What Every Woman Must Know About Breast Cancer Prevention & Recurrence

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Plant Based Cancer Solutions Summit. So glad you're here. This summit is so important, so dear to my heart with. We're helping so many people get through the craziness out there and all the misinformation you hear all the time. I have a really great guest today when let me introduce her. Will get started. Kristi Funk, M.D. is a medical doctor, a board certified breast cancer surgeon, a physician, bestselling author, keynote speaker, women's health warrior. She's devoted her life to this.

She she besides doing, you know, getting a medical or education and residency and breast cancer fellowship, she co-founded the Pink Lotus Breast Cancer Center in Los Angeles, where she practices as a breast cancer surgeon and expert in minimally invasive diagnostic and treatment methods for all types of breast disease. And she helped thousands of women. What if she does for a living navigate breast issues, including well-known celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Cheryl Crowe, and her extensive research over the years into nutritional science caused her expands her passion for medicine and for her practices at breast cancer surgery. Now.

And now she does a lot of extra things that works in this field of nutrition, including starting the Cancer Kicking Summit. And she used to be a former host of the doctor's TV show, which she co-hosted. And now she's a go to breast excerpt for Good Morning America. She's repeatedly appear on many television shows. Today's show, Rachael Ray, Doctor Oz Show, CNN, The View, and of course, she's received tons of honors and awards. It's her dedication to her career, her community, and educating and empowering women for better health.

And so we're lucky to have her here today, and we'll go through some get a lot done in a half an hour, right. Oh, yeah. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So you graduated and became a breast cancer surgeon, and then you found out about. Then you study nutritional science more as a physician as opposed to an undergraduate. Correct? Absolutely correct. Yes, most of my knowledge. So in the beginning, I was director of patient education at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and I would give community lectures.

Honestly, there'd be like ten people that showed up kind of not paying attention at all there for the free pens. Right? Because truth is, no one wants to hear about breast cancer. Like, how do you diagnose it? How do you treat it? Let's talk about surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, anti hormone therapy, and on and on. But you don't want to hear about it unless you're in the throes of making decisions because you yourself were diagnosed or you're helping someone else navigate the journey. Otherwise it's just TMI right?

So what I started to do was razzle dazzle them in my lectures with a few factoids, like, did you know three cups of green tea a day could cut breast cancer as much as 50%? So I started understanding that our choices had an impact on cancer occurrence and then outcomes. But what really, really opened my eyes was, was writing my book, breasts, that owner's manual. And when I dove into nutritional science to back up with fact all the things I was saying, that's when I went into the nutritional science, really, for the first time in my life, and just mind blown about how clear the science is pushing us toward a plant based diet and very much away from an animal based one.

Yeah. And did you have a did you do all the research yourself? You had a research assistant. When you're scouring the literature for these styles of research articles, I did every single thing myself. At first I was shopping around for a ghost writer

How Nutrition Changed Her Breast Cancer Practice 3:34

and a research assistant, and then I quickly realized, you know what? I am the only person who can write this book, and I need to understand exactly what I'm saying. So no, I'll tell you that so many books were a tremendous resource, and Gregor's website was wonderful for me to dive into understanding things, because it was a crash course in this. I had six months to write the whole book, not just for sure. So this was within the last ten years. Exactly. Yeah, the book came out in 2018. So this probably so that radically changed your whole outlook on your career and how you're interacting with patients right now. Correct.

100% correct. Not only did it impact my career in that I had so much more to offer patients than the traditional Western medicine track, which is still a very tried and true path, and oftentimes the best one to take. However, women feel a little bit at the mercy of fate and at the hope that these drugs or whatever, their choices are definitely going to do the trick. And we all know there are recurrence and mortality stats from breast cancer, so we haven't figured it all out. So to empower them with daily things, every time they live fork to mouth, every time they eat or drink or move or think or forgive or don't like, there's so much that goes into creating a harmonious microenvironment that is very anti-cancer and this gives them hope.

Yeah. You know, you would be good to speak about a little bit about breast cancer is like not one disease. It's like five different diseases. And there's like very slow growing cancers that are that are not going to kill you and are best treated nutritionally. There are cancers that are very aggressive and could if you don't give them chemo, they could become they could, you know, kill a person. There's like it's not like a one size fits all. There's very different types of breast cancers and very different types of coming to the right decisions for what's the best route for that person to take with that type of cancer.

Right. Absolutely correct. It's it's my pleasure to come alongside a woman newly diagnosed to help her navigate that treatment decision tree, because it is so varied. And in fact, once you start looking at genomic analyzes of tumors, we have 21 subtypes of breast cancer. And just like you said, some are really indolent. They're slow growing. They're lazy. They may kill you when you're 250, like honestly. So those are the tumors that, as you said, are best supported nutritionally. Do you have to choose everything that we're going to throw at you?

Absolutely not. Even when you have an aggressive cancer, everything comes down to what resonates with you as your best path. But there are, in my heavily researched opinion, dangerous paths to follow when you have a particularly aggressive cancer. And sometimes doctors aren't very forthcoming about subtypes. They're very cookie cutter in their approach. Exactly. You know, that's the giving people over treatment for for insulin cancers. And, you know, and then they give them hopeless prognoses for more aggressive cancer, which is which is also inaccurate because some of the aggressive cancers makes them now more responsive to chemo because they multiplying so rapidly and unraveling their DNA.

And that's, you know, my experience doing this for like three decades is that those people who had young, aggressive cancers are now surviving 20, 30 years later because they embrace this diet to prevent the recurrence that could have occurred. You know, you know, 5 or 10 years after chemo. Exactly. So some of these ones that sound so austere and frightening are the ones that respond the best to treatment, like you were saying, particularly immunotherapy for triple negative cancers, which is our most aggressive subtype that we have to try to cure and treat.

Immunotherapy has been a miracle for now. Early stage, stage one triple negative. And just like it sounds, it awakens your immune system to the reality that, oh, there's a sinister cell here that now is unmasked. So the immunotherapy we give does two things. It's as if the cancer cell is shrouded in some sort of cloak, and the immunotherapy takes it off. And at that same moment, the blinders that your immune system cells were wearing are removed. So all of a sudden they connect and your own immune system can annihilate this tumor.

Breast Cancer Subtypes and Personalized Treatment 7:48

But whence the treatment is over? Because you certainly can't sustain immunotherapy or chemotherapy for a lifetime, nor do you want to write your collateral damage will eventually win out on your healthy cells. So that's where Doctor Furman. Our ideas of diet and lifestyle are so critical because you can maintain that anti-aging, anti-growth hormone for 80% of breast cancers. Anti eating, you can be very strategic in your approach to help keep recurrence and death at bay. You know I know it's it's actually it brings us to a new era in the management of breast and prostate cancer now because like you're saying, even when you're using immunotherapy added to your other types of treatments you would use, now you add the nutritional excellence on top of that, which gives you the much more ability to give people confidence and live without fear.

Right. And to tolerate some of the more toxic things that might be indicated. Yeah, sure. So what? So what are your give me some of the pearls of some nutritional pearls that you tell women when and and how do you get them to feel confident and empowered that they can do something that's effective to take control? And how does that feeling of their taking control with their lifestyle and nutrition give them more hope and more peace in their life with the cancer diagnosis? So I think, again, like we've been saying, for them to know that on multiple times throughout the day, on a daily basis, they are eating and moving and thinking in an anti-cancer way gives them that hope in that security blanket that they might otherwise lack, because they're going generally to their medical oncologist.

Hey doc, when all the treatments are done, what do I do now? Do I eat differently? Do I know, honey, you did everything right. You did everything you were supposed to do. You just go back to your life. I'm sorry. Let's pause there. Because everything you were doing before your cancer diagnosis, clearly, unwittingly, was setting up a microenvironment inside your cells conducive to cancer formation. That's why you got the diagnosis of. The last thing you want to do is go right back to the diet and behaviors that you had prior to cancer, because it's just a setup for recurrence.

And so you asked what I tell patients in a few pearls. I first asked them what their diet is. And oftentimes it's exactly like mine was when I went to write my book. I went into science to prove that the way I ate was correct. Right? Like Mediterranean diet, lots of lean meats, lots of fish, chicken and turkey now and again. Never red meat, lots of fruits and veggies. And I thought I had it right. I knew that I was like queen of the cheese platter at parties, and I knew better. I mean, that's very high in saturated fat.

I didn't think it was a health food, but I didn't think I shouldn't eat it now and again. Right. So a lot of my patients are exactly there. So I get I get them very well because they thought they were doing it right, especially if they're around my age. I'm 55, so I grew up as a teen in the 80s, and that's when bread, pasta, rice and potatoes just made you fat. You looked at that. That was like the dawn of Atkins and all of that, right? So I understand their approach to food, but I also understand the person who's going to In-N-Out burger right after our meeting, until I start to explain what animal protein and animal fat does inside of you.

So it definitely elevates estrogen levels and it increases angiogenesis, which you well know. But for those who don't, Angelo blood vessel Genesis birth. It's the birth of new blood flow that every cancer inside of you aspiring to be bigger than two millimeters must create. It must get this blood flow to get its nutrients. And when it grows up, all big and strong. Exit strategy, right? Same vessels, straight to the liver, long bone, brain. That's how it metastasize. So animal foods are angiogenic.

They bring that blood supply to tumors. Animal foods will elevate IGF one insulin like growth factor which is the big daddy growth promoter inside our bodies, which is very useful because we turn over 50 billion cells a day. But your brain tells your liver how much to make for the day's task. So when you eat animal protein and you spike idea of one as a natural response. So in other words, your body could care less how happy that cow was roaming free for 500 acres. All to itself, though humanely it was killed.

It doesn't care idea if one goes up and now you have too much, so it's still screaming at things to grow well. Plaque grow fat, grow cancer, grow metastases. So once I start to explain to patients what their food is doing that's helping fuel and feed their cancer, they get a little wide eyed and they ask, where do I get my protein right? And that's when I get to talk about how plants come to the rescue, right? There are these Fido nutrients we call them, but they're chemicals, plant based chemicals that all you have to do is chew and swallow.

You don't even have to understand it. But the curcumin in turmeric, the epic catechin gallate in green tea. That was fair trial in red grapes, the limonene.

Why Plant-Based Diets Help Reduce Cancer Risk 13:00

And these chemicals coming from your plants are going to do all of the things that your cancer can't stand. These chemicals have been proven again and again in science to various chemicals do various things, but lower estrogen levels, lower IGF one, particularly by increasing the binding protein. They're anti angiogenic. So they actually shrink up and pull out those blood vessel plugs that got into the tumor. They are from there antidiabetic. In other words we're improving insulin sensitivity. And all of this just culminates in less inflammation a more competent immune system that can then zero in on the DNA that's gone awry, and either fix it or throw it out so cancer can't propagate.

And I can teach you how to eat this way for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And if that's overwhelming, let's pick one meal a day. Let's start there. Right. So I don't make them have to be all or none, because every step you take toward a more plant forward diet is a step away from the cancer chasing you. So when the when they're eating this way to probably losing weight, which also reduces their estrogen and other pro-inflammatory compounds. But are some of the patients some of the people like nervous they're losing weight.

So of so much with the cancer diagnosis, when it's actually a healthy diet that's doing it, do you reinsurer them or not? About that I do. And you know, something I learned from you that I want to thank you for is sometimes they're white counts. No, not during chemo treatment really messes with your bone marrow and white red blood cells. But just as a maintenance mode, maybe for years, after all the big treatment, they'll come back and be like, you know, my white cell counts like 3.1. And they're worried it's so low.

And I learned from you that, you know what? That's because the normal range is our normal American slice of pie, which is, you know, 72% overweight and obese and the third pre-diabetic or diabetic on and on. So normal is an inflammatory state. And you're my friend. Being plant based are very anti-inflammatory. So your white cells are low. They have nothing to do. They don't have any inflammation to fight. You mentioned weight loss. I do let them know when they're overweight. I find when you go plant based and you're already ideal body weight with a BMI on the lower end, you know, between like 19 and 22, you're probably not going to lose a lot of weight.

It's when you have weight to lose. So I tell them, this is really exciting. New research. Actually, the data is flying in from how body fat adiposity affects breast cancer occurrence and outcomes. And it goes way beyond the main driver that we most would quote. So the main driver for fat promoting cancer formation after menopause is that everywhere you have a fat cell, you have an enzyme called aromatase that's turning adrenal gland steroids into estrogen. So the more fat you have, the more estrogen you are making after your ovaries stopped.

And since 80% of breast cancers are fueled by estrogen, this is a bad combination. And in point of fact, the data shows repeatedly that if you just draw blood on post-menopausal obese women, their blood levels of estrogen 30 to 100% higher than their normal weight counterparts. So yes, the fat increases. Estrogen and other studies then show that, yes, the elevated estrogen after menopause does indeed promote breast cancer. But there's so much more going on with fat, so they should be excited that they are losing this excess weight.

The main things just briefly because they're so deep. But one is leptin. So your fat cells make leptin, which is the hey, you're full now stop eating hormone. Right. And what happens is you get guts and made from the adipose. You have a higher level of leptin. And there are leptin receptors in multiple places, like in the brain where it induces satiety because where else it is, there are receptors for leptin inside cancer cells, which is, you know, very ominous. So they're in these tumors themselves and in the microenvironment.

So that I keep mentioning. So these little like bathtubs of, of fuels that your cells are sitting in are either good or bad. But once left and binds to its receptor, it's going to start cross talking with multiple oncogenes, which basically just get the gas pedal turned on on cell proliferation. And that is a huge driver for for cancer. Adipose sets up chronic inflammation, which also is, you know, this pro-inflammatory state with cytokines and activated macrophages flying around is damaging your immune system.

And the final thing is that body mass index correlates directly with insulin. So insulin like growth hormone IGF one is its own thing. But insulin itself is also a direct promoter of breast cancer. So it stimulates growth and invasion. And it also decreases the binding protein for IGF one. So that goes up. It also stops apoptosis of cancer cells. Insulin does. So apoptosis being the program cell death when the cancer has just lived out its course. And that cell should die. Insulin comes along like no no no. Keep going, keep going.

You're okay. Not time to die yet. And then the final thing insulin does is it increases veg f veggie f, which is a potent stimulus a requirement for that angiogenesis. So I encourage women that if you're overweight going plant based will help you lose and maintain that weight loss. And the most important thing to realize is that it's not you were overweight and the damage is done and irreversible. That's the beauty of the forgiving body we've been given. If you lose the weight, you lose the risk.

One study actually showed they looked at over 33,000 women, and they followed them for over 15 years. And in that period of time, 1987 got breast cancer. And then they correlated that to their starting weight and their current weight. So you were 64% to get breast cancer. If you had lost weight in your premenopausal years, you were 34% less likely to get breast cancer if you just maintained weight. And if you lost weight after menopause, you had a 52% drop in breast cancer incidence. So it's never too late to lose the weight.

And going plant based, definitely. That's really important. It gives to people, even if they just doing things now correctly makes a big difference in your past. That's your past now do it right. It reminds me of this, this concept which you could comment on, that when a person gets a diagnosis of breast cancer from a mammogram. So the tumor has been identified, been big enough to seen by the human eye. It may have been there a decade, and that most women without a breast cancer diagnosis, who were over the age of 5560, likely have some breast cancer cells in their body.

So everybody has some cancer cells in their body or not everybody, but a lot of people, most people probably do have breast cancer cells or not. Breast cancer cells, some kind of cancer cells. And we don't need to wait till we get a diagnosis of cancer to start to implement these things. We're learning that prevent cancer from even advancing, you know, wait till it's there for ten years and advances coalesces to a mass and metastasized of the body. And now we change our diet, right? The cancer cells all over the place.

And even if you don't have a diagnosed with cancer, you may have cancer because you ate American food. And now's the time to make this change, you know, so true. And it's so empowering to know that it's never too late to make these changes, because the impact of food is nearly immediate. One of the studies that I love to tell people about,

Top Anti-Cancer Foods: Soy, Crucifers, and Flax 20:30

because it incentivizes them and it makes them realize, okay, I don't have to be all or none because I do find that's a stumbling block. I personally, once I finished my research for the chapter on what to eat in an instant in one, myself, my husband and my triplet sons all went 100% plant based. Done, never looked back. And that was eight years ago now. So I'm like that though. I'm the obnoxious person who ruined your curve throughout all of grammar school. High school in college, right? Because I got 100% and the extra credit.

So like 105% on every test because I'm like, just answer it, right. Why would you answer it wrong? Just get all the questions right and do the extra credit. So yes, I'm going to go plant based in a day once I'm convinced of the evidence. But you don't have to be that way. If we look honestly at how you're eating and living I give it a C minus. Let's get to a B+. Let's start with a B+. Right. So these little steps. Well, I was talking about the fact that even when you don't have a breast cancer diagnosis, you still likely you still could and most likely have breast cancer cells.

And we shouldn't. It's just like you said, it's not too late, but it's not too early. Even if you don't have cancer, you may. Don't wait to get a diagnosis. Take advantage of this information and do it now and prevent it from moving. Stop. Stop it dead and it's trapped in a stage. Possible I know, why wouldn't you want? Why wouldn't you do it now? Why would you take. Because people don't know. Cancer is ubiquitous. It's like they have, you know, it's like cancer cells have formed all over the time.

All the time. We don't wait till we get advances to start addressing it, you know? Well, all cancer is, is mutated DNA. And we make I've tried to research to get an accurate number, but it's somewhere between billions, up to a trillion mistakes, DNA, little mistakes daily. Really, all it takes is a period of time with enough mistakes accumulating for your immune system to get overtaxed. And it's like, I can't deal with that breast change. Now I'm over here in your colon, right? Like it's just overwhelmed.

And will you give it the weaponry? It needs to always be functional and on top of things, which it definitely can be. You know, this gives me a little pause to say that even those who do tend to eat entirely plant based exercise regularly maintain low stress levels and excellent social connections, etc. they twos can still get cancer. But what I have seen in my practice is that really, without exception, except for gene mutation carriers, which is a whole different category, but only accounts for 5 to 10% of all breast cancers.

So except for the mutation carrier, my people who are living well when they do get cancer, there are these indolent ones that I honestly could live with and not die from for the rest of your life. Not going to kill you. Totally manageable. Not going to kill you, maybe came into existence just because. Imagine if you hadn't been eating and living that way. Then all of a sudden the proliferation rate may have been faster. Maybe the grade of the cancer in the stage would have been more advanced. And then all of a sudden you're just like everybody else.

Yeah, it's important to mention it. So so talk about your like 3 to 5 impactful foods, dietary suggestions or supplemental suggestions that you may incorporate in your total portfolio of advice. Because obviously you mentioned EGCg and and turmeric or curcumin from turmeric. You mentioned a few things. So a little further down that road okay. Great. One thing I'd like to start with, because it's fresh on the top of my mind because I just saw this article yesterday. It's really interesting. They looked at.

So polyphenols have a lot of the anti angiogenic properties. And they measured the polyphenol content of a number of foods. And the winners surprised me because they're not all of them aren't on my top list. So let me tell you what they were. Herbs and spices far and away had the most polyphenol content in the most anti androgenic right. Getting rid of the blood vessels. The vegetable winner. Here's the surprise was the artichoke heart that was never been on top of my. That's my favorite food. Look at you go calling me all power.

Wow I live on those things. That's awesome. Yeah. And they're high in protein too, by the way. And yeah they know. Yeah. So that was you know, normally. So the vegetables in the cancer killing category when I lecture isn't I'm not specifically focused on just angiogenesis or the lack thereof. So I will tell you the runaway winners overall for anti-cancer protection are going to be your allium vegetables. So onions, leeks, chives and the like and all of the cruciferous veggies. So broccoli bok choy, broccoli sprouts are the kings of.

So for faint content which is the magic there. But back to the anti angiogenic stuff I have two more. So the top fruits no surprise here. Berries. Yeah runaway winners. And then here was my other surprise. Do you want do you want to be. You want to throw a guess out here to the top. Whole grain. That was the most anti-Indian dent. And there's so many grains to choose from so I can it's whole grain rye. Whole grain rye. Really? Well, yeah. So really surprised me. But back to your original. What do I normally tell people before yesterday's article?

My my top foods for sure, because they have the most science behind them. So I have the most, you know, the highest number of facts in human studies that I can point to to support my advocacy for the high consumption of these foods. Top of the list is going to be soil, and this is a big surprise to a lot of people. So we're talking non-GMO, preferably organic. This is not an expensive food group. So go for the organic here. And soy comes in many forms of the fermented forms like tempeh, miso, natto, tamari.

These are possibly gentler on your gut if you're new to soy, because it can create a little gas and discomfort if you overeat it at the get go. But the more palatable common soil forms are going to be soymilk, tofu, soybeans, roasted soy, nuts. Right? So soy has historically had a very bad rap when it comes to cancer because every not everybody, many people are aware that soy has isoflavones, which are phytoestrogens, estrogen. There's that bad actor word again. Again to remind you it fuels 80% of breast cancers.

Estrogen. Estrogen hits a receptor on the outside of a cancer cell, which then sends a signal for it to multiply and divide. Here's the thing when you consume soy in any one of those forms, the isoflavones like Geneseo and Dade Zinn, they go flying into a receptor for estrogen called beta, whereas the one on the cancer was alpha. So they zip past alpha with 1,600% more affinity hit beta. And when beta is activated, it does a few fabulous things that are very anti-cancer. First of all, it down regulates alphas.

It like blocks it basically. So now there's less of the receptor for that particular cancers fuel source. And it goes out into your fat cells and turns off that enzyme aromatase that we were talking about converting adrenal glands into more estrogen. Soy has shown again and again in every single human study done. And that's the key. Human studies has shown a decrease in occurrence, recurrence and death from breast cancer on average, with a 30% drop in all of those things, sometimes higher, a little lower.

But it's never promoted cancer in any human study as opposed to mouse models. And that's where I think the bad rap got all the whisperings, because when you and I am against animal experiments, but what they did was they grafted breast cancer cells onto mice and fed them soy. And the tumors grew. But turns out they metabolize isoflavones very differently than humans. Mouse models. Studies don't always translate into human medicine. So soil. So it up. Don't be afraid of it. Get your 30 to 60% drop in breast cancer from 2 to 3 servings of soy daily.

Second up, you can imagine, from what I already said, the cruciferous vegetables family, one of the magical compounds in there, so foreign, which is formed particularly in broccoli. But all the cruciferous veggies have it. And then it's 100 times more present in broccoli sprouts. And the magic for fame is that it's been shown in, albeit mouse models. But it's been so does it translate? But the breast cancer stem cell, both estrogen positive and estrogen negative, is thought to be the whole mastermind of cancer recurrence and death.

The main reason why, I think, is that it's known to it divides very slowly. And as you mentioned in passing, when we first started talking chemotherapy and a lot of agents that even radiation, what they're focused on is quick cell division. That's why there's so much collateral damage with chemo. It's super stupid. It's just looking at one thing who divides quickly in this body. Cancer does. So I'll annihilate it. But so do the hair follicles. Baldness. So does your GI tract. Non-zero vomiting, diarrhea.

So do your nails. They're brittle and wonky. So do your nerve impulses. So you get neuropathy right. So keep is not smart. But if your cancer divide slowly then the chemo is not going to kill it. So the stem cell just lies in wait for all the stuff to go flying by, missing it. And then at some opportune moment when you're eating, you know you can drumstick, it's going to reemerge and start proliferating. And it has. So it's what we call pluripotent cell can be anything it needs to be. But when it's been hijacked by a cancer cell, it is enemy number one.

And so for a feint in mouse models took a lot of cancer stem cells, whether they were estrogen driven or negative, which we mentioned was our most aggressive cancer. And it just took three weeks for that cancer stem cell mass to go. Going, going gone. Now your logical next question should be how many like truckloads of broccoli

Smoothies, Supplements, and Daily Food Strategies 30:30

do I have to eat? Or should I just supplement with? So far by how much did this study require to accomplish that amazing feat of stem cells? A cup and a quarter of broccoli sprouts equaled the amount of sulforaphane injected into the mice, so that is manageable. And home growing sprouts is fun and easy. So number. So that's number two. We have soil. We have cruciferous veggies. And number three is flax seeds right. Flax seeds. Wow. They have another phytonutrients phyto estrogen called lignin. So we know them.

Many people know they have like one of the highest concentrations of omega three fatty acids on the planet. Right. But which is a healthy fat? That's not why I love them. I love them for their lignin content, which is also 100 to 800 times any other plant source. So lignin have been isolated as a standalone reason to reduce recurrence and mortality from breast cancer, with a number of pretty fascinating human studies showing that. And one of my one of my favorite ones, because it's just so fun, was they gave 32 women a muffin.

They each had had a breast cancer diagnosis on a core by I'm seeing they analyzed that core on three different parameters. One was a pop ptosis rates. How many cells are actively dying right now? One other one was the or B two expression, which is a marker of aggressiveness. And my favorite marker in cancer profiles is 67. This is simply a division rate. How many cells are actively dividing one becoming two. This is what we refer to as the fast divider that's going to get killed off by chemo, as opposed to the tortoise plodding along very slowly, and chemo is not going to see it.

I figure that out based on 67. So back to our 32 women. They all get a muffin, except half of them have muffins stuffed with two tablespoons of ground flax seeds. And the other was a placebo. Nothing else changed, right? If they were carnivores or diabetic, on and on, they're just living life exactly the same. And now they have some vegan junk food to eat once a day, every day for five weeks. Then they have their definitive surgery, and now we have the tumor back again. Right? So we can attribute solely to the consumption of flax the following things with those three parameters.

In just five weeks of two tablespoons of ground flax daily, the apoptosis rate went up by 30.7%. The curb two expression went down 71%. And now my favorite, the division rate on the cancers slowed by 34.2. That's the power of flax. Yeah just that one change. Do you know you know my acronym G bombs right? Of course I do. I'm jealous. I went to talking about it. Right. Yeah, exactly. I am, and I would be, you know, you should I raised if I, if I weren't mentioning the G bombs as the biggest anti-cancer bombs.

Right. Cool. What about some? So do you do you advise any extra supplements to that? Like, you know, other things they put in their diet? So I, I created a smoothie, a cancer kicking smoothie. Oh, cool. That. So that recipe is available online or just right Christy Funk smoothie. It's semi viral like it'll pop up. And I have so many women drinking this and you make it yourself at home and it helps. I have 18 very potent anti-cancer foods that I like for every cancer patient to try to consume daily.

And this smoothie has 13 of the 18 only because the other five include like tomatoes and seaweed and whole grains made it kind of gross and a smoothie, but make a great whole grain avocado toast or a whole grain pasta with the sauce. You can get the other five easily in two meals total. But the smoothie, when you say supplements, has a number of things that just kind of you, make sure you get them down. It's a little hard to eat all of these powerful foods, and a smoothie is a nice, palatable way of getting them down with minimal process, right?

We never want fruit juice, but lended berries in a smoothie are going to be they're not going to spike your insulin. So in this smoothie the base is so I melt. There you go with your one at least one serving of soy for today. Two fistfuls of leafy greens, two cups of berries. If that's too expensive, you can mix it up because apples are great. Or just citrus fruit too, right? But some of the things that are more on the supplement level, the EGCg in green tea. If you're not a tea drinker, this is a great way because I want you to have three cups of green tea a day.

Matcha green tea in particular, as high as in the EGCg. So you can just scoop that into your smoothie. That's like a supplement. When one study looked at antioxidant content of 3000 plus foods, everything from Coca-Cola to coconuts, the tip top, which is 124 times the blueberry, was the Indian gooseberry, which comes in an organic powdered form called amla. Amla. So I have you put that in. This is where we put the tumor in. I do a whole teaspoon, but technically a quarter teaspoon will do it. You may know that the pip and pepper makes the curcumin like 2,000% more bioavailable in some studies.

It's always more bioavailable though. But 2000 is pretty impressive number. So we're going to add some black pepper in there. Peppering in its own right has anti breast cancer properties. So what else might be cinnamon. Put cinnamon in there. So things that you just might miss out on eating. And sometimes I fall victim to that I'll be somewhere not home. And I'll have like a rice bowl. And I'm like oh I really could put my two mark and pepper in there because I'm not drinking my smoothie today, you know?

But so I always get the flax, the soymilk in my seal cut oats every morning. That's where I get berries, cinnamon, flax, oats and maybe some seeds on there. So that's that's another nice little package of foods. In terms of actual supplements in capsule form. I'm going to swallow them down. You know, every time I try to say, yeah, you can take curcumin in the capsule form or you can take sulforaphane. But we humans have yet to really decipher how synergistic these whole foods are inside of you, and you're going to miss out on some real anti-cancer potency that I know if you don't need it in whole food form.

So while it's fine if you want to do those supplements, it's not not going to be dangerous, even tumeric. So for those of you that I always get this question, so let me just help you out. Yeah. Curcumin has been shown to inactivate tamoxifen, which is a common anti estrogen drug that women with breast cancer often taken. So I get this a lot like oh my doctor told me no curcumin and you're so should I take it out of your smoothie. No. The research clearly shows that the amount of curcumin you'd have to consume on a daily basis to interfere with tamoxifen is 18 teaspoons.

So don't worry about it. You're one you're one teaspoon or less into this movie is going to be all powerful.

Concerns About Unproven Alternative Cancer Therapies 37:30

Now can you get that amount though in supplement form I mean people I have ladies come in with, you know, backpacks filled with all the supplements there. Yeah. You know, it's a little overwhelming, honestly. Take the pressure off. Just aim for 30 different fruits and vegetables a week, which may sound like a high number until you realize you probably easily have 10 to 15 in a salad. And that's just one meal. One day you've got 20 more to go eating the rainbow. That whole idea. Fruits have so many colors.

Mix it up, mix up the veggies, and you're going to get all of these powerful things totally plant based. I think everybody by now hopefully knows we definitely want the B12 and it's optional, but advisable in my opinion, in my research, to be having the EPA da algae based supplement so that you have enough of your long chain fatty acids forming to create neuroprotection. There's no reason to evade your cancer, only to get an early Alzheimer's diagnosis, right? So I definitely love that one as a supplement.

In addition to the B12 and vitamin D, those levels need to be checked. You want to keep your level 40 to 80 nanograms per deciliter. That is your range. So if you're already in it, you don't need to supplement, you get enough sunshine, etc. then you're fine. But if you're low, which a huge percentage of Americans are, then you do want to supplement also with D3. Yeah for sure. I know we're going over, but this is so important. If I could just get one more question, of course it's that, you know, I think you and I know that it's like we have such evidence based, proven efficacy of using a diverse amount of these colorful and nutrition rich plans as a means empowering people with effective strategies to live longer, prevent cancer, and even then, right, we're talking about this.

This is what this is all about. But I think there's also an excessive not only the excessive things of what chemo can do, but people are being diverted into some alternative treatments that which which don't have the proven efficacy of what we're talking about with nutritional input, like, for example, lay a trail or, you know, vitamin drips or ozone, take your blood out, put it through a machine and purify the blood and put a treat with ozone. Put it back in. There's the there's all these therapy clinics opening up and I'm not so against it.

It's just that they're diverting people away from the things that we know are proven efficacy here. You know, I just want to make a view to comment on that, to get your opinion on those things right. The more aggressive the cancer, the more tragic these alternative paths become. Because they do come back to me. I could show pictures that would make you probably vomit at least. Gag. I mean, these tumors are oftentimes on a relentless course of growth and progression, and they will break the skin and fungi it out and get infected and bleed constantly.

And I can smell from outside the room what I'm dealing with. If I have one of these patients coming in and almost all of them are in denial of the tumor being there, but then it's become unmanageable. It's affecting every part of their lives, and they're in chronic pain and it's bleeding. They're getting a knee make. It's a big deal when you ignore aggressive cancers by doing these alternative therapies. I have people do things that are so expensive to I can't help it at sometimes. Like how much was the 200 supplement regimen?

200 pills a day. How much? How much does it cost? It's about 150,000. Yeah, and wholly ineffective. But these are well-intentioned practitioners, I'm sure. But they don't have data to support what they're doing. And it's a very dangerous course. You can do it after you follow some basics. For example, I often encourage women with a tumor. Just let me take it out. Let's just do a lumpectomy, get the cancer out, and then all of these strategies that you want to employ to try to thwart its existence, either valid or some of them, you know, the invalid ones we're talking about right now.

Yeah. Now you're either having a neutral effect or maybe somewhat beneficial effect somehow on an immune system, but you're not trying to dissolve a two centimeter definable wad, which not to freak people out, but a one cubic centimeter cube of cancer with an average division rate of 20% is spewing 3.2 million cells into your bloodstream every single day. So let's get rid of the epicenter and now employ the strategies against the rogue cells. It really are eliminated, usually with one pass through your liver and nodes and all the battling stations, but not always.

And that's the cell that recurs, by the way. Right. It's out there in your body already when the main tumor was here in the breast. So let's get rid of the main tumor and then employ other strategies. And so that's my meet in the middle path for people who are just not going to do anything else. I try to get them at least that far because it's a shame. It's truly it breaks my heart to see someone at a very early, curable stage 1 or 2 and have them go away and do these very, you know, unproven therapies.

And lo and behold, they come back and they'll do they'll go to Mexico, they'll do these, they'll do the, these crazy therapies. And that's crazy. But they're minimal effective. Yeah. And then they then they won't follow a healthy diet either. What they can do, they're not doing. And some of the people that are doing these clinics are also recommending, you know, unhealthy, unhealthy diets in conjunction with those therapies too. So it's you know, I find to there are a lot of these, like some of these well-known clinics in Mexico, the patients will come in to me and I'm like, what did they think when they saw this tumor?

Oh, they never examined me. They just prescribed, prescribed, prescribe all their treatments and pay at the door. And they're not even examining the patients to realize that what they're advising is ineffective. It's very tragic. Well, thanks for your contribution. You're very, very important. I know we went over, but it's important for people to hear this and everybody listening. I know you got a lot of benefit from this. Stay tuned to what's coming up next. And thank you Doctor Funk really so much.

Appreciate your contribution to this summit and everything you do. Really so wonderful. Thank you so much by everybody by.