Transcription
are getting sicker and sicker, and that gap is widening. The health disparities are becoming more pronounced, and it's a tragedy that we have the knowledge and the tools to make significant changes, yet many people are still falling through the cracks.
We need to advocate for better access to health education, healthier food options, and opportunities for physical activity, especially in underserved communities. It's not just about individual choices; it's about creating an environment that supports healthy living for everyone.
In conclusion, while personal responsibility is crucial, we must also address the systemic issues that contribute to poor health outcomes. By working together, we can create a society that prioritizes health and well-being for all its members.
are getting super unhealthy very quickly. Yes, and I think, well, I mean, this is the thing: people need to know what's putting them at risk, and a lot of times they do know, but they really don't have the resources not to do what they're doing. So it's really, um, I know it's a tough question; it's a tough situation.
Well, I want to move out of prevention for a second and go back to people that are diagnosed with cancer looking for resources. You know, you mentioned a clinic that you're aware of in Istanbul, and I know that there are these different clinics that are spread around the world. Obviously, a lot of them are not going to be accepting American insurance and things like that. Are those clinics a potential option? You know, I'm not going to name any by name unless there are any ones that you feel comfortable naming. I know there are some in Mexico, some places that use, you know, water-only fasting. I'm not aware of anybody that's implementing the specific approach that you're taking, but I am more aware of therapeutic approaches like the ketogenic diet. You know, clinics in Germany, are those an option again potentially for people who have resources and are diagnosed with cancer?
Yeah, I think so, but again, we're working on the treatment protocol now, and hopefully we can get it published, which is a really comprehensive way. We put together with people, my friends and people I know in the field who have studied this for quite a long period of time, who are all going to be making comments and signing off on this strategy. Until you have to have a protocol for treatment, you have to have two things: you have to have a correct protocol for treatment, and you have to have a place where you can go to get the treatment.
So I think the frustrating part right now from many of the comments that I get from these podcasts is, "Oh, I talked at all, but where do we go?" You know, nobody's—I’ve outlined what we need to do, but who's going to do that for me? Who can help me do that? I'm not a physician. People are calling me; all these phone calls that I'm getting, they're all asking, "Where do I go? How do I do it?" Well, that should be your major oncology centers. It should be the one. Well, they're not doing it.
Even the clinics that are publishing some of these case reports, as you've mentioned that you're working together, are all right. Those are potential, again, most likely it's not going to be covered by insurance, and people are going to have to have some resources. But would that be a potential resource for people that had resources?
I think the time—I think we, uh, there are a number of people that are really—many physicians that would like to set up clinics, established, you know, brick-and-mortar places to go where a patient would be brought through, follow through the entire process by a team—not handed off like we do in the medical schools. You come in, you get the diagnosis, okay, you're handed off to the next guy who does the treatment, then you're handed off to this other guy. You'd like to have a team that follows you from start to finish, knowing precisely how to deal with the issues as you go through the treatment process.
You know, and listen, if I had cancer, having written the protocol, knowing everybody that I know in the field and knowing what I know, I would certainly want to work with one of my colleagues just to bounce things off of. I wouldn't want to do everything, even though I know what to do and how to do it. I still want to talk to one knowledgeable person just to run things by them. You know, it's like anything; you really want to work—you really want to speak to somebody just to make sure that the newest evidence, the newest discussions, and things that you might not have recognized might not have been recognized.
And I think the cancer patients who may not have any wherewithal in this whole thing would certainly need guidance. And, uh, an app—so we're trying to build apps where a lot of the patients can play a very significant role in their health management, knowing that they're shouldering a lot of what needs to be done. But they would like to share their glucose ketone index values with the trained professional and have that trained professional, if they fall out of the nutritional guideline—or I should say the key, the zone, what we call the therapeutic zone of efficacy—what, how do we get back into the zone? What did you do to fall out of the zone? And they could say, "I did this," and, "Well, okay, modify that, modify this, get yourself back into the zone."
That's why we built the glucose ketone index calculator to allow cancer patients to know what nutritional zone they should be in to create the greatest amount of pressure on stopping the fermentation of their tumor. So, and then I realized after we did this how hard it was for the cancer patients to get into these zones. And I was looking at the students that could easily get into these zones. These are young people that have no cancer; they're all very healthy, and they can get into these zones quite easily. But when you're an older person with cancer and now you're subjected to chemo and you're subjected to these treatments, your blood sugars go up, your systemic inflammation goes up, and now it becomes a real challenge for these cancer folks to get into these zones, which initially I thought were quite achievable.
But now I'm realizing steroids and all kinds of stuff that you're given to the cancer patient keeps them out of the zone, and they're struggling. And they're, "Oh, I've done this, and I've done that, and I can," and a lot of the treatments they have are pushing them out of these zones. So, you know, when we did it with the pre-clinical system, we were not radiating and giving toxic poisons to these mice. I mean, we got these animals in these zones and all this kind of stuff pretty quick. So, and dogs too—I mean, I published a big paper on the dog diet alone resolving this mast cell tumor.
So, um, it's much easier to do it if you're kind of healthy at the beginning. It's much more difficult to get into the zone when you're not healthy. Is early detection also a big part of this too? And there's, you know, a bunch of new things that are out there, everything from like Grail's blood testing, which obviously is super sensitive, and you gotta be aware of that and work with the right practitioner on it, to things like whole body scans. Like, I think there's a company called, I have no affiliation with them, but like PerNova, who are doing whole body scans, and they're able to detect a lot of these because generally, from what I understand, and people like physicians like Peter Attia—who you've been on his podcast before—you guys had a really good discussion, and a lot of he—he stress tests a lot of your ideas in a good way, and you had great responses for them. We'll link to that in the show notes. Are those a part of the process again?
Well, I think, yeah, I think when you come to—I like the idea of non-invasive detection. Non-invasive—men talk about that because you have a whole philosophy on invasive versus non-invasive.
Yeah, well, I think, well, it's a very cutting-edge thing, and I think, you know, the industries are working on what we call liquid biopsy, right? Where we can try to identify where and what type of cancer a person may have by looking at markers in the bloodstream. So you just need to take some blood, evaluate a whole array of markers, and then predict what type of cancer it might be, where it might be, and then do a more thorough evaluation without actually disturbing the microenvironment of the tumor itself.
Because right now, we do—we do a tissue biopsy. Right? Somebody feels—a woman feels a lump on her breast or, yeah, yeah, and then goes in and says, "Is this cancer?" So, not so, then they're going to be taking a biopsy with a needle. Well, yes, and/or a mass on the lung, a mass somewhere, you know, we need to—prostate, you know, whatever tissue happens to be the tissue that's involved. A confirmatory diagnosis is involved with a biopsy, which is taking a sample of the tissue, analyzing it under the microscope, and saying whether or not the cells look malignant or not, which is then the judgment of the pathologist making a decision about what he sees under the microscope.
My recognition of seeing dozens and dozens of studies—and I have some of them published in our breast cancer paper—by taking the biopsy, you actually disturb the microenvironment of the mass that you are evaluating, and you could actually create a—make a bad situation worse in taking—looking at material to determine whether or not you have a malignancy or not. And if it is—if it were to be malignant, that mass that you see with CAT scan, PET scan, or feeling a lump, and it does happen to be malignant, then stabbing it would not be in the best interest of the patient. You run the risk of cold inflammatory oncotaxis. It's a well-known phenomenon where cancer cells can spread around the body by disturbing the microenvironment.
That was one of the reasons they got rid of the morselation procedure for uterine polyps. They had this machine that would grind up polyps, and it was causing, in some people, metastatic cancer because you ground up, fragmented the tissue, got into the bloodstream, and became metastatic. So this is the same thing; you gotta be very, very careful. You don't want to disturb the microenvironment. So what do you do? Well, you institute metabolic therapy, and you have several things that can happen. Number one, it goes away completely. Number two, it gets smaller or doesn't grow anymore, and then you say, "Whoa, it's stabilized." Okay, then consider the surgical debulking completely because you could then reduce the inflammation around the mass, which is key to not spreading it. If you can put the fire—inflammation is fire—put the douse the fire with metabolic therapy so it's not so angry, and the borders become sharper, and the surgeon can take the whole thing out without worrying about spreading it.
So, uh, so there's a lot of key strategies that one could do to reduce the risk of spreading something that should not be manageable very at the very beginning, but they don't do that because they are clueless as to the concept of metabolic therapy as an upfront treatment for this—or an approach. And what I'm telling you is not—oh, you're like Peter was saying, "Oh, you could cause fear in a lot of people by saying that's concerned." I'm just telling you what the biopsies—yeah, I'm just telling you it's already been seen in scientific literature, right? Why don't the patient—oh, and, oh, well, of course, Peter said that, "Oh, it happens very rarely." Yeah, like one out of 200 people. What about the one person who got it spread all over because you took a biopsy on it?
And just to connect the dots, just to make sure that people don't—people are not—we're not losing anybody—is that you have a concern that if people are going in with these invasive biopsies, that the fear is that if you are disrupting that local microenvironment, you could have cancer cells that get released from one area, let's say the breast tissue, and spread to other areas, and then could cancer then end up taking up in that area that it's spread to? And Peter Attia—and again, I'm not sophisticated enough to ask all the follow-up questions; I'm not a physician researcher; I'm just a layperson here interviewing—but I would encourage people to listen to that back and forth that you had because you had some great answers.
And your thing was that still, if it's rare—potentially one in 200—it could still happen. And I understand where Peter is coming from too, which is that his concern is that, well, there are people just not going to go seek out care. And I understand your answer to that, which is that in the ideal world, if we had the metabolic therapy approach to treating cancer, we would see that many more people would get better just from that alone.
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And then you could actually get rid of it much more cleanly without causing any reducing risk of spread. So there's a lot of ways that we can already reduce cancer. We're not arguing that we need—we need to have some diagnostic procedures, of course. You have a lot of things: CAT scan, MRI, PET scans. There's a lot of different things you can do up front.
Well, we can't do it this time; we have to do a biopsy first. Why? What do you need to do the biopsy? You're disturbing the microenvironment. Well, we need to know if it's malignant. Well, if it's malignant, you should never be sticking it in the first place. So, because then you really increase the potential risk for spreading the cancer. But shrink it down.
One question for you: so don't—in the case of, let's say, my mom, who was diagnosed with breast cancer—who's doing fantastic, by the way—and her approach at that time, I've talked about it before in previous podcasts, was we kind of had to assemble a ragtag team of people. We had to kind of convince her oncologist. She had a functional medicine doctor who was involved in her treatment, who herself is a breast cancer survivor, Dr. Elizabeth Bohm, and a few of the people that were part of it, and a cancer researcher named Ralph Moss, who has put together a lot of different reports over the years. And that was a big part of her, you know, team and her approach.
But in the case for her, I believe when they did a biopsy, they found that her cancer was HER2 positive, and they also got a chance to understand what drugs would be the most supportive for that type of cancer that she had. Is that not part of the reason to potentially have a biopsy done?
Yeah, I mean, you certainly can do it, but we already know HER2 positive, triple negative, or any of these things—they're all fermenters regardless. So you're saying regardless it wouldn't change the approach of at least the metabolic therapy?
No, no, you're still going to get rid of it. You're still going to remove it. It's just that you would want to remove it in an indolent state rather than in a potentially more aggressive state. You know, there's a lot of lumps that you can look at; there's a lot of different ways you can do this. The idea of doing a metabolic approach up front reduces the risk of spread when you do the surgical debulking.
So it's not—and then you can analyze it after the surgical debulking. If it's shrunken down, you can still look at it pathologically and see what it looks like, and in many cases, it becomes like, "Oh, this is not an aggressive cancer." Well, it could have been if you took a biopsy from the very beginning. These are judgment calls that have to be made by both the patient and the physicians, right?
So HER2 negative can spread; people can die from HER2 negative cancers, breast cancer. Triple negative breast, which has none of the markers on the surface, these kinds. But, you know, and there are drugs for this, but the bottom line that we have looked at is the mitochondria are abnormal in HER2 positive, PR positive, triple negative. The mitochondria are normal. What does that mean? That means whatever cells are in that mass are going to have to be using glucose and glutamate.
So we already know what those cells are doing in there. Why don't we shut their fuels off, collapse them, potentially get rid of them, and then whatever's left surgically debulk it, reducing the risk of having spread? Now, of course, a lot of women are going to go through the standard and not have to worry about recurrent metastatic cancer, but many of them do. And the issue is you want to reduce the risk of spreading something that doesn't need to be provoked. I mean, you can manage some of these things without provocation and make the outcome better.
Then, I mean, it's going to be good outcomes for a lot of people. Don't get me wrong here; they say that everybody will get stuck with a—as Peter said, you know, it doesn't happen that often, but it happens enough to know that there are many, many scientific reports in the literature describing inflammatory oncotaxis coming from the biopsy of the tissue itself in an attempt to determine what it is, and people should be aware, and they have to make that decision with their care team.
Yeah, I think, but right now the problem is what I just related to you is not known, understood, or recognized by the majority of those working in the oncology field. They are not aware of what I just said. Yeah, they don't read the scientific literature describing what I just said because when I told Peter about, "Oh, well, I didn't hear it," I said, "Peter, you gotta read the literature. It's there. If you just read the papers, you're going to see—I've seen it for prostate, breast, colon, lung, liver—all of these different cancers where inflammatory oncotaxis has been documented in the scientific literature."
Okay, so it's not a—it's not something that's never been seen. "Oh, I didn't know about that." Well, how often do you read the papers? Like I read these papers, I'm sitting there going, "Wow, look at this. Did these guys know about this?" Well, they never speak about it; that means they don't know about it. If they did, you should up front the patient and say, "Listen, there's an outside chance this technique could spread it around," all the reasons why. I'm not saying I guarantee; I'm just saying there's an outside risk factor associated with this.
Yeah, all the reason why, again, early detection is a big part of getting to—you know, the earlier you treat cancer, and especially if you can find a non-invasive way to detect your cancer early, you can get on the train early. And, you know, you've shared this before, but everybody's so worried, and they call you all the time and say, "Well, what if this metabolic therapy," which is essentially—I don't know, I know you don't like that term because it's a lot more than the ketogenic diet; it's a bunch of lifestyle things: exercise, sleep, you know, reducing stress. But diet is a big part of it. They're so concerned that what if the patient has a negative response to this, right?
And your thing is that, look, what do you have to lose? It would be tough, right? But what do people have to lose? And based on your mechanism of action that you've displayed, you've presented the argument here: you have everything to gain.
Yeah, I—you have a lot to gain. Or listen, I don't like to say gain; I think you have—these are called risk assessments, and you want to do things that are going to make the lowest level of risk for making something worse than it actually has to be. So, um, I think a lot of these tumors and cancers can be managed very, very effectively without invasive procedures if people know what to do and how to do it.
And, you know, here I'm speaking about what I understand from years of reading research and doing my own experiments and seeing what's happening to a field that doesn't read the same kinds of information or is not privy to it. So you have this gap; there's no consensus discussion about this. Is it possible that we could—yes, early detection is great if we can detect it early with non-invasive procedures and then manage it with non-invasive procedures and then go in at the end with an invasive surgical debulking removal to significantly reduce the possibility of making something worse than it has to be.
So it has to, again, be a team. The surgeon plays a big role in this, you know. Um, so, and as I said, why are we sticking this thing? Well, we need to know whether it's benign or malignant, and then they want to do a gene profile readout on a lot of these things to tell you what kind of mutations you have in the tumor. That's another thing that they—it's a big industry looking at the mutations in the tissue. But if the mutations are all downstream effects, then most of that stuff is irrelevant anyway. What are you worried about? If they can't use—if they're fermenting and you take away their fermentable fuels, the mutations go away because the cancer cells die.
Yeah, you know, so you essentially are living in the future with your cancer therapy approach, but we have to fight to raise the awareness. And really, with the people that are listening today, they should be the people to demand to their—anybody that's listening, including the doctors—that we need a different approach.
Yeah, you know, the problem what I'm telling people on these podcasts and stuff, you know, it might create anxiety in a lot of people because—and I feel bad about it too. I mean, you're asking me what I do. I mean, this is what I do for a living, right? I read all these papers all the time. I test this stuff on pre-clinical systems. I have my clinician friends try it on cancer patients. We publish case reports; we see really quite significant outcomes.
So, um, but again, the people say, "Oh yeah, this is the greatest stuff." They go down to their oncologist, "Oh no, that doesn't work. No clinical trials; there's no evidence to support anything." "Show me the evidence." That's not supporting it, you know? I mean, it's just one of those kinds of things.
I, you know, I know you're joking a little bit that you feel bad, but it's important that this information gets out there. It's important that people understand the lay of the land. It's important that people understand really that this super scary disease, cancer, that our bodies are not just innately messed up—that something just went completely wrong. There are genetic forms of mutations of cancers that are very rare, right? Genetic—genetically, there are secondary risk factors.
Every one of those inherited mutations, like BRCA1 and p53 and all these others, they damaged mitochondria; they disrupt oxidative phosphorylation. So there's someone who has a BRCA1 because not every woman who has BRCA1 develops a breast tumor, of course. It's about 50 or 60 penetrant. If you have a mutation inherited that's 100 penetrant, then that's a primary cause of the problem. But since all the mutations are not 100 penetrant, they are risk factors, just as someone would be working in a factory with chemical carcinogens. Not everybody in the factory would get cancer from working with those chemical carcinogens, right?
Does your lifestyle turn those genes on? Do they turn them off? The diet and lifestyle could provoke those chemical carcinogens or those genetic risk factors to become more prominent? Absolutely. So this is why you have to be aware of all of these things.
I don't know if prophylactic removal of organs is the best way to deal with BRCA1, but I certainly think because it's not a hundred percent penetrant, that means diet and lifestyle could certainly reduce the risk of having BRCA1 be reduced.
Absolutely. Thomas, this has been fantastic, and as we're concluding over here, and this is—I mean, there's such a wealth of knowledge that you have. Help us understand a little bit more about your work and your research. Like, how have you guys typically gone about the funding that allows you to document these cases as well as, you know, publish and put out the education that you do? And is there any way that the folks that are listening today can be, you know, supportive in the process by putting their attention on anything?
Well, our support now comes predominantly from private foundations and from philanthropy. So, um, you know, there's a number of people that—there are a number of folks out there that want to be part of a new movement and a knowledge-based approach to managing cancer without toxicity, and they want to support us. They support us through funds to foundations supporting us, and they support us by philanthropy, just saying, "I know this is the future."
What I've just described to you—principle metabolic therapy—is going to be the future of cancer management and prevention in this country. How fast do we get there? Like you've indicated, we have massive caverns; there's wall firewalls that have to be overcome. There's ideological dogma that has to be overcome, and there's a desire to be healthy and want to live, and all those things have to come together. But it's going to happen because it's based on the hard science. The science is telling us this is what is underlying the problem, and this is what you need to do to manage it.
So there are some people now—I know there are some people who say, "Well, I got to try to figure out how to make a buck." And what Seafried is saying, you know, I'm not an entrepreneur; I don't deal with those kinds of things. Our issue is how do we prove that what we're saying is correct? How many case reports can I write showing that people that should have been dead a long time ago are enjoying a quality of life far longer than they would have been? What's wrong with that?
I mean, that's reward in itself to know that the ideas and the science that you've articulated and tested actually works, and ultimately that's going to be the way people are going to come to know whether this stuff is right or not—by seeing all these folks that should have been dead walking around with a fairly good, healthy, and prolonged life. That's pretty much the evidence that you need to know that if you know your science is right, then you should have a lot of successful cases that are out there, and we're trying to write these up, and we're writing a protocol so that we can get more and more of these folks.
So there's people that are intrinsically interested in this kind of stuff, and we're working out all the details right now, and the money that we get comes from private foundations and philanthropy to do this. And if anybody here wanted to be a part of that process and donate, is that a possibility?
Yeah, well, they have Travis Christopherson's, you know, Foundations for Cancer Metabolic Therapy. He has a website called that—Travis, it's the Foundation for Cancer Metabolic Therapies. His work supports us, and, you know, we have money from the English British Childhood Foundation, and we have philanthropy—just folks that want to donate money to us through Travis's foundation. And we—and that keeps my research staff going. The pre-clinical animal models are expensive to work with. We have to work with a lot of different strategies. We're doing constantly looking for diet-drug combos that will be even more effective than the ones we have right now.
So press-pulse—we're working on the whole concept of press and pulse synergistic interaction, and we're going to come up with very new kinds of non-toxic drugs working specifically with a new metabolic body change, and this is going to be very devastating to the tumor cell and super healthy to the remaining cells of the body. So it's a lot of—it's trial and error, what we call non-sexy science. This is not the kind of stuff you get big NIH grants for because this is the stuff that's actually going to work in the clinic. You know, this is the kind of stuff that, "Oh, is it that dose? Is it this timing? Is it this scheduling of these three or four combos?" Yeah, that's what works the best.
Well, you can't write a grant up to the NIH to say, "I want to try to do this." Well, that's unsexy, you know? So we're not interested in sexy science; we're interested in therapeutic outcome. How long can you live with something that should have killed you, and you're doing well? That's the ultimate goal, and we don't want people losing their hair; we don't want people bleeding from their gums, you know, feeling like horrible all the time, vomiting, nausea, all that kind of stuff. We want to try to eliminate that and have these people emerge in a much more healthy state, knowing that they had a life-threatening condition, and that's no longer life-threatening.
So this is our strategy, and we're working to achieve that strategy.
Yeah, and it's important work. I'd love to donate. I'll be in touch with your team. I'll make sure that we list inside of the show notes here if anybody else wants to be a part of the process because, you know, my hope of day is that the NIH wakes up or other, you know, big government institutions wake up and realize, but that's going to take a lot of momentum.
Yeah, which is already starting, right? And thankful for new media means like YouTube and social media and podcasting to be able to help spread the word. But this is really the future of cancer therapy, and you're bringing it to us right now, and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing. As somebody who, you know, cancer has touched my life—my aunt passed away from cancer, and my mom has had cancer, knock on wood, you know, we detected it early, and she had an incredible team that supported her around it.
And one of the first things that her functional medicine doctor did was basically talk to her about the importance of dramatically reducing the amount of carbohydrates that she was on and completely switching her lifestyle and getting her exercise up—all the things that you talked about here on prevention.
Well, that makes everything—the other approaches might work much better.
Absolutely, absolutely. And of course, you know, she did have some shortened radiation. You know, there's a place where, you know, there's a place for these other tools and things that are in the context if the team determines it. But if we can add data and lifestyle factors to it, that's going to be, you know, as you mentioned, it's going to make it much more likely to happen.
Thomas, if people want to keep in touch with you, where do you want to send them?
Well, um, you know, a number of people are emailing me for information, which I send out in an email rather than the thousands of phone calls. I mean, the phone was running off the hook while we were doing the interview. Yeah, you know, I just don't know what to say. Maybe I should stop doing all this stuff and get back to just teaching students in the—but we, you know, we have this research. We've started to publish open access; people can read all my papers. It's open access; it's not like you have to be a member of some scientific society.
Yeah, donate to Travis Christopherson's foundation. I think that that'll keep us going because we're here for the long haul; we're not going anywhere. So, um, but you're right. I have to have a new—I don't know what to say. Since these podcasts have started, it's like I'm being buried with all these poor folks that I'd love to be able to, you know, give them—we're working on the treatment protocol now, and I think once we can publish this treatment protocol, then it becomes at least something to do, and we can set up these clinics.
But, uh, it's coming. Let—I wish I had something to say. It takes time; it takes time, and I feel bad.
And resources.
Yeah, resources, you know. But, but you're right; it's a pittance compared to what we're spending on this disease currently.
Well, thank you again for being here. Super appreciate you. Hope to have you back in the future.
Yeah, thank you very much. It's a pleasure.
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