The Metabolic Theory of Cancer with Dr. Nasha Winters: Rational Wellness Podcast 424

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Dr. Nasha Winters discusses The Metabolic Theory of Cancer with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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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.

The Topic for today is an integrative Approach to Cancer with Dr. Nasha Winters. Dr. Nasha Winters is a licensed naturopathic doctor and an integrative oncology specialist. She’s host of the Metabolic Matters podcast, executive director of the nonprofit organization, the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health.  She’s also a cancer survivor herself. She has a vision to open a residential. She’s working on opening a residential integrative oncology hospital and research institute, and she recently opened a metabolic research lab. She offers the Terrain Advocate Program and the metabolic approach to cancer practitioner master courses.  Dr. Nasha is the co-author of the bestselling books, the Metabolic Approach to Cancer, which is one of the few books we have all sorts of highlights and tear backs. Your book and Lisa Alschuler’s book in the cancer realm are the two books you have to have and also the Missiletoe book. In the emerging future of integrative oncology, Dr. Nasha is on a mission to educate and empower the nearly 50% of the population expected to have cancer in their lifetime, and prevention is the only cure. Thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Winters:  It is an absolute honor to be back with you, Ben. Thank you so much.

Dr. Weitz:  Absolutely. So before I ask you about your personal journey with cancer and we dive into the metabolic theory of cancer and your approach to managing the terrain for cancer, I want to ask you, where are we in the nationwide, or perhaps worldwide… (I don’t know why we limit ourselves to our nation) fight against cancer? While cancer mortality continues to decrease, cancer incidence has not really decreased that much and there’s been an significant increase in certain types of cancer in young people. So what do you think is going on?

Dr. Winters: Wow, such a great launch into this conversation.  So we actually just got an update on the statistics, the World Health Organization statistics on cancer. And so just for your listeners to know,

Dr. Weitz:  oh, World Health Organization, that’s fake news…

Dr. Winters:  I know. Maybe we won’t totally trust that it’s pretty compelling information and that today in the United States alone, 1700 people will die of cancer just today.  Wow. Okay. Globally, 26,000 people will die of cancer today. Wow. Wow. That’s a lot. That’s a lot. That’s talk about a, an epidemic, right? Like that’s a big one. A hundred percent. Exactly. We also now, you know, really it has driven home that 50% of us, as you mentioned, we might be living longer with cancer, but we are certainly meeting the diagnosis more often.  And now one of two of us are expected to meet this diagnosis in our lifetime. And then to your point, we’ve had a 36%. increase in cancer diagnoses under the age of 40. And in, you know, peer reviewed journals such as nature and whatnot, they’re scratching their heads and saying, gosh, I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s something genetic, which I’m just sit there and think to myself, are we still having that conversation?

Dr. Weitz:  Massive change in our genes in the last 10 years…

Dr. Winters:  My goodness gracious. So it’s like we just, we are, you know, we look at this like process. So I think how I look at it is this didn’t happen overnight.  Right? So, you know, you and I think have had this conversation before, and I want to give a little context to your listeners that when we think about the world, you know, if we look at a clock and we imagine the world on that clock, that basically we are about six minutes old. We’re about six minutes into this like worldwide.  And so when we look at all the changes that have happened in the world, the majority of them have happened in the past 150 years. Like, it’s like the biggest input of change in our, in, in our environment, which then impacts our internal environment has happened since the industrial food. You know, the industrial Revolution kicked in the 1800s.  So prior to that, we were, you know, primarily for the first, you know, I don’t know, just tens of thousands of years, we were all hunter gatherers. 11,000 years ago, we moved into the neolithic farming era, where we started to literally put down some roots in the whole kind of Mediterranean region known as the Fertile Crescent.  And that’s when we first started the introduction of the gene, HLA, which is the human leukocyte [00:05:00] antigen. So we actually changed our immune systems by changing the way we re you know. Sought our food, our resources, right? And so that was one change, which also HLAs what increase your response, your risk of other autoimmune conditions and immune, like viral sensitivities, mold sensitivities, environmental sensitivities.  That’s what the HLA kind of brought to the table of new kind of diseases, right? Then we really saw the next biggest change in the industrial revolution in the 18 hundreds. So we were cruising along for about 11,000 years, you know, and then suddenly another big change. That change was significant. And then even people like Western a price.  And Dr. Pottinger were commenting in the late 18 hundreds saying, wow, something’s changing. We’re seeing changes in dentition. We’re seeing changes in health expression thanks to this industrialization of our food. So we started milling sugar, flour, and salt. We started having more accessibility to these things.  Refrigeration began, and suddenly we had more [00:06:00] access to foods and ability to start to factorized our food sources.

By World War II, we made another big change. We had leftover ammunition from two major world wars, and we decided to invest that into big Ag and big pharma. And so in that world, we started to change things even quicker.  So basically those folks born before World War II had a little bit of a stronger foundation, you know, genetically epigene, genetically, they had a little bit stronger foundation that maybe they had some new exposures. But it didn’t really pick up momentum until after World War ii. It was also in the 1940s to 1960s, we started introducing hormones into our food systems.  We started giving women, basically, if you were a mother in 1940s, fifties, and into the early sixties, you had a very high chance of being given DES just prophylactically to prevent miscarriage. So we started introducing hormones and that level, we started [00:07:00] introducing hormones into the feedlots, you know, that started factory farming animals to, you know, feed the masses.  And so things started changing. And so we also then saw that with that change, that started to have a ripple effect in diagnoses of other health conditions. So, I say this so people understand that it’s not like we went to bed one night with no concerns and woke up the next day with a problem.  It’s been insidious. These changes have accumulated over time. But the changes in the last 50 to 70 years have been. Even bigger. And so when you say what is the cause, why now? Well, we, you know, even the good old World Health Organization in I think 2012 stated that those born after 1980 are not likely to have the same longevity as their parents.  Right? So we started noting difference in longevity. We’ve also noted the trend in longevity in United States, that we’re the only developed country in the world that is actually [00:08:00] either everywhere else they’re either stable or improving on their longevity. And we, even prior to the pandemic, we’re losing longevity on an annual basis.

Dr. Weitz: Right?

Dr. Winters: And so we were sounding the alarm for some time that, oh, something’s weird here, but it’s picked up momentum. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. I mean, some scientists would say we are in the era of despair because the things that have affected our longevity in the US are suicide and drug overdose. So when we look at the pandemic, one of the biggest fallouts of that was the mental health fallout, right, of isolation and whatnot.  That took an already vulnerable population of, you know, pain mentally and emotionally, and amplified that. So that might have some impact. But we’ve also seen an incredible spike in young people with cancer. Like when I left medical school, the average age of cancer in the 1990s was 68 years old.  Cancer used to be considered a disease of the aged. Today’s the average age is 48 years old. So in just a 30 year period of time, we’ve seen a 20 year different gap difference.

Dr. Weitz: We also, during the pandemic we saw a sedentary, overweight population gain 30 pounds and do a lot less activity.

Dr. Winters: Well, you know, and it’s interesting that in that 2018 Chapel Hill, North Carolina Chapel Hill study that came out, that showed, this is 2018, mind you, that showed that less than 12% of Americans were considered metabolically healthy.  Right there, when you think about metabolic dysfunction.  That is all cause mortality, right? That’s your top killers at that time was cardiovascular disease, followed by cancer, followed by, diseases around obesity, which led to like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney dysfunction, the neural neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s, you know, dis dementia and properly prescribed pharmaceuticals.  So the proper prescribed pharmaceuticals was the number five killer. Now it’s the number three [00:10:00] killer. So those were the things that were happening in 2018. With this 12% of our population being metabolically healthy, that’s a problem. And instead of us saying, what are we gonna do about it? Let’s lean in and get curious and do something about it.

Then the pandemic happened and we went from, well, here’s another crazy study. So in 2022, a study was published that led up to 2020. So just as things were getting started that showed that actually less than 6.8% of us are metabolically healthy. Wow. So we were already seeing within a two year period of time, we dropped that by another 50%.

Dr. Weitz: And then I saw the CEO of Kellogg’s on TV during the pandemic talking about how great it was that so many people were eating boxed cereal for dinner.

Dr. Winters: Yeah, fabulous. Because talk about job security for doctors and cancer, but you know, like, because this is what’s so crazy is we’re looking at data from 2020 and before, which was already put in the writing on the wall.  We’ve not lifted up the corner [00:11:00] of the rug to look underneath to see what the reality is. But I would say we are probably way less than 6.8% metabolically healthy in this country today. And that reaches beyond our borders as well. I mean, we see now we have rates of cancer and diabetes overtaking the US rates in places like India, in places like Mexico.  You know, places like the UK and Canada are right close with us in our stats as well. And so no one’s asking why Ben, and this is where, you know, we may not be able to say one cause because this is what standard of care likes they want one cause in one case, of course.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Winters: Right. But cancer itself is, even the American Cancer Society says it’s a collection of hundreds of diseases.  And when we can look at those diseases and we can look at the health of our nation and our entire global family and realize we are getting sicker and sicker by the year we aren’t asking the right questions and we weren’t bringing together the right solutions. [00:12:00] And that’s where my passion and purpose lies in all of this, and why I’m excited that we get to have this conversation.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. One more question in this realm, which is what do you think about some of the ways to test for early signs of cancer.  Do you like the Grail test and the full body MRI?

Dr. Winters:  So I, you know, it’s interesting ’cause I’ve been on this journey for myself for over 34 year, well, it’ll be 34 years in September for my own cancer journey, as well as helped tens of thousands of patients directly and hundreds of thousands indirectly for decades now, my biggest wish during this last 30 years was to find a non-toxic, so non-contrast dye toxicity, such as gadolinium, and a non radiation toxicity, known ion ionizing radiation, known carcinogen, right way of evaluating someone’s.  You know, insides, you know, in, in a profound way. So we’ve leaned on things like ultrasounds, x-rays, PET scans, [00:13:00] CT scans, even mammograms, and DEXA scans. Those are what we had. But those all come with shortcomings and they also come with a lot of toxicity. ’cause almost all of the devices use some form of radiation and almost all of the imaging uses some type of contrast dye.  So, just to give an example, five CT scans in your lifetime is equivalent to exposures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, radiation wise, right? 

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I think that’s amazing. Most people don’t realize that they, their doctor says Get a CT scan. They get a CT scan. That’s actually the equivalent of between 30 and 50 x-rays.

Dr. Winters:  Exactly, and we’re now doing this, like for even the biohackers, like, oh, I wanna go and take a look at my body fat content with a CT scan. I’m like, please don’t, you know. So when I heard on Peter Attias podcast in 2019, an interview at Dr. Attariwala from Prenuvo, from that time in Vancouver, BC, you know, Vancouver, bc, [00:14:00] a complete unknown in the United States, I immediately got on the horn and said, how can I get patients to you right now?  To get this imaging, which is using no contrast dye and using no radiation in a high resolution, high sensitivity, high precision repurposed MRI, which this amazing brilliant MD who’s a radiation oncologist, who also had a, like a chemical engineering brain, like a PhD in that realized he could rebuild and repurpose the MRI to make it more effective.  Now since then, we have others that have come to market. Simon one, Ezra, Prenuvo, you know, all of those are out there, 

Dr. Weitz:  So you’re a fan of the full body MRI?

Dr. Winters:   Huge. Huge because we, so just when that started coming out, I started sending patients up to get them in Canada. Then they opened up an office in San Francisco and then started moving all over the us and now beyond that.  We were probably their first customers. Like really it was like why they came into the US is because my community was looking for a non-toxic approach because data is really powerful and [00:15:00] compelling. And then we started seeing things like we were able to start diagnosing things that were missed for years in people.  We were able to catch things super early, like I can’t even tell you how many early stage brain cancers, thyroid cancers, breast cancers that were picked up accidentally incidentally, of people who thought they were healthy, right. So powerful. That’s great. So powerful. So I’m a huge fan because, I mean, first of all, I think it should be standard of care.  I think it should replace all of the conventional MRIs that are out there. Those who still argue that gadolinium is a must in evaluation, need to read the book more than meets the MRI specific to gadolinium toxicity, to realize that the the benefits you get from adding that gadolinium are so minimal, but the risks are kind of lifelong.  I personally am a lifelong gadolinium poisoned patient. My kidneys are destroyed from that. I still deal with the fallout of that over 30 years later. Wow. People will likely take that to my grave. And so, you know, it’s  This is not something 

Dr. Weitz: And the FDA has a warning against gadolinium because it builds up in the brain.

Dr. Winters: Exactly. So here’s what do we do with patients with a brain tumor. We are having this scan every three months with gadolinium. So suddenly, are we actually looking at brain tumor pathology, or are we looking at gadolinium pathology, or are we looking at gadolinium driven pathology? Right. So suddenly it’s like we’re clouding the picture, literally and figuratively.  So to your point, the imaging has come a long way. I’m very excited about that. I hope it becomes standard because it’s still outta the price point of a lot of people. And that’s part of what our work in our nonprofit is about trying to raise funds for until these become standard of care. How do we help people finance the right way to do their healthcare?  And then specific to the early diagnostics testing. Gosh, Ben, I’ve been at this for so long that I’ve watched many companies come and go in the early diagnostic space from videssa, which was a test that used to be able to evaluate if a breast lesion was [00:17:00] cancerous or non-cancerous. We were very excited about that.  They’re no longer on the market. We were excited about ONCOblot, which was checking for a specific protein, an enox protein, which is an early sort of fingerprint. Cancer and even to the point where you could identify the source of the cancer, the tissue that it was arising from that was pulled off the market gallery, you know, finally a few years ago, gallery came out and everyone was really excited, myself included.  But it has a lot of false positives and false negatives, you know, so there’s a huge, there’s a lot of room for error. I still think that it’s worthwhile, but people need to take it into context, you know? Right. Don’t just put all your eggs in that basket, that you’re either all good or all bad. Get more information to round it out.

Dr. Weitz: So if you’re going to do one test for cancer prevention, it would be the full body MRI.

Dr. Winters: I like that. And then I do my version of testing, which tells me of course, lot information. Right, right. And we can dig into that next, but I wanna speak to a test that was out on the market that was FDA approved the same price [00:18:00] range as gallery that had a much higher sensitivity and specificity by the company DeTar. They’re coming back online by end of this year, is what the rumor on the street is to be an early diagnostic. There’ll be about $300 more expensive because they are they have a few more steps to their methodology to Val for validation to create that precision, but for about 1200 US dollars.  Last I was told DeTar will be available for early diagnostics and. Again, it was already out on the market. And FDA approved gallery is not, I don’t believe gallery is FDA approved. I could be wrong. So gallery folks, I, if I’m mistaken, please correct me. But it’s, it is still an available direct to consumer test for early diagnostics.  It’s not you know, a hundred percent, but it’s still something. So yes to imaging that’s non-toxic, yes to early diagnostics. I believe this is a field that will continue to explode. There’s really cool tests in the, in research right now, like breath tests. There’s already tests like you can test [00:19:00] for pancreatic and lung cancer through breath.

You can test for breast cancer through tears. There’s already a lot of early diagnostics that are approved and that are out there. You just have to know about ’em. And that’s, I think the key here is accessibility. A lot of people have no idea of what you and I are talking about, that these things exist.  Why are these not made known? Because you don’t make money from capturing a smoldering ember in the basement. You make money when the entire house is engulfed in flames. Right, right. So it’s not financially appropriate for the big pharma or the big radiology departments. If you’re catching things either preventative, like early diagnostics, it doesn’t, you don’t make as much money from prevention or early diagnostics.  And, you know, I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but man, I’ve been in this for so long. My husband was a cancer drug design for crying out loud as his vocation and worked for Merck for years to tell you that there was no interest. [00:20:00] In trying to change the outcomes or actually prevent cancer, that’s not where the money lands.  So, you know, as, as awful as that sounds, anybody who’s worked in that industry will tell you that this is an accurate assessment and it’s just the way of the world. It’s, we have

Dr. Weitz: a profit driven healthcare system, and if it, that provides positives and negatives and that’s the bottom line. We,

?: yeah.

Dr. Weitz: Maybe at some point want to ask, do we want to have a profit driven healthcare system? Yeah. So now’s the time. Tell us a little bit about your personal health journey with ovarian cancer.

Dr. Winters:  Sure. So, golly, I don’t even know if I was ever knew what health was. But I’ll tell you as someone who you know, was born in 1971, no one was breastfeeding.  That was not in vogue. And so, you know, my mom was trying to find which formula worked best for me ’cause I was sick on all of them. So the pediatrician tried everything. They finally settled on soy formula, which that probably is where a lot of my problems [00:21:00] began. I also, it was normalized, my pediatrician normalized my pooping once a month as a toddler.  Once a month. Once a month because it was my pattern. So as an infant and a toddler and all the way up through my teen, only imagine what your microbiome looked like. Exactly. And they put me on basically baby gas X at that time. ’cause my belly was constantly extended. I was in excruciating pain. All these issues like.  But normalized, it was just normal. So just give her this, that will, that’ll take care of it. By the time I was nine, I started menstruating. No one questioned that. Wow. This is 1980 for crying out loud, right? Not normal, not common today, unfortunately, common still not normal. But no one was questioning the why of that.

By the time I was 11, I was put on birth control pills for endometriosis and polycystic syndrome. Wow. 11, 11. By the time I was 14, I had my first bout of cervical dysplasia. 16. The second bout you just like on and on it was diagnosed with juvenile, rheumatoid arthritis. By the time I was 16, no one, myself included, thought I was unhealthy.  There was just a pill for that. You just got the birth control pill when you were nine. You would just take an antibiotic. If you had an yeast, you know this, then you’d take a yeast, a anti-yeast drug. When you got a yeast infection because of the antibiotic. It was just. That was just normal, right? By the time I was 19, everyone thought my symptoms that were, that was showing up in the ER every single week almost for the six months leading up to my official diagnosis in the fall of 20 of 1991, they just said, oh, it’s just your IBS flaring.  It’s just your RA flaring. It’s just your, you know, PCOS flaring or just your endometriosis flaring. So it was again, normalized until I landed in the ER with a hundred percent bowel blockage, a grapefruit size tumor in my right ovary, lesions throughout my liver, my entire abdomen, a belly full of fluid, known as malignant ascites.

Pulse oximetry. My oxygen levels at room were in the low eighties, high seventies. Wow. I wasn’t able to eat or drink anything for days on end ’cause it was excruciating pain and coming back up. ’cause I didn’t know I had [00:23:00] a blockage, like just everything. They finally looked under the hood. Right.  So I was put into that category of a histrionic teenager, just drug seeking. And yet I kept telling ’em, I don’t respond to the pain meds. I get really sick on them. I don’t like these drugs. No one, they just thought I was there to like, get another drug and they would just write a script and write me off at the same time.  So that’s where I landed in, in the er and a different doctor on staff that night who took one look at me and realized, oh shit, you know, I just was extremely cachectic and I had this big drum belly. And he did a proper workup and realized, oh, something really bad here. So, fast forward, it took a couple weeks to get the official diagnosis, but he saw the, they, I got an MRI at that time, that’s what was available to me in my tiny little mountain town.  They pulled the ascites fluid. It was bloody so they knew it was malignant at that time. They, you know, all these things were happening. They realized they had the bowel blockage and they sent me home to die. Yeah, that was just, they’re like, you’re too sick, you’re in, your organs are in [00:24:00] failure. You’ve got this blockage, it will absolutely kill you with a single dose of chemotherapy.

So from that fast forward, I couldn’t eat. And so for the next two and a half months, then I didn’t. So I deeply fasted, not on purpose, not intentionally, I just out of necessity and that started to slow down my need to have the ascites drained every few days to maybe once a week to just every couple of weeks for the first two and a half months.  By the end of that two and a half months of fasting, I resolved the bowel blockage, I resolved the ascites, and I just sort of stabilized the fallout that was happening. Now, they didn’t know what to do with me ’cause I was still alive and they didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect that I wasn’t fighting it.  I just wanted to understand it. And that’s what’s led me to where I am today. I wanted to understand why a 19, soon to be 20-year-old was dying of what was considered a disease of the aged that had been missed. Four years that no one questioned my extremely high doses. ’cause all liter literature at that time said, oh, birth control pill is protective against ovarian [00:25:00] cancer.

Oh, it’s not at all if you’re given a dose as high as I was given. Right. In the 1980s. Right. And all the way through it also, no one understood until a few years after my diagnosis would be another five years when I learned that I had the BRCA mutation. So some people think of that as a death sentence.  But really it’s just a methylation problem. Right. And ’cause I’d also been a self-proclaimed vegan since I was 16 years old. I was severely malnourished and I had none of the co-factors for methylation. I also am missing, I would be another. Eight years beyond 19. So in the early two thousands, I also had my genes tested, my SNPs tested and realized I’m missing the Gstp one.  The GSTM one. So I was missing single nucleotide polymorphisms that helped me detoxify. So all those years of medications, all of those years of birth control pills, all those years of living near four EPA Superfund sites, all of those years of eating a very toxic diet for myself, a [00:26:00] very highly processed vegan diet, because I thought I was doing things right by taking care of the animals, but I wasn’t taking care of this animal.

I was doing all the things wrong, right? But I was living like the outside world looked like I was the uber athlete. I was student body president, I was head of my volleyball team. I was, you know, like all the things on the outside world. I looked like the picture of health. And the picture of success, but inside it was rapidly dying.  Wow. Now I’m a sophomore in college pre-med and literally given months to live, and so that’s what has led to my entire career. Ben is starting to learn about, like in the early months of my diagnosis, I started to go to the library and there was no Dr. Google. There was literally, there was a Dewey decimal system and microfiche where I could do my research on and started to understand.

I started running across the work of people like Otto Warberg and the me, the mitochondrial metabolic dysfunction of cancer versus the genetic mutation theory of cancer. I started to run across the work of Dr. Mina Bissell, who was one of the originators of the studies of the terrain, the extracellular matrix and the tumor microenvironment.  And I started to run across the work of Robert Aler and excuse me, Robert Ader and Candace Pert, and at that time an unknown cell molecular biologist by the name of Bruce Lipton, who were all talking about the epigenetics and the impact of trauma and the impact of emotional impact on your immune system.  It would still be another 20 years before Bruce Lipton’s book came out.

Dr. Weitz:  The Biology of Belief, right?

Dr. Winters:  But in 1991, I was reading his research and so these were the people that started informing my understanding that my biography definitely had impact on my biology. My environment outside of me definitely had an impact on the environment inside of me, and I started to wanna understand it and wanted to start to learn ways to resolve it.

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Dr. Weitz:  Let’s talk about the metabolic theory of cancer, which contrasts with the more mainstream somatic, or. DNA mutation theory of cancer. And I’d like to start this part of discussion with a quote from your book, which I thought was very well said.  Cancer is not a disease of our genes. It’s a disease caused by what we are feeding them.

Dr. Winters: Beautiful. Do we need even need to say more? I love it, but Well, and I love it you brought that up because in 1914, Dr. Theodore Bovary coined the concept of somatic mutation theory of cancer, saying that cancer is simply bad luck of genes that are broken and gone rogue and now can’t stop and actually accelerates the proliferation of cancer cells.  That has been where we have put all of our resources of research and treatment basically ever since. Now, there was a little window though, ’cause in the early 1920s, another character came along a bit controversial. Dr. Otto Warberg, who was the biochemist saying, this isn’t a genetic issue, this is a biochemical issue.  And started to realize that the mitochondria, those little powerhouses of our cells looked different and were less in number in cancer tissue. And he started saying, I think that this is happening more upstream. And then the genes come later. And so actually for a chunk of time, he even won a Nobel Prize for this.  But from about the mid, you know, early to mid 1920s until the mid 1950s, [00:31:00] his theory dominated over the somatic mutation theory and lots of accolades. The world of cancer was all tied up in the biochemistry and in the study of that, and that’s where the energy was. But then Watson and Crick, actually a woman that Watson and Crick took credit for, found the DNA helix.  And we pendulum back over to saying, oops, let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater of the mitochondrial theory, metabolic theory, and go back to mutation of genetic theory. And that’s where we’ve been ever since, including, you know, claiming the war on cancer in 1971. Basically flatlined of our overall survival rate since then.

You know, no real, really impactful, impressive changes in this sense then. And the best part is that this somatic mutation theory has actually been disproven. Thousands of times over the, and all over the globe. And that if this was truly a genetic disease, the little organelles within our cells called nuclei are like the [00:32:00] big biggest organs within our cells are where we house our genetic material.  That is the genetic hard drive of our cells. If this was a genetic disease, if you removed that genetic hard drive, the nuclei of a cancer cell and you replaced the nuclei of a healthy cell, you should turn that into a cancer cell. And the opposite is true. If you removed the nuclei, the healthy cell and you replaced it of a cancer cell, you should turn that into a healthy cell.  That doesn’t happen. Never happened, never will happen. ’cause that’s not where it starts. So good old auto was right. It starts upstream from that. Your DNA is protected by the health and wealth of your mitochondria, which is another little organ within the cell that is doing a lot more than just producing your energy.  It is to me, the mitochondria do three major thi things. So yes, at the end of the day the output is energy and an energy exchange. That is life, you guys. That is just the way it is. We live and die by the function of the energy produced from our [00:33:00] mitochondria. But what the mitochondria do before that energy production is three things.

Number one, it takes in information, lots of information. It is a receiver. Okay. And so when I mentioned earlier about what’s happened in the past, you know, 170,000 years where mitochondria began as bacterium. Of which they today make up upwards of 20% of our mass. So think about that for a moment. You know, we’re kind of mostly a bacteria.

That should probably be a clue that, hey, we’ve brought a lot of things like antibiotics and glyphosate, which is a massive antibiotic into our systems. That should probably be a clue of some problems. But we also have brought in, as I mentioned, all the changes after going from hunter gathered and Neolithic farmer to industrial food to post World War.

Lots of new information coming at those mitochondria. So first is they take in everything in, on and around them, including people, places, and things. That’s all. Second big job. They are translators of that information. So, [00:34:00] you know, sometimes when you guys try and use like your Google translate, sometimes it doesn’t translate well, right?

Sometimes like the system is off. Well, that can happen with our mitochondria as well. Like sometimes it’s not translating as well, or it’s so overwhelmed by the input of information, it can’t translate it fast enough or correctly enough. So we’re also the result of how we translate that data. And then the third job of the mitochondria is to signal out, to communicate to the surrounding cytoplasm, to the surrounding organelles, to the surrounding cells, tissues, organs, structure, et cetera.

That is when you have good information in, you have good information out, but if you get crap information in, you get crap information out, or if you get good information in, but poor translation, that can impact. So now you’re likely realizing that there’s a lot of places where things can go wrong within the mitochondria and all of our conditions today.

Cardiovascular disease to diabetes, to dementias, [00:35:00] to autoimmune conditions, to cancer are all based on our mitochondrial function. And earlier you and I talked about the 6.8% or less of us being metabolically healthy, what that really means is that there’s less than 6.8% of us who have well-functioning mitochondria.

And so that is where, and what’s really cool at the time of our discussion been is about, my gosh, maybe six months, eight weeks or six weeks, eight weeks ago, a study came out in I believe nature that literally asks the question or makes the statement that the somatic mutation theory is dead. Oh, really?

And that the metabolic mitochondrial theory is actually the most dominant theory of cancer today. Wow. So I’m hopeful. ’cause I never expected, I mean I’ve been at this for over 30 years, right? Even though I was reading about this all those years, people thought I was knuck and Butts. Even reading like Mina Bissell, who’s been this [00:36:00] amazing researcher, you know, since the eighties, people just di completely dismissing her.

When Tom Creed’s book came out in 2011 claiming that cancer is a metabolic disease, everyone dissed him. When Travis Kristofferson’s book came out, I believe 2014 or 15 on Tripping Over the Truth, which was a consolidation of Tom’s book along with Shar Ji’s book, the Biography Biology, or excuse me, the Biography of Cancer.  And of all Maldi suddenly conversations around this started happening and basically the last 15 years, right? Just conversations despite us being able to disprove the somatic mutation theory for decades. Finally, people are starting to lean into saying, well, maybe we should start actually evaluating for studying and considering more wholeheartedly the work that Otto Warburg started in taking it to the next level, which started to make us look more at these metabolic mitochondrial underpinnings that this is actually what’s running the show.  Not the good old gene. 

Dr. Weitz: Still wonder though, if metabolism, the metabolic health, blood sugar, all that insulin, if this still isn’t only one of the causes, and wouldn’t we actually be better talking about the terrain theory of cancer?

Dr. Winters: Well, and that’s how my brain sees it, so, okay. The metabolic mitochondrial, that’s still, to me, it’s still the expression of what the terrain is being exposed to.  Right. So, for instance, been like most people now, like we started out with the six hallmarks of cancer, Hanahan and et al in, I think 2006 came out with the six hallmarks, and then we, I think in 2010 or 11 we’re like, oh, now it’s 10 hallmarks and we’re up to like 16 now. Right? We have all these hallmarks, but no one’s saying, but what makes those hallmarks express?  Right? It’s the same thing like, well, what makes the mitochondria not work? No one. So I, that’s my passion, is to say, well, what is contributing [00:38:00] to the dysfunction and the lack of number and the lack of vitality of the mitochondria. So even my colleagues in the metabolic oncology space who are focused in, they’re still focused on the tumor and the tumor metabolism and the tumor cell, and not why that metabolism went amuck.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Winters: And so that’s what I speak about in the book. The metabolic approach to cancer are sort of my 10 drivers, of which there are likely more, but even some of those drivers collect a few things. So things like your epigenetics, the blueprint of your genes that were handed down from generations that make you vulnerable to certain expressions depending on input of data, right?  Input of food, light water, emotions, stressors, chemicals, toxins, et cetera. That is your the input is let’s see, you like fielded by or filtered by your blueprint, your genetic blueprint. And so they’re not set in stone. They’re [00:39:00] dynamic, and you can change the expression of, or the silencing of those genes with your day-to-day dietary and lifestyle choices and an even standard of care.

We will tell you today that upwards of 90 to 95% of all cancers are absolutely diet and lifestyle impacted. So it’s not what I’m saying. It’s like, we know this, we say this, but we don’t do anything about it, right? In standard care. So that’s one of the big drops in the bucket. The second big drop in the bucket is what do you eat or don’t eat, or when do you eat, right?

So the fuel, what are you fueling those cells with, right? Everyone’s trying to give like, oh, the blue zones, or, oh, the Mediterranean diet, or, oh, the keto, or, oh, the carnivore. Oh, the vegan, or, oh, the raw. It’s like, no it’s the raw material. What raw materials are you giving your body, and how does it meet your DNA, your genetic history and your needs in this moment at any given time.

So maybe what you need today will be different than what you need next season. Right. So that’s another piece. And the third drop in the [00:40:00] bucket, the environmental, I mean, my gosh, we have 80 to a hundred thousand new chemicals that have come out into the market since the 1960s, and yet less than a thousand of them have been properly tested.

And we’ve virtually done no testing on how they interact with each other. So suddenly talk about all that information coming in. We don’t even understand, beginning to understand what we’re being exposed to and how our bodies are dealing with it. And then we look at the microbiome, which was completely ignored until we can monetize it basically with really expensive shit.

And so we, you know, that’s, you know, that’s just what is what it is because as nature passes, as Chinese medicine practitioners, Ayurvedic practitioners, so 5,000 year old medicine and beyond we’re saying it all starts in the gut. We didn’t quite understand what. In the gut, but we certainly do now. And so for instance, the microbiome.

Now, we almost wanna put those two together, the microbiome and the immune system, because they’re almost impossible to separate. And so with that being said the [00:41:00] microbiome determines your immune system. It determines what nutrients you absorb. It determines what nutrients you convert to make them bioavailable.

Right? It determines what your how you’re going to respond to other medications, to other treatments. For instance, if you are missing certain things like Akkermansia for instance, you may not respond to immune therapies, right? There are certain chemotherapies that if you don’t have the right meta mi microbiome, it just falls flat.  It does nothing. We actually, 

Dr. Weitz: has anybody tested adding akkermansia supplements to immune therapy?

Dr. Winters: Yes, they have. There’s actually multiple studies on this and oh wow. You go to PubMed and say microbiome and checkpoint inhibitors. Let’s just give you a really simple one. Improvements with supplementation, right?  Or changes if you to pull, like, or detriment when you pull out those particular nutrients or those particular organisms. There’s plenty of studies, in fact I mean, I was trying to think the [00:42:00] last time I took note. I think there’s over 600 studies in this globally right now. On adding Akkermansia or just specific like, and Akkermansia is just one, but that’s like one example.  But there are certain, there’s other organisms that are important for response to certain therapies. I see. Okay. But like Akkermansia has become really well known with specifics to icis, which are the immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs. And so that’s one that you’ll see a lot of data on. And

Dr. Weitz: by the way, Akkermansia has a huge effect on blood sugar and insulin.

Dr. Winters: Exactly.  It’s a, it’s nature’s GLP one inhibitor.

Dr. Weitz: Exactly

Dr. Winters: right. And so here’s where it comes back again to the metabolic drivers like you. Here’s the, you know, like your client, your patient, your listeners may not know this, but like radiation, yes. Is radiation effective in treating cancer? Absolutely.  But it’s also effective at causing cancer. So how do you wanna make it work for you and not against you? One of the most important ways to make it work for you is to sensitize the cancer [00:43:00] cells to the radiation, which then protects the healthy cells from it. And you cannot sensitize cancer cells to radiation.  If your system is full of insulin and glucose, you desensitize the cancer cells. So basically they are impermeable to the radiation when your insulin is high. We know this, we’ve known this for ages, and yet what radiation oncologist is telling, there’s a few Dr. Brian Lunda. You know, is one that comes to mind.  There’s a few radiation oncologists out there. Dr. Christie Kesslering comes to mind to understand this and understand this well, that if they can get their patients metabolically healthy, metabolically flexible, insulin depleted, glucose depleted, their patients have much better outcomes on the radiation.

Less side effects. Their immune systems don’t tank, and they maintain you know, a pushback of the cancer, you know, and even into remission. You also don’t get those patients if you are, you know, not potentiating them. Like if they’re blood sugars are high, that’s a problem. But also [00:44:00] you can protect their cells by giving them things like high dose melatonin, which will potentiate, sensitizes those cancer cells further while simultaneously protecting the healthy cells.  Why is this not standard of care? These are not expensive interventions, and they’re not difficult interventions, and they’re, I guess if you

Dr. Weitz: were to say something to a radiation oncologist about using almost any supplement, one of the responses would be, under no circumstances should you ever take antioxidants.  Right. And, you know, I we have that famous rant from Dr. James Watson, who you mentioned, Watson and Crick.

?: Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: Talking about why would anybody ever take an antioxidant, right. At the same time, knowing that eating fruits and vegetables that are rich in antioxidants are one of the healthiest things you could do.

Dr. Winters: Really, the ORAC score of a blueberry, for instance, far outweighs most things you would take as a supplement. Right. And yet no one’s telling them to avoid blueberries. Right. So, but, and the other side of this is that

Dr. Weitz: can you just talk for a minute about this topic? Yeah. Can taking a vitamin C uncouple the effects of radiation or conventional chemo, or, in my opinion, it’s more like saying if I bring this plastic shield onto the battlefield against you know, rocket fire, am I pretend, am I gonna.

Dr. Winters: Really, if you were looking at a truly antioxidant free diet to support the claim of the radiation oncology team, people would have to be drinking distilled water and eating cardboard. I mean, that’s just the reality, right? And that’s just not possible. Right? Here’s what’s very interesting. I will say that we do, as clinicians want to, if we’re going to use an oxidative cytotoxic therapy, we want to have that effect.  Right. [00:46:00] We do not want to quench that effect. Sure. But we wanna be prepared to quench it. After the half-life is down, we want to come in and clean up the environment as quickly as possible. So for instance, the other thing about radiation oncologists is they do not understand anything about redox chemistry, which is knuck thoughts because there is no such thing as like purely pro-oxidant or purely antioxidant.  There’s sort of these gray areas of we move in different arenas. So for instance, low dose oral vitamin C. Two grams, four grams, six grams a day, and split doses is actually antioxidant. We actually do advise our patients on the day of radiation or the day of chemo at least four to six hours around it to avoid things like vitamin E, selenium, zinc you know, vitamin C in the oral forms, just so we can harness as much of that oxidative stress as possible.

We call it the kill phase. We wanna take full advantage of that, but [00:47:00] like day after you’re going to town on those things you need to clean up and scavenge that reactive oxygen species as much as you can so you don’t further overwhelm those mitochondria. Right. So that is a really big strategy. The other thing is, the strategy is we can potentiate those oxidative therapies like radiation by giving the patient a bump, a hit of oxygen, whether it’s from HBO t insufflation, or even nasal blow by prior to going into their radiation.  You actually open up the pores, for lack of a better word, of the tumor to make it penetrable because radiation is very difficult to penetrate what we call cold tumors or really cloaked tumors. And so the rate, the oxygen therapy adds a level of oxidative stress that actually opens it up more and makes it more penetrable by the radiation.  So we might enhance the radiation effect and, but simultaneously that. So would you do that the day before the radiation or? I do it, I like it within an hour to two hours before the Oh, really? That’s my ference

Dr. Weitz: now. So, so when you [00:48:00] say su fla sulfation, if everybody’s not familiar with that, you’re talking about using ozone?

Dr. Winters: You were using ozone nasal cannula. Well, actually not nasal can. It’s too vulnerable there. But like rectally vaginally, you can do that before going in for a radiation therapy, especially if it’s like a colorectal cancer. We definitely wanna get the oxygen right to that region, you know? So those are the things, if it’s like head and neck cancer, just regular nasal cannula of oxygen, if it’s sort of something more diffuse or in the abdomen, we might put somebody in a chamber.  We want to potentiate that, which will help the healthy cells and focus on the cancer cells simultaneously. That’s one example. The other example is ketone bodies. So therapeutic ketosis mean ketone bodies of above millimoles above three actually increase oxidative stress. So it potentiates your chemo, it potentiates your radiation, but simultaneously protects the healthy same things like hyperthermia, and same things like high dose IV vitamin C, high dose iv, vitamin C above 25 grams intravenous is pro-oxidant. It will fact in like fully impact and synergize the oxidative kill phase effect of those things. So when a radiation oncologist tells a doctor or tells a patient, Nope, no way are you doing my IBC because that is an antioxidant. They’re fucking idiots. I mean, excuse me. But it’s like that is the most pro oxidative therapy out there.  We’re making your work better.

Dr. Weitz: That’s, well, when your lab, you should do a study having patients get IV vitamin C along with their radiation or chemo, then

Dr. Winters: those studies exist. They’re already published. They do. Okay. And they’re already, and they’re favorable. You will potentiate. So not just for radiation, but also for chemotherapy.  So some of those really toxic chemotherapies, it will potentiate the effect of that and protect the marrow simultaneously.

?: And then

Dr. Winters: you come in with your antioxidants [00:50:00] around it, like the day before your treatments the, you know, day after, depending on the half life of the treatment. Then you clean up and scavenge that, what’s still running around the system causing chaos where it doesn’t need to.  That’s where we bring, this is why integration. Right. This is how it rounds it out. And so, this is where, so we were just talking about like the microbiome and we’re kind of heading out to the other drops. So really quickly, the other big drop, the immune system talk about harnessing that inflammation circulation and oxygenation.  Hormone modulation circadian rhythm, stress response. This is such a big one in the cancer world and mental emotional. So these are the 10 major drivers. So for instance, if someone’s willing to eat the right diet, do all the right pills and potions get the right standard of care treatment, but they’re not, like for instance, going to bed before 11:00 PM and they’re on screen till two in the morning, that’s completely disrupting their entire terrain, right?

You know, that insulin [00:51:00] growth factor wiping out the ability to detoxify, which is the time our bodies do that in the middle of the night. You know, things like that. But if they’re also not dealing, say with the skeletons in the closet of their mental emotional resilience and their traumas, they also are less responsive to therapies.

So folks, for instance, with high ACE scores, adverse childhood events. They have a much, they’re wired differently. Their, the nervous systems are wired differently. Their immune systems are wired differently. So until they basically rewire that, reprogram themselves and resolve that trauma, they’re gonna continue to be playing that record.

And it will mean that their treatments don’t land as effectively, whatever they are. And if you’re in a state of constant fight or flight, if you’re in a sympathetic nervous system, we don’t heal and sympathetic. So being afraid, so living in fear, which are com, our complete culture like seems to thrive on and seems to perpetuate the money machine on.

If you’re living in a state of [00:52:00] fear, you can’t receive, no matter how good the treatment is from standard of care, from alternative care, from healers. If you’re in a constant fight or flight, you can’t even receive that healing.

Dr. Weitz: What are your what are a couple of your favorite supplements for patients?  You, you were talking about immune system function. Yeah. When you have a patient and they have low white blood cells or low lymphocytes and you know, they need some boost to their immune system what are some of your favorite strategies?

Dr. Winters: Well, one of my favorite strategies is that there’s a kind of common denominator of deficiencies within patients that are dealing with a cancer diagnosis, but also and so I’ll just start with that.  So they’re really simple. You’re missing you’re missing the fat solubles typically very common. So a DK, right? Those are the main ones. You’re missing major minerals. So zinc, selenium, magnesium are the big ones you’re missing the kind of co the the big, like the B12, the big methylator.  You’re missing that, those are your big ones. So magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, vitamin A, vitamin K, and B12 are the ones that are classically missing across every patient I’ve ever run labs on. Right? Both from functional labs to conventional labs. It’s missing, right? And so we know those are all the important co-factors for immune function, right?

And for lots of cell, like you, like magnesium alone pulls like 200 different genetic levers. And vitamin D alone has major epigenetic, you know, liver pulling and packed as well. Vitamin A is pretty much your entire immune system, right? And K like we so downplay these and we’ve gotten so fat phobic and we avoid the things that those come from.

And we give people synthetic forms and we give folks plant-based forms. So in fact, the studies that show that things like vitamin A and E can cause cancer, it’s because those are the plant-based forms. Right that are misunderstood and misappropriated. So betacarotene, we don’t, we don’t ever give our patients betacarotene, right?  We don’t ever give our patients cyan cabal forms of B12. We don’t ever give our patients [00:54:00] so, solen, methionine forms of selenium. Like we know we need to use certain nutrients that are depleted in our cells. So when we deal with those, if I get those foundational ones, I’m not

Dr. Weitz: sure if everybody knows what the issue is with seleno-methionine.

Ah,

Dr. Winters: so the methionine aspect in

Dr. Weitz: a person who’s dealing with cancer, who’s acting cancer,

Dr. Winters: okay. 

Dr. Weitz: The idea of that high methionine might promote cancer?

Dr. Winters: Yes. And we can tell very sur. I mean, first of all, you can get testing now to actually know which metabolic pathways are deranged. But we can surrogate tests with a homocysteine level.  And so the homocysteine level is elevated and we do what we call a homocysteine challenge. So we give some of those co-factors, you know, high dose for a couple days and we retest the homocysteine. If the homocysteine comes down, drops significantly, we know that was just a methylation problem. But if the homocysteine barely drops or stays the same or even goes up, we know we have a methionine driving the cancer process.  So you don’t want to take supplements that contain the methionine form. And [00:55:00] selin methionine is the most common form of selenium. Interesting. And sodium is a very powerful PTP 53 tumor suppressor support. It’s really great for methylation support, but if you’re using the wrong form, it can backfire.

So we, we want to use the right form. So because I’m a clinician who’s had to piecemeal all of these things together, we actually created a formula. And this is not to mean a shameless plug. It’s that I needed it, it didn’t exist, so I created it. That’s sort of the story of my life, you guys. So it’s like these tests didn’t exist.

So I created, these courses didn’t exist. So I created, this hospital didn’t exist. So we’re creating like it’s, instead of me waiting for somebody else to do it, my personality is just. Do it, like get outta the way and we’ll just do it ourselves. So we created a company called Mito Vita. So the life of the mitochondria and one of our sort of flagship pro products is this Nutra master, which are those replaced or those repleted sub, you know, nutrients I just mentioned are all in one place.

And so that’s kinda like my form of a [00:56:00] multivitamin. ’cause multivitamins otherwise are crap. I don’t ever recommend ’em for anybody. They have too many things that are not therapeutic enough, but they also have too many things that are actually could be drivers and somebody dealing with cancer. And so I just wanna avoid those.

It’s very difficult to find good quality ones. So for years we just had patients take these things individually. Now they take it in one. One pill versus Yeah. My,

Dr. Weitz: I don’t, I’m sure you must be aware of it, but Integrative therapeutics has least s Yeah. Thrive multivitamin.

Dr. Winters: Yep. Yep. And so, but you know, for me, I don’t want anything that contains calcium, boron, iodine, iron non methylated B vitamins.  Sure. Still has a few of those things. And so I love Lisa. I think she’s stinking brilliant, but it’s not a supplement. I personally recommend for my patients on that. But if you’re not cancering, I think it’s perfect. But if you are cancering, there’s. Too many things we’re learning that we have to be pretty careful and pretty thoughtful on.  But when you talk about the immune system, I know there’s a lot of people out there who think that supplementation of vitamin D is [00:57:00] controversial, but the reality is that we’ve all used detergents on our skin to break down the ability to absorb our vitamin D three. We are all terrified of the sun.

So we’re not getting our 10,000 units minimum just to prevent rickets a day exposure to vitamin D from the sun. Perfect world. If you could lay out naked every day for an hour, we’d all be fine. Right? But no one’s doing that except for a few biohackers, right? So at the end of the day, one of my most compelling, you know, levers, especially if people have single nucleotide polymorphisms that make vitamin D absorption difficult, whether it comes from natural sources or supplements, we do need to bring on a supplement for these patients.  It pulls so many levers. It’s a really important one to optimize. Another one that we like to use that really optimizes the entirety of the immune system, the entirety of the metabolic system, the entirety of the like hormonal modulation and DNA protection is high dose melatonin, right?

Again, your like, probably the most studied outside of missile toe [00:58:00] alternative cancer therapy out there. Hundreds if not thousands of white papers on it. If people wanna go, people like Dr. Dr. Ri Ryder Russell Ryder famous researcher in melatonin chemistry, because everyone’s always like, oh, it’s gonna replace your function.

It doesn’t. It doesn’t. That’s a myth. And so there are ways that we can harness the power of high dose melatonin like I potentiate. I give somebody like, you know, 500 mil, you know, IU or 500 milligrams of for going to radiation therapy or getting an X-ray or a CT scan to both potentiate the impact of the radiation where you want it to go, but also to protect the healthy cells.

It’s a TP 53 protector as well. And so these are some of the tools we can be using that brings us back to this conversation and need for integration that it shouldn’t be either or. It should absolutely be an and. Absolutely.

Dr. Weitz: I have a million more questions, but running outta time. I’m sure you are too.  I’d like to get one more particular [00:59:00] question. There’s a particular issue that has come up that is a peeve of mine and that is there’s at least one prominent ca researcher who also has researched cancer and recommends a low protein diet, particularly because. According to him and some data that higher protein diets, meaning including animal protein raises IGF one levels.  And in your book you point out how IGF one levels are raised by insulin being produced by eating a higher carb diet. So therefore, eating a lower protein vegetarian diet is automatically gonna be a higher carb diet. And so we measure IGF one levels in all our patients, and I do not see uniformly that our patients following a healthy diet with even [01:00:00] three times a day of animal protein.  We, I do not see a big increase in IGF one levels. And so I’ve always been very skeptical about that. So should. Patients who wanna prevent cancer follow a lower protein diet because of the fear of raising IGF one? Or is the concern more about eating sugar and high glycemic carbohydrates?

Dr. Winters: So, couple, there’s a couple places to unpack here.  So biggest prevention is going to be carb restriction, right? That’s because 70%, some research shows upwards of 90%, but let’s just be conservative. So let’s say 70% of all cancers are very heavily driven by insulin. All I would say a hundred percent are to some degree, but 70%, it’s pretty much the main driver, right?  Right. That other 30%, it’s a driver, but there’s usually other players such as glutamine. Methionine cystine, right? Loose arginine, [01:01:00] right? Somebody’s so what you’ll notice is those are proteins, right? So this is where the conversation gets confusing to people. Healthy metabolism of healthy cells and metabolism of cancer cells are two different animals, and they’re happening simultaneously.  So when you look at, does sugar alone cause the cancer process it doesn’t it. So what you have to have a metabolic derangement that then switches and says, I want to utilize glucose as my primary fuel. That doesn’t start that way. It’s a response to something stressed in the environment that allows that ship to happen.

Similar to the protein question. So let’s talk about this for a moment, because IGF one is definitely a problem, but it’s a problem once the metabolism is switched over, right? And so absolutely too much protein will drive IGF one, [01:02:00] but it is far less common to see that than it is to see IGF one being caused by too many carbohydrates.

Also, people always forget too much steroid, which they give every freaking patient who’s on chemotherapy, which even in Dr Balter Longo’s newest book in the first few chapters says this should be pulled, which I’ve been saying for 30 years from every patient. It’s like peeing in the wind when you give a patient a steroid for with going through cancer treatment.

And then the other side is, so she’s talking about corticosteroids like prednisone, which are often included in the protocol to reduce inflammation. All included. It’s a, it’s an, it’s a CYA. But I tell folks that even if you get the CYA of the pre the preload drugs, if you’re going to have a reaction, you’re gonna have a reaction.

And you’re in that chair with a lot of people close by that are gonna give you the proper drugs like histamine, antihistamines, and even more steroids if you do have a reaction. So why don’t we already know they’re there? Just keep those things on hand to give them those drugs right away because the patient’s still doing [01:03:00] CYA drugs are going to have that reaction that are going to have it, right?

So it’s like we’re preempting things that we actually can treat if it shows up in immediately and deal with it immediately. But the other things that drive up insulin growth factor stress. So cortisol drives up IGF one

?: right

Dr. Winters: over exercising. ’cause it drives up insulin, it drives up cortisol. Okay. And sleep.

Lack of sleep. So two nights of bad sleep, just two nights of bad sleep will impact your IGF one levels. So we may be blaming the wrong things for IGF one. I see interesting other drivers for it. But if I have a patient who’s actively cancering and their IGF one is elevated, we’re gonna go after all of those things.

We’re gonna see, well, is this stress? Is this sleep? Is this too many carbs? Is this too much protein? And we will adjust accordingly. We will get back the data and we will be able to know what was the driver for that patient. And so to me, that’s what’s really exciting is we don’t have to [01:04:00] guess, right?

You’re modulating

Dr. Weitz: nurturing and you’re testing to see what’s happening with that individual patient. And that’s how you provide individualized, personalized care.

Dr. Winters: And so, Ben, when someone says. It’s always bad or it’s always good, you need to kind of run from it. We know across the board carbohydrates are the driver.  Too many carbs and too many processed carbs in particular are the driver of many of our chronic illnesses today. We all do not expend enough energy, right, to utilize the carb intake we have. And then because of the things like altered metabolism from light exposures in the wrong times of day because of the endocrine disruption, we are completely swimming in from the chemicals in our environment to the exogenous hormones we take to the plastics we’re exposed to the glyphosate drenching our entire planet.  Today, that impacts the way we metabolize things. Like we have to become aware of everything we put in on and around us, including people, places, and [01:05:00] things, which is where we started our conversation today. And the simplest place to start is just to be aware of when you eat. And what you’re eating. Like that’s the thing that’s like your base camp.  And to start to realize that we’re all leaning towards way more carbs than ever before, right? And that some of us can tolerate more than others based on our epigenetics. So you can even take that information in. So even the question about IGF one, my husband would love to be carnivore, but he has a PA two snips.  He has a CSL one snips. He’s got snips that when he eats red meat, he can get by with a little bit, but if he eats too much, his glucose and insulin go up and his ketones drop.

?: Wow. His

Dr. Winters: body thinks it’s a candy bar. But there other people who have like the seven oh gosh, I can’t believe I just forgot it.  The seven FL 7 22. Ugh. I cannot believe I just completely lost this one. There’s another SNP TCF seven L two, which is for those folks who wanna be like a vegetarian or vegan. They’re, they are [01:06:00] so predisposed to diabetes and the issue is they don’t have the enough amylase to break down all the carbohydrate.  So the point is that there’s a time and a place to be more, you know, higher protein, more higher carbohydrate based on our biochemical individuality and our single nucleotide polymorphisms. And in, if we’re even then using a clinical application, we may wanna pulse things like maybe we need to restrict.  This is why I’m such a huge fan of fasting and intermittent fasting, because you basically starve all of the potential drivers, glucose, fats, and proteins that could potentially be causing a problem. So if you pull that out for a little bit of time, you make those cancer cells a little more vulnerable, and then you pair that with some other pushing therapies such as oxidative therapies of some sort, standard of care or otherwise, you completely change outcomes.  Right. So we might get caught up in these dogma wars of which is the best diet or which is the best foods to avoid [01:07:00] or to take. But really some of our most compelling data is when we’re not eating and how to layer that in more strategically with some of these therapeutic interventions.

Dr. Weitz: Oh, so let’s wrap here.  It’s another continuing conversation. Tell everybody about your programs, your training programs for practitioners and whatever other contacts you want everybody to have.

Dr. Winters: Thanks, Ben. Well, first of all, folks can start by following me at drnasha.com, D-R-N-A-S-H a.com. That will probably take you to all the things that we’re up to.  That’ll take you into the nonprofit land of MTIH, which is Metabolic Training of Health, where we’re doing research and innovation, but we’re also doing patient grants to get access to this type of care. And then also working on funding for a really powerful hospital that we hope to build on this model, around this model.  And then you can also learn about the product line that we’ve developed is very specific to the metabolic health and metabolic oncology space. So we’ve been using it internally in our community for some [01:08:00] time, but that’s where it’s been tough because there’s no, there’s a lot of stuff on the market that doesn’t quite fit what we need for our particular population.

We also have a data platform that’s a clinical decision making tool, our MT that is about to launch to the public, which is a really powerful way to. Make this approach more available and scalable by clinicians. ’cause it takes a lot. We’re about a thousand strong now in 46 countries of clinicians and allied health professionals who’ve come through my training program.  But this requires a lot of time and energy to master this information and to apply it. And so we’re creating tools to make this more accessible and scalable by clinicians globally. And so you can learn about my book, the Metabolic Approach to Cancer, all the things that Ben and I talked about really go into greater detail about this.

And then the book, the Metabolic missile toe and the future of integrative oncology is kind of like the next gen. This is actually written for clinicians as a kind of a toolbox for them to access in the integrative oncology space. But ultimately, you know, if you go to [01:09:00] Dr. Nayha or mth.org, you can sign up for our newsletter to keep abreast of all the conferences and all the podcasts I do where I’m guests or I have guests on.

And then I think the final thing I want your listeners to hear is we’re doing a really amazing event. I hope this comes out in time for that. In October 10 10, by the way, October 10th is our Health Day on the calendar, right? So for the last couple years we’ve been doing some events, just kind of one day virtual things on 10 10.  But this year we’ve had such a demand. We’re actually creating a conference and we’re bringing together all the things that personally for me. Are about how we impact the terrain being in the best of metabolic health and metabolic, you know, like regenerative health with region farming and soil mitigation and environmental medicine all under one roof.

So if you go and Google Metabolic Health Day conference, and we’ll give a link to this you will see that. E any one of our keynotes would fill a stadium on their own. Really unbelievably brilliant people that I’m really proud to have on board. Plus 30 other well-known, high, [01:10:00] highly followed, highly influential clinicians and influencers out there in the world making, making a difference in health as we know it a healthier planet for healthier people.  So I’m excited about that because it’s bringing a lot of these voices together that are impacting policy, impacting planetary health and impacting people health. So is that in person? It is. There’s an option for in-person in Tucson, but there’s also an option for virtual live streamed as well as recorded if you can’t be, take part in the livestream aspect.  So we want this to be a toolbox for creating a better future.

Dr. Weitz: Great. Feel free to post a notice on my functional medicine discussion group of Santa Monica closed Facebook page.

Dr. Winters: That would be amazing. Thank you for that opportunity. 

Dr. Weitz: You’re welcome. Yeah. Thank you so much Nasha. Another amazing discussion.

Dr. Winters: Thanks, Ben. You’re the best. Appreciate you so much. Thank you.

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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 very much appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcast or Spotify and give us a five star ratings and review.  As you may know, I continue to accept a limited number of new patients per month for functional medicine. If you would like help overcoming a gut or other chronic health condition and want to prevent chronic problems and want to promote longevity. Please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310-395-3111 and we can set you up for a consultation for functional medicine and I will talk to everybody next week.