Can We STARVE CANCER? What You NEED TO KNOW! | Dr. Thomas Seyfried

the cancer field today is focusing on mutations and targeting mutations these are all effects they're not the cause of cancer what is it about a chimpanzee that or Inuits or African tribes living according to traditional ways that makes cancer an extremely rare uh rare event in their in their environment and clearly it's the environment that we that we that we live in that's putting us at

risk for all these chronic diseases including including cancer so and we know how it arises we know that you cannot get cancer if you maintain healthy mitochondria so it starts as Warburg said with mitochondrial disruption so then the question is well how do I prevent cancer well if you can keep your mitochondria healthy well how do you keep your mitochondria healthy avoid highly processed carbohydrate Foods

uh do can do exercise uh this kind of thing in other words in other words now that we know the plan who is willing to adapt the plan adopt the plan to their lifestyle and it's hard because every corner we have a fast foods we have fast food well you know my my father died of cancer my sister died of cancer and had cancer twice so

I'm very interested in this subject I see so many patients with cancer so many of my friends and colleagues reach out to me you know were they looking for a Hail Mary on cancer treatment and it's one of those horrible horrible conditions that we haven't made a whole lot of progress from and and it's and you know we think you know we're a little bit better

at early detection we're a little bit better at at some of the chemo regimens we've gotten advances in certain areas like immunotherapy and car T cells and things like that but they don't work universally uh and and we still have a lot to learn about how to use those Therapies so the question is you know is there a different way of thinking about cancer is there

a different way of looking at how um to understand the origins of cancer and cancer metabolism as a way of coming up with a radically different approach to treating cancer you've been doing this work for 30 years now it's pretty much uh an accepted form of research and thinking but when you start it was kind of heresy and I remember not too long ago I was

with Sid Arthur mukuji who was a oncologist who wrote the Emperor of all maladies when the Pulitzer Prize for that is a leading cancer oncologist researcher and thinker and uh he now was doing his work really primarily on using ketogenic diets to treat to treat cancer and when I saw him once in a conference he says Mark I think we finally figured out what's the problem

causing so much cancer I'm like what's that it means like sugar and I'm like oh yeah of course of course you know and we know that people who are overweight have a high risk of cancer people with diabetes have a higher risk of cancer and so um this is actually something you've been working on for 30 years and I'd love to sort of walk back to

the origins of this idea which arose early in the 1900s from a scientist named Otto Warburg who talked about the Warburg effect and he was a guy who was Theory card hold a little bit but was mostly discredited and ignored and it's still sort of on their peripheral medicine but you've taken his work to the next level and let me just sort of talk about what

is the metabolic theory of cancer and and how did how did out a war become a process and and where we come since then and let's sort of have you unpack some of that yeah okay great well thank you very much yeah these are really important uh points in our um understanding of cancer you know where we've been in in you know where we are and

where we need to go actually um yeah well you know I in my science uh training over the years uh the word Otto Warburg really really was mostly in the background um I didn't really know what what he had done uh in any meaningful way uh as trained geneticists and biochemists and when when we started our work in epilepsy at Yale University um you know we

were working predominantly on on biochemistry of epilepsy uh I even try to write a grant on ketogenic diet for epilepsy at Yale back in the 1970s and internal Grant and they met they basically said forget about it uh we we've uh nobody cares about ketogenic diets for epilepsy that was it was CH it was Jim Abrams from um Hollywood um whose son Charlie uh almost died

from standards treatments for uh for his epilepsy and Jim started the Charlie Foundation uh using ketogenic diets and one of my students at that time that was late in the mid mid 90s 1990s said oh you know there's a real excitement about this ketogenic diet I said forget about it nobody's interested I mean how could food have anything to do with disease right yeah right after

my experience at Yale I said wow these guys down here they don't care about so anyway she went out there came back oh man everybody's excited about this ketogenic diet so we had developed really some excellent models of epilepsy in our lab we would figure trying to figure out you know you know mapping genes for epilepsy and doing all this kind of stuff and um we

came back she came came back Mariana troto and said let's try ketogenic diets on epileptic mice and at the same time we had been doing a lot of work in in cancer but it was mostly biochemistry it wasn't it was like traditional biochemistry it was no translational benefit to the clinic uh about most of what we were doing other than trying to figure so we had

two parallel projects one was epilepsy one was cancer biochemistry and then uh we started treating our our really good model of epilepsy with keto with calorie restriction and restricted ketogenic diets it all came down to the lower the glucose the better the seizure management management was on this so um some some guy came in a company uh that was interested in in a drug UH 60

oxy uh it was um and and B dnj it's it's a kind of a drug and we found out that if you feed it to the mice um their seizures went away and say wow this is really exciting but we fit we fed into the mice with cancer and then all of a sudden the two or went down as well wow so what's that what's going

what's going on with this drug so um this is a drug off known as Don right Don no no no that wasn't done this was um uh uh nor nor uh nor jeromycin it's a it's a kind of a glucose analog of some sort and um it was having an effect on uh epilepsy uh at least in pre-clinical models but we tried that drug on some

of our T our our cancer mice and we found also that it it seemed to uh reduce tumors the same drug that we had for epilepsy so what's going on here with this and um it turns out that the drug blocked sucraces in the gut so the animals would eat the food but they couldn't digest the food and their blood sugar went down so uh the

the drug company at that time uh thought we had a blockbuster drug for cancer because it was it was shrinking tumors but the mechanism wasn't known um about how that worked uh then when we found out that uh well the animals were eating food but they were losing body weight uh and the tumors were shrinking so we said what the hell is going on with that

so then when I put in a control group of mice feed them uh uh until their Body Works cut their calories down until the body weight of the control mice not getting the drug and the mice getting the drug were the same and we found that the tumor shrunk uh just as just as well in the control guys as it did in the in the drug

treated guys and the drug the drug was simply preventing the the mouse from eating the food and digesting the food went down so when I told the company that this drug was working through calorie restriction they dropped the project immediately they didn't want any part of this so uh they want to move on now we want drugs that are good I said yeah you can get

the same effect if you restrict calories so that then so so you'll find out how fast people uh are they're all excited Until you realize what the mechanism is and then when you realize all you have to do is just cut calories and get the same effect that wasn't exciting so um but we were excited about it and and we thought you know what that what

is the mechanism by which calorie restriction uh is have such a powerful effect on reducing cancer brain cancer in particular and then we started to hear about Warburg and he was saying it's it's the the tumor cells are dependent on glucose and these drugs block glucose and the calorie restriction blocks glucose so we started to then bring in what Auto Warburg had was saying for a

long time and and then um you know uh we started to do the mechanism of action action and what we found was calorie restricted diets that would reduce blood sugar and Elevate Ketone bodies which is an evolutionarily conserved adaptation to food restriction we all go into ketosis if we stop eating food for a long enough period of time you know we our brain our brains have

to have some level of energy and what happens is is the blood sugar goes down you start mobilizing fats making them go to the they go to the liver and you make water soluble Ketone bodies that go to the brain and allow the brain to burn energy in in the presence of low glucose I know the tissue is the heart as well so so so we

were looking into all of this stuff and we found that calorie restriction is powerfully anti-angiogenic which means the abnormal blood vessels and tumors are really hammered and that at that time in early tumor cells need the blood flow and the blood vessels to go there yeah they're they're abnormal too the the blood vessels are leaky they're abnormal um and and that was thought to be provocative

to the growth of the tumor and as you know during the early 2000s they were coming out with all these anti-angiogenic therapies from the pharmaceutical industry um many of them which don't work uh and we found out why they they don't work for the most part um but at that time it was a hot area you know anti-angiogenic therapy was like a Judah Volkman and a

lot of well-known people were were saying how powerful these anti-angiogenic therapies you know Napoleon Ferrara who later come out and said most of them don't work a lot of them were pulled off the market for all these adverse effects some of them are still on the market which to me makes no sense at all but but any event it was a hot area and we showed

the calorie restriction could be as powerful or more powerful than anti-angiogenic and then we did some really good mechanistic work on inflammation NF Kappa B inflammation was targeted by calorie restriction um and then the cells were dying through a variety of mechanisms tumor cells were dying the micro environment was becoming much much less inflamed angiogenesis was going away and I'm saying what the hell you know

this stuff is this calorie restriction is really powerful and we were doing it in the mouse and then we realized you know what does calorie restriction mean in the mouse to a human and then when we compared the base differences in basal metabolic rate between The Mouse and the human we realized that the human could get the same effects as this calorie restricted Mouse only if

a key shifting just water only fasting to calorie because that's what that's ultimately what Wilder found in the 1920s for managing epilepsy he said people with epilepsy who went on water only fasting invariably their seizures would go away but it wasn't a sustained way to treat epilepsy so so he developed the ketogenic diet as a prolonged way of treating epileptic seizures so I said what makes

calorie restriction right when you're fasting your body starts to burn fat from your fat stores so it's a survival mechanism and we end up having the ability to actually burn fat which mimics calorie restriction that's right and what you do is when you water only fast your blood sugar goes down and your ketones go up um and then Wilder said why don't we get a diet

that will make blood sugar go down and ketones go up and that was a ketogenic diet but it was quite unpalatable at the time um but I said let's let's let's try that same concept with cancer and some people had uh dabbled with that in the past but not in a serious way so we kind of launched a much more aggressive and serious evaluation of how

we can move someone from water only fasting into another therapy that would that would have a similar uh benefit and then of course at a warburg's Concepts came in and I looked at what Warburg had said and we started getting his papers trans some of his German papers translated into English I read all of his all of his major papers and his argument was his argument

was that in cancer uh there is some defect in the ability of the mitochondrion in the cell to produce energy uh which is the way most of our cells get energy may we breathe oxygen and oxygen is a form of uh serves as the final common acceptor of electrons in our mitochondria to generate energy through oxidative phosphorylation and he said that's broken in cancer what he

basically said was in order for us to produce energy in our cells most of us combine oxygen with sugar in this kind of chemical reaction down an assembly line called oxidative phosphorylation it's kind of the normal way you produce energy from food and it's through glucose uh primarily and oxygen so that's what that's what you're talking about yeah yeah yeah so so we we bring we

bring glucose into the cell or other foods that would be broken down into either into glucose or acetyl-coa which is the end product of the glycolytic pathway pyru so the cell brings in glucose there's a 10-step pathway called glycolysis the old emden meyerhof parenths pathway and then the pyruvate which is this a three-carbon derivative of glucose is then enters into the mitochondrion is fully oxidized uh

to produce significant amounts of energy with the key waste products being water and CO2 so every time we exhale we're exhaling the waste products of food metabolism which are which is CO2 and and the moisture water we can develop urine from uh combining with amino acid breakdown products so it's a very highly efficient uh highly highly energy efficient system but Warburg was saying uh that cancer

cells have a defeat defect in their mitochondria and that defect is compensated for by a upregulation of these ancient glycolytic fermentation so glycolysis is present in all of our cells the problem is when the mitochondria become defective the end product of glycolysis pyruvic acid is no longer entering the mitochondria but is being diverted to lactic acid a waste product of the glycolytic pathway and that acidifies

the cancer micro environment so cancer then becomes a a a a a a a a disease of cells that proliferate with instead of producing oxygen CO2 and water they're producing lactic acid as a waste product so and and Warburg noticed that all the major cancers that he studied were all blowing out large amounts of this lactic acid and and he said I just kind of what

accumulates in your muscles when you over exercise it causes exactly exactly but they but then that deficit is made up as soon as the oxygen can be the muscles can be re-oxygenated they go back to respiring so the muscles have a capacity that when oxygen becomes deficient from overuse of muscles the muscle will then use the local glucose to produce uh massive amounts of quick energy

with the waste product of lactic acid which goes back into the bloodstream in exercise folks and the lactic acid goes to the liver and is created back to glucose and that's the Cory cycle and Saul and Gertie Corey receive the Nobel Prize for their for their recognition of how lactic acid from muscles can be reconverted back into glucose for the body okay I I think that

what you just said was so important I want to make sure everybody gets it and then we can kind of continue with on how this relates to cancer so everybody basically basically from my understanding is that when we eat our food is is primarily turning to glucose glucose then has to go through this process of breakdown into byproducts we call pyruvate and there's a whole bunch

of steps that then turns that into energy in the body with cancer cells that basically processes and is is kind of defective and so it turns instead of turning into easy form energy from glucose it creates lactic acid which changes the whole environment itself and basically the other sort of point I think it's important to realize is that your your body is like a hybrid car

it can run on gas or electric your cancer cells and the gases sugar and the electric is fat okay in cancer cells they don't run well on fat and it basically Stars them they only can run on sugar which is gas but it's kind of a dirty burning fuel and that ends up with all this this linkage of cancer to things like diabetes and then some

resistance and all these various factors so that's all how it ties together now then take the sounds of this process of the secondary pathway which is fermentation instead of what we call the primary pathway burning energy which is oxidative phosphorylation essentially the Krebs cycle it's how we break down sugar and energy so so I think I just sort of want to like reinforce that because there

was a lot in there no no you're you're 100 correct mark this sometimes can be a little overwhelming I mean even most doctors by the way like you know we remembered biochemistry for just enough for our exams and then we forget it all including the Krebs cycle which is what you're talking about which is how we turn food and oxygen into energy but it's one of

the most important things we do you know it's it's really an interesting thing because you know most of us when we had to study the Krebs cycle as as a requirement uh only because it was tortuous to try to memorize all this you know and it was it was no pleasure in in doing that other than the fact that you say oh if you memorize it

you regurgitate it on a test and then you wouldn't have to worry about it again so um but when when when when when we are in a different in a different sphere now where we really need to understand that in order to manage a very devastating disease so you haven't you I take I I took a completely different view of these tortuous biochemical Pathways when I

said I needed to know this in order to manage the cancer not in order to have an effective non-toxic management of the tumor so now it becomes um a a process it becomes part of your soul to understand these processes yeah because because you're going to be able to wield the power of your knowledge to manage a disease because you finally understand what all this all

this crap meant and and uh so now we realize that as Warburg said uh cancer cells don't need oxygen for their growth um and and what and he showed data that you know he can take all the oxygen out of the system and these tumor cells were still growing fine and his argument was they they replaced their oxidative phosphorylation or energy through respiration with energy through

fermentation fermentation is energy without oxygen and he was he said that they were getting okay wine or beer right yeah yeah well the the byproduct that's an alcohol that's um alcoholic fermentation lactic acid fermentation there's an extra step by that the yeast use to to convert the the the lactate into uh ethanol so uh um but that's a that's another step uh our muscles and our

cancer cells are producing lactic acid as a waste product uh of the fermentation uh process so um so as a result but Warburg was saying that the you have to replace energy so without energy nothing will grow period that's the key basis of all of our life uh existence without energy we die real quick and you want to know how fast we can die if people

drink cyanide you die real real fast um yeah it poises complex four and the mitochondria shuts down electron transport prevents oxygen from binding to electrons and your whole body just shuts down instantly cyanide you just can't make energy and then you die can't make energy your brain dies your heart dies everything dies anything that's linked to oxidative phosphorylation dies real quick um except the cancer cell

so that's the so Warburg said cancer cells are resistance to cyanide I say whoa this is uh so they don't need they don't need oxygen and they don't and they can live in Cyanide and I said whoa what the hell is this uh but he said a long time ago in the 1920s they they were showing this kind of thing they would take a rat that

had a a tumor and they would inject the rat with Cyanide and the rat would die instantly but not the tumor you could take the tumor out and grow the cells and culture was fine the tumor was resistant to the cyanide and he said that's because they're oxidative phosphorylation they have replaced oxidative phosphorylation with fermentation which is energy without oxygen so what what uh that became

very clear from his hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers and analyzes and so I went back and I looked at all that stuff uh really really carefully and uh confirmed in no uncertain terms that Auto Warburg was a 100 percent correct in his knowledge of the origin of cancer he was not correct in the readouts and I'll explain that in a minute because we've clear we've

cleared that all up uh the misinformation regarding the readouts of of uh dysfunctional respiration but he claimed that cancer starts with a chronic disruption of oxidative phosphor energy through oxidative respiration then the cell will gradually over time transition to this ancient process of fermentation and he also clearly said that if you damage respiration too acutely the cell will die and you will not get a cancer

cell from a dead cell and that's exactly what happens with the cyanide you can never get if your the whole body is dead there's no way you're going to get a cancer cell but if you have a cancer cell in there it's not going to die from cyanide so as I said so people with cancer take drink cyanide to kill themselves well they'll kill their body

but the tumor cells in their body will still remain alive so as long as they have the fermentable fuels in the micro environment and at that time orberg figured that the major fermentable fuel was the sugar glucose so glucose can either be completely respired in the mitochondria of the cell or it can be fermented if the mitochondria are not functional or the individual would be in

a low oxygen environment so so it became clear to Warburg that the release of large amounts of lactic acid from tumor cells was the result of a defect in oxidative phosphorylation and this then could explain the origin of cancer problem is in the 1950s Sydney Winehouse and others who was the the head of the National Cancer Institute and rightly so reported that there were some cancer

cells that took in as much oxygen as some of normal cells so he said Warburg must be wrong because the oxygen consumption we're seeing cancer cells that are taking in oxygen as as avidly as normal cells and yet the cancer cell is still blowing out lactic acid what's going on with this so they said then oh the cancer cell needs so much energy it both respires

and produces lactic acid at the same time so this major controversy in battle went on for years and is still going on for many people today in the papers that they publish showing that cancer cells consume oxygen just as readily as normal cells uh in culture and therefore cancer cells are using uh oxidative phosphorylation uh wrong we've shown that's not the case it turns out that

the tumor cells do in fact consume oxygen but they're not using it for ATP synthesis they're not using the consumed oxygen for generating energy through oxidative phosphorylation they are using it to produce reactive oxygen species Ros are carcinogenic and mutagenic these radicals oxygen radicals damage DNA RNA and proteins they cause the mutations that you see in the nucleus of the tumor cells so the oxygen consumed

by cancer cells is producing DNA damage as a downstream epiphenomenon of the damage to oxidative phosphorylation so the cancer field today is focusing on mutations and targeting mutations these are all effects they're not the cause of cancer and this goes back to the argument with Sydney Winehouse and Warburg in the 1950s except the folks today absolutely do not understand do not appreciate or cannot accept the

fact that the oxygen consumption and cancer cell is not used for oxidative phosphorylation it it's used for reactive oxygen species and other reactions not involving ATP so you have to put the store you have to put the story together so you when you mentioned car T immunotherapy um all these immunotherapies they're based on the somatic mutation Theory so now warburg's Warburg was the initiator of the

mitochondrial metabolic theory of cancer I will explain more because he did not know about glutamine fermentation which we now know about he did not he also assumed that the oxygen consumed by cancer cells even though it was low was still linked to oxfos okay that's a misunderstanding on warburg's part he's getting him credit he was that was over 100 years ago oh yeah it was a

hundred years ago and I and because the pathway for glutamine fermentation was not yet developed so he did not know about the second major fermentable fuel so we got he was absolutely right on the origin of cancer he was incorrect on assuming that lactic acid production equaled a certain amount of ATP we now know that that calculation is is somewhat in error we also know that

oxygen consumption is in error so we can put it all together orberg was 100 correct in the knowledge of how cancer started his readouts were were were incorrectly we're polishing it all up so this is the mitochondrial metabolism so basically what you're saying is that most oncology today is focused on the idea that cancer results from genetic mutations in the cancer however or allow learning at

the same time is that you can take 100 cases of breast cancer and they may be all genetically very different or colon cancer or prostate cancer or pancreatic cancer and so even though they have the same name the same pathology on a microscope the underlying genetics are quite different and so we're playing a little bit of whack-a-mole now there may be some ways of improving cancer

response to chemotherapy by identifying which genetic mutations there are in which drugs work better for which ones and it's it's sort of an incremental Improvement but it's not a it's not a kind of cataclysmic shift in our thinking around cancer which is moving from a genetic theory to a metabolic Theory and I think the metabolic theory is quite interesting interesting I think it clearly needed to

be fleshed out more but it looks like it's holding promise to deal with things like stage four melanoma stage four pancreatic cancer stage four breast cancer cancers that are really death sentences are responding even glioblastoma which is brain cancer very well the ketogenic diets so you kind of have to be able to sort of navigate this new landscape where certain cancers are really responding to a

metabolic approach and so we can't just sort of relegate it to some crazy whack job Theory this is actually now becoming more mainstream thinking well going back to what you said about the breast cancer um you know when you look at individual breast tumors you know they have different stage ones for you know all the different kinds of um you know her2 and and yeah the

staging and the typing which actually may be less important yeah yeah so so but you're 100 correct when you look at the genetic profiles of all these different tumors they're all essentially different from each other I mean there's some commonalities in mutation of course but many of them many Studies have have shown if we take all the individuals sell many individual cells out of a tumor

and do a full genomic sequence no no two cells in this in the tumor exact have the exact same kinds of mutations yet yet every cell in that breast tumor has dependency on fermentation as a source of energy so the common metabolic problem all the cells have one major common problem uh or or phenotype or or observation they're all fermenting regardless of what their mutations are

so the common pathological phenotype is fermentation okay so then the simple question is where do how do they get their energy from fermentation and the two fuels that dry fermentation are glucose the sugar and what we have shown is the amino acid glutamine now glutamine for the cancer feel people will say we all knew glutamine was a big big role in cancer you guys in the

field thought it was being respired no because the oxygen no it's not respired it's fermented just like the glucose so but it's also fermented in the mitochondria so the mitochondria they call the pathways called glutamanolysis and it's a fermentation pathway in the mitochondria so you have a fermentation pathway in the cytoplasm and you have a fermentation pathway in the mitochondria which makes it look like the

mitochondria respiring especially when they're taken in oxygen so we had to parse out all this stuff and clearly Define what the actual biomedical biochemical mechanisms are that are driving the Beast and the Beast is the Beast is driven by fermentation and you're you're right Mark the cells in a glioblastoma the cells in Colon lung they're all fermenters so they all have different that's why when you

take uh car team immunotherapy if you're not hitting the fermentation pathway you're you're essentially missing missing the target so nothing could be like when you say oh we have a targeted therapies Precision medicine These Guys these targets I mean they're missing the Target and you pay a lot of money for a missed Target and then you say and then you say oh you know I have

we're going to use Precision medicine yeah well if it's so precise how come you blew out my liver when you were trying to cure my lung cancer exactly yeah that's the problem you know most of the treatments we have now are really toxic radiation and chemotherapy surgeries have been crude and and and what's amazing about metabolic oncology is the therapy is diet and maybe some other

compounds and block some of these fermentation Pathways that really have not only no side effects but have a ton of beneficial effects in terms of overall metabolic Health in terms of reducing inflammation improving stem cell function causing DNA repair and and helping deal with oxidative stress I mean just it's just the list goes on about how this works pretty amazing no it is made it is

it's remarkable and um because you're all good you're going we're going back to the origin of of many of the diseases that we have and uh you know a lot of this is systemic inflammation you know chronic exposure to different chemicals you put all that together and you end up with diabetes cardiovascular disease cancer dementia you end up with all these kinds of chronic diseases and

um a lot of it has to do with Disturbed energy bio metabolic homeostasis is Disturbed in many of these chronic diseases the issue for us though is you know ferreting out the mechanisms of how cells grow uh cancer cells grow uh in a dysregulated uh dysregulated way and and I think um you know we're I I don't want to become too diffuse and say okay let

me jump now into Alzheimer's and show you how this works let me jump into type 2 diabetes and show me and show you how that works the the the major Focus we have right now is correcting massive misinformation on how that this how cancer cells Express this dysregulated growth because ultimately that's what the disease is it's cell division out of control and they these cells are

dividing out of control because they have lost their ability to use energy through respiration have fallen back on on Ancient fermentation Pathways and and the organelle the organelle inside the cell that controls the cell cycle and regulated growth is the mitochondrion and Warburg clearly showed many years ago and I have in my own work validated everything that orberg said with respect to mitochondrial dysfunction that the

organ L controlling the differentiated State and regulated growth is dysfunctional and therefore the cells are falling back on Ancient fermentation Pathways and are dysregulated in their cell growth so you know so what's the best way to manage cancer is pull the plug pull the plug on their fermentation fuels and there's only two fuels that can drive this beast and it's glucose and glutamine so and then

they can't as you mentioned earlier they can't burn fats or Ketone bodies because you need a good mitochondria oxidative phosphorylation system to generate energy from fats and Ketone bodies so the fats and Ketone bodies though help the heart help the the brain especially for Ketone bodies so you mentioned as you said you can all of these different chronic diseases uh can be improved significantly uh by

this metabolic approach because when you burn ketones you essentially increase the metabolic homeostasis of normal cells so and the cancer cell is marginalized it can't use the Ketone body or the fat so you really put them in a very compromised position and they will gradually be eliminated and not only that in our in our paper in my book and in the paper we just showed for

managing cancer in the dog uh using purely metabolic therapy when you cut the calories down we have this process called autolytic cannibalism it's very interesting so uh all cells in the body must carry their weight when food restriction so there has to be a coordinated interaction among all the cells in our body and when you have a cancer a group of cells that are using energy

in a very inefficient way and not contributing to the Society of the cells the body will turn on those cancer cells and use them as fuel eat them and Supply their their metabolites for the rest called autolytic cannibalism and in order to get in order to get into that stage you have to lower blood sugars and you have to increase ketones and then the body starts

turning on these cancer cells and dissolving them so does it have to be both calorie restricted and ketogenic because ketogenic diets aren't necessarily calorie restricted although people might want to eat less because they're not as hungry because fat inhibits appetite yeah in in humans they the ketogenic diet high fat diet impacts the hormone cholecystokinin which shuts down appetites it impacts on the 10th cranial nerve um

you don't have to deliberately restrict calories for the ketogenic diet to get cancer well most people most people do because their appetite is turned off so uh it's a it's a indirect calorie restriction nobody sits down and eats a whole you know let's lead a pound of butter you know nobody's going to do that and as a matter of fact there we are learning now from

a lot of our colleagues there are many palatable types of ketogenic diets and we developed the the glucose Ketone index calculator uh to allow the cancer I I did it mostly for cancer patients but it seems like people just want to get healthy they use the gki it's the ratio of blood sugar to blood ketones using a finger prick you Goose keto mojos or these different

instruments to measure this and you know regardless of what you're eating if you can keep your gki levels to 2.0 or below I mean you're going to put significant metabolic pressure on these tumor cells so you know people say oh this ketogenic diet is unpalatable uh well you can develop a Mediterranean diet that will do the same thing uh just gotta just got to use the

gki to let you know what you can eat what you can eat so and they people are learning now hey you know I'm a vegan I can I can get my gki down and uh and I feel pretty good about the whole thing and this other guy I'm a carnivore and I can do the same thing and the pescetarian and whoever the hell else you want

to be you know the the bottom line is if you have an instrument now and a ratio to put pressure on your cancer cell and you can build your own diets to see for this so that's a nice Tool uh that allows the The Physician or the patient to know when they're in this Zone and then when they're in this zone of low of a low

glucose Ketone index that's when you bring in the drugs like glutamine Inhibitors and other glucose Inhibitors uh to to fully Target and eliminate these tumor cells in a non-toxic way so it's a strategy yeah you have to be aware of of how to do this it's you just can't all of a sudden go into a into a clinic at the top medical school and say man

I'd like to have metabolic therapy instead of cartoon immunotherapy oh we don't know how to do this you know this doesn't work you know there's no evidence to someone look you got to read the scientific literature you know my favorite thing is there's no evidence it means translate says I haven't read the evidence or looked for the evidence you know this is another thing sometimes I

do these podcasts and and people say well who's this guy's pulling this crap out of his ass saying all this kind of stuff and I said well you want to read my papers I mean I open access I mean it's not like I'm making this stuff up I mean we've been spending 25 years doing the research and we published the research it just so happens you

don't read the research I mean what am I supposed to say you know so everyone's always this guy getting all this information you said I did the damn experiments for crazy you know what I'm talking about yeah and then I published them oh I wasn't aware of that well I I know what more you want me to do write it in crayon and put a big

sign on the side of the road there's only about nine million papers in the National Library medicine so you know I think most doctors haven't read a fraction of that yeah no and it's true and I I blame them I I they're overwhelmed with their cancer patients and uh trying to do the best they can uh but what I what bothers me is they're the absolute

absolute resistance uh on the part of the medical establishment uh to might even consider what we're saying and as a matter of fact as I said uh you only have two major theories that describe the origin of cancer and that is the somatic mutation Theory which is advocated by the National Cancer Institute if you go to the National Cancer Institute the fir the thing you say

about cancer cancer is a genetic disease so this drives the grant support from the National Cancer Society and the NIH are all supporting Gene approaches which then involves the immunotherapies and all this crazy stuff that you hear on television every night and it's all driven by the somatic mutation theory of cancer and the the alternative and the correct theory is that cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic

disease so it's the mitochondrial metabolic Theory so when patients go into the clinic they should ask their oncologist is the treatment you're giving me based on the somatic mutation Theory or on the mitochondrial metabolic theory of course it's like a deer looking into the headlights most of the most of them just don't don't know anything about what I just said but you know the tragic thing

is that the National Cancer Institute itself is push is pushing a misinformation on this uh incorrect Theory the theory cannot is no longer we've presented so much evidence that the only way you can say cancer is a genetic disease is through ideological Dogma it can no longer be a rational thinking it's ideological Dogma is is maintaining uh the status quo in the can and managing cancer

uh you know so you have to you have to realize and Dogma is an extremely powerful force on the brain it underlies religion it underlies political affiliations and it also underlies the somatic mutation theory of cancer so when you put all that together you can see why we're not making the kind of advances that we should be making and it's due mostly to a dogmatic view

that cancer is something other than what it actually is talk a little bit more about the glutamine because it seems like we can restrict sugar pretty easily through a ketogenic diet and reduce their carbohydrate intake and switch to mostly fat and also we have to limit protein because protein can turn into sugar in the body so to be careful it's not a high protein diet but

what about glutamine because glutamine is an essential amino acids involved into the sound production it's found in many healthful foods such as fish and dark green leafy vegetables which we think we should eat you know when we're you know uh eggs nuts and seeds soybeans uh you know seaweed meat so you know wow what are we going to do how are we going to get away

with limiting glutamine yeah yeah no this is so so important because I don't know what it is people uh from all the other podcasts that I've done they all rush out and say well what can I what can I eat to reduce glutamine uh nothing you can't uh there's no diet that can reduce glutamine now what we did find and we're done the work done by

George Cahill and others you know prolonged water only fasting will reduce glutamine uh but glutamine as you said is a non-essential amino acid because we can make it can make it predominantly from glucose actually um but there's no diet uh by itself that can reduce glutamine so therefore we need drugs to Target the glutamine I want to say it again there is no diet that is

can effectively reduce the availability of glutamine in our body okay so that's why we need drugs and the drugs are designed to further put the pressure on glutamine and as you said this is an incredible amino acid and may not be considered an essential amino acid but it is essential for the immune system for our gut and for the urea cycle it's a it's a so

when we that's why the glutamine issue allowed me and my colleagues to develop the Press pulse strategy for managing cancer you can press glucose as you said Mark we don't need glucose we can replace glucose with fats and Ketone bodies that the tumor cells can't use for energy so we can push glucose levels down pretty low and then the rest of the normal cells when they're

deprived of glucose will compete directly with the tumor cell for any available glucose in the body so we're really we got the glucose thing under control the glutamine issue now requires kid gloves because we know how important that molecule is for the normal physiological health of our body so when we when I say press pulse we press glucose chronically stress put just diet can and and

some small amounts of other drugs can press glucose without harming the body but we pulse are we pulse glutamine we can't we can't we can't chronically deprive our bodies of glutamine because it's an essential amino acid so we put a drug like 60 oxine or leucine which is done uh which has been a known glutamine inhibitor it shuts down the glutamanolysis pathway so you can't metabolize

glutamine to glutamate so but we can't be too aggressive with that because if we're too aggressive with it we're going to damage our immune system we're going to damage our gut we can damage things so we just put it in there for a short period of time at a particular dosage slaughter a whole bunch of tumor cells and then pull it away and then we need

our immune cells to come in and pick up the corpses so our immune cells our immune system and the tumor are both utilizers of glutamine so yeah you can kill tumor cells because they're absolutely dependent on glutamine but we can also paralyze the function of our normal immune system if we keep glutamine targeting too aggressive on there so we have to pull it back allow our

immune our our indolent immune system to become aggressive again pick up the dead corpses of the cells that we just killed and then and then hit them again with a small dose of glutamine so the Press you press the glucose hold that down with diet and then you pulse the glutamine and eventually you gradually degrade the tumor while enhancing at the same time enhancing the health

and vitality of all of the normal cells in the body including the immune system so you have to know you have to know biology you have to understand that by the biology of the different systems that you're working with because you can play off one biological system off of another it's a beautiful elegant system well once people understand how to do this uh it's going to

be the new it's going to be the the Paradigm it's going to be the way we're going to manage all these differences so you have to do both right you have to do both the glucose restriction and you have to inhibit glutamine Pathways to a drug or a compound which is not actually an approved drug it's some research compound right now it's not about well it

was a proof that they did State they did was it phase two trials with this drug I mean it was used in little kids with with leukemia it's just that they never targeted the glucose when they used it and they didn't know the dosages so it's like anything you know if you don't know how to use the tool it's not it's never going to give you

the outcome that you would have expected it doesn't have side effects or oh well what we showed yes of course it has like any drug I mean radiation has side effects you know cartoon you know all this stuff has side effects um but if you don't if you what we had what we showed is that when you administer Dawn with the ketogenic diet you use much

lower dosages and you pulse the system you don't press the system and therefore you eliminate the toxicity while at the same time improving therapeutic efficacy so therefore you learned how to use the tool if you don't use the tool that's what they said oh we can't use Dawn because it was too toxic we didn't know how to use it you got to use it you got

to know how to use this drug and believe me have there been clinical trials in humans on this well of course they're they're doing it now at Johns Hopkins they they took that drug gone and they put a little tail a little tail on it made it like a new drug there's two ways to make a new drug one you can take an already existing drug

modify it slightly and then say oh we're going to make a billion dollars on this the the other way to do it is like we did we have a drug that we knew worked but we didn't know how to use it in the correct context we changed the context and the drug now becomes super powerful so it's like like a new drug but you put it

into a different environment you get the same effect so you know my my goal is to save lives and improve quality of life other people may want to make billions of dollars on this stuff but either way the bottom line is that if you use the drug from Johns Hopkins or you use the the regular drug in a different context in a different way the outcome

is going to be similar but now the problem of course is if you use Don by itself you're never going to get the complete therapeutic benefit unless you target the glucose you got to Target the glucose with it and we also found that in administration of dawn to brain cancer in a ketogenic diet the ketogenic diet facilitates delivery of the drug through the blood-brain barrier onto

the target so clearly you're going to get much more bang for your buck by administering the drug in the ketogenic diet then if you administered in a high carbohydrate diet we publish beautiful papers beautiful papers on this and what about the data around the Inuit because they were popular relations that lived in the Arctic Circle who a primarily fat whale blubber seal you know uh and

they essentially were on ketogenic diets and and they had very few cancers right I mean what did we learn from those populations well we have a book coming out from Tim knox's group in uh oh yeah yeah big book on K on ketogenic diets used for everything and they talked about the Inuits uh in that book when they were first evaluated um they were considered to

be resistant to cancer and some of the other chronic diseases and they never never not they ate very little vegetables of course seasonal everything had to be had to be seasonal but yeah they were in nutritional ketosis probably for the majority of their of their lives and they didn't have any cancer uh you know I I visited uh the medical um hospital is that because is

that because we used to diagnose it or because they actually didn't have it well you know it's a combination of both probably I mean who would know whether some guy might have had some problem I mean there wasn't a lot of medical evaluations but the Western Physicians from I think mostly from England uh I have to go back and double check on that but they did

some evaluations they I mean just overall what what chronic any kind of chronic diseases and you know the bottom line was there wasn't uh cancer was not recognized as being any any concern uh in these folks uh but when I visited the medical school at Thunder Bay uh Canada I gave a lecture there and that medical school predominantly focuses on the health of Inuits uh because

a large population of Inuits are in the Canadian provinces in the northern Arctic Circle and these folks were just decimated by type 2 diabetes cancer dementia all kinds of things that they never had were Afflicted with until Western diets and Lifestyles came into their environment and you know the Inuits are just one example the other example is Albert schweitzer's evaluation of the African tribes in various

countries of Africa and the African tribes that lived according to traditional ways and he actually was looking for cancer and he looked at over almost 40 000 Africans and found not one single case of cancer in tribes that were following traditional traditional ways so clearly cancer is a disease of Western diets and Lifestyles and um because it never existed and nor nor does it exist in

our closest primate relatives to chimpanzee which is about 98 and a half percent similar to us in Gene and protein sequence and these these animals are under constant Veterinary surveillance at the major zoos and there's never been a documented case of breast cancer in a female chimpanzee uh despite the fact that they have the same very similar if not identical uh genes and proteins uh that

that we have and we can't do the kind of experiment that would show the evidence like if we took uh chimpanzees and gave them an American diet lifestyle uh in the zoo uh jelly donuts pizzas and uh you know big hero sandwiches they said I asked the Zookeeper at the San Diego Zoo I said Can why don't you I said how are these bonobos they have

some bonobos oh they would eat those donuts like there'd be no tomorrow I said but I said why don't you give them go down to the Dunkin Donuts and bring them in a box of jelly fills they said animal cruelty that's right with the animal cruelty so I said what about us oh no you know so um but any of them I I I've always asked

that to the uh the veterinarians at the zoo use with their their primate I said why don't you guys go down because you think this guy would love a big pizza you know Margarita oh they'd be all over it but they they can't they can't do that because it's uh it would be a cruel thing to do today you know and I say well we're doing

it to ourselves and now we're suffering from all the consequences uh of this action and uh consequently we have all these chronic diseases and then we can manage them all very effectively if you listen to the TV coming out with all these uh wonderful ways that take this drug that drug do this and then uh you got a thousand side effects that'll kill you before before

that before the disease will you know it's really it's really crazy man I don't know what to say I want to ask you a couple more things that I think are interesting in your work one is is the you know use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy as an adjunct to what you're talking about in combination with uh interrupting the glucose Pathways in the glutamine Pathways uh and

and by the way just everybody knows the way we detect cancer in screening for recurrence or looking at someone's overall status because we use a pet scan which is basically a special type of skin where we give people a radioactively labeled sugar like basically sugar with radioactive sugar and it goes regular cancer and that's how we tell what the cancer is it doesn't work for the

glutamine Pathways but it actually is how we detect metastatic cancer so is it weird the doctors say to patients oh don't worry about you eat why don't you eat ice cream and milkshakes and I'm like what are you doing you know this doesn't make any sense right especially in the context of knowing just from a from Pure you know well-established research that insulin resistance and pre-diabetes

and the whole phenomena of too much sugar or Diet is driving so many cancers made the major cancers colon breast prostate um even some lung cancers pancreatic cancers are driven by sugar yeah and that you're right about that I mean we use fluorodeoxy glucose it's an analog of glucose that can't be metabolized so it collects uh in the tissue and it lights up and um and

you say well there's your cancer right there you can it's sucking down the glucose and then at the same on the same breath you know you're going to have a drink Enfamil to help you so and then uh you know one of the things right yeah and then you take a guy and they're so fearful of weight loss in a cancer patient you take a guy

who weighs 350 pounds and you say now you got to eat keep your weight up you know you wouldn't want you to lose anyway I mean you got you got to be nuts to say something like that right so um but but uh you know the whole thing the whole thing here is getting back to a hyperbaric oxygen which was your original question um Dom the

Agostino and I uh Dom is a guy who's constantly in nutrition ketosis he had done some studies in his lab showing that in Hyperbaric pressure the cancer cells were exploding and they would create a tremendous amount of reactive oxygen species furthermore from from not only the fact that they produce Ross but the oxygen Under Pressure enhances the killing effect of the Ross so um what we

did in our press pulse big paper that we wrote The Press pulse strategy for managing cancer hyperbaric oxygen was part of the pulse strategy so if the patient can get into therapeutic ketosis with the glucose Ketone index of 2.0 or below we would then 2.5 atmospheres for about 90 minutes you could put that patient in hyperbaric oxygen and hyperbaric oxygen would essentially facilitate the killing of

the tumor cell through oxidative stress and it's important to remember that radiation and some some of the toxic drugs that we use for cancer Management in the clinic also kill cancer cells through oxidative stress but the key is with hyperbaric oxygen you're killing the cancer cell with oxidative stress without causing collateral toxicity to the rest of the body so it's a beautifully dovetails in uh with

the overall concept of metabolic therapy and and that becomes another arm of treatment is Ox is hyperbaric oxygen once the patient is in therapeutic ketosis because we know that that's when hyperbaric oxygen will have its greatest therapeutic benefit is when that patient is has the glucose Ketone index value which could change during the course of the day so he would know when to go into the

chain he or she would know when to go into the the chamber for oxygen therapy uh when their gki would be at the lowest point during the day and then they would schedule treatments that would be based around around those values so clearly it becomes an arm of the therapeutic strategy called a metabolic mitochondrial metabolic therapy is the whole concept for this new new treatment strategy

yeah so I have America oxygen ketogenic diets now let's talk about phenylbutyrate and glutamine because this is a compound that's been around for a long time and it seems to bind the glutamate and it causes excretion in the urine is that a reasonable approach and is that available as a drug still or yeah well I think for blood cancers it could be very effective um I

haven't tested it yet because in the mouse we do most of our work in The Mouse and the way it works in humans is phenylbutyrate is metabolized to phenyl acetate and phenyl acetate then binds with glutamine and you kind of flush it out of your body the mouse doesn't have that enzyme so we we're never able to test phenylbutyrate in a full full effective way in

the pre-clinical system but I certainly think it could be effective for uh because glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in the in our blood in the blood of a normal person it's about five milligram five millimolar I guess it's about five millimolar constant it's the most abundant amino acid because it plays such a vital role in so many of our physiological processes but phenobutyrate uh

could be an effective way to reduce levels especially under calorie restriction and ketogenic diets could be further a very powerful way to kill blood cancers and blood cancers like brain cancer colon cancer they all have damaged oxidative phosphorylation so they're all fermenting so they're using glucose and glutamine and they become more they would be even more vulnerable uh to I think I I don't I don't

want to say that with any level of certainty until I actually do the experiments myself most of the knowledge that I provide or tell is because I've done the I've done the experiments and I've looked at different things but I think for human I think for humans it could be a real value to try to reduce especially for blood cancers whether it works for solid tumors

it's hard to say because the the micro environment of the solid tumor may not be permeable to phenylbutyrate or fennel acetate and therefore I cannot speak to that your learning work has been done in in animal models in Latina can you talk about some of the clinical human trials that are happening now the ones that have been done what have we learn and where is this

being effective and I've seen some pretty remarkable things happening coil by Stone and other cancers so can you talk about like what we know right now in humans and where where you think we're going to be in three five ten years with cancer treatment well we're developing a treatment protocol right now as we speak a comprehensive treatment protocol for humans so that we bring together all

of the things that I I was saying in a kind of how-to manual manual and strategy so once folks once the medical professionals uh read this they'll they'll know what to do and how to do it and I am working with folks in different countries right now where there's a little bit more flexibility in what we're able to do and to be honest to be honest

with you mark I'll tell you the mouse basal metabolic rate is seven to eight times faster than that of a human so everything happens in a kind of a split second uh time frame uh whereas in humans we have so much more flexibility to really to really max out these therapies and what we're seeing in humans we're seeing therapeutic benefits in humans that we never could

see in the Mouse um so so you know we have uh not cured any mice with medicine Advanced metastatic cancer we've managed it certainly massively better than if we didn't do the right thing things but in humans we're seeing much much greater therapeutic benefit and dogs too I want to emphasize that cancer is the number one killer of domestic dogs and and we're starting to see

tremendous therapeutic benefit in dogs because they're basal metabolic rate is closer to that of a human than it is of a mouse it's interesting I put my iPod with sort of widespread metastatic lymphoma who was given like a few weeks to live and I basically put them on a ketogenic diet and uh he lived for at least a year when he stopped eating the food and

then I said all right I'll just give him the food he likes again and then he died within a few weeks it was quite amazing yeah no it's unbelievable and as a matter of fact we published the papers Open Access in Frontiers and nutrition on uh the complete resolution of mast cell cancer in a dog um with with no radiation chemothers or anything just metabolic therapy

and we and we pulled we published the recipe in there so if anyone has a dog with cancer the recipe for managing the cancer with without toxicity is present in that paper and um uh you know it works in dogs really well and I think we're going to be able to manage the cancer and the dogs so the dogs become now a really good tool to

fair to to test out all these things that we want to plant to put into humans but I what what I do in my in my pre-clinical mouse models is we can troubleshoot uh all the different strategies doses timing and scheduling uh that will be necessary before the eventual long-term management and possible resolution of the majority of human cancers so uh and that's how the funding

for our research comes predominantly from private foundations and philanthropy and because there are folks out there that know we are on the right track and as you said when will this become a reality is not clear to me because I mean you have an Institute powerful institutions that have built up around the somatic mutation theory of cancer so you get this dog dogmatic ideology that keeps

the the status quo but you have to basically the Earth is flat and yeah yeah the Earth is round right yeah well no the the the the center of the earth the center of the solar system is the earth not the sun right this is the heliocentric uh you know geocentric theory that was broken down and and the Catholic Church adhered very strongly to keeping the

Earth in the center of the solar system until Galileo Copernicus and Kepler came along to prove that it could not be so um we we have absolutely shown that Cancer Cannot Be A genetic disease absolutely cannot be a genetic disease and I have written all these papers and people say oh I don't believe you I don't believe we'll read the read the damn papers will you

and then you'll come to the and come to the realization uh that this is what it is so once you realize it's not a genetic disease and it is a mitochondrial metabolic disease the field will shift over and it will shift over because people want to live I mean you have a very uh anxious population of suffering people that would like to have their disease managed

in a more logical way not some through some medieval uh kind of stuff that we're doing to these folks today so uh clearly it's going to happen it has to happen and it will happen because what we're doing today is not working cancer is going to overtake heart disease soon and that's only because we're locked into the somatic mutation theory of cancer and once you once

you realize the sun is the center of the solar system you're going to start to see advanced is real fast really effective amazing so um but it's not necessarily just something we have to do alone and I I've seen data for example from Walter Longo who uses calorie restriction diets as an adjunct of therapy for chemo and radiation it seems that ketogenic diets can be used

along with chemo radiation to actually improve their effectiveness and I have a very close friend who had uh you know uh throat cancer basically and had neck cancer and uh was you know very poor diagnosis and he decided to go on a ketogenic diet and get chemo and radiation and not only did he do great but there's been no cancer three years out and he's also

also actually had no side effects from the treatment because of the way that the the treat the ketogenic diet protect them against the chemo and radiation of side effects yeah yeah well I think that's important because we're going to go through a hybrid system because you can't dramatically change one one series of treatments over to another overnight so you're going to have to gradually go through

this kind of a hybrid system where some level of radiation or some level of chemotherapy uh or even immunotherapies may be enhanced in their in their action when combined together with metabolic therapy so uh there's going to be that hybrid transition and that might be essential because you know some of the strategies for the complete resolution of cancer using metabolic approaches alone are not yet completely

developed and validated in clinical trials so you will have this inter interim hybrid approach like all major technologies that go from one Paradigm to another there's always this hybrid uh a transitory hybrid system and I think we're going to realize that extremely and this is what some of our clinics are doing extremely low doses of chemo uh managed together with metabolic therapy seem to be far

more effective with most with significantly lower toxicity so whether that's radiation or chemo uh you can significantly improve the outcome uh by by using much lower Doses and these kinds of things so I think that until we come up with the the most elegant and complete a way of managing cancer with metabolic therapy alone I think we're going to have this hybrid transition period and what

you know what is your conversation with an oncologist you get invited to the oncology meetings to talk to them what do they say well it's a it it's a it's a variation of things I I think some of them feel threatened sometimes like what are you going to do you know you're touching my meal ticket here you know I I do this for a living and

now you're coming along saying I shouldn't do what I'm doing I think for certain certain cases like a radiation of brain cancer I think that should be eliminated uh as soon as possible I I think that's an outrage I have published papers clearly showing how the radiation of a of a patient with glioblastoma elicits the rapid recurrence and death of the patients and I I provided

that I provided them the metabolic mechanisms by which that is happening and we show that why the why the survival of these patients is so poor is because they're radiating the the brain of these patients now whether that's not may not be the case for other types of cancers so in in those kinds of situations we may we may be able to have a more transitional

uh uh situation but certainly not for brain cancer but when you talk to uh some oncologists uh they're kind of surprised a lot most of the oncologists that support our work are those guys that are now retired it's kind of like yeah I knew what I was doing all my life was and it wasn't the best and now I realize but I'm no longer practicing medicine

and now I can pretty much come out and say and say the things that I would have never said if I were practicing so so I I see that I always have to laugh about that um but you know I have a quick question and you're you know being in this field you need to share a few stories before we close uh patients you know who've

been treated or tried themselves or what the stories are because I think you know they're consider these anecdotes but anecdotes are really the beginning of hypotheses and they're the beginning of actually the scientific research method which is actually absorbing what you see and being curious about it and creating a hypothesis so let's talk about some of those cases and what you think yeah the most remarkable

one was Pablo Kelly uh from England who who was written up in all the newspapers over there and he has his own little podcast thing I think he came to me in 2014 uh with um he heard from Andrew Scarborough his friend who had a high grade glioma who took one radiation shot he said I'm adding I'm not doing that again so Pablo talked to Andrew

Anderson contact C3 so he came to me in 2014 Pablo Kelly he had just been diagnosed with a glioblastoma and um he he said to me do you think the metabolic diet therapy would work and I said geez you know I I think it might but I but I don't know we've done it mice but we've never really done it in a human and he started

it and they said you're going to be dead in nine months Pablo his oncologist got really angry and if you listen to his his stories uh how they brought him in they had him put him he threw all that stuff off and uh just went on the metabolic therapy and um he his tumor didn't grow very fast and uh finally after no surgery even had no

surgery and nothing which was really shocking and then after three years um he he decided he kept emailing me and he said I'm still alive in fact I hadn't heard from him for two years he emails me he said I'm Pablo Pablo here I said Pablo Jesus I thought you would have been dead I didn't know you're still alive so so um then three years after

the diagnosis he did a a surgical and my colleagues some radiation um Radiologists said this is growing so you probably have to have it to both so he had went in got the bulk surgery for the first time three years after diagnosis and then um we followed him he has five years of of daily and sometimes more than one day glucose Ketone index so in the

in the paper that I published uh which is in again Frontiers and nutrition we put in Pablo's story so I didn't write Pablo's story up until uh five years after his initial diagnosis so I didn't want to write something up prematurely and say you know are we thinking this poor guy dies at you know a little longer than than what you'd have expected he's now out

almost nine years he's still alive and um wow yeah and then we found out that the idh1 mutation which is interesting because it acts like a drug it's God's gift to the GBM patient it's it's a draw it's a gene that disrupts glycolysis and glutamanolysis and here's the crazy thing there are drug companies out there thinking that that mutation is bad so they make drugs to

Target what what we consider a therapeutic mutation and their drugs are killing the cancer patients some of the patients fasting it's like nuts so unless you understand the biology of the disease you're working with you really make you can make real major errors but anyway that story of Pablo and you can get you people can read about him uh he's on British television he was on

newspapers he has his own podcast and then there's a there's a movie coming a documentary that will that will highlight the stories of all of these kinds of patients that should have been dead that are alive and the the documentary is called the cancer Revolution it was made by Maggie Jones another other stage 4 breast cancer person where the metastasized to all her lungs and brain

and she's still alive who had done metabolic therapy and she her husband is Brad Jones a documentary movie guy and then she says uh Brad you got to make a movie on this stuff and so he's making a documentary and they're collecting uh as you said these anecdotes well there's not a few there's a now a whole slug of these anecdote guys that are out there

and the question is you know why are we not doing clinical trials to prove that this is a a very effective way and the answer is we don't do clinical trust because we don't have people that aren't knowledgeable enough to do it and the hospitals can't generate Revenue doing clinical trials but we're not using these kinds of drugs but I think we can work through all

of this I I think there will be a way to to do this because you can't collect so many anecdotal evidences of stage four people that should be dead that are walking on the planet over and over and over again whether it's brain cancer lung cancer colon cancer kidney cancer bladder cancer uh you know all of these different Cancers and so-called Walking Dead people uh I

mean there all seem to be getting on with their life they're living having a high quality of life you just can't suppress this stuff for any longer I mean it's becoming too too too much and it's based on hard science so once you have the mechanisms of the hard science uh we're going to start seeing it and then some people will say well I can't believe

it until the clinical trial they won't believe it even with a clinical trial so we're always going to have the people that will never believe this through dogmatic ideology and how do I know that because we did clinical trials on ketogenic diet for epilepsy and some people said we can never use a ketogenic diet for epilepsy until it's a clinical trial so we did a clinical

to my colleagues did a clinical trial and they still want to give drugs rather than ketogenic diet so so it's just you know it's just part of the system so it's going to happen I know it's definitely going to happen I can't tell you when I don't know uh but we we're not if we're still sitting here in 30 years talking about car T immunotherapy and

pdl1 this kind of crazy stuff based on a somatic mutation Theory no no no things will definitely change the the field is changing rapidly I mean I think this is one of the most exciting conversations I've ever had about cancer and and all of us are affected either and personally or family members or friends it's really such a widespread condition and we're really not winning the

war very much I think we've made incremental benefits some cancers we definitely have had good cures for but very far and few between and I think there is some benefit to cartoon therapy and you know pd1 and you know we'll call it checkpoint Inhibitors uh there are there are improvements in things like cancer vaccines but I think they're again moving around the edges rather than dealing

with the fundamental metabolic issue which is actually driving most cancerous yeah well I think though I there's no question if I looked at the data for pdl1 Inhibitors and you get about 20 20 to 30 percent of people that really do really well then you have a majority of people that it doesn't do anything and then you have a 20 of the people where you get

what we call hyper Progressive disease where the where the therapy kills you faster than the tumor does and it's called hyper Progressive disease it's well known in the scientific literature okay so you know why would you take why would anyone want to take a drug that would have a remote possibility of killing you you know uh I mean this is the truth this is what happens

I have that that again people should read the literature about hyperprogressive disease immunotherapies are based on the somatic mutation theory of cancer if the theory underlying the treatment is not correct you're not going to get the the the results that you would have predicted at the beginning okay so um and I have hundreds of people emailing me who tell me how their immunotherapies have not worked

and now they want to do metabolic therapy so I see a lot of those folks so basically the messages start with metabolic therapy don't wait till the last minute and try and after you've done everything else in your last legs because metabolic therapy is essentially risk-free it's got no side effects really maybe maybe the the glutamate Inhibitors do but I think I think it's as a

whole a very safe effective and by the way uh almost free therapy because it's just what you're eating yeah another thing marks listen it's very important if you can pare down the size of that tumor to a few a few cells that are just hanging on they become extremely vulnerable to a potential uh immunotherapy because there's where there's where they may all express the same epitope

and therefore the immunotherapy could just blast them out of existence but you wouldn't want to do it when you have the whole hodgepodge of cells at the beginning bring them down to a small manageable group of cells by metabolic therapy and then polish them off with a car D immunotherapy or or or an immunotherapy so you're right everything is bass awkwards whether we're doing it now

you gotta you got to start with metabolic therapy shrink the tumor down make yourself healthy and then come in with some of these more perfected treatments makes sense right yeah it totally makes sense if you loved that last video You're Gonna Love the next one check it out here insulin release will cause weight gain insulin resistance will cause heart disease diabetes Alzheimer's cancer and virtually all

of the other chronic metabolic diseases that are chewing through our entire Health Care system