimes I I use herbs and homeopathy mostly. Uh there's like a a trick. It's medication. It's certid. It's like you take both of them at the same time and it's supposed to knock out knock out both H1 and H2 something receptors, but
it doesn't always work. So, I just try to lay low and keep it easy. M so my fastest uh like you know public service announcement to keep histamine low in somebody who's having a reaction is to lower their body temperature.
So I used to run an ER for the first 10 years of my um my pre my medical practice. Um and I was in the middle of nowhere Filillmore Utah. I about a 100 miles from a major hospital. And so when people would come in with a severe allergic reaction we don't have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber or anything. It's kind of it's not quite rural medicine, but it's rural for access to the kind of tools we might need. And when any and ever someone so a physician taught me this probably in the first month of my of the scariest thing ever is being the only doctor around for 100 miles when you first graduate like do I know enough? Google didn't exist then guys. It's got to be in my brain. I mean it might have existed but I didn't know I didn't recall me using it. Uh when you look at the um the ice bath that we would put patients in. So a patient would come in you know angioadema is the classic do you know what that is?
No
angiadeema means they're they have one area of their um body that will swell up. It's commonly around their mouth. So like the lip it would be the size of an orange. I mean it just swells up. They'll get stretch marks on their skin from how quickly it will swell up. Their eye will swell closed and it'll look like the size of a baseball. um if that happens around their vocal or around their um airway, you can you can they can have a compromised airway and you you you die.
Uh so to stop the histamine responses, you want to lower the body temperature. So we would pack them in ice. Uh we would, you know, we get the helicopter headed our way, but uh many times we could reverse their histamine response by lowering the core body temperature um in that. So today that's called an ice bath. Yeah.
Or a fuckle plunge, whatever they call it. Uh, so I'm saying that to you to for anybody who suffers with what you've got. When that's coming on, you got to get up into your armpits. You got to stay there for at least three minutes to lower body temperature. If you can stay till five, you're really doing good things, but you got to lower the body temperature in order to stop the histamine releases. So, good hack, good public service.
I'll keep some ice in my freezer and and try that next time. I recently had Dr. Thomas E. freed on my channel to talk about cancer and the ketogenic approach to um he said don't ever use the word treat but you know
right
to use it for that. Um, and you wrote a book called Any Way You Can about your mom who had cancer and how you discovered ketosis and um have you seen a lot of other patients become much healthier or live much longer with this recommendation?
Wow. Yes. Oh my gosh. So again, Dr. Seafruit and I are both on the same page there. We do not use the word cure or treat. We are augmenting the therapies of what is out there for patients with cancer. Um, that we know there are some incredibly beneficial uh uh um replication of cells. Uh there's there's a formula for what healthy cells do, what cancerous cells do, and then especially what they do when glucose has been um made scarce and ketones are more abundant. Healthy cells are able to quickly flip between those two s fuels using the fat um especially oxidizing the fat very efficiently delivering the energy to the cell without compromise. When you look at a a cell for that has cancer part of the defect is what happens to its mitochondria. Um, and that's your powerhouse that takes energy and makes it into ATP makes the makes the energy present. That is not as robust. There are flaws in how that works. Um, and when you offer it a glucose, it will quickly turn it into suinic acid and lactic acid, uh, making for a quick, uh, fuel, very wasteful fuel, but it stays alive. Uh, when you offer it a ketone, it doesn't have the right parts to really convert that to uh, to the robust production of ATP that a healthy cell does. So, when you can see that separation, and you know, he'll you'll hear Dr. to see if you'd say cancer is a metabolic disease. What does he mean when he says that? It means that the the cancer's ability to take a fuel and and get extract the highest amount of ATP out of it is flawed. That is a true statement. It doesn't do that. It has some hacks that it can get around and do different things. It can adapt. Cancer is a smart problem. uh but it is at its foundation linked to the poor metabolism um that is found in a cancer cell. Now you say wait a minute this can this cell grows it grows and grows and grows. Isn't that mean the metabolism is good? Oh it's a robust production and cell proliferation. The way it's using that fuel is crippled though. It's not sustainable. It's it has flaws which is why the patient succumbs from it. Um, when I look at um some of the best stories out there, again, uh, it is a delicate thing to talk about, um, to a podcast or to a a large audience because I've been walking folks through this last chapter of life for a long time and it's easy to exploit them. They are scared. Um, number one fear in life is death. That fear goes up a lot when somebody says the word cancer and now they're counting will I have another birthday? Will I have another anniversary? Will I see my kids at Christmas? Though it's a very delicate season that I think gets exploited in the setting of of medicine. I mean just chemotherapy and you know hospice can be what the heck did you do that to that patient? You did not improve their life at all. Um, so I say this with all the grace that having cancer means you got some major conversations to have. Nobody is going to step in there and do that for you. It is a lonely season. But having cancer and saying, "Can I live can I live my best life as I deal with whatever's come my way?" Um, I would I would tell you that there hasn't been a cancer patient that I wouldn't have recommended a ketogenic diet to. Now, there are some of them that come to me and they write into my channel and they say, you know, would you help my mom? She's, you know, 200 lb overweight. She has had diabetes for 20 years. She injects 100 units of insulin. She has sleep apnea. She she has all the things. And I'm going to now ask you to take care of her um by using a ketogenic diet because she has colon cancer. and you're like, there are so many steps involved of where you're at right now and where you need to be that our our solution again this has been a difficult place that we go like we don't want to not offer help but that season of how many how many layers of improvement to your metabolism do need be we need to offer and you're sick now you're going to have a surgical removal of the colon and a bunch of chemotherapy um to then add a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet that puts them into ketosis is uh there's only so much a human can handle. Uh you watch those um those attractions to say can we use a ketogenic state to improve the quality of life? Absolutely. Have I seen people reverse their cancers? Yes. I mean evidence that we have looked and looked we cannot find the cancer. It's two years later. Have we seen people reverse their their symptoms of Larri's disease ALS? Yes, and those are real stories. That is not fake news, but I do not lead with that. I I look at the amount of people saying you're we all have a little cancer in us. It's your body takes care of it. Um, when it gets to be the part where the medical system says, "Let me give you the best we've got, which is chemotherapy and radiation." It's because the cancer is large enough to have the risk outweigh um the the benefit outweigh the risk for what we're about to do. that's not the that's not the day to start learning about the ketogenic diet.
If someone is concerned about cancer, it they're afraid because it runs in their family or, you know, past lifestyles. If they start a ketogenic diet, do you think that's enough to keep cancer away?
Well, that's what I'm doing. So, my mom had CLL and um and she was a healthy woman, grew up on South Dakota without, you know, air pollution or other things. She was a good old prairie woman. I had good food that not processed. She was but but we were farmers so there was toxin exposures and what happened to her bone marrow um is a overgrowth of a cancer that is highly insulin dependent. The insulin is a growth factor. And so when they're putting you know she did have years of just struggling with her weight. Her thyroid took off in the wrong direction. uh she had she she could not seem to lose weight despite her you know really smart doctor and daughter saying well here's what you need to do mom um and and when we used a ketogenic diet it was because she was refusing treatment for any I'd already tried to kill her a couple times with chemotherapy and it's not like we never that we didn't use that again but when we added the ketogenic diet the insulin reduced the in she went back to the weight she was in high school she reversed age by like 35 40 years. She looked amazing and that energy and joy and and fresh amounts of mitochondria. That's really what happened. Um, they didn't happen because she dabbled in it once a week. She pricricked her finger. She stayed the numbers. She did the things to keep her um to keep a state of ketosis persistent. I fast every week, not because I have to. I don't need to lose any more weight. I want to make sure I push a stressful um a programmed, you know, hormic stress to my system where ketones go up and glucose goes down so that each week I plunge that stress, reduce the amount of insulin needed to keep my body um doing what it's supposed to do. Um I I love to get to 60 hours of fasting. Sometimes I only get to in the high 50s. Um and then when I do that class twice a year, I do the 72-hour fast with them at least twice a year. But there's many hours, many weeks in there that people say, why are you doing that? It is for persistence of health. My mother had cancer from a high insulin state. Um, the reversal of that was such an epiphany that you could reverse these things. She was 71 when we started and incredible education for me um to then be a really good teacher that of this not just dabbling. You need to check if you are trying to prevent cancer. If you are trying to reverse autoimmune problems, you got to man up. You got to prick your finger. If I can teach a seven-year-old type one insulin, you know, type 1 diabetic who needs to inject insulin to prick their finger and give them a shot, you can prick your finger and check your glucose, check your ketones. You can do it.
A lot of life change, life-changing events like that are something that people then use as fuel to like drive them and and become so uh passionate about and sharing with others. And I think it's really beautiful that you do that. You know, you took a really scary story and you you all learned from it and now you're sharing it with the world and you're helping people heal for free, you know, and I think that like I've loved watching you and I think that what you're doing is amazing and yeah, I just want to thank you for all your work. I think it's awesome.
I I I am a woman of faith and I I do know that um when you're doing what you've been called to do, it it is easy that you can get all stressed out. I do all this stuff for free. How do I make payroll? Yeah, that does bother me sometimes.
Uh but then I think it's the devil. You say, you know what, my role, what I've been asked to do, what I've been called to do is it took this incredibly difficult moment where I'm a really good physician, but my mother was dying under my care. And it was awful. And then to see how much her health resurrected when I fed her correctly. Shame on me for not knowing that for the 15 years before I started that. And let there be so many people that learn from her pain, from my pain in a story that says, read the book, listen to the audio book of any way you can. It's a love story between a mother and a daughter. There's about 30% science in there. It's mostly a story of what it looks like to resurrect someone's health and and say, "Thank you, God, for that."
Wow. I just got chills. That's awesome. Now, not all health is related to diet, right? There's a lot of different aspects that that come with it. Diet's just what I tend to focus on a lot because that's what helped me the most.
But if there was something else that's not related to diet that someone could change today that had that would have a dramatic positive improvement on their health, what would you recommend?
I would recommend midnight. Midnight. What does that mean to you?
Sleep. Are you going to sleep? Are you deep in sleep or is it bedtime?
I would hopefully be deep in sleep. I try to go to bed by 10:00. I've got a six-year-old and I'm busy all day, so I'm really tired by like 9:00. I remind people that midnight is supposed to be the middle of the night and that when you look at the restoration of our immune system, of our brains, and and that beautiful little boy that you are teaching how to take on the stresses of the world, that sleep routine is a learned skill. It is taught by mothers to their children. Yes, there's dads that teach it, but universally across the globe, mothers teach sleep habits. Uh there's a really good book out there called on becoming baby wise. So if you just type in baby wise, it's a it's written by one of my colleagues on how important it is for mothers to teach the routine depth of sleep. Uh I give it to every one of my friends that's pregnant, every one of my friends that's had a baby. Uh this is how you wire a healthy brain. And when patients come to see me in their, you know, chapters of life in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, the first, we can't fix a thing until they get sleep back to happening. Not booze laced sleep, not benzo laced sleep, not tranquilizer lace sleep. Sleep, deep sleep is how we heal an a a a body, whether immune system or brain. And if midnight doesn't come anywhere close to the middle of the night, you got a problem. That is great advice. I've also noticed when I don't sleep well that sometimes symptoms return or I just, you know, I just don't feel good. Everything's worse when you don't sleep. Right.
Wait till you start checking those numbers. As soon as you stop sleeping well.
Yeah, I will. Yeah, I'm definitely going to do that. I'll let you know because you'll Are you going to Meattostock in Tennessee?
Yes. Yes, I am. I'm excited.
I will be there, too. So, I'm going to start I'm going to order it and then I'll let you know.
Okay. All right. Well, Lauren, it was awesome to for us to be able to share time together and I hope what I educate you, you your audience appreciates and it helps them and that you can have uh all the praise for leading the efforts here and and serving them.
Thank you. It's been an honor to talk to you today. Thank you so much for coming on.
You bet. Thank you guys so much for watching this conversation with Dr. Bos. I hope it challenged you and encouraged you to think deeper about what true metabolic health actually looks like. Make sure to like this video and subscribe for more videos like this. And I would love it if you left your personal story in the comments. Thanks again for watching.