Dr. Katie Deming [00:00:00]:
Are you ready to unlock the secrets behind chronic diseases that plague our modern society? Join me as I explore the groundbreaking research of doctor Thomas Seifried, a distinguished professor of biology at Boston College, and author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. Prepare to uncover a hidden metabolic link that ties together most chronic illnesses. This eye opening insight not only sheds light on the origin of illness, but also offers hope for transformative change. You're listening to the Born to Heel podcast, and I'm your host, doctor Katie Deming. After 2 decades of practicing as an oncologist and caring for thousands of patients, I've seen first hand how our health care system places obstacles in your path to true healing. My guests and I will bridge the worlds of western medicine and alternative healing to co You achieve optimal health. Expect to uncover new insights, share a few laughs, and maybe even shed some tears along the way. But most of all, we'll learn how to heal from within together.Dr. Katie Deming [00:01:05]:
So let's dive into today's episode. Welcome doctor Thomas Seyfried. It's a pleasure to have you bond, the show today.

Thomas Seyfried [00:01:13]:
Thank you very much, doctor Deming. It's a real pleasure to be here and have this opportunity to speak with you.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:01:19]:
Thank you. You know, I wanted to start just by asking you, how did you initially become interested in cancer as a metabolic disease?

Thomas Seyfried [00:01:29]:
Well, you know, that's a 20 to 30 year story. It doesn't, you know, a lot of people ask me this and you'll hear me giving this description of how we all got into this because we as I said to people, we don't start our research scientific career Thinking we're going to manage this cancer problem using metabolic approaches. You know, we were all Predominantly indoctrinated into the idea that cancer was a genetic disease and we all studied oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes and Targeted therapies and we just heard a lot about all the mutations and you just talk about oncogenes and tumor suppressive genes as if you actually knew what was going on. And in in reality, we no one had any idea what was going on. All we knew, there was a lot of mutations. And we just told My students, oh, yeah, cancer's a genetic disease, you know, you have these different p53 mutations, does this, does that. And we didn't think about it because it was in the book and this is what you teach the students out of the book. But don't forget, we were deeply involved in research in Ganglioside Biochemistry, which is lipids that accumulate in the brain of patients Tay Sachs disease and these kinds of, rare lipid storage diseases.

Thomas Seyfried [00:02:46]:
But we were I was trained in fundamental neurobiology, biochemistry and genetics at the University of Illinois State University, moved my program to Yale University, Where I was in the neurology department, we were working on brain biochemistry. And at that time, Yale was one of the leading programs in epilepsy in the country. So, Doctor. Gil Glasser was there and a variety of other distinguished physician scientists. So I knew as a PhD in a clinical department of neurology, I would need to do something that was related to the mainstream of that department If I wanted to stay in the department and it was epilepsy, so we started looking at mapping epilepsy genes. And I actually wrote a paper or an internal grant At that time, to the medical school at Yale University indicating, you know, ketogenic diets for epilepsy are interesting and we had all these animal models of epilepsy And I wrote a nice little proposal up to see if we could treat mice with ketogenic diet and they had threw it back at me, so nobody's interested in that. This is like passe. This was stuff from the 1920s.

Thomas Seyfried [00:03:52]:
Today, we have all this, new drugs and all these guys. As a young scientist, I didn't know what to say. I said, okay, well, we just continued on mapping genes for epilepsy. But then, I was involved and I came up to Boston College After I was an assistant professor at Yale, I came up here as associate professor and we were still working on epilepsy and I got some really good epilepsy models And mapping the genes and we were looking at all these different kinds of things. At the same time, he was doing a lot of biochemistry and glycol like glycobiology. And one of my students, Doctor Marianna Tran, went to the one of the epilepsy meetings. I went to the epilepsy meetings to talk about the genetics of epilepsy. She came back and said, oh, This guy, Jim Abrams from California, the moviemaker.

Thomas Seyfried [00:04:37]:
His he makes the movie, the airplane movies and these kinds of things. And she said he's excited about, ketogenic diets for epilepsy. So I talked to Marianne, I said, Forget it, nobody's interested in that. That's what the guys at Yale told me in it. They were the leaders in epilepsy. So she's, oh, no. This guy, Jim Abrams, because his son, Charlie, they started the Charlie Foundation. He got Meryl Streep to do the her first do no do no harm.

Thomas Seyfried [00:05:01]:
So her influence, of course, being a superstar kinda brought the attention. And Jim, his son, Charlie, was on a near death being treated by conventional medication, standards of care, and he just his seizures were just unrelentless. They were relentless and uncontrolled and couldn't be managed. Finally, he found former colleagues at Johns Hopkins, John Freeman and Eric Sokoff and Kossoff and others, and it turned out that Charlie was put on this diet and his seizures Became managed and that was the movie Do No Harm and all this kind of stuff. But then I became very excited about this. I said, Wow, let's look into this a little bit more deeply. So I was involved In setting up some of the early workshops on ketogenic diets for epilepsy, and then we brought in more and more people. And at the first, it was only like a small group, maybe 5 or 8, 10 physician scientists that were interested in this and then by the time I stopped doing this, I mean, there were halls of people filled with wanted to know more about this.

Thomas Seyfried [00:06:00]:
So, yeah. So we started and then, you know, I was working on cancer at the same time, but it was brain cancer and it wasn't anything to do with management. It was all biochemistry, Brute Force Biochemistry, just to look at differences between human brain tumor biochemistry and mouse brain tumor biochemistry with the hope of finding some sort of parallelism. But then interestingly enough, as I tell others, we were working with these glyco biology synthesis, ganglioside synthesis Inhibitors with the hope that we could reduce the storage of material in the brains of kids with Tay Sachs disease. So, because if we could stop the accumulation of the ganglioside, the accumulating glycolipid, we might be able to help manage the disease called substrate reduction therapy. So they they gave me a drug and then, you know, one thing leads to another. We put the drug on some mice that had brain tumors. So, lo and behold, the drug that was Go to work to stop ganglioside biosynthesis had a huge effect on shrinking brain tumor in these mice.

Thomas Seyfried [00:06:57]:
So I called the company, I called the company that was making this drug, they got super excited. They said, Oh my God, we may have found this drug that can stop brain cancer. It's a very, very simple drug. And so, they gave me $200,000, this was twenty Some odd years ago to figure out how this drug was blocking brain cancer. And because they were all excited that it was gonna inhibit the ganglioside pathway, thereby, gangliosides Could be inhibited, play a big role in managing cancer. So we did all these studies and we noticed that the drug shrunk the tumors big time And stop ganglioside biosynthesis, but at the same time, it was making the mice body weight was reduced. So that was interesting. So we had this speculation.

Thomas Seyfried [00:07:41]:
Do you think the reduction of the Tumors had anything to do with the body weight loss rather than the restriction of the ganglioside biosynthesis. So we repeated the experiments and this time, we put in Mice that got no drug in their food, but we restricted the food so the body weight of the control group matched the body weight of the drug treated group And, we found strikingly that the tumor shrunk to the same exact size as the guys getting the drug. And then we realized that the drug, the mice were always eating, but they lost weight and that we couldn't figure this out because how is it possible the guys could eat the food and lose weight. The other guys were, the control guys were deprived of the food, so their body weight was maxed, but these other guys are still eating. So it turned out Interestingly enough, that the drug blocked sucrase is in the gut. So the animals were eating the food, but they couldn't digest it. Wow. So that accounted for why they shrunk.

Thomas Seyfried [00:08:37]:
But then when we looked at the biochemistry of the tumors in the brain, yes, the drug guys had Restricted ganglioside biosynthesis, but it wasn't that, it was the anti angiogenic effect of the calorie restriction That was causing the shrinkage of the tumor. And of course, the drug company was very unhappy, by the fact that their specta their super What the A blockbuster drug would just deprive mice of eating and the fact that they weren't able to digest their food, shrunk the tumors down. So this was not the kind of blockbuster you wanna really talk about. So, of course, the funding was pulled, the plug on the funding was pulled immediately And we did publish this. So why are we gonna publish it? It definitely reduces ganglion, shrinks the tumor, but we don't we don't want you to say that it was through body weight. I said, what do you mean the hell? That's the reason. That's what it worked by. You don't give me any stuff.

Thomas Seyfried [00:09:29]:
So anyway, we published the British Journal of Cancer. That was the end of my affiliation with the government. But anyway, that's the way science works. But it brought us to the idea, what was going on with this calorie restriction? Why are the tumors shrunk so much? And, we started to look and I knew from the work of epilepsy. We knew, and and this is another thing. We knew these ketogenic diets worked, but they work by lowering blood sugar. And you can get the same effect of a ketogenic diet as you can with water only fasting. So the epilepsy and the cancer were both going down as the result of managing lower blood sugars.

Thomas Seyfried [00:10:00]:
And we showed that. We showed clearly that the level of sugar was responsible for both the maintenance Of epilepsy, seizure inhibition, as well as shrinking tumors. And then we also knew the ketone bodies were going up when you fast, water only fasting and this kind of thing. Ketones go up, and that's the reason Wilder made the ketogenic diet in the 1st place back in 1921 at Mayo Clinic, mainly because He knew that water only fasting blocked epileptic seizures, but it wasn't a long term therapy. You had to have something. So he looked at water only fasting, saw a blood sugar go down, ketones go up. He says, let's build a diet that could do something like that so the patients don't have to starve to death while we're managing the seizures. So, that's how the ketogenic diet Got started.

Thomas Seyfried [00:10:44]:
But for the brain cancer, we we used a ketogenic diet, unrestricted, did not shrink the tumors. It was only when you calorie restricted it. That's why you could either you could either do it on a regular high carb diet or, a ketogenic diet as long as the blood sugars went down and the ketones went up. So it was that kind of a relationship. And then we said, had anyone ever noticed this before, other than anecdotal observations. And it all went back to the great scientist, doctor Otto Warburg, who clearly said cancers are driven by sugar. They're driven by sugar because the mitochondria Are dysfunctional. So the cell, all tumors have dysfunctional oxidative phosphorylation or mitochondria, ability to get energy from oxygen.

Thomas Seyfried [00:11:27]:
So he said they have, and in order for them to survive, they have to ferment and they use glucose as a fermentable fuel, which is energy without oxygen. So he was saying that the cancer cells are all fermenters because they they're oxygenated phosphorylation. They're mitochondria are defective. The reorgonell That's needed to get energy from oxygen is dysfunctional and therefore, the cells have to suck down a lot more glucose, to survive and it was a shift from OxFos to fermentation. So, we confirmed that. I wrote a big book on this whole thing, doing a deep dive on what Warburg said and why they attacked him and what was all the The fighting about and why people didn't understand that. So over the years, we clearly show that Otto Warburg was absolutely Correct, on defining the origin of cancer as a mitochondrial metabolic disease. He was correct that all cancers need to ferment.

Thomas Seyfried [00:12:16]:
He was incorrect in using the quantitative readouts, of oxygen consumption and lactic acid production to quantify How much energy was coming into these cancer cells? We have resolved all this now. And he did not know about the 2nd form of fermentable fuel, which was glutamine, And that's our big thing. Every, I shouldn't say, when I say big thing, if you ask anybody in the cancer field, They're all, oh, yeah, we know glutamine. Glutamine is a powerful fuel for cancer, but they all think it's respired. We're saying it's fermented, So there's a big difference here. It's how you use the fuel, okay? How is the cell using the fuel? Our immune cells, normal immune cells, use glutamine And they respire it. It's an anaplerotic, that means the carbons of glutamine are going into the TCA cycle, anaplerosis. But when cancer cells take in glutamine, they are not doing the anaplerosis, they're doing the fermentation and they're throwing out a waste product called succinic acid.

Thomas Seyfried [00:13:16]:
So there's a big difference and this is the the battle lines right now in the cancer metabolism field, scientist to scientist, Lab group to lab group. The battle is that is that cancer cells are fermenting an amino acid called Glutamine. They're not respiring it. Normal cells can respire, but not the cancer cell, they ferment. Normal cells can respire glucose, cancer cells fermented. So so that Warburg was right. And then I went through the entire, ancient literature on electron microscopy, ultrastructure. I had to go through And look at all these guys at the major hospitals looking at mitochondria under the electron microscope of all these cancer cells.

Thomas Seyfried [00:13:56]:
And in every one, I saw damaged, cristae, broken mitochondria, few mitochondria, all the things that Warburg actually said. But, At his time, they didn't have the electron micro. He didn't actually see the structural abnormalities that we now can see very, very clearly. So it explains the linkage for why cancer cells are fermentors because the structure needed for them to generate energy through oxidative phosphorylation Is defective. Now that's still a major controversy in my area because they're using all these sophisticated dedicated new respiration instruments like a seahorse. And they say, oh, the cancer cells are sucking down oxygen real good and they're making ATP through mitochondria. And I'm now going a little deep here on it, But, you know, some people always ask me, can you can you get to the guts of this problem? And the problem is is that cancer cells take in oxygen, but they're not using it efficiently for for making energy. So, they're using it for other things like making reactive oxygen species, ROS, which are carcinogenic and mutagenic.

Thomas Seyfried [00:14:55]:
So that's when we found out that all these mutations that the cancer field is studying are all downstream epiphenomenon of damage to the oxidative phosphorylation. So we have spent 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars on the genome projects and all these precision medicines and all this kind of stuff Looking for things that are downstream effects. They're not the cause, they're the effects. So this then brings everything back into perspective. So When the National Cancer Institute says cancer is a genetic disease, they're wrong. They're not correct. They don't look at the data, But it's become such a dogmatic view that all this, the grants, the NIH grants, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, They're all in building immunotherapies and all these targeted therapies, precision medicine. It's all based on a flawed theory.

Thomas Seyfried [00:15:40]:
It's not a genetic disease, it's a metabolic disease. And once you realize that, the entire paradigm of how you manage cancer will change. I could go on for but you asked me to give you an overview, and I'm sorry I have to go a little bit deeper. And I found over these years, most of the Folks in our country are scientifically illiterate and the people treating the disease, cancer, almost clueless as to the biology and biochemistry that underlies The dysregulated cell growth and the patients who come into these guys also have no clue. So you have the blind leading the blind And as the result of this, you have, almost 1700 people a day dying from cancer in the United States. And when I start my cancer class every Tuesday Thursday, we have to recognize in the 1 hour of my class, we'll have 70 dead people from cancer In the United States, in 1 hour, you'll have 70 dead people. And this is going on every day, day in and day out, week after week, month after month, year after year. It's not changing.

Thomas Seyfried [00:16:40]:
It's only getting worse, so it's never gonna change big time until you recognize that this is a metabolic disorder and not a genetic disorder. The problem is it's too radical. It's too disruptive to an entire system in an industry. So, people are, they just can't discuss it and they deny it. Well, there's no clinical trials. Oh, I haven't heard about that. I would have had it medical school, I would have done that. There's always some non scientific excuse, it's happening and it works and it will work even better Once the physicians understand what to do and how to do it.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:17:10]:
I couldn't agree with you more on so many of your points, but as being, you know, trained western trained medical doctor, and then radiation oncologist. And actually, you know, in my specialty, we have to take 2 years of advanced cancer biology biology and radiation physics. Everything that we're taught is about the DNA, that the DNA is the cause, and that this is what's ingrained into us, even though, you know, my specialty was breast cancer and gynecologic cancers. And in breast cancer specifically, I know that only 5 to 10% of it is genetically related. The rest is spontaneous, and we say we have no idea. And so it's interesting that we're trained into this paradigm to think that it's the cause, but then in practice, it's clearly a minority where they have a genetic mutation.

Thomas Seyfried [00:18:00]:
Well, even the genetic nation like BRCA 1 or p 53 for the leaf realm any or some of the other Mutations, I have tracked them all down and none of them are a 100% penetrant, meaning that there's secondary risk factors. Because as women with BRCA One mutations don't get breast cancer. But those who do get breast cancer, it damages oxidative phosphorylation. So the mutation is a secondary risk factor. Some woman could have breast cancer because of intermittent hypoxia, systemic inflammation, from radiation, from a viral infection. There's a lot of ways that you can get the same thing that looks like the same under the microscope that have a multiple different causes, but every one of those Cells in that breast cancer are fermenters. And regardless of what their genetic mutations look like, they're all fermenting. Every cell in the tumor That's neoplastic and dysregulated in its cell growth is fermenting.

Thomas Seyfried [00:18:51]:
There's only 2 fuels that drive fermentation and that's glucose and glutamine, And they can't burn fatty acids or ketone bodies, so now you have a clear plan to manage them. And I can't tell you how many women with stage 4 breast cancer or these Terminal, like you would use not these kinds of terminologies, but can be managed and they have a high quality of life. And I don't know how long they're gonna survive, but they certainly feel better when they were at 35 with a with a advanced stage breast cancer, they die from old age, Then you know that person was obviously cured, but you wouldn't be able to say that, until until you know that they went that long Because you never can really know if you've cured. It could come back 10, 20 years later. But the issue is is that you have a level of control. You can control your destiny to a to a large extent if you know that the cells in your tumor, wherever it's a a colon, Ovarian, breast, brain, doesn't make a difference. They're all very, they all ferment. So, but you have this extra control mechanism.

Thomas Seyfried [00:19:51]:
We have, Pablo Kelly, I've been working with him now for 9 years, a glioblastoma guy from England. He has a little website he can tell you all about his. He just finished his 3rd debulking surgery. He never took radiation, chemo, or anything. He just used metabolic therapy. Is he cured? No. Is he alive and doing well? Yes, he's had a family and all this since he's had his tumor, but he rejected all the standard of care because he knew it was gonna damage him. And we know, in glioblastoma, I published papers.

Thomas Seyfried [00:20:22]:
Majority of people who die from glioblastoma are dying from the treatment. They're dying from the radiation. They freeze up massive amounts of glucose and glutamine in the microenvironment of the tumor leading to recurrence and death. And we think that if we avoid radiation to the brain, we think we can keep peace people. I'm not saying we cure them, but they certainly can live a hell of a lot longer at a higher quality of life, And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You know, if you're doubling their lifespan and they have a good quality of life, I think that's a major advance. And some of these guys like Pablo, he's still alive. So, how many more can we have like that? So, I'm very hopeful for the future.

Thomas Seyfried [00:20:58]:
I I just don't know how long it's gonna take for the system to understand this and change.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:21:04]:
Well, I mean, I think the incentives are against having a systemic change to adopt this because it's, you know, free to do a diet rather than doing some drug. And so I think the incentives in terms of, and also within the research and everything like you said, you know, the grants were pulled when basically it showed it wasn't the diet, it wasn't the drug, it was, you know, the restriction of the calories. One question that I have for you is basically, you're saying that cancer is a dysfunction of the mitochondria, and that this is what is leading to fermentation within the cells. The cells are using glucose, and we can use the ketogenic diet as a therapeutic means to basically starve the cancer cells. But one of the questions that I have for you is, like, thinking, you know, I have a lot of nurse who don't have cancer yet. The statistics are not good in terms of where we're headed as a society with 50% of the population projected to develop cancer in a lifetime mind by 2030. What are the things that people are doing that they can help with their mitochondrial function even before they get cancer, and then also once someone has cancer in addition to doing the ketogenic diet, what are other mitigating factors there that are in the mitochondria.

Thomas Seyfried [00:22:18]:
Yeah, well, that's an excellent, excellent question. I know a lot of people have that have that same question. As I wrote in my book, it's very difficult to get cancer If your mitochondria remain healthy, and how do you then maintain healthy mitochondria? And that is you have to do exercise and you have to make sure That your obesity is now replacing smoking as one of the most prominent risk factors for cancer. And I think, I mean, let's be honest, lack of exercise, obesity, systemic inflammation, all these kinds of stress, emotional stress is another provocative agent. All of these, in one way or another, will cause chronic damage to the mitochondria leading to compensatory fermentation and the risk of dysregulated cell growth in some population of cells in some part of the body. So I said I did started working with ketogenic diets for epilepsy, which is kind of a more traditional thing now, rather than some alternative type of approach. But we learned The ratio of glucose to ketones in the blood, and we developed the meter, the calculator is called the glucose ketone index. And, you'll hear a lot of cancer patients or, oh, I don't wanna do a keto.

Thomas Seyfried [00:23:32]:
Oh, it's horrible. I get diarrhea, it haunts the patient or whatever whatever they have. But We found out that you can take any diet as long as you can get your GKI down to a ratio of 2.0 or below. It's you're gonna make your mitochondria very, very healthy because they're gonna be burning ketone bodies. And ketone bodies protect The metabolic efficiency of the mitochondria prevent reactive oxygen species, maintains your mitochondria in a healthy state. So people say, well, how do I do that? What can I eat? And the answer is water only fasting will do it. But, oh, I don't want it because there anything else you can give me. I don't wanna do that.

Thomas Seyfried [00:24:10]:
You know, of course, nobody wants this. It's hard. I tried to let people do it. I tried it, brutal. The issue is, is we do low carb for a week or 10 days, Because that allows the body to slowly transition away from the availability of dietary introduced carbohydrates. And then we jump into water fasting for cancer patients. This is the jump now becomes so much less stressful to the body because their body has already semi acclimated To this new metabolic state, this new homeostatic state. So, ketones are naturally starting to elevate.

Thomas Seyfried [00:24:44]:
Your body is now going after your fat And the fat in your cells, your adipose sites are mobilized and put into the bloodstream and it goes to the liver And the liver, it's like those fats are like putting branches in a wood chipper. Outcome the water soluble ketone bodies, Which then subserved the energy of almost all cells in our body, okay? So the liver makes this K of energy for all the heart, brain, and all these other cells, that that can use an alternative to glucose. So then when you jump into water only fasting, it's not so traumatic. Yes. Still is to some extent, but not as bad as if you go cold turkey. And the exercise is absolutely important for managing your health. We are sitting in traffic, on cell phones in traffic, listening to books on tape in traffic, but sitting in traffic is stressful And doesn't do anything for your cardiovascular system. Our Western diet and lifestyle puts us at risk For all the chronic diseases that are presently crippling the health of our nation.

Thomas Seyfried [00:25:51]:
So I also I sometimes look at it as a national security risk. We're putting so many people at risk and don't forget, we evolved during the paleolithic period. There weren't Dunkin' Donuts and delicatessens on every corner during a paleolithic period. We were always in a level of semi ketosis Because it was hard to get food where we had to use a lot of energy to kill and eat something or catch something. That was before the agricultural cultural revolution in the Neolithic period. So most of it, we evolved as hunter gatherers. Only did we, in the near 10,000 somewhat years Did we start planting corn and rice and wheat and this kind of thing where we can build civilizations around the food, so we didn't have to spend all our time chasing down buffaloes and whatever else we But that was our historical history. We have an incredible capability of storing energy Because we evolved in an energy depleted environment.

Thomas Seyfried [00:26:47]:
Now, the obesity epidemic is evolution in action. People wanna know what evolutionary biology is? It's the obesity epidemic. Because now we have all this energy that we never had access to and we store it. We store it because we're gonna be starving to death if we don't. So the obesity epidemic is evolution in action, but now it's putting us at risk for cancer type 2 diabetes, Dementia, macular degeneration, cardiovascular disease, name, they go right down the list. It's all diet lifestyle and that's kind of a cliche, diet lifestyle, diet lifestyle. Okay, if you're walking 3 to 4 miles a day, every single day, and you're not eating a lot of carbohydrates, you're putting yourself at a better place to be resistant to some of these things, including cancer. We are in charge of our own destiny, but we are tempted.

Thomas Seyfried [00:27:31]:
We have temptations all over the place. Just walk out to any downtown section of the aroma of the baked goods, the aroma of the barbecue grills. I mean, it's just like, wow, this is unbelievable. So, I'm not saying we should not do any of this, but to do it every day and highly processed carbohydrate foods, This is like semi poison to us and it stores wasted energy, poorly nutritious food, But yet the calories, the glucose is stored in fat. So the glucose from what we eat is stored as fat. And people always say, how is it possible you were to fat diet Like a ketogenic lose weight because you can't store fat well, you either burn it or excrete it. You don't store it very well, But glucose is stored, glucose is gold. You don't pee out glucose unless you're a diabetic.

Thomas Seyfried [00:28:22]:
Glucose is stored in fat That's how we get so it's the sugar that's making the fat, not the fat. And the food industry puts on all low fat diet. What low fat means high carb. So you eat low fat, you're gonna get fat. So, you know, it's just the marketing of how the industry works. And don't tell me, this stuff It's delicious. I mean, you eat a jelly filled for me. I had a jelly filled dog, are you kidding me? Especially with these special chops, it's delicious, you know? But I know if I eat too many of them, I'm gonna be in the in in in the ward.

Thomas Seyfried [00:28:51]:
Yeah. Only if he's demented, type 2, diabetes, cancer, some damn thing.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:28:55]:
Well, and I think the the point that you're making is that the rise in all of these diseases are related to the same cause. It's not like we think of them all as different. Grant. Like cancer is different from diabetes, from neurodegenerative disease, but it's all related to lifestyle and metabolic, you know, disease. This is basically, we're in an epidemic of metabolic disease, but I wanna come back. So you said, you know, low carb for 10 days. I'm wondering if you can just explain what to you is low carb. Like, what is the grams that you would say is considered low carbs?

Thomas Seyfried [00:29:27]:
Well, again, we try to do it based on the glucose ketone index.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:29:30]:
Okay. So as long as their GKI is less than 2 that's basically okay.

Thomas Seyfried [00:29:33]:
Yes, and everybody is not everybody, but many people are different from each other. So what might be easy for 1 person may not be as easy for another person. So if someone were a vegetarian, they may have to choose foods that would be a little different from the carnivore, from the pescatarian, from the Mediterranean. So everybody would have to look at what they like. And they always ask me, can I eat this? Can I have no idea? You didn't see what it does to your GKI. If it makes it go up, don't eat that.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:29:59]:
No. Absolutely. And I think, actually, this is an important factor because, you know, recently, I've done some work using continuous glucose monitoring, and seen that, gosh, with different clients, they really respond so differently and our bodies are all different. And so and I actually just got a meter from, keto mojo, to test this to see because I hadn't used, GKI before. But okay, so if you do 10 days of low PARB keeping the GKI less than 2.

Thomas Seyfried [00:30:30]:
Well, don't forget now, this is what we have for the cancer patient. Okay, so, and sometimes we have to work with them a little different than the healthy young or the healthy person, Okay, a healthy person might do 3 or 4 days of low carb and realize that. So, you start off by measuring your Glucose Ketone Index And you'll see how it changes during the course of a day. So in the morning, it could be high, we call it the dawn effect. And then during the course of the day, you can see it Changing and most of the time, ketones are very low in the bloodstream. I mean, they're there at a 0.1 millimolar or 0.2 millimolar, But as you stop eating and exercise, you begin to see the GKI go down and what that means is The blood sugar is going down while the ketones are going up and you divide the glucose by the ketones in milli molar and then you can get a singular number And it's the ratio of 1 fuel, the glucose to another fuel, the ketone body in the bloodstream of the person at that moment in time. They can match How how it goes. And then all of a sudden, you'll say, man, this is tough, man.

Thomas Seyfried [00:31:40]:
I can't get my GKI down to 2.0. What do I have to do? I said, stop Or stay on the low carb. So anybody that would be a vegetarian or a vegan, they would have to choose those foods That would be low, have low glycemic index, which means how fast sugar would be produced into the blood from eating that, Okay, so they asked me, what about fruits? Oh, yeah, fruits. Well, I said eat the fruit and see what it does to your GKI. If it makes it go up, don't eat that. But when we worked with epilepsy kids, My colleagues, my physician knew that grapefruit was a good way to get a vitamin C And it was a low glycemic fruit. So it provided the great vitamin C and minerals, but it didn't have a high glycemic index As opposed to a banana, you know, or something like this. But everybody will have to experiment in their own lifestyle Going through, and it's kind of a game.

Thomas Seyfried [00:32:41]:
As you go through, you can start to see your GKI going down over the days. Oh, And you get all excited. Geez, it went down by 10 points. Oh, look, it's going down by another 10 points. Let me eat this thing, boom, back up there. Now I know I can't eat that. So, and you're right about the free Libra. I understand from my colleagues, that there might be a similar kind of measurement for ketones as well.

Thomas Seyfried [00:33:04]:
So you might be able to get your GKI directly, real time. But I think that technology is on its way. The keto mojo right now, you have to prick your finger and get a drop of blood and measure with the glucose strip, the glucose, And then with the ketone strip, the ketones, the meter does the conversion, and then you get the results, but if they can do it with a free Libra, then you really have, you don't have to be pricking your finger, and in the epilepsy field, this was always a problem for us. It was the little kids didn't want their fingers pricked to determine What their glucose and ketone levels were. So I think that's coming down. It would be a great technology and allows the patient then, the individual, to take charge of their own destiny With respect to their diets, what they can eat, what they can't eat, and they'll have come to know. Now we built glucose ketone index calculator For cancer patients, in particular, glioblastoma patients. But since we built that, now we've learned the web, All these young, athletic men and women, they all wanna be buff and they wanna be looking tough and they all go on, what's your GKI? I'm looking like, look at the muscle, look at this.

Thomas Seyfried [00:34:13]:
I have no fat and all this. I didn't make it for that. I didn't make it for those people. I made it for the cancer folks. But then we know the cancer folks have a much More difficult time getting into these low GKIs, sometimes because of emotional stress. What we found is that, and I think you know very much about this. The fear of the diagnosis creates a hormonal glucocorticoids, Which is a fear response raising blood sugar. Consequently, the fear of the diagnosis makes it a little harder to get into a low GKI.

Thomas Seyfried [00:34:45]:
So, one of the A big parts of our Press PULSE therapeutic strategy for managing cancer is stress management. You have to bring the individual stress down So that the metabolic, homeostasis begins to take hold. So again, stress management is an extremely component for effective cancer Management because once you get that glucose down, then we take drugs and when you get into the low GKI levels, cancer killing drugs become super powerful, To kill at low doses. So it's really amazing. You don't have to have hair loss. You don't have to have all of these horrific adverse effects to kill cancer cells, Once you've taken away their fermentable fuels or significantly reduce them, and then we can slowly degrade the tumor Over time and, like some of the folks that I know, if they had hypertension, high blood pressure, diabetes, all of this stuff goes away while you're degrading your tumor. So you emerge as a kind of a new evolved guy. You don't have cancer, you don't have diabetes.

Thomas Seyfried [00:35:45]:
Now, this is this is not a good good news for the for the pharmaceutical industries. In other words, I can target all these things simultaneously by using a glucose ketone index.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:35:54]:
Well, and can you speak a little bit to water fasting? Because you started to talk about that, but so with someone with cancer, and I know you're also doing the Press Pulse therapy with the Glutamine, but I'm just wondering can you and I actually did have Lauren Lachman on the show who does, you know, prolonged water fasting Costa Rica. You know, talk about that, but I'm wondering if but the interesting thing is he deny it was interesting because he was telling me that the fasting was detoxifying the cells and then also in improving immunity, and that was the mechanism. And I said, but you're missing. It's also basically putting them into ketosis. And it was interesting because he kinda downplayed that part of it. But I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to water fasting, and and what type of fasting, like how long are are you?

Thomas Seyfried [00:36:40]:
Well, when we did calorie restriction in the mouse, Published a big paper on this, nutrition and metabolism, where we were characterizing the blood changes in a mouse with a 40% restriction of its food versus a human water only fasting. And because the differences in basal metabolic rate between a mouse and a human, You can't use, you can't use value in the mouse like what would be equal to a human. So 40% restriction in a mouse is is comparable With lowering blood sugar and elevating ketones and reducing blood triglycerides as well. So we matched human and water only fasting in human is like a 40% calorie restriction in a friction in a mouse, but don't forget the mouse has a 7 fold higher basal metabolic rate than human. Don't forget their heartbeat. No. We're talking about, about 70, 60 to 70 beats per minute. Mouse has 600, 600 beats a minute.

Thomas Seyfried [00:37:34]:
So so you have to do these conversions like measured of a year. A head would blow off the guy if he had a 600. So the the, So we're trying to we're trying to match the the basal metabolic rates to to to figure out what's going on. So so yes, water only fasting Is comparable to a 40% restriction in calories to a mouse to produce the same, physiological changes in the blood. When when I and my students And associates first started to realize how you kill cancer cells by lowering blood sugar and elevating ketones and targeting glutamine. We didn't wanna appear like nuts, like some whack jobs. Oh, yeah. You wanna get rid of your cancer? Don't eat for 21 days.

Thomas Seyfried [00:38:12]:
You know what? What a what a jackass. Who's gonna who's gonna do that? You know, so I said, well, why don't we try these like ketogenic diets restricted and make it a little bit less traumatic to tell this Poor cancer guy, I'll come in today, okay, doctor, instead of, and we used to say, you know, take one of these pills A day with water and that's all you take each day for 3 weeks. Well, without food. You know, we say take the pill without With food. Right? They always say, take this pill with a meal. Oh, yeah. Take this pill once a day with no meal for 21 days. Well, they think you're nuts.

Thomas Seyfried [00:38:45]:
Could I get a second opinion on this? So we said, let's move the field slowly Into this realization that a change in metabolic homeostasis can be done with restricted diets and maybe some modifications, But now I'm seeing more and more folks are telling me, oh no, you got a 21 way water only fasting. And I've met so many people, cancer patients, Who have eliminated their tumor like Geithannenbaum, doing this and I didn't tell them to do that. I just, first of all, I'm not a physician, I can't tell anybody what to do or what not I just have educational material that they can look at, make their own decisions, but Guy got rid of all of his, diabetes, cancer, and everything. And I've seen more and more people. Here's what happens. You asked the question. Okay, I wrote this paper called Autolytic Cannibalism, I write a habit in my book. The body is a unique machine.

Thomas Seyfried [00:39:36]:
All the organs are working together, the brain, the colons, I mean, the gut, The, liver, kidneys, we all have this machinery in our body all working together For the good of the whole and when there's enough energy consumed, the cells of the body are all sufficient in their energy. So there's no lookout for anything that's not efficient. There's no surveillance because everybody, all the cells seem to be the brain, Everything is sated, satiated. But then when you start lowering the blood sugar by water only fasting, the body starts to look Around, okay, you start mobilizing fats out of your post tissue. And then as you continue to do that, the normal cells of the body, The brain cells and the liver cells and the kidney cells all start looking for the valuable fuel, which is glucose and, there's a threshold. So now these cancer cells that are absolutely dependent that were not recognized by the normal body because everybody was fat and happy, But when you start lowering this level of energy, the body then will turn on any group of cells, it's called autophagy. And the mitochondria in the cells are then recognized as being not efficient. Parts of the mitochondria are go to the lysosome and are digested.

Thomas Seyfried [00:40:58]:
Only what remains is the singular most efficient metabolic system. And if you have cells that are consuming Excessive amounts of a valuable fuel for everybody else. The body will turn and eat those cells and redistribute The energy to the rest of the body called autolytic self cannibalizing cells in your body that are not energy efficient and those are cancer cells. So then, if you can stay in these zones of low sugar, elevated ketones, the body will eventually attack. And this is the shot, the thing that we're seeing. Some of these guys They come out cancer. What happened to my tumor? Where did it go? The body ate it and this you have to know is evolutionary biology. So once you understand evolutionary biology.

Thomas Seyfried [00:41:42]:
All this cancer stuff makes sense. The problem is almost nobody knows anything about evolutionary biology. So you're doing all these crazy things That are not consistent with how we all evolved on the planet. So and that's what we go back to the cancer cells. They're using ancient fermentation pathways That existed before oxygen came into the atmosphere 2,500,000,000 years ago. So they're just falling back on heirloom pathways. All of our cells have those same heirloom pathways, But they're only very minor in producing energy. But when the cancer cell can't get good energy from oxidative phosphorylation, They fall back and those pathways become the dominant form of energy.

Thomas Seyfried [00:42:19]:
So their fermentation, they're just nothing more than what we evolved that this before. This was, we had a lot of organisms on the planet before oxygen came into the atmosphere. Don't forget our earth evolved in a hypoxic environment 1000000000 of years ago. There was a yet we have fossils of these cells that lived and they were all fermenters and they would grow dysregulated growth until the fermentable fuel was used up and they would die. And we do the same strategy to kill cancer. We just take away their fermentable fuels while enhancing the health and vitality of the normal cells with ketone bodies. Cancers can't use the ketones. It becomes a restricted fuel only for normal cells, not the tumor cell.

Thomas Seyfried [00:42:56]:
It's beautiful. It's unbelievable When you start to see the power of what your body can do when given the opportunity to heal itself.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:43:02]:
It it's amazing. And I and I love talking to you because you know the science so deeply, which is fascinating to listen. I have a question for you. Is the idea of cancer cells growing more rapidly, and if the the DNA changes are really just effects of this malfunctioning mitochondria. Why does it appear that they're growing faster? And actually, so doctor Tom Cowan, I read his book water in the new biology or cancer in the new biology of water. And he talks in there about that, like, maybe that the cancer cells aren't growing faster, and I'm just and also he says that the DNA damage is an effect, and I'm just wondering if you can speak to that idea of why would the cancer cells be growing faster if they're dysfunctional and using fermentation for their metabolism?

Thomas Seyfried [00:43:54]:
So they use fermentation for their metabolism.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:43:57]:
Yeah, they do. But

Thomas Seyfried [00:43:58]:
Why do they grow faster? Okay. Brace yourself. Brace yourself, you want the, do you want the answer to this question?

Dr. Katie Deming [00:44:05]:
I want the answer, yes.

Thomas Seyfried [00:44:07]:
Okay, okay. The organelle that maintains the differentiated state Is the mitochondria, okay? The mitochondria controls the differentiated quiescent state of the cell. The cell is alive Whether it's a liver cell, a lung cell, colon, whatever it is, and it's doing its programmed activities. They call them housekeeping, whatever it is. All that energy is efficiently distributed from the mitochondria through oxidative phosphorylation. When that organelle also, if The cell has to repair or in the gut, you have these constant crypt cells that come in there. There's a regulated rips of cells. There's growth, but it's a regulated growth, not a dysregulated growth.

Thomas Seyfried [00:44:52]:
It's the mitochondrion That maintains the regulate The quiescent state and the growth of the cell. When that organelle becomes corrupted, Losing its ability to produce energy through oxidative phosphorylation. The cell begins to grow out of control because the regulatory system itself Loses the control. And all this is very, very intriguing because we know about the thing called the cell cycle, The mitosis, the DNA synthesis, the resting and all this, this is all controlled by cyclins, checkpoints and all this kind of stuff. That's all regulated by the calcium gradients from the mitochondria. So if the mitochondria calcium gradients start to fall because they're no longer getting energy from respiration, The controlling mechanism of cell division and control of growth goes out the window. So the cell gradually loses it's the controller of the destiny of the cell is now taken off. You know, people always say cancer cells are, they have a growth advantage, such an incredibly stupid question, statement.

Thomas Seyfried [00:46:00]:
It's not that they have a growth advantage, they're dysregulated because the regulator is broken. You wanna see what regulation growth looks like? The liver regeneration, you know that a lobe taken off of someone's liver, the liver will regenerate that lobe And those regenerating liver cells grow faster than any tumor, than any hepatoma liver tumor. So, and why they know exactly when to stop. They don't continue to grow out of control. It's under control growth, and that's because the mitochondria are directing that.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:46:30]:
That was amazing, because that like, that has always not made sense to me. Like if they're dysfunctional, then why do we talk about them being, you know, growing more aggressively and faster. It's like having a car that works better when it's broken than, you know, when it's fully functional. So that makes sense to me.

Thomas Seyfried [00:46:49]:
Oh, everything. People have been nuclear centric in biology for centuries because they could see the nucleus under the microscope. It was very hard to see the mitochondria, it was kind of amorphous stuff, but now we're realizing that it's the mitochondria that are the controllers, Not only of the cell cycle, not only of the functionality of the cell, but also aging. When we die by natural causes, Our bodies just simply shut down energetically. That's because the mitochondria have reached their endpoint and, none of us are going to live to be 200 years old, But we can certainly allow us to live a little bit longer if we keep our mitochondria healthy. And this is the mitochondrial theory of aging That reactive oxygen species by just breathing air for decades causes wear and tear on your mitochondria and eventually sustain, you cannot Avoid equilibrium. And I always said equilibrium is death. When the mitochondria can no longer produce energy, The ionic currents across the membrane reach equilibrium and you're dead.

Thomas Seyfried [00:47:53]:
That's it, we have no longer any energy. An energy is life, without energy, we don't live. Cancer cells are immortal, as long as they have fermentable fuels in the microenvironment. And this was exactly what happened before oxygen came in 2,500,000,000 years ago. They were dysregulated in their growth. They have no regulation because the mitochondria had not yet, merged to be the symbiosis between cyanobacteria and these And these other bacteria that came together to form this hybrid thing, which was the beginning of metazoans where we get a multicellular division of labor within everything. Before that, it was just Growth out of control, no mitochondria, no. So a cancer is just falling back on this ancient pathway.

Thomas Seyfried [00:48:30]:
They do not have a growth advantage. They have no growth control and it looks like they're growing out of control. There's no control here. And once you know that it's driven by fermentation, Plucose and Glutamine, and they can't burn fatty acids or ketones. This is the path. It's very clear how to manage cancer.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:48:47]:
Yeah. Well, and I love too, that you brought in the whole role of stress because that's one of the things with GMs is monitoring patients' glucose. They'll say, I ate the same thing as I ate yesterday. Why is my glucose higher? And it's really, you know, what happened? What just friend that day before you had that measurement. And I love this that you're bringing attention to it, that stress you know, I I put it together for, like, weight loss when we're trying to help patients lose weight, understanding that stress plays a low role in that, but I love how you connected the diagnosis and the fear related to that not only is releasing stress hormones, which ultimately affects our ability to heal, but it's also raising the sugar, which is further complicating the problem.

Thomas Seyfried [00:49:33]:
And the other thing too seen from many published papers, people who get radiation. Regardless of where it is, if it's any part of the body, it creates a stress and blood sugar goes through the roof after you irradiate somebody and Chemo and a lot of the things that we do to people, raises all this blood sugar. All these things can make the cancer, it's hard to kill A tumor cell when it has a load of its fermentable fuels in the microenvironment. So when we, in our Press PULSE concept, we use spirituality, prayer, Massage therapy, Aqua pump, anything that lowers the stress that a person feels comfortable doing While knowing that if you have a low GKI, you take small doses of the drugs that target glutamine and glucose, You can degrade slowly your tumor while maintaining a very high level of overall health. It doesn't have to be all this toxic treatment. It doesn't have to be all this that speaks to a fundamental lack of knowledge on understanding the biology and biochemistry of the disorder you're trying to treat. So, we put all that together over years, and I have to be honest without an understanding of evolutionary biology, none of this stuff would be known. I have to know that because I read this stuff.

Thomas Seyfried [00:50:48]:
I look at this stuff. I tested in my lab. And then of course, metastatic cancer is interesting Because we have shown that the metastatic cancer cell, regardless of whether it's a breast, a colon, a lung, they're macrophage, they characterize professor. Macrophage is an immune cell in our body. It's called, it's like the Marine Corps, either your best friend or your worst enemy. It's designed to attack and kill bacteria in our body, okay? If you get a stab wound or a broken bone or anything like that and the skin is breached, Bacteria get in, and then we have monocytes pouring out of the bloodstream, maturing into macrophages to kill the invading bacteria because if we don't beat that Down real quick. We're gonna be dead from an infection, sepsis or something like this. So those cells are macrophages And they're heavily glutamine dependent.

Thomas Seyfried [00:51:43]:
Now, when you have an incipient cancer, like a wound that doesn't heal, And it's there for long periods of time, could be decades. The macrophages are always in there trying to facilitate wound healing. And what happens sometimes they release growth factors and cytokines that are supposed to facilitate wound healing, but in that context, It actually stimulates these dysregulated cells to grow a little faster. And then they're getting bigger, causing a bigger disturbance in the micro environment And macrophages have this unique biological capability. They're fusogenic. They will fuse with each other and sometimes fuse with these cancer cells. The cancer cell at that point, the dysregulated cell has no capacity to spread anywhere other than that in that focal area. So what happens is it fuses with the very cell trying to heal the wound, and then the cytoplasm of this macrophage becomes diluted with the abnormal chondria from the cancer cell.

Thomas Seyfried [00:52:40]:
And now you have this dysfunctional macrophage, a rogue, what already is programmed Enter and exit tissues and spread around your body. So when I found out that all these metastatic because are essentially fusion hybrid between one of our immune cells, I went back to the news conference in Oxford, England, and they studied these macrophages for years. And I said, what do they eat? And they eat glue to me. When a person is burned and you open the skin up to all kinds of bacteria, they give high dose glutamine to these burn patients In order to keep our immune system healthy to kill the invading bacteria. So I know the cancer cells are sucking down the glutamine Because they need they need it to ferment. So now they're fermenting this glutamine. So we know exactly how to kill metastatic cancer cells. We know how to kill all these cancer cells if you understand The biology and biochemistry of the system in the context of evolutionary biology.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:53:30]:
And so is that only important in the setting of metastatic disease, the having a.

Thomas Seyfried [00:53:37]:
Yeah, because I think most people fear, when anybody says they have a stage 4, that's metastasis. Okay, so that was considered terminal. We don't consider that term in turmoil anymore. We consider that susceptible to metabolic therapy. So glucose glutamine targeting. I don't want to make it sound like we have a panacea here. All I want to say is that we are on the cutting edge of dosage, timing and scheduling for using The body's healing capabilities together with strategically placed drugs because if we become too aggressive on the Glutamine, We in paralyzed the normal macrophages and immune cells in our body to prevent them from doing their job. So that's why we developed the pulse concept.

Thomas Seyfried [00:54:19]:
So you press the glucose hard because the body can switch to ketones and then we hit them with small doses of Glutamine inhibitor Because that'll kill the tumor cells, but will not kill our immune cells because if you kill a lot of tumor cells or any tumor cells, You have to have immune cells picking up the dead bodies, getting rid of the corpses. And if you do this in the wrong context, you end up with a potentially infectious area And the tumor cells are not being effectively killed. So again, it's how you do what we know to do. And this is where if we had trained physicians That understood all this. They would be on the front lines, experimenting with dosage timing and scheduling, writing the papers and telling us what their strategy is For various types of young people, middle aged people, older people, and what the best strategy is for managing these folks. But right now, we're not doing any of that Because can't they all think cancer is a genetic disease? It's not a genetic disease. It's a mitochondrial metabolic disease. Wait until you see what happens When the field comes to recognize this, cancer death rates are gonna drop.

Thomas Seyfried [00:55:22]:
It's gonna drop like the AIDS epidemic that it was years ago, but how do we get that? I don't know what to say. When I tell people this, and when I go to medical meetings with the physicians, it's like a deer in the headlight. I don't know. They just stare at you. It's like they never heard any of this before.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:55:37]:
Well, we haven't though. I mean, this is the thing is they nutrition is not taught in medical school. We're not the teaching kitchen. I was at the teaching kitchen conference back in 2022, I think. And they had, like, an attorney on their team lobbying to get something passed. I forget whether it was the congress or senate, to actually ask medical schools to include nutrition in the curriculum, and the only thing that they could get past with that was that it would be optional for them to include nutrition, which is just mind boggling. So the reason why they don't understand is because we are literally not taught anything about this.

Thomas Seyfried [00:56:15]:
Well, that's what I'm saying. You guys all take this oath for do no harm and then you're trained To push pills and, use treatments that are not as effective as they could be if they were combined with a good nutritional strategy. So we do diet drug therapy. We're not against drugs. You have to realize that, but we wanna use the power of the body to work with the drugs And the drugs don't have to be these super expensive things. There are a lot of them are are repurposed drugs. And I know I've spoke to many I put so many of my kids in medical schools, And they never, they only hear is that cancer is a genetic disease and they never hear the power of nutrition on how to use specific drugs To make not only kill the tumor cells, but make the patient healthy. Exactly.

Thomas Seyfried [00:56:56]:
So it's a failure on the part of the medical training and that's what I call the system. Okay, the system is the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Health, the pharmaceutical industry, The hospital industry, all of these are in the same bubble and a lot of people are making fortunes on these drugs That don't really work well. And the idea is because they're not based on an underlying theory that it's a metabolic problem. And if you understand metabolism, and it's just not nutrition, It's evolutionary biology and very few people really understand that either. So, even if you say, oh, I'm gonna eat this and eat that, To know how it all works mechanistically in the body, you have to understand these other concepts and that That's how you connect the dots. And that's how you'll really be able to move the field forward for a main managing healthcare in this society.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:57:51]:
Yeah. And I have a question for you. Where would you recommend someone start to learn about evolutionary biology?

Thomas Seyfried [00:57:57]:
I think that's a very good question. It's not easy and even here at BC, very few people read Darwin. When I read Darwin, it made no sense to me in a medical sense. He wasn't talking about cancer. He wasn't talking about type 2 diabetes, but he was talking about How things happen and change over time. Where does all these integrated systems Come from because we can see, I mean, you guys, we studied the section of a frog. We just studied the section of a rat Or a cadaver and we see all the linkages between, where did all this stuff come from? It evolved over 1,000,000 year to subserve functions And then you're looking at the molecular and biochemical lever, and you can see you can see the unbelievable connections between all these all these units. And then you have to know how different systems use different fuels.

Thomas Seyfried [00:58:51]:
The liver doesn't use ketone bodies. It makes ketone bodies, but it burns fatty acids, Okay, but the liver is like is garnishing everybody else with fuel. So you really have to know how all this is working, why the brain Can burn ketones so effectively. If we were dependent on glucose and our blood sugar for everybody to go unconscious, but the brain doesn't do that. The brain can Can function under ketogenesis. It evolved to do that in order for us to remain alive as a species. So again, it takes time, to read these things and understand them. But I think Most students, they just read it, oh, this is painful.

Thomas Seyfried [00:59:32]:
Look at a Krebs cycle. Oh, this is painful. I gotta memorize all these pathways. Oh, everything is painful Because they they don't see it connected to who they are as an entity on the planet.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:59:43]:
Well, I think that there's a disconnect between because when I learned the Krebs cycle, it was like, you just have to learn this. But if I understood that disease was, you know, related to embolism and respiration oxidative phosphorylation of the mitochondria, it would've given me a whole different context to Yeah. Learn those systems.

Thomas Seyfried [01:00:01]:
Yeah, well, I had the same problem. When I looked at that when I was a student, oh God, it was painful. Well, you know, all these steps and the reducing equivalents and all this You know stuff, but I'll tell you, after you start to learn, well, Otto Warburg brought me and I started doing it. You have to reach a certain point In your development of an intellect to be able to see these connections because I couldn't see them when I was younger. I didn't see anything. I couldn't put these connect. As you're focusing on brute force biochemistry, isolate lipids from a brain. It didn't have anything to do with energy, but then you begin to say, you know, what's going on? Why are we killing these tumor Why are they up and dying? Why can't they survive under these conditions? And you start to put the dots of the puzzle together and you say, oh my God, it's unbelievable.

Thomas Seyfried [01:00:45]:
So the most important thing that we should focus now on is changing the paradigm for how we're treating cancer patients Because the current paradigm is a failure. It's one of the greatest tragedies in the history of medicine that we would have 1700 people a day dying From cancer. And the only advance that we've had is this anti smoking campaign and the cancer statistics that comes out every year from doctor Seagull from the American Cancer Society always gives a picture. We've dropped cancer rates by 33%. Well, yeah, because people stop smoking. If you didn't stop smoking, we would have 33% more cancer than we have today. So it's all just prevention, not any treatment, Because the treatments, immunotherapies, you hear them advertised on television at night, CAR T, oh, oh, look at this guy, Opdivo, Keytruda. Oh, we got this and we got that.

Thomas Seyfried [01:01:34]:
You always show some smiling face, not sitting on a toilet, you know, with diarrhea or anything like this. So, and that's all based on the somatic mirror. It's wrong. It's not gonna work. It does work for 20% of the people. I have to be honest with you. 20% of the people die faster from those drugs, All right. So it's kind of a crapshoot.

Thomas Seyfried [01:01:51]:
And then, you know, 60% of the people doesn't do anything better than what what standard of care would have done. And they charge you at like $100,000 or more for this. And then they cause financial toxicity. That's another thing, I had one of my students write a big paper, okay? A lot of folks in our country, they're living paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford $20,000 for for cancer treatment. So, the marriages fall apart, suicides. I mean, it's unbelievable. This call Financial toxicity is immoral.

Thomas Seyfried [01:02:17]:
This is immoral. So, we're dealing with an immoral system here right off the bat.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:02:23]:
Yeah. I I I hear you, and I and I agree with you. You know, I wanted to ask a question, and this is like putting 2 things together that I don't know if you'll know the answer to this, but one of the things that doctor Kaun has talked about, I've I've been studying doctor Gerald Pollack's work with the 4th phase of water, which I'm not sure how familiar you are with that with easy or exclusion zone water. And one of the things that doctor Cowan has talked about is that actually, the role of ATP is creating a conformational change within the cells to structure the water, and that actually, ATP is rest less related to energy and more related to structuring the intracellular water. And I'm just wondering if you know anything about this, or you have any understanding or insight.

Thomas Seyfried [01:03:12]:
Well, when we grow ourselves in water, buffered water, phosphate buffered water, and measure their ATP Through bioluminescence technology, which is what we do. The cells die, okay? Without energy, nothing lives. So, water is there, No energy is there, the cell is dead. And then, I can't speak specifically to that role, I speak specifically to energy. And as what Otto Warburg said, Without energy, nothing can survive. Okay, so energy in biochemistry is ATP. So ATP is the currency of energy. It creates the the conformational changes in proteins, enzymes, Synthesis degradation.

Thomas Seyfried [01:03:55]:
It's the energy of life is ATP. Ultimately, it comes from the sun. Yeah. The energy comes from the sun in carbon hydrogen bonds that the plants produce, all right? So we break that, we eat food, we break the carbon hydrogen bonds That was embodied the energy of the sun is in the food that we eat. Okay, you can burn wood and you release the carbon hydrogen bonds in the form of entropy, disordered Heat is what you feel, but in when we eat food, we break those same bonds, capture that energy in the form of a proton motive gradient. So when I say water, we grow cells in water, without any food that just put the cells in there and in 24 hours, they're dead. So, what will keep them alive if we just add in the buffered water, the, salt water, buffered water, we add back Fuels. We see what boom, all of a sudden, man, you had a little glucose, they start perking up and then you add all these different amino acids, you add the gluten, boom, You get the big explosion right there.

Thomas Seyfried [01:04:54]:
So we know, and the light comes on, so they're burning, they're making energy. So that's how we were interrogating these cancer cells to figure out What do they need to survive? And you go through the litany of things that they, and we only found glucose and glutamine as the 2 fuels that keep these guys alive. And vitamins are important for the cancer cell as it is for the normal cell. Sometimes the cancer cells need even more vitamins. So, you always have to be careful. You don't wanna be pumping all this crazy The thing of it is, is you just gotta deprive them of the only 2 fuels that they need to survive, which is these 2 fuels, and then it becomes a very manageable problem. You don't have to be chasing things, all these things that are not as pertinent to the survival of the cell because what do they need to survive and grow? They need energy. Where does the energy come from? It comes from fermentation.

Thomas Seyfried [01:05:41]:
What are the only things they can ferment? Glucose and gluten. How do you know? Because I tested it.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:05:47]:
Well, this has been really helpful for me. I feel like since I've stepped out of my traditional Western practice I really feel like a student again, and also open to hearing different ways of thinking about things. And and I have learned so much from just spending the past hour with you, and I know that my listeners will as well. So I wanna thank you for your time and generosity of information.

Thomas Seyfried [01:06:10]:
Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:06:11]:
If people would like to find you or your work or learn about the studies that you're doing, where is the best place for them to find you?

Thomas Seyfried [01:06:18]:
Yeah. Well, that's another important point because people hear me on these podcasts and these, oh, he didn't talk about this. He didn't talk about that. But we publish all of these in open access. So all you have to do is go to Google, Put my name into Google and say publications, and then they'll be they'll come right up. You'll see a whole bunch of them on the Press Pulse Therapy, Pablo Kelly dog. We have a a beautiful response in a dog put on metabolic therapy. Unbelievable.

Thomas Seyfried [01:06:43]:
The tumor just went right off his face. I can say works of all the animals that we've looked at, that therapy works best on us and our research is supported predominantly through philanthropy and private foundations. So Travis Christofferson's Foundation For Cancer Metabolic Therapies supports us and there are people who hear this And they say, I wanna be part of the change. I want There are people who donate money and they're not expecting something in return other than the Fact that we keep people alive a lot longer than they should have been. And this is a work in progress, and I think it's going to be the eventual standard of care. Right now, we're Writing a big treatment protocol for cancer, a how to manual, a physician's desk reference, if you will. And we're gonna try to get that published and we have a lot number of physicians and scientists on this. And once we would have that, then primary care physicians can play a huge role in helping these patients.

Thomas Seyfried [01:07:40]:
They don't have to be Handing off patients to so called more special specialists. So I think the system is gonna definitely change for the betterment of the population.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:07:49]:
So- Yeah, this Benefit everyone.

Thomas Seyfried [01:07:51]:
Yeah, yeah, you're right, and I think this is going to happen and as long as we can test everything pre clinically Here, and then I write up sometimes case reports with my physician colleagues. The movie, Cancer Revolution is coming out, documentary on this. They put in all their so called terminal patients that are all happy and waving to everybody.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:08:10]:
Well, I love the I mean, this is the thing. People take very sick chemotherapy drugs to live like an extra 2 months. The fact that you have the GBM fellow who's here, what did you say, 11 years, that's 10 times what the average survival is for someone with a GBM. So it's just, you know, you know, not toxic drugs.

Thomas Seyfried [01:08:30]:
Yes.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:08:30]:
So I love it. Well, thank you so much again for your time. That's a wrap for today's episode. Thank you for joining me on Born to Heal. It's been a privilege to share this time with you. And I hope that today's episode has offered you valuable insights on your journey toward optimal health. Please consider subscribing, sharing this podcast with your friends, and leaving us a review. To learn more about how you can work with me, please visit katydemming.com.

Dr. Katie Deming [01:09:00]:
You can find additional resources in the episode show notes linked below, and remember to join us next week as we continue to explore more holistic approaches to healing. Until then, this is doctor Katie Deming reminding you that just like me, you or born to heal.