Dr. Christian Gonzalez Shares Key Contributors to Disease, Illness, & Cancer | Health Theory

i believe that almost every disease can be healed if we ask that question everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i am here with dr christian gonzalez christian welcome to the show man thank you so in going ham on researching you i went down the gmo rabbit hole um so i'd love to talk more about it this is something that i'm i'm sort of clinging uh to the edge of having any knowledge so i'd love to learn more so why do they matter like you're a health guy you're all about i mean attacking it from a lot of different angles so how did gmos make your radar what began to shape your thoughts on that yeah understanding how important our gut function is because when you think about genetically modified foods and the system that they affect their their multi-systemic in their effect but really they they wreak havoc on the digestive system and as we've known for the past really 10 years it's been blowing up about what are the implications of our digestive system for overall health and part of the reason they came to the public and deemed as quote unquote safe is because the mechanism of the way they work was not affecting our cells human cells but it but we find that it affects the pathways in the gut bacteria and the target is for effect as a pesticide on food right outside of our body but that same pathway the shikamate pathway it's called is affected in our gut so that's the part that's really controversial when it comes to our overall health the other side of controversy it's everywhere we don't there are implications in blood cancers uh liquid cancers like leukemia which is what we're seeing now in court right the the billion-dollar awarding of of um of the test of the court case with with the the man who had leukemia or lymphoma and when you look it's unfortunate because um it was when was it three years ago uh these emails came out from monsanto and they showed that they were they're very much so aware that glyphosate causes cancer causes uh lymphoma affects the gut you see this in emails between scientists warning people within the company about what they're seeing and that's a big problem because the awareness we learned when those emails came out we learned that the company was very much so aware of not only does it affect people but exactly the mechanism of how it affects folks so the best thing i tell folks is look why not just just those foods if you can't even afford organic food let's buy the ones that need that are doused in glyphosate let's just buy those organic right corn soy papaya let's get those organic can we run down the list of ones that are more affected than others so i know from what i've heard things like strawberries that have an exposed outer area that you're going to eat that are just sucking up the glyphosate is going to be way worse than something like a banana where you're going to take the peel off is there sort of a rough list of common foods that are problematic versus ones that are a little bit safer or do you just have sort of a whole approach where it's like if it's gmo i don't mess with it um well you were referring to the appeals with the pesticides at list by the environmental working group that they made the rough thing that we can do is okay yeah like pineapple watermelon avocados they don't necessarily need to be organic because they have that protective covering even oranges lemons limes whereas like you were mentioning strawberry blueberry raspberry spinach kale but as as as a rule of thumb let's try to go for organic with those so it puts us in a place where okay if we're ingesting this one isn't going to hurt us maybe one a day for a month isn't going to hurt us but over time we'll see it on tests that it's building up in our body and there's known implications to those pesticides so are what are the tests that you would run to check for a glyphosate is there like a glyphosate blood test or how do we how do we find out where we're at on that terrifying scale it's a good it's a good test i think everyone should do it it's a urine test actually right because that's the way the body metabolizes it there's different companies out there labs that do um basically full spectrum toxin testing um i do it for my clients once a year i say let's just see where you're at right because if you're pesticides it's not just glyphosate there's over 200 pesticide or your diet is really lending to that and that can have long-term implications right so i i the the reason i become so passionate about environmental medicine you know what what we're being exposed to not only just not only from food but the air we breathe environmental medicine i've never heard that term it's basically the medicine of our outer world like what are exposures toxic exposures so we were just talking about pesticides herbicide insecticides but then stuff in our water right heavy metals in our food also we didn't mention uh volatile organic compounds in our rug in our bed one exposure's not going to hurt you over years it's not going to hurt you but you have this cup that fills up right and the size of your cup genetically is different than the size of my cup and depending on how stressed we are that's the cup will get smaller but it's going to fill up at some point and it's going to manifest maybe for you you might have skin diseases but for me i might have a lung disease so this is what i tell people how can we empty the cup so let's just let's go shopping for some organic products versus non-organic let's think about the rug that we just bought is it off-gassing in the house um what about water quality can we improve our water quality air filters just small things in the house that's basically environmental medicine in a nutshell so if you had to start rank ordering this stuff like what are the the worst ones if i if the average person did that full panel what are the things that come back is it mercury poisoning that's at the top and people need to really watch their fish game is it glyphosate and hey if you're eating a plant-rich diet and i know that you're full vegan if you're eating a plant-rich diet are you more at risk and like yo you really need to go hardcore on organic if you were going to give us sort of the top three or five ways that people are really getting themselves in trouble um what are those obviously a soft rank order yeah on the on the test the major ones are the whole spectrum of pesticides including glyphosate even for folks who are like fully organic that we're still going to see exposures to that because a lot of even organic foods they may get uh the runoff from other farms so food and water major entry points major major major bpa that's the other one that's really high for folks on this test and all that all of their analog bpa coming from plastic exactly plastic receipts um the lining of like tomatoes plastic thermal paper thermal paper will have the bpa and you can actually take that in through your skin it's less so through the skin and more so that when we touch our face or touch our mouth so people get it on their fingers and then they put it in their mouth exactly talk about something that i have never heard before i had no idea i needed to be watching out for those okay super interesting yeah so i tell people all right well do you work in retail where you're touching receipts all day if you do wear gloves um but you if let's say we went to whole foods together you wouldn't see me touch the receipt i tell them to put it in the bag um just for that reason because to that knowing but also children's toys the lining of like canned tomatoes uh or soups these are all things that are leaching bpa bpa is major hormone disruptor for men and women i think that's the most insidious thing one of the most insidious toxins with having the most amount of effect on our body what is the effect that bpa has is it an estrogenizing effect is that is it kind of like soy in that way close so okay uh bpa in itself is a xenoestrogen meaning it exerts estrogenic effect in the body so it doesn't soy is a phytoestrogen but it's not a female estrogen it actually doesn't exert estrogenic effect bpay absolutely does which is concerning because then it's predisposing us as men to prostate cancer women breast cancer and some and men ovarian cancer for women and the problem is bpa mimics estrogen binds to the cell and then tells the cell hey estrogens here act accordingly but it's also blocking normal healthy binding to that receptor of other healthy hormones the problem with bpa is this a cdc maybe five years ago i think it was did a study of 2500 people and 93 of those folks had elevated bpa in their urine which is crazy because we metabolize bpa half-life is six hours you know so basically in a day it's gone and the biggest problem is bpa exerts something called a non-monotonic dose response meaning that we know that high levels of bpa have an effect on the body right and the safe levels were extrapolated from those high levels the safe level now we see especially for endocrine disrupting hormones is below that safe level that we see that's allowed it's also having an effect on the body it's having that estrogen hormone disrupting effect and that's the biggest problem um so then i'll hear like they'll be toxicologists saying that dose makes the poison but it's not necessarily true right it's partly true that's in a vacuum but they're not taking into account that even low doses will have that effect they're not taking into account how things bio accumulate in the body synergistic entourage effect of how they all work together these chemicals we don't know that so i think i mentioned bpa because it's i see it in tests the cdc test showed it in a bunch of people so i think that that's one that really needs to be spoken about way more okay so we've got glyphosate we've got bpa i didn't hear mercury on that list is that something that you see a lot or just going to get into that one the heavy metals right and so the heavy metals that we see dietarily especially are going to be mercury cadmium arsenic and lead uh those are the four that are really that show up for folks um we get a lot of that right so fish heavy diets are going to be exposing you to mercury but then rice heavy diets are going to be exposing you to more arsenic whereas things like cacao powder um plant-based protein powder are going to give you exposures to lead and cadmium chocolate lead and cadmium cacao lead and cadmium so it's just a matter of like measuring these and educating the public and being like here's what we can do it's it's hard with heavy metals it's hard and here's why the usda organic label doesn't tell us anything about heavy metals it tells us about pesticides and synthetic chemicals the heavy metal onus is on us to find out from the company if it's a big concern for me it's a big concern if i have a wife she's pregnant or i have a kid who's having smoothies and we're putting in like a little protein powder or some cacao because he loves cacao then that's a problem as a vegan how are you approaching the food angle are there certain stores that you shop are there certain foods you focus on what is what does a day in the life look like for you i love that i love that because it's going to be able to empower the the folks who are listening and viewing um really from the get-go it's a matter of like when you think about us as human beings we have incredible detox systems right like we're so sophisticated so how do we optimize that are we pooping every day right are we hydrating and peeing every day are we sweating as much as we can or working out every day getting that going right okay before we move on let's hit those individually so um what's what's the protocol if you're not pooping every day we'll start with that one what do you do if you're not every day it's a matter of why we have to investigate why is it a dietary thing or do you have to are you having too little fiber like we have folks who are eating still like 20 grams of fiber which is too low way too low but that's what we're accepting i think they need to go more towards 40 50. not only because it affect it helps feed your gut but with constipation right so i think we need to eat more getting in more plants as much as we can and so we're going to get the fiber and then you have a hit list on the plants like if i was only going to eat three which is pretty close to the truth what three would i want to go for to maximize my bang for buck here i love i love raspberries because pound for pound they're one of the top you know you can get a whole handful and you're getting a good amount of fiber apples wonderful they have prebiotic they have prebiotic effect on the body they're going to feed the gut bacteria and any leafy greens this is what i tell people whatever you like some people hate swiss chard some people love spinach some people love kale fiber rich leafy greens should be pretty much in all your plates if you can or your smoothies um so yeah that's the pooping part make sure you're getting adequate hydration for me i can drink a gallon for you could drink a liter what's more important for me is that you're getting minerals right adequate minerals in your body um that's true hydration right that where your cell inside the cell and outside the cell is quenching the perfect ratio of minerals um so for me i i'll i'll filter my water and then i'll re-mineralize it because the filtering process is going to get rid of any inherent minerals that are coming from the water anyway but i think that everyone should be re especially if you're filtering your water remineralizing that so that's good there's just mineral complexes just dropping it in there mineral drops i like the quicksilver kington ones qui and ton you may have seen them um they're little glass vials that you just break oh my wife takes that yeah yeah right yeah those glass vials are amazing they're amazing for they taste like seawater they do because they're they're actually derived of purified seawater with 78 different trace minerals that's a basic for health right because minerals are the reason we can recharge ourselves uh like we charge our cell phones we need minerals to as part of the equation for charging us so um i love them so that's really helpful again for adequate hydration if i'm drinking like water with no minerals i can drink a gallon but it's drinking a liter with adequate minerals is gonna make a difference that's true hydration you're getting electrolytes and minerals in there okay so um if you had to ball park the amount how much per day given that you're going to get a ton of water from what you eat how much do you tell people that they should be drinking so it depends on the person but a really nice rule of thumb is half your body weight and ounces right so you know i'll drink 80 80 to 90 ounces of water a day and waking up with a ritual of like having 24 ounces boom right from the get-go when you wake up because you're your most high dehydrated state so filling up that water there you go you have already you know you just have 60 ounces the rest of the day that's why i always tell people get a not a plastic a stainless steel or glass water bottle and having that with you throughout the day is going to be so important because then you'll have a you'll see you have a gauge oh damn well today i only drank 40 ounces let me just let me just chug 20 ounces right now your dehydration is like that is that is such a big issue that we see in folks they don't even know they're dehydrated so get your hydration set first right poop as regularly those are two major ways of detoxification sweating you know working out it is incredibly necessary in every single way but part of that necessary benefit is the detoxification and uh and you know moving through like that sweat we see it like you can measure even in like let's say a sauna you can measure the release of those toxins into the into the sweat it's amazing like you can actually collect the sweat and see the toxins coming out some studies that have shown that you can see heavy metals coming out of your sweat in the sun but still when i tell people you just sweat put on a sweatshirt work out downstairs you know just just move it okay so those we we've got the the first three bowel movements sweating urine what's next home think about your home how do you how do you detox your home and and this is what i love about the environmental working group they have a database where you can cross check your products that you have at home right like shampoo if you're like oh i don't know about the shampoo let me just type it into the uh skin deep database then you'll see well damn my shampoo gets an f why then you'll see allergies immunotoxicity predisposition for cancer how it affects the environment you'll see why it gets the grade and then you'll see the list of chemicals and then their grade each individual chemical so slowly changing our consumer goods right soaps lotion shampoos cologne perfume whatever we have in the house that's a great start cleaning supplies right again the environmental working group has a cleaning database where you can type in lysol windex bleach and then not only that you can see better options ranked like all the a's all the b's all the c's so um that's what an amazing empowering way that we can slowly start shifting the things out of our home and then i think the next phase would be just thinking about the stuff that you're purchasing at home you know you sleep in a bed seven and a half eight hours a day you know those flame retardants those volatile organic compounds we breed them in so can we get a bed that is made that that doesn't have those vocs right is that a thing like is there a mattress company that are there there's so many what do you think of course organic how is this stuff labeled there's the o e k o t e x o ecotex and that that ensures that they test over 300 different chemicals in the mattress um sustainable ethically made and then there's the green guard certified which is the other label that's the basically usda organic label of mattresses and bed sheets and bedding uh pillows that's what we want to look for when we have those type of things so like i i i bought a brentwood home mattress uh no affiliation with them but that's one of the better ones and affordable you know bed sheets okay i'll spend another 30 on bed sheets that i'll have for a while but i just know that they're they're clean you know so i think that we don't have to be crazy hardcore we just have to make little shifts over time you know this is why we don't people don't talk enough about environmental medicine as i was talking because there's no you don't just feel it immediately but if you have let's say a child at home who's developed asthma and you go to your allergist and they go okay they're allergic to pollen and you're like okay and they're taking the inhaler but it's not really helping it might be because they're rolling around in the new rug with formaldehyde benzene and halloween and there's known studies that show it not only exacerbates asthma but will induce asthma so i think that we need to be aware of this because unfortunately conventionally not a lot of doctors talk about this so it's just like that's what i'm trying to do i'm just like let's bring this awareness let's empower ourselves not be scared and make a change yeah that that stuff is um it is really beginning to make my radar as a potential problem especially as i think about cancer and you know like the the just ever increasing rates of cancer that we see and how much of this is diet related which was my first angle of attack um which is man probably for the last i don't know 10 or 15 years has been how i've approached most problems like if you have a problem i'll just tell you right now the answer is diet right change your diet but environmental toxins are starting to make my radar as a potential issue talk to me a little bit about cancer i know that your mom had cancer and that sort of changed the trajectory of your medical career um what what's sort of happening at the the cutting edge of cause i think is is probably the best place to start like what are we you touched on glyphosate at the beginning um link's starting to seem pretty clear there um what are some other things that we need to to really worry about yeah i think i have like you mentioned i had the personal experience with cancer and i did my residency in this integrative cancer hospital and in that hospital i was a little disappointed because i was like well we're not really looking to the root cause we're just treating the manifestation the end stage manifestation of what's been going on for years and you're right diet is huge and that was the initial entry point i said diet what are they what are we putting in our body from our mouth first and then came a point where i was seeing people who've been super healthy dieters for 20 years or eating very healthy triathletes coming with pancreatic cancer young men young women athletes and i'm like what is going on because i know these people work out they eat well and then that i started thinking as i left that residency and working in my own practice i said we need to investigate so then i started thinking about what are the pillars you know sleep we don't talk about that but sleep is when our melatonin is it's highest our melatonin is actually one of probably the most healing when it comes to cancer hormones so if we're not optimizing melatonin at night and cortisol is high at night which is actually pushing that cancer right and reducing our immune function that's a problem so that's where stress comes in so now now we're talking nutrition environmental medicine sleep stress mental emotional like there's absolutely you can't tell me differently i've seen over 2000 cancer patients you can't tell me that there's not a mental emotional part right i've seen folks do everything right and then they've released that trauma from when they were a kid or a teenager and that was the straw that broke the camel's back that's what started the real healing so we got to stop thinking just like tumor cut it out that is not the way to do cancer medicine by any means we have to watch because this is what i say it's like you come in and let's say i'm your doctor and i'd show you a picture of a field with a bunch of weeds and then i go all right we're going to cut the weeds with surgery we're going to burn the weeds with with chemicals radiation uh and when we're going to uh put chemicals on the weeds with with chemotherapy right so we're going to get rid of all the weeds i promise you that or most likely then we take a picture and yeah it's all grass no weeds and then i show you that and you go you go wow i'm cancer-free and then we say go home you understand what i'm trying to get at the soil in itself is never addressed and that soil has many different factors that we were talking about i was just talking about and that's the problem because what i've seen way too much of my career is folks go home cancer free and they come back a year later six months later maybe two years later and unfortunately their cancer is more aggressive and i know whoever's listening i guarantee there's people who can empathize with this because they see this comes back more aggressive and all of a sudden it's desensitized to the same therapy that was given and then it's metastasized somewhere else in the body right so now we have a bigger problem and a lot and that's what happened with my mom came back and she passed away the problem is no one ever no one ever even did a comprehensive hormone test to see how she was metabolizing estrogen in the first place right and that she had an estrogen-dependent cancer and there are tests out there man like we can test i can see your hormones right now see how you're breaking down testosterone see how you're breaking down estrogen if your breakdown of estrogen is giving us too much of that carcinogenic form of estrogen that pushes prostate cancer that pushes breast cancer ovarian cancer that's available this is why integrative medicine and cancer is essential for me like we all have to be working together to optimize these patient outcomes so let's dive in a little bit more to what's going on at a cellular level that's happening to the cancer when you talked about trauma and people letting that go or finally dealing with that and the real healing begins full disclosure i want you to convince me but i am super skeptical if you had to translate it into something that's happening at the cellular level is this going back to just the immune system is depressed because they're constantly going over this this trauma and the trauma itself is causing stress and so it's very straightforward it's like you just have elevated stress and now as you deal with it that's going down or is it something more spiritual than that so there's something called transgenerational trauma where we see when there's an experience of a trauma in a pregnant woman or even in a kid there's a change in their gene it's called nr3c1 and that gene itself through as it's exposed to that trauma epigenetically the body responds and it changes the expression of that gene and then all of a sudden the always and i can't handle cortisol as efficiently as you so over time over my life let's say we grew up in the same household you're my twin brother we grew up in the same household i had the trauma we go to we have the same amount of stress in college and then also we have the same job and we have the same amount of stress the effect of that stress over time is going to be much more on my body and we know a thousand percent that stress is a huge contributor to any disease chronic disease cancer you know we know have the effect on the immune system we know the effect on biological aging on our our our whole defense system as a whole detox everything this is how things like working with ptsd you can have ptsd you can your body can adapt to that experience but when you integrate it you think about the inciting factor differently um so all of a sudden your physiology changes around that right because imagine like let's say you have ptsd iptsd we're both in a war we're constantly in a state of fight-or-flight that epinephrine norepinephrine cortisol is signaling not only our immune system to be hyperactive but over time that immune system is going to get exhausted it's going to go down and down and down but what happens when we go down and down opportunistically those infections those viruses latent viruses well they they take action right other infections take action and on top of that those tumor cells that are growing all of us have them they're not being surveillance the way they should be and then the cascade is that usually when we're constantly stressed our sleep is affected well when our sleep is affected now we're not not now we have a problem with melatonin not being at a high level for us cortisol is too high inflammatory cytokines in our body right inducing more inflammation to crazy cycles inflammation immune system depletion infections tumor cell growth sleep disruption all right so let's go back to um cancer as a sort of cellular breakdown i've heard you say something i've never heard anybody else say and i'm super curious but you said that it's basically the body's last ditch effort to protect itself and i've never heard anybody talk about cancer like that um what is it trying to accomplish well the way let me let me start by saying this the way i've approached the body for many years is that it's more intelligent than any oncologist any scientist anyone walking on earth right we know how sophisticated it is we don't even understand the immune system okay we kind of do but we don't understand um so my belief is the body has its inherent force to heal right the same thing like we got to cut on our knees when we were kids we're not still walking we may have a scar but it's still not open it's the intelligence was there to heal so the way that i sort of think about cancer is like what is the body trying to do right is your toxic load so so high over life with a crappy diet um exposures throughout your life drinking water um just every that whole soup and the cup is is filling over and you're not detoxifying correctly is your body creating the tumor to hold in these or siphon in these toxins it's something that i think we should talk about we're not talking we're not studying this more um so my thing is this is the body so sophisticated and intelligent that it's creating this tumor for a reason not a quote-unquote mistake we as we in oncology go up the body made a mistake right is it a mistake or is it an adaptation to the conditions that it was exposed to or given and i think if we think about it that way we can make way bigger jumps in oncology by trying to understand what the body is doing instead of going the body's imperfect it makes a mistake let's just cut it out because we're smarter than it let's just burn it let's throw chemicals at it and now it looks fine go home you know that's interesting i i love the way that you're thinking about it and if you're my oncologist there probably is a lot of sort of lowering of my anxiety levels to think that it has a purpose having said that i'm very curious to talk about the mechanisms by which a cell becomes cancerous my understanding of cancer goes something like this you have cells and they have a certain shelf life that evolution has said if we don't have this shelf life then we get cells that proliferate too much that actually becomes a problem so why will humans never live forever because cancer is the ultimate punch line to a cell that doesn't have a pre-programmed time of death so okay the evolution is just that these cells need to have a finite lifespan and what makes something cancerous is when it gets basically a mutation on a mutation that gets it to the point where it no longer recognizes that i'm supposed to die so the immune system goes okay cool we have a role to play here is a cell that has lost the realization that it needs to die it's proliferating every time it divides it passes on this mutation on a mutation so all of these new cells don't ever die with programmed cell death so the immune system is going around looking for those and says okay this cell has a problem and we have to kill it which makes all the sense in the world about why a virus would be a problem or ongoing stress because now the immune system just isn't going to catch as many and so it's more likely to proliferate as a tumor begins to grow obviously it draws blood supply to itself it now starts getting more and more robust but all of that like it you're so wise to say we don't understand this well enough and so we need to open our minds to this could be something else i am totally on your team with that um i'm just thinking it does seem though like the body is really trying to hit the brakes on cancer before it gets out of control yeah that's a great that is and the way you describe it is literally the mechanism there is a inciting factor over time right let's say um let's say oxidation from really poor diet right poor no antioxidants in the body over time over time and it's hitting that gene it's causing the mutation in the gene and what you said is the differentiation step where all of a sudden the cell's not differentiating the way it's supposed to and then it's propagating over and over and over my my only question is what is the reason it's propagating right and what is what is that tumor doing right it's drawing blood supply but why um but i love the way you think right because if if we subscribe to the idea that the body is essentially always trying to balance and create homeostasis then we sort of have to understand why it's in balance and i always say it's like is there an obstacle to healing and are we giving the body what it needs to heal those are the two i believe that almost every disease can be healed if we ask that question right giving the body what it needs those building blocks to heal and then removing the obstacles to cure so and the building blocks is there anything beyond food like are we talking about grounding sunlight like i think foods is the major part right like vitamins minerals antioxidants nutrients but also like vitamin d we're talking about from the sun grounding for it um for its effects on oxidation in the body anti-inflammatory yeah like all of that as a whole if you had all the money in the world and you could run any test that you wanted to figure out whether um tumors have a function towards taking us back to homeostasis in the face of something problematic either there's uh building blocks that are missing i'm not my diet's totally up and meaning it's missing something or that either i'm eating the wrong things or you know i'm intaking all these toxins so uh because it's super interesting question you're asking man so the we take the hypothesis that the um the cancer is a last ditch effort to get the body back into homeostasis in the face of some incredible to use my own language um what tests would you run to find out if that's true like what would need to be present in the the cancer cells themselves for you to go i knew it there it is this is it's trapping something or it's um a drawing resource it's like an immunosuppressive i'm guessing i'm just curious like what what the answer would need to be that's a great question man and i think it would start with depending on the type of cancer that we see uh for some hormonally driven cancers absolutely i would do a not only a blood hormone test but a dried urine hormone test which is going to be so important at seeing like again is your form of estrogen so high the carcinogenic form the 4oh form is it super high you know we do the toxin test the heavy metal test for sure and then i would want to see what's what's in the tumor if if there's the presence of you know any of the fat soluble toxins are they staying in the body so absolutely i'd be like let's do human trials let's take a thousand tumors and let's just see what's in them and let's test them for every single known toxin in heavy metal that we have and let's put the data together and let's see let's see what what percentage of folks who have this cancer this cancer this cancer and how does it manifest that would be an incredible study because i think it would advance oncology big time right because then essentially theoretically we may have like a root cause that we can address right even before it even manifests and preventatively as a vegan oncologist who has spoken very profoundly about the sort of freakish horrendous nature of food in hospitals what kind of diet do you put your patients on do you put them on a vegan diet do you let them decide like what does that look like it's a good question when it comes to diet again it's bio-individual right like my basis i use is say how do we get more fruits and vegetables in someone's diet period right can can their plate be 60 fruits and vegetables variety of colors right because we know that these a lot of these plant-based foods have known anti-cancer effects right beans legumes leafy greens what is their anti-cancer effect what mechanism it depends so some of them work just purely as an antioxidant some of them are anti-angiogenic we're talking about the growth of the blood vessels some will some will actually regress the blood vessels from growing some will actually be anti-cancer meaning like they'll kill the tumor cell they're actually targeting and kill the tumor cell turmeric like a spice that we you we can use all the time the anti-cancer effects more than one so uh starting with food how do we get in those spices how do we get in those fruits and vegetables all different colors really fast going back to the ones that have like they are actually targeting the cancer cell um i'm assuming that it's not like that thing itself makes it into the bloodstream so what what of those things you just listed has that kind of aggressive anti-cancer property and what sort of cascade of things triggers that like what is it actually doing the like for example turmeric in itself it's byproduct or it's breakdown product curcumin that's what we see have the physiological effect on cancer right so antiangiogenic it'll reduce that signal that's telling blood vessels you know vegf it'll say it'll tell the blood bloods blessings nope no more reduce it no we don't want we don't want any more blood glucose does it do that only to tumors or does that do that all across your vasculature the beautiful thing about a lot of these foods is that they target tumor cells cancer cells it's pretty amazing and this is where i go back to like nature our connection with nature like there's something very perfect about the way nature design stuff we've created amazing pharmaceuticals that can have incredible effects on folks who need it the most but we also have to consider what nature does in perfection so i always say all right what's the type of cancer what foods have been shown to be effective against this cancer what is the organ in question and how do we support those also with these foods um but i like no i don't make i don't say everyone you got to go vegan right because there's folks who actually can benefit from quality it's got to be quality now the question if you're having animal products it's got to be quality that's the most important because getting that conventional meat in someone's diet when it's conventional you'll have a higher inflammatory profile as a by virtue of the feed and living conditions also they're eating that and that's lending to the inflammation that we don't need right so it's they're having the opposite effect the the what i'm trying to say the rule of thumb is how do we get in rainbow fruits vegetables you know some beans some legumes some nuts some seeds things that we know have a physiological effect on the body at the very least being an antioxidant and what do you think about cancer metabolism and the warburg hypothesis in terms of cancer cells basically only being able to metabolize glucose so for those that have never heard of it the warburg hypothesis is basically uh cancer happens when the cell the mitochondria get damaged and they can no longer use ketones as a fuel source and they have to use glucose and if the cell can truly only thrive on glucose then if you simply starve the body of glucose from a diet perspective the only glucose would be in the system would be from the neogenesis that occurs from protein so you can gluconeogenesis you can turn protein into glucose but it's actually a relatively small amount and so you should be able to halt or in some cases even reverse the growth of a tumor okay so that's the hypothesis whether that ends up being entirely true partly true whatever i don't know but the the sort of first rule of cancer club for this only mildly educated person would be i would cut out sugar immediately and i would go into as deep a state of ketosis and prolonged fasting as i could um but as somebody who actually deals with patients what's your take when it comes to ketogenic i that that's actually a go-to diet for me for a lot of the brain cancers in particular so the question is like we know that these foods have an anti-cancer effect anti-inflammatory effect um they they're going to be protecting the body they're going to be stimulating the immune system all these wonderful foods and the other side of it that you're presenting is glucose having an effect as far as feeding the cancer cell the thing is it's going to feed every cell right the glucose but cancer cell yes it will utilize that for me i would know what i would do immediately is i do a fast for sure um i don't know how long yet i always think question if i was never get cancer how long i would do a fast for i would definitely do it within a safe window but i want to see because we know that folks who are getting chemotherapy and they fast it actually sensitizes the cancer cell to the chemotherapy and protects the healthy cells so fasting has a major major role when it comes to i'm not going to say prevention because i'm not going to say like okay do this and you're going to prevent cancer but what i do for folks who go hey look my dad had prostate cancer or my mom had breast cancer and i want to do everything i can prevent i always always check their insulin status and their blood glucose that's so so important that metabolic health translates to so so much when it comes down the road but right now it's like what what can we do we only know what we have the data for um and that's the only way to practice safely word christian thank you man thank you so much for taking the time uh there were a lot more stuff that we definitely could have gotten into i appreciate you diving into all this stuff tell people where they can find you and learn more about uh what you're up to cool so it's uh instagram and i put a lot of information out there at dlc tor.g i too have a podcast this is where i'm at the studio of heal myself and um starting an online community called the swell score this is going to be a community where it's going to be curated by doctors and practitioners where we put together the top supplements for whatever condition so let's say you want to find the best magnesium we're going to hand pick the best based on what we talk about remember we'll talk about heavy metals we'll have cacao powders on there that we know have third party testing low heavy metals so now people don't have to be like hey doc what do i get where do i find this so that's the projects this is where they can find me 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