Top Cancer Expert: This Is The WORST Food To Feed Cancer!

welcome to the plant-free md podcast with dr anthony chafee where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically hello everyone this is dr anthony chafee and today's interview will be with professor thomas seyfried and what i think is probably the most important interview i've ever done professor seafried is one of the world's foremost experts in cancer and cancer biology and research and he has actually shown quite conclusively that our understanding of cancer is all wrong and by being all wrong our approaches to treating it are all wrong and so we're not getting the results that we should and could be so please if you know anyone with cancer or anyone at all who would find this interesting please share this this is very important to get this message out so please get the word out there please share this video it's very important thank you very much all right hello everyone this is dr anthony chafee and i'm here today with a very special guest someone who i've long admired uh his work uh professor thomas sieffried of boston college uh professor seaford thank you so much for joining us how are you yeah well thank you very much anthony it's a real pleasure to be here yeah thank you um so i was just going to say uh for people that aren't familiar with your work can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do and and some of your current projects yeah well thanks um i'm a professor of biology at boston college i teach cancer metabolism every semester to a select group of undergraduate and graduate students i also teach general biology to the the folks that uh are not not science majors like like the economists and political science folks and english majors and those guys get to get to try to increase scientific literacy uh among the population our research program um we have a very active research program supported by private uh foundations and uh our goal is to develop diet drug therapies for managing uh cancer uh and i mean all all types of cancer so um that's our that's our big thrust right now is what is what is the most efficacious diet drug combinations that can manage cancer without inducing toxicity to any of the normal cells or tissues of our body and what we do then is we collaborate with clinics uh that are treating cancer patients throughout the world and we share the knowledge that we have from our pre-clinical studies with the directors of these clinics so that they can start applying metabolic therapy non-toxic metabolic therapy to their patients in these clinics and the success that we're hearing and coming back is quite astonishing uh how this is working so we do we ferret out everything before we put it on patients and the my clinical colleagues will then apply it to the patient so we have everything uh planned in advance and we get feed forward feedback information so what we do is we we tweak our systems in-house here to see if we can improve uh therapeutic efficacy and then share that again with the clinical groups and we're constantly making more and more advances and perfections in the in the strategy that will eventually become the standard of care for all cancer patients that is metabolic therapy yeah well i i certainly hope so and i know i've read you know some of your papers and specifically on like glioblastoma multi-form which is something that you know i mean in neurosurgical uh residency at the moment so that's that's obviously you know the most common things that we see and it's absolutely devastating uh disease uh obviously without any sort of treatment people on average live about three months with treatment they make it you know you know 15 to 18 months and and this is a very very devastating illness to watch watch someone have to go through um you you've obviously copious amounts of publications and some of your publications talk about cancer as a metabolic disease and specifically a a dysfunction of the mitochondria can you can you talk a bit about that yeah so um i mean this goes back to the work of otto warburg in the 1920s and 30s and 40s where he defined that cancer originated from damage to um mitochondria uh and that then elicited a whole series of changes uh forcing the cell into a fermentation mechanism to survive um and and we we have uh validated and confirmed warburg's original finding so in order to do that uh what i did uh was to go through the through the literate the scientific literature looking looking at um electron mic my micrographs the very high uh magnification uh of mitochondria and tissues because you can't see them under light microscopic microscopy in order to look at the structure of the mitochondria in the cytoplasm of the cell you need you really need electron electron microscopy scanning electron microscopy and then when you look at so what i did is i went and i looked at all the major cancers probably representing 95 of all cancer deaths caused by by these kinds of cancers and then and i went back through the 50s and 60s 1950s 60s 70s because in a lot of uh uh medical schools uh people would be looking at cancer tissue with electron microscopy and then you go to those papers in and you look and see what they found with respect to the the number and structure of the mitochondria in those tissues and invariably they were abnormal structurally and even even if one were to isolate them and look at the biochemistry it was abnormal so we have never found normal mitochondria in any kind of a major cancer okay so if you don't have normal mitochondria that means your the cells are not going to be able to generate energy through normal respiratory systems like oxidative phosphorylation and this is exactly what warburg said he said mitochondria oxidative phosphorylation becomes irreversibly damaged in all cancers regardless of where they come from thereby forcing them into a fermentation mechanism and that's what the characteristics of all cancer cells are they ferment and and then what we did is what we did is we well warburg knew glucose was the lactic acid fermentation derived from glucose was the major fuel at that time we have now defined uh glutamine as a second fermentable fuel the field had i think thought for many years that glutamine was being respired no it's not respired it's fermented so the two fermentation fuels that drive the majority if not all cancers are a a sugar fermentation and an amino acid fermentation and without the glucose and glutamine no cancer cell can survive so our our goal is to scientifically validate fermentation uh mechanism for a glutamine and uh and show how warburg was right uh on his original description but he also did not have new information which would clarify and saw and and resolve this entire cancer issue and we're in the process of doing this right now yeah that's fantastic and and so what are some of the things that you that can disrupt the mitochondria to make them precipitate cancer and how does that how does that go about you know i've seen you know somebody talked to you talk about how this actually precipitates the genetic uh mutations that we see and attribute blame to as causative um but you're saying that that's actually a knock-on effect yeah so they're all the mutations are all downstream that'd be phenomenal as as are most of what people are studying today um are all downstream the angiogenesis the failure in apoptosis and all these kinds of things they're all downstream of the original damage to the mitochondria so to answer specifically your question it's called the oncogenic paradox and this paradox has perplexed the cancer field for decades in other words how is it possible that you could get cancer from a whole range of different kind of insults how what is that what is the common pathophysiological mechanism that could underlie this range of cancer initiators like for example some people women may get breast cancer from a clogged milk duct another one may get it from some sort of viral infection another one may get it from a unhealed wound there's a whole variety of different ways that could elicit elicit a breast cancer you can do the same thing you can consider the same thing for possible colon cancers um or bladder cancers or lung cancers or any of these kinds of things in other words there's not any one of course smoking would damage the mitochondria in certain uh lung tissues and possibly other tissues intermittent hypoxia you know uh radiation um chronic inflammation any any of these kinds of insults could damage a cell in a particular tissue damage the mitochondria of a cell in a particular tissue leading to dysregulated cell growth in that tissue and the definition of cancer is cell division out of control or dysregulated cell growth how does that happen it happens from damage to the mitochondria in a particular cell or populations of cells in a particular tissue eliciting a growth a dysregulated growth and that's the oncogenic paradox so you don't always get cancer from a single insult it could come from a variety of insults the bottom line is that you end up with cells that are dysregulated in their cell growth all of which are fermenting and it's important to regula recognize that the mitochondria of our cells is the controller of the cell cycle so when that organelle becomes defective the cell falls back into a uh a dysregulated cycle leading to this is the way all cells uh on the planet uh evolved before oxygen came into the atmosphere 2.5 billion years ago we had living cells on the planet before oxygen was in the atmosphere and they were all fermenting and they all had dysregulated cell growth so the cancer cells and bodies are simply falling back on these ancient pathways that have always existed even before respiration even before the origination of the mitochondria so the cells are just simply falling back and as long as they have fermentable fuels in the environment they're very difficult to kill radiation and chemo and all these things that we use are not at the heart of the problem as a matter of fact some of the standards of care actually facilitate the availability of fermentable fuels making the the management of the disease impossible so that's why the current standard of care makes no sense when one considers the origin of the disease in the concepts of evolutionary biology yeah um i i did read a study you know a number of years ago where it spoke about you know when people go into a ketogenic diet and speaking specifically about using ketosis in order to by cancer and and talk about mitochondria specifically and showing that when in a state of ketosis you actually your mitochondria first of all uh were more efficient and they also increased in number and so it you know it's this uh sort of mechanism that would protect from cancer what is it about eating carbohydrates and not being in ketosis that just jams up our mitochondria so much well i don't i don't think the carbohydrates uh jam up the mitochondria um what what happens is uh excessive amounts of carbohydrates facilitate the um it causes an inflammatory such a condition in the body and it's this it's this elevated uh inflammation the state of an inflammation that contributes to the damage so you know sugar itself is not a carcinogen however chronic consumption of excessive carbohydrates can put the body in an imbalanced a nutritional state and that's what elicits it's not only cancer it's type 2 diabetes it's alzheimer's disease it's cardiovascular disease essentially it's all of the major chronic diseases that we are currently suffering from is the result of excessive amounts of carbohydrates in the diet we as a species did not evolve to eat large amounts of carbohydrates it was only a seasonal kind of situation a ripe fruit a ripe berry or something like this would be the sweet maybe honey it wasn't chronic exposure to high levels of carbohydrates that are coming from the foods that we presently have in our societies and that is ultimately the origin of the majority of chronic diseases that we have is a diet that is does not fit our evolutionary past yeah i 100 agree with you on that and that's something that i've sort of argued for a while now which is that you know the chronic diseases that we're treating nowadays you know exactly as you've outlined are are not diseases per se but you know toxicities and malnutrition toxic buildup of species and appropriate diet and a lack of species specific nutrition and yeah and you build up these toxins as i sort of mentioned to you before um before i started filming you know i got into this like when i took cancer biology and we talked about all carcinogens at the time this was 20 years ago there was uh we were talking about there's 136 known carcinogens just in brussels sprouts and over 100 in mushrooms and so on so uh you know plants obviously using defense chemicals to stop predation or deter predation this can build up and cause these these uh toxic effects in our body and uh well well let me say that i think that's true for the industrially produced vegetables i think uh organic vegetables if one were to use natural fertilizers you know um you know as as would be as would be appropriate i think you can reduce significantly but the problem is the um organic foods are hard to come by there's no unknown it's not known whether they're really organic or not yeah i i don't think there's any regulatory commission um you know of free-range animals or organic plants i mean this is what we evolved to eat they were all organic you know 50 000 years ago there was no industrial harvesting of foods but but i but i think that uh organically grown vegetables if one could do that you know with natural fertilizers i think those would be very very healthy along with any other free range of meat products or things like this the problem is they're not convenient for the majority of people in the society you know a drive up mcdonald's hamburger is a hell of a lot easier than going out and shooting a deer in the woods yeah you know um it's just the way our society is um and our demands on our time and what we do uh prevent us from actually rebalancing our our our physiology but yet we put ourselves at risk for cancer and all these other chronic diseases by the convenience of our lifestyle yeah yeah no i certainly agree like any sort of you know whole foods approach you're going to be in much better uh stead um you know one of the things that that we went through was actually a guy from berkeley professor bruce haynes and he published in 1989 uh some work looking at comparison to alr which was a pesticide used on apples at the time they were trying to ban it and he actually showed that uh he was looking specifically in mushrooms that mushrooms had around 10 000 times the amount of natural insecticides and pesticides by weight as as the alar would get pumped on these plants and that it was it was more likely to cause cancer than natural ones as well um but at 100 you know obviously you know pesticides insecticides these are toxic by design they're trying to to you know kill insects from eating them and so certainly that's going to make things a lot worse well we we i when in my book i showed that a lot of these so carcinogens that you just mentioned they're they're taken up in mammalian cells and uh they actually cause the mitochondria to fluoresce they call bio biofluorescence so you can you know those carcinogens are going right to the mitochondria and uh and damaging the mitochondria which is then the first step the first step in the initiation of cancer is to disrupt oxidative phosphorylation and only cells that can upregulate a fermentation mechanism as the result of this damage can become cancer cells cells that cannot upregulate fermentation rarely if ever become tumorogenic cells of cardiomyocytes they can't switch from oxfords to fermentation neurons in the brain rarely become tumorogenic it's the glial cells not the neuron neurons can't ferment for very long so only cells that have the capacity to replace respiration with fermentation can become a cancer cell otherwise you can't do that that's very interesting and i think that's that's a good uh illustration of of what the actual mechanism is going on as well yeah i mean it becomes very clear once you understand the biology of the problem um understanding how we how we get it and more importantly understanding how we manage it uh becomes very logical the problem is this information is not known by the majority of oncologists or scientists in the field absolutely and um you know i additionally that that you know with my sort of endeavors into into nutrition how this affects uh disease you know even just the idea that that uh you know diabetes and heart disease um are you know caused by sort of eating a lot of carbohydrates and sugar and all sorts of things a lot of people uh really don't know that like doctors and nutritionists as well and they still sort of are on the same you know cholesterol will kill you sort of idea which i think has been thoroughly debunked um well you know it's been debunked but everybody's popping the stat tablets obviously they still think cholesterol has a big big role in cardio it's triglycerides yeah um you're absolutely right you know and and in the cancer wards they still give the cancer patients you know uh sugar and coke and ice cream cake um yeah and then they say glucose has nothing to do with cancer so this there's such a lack of knowledge that it's profound it's it's chasmic it's it it's unbelievable the lack of knowledge on the part of the healthcare industry as to what what should and should not be done to keep people healthy yeah that's one of the things you know i i just sort of was you know i was a bit upset there because i see this every day in the hospital you know i see the food that they they feed them it's just it's just sugary carbs that's it and there's almost no meat there's certainly no fat uh there's a bit of dairy but it's it's always like chocolate milk as opposed to just normal milk and and the rest of it is just is just garbage and i'm going around seeing our brain tumor patients and who just underwent surgery and and here they are eating all this this sugary nonsense and i just can't help but think i mean like this is this is what gave you this problem in the first place and we're just shoveling it into your face yeah it drives it drives the tumor and and what we also found um i published a major paper on this uh with the standard of care from for brain cancer um the very treatments that are used the um uh radiation as well as temazolamide um they free up massive amounts of glucose and glutamine in the tumor micro environment uh making long-term survival very very rare so it's the therapies themselves that in other words that's bad enough to have a glioblastoma it's even worse to use standard of care to treat it because you've more or less signed and sealed the death certificate of this patient um simply by the the human brain should rarely if ever be irradiated this is nonsense this has to stop people i published a clear paper on how the radiation breaks apart the glutamine glutamate cycle in the brain freeing up massive amounts of glutamine and the and the steroids they give these patients increases blood sugar the two fuels necessary for but causing cancer cells to grow out of control are made available in abundant quantities by the very treatments that we're doing to these patients yeah so um we have made no advance in glioblastoma therapy in almost 100 years and my most recent paper shows in 100 years we have a telescope that now orbits 1 million miles from earth to look at the very origins of our solar system um this new telescope i can't remember the name of it but but anyway and yet and yet we do that and we've made no no advance in glioblastoma yeah so so and many other cancers once you have metastatic lung cancer a colon cancer the the survival is is so much less because the treatments we're using contribute to the demise of these patients it's unbelievable yeah absolutely a tragedy that's actually a tragedy yeah and and you know chemo can be so hard on people and you know i don't know what people are more concerned with like getting cancer or getting cancer and realizing that means they need chemo because you know i've had i've had friends and obviously patients devastated by by these treatments yeah i think they fear the treatment as much as they do the disease they think their hair is going to fall out they're going to bleed from the gums they're going to be sick and tired all the time you know many people are some people recover really well actually there are some reports now that show water only therapeutic fasting can significantly reduce some of the toxic effects of chemotherapy but my my point is why would you want to use chemotherapy when we know we just have to pull the plug on the fermentable fuels with diet and very and drugs that aren't nuts are not so toxic especially when under therapeutic ketosis i mean there's a clear framework and strategy for managing cancer without toxicity the biggest problem is no business model to support this which is the singular greatest stump uh inhibitor of moving this forward there is no way yet that people have found out how to make money uh on metabolic therapy that's the biggest problem not that it's not the patient that should be benefited it's how to make revenue from this i think the entrepreneur will come and the entrepreneurial will figure out how to do this i'm not that kind of a person my job is not how do we keep cancer patients alive with a higher quality of life beyond what they were ever predicted to to have yeah i suppose a good business model would be just setting up clinics that have this uh treatment regime and actually get results and then people will will go to them and uh and that might we're doing that now actually we have some clinics that are but you know some of the drugs that we use like a sixth deoxy nor leucine is not available to the public and and it really bothers me because that was used on children and uh cancer patients and other uh indications in the past um but yet uh if you try to get it the uh the drug would say is not for human use not for human consumption and that that's that should not be because that drug is very very powerful especially when used in ketosis we we did the experiments we showed the results and and my patient hundreds and hundreds of cancer patients are emailing me how do i get this drug and the answer is right your senator and congressman that they should because it's a a it's a drug um what would be repurposed it was used on cancer but it wasn't used in the right way if you don't know how to use the tool it's not going to give you the the outcome that you would have expected they say oh it's too toxic relative to what chemo and radiation no not even close so you have we have a drug available that can be used right now to sol to result reduce cancer in so many patients when used with nutritional therapeutic ketosis we've already shown how it works and it works really well and it should be used right now but it's not because there's no profit in this drug so if there's no profit we can't use it regardless of the patient can you believe this this is what we call a moral issue yeah is is there any way to sort of push through uh you know is getting it getting it approved uh by the fda to get this this going or is it just there's just no money behind it are you it's you know um you know it's it's a it's all i think it's all a revenue generation i i'm sorry to say that the fda will approve drugs um if there's a proof of concept nothing could be stronger than the proof of concept of how this drug gone 6-deoxy neuroleucine works with ketosis nothing is as strong as this yet it won't be approved because there's no revenue to be generated from this so it's a business model people have to realize that uh cancer is a revenue generating disease yeah hospitals require use drugs and radiation because they generate so much revenue from the insurance companies all right so one all has to go back so is it are we uh uh are we interested in keeping people alive longer yes only if it can be associated with revenue generation if it's not associated with revenue generation i'm sorry we have to sacrifice those cancer patients yeah there it is yeah you know i wonder if um you know just obviously i'm in australia at the moment so a there's a public and private system here but in in the public system obviously this is this is coming from the government and and it is and there are massive delays so it can actually take four and a half years for some uh someone to get into our clinic with uh like radiculopathy a compressed nerve in their spine that needs surgery for four and a half years is our current wait list for that so there are a lot of delays and there are a lot of issues but we deal with a lot of cancer as well and those get you know obviously uh treated right away because it's a life or death emergency but the you know the government really tries hard to not pay for anything that gets done and they and they put a lot of roadblocks in their way and i just wonder wouldn't this be something that would be attractive to them because this is this is eminently more uh cheaper than the actual standard uh treatments but i think that well you may have some ideas but i think maybe it's that a lot of a lot of hospitals and and systems around the world that that have a public model generally you know try to emulate the guidelines set in america in the private system with the with the insurance that so we're sort of driving things yeah you know you would think so you would think this would be the best thing for governments to you know cut their medical bills uh no no no no no no there's a force there's more power uh that's controlling this uh even though the governments would like to do this uh uh irb institutional review boards have shot down this so many times um they want to do standard of care first before they do metabolic therapy why well there's something else going on here um there's and again it has to do with the control of the entire medical system how what we call standard of care standard of care should have never been written in granite but it seems to have been written and granted in other words you can use metabolic therapy only after you demonstrate that conventional chemo and radiation don't work now for glioblastoma 99 of the time they don't work so you think that so why do we have to continue to uh push ineffective therapies and once we realize they don't work then we maybe we want to do metabolic therapy no no no you should do metabolic therapy first that's the number one do metabolic therapy first and then you'll be shocked at how you won't need toxic radiation and chemical chemicals and that is not what the system wants to hear period yeah um yeah well that that obviously needs to change somehow yeah well who's going to change it yeah right i mean well which you know the bottom line is you just keep treating patients with metabolic therapy and let the patients be the advocates of what's going on let them go out and tell people what they did why are you still alive how come you're not dead you should have been dead three years ago and you're out here you know working in your garden uh and he'll tell you those guys will be more than happy to tell you what they did yeah well that's the thing um not even to the extent that you're talking about actual you know treatment um modality with with diet and and drugs but i had a friend of mine who was diagnosed with uh glioblastoma multi-form about six years ago and and i had already been involved in this this sort of research and then seeing a lot of work uh from yourself and others and i just i just said hey look there's there's a lot of you know uh evidence here suggests that that at least being on a ketogenic diet is going to be very very beneficial and i sort of you know pitched a carnivore diet because that's that's uh you know my thing but she didn't do like a whole carnivore diet she did more keto but she had a lot more meat she cut out the carbs she stopped drinking and she's now six years still alive at five years she had an mri and she had no sign of disease unfortunately it did come back in her sixth year so she's sort of going undergoing a further debulking but five years and and her five-year mri was was clear that's um almost unheard of in with gps yeah well see those kinds of cases need to need to be written up and the pa the patient that we wrote up uh pablo kelly who has a website and talks about his survival uh he chose no standard of care just metabolic therapy and he was a carnivore on the carnivore kind of diet yeah um so so he's out now eight years and um his tumor is not going it's there he has a debulking surgery every three years um uh and no radiation or chemo he'll give you the full story about what very kind of a colorful guy from devon england um and he's out there and he's he used the carnivore uh procedure but no carbs you know he cut all that stuff out and he's still going fine he's had two children you know he was 26 when he was diagnosed lived a horrible uh lifestyle um you know as he said alcohol and drugs and bad food and all that kind of stuff and then of course when after his tumor he became very pristine in what he was doing and he's still doing fine but um yeah but i think we're seeing now that there's two things you need that we think need to happen number one uh avoiding the standard of care uh number two uh uh switching your entire diet lifestyle over to zero very low carbohydrate whether you do that with carnivore or whether you do it with plants you know you can you can do it with either or uh but and we developed the glucose ketone index calculator to allow uh people to know whether whether or not they're in a state of uh nutritional ketosis by blood markers you can do keto mojo blood glucose ketone meter so the pain the cancer patient knows and when pablo went off his diet a little bit he started the tumor started to grow again and you could see it on mri and immediately he threw himself back into a very low uh gki index and you could see the tumor stopped stopped growing it was very clear so uh the diet and and the cancer cells can't burn ketones or fats they only they only can burn glucose and glutamine so whatever you and there's no diet that will target glutamine um so one always says oh how am i go what am i going to eat to target glutamine glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in our body now it's i'm shocked that how long people can live with just ketogenic diets or these kinds of things but if we ever married those diets with the glutamine targeting drug dawn i think we could eliminate these tumors and the majority of people very quickly so we're not doing that we're not doing the very things we need to do to make cancer a very manageable disease without suffering great toxicity why are we not doing this because nobody knows about it they don't know it and the ones that are in charge don't want to believe it okay if you go to most of the oncology uh centers oh there's no evidence to support metabolic therapy if it were so important we would all know about it wrong you're not no you wouldn't know about it and there's a and and people don't want to you you're dealing with the with a meal ticket for an entire industry here let's be honest right yeah absolutely yeah and um so so with the dawn um so go into the to the the drug and diet uh cocktail so is this something you know obviously they're not letting us use this in humans but we've we've uh or you've done uh quite extensive animal models is that right yeah we've looked at it in a variety of metastatic and invasive brain cancers and things like this yeah i mean i mean all of these drugs i mean don was used in humans it was used in little kids with leukemia okay so it's not like it's a drug that's never been used on humans of course it's been used it's in malaria treatments there's a lot of ways that that drug has already been used but not for cancer okay so um and there's other of course that you don't think the pharmaceutical industry knows about glutamine targeting so what they do is they build drugs that that are not nearly as effective as dawn patent that drug and then throw that drug out on the cancer population never using keto with it so you get some therapeutic benefit but you're not going to get the full therapeutic benefit the the cancer can be managed with drug diet cocktails people need to know that we clearly showed how nutritional ketosis can facilitate the delivery of these drugs to to tumor cells three three times more that means you can lower the doses reduce the toxicity and increase the efficacy of the whole process so we know the framework we know how to manage cancer without toxicity the problem is it won't be used in the clinics for a variety of different reasons and the people themselves have to rise up and say i want metabolic therapy forget about all this crazy nukin and poisoning people and doing this kind of nutty stuff i mean it's it's not based on the by what we understand the biology of the disease to be so who's going to make the change the guys at the top medical schools know it's going to be the people themselves who who will benefit most from metabolic therapy the cancer patients will benefit most from metabolic therapy they need to understand this they need to rally they need to do some put pressure on your government officials and these kinds of things then we'll it will happen it's never going to happen when you're trying to convince big pharmacy and big medical schools that metabolic therapy is the way to go because it's not going to generate the replacement revenue yeah so you have to have something that's going to give replacement revenue but you want in my mind i want to see how many people can survive long term like you're like your friend like pablo kelly like many others who should have been dead a long time ago are living a hell of a lot longer with a higher quality of life what's wrong with that yeah why why is this why is this being resistant why is there resistance against this does that makes no sense to me right yeah yeah so especially something like cancer i mean like like if if there was ever something to rally behind i think i think cancer is it i think that you know any sort of uh anyone you talk to around the world like they always have sympathy for cancer and people that get it so i would i'd just be i'm just amazed that that these things aren't um well the other thing you have to keep in mind is that the term cure has been a very reactive kind of term and we never use that term uh cure can't we don't say we a metabolic therapy can cure cancer what metabolic therapy can do is allow the patient to live longer it's a management uh strategy you can manage the disease okay in other words you don't have to die so quickly you you you can live a lot longer i'm not saying you can cure how are we going to know if anybody's cured as i said okay if you're if you have cancer at your age you look very healthy uh suppose you get cancer and you manage it with metabolic therapy and you diet 99 from a heart attack well you obviously were cured from your cancer because it wasn't it didn't kill you so we don't know uh whether anybody is cured using metabolic therapy all we know is that they seem to live longer than their predicted in a higher quality of life what's wrong with that what is wrong with that scenario yeah and not being burned down by like the chemo and radiation as well yeah i mean let's be honest if don't forget we have we have millions of cancer survivors who have survived toxic radiation and chemo but their body pays a significant price yeah for that uh they're suffering from uh gastrointestinal problems nor psychiatric problems hormonal imbalances um microbiome disturbances i mean all kinds of things that make their life less less enjoyable less pleasurable because they were exposed to toxic poisons and toxic radiation this is stone age this this should not happen in today's uh day and age when we understand the biology of the disease very clearly and yet we're doing these crazy things to these poor people you know it doesn't make any sense to me i had a very good friend of mine that i that i grew up playing rugby with and he unfortunately contracted uh sarcoma in his sinuses probably when he was late 30s and he late 30s early 40s and very fit guy very active guy but you know and any and he went on and kept going he he struggled along with this for about three years one of the chemo agents that he used just completely destroyed his his nerves he became almost crippled from this just from from basically half a course of this chemotherapy and he and he stopped it and he just said even though the cancer was was responding well to it he just said look i i'm not gonna i don't want to survive cancer to be a and an invalid you know so i'm not gonna take that one no i i have hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of situations like this because i i get uh thousands of people emailing me and they always have a story and what i feel so bad about is they always contact me after they've been suffered through the standards of care and their stories are horrific i mean you can't torture human beings uh as well as as what what some of the standard of care does to people i don't even think waterboarding would have would be as bad as as some of the treatments they give these cancer patients yeah you know it's like this is tragic i mean i i it we can't laugh about it it's a it's a it's a tragedy of monumental proportions and we don't have to do this um you know some of the chemotherapies our colleagues in turkey use what we call a metabolically supported chemotherapy and they use the lowest doses of chemo together with nutritional ketosis which has rather really good good outcomes and they said they would prefer not to use any chemotherapy but they're forced to do it by the system so the system of treatment seems to have permeated all healthcare industries in in in societies throughout the world um you go to india i was shocked at how they love radiation over there radiate everybody over there or any kind of a cancer i think i figured that they might culture and i thought their various cultures would be more open to metabolic therapy but there seems to be a lock hold on cancer treatment throughout the world um they have to do this radiation in chemo and now it's immunotherapy you know the problem the problem car t immunotherapy such a costly and um very complicated uh what are they doing why are they doing this all they have to do is pull the plug on the glucose and glutamine while under nutritional ketosis and you don't have to spend 265 000 to have your cancer managed yeah you see what i'm saying and it comes right down to this whole concept of what is cancer is it a genetic disease or is it a mitochondrial metabolic disease and you know once you realize that it's a mitochondrial metabolic disease most of the treatments we're doing to the cancer patients make no sense it's not based on the fundamental underlying what the disease is yeah so i don't know what i have what we have to do to get the word out but um somebody has to know about this otherwise we're just going to continue to kill these four patients year in and year out yeah let's be honest in the united states alone i don't know what it is in australia in the united states we are over 1 600 people are dying every single day from cancer over one thousand six hundred when i was in china it's eight thousand one hundred because their population is large as a matter of fact in china cancer has replaced heart disease as the number one killer of their of their population jesus right so what the hell is going on here and they're always saying oh you're making major breakthroughs i said where's the breakthroughs you want a breakthrough you should drop the the death rate there's no breakthroughs it's it's it's business as usual more and more cancer deaths no accountability i'll tell you we're always running around raising money for cancer patients you know let's do the 5k run for breast cancer let's do this what do they do with all the money that you get for raising the they give it to the people who think cancer's a genetic disease keeping the the system in place i mean it's nuts we got we got to start wise enough and people have to start asking where the hell is the accountability for the money that i'm raising the only people who get healthy are the ones running and swimming to raise money for the cancer do a bike ride you get healthy doing a bike ride but that you raise the money and you then you poison and irradiate the people that you're raising the money for i mean it doesn't make any sense does it no no and that's the thing too you know uh a good point that you raised i mean cancer rates are you know getting worse you know like you know cancer eclipsing heart disease in in china uh as the number one killer you know i i sort of looked at some of the the gross figures uh in the u.s since and i was looking at you know since we sort of overhauled our our diet after the 1977 usda declaration that cholesterol is going to cause heart disease and you know we reduced our uh fat cholesterol intake by about 30 percent increa or reduced red meat by about 33 and increase fruits and vegetables 30 40 increase carbs increase sugar all these things since then there's been roughly an overall uh tripling in cancer rates in the uh in the united states you know that cannot be genetic you know or no anyone who studies populations you know knows very well that that it's not possible uh to do that in a limited number of generations like that so yeah that means there's something in the environment that has changed and has affected this well here's the other other statistic that's often used to say we're making uh major advances in cancer um the anti-smoking camp that was started probably around 1990 1991 uh smoking cancer was associated with smoking so if people stop smoking so you use the 1991 rate of increase compared to today and you say look at how much how fewer cancer patients we have today based on 1991 data yeah because everybody was smoking and dying in 1990 not everyone many people were smoking and dying so but but if you look at the number of dead bodies uh accumulating every year the number of dead bodies accumulate at the same percentage as the population growth so every year the number of dead people from cancer goes up american cancer society has all the numbers they all publish it every year so this is a well documented event that cancer death numbers of dead people increase every year you don't use a 1991 rate to predict how many you're saying oh if we continued to smoke in 2022 uh we would have had a lot more dead cancer pay yeah of course you would you stop smoking so the only the only the major advance was prevention we stopped smoking and therefore reduced lung cancer is still the number one killer but it would have killed a hell of a lot more if we didn't stop smoking but the treatments you have to look at what are any new treatments that reduce cancer deaths and the answer is zero so it's it's a tragedy no matter how you look at it you know um and yet the poor people in the hospital suffering immensely you know hair falling out i said anytime you see a bald cancer patient that person was treated by someone who doesn't understand the biology of the disease they're working on well you shouldn't be bald you're trying to kill cancer cells what the hell while your hair falls out oh the hair and the cancer cells share they're both growing but you don't want to kill all your gut cells your hair cells that tells me you have no idea so they use these terms precision medicine well how in the health of your hair falls out with precision medicine you know or other adverse off target oh so if it's so precise how come we have all these off-target effects on the person's body i mean this is such a bunch of crap i mean when are they going to wise up to understand what's going on here it just doesn't make any sense yeah um you know that's another thing too uh something that you you point out um is that in a cancer cell in a cancer like a tumor uh we get taught in medical school obviously you get these genetic changes and then this thing just starts propagating that and it's basically monoclonal uh but that's not what we see we don't see that in tumors we see uh certain ones that have certain hallmarks and changes and and increase you know mitosis but a lot of these things just look normal they just look like normal tissue and yet they behave as cancer um that that sort of to your point you know is uh you know if these all have varying genetics why are they all acting the same you know that that definitely looks like a downstream effect as opposed to a cause of effect you know oh yeah absolutely absolutely the now the other thing that we're you're 100 but every one of the cells in that in that tumor is fermenting so they're all fermenting but they all have different genetic characteristics but they're all fermenting so why are we so concerned about targeting the genetic mutations that differ in every single cell of the body when the when the tumor cells are all fermenting that's that's the power of the somatic mutation theory if the somatic mutation theory says cancer is caused by genetic mutations mindlessly we go out and try to target all these different genetic mutations but on the mitochondrial metabolic theory says that they're all fermenting so but the field has not yet accepted the mitochondrial metabolic theory as the origin of cancer as warburg had originally threw him under the bust when watson and cricks first discovered the dna structure everybody ran off like the lemmings over the cliff chasing the the dna mutations you know it's like the dog chasing his tail now we've come to realize that all that genomic millions and billions of dollars spent on all this genomic stuff now what we're finding though which is very now interesting is there are certain spontaneous mutations that actually interfere with glucose and glutamine metabolism so we call these therapeutic mutations they're actually god's gift to the cancer patient by a rare event nobody knows people like pablo kelly has an idh1 mutation okay it's called idh1 idh1 mutation produces a metabolite called 2-hydroxyglutarate and we have found that two we and others have found that 2-hydroxyl glutamate interferes with the glutamineolysis pathway driving the energy of the tumor and also the glycolysis pathway building the raw material so the tumor can grow so the mutation itself is acting like a drug that can target two of the pathways driving the cancer can you believe this and people that have this mutation are known to live twice as long as the people who don't have the mutation the problem is even the people with the mutation are given radiation and chemo which which reduces the ability of the of the very therapeutic mutation to work it's unbelievable yeah you know if you know what i'm talking about so if you don't do standard of care and are fortunate enough to have this therapeutic mutation you can live a long time and and and this is the pablo pablo has the therapeutic mutation goes on a carnivore ketogenic diet and every three years has had the bulking surgery because this indolent tumor just hangs around but he's never used the dawn to target and kill off the rest of it so so we have a strategy i think but it's really when you understand that the biology of the disease you can't help it be bewildered and overwhelmed by the by the new information and how easy it is to get rid of cancer or manage it let's put it that way i would say get rid of it but certainly and manage it it becomes a clear uh strategy it's just that more and more people need to know about this and and once they know that there'll be a stampede for this yeah what are some of the uh cancers that you found that are that are more susceptible and sensitive to this sort of uh metabolic treatment well the the the other the the alternative question is which which cancers have been have i found to be resistant okay to this because they're all almost everyone is susceptible um every lung cancer that we've looked every breast colon bladder kidney they're all they're all very very prone they all have to ferment so um you know and blood can't all the blood cancers are all driven by glutamine they're in the blood you know so so you're you're talking about all the major cancers you know here's the situation there are reports in the scientific literature showing some mouse uh a genetically engineered mouse that has a genetically engineered lung cancer that doesn't respond to metabolic therapy now the problem is is we don't know any human being walking around the planet that has been genetically engineered the same way as this mouse has been genetically engineered nor does that does that person have a genetically engineered lung tumor so until we can find that person and ask that individual why they're not responding to metabolic therapy i don't know but you know all of our all of our uh mouse models that we found all have naturally arising cancers okay in other words the cancer arose naturally in the natural host this is the the best model that you can use because because it's the same kind of cancer that would be found in dogs if a dog cancer arising naturally in the doghouse a human cancer arising naturally in the human host those are the kinds of cancers that respond to metabolic therapy some of these genetically engineered things are not responsive in some ways what reasons i have no no clue i don't know why a mouse that's been so genetically engineered with both the the host and the cancer doesn't respond to metabolic therapy but i think i'll leave that for the next uh and the next uh 10 000 years let somebody figure that one out but who cares about that who gives a rat's ass about a mouse that's been genetically engineered it doesn't respond to metabolic therapy right yeah let's let's focus our attention like dogs for example they respond remarkably well dogs with cancer cancer kills more dogs it's like the number one killer of domestic dogs the wolf never has rarely there's very i don't think there's been a cancer in a very rare in a wolf um because they're eating natural they're eating their natural diet in the wild you know they're not pounding down big burgers or jelly filled donuts and this kind of thing uh and then if you go to the zoo and ask the zookeeper why are you feeding your chimpanzees you know uh their natural you're giving them their natural diet why don't you let them eat jelly filled donuts and pizza and drink coca-cola and what the zoo keeper told me down here at the franklin park zoo in boston oh that would be animal cruelty animal abuse and i'm saying what the hell man we're 98 similar to the chimpanzee protein right let's take chips and put them in an american diet from the time they're they're weaned weaning take chimpanzees let's take 100 chimps from the time they're weaning and give them only what we eat right not their natural diet what do you think is going to happen cancer dementia type 2 diabetes obesity all the same that we have would be seen but you can't do that because it's animal abuse yeah yeah well and that's it you know they have the signs said you know do not feed the animals this isn't their natural food they get very sick and then we put that same nonsense into our mouths and and don't think that anything bad is going to happen you know no we get very sick yeah yeah and the food industry and the pharmaceutical industries are both linked i had one of my students go and look at the investigation between the two organizations like the the big food industries producing all these foods that are poorly nutritionists and full of highly processed carbs make you sick and on the other end of the other spectrum the pharmaceutical companies will give you drugs and therapies to try to uh make you uh healthy yeah yeah what an industry right it's unbelievable it's the draw it drives the economy so i guess we have to be happy because we're all you know uh many of us are doing well based on the revenue generation from these two industries overlapped with each other um but you know i think that prevention is one thing uh people who know about this certainly can even otto warburg said you can't get cancer if you're if your mitochondria remain healthy so uh and that's true you can't get cancer if your mitochondria remain healthy that's prevention but we live in a society where it's hard not to eat you know i okay you i saw you cooking the giant uh tomahawk rib eye okay well i i think that's wonderful and i would eat it but also with a big baked potato and a big loaf of bread with butter slathered all over it right yeah yeah and a big pile of unhealthy vegetables yeah yeah i mean everybody would go down that path but eating the tomahawk ribeye by itself well i don't know about that but i i certainly would certainly do something like that yeah yeah no it's um that's funny um i was gonna say too one of the um one of the things i thought you know exactly as you say that uh you know we don't see cancers in in wild animals and we don't and we don't see them in the zoo you know everyone says that well you know animals in the wild they probably don't live long enough uh to get cancer but that you know that never explains animals in the zoo or they're or they're active and they're running around but an animal in the zoo is sitting in a pennant's whole life and they live you know out there their natural life they don't get these cancers and the you know the cancer rates in dogs and cats and domestic animals domestic pets these have all increased uh dramatically you know since the uh you know inception of of uh packaged dog and cat food yeah yeah absolutely absolutely yeah and the zucchi because the zeus maintain a very nutritious diet they have they have a staff of veterinarians that monitor the the diet they're so carefully monitored this yeah these these zoo primates the primates the the gorillas and the chimps uh are very uh monitored very very carefully all the time uh nutritional balances you know uh that's why they said if we gave them uh big jelly filled donuts and pizza uh they would they would hammer it there there is uh a family of chimps that live with the humans they're on the web they're it's a chimp a group of chimps that live with humans you should see these chips go wild when they get the jelly sandwiches oh they're banging on the table they're they're they're getting all excited eating jelly sandwiches that's awful yeah so look at it it's a you can go on the web there's a family of jim there's a bunch of chimps that live with a human family and they like to talk about what they're the chimps are pounding down all this stuff loving it bang banging on the table yeah you know yeah captain crunch just going after it oh i mean you know i mean who wouldn't you could drop off your box of donuts into the into the pen with the chimps down there they'd be all over the donuts you know uh um and the other guys that weren't getting the donuts would be all upset yeah so yeah it's humorous it just shows you we we as a species have used the technology the stuff the sweetness in our evolutionary past was only rare seasonal but our technology has now made it permanent so we can get this sweet stuff all the time yeah and we like it i mean uh we evolved to like sweets so it's everything has been carefully developed to tweak all of our taste buds to make us want to eat more of this even though we put ourselves at risk for cancer dementia heart disease diabetes all this kind of stuff we're willing to still eat the foods that are putting us in that situation because they taste so good yeah you know yeah and to you into your previous point about uh you know the sort of unholy alliance between food and farm and pharmacy um dr robert lustig of ucsf he you know mentioned one of his uh one of his books that the if i can remember the numbers correctly the sugar industry makes about 1.3 trillion dollars a year you know gross figures and the um like what we spend just treating the metabolic issues that are derived from sugar consumption is about 2.4 trillion dollars so you know this is a massive massive amount i mean that's the entire federal budget you know yes on eating and and supporting uh sugar addiction yeah of course but if a politician came out uh and said listen uh our health uh health uh industry budget is crippling their nations it's actually uh causing a uh a crisis right putting us at risk so we're all going to go back and do paleolithic eating okay we're going to eat tomahawk rib eyes yeah we're going to cut down on our carcinogenic vegetables how long do you think that guy's going to remain in office right yeah he'll vote his ass out right away yeah that people don't you know but you know when when when you have the cancer you then all of a sudden oh your whole world begins to change you know how come i wasn't told about this and all this well we're telling you now do you want to make the choice or not you know it's just yeah so with uh glioblastoma um what are you finding um you know what in in your animal models what are you finding to be the results when you put them on this uh you know the dawn and the restrictive dietary ketosis how much of a benefit are you seeing in in those oh yeah we're getting three four times longer survival wow and then we have metastatic cancer one of the things we've done um um because we take these phleoblastoma cells and and we identified the metastatic cancer as being a type of uh this plastic macrophage and in the gbm if you look at glioblastoma many of the so-called mesenchymal cells the cells that have this mesenchymal phenotype are the most highly invasive because gbm is a why you could call it multiform they don't call it multiforme anymore they call it glioblastoma but they did call it multiform because of all the different kinds of cells that you would see in there the mesenchymal kind of cell uh is the most invasive and when we took those cells out of the brain of the mouse and put them in the flank they metastasized they spread all over the body and then we found out that all metastatic cancers have macrophage characteristics so we know that we know the nature of the metastatic cell it's a type of a macrophage loves glutamine and glucose so uh when we put them in the flank uh they spread all over the body and we use bioluminescence imaging we can image the tumor cells and see how much they've spread through the through the body then we we call these a term that you know we call them terminal mice they're they're they're going to die in a couple of days you can see the heavy breathing you can see their immobility then we hit him with our diet drug cocktail and within three or four days these guys are back walking around like they they they never had anything but they still have cancer but it's been managed then you ask okay uh we took these guys from from death's doorstep normally they would be dead by 30 days if we did nothing or just continue to feed them the high carbohydrate standard lab chow but then we got them now to live uh over over four and a half months uh five times longer than they normally would have we haven't published this yet but we plan to publish it once we have the all the conditions of the drug diet cocktails uh uh defined we're seeing it for pediatric cancer in the mice uh because we're doing the same thing to these little kids that we do to the adults you know we hit them with high-dose chemo we hate them with high radiation we have we do the same toxic things to little kids as we do to adults and and we can take these pediatric models that we've developed here at boston college and we can keep these mice alive so much longer and in such a higher quality of life we know we can get the same results in the in the pediatric clinic as we see with these natural uh pediatric brain tumors in in the mice we know we can keep people alive with advanced metastatic cancer if we do drug diet cocktails at the right time don't interfere with this don't forget none of our mice uh we do radiation we never do radiation on any of our mice so the results that we get uh they say oh you just get all those great results in the mice you wouldn't see that in the human well maybe because we don't irradiate the mice so um if we radiate the mice maybe we'll see what we get in the human i i don't know um because we're not we don't plan to do that you know and i don't plan to irradiate why am i a radiate now i'm not saying radiation is bad for everything because i think if you have a tumor in a particular location it's well defined it's not it's not metastatic radiation could potentially cure that kind of a tumor so we don't want to throw all these things under the bust but we did temozolomide with metabolic therapy and we showed that it was no better than a temozolomide is the primary uh uh chemo for brain cancer and uh we showed that it was no better than metabolic therapy uh used with hyperbaric oxygen so and the mice never got sick with our metabolic therapy they got sick with the temozolomide so we tried temozolomide with metabolic therapy we put we put them all together and uh yeah they did good but they didn't do any better than metabolic therapy by itself without the sickness so i'm saying why are we doing all this stuff why why are we doing what we're doing because temozolomide generates huge revenue for the hospital so uh we're not interested in the revenue generation here we're interested in how long we can keep animals alive with metastatic advanced stage four cancers yeah and uh there's a different we have a different uh outcome different different perspective on looking at this whole thing but yeah so we have we have uh achieved levels of success that are beyond anything we would have ever expected uh without toxicity and that's diet drug cocktails that will well hammer and we published a big paper on this called the press pulse therapeutic strategy with some of my clinician colleagues and it outlines the framework for how we would treat human cancers with the press pulse therapeutic strategy the diet is the press and then we use strategic drugs with the diet to pulse them not chronically use them but pulse them and that degrades slowly degrades the tumor while enhancing the health and vitality of the normal cells and we think that many cancer patients come into the clinic they not only have cancer they often have diabetes they often have some other uh comorbidities associated with the fact that they have cancer in our metabolic press cult strategies we not only manage the cancer reducing it significantly but we also get rid of the diabetes we get rid of the hypertension we get rid of the other uh comorbidities that these patients also have had clearly linking all of these chronic diseases to a common underlying uh provocative situation which is nutritional imbalance and uh and and diets that provoke and treatments that provoke the growth of these tumors and persist on these kinds of conditions so clearly you know it's it it once you understand the biology of this of the problem the solutions become much much more clear and logical yeah i was going to say too about the radiation obviously we do use this in the pediatric populations uh it can be it can be absolutely devastating to those kids i think that if i were in a position you know even not knowing you know the things that we're talking about now i have thought about this i don't think i would ever let my child get uh you know radiation for for a tumor you might you uh you might not have a choice yeah you might not have a choice because if that child is beyond is lower than 16 years of age or 18 that system determines what you should do to that child oh really right the system determines the parents are taken out of the equation unless remember they had the woman went to mexico to savor the life of her child the the the the system controls what you do to that child so even if you said the standard of care involves radiation and chemo for that child it's very hard to break the system they'll have you arrested as a as parental neglect yeah that's how that's what i'm talking about this system is very powerful yeah that's a that's definitely too much i've you know i've seen kids uh who have grown up after getting uh radiation like this uh they it completely stunts their mental development and and so you know where wherever they were it's probably damaged them from that point say they're three they probably damaged them from three and then they never developed past that and so you have this person in this 30 year old body with you know the mind of a five-year-old uh or less and it's it's absolutely tragic to see that i just like that and at more track it doesn't have to happen yeah exactly that doesn't have to happen that's the tragedy that's the tragedy that child could have been rescued uh i'm not saying the child could have been cured but if the child lives to be the same age they they would be cognitively uh intact not not cognitively challenged yeah and we you know we talk about you know quality of life and we do give people the choice you know dude is this something that you want to do you know given the fact that this is going to be a pretty rough road do you want to just live out your you know months or or whatever uh at a better standard of living or you know you know go for the go for the gold uh you know i i think that especially when you're talking about about a child who could potentially have such a devastating uh damage to their brain and their development i for me i i would never want that personally and i don't think i would ever want that that for my child either no and but and no one does but this is the way this is the way it is and um you often see the child uh if you look at their they they're given such high dose steroids yeah they get the big moon face um and uh you know the steroids are driving blood sugars to extremely high levels and and then once you see that phenotype the big moon face whether it's in a child or an adult with a glioblastoma you know they're finished you know that's that that you know that the therapy itself is killing those people and and and that's the tragedy and and i what i just said to you in that statement that i just made is not known to the majority of the cancer of practitioners in the field they are under the impression that this is helping their patient this is the gap in knowledge that needs to be closed we cannot continue to do this toxic therapy on these poor people whether it's a child or an adult it speaks to the lack of knowledge on the part of the field treating a disease okay it has to change it has to change otherwise we have to continue to see this these tragedies one after another not only in america throughout the world you're in australia they're doing the same thing down there as we do here in england germany japan they're all doing the same thing it's a it's a worldwide tragedy and i it will only change once come to realize that cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disease with uh we could we could make it a dent in this disease so quick if people knew what i what i just said you know it's the problem is either they they don't want to know about it they don't want to hear about it they don't want to talk about it for various reasons yeah um on that on that note uh what are you mentioned there's some there are some uh clinics and and centers that are using this uh as a model where where are these guys at and how are they getting away with it well well then i i think there's small clinics um you know that have um uh uh you know patients have to be all they have to be offered an alternative you know right now if you go to the main hospitals like dana farber md anderson you know sloan kettering and moffitt came in or center or wherever where else wherever else they have these major cancer centers you're not offered they're not offering metabolic therapy um offer metabolic therapy see with the patients and the problem is of course if you're going to be dana farber md anderson you want to do metabolic there's no one there to really that knows what to do um so how do you you have to have a staff of professionals that know what to do and how to do it okay without that knowledge base and the young people going through medical schools in the oncology area they're not trained to do metabolic therapy you know um so where is the training coming from uh i work with uh people we have written a protocol to treat cancer patients based on metabolic therapy with uh miriam calamian a world-renowned expert on keto for cancer and diet for this she's helped a lot of cancer patients we we write a treatment protocol can it be used it will not be used in the major hospitals of course because you're you're doing it as an alternative to radiation and chemo and immunotherapies and these other kinds of things but it can be done in smaller clinics and smaller clinics that are not so yolked by the system uh to do what they have to do and the goal is to keep people alive and have the people themselves tell everyone that this is what i did guy town obama's on the web uh overcome his uh stage four prostate cancer using metabolic approaches so you're getting more and more vocal advocates that are telling others that listen do metabolic now is it easy don't i don't want to let people think that oh doing metabolic therapy is a cakewalk because a lot of the success rides on your shoulders how compliant are you to not eat carbohydrates which can be very hard for a lot of people yeah it was um that's one of the things you know i see in in clinic here in neurosurgery you know we get we get these people with the gbms it's this devastating uh diagnosis obviously i think i think every single patient that i've ever uh done a consultation with and we do this once a week we have everyone come in with all the new diagnoses and i don't think there's a single person that hasn't asked me okay what can i do how can i do this what can i do they really want to be a part of this they don't want to feel uh helpless like this is just out of their control and i remember getting really upset uh at another at another physician who um you know basically said you know they asked some sort of like you know well should i stop eating sugar should i should i stop drinking alcohol or what should i do and they're like you know what you probably don't have that long anyway so just do whatever you want and and i was i was furious at that um yeah the person who looked so defeated i was like yeah i guess i guess it just doesn't matter i was like of course it matters it absolutely matters you have control you have you know you have a say in this you have a dog in this fight you are able to affect your own course of your life and uh and and just seeing their eyes like literally hope just rising in their eyes and i know i try to i try to mitigate that because you know this isn't this isn't good any way you cut it but you know i i tell them i tell them about your work i point them in in the direction of your material and and studies and i just say hey look i'm not telling you that this is going to cure anything it's not going to stop anything but there's a lot of evidence that says that if you do this this will help and like here just you know go to the source yeah see what you think you're 100 correct about that and i i can't emphasize that more than than what you just said because i see people once they understand about the glucose ketone index that they are measuring their own blood every day not every day but every other day or whatever using a little meter and they're collecting the numbers and they know what direction those numbers have to go in for that therapy to be effective they they get really motivated they now know that they are able to do something they are in control of their own destiny and they work very very hard and they become extremely motivated this is what pablo did so when he knew what numbers he had to achieve in order to put pressure on the growth of that tumor he knew he was in control and you give the patient now power they have the power and they get motivated to know what they need to do you're absolutely right nobody should ever be told there's nothing more we can do these people can do especially at the beginning especially at the beginning of their disease and then they then they have to know that it's a it's a long haul it doesn't have like oh i can do it you know i'm really good at this for a month no no you're gonna have to you're gonna have to bite the bullet on this so so uh and power it through until until you have achieved control of that of that growth the growth does not control you control the growth yeah and the patient can do that with the proper motivation with the proper training so i can't emphasize more of what you just said you've got to let these patients know that they're part of the fight and that and they can control this and and you'd be surprised how how much longer these people live in a higher quality of life and when they i don't want to say they all pass but i i've had i've had people tell me or their loved ones told me that uh this guy fought the fight he was uh felt so good about himself and even though he may not have made it all the way he lived two three times longer than he was supposed to live at a much higher quality of life and never had to suffer and die in these painful situations and then there's many people who are still fighting the fight and should have died a long time ago and they're still they're still on and i tell if i had the drugs that work with the diet uh we would have we would be able to settle this in a much more uh uh defined period of time so uh yeah there's a lot of hope for the future the i would say the future of cancer is bright not bleak you know uh it's a whole new strategy and and and i think that that the future if cancer we can we can keep this disease managed and and people are going to emerge in a healthier state and feel much better about themselves that's my that's my view i base it on my understanding of the biology of the disease and 30 years of research in the field looking at this problem so uh and publishing all these papers and uh and this is the way i see it so i i think i think i think the future is is far brighter than it should be uh than people make it out to be yeah good yeah and i i yeah i agree with you and just and just trying to get this out there and let people know that they actually have a say in this and then they can actually affect the course of this disease they're not just out of control and just at the whims of the chemo and radiation but they actually have have something to say in this as well um i was gonna say when did you get uh sort of focus in this line of research i know that when you were doing when you were at yale you were doing research onto seizures and preventing seizures with with ketosis which is you know which is something that you know i've looked into and it's like we've been using this for nearly 90 years to treat refractory seizures and it's something that almost no neurologist that i know of use and i've seen a lot of people with epilepsy have spoken to them i've always asked them you know have they ever spoken to you about your diet not a single one has said yes which which just blows my mind because it's such an such a simple thing it may not be easy to implement but it is straightforward and it has a lot of evidence behind it yeah well don't forget uh uh what i was doing yale at that time yale was one of the leaders in the field of epilepsy research gilbert glasser was the chair of the department i had written many many distinguished books and papers on on epilepsy and they told me uh because i was working on ganglioside biochemistry at the time too looking at different disorders of lipid metabolism but they said if you want to stay at yale you better work on something to do with epilepsy so we were mapping genes map genes for epileptic uh seizures and oh everybody was excited map genes and because the idea was if you map the gene you could figure out the product and you can make a treatment for that product the problem is and then i realized that well that didn't always always do the same kind of chemicals and things all the time why don't we try keto i i didn't do ketogenic diet until i came to boston i tried to get a grant at yale uh but they said out nobody's interested in ketogenic diets for epilepsy and we have all these drugs but then jim abrams of of uh the movie industry uh produces the film first do no harm with meryl streep and his son charlie had epilepsy and he started the charlie foundation and he brought together a lot of people in the epilepsy field to look at why are we not using ketogenic diets to manage epilepsy when it was known since 1921 by wilder at mayo clinic why are we not doing this so uh one of my students went out to the meeting because we were still doing looking at epilepsy and come back and said hey listen we should put our mice on ketogenic diets and sure enough we mapped all these genes but the thing of it is the diet blocked the seizures it was really quite an interesting thing yeah and then calorie restriction um uh was even more powerful along with ketogenic diets and and then uh we were working on the gangliosides for brain cancer we were doing a lot of work on brain cancer and then we said uh why don't we see if the diet works on brain cancer and then i said oh my god you know this is unbelievable what's going on here then we discovered otto warburg had said this many many years ago yeah you know we know that the tumors can't burn ketones for energy because they're mitochondria defective they need glucose so the glucose is low ketones are elevated wow makes perfect sense otto warburg was right so then send us off into a into a better understanding of how we manage cancer metabolically coming from our understanding of how ketogenic diets work on epileptic seizures and actually we still don't know the mechanism by which ketogenic diets block epilepsy because it's a very complicated brain wiring uh scenario that has to be has to be looked into but it became crystal clear as how this diet could stop cancer growth or restrict cancer growth and the fact is that we have tens of thousands of little kids around the world using ketogenic diets every day to manage their seizures yet when you talk about it in cancer they talk oh it could hurt the kid it could hurt the patient it could hurt this oh the toxic effects of ketogenic diet what are you kidding me we have thousands of little kids doing ketogenic diets for epilepsy and and nobody's talking about that but when you take a a little kid with cancer oh no it's terribly toxic it's nutritionally impact what are you nuts yeah compared to radiation and chemo you're telling me that ketogenic diet is more harmful than radiation and chemo yeah i mean give me a break yeah so uh um i mean this is the the absurdity of dealing so yeah we we have we came to this state where we are through a long circuitous path not knowing where any of this would have ever ever taken us but we were aware enough of the underlying mechanisms of action to know what we were doing why we were doing it and how it works now the big challenge is getting the word out to people and seeing more and more success stories of using this now jethro you at cedars-sinai in los angeles has a big trial and ketogenic diet for glioblastoma and he's getting spectacular results more than he would have ever imagined but and that's still with upfront standard of care and he knew he and i know i said if you took away that radiation and chemo your results would probably be even more spectacular you know so it's just it takes the time for the system to come to adjust and realize what's happening here there there is a clear mechanism of action it's a very clear mechanism of action yeah so uh it just takes time that's that's all but i i feel that this time is being uh wasted and we're sacrificing all these poor kids and adults and cancer and it's just that's the tragedy that this doesn't have to happen and yet it's happening yeah um that sort of uh just you know raised the question so these damaged mitochondria obviously this is this is precipitating this this issue can that ever reverse or i mean is it obviously there can always be a point of no return but does that ever come back um yeah well uh that was one of the big that was one of the big things that i did when i when i bundled together all the nuclear mitochondrial transfer experiments that were done in animal animal systems over decades all independent of each other done by some of the best developmental biologists in the field and i spoke to many some of these individuals so if you take i if you take the nucleus of the tumor cell that has all the mutations that are supposedly drivers and you put that drop that nucleus into a new cytoplasm you get uh growth regulation not growth dysregulation and sometimes you can form a whole frog or a mouse uh from the the the nucleus of a tumor cell so you replaced essentially the bad mitochondria in other words you put that nucleus into a cytoplasm with fresh mitochondria and that those new mitochondria are able to re-regulate the growth and development despite the continued presence of the so-called driver gene mutations that we're supposed to i mean this is this is the hardest evidence you can say against this gene theory so and if you do the reverse if you take the normal nucleus and drop it into a cytoplasm that has cancerous mitochondria mitochondria that the the the cell will either die or form dysregulated uh cancer cells so this was clear evidence getting back to your question um can we revert uh cancer by putting new model it's called mitochondrial therapy actually um and you know i think that's gonna come in the future i i think it's so it's so uh new that eventually we will be able to use maybe replace but you know i i don't want to at this point say let's see if we can uh restore the growth regulation of a cancer cell by putting new mitochondria i think it's better at this point to kill them off uh get rid of them uh put them in a lot a growth lock hold uh rather than trying to re-educate them in the event you get recidivism and and we don't want that so i i mean everything is but i think mitochondrial therapy for the future is going to be really exciting and interesting but i don't think we're there yet so let's let's let's work with what we can do and make a real big difference and then we'll move forward uh with these newer newer kinds of things for the future um but right now let's just put a lock hold on these cancer cells and keep people alive in a healthier state and that means eating tomahawk ribeyes i think i think you'll find a number of people that would buy on to that yeah and and you know that's me you know just that you know that that experiment that you spoke of you know you know taking the nucleus and then putting it into a new cytoplasm and the mitochondria and showing that you have all these genetic changes and it doesn't behave as cancer and you take the mitochondria and put them in and it does behave as cancer and that's qed as far as i'm concerned yeah but it's still so the response by the oncology field is they don't want to talk about it they don't want to look at it and they don't and they don't want to hear about it so so you put that that's because it's so devastating to an entire industry that uh once once that becomes more widely recognized yeah and it's been repeated over and over all different different kinds of models um so what's the holdup yeah what is the holdup here yeah somebody has to scratch their head and say what why why do we continue to persist with therapies that put patients at risk for all kinds of health diseases when we when we have a solution or a better a better approach to management than we currently have what is the hold up here [Laughter] yeah so so if someone were to you know have cancer now and and uh you know what would what would be the you know the best side obviously you know ketogenic or even carnivore but you know eliminating that out what ratio are they looking for um uh to get and like what what is so the best way for people to manage this at home if they don't have access to one of these uh clinics that are um popping up well that's that you see as i said in the letters that i sent to people you know i'm not a physician i can't tell you what to do and what not to do all i can do is provide you with uh information knowledge from published papers and and observations and i'll let the physicians in the clinics uh treat the patients you know we know what we need to do as i said the first now a lot of people cannot do only fasting because it's too too much of a shock the brain is addicted to glucose and it's it's just as difficult to get off glucose it is get off heroin alcohol and nicotine uh and these kinds of things but the body the body can adjust to the change so you will have withdrawal symptoms but what we realized what we realized is that if the patient were to gradually transition to a zero carbohydrate diet for several weeks even that can be difficult for some patients for some individuals but it's not as much of a jump to do a water only i tried it man it go cold turkey on on on carbs is really really tough i mean i mean i mean you start to you can smell stuff cooking like blocks away you know it's it's unbelievable you know so but it's too it's too hard and and so what we've learned is that patients can transition to water-only fasting after a couple of weeks uh on on on on zero carb diets and you know with meat um uh no carbs at all because you have vegetables we're not we're not uh as opposed as you might be uh but if we can get an organic if we can get an organic a grow the vegetables in your backyard using manure and these kinds of things but but but i tell you then the transition to water only fasting for a few days bring those blood sugars down bring the ketones up get into the new diet state then you hit him with the drugs uh the the drug like don and and some of the other uh drugs and ben does all these parasite medications man they're powerful yeah oh damn so uh um uh yeah you hit with a embendazole uh they they target some of the metabolic pathways that the cancer cells need okay so so all this stuff is uh cheap now here's the interesting thing and bendazole was really cheap it's a parasite medication right yeah for worms some sort of worms and and uh yeah you can get the pills over in india for 50 cents a tablet but now when we realized in the united states they work on cancer it's three hundred dollars a tablet oh yeah you tell me where you tell me what's with the drive in this industry it's not helping it's it's a revenue generation so we call that school mark you know the guy martin scarely the most hated man in america who made the epi pens like eight hundred dollars when these guys remember that guy yeah he took advantage of the system because he could everybody hated the guy but you know the pharmaceutical industry there's the same thing they just don't broadcast it's called schorrell you squirrelly the price of all these things you know you can make a buck on it's terrible right it's it's it's really despicable behavior no it is yeah but that's the way that's the business of america right the business is what calvin cooley said the business of america's business right so so so but you know these are the drugs you can get drugs on the cheap uh as long as you know how to use them um you put them together with diet drug combinations and you can get a really good powerful uh management of cancer uh but you have to have knowledgeable people they have to know doses timing and scheduling and this is all quite quite doable uh the framework was already there we published the framework so people are willing to know how to do this they're willing to take it and so cancer patients should be seen they can sure they can do a lot of it themselves as long as they're educated and told what to do and how to do it and then you have non-invasive imaging technology that can monitor their cancer to see whether or not it's growing whether or not it's stabilized or whether or not it's still there or not so we don't need to be taking punch biopsies and doing all this crazy stuff to what are you doing biopsies for everybody's oh i gotta have a biopsy of my cancer why oh i don't know if it's malignant well if it's malignant you should never take a punch biopsy you could spread it all over the damn body right yeah and if it's a benign what the hell you sticking a benign tumor for right yeah so they want to get a gene profile and the cells that come out of your tumor to tell you what kind of a a new drug a new toxic drug that will target that mutation but the damn cells are using glucose and glutamine why don't you target that before you stick the tumor i mean every everything we're doing is like back ass forward so um yeah you know it's it's uh you got to know what to do how to do it educate people educate the practitioners and things will begin to change you have to change can't continue to do what we're doing yeah no i completely agree um professor sifri i'm i'm so appreciative of your time i don't i don't want to take uh your whole day um thank you so much for coming on i really appreciate it it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you i've been referencing your work and pointing people towards you uh for a number of years now and i i really uh really appreciate this uh opportunity to speak with you so thank you very much well thank you and i and i hope uh some of this information uh can help people well i think yeah you know and our on our support that we have um comes from philanthropy and private foundations so obviously there are people who recognize uh what we are doing and what we are saying and the strategies because they know there are good people who say you're doing the right thing let me support what you're doing because it's very hard to get the federal government uh granting systems through the national cancer institute when everybody thinks cancer is a genetic disease and you're coming along tell him it's not you don't go very far in getting funds from for for doing that kind of stuff but uh yeah we'll keep pushing we have good pre-clinical the best pre-clinical model systems the best trained staff and knowledgeable staff and we're not going anywhere good uh we're pushing forward on this until un until the job is done so uh thanks uh for listening and i hope this uh helps your podcast audiences well i hope it does too and and there are certainly people um you know that that are suffering from cancer or that will be they will become afflicted by it and i think anyone who's who sees this and has knows someone with cancer i really encourage them to send this over to them so that they can really understand what's going on and actually really understand that they have a lot more to say in their own uh you know prognosis and recovery uh than they might think they do um professor seaford what's the best place for people to find you and find your work and you know you mentioned uh you know the letter that you your email that you send out to people yeah is there like a link to a website or something that people can yeah there there's there's a link to um the foundation for cancer metabolic therapies uh we we we obtain money uh uh from private foundations um people also support us through boston college you know they they can direct funds directly to my to my research program okay so so you know these kinds of things and and believe it or not yeah we uh more and more people uh are coming out to support this um uh because it's gonna it's going to have a greater impact in supporting almost anything else in the cancer field there's no question about that so uh the faster we get our papers published the more evidence we continue to our case reports human case reports we work we do that so i i help the physicians write up the case reports on the patients that have survived longer than than would be expected it takes a lot of my time of course but but uh but i'm willing to do this and we and our peer-reviewed scientific publications continue to push this field forward and this is it requires funding to do this because we have to where there's animal cost staff costs consumables you know things that we use equipment costs to maintain um so so bottom line is yeah um i send a letter out has information helps cancer patients make decisions try to get them in the right contacts people who understand what's going on and then they take it from there so um this has been the plan so far it seems to be gaining more and more momentum um as more and more uh word gets out about this whole cancer thing and uh things begin to change fantastic well i i'll put up all those information in those links in the description and i encourage people to go and visit and to donate if they if they can possibly do so because i think that this this sort of work is really and the letters and the letters that i send out it's not and it's only donation if you can if you feel that that's helps you um you know if something helps you you might consider donation uh i i'm not asking anybody it's only if the information that i send is of value and i don't charge anything for this yeah um you know the bottom line is is to get the is to see the results uh uh more than you know anything else and that's i think that's the most important thing at this stage yeah no i i completely agree and there's a lot of things that i do that i don't i don't get paid for i you know you know stay late and talk to people and talk to people outside of the hospital to try and to try and get them uh better because that's yeah you know that's that's sort of why we're here and i you know i think a lot of people a lot of doctors and and researchers are still in that mindset but unfortunately some have forgotten that or forgotten that it's even possible to to do that anymore and you're just sort of just sort of milling these things out as as numbers unfortunately yeah yeah yeah anyway i'll let you go thank you very much and um thank you for the interview thank you i really appreciate it [Music]