The WORST Food That Feeds Cancer Cells: Tom Seyfried (Transcript)

We have this for studies of glycobiology predominantly. But when we started using calorie-restricted diets and things like this, we would notice that many of the hallmarks of cancer in the environment of the tumor and the tumor themselves became much less aggressive and sometimes would get very small, which then linked us to the work of Otto Warburg, who clearly said that cancer was a metabolic disease, not a genetic disease.

And yet we scratched our head and said, well, the entire field of the world, the world, all cancer organizations in the world say cancer is a genetic disease, including the National Cancer Institute of the United States.

Challenging Conventional Cancer Theories

And then as a trained geneticist, I understand genetics very, very well. And I started to seriously question the foundation upon which the whole field was based from our own biochemical experiments to my knowledge of genetics. And then we began to put the pieces together to find out that Otto Warburg from the 20th century was actually correct in showing that cancer originated from the energy disruption, energy metabolism, not from gene mutations.

And then I went and clearly collected data that absolutely eviscerates the entire somatic mutation theory. It’s not right. And it’s indirectly responsible for the continued progression of cancer, the continued deaths of cancer. The continued view that cancer is a genetic disease is largely responsible for maintaining death of people. By recognizing that cancer is a genetic disease and not a metabolic disease, you inadvertently are treating people in an incorrect way, thus contributing to the disease itself.

The Shift in Cancer Treatment Perspective

So until the field comes to realize that cancer is not a genetic disease, until they realize that we’re not going to make any major headway in dropping the death rate. Once the field comes to realize this is a mitochondrial metabolic disease of energy metabolism, we will drop the death rate by more than 50% in five years. No question about it.

The problem is you’re up against massive institutional systems that hold that this is a genetic disease so that many of the treatments that we’re currently using remain in place largely for dogmatic ideology as well as revenue generation.

So you have these big forces that are in the way that are blocking the advance of treating cancer as a metabolic disease and seeing outcomes much, much better than what we presently have.

The Root Cause Of Cancer

RINA AHLUWALIA: Absolutely. And as you say, it is no different towards treating heart disease, diabetes, all these metabolic syndromes. They’re at the heart of our lifestyle, our diet and all the chronic inflammation that we live in these days.

And the fact that you have big companies, big corporate, big pharma trying to push drugs per se for profit could be the reason why we have all these traditional standards of care therapies that actually don’t solve the problem, but they kind of exacerbate the problem. It’s not a cure. It’s not a fix. The fix is what you’re talking about, which is what you said, metabolic therapy.

But I wanted to take a step back, which is to understand the root cause of cancer. You mentioned that cancer is a cause of mitochondrial dysfunction, metabolic mitochondrial dysfunction. So to understand the root cause of cancer, it’s first important to understand what is the mitochondria for people that might not know?

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah, well, this is in classes of cell biology. The cell, for other purposes, let’s just do a circle. Everybody understands there’s a nucleus inside the cell. I think, well, I can’t be sure about everybody, but even the most remedially trained cell biologist knows we have a cell.

Understanding Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Cancer

There’s a cell wall that incorporates inside the nucleus. But we have other organelles as well. So we call them organelles, just like we call organs in our body, the liver, the kidney, the spleen. These are organs. Inside the cell, there are organelles that allow the cell to function. And the nucleus is one, of course. And then you have the mitochondrion, which is a second organelle, major organelle. You have lysosomes and Golgi apparatus and endoplasmic reticulum. You have a whole bunch of things.

But the mitochondria is actually another type of organism. It’s another organism with its own DNA that lives inside the cell. So it has a genetic apparatus independent, different from that of a genetic in the nucleus. So you have this other organelle.

And this organelle, the mitochondrion, it’s like a spaghetti network inside the cell. It makes the energy so that the cell can do its normal functions. So, if it’s a liver cell, it will do liver cell stuff, maintaining blood glucose, maintaining metabolic homeostasis. If it’s in the neuron of the brain, it maintains electrical signaling capacity. If it’s in the kidney, it plays a role in fluid balances.

So, every one of the cells in our body has a particular function in the society of cells. And the energy that’s used for all of this is the mitochondrion. And the energy comes from us breathing oxygen.

The Role of Mitochondria in Energy Production

So, every breath of oxygen that we take into our body serves as an acceptor of mitochondrial electrons to allow that organelle to produce ATP, which is the chemical energy. It’s the chemical energy. It allows our cells to do everything. And the waste products are CO2 and water, almost like a gasoline engine in an automobile.

It produces CO2 and water and other breakdown products of the gasoline itself. But the bottom line is that engine works on oxygen. If there’s no oxygen, the car engine will shut down because you have to have a spark to ignite the combustion. We use the oxygen for controlled combustion. And that controlled combustion is in the mitochondria. And that mitochondria produces the energy so that all cells in our body can work. And every cell has a mitochondria, except red blood cells. But most of them, our cells, have this mitochondria.

This mitochondria allows the cell to remain quiescent in a differentiated state. In other words, a state doing what it’s supposed to do to maintain metabolic homeostasis so that all of our organs, brain, liver function, all work together because of the energy metabolism, because we’re all breathing. So, when that organelle gets corrupted in any particular way, in any particular cell, the cell either outright dies if the energy there is restricted to such a great extent.

Cancer and Mitochondrial Disruption

Or in the case of cancer, it’s a chronic interruption of energy from that organelle, the mitochondria, chronic. Acute disruption will kill the cell. And a chronic disruption will allow the cell to slowly adapt to an alternative form of energy, which we call fermentation energy, which is energy without oxygen.

And over years, months, or years, or decades, some of these cells gradually adapt to this other form of energy because the mitochondria have become chronically incapable of providing energy. The mitochondria also control the quiescent state. And what happens is they slowly lose grip on the energy within the cell. This fermentation takes over and cells begin to divide, dysregulated division, division out of cell division out of control, which is the definition of cancer.

The definition of cancer is cell division out of control. The ultimate result is a tumor that people, a tumor. Where did the tumor come from? It came from a gradual disruption of energy metabolism from mitochondria, leading to dysregulated cell growth.

Cells are falling back on energy without oxygen, which is the way all cells on the planet got oxygen before oxygen came into the atmosphere 2.5 billion years ago. So these cells are simply doing nothing more than falling back on ancient pathways that were always present, but now become dominant in these tumor cells. And that allows the cell to grow in a dysregulated way because the organelle that controls growth regulation is now dysfunctional.

Cancer’s Metabolic Nature and Potential Triggers

And the cells have switched from respiration using oxygen to energy without oxygen, which is fermentation. How that happens, it can happen from any number of assaults or insults to a population of cells in a particular organ. What are they? Exposure to chemical carcinogens, intermittent hypoxia, exposure to radiation, old age, viral infections, hepatitis, papillomaviruses, rare inherited germline mutations that disrupt mitochondrial function.

Any of these are called secondary risk factors. So there’s a whole variety of things in the environment that can cause a disrupted energy metabolism in a cell, thereby leading to mitochondrial disruption and dysregulated cell growth. So one person’s breast cancer could come from a carcinogen, another one from an occluded milk duct causing intermittent hypoxia, another one from exposure to radiation, another one from the BRCA gene, another one from just being older.

The Singular Origin of All Cancers

So any of these could cause a tumor in a particular organ through any variety of causes. All of the primary cause and the only cause for the disruption cell growth is damage to the oxidative phosphorylation capacity in the mitochondria. That is the origin of cancer, whether it happens in the brain, colon, breast, bladder, lung, all of these.

So there’s one common origin, disruption of oxidative phosphorylation leading to fermentation. So all cancers, regardless of their organ, are highly fermentative cells dysregulated in their growth, driven by two fermentable fuels, which is the sugar glucose and the amino acid glutamine. They are the two major fuels that we have found driving all cancers, making cancer a singular disease of energy metabolism, not a complex hodgepodge of all kinds of diseases. It’s not that complicated.

RINA AHLUWALIA: And that’s what was so fascinating about your work. These two things about glucose and glutamine, I think a lot of people understand the glucose, the sugar, and that we need to eliminate sugars, a lot of the excess carbohydrates to actually reduce the risk of cancer, reduce the risk of disease. But there was something that you mentioned around glucose.

The Role of Chronic Inflammation in Cancer

TOM SEYFRIED: Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, you can’t — sugar does not — sugar is not a carcinogen. Okay, sugar does not cause cancer. If you have a tumor, it will feed on the sugar. But sugar itself is not a carcinogen. So carcinogens are chemicals that cause cancer. Sugar by itself does not cause damage to the mitochondria, okay? But excess sugar in the bloodstream can lead to systemic inflammation, and systemic inflammation can damage mitochondria in cells. So we have to know how to parse out cause and effects of things.

RINA AHLUWALIA: That’s a very interesting clarification, because I think a lot of people think sugar, as maybe I kind of mentioned previously, is the toxin that’s going to cause cancer, but it’s the elevated glucose consistently in our bloodstream over the long period of time that causes inflammation. It might not even show up as cancer. It could be brain disease, it could be heart disease, it could be anything.

All these problems that we are seeing is coming from chronic inflammation. So, I wanted to just backtrack before we get into the glucose, the glutamine, the worst foods, and all the rest of it. You mentioned right at the beginning that cancer is not a genetic disease. We’re not born with cancer. It is something that is a metabolic dysfunction in our mitochondria.

Nuclear Transfer Experiments and Cancer Origins

And there were some experiments called the nuclear transfer experiments which prove this. Could you talk more about that which actually proves the fact that cancer is not a genetic disease and more of a metabolic dysfunction?

TOM SEYFRIED: Yes. Well, the nuclear mitochondrial transfer experiments certainly are the most powerful evidence that it cannot be a genetic disease. But we also know that there are some cancers that have no mutations. People don’t like to talk about that, but they’re there. We and others have shown that there are.

And there are some carcinogens like asbestos that can cause cancer without causing mutations. So, we have these things. And now we now know, the field had said that there are only certain kinds of mutations that cause cancer. And they’re called driver, these so-called driver gene mutations.

That was considered the cause of cancer. But now through newer experiments, we’re beginning to see that normal cells, like you, a young lady, if we took a sample of various parts of your organs and did a genomic screen, we’d see these so-called cancer driver genes already expressed, but you don’t have any cancer. So, with the very driver genes that are supposed to cause cancer are found in normal tissues that never have cancer.

But the nuclear transfer experiments are the most powerful because there’s where you can take the nucleus of the cell, which is supposed to contain the mutations, and take that nucleus and put it into another cell, a normal cell, where that normal nucleus was removed and the cytoplasm containing the normal mitochondria are there. And you take that cancer nucleus and put it into that cell, and then take that cell and put it into a mouse or a rat to see whether or not it forms cancer. And the answer is it does not form cancer, even though it has the tumor nucleus there.

Cancer’s True Origin: Mitochondrial Dysfunction

On the other hand, if you take the normal cell and remove the nucleus of the normal cell and put it into a tumor cell where the nucleus of the tumor cell has been removed, you’re putting the nucleus of a normal cell into the cytoplasm of a tumor cell and then put that into the rat. That grows like crazy. So that becomes the tumor.

So what it says is the origin of cancer is not in the nucleus with the gene mutations. It’s in the cytoplasm with the mitochondria. So the mitochondria in the cytoplasm are the controllers of quiescence or the drivers of dysregulated cell growth. So clearly we know the origin of cancer is not a nuclear genetic disease.

I went through the entire scientific literature and put all those independent experiments together in one composite paper that makes it. The only way you could think that cancer is a genetic disease is through dogmatic ideology or cognitive difficulty. So there’s no way any rational human mind would have to sit there and say cancer cannot be a genetic disease. So yeah, cognitive challenge, I guess is a better term for that.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Cognitive dissonance. It’s a kind of nice way to say that. You know, it’s interesting when people come up with these different ways of thinking about disease, which really challenges the traditional theory. And I was listening to a lot of your work, which is talking about the standard of care and that the standard of care, which is radiation therapy, chemotherapy, it doesn’t treat the root cause. It’s making the problem worse.

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah. In many cases it does. Now, don’t forget we have millions and millions of cancer survivors on the planet who have taken standard of care and have been cured of their cancer. But many, many, many, perhaps even most of those folks pay a significant price in overall health for having that chance to live longer.

Neuropsychiatric problems, hormonal imbalances, digestive issues, growth problems, all kinds of problems have come as the result of surviving toxic radiation and toxic poisons. Many of them, not all of them, but some will go on to develop all kinds of new cancers as the result of the toxic treatment of these cancers.

Immunotherapy and the Mutation Theory of Cancer

And the new therapy that many people are talking about are called immunotherapies. You hear PD-L1, Opdivo, Keytruda, they’re advertised on television, they’re advertised in magazines, CAR-T immunotherapy. These are all based on the somatic mutation theory of cancer. If the somatic mutation theory of cancer is not correct, then the outcome of many of these new therapies in conjunction with radiation and chemo and all this other stuff is unlikely to have a major impact in reducing deaths. And that’s clear. I mean, cancer is getting worse and worse, not getting better and better. So all this new stuff is not working.

Alternative Approaches to Cancer Treatment

And I’ll tell you one thing that’s very interesting. Some of the people that do really well on CAR-T immunotherapy or some of the immunotherapies, the ones that do best are the ones that develop the high fever. High fever is often associated with therapeutic success. A long time ago, William Cawley used to inject live bacteria into people causing massively high fevers in cancer patients. And he had such an incredible cure rate, 95% of the patients that he gave back, the body would launch an incredible fever and attack, cytokine attack. And cancer would be destroyed by the heat.

And the mutations that exist in cancer prevent the tumor cells from adapting to heat stress. So they up and die. So the simple… Now, here’s the situation. You can pay $250,000 to $300,000 to get an immunotherapy that works because it gives you a fever, or you can take some pyrogen that would give you a fever and get the same result for pennies.

RINA AHLUWALIA: So, really? You’re kidding.

TOM SEYFRIED: Absolutely. So this is the whole thing. Because the folks that do… If you think cancer is a genetic disease, you have no clue. You think it’s working because your immune system is attacked. Because if the patient doesn’t get a high fever, the immunotherapies don’t generally work. So they work on the papers that people that get high fever.

So it has nothing to do with the $200,000. So once you understand the biology of the disease, most of the stuff we’re doing makes no sense. It’s actually harmful. As a matter of fact, the dirty secret of immunotherapy is we call hyper-progressive disease, which means that about 15% to 20% of people getting immunotherapies die faster because the immunotherapy kills them before the cancer does.

Understanding Cancer’s Biology

So I guess there’s 20% that do well that can survive, and a lot of them do well because they had a fever. So when you put all that together, you’ve got to understand the biology of this disease. It’s really scary.

RINA AHLUWALIA: And that’s why you are so amazing, because you understand the biology of what cancer is, explaining the mutations in the gene and the root cause of it, and then how to fix it. Because many people, I think many doctors, they just follow, I don’t want to say this in a bad way, but they follow what they’ve been taught in medical school. And they don’t have the, I guess, the time or the power to actually do their own research and to understand the biology of even, not even cancer, but heart disease.

Even we understand with heart attacks, heart disease, that it’s completely preventable. The question for you is, is cancer preventable?

TOM SEYFRIED: Well, I mean, Otto Warburg said that, he said 80% of all cancers could be prevented. But now we understand, he didn’t really know, and this is where our work has expanded what Otto Warburg originally said. He was trying to focus on improving B vitamins and things like this. But the real way to, let’s put it this way. You can’t, it’s extremely difficult to get cancer in any cell where the mitochondria in that cell are healthy.

Healthy Mitochondria and Cancer Prevention

So healthy mitochondria prevent cancer. So the question is, how do you maintain healthy mitochondria? And that’s why nutritional ketosis, ketone bodies are burned in the mitochondria with unbelievable efficiency. My late good friend, Dr. Richard Veach from the National Institutes of Health showed how mitochondrial metabolism increases the energy efficiency in mitochondria and produce very few reactive oxygen species, which are damaging radicals.

And you can keep your mitochondria humming at the most energy efficiency if you can go into ketosis. Now what is ketosis? Now our species, human beings, evolved in a food-restricted environment. We were always, for long tens of thousands of years in our origin, we were always in ketosis because we had very few carbohydrates in the environment. We were always in a semi-hungry, starved state. And the foods that we ate were very, very low in carbohydrates.

You know, we’d kill animals. We would eat different kinds of plants. But we wouldn’t have high carbohydrate foods. So the foods of our ancestors were very low in carbohydrates, putting us in nutritional ketosis. And that’s why cancer in aboriginal folks that still are on the planet, cancer is almost unknown, unheard of in these aboriginal tribes of people who live according to their traditional ways, which was no high carbohydrate foods, a lot of exercise, your mitochondria maintained in a super energy state.

And cancer does not exist, let’s put it that way. Only very rarely. It’s a very, it’s almost like finding a needle in a haystack to find a tumor in an aboriginal person who living according to natural ways. And yet cancer in our Western society is replacing heart disease, number one killer.

So now we should focus, how to prevent cancer is obviously, cancer is being caused by our Western diet and lifestyle. So that’s what’s causing cancer. So what is it in our Western diet and lifestyle that’s allowing our mitochondria become damaged leading to dysregulated cell growth?

Western Diet and Lifestyle

And there’s a whole range of things, minimal exercise, massive amounts of highly processed carbohydrate foods in our diet, stress, mental stress of the kinds of jobs that we’re doing. So you put all that together and we put ourselves at risk, not only for cancer, but cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, macular degeneration.

You can go down the whole list of chronic diseases and you can start to see a dramatic increase in all kinds of inflammatory chronic diseases as the result of our diet and lifestyle. The genetics has very little to do with this. As a matter of fact, our genes protect us. They do the best job they can at trying to protect us from all this stuff. But we overwhelm the protective capacity of our body by putting ourselves into these very risky kinds of conditions.

And the study that came out of Mediterranean diet, reducing dementia and cardiovascular disease and cancer, it wasn’t the Mediterranean diet by itself. It was a diet that had no highly processed carbohydrates. So you want to get cancer, you want to get demented, you want to get a type two diabetes, make sure that you are obese and you keep your blood sugars really, really high. And then you’ll put yourself, you’ll be able to get into the crowd of those that have all these chronic diseases.

And that’s another thing. Obesity has now replaced smoking as one of the top risk factors in getting cancer. So and as you said, if people were really, really, really interested in preventing cancer, we would not have an obesity epidemic. So all of this stuff is perfectly logical. But I have to be honest with you. The foods that are being engineered, highly processed carbs that are being engineered, are very tasty to a large number of people. They’re cheap, they’re convenient, and they’re tasty.

And we evolved to like very sweet carbohydrate foods. It’s just they weren’t available in the environment. Now they’re available in an abundance and we pay a price for that.

Carnivore Lifestyle and Ketogenic Diet

RINA AHLUWALIA: Absolutely. So as part of my audience, we follow a carnivore lifestyle. So I’m very keen to hear your thoughts about because you talk about a ketogenic diet and that is primarily higher fat. And especially if you do have active cancer, even the likes of Dr. Boz, they talk about therapeutic ketosis. So that is increasing your fat, even sometimes decreasing your protein to try to flood your body with fat and ketones so that the cancer or anything that you have that is inflammatory cannot survive.

I’m curious about your thoughts on carnivore or even keto as a lifestyle to prevent all disease.

TOM SEYFRIED: Well, this is a good point. We developed the glucose ketone index calculator and published this. This is the way to let people know whether or not they’re in ketosis. So some people say, “Oh yeah, I eat a ketogenic diet.” So what’s your GKI? “Well, I never measured it.” Well, how do you know you’re in ketosis? You have to have a blood measurement to know where you are, not what you think.

Glucose Ketone Index Calculator and Ketosis Measurement

So the Keto-Mojo meter, which is available through Amazon, allows a lot of… We built it for the cancer folks so that they can know how to kill their tumor cells and also deliver drugs. When the cancer patient is in ketosis, the drug delivery can kill the tumor cells much more effectively. The drugs take on tremendous power when the patient is in ketosis. Even then you can cut all your chemotherapy drugs in half or even lower than that sometimes, so it really has tremendous power.

But the guys who are just in society that want to stay healthy and think they’re in nutritional ketosis, they can use the meter to see whether or not they’re in that state.

Now my good friend Dom D’Agostino is always in ketosis. Dom eats meat, yeah, eggs, certain vegetables, and things. He’s just eating more of a Paleolithic lifestyle. Yeah, so I mean you have to think of our Paleolithic ancestors, ate a lot of meat, but the meat was organic. I mean you’re killing… You know how much energy it takes to run after a deer and kill it and then drag it back and cut it up and eat it? You’ve got to use a lot of energy on this.

And then what are you eating? Organ meat? You’re eating the flesh? There’s not a lot of carbohydrates in this, but you get a lot of energy.

So now vegans, I understand they may have an adverse whatever, but if our ancestors were vegans, you and I would not exist today on the planet.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Thank you. Did you hear that?

TOM SEYFRIED: No, but I’m just saying you have to go back to the Paleolithic period.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Yeah, I’m not anti anything. I think that if you believe in something, if it works for you, do it. But the fact that even you’re saying, Professor, that it’s really unlikely that our ancestors were vegans, that you could actually survive on a no-meat diet,

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah, you couldn’t. It would be impossible. Because there wasn’t enough… We didn’t have a farm. Now today, because we farm wheat and corn and rice and all this other stuff, which has a… You can replace the energy from meat with enough farmed vegetables and things like this. You can certainly, for religious or cultural reasons, you can certainly replace meat with vegetables today.

The issue that we’re finding, it’s a little bit more difficult to get into nutritional ketosis on a purely vegan diet. You can, but you have to eat very few, like eat one leaf of lettuce every other day. Yeah, you’ll get into ketosis for sure. But again, it’s going back to water-only fasting or this kind of thing. That gets you into ketosis, but it’s hard. It’s not easy.

Transitioning to Nutritional Ketosis and Fasting

So when we look at cancer patients, we usually… I don’t, because I’m not a physician. My physician colleagues will say you have to go on a zero-carb diet for about 10 to 14 days. You can eat some meat, fish, and things like this, or plants, whatever brings you down into nutritional ketosis.

Then the step off from nutritional ketosis to water-only fasting, it’s not such a dramatic jump. If you go cold turkey, if you’re eating a high-carb diet or just a Western diet, and then stop eating that for several days, man, it’s tough. It’s not easy at all. Very uncomfortable headaches, shaking, all this kind of stuff.

But if you do a zero-carb diet for 10 or 14 days, the jump now to water-only fasting is much less stressful on the body. The body now has acclimated itself, and that’s the best way to really get into this ketotic state. Some people, like Dom DiAgostino, he’s always in this state because that’s his diet. He’s always active, a lot of physical activity. He eats foods that are very low in carbohydrates, very highly nutritious, and he’s always in nutritional ketosis.

A lot of folks are like that. They do these Paleolithic things and stuff like that. But you can measure your GKI so that you know whether… And is it good to stay in this zone forever? I mean, Dom seems to do it. He likes… He’ll eat all kinds of things to keep him in that zone. But most folks in society don’t. You want to go out, you’re in France, every now and then you like a baguette with a little foie gras.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Well, I had the foie gras, but I didn’t have the baguette because when I have the baguette, I just feel terrible. So I was like, you know what, foie gras, I’m going to try some foie gras while I’m in France. But with the baguette, I’m like, you know what, I’m going to pass because I feel terrible the next day.

TOM SEYFRIED: I- Oh, I feel good. Oh, absolutely. You’re kidding me? You rub that big foie gras all over the baguette. It’s great. But you don’t do it every day. You’re not sitting there every day pounding down big baguettes with foie gras. I mean, let’s be honest.

But every now and then, I mean, I live in this society too, and I’ll eat a donut every now and then. “Well, this donut is going to kill me.” Yeah, if I ate it every day, it might kill me, but I’m not going to eat one every day. But it’s just moving in and out. You’ve got to know that if you get sick or you start feeling bad, I tell you one thing, if you start feeling bad for whatever reason, don’t eat for several days. Whatever was bothering you generally goes away.

Water Fasting and Health

RINA AHLUWALIA: And that’s the water fasting, which is really, really, really hard. You mentioned the GKI, so the Glucose Ketone Index, and I think I want to get questions from people watching around, can you tell us more about that? So you mentioned the Keto Mojo. What are some numbers that we should be looking at? Like you have a Keto Mojo, how often should I be testing? Is it before or after food? What time of day? What are some numbers that I should be hitting? I know I want to get these questions.

TOM SEYFRIED: No, no. But those are all good. There’s a lot of folks on the web talking about GKI values. I built the — my students and I built this GKI for the cancer patients to help them. Then I realized all these health gurus are out there, and they’re all seeing who can get the lowest GKI and feel the healthiest and all this kind of stuff. They have no cancer and they have no chronic diseases. They just want to feel good and see how low they can get their GKI.

Now for cancer, based on the patient’s feedback, if you can get a GKI value of 2.0 or below, and even below one, you’re definitely in ketosis. That’s where the millimolar of ketones is equal to the millimolar of glucose in the blood. Or sometimes the ketones can go just a little bit higher. People with normal metabolism will rarely, if ever, get into ketoacidosis, which is the fear of the medical community.

Ketoacidosis and Normal Physiology

That happens mostly in type 1 diabetes. People with type 1 diabetes, that’s the fear for that group, where blood sugar and ketones both are extremely high in the blood. This is a very dangerous situation. But most people who have normal physiology can get into low GKI values. It’s like running a 26-mile marathon without having some preparation. You have to get yourself into so-called shape. Same thing with getting into nutritional ketosis. It takes a little bit of adjustment in the diet and lifestyle exercise range.

People can get into these zones. The first thing you do is you measure your glucose ketone index. Most people eating a Western diet, you’re talking about a range of about 50, 50 to 60. Sometimes you drink Coca-Cola and you can get up to 100. But you want low numbers, not high numbers.

It’s just like golf. In golf, you try to get the lowest number you can. With the GKI, you try to get the lowest number you can. Like Dom D’Agostino, he showed me one time he had a GKI of like 0.5. And I’m saying, “Man, that’s unbelievable.”

What Don did is he did water-only fasting for four days and then drank one of his ketone solutions, which made his blood sugar go down further and his ketones go up a little higher. And he was telling me this. And he’s perfectly healthy. I mean, this is a guy who’s not, I mean, if you ever saw him, put him on the web, you’ll see.

RINA AHLUWALIA: I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him. He looks like an athlete. He’s an athlete. But that’s the thing. It’s not to say that anybody watching needs to do water fasting or anything crazy like that. I think it’s important to understand the different modalities that you can get. We’re trying to lower inflammation. If you don’t have active cancer, you don’t necessarily need to do all these things. But you know the reason why we choose a ketogenic lifestyle, a carnivore lifestyle, a higher fat, higher protein, close to zero carb lifestyle is to improve and get to your optimal health.

TOM SEYFRIED: Well, I mean, let me just say that some carbs are okay. There are complex carbohydrates that you can get from some vegetables and some things like this. I mean, not all carbs are bad carbs. Highly processed carbs are not good.

But we have complex carbohydrates that you can get from some vegetables and things like this, which are in fact very healthy for the body.

RINA AHLUWALIA: See, this is the thing that I was really trying to understand. I have been carnivore for the last three years. And then I was doing keto for 10 years. I had really bad sugar addiction, so I would binge. I had a lot of bad gut issues. So for me, the reason why carnivore works, and I think a lot of my viewers on the channel, the reason why they follow carnivore is a mixture of these reasons. And sometimes when they eat vegetables, they can get really bad chronic inflammation.

So I can really understand with carnivore or any elimination diet as a short protocol, even if it’s 60, 90 days, and then as you’re saying, to reintroduce some safe carbohydrates. And these carbohydrates are vegetables that are not as toxic as other vegetables.

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah. And some fruits as well. Like when we were working in the epilepsy field for decades, we would have to maintain low constant GKI values or low glucose values for the children with epilepsy, because they would have breakthrough seizures as soon as the blood sugar would go up. So they need to have appropriate nutrition.

Identifying Low Glycemic Foods

But what we found for vitamin C was grapefruits. And it’s another thing too, low glycemic foods, foods that release glucose very, very slowly into the bloodstream, rather than like white rice, potatoes, pasta, all this stuff. This will give you a high shot glucose in the blood. But grapefruit was a low glycemic.

So if you look at the types of foods that you want to try to say, “Well, I want some carbs, but I want low glycemic carbs,” then you can go, there’s a whole list of foods on the web that will tell you their glycemic index. And the glycemic index will allow you to take in those foods without spiking glucose and thereby not creating a major shift in your GKI values.

Emotional Stress and Blood Sugar Levels

The other thing that we learned is that emotional stress can make your blood sugar go up because you release corticosteroids into the blood, which is a fight, flight kind of thing. And that’s how we learned about the GKI in the first place, because I had some cancer patients that would get into an argument with a neighbor or a parking spot or whatever, and they would see their blood sugar spiking.

And I would say, “What’s your ketone?” “Oh, no, ketones were stable.” So it really didn’t change the GKI too much. So glucose is a lot more variable. If you can keep your ketones at a steady level, you can buffer some of the spikes that you might get occasionally in glucose and then not throw out your GKI overall.

But what you…and you’re right, during the course of a day, the GKI can vary. And this is what we tell the cancer patients. You’ve got to know the point during the course of a day when your GKIs are the lowest. It could be for some people it’s late morning, for some people it’s late afternoon, for other people it’s in the evening. So everybody is different. So we don’t know, we can’t say to anyone, “Everybody do this,” because it may not be appropriate for your physiology.

So each person has to learn their own physiology. And then when they know that this is the part of the day when I’m in the lowest GKI, that’s when we suggest they go into hyperbaric oxygen for cancer, of course. This kills cancer cells without radiation therapy. So it’s really a super healthy way to do it.

But it has to be done with the body’s adaptability to the particular GKI thing. And so we do this. We work. And everybody’s an individual when it comes to metabolism. Some people do well on one food, another person does better on another food. But the bottom line is your body adjusts metabolically into a new homeostatic state. And you can use the GKI as kind of a general indicator. But people will learn how they can adjust themselves and stay in these so-called healthy zones and how long they want to stay in there. Every now and then you can step out and step back in.

RINA AHLUWALIA: And have a life and go out and enjoy something.

TOM SEYFRIED: Yes. You know? It’s just that you are aware of it. And you’re taking charge of your own physiology in a toxic world.

Insulin and Cancer Risk

RINA AHLUWALIA: Absolutely. I wanted to ask about blood sugar, because you know how you have these kinds of trends that you hear about all the time about different things? Like 10 years ago, it was like cholesterol is bad. Now we’re hearing insulin. Everything is about insulin. And then you want your insulin to be as low as possible and blood sugar and all the rest of it.

Do you think that insulin is also a driver or elevated insulin is a driver towards cancer metabolic disease?

TOM SEYFRIED: Oh, yeah. So it’s a marker of high blood sugar. I mean, when sugar is low, insulin goes down. When sugar goes up, insulin goes up. So the problem is you get insulin insensitivity. Your body no longer can control the level of insulin. So as soon as that sugar comes in, you’re driving it into fat. So you’re insulin insensitive, the best way, which is type 2 diabetes, by the way.

So the best way to get — some obesity associated with type 2 diabetes. But Virta Health, some folks that I know, Jeff Volick and others, they cure type 2 diabetes using metabolic therapy. So you don’t need all these drugs. You don’t need… But most people want the easy way out. They’d rather have a pill than have to take charge of me doing some discipline, personal discipline. “I don’t want personal discipline. I want a drug.” Most people, that’s what we are. We always want the most convenient way to deal with a problem, right?

And if you can take… What is it?

RINA AHLUWALIA: Ozempic.

TOM SEYFRIED: Ozempic and all these, inject yourself with all that kind of stuff, then you can maintain your obesity while not worrying about all this other stuff. And I’m saying to myself, “This is nuts.” But those folks, hey, listen, that’s their life. They want to do that. Let them do it.

And then they become… They don’t understand why they have all these… And if you get off those drugs, nobody knows how long, what’s going to happen by staying on them for so long. And nobody knows what’s going to happen when you get off them. But if you can take charge of your own lifestyle, but at least you have tools.

You want to reduce cancer risk, exercise. You’ve got to have exercise. You’ve got to keep your blood sugar in a reasonable level. Don’t get into insulin sensitivity. Keep your blood sugar low insulin, you’ll recover insulin sensitivity.

Gluconeogenesis and Cancer Cell Competition

And then people say to me, “Well, you can never… Your liver will make glucose even if you don’t eat glucose.” And that’s true. The liver and gluconeogenesis is made by the liver, but that’s a very low level of glucose. It helps the brain out a little bit. And all the other cells in the body then crave the glucose. So you keep a very low stable level of glucose. For a cancer cell, the cancer cell now must compete with normal cells that want the glucose. And the cancer cell gets out-competed every time.

So again, water-only fasting, it always works really well to maintain nutritional ketosis, low GKI values, low insulin values. So this is all a diet lifestyle. It all comes back to diet lifestyle. How many people in our society, whether you’re in France, Germany, or the United States, want to go back and live like some caveman in a Paleolithic period? There are people that want to do this, believe me. You always want to get out there.

RINA AHLUWALIA: You know, I love that you’re very realistic because you see a lot of people that talk about the dogma of like, hey, this certain diet and this certain way of living. But most people can’t adhere to such a strict lifestyle. But understanding these fundamentals is great so that you can reduce your probability of having cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, brain disease, liver problems, all these different things.

You did mention metabolic therapy. So I really, really, really want to… This is fascinating. This is going beyond traditional standard of care. Not the chemotherapy, not the radiation therapy. Diet and a drug called DON, which is used to target cancer. Can you talk about that, please?

Targeting Glutamine in Cancer Therapy

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah, well, it’s a glutamine targeting drug because people always ask me, what do I… Hundreds and hundreds of people, what can I eat to reduce glutamine? And you want to know the answer, nothing. The way you can reduce glutamine is go on at least two to three weeks water only. That lowers your blood sugar.

And the common response is, “Is there anything other than that I do?” Yeah, there are drugs that will do this. One of the drugs that we think is really effective is Mebendazole, a parasite medication called Mebendazole, a similar drug to fenbendazole. We have some evidence now that it will restrict glucose and glutamine to some extent.

Together with nutritional ketosis, these drugs work remarkably well in killing tumors. Yeah, one of the best drugs is 6-deoxynorleucine. Structurally, it looks very, very similar to glutamine, but it blocks a major enzyme that breaks glutamine down, so the body can’t use it. You have to be very careful with that drug. Again, like biology, you really need to know it’s a tool. If you don’t know how to use it appropriately, it could be harmful.

But when used in appropriate manner, which is dosage, timing and scheduling, together with the condition of therapeutic ketosis, this is remarkably powerful, and we are also finding that once the body is in ketosis, chemotherapy can be reduced massively in their dosages and still have good therapeutic benefit. We can enhance therapy and reduce toxicity massively with metabolic therapy. Metabolic therapy is just hammering the tumor cells out of existence using what we call press pulse that I’ve developed as well.

We press certain things, like glucose can be pressed. The body does not need glucose to survive, so we can put a chokehold on that. And then we pulse the glutamine with glutamine-targeting drugs to gradually degrade and eliminate tumors. This is an elegant system of killing cancer cells naturally without causing toxicity, but at the same time, improving overall health of the patient.

Case Study and Misconceptions

Some people say this is very dangerous, because many folks who have cancer, and Guy Tannenbaum is on the web talking about this. Guy was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, hypertension, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes, and he did water-only fasting, metabolic therapy, and the prostate cancer went into total remission. Type 2 diabetes went away, hypertension, high blood pressure, everything went away. So this is what I’m saying.

Metabolic therapy will get rid of a lot of things besides your cancer, and this is why it’s dangerous. This is why it’s dangerous.

RINA AHLUWALIA: I thought you meant dangerous like a bad thing, I’m like, “well, that sounds good, like getting rid of diabetes, hypertension.” I was like, “oh, okay, it’s a good thing that’s dangerous because it’s such a good thing.”

TOM SEYFRIED: It’s dangerous to a health industry.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Absolutely. And that’s why people don’t want to hear it, and they don’t want to change the standard of care, because where is the money?

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah, well, that’s the thing. You’re dealing with a multi-billion dollar industry that would have to then grope to find another way to… Now, I’m not saying you can’t make money on any of this stuff. All I’m saying is that as long as we can manage diseases without toxicity effectively, I think that’s a tremendous goal in and of itself.

If there’s an entrepreneur that can figure out how to make a buck on the whole thing, I’m not against that either. But my interest is how can we drop the death rate of cancer significantly while improving overall health? And absolutely, just like Otto Warburg said, 80% of cancers can be prevented. And I think we can drop the death rate massively in a very short period of time if the health government agencies would say, “yes, cancer is not a genetic disease, it’s a mitochondrial metabolic disease, and we recommend metabolic therapy to treat cancer.” Boom, the death rate would collapse unbelievably.

Cancer Trends and Lifestyle Factors

RINA AHLUWALIA: So you said that earlier, that cancer is overtaking or has overtaken heart disease as a number one killer.

TOM SEYFRIED: In China, it certainly has, and I just heard in Korea it has as well. So the United States, for breast cancer, breast cancer in women has become the number one killer over heart disease. And it’s happening slowly around. The more we are into the Western diet and lifestyle with highly processed carbohydrate foods and reduced exercise, the more at risk we’re going to be for cancer and all the other chronic diseases.

Cancer is the one that people most fear. I think it puts a fear of God into people, that they have this immediate impending doom that their existence on the planet is going to be shortly lived. And that’s missing. Yeah, if you’re being irradiated and poisoned, that might be true. But if you do metabolic therapy, that I don’t think is the case. And I think people should recognize that.

You should not recognize. Nobody should tell somebody they have a terminal cancer. If they do standard care, that might be terminal. But if you do metabolic therapy, it might not be terminal.

RINA AHLUWALIA: And as you said, cancer can be preventable if you have the right diet and lifestyle and you live stress-free. Try to live a stress-free existence and try to enjoy life as well. It’s all these things, it’s not just food, it’s not just these things that we’re hearing every day. It’s the holistic lifestyle that we have to live.

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. It’s a whole composite. It’s food, diet, lifestyle, exercise, and stress management. That’s why in our Press Pulse, we talk about stress management as a major part of the overall therapeutic process, part of metabolic therapy, music therapy, massage therapy, acupuncture. Whatever you do to reduce stress, because stress, a lot of cancer patients have impending doom, which causes their cortical steroids to go up, and they have high blood sugar, because they fear that they’re going to be dead from this disease.

Integrating Stress Management in Cancer Treatment

So they have to be told and do a variety of things to reduce the stress, the blood sugar goes down, metabolic therapy works a hell of a lot better. So again, it’s all part of the package. And I have that written in the Press Pulse outline, the framework for managing cancer. It’s all in there. It’s just that the medical system needs to incorporate that into their treatment protocols.

And you said it right at the beginning, that the system, unfortunately, the system prevents a lot of goodwill physicians to do what they know should be done and what is right, but yet they can’t do it because the system controls them. So then you have to go back and say, well, who’s running the system? And people say, “oh, it’s the government.” Well, who’s the government? It’s folks like us. I mean, I know I have a lot of friends who work in the government.

So the government is not some amorphous thing. They’re human beings that are part of this government. So the system is controlled by human beings. Okay, who are the human beings in the system that are maintaining the status quo? Right? Then you’ve got to just say, who are these? There’s not many of them. You know, a couple of folks that call the shots on a few of these things. And the majority of Congress and senators and these guys, they’re clueless as to the biology of some of these health things.

And they go along more with lobbyists and recommendations from big companies. And who’s running the big companies? Well, you find the CEOs, the boards of these big companies, they’re the system. And they’re the ones calling the shots on a lot of this stuff. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the system in general is bad. It just means that things can be changed, as long as you get the right people.

And I always find that people, all of a sudden, who have one viewpoint, change their view really fast when they’re the ones with the brain tumor, when they’re the ones with the advanced lung cancer. All of a sudden, everything changes in their view, right? Now, what can you do for me now? And so it’s amazing. I can’t tell you how many physicians have come to me with those who have cancer that would rather do metabolic therapy than do what the system tells them to do.

So yeah, so this is just natural human behavior. But things can change. There’s no question about it. And with cancer, people, most people want to live. And they want to know that there’s something other than the standards of care that can be used or in combination sometimes with standard of care that can improve their outcome. And these are the things that will be coming once people understand. So who’s going to make the change in the system?

The people. Once you get enough people knowing that there is something different, the people will make the change because they are the consumers of what the system delivers. So the system will change when the consumer’s demands begin to change. So it’s educating the consumers. And we have to recognize that scientific literacy is very rare in our societies.

Scientific Literacy and Cancer Awareness

Most folks in all societies are scientifically illiterate. So unfortunately, they have a tough time. But I can tell you, when you have cancer, I wish my students could learn stuff as quickly as the person that has been diagnosed with cancer.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Oh, you see, that’s the why. When you have the why, and when you have the disease, and when you have the cancer, you want to know everything that you can to try to fix this. But when you don’t have that in front of you, that impending doom, the motivation is not there, is it?

TOM SEYFRIED: Oh, you’re right. You’re absolutely correct. Motivation is powerful. When people are motivated, you’d be surprised how incredibly accomplished they become. It’s unbelievable. I wish my students could do that. They’re all young. They don’t have cancer, right? They just do it to take the class.

Later on, they come calling me years later and say, ‘I’m trying to go back through my notes now to find out what you said.’ And now we have all this stuff that we’ve published, Open Access. So everything that I’m saying is published. People always say, ‘oh, he didn’t explain it clearly.’ Well, read the paper. It’s published in the literature. All you have to do is go onto the web, look my name up, and see the publications.

If you want more detail about what I’m saying, if I’m just, ‘oh, he didn’t say this, he didn’t tell me exactly what to do and how to do it.’ Well, go into the papers. You’ll find a little bit more detail. But we are writing a treatment protocol as we speak, very totally comprehensive. It’s like a how-to manual for anyone that knows anything. This is exactly how you do it.

And we have a large number of co-authors on this paper that we hope to publish, hopefully by the end of the year. We’ve been working on it for a couple of years now. It’s a how-to manual for managing glioblastoma, brain cancer. But with a couple of tweaks, you can manage all kinds of cancers the same. They all depend on fermentation. So once you understand their Achilles heel, their weakness, it’s not that hard to go after it and get rid of them.

But you’ve got to go for the cancers that have no hope, and that’s glioblastoma. 99% of people are dead within 10 years, 95% within five years. So the hope for GBM is minimal. But if we can crack that open, if we can extend survival by five times, two-, three-fold, five-fold survival, and you can say, ‘well, if you can do that for glioblastoma, can you do it for lung, colon, breast?’ Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

It’s just that we don’t want to go into all those other cancers right now because they’re always, ‘ah, we got all this other stuff.’ For GBM, you’ve got nothing. And as I tell you, we have not made one single advance in glioblastoma in 100 years, if you can believe this.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Really?

TOM SEYFRIED: Yes. The survival for glioblastoma in 1926 was 18 to 14 months. Today it’s 15 to 16 months. So you’re talking about zero impact over 100 years. So we can make a massive improvement in that in a very quick period of time. If we were allowed, if the system allows us to do what we need to do, we can make huge improvements in cancer survival very, very quickly.

The problem is the system does not permit that. You cannot break the standard of care. You think it would be malleable. You think it would be, but it’s not. It’s like written in granite. And so there’s a lot of self-interest in maintaining the status quo. But you’ve got to break it down because people are dying. We cannot let this tragedy continue to happen. We’re losing all these good souls on the planet because the system does not want to change.

So how do you change the system? You’ve got to educate the people. Let them know that there’s something there that will work if you do it the right way. And it doesn’t have to be toxic. You don’t have to have your brain irradiated. You don’t have to have all this crazy stuff that they do.

Revisiting Otto Warburg’s Work

Yeah. So I always say, prove me wrong. Show me where the science that we have done is, because Otto Warburg said it originally. He had the Nobel Prize for discovering cytochrome C oxidase. I mean, the guy was a giant. But the gene, the tidal wave of genes washed him away. Now the genes have not given us the promised land. We have to go back and figure out what happened. Otto Warburg was correct.

Not always, not completely. We have now polished up, shown where he was right and where he was a little off base. And we brought in all this new stuff to show that cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disease that can be managed effectively with metabolic therapy.

RINA AHLUWALIA: And I wanted to just quickly summarize for people that just want that clippet of, ‘how do we fix your mitochondrial dysfunction?’ It’s through metabolic therapy.”

Metabolic Therapy Explained

So metabolic therapy, you focus on, so cancer drives off two things, and I’m just regurgitating everything that I’ve heard from you. Cancer drives off two things. You mentioned glucose and glutamine.

I wanted to just ask, because we know the glucose, which is the elevated excess sugar, doesn’t mean that you’re just eating a lot of sugar. It means that over a long period of time, you have a lot of blood glucose in your body, elevated glucose. Okay.

Questioning Glutamine’s Role in Cancer

And we can talk about how we can fix that one, which is the ketogenic diet. But I just wanted to ask about the glutamine, because glutamine is an amino acid. How does that make cancer worse?

TOM SEYFRIED: This is a very important question. Now you’re asking me to get into a little bit more of the deep chemistry. Well, that’s okay. What Otto Warburg did not know is that there is the glutamine fermentation. And the field thinks glutamine is respired, meaning that the mitochondrion cancer cells are healthy. Wrong. They’re not healthy. They’re sick.

However, in the mitochondria, there is a part of the pathway called the glutamine-glutaminolysis pathway, where the amino acid glutamine can be fermented to get energy without oxygen, not linked to oxidative phosphorylation. So it’s a second fermentation pathway that Otto Warburg and most of the cancer field does not know about. But my good friend and colleague, Christos Chinopoulos from Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, is the world leader on this pathway. And we, Christos and I, have shown clearly that this pathway is operational in cancer cells in the mitochondria.

So this has confused the field, because the field says, “Oh, mitochondria are still making ATP and still taking in oxygen, therefore Warburg must be wrong.” Oh, this is the big fallacy. The mitochondria in cancer are taking in oxygen, but it’s not linked to ATP through oxygen. It’s linked to the ATP from glutamine fermentation.

The Dual Nature of Cancer Cell Fermentation

So you’ve got glucose fermentation on one hand, producing carbon so the cells can grow and a little bit of energy in the cytoplasm. And then you get glutamine fermentation in the mitochondria that gives the nitrogen, so DNA and RNA can be synthesized in the tumor cells, and again, additional energy. So you’ve got to know the biochemistry of the problem to know how these cancer cells are living.

Now, if you target glutamine alone, the cancer cell will survive on the glucose. If you target glucose alone, the cancer cell can survive on the glutamine. So you have to target them both together. And the issue is, the cancer cell cannot use fatty acids or ketones because the mitochondria are dysfunctional. So the fatty acids and ketones that you have in a ketogenic diet or low GKI value is used for the brain and for the rest of the normal cells in the body. So the ketones and fatty acids are allowing the rest of our cells to survive without glucose so they can use an alternative fuel. Cancer cells can’t do that. They’re trapped into this fermentation mechanism.

So the solutions of the cancer problem simultaneously restrict the two fermentable fuels driving the dysregulated growth while transitioning the entire body off to a fuel that’s good for the normal cells but not good for the tumor cells. So this is the solution to the cancer problem? Absolutely. It’s just going to take time for the field to come to understand how to do this. Is this a cure for cancer? We don’t know. And we don’t like to use the term ‘cancer cure’ because we have no idea.

The Potential of Metabolic Therapy

Is it a therapeutic benefit to manage cancer? Absolutely. Will it cure cancer? We don’t know, but it can manage it. And we would say it will be the most effective way to manage cancer. Is it a cure or not? We have no idea. But we don’t know. The only thing we do know is it worked really well. It cured cancer in a dog that had a big mass tumor on it. I published that as well. This dog died of old age from heart disease, but the tumor that was supposed to kill it many years earlier dissolved.

So people can read that. I published that on the Open Access web. It’s getting a lot of attention in the veterinary world because you can manage these cancers in dogs just as well with metabolic therapy. So again, it’s unbelievable. Yeah, because cancers in dogs and humans and rats and mice, they all ferment. They’re all fermenters, regardless of what organ they come from. So just pull the plug on their fermentation fuels while transitioning the whole body over to ketones, and these tumor cells up and die.

You throw in a few drugs that push this system along a little bit more effectively, and you can live with the disease. You don’t have to feel this impending doom. You’re in charge of your own existence. So yeah, you have somebody, physicians need to know this. This is the tool of the future. I just told you the future of cancer management in the Western world, so it’s just a matter of time.

RINA AHLUWALIA: And it is just a matter of time, and people, it’s kind of like even keto or even carnivore or even all these diets that have taken time to adjust, and people understand that cholesterol is not bad for you. Cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease, all these different things. But I did want to clarify that so people could understand metabolic therapy, what that means. Glucose and glutamine, you’re targeting those two things, not just one, not just the other.

So one is using a bit of drugs for the glutamine to target and kill it. The other one is the ketogenic diet. It could be keto, carnivore, but I really, I love talking about foods, so talking about this side of things, the glucose, because people really understand foods. So I really wanted to just briefly, as a last thing, to talk about the worst foods that feed cancer cells.

Foods to Avoid in Cancer Management

If you could give a list of them, what would they be so that people would just totally avoid them?

TOM SEYFRIED: Highly processed foods.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Do you have a book there?

TOM SEYFRIED: I have my Twinkies. I bought Twinkies 10 years ago when we thought Hostess was going out of business. And I carry a box of Twinkies and I can pull it out. I have it up there. The Twinkie made 10 years ago, I can put it on a store shelf and people will buy it, think it was fresh. It’s like all chemical. Highly processed.

As a matter of fact, if you look at the ingredients of a Twinkie, most of the terms, most people can’t even pronounce the names of the chemicals that are in Twinkies. Highly processed carbohydrate foods. And that includes high fructose corn syrup. In fact, they’re now, some companies are saying “contains glucose” rather than high fructose corn syrup.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Because they think it sounds better because they know the fructose is the bad one, right? It’s a marketing thing.

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah. So I think anything that comes packaged, which is almost 90% of what we eat, is packaged in some way. Because it has shelf life. Once you give something shelf life, foods should not have long shelf lives. Good food will spoil on you real quick.

But those healthy foods, but most people don’t have access to that. We live in food, some people live in food deserts, where you only have highly processed carbohydrates. And a lot of people aren’t aware of that. So you put all this together and you have a problem, epidemics of obesity and cancer and all this other stuff.

So almost everything that we eat contains highly processed carbs. So people are going to say, ‘well, I’m going to go start the death of everything in my neighborhood is this.’ And the answer is, unfortunately, yes, this is the problem. And anything that comes wrapped up in a package is some sort of a process that had to go into producing that. But again, don’t eat too much of it.

The Quality of Meat and Cost Concerns

And then the meats, organic, you know, people say, “oh, you know, free-range meat is tough.” Well, you can use soy vegetables, you can get the toughness out of it. But it’s also more expensive. People say, “oh, grass-fed beef, you got to pay twice as much than corn.” Corn-fed beef is much more tender, so much more. But it doesn’t have the flavor that, well, I go through all this stuff because we talk to people about all these things.

I know what goes on behind all the stuff that-

RINA AHLUWALIA: Well, that’s the thing.

TOM SEYFRIED: Yeah, they’re made to taste very, very good. You got to realize-

RINA AHLUWALIA: You mentioned the, okay, even these small things, so even in the carnivore world or even in the keto world, we talk about, you know, grass-fed beef versus grain-fed beef. The fact is you’re eating beef versus Doritos, okay? Like you’ve got processed chips versus meat. Maybe that animal wasn’t fed the best diet, but they have a four-chamber stomach to actually break down all the crap that they’ve been eating and it can be better for us.

So it’s kind of like making better choices. But I think that even in the meat-based world, we still have highly processed foods like deli meats and they’re really not the greatest for us. But if you are on a budget and you can’t afford any of these things, get the fattiest cuts of meat because fat is not going to be inflammatory. Is that right?

TOM SEYFRIED: Some fats are. You have to be careful of the, you know, saturated fat is what’s broken down at the ketones. But getting back to what you said about the cold cuts and things, I, you know, I’m not a food expert. I don’t really know a lot about that stuff. But if all I know is if you eat very little of it, it generally doesn’t harm you that much. It’s when you start eating a lot of it.

RINA AHLUWALIA: That’s a fair point. That’s a fair point because how much of the carbohydrates do we eat in excess? And that’s the same thing with vegetables. Even though vegetables aren’t inherently bad for you, but the fact that we were told so much to eat so many vegetables, that’s why a lot of people can have some gut issues.

But if you’re talking about our ancestors, they weren’t eating that many vegetables. It was like a small handful. And then as you said, they were fasting for days, walking miles upon miles to kill an animal to eat. So the age is very different.

TOM SEYFRIED: So you can see that gorillas versus humans, gorillas have a big gut. They have a big belly because they’re plant eaters. So plant eaters have to have much longer digestive tract than carnivores because you can get the energy out of meat much faster than you can get the energy out of plants. So if you look at the gorilla, the gorilla compared to the chimpanzee, the gorilla has a bigger gut because it’s a purely vegetarian kind of animal, where the chimp is more omnivorous.

They’ll eat vegetables and meat, they’ll eat a lot of different things, but gorillas are pretty much locked into the vegetarian kind of diet, where humans are omnivores. If we evolved to eat plants, we would have a big gut like the gorilla has, but we don’t. We can eat anything that walks, crawls, or flies on this planet. That’s how we evolved. We were not too particular. Even eat each other, for crying out loud, to get some sort of a spiritual thing.

You go back in these societies, right? That’s how they got Kuru, which is a brain disease, from eating the flesh of your dead relative that had… I mean, you see all the crazy stuff that we as a species have done over the millennia. But no, I mean, our diet is quite varied. We can go from complete vegetarian or vegan, all the way up to pure carnivore.

But we have to have balanced nutrition, and what works for one person may not work for another person. So everybody has to work their own, what they think is best for them. And I think that’s why we developed the Glucose Ketone Index, at least it’s one quantitative measure that allows people to know about this rather than guessing.

At any event, I think that, yeah, food nutrition is very important. We have a problem in availability of the things that are really the most… And the cost is higher, the availability is less, and therefore we’re trapped into eating highly processed carbohydrates in a new cultural system where exercise is not as undertaken as much as it was in the past. And then we overdo it.

We go out and run like crazy to see if we can get it. And then we have hip replacements coming. Everybody’s getting a hip replacement, knee replacements, and all this kind of stuff, because they’re trying to run, trying to do too much exercise too fast. Obsessive compulsive behavior is also a problem among our species.

RINA AHLUWALIA: It’s the two extremes. It’s the high-carbohydrate processed foods, sit on the couch and watch Netflix, and then you have those, you know, “let me just be really, really strict on something and like run so much to burn calories,” or it’s somewhere in the middle, the middle, which is, you know, my grandfather or my grandfather’s grandfather, what they were eating, whole unprocessed food in smaller quantities, move, be happy.

And the levels of chronic inflammation were so low, cancer, heart disease, brain disease, kidney disease, liver disease. Right now, it’s just exponential, and it’s coming to the same root cause. And that’s why the work that you do is so important, so thank you for that.

Well, I just want to say, this is a great time to finish everything, because I think that we have spoken so much on every topic that points to the fact that cancer is preventable. It is something that we can have control over if we have the right lifestyle and diet. But I just want to say a big thank you for coming on and sharing everything, all your research. And if people want to see more of you, where can they find more of your work?

TOM SEYFRIED: Well, as I said, Rina, we publish, they can go, just put my name into Google and publications, and anything that’s open access, anybody can read. So it’s not hidden behind some wall, some, it’s out there, it’s out there for everybody to read. But they, some, they just have to read the papers.

And then we have a lot of YouTube videos, and we continue to publish this research. And we, and we have case reports, if you want to read about Pablo Kelly, the guy with the brain tumor who’s out now, over eight years, you can read about Pablo, email Pablo. He has, well, you can talk to him, so I don’t, ‘Pablo, I don’t believe you’re still alive.’ Well, he’ll tell you ‘I’m alive, and here’s my history, and here’s all the records.'”

So people can make up their own, their own mind about this. But again, open access, on the web, they have access to everything that I’m saying. So, so they can do that.

RINA AHLUWALIA: Well, I’ll try to link Professor Seyfried’s open access papers in the description of this video. So you can just click there, open it, read it, and find all the information that you need. But thank you so much for your time today, and I’m sure we’re going to see you very soon.

TOM SEYFRIED: Well, thank you very much, Rina, it was nice to be here.

RINA AHLUWALIA: I hope you love this interview with Dr. Seyfried, all about how to prevent cancer. Now, if you want to know how to prevent heart disease, you need to watch this video with Dr. Philip Ovadia. He’ll talk about the one food that is destroying your heart, and how to use diet to reverse heart disease. I’ll see you guys next week.

SUGGESTED BOOK FOR READING:

Cancer and the New Biology of Water

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