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Busting Breast Cancer with Susan Wadia-Ells: Rational Wellness Podcast 208

Susan Wadia-Ells discusses Busting Breast Cancer with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

3:07   The predominant, traditional theory of cancer is that either as a result of having unfortunate genes like the BRCA1 gene or as result of radiation or toxins or other things that damage our DNA, cancer cells form and grow until they form a tumor, which can then get out of hand and spread to other parts of the body. Treatment is focused on the mutations that are going on as this mindless cell is duplicating.  Susan’s book is based on an alternative theory of cancer from Dr. Thomas Seyfried, who published his textbook, The Metabolic Theory of Cancer in 2012.  The metabolic or mitochondrial theory says cancer begins when your lifestyle, your life happenings basically suffocate the mitochondria, which are the energy powerhouses of the cells.  The lifestyle changes that can prevent cancer include:  keeping your vitamin D level above 60 nanograms per milliliter, avoiding birth control drugs, and progestin menopausal relief drugs, losing excess body fat, periodically following a ketogenic lifestyle, lowering chronic stress, and avoiding mammograms. We can now say to women what will protect your mitochondria and what will protect them.

7:24  The old theory, the Slash-Poison-Burn theory of cancer treatment is failing us.  This Slash-Poison-Burn concept is that we offer mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation to women with breast cancer.  The Metabolic Theory leads us to reduce the fuel the cancer cells need to grow, which means to eat a low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet, which starves the cancer cells of glucose. The other fuel for cancer cells is the amino acid glutamine, and Dr. Seyfried is working on ways to reduce glutamine getting to cancer cells, while protecting the glutamine that our healthy cells need.

13:45  The role of sugar and carbohydrates in cancer promotion.  Breast cancer is most common in post-menopausal women and 75% of American women are either overweight or obese.  Fat cells produce estrogen and this estrogen is unbalanced to progesterone, so it becomes toxic to the body and this is what affects the mitochondria in your breast cells. A ketogenic diet will help you to burn your excess body fat and this will stop suffocating your mitochondria, which then stops your ability to develop that first cancer cell.

17:35  Glutamine.  Dr. Seyfreid’s research points to the idea that besides glucose the other fuel for cancer growth is the amino acid glutamine.  But while you want to block glutamine going to the cancer cells, you want to protect the glutamine going into the healthy cells.  Stress can also play a role in elevating glucose levels as a result of high cortisol. 

29:02  The metabolic cancer clinics are using a low dose of an anti-parasitic drug to block the glutamine.

31:55  Taking vitamin D3 is the easiest, fastest, and most effective ways to prevent breast cancer.  It is crucial for the immune system and stimulates apoptosis of cancer cells.  Women who are diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer have the lowest amount of D3 compared to women who are diagnosed with estrogen positive, progestin positive, a much slower growing type of breast cancer.  Women who are over 60 years of age should keep their D3 at your age level. Women who are in breast cancer treatment, it’s recommended that they keep their D3 levels above 80. 

42:32  Susan says that women should avoid mammograms, which is very controversial.  During the mammogram procedure your breasts are smashed flat and then they are radiated. If there is a tumor in the breast, this will potentially cause it to burst and flip these cancer cells out into the body.  Mammograms lead to over diagnosing and over treating since according to Dr. Gilbert Welch from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston 40-60% of women who are told they have breast cancer because of their mammogram report really had either, atypical cells, aka, ductal carcinoma in situ, which are abnormal cells but are not breast cancer and may never become breast cancer.  Or these women have what is known as a stage one indolent tumor, which might’ve been there for decades and may stay sitting there doing nothing for more decades until after they’re dead.  These women should not be treated with surgery, chemo, and radiation.

46:35  Thermography.  Thermography is a useful screening tool for prevention. They should be done yearly and are very safe. A thermogram will show you if you have inflammation in your breast tissue.

 

 



Susan Wadia-Ells is an investigative reporter with a background in political economy and cultural change, who wrote a book about preventing breast cancer, Busting Breast Cancer. Susan independently researched in thousands of ignored statistical studies identifying lifestyles that increase breast cancer risk and she merges these findings with Dr. Seyfried’s metabolic understanding of cancer. Busting Breast Cancer is thus able to describe how that first cancer cell is created and then fueled, as it continues to duplicate within a woman’s breast tissue.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.



 

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Weitz:            Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. And to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters. Our topic for today is busting breast cancer with Susan Wadia-Ells.

Susan Wadia-Ells is an investigative reporter with a background in political economy and cultural change unlike many of our guests who are doctors or researchers, and she wrote a book about preventing breast cancer, Busting Breast Cancer. Susan independently researched thousands of ignored statistical studies, identifying lifestyles that increase breast cancer risk. She merges these findings with Dr. Seyfried’s Metabolic Understanding of Cancer, Busting Breast Cancer, thus able to describe how that first cancer cell is created and then fueled as it continues to duplicate within a woman’s breast tissue.

This book describes how and why following certain lifestyles can enable a woman to remain free of breast cancer. These lifestyle changes including keeping your vitamin D level above 60 nanograms per milliliter, avoiding birth control drugs, and progestin menopausal relief drugs, losing excess body fat, periodically following a ketogenic lifestyle, lowering chronic steps stress, and avoiding mammograms. Susan, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Susan:                 Well, thanks, Ben, for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Dr. Weitz:            So, can you tell us how you became personally so interested in studying breast cancer?

Susan:                 Sure, sure. Over the years, I have lost too many friends to what is known as recurrent metastatic breast cancer. That means that a woman is diagnosed with an early stage of breast cancer. And then she is “successfully treated.” But within a few years in one case, one friend, it’s been more than a decade. And then what happens is they’re diagnosed with what’s called recurrent metastatic breast cancer, and this is always an early death sentence for a woman. So I just got very angry and I tend to find a problem and latch onto it. In this case, I just latched on for a very long time, this book has been in the making for over 12 years. I’ve been writing about it in newspaper articles, magazine articles, and finally, I finally was able to put the book together.

Dr. Weitz:            So please explain the predominant theory of cancer today, perhaps you can explain what that is and why it’s wrong. My understanding is, is the traditional theory is that either as a result of having unfortunate genes like the BRCA1 gene or as result of radiation or toxins or other things that damage our DNA, that’s what leads cancer cells to start forming. But this differs with the metabolic mitochondrial theory of cancer. Perhaps you can explain the traditional theory and why it’s wrong and what is the best way to understand the concept of cancer?

Susan:                   Sure. That’s a really important place to begin. In fact, chapter one in my book begins with just that question, Ben, so thank you. Today’s genetic understanding of cancer, what we find is the oncologists really don’t know exactly why one woman develops breast cancer while another never will. All they know is for some reason, some gene in the nucleus of one of your breast cells goes haywire and loses their mind and starts to just duplicate uncontrollably, forming a tumor which can then get out of hand and in some cases spread to other parts of the body and really cause you a lot of damage. That is the genetic theory, and the treatment is focused on the strange different mutations that are going on as this mindless cell is duplicating.

With Dr. Thomas Seyfried, who my book is based on, his 2012 theory that he published in 2012 in his book, his textbook, which is called The Metabolic Theory of Cancer. This is the first time that complete theory has been published. And what that metabolic theory says is that cancer begins not when a cell goes wacko in the nucleus of, in this case, your breast cell, but cancer begins when your lifestyles, your life happenings basically suffocate the mitochondria, suffocate the mitochondria, the little power batteries. In terms of breast cells, they’re about 70 or 80, these little power batteries in every breast cell or every breast lobe cell.

Those cells suffocate, they suffocate because of lots of different reasons. Everyone knows a lot of the reasons cancer begins, but they don’t know how biologically it begins. So thanks to Dr. Seyfried’s understanding of how that first cancer cell begins, we now finally can say to women, we understand what will suffocate your mitochondria and what will protect it. So therefore, we can finally, and this book does, give women five effective steps that you’ve already mentioned to basically cut breast cancer risk factors as much as 80%. It’s amazing.

Dr. Weitz:            Wow.

Susan:                 It’s amazing. This is a good news book, I need to say. This is not the old type of breast cancer book which is go have a mammogram, see if you’ve got it yet and then let us give you a double mastectomy. This is not that book at all. This is saying, forget that, that is ancient. The world is now around, the world is no longer flat. That’s the good thing.

Dr. Weitz:            Well, the flat earth society is, is still on YouTube and they’re still putting out videos. Can you talk about why the Slash-Poison-Burn theory of cancer treatment is failing us?

Susan:                 Sure. And Dr. Susan Love, who as many know, is an eminent breast surgeon. I’m not sure she’s still practicing, but she has the Susan Love Foundation out in LA near you, that she used that term. And she used that term probably 30, 40 years ago when she was first practicing. She said, “This is crazy. This is not good medicine.” She was considered a really hinder heretical being. She said, “All we’re doing is saying, women, we’re going to help you. And then we poison burn or cut them.” Meaning we give them chemotherapy, we give them partial mastectomies or mastectomies, and we radiate them. We burn them. And she’s saying the important thing is we need to prevent it. I’m hoping that she and I will begin a conversation now because… And she has reached out, so I’m very excited because finally we don’t have to poison and burn.  The reason we don’t have to poison and burn is we can prevent most of it. The other very important thing that Thomas Seyfried’s book tells us is that there are only two fuels, only two things that are feeding a person’s cancer cells. And this is critically important because this means that a cancer diagnosis doesn’t have to be a horrible death sentence for people or one in which they have to start whacking their body around with being poisoned, burned, and cut. There are ways now to block the fuels that are supplying the cancer cell. I think you have had many, many guests on that talk about the ketogenic lifestyle. That is certainly a very, very important way to stop cancer cells from growing, is to pull away all of the glucose, carbohydrates, equal glucose. Sugar is sugar.

Our mitochondria don’t really know the difference between eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough and having an apple. It all turns into glucose and that’s what they’re looking for. The cancer cell is looking for that in spades. And if you pull those foods away from your cancer cell, you don’t put them in your mouth. Then that cancer cell gets very, very weak. With Dr. Seyfried, and I believe he will, he certainly should. I hope he will win the Nobel prize in the next five years, let’s hope, or earlier. He will win it because he also discovered for the first time, the second thing that is fueling everybody’s cancer cells, who has been dying, who have been diagnosed with cancer. And that is the amino acid glutamine.  As you well know, glutamine is the most prevalent amino acid in our body that we make and the most important to keep us healthy. So it becomes very, very difficult, but not impossible to not only zap the glucose going into a cancer cell, but to basically zap the glutamine going into a cancer cell, but protect the glutamine that our healthy cells need. This is basically the last stage of how we really effectively non-toxically treat cancer. So it’s very exciting and it’s beginning to happen. That’s the most exciting.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah. I want to get into the glutamine piece, but I’d like to talk about the ketogenic carbohydrate portion of it first. I would like to mention, for those listening to this podcast, if you’re not really familiar with this topic, you may wonder why we’re bashing the Slash-Poison-Burn theory of cancer. It’s not that we’re not in favor of research to help cure cancer. That the problem is, is over the last 40 years, when it comes to metastatic cancer, which is cancer that spread, which is the cancer that you die from generally, we’ve made virtually no progress. We’ve made a fair amount of progress on primary cancers, but when it comes to metastatic cancer, this model has really failed. And that’s why we’re looking for another model. And then of course, we’re trying to look for prevention rather than having to even need these exotic treatments.

 



Dr. Weitz:            Interesting. I’ve really been enjoying this discussion, but I’d like to take a minute to tell you about a new product that I’m very excited about. I’d like to tell you about a new wearable called the Apollo. This is a device that can be worn on the wrist or the ankle, and it uses vibrations to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system. This device has amazing benefits in terms of getting you out of that stressed out sympathetic nervous system and stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. It has a number of different functions, especially helping you to relax, to focus, to concentrate, get into a deeper meditative state, even to help you sleep, and there’s even a mode to help you wake up. This all occurs through the scientific use of subtle vibrations.

                                For those of you who might be interested in getting the Apollo for yourself to help you reset your nervous system, go to apolloneuro.com and use the affiliate code, Weitz10. That’s my last name, WEITZ10. Now, back to the discussion.

 



 

 

Dr. Weitz:            Let’s talk about the role of carbohydrates and sugar and what part this plays in cancer promotion and development.

Susan:                 Sure. Well, in chapter two in my book, and this is the book, it just came out on Amazon. I always forget to talk about the book. I get so much involved in the content, and it’s now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, looks like it’s all over the place, which is great, which is great. And also from my website, bustingbreastcancer.com. In fact, people who order from my website get a fancy launch edition that’s signed with color charts and graphs and stuff like that. But in terms of how the ketogenic diet, why it’s important right now, one of the reasons we have the highest breast cancer rates in the world, well, for both pre-menopausal and post-menopausal. But this applies especially to post-menopausal women, women over 50 years old usually, is that the vast majority of women, we’re talking like 75% of American women today are either overweight or obese.

We’re talking 20, 25 pounds to 325 pounds literally overweight. And what a lot of us don’t know, I certainly didn’t know it before I started this research, is that every fat cell, it’s called adipose tissue, every excess fat cell in our bodies is an alive organism. In fact, all of those fat cells together, apparently if you’re overweight or obese, make up the largest endocrine organ in your body. And those fat cells, 24/7 are manufacturing this weak type of estrogen. Women really need to know that it’s not estrogen per se that’s going to cause breast cancer. It’s unbalanced estrogen to your progesterone that basically becomes toxic to the body and zaps those poor little mitochondria in your breast cells and suffocates them. And that’s what’s creating so much breast cancer in women who are overweight and especially those who are obese.

A ketogenic diet, and I really talk, of course, as you said, in my book about prevention, I’m not into the treatment end of things. I’m not a doctor. I’m just trying to learn like the rest of us lay people out there, not like your doctors. What we find is that if you are able to cut back on your carbohydrates and increase your fat and go into this ketogenic lifestyle and have just moderate protein, that that will effectively burn your excess body fat. Which is the best thing you can do to stop suffocating your mitochondria, which then stops your ability to develop that first cancer cell. The sad thing is that the genetic industry does not seem to be telling women who are fighting cancer, be that metastatic cancer, early cancers. The Dana-Farber, the Sloan Ketterings, I don’t hear them telling women to immediately go on a ketogenic diet and lose their excess body fat. Every time they have their Ben and Jerry’s, or their apple, or their bowl of oatmeal in the morning, they’re feeding their cancer cells and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart.

Dr. Weitz:            Let’s touch on the glutamine concept. This is one that’s probably new to some of us. People have been talking about specific amino acids that may feed cancer. I know methionine is one that’s been mentioned, and I’ve also heard people mention leucine. The interesting thing is there are practitioners out there who are putting patients on a vegetarian diet devoid of animal protein. The claim is that this is going to reduce their cancer because it’s going to starve them of these amino acids. A vegetarian diet is quite a bit different than the average ketogenic diet. I know you theoretically can do vegetarian keto, but it’s not that easy. What do you think about this concept? Should we be based on the data that you’ve read and looked at? Should we be starving our body of protein to lower our glutamine levels to reduce cancer risk?

Susan:                 Well, that’s two different questions. The first one was about the amino acids and the second is no protein.

Dr. Weitz:            Okay.

Susan:                 Let me just take the amino acid one first.

Dr. Weitz:            Let’s do it.

Susan:                 What Tom Seyfried says it’s like a mantra, it’s the stuff that there are only two important fuels. If you want to stop cancer from growing in your body, this is not real complex. There are only two fuels to really focus on. There’s lots of other things once you have a cancer cell thriving, lots of other things that you take away, you put in them and stuff that will slow them down. It will stop the blood supply to the tumor. It’ll stop this pathway, that pathway, everybody talks about pathways. Well, that’s talking about what an active cancer cell does. Tom Seyfried with his metabolic theory is interested in annihilating and starving the cancer cell by taking away its two fuels.  When you’re talking about cancer treatment from Dr. Seyfried’s point of view, and he’s considered the George Washington and all of the ketogenic, not the ketogenic, the metabolic cancer clinics around the world depend on him to advise them on how to move forward with their metastatic cancer solutions. So he will continue to tell you, find ways to block the glutamine, the glutamine that’s going into the cancer cell, but for heaven sakes, protect the glutamine going into the healthy cells. The idea is to make the cancer patient healthier when you finish the metabolic treatment than when they first got the disease, because people who get cancer, it turns out are not very healthy. They may say I was fine, I had no idea. And then I was diagnosed suddenly. Well, if you take a look at them, and again, you have more personally as a chiropractor than I do, but if you look at them, you’ll see that their glucose levels are incredibly high and it could be they’re quite thin.

It could be that they’re not overweight, but their glucose levels are high because their cortisol levels are high. They’ve just had a 16-year-old child die overnight in the car crash. They’ve just gone through their first divorce. There was one woman said, “I got my first breast cancer diagnosis two years after my first divorce. I got the second breast cancer diagnosis two years after my second divorce. I’m not going to get married anymore, forget this. I want to stay away from breast cancer.” So you’ll find that people who develop breast cancer, if they’re not obese, they have high cortisol levels, they’ve been using a cell phone constantly. Think about Teddy Kennedy, John McCain, they’ve been suffocating the mitochondria in a variety of ways in their brain.

In terms of the breast cancer situation, not all organs will accept estrogen. It’s the ovaries, it’s the breasts and a few other organs. And this is probably with all of the estrogens going on in the chemical estrogens, going on in our society and the obesity going on. Most women are walking around with much more estrogen than progestin. Obviously that’s suffocating the mitochondria, but anyway, that’s the answer for the amino acid. It’s not bad. You can slow down, I suppose, the growth from what I’ve read, the growth of cancer cells by worrying about the other amino acids, but you’re not going to starve them. You’re only going to starve cancer cells by taking away the glucose and taking away the glutamine. That’s it. And the other-

Dr. Weitz:            I would add, if we reduce our protein too much, then we’re going to be starving our healthy cells to be able to help our bodies fight off the cancer for your immune system to work, et cetera, et cetera.

Susan:                   Well, I haven’t seen that research, but in reading Dr. Seyfried’s book and other pieces of his research, apparently what happens if you have too much protein, that’s going to turn into carbohydrates. You’re going to store, if someone is eating tons, and we’ve seen the John Wayne’s of the world with their big pouches in the front. It was like they’re seven months pregnant. 12 months pregnant. That’s probably from eating all that steak. What they’re doing is not only are they storing their excess carbohydrates as fat, which is why people get fat, but also if you eat too much meat, too much protein, that apparently then turns in… You only need so much protein to supply the energy to your muscles, that’s what’s using the protein.  If you’re going to eat more than that, then that’s going to convert to carbs. And what does carbs do, they get stored as fat. So you get the John Wayne look. You’ve seen the men walking around with their pregnancy. Now you see women who were 65 years old walking around with their pregnancy. I’ve never seen so many pregnant bellies out there for both men and women. And that talks about their bodies are apparently unable to process all of the carbs that they’re eating. So it’s turning-

Dr. Weitz:            We have 75% rates of overweight in this country. It’s really embarrassing.

Susan:                 I know. And that’s why we have the highest breast cancer rate in the world, in the world.  A lot of it has to with obesity.  And we can talk about the other four simple steps when you want to, but really just knocking off your excess body weight is going to reduce your risk of breast cancer by at least 30%. And for younger women, they have a few studies that say, well, sometimes being overweight can protect you.  We have fewer women getting breast cancer who are overweight, who are premenopausal. But the other studies say, if you do get breast cancer and you are premenopausal and you are overweight, you have a much higher rate of metastatic breast cancer of not coming through your surgeries, your radiation, your chemotherapy, as well as someone, a younger woman who is not overweight. And of course, if you keep your weight up and keep eating lots of carbs once you’ve been diagnosed, you’re doing nothing but feeding those cancer cells you’re trying to kill.

Dr. Weitz:            Yeah. I would like to put my two cents in too with respect to diet. I do think that at least having a small to moderate amount of animal protein in your diet, especially things like fish and perhaps chicken, I think is important to keep your body healthy. It’s really the only way to get sources of protein into the body that don’t contain a lot of carbs, which is what happens on a vegetarian diet generally. You’re relying on things like beans to get your protein.

Susan:                 Yeah. I think it’s much, much more difficult. But I have a personal knowledge of a number of women who have stayed on a vegetarian diet and have successfully dealt with metastatic… No, no one dealt with metastatic, I want to say prostate, I don’t mean that.

Dr. Weitz:            Ovarian or uterine.

Susan:                 No, it wasn’t, it was pancreatic. It’s the one you least expect.

Dr. Weitz:            Yes.

Susan:                 The other woman had an early stage triple negative. One of them lost 100 pounds, and she ratcheted up her vitamin D3 from nine to 100. She stopped using on a regular basis an estrogenic skin cream. There were a lot of clear things that she quickly changed and she’s now, that was 2013 she was diagnosed, and the physicians cannot find the tumor any longer. The other woman’s case, she stuck with her vegetarian diet, but she cut out many, many of her carbs and it was a lot of sugar. She also lowered cortisol levels like crazy by basically going into a meditative retreat on a full-time basis. She really dealt with her cortisol level. So you can do it, but it’s incredibly difficult.

Dr. Weitz:            Those are two of the most aggressive cancers. Since we’re on the topic of breast cancer, triple negatives seems to be more of a death sentence than the other forms of breast cancer.

Susan:                 It certainly can be, or at least it’s quicker, it’s quicker, it’s quicker.

Dr. Weitz:            Do we know why that is, why triple negative breast cancer seems to be more aggressive?

Susan:                 I personally do not know. Tom Seyfried’s answer would be, it really doesn’t matter what kind of cancer you get. All cancers are the same. They’re all fueled by glutamine and glucose. And if you want to treat it, you basically want to take away those two fuels. That makes it easy.

Dr. Weitz:            Except taking away glutamine, as you said, it’s not that easy without starving your healthy cells of glutamine.

Susan:                 No, I really didn’t answer that question about how they’re doing it. They are doing it now. What they’re doing is, and we can talk about some of those clinics. I know some, not a lot about them, but they exist. One is a telemedicine group here in the United States, and you have metabolic cancer clinics in Istanbul, Turkey, and in Alexandria, Egypt. I believe in Budapest and stuff. One of the ways is to use an anti parasitic drug, but a small amount of it. What they’re doing is they make sure the person is what they call in ketosis, You understand what that means and maybe you can explain it better than I can, in which your body is no longer burning glucose.  It is now switched from that dirty fuel called glucose into a high powered fuel called ketones. The ketone bodies are made by the liver. And the liver takes all the good fat you’re eating either from your body that you’re losing weight, you’re using your own body fat, or the coconut oil, or the grass-fed protein fat that you’re eating. That uses that to fuel your body and it’s using high octane fuel. Once a person is in ketosis, then it means their cancer cells are going to be hanging on for dear life because they don’t have one of their fuels. That’s when they start to give people these antiparasitic drugs that will zap the glutamine.

Dr. Weitz:            Do you know how that is, the mechanism by which antiparasitic drugs would block glutamine?

Susan:                 You’re getting in above my pay level, totally my knowledge level. Again, there are some pieces of Tom Seyfried’s book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. I think I have it right here someplace. Yeah, this is his book. It’s like a hundred dollar textbook. But it still has been selling like hotcakes. Even me who had one biology course sophomore year in high school, I think it was like 1908 or something, I swore never to touch another dead frog again. Even I can understand a lot of what’s in here. Biochemists, people like yourself, who’ve studied biology and chemistry, you can get through a whole lot more of it than I can. But it talks about those questions.

Dr. Weitz:            So let’s continue with the steps we can take to prevent breast cancer, and I think the next one would be vitamin D.

Susan:                 Yeah. Vitamin D is the easiest, the fastest and maybe the most effective way to protect a woman against developing breast cancer. It is the best news possible. It is because, as I described in my book and I have a whole chapter, chapter three on vitamin D three, that I equate the amount of vitamin D3 in our body to the level of power of our internet system. So I call D3 our internal internet system. And if we’ve got a lot of electricity flowing hard, and we’ve got a high internet system, as our cells, let’s say in our breast start to suffocate. And as they’re thinking about becoming cancer cells, because the mitochondria are suffocating, the cell has the ability to quickly call in the immune system to come help it, what they call create self suicides, it’s cellular suicide. They call it apoptosis.

Dr. Weitz:            Apoptosis, yeah.

Susan:                 I call it pop goes the weasel. I’m telling you, anyone can read my book and can understand the biology. They may not pass a biology test. They won’t have the right terms, but they’ll understand what’s going on, which is our goal here. So if you can keep your vitamin D3 blood level, and it’s easy to be measured with a blood test, above 60, 60 nanograms per milliliter, that’s a very…. Nanograms are teeny, teeny, but 60 nanograms per milliliter. Apparently, there are a couple of studies now that say that there’s never been a woman diagnosed with breast cancer who has ever had a blood level, a D3 blood level above 60.

That to me is the best news in the world. Here’s the response to your question about triple negative, women who are diagnosed with triple negative, this is all in my book, chapter three, there it is chapter three. That women who are diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer have the lowest amount of D3 compared to women who are diagnosed with estrogen positive, progestin positive, a much slower growing type of breast cancer. Isn’t that interesting?

Dr. Weitz:            That is interesting. Of course, we need to point out that this information is not seeped into conventional medicine. Women who get a vitamin D test from their primary care doctor may find out that if their vitamin D level is above 30, that their doctor may say, “Maybe you’re taking too much.” Another myth that I often see or I think misnomer is a woman will come in and she’ll have a low vitamin D level, like she’ll have an 18. And the doctor will say, “Well, take this 1,000 milligrams of vitamin D.” And unfortunately, I can tell you for 33 years in practice that 1,000 milligrams of vitamin D with somebody with a low vitamin D level, very, very unlikely to move the needle to any appreciable amount.

Susan:                   That’s right. And if you’re overweight, at least half of that D3 goes into your fat cells and sits there and looks at you. It does not connect with your immune system. Also, the older you get, the more difficult it is to convert the supplements you’re taking, or the sun that you’re getting into D3. So I say for women who are over 60 years old, keep your D3 at your age level. But it’s a full-time job. I live in the cold of the Boston area of New England. And when I’m here in the winter, which unfortunately has been most of the time the last few years, I do indoor tanning two or three times a week in order to keep my D3 up close to 60, and I also take five to 10,000 use along with K2 and 1,000 of calcium on the days when I’m not doing indoor tanning.

Even with all of that, I still struggle since I am clearly over 65. I still struggle to keep my D3 above 60. Women who are in breast cancer treatment, it’s recommended they keep their D3 levels above 80, very difficult. I realized the other day, my book is actually five books in one. It’s a textbook because we’ve been talking about elementary, and with the citations, it becomes a pretty advanced textbook. It’s also a political book because I finally was able, I kept trying to figure out how come the government and the medical associations are not telling our doctors to keep the D3 so high? How come they’re saying a thousand I use as you’ve said, how come we’re walking around with the D3 deficiency epidemic and we have this breast cancer epidemic? Which I now call an unnecessary… We have a cancer epidemic.

I just happened to be focused on breast cancer, but it’s an unnecessary epidemic. And of course, one of the major reasons that we’ve talked about is low D3 in most people, because our doctors even are not telling us the truth. And what I’ve realized is the group that is advising a lot of the [inaudible 00:38:14] cancer agencies is called the National Academy of Medicine, used to be called the Institute of Medicine. And if you unpeel the onion some more, as I did, very boring research let me tell you, reading the history of the Institute of Medicine, is that this National, it’s now called the National Academy of Medicine, NAM, they are the largest best funded lobby group for the processed food industry, the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical industry, the for-profit medical industry. They are all working hard to make sure that NAM stays powerful and is able to advise the government on our food pyramid, which is why the food pyramid is upside down.

Many carbs at the bottom and you can’t find any fat at the top. So it’s causing the obesity epidemic, which is causing type two diabetes, which is making millions, billions a day for the pharmaceutical and the medical industries and has our cancer epidemic. Unfortunately, what my book told me, and I didn’t know this going in, is that there’s no difference between our government when it comes to cancer agencies and food agencies, health agencies, and the processed food industry, the medical industry, et cetera, et cetera. Very depressing, very depressing. I guess one of the main themes I want women especially to understand when they read this book, is that given the situation of the US government right now and how we are maintaining this profit-driven healthcare, it’s really a sick care system. It means that women, when it comes to breast cancer, form the only group that has the self-interest and now the knowledge to stop this unnecessary breast cancer epidemic.

Dr. Weitz:            Another factor in not being able to get your vitamin D levels up even when exposed to sun, and we measure a lot of women in Southern California and surprisingly, a lot of them have low or at least sub optimal levels. That’s what we’re really talking about when we’re talking about a vitamin D level 60, it’s not above the minimal normal level. It’s in the optimal level, is that your body makes vitamin D from cholesterol. And we’re all on this mission to lower our cholesterol as always possible, including taking drugs that lower your cholesterol, like Statins. And you have found that some of the data shows that Statins can actually increase breast cancer risk.

Susan:                   Yeah. That was scary. I don’t think there are a lot of studies. Probably no one wants to fund them. That’s why there aren’t a lot of studies. That’s something else I learned about medical research, is that if people want you to believe something, the medical industry funds tons of studies. If they don’t want you to know about anything, there’s never any money for those studies. And…

Dr. Weitz:            Or we just didn’t decide to publish that one.

Susan:                 Right, right, right, right, right, right.  That’s right.  Yeah.  But the other thing is, before you even get to Statins is that, and there are a number of books like Grain Brain is out there, David Perlmutter’s books.  He’s wonderful to read because here he is, I guess he’s a neurologist.  He’s in Naples there.  And what he’s doing is he’s showing people that some of us need high levels of cholesterol. It’s genetically what we are. And with other people, we don’t need high levels, but having a high level of cholesterol is not necessarily bad at all.  As you say, we need the cholesterol.  So it’s nice to keep yourself well-informed and not just listen to government regulations.

Dr. Weitz:            Another step you mentioned, which is equally controversial or even more controversial, is you say that women should avoid mammograms.

Susan:                 Oh yeah. This is probably the most controversial piece of my book. I almost didn’t even include mammograms in the book, because if you just think about it, mammograms have nothing to do with prevention. It’s basically smashing your breasts flat to just shove some radiation into the soft tissue, which doesn’t leave. It’s not like going through a bone and it comes out a metal plate in the end. It doesn’t usually come out. It sits there and you generate rads in your breast issue, but there’s nothing preventative about that.

In fact, they’re finding that in some cases, when you smash the breast together with those two plates, the pressure can potentially break, burst any tumor that exists and flip these cancer cells out into the body, which is a surefire way of increasing your risk of metastatic cancer. Because we’re understanding now that the macrophage in your immune system coming to heal any wound internal or external will come and grab excess cancer cells and take them off into the lymph system and you’ve got metastatic breast cancer. Also, mammograms just for that physical reason aren’t good, but mammograms are also, over diagnosing is the term. And then overtreating probably 40% to 60% of women who were told, oh, Matilda, we’re very sorry, your mammogram report shows that you have breast cancer.

 Dr. Gilbert Welch, who’s at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston here now is a really wonderful researcher, epidemiologist. He has been doing the most amazing research on mammograms for the last, I don’t know, 20 years at least. He’s written a few books about that too. He is showing literally 40% to 60% of women who are told they have breast cancer because of their mammogram report really had either, it’s called atypical cells, ductal carcinoma in situ, which is not breast cancer, may never become breast cancer, but it’s abnormal cells. Or they have what is known as a stage one indolent tumor, which might’ve been there for decades and may stay sitting there doing nothing for more decades until after you’re dead. Those women, instead of being poked and cut and mutilated and burned and poisoned or whatever Susan Love talks about, and for what use? For nothing but bad.

Because of that, the studies, they’re not a lot, but they’re out there saying that breast self exams and annual clinical exams, as well as ultrasound, and they now have whole breast ultrasound, can detect tumors as they’re growing when they become problematic. But the problem is the government is supporting the medical insurance companies, which is supporting the medical industry and requiring all women to have mammograms before they’re allowed to have any type of ultrasound, any type of MRI. So they just really don’t want women to escape having mammograms and women need to stand up and say, “No, I’m just not going to do it, there are other ways.”

Dr. Weitz:            What about thermography, do you think that’s an alternative?

Susan:                 Thermography is about prevention. Mammograms are about, do you have it yet? Thermograms are about prevention. Yes, they should be covered by insurance once a year because they’re safe for women of all ages, but more important, equally important, a thermogram will show you if you have inflammation in your breast tissue. This is what women need to know. Probably every woman who is obese has inflammation in her breast tissue.  It would be nice if once a year, she went to a medical practitioner and they said, “Jane, Genevieve, you have high inflammation in your breast tissue. This is a precursor to breast cancer. You need to lose your excess body weight. You need to increase your vitamin D3. You need to get off of your progesterone menopausal drugs. You need to detox your mind and your body, your cholesterol levels are off the charts. You will probably be diagnosed with breast cancer within X years.” Yes, I think thermograms are one of the most important things a woman can do for prevention annually.

Dr. Weitz:            Since you mentioned that smashing the breasts in the mammogram can cause cancer tumors to break open and potentially breast cancer to spread, you also mentioned in your book that biopsies have a high rate of causing metastasis.

Susan:                 Oh boy, this is a real hot topic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, you’re hard pressed to find those studies because nobody wants to fund those studies.

Dr. Weitz:            Your book said 94%.

Susan:                 Well, that’s coming from one meta-study. A meta-study is you take a series of studies-

Dr. Weitz:            Right. Meta analysis.

Susan:                 studies on the same topic and then you general-

Dr. Weitz:            And that’s considered a much higher level of evidence.

Susan:                 Well, I am still shocked by it and I still don’t have really good answers how they’re generating that 94% and on what basis.  Because trying to find the studies behind that study is a whole nother study in itself.  But we do know about the seed and soil theory, which has been around since I guess, 1889 or something.  That and the metabolic theory go hand in hand.  The genetic industry, the current day cancer industry doesn’t teach the seed and soil theory.  You ask most GPs, maybe even most oncologists and they may say, “I remember maybe reading it on page such and such back in medical school, but no one talks about it.”  I don’t know, you have to ask them.

But the seed and soil theory basically says that if you stick, Tom Seyfried calls it sticking a pin in a beehive, sticking a needle in a beehive. Apparently, the cancer cells are very loosely connected to one another in that tumor. They’re not like a healthy cell that’s connected to its brothers and sisters alongside it in the lining of something or in the lung lining or the breast lining or whatever. They’re very loosely connected. If you poke and smash and press and you increase inflammation, then that’s going to naturally bring in your immune system to help heal the inflammation the doctors just caused by poking you with that fine needle or that core biopsy. If you’ve released even one cell, it can apparently fuse with the macrophage, which we understand is the most powerful immune cell in the body.  That thing can go anyplace. It can go into the bone, it can go into the liver, it can go into the brain. Certainly it does, and it takes that cancer cell with it. That’s why the whole topic of recurrent metastatic breast cancer is very, very important to me. I’m still trying to figure out why all of my friends died because they got recurrent metastatic breast cancer, and they did everything their doctors told them to in terms of successfully treating their early stage, but they still got recurrent metastatic breast cancer and they died.

Dr. Weitz:            So if a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer and her oncologist says, we need to biopsy it to find out what type so we can know how to treat it?

Susan:                 Good luck. It’s very hard to do. I want to say to every person out there who has been diagnosed with cancer, only you know what you will be willing to do, how much you will be willing to stand up against this edifice called the cancer treatment industry once you’ve been diagnosed. I thank the goddess I have never been diagnosed. So it’s pretty easy for me to say, I believe I would, but it’s also easy for me to say, I would never go to a Dana-Farber or a Sloan Kettering Cancer Center or my community cancer clinic were I diagnosed with breast cancer. I would only go to a metabolic clinic because I would not want them to biopsy my tumor because the reality is it doesn’t matter from the metabolic perspective.

Dr. Weitz:            Well, the argument they would give you is that if we know that what type of breast cancer this is, if it’s estrogen sensitive or progestin, we have targeted drugs, or HER2 positive breast cancer, we have specific targeted drugs that only work with that type of breast cancer.

Susan:                 Oh, sure. Yeah. Also, I don’t have enough money to pay for your treatments. What we’re finding is people who don’t have a lot of money are running to the metabolic treatments faster because, one, it is much cheaper. And two, they’re living in much better lives, much longer. There is a group that’s been around in the United States now for maybe two years called Care Oncology, and people can find it at careoncology.com. They’re very interesting. They’re never saying to you, do not cut, poison and burn. They’re saying, you go right along with your traditional cancer therapies if you’re happy with it. We are going to send you, based on the records you’ve sent us your real diagnosis, we’re going to send you four or five different inexpensive, it’s like 60 bucks a month, these repurpose drugs. And one of them, or a few of them are going to lower your glucose levels and they’re going to encourage you to go on a ketogenic lifestyle.

There’s another drug in there that’s going to block your glutamine. It’s the Antiparasitic. You take that after you’ve been on your lowering glucose drugs for a while. One of those drugs, fascinating, Ben, is a statin. I couldn’t believe it. The statin has nothing to do with lowering the cholesterol, don’t quote me, maybe it has to do with lowering the glucose and maybe that’s… I don’t know. I don’t know. But Care Oncology and a lot of people who would get arrive at their doorstep near death, because they’ve been burned, poisoned and cut, and they have no other place to turn.

Dr. Weitz:            That might be the inflammation factor. There’s some data showing that some statins slow inflammation.

Susan:                 Okay. Maybe that’s probably the reason. Care Oncology is really straddling both sides of the fence and having it would appear some wonderful results. They’re also not being shut down because they’re not telling anyone not to do traditional therapies. They’re saying, whatever you feel comfortable with, if you don’t want to do traditional therapies, you can’t afford them, whatever. I think it’s a $900 initial fee and then 60 bucks a month, and they mail you the drugs and you have Zoom calls with the doctors and the nurses. So it’s a very interesting next step.

Dr. Weitz:            So let’s hit one more topic before we wrap. There’s a bunch of things we could talk about because this is a fascinating topic and your book is a fascinating read. But let’s talk about your recommendation to avoid birth control and IUDs that contain synthetic progestins.

Susan:                 Right. This was maybe one of the most upsetting pieces of research that I came upon in the 12 years that I’ve been working on this book. In 2010, a blue ribbon, you can’t get better than this, a blue ribbon team of maybe, I don’t know, a dozen researchers, international. After 10 years of doing all of their preclinical, which means they’re working with mice, is my understanding, in the lab. They were finally able to figure out why and how, well, they almost [inaudible 00:56:55], why and how progestin that is in every birth control drug, that is in those combination menopausal drugs, and now is being laced in most of the IUDs are allowed to be sold in the US. So basically, premenopausal women are being forced unless [crosstalk 00:57:15].

Dr. Weitz:            This is not natural progesterone. This is a synthetic progestin.

Susan:                 Yeah. It was spelled with a P-R-O-G-E-S-T-I-N. The sad thing is clinical dictionaries don’t make the distinction. They intersperse and you’ll find clinical studies, they’ll talk about progesterone, which is the natural stuff in sentence one. In sentence three, they’re talking about the same situation and they’re calling it progestin. So the medical industry is doing their utmost to really keep the unaware completely confused about the difference, the massive difference between progesterone, which is what your body, my body, most women’s bodies makes and needs to make, because it needs to balance out the estrogen and progesterone by the natural, it’s an antitumor thing as well. It’s interesting. But this progestin, they had to create this when they created the birth control drugs or else the pharmaceutical companies couldn’t make any money. So they made this chemical thing that they could then patent and then they could make money.

Dr. Weitz:            Because you can’t patent a naturally occurring hormone.

Susan:                 No, no, no, no, no. Right, right, right. But anyway, quickly, and I quote chapter and verse, and I even have excerpted a couple of paragraphs of this study in my book in chapter three, I think four, I don’t know, four. Basically, what it says is that when the progestin, the chemical enters a woman’s body from the birth control drugs, the menopausal, or that IUD, it stimulates the production of a protein called RANKL and then as they describe what happens next, that RANKL not only can initiate the suffocation of the mitochondria. They don’t use the term suffocation and mitochondria, they say can initiate breast cancer and/or can accelerate breast cancer.

Of course, we saw this back in 2002 when they stopped the National Women’s Health Initiative that was looking at pros and cons of that Prempro and Premarin, those new menopausal drugs. And the women who were taking the progestin drugs had a 26% increase in palpable tumors within two or three years of popping those progestin drugs every day. The women who were taking the progestin were normal. They didn’t have that increase in the palpable tumors. It always was of interest to me why they didn’t quickly do a similar national study on birth control drugs, but they didn’t want to.

Because again, if we understand that our US government cancer agencies are run by the US for-profit medical industry, they did not want to find out and then have to announce that birth control drugs were not only initiating breast cancer, but they’re also accelerating breast cancer. And the sad thing is that one of the study authors is now the CEO of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. And no one has taken it upon themselves, other than the two press releases that came out of the Austrian Research Center that was like the lead investigator on this. And that’s what I found. My Google search, my Google alerts, it was there and gone. Thank heavens I got to see it. It was there for one day with Science Daily. They showed it to me and it says, and I quote this in chapter four in my book, “Progestin causes and accelerates breast cancer.” That’s the study. I just researched it and I have published it. I also in 2013, came out with a short ebook, which is offline now, but I’ll put it back on, which I go into excruciating detail on how the progestin creates the breast cancer.

Dr. Weitz:            Awesome. Thanks, Susan, for a fascinating discussion and very helpful, useful information. How can our listeners and viewers get a hold of your book and find out more about you?

Susan:                 Okay. So if they want the signed launch edition of the paperback with the color, there’s color charts and graphs in here and stuff, they can just go to my website, bustingbreastcancer.com. I’m also sending out discounted bulk orders. We’ve got biology classes now in college level and high school level who are ordering the book, the professors are ordering 15, 20 copies of the book, and then they get a 20% discount, whatever. Also, book groups are ordering it. So I’m happy to ship those out. Then of course, everybody can go to Amazon and get the paperback or Barnes and Noble, Walmart. It’s all over the place. The ebook is coming out in about a week, and that’ll be available again from Kindle, Amazon, over to Walmart, et cetera.

Then someone has stepped in and is funding the audio book. So that will be available in about two months time, which I’m delighted with. I should say that once I finally pay off all of my, I think it’s like 30,000 bucks, that’s the paying off now from my designer, because this is self-published, this is independent. But once those bills are paid off with book sales, then 20% of all my net sales are going to the Foundation for Metabolic Cancer Therapies, because that’s the group that’s funding Tom Seyfried’s research on finding all these various effective ways of blocking the glutamine, as well as easier ways of blocking glucose. But that’s the story.

Dr. Weitz:            And then what’s your website?

Susan:                 It’s bustingbreastcancer.com.

Dr. Weitz:            Excellent. Thank you so much, Susan.

Susan:                 Thank you, Ben. It’s been delightful.

 


Dr. Weitz:            Thank you, listeners, for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. Please take a few minutes and go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five-star ratings and review. That would really help us so more people can find us in their listing of health podcasts. I’d also like to let everybody know that I now have a few openings for new clients for nutritional consultations. If you’re interested, please call my office in Santa Monica at (310) 395-3111, that’s (310) 395-3111, and take one of the few openings we have now for a individual consultation for nutrition with Dr. Ben Weitz. Thank you and see you next week.