June 22, 2016
Podcast with Dr. David Minkoff from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2016/06/what-are-the-best-alternative-cancer-treatments/
[1:30] Nuts.com
[2:10] Kimera Koffee/Jon Cull
[3:55] Harry’s Razors
[5:14] Introduction
[6:48] All about Dr. David Minkoff
[8:35] Chernobyl and the voles
[13:37] Metabolic Theory of Cancer/ATP
[19:32] Mitochondria and Chemotherapy
[25:26] Lactic Acid and Anaerobic Metabolism
[26:45] Bio-energy Testing/Bursting with Energy Book
[31:41] Tripping Over the Truth Book
[34:12] Nutritional Ketosis and Cancer
[36:03] Dr. Minkoff’s take on cancer as a metabolic issue
[40:15] The Nature Aminos Essential Amino Acids
[41:19] What is it about the protein source or amino acids that makes them any different from eating a steak?
[51:59] Mercury toxicity or metal toxicity podcast with Dr. Minkoff
[52:49] Can we consider Hyperbaric Oxygen to be an effective therapy for mitochondrial health?
[59:12] Dr. Minkoff’s take on Gerston Therapy
[1:04:14] How to mitigate the damage that Chemotherapy causes
[1:07:31] Anaebolic State and Supplements
[1:15:13] End of Podcast
Ben: Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield. I’m in LA right now podcasting on the road. I’m actually at my friend, Tai Lopez’ house. We’re probably gonna do a podcast later on. So check out his podcast on iTunes.
But in the meantime, I wandered out to his little backyard garden here in Beverly Hills this morning and picked some greens to make myself a smoothie. I’ll give my smoothie recipe for this morning. I grabbed some bokchoy, some dinosaur kale, some regular kale, little bit of romaine lettuce, grab that, took it in, ripped it up and let it sit for a minute coz when you rip up plants and you let ‘em sit, it activates the antioxidants, and then I threw that in a blender with some ice. A handful of ice, half an avocado, a bunch of hemp milk, some cinnamon, some sea salt and then I blended all of that and afterwards I stirred in Brazil nuts, and then finally, something that I use as a thickener. What I do is anywhere I go I travel with a Ziploc bag full of chia seeds when I get to where I’m going, I put’em in water and I let’em soak. And that makes this pudding that you can put into smoothies, you can eat with a spoon, you can break up a protein bar and add chunks of a protein bar into it to make like a cereal. You name it.
But the other thing I put in there was I crumbled up a bunch of Brazil nuts from the freezer. It’s important to keep Brazil nuts in the freezer so they don’t go moldy. And I put those in there. Two of those things; the chia seeds and the Brazil nuts, you can actually get from one of the sponsors of today’s podcast nuts.com. And the way that you do that… And by the way, nuts.com has a ton of other things that got like goji berries, a berry that’s really high in protein, they’ve got dried strawberries really high in Vitamin C, pistachios which are great for your gut microbiome. You name it. Anything you’d want that’s nutty or fruity. You can get from there. Nuts.com/fitness. When you go to nuts.com/fitness and you order, what they do is they throw in over $15 worth of free samples. You get to choose from over 50 free samples to just toss into the bag’o nuts that you get shipped to your house. So check’em out. Nuts.com/fitness.
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Today’s podcast is about cancer. It’s gonna blow your mind in terms of what you thought you knew about cancer that could be wrong with the great Dr. David Minkoff. Let’s dive in.
In this episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness show:
“These cancers act the same way, instead of dying which they’re supposed to, they form a little placenta-like unit which becomes a tumor, and most of these are almost all anaerobic. And they produce a lot of lactic acid because the result of anaerobic metabolism which is fermentation is lactic acid. “Athletes and fit people who are also healthy produce a lot of CO2 with the oxygen that they breathe in. But people who are sick or they’re fatigued, or they’re chronically infected, they don’t produce much CO2”.
He’s an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America’s top personal trainer and one of the globe’s most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. “Power, speed, mobility, balance – whatever it is for you that’s the natural movement, get out there! When you look at all the studies done… studies that have shown the greatest efficacy…” All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.
Ben: Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield. And today I’m back with one of our most popular guest ever. This physician has been on the show in the past to talk about metal detoxification and metal chelation. He’s been on to talk about exercise induced asthma, about ketosis. He’s come on to talk about essential amino acids versus branch chain amino acids as well as his own story completing 41 Ironman Triathlons over the course of the past several decades, and also to talk about the anti-aging clinic that he runs down in Florida called Lifeworks Wellness Center.
My guest today if you haven’t guessed it yet is the one and only Dr. David Minkoff. David, welcome back to the show, man.
David: Hey, thanks Ben. It’s great to talk to you.
Ben: We’re having a chat before the show about how much you kinda delve into in the anti-aging sector this topic of cancer. And honestly like, we’ve talked about cancer a little bit on the show. I’ll be honest with you, it’s a topic that I don’t talk about too much ‘coz it seems to be kinda controversial especially when we’re talking about like alternative treatments for cancer and things along those lines, but we had one podcast that we did a while back with the guy I met in Northern Galilee when I was doing a tour of Israel. And we talked about a lot of like the psychologically and the mental precursors that could set someone up for cancer. That one was called Why You Get Cancer and What You Can Do About It. If you’re listening in right now, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes to this podcast which you can grab over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/cancerpodcast. That’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/cancerpodcast.
But David, you were telling me before we started the recording about this fascinating story from Chernobyl that has to do kinda like some of your theories on cancer and treating cancer. So, can you go on that story ‘coz I thought that was just crazy.
David: Yeah, it’s very interesting. However, many years ago maybe 15 years ago when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew up, they basically sort of filled it in with cement and now nobody can go close to that place because it’s so hot radioactively. But nature has its sort of ways of dealing with things, and the voles, that’s voles are little rodent type insects. And the voles that run the area have acclimated to the high radiation and they’re completely radioactive themselves, but their populations are thriving. They mate, they have babies, they, and their numbers are increasing. And but if you put…
Ben: Is that not what you’d expect like normally you’d expect them to just be dying from having been exposed to the radiation in Chernobyl?
David: Yeah, I mean with chromosomal defects and not being able to reproduce and you know, all kinds of things that would you know, like if you look at the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the leukemias and lymphomas and scattered cancers and sterility that occurs was very, it was very high because these people got radiation poisoned. And what’s happened with this vole population is they haven’t been able to adapt somehow or somehow where they are thriving as a group, and there’s wolves in the area that their main food is these voles. And these wolves are eating the voles and they’re radioactive too but their systems have adapted to this high level of radiation and they’re still alive. In fact they’re thriving. And I heard this story this weekend about a doctor in Virginia who deals with cancer, and the point of it kinda was, is that if your system can continue to produce the things that it needs to, to survive which is basically ATP. It’s energy…
Ben: Yeah.
David: …then the body can detoxify, keep its communication system in and keep things going. But if the environment puts forces onto the body where that can happen where the mitochondria, the things inside the cells that are supposed to make energy can’t do it, then you get sick. And one of the consequences of being sick might be fatigue. But another consequence is you get cancer.
Ben: Okay, so what’s you’re saying is these voles that are around Chernobyl and they’re basically like tiny, tiny little mice, right?
David: Right.
Ben: Okay, so these voles basically should have an inability to create ATP based on DNA defects from exposure to radiation around the Chernobyl zone and they’re not showing that?
David: Right. They’re showing that their population, like their thriving population that you’d think that they would’ve died down and that they’d be done. But…
Ben: I don’t know, like just playing devil’s advocate, I would think that maybe they could keep reproducing but they’d have a bunch of defects, like a bunch of random mutations.
David: Well, they might, and I don’t know how many random (laughs) mutations they have. The sort of point of it was is that they have adapted enough that the numbers of them are really increasing and that they’ve been able to adapt to this environment so that they can keep their species going.
Ben: Okay. So what does this have to do then with your theory about why like a vole for example that would get exposed to huge amounts of radiation wouldn’t get cancer?
David: Well, I think what’s happened is, is that the voles, the biochemistry has been able to adapt or within the vole, the biochemistry has adapted so that it can continue to produce energy so that its cells can work and so that even in the face of this radiation and how it deals with this radioactivity, I don’t even know. But that it can thrive as a species. I think the point of this story is that the problem that’s happening with humans now is that with epidemic rates of cancer and other diseases where there’s not enough energy from Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or autism or chronic fatigue or most of these people or lime disease is their bodies as a consequence of whatever the infections and toxic insults, is they can’t make energy. They can’t make ATP, and when you can’t make ATP then you can’t do what you know yourselves don’t work.
Ben: See, I thought then again like I’m not trying to disagree with you too much but at the same time I just read this book called “Tripping over the Truth”. It’s about the metabolic theory of cancer, and it’s the idea that cancer cells in the presence of oxygen basically overproduce lactic acid. Like this is this idea called the Warburg Effect that a cancer cell that should be operating like aerobically begins to operate anaerobically and that generates a bunch of lactic acid which is like a toxic byproduct and generates like enormous, enormous amounts of fermentation and ATP like overgrowth not I guess what it sounds like you might be proposing which should be undergrowth. Like are you familiar with this metabolic theory of cancer, or do you have any opinion on it?
David: Yeah, I know I’m very familiar with it. But I think the way it goes is this and that here’s what happens. Within our bodies there’s 2 kinds of cells; there’s regular cells and there are stem cells. So within each tissue these stem cells are responsible for keeping the organ or tissue with enough of its kind. And they’re the ones that actually can reproduce. Now if these stem cells are stressed with not enough oxygen or if they have enough oxygen but they can’t utilize the oxygen because their mitochondria are broken. They’re broken because of chemicals and pesticides and fluorides and heavy metals, and all these things that are not round up, and all these things that are in our environment that are toxic. Those toxins get into the mitochondria. Those mitochondria in order to make ATP normally, they take sugar molecule or a fat molecule or a broken down protein molecule plus oxygen, and they make ATP. And with each cycle it’s somewhere 36–38 ATP, and their waste product is water and carbon dioxide.
Ben: So that’ll be like what you just described the aerobic metabolism like what we should be doing most of the day in the mitochondria just basically breathing in oxygen and essentially producing lots of ATP efficiently without a lot of lactic acid being produced as a byproduct.
David: Well yeah, with really no lactic acid produced because this, the byproduct of this is water which you pee out and carbon dioxide which you breathe out. So there’s no acid gain there. But when the mitochondria can’t work, so let’s assume the guy can breathe and his lungs work and he’s got enough hemoglobin, and he can get oxygen to his cells, but the cell itself can’t take that oxygen and utilize it in the mitochondria to make ATP, then that cell is supposed to die. It’s supposed to self-destruct and they don’t always do that and so the cell as it has, this is the stem cells now within the tissues. And the stem cells within the tissues have sort of they revert to a primitive kind of metabolism which is anaerobic. Instead of using oxygen, they use sugar and they make ATP but they only make a couple ATP with every cycle rather than 38 and it’s too little. And they have to turn on mechanisms which are exactly the same as what happens when a sperm and an egg meet and it forms this thing called the trophoblast.
A trophoblast is like an offshoot from a sperm and an egg union. This trophoblasts implants into the placenta, it forms, it sends out hormone-like particles to get blood vessels to go in and to start replicating in an anaerobic way. And this is cancer and pregnancy are just about identical. It coats the fetus so that the body doesn’t see it. It’s not rejected. And it grows. And these cancers act the same way instead of dying which they’re supposed to, they form a little placenta-like unit which becomes a tumor. And most of these are almost all anaerobic and they produce a lot of lactic acid because the result of anaerobic metabolism which is fermentation is lactic acid.
Ben: Okay.
David: And when you have this acidic area around it and a coat around it so the body can’t really see it. That’s where you get a tumor, and you can pump oxygen in there all you want but this cell really can’t use it very well, so it isn’t it’s the lack of oxygen that triggers it rather than the high amounts of oxygen.
Ben: Okay, so basically what this comes down to is if you somehow have dysfunctional mitochondria or this big radical reduction of the amount of mitochondria in your body or you’ve got say an unhealthy mitochondrial membrane, and you have perhaps some kind of genetic predisposition to some certain types of cancer because I know that you can for example be holding the dynamite so to speak, but it doesn’t necessarily go off unless you light it with a match that you might have on the other hand. That would be a situation in which you would have a cell that begins to flip out, produce a huge amount of lactic acid instead of say, water and ATP, and that’s where you begin to get it’s tumor formation with that combination of genetic predisposition and mitochondrial dysfunction.
David: That’s right. And again there’s sort of genetic backgrounds for all these but most of cancer isn’t genetic. Most of, you know, there’s been experiments done where you take a healthy cell and you take a cancer cell, and they can take the, because the whole theory on cancer is Ben, it’s genetic damage, it’s genetic defect.
Ben: Well, yeah! I mean that’s like the whole idea if you look at uhm, if you’re Watson who discovered the structure of DNA, I think that after he discovered the structure of DNA, a lot of people in cancer research if I understand correctly, they started to go after how to target mutations within the DNA code, more or less. So I mean, isn’t that what chemotherapy and cancer drugs are doing going after mutations within the DNA or at least that’s what cancer research is looking at or at least looking at that as the underlying cause of cancer rather than this metabolic theory?
David: Well, most that chemotherapy gives particles that looked like what the DNA should use to replicate and it doesn’t work. There’s sort’ a pseudo nucleic acids that break the replication of the DNA, but if you just take like a step back for a second, If you take healthy cells and you take a cancer cell, and you take the nucleus which is the DNA out of that cancer cell and you transplant it into the healthy cell, you don’t get a cancer cell. It doesn’t really work. It’s not really…
Ben: Is that because of the healthy cell that you just put the nucleus from the cancer cell into that healthy cell still has just fine mitochondria adequately functioning mitochondria?
David: Yes, it doesn’t cause cancer. So the idea that this is all DNA driven or all DNA damage driven doesn’t really work out. It’s really mitochondria. Now mitochondria have their own DNA. They replicate themselves. And they, but cancer isn’t from a damaged DNA, I mean this probably not universal but most of the time when you do these experiments getting putting a cancer cell nucleus or DNA into a healthy cell, you don’t get a cancer cell. It doesn’t go that way. And so the same thing, if you take a cancer cell and you take a healthy nucleus and transplant it into a cancer cell, the cancer cell doesn’t change back to normal.
Ben: Right. Right. Which makes sense because the cancer cells still has broken mitochondria or dysfunctional mitochondria, so it’s still going to begin to produce a bunch of lactic acid anaerobically.
David: That’s right. It’s got dysfunctional mitochondria, it’s a dysfunctional energy production system…
Ben: Okay.
David: … and it’s whole effort. Cancer is like a survival mechanism for a cell that can’t generate enough energy to really live.
Ben: Right. So just has to generate a bunch of ATP or at least as much as it can by using anaerobic metabolism by producing a bunch of potentially toxic lactic acid in the process of producing that ATP.
David: That’s right.
Ben: Okay, so I wanna ask you about this in a second. About what you can do about the mitochondria because obviously if it’s a mitochondrial metabolic issue when it comes to cancer, you would wanna address dysfunctional mitochondria rather than necessarily going full bore after just say genetics or chemo. But before that, you know in terms of modern medicine, why the heck are they so focused on the DNA component of cancer or the genetic component on cancer and on chemotherapy, and on doing things to the nucleus of the cell rather than addressing the mitochondrial issues?
David: Well, most of research is driven by you know, how can profit be generated from this? And I’m not against the profit motive but since 1972 or ‘74 when Nixon declared the war on cancer, the gains in actual results of people who have cancer are really very little. There’s a study published in the Journal of Cancer in 2002 or 2003 where they looked at patients that had stage 4 cancer, and this study was done in Australia and in United States. And half of them got chemotherapy for their problem and the other half didn’t. And the difference in life span that the chemotherapy made over a 5 year period was only about a two and half percent increase in survival. That targeting chemotherapy as your sole way to kill cancer cells or cure cancer doesn’t really work very well.
And so, the statistics on survival with cancer have not really been affected by it. So, that doesn’t work by itself and if you talk to most oncologists they don’t really have a mindset of gee, maybe environment matters, maybe diet matters, maybe supplementation matters, maybe other strategies to rehabilitate mitochondria matters. The mind set pretty much is; do whatever you want, eat whatever you want, do the chemotherapy, keep your fingers crossed and hope it works out. But it’s a rough go. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some success, as sometimes there are. But there are some cancers where when chemotherapy is given, the survival rates are good. But they’re few. You know, with testicular cancer, or some of the lymphomas the results are better than what anybody else is doing. But in the…
Ben: So. Oh god.
David: No, but in the big cancers, you know, colon, breast, prostate, lung. These are the big, these are the one’s that are the most common that the usual approach when chemotherapy is given which is the tumor is past the stage 1 you know, it’s outside. The survival rates are, they’re terrible. And so it’s that as a strategy has not really worked out very well.
Ben: So why is it that lactic acid to be such a big issue if we’re talking about, oh like a cancer cell churning out a bunch of lactic acid? The reason I ask is ‘coz you know, I know that you like exercise you could say, you’ve done 41 (laughs) Ironman Triathlons and you know, earlier this morning I was doing kettlebell swings, and I was doing sledge hammered slams against a big tire and I was doing the battle rope. And I was doing this anaerobically, so my cells were producing tons of lactic acid. So what’s the difference between that type of lactic acid that I’m producing with anaerobic metabolism from exercise in the over production of lactic acid from cancer cells. Like why can’t the body just get rid of or convert that lactic acid into glucose, or whatever it usually does with the lactic acid we would make during exercise.
David: Well, because your system, you know, when you produce lactic acid, you stimulate a healthy system to be able to metabolize it faster…
Ben: Interesting.
David: So that your lactic acid levels either clear very fast or you can tolerate a lot of them. There’s, I know some studies that were done on Lance Armstrong. They had trouble getting his body to produce enough lactic acid so that he got the normal fatigue that a regular guy would get because his clearance mechanisms for where very, very efficient but that depends on ATP. We do a, what’s called Bio-Energy testing on every patient that we see in our office. Which is they come in fasting, they lay on a bed, they’re not supposed to have exercised or done any kind of real activity and they haven’t eaten. But we lay’em on a bed and we put a mask on’em which measures how much oxygen they breathe in, and how much CO2 they breathe out.
And there is a linear relationship between oxygen in and CO2 out if ATP is produced. It’s one for one. So you can measure in someone who’s not making ATP very well, they will breathe in a lot of oxygen but the amount of carbon dioxide that they make is very low because they’re not converting their oxygen properly to CO2. They’re converting it to lactic acid. And when you look at this, it’s very interesting because you can dial someone in right away of how efficient or how well is their aerobic system working. And you know, athletes and fit people who are also healthy produce a lot of CO2 with the oxygen that they breathe in. But people who are sick or they’re fatigued, or they are chronically infected, they don’t produce much CO2 and so their tolerance for activity is low. And what’s interesting about this is that a lot of the people that we see, they’re anaerobic at rest. When they say I can’t get up to the kitchen and go pour myself a glass of water or walk to the bathroom, they’re not kidding. They’re basically anaerobic because their system is so broken that they can’t make oxygen and so they can’t do very much.
Ben: So when we’re talking about like the body being in acidic versus an alkaline state, I know that some blood tests, you know, if you’re getting a Wellness Fx blood test for example, it will show you how much carbon dioxide, how much CO2 or how much chloride that you have, now are you saying that if you were to get a blood test like that and you’re to show say a very, very low amount of CO2 that that would indicate you were spending too much time in a potentially acidic anaerobic state or is blood not a good marker for that?
David: Blood’s not a very good marker because the body controls that so well so that person will just breathe faster, they breathe off you know, they would, if they could buffer you know, if their buffers are working, if their nutrition is good and they’ve got bicarbonates and phosphates and proteins, they could buffer it. The best way to do it is this testing where you basically, you either lay’em down if they can’t do anything you know where they are, or if you exercise ‘em you see that they can’t hardly do anything ‘cause it’s very sensitive to this ‘coz it directly measures, can the guy produce ATP when he’s given oxygen? And if he can…
Ben: What kind of testing did you call that? Bio-Energy?
David: Bio-energy Testing. If you look there’s a really good book by Frank Shallenberger called Bio-Energy. Bio-Energy something or rather.
Ben: I’ll find it and I’ll put it on the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/cancerpodcast. Frank Shallenberger you said is his name?
David: Frank Shallenberger he’s a medical doctor in Carson City, Nevada. He’s very innovative in this, and he actually sort of manufacture software and there’s a devise that goes with it so that you can put it in your office.
Ben: Okay yeah, I actually see he’s got a book called Bursting with Energy – Breakthrough Method to Renew Youthful Energy to Restore Health. That at least that’s one book that he has on Amazon. I don’t know is that the one, or there’s a different one?
David: That’s the book. And it basically explains this, and it’s interesting ‘coz his experience over doing this with 15 over 15 years with thousands of patients, is that if the person is in the state healthy enough so that they can take in oxygen, you and manufacture CO2 and there’s sort of numbers of the like. You know, are you at a 100%, are you at 110%, are you at 30%? That the people who had been at a hundred percent or more who were able to do this, they, he never saw in them a heart attack, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, chronic illness, because their mitochondria for whatever reason their lifestyle, their therapies whatever it is. That their mitochondria are working and they’re able to make ATP and their able to deal with the environment. And I think this is what’s going on with the voles. That they are able to meet to keep up with their environment because whatever happened in them is that their body can make ATP. And if you can do that, you can stay healthy and you don’t get chronic problems.
Ben: Right, the voles were still able to produce ATP aerobically, somehow.
David: That’s right.
Ben: Yeah, okay. And I wanna ask you still more. I keep saying I’m gonna get to this eventually and I will ask you about the mitochondria and how we can basically take care of our mitochondria. But one thing I wanted to ask you about was, it was a little while that I read this book, it’s called “Tripping Over the Truth” which goes in to this metabolic theory of cancer that were taking about right now and it goes into it in a really great detail.
And in that book they talked about a medical treatment and how at one point they figured out that you can, I think the way they explained it was that you can somehow take all these lactic acid that a cancer cell is overproducing because that cancer cell has mitochondrial dysfunction and you can use a special molecule.
The molecule was Bromopyruvate or Bp, 3BP or something like that. And this molecule you can use it because it looks a little bit like lactic acid and it would slip into this same pore on the cell that would normally allow lactic acid to get out of the cancer cell and instead all the lactic acid stays inside the cancer cell, and the cancer cell just basically destroys itself. It just self-destructs because it’s got all these acidic lactic acid building up. And the idea was that this 3BP stuff was working better than chemotherapy drugs. Have you ever heard of the 3BP molecule or why medicine isn’t using something like that to control cancer?
David: Ah I don’t. So, I’ll have to look at that ‘coz it’s not as I haven’t heard of that before, so I’ll check it out.
Ben: Okay. Gotcha. I think it was while I read the book, but if I remember correctly it was basically an issue with the patentability of this stuff not being very profitable compared to the amount of money being poured into chemotherapy research and the whole like DNA genetic theory of cancer. I think a lot of it came down to patents and money. But I’ll put a link to the book in the show notes for the people who wanna read this book “Tripping Over the Truth”.
It does relate though to the next question I wanted to ask you about mitochondria because one of the ways that the blocking of lactic acid from getting out of the cell actually works is kinda similar to what happens when you shift from say glucose metabolism to the metabolism of something that doesn’t produce as much lactic acid like ketones. So you force a cancer cell to have to burn ketones, and if the cancer cell doesn’t have very good mitochondria or doesn’t have much mitochondria, it can’t go into ketosis very well. So that would put an end to a lot of energetic pressure, put it under a lot of oxidative stress. So basically by depriving a cancer cell glucose and instead forcing the cell to burn ketones, you could do something very similar to what say like that lactic acid blocking drug they were trying to develop could do.
And so I guess that’s the first question I have for you about mitochondria. Is it as simple as going into a nutritional ketosis or limiting the amount of blood glucose in terms of that being an effective way to go after cancer cells?
David: Well, we think so. We put all our patients that had cancer on a ketogenic diet and sometimes they can’t do it because they’re so wasted by the time we get them that they can’t hold weight on a ketogenic diet. But the ones that are able to do it, the research seems to point that it at least stresses cancer cells because many times they really need sugar in order to manufacture energy, and if you reduce the amount of carbohydrates that are coming in to these patients the tumor cell goes under some stress.
You know, we know that if you just try to kill ém off like ramp the dose of chemotherapy up and try to kill ém off that that strategy doesn’t work because the chemotherapy actually doesn’t kill the cancer stem cells. It kills the other cells, the daughter cells but the stem cells it doesn’t kill. So you’re still faced with the stem cells, and if you ramp up chemotherapy too high, you have no immune system, so you’re not gonna survive that.
Ben: So I have a question too about this ketogenic thing because it makes sense right if you would deprive a cancer cell of glucose, and the cancer cell has an inability to burn ketones ‘çoz it has dysfunctional mitochondria, then the cancer cell could die. But would that be the case with all forms of cancer? And the reason I ask this is because I was talking to one guy yesterday. I was on the, I’m in LA right now. It’s on the Dr. Drew podcast and Dr. Drew was talking about prostate cancer and I mentioned the high fat diet and I believe he said that prostate cancer was one form of cancer that perhaps would not respond to glucose deprivation or to like a ketogenic protocol. So do you know if it matters on the type of cancer or is all cancer basically are metabolic issue and it doesn’t matter?
David: I think to some extent it’s a metabolic issue but you know in the animal studies that are done down here in Tampa. USA [0:36:17.8] ______, you know, when they transplant rats with tumors and they put the rats on a ketogenic diet, the tumor shrink. It’s not that simple in humans. So I think that as a strategy as part of a strategy to help someone with cancer that a ketogenic diet is worth trying.
You know, limiting carbohydrates and sugars and getting your blood ketones in 3–5 range that that is a helpful thing. And that what you have to do other things at the same time because most of the time for most people’s cancer doing that alone isn’t enough.
You know, these cancers are very, they wanna survive in a bad way and they have a huge amount of adaptability. So, it’s not a one thing will work and I think part of the problem with this 3 bromo pyrene, whatever, is that it’s like everything else. In some people it works and a lot of people it doesn’t, and that you have to do a lot more things because cancer is a metabolic disease. It affects the body all over the place. The cancer cells or the cancer cell line that went bad is the one that was sort of the “canary in a coal mine” and it went bad first.
Ben: Okay.
David: But generally these people have a whole body problem with it and that’s why they’re acidic, and that’s why they have lactic acidosis.
Ben: So essentially if we’re talking about a cancer cell that would be a cancer cell that relies primarily upon the metabolism of glucose, that would be a form of cancer that could effectively be targeted with something like a low carb ketogenic approach.
And I would be curious the way if anybody’s listening in, if you know of certain types of cancer that don’t metabolize glucose or cancer cells that don’t respond well to glucose restriction, add it in the comments. Go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/cancerpodcast, ‘cause I’d be curious if there are forms of cancer that have been shown not to respond well to say glucose restricted diet or glucose deprivation. So leave that in the comments section ‘cause I’m personally curious and haven’t had a chance to do a bunch of research on it.
But I wanted to ask you about proteins too, Dr. Minkoff because there’s this idea that there’s a pathway the mTor pathway, the mammalian target of rapamycin pathway that’s this pro-growth pathway that if out of control can put one’s body into a constantly anabolic state. And that can happen from excessive protein intake for example or excessive feeding with proteins that activates the mTor pathway and could potentially cause cells that are cancer cells that respond to this constant state of anabolism to grow. So you could trigger cancer growth with excessive protein intake or you could limit the risk of getting cancer with protein restrictions. So do you think that similar to glucose restriction that protein restriction is also important?
David: Well, if you are putting someone on a strict ketogenic diet, they’re gonna be pro you know, like the traditional, the guy who’s sort of the master, this guy named Dr. Seyfried who wrote cancer as a metabolic disease. That the diet that he suggests is 80% of the calories are coming from fats and less than 12 grams a day of carbohydrates.
Ben: Yeah, eighty percent or up, that’s like a hard core ketogenic diet.
David: It’s a hard core ketogenic diet. And restrict…
Ben: We’re not talking about a high fat diet, we’re talking about full on strict ketosis.
David: Right. And so it’s real ketosis and restricts people to 12,00o calories a day and the amounts of proteins that they get aren’t actually enough protein I feel, to nourish the body. So you know, we use products like your Nature Aminos because these things are utilized as protein, the body doesn’t turn them into sugar ‘çoz most of the meat, egg, fish, soy, brown rice proteins more than 50% of the best one’s are turned into carbohydrate by the body. That’s just part of the natural metabolism.
Ben: Now, can you explain in some more detail ‘coz I tell people that, and this is something that I’ll use. Like when I do a 24-hour fast and I had clients do even week-long water fast, we use things like minerals and a multivitamin and also essential amino acids like the Nature Aminos that you talked about.
And by the way, just so everybody listening in knows Dr. Minkoff developed these essential amino acids and full disclosure I actually at greenfieldfitnesssystems.com, I sell these amino acids called Nature Aminos just çoz it’s such a staple for me and my clients I have them available over there.
But basically, what I’m curious about is when it comes to these aminos, I think a lot of people including myself still have a hard time wrapping our heads around this. When you take something like whey protein isolate or steak, in terms of its ability to cause an insulin release or to activate this mTor pathway or to become gluconeogenesis or gluconeogenic and make a bunch insulin or glucose. What is it about the protein source? What is it about amino acids or essential amino acids that makes them any different than say eating a steak or taking in some whey protein isolate? What is it about the amino acids that keeps you in more of like a fasting simulated state while still giving you protein?
David: Well, see the thing that matters is proteins are made up of amino acids and like a muscle protein of one muscle protein fiber has a link of about I think it’s 455 amino acids. There’s 22 of them that are used. So the alphabet is 22 amino acids. Amino acids put together in different patterns, in different sequences then give you protein. So insulin I think is like 69 amino acids. Certain amino acids in a certain order. Growth hormone is I think 89 and muscle proteins like 455, so it’s sort of like we’re playing scrabble and the tiles aren’t A,B,C, A through Z. The tiles are 22 amino acids and then the body depending on what it does puts them together in different ways. And then those come in to the cell and it’s kindá like this. The perfect analogy is let’s say we’re gonna build a car. And the car needs a chassis and a motor and a stirring wheel and 4 wheels like the simplest, simplest car. So if I shipped you a hundred wheels and 25 chassis and 25 stirring wheels and 25 motors. You would utilize all the parts to make 25 cars. And there wouldn’t be anything left over.
So, that would be the ideal thing if you were gonna make a protein, if you had amino acids that were the ones that ideally would make every protein. Then there would be nothing left because what happens in the body is here’s the other part of this analogy, what if I told you we were gonna make 25 cars but I sent you 25 stirring wheels and 25 chassis and 25 motors. And I sent you 400 wheels. What you would have 300 wheels left over. Now those wheels the body doesn’t store. It doesn’t keep them around. It takes ‘em and makes’ em into sugar.
Ben: And more being an example just for the propeller hats out there. Like when you’re saying wheels. Give me an example of in a car like what would be the actual chemical in the human body, what would be the molecule in the human body that would be an example of a leftover wheel or leftover wheels that you’d get from say, whey protein powder versus essential amino acids?
David: Well, let’s say, let’s just take whey protein or whey protein isolate or cottage cheese or yoghurt you know, any dairy protein. That the dairy protein that if you’re gonna say we wanna make, there’s about 16 grams if let’s say we’re gonna take a 100 grams of dairy protein and we’re gonna feed it to a guy all day long. And we’re not gonna give him any other protein. He’s either water fasting or he’s eating say vegetables or fruits which have negligible amounts of protein.
Ben: Right.
David: And we give him a hundred grams of whey protein. And in a hundred grams of whey protein there is roughly 16 grams of nitrogen ‘coz proteins have nitrogen and carbohydrates and fats don’t. So we could get an idea of, okay, we drop off at the lot where the cars are being made 1600 grams of whey protein, and then most of the protein, the nitrogen that doesn’t get incorporated into the body protein, it gets peed out. That’s why we pee mostly. So we collect as urine for the day or we do it for three days. And we get a total of this many grams of nitrogen went in so for every hundred grams we got 16. And then we collect the urine we’d say how many grams of nitrogen came out? ‘Coz if it came out it didn’t get made into muscle, bone, hair, liver, enzymes, whatever. And with whey protein 84% of the nitrogen comes out, it doesn’t stay in because it isn’t utilized as body protein. It gets made into sugar. And then it’s either burned or stored as glycogen or it’s stored as fat.
Ben: Okay, so we’re just essentially talking about gluconeogenesis from nitrogenous byproducts of whey protein or any other thing like excessive steak or something like that because of the amount of the protein or cottage cheese or whatever food protein source that doesn’t get utilized.
David: That’s right.
Ben: And that doesn’t make those bad foods I mean, I personally really like steak and protein powder. And you know, that’s one of my staples every week is a good French cut rib eye steak. But what we we’re saying is that you’re trying to engage in something like calorie restriction, or if you’re trying to get the most out of a protein as possible with the least number of calories, the most nutritional density out of a protein, the least insulin or glucose release from a protein, you could just go straight to better living through science and use something like essential amino acids or you know, powders or capsules or something like that.
David: Right. And like dairy protein which isn’t very you know, it isn’t very well utilized but it’s very insulinogenic. So. you’re gonna, those glucose molecules that come off once the nitrogen comes off, those glucose molecules stimulate insulin. And in these cancers insulin is a growth hormone. And in these cancer patients we don’t want those kind of growth hormones. We want their insulin levels low. We want their sugar low.
Ben: Right. So if you’re gonna do like a ketogenic diet for someone with cancer, kinda returning back to cancer, you actually wouldn’t include a lot of higher fat dairy products. You’d be including more like avocado oil and coconut oil, and medium chain triglycerides and things like that?
David: Or heavy cream…
Ben: Heavy cream.
David: … or butter because there’s no protein in there. It’s all fat and so, it’s a neutral effect on insulin and a neutral effect on sugar. So…
Ben: Is heavy cream not insulinogenic?
David: Yeah, it’s hardly, probably not insulinogenic at all. The old Stillman diet was you know, a pint of heavy cream every day and most people couldn’t even drink the whole thing because they were, and they would just pour, the way would pour off of them because they’ve didn’t, they weren’t hungry and there was so much fat (laughing) in their stomach. They were satisfied and their blood sugars were low, and they just, they never stimulated insulin and they burned, and they just had to burn their own body fat.
Ben: Okay.
David: So…
Ben: By the way, before we get back to few other questions about mitochondria just real quick. When it comes to heavy cream, what do you look for to make sure you’re not getting exposed to growth hormones and other byproducts of the commercial modern dairy industry?
David: Well, it’s tough I mean, you try to go as organic and as local as you can but honestly, there’s the, I just heard this I think this weekend too is that three quarters of the rain water has measurable amount of roundup in it. The planet is so saturated with these chemicals, these chemical fertilizers and like roundup which is dreadful poison. That the, there’s no escaping it. There’s no butter that’s pure. There’s no meat that’s pure. There’s no beans that are pure.
Ben: I don’t know, man. I have goats, I think they’re pretty pure. The goats in my backyard.
David: Well, they might be pure but what they’re eating isn’t pure and then they’re not pure. So I just mean to tell you this.
Ben: Yeah, that’s true we do get some of their alfalfa and some of their oats from the feed store, I will admit. So yeah, you’re right.
David: Yeah. Listen to this. I had a patient who was mercury toxic and he’s a, he was a nuclear physicist, then he worked actually for the government developing missile systems.
Ben: Okay.
David: And he was a brain guy. He’s in MIT like a super brainiac-type guy. And he got mercury toxic, and he was, he could be losing his memory and he was like really like he was making crazy. And he ended up coming down here and became a patient of mine and his mercury, we cleared his mercury toxins. In the end, he got to be completely normal. He got his brain back and decided that this area was a fascinating area of research for him, and he wanted to make a contribution ‘çoz he had suffered from this and he wanted to see if he could help other people. So he went and bought a mercury vapor analyzer. This is what the EPA uses if somebody to like check toxic waste sites or if somebody drops a thermometer in a public setting to make sure that there’s no mercury vapor anywhere, or the levels are low enough.
So he got this mercury vapor meter and he started checking people. He says, open your mouth, you’ve a mouthful of mercury fillings, open your mouth, stick the little probe in there, and they hold their breath and the ambient mercury coming off their fillings would be registered by the vapor meter. And the EPA’s limit I think was ten parts per million as safe. And most of these people had 1600, 200 parts per million of mercury vapor coming right out of their mouth or right out of their lungs. So then, he started to check foods. And he bought organic broccoli you know, foods that might accumulate mercury ‘coz they have a lot of sulfur this cruciferous type of vegetables. So two broccolis.
Ben: Is that the deal like sulfurous vegetables accumulate mercury?
David: They accumulate ‘coz mercury by itself are really well. So he took organic broccoli, and he put it in a covered pot, and he would gently heat it up so that the broccoli would start to cook, and then he sticks his vapor meter in the side of it to measure the broccoli, onions, kale. Their mercury levels were very high even in organic because they’ve taken in from the soil, they’ve taken in from the atmosphere. It’s all over the place. And when you eat it, you get it and they’re just you know, are you gonna not eat those? No, you’re gonna eat’ em. Again, if you have a decent detox system, these mitochondria that can make energy and enough varieties of foods and supplements so that your body can handle it. You can deal with it. But if you don’t, then it’s gonna get you and you’re gonna get sick.
Ben: Yeah, makes sense. And by the way, if you’re listening in right now and you don’t know much about mercury toxicity or metal toxicity, we did a whole hour long podcast on it with Dr. Minkoff, and in my opinion everybody should listen to it. Dr. Minkoff actually makes this metal detox like this metal chelation spray that I personally use every single year. I do a 30-day full on protocol with this stuff because I know that we’re surrounded by brake dust and Chinese toys and car keys, and everything else that leeches metals into our bodies.
But we kinda got away from cancer there for a little bit, Dr. Minkoff, so back to mitochondria. You talked about ketosis and how adapting like a higher fat somewhat protein restricted diet with some intermittent fasting, some caloric restriction that could be one way to treat cancer, if cancer is indeed a metabolic disease.
But I had some other questions for you about mitochondria. So one thing I’ve heard is the use of hyperbaric oxygen like to enhance mitochondrial efficiency or to enhance mitochondrial health. Is that something that you would consider to be an effective therapy?
David: In some people it’s a very effective therapy and it can help them because sometimes if you super saturate their blood with oxygen by breathing hyperbaric oxygen you know, 100% oxygen under pressure, you can actually force more oxygen into the mitochondria, and that the mitochondria will then sort of be pushed to make more CO2 and more ATP. And sometimes that works very well and can be very helpful. So that is a potential strategy. We know if you drink…
Ben: So do you have hyperbaric oxygen at your clinic in Florida?
David: We don’t because we’re doing so many other things. We’re doing, we’re using oxygen systemically in a form of ozone. So, we give intravenous ozone which is oxygen’s O3.
Ben: Really?
David: And it’s a similar type of thing you super saturate their system with oxygen and we have them drinking water that’s saturated with oxygen.
Ben: Oh, I was gonna ask you about that ‘coz I actually got to mess around with seeing whether it would affect my breath hold time or indirect indicator of my mitochondrial performance, and I got one of these counter top Water Ozonators. Do you use something like that in your clinic, like one of these ozonators that you can put into a glass of water to introduce ozone to water to get the similar effect to hyperbaric oxygen?
David: Yeah, I mean, but we do it you know, we put it in different orifices depending on what the problem is. But mostly we put it in blood. So the ozone direct you know, interacts directly with the blood, so you take vein blood out and its dark ‘coz it’s desaturated. It doesn’t have oxygen in it. And then if you add ozone to that blood, the blood turns bright red, it’s like super saturates it with oxygen.
And then you can put it back into the patient and has an effect similar to what hyperbaric oxygen would be which is to add oxygen to the system. And to either get cells that are asleep or they their low and they can still use some oxygen if you put there on higher concentrations, it will give you a beneficial effect.
Ben: Yeah. A lot of people who don’t have the ability to ozonate their blood, they’ll just drink ozonated water to literally like ozonated water enemas, right?
David: Yes. I’m not sure. I don’t know what the effect in that, you know how much of an effect on that you’ll get. I don’t think it’s bad. I think you just have to test it on each patient.
Ben: Yeah, I mean when I drink ozonated water at least so far my experience with it is it’s like a shot of coffee. I mean, you actually get this huge release of energy. But I’ve only been using it for, maybe three weeks, so I’m eventually gonna talk about it little bit more in a podcast. What’s interesting though it can also be potentially used to enhance mitochondrial health for something like cancer.
What else in addition to ketogenic diets? Something like; hyperbaric oxygen therapy or concentrated oxygen or water ozonation or blood ozonation. What are some other therapies or things that people can do to help out with cancer or to keep themselves from getting cancer by enhancing their mitochondrial function?
David: Well, just one more on the oxygen thing this water called Kaqun. K-a-q-u-n, is a water that actually has liquid oxygen saturated in it. And if you drink the water it will make your oxygen levels go up and you can measure it on a skin probe. You can measure that this concentrational oxygen in your skin will go up somewhere between 10 and 15 percent and I’d love you to try doing the Kaqun water for a few days and seeing what effect, if it has an effect on your breath holding because…
Ben: Is that like Asea water?
David: No. Asea is more like a chlorinated water that produces it’s, it’s not oxygen. This is actually water that if you stick a probe in it you know, there’s a lot of waters on the market that say oxygen water but if you stick an oxygen sensor in them there’s no oxygen in that water. There’s you know, a normal amount.
Ben: Yeah.
David: This water called Kaqun, if you stick a probe in it, there’s the probe starts to measure the oxygen concentration. I think it’s a 164 millimeters of oxygen per mil, I mean it’s real oxygen is in that, and if you take the cover off it doesn’t blow off. This oxygen is in a liquid form and when you drink it within about 6-8 minutes your oxygen level in your blood and in your tissues goes up.
Ben: Interesting.
David: And in fact, there are some baths in Bulgaria where this is used as a treatment for chronic illness and cancer, and they put very high concentrations of this water in a bath and the person sits in the bath. And there’s a patient of mine that I sent there who had a head neck tumor and a very bad rash on her face. And so, they had her submerge herself in the water and used a snorkel so that her head can be underwater for like 15 minutes. The treatments are 15 minutes 3 times a day in this super saturated oxygen water. And she got so much oxygen from her skin through into her tissues that she was only breathing two or three times a minute.
Ben: Interesting.
David: Because she didn’t have to because her whole body had oxygen coming in through her skin from the water itself.
Ben: So this Kaqun, do you say Kaqun or Kaqun? How d’ you spell that?
David: Kaqun, K-a-q-u-n.
Ben: How do they actually get oxygen into this stuff?
David: There’s some secret process where they’re able to cap oxygen when it’s O2 and O3 is a gas. But when oxygen is clustered like O16, 32, 64 it’s a liquid. And they have some secret process where they can make oxygen clusters, and its stable than in regular water. And it, and you can drink it.
Ben: Interesting. I’ll look into it. I’ll put a link in the show notes if I find anything. If anybody listening knows much about this water let me know. I mean, I’ll admit I always raise an eyebrow when I hear words like secret and proprietary but…
David: If you go to bodyhouse.com there’s a whole bunch information that we use for our patients. We actually import this from Budapest to, so that people can take it if they want to.
Ben: Okay. What do you think about Gerston Therapy? ‘Coz a lot of people will do you know, juicing and enemas and this entire Gerston Therapy, and frankly, in some cases I’ve seen protocols where they’re essentially mainlining via juicing things like fructose and glucose in the blood stream which to me seems to fly in the face of healing cancer if cancer is indeed a metabolic disease in which we want to restrict glucose as we’ve been talking about. So, what are your thoughts on Gerston Therapy?
David: Well, I think when Gerston first introduced his therapy that he was definitely getting results, and he was doing you know, really good work. The cancer is evolving. Cancer is not the same disease as it was 20, 30 years ago. It’s way worse. It’s more aggressive. It’s more difficult to handle. And when you…
Ben: Just a second, I wanna interrupt you. What do you mean it’s worse than it was 50 years ago?
David: Well, that they’re more aggressive. It doesn’t, you can’t treat it like you used to. The results used to be better with simpler things.
Ben: So, is that because of genetic mutations and the genes becoming less responsive to treatments or…?
David: We’ll, I think it’s partly that and it’s partly that the bodies are so toxic because the environment is so toxic.
Ben: Okay, so you’re talking about post industrialization, things like air and water and light, electricity. All of that stuff becoming more and more artificial and unnatural. And so, as we have been in this post industrialized era or mitochondria, and from my understanding based on epigenetics even our children’s mitochondria would be becoming less dense or more weak, and so cancers would be better able to, if there is a genetic predisposition in someone to produce lots of lactic acid inside a cell.
David: That’s right.
Ben: Okay.
David: I mean, you know, we test your average patient nowadays and we find that their body is full mold toxins. That it’s their deficient in you know, zinc and selenium and magnesium. And their amino acid levels are low, and they’ve got a bad bacteria colonized in their sinuses. And in their intestines they’ve got 3 parasites and 3 more bad bacteria and their not producing digestive enzymes. And their cortisol levels are like really suppressed and their testosterone levels are suppressed.
And you just go down the line and you look at, no wonder this guy can’t fight cancer. He’s barely alive. And he doesn’t even have the tools in his body or the nutrition in his body so that he could even put up a good fight. And that a lot of the strategy for cancer is that you have to give the host back to some semblance of being able to fight. Ninety nine percent of the cancer patients I see have a Vitamin D level of 10. And we know that if it would be 80, their chances of even getting cancer are like 46% less.
Ben: Why is that, does Vitamin D affect the mitochondrial?
David: Vitamin D affects the whole immune system and probably the mitochondria and when the levels are too low your immune system sucks.
Ben: Okay, so back to Gerston Therapy. What are your take away thoughts on it?
David: My take away thoughts on it are that it doesn’t work. That today, it doesn’t, it’s just not an effective therapy for most people.
Ben: Okay. Compared to doing something like introducing higher amounts of oxygen into the body, combined with metal detoxification, combined with limited protein, intermittent fasting and low glucose and higher fat intake.
David: Yes. And I think you know, that just the caveat on it is that there isn’t one size fits all. We do genetic studies on all the cancer patients that we see of their cancers. And one colon cancer is not the same as the next one, is the same as the next one. These cancers are very unique individual entities. And they’re actually mixed entities ‘coz the genetic qualifier within the tumor itself is different. And so, there it’s really not one size all but the only strategy that I think does work is that you have to really test people and see what condition is their body and their nutrition in.
What are the characteristics of their cancer? What is their cancer sensitive to? You know, what nutritional agents does, you know, stop that cell from growing or alter that cell so it doesn’t grow or so that it dies. And then if you could get these information, you can help cancer patients to survive their disease and to live. And sometimes it includes low doses of even chemotherapy because sometimes the cancer’s in a state where if you don’t arrest it quick, it’s gonna wreck their you know, their liver won’t function or their breathing tube was blocked off and their gonna die just because you need time for these certain nutritional bioenergy treatments for them to take place.
Ben: Let’s say somebody’s on chemotherapy or somebody knows somebody who’s on chemotherapy, and they want to at least mitigate the damage or limit the damage of chemo. What are some of the things that you would do in your clinic or that you would recommend to people to keep chemotherapy from being as damaging as it can be?
David: Well, I think the first thing, and the thing that we do first is we test them. We get all body fluids you know, stool, urine, saliva, blood and we look for what state is their amino acids, their vitamins, their minerals, their essential fats. What are their detoxification pathways? Are they full of other organisms that are part of the immune load? What is their dental situation ‘coz the most difficult thing in a person with chronic illness is their teeth you know, they got infected dead teeth, root canals, cavitations, lot of cavities, lot of gum disease. You can’t fight cancer when half the battle is trying to just you know, keep the mouth clean.
Ben: Uhm.
David: So it’s really to, I think most people need help, they need a practitioner who can, who understands this and who can say, look we’ve gotta just like even if they decide to keep, we have some people who go to the oncologist and get regular chemotherapy treatments. But in the background we’re doing a, we’re rehabilitating their basic body stuff and they might be getting intravenous Vitamin C or intravenous ozone just helps support and protect their healthy cells from the devastating effects of the chemotherapy that might under those circumstances be helpful to them.
Ben: Interesting. So you’re doing a lot of things that you would also do to support mitochondria.
David: Hundred percent because you know, the athlete that you’re trying to get a hundredth of a second better in his hundred meters wind time.
Ben: Yeah.
David: The things that make him better are the same things that get the guy with cancer or the guy with chronic fatigue off the couch. The athlete has you know, miniscule little things that can be tweeked that when you measure him he’s like, oh, oh, oh okay! Tweek this, tweek this, tweek this and he’s a little faster. He’s a little better. And the other guy that’s on the couch or the guy with cancer, he’s got, oh my god there’s like 45 things here that are just like really screwed up. That we have to get in reasonable shape and then your body will be able to fight. You know, it’s like I’ve heard you talk about the Spartan race thing. And you get somebody or you put somebody in that kind of atmosphere where they haven’t worked and their nutrition’s terrible, and they’re gonna die in the first 5 minutes ‘coz they can’t do 10 pullups and they can’t pull themselves over a rock. They can’t do it.
But if you take that guy in 6 months and you say, ok we’re gonna tune you up. We’re gonna get your nutrition optimized and your vitamin, minerals, [1:07:08.6] ______, all these stuff optimized and we’re gonna put you on a workout program that is for your body radiance so that you can get stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. At the end of 6 months you’d be able to do 10 pullups, you’d be able to run a mile in under ten minutes and whatever those criterion are. And then got an hour he can fight, he can play.
Ben: Yeah, that makes sense.
David: And it’s so the same with that works for on the whole front.
Ben: I’ve got one other question for you. There’s this idea, now I’ve talked about this a bit before on a podcast. There’s this idea that when it comes to being in an anaebolic state and we actually already touched on this a little when we were talking about protein and how too high of a protein intake, or bacon and eggs everyday for breakfast, and then fish for lunch and meat for dinner, a.k.a the paleo diet could potentially activate something like the mTor pathway to an extent where you become too anaebolic and too nitrogenous. And may eventually even assist with tumor growth or cancerous cell growth.
So what about supplements? ‘Coz there’s people who take supplements that are also really anaebolic stuff like bioidentical hormone replacement therapy or colostrum or DHEA or you know, injectable peptides and there’s all sorts of these things that are anaebolic. What are your opinions on these? Do you think people are pushing the fast forward button on their body in terms of increasing their chances of getting cancer in the same way that they could do so with eating excessive calories?
David: I think that they can, and again it’s individually dependent. Some people their testosterone’s 150 that if you give them either supplements or testosterone and you get them their 550 or 750 that their way better off because at 150 they’re in a catabolic state and things are lousy. And if you get them in a healthy state and then monitor them that they’re way better. Their longevity is gonna be better and their less risk for cancer and not high risk ‘coz people with low testosterones and low growth hormones they’re at risk for these diseases. I think that there is a physiologic range for each person which is optimum for them and their genetics and their age. And that what we’re trying to do is find that sweet spot so that then their body performance is the best. And I think of other guys who are doing the anaebolic stuff are overdoing it. Their testosterone level’s 2,000 and their half crazy, half the time and it alters a lot of things. So too much and too little is never the right thing. It’s what is that area where the guy feels good, can have fun, can play and can have good longevity. And that’s the, you know, an ideal nutritional approach to biochemistry or medicine. It’s trying to get the person there and usually when you get’ em there they know it. And then monitor them and what does it take? Some people need lots of supplements, some people need less. But again, it depends on where are they at and what are they trying to do, and then to try to get it, so that that’s, so that works.
Ben: Yeah, makes sense. I mean that like, I use some of that stuff so I’d I can’t use for example, DHEA ‘coz it’s banned by the World Anti-Doping Association or bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. But I use something like colostrum for example, not everyday of the year you know, I’ve used peptides like BPC-157 is one I recently wrote an article on at bengreenfieldfitess.com. It’s an injectable peptide based amino acid and I’ve used that before but it’s not something that I would use everyday because in my opinion I think you have to be careful being in a consistently anaebolic state. Same reason I personally almost every single day of the year doing intermittent fast where I’ll go in 12–16 hours, and most of that overnight without putting calories in my body.
In general, it’s like, it’s also like carbohydrate refeeds right, like I’ll have one meal at the end of the day that’s higher in carbohydrates and sure that introduces some glucose in my body, and it could potentially for I were overdoing it, be damaging the mitochondria or encourage something like you know, enhanced glucose metabolism and cell growth and some kind of lactic acid production. But if it’s in moderation you know, anything from caloric refeeds to carbohydrate refeeds to the use of colostrum or peptides or anything like that, if it’s in moderation you are not staying in a constantly anaebolic state. I guess that’s what it comes down to, huh?
David: Yeah, or it’s everything so that balance is achieved. Because sometimes you take you know, you take the same stuff almost everyday for 5 years and the body at first, you know if you’re measuring things that are low and at first you measure it and it comes up and you know it’s good but then you keep going for 2 months and then, then you measure it then it’s gone back down because it’s not like the body, we don’t know, you know, I don’t think it happens with steak and broccoli and eggs but when you’re putting in things on the outside, again you sort of have to watch with the response.
Ben: Yeah, makes sense. Well you know there’s obviously a ton of stuff we could talk about. That’s why I keep having you back on the show, man. And then for those of you listening in, stuff that we talked about today like the water and the ozonation, and these books like “Tripping Over the Truth” and “Bursting with Energy”, and all of the other podcasts I’ve done with Dr. Minkoff ‘coz there’s 4 or 5 of them now, and the Nature Aminos that Dr. Minkoff makes that I take, and the metal chelation stuff that he makes that I also take, all that stuff I’m gonna put it on the show notes. So just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/cancerpodcast. That’s bengreenfieldfitness.com/cancerpodcast. And I’ll also put a link to Dr. Minkoff’s website over there too.
And if you have questions or comments or things you wanna pipe in on, we’ll be happy to reply to those. Just leave ‘em on the comments section over there and we can chat over there, too. Oh, one other thing, Dr. Minkoff ,are you gonna do your 42nd Ironman any time soon?
David: Ah, November.
Ben: Nice. Is that Arizona?
David: Yeah.
Ben: Dude!
David: Ah, I’m doing Florida in November. I’m doing Augusta in September, so I’m feeling good and you know, I’m busy (laughs) so. When I was young I could train a lot and now I’m trying to, I’m listening you know, I just read your book which is amazing and trying to incorporate…
Ben: Which one? Beyond Training?
David: Huh? Yeah. With very little, and hope it works out a lot, and but who cares? I’m aah, I don’t have anything to prove to myself or anybody else anymore, but it is fun and I love the lifestyle.
Ben: Yeah, well. Man, if you’ve done 41 of them, I think it probably becomes a little bit of a cruise control issue. I bet it’s still not freaking the hard and impressive but your 42 and 43 this year. Best of luck, man!
David: Thank you so much, Ben. And good to talk to you.
Ben: Alright, folks. This is Ben Greenfield and Dr. David Minkoff. Check out the show notes at bengreenfieldfitness.com/cancerpodcast, and have a healthy week!
You’ve been listening to the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. Go to bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting-edge fitness and performance advice.
Dr. David Minkoff and I go way back.
I first met this MD and 41 time Ironman triathlon finisher at the Half-Ironman World Championships in Florida six years ago, and interviewed him a few weeks later in the podcast episode “A Peek Into The Life of An Ironman, Natural Medicine Physician.”
Then, he helped me with metal detoxification using a metal chelating spray he designed, and I interviewed him about this in the podcast “How Hidden Sources Of Heavy Metals Are Destroying Your Health, And What You Can Do About It.”
He also helped me with my son’s exercise induced asthma, which is now completely eliminated using the techniques Dr. Minkoff introduced me to in the podcast “Why More Kids Are Getting Exercise Induced Asthma, and What You Can Do About It.”
And last month, we recorded “Amino Acids, BCAA’s, EAA’s, Ketosis, Bonking & More With 41 Time Ironman Triathlete Dr. David Minkoff. “.
Now Dr. Minkoff is back to talk about cancer. During our discussion, you’ll discover:
-The crazy story of why the voles around the Chernobyl radiation don’t get cancer…
-How a cancer cell produces toxic amounts of lactic acid, and why modern cancer medicine doesn’t fix this problem…
-Why we have been completely misled about why people actually get cancer, and why we’re treating the cancer completely wrong…
-How to mitigate the damage that chemotherapy causes…
-Why you need to test your body’s carbon dioxide levels, and how to do it…
-Why too much protein – especially from dairy sources – could be a big issue when it comes to cancer…
-The little-known water and blood ozonation methods Dr. Minkoff uses in his clinic, and how you can replicate the same effect in your own home…
-Dr. Minkoff’s controversial thoughts on “Gerson therapy” for cancer…
-How you can personally decrease your chances of ever getting cancer…
-And much more…
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More About Dr. Minkoff:
Dr. Minkoff graduated from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in 1974 and was elected to the “Phi Beta Kappa” of medical schools, the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha Honors Medical Fraternity for very high academic achievement. He then worked as an attending physician in infectious disease, co-directed a neo-natal intensive care unit and worked in emergency medicine until 1995.
In 1997, his interest in alternative and complementary medicine led him to open LifeWorks Wellness Center, which has become one of the foremost alternative medicine clinics in the U.S. His search to find a source of the highest quality nutritional supplements led him to establish BodyHealth in 2000, a resource that could provide doctors with the best possible supplementation and education for their patients. Today, his BodyHealth products are used by hundreds of practitioners and individual consumers who seek all-natural wellness and detoxification supplements with a demonstrated high level of quality and effectiveness.
In addition to their use by patients looking to heal disease, the BodyHealth products are also used by sports enthusiasts interested in achieving and maintaining optimal performance. As a 40-time Ironman triathlon finisher, (including 8 appearances at the Ironman World Championships) Dr. Minkoff has first-hand experience to help athletes achieve optimum conditioning. His expertise in protein synthesis, detoxification, and nutrition allow them to run, swim, and bike faster and longer.
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Resources we discuss in this episode:
-Book: Tripping Over The Truth
-Book: Bursting with Energy: The Breakthrough Method to Renew Youthful Energy and Restore Health
-Podcast: Why You Get Cancer And What You Can Do About It
–NatureAminos Essential Amino Acids
-Previous Interview with Dr. Minkoff: How Hidden Sources Of Heavy Metals Are Destroying Your Health, And What You Can Do About It.
-Previous Interview with Dr. Minkoff: A Peek Into The Life of An Ironman, Natural Medicine Physician.
-Previous Interview with Dr. Minkoff: Why More Kids Are Getting Exercise Induced Asthma, and What You Can Do About It.
-Previous Interview with Dr. Minkoff: Amino Acids, BCAA’s, EAA’s, Ketosis, Bonking & More With 41 Time Ironman Triathlete Dr. David Minkoff.
** Use code BEN for 5% off any purchase at BodyHealth.com! **
Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2016/06/what-are-the-best-alternative-cancer-treatments/