Natural Insights Into Cancer with Dr. Dominic Brandy: Rational Wellness Podcast 304
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Dr. Dominic Brandy discusses Natural Insights into Cancer with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
2:25 Dr. Brandy explained that his journey started in September 2017 when he and his wife were on a Viking cruise and he read the book, How Not To Die by Dr. Michael Greger. How Not To Die has lots of scientific references and shows that eating a plant based diet is associated with lower rates of cancer and other chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and dementia. Gregor also discusses the Blue Zones where Dan Buettner looked at regions in the world where people lived the longest, including Loma Linda, California, where most people are Seven Day Adventists and they are vegetarian, don’t drink alcohol, and exercise a lot. The average woman there lives 10 years longer and the average man lives 14 years longer than the average American. Dr. Brandy started right then to eat a plant based diet.
6:25 When Dr. Brandy came home the last week of September he was doing a surgery case and he felt a pop in his right collarbone. This pain then got worse and worse and on November 10th he went to pick up a container of water and his clavicle cracked in half. He went to the Urgent Care center and got an x-ray. Then he got an MRI and his orthopedic surgeon told him that he either had multiple myeloma or a cancer metastasis. He had a biopsy and lab work, which confirmed IgA multiple myeloma free Kappa chain. Dr. Brandy’s oncologist recommended a triple drug regimen of a common medication for myeloma, a corticosteroid and Velcade, a proteasome inhibitor. Dr. Brandy accepted with the first two medications but rejected Velcade, because its common side effects include peripheral neuropathy, which is bad for a surgeon. Then Dr. Brandy researched every thing he could do from a diet, lifestyle, and nutritional supplement perspective and started employing them. He started taking various herbs, employed exercise, stress reduction, sleep, intermittent fasting, detoxification, and every month his numbers kept getting better and by six months he was in a complete remission.
Dr. Dominic Brandy is a plastic surgeon and anti-aging expert, but after being diagnosed in 2017 with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer, he plunged himself into cancer research. He is now coaching cancer patients. In addition to conventional therapy, he has adopted a natural approach to fighting cancer that includes a whole food plant based diet, daily exercise, and targeted nutritional supplements. And now he has written a book, Beat Back Cancer Naturally, and he wants to share his approach with patients looking to prevent or treat cancer. His website is NaturalInsightsIntoCancer.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional 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. I’m very excited today that we’ll be speaking with Dr. Dominic Brandy, and he will be giving us some natural insights into cancer. Dr. Brandy is a plastic surgeon and anti-aging expert, but after being diagnosed in 2017 with multiple myeloma, he plunged himself into cancer research. In addition to conventional therapy, he’s adopted a natural approach to fighting cancer that includes a whole food, plant-based diet, daily exercise, and targeted nutritional supplements, and he’s written a book, Beat Back Cancer Naturally, and he wants to share his approach with patients looking to prevent or treat cancer. Dr. Brandy, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Brandy: Hey, great being here. Thanks for the invite.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. Cancer’s such an important topic. Perhaps you can tell us a bit about your personal journey.
Dr. Brandy: Well, just to give your listeners a little background about me. You mentioned I had a plastic surgery practice. It was a plastic surgery slash med spas slash anti-aging center, had it for over 40 years. About three years ago, we had a venture capital group come in and they made an offer to buy the practice. At that point, I had over a hundred employees. We were ranked number five in the country by our Botox. So it was quite an operation. We had four different clinics, one in the Columbus, Ohio, and three in Pittsburgh. So since that point, I have devoted my life to cancer lifestyle coaching, and the way I got into that, you mentioned, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma about five and a half years ago. It was November 10th of 2017. Actually, my journey, interestingly, started in September of 2017, which was two months before that. My wife and I were on a Viking cruise. It was a two-week cruise. I’ve read well over 300 books on health and nutrition in my career because I have this anti-aging center, I was always interested in it. So when I’m on vacation, first thing I do is I look for a health and nutrition book. So the first book I pulled up was How Not To Die by Michael Greger. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but it’s a phenomenal book. If anyone’s ever read the hard back, I mean, it’s literally two inches thick and about an inch of it are scientific references. I don’t know how many scientific references are in there, but there’s got to be over 6,000 or 7,000. Being a medical doctor, as I was reading this, that was the thing that really super impressed me. What the science was showing over and over again was that cultures and research cohorts that ate more of a plant-based diet had much lower incidence of cancer, cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, dementia, and really all cause mortality. Then he got into the Blue Zones where these are the five areas of the world where people lived the longest. Ikaria, Greece, Sardinia, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Okinawa, Japan, and right here in the United States, Loma Linda, California, and that’s where there’s a predominance of Seven Day Adventist, and they are either vegan, vegetarian, they don’t drink alcohol, they exercise a lot. What’s interesting about Loma Linda, and I always like to use them because they’re in our culture. Some people will say about the Blue Zones, well, that’s a different culture. It’s not like the United States, but in Loma Linda, the average woman lives about 10 years longer than her American counterpart, and men actually live 14 years longer, which is interesting, but if you look at all the Blue Zones, they all eat anywhere from a 90% to 95% plant-based diet, and if they do eat meat, it’s usually the size of a deck of cards. They might have it once to four times a week.
Recently, really, I started reading a book called Healthy at 100. It’s by John Robbins. You should read it. It’s really interesting. Dan Buettner is the one that wrote the Blue Zones book, but Dr. Alexander Leaf, he was the Dan Buettner in the 1970s, and National Geographic put him to the task to find the longest living areas of the world, and he looked at the Acacians, the Vilcabamba, they’re in Peru, and then the Hunzas, you probably have heard of them, and then the Okinawans. In fact, I was reading it last night, it was interesting. They had the breakdown of their diets, and the Hunzas, their diet is 99% plant-based. They eat 1% animal products. They eat about on average about 10% to 15% protein and anywhere from 10% to 15% fat, but that’s about how the other ones are too. Once again, when he did his research into these areas, they were basically anywhere from 90% up to 99% plant-based. So I always look at that as the preponderance of evidence along with a lot of the scientific studies. So anyway, I’m on this cruise and I tell my wife two days in, “Trina, I’m going to start eating whole food plant-based,” and she thought I was out of my mind because we’re on this cruise, there’s all this meat and dairy and desserts, I mean, you name it, but I’m one of these people type A personality, “Hey, you know what? I’m just doing this.” So from September till now, I have been totally plant-based.
So when I came home, this was the last week of September, I was doing a surgery case and I remember feeling a little pop in my right collarbone. I didn’t think anything of it, but then it just kept getting worse and worse. Then by the time I got to the last week of October, it was starting to keep me up at night. I literally asked my wife, I said, “Trina, do you think I have bone cancer?” and she said, “Oh, you’re the healthiest person. I know you’re fine,” and I kind of slapped it off, but on November 10th, which was about a week and a half after I said that to my wife, we were watching TV, I accidentally knocked over a container of water, I lunged for it and my bone just cracked right in half. Went to the urgent care center, it was completely displaced. Went to a friend of mine who’s an orthopedic surgeon. I said, “Hey, what’s going on here?” He said, “We need an MRI.” So that happened, I cracked my bone on a Sunday, he called me on a Friday evening and he goes, “Nick,” Nick’s my nickname, he said, “Nick, I think you have a tumor in there.” He said, “It’s either multiple myeloma or some kind of metastasis,” and I must tell you, I was totally blown away. I’m sure you deal with cancer patients, but I don’t think anybody can predict the way they’re going to react to it because your world is totally rocked.
So anyway, from there, I had biopsies. They did all kind of blood studies, and they came up that I had what’s called an IgA multiple myeloma free Kappa chain. If you go on the internet, there’s three different basic types of myeloma. There’s IgA, IgG, IgM, and myeloma, for your listeners, is a cancer of the plasma cells. So they’re the cells that make your antibodies. If you look through the research, IgA, the one that I was diagnosed with, is definitely the most aggressive. Because of that, when I went to my oncologist, he wanted to put me on this triple regimen of two oral medications, and then there was a drug called Velcade, which is a proteasome inhibitor, where I would have to go into the hospital every week and get an injection into my abdomen. As I was researching this, I was learning that just about everybody that gets this drug gets a pretty bad peripheral neuropathy. I’m a surgeon, I didn’t want to risk that. Told my oncologist, “Hey, listen, I don’t think I want to do the Velcade.” He was upset. He pulled me into a side room. There was a patient over there that actually finished the Velcade treatment. He tried to get him to talk me into it. In fact, that guy’s actually a good friend of mine now, we go out to lunch all the time, and he calls me when he has a question about his treatment and so forth, but I came back to my oncologist.
Remember, at this point I had already been eating whole food plant-based for two months, and I was 100% sure it was going to help me in this battle. So I told my oncologist, I’m not doing it. He said, “I don’t think you’re going to get into remission.” He was upset with me, but we just went ahead. I would just take these two oral medications, 21 days on, seven days off. At this point, I started to do a deep dive into the scientific literature. I wanted to know every single thing that I could do from a lifestyle perspective. I researched every herb that I could possibly take. I looked into exercise, stress reduction, sleep, intermittent fasting, getting rid of toxins, how all these things would affect my final result. Well, every month, my numbers just kept getting better and better, and by the sixth month, I was in a complete remission and my doctor was blown away by it. He never thought I was going to get there, and to get there in six months, he was totally befuddled, but I really wasn’t because I knew everything that I was doing was helping.
So a year after I started treatment, I started treatment January of 2018. January of 2019, I decided I was going to give a lecture at one of the local hotels because I was learning all this stuff and I said, “I need to share this with people, especially cancer patients.” So I scheduled a hotel and I’ve given a lot of interviews in Pittsburgh with various news stations for plastic surgery, anti-aging, med spa. There was one anchor that I’ve gotten to know really well, Michelle Wright, and I gave her a call. I said, “Hey, Michelle, can you do a little story on all the different lifestyle things I’m doing, my cancer diagnosis, and so forth? I’m doing this lecture. Maybe we can get some people there.”
So she did it. In fact, that whole interview is actually on my website, naturalinsightsintocancer.com. So it was a really great program that she did. We figured we were going to get maybe 50 people there. So we opened the doors and these people are flooding in. I mean, we were pulling chairs out of the restaurants. It was crazy. We ended up with 125 people, which was amazing.
So I gave this lecture. I thought it was going to be an hour. It ended up being two hours. People kept asking me questions as I was giving the lecture, and then afterward, I had a standing ovation. I’ve never had a standing ovation for anything in my life. I don’t know if it was because they felt sorry for me because I had cancer or it was because they thought the lecture was good, which I don’t think was that great, but I thought it was pretty good, but I think the reason they gave me that standing ovation is that there were a lot of cancer patients out there, and I think they felt that they were at the mercy of surgery, radiation, chemo, and there really wasn’t anything else that they could really do.
In fact, I had quite a few people come up to me after the lecture. One I remember very vividly, she was a multiple myeloma patient, and she was definitely overweight. I would say probably even obese. She said, “Hey, Doc. When I talked to my doctor, I asked him, ‘Should I change my diet?’ and he said, ‘Oh, no, just keep eating the way you are. You’ll do just fine.'” She told me, she said, “I just knew that wasn’t right, that that could not be right,” and I think that’s how a lot of these people felt.
So I think when I gave that lecture, I really empowered them. From that point, I had monthly meetings in one of my med spas, and we would pack anywhere from 50 to 100 people in these little med spas. We had these chairs. People were standing and I’d bring other speakers in and people started asking me then, “Hey, Doc. You need to write a book. You have so much knowledge.”
So on Memorial Day, this was 2019 or 2018, I’m sorry, every morning I would wake up and I would write for one to two hours, and by Labor Day, I had the book completely done. I mean, I had to do a lot of research and so forth. I had it on Amazon first week of November. I had a book launching the second week of November, and I developed a website, Natural Insights Into Cancer, an Instagram site, Cancer Veggie Doc, and I started doing virtual consultations for people to help them, when they have cancer to get through it, how to make different lifestyle changes. I make supplement recommendations and so forth. So that’s how I got to this point. I know it was a little long-winded, but I think it’s important for your listeners to understand how I actually got to this point.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing your story with us. So let’s start with how you got to the plant-based diet as the best anti-cancer diet. So I’m going to challenge you a little bit on that. I think the idea that fruits and vegetables and herbs contain these powerful anti-cancer phytonutrients, I think is without question, and I’ve been looking at the research on that. I think absolutely no doubt at all that there are many powerful health-promoting anti-aging, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer factors in fruits and vegetables, herbs, maybe nuts and seeds. The question is, should we include some animal protein in the diet, and what about things like grains and beans and et cetera, oils, I guess? So fat’s a whole issue. I’ve interviewed a number of people in the cancer world, and Dr. Thomas Seyfried wrote the Metabolic Theory of Cancer, and he advocates a ketogenic diet due to the fact that cancer cells predominantly produce energy through the glycolytic pathway through sugar, and so therefore, if we’re on a ketogenic diet, which gets the carbohydrates as low as possible, we’ll starve cancer cells of their source of energy.
I’ve also interviewed Al Danenberg, Dr. Al Danenberg, who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2018 and he was given a few months to live, and he’s still alive using his carnivore diet. So I guess one of the questions would be, can there be different anti-cancer diets for each person? So anyway, let’s see where we go with that.
Dr. Brandy: Well, once again, I look at the preponderance of evidence. Once again, when I went through Dr. Greger’s book, I mean, and I advise everyone to read that book because there’s thousands of scientific references. There’s a journal article, the British Journal of Cancer, where they looked at people’s eating habits in England over a 10-year period, and they found that people that ate more plant-based had much lower incidence of cancer, especially blood cancers. That was the one that was … Then there was another one in JAMA Internal Medicine. It came to the exact same conclusion, and there’s a lot. In fact, recently in 2017, there was a meta analysis of many different studies, and they found that those that ate plant-based had much lower incidents of cancer. Also, the EPIC-Oxford study, the AHS-2 study showed exactly the same thing, that people that ate more plant-based have much lower incidence of cancer.
So what I always tell patients to start off, just to get rid of all the esoteric crap. The National Cancer Institute recommends nine servings of fruits and vegetables, and they recommend it for a reason. The studies show over and over that people that eat more fruits and vegetables have much lower incidence of cancer. So what I tell patients, “Listen, if that’s what the studies show to prevent cancer, if you have cancer, you should be eating a hell of a lot more than nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day.” In fact, this weekend on Saturday, I’m giving a lecture at one of the wellness expos, and I have a couple lectures on my website about the synergy of these phytochemicals. The way they work is that when you combine … Two plus two doesn’t equal four. Two plus two equal seven. I go through several studies that show this remarkable synergy with these phytochemicals. For instance, there was one study that was done with breast cancer cells where they applied a grape extract that killed about 25% of the cancer cells. Then they did onion extract, killed about 50%. Then you would figure if you would do a combination of both, you’d get maybe 35% destruction of the cancer cells. No, it was 75%. There was another study with carotenoids. It was a tomato extract with turmeric, and then vitamin E, which vitamin E, actually, the cancer actually grew faster with the vitamin E. It was against prostate cancer cells, but when they combined the three, it increased the anti-cancer activity by almost 10 times.
Now, one of the things that I stress in my lectures and in my book at the beginning, I talk about my philosophy on how cancer gets started. I personally think it’s the accumulation of DNA mutations over your lifetime. When I first got diagnosed, I read an article in Nature by Nikhil Munshi. He’s a world renowned myeloma researcher. This article actually upset me because he found that by the time you are diagnosed with multiple myeloma, you have about 5,000 DNA mutations in that cancer cell, and by the time you relapse, you are up to 12,000.
I think a lot of those mutations are probably from the chemo drugs. There’s a lot of free radical activity that’s causing a lot of DNA mutations. If you look at plant foods compared to animal products, plant foods have 63 times the antioxidant power compared to animal products. So if I have a patient in remission, and I can honestly say at this point, I was on a podcast and someone asked me, I never really thought about it. I have never had a patient that was in remission that came to me that came out of remission.
I really think one of the reasons is we’re increasing their antioxidant activity. What I recommend for supplements, they’re almost all herbal supplements, I do not recommend individual vitamins. If I do, I do it as a drug. For instance, vitamin D is really more of a hormone. I think everybody should take that. I really try to get people up to 80 to 100 nanograms per mil. If you’re eating whole food, you have to take a vitamin B12 supplement. I mean, that is really a given, but we know that there are over 100,000 phytochemicals in whole food plant foods.
I listened to a podcast, Simon Hills podcast with Jed Fahey, and Jed Fahey is a world renowned expert on phytochemicals. I mean, he actually feels there’s over five million phytochemicals in edible plant foods. We have only studied about 150 of them. When we study these phytonutrients, and there are things like curcumin. People have heard a lot of these things, daidzein, isoflavones. When we studied these, they all have four common elements. They have very powerful antioxidant activity. They have very powerful anti-tumor activity, very powerful anti-inflammatory activity, and they have an amazing epigenetic effect that is really mind-blowing. In fact, on my lecture, I have this one diagram where I have all these different phytochemicals and the way they either upregulate or downregulate certain genes. For instance, curcumin is one that I show in my lecture, and there’s an arrow that goes up to the BRCA gene. BRCA gene is a DNA repair gene for the cancer cell. Angelina Jolie made that famous, the BRCA DNA repair. Well, curcumin actually upregulates the BRCA gene through epigenetics, so does soy. A lot of people think you shouldn’t take soy with breast cancer, but it’s the exact opposite. There are many studies that show that women that actually intake a cup of soy every day over a five-year period actually have about a 36% lower chance of relapse. The the way it works, soy works, it actually, the breast cancer actually methylates the BRCA gene, which it downregulates the BRCA gene. So it’s not working as well, can’t repair the DNA. With soy, it actually methylates it. So now the BRCA gene is working properly.
So these phytochemicals, and then the other thing I show how it downregulates, for instance, the P53 tumor suppressor gene when it’s mutated. So for your listeners, what basically happens with cancer is that you get all this free radical damage. We have three innate antioxidants in each one of our cells. We have catalase, glutathione peroxidase, superoxide dismutase, and they can pretty much keep free radical damage under control, but most of us overload the system. I mean, smoking’s probably the worst thing you can do, but all the pesticides that we eat, [inaudible 00:23:27] radiation, pollution. I mean, there’s so many, the water that we drink, there’s so many things that we do that create excessive free radical activity that a lot of times our body just cannot neutralize these free radicals. So these free radicals damage, remember I talked about that P53 tumor suppressor genes, proto-oncogene. So a proto-oncogene is supposed to protect you from cancer. You get enough DNA mutations of that proto-oncogene, it actually becomes an activated oncogene. So instead of protecting you, it actually promotes cancer growth. So the turmeric, the curcumin actually downregulates that activated oncogene, so it’s not as active as it was before. So the bottom line is I try to get as many phytonutrients in the patient as possible. I document all the ways that phytonutrients work. I mean, turmeric alone has been shown to disrupt 80 plus cancer cells signaling pathways.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, no, I’ve seen some of the charts with all the different arrows on all the different cancer pathways. Curcumin’s amazing.
Dr. Brandy: Sometimes I take 30 plus herbal supplements, and when I-
Dr. Weitz: I do too. It’s interesting. You and I, even though I don’t have cancer, have similar regimens except that I also include some animal protein in my diet.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah, I mean, that’s fine. Like I said, the people in the Blue Zones eat 90%, 95% plant-based. I try to use the word, for people that don’t have cancer, I like to use the word plant strong, plant predominant because-
Dr. Weitz: Rather than use the word vegan, which is politically charged to say.
Dr. Brandy: I don’t use the word vegan at all because I think vegan is more of a political term. Most people that use the term vegan, they’re usually animal rights activist or they believe it’ll cure climate change, whatever. I really don’t go there at all. I talk about the health benefits. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve ever read The Starch Solution by Dr. McDougall.
Dr. Weitz: I have not.
Dr. Brandy: He has a character called the Fat Vegan, and it’s somebody that’s eating potato chips all day, Doritos, muffins, frosted flakes, drinking Coke all day.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. I have had more than a couple of vegans come in my office who were overweight for nutrition and were eating very few vegetables.
Dr. Brandy: I mean, honestly, that diet is the … I’d rather somebody eat a carnivore diet than eat that to be honest with you because that is the most unhealthy diet that you could eat. So I always use the word whole food plant-based or whole food plant strong. When you use the word plant strong or plant dominant, it really doesn’t freak people out as much. It’s like, “Hey, you know?” Why don’t we … In fact, when I take people that are eating like the average American, which is about 65% processed food, 25% animal products, and probably anywhere from 5% to 10% fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, et cetera, I tell them, “Listen, if we can take you from maybe 10% to 30%, why don’t we start there? At least I’ll be tickled pink if we can do that, and then if we can get you up to 60%, that’s even better.” So I try not to freak people out too much, but I think we know, and like I said with the National Cancer Institute, the studies show that the more plant foods you eat, it definitely has an anti-cancer effect. The way these phytochemicals work, and I’ve done a lot of research on this, not only do they affect the cancer cells signaling pathways, they actually fragment DNA, they inhibit angiogenesis, which is the blood vessel growth that these cancers need to progress. It’s a proteasome inhibitor like Velcade, the drug that I was supposed to inject in my abdomen. In fact, turmeric is a very potent proteasome inhibitor, so the cancer cell can’t get rid of unwanted protein, so it actually dies because it’s all infested with all these abnormal proteins, but it affects the cell division, the cancer cell division at varied phases of the cell cycle.
I get into all these. It really helps chemo and radiation actually work better and it prevents chemo resistance. So I document all of this in the book. The big thing, I think, is the fact that we really need to keep the amount of free radical activity minimized. Like I said, plants have 63 times the oxidant power. The other thing about these carnivore diets, and I will just tell you this, in fact, I just did a post on Instagram a couple days ago, and I have these two studies actually in my book. I really try to alkalinize these patients. I mean, we know that the pH should be between 7.35 and 7.45. Your body just keeps it there automatically, but I really like people to be leaning more towards 7.45. So I have a chart, it’s actually in my book, and I send it when I do a consult, I send it to all my patients. It was done by Dr. Jaffy. That was really the work that he did for his PhD, and it’s really the best alkaline base chart I have ever seen.
I actually came across this. I was at an anti-aging meeting, and I came across it and I’ve really kept it and I give it to everybody, but cancer really struggles in an alkaline micro environment. Cancer loves high acidity, it loves high inflammation, and it likes an environment of low oxygen. So I have this chart, and basically, it has the most alkaline foods, it has the most acidic foods, and has all these in between. I try to get people started with eat 70% on the alkaline side, and they’re most all plants. On the acidic side, it’s mainly meat, sugar products, but there are whole foods that are more acidic, legumes, carrots, corn.
So there’s certain foods. I just tell patients, “Look at this. Try to memorize it.” For instance, before I go to bed, and I know this would freak your people out to do these carnivore diets, but before I go to bed, I actually eat pineapple and watermelons, They’re two of the most alkaline foods. So they would probably think, “Oh, man, he’s going to have all these cancer cells going out of control.” I’ve been in remission for 5.5 years, and I take very low doses of those two drugs. Myeloma isn’t curable, so I’m likened what they call a functional remission, but I live a very, very full life. I exercise every single day. I do resistance training every day. I ride my bike every day.
We can get into exercise because that’s probably the second most important thing next to a whole food plant-based. In fact, exercise, in one of the studies, I think it was into cancer research journal, it showed that exercise actually increases oxygen in the microenvironment, the cancer microenvironment. So the anti-inflammation in the cancer microenvironment, we take care of that with more of a whole food plant strong diet. The alkalinity, we increase that through eating more foods on the alkaline inside. I do have my patients check their urine pH every morning. I really like it to be between 6.5 and 7.5. As soon as I wake up in the morning, that’s what I do. I have this little strip. You can get it on Amazon and patients just pee on it first thing in the morning, and it should be pretty green. When people start, they’re usually about 5.5. I mean, I am consistently 7.2, 7.3.
Then we want to keep the oxygen content up, and that’s really, really daily exercises, so, so critical to that, but these people eating these carnivore diets, I mean, their pH is so acidic. I’ve never measured it on somebody with a carnivore diet, but I will just tell you, it’s got to be, if they check their urine pH, it’s probably 4.5 or something, and that does have a negative effect on your bones. Your bones will release certain minerals to try to neutralize some of that acidity, and it’s really hard on the kidneys. These animal proteins cause what’s called hyperfiltration, and it really is very stressful on kidneys. It’s really the branched amino acids in animal proteins that cause that hyperfiltration, and it’s also the branched amino acids that actually send a signal to the liver to release IGF1, which is a very potent growth stimulator. I mean, we know that IGF1 is a growth stimulator in patients that have cancer. Remember I talked about how the DNA mutations increase with age? You do not want high DNA mutations when you’re 50, 60 years old and be having all of those DNA mutations exposed to a gross stimulator like IGF1 or mTOR. That’s just a recipe for disaster. mTOR-
Dr. Weitz: Right, but in terms of longevity, we know that being able to maintain levels of growth in the body so you can repair and regenerate cells and tissues that have broken down, you want to maintain your bone density, you want to maintain your muscle mass, you want to maintain your strength, your balance because all those things can affect longevity. So it’s not necessarily the case that we want to drive the IGF1 levels as low as possible, right? We need a certain amount of growth still occurring for us to maintain our health, don’t we?
Dr. Brandy: I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Dr. Valter Longo.
Dr. Weitz: I am.
Dr. Brandy: I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Laron dwarf syndrome.
Dr. Weitz: I am, yeah, I’ve read about that.
Dr. Brandy: Laron dwarfs, their IGF receptors are screwed up. So they really don’t have IGF1 levels, and there’s never been a reported case of Laron dwarf ever having cancer. If you go through the literature, high IGF1 levels in adults is actually correlated with increased cancer incidents. In fact, if you look at Valter Longo’s work, and I try to keep people’s IGF1 levels between 120 to 160. Remember, we’re talking about cancer patients. I’m not talking about somebody that’s a body builder or wants to be. I probably eat about 100 grams of protein per day, and I work out every day. I mean, I’m 70 years old and my muscles are like when I was 25, 30 years old. You do not need excessive protein to build muscle. In fact, once you get over 30 grams of protein per meal, your body doesn’t even utilize that. When you get to about 30 to 50, it starts to plateau, but the first 30 grams are really what’s utilized for protein synthesis.
Dr. Weitz: I would totally agree with that, but it’s not easy to get 30 grams of protein eating just a plant-based diet without any animal proteins.
Dr. Brandy: It’s so simple. I’ll just give you an example. I don’t know if you Dr. Joe Mercola. I follow his website. One day when I read it, he talked about what he had for breakfast, and it was a 12-ounce steak with six eggs, and there was ghee butter and all this saturated fat. I was befuddled by it, to be honest with you. Then a month later, he was talking about how he has to blood let every month to get rid of the excess iron. I mean, actually, he tried to keep my ferritin levels really … My ferritin’s about 11. I want to keep that low because that is definitely a pro-oxidant. So what I did is I compared what he has for breakfast compared to me. So he was eating, just with the steak and eggs, he was eating 1300 calories. There was 1,550 milligrams of cholesterol. There was 30 grams of saturated fat, there was zero fiber, zero phytonutrients. There were high levels of carnitine. We can get into carnitine and choline because that’s a whole another issue with TMAO and-
Dr. Weitz: By the way, I’m pretty skeptical about that whole concept, but yeah, let’s keep going.
Dr. Brandy: No, I tell you what, there was a recent study came out at Cleveland Clinic. If somebody comes into the ER with chest pain, if you do a TMAO level, you can pretty much predict that they’re going to have heart attack in 30 days.
Dr. Weitz: I’ve also read a meta analysis saying people who eat a vegetarian diet had much higher levels of TMAO than people who eat meat.
Dr. Brandy: That’s definitely not true. I don’t know where you got that information, but that’s definitely not true.
Dr. Weitz: I’ll send you this.
Dr. Brandy: It’s the hungatella bacteria that, in fact, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this article. It was really a land breaking article in Nature 2014 where they put one group on a completely carnivore diet. They put another group on a plant-based diet. They evaluated the microbiome and they wanted to see what kind of changes were going to occur. Very quickly, the microbiomes started … After five days, it was dramatic, but each day they could see a dramatic difference. So the people that were eating carnivore diet, the more pathogenic bacteria was increasing. The prevotella and their subspecies were decreasing in the plant-based group. The prevotella good bacteria in their 500 subspecies were increasing and the pathogenic bacteria were decreasing. The one bacteria that started to increase immediately was hungatella, and hungatella is the one that primarily converts choline and carnitine to trimethylamine. It goes to the liver, it’s converted to trimethylamine oxide. The studies show that trimethylamine oxide definitely is correlated with cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, really all cause mortality. It just increases your inflammatory levels extremely high. I told you about the study about the people that come in with chest pains. Choline is higher in eggs, seafood, and cheese, and vegans get plenty of choline. You get plenty of choline and now carnitine is made in your liver. So you don’t need more choline or carnitine. When you’re eating meat products, you’re actually getting an excess of those, and that’s really what we don’t want in this situation, but everybody has a different view. I think I’ve done a lot of research on this. I think I’m very knowledgeable on it.
Dr. Weitz: Fish is actually the highest source of TMAO, and we know that fish is consistently associated with lower risk for cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Brandy: I recommend a fish oil supplement for all of my patients. In fact, I take about six grams of EPA/DHA. I recommend that for all my patients. I do check their omega-6, omega-3 level. Here’s the problem with fish. I would say a hundred years ago, fish was great. I think the waters are just so contaminated right now that when you eat fish, you are getting a crap load of toxins. In fact, there was an article-
Dr. Weitz: What water do you think is being used? What water is being used to water the plants? It’s the same water. Our planet is polluted.
Dr. Brandy: Oh, yeah, but there was an article in the International Journal Environmental Research, and what they did, and this study blew my mind, they took wild-caught salmon outside of Seattle and they wanted to see what kind of chemicals were bioaccumulated into the fat tissue. I mean, it was mind blowing. They were birth control pills, antidepressant sedatives. I don’t believe all the stuff that’s in there, and then they’re loaded with these microplastics right now. So I don’t recommend that. In fact, Dan Buettner, who wrote the Blue Zones, who I very much respect, he did a post probably about a month ago, and he’s basically saying what I said. He goes, “I just stay away from fish products.” They have some of the highest PCB levels also of any animal product. So I do think you need the EPA/DHA. I think that’s one area where vegans or whole food plant-based people don’t get enough of that. When I say fish oil to them, some of these vegans freak out. I don’t think algae supplements are adequate because they’re high in DHA and they’re very low in EPA. The fish oil supplements are high in EPA and a little bit lower in DHA. So I think they’re really good. The one that I take new age I think is really good. Each one has about 900 milligrams of the EPA/DHA. So I take three of those in the morning, three at night, and I always take those before I take my turmeric because you really do need fat to be able to absorb all the phytonutrients in the turmeric. Hey, one thing about turmeric that I do want to mention, I’ve listened to some of your podcasts and I think everybody agrees that you need to take some fat with your turmeric. One of the things I don’t do, I actually look for turmeric supplements that are not standardized for 95% curcumin. There was a study, I think it was in Cancer Research Journal, where they compared curcumin versus turmeric, the whole root. They actually looked at it against seven different cancers. What they found at every single cancer, the turmeric actually worked better than the curcumin. It gets back to that synergy effect that I was talking about. There’s over 300 phytochemicals in turmeric. So there’s turmerone, zingarone. There’s all these different phytonutrients in there, and they all work synergistically. So I think that’s why you get a greater anti-cancer effect. So when I recommend a turmeric supplement, I use one by Carlyle. All the supplements that I recommend you can get on Amazon. I do heavy research on these. I go to consumerlab.com. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that website.
Dr. Weitz: I am, yeah.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah, but I always try to go there to see what the deal is. That’s a good thing for your listeners to know about because, for instance, I was doing olive oil. My wife and I were doing this Carapelli olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, and I thought it was a good olive oil, and then I went on there. I found out 25% of it was rancid. There wasn’t even any olive oil in the olive oil. So we use a Lucini organic now. That was their top pick, but in soy milk, Silk was their top pick. So I go on there a lot when I’m looking at supplements, but when I recommend turmeric, I recommend actually a Carlyle supplement. Each capsule has one gram of turmeric. So I have people do four of those in the morning, and I have them do four in the evening with the fish oil. Those do have a little bit of the BioPerine, the black pepper extract, which increases the bioavailability. Some people that might upset their stomach, but I think that’s such a low dose, it doesn’t. I do have them do a black pepper extract on top of that to increase bioavailability. I have them do 20 milligrams of a Carlyle supplement with-
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I’m constantly reading about some-
Dr. Brandy: Some people get stomach upset from that, so you have to watch that. If they do, you just cut it.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, that’s interesting topic. I’m constantly reading about a new form of curcumin or turmeric that’s better absorbed because it’s in a fat soluble form, in a water soluble form mixed with certain other things. So everybody’s trying to find a way to get turmeric or curcumin at a higher absorption rate since I think naturally has a low absorption rate.
Dr. Brandy: I actually go to the study that, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the study that Golombick and group did in Australia on MGUS. So my type of cancer goes from MGUS to smoldering myeloma to myeloma. I probably had MGUS 20 years ago, I didn’t even know it. So MGUS and also early prostate-
Dr. Weitz: What does MGUS stand for? That’s an acronym I’m assuming.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah. I think it’s myeloma of undetermined origin or something like that. It’s something like that, but 3% of the population actually has MGUS. So if you have MGUS, you have a 1% chance every year that you’re going to turn into myeloma. So there’s a ton of people walking around with MGUS, they don’t even know, and they’ll probably die with it. In fact, my dad was 91 years old. He had MGUS. He died with MGUS. My brother actually has a IgM MGUS. So they say it’s not genetic, but when I told my oncologist that, he was like, “Hey, boy, that’s interesting.” [MGUS stands for Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance]
Dr. Weitz: It is interesting.
Dr. Brandy: The three men of the family have-
Dr. Weitz: Exactly.
Dr. Brandy: … a plasma cell issue, but what Golombick did, she did an interesting study, and the reason I used eight grams is because that’s what she used in her study. She gave these people, and she did two different studies and they both came out the same way. It was eight grams per day of turmeric, and they had a 33% drop in their M spike. So the M spike measures the amount of this paraprotein that’s released by this abnormal plasma cell. Also, the free Kappa chains came down and also their bone density biomarkers improved, but most people with myeloma really get severe osteopenia or osteoporosis due to the fact that nobody really knows exactly how it happens, but myeloma, it downregulates your osteoblasts, the cells that actually make bone and it upregulates your osteoclast, the cells that actually break down bones. So that was an interesting study. I always go over that. The other good study that people need to know is really a landmark study in the Journal of Urology. Dean Ornish did it. I think it was in 2005. He did it with Elizabeth Blackburn, who’s a Nobel Prize winner, and they basically took people with early prostate cancer. They put them into two different groups, plant-based group, and then the standard American group, and then they looked at their PSA levels over a year.
The plant-based group, their PSA levels came down 4%. Standard American group, they went up 6%. Then what they did through heat map technology, they looked at the epigenetics that we were talking about before, and they did it through heat map technology. What they found was there were 48 good genes that were upregulated and there were 453 bad genes that were downregulated. Then five years later, they looked at the telomeres, and this is Elizabeth Blackburns claim to fame. That’s how she won the Nobel Prize. They wanted to see what happened to the telomeres. With the people that in the plant-based group, the telomeres actually got a little longer, and then the standard American group, the telomeres shrunk significantly. So I mean, that was some really interesting-
Dr. Weitz: As I recall it, in addition to the plant-based diet, I believe they also had them exercised and do some stress reduction.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah, there was lifestyle.
Dr. Weitz: It was a whole lifestyle program. Yeah.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah, and that’s what I recommend to people. My whole thing is a whole food plant strong or plant-based diet. I think for cancer patients, if they can lean a little-
Dr. Weitz: What’s the best form of exercise for cancer patients? Is there a best form?
Dr. Brandy: Well, I do think resistance training is really important. I recommend aerobic something, brisk walking. For instance, there’s one study in my book just to show the power of exercise, even brisk walking. In this one study, these were breast cancer patients and women that just did brisk walking even five days a week, they lowered their relapse rate by 24%. If they jogged two-thirds of a mile per day, they decreased their relapse rate by 40%, and if they ran 2.3 miles per day, they lowered it by 95%. I mean, I don’t think a chemo drug can even do that. So it has this amazing effect on your immune system. I have in my book, there’s an article that I researched where just fixed minutes of exercise increases your natural killer activity by 50%. So anytime a patient tells me, “I don’t have time to exercise,” I go, “Do you have six minutes? Go through a little break.”
Dr. Weitz: I remember being in 2015, IFM had a cancer conference, and Keith Block was there, and he showed a picture of a patient hooked up to a chemo IV on a treadmill.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah. Well, one of the reasons he may be doing that is exercise actually makes your innate antioxidants more efficient. So it makes your superoxide dismutase, your catalase, your glutathione peroxidase actually more efficient. I know you’ve had some other people on your podcast that talk about fasting before chemo treatments. I do think that is really powerful, and not everybody can do it, but I do. Right now, I’m dealing with a bunch of patients that are in a metastatic stage four cancer and they’re getting chemo, and I really try to encourage them, “If you can at least calorically strict one to two days before you get your chemo treatment and then the day of the chemo treatment and then the day after,” and they can even do Valter Longo’s fast, mimicking five-day program through prolonfmd.com if they wanted to get that that way, that they’re at least eating something. I think it’s about 600 calories per day. It’s a plant-based keto, essentially.
What he’s shown, he started with rodent studies and he found that as he fasted them before they got the chemo, the results are dramatic. In fact, I have the graph on some of my posts on Instagram. I mean, they’re actually mind-blowing. If you just fast even, cancer cells really struggle because they need a lot of nutrients to keep multiplying at this incredibly fast rate. If you just fast, it can have a negative effect. Then if you’re fasting and then all of a sudden you give chemo and they’re struggling, those cancer cells are going to be more in a weakened state and they’re going to have a chance of getting eliminated a lot easier if they’re more in a fasted state.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, absolutely. There’s some integrative cancer experts that for quite a period of time have done insulin potentiation, where they’ll actually give the patient insulin to drive their glucose really low before their chemo and find that that’s beneficial as well.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah. I’ve read that. That is something that you could basically do. In fact, one of the things that I really try to do with all of my patients is try to make them more insulin sensitive. We were getting into exercise. Resistance training is really the most important thing for developing insulin sensitivity because as you lose muscle mass, your cells definitely do not accept insulin as well. The receptor doesn’t work as well. Then you’ll get accumulation of sugar and you’ll also get accumulation of insulin. I don’t know if you know this, but insulin is the most potent growth factor. So that would be the one thing that I wouldn’t like, giving insulin while you’re getting chemo, because insulin is the most powerful anabolic hormone in your body. In fact, when they do studies with cancer cells growing in a Petri dish, to get them to grow faster, guess what they add to it? They add insulin and they start going totally out of control. So we really need to keep insulin sensitivity. There are four supplements that I always recommend for people to really keep their insulin sensitivity high and keep their blood sugar levels low. I will tell you, I eat whole food plant-based. I eat a ton of whole grains. I eat a ton of legumes. I think they’re the most important two that you should eat. I know paleo people don’t eat those. I mean, the longest lived people, like the Hunzas for example, I mean, whole grains are a major part of their diet, and whole grains do not cause glucose spikes.
Actually, before, I get blood work every week, every month, I’m sorry, but before I go in, I actually drink a giant smoothie. My fasting blood sugar’s never been over 80 when I go in there. It just never has because the fiber actually slows down the absorption of the sugar. There’s four supplements. Amla is one that really helps keep the sugar down. Berberine, I think every cancer patient should be taking berberine. I think it’s super, super important. Gymnema sylvestre, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that’s a supplement that definitely has a very potent effect on blood sugar, and then garlic.
I like to do the whole herb. I get it through. I think it’s called herbal roots. I recommend that for patients. Once again, when I recommend herbal supplements, I usually like the whole root rather than something that’s standardized for a certain chemical in the herb because of the synergistic effect. In fact, one of the things I do that it’s in my book, I am really big into freeze dried powders. In fact, first thing I do in the morning, and I do time-restricted eating, I eat my last meal at eight and I don’t eat until noon. In fact, right now it’s noon, I still haven’t had breakfast yet, but I woke up at 6:00 this morning, I have a special coffee drink that I do, and I put 12 different freeze dried powders in there.
I also put about 20 shakes of cinnamon. I put a couple little shakes of clove. I always put baking powder in the sugar because coffee is very acidic and cacao is the main thing that I put in there to give it a hot chocolate taste. Then I put soy milk in there. I also had a little scoop of a protein powder. It’s called So Clean So Lean, which is a really great protein powder or vegan protein powder that I put in there.
What I tell patients to do is look at the blueberry freeze dried powder. It has a 50 to one ratio on there, and what that means is one gram of that freeze-dried powder, blueberry powder is like eating 50 grams of blueberries. So the ones that I do are blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, goji berry, cranberry, acai berry. There’s a 10 mega mushroom that I put in there.
So I put all these together. I use a 247 ounce coffee cup. That takes me up about a quarter of the way up. When I do my coffee, I do an organic light roast. Takes me about halfway. Then I do a cup of soy milk, and then as I do my work in the morning, my research, my writing and so forth, I’m drinking that. I sip it during the day.
Now, the way that I look at that, I talked about all the different ways that these phytochemicals actually kill cancer cells. I still consider that I’m still in my fasted state. So way I look at it, I’m in a fasted state at that point, and I’m drinking all these phytochemicals. I look at it like it’s almost like a chemo infusion that I’m doing while I’m doing that first thing in the morning, and then when I get ready, take a shower and get ready and so forth, I have a five concoction tea that I do. It’s camomile, dandy lime, hibiscus green tea and red clover, and I put those all together. I add some organic lemon juice, organic lime juice. I put a cinnamon stick in there. Cinnamon has amazing anti-cancer activity, by the way, and cinnamon also has significant blood sugar lowering effects. That was the fourth thing that I really recommend for lowering the blood sugar.
Then I fill that cup all the way up, and then I basically sip that as I’m getting ready. Then when I take my supplements, I basically take a handful of nuts and I do 12 different nuts. I know this sounds obsessive compulsive, but it gets into that synergy thing. I do 12. I do two walnuts, two almonds, two pecans, two cashews. I do all these different, and there’s studies that I have in my lecture where I show the most potent nuts against a cancer. There was a study done at Cornell University. They looked at the 10 most common nuts in which one had the most potent effect against liver cancer. Walnuts and pecans were definitely by far the most potent.
Then there was another study that actually looked at antioxidant activity, and it showed that pecans and almonds had the highest antioxidant activity also. I don’t know if you’re familiar with some of Keith Block’s work with molecular probe technology, but he actually showed that when an antioxidant gets into a cell in the environment of high iron and high copper, which most cancer cells have very high iron and high copper levels, it actually turns into a pro-oxidant through the fenton reaction. It actually kills the cell through free radical damage. So it’s interesting that the higher the antioxidant food, the more potent its anti-cancer activity. I think maybe that’s even the way IV vitamin C works when they give it to patients.
Dr. Weitz: 100%, yeah. IV vitamin C has a pro-oxidant effect, absolutely.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah. So it actually becomes a pro-oxidant once it gets into the cell in the environment of high iron and high copper. So it’s really interesting. So I take my supplements actually with that tea and I get about halfway, I put it in the fridge, I cover it, and then in the evening before I go to bed, I take all my supplements. In fact, I take my supplements with my Revlimid. I get in arguments all the time with oncologists. They say, “Oh, you shouldn’t-“
Dr. Weitz: That was going to be my next question. Patients taking ongoing chemo and the oncologist is telling them, “Whatever you do, don’t take any antioxidants couple with your chemotherapy.”
Dr. Brandy: Yeah, I get in arguments all the time with these guys, and it is a knee jerk reaction. It’s not based on any science. Keith Block wrote a really good meta analysis. He looked at 965 articles, and these were people that were taking antioxidants with chemotherapy or radiation. What he found was that it actually made the patients finish their treatments better, they had less side effects, they actually got better results. There was only one side effect. One person overdosed on vitamin A, which is a fat soluble vitamin. If you’re taking a fat soluble vitamin, you need to make sure you monitor it so you’re not getting overload. There was another study, I actually have it in my book, did the same thing, looked at 280 studies. It was a meta analysis, and they came up with the same result.
The other thing I always … There’s a drug called Amgen. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It’s an IV antioxidant that was approved by the FDA 20 years ago, and it was approved so that it could prevent damage to the normal cells when people were getting radiation in certain times of chemo. What they found in that study, and there were many clinical trials for that to get FDA approval, that it had no negative effect on the final treatment and it did protect a lot of the normal cells that were around the area of radiation.
So anytime an oncologist gives me a hard time with that, I go, “Well, you know what? Why did the FDA approve this IV antioxidant that’s way more potent than any antioxidant in turmeric or vitamin C or green tea?” I mean, it’s not even close. So that whole thing is really, I really feel it’s a total knee jerk reaction because you know as well as I do, most medical doctors know nothing about nutrition. Zero. I mean, we get two weeks in medical school and honestly, it’s like a junior high school health class. It’s like if you don’t get vitamin C, you’re going to get scurvy. If you don’t get vitamin D, you’ll get rickets. I mean, even fruit loops is probably fortified with vitamin D. People don’t get scurvy nowadays. I really do, talking about these phytonutrients, I think a lot of these people in these carnivore diets and so forth, nobody ever talks about this, but we don’t have any acute deficiencies. But I think a lot of these people over time are going to have phytonutrient deficiencies that develop over time.
Dr. Weitz: I would totally agree with that. Even Paul Saladino, I think, didn’t Paul Saladino changed and start incorporating some vegetables or something now?
Dr. Brandy: Yeah, and you know what? I don’t know if you’re familiar with the American Gut Project by Robert Knight. He’s the premier microbiome researcher in the world, and he has the American Gut Project. You basically send your stool sample in with all these … There’s a questionnaire, ask you all these different questions, and they’ve analyzed over 10,000 stool samples at this point. What they’ve found is people that eat 30 or more different plant foods in a week have the most diverse, healthiest microbiome compared to people that eat 10 or less. The people that eat 10 or less have some antibiotic resistance bacteria. The people that eat 30 or more didn’t have any.
It’s probably because the people that are eating 30 or more per week are probably plant-based. People who are 10 or less probably are eating maybe paleo or keto and they’re getting some of these antibiotic resistant bacteria from the animal products that they’re eating, but that’s one thing I stress, and it’s really not that hard to do. When I’m doing a consult, I show people the salad that I eat every day. I really never knew how many vegetables I had in there until somebody asked me. I actually count. I had 25 different vegetables in that salad.
So I tell people, “Listen, when you eat a salad, don’t put a bunch of greens in there and then maybe little carrots and onions and a tomato, but two radish, put two broccoli, put two cauliflower, put some corn in there, put some peas, and get that diversity in that salad.” Then as far as getting up to 30, the Blue Zones kitchen and I give patients probably about 15 different cookbooks and websites that they can go do to get some amazing recipes.
My wife is an amazing whole food plant-based cook. She’s always in different cookbooks, but there’s some really good ones in the Blue Zones kitchen, some really good soup. So just in that soup, there’s usually 15 different vegetables, legumes. So if you make that in a big instant pot, put them in some little mason jars, you can just pull that out. You do the same thing with your salad. You just put them in little mason jars and you just pull them out. It’s really not that hard to do. Then supplement that with fruits, whole grains.
Every morning, I start with steel-cut oats, with all the berries. I put cinnamon and I put soy milk with that alone. I was telling you by Joe Mercola, what he eats in the morning. I compared what he was eating to what I was … So with that, I was getting, I think it was like 680 calories. I was getting 25 grams of fiber just with that one breakfast. I will tell you, with that drink that I do in the morning, I’ve calculated what I get just with that. I actually get 25 grams of protein and 12 grams of fiber just with that drink that I do in the morning.
People think, “You don’t get enough protein.” I probably get 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram. Honestly, I really don’t even want to be that high, but I am very active. I do think the more active you are if you’re doing resistance training and so forth, you need to get above that 0.8 grams per kilogram, but I looked at what I was doing, I’m getting thousands of phytonutrients. I was getting about 25 grams of fiber. In that, I was getting almost 40 grams of protein just in that morning breakfast that I’m eating because I’m using that soy milk, that Silk soy milk. One cup alone has eight grams of protein and two grams of fiber just in the soy milk. That’s why I like Silk. I think that is the best brand.
I’m getting all these phytonutrients and I’m getting all this plant diversity with that. Dr. Mercola was getting zero fiber or he is getting zero phytonutrients. He’s not getting any plant diversity in there at all. He’s getting a ton of saturated fat. He’s getting, as I said, 1,550 milligrams of cholesterol. What I was surprised at, it was 1,600 milligrams of sodium. I was surprised by that, and then 130 grams of protein, animal protein.
As I told you, once you get over 30 grams of protein, it’s really all it’s doing is really acidifying your pH, putting a heavy load on your kidneys. It’s creating very high iron levels, which are very pro-oxidant. In fact, I told you he actually blood lets himself every month. So I just think that people that are eating these carnivore or Paleo or keto diets really got to be careful because the preponderance of evidence does not show that that is going to have long-term results. You might have some short-term results, you might feel better, but long term we know you have to look at the preponderance of evidence over many years, you have to look at the Blue Zones, you have to look at the work the John Robbins did with Be Healthy at 100.
The preponderances evidence is that people and cultures and research cohorts that eat more plant-based definitely live longer and they have less lower incidents of cancer. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve read Fiber Fueled, you really should read that book. In fact, you should get him on your podcast, Will Bulsiewicz. He’s a board certified gastroenterologist, and his book is amazing, and he’s a great podcast host, if you ever get a chance, and I think he’s really amenable to doing podcast interviews, but he went over a study that came out, Lancet 2019. They looked at 185 prospective studies, 58 clinical trials. It was a meta analysis, and it was 135 million people years. They found the highest fiber consumers compared to the lowest fiber consumers actually lived 30% longer. So we know that when you eat more fiber, you’re healthier. In fact, there was a 2014 study. It looked at 1.7 million people, I think had followed them over 14 years, and they found for every 10 grams of increase in fiber, you lower your mortality by 17%, premature mortality. 10 grams of fiber, just got to give you an example, if you eat a half couple lentils, that’s 10 grams of fiber. If you have a cup of navy beans, that’s basically 10 grams of fiber. So it’s really not that hard to do, but the average American only gets 15 grams of fiber. If you look at the NHANES report, men 30 to 50, 0% eat 30 grams of fiber, 0%. In women, it was 3%. So the American diet is really sorely deficient in fiber, not protein. I’m not worried really about protein. If you’re getting enough calories, you’re getting enough protein. That’s my feeling. Now, if you’re doing a lot of weight training and you want to increase muscle growth, you’re probably going to need a little bit more protein, but I will tell you, when I look at eight grams per kilogram, it’s about 52 grams. I mean, I always get over 100 grams. I’ve checked on consecutive days. I don’t really want to be that high, but it’s really not that hard to get up to 100 grams on a whole food plant-based diet. With the nuts and seeds I do, I eat legumes every day, I eat whole grains, have a lot of protein. I do a lot of whole grains. I do Ezekiel bread this morning, I had it with walnut butter with a little bit of jam. So I think whole grains are extremely important.
Dr. Weitz: Sounds great, Doc. This is a fascinating discussion. I’m really enjoying it. However, I’ve got a patient here, so I’ve got to run.
Dr. Brandy: You got to take care of that patient, man.
Dr. Weitz: Tell everybody how they can get your book and learn more about you, your website, et cetera.
Dr. Brandy: Yeah. My book is called Beat Back Cancer Naturally. You can get it on Amazon. It’s in hardback, paperback, audio, and in Kindle. You can also get it on my website. My website’s naturalinsightsintocancer.com. If you get it there, I do give you a signed copy, and it’s about the same price as if you go on Amazon. I have a Instagram site. It’s called Cancer Veggie Doc, and I have over 36,000 followers on there. I make sure I do a post every single day. In fact, the post I did last night was how a ketogenic diet. It was a study in cell cycle. It actually increased breast cancer by 2.5 fold. So you can take a look at that. I’m always looking at studies on different diets and how they affect cancer growth, but that’s basically the best ways to get me.
Then if they want to do, I do extensive lab testing. I do 70 plus biomarkers request. I check all the vitamin levels, mineral levels. I check C-reactive protein, heavy metals, the omega-6/omega-3 ratio, hemoglobin A1c. I always check their IGF1 levels. I think it’s really important. What I find, and I will tell you this, almost every single person has messed up mineral levels. I mean, I’ve never had anybody had a normal molybdenum level. So I do recommend people take a liquid colloidal mineral supplement every day because our soil is just so messed up right now. In fact, I was reading a book last night and I guess 50 years ago, our top soil was about 16 inches thick and now it’s 20% of that. So our soil is really super depleted.
Then I also do microbiome testing through Doctor’s Data, and I check 173 different toxins from the urine through Great Plains Laboratory. So they can get all that on my website. They get a virtual consultation there. I also have 24/7 availability to me through email, text, and phone, and patients absolutely love that. I have a lot of these patients going through metastatic stage four cancer and I’m in contact with them almost every day through text message because they’re nervous, they’re scared, they’re reading articles. So I’m with them day in and day out. I mean, I get enundated with text messages.
Dr. Weitz: That’s awesome, Doc. I do have to run. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Brandy: Okay. All right. Take care, Dr. Ben.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you. Thank you.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would certainly appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a five-star ratings and review. That way, more people will discover the Rational Wellness Podcast. I wanted to let everybody know that I do have some openings for new patients so I can see you for a functional medicine consultation for specific health issues like gut problems, autoimmune diseases, cardiometabolic conditions or for an executive health screen and to help you promote longevity and take a deeper dive into some of those factors that can lead to chronic diseases along the way, and that usually means we’re going to do some more detailed lab work, stool testing, sometimes urine testing, and we’re going to look at a lot more details to get a better picture of your overall health from a preventative functional medicine perspective. So if you’re interested, please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310-395-3111, and we can set you up for a new consultation for functional medicine. I’ll talk to everybody next week.
