Boost Your Mitochondria To Counteract Cancer

Mary Hardy, MD

My pleasure. I am delighted to have been invited. Thank you so much.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, for all viewers out there, Dr. Hardy is just going to read some highlights from her bio. You can read it all there associated with this talk. But Dr. Mary Hardy, a Board-Certified Internal Medicine Specialist and an expert in Botanical and Integrative Medicine, has actively combined complementary and alternative therapies with traditional Western medicine for over 30 years. In both her clinical practice and research projects. She founded the Integrative Medicine Clinic at Cedars-Sinai and is also a research associate at the RAND Corporation. Over her five years at RAND, Dr. Hardy was a co-principal investigator in several systemic reviews of complementary and alternative medicine topics conducted in the evidence-based practice center at RAND. 

She chaired several United States Pharmacopeia Expert Committees examining the safety of selected dietary supplements. Served four years in the External Advisory Council for the Natural Product Directorate for the Canadian Ministry of Health. Previously served as faculty for the Georgetown University Massive Program in Integrative Medicine. Founder of Wellness Works, an educational and consulting service for integrative medicine. Served for two and a half years as the Associate Director of the UCLA Botanical Research Center, funded by the National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. 

Dr. Hardy is the past Medical director of the Simms/Mann UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology. Served as a Board Member of the Society for Integrative Oncology and as co-leader of the Oncology Interest Group in the Consortium of Academic Health Centers of Integrative Medicine and member of the Stiles Integrative Oncology Center at UCLA and has been the co-director of a fourth-year medical school Elective in Integrative Oncology and recognized as an authority in integrative medicine and herbal natural products by organizations such as Office of Dietary Supplements, the California Medical Board, Canadian Government Unit, the United States Pharmacopeia, American Medical Association, the American Pharmaceutical Association, National Geographic, CBS, NBC, Discovery Channel and Los Angeles Times. and this was just a little brief. I made your bio even more brief, and it is still incredible.

Mary Hardy, MD

I’d rather have the time to talk to your viewers, to be honest, because I think what we are here for is to put good information in their hands so they have the power to make the decisions to help themselves.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I could not agree more. I just wanted the audience to understand the knowledge that is behind your words.

Mary Hardy, MD

Okay. I appreciate that. I am just going to pretend I am not embarrassed, and I am just going to ask myself questions, and we will just go from there. Thank you for the kind introduction.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Thank you. I am curious here. You started in internal medicine, and you ended up in integrative oncology. But how did the road take you there?

Mary Hardy, MD

Well, it is interesting. As usual, I think that it is a combination of my family; both my father and my grandfather were doctors. My mom was a nurse, and my patients and my friends. Those influences have been the main influences on my career. When I was in medical school, there were still folk practices being practiced. I trained in New Orleans, and that was the beginning of it. Then, when I was in my residency, my college roommate, who is also a surgeon, invited me to go with her to China. We went, let us see, 38 years ago. We went before things changed. We saw acupuncture surgery for taking in a brain tumor and for thyroid surgeries. The patients were completely relaxed, alert, and not in pain or discomfort. It was stunning. That shattered a lot of stereotypes for me. I tend to be a flexible thinker. But after seeing something like that, you come back and say, I am going to be humble about what I think I know so that I can have new ideas come in and then test them for their efficacy. 

When I started the program at Cedars, my patients were very happy to have their menopause taken care of; their cholesterol, and their prostatic hypertrophy treated. Then, as people do, they start to get cancer, and they say, Well, you were so good for these things. We want you to treat our cancer. That does not exist. There are no books about that, and there are no fellowships for that. They got me interested in this, and I thought I would start simply by making sure they are eating well and have good relaxation. Then I will look at reducing the toxicity of their therapies, they just kept building on each other and ended up with a fairly robust protocol to help patients get through conventional therapy, radiation, and chemotherapy. I think the most important thing was to help the patients develop a toolkit so they could become active participants in their care because getting cancer puts you on this incredibly scary rollercoaster ride where you do not feel you have any control over what is happening. Returning some sense of how they could help themselves back to them, I think, was incredibly comforting for people. It is very comforting for people. I have lived this, and I have lived this from both sides now because my husband developed leukemia about three years ago. So I got to test myself and see if what I believed was what I believed. Even in this case, could I still have the same values? I am happy to say I did, but it made me a lot more compassionate for the position that people were in.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, and I always say this to patients when they ask me, If you were in my situation, would you do this or that? I always tell them that, and I can logically do so. I reasoned about what I would do, but I did not know until I was in that situation. because when you are not facing it in real life, your decision-making is so different.

Mary Hardy, MD

It is everybody’s value system that has to come to the fore. What I value for my patients is that their quality of life is as good as possible, so whatever time they have is a good time. Then that was the lowest step. Then above that, if we could help make them more cancer resistant, using the garden as a metaphor, give them good water, give them good soil, give them good food, and give them the support to get rid of those pests. That was perfect. That was what I tried to do. But always remember that you want the person in front of you to just be comfortable and not suffer,

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

How did your tool kit look? What were some of the things that were implemented to be able to achieve your goals?

Mary Hardy, MD

Well, I am just going to do a couple of things, but I certainly started everybody off by thinking about their diet. I had patients who came to me with pristine diets and organic everything, and I had people who were on the cheeseburger junk food, Twinkie diet. We brought everybody to the center, where we focused a little bit differently during treatment. I wanted to make sure everybody had enough protein, spaced their meals out properly, had ate in ways that supported as many fruits and vegetables as they could get. Limit the amount of extra sugar, etc. It was appalling to me that the height of the information people got from conventional dietitians 15 years ago when I started this in earnest was just eat whatever you want, and there were handouts from the Cancer Institute that said, Mayonnaise is good because it adds calories and sugar. Eat, eat ice cream. I am. No, let us not do that. 

I started off making sure people ate well and then started to look at things that reduced toxicity. I am sure we are going to talk about one of those things in a lot more detail. But I looked at the symptoms people can usually have. It would be, I saw in people who had neuropathy, fatigue, white counts dropping, and all that stuff and I tried to support those as much as possible. Again, I had another family member who developed breast cancer. I had developed this routine. I was able, I am delighted to say, to give her a relatively minimal level of stuff to take. She got through her therapy like it was nothing. I was very pleased. She is a tough little cookie, but still, I think she got the right support at the right time. Then, I think patients will surprise you by how well they do if you give them hope.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. It is always fascinating to see the difference between somebody who is going through their cancer journey, their medical oncology treatment, and bringing in integrative therapies versus somebody who is not, and it always fascinates me how much better they tend to do and how much better the outcome and quality of life. 

Mary Hardy, MD

We finally have the first study that confirms this, and it was Wayne Jonas, who, as everybody knows, I am sure, was one of the early leads of the Office of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. It became a center, and he was involved in that. It is progressing now. He was working with the research team at one of the A. Johnson Comprehensive Cancer Centers, and they had an active integrative medicine program. He showed in this paper that the patients did better, had fewer complications, and lived longer. I do not think you can beat that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

No, that is amazing. Diet is huge also, I can narrow the toolbox out later on as we discuss certain subjects. But what were some of your favorite tools that you used through this journey?

Mary Hardy, MD

One of the first things I did was get the patient support group involved in their care. Give them all assignments, especially in preparing food. There were ways I could get snacks and stuff so they could help prepare all that food. They had their social support network actively involved in a way that was not everybody wringing their hands. Oh, no. It was very useful. Then I would use supplements, which I must say a lot of integrative oncology programs feel worried about because they do not want to give anything that might make the cancer therapy less effective. But I am happy to say that I never saw that. The research, for the most part, does not support this. I use a lot of supplements, and I also had referrals for meditation groups. 

I used acupuncture a lot.  An art therapy group that I thought was just great. I wanted to go to the art therapy group, but I was seeing patients. There are lots of fun stuff. We have had a great group of social workers and PhD students since last year who were very helpful with patients in helping them take away the trauma and stress of hearing the diagnosis and then engaging in the treatment. But the part that I did that nobody else in my program was able to do was the supplement part, which I think is super important.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

How did you navigate that with a medical oncologist in regards to saying that, yes, here I am giving this supplement, and then the oncologist says, Well, I do not know how it is going to interact, or maybe it has antioxidants, and say we are doing oxidative therapy? Then, yes, you are okay doing that, but let us wait until we are done with the treatment, and then you can bring it in. How do you navigate all that?

Mary Hardy, MD

Happily, I learned the lesson early in this part of my career, where I just did not engage actively with resistance. I just told people, Thank you for pointing that out to me. I would consider that. One person who was completely, horrendously upset when I was at Cedars that I was going to ruin medicine. I invited him to join my board and said to be sure that what we were talking about and what he was talking about represented well, but he never showed up. But I mostly just found that if I shared papers in my rationale and started small and did not do everything but had a tailored set of things, people usually did not find that too concerning. 

Even one of my most difficult oncologists finally came to see me and said, Well, at least you are inside the tent. Because, mostly, if they did not listen to me, they were often going to find somebody who did not understand the Western medical system very well and might make choices. They also knew that I was careful to stay out of their way and that if there was a concern or an issue, I would understand a new medication and be much more conservative in that case. There was still a lot you could do. If they did not want me to use glutamine for the mouth, for example, then I could use honey, and that would help the mouth as well. I could often substitute things and make a difference in people’s conditions by substituting things differently. I used a lot of glutamine because I do not think that the risk of glutamine, as most people think, is going to promote the cancer that does that. if you look at the cancer cells in isolation, but if you look at the whole body, it does not. 

This is how I think you have to change your thinking about integrative oncology. Yes. Tumors like glutamine; that is true. But they have stripped glutamine out of the body everywhere and maximized their sources of nutrition. What happens is that the tissues that normally need glutamine to survive—the lining of the mucous membranes and the digestive system—are the ones that get harmed by the chemo, which means it becomes hard to swallow and hard to eat. The patient gets more tired, and they do not do as well. and there has not been evidence that I know of to date that says that giving a modest amount of glutamine as a supplement, which is enough to support the digestive system, will make the cancer any worse. That is an example of how you might have to noodle things back and forth.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Something that I read, and I cannot remember where I read it, said the body uses about four grams of glutamine a day. As long as you are below that threshold, the body will consume and use it.

Mary Hardy, MD

I gave a little bit more than that because the cancer puts people into a negative nitrogen balance because it tears up the system. The other supplement that I just loved is one that we were going to talk about more tonight, which is fermented wheat germ extract. This is, again, food. It is very simple. It is food. It can, and it starts with the yeast you use if you are making bread. Not exactly, but close enough, and that product is fermented. Then, fermentation is a very interesting biological process. It creates unusual, quirky things. We get beer and wine. That is not something that you find unless this magical process happens. that that material has been refined over the years. It is one of the major things I use, and it is useful for supporting quality of life, supporting white cell count, and reducing recurrences. 

There is human research, and there is a fair amount of human research that supports that. We can talk about that in more detail if you want. But it is just very benign. It is easy to take. I also use medicinal mushrooms. They do not have any drug-drug or drug-herb interactions that we know of. They are designed to be tonic supports for the system. Those are great to use. You can use those even if you have a person who does not want to hear about a lot. I always normalize someone’s vitamin D; that is the other thing. But I think if people’s vitamin D is low, they are going to have trouble mastering their immune system and then mastering the rest of their neuroendocrine system, too. I do that. I always make sure people have a normal that is a little bit better than what the conventional system calls normal. But that is what I do a lot.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

With fermented wheat germ extract, what are the gazillion different supplements out there, and what drew you to that specific one?

Mary Hardy, MD

Okay. That’s a perfect question. That is an excellent question because you will hear about things every day. I often have patients come to me whose beloved family and friends, out of fear, scoured the Internet and came up with all kinds of stuff. that becomes very stressful. This project has a long history of development. That’s the first thing. The people who have been involved in it—one of them was a Nobel Prize winner, and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was a Hungarian biochemist who discovered vitamin C. He started developing anti-cancer medications after watching the horrors of World War One, where mustard gas, which has been used as an anti-chemotherapeutic agent, was devastating to the troops in the trenches. He decided that he wanted to use his chemistry knowledge to do something that would help. He started by preparing a compound that can be found after you ferment baker’s yeast. That was the beginning. He was developing all these ways that he could interfere with the cancer metabolism rather than try to directly attack the cancer. He had seen enough war in his life. He wanted to disable the cancer. There is another chemist, Otto Warburg, who said that cancer metabolizes very differently than normal cells. Instead of using oxygen, it uses a much more primitive form of metabolism. That primitive form is very inefficient. Cancer does this; it regresses cells, so they lose a lot of their activity. That’s why an estrogen-negative tumor is often more of a problem than a nitrogen-positive tumor because it has lost that ability. Cancer loses the ability to metabolize what normal cells do. It looked like what he was targeting was that exact thing. Then we developed the war on cancer, which started in Boston with successful childhood leukemias. We have fought that war for a long time and had good benefits from it. People who wouldn’t have lived before but the cost was that the most conventional cancer treatments can be quite toxic. 

At about that time, the communist reign in Hungary was ending. Another biochemist, this man named Mate Hidvegi who’s just a lovely man, started to go back to this, Szent-Gyorgyi, because he was in the lineage of Szent-Gyorgyi. One of his advisors was taught by Szent-Gyorgyi. He had learned about this natural way of looking at how things metabolize. He developed the first commercial product of fermented wheat germ extract. But it was tough to take because it was eight grams and it tasted horrible. It was tough to get people to take it. Dr. Hidvegi eventually met the group working at American Biosciences, which developed a freeze-dried method. They got this down from eight grams to five grams, and it tasted not awful—still not wonderful, but not awful. Then they met Dr. Watson, James Watson of Watson, and Crick, founder and the elaborator of the DNA helix. He had said in an op-ed in The New York Times, I believe, that he thought we were missing the boat in this war on cancer. We should attack this abnormal way that cancer cells metabolize because normal cells do not do that at all. If we interfere with this metabolism, it should not harm normal cells because they do something very different. 

So American BioSciences sponsored some research with him at his lab, and they published it. They took these five grams and got it whittled down to the essential components. It is 250 milligrams. It can go into capsules. It is game over. It is easy now to take and very useful. That is the development of this project. The new material is fermented wheat germ extract, which is super concentrated. I think they have done a lot of research and have supported a lot of research looking at the mechanism of action. Then, Dr. Hidvegi and his people in Hungary had done a lot of work with human subjects. We inherited a non-toxic product that had a lot of research behind it. For those reasons and for what the human research showed, to be honest, it was the human research that drove my interest, and I knew about this stuff because I had read an abstract that was about a Russian study, and I was like, This stuff sounds too good to be true. I have got to find it. I started poking around, trying to find it. Then I met the guys from American BioSciences, who have taken over the U.S. distribution of this material, they gave me all the research that existed. They introduced me to Dr. Hidvegi. I got to talk to the person who developed this, and that was the beginning. I watched all the research develop after that. It was pretty convincing for me. If it is not toxic and has some human research behind it, there are a lot of things we do that have less support than that. That is my rationale for picking this thing. You must get the exact stuff because some of the other stuff is still being sold. Although it might do you good, it probably will do you good. It is just too hard to take. You want to get this fermented wheat germ extract super concentrated that was done in this very high lab at Cold Spring Harbor in New York. 

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes.

Mary Hardy, MD

The box lab.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. I know, I use it for the majority of my cancer patients. It is exactly what you are saying. It is a whole lot easier to take a couple of pills than to swallow

Mary Hardy, MD

I know the American BioSciences guys spent a lot of money to do this. I am grateful every day because it means that what was unable to be taken off—people already nauseated from their chemotherapy—you cannot ask them to take something challenging by taste. I just think of all the patients before this new product was developed who could have benefited from it. I am grateful that it exists now. My family member, for example, took it and did very well with it. But I just wonder, You always regret what you could not do, but you have to always give yourself a pass and say, Well, from now on, I will do what I know is the best you can do at the moment.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, you appreciate the new knowledge and the new tools that enable you to make an impact in situations that you were not able to before. Yes.

Mary Hardy, MD

Yes. I got very interested in this material because it has mechanisms of action that no other cancer drug that I know of has. Okay.  For one thing, it interferes with the cancer’s ability to use sugar. That is very rare; no one else has done that. That is like the Holy Grail. Everybody’s looking for the single-molecule drug that will do this. This is not a single molecule. It is a concentrated extract. In most good integrative therapies, there are a lot of actors in there helping each other. This interferes with the cancer’s ability to pick up sugar, use it, and use the alternative pathways that it uses to try to get around the blockages. The cancer’s starving and that is a problem. It helps create things that end up triggering other enzyme systems that lead to different cell differentiation, and then the cell says you are not a normal cell, so we are going to convince you to commit suicide, apoptosis, or programmed cell death. That is one mechanism, just through the sugar mechanism. The second thing it does does a lot of stuff, but the two big things that I find gobsmacking impressive. The other one is that it normalizes mitochondrial function. I know this and I am sure most of the people watching do because they are probably very well-informed. But the mitochondria are these little peanut things that are inside the cytosol of the cell. They are the little manufacturers of energy for the cell. Because that is a central function that keeps the cell alive, it also controls a lot of other functions. Cancer disables mitochondria pretty early in their development because normal mitochondrial control genes control differentiation and apoptosis cell death. When those get turned off by disabling the mitochondria, then the cancer can do whatever it wants. But if you normalize the mitochondria, it comes back online and goes, Wait a minute, how did this get so out of whack? It starts turning on the genes that program cell death, apoptosis, etc., and then the mitochondria start to respirate more normally, and energy production becomes more normal. It has been used in other conditions. 

I have had success with chronic fatigue patients and fibromyalgia patients, and they are using it with some of my long-term COVID patients and family members. I think that that operates through mitochondrial action, restoring normal mitochondria. Those are the two big mechanisms of action that I think are so important. But there are tons of other things to it. It interferes with the cancer’s ability to hide, so it strips off, cancers are a great imitator. You have heard that before. It imitates and puts out on top of its cell, a little protein complex that is an antigen, and it tells the cells, We are normal. In the low surveillance cells come by looking for bad guys, they have this little camouflage and funny glasses, and it says, I am normal; you are not looking; I am not the droid you are looking for. So it passes it by. But for fermented wheat germ extract, the super concentrated version helps strip out that cell marker. Now the cells cannot hide as well, and it improves natural killer cell number and function, etc. It just has many different mechanisms for helping, and that is shown to be so in human research as well. I want you to know all the background on it. You think, oh, that should be done well in human studies, and it has a wide variety of cancers.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

That is the beauty of it; with all these mechanisms at work, it is safe. It is something that people do; you cannot overdo it and get sick from it. The worst is that you are taking too much, and you need a new wasted.

Mary Hardy, MD

That is the thing: it supports normal cell function, as we talked about before. If you find a way to get behind the normal function of the cell, the natural biology, then luckily the cells are smart. They do. A lot of you do not have to. You do not have to know all this stuff. I just know that if I support the normal mitochondria and interfere with cancer and cannot eat very well, then oftentimes things turn out quite well and people feel better. That is the most important thing. They generally feel good while they are taking this stuff; their energy levels are better. That is because the other side effects are better too. That is important for me.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, so here you have you are starving the cancer, and the cool thing you are saying is that it does not work just through one pathway just because it is a complex molecule. As the cancer is trying to avoid or evade that blockage, it will try other pathways and then someplace else. 

Mary Hardy, MD

Yes.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. You have this starvation, and then you have to activate the cell death switch. Then you also have to add the recognition of the cancer cell by the immune system. All those three have huge things in them.

Mary Hardy, MD

By turning back on the mitochondria, a lot of other stuff starts to happen. It turns out that other cascades are all normal. It is not going to upset the host because it is just stuff that the healthy cells are doing anyway. It starts to turn that on in the cancer cell. The cancer cell cannot tolerate that because it has too many mutations. If these genes are turned on in the cell before it is allowed to divide so that badly damaged cells do not divide, then the body looks at that and says, Oh, no, you are going in the wastebasket. No, you are not going to get a chance to divide. You are too damaged. You cannot perform your normal functions. Then again, you come back to the apoptosis cycle. 

But there are also multiple ways to trigger that same action. I said that it all operates in ways that are normal functions and normal behaviors that normal cells do. The toxicity is very mild. It is what I said, and now that does not taste bad. It is hard, and everybody also says it is everything everybody’s always worried about. Well, I have a gluten allergy. Can I take this? Because it is fermented wheat germ, everybody knows that region has gluten in it because it is not that part of the cell but that part of the seed. But, after the fermentation, that is all gone, and especially after the super concentration, that part gets thrown away in the process of reducing just to the essential ingredient. Even people with full celiac disease wouldn’t have to worry. I do not think so.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

How does this interact, then, with any traditional oncology care? Does it play well with chemo and radiation? Does it improve the outcome? How do they play with each other?

Mary Hardy, MD

It does play well. I think most of the research has been done looking at chemo, which is not surprising because it is also excited about a metabolic site in the body. I will tell you about a couple of different cancers. For example, I have some sort of source of interest in radiation chemo, head and neck cancer, and oral cancer. Sorry, I have a little cough. No problem. I will stop in a minute. Okay. When talking about head and neck cancers, you get a sense of both chemo and radiation effects. given fermented wheat germ for about a year, along was standard curative surgery, and then chemo radiation, which was very difficult for the mouth. It can cause a lot of irritation in the mouth. But the quality of life in patients who took the fermented, which was good, was very good. They continued to eat. They did not have as many problems. Then, in the first year, their rate of recurrence was, I think, 87% less, 85% less than that. 

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

That’s incredible.  85% less reoccurrence in the patient.

Mary Hardy, MD

In the first year. All they did was take standard care, and then one group got a year’s worth of fermented wheat germ extract.  For people who are looking at conventional therapy, it does go well. Conventional therapy and a couple of other studies had done the same thing, giving the fermented wheat germ for a year, during and after conventional therapy. If someone is considering doing this, which I strongly encourage, then a year is a reasonable amount of time to do this because it allows everything to settle and come back down, including any random cells that are still left. Hopefully, they will be cleaned out by conventional and normal surveillance systems by then. Then, five years after just one year of wheat germ extract, these neck cancer patients had a 50% improvement in survival throughout the group but just got conventional therapy alone. This is a very bad cancer. It is very difficult to cure. That is amazing. The abstract that I saw was about stage three melanoma and melanoma stage by how deep it is. The deeper it is, the more likely it is to metastasize. Once it is metastasized, it cannot be cured surgically. Until recently, with these new biological response modifiers, we did not do very well with chemotherapy for metastatic melanoma. It was very difficult to treat. 

So what happened was that they took the same thing that took the group of patients. They gave them a chemo that is not even conventional chemo anymore. It is not that effective. Then they had a regular group, and then they had a group, a regular treatment, and another year of this fermentable term extract. They had a much better survival rate at five years. After five and seven years, 50% of the patients were still alive. When should the result be much lower than that? I was at that time treating the late melanoma; if you saw them on somebody, you were just, oh God, I feel terrible. to see that result, that is what got me chasing this down in the first place. In colon cancer studies done in Israel, given a fermented region extract during treatment, there was an 89.2% decrease in recurrence and a 62% decrease in death in a couple of years. We do not have five, ten, or 15 years. Follow up. I would love for someone to sponsor the research to do that. But what we know so far is quite good. It has also been used in pediatric patients. Frankly, I was often asked to see pediatric patients. Since I trained as an internist, I have always felt uncomfortable. So I had a rule: you had to be holding my shoe size for me to be comfortable seeing you. But I felt comfortable giving this because, again, it is so benign. There was a study looking at children who had solid tumors. 

One thing that they found in this study was that it kept children’s white count up, which usually crashes. When that happens, people can get what are called neutropenic fevers. fevers with a low white count, and those can be deadly. They can kill people. so it requires a hospital stay and usually a lot of antibiotics. then sometimes you can treat it and sometimes you cannot, so that the children had a much lower rate of neutropenia and did not have any fevers, so they did not have this life-threatening infection. I can talk to you about breast cancer; talk to you about lung cancer. It has been tested on a bunch of different tumor types. Now, I told you that most of the work was done in Israel and Hungary using fermented wheat germ extract. The first kinds of products were produced, but when the new material was prepared, it was tested on all kinds of cell lines in lots of different ways. Not in humans yet. There are lots of different ways. It was shown to be equivalent to how the same results have an equivalent or at least an equivalent rate of effect on cell cancer lines in vitro and animal studies. I feel comfortable saying that I believe that this material contains everything that was in the bigger amount and everything that was left that I do not think was crucial to the action. I think you can expect the same results. I am hoping that we will get some people interested in doing some more research. We will get some direct human data with the new cancers as well. One of the ways I have used it that I thought was great was because I had triple-negative breast cancer patients. There is nothing you can do. You cannot give them estrogen to decrease their recurrence. You cannot give them anything we know, there is nothing that can affect them as far as we know. I used to give them a year’s worth of this material. I do not have that, which is not a very common cancer. I do not have a big number, but I trust and hope that it did them well.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. What are some of the things that you saw personally using it? That you brought it in and you had that wow factor.

Mary Hardy, MD

Everybody had a good quality of life. That’s the first of all, I said, they met my basic criteria and they seemed to help support energy and well-being. That is the first thing. Then I had a couple of wows. a case report worth being published. They were so unusual. The first was when a man came to me who had a malignant melanoma, and I was excited because I said, Oh, I think that is going to be helpful. He only had one metastasis in his lung, and he was seeing another oncologist who was doing clinical research on the new material that is being used now for treating melanoma. So I gave it, but that was not available commercially yet. I gave this guy my whole picture that he had on here. So his oncologist called me about a month later. It was, oh, and I was, Oh, wait, what did I do? Because his lung metastases are completely gone. I said, That’s bad? How do we know that is not bad? That is good. He said, Well, I cannot put him in the study now. I said, Well, we will find you some more. But that was one. 

Then the second patient, one of the cell lines, showed that this stuff is very active in his ovarian cancer. I had a patient who had surgery done for her ovarian cancer.  You are often unable to take everything out. You look, and you find as much as you can, but it is often not found super early. Commonly, it recurs, and ovarian cancer recurs and then gets beat back and then comes back. Again, that is a long time. This woman had the surgery but then decided she did not want the chemotherapy that was offered to her. She did not want to take the chemo, and she wasn’t going to take any. She was going to just do these things that she found my recommendations. Well, I am not comfortable with that. I will let you, and I am. Okay, well, I gave you the back of the package warning. All I can do is wish you well and keep in touch. She was when I lost touch with her because I left UCLA; she was two years after her initial surgery and had no evidence of cancer. It was known the cancer was left on the side because the surgeon could see it. She just could not get to it. In all those two cases, I think if I needed any additional support, I have a third case that was reported to me by a friend of mine for esophageal cancer. It just had another miraculous regression so that conventional therapy could be done to help nail that in place. I am not saying to do this instead of conventional therapy. It is not what I recommend, but I am saying that if you do this, I have personally seen two cases and heard of another one, and we do not want to get people to do something because of a rare event. So I can tell you that I can also recommend that to you because we have done research so that you will get benefits that are not as rare as those two astonishing cases I saw.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

What are some? I see you mentioned ovarian cancer, and this has been active against that cell line. What are some of the cancers that have been researched and are saying that if you get this cancer?

Mary Hardy, MD

Dr. Hidvegi said they never used it for leukemia or lymphoma. That is, and so it was never done after a cell transplant or a bone marrow transplant. I did not feel comfortable giving that to my husband without more research behind it. It had not even been done on animals yet. We do not necessarily go there first for leukemia. I still feel it would be okay for lymphomas. Then Dr. Hidvegi said they did not have a lot of success with prostate cancer. Now, I have also seen a lot of breast cancer patients, and I saw the results that were shown in the study that looked at breast and lung cancer patients, where quality of life improved. We would have to follow people from two to five, 10, and 15 years to be able to say that we have a cure. 

Even then, cancer can recur quite late. Often,  when cancer does recur late, it is breast cancer. It is different than it is, and it was estrogen-positive before. It might not be estrogen-positive now. It might be HER2 positive in the recurrence, but it wasn’t in the original cancer. I think, that all I can tell you for sure is that almost everybody uses it in solid tumors. I use lymphomas with great results. I did not particularly use it in public cancer tumors or other things I do that I thought were helpful and that was helpful in research. I did not feel I had to, and especially when it wouldn’t taste, I did not want to have to struggle with that when I had other things I could do for prostate cancer patients.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

That is when we use the nasty-tasting things. But now, obviously, when it is and if it is due to pill format, it is a whole lot.

Mary Hardy, MD

You had a lot of results. Do you use it on prostate cancer patients yourself?

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I have, and it is a little hard sometimes because you do a combination of several things, and yes, it becomes hard to say whether this is the one that did it or not.

Mary Hardy, MD

Yes, yes. Well, I said in the metastatic stage, which is stage four melanoma, that it does not matter. I did not do anything else; I think it was pretty much window dressing, and I think it was the medical that caused that metastasis to resolve. and now they have much more effective therapy that is much less toxic. But still, if I ever had a melanoma, I’d start on day one.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

One thing that I wanted people to understand, when you are starving the cancer, you are interrupting energy production. But then, as a metabolite of that process, the cancer is used to produce energy, and they are sick. They’re metabolites of functions. That’s a signal mechanism in the environment. that tumor microenvironment that is promoting metastases, promoting growth, and promoting a lot of things. In addition to starving that cell, you are also shifting the whole environment.

Mary Hardy, MD

Yes. Because to manufacture sugar instead of making 32 units of energy, you make eight, and you waste a lot of the sugar as lactic acid, which you guys know, if you would say, exercise for the burn that gives you the burn in your muscles, and that means that your muscles are working so hard you are asking the metabolized more than you can deliver oxygen to the muscles. Okay, so the tumor makes this environment anoxic and it makes it acidic, and that promotes the genes that, if that turns off the genes that do limit cancer growth, promote the genes that allow it to grow and metastasize as well. 

Yes, so you are. I think that by changing metabolism and blocking certain other things, I have another ten different ways that it works. It starts to rejigger the metabolism of just a very finely interwoven set of activities so that they all start to support each other. When things start to go in a good direction, it promotes a good way to continue. That does not sound super scientific when I say that, but that is what happens, I think.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. Well, I have. I appreciate you explaining this and bringing your expertise. You have been doing this for 30 years.

Mary Hardy, MD

More than that now. I have had a few birthdays, I think, since that was something like that, but no.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, well, and just yes. Sending up programs in Georgetown, Cedars-Sinai, and UCLA. It is known that these are not small institutions, so yes, that is quite an amazing feat. Dr. Hardy, thank you so much for joining me.

Mary Hardy, MD

My pleasure. I appreciate what you do. Getting good information out to people so that they can make empowered choices to help take care of themselves is important because we need them on their side.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, I agree. We mentioned before our discussion that whatever we can do to turn on the innate intelligence of the body and allow the body to do its magic and trust the body’s ability to do so, the better we are.

Mary Hardy, MD

Absolutely. Especially when we report, when we are supporting normal function, then I do not think we have to worry so much about toxicity.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. Thank you so much, Dr. Hardy.

Mary Hardy, MD

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Bye 

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Bye.