Transcription
My thing was I didn't want to die. My liver is fully covered, so they've deemed me inoperable, incurable, palliative, and terminally ill. I knew I didn't want to go through chemo again; it had already spread to my liver and my lungs. So now I was terminal. With that news, it was kind of shocking. Without treatment, I think I have about a couple of months to live. The thing that we're trying to emphasize is that if you do metabolic therapy the correct way, you can not only manage the disorder, but you also correct and fix many other problems that some cancer patients might have, like diabetes, high blood pressure, and hypertension. So you actually get healthier as you're degrading your tumor. It's down now to 0.05, which is almost nothing.
Here I am about 15 to 18 months later, and I am doing really well. I did that for 2020. In December 2020, I was cancer-free. My wife had a stage four cancer diagnosis, and she used metabolic therapies. One year later, she was cancer-free. I'm not saying we throw out all chemo because obviously you folks have done really well with chemo. What we're finding with fasting and part metabolic, part chemo, is that dosages of chemo can be lowered significantly and still have powerful therapeutic efficacy. If you want to live and you want to get healthy, you do metabolic therapy. Now, that doesn't mean you don't do radiation and chemo; it would change the entire system, but they will not allow that to be done.
Anyone that's been touched by cancer, if you're worried about cancer, please share this video. Please share Professor Seed's work. Please share Brad's documentary, "Cancer Evolution." It's a travesty, a tragedy; it is criminal that this information is not given to them just as an option, just as an additional tool in their toolbox of ways to treat their cancer.
Hello and welcome to our roundtable discussion on cancer as a metabolic disease. I'm Carrie, and with us today is Professor Seed, along with a group of remarkable individuals: Diane, Jeff, Ronnie, and Brad, who have personal stories to share related to battling cancer with various regimens. Brad, along with his wife, is producing an amazing series on cancer at cancer evolution. film. I highly recommend it, and he's worked with many individuals and experts himself.
My goal for today is to deepen our understanding of cancer and treatments, guided by Professor Seed's expertise and the firsthand experiences of Diane, Jeff, Ronnie, and Brad. I'd love to start with Professor Seed, and then we can meet the other individuals and hear their stories, followed by some roundtable Q&A and open discussion.
Professor Seed, would you please share a bit of your background with our audience, and could you talk about cancer as a metabolic disease and what that means?
Thank you very much, Carrie. Right now, I'm sitting in my office at Boston College. I teach a class on cancer metabolism and a general biology class to non-majors. I spend a lot of time telling them about energy metabolism. It's an area that is not well covered in many biology classes. I mean, it's very briefly covered, but to get into the depths, it's been kind of overlooked unless you're a biochemistry major in the biochemistry department.
We've published many papers on targeting cancer metabolism. We've been working on trying to figure out what Warburg was doing for more than 20 years now—almost a quarter of a century. In investigating, we've done a very deep dive into what he said, what he found, and the controversies and difficulties associated with trying to interpret what Warburg had done. At first, he was largely correct, but there were some serious debilitating errors in the way he quantified energy metabolism, and he was attacked for that.
I think it was the systems that folks were using—oxygen consumption as a readout for ATP synthesis from oxidative phosphorylation, lactic acid production as a readout of ATP synthesis through cytoplasmic substrate-level phosphorylation. We now know from our own research and the research of others that these are not accurate measures for ATP in cancer cells.
We've stripped it all down to a very simple process: a defect in oxidative phosphorylation. Insufficiency of oxidative phosphorylation leads to compensatory fermentation. This is what Warburg said, but his readouts for the quantification of these processes were not accurate—not because of his inaccuracy, but because he didn't realize at that time that oxygen consumption was not always linked to ATP in cancer cells. In normal cells, yes; in cancer cells, no.
He knew nothing about substrate-level phosphorylation in the mitochondria in the TCA cycle and the glutaminolysis pathway. That was always a point of misinformation and still is for the large part. We have been able to streamline this whole problem. We interrogate every molecule that tumor cells could use as fuel, and we looked at every single amino acid, a variety of sugars, and things like this. We found that glutamine is the only amino acid that can provide enough energy for them—the nitrogen and energy—and glucose is the only sugar available to the tumor cell. There are other sugars, but they're not available in our body.
Once you realize that the only two fuels to drive the fermentation metabolism in sufficient amounts to keep a cell growing are glucose and glutamine, and secondly, you know that every major cancer has some deficiency in oxidative phosphorylation, meaning their mitochondria are deficient. They cannot use ketone bodies or fatty acids. Ketone bodies and fatty acids are non-fermentable fuels. When you take away glucose and glutamine and give these cells ketone bodies or fatty acids, they die.
Some people say fatty acids can be used only in the presence of glucose and glutamine. If you take away glucose and glutamine, fatty acids can do nothing. Once you've realized this, then you have a clear path to the resolution or long-term management of cancer, which is the simultaneous restriction of the two fermentable fuels, glucose and glutamine, while the body is in a state of nutritional ketosis. It's the dosage, timing, and scheduling of these processes that will eventually degrade, slowly degrade, and eliminate or put the tumors in a very indolent state where they no longer become life-threatening.
This is the plan. We're working out the details, of course, with our press-pulse therapeutic strategy. We know the plan; we've interrogated these tumor cells. We know all the tumors in the body are similar—lung, colon, breast, brain—they all are very similar, and they will all respond to a very similar kind of non-toxic strategy. It's just that this is not known. People don't want to know about it; people want something a lot more complicated and complex.
It's not a genetic disease. The mutations are there, but they're downstream effects; they're not the drivers. They're not causing the disregulated growth. So what's causing the disregulated growth of cancer is the inefficiency of oxidative phosphorylation. People forget that it's the mitochondria that controls the cell cycle. When that organelle becomes corrupted, the cell falls back on ancient fermentation pathways linked to disregulated growth.
Once you understand evolutionary biology and biochemistry and start interrogating these cells and putting them in very different kinds of environments, it becomes clear what we need to do to manage cancer without toxicity. The problem is there's a lot of firewalls; there's a lot of problems in trying to get that information out.
So many people that I know who have been diagnosed with cancer are told it's a fluke or we don't know why. Do we know why? What is the cause, in simple terms? Chronic disruption of oxidative phosphorylation happens in every major cancer, but it can have different origins. Somebody could be exposed to a high dose of chemical carcinogen in their work environment or in their home environment without them knowing, and that chemical carcinogen can gradually degrade the ability of a cell in some part of the body.
It could be a breast, colon, or bladder. That chronic exposure to a chemical carcinogen will elicit, over time, a disruption of energy leading to compensatory fermentation and disregulation of growth. Viral infections, like hepatitis C virus and papillomaviruses, if you look at what the virus does, the virus enters the cell. You get many kinds of liver cancers from these hepatitis viruses.
We saw that the virus itself will replicate in the mitochondria, or the product from the virus from the nucleus goes to the mitochondria and gradually disrupts the ability of some hepatocytes from producing energy through oxidative phosphorylation. Papillomaviruses in urogenital tracts are called oncogenic viruses.
Then we have intermittent hypoxia; obesity can be associated with this chronic inflammation. You look in the blood and see elevated C-reactive protein, which is a marker for systemic inflammation. That will damage respiration in some cell in the body. You can get a breast tumor, colon tumor, bladder—any of these kinds of standard cancers can come from any chronic damage.
This is what St. Gorgi, Albert Sorgi, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin C, called the oncogenic paradox: that almost anything provocative can be linked to cancer in one way or another. We were the ones that showed that every one of these provocative factors links to cancer. The common pathophysiological mechanism is chronic disruption of oxidative phosphorylation, and that also links to the rare inherited risk factors like BRCA1, Li-Fraumeni, neurofibromatosis—all of these so-called inherited factors.
We found out that they code for proteins in the electron transport chain; they disrupt proteins in the electron transport chain. So they're not primary causes; they're secondary causes, as is a carcinogen, as is a virus, as is inflammation, as is hypoxia—all of these things. Age—cancer is generally more common in older folks than younger folks because there's more time to damage or disrupt oxidative phosphorylation by its very nature. You live longer.
However, I want to point out that for whatever reason, we're now beginning to see an increasing incidence of cancer happening much, much younger. I'm in my own because I get hundreds and hundreds of emails from cancer folks, and I'm seeing a lot more younger people in their mid-30s and early 40s coming to me with all kinds of metastatic cancers, stage four cancers, more than we've seen in the past.
So something in the environment is triggering a lot of this, and now we know that obesity has replaced smoking as one of the top risk factors. Clearly, a lack of exercise, a more sedentary lifestyle, more bombardment with poorly nutritious, high-carbohydrate foods, and more exposure to chemical carcinogens—all of these together, any one of which or combinations of which can damage oxidative phosphorylation in a cell in a particular tissue, leading to neoplasia and disregulated cell growth in that organ.
It seems like chronic inflammation is kind of like you're taking a hammer and you're hitting your thumb with it over and over again for decades, and then you're going to the doctor and saying, "Give me some medicine to fix this." But they don't say, "Stop hitting it with the hammer."
Are we ever going to cure cancer with medications, or is it going to just continue if we keep living in ways that perpetuate cancer and cause more of it? There are a large number of folks that have been cured by medications. The problem is that many—not all, but many—of these folks suffer other debilitating collateral damage as a result of surviving these toxic medications.
So yes, we have people that are five- and ten-year survivors, but many of them sometimes have neuropsychiatric problems, hormonal imbalances, digestive issues, bone density issues. They have other maladies that impact their body, increasing entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which is disorder, making their life a little bit more complicated and difficult after having survived these toxic approaches.
The thing that we're trying to emphasize is that if you do metabolic therapy the correct way, you can not only manage the disorder, but you can also correct and fix many other problems that some cancer patients might have, like diabetes, high blood pressure, and hypertension. So you actually get healthier as you're degrading your tumor and avoiding collateral damage and risk to other parts of the body.
That's one of the beauties of knowing about metabolic therapy. It's scientifically accurate and does not produce toxic effects; if anything, it's just the opposite—you get healthier. Thank you so much, Professor Seed. I've got a ton of questions, but I want to leave time for everyone else here too.
Hey, Brad, could we maybe start with you? I know you've done a ton of work with the documentary series you're working on. Could you maybe introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you've been working on?
Yeah, sure! I'd love to, Carrie. Thank you so much for having me. If you just listened to Dr. Seed, who we love and who is part of our documentary, but you're kind of wondering, "What did he just say?" That's where Maggie and I decided we needed somebody to tell people who are cancer patients and cancer caregivers what they can do. They also wanted to know the science behind it in a way that they can understand easily, right?
So that's where Mag and I came in, and we were like, "Hey, we need to talk to Dr. Seed. We need to talk to him in his lab." We talked to Tomas Duraï and many other researchers, and we were like, "We need to make this accessible to cancer patients." So that's what we're doing: we're making a documentary, a four-part docuseries on how Warburg and Dr. Seed's work shows how cancer could be a metabolic disease. Then we also talk about the treatments that you could do that act metabolically.
That's where we're coming from. Oh, and we got into it because my wife had a stage four cancer diagnosis, and she used metabolic therapies. One year later, she was cancer-free, so that's kind of how we got into this.
It's amazing. Thank you, Brad. Ronnie, would you mind telling us a little bit about your cancer story and introducing yourself?
My name is Ronnie Campbell. In 2018, I went for a routine colonoscopy. My twin sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, so I went and got all of the treatments. In 2018, they found some cancerous tumors. A couple of weeks after the colonoscopy, I went for surgery, and during the surgery, they took out some lymph nodes—12 and a half inches of my colon. To their surprise, they found a satellite tumor on my omentum, which is the netting around your organs.
That was going to put me at stage four, and it was going to ensure that I had chemo. When I went to meet my oncologist, he wanted me to do another CAT scan just to make sure that all the cancer was gone. When I did the next CAT scan a few weeks later, it had already spread to my liver and my lungs, so now I was terminal.
I was on palliative chemo; that was my option. That would give me six months with no chemo or anything, or two years, maybe three, with a better quality of life if I took the chemo. So I opted for the chemo, but I also opted to do naturopathic treatments. I did vitamin C IVs; I did that on my off weeks every other day. During my chemo, I fasted and did hypothermia treatments.
On my other weeks, when I started to feel better, I did more exercise—walked, then began to run, and then cycle. In November 2019, I had my last chemo. I didn't need chemo in 2020, but I continued with my naturopathic treatments—the IVs, hypothermia, like I would have done every other week. I did that for 2020.
I continued to fast, and I was on the Mediterranean diet at the time, reducing my carbs and watching what I was eating. That's my story, and I'm doing really well.
So you fasted, you did a lot of exercise, but were you ever told by your doctors about Professor Seed's work or fasting or anything like that?
No, I wish. I kind of found it on my own. My thing was I didn't want to die. You get that kick in the stomach. I mean, the day before my surgery, I rode 60 kilometers on my bike, thinking, "Okay, I'm going to be out for like five or six weeks." I had no idea that it was as bad as it was.
For me, it was just like, "How can this be?" I didn't want to die; there's got to be something wrong here. That's where I did as much research as I could, and I followed what my naturopath said. I did cupping, acupuncture, Reiki, and massage. I don't think there was anything I didn't try. My calendar for every month was totally busy, and I just wanted to give it my all and try everything so that I could be cancer-free. My goal was to not be doing chemo within a year, and it took me 15 months, which I'm okay with, but I just wanted to get off chemo, and I wanted him to tell me that I was cancer-free. December 2020 was like the best Christmas ever.
That's amazing. Thank you, Ronnie. I'll come back to you; I know I have some questions for Professor Seed or Brad, but maybe we can go to Jeff real quick. Jeff, could you introduce yourself and tell us your cancer story?
Yes, thank you, Carrie. My name is Jeff DeProspero, and I just want to say hi to everybody. Dr. Seed, thank you very much for being here today. I just want to say that myself, my family members, and my team that have been on my journey—you're one of our biggest fans. I've claimed you as my doctor, especially myself and my sons, Peter and Dante. We've been watching you for the past year and a half, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart because when I listen to you, and even with my sons, when we listen to you, it's very calming, and it makes me feel that I'm doing the right thing and I can keep living.
To expand on that, Thomas Seed, I have stage four colon cancer. It was diagnosed in April of 2022, and my colon cancer has metastasized right from the start. When I was diagnosed, it was already fully metastasized to the liver. My liver is fully covered, so they've deemed me inoperable, incurable, palliative, and terminally ill. With that news, it was kind of shocking. Without treatment, I think I have about a couple of months to live, and with treatment, I think Dr. Baker even said it—I did an interview with him last week—said I have about nine months to live with good treatment.
Here I am about 15 to 18 months later, and I am doing really well. My regimen has been expanding with the help of a good friend named Dwight, who has been coaching me through this. He's the one that introduced me to you on YouTube—yourself, Dr. Chaffy Baker, Dr. Berg, and a whole bunch of doctors I've been following on YouTube that help me with this.
My regimen has been, along with chemo, I've done 31 rounds of chemo. I had a three-month break in the summertime, but I'm back on it again. With chemo, I've done fasting every other week. My chemo is every other Wednesday, and I do a five-day fast around that. I started with a ketogenic diet, and I've been carnivore for over a year now. I try to exercise as much as possible, and I have a naturopath doctor and an osteopath doctor. I'm trying to introduce heat and cold therapy, along with a whole bunch of supplements as well.
I have about seven or eight that are part of my regime. In terms of my oncologist, I've been starting to talk to my doctors—my oncologist, my naturopath, my osteopath—about the doctors I've been following on YouTube. My oncologist has never heard of Professor Seed. I was a little bit shocked there, but my naturopath and my osteopath doctors are big fans of Thomas Seed. They've been following your works, Seed, along with one other, I think Walter Longo, from Italy, that they follow quite a bit, and I've been following him as well.
Sorry if I was a little bit long there, but I just hope that was good, Carrie.
No, that was great. Thanks, Jeff. I know you have some questions too, but maybe first, Diane, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your story?
First of all, I'm very humbled to be in this circle of people here. My story isn't nearly as harrowing as Ronnie's or Jeff's, but in 2021, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was stage 2B. We went in for surgery, and I had chemo for six rounds. My last chemo treatment was in January of 2022. For, I guess, a year, the numbers were okay; we were monitoring. There was no change to my diet or anything. I was just hoping that I could keep stuff down at that point.
Then in March, I started noticing that my numbers were getting bigger again. My CA 125, the cancer marker, was increasing. My doctor started introducing this new test called Signatera. I'm not sure if anyone else is familiar with it, but it tracks blood; it tracks the cancer cells in your bloodstream. They noticed that it was starting to increase, and I did go in for chemo in May. Then it went back down to zero, and the Signatera was showing zero cancer cells.
So I stopped that and was just monitoring. Then it started slowly increasing again, and the numbers were getting bigger and bigger. I knew I didn't want to go through chemo again because the one chemo treatment that I did this past May was just horrendous. I was like, "Okay, no, I need to find something else." My parents introduced me to the carnivore diet, and I changed my doctor, who was really pushing me on chemo.
So I changed my doctor, changed my diet, and now my numbers are going down significantly. I have actual numbers; the two Signatera tests ago, it was 0.6, and it's down now to 0.05, which is almost nothing. So very good, and that was all with two weeks of not being on my current medication, Imara. So it's all very encouraging.
That's great. Thank you, Diane. I figured now we could just open this up to questions and discussions. Maybe I'll start with one question. Professor Seed, one thing I've been hearing, talking to more and more folks with cancer, is that everything seems so backwards. My friend Jeff here was telling me he goes in for chemo, and they come around with cookies and sugar. It just seems like everything is so backwards. How are we going to fix this and change things?
Well, that's a really important question, Carrie. Unfortunately, so many of our oncologists have never had the appropriate training to understand or know about the biology of the disease they're working on. They don't view diet changes as important, mainly because it's kind of ambiguous about what one person may think is effective and what somebody else may think is effective.
I think that might be from what we've just heard here. People have used different diets, yet the outcome has been favorable under a variety of different diets. Most of these, what we've heard, are diets that lower blood sugar in some way, exercise, and a variety of other therapies that will reduce stress, massage, and acupuncture, which lower blood sugar naturally. Emotional distress elevates sugar, so you have a variety of these kinds of approaches.
The oncology field has become so tranquilized by drugs and radiation, and their training is in that zone. I think the biggest—there's not one biggest; there are so many that come together. The idea that cancer is a genetic disease, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute—nothing could be further from the truth. I and many others have done very deep dives on this. There are mutations in cancer for sure, but they're not the drivers.
When you look at where all the energy and treatments and drugs that are being developed, they're all in some way or another linked to the idea that cancer is a genetic disease. The pharmaceutical industry comes out with various new drugs that make people think they have something better than they had before, only to realize that the death rate continues to rise.
We see this, and then they say, "Well, we'd like to get rid of toxic chemo and radiation if we had a drug that could replace those toxic things." But they keep the toxic things in place because the new drugs that are coming out are not working, and they're extremely expensive, putting many of the cancer folks not only in physical toxicity but also in financial toxicity, which has a very devastating effect on families.
So we're perpetuating. The field is waiting for something to come along so we can get rid of chemo and radiation, or at least reduce it down significantly, perhaps as an add-on. The issue here is that we have knowledge now that says the standard of care is not effective because it's based on a misunderstanding of the biology of the disorder.
So why is there no flexibility in the system? Well, then you have to say, "Who is this system?" If a well-meaning oncologist would say, "Yes, cancer is a metabolic disease," but unfortunately, I cannot practice medicine and treat cancer patients with metabolic therapy because I'll lose my license.
You have that inhibition. When you put all this together, you have a locked-in status quo where people want something different, but the system doesn't budge. That's why I think it has to come from folks like Jeff, Ronnie, Diane, and these more and more of these kinds of people coming out and saying, "You know, I was terminal. Well, why are you still alive if you're terminal? How long are you going to be terminal?"
At some point, we're all terminal. But you know, if you're bypassing your death time, who is somebody to say, "Well, you know, you've got nine months to live"? You know, I'm looking at all these things. Pablo Kelly, who had a glioblastoma in 2014, was told he was terminal in nine months. If he doesn't do well, he's nine years now. Survival—at what point is Pablo terminal?
He's alive nine years, and he still has the cancer; it's just that it's indolent. Every three years, he has a debulking surgery, and he's pretty much on a carnivore kind of existence. So what's wrong with this? Why is there some resistance to improving quality of life?
We're not saying we have to cure everybody. The issue here is how about living far longer than what would ever be expected? What's wrong with that? You know, I mean, we're all—I mean, who knows? You could walk out the street and get run over. The issue here is that if people were told that they have a terminal disease and they seem to live year in and year out, what the hell does "terminal" mean?
You know, so I think we need to reevaluate this. I am absolutely convinced that metabolic therapy is not that complicated once people—we're writing a treatment protocol right now that covers a lot of what we've just heard from you folks, but we're instituting it with flexibility for the individual, what they're capable of doing.
It's a both a diet-drug combination. We're not not using drugs; we use drugs that specifically target glutamine. We're not using drugs that have very specific effects, not these off-target effects. Once we have this, any physician with a license to practice medicine—you don't need to be an oncologist—all you need to know is how to implement metabolic therapy, which is based on the practice of medicine itself.
Each individual might be a little bit different from another individual. Some might do better on a Mediterranean than a carnivore diet. Someone may be better on a pescatarian or a vegetarian diet. You use the glucose-ketone index to give you a quantitative assessment, and then from there, you can mix and match the various other kinds of modalities that an individual would have until they feel really comfortable.
Just like we saw the biomarkers—oh, it's really down to near zero, or I can't see the CAT scan anymore—those are the kinds of positive responses that we would get from the majority of people that would transition to metabolic therapy. I'm not saying we throw out all chemo because obviously you folks have done really well with chemo.
What we're finding with fasting, in part metabolic, part chemo, is that dosages of chemo can be lowered significantly and still have powerful therapeutic efficacy. So you can actually maintain some of these things, but we found that when our preclinical system was in ketosis, we were able to deliver three times more drug on target, making these drugs so much more therapeutically effective at lower dosages, therefore bypassing a lot of the toxic effects that people would like.
Like Diane said, this should never happen. You should never have to be brutalized by a poisonous chemical so you can use those chemicals at much lower dosages, still maintain therapeutic efficacy, and avoid the toxic secondary effects. All of this is part of metabolic therapy. It's the new form of treatment of cancer, and just people need to be trained.
It's a lot of trial and error on individuals as well. I mean, we have a chance. I mean, how do you feel today? I feel really, really good. Well, we're going to try this. No, I didn't feel it. Okay, back off that. You can work it for each individual until that individual all comes out with the same thing: the tumor is not there, my biomarkers are down, I'm doing—I feel pretty good. A lot of folks say, "I never felt better in my life since I had cancer."
When you do metabolic therapy, you get rid of your diabetes, you get rid of your high blood pressure, your hypertension, rid of all that other stuff. So there's a lot of benefits to this, but how long will it take the system to realize this? I don't know. It seems like it's going to be a grassroots individuals kind of getting it out there before the system will ever change.
Jeff, I saw you kind of shaking your head there. I know you have some questions for Professor Seed, but you've had some pretty good success metabolically speaking. Do you want to speak a little bit to that?
Yes, thanks, Carrie. The first one, Dr. Seed, is you speak of your one medicine when it comes to your pressure pulse being DA. Is this something that could be available to myself?
Yeah, well, this is a very important point. I have no clue why this drug is not widely available to all cancer patients. We make all these other incredibly expensive and toxic drugs available to everybody, but here's a drug—and the argument was when they used it on little children years ago for leukemia and a variety of other cancers, the little kids did pretty well on DA.
They had some sort of leukemia. The older folks—some of them, yeah, it was toxic to some guys, and they said, "Oh, we can't use it because it's toxic." Well, number one, they weren't targeting glucose at the same time. It's like a barn to get the horse in the barn; you have to make sure both the front and back door are closed; otherwise, he runs out.
If you don't target glucose, the DA is not going to be as effective. You must use much, much lower dosages for sure than what was used on those original phase one and phase two clinical trials that they used. So they just simply canned the drug.
DA is a dirty drug, and dirty drugs are drugs that can hit multiple pathways simultaneously, so you can't patent the darn thing. What folks have done is they've taken the molecule, like DRP 104, and there's a few of these other derivatives of DA. They put little tails on them, like a four-carbon tail, and all of a sudden, now that becomes patentable.
Many pharmaceutical companies are out there trying to tweak and manage, but the bottom line is that all those little tails and things are eventually cleaved off, and the drug that does the therapeutic job is the DA itself. So why is this not available to the public? I have no idea.
We have clearly shown how we can use this drug, especially with metabolic therapy. When you're in low glucose and elevated ketones and you use DA, it's not that toxic. It's toxic if you use a whole buttload of it in the absence of the way they used it in the past. Anything can be toxic if not used in the correct dosage, timing, and scheduling.
So why is there no outcry on the part of the population for a cancer drug? Because it might be because who's going to make a profit on this? The other thing we see is, remember Martin Shkreli, the most hated man in America? He went to Congress and just degraded the people, said horrible things to the congressman, and he started selling EpiPens or something, elevated the price 700%.
This is called "scaring the drug," a very cheap drug, just done because they could do it. You can make a huge profit on something, and this is what I've seen happen in the industry. Luminal was a very cheap drug. Someone found out that it had some effect on tumors; it was like $2 a tablet. As soon as the field found out that it had an effect on cancer, it became $700 a tablet.
This kind of behavior is immoral. I don't care what anybody says; this is immoral behavior, and any company or person that would do something like that is morally challenged. The folks in this society need to know that there's no defense—I don't care what it is—there's no defense for immorality when it comes to this kind of stuff.
There are drugs available, and these drugs could be very effective when used in the appropriate way. The problem is they're not available. Why is this? Why are they not available? You say, "Oh, it's too toxic." What about radiation and cisplatin and these other kinds of drugs? Give me a break.
We can do this if the people—and then we have the problem that we have all these cancer societies: breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer. These societies need to unite. Cancer is a singular disorder of energy metabolism. Lung, breast, colon—they all have the same fundamental problem; they need to ferment.
So why are the societies united? Where are we doing with all the money that they're raising? Why doesn't this go to get these drugs on the market? They keep running and jumping and swimming and raising all this money. Oh, we feel so good. Well, where is it going? The more money we raise, the more breast cancer, colon cancer.
I mean, we have almost 1,700 people a day dying from cancer. It's not getting better; it's getting worse, and there's no accountability with the money either spent by the federal government or by these private foundations that raise funds.
So this is the system itself. There are so many different things that need to be changed before we can see real progress.
Thank you, Dr. Seed. I just, you know, I think I'm going to look into DA a little more, maybe with you at a later date. You've answered some of my other questions kind of in your answer, but I was going to ask you, especially with glutamine, because I have taken control of my glucose through my diet, my fasting, and my exercise for sure.
But when it comes to glutamine, in terms of how I can naturally suppress glutamine, especially because glutamine is an amino acid found in pretty much all foods and in red meat especially, I'm going to contradict what I'm doing here as a carnivore. It's very high, and glutamine has benefits in terms of being an anti-inflammatory amino acid, but at the same time, I'm trying to suppress it.
You know, I do try; I take an EGCG pill. I try to drink as much matcha and green tea as possible, but my question to you is how can I naturally suppress glutamine with what I'm doing in my regimen right now?
Well, this is the question that so many people ask. There's no food; there's no diet that will suppress glutamine. I mean, EGCG is a very minor thing. Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in the blood; it's the most abundant amino acid in our body. You have to realize that this amino acid is necessary for driving the growth of a tumor cell, but it's also necessary for the health of our gut, our microbiome, and our immune system.
Now here's the situation: the metastatic cancer cell—and we have published papers showing this—all metastatic cancer cells are derived from the immune system. They fuse with stem cells, and they fuse with themselves, and they become corrupted metabolically. So the same cell in our body, the immune cell, needs glutamine, as does the neoplastic metastatic cell, which comes from the macrophage, which is another immune cell.
So taking glutamine helps your normal cells but then forces the tumor cell to survive. So how do we—that's why we develop the pulse strategy. We shut—we can press glucose down, which slows down the tumor, but we can't press glutamine targeting with DA because then you risk your immune system from coming into the system and picking up the dead corpses, the tumor cells that you just killed.
You've got to have an active immune system to come in and pick up the dead cancer cells; otherwise, you get inflammation, and you can get other problems from leaving dead bodies hanging around in your body in some tissue. So that's why we press glucose. You can push glucose down really, really well. Hypothermia, all the things you guys have been using, is great, but then you need glutamine-targeting drugs that actually work, like DA, which is only one of the newer ones that are coming out.
But you pulse them. You don't treat them too aggressively because you're going to damage your immune system, damage your gut, and make yourself unhealthy. So that's why we press glucose, and we use drugs only for short periods of time at lower dosages. Pull it off; let the immune system recover; pick up the dead corpses.
Yeah, a few tumor cells might hang on, but it's a graded process. You don't go in and try to get rid of all your cancer cells all at once. You degrade them slowly, and that you need diets and drugs for that. So metabolic therapy is a diet-drug combination cocktail, and it's based on targeting glucose and glutamine simultaneously.
Now, as far as is there anything you can do without using a drug to lower glutamine, the late George Cahill of the Joslin Diabetes Center, who I used to speak to at length about all these kinds of things, has a paper published that when you water-only fast for at least 14 days to 30 days, you start to see blood glutamine going down.
So not only are you lowering blood sugar, but you're also lowering glutamine. So water-only fasting will definitely do that, and then you just sprinkle a little DA or Endisole, one of these parasite medications, will do this also. So we're building cocktails—drug-diet cocktails that will be designed to do this.
But there's no food, like eating meat; there's no food that will restrict your ability. So you need to know how to use drugs, and this is why it's absolutely essential that metabolic therapy is a diet-drug combo. It's a cocktail, and knowing how to use these things is the training, and this is the new frontier. This is the new standard of care: how do we use diet-drug combination cocktails to slowly degrade your tumor without harming your immune system or gut while you're doing this?
Again, you answered my last question because I was going to ask you about fasting, and you answered that, so thank you. I just, you know, I might—I do a five-day fast around my chemo, and I kind of follow Dr. Walter Longo. I came about his work later on, and he actually says two days before chemo, two days after, which is good.
But you know, I'm learning something here about the 14- to 21-day fast, and you know, I've been humming and hawing about it. I was going to try to do it in the summertime, but I think I'm, you know, sooner or later, I'm going to do a good 14-day fast coming up to see if I can suppress that glutamine a lot.
But my last question—sorry, guys, I just want to ask this quickly—can I pressure-pulse treat metabolically treat my cancer with chemo? I asked my oncologist this in terms of because I go to chemo every other week. I kind of like twice a month, so I kind of want—I asked them, I'm like, "Can I do like one chemo a month and then three weeks where I'm metabolically attacking it?" Am I—do you think that's kind of similar to using the DA with the three weeks, or no, it's not really worth it?
No, I think it could be effective. I mean, the paper we published on the woman with terminal cancer—again, like you guys, terminal cancer—who are not terminal, right? That woman was given one month to live from Ohio. She went to my colleague's clinic in M.U.L. Turkey, and she was in such bad shape. I mean, they had given her up completely at the oncology center in Ohio, and she flew to Istanbul.
She was in the emergency room for two weeks. I mean, she was so sick from the chemo and everything else, and so they gradually pulled her off everything, re—she slowly got out of the emergency room. They built her immune system back up, and they used a very low dose of chemo while under hypothermia and these kinds of things as well.
They have the paper; if it's open access, it's in the journal "Cures," and you can see she was lit up like a Christmas tree with PET scans for cancer. It went from her breast to her bones to her brain to her liver—everywhere. She was just full of cancer, and within, I think it was six or eight months, the scan was clean.
Then she stayed on that for another year, and we have pictures of her with her husband in Hawaii celebrating her new life. Again, they were using metabolically supported chemotherapy in that strategy. The interesting thing about hyperthermia—and they used that as well—we know that cancer cells are weak. They are very inflexible in how they deal with physiological stress.
They're not like the normal cells in our body, which evolved over millions of years to be stressed in all kinds of ways and still survive. Cancer cells are very susceptible to death by heat stress, energy stress, and all these kinds of stresses. You must also recognize that the new thing in cancer today is immunotherapy—PDL1 inhibitors. You hear them advertise CT immunotherapy.
The interesting thing about these therapies is they work best if the patient develops an extremely high fever. So you pay $250,000 to get a fever, and that fever is going to kill your tumor cells. This goes back to what William Coley did in the early part of the 1900s. He would give live staph and strep bacteria to cancer patients that would develop extremely high fevers, and he had a cure rate of about 80% just because the tumor cells can't handle the hypothermia.
You throw a little chemo in the side, and you throw a little metabolic stress—lower the glucose—and these tumor cells just up and die. You do it in a kind of a natural way. The whole thing is how many different—the new theory, the new excitement is going to be how many different ways can I kill my tumor cells without causing toxicity to my body? That's going to be a really exciting future.
No, thanks a lot, Dr. Seed. Sorry, guys, I had a few questions there.
No problem. So open floor. We got a couple of minutes left. Ronnie, Diane, Brad, if anyone has any questions or discussion points, feel free to jump in.
I'm just surprised that other oncologists don't have the information you do. I mean, that would be so helpful, you know, to have that information. Or maybe they do; they just don't—I don't know. I'm just dumbfounded. You know, I listen to your work on YouTube, and I'm just like, "Why doesn't anybody do what he's saying?"
Yeah, the system's just not set up that way, unfortunately. A lot of them work within a medical system where they have to go by their flowchart. They have to go with whatever the approved standard of care is. What we kind of are seeing is the sort of knee-jerk reaction to fasting and ketogenic diets is, "Well, there's no double-blind clinical trial that proves that that's effective," right?
Well, we're in this giant catch-22, right? Where all the drugs that are out there went through multi-hundreds of millions of dollars of testing and clinical trials to get to the point where they're at. It's pretty obvious to know that, well, no one's going to fund a clinical trial on fasting—just to, you know, hundreds of millions—there's no back end, right? No one's going to make money off of that.
So there is some good news. There are a couple of trials out there. The one that I'm aware of is Jethro, who at Cedar Sinai has a glioblastoma trial on keto. He did get some government funding, but a giant chunk of his trial was privately funded. But yeah, it's kind of interesting because there's this knee-jerk reaction like, "Oh, it's not clinically proven," right?
Well, you know what else isn't clinically proven? That smoking causes cancer. There's never been a double-blind clinical trial to prove that smoking causes cancer, right? So, you know, it's convenient to use it at times, but if you really look at it, it's interesting.
So yeah, and that's what both Seed and Carrie alluded to. We just got to do this grassroots, right? That's what's going to happen. That's kind of what happened with smoking, right? It's like you just—enough people do this, there becomes a giant mountain of evidence that you just can't sweep it under the rug anymore.
Yeah, well, let me say something, Brad. Having worked in the epilepsy field for many decades as well, when Jim Abrams brought the world attention to ketogenic diets to save the life of his son Charlie, they started the Charlie Foundation. The major medical schools would always use that and say, "Well, there's never been a double-blind crossover for ketogenic diet to show that it really works in children with epilepsy."
So the group Helen Cross and the group from Johns Hopkins put together with Beth Supc Kenya and a variety of other folks. They put in a really powerful clinical trial and showed without any question of a doubt that the ketogenic diet, metabolic therapy for epilepsy, was very powerful in reducing a whole range of different things.
So even with that article published, when parents take their child who might have a seizure, they get drugs before they get the ketogenic diet. There's a tremendous resistance on the part of the industry to push pharmacy before more natural approaches.
So that's always going to be, especially for cancer. But cancer, when you have a child with epilepsy, the probability of death from seizure is quite rare. But with cancer, you're dealing with a much more life-threatening kind of issue. I think you're right; it has to—I think the grassroots is going to be the primary approach for this.
When these so-called flukes—like you're collecting all for your movie—all these so-called flukes, people that, "Oh, I don't know." I mean, he's alive. All you folks are like flukes, all right? How many flukes do we need before we start to say, "Hey, there's something going"? Because people want to live.
If you want to live and you want to get healthy, you do metabolic therapy. Now, that doesn't mean you don't do radiation and chemo, but the issue here with Jethro's trial—and I've spoken to many IRBs, institutional review boards—you must do radiation and chemo first. When that fails, then you can do keto.
Sometimes they'll do standard of care with metabolic therapy, but never ever metabolic therapy in the absence of some toxic radiation or chemo. If that group did better than the other groups, it would change the entire system, but they will not allow that to be done.
In fact, his trial is just, you know, people doing chemo and radiation with a ketogenic diet and people doing chemo and radiation without. That's what the trial is, right? Is there a better outcome with it?
Yeah, there is a better outcome with it, but there'd be a spectacular outcome. As I said, this over and over again, we published many papers showing that the radiation of the human brain frees up massive amounts of glucose and glutamine, which can explain why the demise of all these folks rarely make five years. It's very clear.
But yet it's continuing to be done, and as much as I keep saying this and presenting the evidence over and over again, it doesn't have any impact. There's no movement, and there's no radiation oncologist that says, "Maybe I shouldn't be doing this." It just doesn't change, and the poor folks—they should know that people with brain cancer should know as soon as your brain is irradiated, the probability of long-term survival is significantly reduced, even with keto.
Now, I'm saying you could do much better with that. Pablo never had any radiation, chemo, or any of that stuff, and we're starting to see some other folks that are avoiding that. I'm not saying you shouldn't use some of the standard chemo at lower doses; it can be effective under metabolic therapy.
So we don't want to throw out everything, but certainly for the brain, radiation should never be done. I don't care what anybody says; you should never irradiate a person's brain who has a brain tumor. It just makes it worse.
My wife actually has radiation necrosis from that exact same thing because we didn't find you until after she had already had a round of radiation.
Yeah, well, we're at the end of the hour here. I just want to say a huge thank you to Professor Seed and everyone—Ronnie, Jeff, Diane, and Brad—for joining us and sharing this. It's, man, it's just such a shame. I just wish that as soon as someone's diagnosed with cancer, they should just have this as an option.
We're not saying you have to do this, but knowing that it's an option, it's such a shame that people are diagnosed with cancer, and they never learn about this, sadly for some, until it's too late. So I'm going to do everything I can to spread the word, and a huge shout-out again to Brad's documentary, "Cancer Evolution."
Cancer evolution. film. I'll have a link in the description below for that. I did a whole video about it because it was just fantastic. I learned so much from watching it. A huge shout-out to Professor Seed. I'll have a lot of your links in the description below for your website, Twitter, and your book.
Is there anything else people can find you want to mention?
Well, again, all the support for our research comes from private foundations, and Travis Christopherson's Foundation is a major supporter of our work. As long as we continue to have the funds, we're working on pediatric brain cancer now—high-grade pediatric glioma, which is the number one killer of little kids.
We have a paper that we just put out, and we're polishing it up for a major journal right now for high-grade glioma using diet-drug cocktails to do that. We think we can definitely make a huge impact on keeping these kids alive without toxicity. I'm absolutely convinced we can do this.
These papers have to come out; people have to see the strategy and what we're doing, and things will move forward. But as long as we have philanthropy and private foundations, we can keep going. I don't rely too much on the federal government anymore; it's kind of a lot of work, and it's a lot of hassle. Two or three guys make a decision as to whether or not you should get funding.
So people who have family members that need help seem to be far more interested in what we're doing than people that sit on study sections and things like this. So yeah, I think in the future, everybody will be getting grants for metabolic therapy once it becomes well established, but we've got to establish it with folks that live.
We need—and I need—and I write up case reports, so I keep writing. The dogs too; it's unbelievable. It worked on animals, but people like—we're going to try to write up a couple more folks that have these so-called stage four prostate cancers and different kinds of cancers.
The more of these kinds of—like you guys are great, but we don't have a case report in the literature documenting everything you've done—your blood sugar levels over—like we did for Pablo. You want to see the way it's done correctly? You look at the way we wrote up Pablo Kelly. We had five years of accurate blood glucose and ketone meter markings. We had MRI and CAT scans on his brain. We had how he felt.
We put in everything we could possibly put in there so others can follow this. The guy from Israel, from Egypt, that young man—he had a glioblastoma. He was doing really well, but they insisted on irradiating his brain, and we said no, but they did it anyway, and eventually, he died.
When they did the autopsy, he had radiation necrosis; the brain was liquefied by the radiation. It wasn't the tumor cells that killed him. So again, I've seen so much of this happening. But I think we can keep people alive in a much higher state doing metabolic therapy, and that doesn't eliminate all parts of standard of care, but it certainly modifies it in such a way that we can have many more Jeff, Diane, and Ronnie's armies of you guys out there.
But you've got to also be vocal about it. I think, Jeff, you're doing the right thing. I think all you guys are doing the right thing, and the doctors need to be aware of this. You can tell them; you can see how they respond right after answering how is your therapy going to target my glucose and glutamine.
If they say, "Listen, we have the best method to do that," then you want to listen to these guys; they might know what they're talking about. But if it looks like a deer in the headlights, then you automatically know that you might not be talking to the right person dealing with your very existence and soul.
So again, it's an educational mission. Scientific literacy is important. Just knowing this information, you're right. But I think, Carrie, this is the way to do it—slowly but surely. Brad, this movie is going to have a major impact. All of these things are going to be out, and eventually, you're going to see a turning. There's going to be a turning.
Absolutely. Yeah, I look forward to that day. Thank you all so much. I urge you all to support Professor Seed and Brad's documentary. Jeff has his own YouTube channel; he's bravely sharing his story there. So does Diane. Ronnie has a book she wrote.
I'll have links for everything down there, but please share and get the word out, especially if you know someone touched by cancer. I think everyone needs to have this information; it's life-changing for sure. So thank you all so much. I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much. Take it easy now.