Dr. Katie Deming [00:00:00]:
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Born to Heal podcast. Today, I want to talk to you about being wrong. And what I mean by that is that I'm learning that a lot of the things that I had I thought I knew, I put new new in quotes because I thought I knew were actually not right. And that is, I think, part of what may be hard for other people who are similar to myself have been, you know, learning information and trained into traditional medicine. Time. And I have definitely felt this because I'm coming into this new space. I'm learning all this new information with you guys. So I'm bringing on these guests because I'm learning as well.Dr. Katie Deming [00:00:55]:
I'm learning about all the things that I really feel like I should have been taught these things in medical school but wasn't. And so now I'm creating my own curriculum to really understand the foundations of healing, what creates health in our body, how do we help people understand those concepts so that they can figure out what's right for their body. And this is the other thing is is that I used to think that there was, like, you know, I knew how to treat a disease. And now I'm really realizing that every individual is very different, and what they need is different in terms of their healing. And that that person I've always known this that the person who is going through the experience is the one who is their own healer. I I had that sense when I was practicing. But now I'm realizing that it's so much more individualized what someone needs for their own healing than what I had thought. And then also the things that I had thought were helpful in terms of treating cancer as I listened to these episodes.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:02:03]:
So now we've heard from doctor Gerald Pollack, we've learned heard from doctor Thomas Seyfried, and we've heard from Lauren Lachman. And as I'm learning these things, I'm realizing that actually some of the stuff that I was taught is just plain. Like, for example, that DNA is what determines whether someone gets cancer. Our DNA does not determine whether someone gets cancer. We've seen this over and over again, and I knew this instinctively. And you heard me say this when I was talking to both doctor Pollock and doctor Seifried that I had been taught that cancer was a genetic mutation, but then I saw in my practice that that wasn't the case. But now I'm understanding these other underpinnings of what actually contributes to illness, not just cancer, because now I'm really understanding that cancer is not, like, its own thing. Cancer is just one type of illness that is created in the body, but chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, neurodegenerative disease, they are all tied back to the same things.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:03:11]:
And this is really about our way of life. Like, our way of life is not supporting the health and well-being of us as human beings. And I think that the reason why I couldn't see all this before was that I was in a system that actually valued all of those things. The doing, the busyness, the making money, the, you know, accomplishing, you know, whatever it is, I was always looking for the next thing because I wanted to be successful and I was. You know? So I've had a successful career, but the chasing of the things, the chasing of the accolades, the chasing of the accomplishments is what actually is making us sick as a society. And now that I've stepped away from it, it's really easy to see. And I I I don't know that I've said this on this podcast, but I've said it in other interviews. It's like when you're inside the bottle, you can't read the label on the outside of the bottle.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:04:10]:
And I think that that's really true. So in my career as a radiation oncologist, I couldn't see what the label was on the system works exactly as the way that it was intended to work. It is a system that is designed to prescribe pharmaceuticals or, you know, mechanical interventions, whether that's surgery or, you know, devices or that kind of thing. So it is a business, and it is designed to have people get these things done to them, whether they're medications, whether they're procedures, whether they're, you know, inventions that are used to treat this type of condition. But it is designed for that kind of interaction that someone comes in, they're given a diagnosis, and then they're given something to treat that that fuels the system. And, basically, this is the way the system works. And it works well. Like, so this is what the system is designed to do, and this is it it does what it is exactly designed to do.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:05:22]:
So but the truth is is that now that I'm on the outside, I can see, oh, okay. This works exactly the way that it was designed. I just thought it was designed to do something different. Like, when I came into medical school, much like I would say, most of my colleagues, I came in because I wanted to help people, because I wanted to have intimate connections with other human beings. And that space of when someone's facing a life threatening illness is beautiful and I loved being there. And so I went into that with the goal of helping people, which I think that all of my colleagues do. But in the training, I was trained into the system without ever questioning it, without ever having alternative point of views to say, hey, Is that really how the body heals? And so now that I'm stepping out, I'm seeing the label from the outside of the bottle, and I'm recognizing, like, wow. Okay.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:06:22]:
For many years, I was saying things that weren't right, that were correct. And I'm not saying, like, I know the truth. I don't know what the truth is. I can just tell you that there are basic fundamental principles that underlie healing that are not being taught in medical school. They are not being taught to our doctors and training, residents, and interns. They are being taught into a system that teaches them how to identify problems and then plug in these particular fixes for those problems. Right? And one of the things that you will hear from doctors in terms of saying, well, there can't be that much to let's just take a metabolic approach to cancer. So we'll take the work of doctor Seifried.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:07:08]:
So I remember this when I was practicing, and this was actually just before I left. And I was talking to one of the new radiation oncologists that we had hired about ketogenic diet for brain tumors specifically, and there's, actually, there's data supporting that. And I was talking to him and he said, well, you know, there's some data for this, but there's just it can't be that significant, the role of diet and cancer. Otherwise, we would would have learned about it. And this is the thing is we have to remember is that there are not incentives within the system of Western medicine to study diet because diet is like a free intervention. There's no money to be made on that within that system. And so we have this lack of data to support some of these interventions that are cheap and simple, and that's by design. The system is not designed to study and promote the cheapest, simplest, most accessible things that people can do on their own.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:08:12]:
It's designed to deliver and basically sell these other interventions. And when you see that, it starts to make it easier to be like, okay, it's not as confusing as I thought. So, I mean, it is confusing, actually. There's a lot of information. And what's hard is that in this space, when you step outside the world of pharmaceuticals, the data is not as robust. Right? So we don't have as many large studies on these things because there's not the money in it. But if you start to dig at the underlying principles and the science, you can come to your own conclusion. And that's what I'm hoping with this podcast is that people listen to these experts.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:08:58]:
And not that they think what I think because I don't. I'm learning myself. I am putting all of this together myself. But what you do is you start to put together a story where you can decide. Okay, how do I empower myself? How do I become my own health advocate to create health in my body. And the one thing that is interesting with these three episodes that we've just had is that they And doctor Pollock explained to us that our bodies are 99.9% water by molecules. Right? And that that water in our body is ideally structured in a hexagonal form. And when the water is structured in this way, he calls it easy water or the 4th phase of water, that's when our cells function optimally.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:09:58]:
And in order for our cells or our bodies to hold our water in this way, you know, forming easy water in our cells, in our bloodstream, in our bodies, it requires the proper inputs into our system. And we are human beings living on planet Earth. And it, to me, is, like, no surprise that those inputs are things that come from our natural environment, and doctor Pollock cited those. You know? So infrared from the sun. We're designed to be spending time in the sun. The earth grounding. So we're designed to connect with the earth. So vegetables are full of structured water, and that is one way of getting that into your body.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:10:47]:
In that episode, we didn't talk a lot about it, but it's not just about what you're bringing into your body in terms of the water that you drink or the water that's coming from the vegetables. We actually structure the water in our cells, in our tissues. And the the structuring of that water is done when we're getting these inputs. Okay? And the interesting thing is that this ties to what doctor doctor Seyfried was talking to us about cancer being a metabolic approach. And that when you think about cancer from a metabolic approach, you basically have a dysfunction of the mitochondria and the normal metabolism of nutrients into our bodies. And, basically, we flip from doing normal respiration using oxygen to fermentation. This is what cancer, by definition, all cancer cells are doing fermentation for their energy. But this ties back to the water because, actually, the energy that is created in our cells from metabolism, so either through an the oxidative phosphorylation or through fermentation or anaerobic glycolysis, basically, what we're doing is we're forming ATP, which is the energy source in the cells.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:12:06]:
And that ATP is responsible for a conformational change in the proteins of our cells that help structure our water. Okay? And so when we're getting when we have healthy mitochondria that are functioning well, that are doing what they're supposed to do, and we have the appropriate nutrients into our cells that help the mitochondria function and the right nutrition. So we're getting the appropriate vitamins and not too many sugars, and basically eating things that are nourishment rather than, like, a lot of processed foods and a lot of extra sugars and carbohydrates in our diet, that actually helps structure the water in our cells. So the information that was shared by doctor Seifried ties directly in with the information that was shared by doctor Pollock because the mitochondria are involved with metabolism, and the metabolism creates the ATP, which organizes the water in the cells. And so even though these topics may seem like they don't go together, they actually are intimately intertwined. That if we start to get the nutrients correct, what we're eating, so lowering the amount of sugars, lowering the processed foods, getting vegetables, and the vitamins, cells. And so, basically, by doing a metabolic approach to anything, and then this is not just about cancer, this is like all of us could use a metabolic approach to our diet. And I'm not saying you have to go do keto.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:13:52]:
You could be a vegan like doctor Seifried talked about, but you have to really look for low glycemic index foods to get your glucose levels down. We have a big problem in society where we are just having high levels of glucose chronically and, you know, leads to diabetes and then neurodegenerative disease. But all of us could use kind of a look at our diet to say, okay, is the food that I'm getting nourishing, and is it not spiking my blood sugar? You know? And then, also, am I moving my body so that, basically, I'm getting oxygen, and I'm moving the muscles, and I'm using the nutrients that are coming through. Right? Because if, basically, we're just storing, taking in sugar all the time, then, basically, our body is just packing that on as fat. And if we're not burning it off, we're just gonna get fatter and fatter over time. And doctor Siegfried talked about that. You know, that eating fat doesn't make you sick. It's eating the sugar, and then the sugar sends the signal to your body to store the fat.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:14:53]:
And if you're not exercising and you're just constantly in a fed state, you're basically going to gain weight. You're gonna become less healthy. The water in your cells is not gonna be optimally structured. Okay? And so I wanted to bring that parallel together for people that when you do a metabolic approach to your health, you're also working on your water. Okay? And that the mitochondria need the same inputs as the water, because it's all tied You know? So all of these things tie together there, and I wanted to make sure that people really understood that. And then if we look at the information that was shared through Lauren Lachman with water fasting, so we are basically I would describe us as bodies of water. We are walking bodies of water. We're 99.9% water by molecule.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:15:54]:
So we're, like, walking around there. And if you think of yourself as a body of water, everything that we've eaten is basically, you know, being stored in our bodies. So if you think about if there's glyphosate in the soils and and we've been eating that for decades, that is all stored in our fat. Okay? Our fat is where the body stores toxins. And so we we have toxins from that. We also you know, the cell phone, you know, 5 g radiation is also basically a toxin that we are affected by in our body. And what Lauren talked about was that water fasting is a way for us to flip into this mode of healing within the body, which, by the way, flips the metabolic switch so that we're not doing, you know, if you were doing glycolysis with the, you know, sugar. If we say we're using cancer as an example for fasting, and the tumor is doing anaerobic glycolysis, basically, fermentation using sugars, when we go into a fasting state, you're flipping into ketosis and also stimulating autophagy, which is basically getting rid of all of those toxins in our fat cells and and getting them out of our body, flushing that out of our body.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:17:15]:
And so fasting is really a metabolic approach. It's like a quick switch to flip yourself into ketosis and then also into this phase of clearing out and detoxifying the toxins that have build up in our body. And and, you know, one of the things that I think someone might come and say, you know, for the past, like, 5 years, I've been eating really healthy, and that's amazing. But the truth is is that we have accumulated toxins from our entire lives. And this is why he talks about doing these prolonged fast because it can take a long time for the body to rid these toxins out of our bodies. And it sounds a little bit out there when you're thinking, gosh, How could someone go 21 days or 30 days without eating food and just doing water? But people who do this kind of fasting have a profound benefit on their health, basically detoxifying all of that stuff that's built up and then also resetting their immune function, their mitochondrial function. Basically, you're getting everything back online at a very highly functional level. And so, again, the water fasting ties into both what doctor Seifried said as a metabolic approach, but it also ties into the water.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:18:41]:
Because as we clear ourselves out and as we reset our mitochondria and basically get ourselves functioning better again, then we are going to structure the water in our cells better. And so these three different episodes that seem very different, and they were quite technical. I I really actually appreciate the science that was brought by each of these guests. But you can see how you can start to put it together and be like, oh, these things all fit together. And this is actually these first three guests are, like, foundational for the things that I believe someone needs to do if they want to heal illness. I really think that for cancer, for, you know, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, it would be very beneficial for people to take a metabolic approach, lower their sugars, basically get into that state that doctor Seifried talked about with the GKI less than 2. So this is not going into full ketosis. You don't have to go into full ketosis initially.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:19:46]:
You can just get yourself down to, like, a GKI less than 2, and this would be you'd have to monitor to do this. So monitoring your glucose and monitoring your ketones, and then using water fasting to really kick you into the ketosis and then the autophagy or the dumping of the toxins. And so for me, it's like if I was diagnosed with cancer now, what I would do is that I would get myself, you know, initially with my diet, get down into a key GKI of less than 2, and then do a water fast. And I know it sounds crazy to do a 21 or 30 day water fast, but I personally have done 6 days. And I did it not correct. So I did this before I talked to Lauren, and I wasn't resting. Actually, it was a problem because I was working while I was doing that, and I I don't recommend that. That is not a good idea.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:20:40]:
And, actually, I think that these prolonged water fasts really should be supervised. And like he explained, making sure that you're checking electrolytes before you do it, and then also that you're supervised to make sure that you're safe in doing it. But doing those things of getting your metabolic your diet from a metabolic approach tuned in or dialed in, then going into fasting, whatever that length is for you that you think that you could do in a supervised fashion, and then really doing the practices that doctor Pollock talked about that, like, we should be incorporating into our everyday life of making sure we're getting sun exposure, making sure we're grounding with the earth, making sure we're eating vegetables that come from the earth that is free of pesticides that has that structured water in it. You know, using infrared sauna for detoxification, connecting with other humans, which is basically a form of infrared, and then also with animals as well. These are simple things that we can all be doing. It's not that when I could do it, but I'd like to do a prolonged fast to help myself clear out the toxins. But if you can't do a prolonged fast, just doing intermittent fasting or fasting 1 or 2 days a week is very beneficial. So for me, I tend to do intermittent fasting where I'll eat for a window of 8 hours, and I'll fast for 16 hours.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:22:13]:
But then I'll also occasionally do a longer fast. Like right now, I'm fasting, and I'm on day 2. My goal is to do either 2 or 3 days, and I do that about once a month, a 2 to 3 day fast just to help clear myself out. And there's definitely value to that. I what's interesting is you think that you're gonna feel bad, but, actually, once you get into ketosis, you know, from drinking nothing but water, your body starts to clear, and you actually aren't hungry. So for me, it's been relatively easy to do these shorter ones. Again, I would recommend if you're gonna if fasting is new for you, you know, starting with, like, maybe narrowing your window of what you're eating every day just to give your body because our bodies need time to repair. And if we're always eating, basically, our energy is going to digesting food.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:23:06]:
And so giving yourself a break from that is when your body heals. And so I think that this is something that all of us could do, and doing intermittent fasting of just the, you know, 8, 168, or, you know, some you could start longer, you know, like, if you'd go 14 hours without eating and you eat with a 10 hour window and then shorten it. I think that that is a really safe way to step into fasting. But if you're having trouble with that or if you wanna do prolonged water fasting, then I think really having someone to help guide you through that is important. But, you know, I am excited to be wrong. I'm actually excited to embrace the idea that I did not know really how healing happened. And now I'm learning so much. And so in some ways, it's very humbling, actually, I'll say.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:23:55]:
It's very humbling to be in this place where I thought I knew about healing and cancer specifically and to acknowledge that, wow, like, there's a lot I didn't know. And, actually, one of my former patients was, like, she had listened to the episode with Gerald Pollock, and she's like, I'm shocked that you didn't know this before. And I was like, yeah. We're not taught it. And so that's part of what my goal is with doing this podcast is that I know there are other doctors who follow me who also weren't taught these things in medical school. And so I want to at least bring this so that people are hearing these other modalities. You know? What are all the things that we can bring in to help people heal and finally get well and get ahead of that curve? Right? So instead of waiting until we're sick, it's like, how do we start to do these things now so that we can prevent illness? Because the statistics are really dismal that, you know, over 60% of the population is overweight, obese, in fact, and that diabetes is epidemic and neurodegenerative disease, which neurodegenerative disease is just a continuum of diabetes. It's like when you have sugar in your system for this long, it starts to affect our nervous system.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:25:11]:
And so we can clean that out, which is amazing. So it means that all of these things that we see rising, that we think we have no control over, we have a lot more control. And so I'm willing to be wrong because being wrong means that we all have a lot more control than we thought, and that getting healthy is within reach for all of us. So I will continue to do, you know, these interviews, and then I'll have some of these solo episodes so that I can give my take on on the information that I'm hearing. And I also realized that it can be challenging for people to listen to some of these scientific episodes if they don't have a science background. And so I wanna make sure that I have these episodes in here where I can explain, okay, this is the takeaway. This is what I want you to get from this episode. And then also in my substack newsletter, I break things down there.

Dr. Katie Deming [00:26:05]:
So if you're not subscribed, the link is in the show notes, and you can go there. And on Wednesdays, I break down the episode that was released on Tuesday so that you can have kind of a cheat sheet for what it was it that this guest was talking about on the podcast, and we can make it simpler for you. So, anyway, I hope you have a great week, and I look forward to seeing you next week, the next episode. Take care. 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 [00:26:53]:
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 were born to heal.