The Metabolic Theory of Cancer with Dr. Nasha Winters: Rational Wellness Podcast 322
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Dr. Nasha Winters discusses The Metabolic Theory of Cancer with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
1:30 Cancer is more likely caused by mitochondrial damage, often related to the metabolic environment in our bodies and related to the modern diet and toxins, et cetera, rather than primarily caused by somatic DNA mutations. Dr. Theodor Boveri, a German zoologist, comparative anatomist and co-founder of modern cytology, first proposed the somatic mutation or genetic theory of cancer in 1914. We have taken this theory and run with it for the last 109 years without really proving it. At about the same time, Otto Warburg had proposed the metabolic/mitochondrial theory of cancer and it was outpacing the somatic theory until the 1950s when Watson and Crick found the DNA helix and everyone went back to the genetic theory of cancer. Nixon launched the war on cancer 52 years ago but given the increase in the number of people being diagnosed with and dying of cancer continues to grow, we are sadly not winning this war. We mapped the human genome and we hoped that this would provide more answers, but it really just raised more questions than answers. And clearly the one gene, one target, one cause is not what we had hoped it would be. Also, multiple studies using a nuclear cell transfer have been unable to create cancer in a cell by transferring the nuclei out of a cancer cell into a healthy cell. This demonstrates that cancer is not caused primarily by somatic mutations.
6:08 We have been able to show that the mitochondria not only make energy but are the protectors of our DNA and our genetic expression. Unfortunately, most of the therapies we use to treat our genes, like chemotherapy, only further damage the mitochondria, which then make us even more vulnerable to recurrence, progression, and even having a cancer diagnosis to begin with. What affects the mitochondria are everything we put in, on, and around us, from food, to thoughts, to water, to the people around you, to the environments you live in, to the light you’re exposed to, to the chemicals you put on your skin and spray in your gardens. Your mitochondria are signaling agents and they take in information and translate it into the body. We can have a big impact on the environment in our bodies by how we lead our lives, which can either drive cancer growth or make it more difficult for cancer to thrive. With the genetic theory, it’s just bad luck and there’s nothing that you can do about it.
12:11 Blood Sugar. High glucose levels can increase free radicals and lead to DNA mutations. Sugar in the body creates glycosylated end products, which essentially means that you are oxidizing or rusting your innards. Hemoglobin A1C is a blood test that measures this glycosylation. We can also measure certain cytokines that direct the inflammation. When glucose is high, it stimulates cortisol and estrogens and these things impact glucose as well. High insulin levels also blunt your immune response. We can literally treat disease by what is on the end of our fork.
15:15 New targeted therapies. For decades conventional cancer care has consisted of chemo, radiation, and surgery. But now we have newer more targeted therapies, including immunotherapy, CAR T-cell therapy, etc. Before commenting about the new therapies, Dr. Winters pointed out that there is a better way to utilize the standard of care like chemotherapy. When you pair metronomics with chemotherapy at a dose less than 20% and pair this also with natural stressors, like fasting, hyperbaric oxygen, and other natural therapies, you get more effectiveness with fewer side effects. This is using chemo smarter. When it comes to the newer therapies like immunotherapy, it’s interesting that Integrative doctors like Dr. Winters have been recommending therapies to stimulate the immune system for decades, such as Mistletoe, though it is only now being embraced by the conventional cancer care community. While we have heard of some miraculous successes with some of these new drugs, including the checkpoint inhibitors, the PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors like Keytruda and Opdivo, these drugs only work about 20% of the time. Unfortunately, there are unfortunately terrible side effects to these drugs most of the time. In 2018 MD Anderson came out with a prognostic score for who would be a good candidate for these drugs based on seven questions: 1. Are you over age 52?, 2. Do you have elevated neutrophils?, 3. Do you have low lymphocytes?, 4. Do you have elevated LDH lactase dehydrogenase? 5. Do you have elevated platelets?, 6. Do you have a poor ECOG score?, 7. Do you have elevated liver enzymes? If you have 3 or more yeses, you should probably avoid these drugs. We also know that these immunotherapy drugs are worthless if you’ve had a bout of antibiotics in the last six months prior to taking them, so we know they are working through the microbiome. As Integrative practitioners, we need to make sure to address the microbiome to allow these drugs to work better. Also, these drugs are better suited as first line therapies instead of as last line, but this is because they are expensive and insurance companies don’t want to pay for them until cheaper chemotherapy drugs fail first. But even with these new immunotherapies, we have not extended life much more than 2-3 mths for stage 4 cancers, so we have to do better.
24:35 Cancer Stem Cells.
Dr. Nasha Winters is a Naturopathic Doctor and a Fellow of the American Board of Naturopathic Oncology. And she is also a cancer survivor herself. Dr. Winters is a sought-after speaker and an authority on integrative cancer care and she is currently involved in research on using Mistletoe Extract, hyperthermia, cannabis, the ketogenic diet, and IV Vitamin C to treat cancer. Dr. Nasha is a co-author of the best-selling book, “The Metabolic Approach to Cancer” and in 2021 she published Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative oncology. Her website is Dr. Nasha.com and she is focused on educating practitioners about the metabolic approach to cancer.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure. Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their 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. Today our topic is an integrative approach to cancer with Dr. Nasha Winters. Dr. Nasha Winters is a licensed naturopathic doctor and a fellow of the American Board of Naturopathic Oncology. She’s also a cancer survivor herself. She’s a sought after speaker, an authority on integrative cancer care. She’s the co-author of the bestselling book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, and in 2021, she published Mistletoe and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology. Dr. Nasha is on a mission to educate and empower the nearly 50% of the population, unfortunately, expected to have cancer in their lifetime. Prevention is the only cure. Dr. Winters, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Winters: Oh my gosh, Ben, it’s great to be back with you and your tribe, so thank you for having me.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you. Thank you. So let’s explain what causes cancer and why you feel it is more likely caused by mitochondrial damage, often related to the metabolic environment in our bodies related to the modern diet and toxins, et cetera, rather than primarily caused by somatic DNA mutations.
Dr. Winters: I love it. So that’s a perfect way to start. Back in 1914, Dr. Theodor Boveri is considered the father of modern day somatic mutation or genetic theory of cancer. And that just got thrown into the universe, a theory. And shortly thereafter, in the early 1920s, Dr. Otto Warburg also started to explore other theories of cancer. And for him, it was not about the DNA damage that started the course of cancer, it was what happened upstream from that, which is at that mitochondrial level. And so, many of your listeners might’ve heard about the concept of the Warburg theory, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But what I think is really interesting about this is these are theories that were thrown out there that we have since, like some of them we’ve just adopted like the somatic mutation theory. We have just taken that and run with it for the past 105, 106 years without really, really proving it.
And then, what’s very interesting is that at the same token when the metabolic theory or the mitochondrial starting points of cancer of Otto Warburg, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work, it was cranking along. It was actually outrunning, outpacing the somatic theory during its time until the 1950s when Watson and Crick found the good old DNA helix, and basically, everyone was kind of looking over here and went back to the old genetic ballroom. And so, that energy is where we put all of our focus. And so, just so your listeners have a big construct of this is that we claimed the war on cancer in 1971. So that was the year I was born. So 50, almost 52 years ago, Nixon said it’s claim the war on cancer. And sadly, at the start of this, you introduced me as talking about that nearly 50% of people affected by this diagnosis. In fact, just this week, it is one in two people are expected to have cancer in their lifetime. So the studies are now outpacing cardiovascular disease as the number one cause of death, and that we really are looking at a one to two chance of having cancer in your lifetime. So clearly, we’re not winning any wars here. So that’s a big one.
And then the other interesting thing that was coming out of this as we mapped the genome and we thought this is where all the answers are going to be for us, and all as it did was basically say there’s a lot of genes, there’s a lot of what they call junk DNA, we don’t really know. We have more questions now than ever before, but clearly the one gene, one target, one cause is not the holy grail that we were hoping it would be. The other thing is that for decades, not once, not twice, but many times over, we’ve done multiple studies where with what’s known as the nuclear cell transfer studies. And this is where you take two cells, one of them is a cancer cell, one of them is a healthy cell, non-cancering cell, and inside each of those cells is this nuclei, which think of that as like the hard drive, the brain, the important, this is where all the magic and all the communication, all the signaling theoretically happens from. If this was a cancer caused by a genetic somatic DNA mutation as the primary cause, if you took the cancering nuclei out of the cancer cell and you replaced the healthy nuclei of healthy cell, if this was somatic genetic, you would turn on cancer, and vice versa. If you took the healthy out and replaced the unhealthy nuclei of the cancer cell, you should make a healthy cell. That does not happen over and over and over and over and over again. We’ve shown that. So in essence, we’ve come up with multiple studies that show that this is not a somatic mutation.
However, what we have been able to show and the research is luckily catching up with us, is that when the mitochondria, those little powerhouses that we were all taught in, what, sixth grade biology, that we only thought their only function was to make ATP, the energy source of our cells and our bodies, it does so much more than that. We now understand that the mitochondria are the sort of protector of the DNA, of our genetic expressions. And so, it’s whatever we’re doing to encourage the health or the disease of our mitochondria, that is the precursor of protection or destruction of our DNA. So we needed to back it up a notch. And yet, in standard of care today, we are still fighting hard for the concept that this is a genetic disease. We’re still spending billions of dollars of resources every year trying to find ways to silence those genes, splice those genes, replace those genes, gene, gene, gene all the way along. And yet, ironically, most of the therapies we even offer to treat those genes, to destroy those genes, to go after that will only further damage the mitochondria, which then make us even more vulnerable to recurrence, progression, having a cancer diagnosis to begin with.
And then, all of the things we’ve since learned that affect the mitochondria, just everything we put in on and around us, from food to thoughts, to water, to the people around you, to the environments you live in, to the light you’re exposed to, to the chemicals you put on your skin to spray in your gardens, all the things directly impact our mitochondria. And just simply put, think of your mitochondria as just signaling agents and antennas. They’re taking in all the information, they are translating that information, and they’re sending signaling pathways back out into the body. So when you mess up there, you mess up everything.
Dr. Weitz: Another interesting thing is that when DNA is the cause of our cancer, of our health problems, we no longer have any agency in that. It takes the blame away, but it also means that we really have no say in the matter. It has nothing to do with what we’ve done or say or anything else. And therefore, the only possible treatment is something that somebody else can put on us or do to us.
Dr. Winters: Yes. Yeah. I really love that you brought up this idea of agency, of personal responsibility, but also of personal empowerment. I mean, to me, the message that there’s something happening at the mitochondrial level versus at the DNA level is frankly much more hopeful at its core. It gives us a lot more opportunity to realize we are far more powerful than we’re led to believe. And really, in the moments when there is a true genetic deficit defect problem, that’s happening in the cancer realm less than 5% of the time. Even standard of care acknowledges that and says that 90 to 95% of all of our cancers are actually caused by dietary and lifestyle influences. What they don’t say is what those diet and lifestyle influences are doing. They’re imparting their wisdom, if you will, their input into our mitochondria. And so, that is where it gets funky.
So it’s like they’ll tell you that, but they don’t really put the dots together of what’s going on. And so, I like you really appreciate the part about the agency and about how this changes it into our court. One thing I’d like to also offer to people, because sometimes there are people, especially if they’re in a state of duress or stress or anxiety, they may take that message wrong or take it into a system that’s quite wounded and fearful and that, “Oh, you’re saying this is my fault.” So let me reframe that while we have this opportunity.
You don’t know what you don’t know until you know. So you could not have known. 99.9% of the people that have ever seen me or one of my colleagues that have trained will tell us that they were healthy until they got cancer. That is impossible. You may not be aware of all the contributing factors that allowed for this process to take off in your body, but once you do have that awareness, then it does become, for lack of your fault, it’s that you knowingly have this information now, and yet you still choose to abuse those mitochondria for whatever reason.
So if you’re still spraying the glyphosate on your gardens, you don’t want to bend your ass over and pull weeds out of the ground, that’s a problem. That’s cognitive dissonance at its best. And so, these are the pieces where my work and the work we’re doing in the research world, in the metabolic oncology world is understanding some of the unknown offenders and drivers and doing something about them. So it really is about an education and an empowerment process to help you make different choices to better your ability to prevent this from every landing in your body and expressing in your body, and to prevent it from ever progressing or mutating or prevent it from ever recurring. And so, those are the types of things that we can impart this knowledge into the population to empower them instead of having them believe that a lot of the researchers, and I guess the main belief systems out there still today, unfortunately, the dominant paradigm is that this is just bad luck, that you’re just a sitting duck, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s just your genes, and just go on blindly doing all the things that are causing harm to your body.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And really interestingly in your book, I was reading it for the second time, you argue that high glucose levels can actually increase free radicals and lead to DNA mutations.
Dr. Winters: Yeah. So it does a few things. So it does that, it creates, and in fact, what we know is sugar in the body creates these things called glycosylated end products, very fancy name for basically rusting your innards. Would that be a fair description?
Dr. Weitz: Oh, yeah. Most people know what hemoglobin A1c is, and that’s a perfect example of it.
Dr. Winters: Yeah, you can literally measure how quickly you are oxidizing or frying or rusting your innards with this blood test that shows you the average of your glucose over three months. So it’s not like a one and done, like you had a bender over the weekend with your friends and now your glucose is really high. It’s the average of that glucose in your body over those three months, which is the idea that we need to temper what we’re being exposed to, so it does that. It also just directly increases inflammation, both secondarily from that glycosylated end product, but also directly by increasing certain cytokines, certain inflammatory molecules that just keep you in a state of inflammatory process. It definitely changes your metabolic expression, so it affects your hormones. So when glucose is high, it stimulates cortisol, it stimulates estrogens and vice versa. All those things impact the glucose as well. Just being even under stress will affect your glucose. A poor night’s sleep will increase your insulin, which will affect your glucose. Then, the other thing that having a high sugar intake or a high glucose, high insulin in your diet does is it blunts your immune response. So it has such so many levers and so many triggers that we have to be mindful of this, and ultimately it should be foundational. Since we can literally treat disease or create disease by every single thing is at the end of our fork, we need to be taking advantage of using our food strategically.
Dr. Weitz: A good way to think of glycosylation is imagine if you could open up your cell phone and pour a bunch of honey in there and see how well it works.
Dr. Winters: That is a really good analogy, or even putting a bag of white sugar into your gas tank.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. Winters: Right? That’s the thing. I remember I heard my mom talking about growing up that that’s what they would do, like toilet papering houses and pouring sugar in a gas tank. That will destroy the engine. That’s what we’re ultimately doing to ourselves. We are destroying our own engine. We are destroying our own hard drives in our cell phones and our computers or whatever, our bodily ones when we ingest too much carbohydrate.
Dr. Weitz: Now, when it comes to conventional cancer care, for many, many decades we’ve had chemotherapy and radiation and surgery, but now we have all these newer targeted therapies, immunotherapies, CAR T-cell. What do you think about some of these newer therapies and how should we think about them? How do they interact with diet and lifestyle differently than say chemotherapy does?
Dr. Winters: Gorgeous. So a couple of things here is first of all, one thing I want to also put out into your community is that there’s a way to use standard of care better. So we can be doing, not to say chemo’s bad, but we certainly can know exactly what somebody’s cancer cells are going to respond to. So we can do testing that is FDA approved and insurance covered to know what targets that person’s cancer type has, and that tells us then what are the best suited therapies for it. We have this now, and yet it’s rarely actionable, like really do we do anything with that data, which is really sad, but we could take that information and say, okay, we now know that this person has these targets, so let’s approach it with this tool. But the best part is when we lower the dose of that tool. So chemotherapy, oftentimes patients will have to lower the dose a little bit. If their treatment’s just been too harsh, we might lower it 25%, maybe upwards of 50%. But what’s really cool is when you pair metronomics, so chemotherapy at a dose less than 20% with some stressors into the system such as being in a fasted state or with hyperbaric oxygen or with other integrative natural therapies, you can actually potentiate the fact that that 20% of chemo to drive it directly into the cancer cell while protecting the healthy cells. This is using chemo smarter. That’s one example.
The next example that you mentioned are the new hot to the market immune therapies. I’ve been at this for over 30 years. It was not, but a couple years ago where literally the entire, I was the charlatan, I was the quack for even mentioning, for even whispering that the immune system might have anything to do with the cancer process. And so, now that it’s a trillion-dollar industry, now everyone, they’ve all invented sliced bread themselves. And so, the irony of these therapies is we actually have many of these therapies that have co-evolved with us. One of the most simple is just fever. Our internal favoring process is a strong immune reaction, which ironically is what a lot of these pharmaceuticals will induce is a favoring process. We have in the latter part of the 1800s into the 1900s, we have the Dr. William Coley from Sloan Kettering of all places, where to this day they give a Dr. Coley award for medical innovations, and yet nobody seems to understand who this person was. They don’t even know their own medical history to know that this man was the first man who was giving patients injections of an infection, so of a bacteria, that then stoked this massive fever experience that reduced the tumors. This was used in standard of care oncology until the 1960s. Then, we just pretend that didn’t exist. And then you have mistletoe, which is one of my favorites. You mentioned my book in the beginning with co-authors, six authors including a hematology-oncologist and conventional medical doctors, other naturopaths, like a whole mix of us. We’ve all brought our well over 100 years of experience with this plant to a book that’s a best practices for physicians and a great resource for patients to educate their doctors on this therapy. That’s the most studied integrative therapy out there. It’s been used continuously as an injection of an extract of the Viscum album or the mistletoe plant for a treatment of and support of other cancer therapies since 1917. So we have, this is between Coley’s toxins, between fever therapies, between mistletoe, we’ve had immune therapies available to us and working beautifully for some time.
When we brought out this whole new checkpoint inhibitors, the PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors like Keytruda, Opdivo, we brought on the drugs like the CTLA-4 and 6 inhibitors, when we brought on the CAR T that you mentioned, these drugs even by all of standard of care work at best about 20% of the time. And when I say work, that means response. That does not mean cure, that means response, meaning it’s going to give some tangible shrinkage of the tumor itself or the tumor load, the burden itself. The bad news is that over 80% of the time, there are terrible side effects, no effects or death, really harsh. These guys are really harsh. And the thing that was so crazy is as an integrative oncologist, I knew upfront what was going to make somebody respond well to those drugs and what wasn’t going to respond well to those drugs.
And even in 2018, MD Anderson came out with their own prognostic score to show who’d be a good candidate or not for these drugs. Seven simple questions. Are you over the age of 52? Do you have an elevated neutrophil level? Do you have a low lymphocyte level? Do you have an elevated LDH lactase dehydrogenase? Do you have elevated platelets? Do you have a poor ECOG? So daily function score, and do you have anything going on in your liver? If you answer three yeses or more to that, you probably should reconsider bringing on one of those drugs because they can have a holy hell nightmare in your body that is far worse than the cancer process.
And so, what’s cool is somebody like me is we can actually get those yeses to nos with our integrative therapies to make a drug like this work better. And just like I talked about the metronomic dosing of chemo, we can also do that with immune therapies. And even better, the latest studies, which we’ve also known is that the immune therapies are basically worthless if you’ve had a bout of antibiotics in the last six months. So that right there gives us indication. And the studies are showing us that the microbiome is integral to receiving and using these medicines. And the craziest part is these medicines, immune therapies, they’re best-suited as a first line versus how they’re often given today as a last line because you have to have at least some amount of immune system left for these drugs to play with. And so, a really good example-
Dr. Weitz: But the reason why that’s not happening?
Dr. Winters: Because we’re blasting the crap out of them. Well, money.
Dr. Weitz: Because of money, because the insurance companies run the healthcare system and they want to use the cheaper therapies first.
Dr. Winters: And that’s a very good point, because a CAR T therapy can be upwards of $1 million. A typical KEYTRUDA is like 10 grand a month for those injections. So these are expensive, and so the patient may not see it directly because their insurance covers it, but it’s crushing our medical system, the expenses of this. And so, here’s the other thing to tie in the standard of care approach is in the last 17 years, there was a study that came out a couple of years ago that showed that the 96 new drugs that have come to the market in the last 17 years specific to oncology, so specific to treating cancer, when you put them on a bucket at best, and you probably know this study, you probably run across it, but guess what the overall survival rate is of what we’ve brought to market in the last 17 years.
Dr. Weitz: 3%.
Dr. Winters: Well, 3%, but overall, 2.4 months. That’s what it’s giving us.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Dr. Winters: Right? I mean, and to your point, statistic of the 2 to 3% is actually these studies have been repeated over and over about the actual efficacy of chemotherapy, which is about 2 to 3% depending on the study. At the time, and there’s only a handful of cancers, testicular, some lymphomas that are actually responsive to chemotherapy. The rest really aren’t. It’s like it’s moving the paper around the desk until the immune system figures out what to do with it on its own. And that’s why when people finally end up in an immune trial or an immune therapy is offered, they’ve obliterated what little bit of functioning immune system they had with those standard of care therapies. And at best, modern day oncology is bringing us 2.4 months extended overall survival. These are all studies that I’m not, this isn’t a naturopath’s opinion. This is just the reality, and this is why it is time for us to be having conversations like this with 50% of us going to face this in our lifetime. We have to do better. We have to do better.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, no, absolutely. I’ve seen plenty of those studies where the result was an increase in lifespan of two months, four months, something like that, and then the stock shoots up. The drug is lauded as the next billion dollar drug.
Dr. Winters: Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yep.
Dr. Weitz: So what are cancer stem cells?
Dr. Winters: So I’m going to simplify this. Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who’s an integrative oncologist down in Florida, I heard him present at a conference a few years ago, and he described it really elegantly, the stem cells. Think of the stem cells as the sleeping mother cells. They’re just taking a nap. The active cancer cells are the daughter cells. These are the ones that are proliferating, mutating. They’re the ones that are active. Those are what the conventional therapies like chemo, radiation, surgery target, they target the active proliferating cancer cells, the daughter cells. The stem cells wait and rest. They’re waiting out in a state of quiescence, not doing anything until we over harvest, over-treat, over stress, things like the good old mitochondria and over-treat all those daughter cells to the point of harvesting them down below 20% of what’s left in the body.
At that point, mama bear wakes up and she’s pissed. That’s the stem cell. That puppy wakes up. It’s a different personality, a different behavior, and a different aggressivity, and it’s less responsive to therapy. In fact, that’s the time you must consider a different approach because if you’d been on, let’s say, carboplatin and Taxol for your ovarian cancer all along, which was going nicely after your daughter cells and you over-treat, and so somebody like me, I can tell on the labs, I can tell with the patient, I can tell immediately when they’ve been over-treated, right? Maybe there’s no evidence of disease on scans or CA 125 is now normalized.
But they say, “We’re going to give you a couple more for good measure.” That’s called the maximum tolerated dose approach. When that happens, you now push those far enough down that the mother wakes up, she sprouts up, she’s no longer responsive to that CarboTaxol. In fact, if you give her more of that, she will eat it like candy and she will make it her bitch and she will turn it into new cancering processes and be much more aggressive and much more difficult to deal with. It creates a drug resistance and it creates a stem cell and cancer persistence that’s really difficult to treat. And so, that’s why a lot of people were like, “I had a really good response my first round of chemo, but then the second round, not so good. And then the third round even less, and then the fourth round even less,” because our response gets shorter and shorter as we wake up more and more of those stem cells.
Dr. Weitz: I’m sure cancer researchers are aware of stem cells. What have they been trying to do about this?
Dr. Winters: It’s hilarious. So in 2013, I was speaking to the concerns of stem cells and seeing this in my practice and talking about it, and everyone, literally, every oncologist I ever encountered was like, “Bah, humbug, hooey. This is BS. This doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as stem cells.” I’m like, I’m quoting them from Dr. Wicha’s research and Dr. Dean’s research, all of these big institutions that are sounding the alarms of, “Hey guys, when we over-treat, when we see patients having recurrences or we see them becoming drug resistant, this is what we’re seeing. This is the actual reality.” They literally couldn’t see the writing for the wall. Again, once we had some therapies that are worth millions, if not billions of dollars come out of the market theoretically targeting stem cells, now they’re talking about it. Well, now we can test for it. Okay, great.
They make fun of us when we tried to run our CTC testing, our circulating tumor cell testing saying, “Those don’t exist. That doesn’t exist in nature.” It’s so weird what a decade difference will make when you’re saying the exact same thing that whole time and until you have a profitable treatment for it that’s patented and owned, then and only then will they take interest. And so, what’s crazy now is what I have patients do is I want them to ask their physician, “What are you going to do for my stem cells while we’re treating my cancer? While we’re treating those active cancer cells, what will you be doing to support my stem cells?” And I explained to them that this is a really good filter for you. If that doctor looks at you like you have 10 eyes, tells you that’s bullshit, that doesn’t exist, it’s time to get a different doctor. That’s how much we’ve learned. That’s how much the data backs it, and that’s how much we can even test even-
Dr. Weitz: What could a conventional oncologist offer?
Dr. Winters: Exactly. So what a conventional oncologist could offer is what is an emerging approach in the oncology world, which is known as the adaptive theory or the adaptive approach of cancer, which people like Dr. Gatenby at Moffitt University and oh gosh, I can’t believe his name just left my brain, but he is a really well-known researcher in University of Arizona, these guys talk about we want to just push back just enough, so get the patient out of harm’s way. So let’s say we’ve got a massive tumor burden, like a very high elevated tumor marker. We’ve got a big, big mass somewhere in the body. Maybe it’s starting to push up against some valuable real estate of our blood vessels or organs. Maybe it’s pushing against our colon and causing us problems.
So we definitely need to debulk that. We need to take some of that tumor volume out of the body, so it has a time and a place to use some of these targeted therapies, immune therapies, chemotherapies, radiation therapy, surgery to do that. But you just want to take it back enough so that you don’t further harm the terrain or further harm the mitochondria. And then, you want to bolster the immune system and the mitophagy of our healthy cells, the new creation of healthy mitochondria that can scooch out the cancering process and hold it at bay. Either treat it like a manageable disease process, just like something like diabetes, or actually getting into remission.
In my world, I don’t shoot for remission with patients. That’s a great side effect if that happens. In my world, I treat this like a manageable disease process because what happens when people think that there is a start and an end point to cancer, that is where your most dangerous thought process happens. When you ring that bell at the end of your chemotherapy or the end of your radiation, what I tell people is you’re not ringing in the end of a treatment, you’re ringing in the beginning of what actually needs to happen to help you prevent this from coming back or progressing further. And so, these are the ways we are thinking about this differently. You can push back just enough and then take much needed pauses and breaks and don’t bring on more aggressive therapies unless the cancer’s getting more aggressive. And so, it’s this just gentle pushback so that you can actually bring in all of the other resources both within and outside of you that helps stave this cancer off even further.
Dr. Weitz: And what are some of the integrative approaches to cancer stem cells?
Dr. Winters: Wow, high dose IV vitamin C. That’s one of our best. The other one that’s one of our best is good old intermittent fasting, therapeutic ketosis, which can be achieved through fasting, can be achieved with a high fat, low-carb diet, can be achieved with just carbohydrate restriction, can even be achieved with some pharmaceutical interventions such as metformin, things along those lines. So ways to get that, and in fact, there’s some really compelling study of both metformin as well as its herbal counterpart berberine that have some direct influence over the stem cells as well.
Dr. Weitz: Cool.
Dr. Winters: Yeah. Very cool.
Dr. Weitz: Let’s talk about cancer and diet.
Dr. Winters: Ding, ding, ding. Here we go into the danger zone.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. Vegans over there. Carnivores over there.
Dr. Winters: Yeah, exactly. Duking it out.
Dr. Weitz: I did solicit some questions from our functional medicine group and one of the questions was about methionine restriction from Mark Simon. I know that you generally tend to recommend a lower carb approach for most patients.
Dr. Winters: Yeah. I would say all patients need to be on a lower carb approach. And let me just bring, so I love this because I almost brought on Dr. Ahmed Elsakka last night just to have this piece, because I saw that on your forum about the methionine question, which comes up. If I had a dollar for every time it comes up, I could probably retire. But I like the questions coming up because it’s a very compelling piece here. But what happens is people don’t understand what it means. So people when they think, so I know Dr. Hoffman’s research, gorgeous. This man is brilliant. I have his textbook. I understand this is a real thing. But even that, what happens is even though he’s sharing this knowledge, the average lay person and the average physician is misinterpreting the state.
Dr. Weitz: You know what? Let me just back up a second.
Dr. Winters: Sure.
Dr. Weitz: So I’m thinking if somebody’s not familiar with what we’re talking about, I jumped just right into methionine. In the context of what kind of diet is best, there’s concerns about carbohydrates and glucose and the metabolic concept of cancer. There’s a number of researchers who claim that protein, especially animal protein, leads to cancer possibly through increasing IGF-1 levels, other ways in which it promotes growth. And then, some researchers have focused on specific amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins and have targeted those and said, “Okay, methionine. If you can reduce methionine, that’s going to help with cancer. If you can reduce glutamine, that can help with cancer,” and so, in this context.
Dr. Winters: Gorgeous. So big picture, cancer is opportunistic. It will go after whatever is overly abundant in the system. Pretty straightforward. We can simplify that right there. So if you have an overabundance of glucose, it will go after that. If you have an overabundance of trans-fatty acid, like really toxic high omega-6 fatty acids, the linoleic acid, it will go after that. If you have high levels of glutamine when there’s been a metabolic shift into a cancering process, that can be problematic. If you have high elevations of methionine in certain situations, that can be problematic. Arginine is another one. Cysteine, which is actually more related to the methionine piece as well.
So to your point, there’s this way that people are like, if you look in a Petri dish and a cell line, there’s a lot of theoretical things that are happening. If you look in an animal study that is a rat or a mouse that has very different metabolic needs and dietary like normal genetic dietary requirements, they’re not as effective. When you look in the models like dogs, they also get naturally the types of cancers we do as humans, those are a closer fit. So you can see a little bit more translational information. So I want folks to have that context first. Number two, methionine is… So you’ve got your healthy metabolism like a normal, you’re not cancering, everything is good, and you have your cancering metabolism. These two are very different animals themselves.
Dr. Weitz: And by the way, I love the way, the fact that your cancering as opposed to having cancer, and I know that you say that very deliberately.
Dr. Winters: Thank you. I appreciate you pointing that out because we all have cancer cells all the time, all of us. It’s when they hijack the metabolic processes that it can get out of hand.
Dr. Weitz: In fact, we all have hundreds or even thousands of cancer cells, right?
Dr. Winters: Some say even upwards of a trillion.
Dr. Weitz: Why?
Dr. Winters: [inaudible 00:37:14] know what to do with it. That’s the beauty is when you have functioning mitochondria that can take in all the information from its environment and send off signaling, your mitochondria are what are in charge of apoptosis, the programmed cell death. So if they sense something awry, they’re going to take it out. They know what to do. But if you’ve damaged it over and over by excesses of anything or deficiencies of anything, you make them vulnerable and you make them less likely to respond and react to those cells that need to be removed.
Dr. Weitz: We just have to equip on mitochondria with these new baby AR-15s.
Dr. Winters: Yeah, exactly. Nice. I like your brain. You’re thinking in this. So here’s what happens with the methionine piece. So in healthy metabolism, this is one of our nine essential amino acids, essential meaning you have to have it to live, period. So that’s one thing to remember. The other thing to remember is that it is so integral in the repair and cleanup of all of our healthy DNA. It is literally what’s helping our immune system function, our adrenals function, our neuroendocrine systems function. It is absolutely required for you to live.
So one thing I want your listeners to listen to or hear is that when we start to get so myopic and say, “We’re going to put in this pharmaceutical or this drug or this herb or this dietary intervention to starve something,” when you understand that it is just as integral, if not more so to survive to help our healthy cells survive, it should probably give you a moment of start to realize the way you use these therapies need to be very judicious, because we can fall into the same trap we do in standard of care oncology that you over-harvest, over-treat, over-push the system in one direction or another. That is a bad idea. Think always of the teeter-totter of balance. If you’re like, “I’m going to methionine restrict, I’m going to want carbohydrates…” You got to keep focusing in the center of this teeter-totter, because it’s a dynamic flow.
So that being said, there is some interesting biochemistry that happens at that cellular level, especially in our methylation pathways where we should have a normal process, we should have homocysteine turning into methionine and off we’re running into health creation. When there’s a metabolic shift in the cancering process, that clock goes backwards. So methionine goes into homocysteine and then becomes this bastardized process that can definitely influence cancer cell progression and proliferation. So I want folks to know that yes, it’s real. Yes, it can happen. But here’s what they don’t get told by the researchers is that we have a very simple means of knowing when and where that is appropriate.
And the one thing about methionine restriction is it should never be done as a long-term lifestyle. It will kill you. It will absolutely kill you. You change your methionine process within a matter of days when you methionine restrict, days. So literally, the concept here is what I tell people is instead of fighting over, like you said, which diet, which camp is right, the most effective therapy we have that gets everybody out of the way of their own bullshit, excuse me, I get really passionate about this, is fasting. So when you put things head to head and you’re like, “I’m going to carbohydrate restrict, I’m going to methionine restrict, I’m going to glutamine restrict,” and you look at any of those by themselves, yes, all of them will have some pushback in the cell line studies.
When you take methionine restriction and you partner it with carbohydrate restriction, you get a massive synergistic approach that pushes back even harder. But what wins hands down out in front of all of these strategies is intermittent fasting. So that’s the simple answer for people. But here’s the place here. If I have a patient with an elevated homocysteine, so for me, my normal range is seven. If it’s a tiny bit higher than that or a tiny bit lower than that, I’m watching it. If I have it a little bit higher than seven, I put a patient on a methylation support supplement, pretty high doses for anywhere from six days to two weeks, so a week to two weeks. Then, I retest that homocysteine.
If the homocysteine stays exactly the same or gets worse, I know we have a methionine problem. If the homocysteine gets better, we just have a simple methylation problem. Maybe you’ve got MTHFR, MTR, MTRR, which are all methyl transferase receptor issues, and that it just means that you just probably should take a little bump of folinic acid or leucovorin on the pharmaceutical world or a B12 on occasion. Those are things that are very helpful.
But if a patient is stalling and their homocysteine is high no matter what we do, then and only then is it appropriate to consider a short-term methionine restricted diet. But what I want to caution for folks is the BS that’s online and that influencers have taken on is they tell people a methionine diet is a vegan diet. So I want to throw that, I want to kick that one out of here, because you can actually put a link in there of the top 10 methionine-rich foods. And yes, animal proteins have a lot, but so do vegan proteins, tofu, quinoa, many of the nuts and seeds, but especially Brazil nuts and beans.
So what does that tell you right then and there? You’re going to have to fricking starve yourself to avoid methionine. And then the people, like a colleague of mine who is really promoting of the NORI diet, a lot of people will just get on fruit. What I just explained to you will kill you, because fructose is definitely a problem in the cancering process. And carbohydrates are definitely a problem in the cancering process. So even if someone’s going to do a methionine restriction because they have all the parameters that say, “Hey, this is a therapy that’s suited for you,” it must also be done in carbohydrate restricted. They have to go hand in hand.
And then what happens is once you get that process and you’re using the homocysteine testing to know, you then literally wean them off methionine, restricted diet, back into a carbohydrate restricted diet only, and then you only pulse the methionine restriction if and when it’s warranted. I have been at this for a very long time, and because I test homocysteine levels on every patient every month, I’ve had three patients that needed methionine restriction. All of them were able to get that process down, and all of them were able to go back into just a restricted carbohydrate lifestyle with intermittent fasting. That is the simple strategy that gets everybody out of their own way of fighting each other of what’s right and what’s wrong. And what’s-
Dr. Weitz: Another thing you pointed out in your book, which I thought was really interesting is making sure you consume some organ meats, because those contain the B vitamins that help balance out the high methionine levels in the muscle meat.
Dr. Winters: Yeah. And so, that’s also, think about that as your master methylaters, and it’s helping you in that process is it’s helping keep the chain, the circle moving in the right direction. But again, we don’t have to guess here. We don’t have to assume. It’s a simple blood test and it can be run regularly. In fact, it can be run every week if you wanted to watch the process. And a lot of us are doing that, and we’re doing some research in this field. And so, there is an absolute time and place for this, but it’s far less common than people are led to believe, and it’s not meant to be on long-term. In fact, the longest anyone’s ever… has been on and should be on a methionine restricted diet is two to three months maximum. But I will tell you, I’ve never had a patient get that far because they start to get very cachectic and very sick pretty quickly.
Dr. Weitz: And this is all in the context of the fact that losing weight for cancer patients is not a good thing, that once they start losing a bunch of weight, that’s really bad for survival.
Dr. Winters: Well, there’s a difference between losing weight and becoming metabolically cachectic. So cachexia is a type of sarcopenia, type of muscle wasting that is not caloric-specific. It will never respond. You could give that patient 20,000 calories and it will not stop this process. It’s a metabolic process. And cachexia is driven by two things very simply, inflammation and sugar. So the worst thing you can tell a patient who’s losing weight with cachexia, by the way, we can start to see cachexia not by how a patient looks. I have a lot of morbidly obese patients in cachexia, because you would never look at them and think, “Oh,” and I have patients who look like walking skeletons that are not in cachexia.
Dr. Weitz: And the first recommendation, of course, is Ensure.
Dr. Winters: Which is only going to ensure your untimely death, and not which is like, it’s just-
Dr. Weitz: Because it’s loaded with sugar.
Dr. Winters: Yes, and really high linoleic acid, corn syrups and corn bits and… Talk about, so Ensure is super high in methionine. That’s what they’re bringing into the patient. So if a patient has a homocysteine that’s elevated along with cachexia and they’re put on Ensure, it’s going to ensure that a lot of processes are going to feed and fuel that cancer and that patient’s going to be dead. So the cachexia is you have to take… I mean, I literally had patients in cachexia do better in a deep fasted state to reverse their cachexia than patients who’ve even tried to do a high fat diet, like a high protein or high fat diet.
Dr. Weitz: Wow. Interesting. Say that one more time. So we’ve got patients who are in what we often refer to as the wasting stage, where they just start losing their muscle, their cheeks get hollow, they start looking really bad, and say again, what you found.
Dr. Winters: And this is again, under deep, we’ve got medical, we’re taking labs, we’re staying in close contact with this patient, so this is medically supervised, but we will fast those patients for 5 to 10 days, and they will actually reverse the cachexia. The inflammation drops and the glucose and insulin drop. And then, because what happens after about five days into fasting is you start to build your muscle mass again. And so, we’re having-
Dr. Weitz: Now, that’s pretty scary though, right?
Dr. Winters: Well, of course, it is because we’ve been told by, I mean, we fasted patients in the oncology world into the early 1970s when someone said, “Oh, that just seems really cool to do this to them as well.” And yet, now you’re seeing this is probably one of our most powerful tools. In fact, in 1909, Dr. Moreschi was able to debulk all of the tumors in his patients with deep fasting anywhere from 10 to 30 days, medically supervised fasting. And basically patients would go in, I’m pretty certain as an accident because I had a bowel blockage at the time of my diagnosis in 1991, that the very thing that turned around my cachexia of severely cachectic that dried up my ascites, I had a belly the size of a nine-month baby, despite every time they kept pulling the fluid out, it would fill right back up. And because of the bowel blockage, I could not eat for two months.
And so in that, that’s probably accidentally why I’m here today, because that means I starved arginine and glutamine and methionine and brought down my insulin, and I had all kinds of the polycystic ovarian syndrome metabolic patterns that were prior to my diagnosis. I took away all the inflammation, which was the drivers of both the cachexia as well as the ascites. I accidentally cured myself, not cured, but stopped this process from going off a cliff. So we have known this for millennia. Hippocrates fasted his patients. Many have over time. You want to be doing it in a supervised state. I accidentally, unbeknownst to myself, did it by myself back then. I do not recommend that. I luckily was also studying herbology and things. I knew about electrolytes, I knew about herbal teas. I knew the things that I could take into my body that was helpful, but you have to do this with somebody who’s got some training in this.
But yeah, we are really approaching this incorrectly, the world of cachexia, and we’re also really getting too dogmatic about our dietary. Even though my book came out and because of SEOs and whatnot, the publisher really wanted us to really highlight the ketogenic diet. What I really want people to hear that I do and that I really think is about metabolic flexibility diet is about approach the patient where they are in that moment and what is asking to be either nourished or depleted within them. And that’s what can lead to the fact that I will use a methionine restricted diet in certain situations. I will use a glutamine. Now, you can’t glutamine restrict in any diet. There’s no way to do this. People talk about that all the time. It’s literally impossible. Your body will start to auto digest your muscles to get glutamine because glutamine is absolutely critical for you to survive.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Thomas Seyfried talks about pulsing some glutamine restricting drug.
Dr. Winters: Yeah, exactly. And they’re harsh. That’s why they’re still in clinical trials, because they kill the patients. They’re tough. We’re coming up with new, there’s some really cool studies about new delivery systems and lower dosing and how to pulse press these up and coming pharmaceuticals. The same thing in the methionine restriction world, there are really cool ways to use methionine enzymes and things like that that we can use and target, get in, get out like a scalpel very gently. That adaptive approach we talked about earlier, instead of this like let’s lambaste you and [inaudible 00:51:35] on the field, which is what would happen if you got thrown on dawn, which is the glutamine suppressing therapy or put on some of the methionases that are the drugs that wipe out your methionine levels, you will die.
But we do have kids who were born with issues in methionine metabolism that have to live on a restricted methionine diet, and they have to take a lot of other nutrients to offset that. And it’s a tough life for those littles. It’s really hard to grow and overcome that. Now, they’re not cancering, so it’s totally appropriate for those kiddos to be eating more fruit and the things like that, that are higher in sugar and higher carbohydrate because they’re growing their little bodies. But you reach a point where that will flip a switch and start to become problematic in all of us. And so, strategically, people are like, “Well, what diet should I do?” Well, the best would be start to play with intermittent fasting, and then when you do eat, eat real food, clean food. Stay away from the bars and the powders. Get to the real food. What did your grandparents or your great-grandparents eat? Get as close to the source as humanely possible of like, did it come from a tree, the earth, the ocean, the sky? What did it come from?
Dr. Weitz: It’s really hard. You almost have to grow it yourself.
Dr. Winters: 100%. And this is what’s so crazy. Do you know they give people like me a diagnosis now of orthorexia because I so worry about where my food comes from and what is in it? And they’re like, “Well, that’s crazy.” Well, when you’ve kicked the can down the road for 32 years past your expiration date, you feel pretty passionate about knowing what you know from all the years of study, and all the studies continue to come out that we do need to take more attention to what we put in on and around our bodies and what’s going in on and around our soil, to our plants, to the animals, to the planet, to us. It is a constant chain of events. And if we don’t address all of them, the chain gets broken and we get problems.
Dr. Weitz: One last question. You’ve mentioned certain lab tests, and I know there’s a lot of lab tests that you like to do on a regular basis, but I don’t really want to go into the whole panel right now given the time, but you talk a lot about lactic dehydrogenase, and I’ve never really appreciated that marker. So can you make me appreciate lactic dehydrogenase and how important it is?
Dr. Winters: Ben, I love this question. This is a great way to end on this topic because LDH, talk about 15… Yeah, I know, right?
Dr. Weitz: You got to be a geek to think that-
Dr. Winters: You do. I like it.
Dr. Weitz: … lactic dehydrogenase is an exciting topic to end on.
Dr. Winters: It’s really exciting, sadly. It’s like, in fact, in the new book, the Mistletoe book, we have an entire section about this. So if people have that book, they can go to my lab chapter and read about this. But specifically, up until about 15 years ago, LDH was part of all of our complete metabolic panel testing. And then someone behind a desk decided, “Frivolous, we don’t need this test test.” But what I can tell you is it is literally the most important marker of our mitochondrial health. When you think about when you look at the Krebs cycle and you look at the pyruvate and the dehydrate, this is exactly where it interfaces. So when there is a respiratory chain problem in the Krebs cycle, that’s going to impact the expression of your LDH and at various tissues. You can even break down your LDH into the tissues. That’s-
Dr. Weitz: The isoenzymes?
Dr. Winters: Exactly. So you’d be like, “Oh, is this happening at the kidney level, at the liver level, at the bone level, at the marrow level?”
Dr. Weitz: Do you order the isoenzymes all the time, or do you just get to-
Dr. Winters: I do now because after, I’ll throw a little controversy into the mix, but after COVID, either the injection or the infection has changed a lot of LDHs, which tells me something right there, changed a lot of our mitochondria, which is probably not a good thing. But I can then go into the isoenzymes to know exactly what tissue took on the destruction, took the hit, if you will, and then support that and change that expression again. So it is such a powerful tool. It shows us your metabolic health. It shows us your liver health. It shows us your bone health. It shows us your kidney health. It shows us your bone marrow health. It’s so critical, and it’s so funny. It’s so not appreciated as you mentioned. When I have patients order this in far away places, most of the time they come back with an LDL because their doctor literally hasn’t a fricking clue what this test is. And so, when they start to read, if you have, your listeners just go and run LDH as a prognostic marker in all cancer, a prognostic marker in chronic illness, you will be blown away at the utility of this. And by the way, it is the marker for multiple myeloma, leukemias, lymphomas, and melanomas. So it should be a standard test in every patient dealing with those diagnoses. And it rarely, if ever is. So it’s a doozy. My husband says if the LDH is on, so if it’s elevated, and elevated in my ranges, right?
Dr. Weitz: Okay. That’s what I wanted to ask you about is what’s the range that we should be concerned about?
Dr. Winters: So if you see the LDH on, you know the mitochondria are off, simply put. That can be your take home for this. But in the ranges, in the United States, LabCorp, they have a range from like, I don’t know, 50 up to 250. We want that one under 175. If it’s a quest test in the United States, they have a range that goes up to 450. We want that under 300. We want to be well in the middle of that zone or less. Too low is also a problem. It can be a genetic issue, but it can also be sarcopenia and it could also be massive suppression of the marrow. And so, those are things too, that’s more rare, but it shows up on occasion. That’s why the isoenzymes are helpful. Even if you get a low or normal LDH, you can still see what tissues, because the LDH isoenzymes are the average that lead to that LDH. So you might have a really low LDH, but a really high bone isoenzyme. So that’s the average of that is the total LDH. So it’s a very important marker to be running on yourself and your patient population.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. That’s a great clinical pearl. I’ll have to add that to all the panels.
Dr. Winters: Right on. Perfect.
Dr. Weitz: All right, so I guess I also want to ask you about this center that you’re working on opening in Arizona. That sounds very exciting. This is going to be a cancer center hospital research facility that incorporates integrative care.
Dr. Winters: Yeah. A lot of our patients have to leave this country to go find seek treatments elsewhere. So if they want metronomic chemo, they have to go abroad, because the cost is pretty prohibitive in the United States of those who do offer it here. If they want to get hyperbaric oxygen paired with high doses of curcumin IVs, which is no longer available in the US unless you get it under the table, they have to go elsewhere. If you want to get photodynamic therapy injected right into your tumors, you have to pretty much go elsewhere. People are doing some of these things in the United States. They’re doing it quietly, they’re doing it underground, and it’s very, very costly for patients.
So we’re building the first ever truly integrative oncology hospital and research institute on a 1,200 acre regenerative farm in southeast Arizona. This will bring in the best, as I mentioned, the metronomic chemos, the tissue assays, the thorough testing, the evaluations, the fractionated radiation partnered with hyperthermia. It’s going to bring the best of a modernized up-to-speed standard of care with all the proper testing to know how to use these other therapies along with the best vetted integrated medicine under one roof. It will be a training ground for physicians from all over the world. It will be a place where patients. We’ll have an 80-bed hospital to start. So it’ll be a campus that is people who are very, very sick and come and stay.
It’s also going to be a wellness destination. There’s options on this that if you are just well and you want to just come and have a full assessment of your terrain, we can do that and help you fortify yourself a bit more and enjoy the beautiful nature that we’re offering and the bounty that we’re offering on feeding everyone who comes from the land of which we’re building this hospital. So we hope this becomes the model for a new global healthcare system and that this is our beta campus, and the plan is to see them perk up, pop up all over the world.
Dr. Weitz: And since it’s in Arizona, you can incorporate hyperthermia just by being there.
Dr. Winters: Exactly. Especially this summer there. Poor people. My God. Oh, yeah. We will harness all of what nature has to offer, including the sun right now. Holy cow.
Dr. Weitz: So I understand you’re not seeing patients anymore, but you’re doing practitioner training?
Dr. Winters: Yep. I’m treating physicians, but I will do consulting with the doctor of a patient. So if someone says, “I really want my doctor to consult with you on my behalf,” I still do that type of work. I also train now 155 physicians in 16 countries. Our eighth cohort starts in September. So if you are interested in joining this tribe, we need you. We cannot keep up with the demand. We get about 1,000 inquiries a month for people trained under this methodology. We can’t meet that need. We also have trained almost 300 patient advocates. That next cohort starts in November. So if you have a nursing degree, a nutrition degree, or just something in the clinical health coaching world, and you want to be part of this mission and vision, that next cohort starts as well. We have you being the beautiful liaison between the patient and the physician. So this is this beautiful system that we’re creating. We’re literally, we’re building a new model of healthcare and it’s really, really, really exciting.
Dr. Weitz: And where do we go to find out about that?
Dr. Winters: All of this we’ve talked about here between my books and podcasts and lectures and all the things we’re doing with that, to the hospital, to the data platform we’re building, to the lab, mitochondrial metabolic lab that we’re building, to the trainings are all on mtih.org, our nonprofit organization, the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health. If you Googled that, you’d get there, but mtih.org should get you there.
Dr. Weitz: Awesome. Thank you so much, Nasha.
Dr. Winters: Oh my gosh, Ben, thank you. Really grateful.
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, and 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.
