Can a keto diet eliminate cancer growth? Dr. Thomas Seyfried says yes

of time. As this process is going on, and of course, when you add the glutamine back in or you don't remove the drug, you will get the rescue of some of the tumor cells that might be there, but they won't come back very quickly because I have the choke, the glucose. They are there, but they are growing very slowly. And then once our immune system recovers from the small dose of glutamine inhibitor, we hit them again. With another small dose of glutamine inhibitor, we gradually degrade the tumor while the rest of the body's cells generate excessive health efficiency.

Then the rest of the body's cells become super healthy while you degrade, slowly breaking down the tumor cells that are absolutely dependent on fermentation metabolism. It is an elegant and beautiful system. And when it's done. You can't believe how well it works. The problem is Sanjay. Nobody is doing that. Yes. I think the first time I heard about this in a clinical setting was from Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. I think he has a new project he's working on for pancreatic

cancer

. I think more particularly about that, about the glutamine, metabolic and starvation process. But, my goodness, that's almost like having goosebumps as a traditional oncologist, obviously a doctor.

It makes sense on a cellular level and I think part of me just wants to believe. If it replicates really fast, shouldn't we spray some cytotoxic chemo just to speed up the replication process? You can do that. Our colleagues in Türkiye do that ul. They use the lowest possible doses of chemotherapy allowed by the profession, right? So you are not in default. And once the body is in nutritional

keto

sis, these chemotherapy drugs can also be used in minimal doses, and they simply kill these tumor cells and the level of toxicity is reduced. My opinion is that I am not against it because I have seen spectacular recoveries from some people who use this type of strategy.

But why would we want to introduce any level of toxic material into our bodies when we really don't need to? Yes. I'm not opposed to people who say, let me use the lower doses of chemotherapy once I get my patient into a nutritional state of

keto

sis. Because toxicity levels are significantly reduced and therapeutic benefits are enormously high. So when we used our glutamine inhibitor, 6-diazo-5-oxo-l-norleucine, it was considered too toxic when used alone without targeting glucose. Oh, it's toxic, but it's never been as toxic as cisplatin, carboplatin, lustin and all those horrible drugs. But once you put the patient in ketosis, you can use very small doses of this product, and it's like crazy.

You just

eliminate

those tumor cells because you don't, they are very vulnerable now. They are like on the precipice, surviving. And you hit them with another silly little bit, boom, they're gone. The fragile ones. Yes. Wow. Yes, they are very susceptible. But you have to put your body in the right state before you can use this kind of thing. You can't go in there like a bull in a china shop. You really need to know. The strategy we are talking about. So it's a graduated process. Why we developed the Press Pulse therapeutic strategy for

cancer

management.

It is a process and you have to know how to use the tool, the tools you have are the

diet

and the medications used in the appropriate way. Therefore, the glutamine inhibitor cannot be used alone. You cannot use the glucose inhibitor alone. Most of the time you can't use

diet

alone. You have to put the package together and know how all the components fit together to have powerful synergy without toxicity. And in what sequence. And that is, I think, us, the. Yes. Dosage, moment and schedule. This is where we are now. We are refining the dosing, timing and scheduling in our preclinical systems, and then moving it directly to patients with my colleagues who have clinics that can do all of this.

That is incredible. It's a work in progress. We have a very unique objective. How long can we keep stage four cancer patients no matter what? Where, what or tissue of origin, how long can we keep them alive with a high quality of life? If they die at 98 when they had cancer at 38, they were obviously cured without recurrence. But you can't know that. When you say, oh, you can cure, I don't know if I can cure cancer. All I know is that... All I know is that if you can live much longer than expected with a higher quality of life, that's good in itself.

And if you live to be 90 because you made it when you were 30, then you can consider yourself very lucky. But the goal is: how do we keep cancer paid? All these guys, oh, stage four, lung, brain, colon, and they're all out. Many of them are doing well. Are they cured? I have no idea. But they are still alive longer than I would have predicted. That's another thing. So I'm sure a lot of people are thinking this and myself included. Is it possibly correct if someone said that if they are constantly in a state of ketosis, the probability of generating a population of neoplastic or cancer cells in a constant state of ketosis is low?

Yes absolutely. And how do we know that? We know this from historical records and Aboriginal people, and we know this from our closest relative, the chimpanzee, which is genetically, chimpanzees are 98% similar to us in gene and protein sequences. And the aborigines. The tribes that existed have been carefully examined. The Inuit of the regions of Alaska and Canada, the African tribes, the inhabitants of the rainforest, the Australian aborigines. These people never had cancer. And they are always in a semi-state of ketosis because their natural diets are very low in carbohydrates. So when you're very low in carbs and doing a significant amount of exercise, you're always in a low state of ketosis.

You might have two, you might have 0.5. The millimolar ketones that circulate through your blood glucose level are low and it is very difficult to generate cancer if you have very healthy mitochondria. The only way to get cancer is by damaging oxidative phosphorylation in the mitochondria. Whether that comes from drugs, diets or whatever. If you are in a state of ketosis, you are improving the health and vitality of your mitochondria. It makes it very strange. That is why Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian doctor, examined 40,000 people in Africa. He never saw cancer in any of these patients. So he said, wait, no.

What is happening? Why don't these Africans get cancer? Why the Inuit never? Now the problem is that the Inuit are burdened with type two cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. As soon as the Western diet includes highly processed, carbohydrate-rich foods, you put yourself in a state of inflammation. Damage from inflammation, breathing. So chronic inflammation can damage respiration in a population of cells in some tissue. Causing cancer. We have an obesity epidemic. In fact, obesity is now replacing smoking as the number one risk factor for cancer. So what's going on with all that? Diet and lifestyle. It's all diet and lifestyle.

You don't exercise, you eat horrible foods, you put yourself into obesity, inflammation, and that puts you at risk for all kinds of different cancers. And you're saying that inflammation, when I've always said it, basically invites opportunities for error and inflammation obviously decreases the good immune cells to be able to clear an area. You're saying in addition to that, if not, the most important thing is that inflammation allows an environment conducive for mitochondrial injury or dysfunction to occur. Yes. And then what happens? What's happening? So you put... That's chronic, it's chronic, it doesn't happen overnight, obviously, right?

Sometimes it takes years. For that constant inflammatory insult, whether it's intermittent hypoxia, chronic inflammation, all of that, and then you combine it with a low dose of carcinogens that might be in your body, and you put all of that together. And then gradually the oxidative phosphorylation of oxygen is replaced by fermentation. During this process and when oxphos becomes dysfunctional, it sheds reactive oxygen species. ROS. ROS are carcinogenic and mutagenic. So the mutations that you see in the nucleus, all of those somatic mutations, are downstream effects of ROS produced by damage to chronically injured mitochondria. So the cancer field, for the most part, is chasing its tail.

They are chasing effects. They are not focusing on the real problem. So we're looking at how many different types of somatic mutations people have in their different cancers, which is largely irrelevant. All of that is largely irrelevant. The National Cancer Institute

says

cancer is a genetic disease and nothing could be further from the truth. It is not a genetic disease, it is a metabolic disease. So why is everyone focusing on all these crazy mutations when they are all after effects? Mutations do not occur until the mitochondria become dysfunctional. If you put carcinogen, you can see that the mitochondria are damaged.

In fact, they have bioluminescence and you can already see them shedding ROS. So it is a chronic process in stages. It is very difficult for the human body to contract cancer. You can't believe how hard it is to get it. We evolved to be completely resistant to cancer. So in order for us to get cancer, we have to abuse our body long term by being exposed to all these kinds of things. Because Aboriginal tribes and chimpanzees tell us how difficult it is to get cancer. It's, it's just yeah. It's hard, we're just so distracted from our own things it's just unbelievable.

It's so interesting to hear you say that it's interesting in the sense that I always say when people ask, often: What can I do to reduce my chances of getting cancer and what causes cancer? And I basically spit out a bunch of things and think, basically, the same things that they recommend doing for cardiovascular health and not doing for cardiovascular health. They really like to overlap completely. Am I hearing that? Possibly because of what it is called, when we say vasculopathy or basically inflamed artery disease. If you smoke, if you have diabetes, gly oscillation, all things that can alter vascular flow.

Is that somehow a superimposition of why people get cancer? Because the delivery of oxygen and then the increase of ROS. Are things that spread or invite cancer a fair statement? Yes. That's crazy. I think it's very fair. It is a very fair statement. And that's why there is such an overlap, because of the mitochondrial injury that occurs in people with blood flow problems due to, again, diabetes, smoking, and poor cardiovascular health. Yes. So when you said processed foods, I obviously ruled that out of the list as well as one of the reasons that can cause cancer.

But let's say someone was keto. But you ate processed foods, what is it about the processed part itself that invites mitochondrial damage? What you're saying is, as you're saying, it's an absolute necessity, correct? Become a neoplastic, cancerous, malignant cell. What you have to have is like the limiting reagent. Well. So yes. That is the origin. That is the origin of cancer. And then. This oxide damage, chronic damage to oxidative phosphorylation, is the origin of cancer, which can occur from any number of provoking agents. What, when you say highly processed, what is highly processed? So the problem, of course, is that these are high glucose, high sugar foods, and they have no nutritional value.

They have minimal nutritional value, but high sugar content. Now, don't forget, we evolve. As a helpless species, our entire existence on the planet has been about trying to survive famine, trying to... move. We had to bring tools to get the food we needed. Our physiology and our genome are ultimately driven to store energy. Since we are always starving now, we put ourselves. For the last 50, 7500 years, we have been in a state of massive amounts of carbohydrates that have no nutritional value. And that, again, causes your inflammation, your obesity, your type two diabetes, your cardiovascular disease. Then you are absolutely right, Sanjay.

This is all part of a continuum. And when we. In our metabolic approach to cancer management and people who follow our instructions, many of these people come in with cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, hypertension, and all these other types of things. And by the way, all that disappears along with cancer. You are talking about a very dangerous situation. You're talking, and actually the point is the recent article that came out about the Mediterranean Diet, which reduces cancer, dementia, and cardiovascular disease. And it is not the Mediterranean diet, it is the absence of foods with highly processed carbohydrates, which are not part of the Mediterranean diet.

And all of those don't. Not complicated. Not complicated. So it's not olive oils and all that?No Yes. It is the absence of highly processed carbohydrates. You want to neutralize a Mediterranean diet, go out and eat a big sandwich or eat a couple of Donuts and you will be able to neutralize all the therapeutic benefits of a Mediterranean diet very quickly. That's too funny. And it's so true. Cause. Again, why is it a coincidence that it is always the things that help reduce the chances of heart attacks and strokes and have good cardiovascular health? Oh, and they also have less cancer, I love that we're actually somewhat linked.

Brother, it's not just a coincidence, there's a reason. Those things almost always, yes. Aligned or overlapping, I assure you, no one cares. Unless it's really pointed out like I just did, and I tell you why, no one cares because we have an obesity epidemic. If people really cared about preventing cancer, we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic. Yes. Yes. That's difficult. Me, you know what I think is fair, Those things are very distant. As far as concerns go, I mean, hopefully things like this and hearing this, I'm more motivated right now to be healthier and eat less processed foods than I probably have been in a long time, like just hearing all this. . .

Because now, when you understand it and hear it, you think: "I feel like it." Again, that's why we're doing this, is it's empowering them now instead of listening. Oh, your risk will be higher. This is what is happening. This is where the potential for mitochondrial damage exists. That's why these are your arteries getting all clogged by X, Y, and Z, and then all these sugars or whatever. Now it's No, I'm second-guessing my lunch now. Yes. But the other problem is that, of course, we have fast food stores on almost every corner in every place in America.

It's very convenient and not only that, we say, wow, have you ever eaten this? Have you ever had that subway sandwich? It is absolutely delicious. Yes. Have you ever eaten McDonald's hamburgers? I. Alright. This is really good. A Taco Bell. Are you kidding me? Papa John's Pizza. These things are really tasty. They have been designed to make you want to eat these things. They should put a skull and crossbones on a lot of those things, just so you know that once in a while you shouldn't do it. If you do it all the time, I'm not saying we should purge our society of these things because I enjoy it too, from time to time.

But the problem is that I think a lot of people in our society think they don't know. If you do that, if you don't, you're eating poorly processed food, and it's not just that, it's our lifestyle. We are not as active as before. Those aboriginal tribes I talked about. Those guys are working in the fields. They are doing things all the time. They're not sitting in traffic listening to books on tape or sitting in front of a computer, eating a big blueberry muffin. It's ours, it's a combination of the foods we eat, the lack of exercise, the mental and emotional stress we have in society.

All of these things impact together to damage the mitochondria in some population of cells in some tissue, which puts you at risk for diabetes, cancer, dementia, let's move on to the topic of dementia. It's all part of the same process. Yes. And we are paying the price. We are paying the price for tasty and convenient meals. Yes. And that. People need to know that. And it's almost like it's not our fault because they made us have a pension for those things because we needed to know when we were, distracted and tripped over something in the field.

As if we needed to know that this was something high in calories to want more. It's like a bottleneck effect in evolution. That's now. We... That's why they say that with intelligence and greatness comes potentially death or concern for such. We are still stuck with the things we needed when we were very ambulatory and desperate. But availability is plentiful. I like what you said about really linking the concept of having to move and being more physically active. It's not so much that we're saying, oh, be active to lose weight. We're saying that it's that activity that really burns things and burns fuel and makes you, I love that angle of explanation, of saying don't do it just to lose weight or be healthy.

It is the real process. And one thing I remember reading when I was working, I was a workaholic, is what is the best kind of cardiovascular health you can have? And lowering your chance of having a heart attack and stroke is even less than 60 to 80 minutes of cardiovascular exercise a day, that is, doing 10 minutes every hour, every two hours, to get your heart rate up. And that gets into the concept of constantly burning it out and making you have to break some of these chains and stuff so that's what protects your body, ideally as regularly as possible.

Absolutely. You're... you're making your mitochondria healthy. You are giving them the oxygen they need. You are increasing blood flow. Overall, you are simply getting healthier. I would not do it. Yes, I agree with you one hundred percent. I don't think it's just to lose weight. I think it's just to stay healthy. Yes. Walk swim, whatever you are able to do. Make your body need to generate energy. As in a moment, make it dynamic. Do it, we are, yes, we are very mobile species. We traveled great distances in search of food. It is, in the Paleolithic period of our existence, before the cultivation of cereals and the development of civilizations.

Think about how hard it was to get something to eat. You had to locate some animal. Many times he was bigger than you with a team effort and would drag his butt back, cut it up and eat it. And there's a lot of energy put into this. Imagine, the reward too. And you're going to, yeah. And then you'll pick some ripe berries when they're seasoned and gorge on that stuff, and that was ours, and we survived. In fact, we survived on these products because we learned to use certain tools. We learned to kill animals in a better way.

Now we can grow them, or they put them in a pasture and things like that. But we survived because Rick Potts of the Smithsonian put it quite clearly. We have this ability to adapt to the environment better than most other animal species, and our genome and physiology are geared toward survival in extreme conditions. And now we are placed in a new environment, completely different from the environment in which we evolved. And we have all these different types of chronic diseases, including cancer. So it's not so mysterious when you put everything into the concept of biological evolution.

No. And that makes it very clear what the situation is. So rather, we spend billions of dollars trying to put a Band-Aid on type two diabetes, we try to put a Band-Aid on cardiovascular disease and all that, and cancer and all that kind of stuff, when the only thing that What we need to do is keep our mitochondria healthy and First of all, we won't have to address these problems. Yes, that was very well said. It makes sense only on a macroscopic logical level. The more you like it, stay away. From the cellular and behavioral level, the adaptations we have made to exist as a human race for hundreds and thousands of years.

What things we had to select for things that died if they couldn't store their fats well enough or they didn't like fats and they said, oh, I don't like fats. You are dead. Because that's what will make you more likely to live. The fact that we had all this is almost irreverent. And then to say, let's go ahead and now live a life that is very, divergent or distant from what exactly is, I mean, the sharpest blade that you sharpened. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. And now you can't even drive, you don't even have to take control of the car.

You can just walk up and they deliver your food right through the window. Yes. You don't even have to get out of the car. Instead of going in to get, make a donut or something, oh no, I have to drive and wait in this line of cars, and then some guy's hand comes out the window. And puts a lot of food in your lap. Thomas, I want it in my mouth. I don't want to take off the packaging, take it off and put it in your mouth. Then they wonder why we have obesity and cancer. What the hell is happening here?

Oh, and again, on the other hand, the defender could say that we are like the tragic hero or the antihero because it is as if we are also at the mercy of our own adaptations. I know you are oh yeah. That is called being an adult or being mature and not being a mammal. We have to fight against that same thing. That we are programmed with time, it's okay. I have, yes, I have a question that I heard related to ketosis and it blew my mind and talking about shortcuts in society and the way we are, especially in this country, I heard that there are ways that you can consume things and temporarily, for which won't give you sustained ketosis, but maybe a four to six hour ketosis or is there a product that you would take.

Six hours where I can be in ketosis without having to do the legwork because, like I said, I physically want the burger in my mouth. Is there a way to achieve this without the two and a half days of supposedly headaches before being in ketosis? Listen no. The thing, of course, is that yes, we were talking, we were in the, I worked in the field of epilepsy for years. And everyone talks about can we do a ketogenic diet or ketosis and a pill? Yes. Yes. Yes. That was the most important thing, right? So you really want that.

Well. You take one pill at breakfast, take it with water, one pill at lunch and take it with water. Did you do that for three days? A pill for dinner? Yes. And you do it for a week. That's hilarious. That is the sacred path of a similar marketing plan. Because it's true and you're not doing anything. But more seriously, when you say, can I go into detail, it's the sustained condition of being in some level of moderate ketosis that really is the healthiest for your body and we're learning now from a lot of people who are measuring their, I developed here at Boston College, the glucose ketone index, which was for the cancer patient to know when their blood sugar was low and their blood ketones were high and then they were in the perfect condition for high dose chemotherapy low or target and glucose and glutamine.

And we built it. But now we realize that you can stay in those zones with a carnivore eating carnivore, with Mediterranean diets, with plant-based vegetarian diets, as long as you don't eat too much and the foods you eat are very low glycemic index, you can get into these ketosis states without too much difficulty. The only difficulty would be the restriction of highly processed carbohydrates, and for some people who turn out to be addicted to that type of thing, because glucose is a powerful and addictive fuel. It's like cocaine. It's like opium. It's like nicotine. It can be very powerful for the brain, but...

We evolved to not have much glucose in our diet. Then we will go back. Our bodies will recognize that we are back in a semi-Paleolithic state, but we can enter these ketosis zones. Now, my colleague Dominic D'Augustino at the University of South Florida has created ketone ester solutions where you can take them and plug them in, just like you said, but it goes away. He's leaving. You really want it to be sustained and sustained low glucose ketosis is very therapeutic. And people can do this. At first we were like, oh, you have to do a water-only fast.

Yeah, that doesn't work very well. Nobody after a couple of days, you run out of it. Hell, I am. I'm already out of this, but with a carnivore diet, with certain types of low glycemic index vegetables and things that you can include in them and use the GKI to know if you are not, if you are there or not. So we did it for cancer patients, but now we see all these young, healthy people, not cancerous, not cardiovascular, not any of these chronic diseases, they are all doing the GKI because they know that if they are in this zone their mitochondria will be in the healthiest state.

So they are using it as prevention, as a health benefit for their body. I want to use it, but yeah, GKI, glucose ketone index. You get it from Keto Mojo and when we did it, we had to ask people because blood sugar is in milligrams per deciliter and ketones and millimolars. So you have to divide the glucose by 18 and then divide that number by the millimolar of ketones. Yes. Wow. Yes, it is too little, too much. The guys at Keto Mojo made a little chip in the meter, so all you have to do is get the blood value and do the glucose strip and then the ketone strip, and press the button on the measurement.

It gives you the ready. You get the GKI right there. You don't even have to do the administrative arithmetic anymore. Dr. Seyfried, you were amazing. I would love to have you back. This has been very uplifting and now I almost have anxiety from having been slacking off for 35 years. But you've definitely catalyzed my thinking on this, especially with young children. And I'm excited to do some research, but we appreciate you and yeah, so where can people find you if they want to read more of your material? We have publishedour articles in peer-reviewed journals. Cureus is one of them, for our case reports.

But anyone can search my name and see the posts we've written on PubMed, the Library of Medicine's journal. Hello. Thank you so much.