Connecting Metabolism With Cancer And Type 2 Diabetes

Ralph Moss, PhD

Thank you, Nasha. I’m a fan of mysteries, so cancer is a mystery. It’s a mystery story. You’re looking for clues, and you’re looking for the red herrings that send you off in crazy directions and so forth. It’s a terrible disease when you deal with it personally. It can be incredibly tragic, and you and I are both survivors of cancer, but so many aren’t. You see horrible, tragic things happening. But on the other hand, it’s endlessly fascinating because you are dealing with one of the biggest mysteries in the world and one of the most serious issues. My father used to say, was something as serious as cancer. It’s a proposal, a phrase, and it’s so serious. But on the other hand, it’s annoying when scientists say, it’s fascinating. As a patient and as a person, you get annoyed and a little insulted. We had this happen when my wife had had a biopsy, and they thought we were in the room with the pathologist when she was looking at the sample under the microscope. Her first reaction was, This is fascinating. Look, come here. This is incredibly interesting. No, tell me, is it cancer or not? It was not, thankfully. But you don’t want to hear that as a patient. But on the other hand, it’s endlessly fascinating. I was up at 4:30 this morning working on my new book. This is not uncommon for me, so in 50 years I’ve never lost interest in this disease. The way that the scientific community and the complementary medical community in particular have come up with to deal with this.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Amazing. Your curiosity is what has plunged you through the naysayers over all of these decades,?

Ralph Moss, PhD

I’m not going to go into any depth on this because I’ve written books about it, my book Doctored Results. But, I had a baptism by fire at Sloan-Kettering because I had the best job in the world for a person myself. I was the science writer for Sloan-Kettering. They were then promoted to, as you mentioned, assistant director of public affairs. At the same time, I found myself amid a cover-up of the positive experiments with a phytochemical called amygdala, where, for reasons I go into in my book Doctored Results, the top brass of the institution saw fit to cover up the positive results and announce negative results. I was given the job of writing the press release and announcing these fake results. I did it. But I was also, at the same time, undercutting them. by doing an in-house, unauthorized in-house newsletter, dealing with this. Then I was fired in 1977 for failing to carry out my most basic job responsibility, which I learned meant to lie when your boss tells you to lie, This was, as I said, my baptism by fire. I was propelled out of this cannon to understand A. why that had happened. B. What else was out there? Because I know what I know from my almost four years of interviews and experience at Sloan-Kettering. I had a good idea of what the conventional world looked like, but I didn’t understand what the complimentary world looked like, and it didn’t. That was my background, which was amazing.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

What you speak to that was happening back in the early and mid-70s is still happening today.  in a lot of places.  that you’re and we’re in this echo chamber of similar experiences that are happening, and it’s tough. It’s tough when my colleague, Dr. Angus Douglas, is out of the UK. You’ve probably read about him, studied about him, met him, and interviewed him.

Ralph Moss, PhD

I met him, yes.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Exactly. He’s trying to, like, scream from the rooftops.  here’s a man who does his research: an oncologist develops vaccines for cancer and is calling. Guys, there’s a problem here. No one’s going to look at it. this is what Dr. Moss has been doing for 50 years: saying, Let’s look over here. Let’s not disregard this evidence. That’s not very much information that needs to be shared with the public, good or bad, because you are not unbiased, honestly. People try to put you in a biased camp, but you aren’t. On that note, you’ve mentioned your book Doctored Results. But I’ve been a follower of yours for years. At this point, I’ve read every book you’ve ever written.

Ralph Moss, PhD

Good.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Incredibly excited. By the time everyone’s watching this summit, your new baby book will have been birthed into the world. The Moss Method is the culmination of 50 years of your pursuit of less toxic, more natural approaches to cancer, and just your life experience here. This is your magnum opus. Can you give us a little taste of it? If folks haven’t already devoured it by the time they botched this summit,?

Ralph Moss, PhD

I made a few key decisions about the book early on. One was that I was only going to talk about prevention, and I was not going to talk at all about treatment. This removes a big, stumbling block when you talk about cancer with the conventional oncology community. The great fear is that you’re going to divert patients away from potentially curative treatments into unproven avenues. It’s not without a foundation; a foundation; it’s a fear that’s not without some foundation. But that’s why I wanted to take that off the table. Secondly, I’m a cancer survivor. You’re a cancer survivor. There’s some—I forget the exact number—17 million or 22 million of us.  in the country. It’s an enormous number— 4.5% of the population. When you get up into my age range, it’s much higher than that as well. There’s a huge, unserved, or underserved audience of people who’ve dealt with cancer, been declared cured, in remission, or are under control. then they’re given next to nothing to do on their end. Come back in a year; come back in six months.

I have a close relative who’s dealing with myeloma now, and I can see very closely how this is dealt with. Now he’s been given chemotherapy drugs, and he’s gone through bone marrow stem cell transplantation, but nothing about diet. It’s nothing about herbs, nothing about any complementary treatments, not even forest bathing, meaning walking in the woods in nature. Nothing. There is a judge, I bet. Judging by that and the thousands of cancer patients that I spoke to when I was doing phone consultations, I’d say there’s an enormous need for us to know what the science shows about the ability of the person themselves, the patient, and the patient’s loved ones to impact this disease. I have, the more I got into the research for the book, and there are 12 or 1300 references in the book, separate references in the book. but the more I got into it, the stronger my belief became. that the world of phytochemicals, of plant chemicals in particular, has a great deal to offer to people who are interested in A. Preventing cancer as a primary goal and B. Preventing the recurrence of a cancer that already exists but seemingly is in remission.

But why might it not be in remission? This all synced with my fairly long-term interest in the topic of cancer stem cells. a lot of the book deals with that. The reason I felt that calling it the best method is because, even though I acknowledge my debt to other scholars in the field who have covered some of the same ground, I did find it from my point of view. There were some unique features.  my emphasis on cancer stem cells and my ability to connect the fight of traditional diets and chemicals to cancer stem cells is something that I haven’t seen anywhere.  or only very sporadically. There were a few articles. There have been 12 articles that I could find showing research articles showing that specific natural agents or phytochemicals could block or kill cancer stem cells.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Brilliant. I love this, and I remember not too long ago, while I was still in private practice, and this must have been around 2012 to 2014. Oncologists were pooh-poohing the idea that a cancer stem cell even existed. We were even showing work from the doctor, and all these others were saying, what about this data suggesting other ways? Going up the fact that we couldn’t even talk about a cancer stem cell until just a couple of years ago, and the fact that now you’re showing them because we don’t have much and standard of care if any while there, there’s a few off-label drugs that are showing maybe some promise. I love that you are taking us into the next generation of this knowledge to look at natural compounds and their impact on both the treatment and prevention of stem cell expression.

Ralph Moss, PhD

It’s interesting. Here we go with interesting. But it is an interesting topic. There was a book written by a French philosopher of science about the question of whether stem cells exist. Now, the reason that you can raise that question is because there is a quality of stemness, and then there are cells, and some of these cells have stems attached to them. But the philosophical question is, do stem cells exist as a separate category of things, or is it just that certain cells go bad, as it were, and develop this stem quality, the quality of stem cells? I’d say it’s an open question. When people say there aren’t any stem cells, nobody can deny that there are cells that have the particular surface markers that define each cancer, stem cells. That’s not debated. What’s being debated is: is that an actual thing or is it a quality? There’s a big implication difference in deciding one way or the other. Because if their stem cells are a thing, then anything that would block or kill those things could cure cancer. I’ll put it very bluntly: if the stem is a quality that can attach to any cell, then you can still use the natural elements to fight cancer. But it’s going to be a lot harder to cure the patient of quality.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

What a great clarification on that in that, this is almost its a; the stem cell debate is more about a verb. It’s like, is this it’s stemming? Is this stem?

Ralph Moss, PhD

Is it an adjective, or is it a noun?  It all comes together, and the whole idea of curing cancer could hinge on grammar.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

That gives me goosebumps. Coming out of the words of a bright class.

Ralph Moss, PhD

A classicist background is showing itself.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

I can’t wait to ingest that part of your book. It’s going to be exciting. But among the prominent features of your book, you’ve talked about three major pillars. Are you willing to prioritize the crowd a little bit about what the other two pillars are about, which starts to segue into what we’re going to talk about here??

Ralph Moss, PhD

These two famous researchers, Hanahan and Weinberg, tried to summarize what cancer is. They had the latest version, which Douglas Hanahan put together a couple of years ago. Ten characteristics of cancer, which I talk about, I have a chapter in the book because you can’t talk about cancer in any serious way without dealing with a set of papers that have had tens of thousands of downloads in the scientific community. I was seen as the Bible, as it were, of the cancer community, cancer research, and cancer treatment communities. We take the Bible analogy. It’s something you can’t talk about, like Jesus, if you don’t talk about the New Testament. It’s every little bit of that.

I’m sure they would laugh at that characterization, but it has that stature. Now, I don’t agree with everything in Hanahan and Weinberg. I a little bit explain why in the book, but we can’t talk. We can’t assume to have a serious discussion about cancer unless we take their characterization into account. Now, of their ten, I picked two, and you’ll be interested to know what they are because I’ll tell you what they are, and then we’ll explain why I picked those two. I have the two Hanahan and Weinberg definitions, I picked the immune system.  That’s one. By the way, that’s a Johnny come lately to their list. They were very slow to adopt it. The other one I picked is a metabolic disorder. The third year in our beautiful drawing that my son Benjamin created for the book is cancer stem cells. If I were pressed against the wall and I had to say, what is the what for? You are the hallmarks of cancer, or at least what is actionable for the patient, and you are the person who doesn’t want to be a patient. In other words, in terms of prevention, in terms of nontoxic prevention, which is the only prevention that interests me, then I would say that the three gears that run the cancer basically, or at least a weakened effect, are the immune system, the metabolism, and, oddly enough, the cancer stem cells.

This is all new because, again, you could point to certain precursors I’ve had in writers and scientists, but I don’t think anybody has put this together quite this way. It’s going to be very convincing when you see it. Because once I had the idea, that’s what got me up at 4:30 in the morning. I got it because, it’s gotten to the crazy point where it’s in the book has been invaded by dreams, and now I can barely sleep because when I go to sleep, I’m still editing and still moving things around. Some good ideas and some crazy ideas come to me in the middle of the night. But, you know you’re reaching the end of a writing process when it’s starting to overwhelm your sleeping hours the day. But those are the three things—the three things—that I don’t want to say that matter because, of course, we have to give oncology a try. Not everything at this point can be handled with natural medicine. But we’re on. Some things are not addressed in the book, but we’re on very safe ground if we limit ourselves to, first of all, prevention. Secondarily, I’ve put a bigger limitation on myself, which is that I want the prescription, as it were, to be either entirely nontoxic or else with minimal well-defined toxicities in grade one or two. even though I object to it. But some herbs and some supplements can and do have some side effects. I lean very heavily on foods and what I call functional foods, meaning we’ll not just go grab something at the Subway or Chick-fil-A. it’s food—supposedly food. I don’t know. I’ve never tasted it, but there are special categories of things that are special. Those are the things that I lean very heavily on, because the more that I learned and the more I delved into this, the more important these functional foods became for me. In my program, the Moss Method is a clean traditional diet because it doesn’t. There are a lot of reasons not to jump on the Mediterranean diet bandwagon.

We don’t need to go into that unless you’re interested in it. Secondly, so there’s a dietary, just basic rules of dietetics: organic, not adulterated, not having sugar added—that thing. Then there are the functional foods, and so if you have a basic diet and a lifestyle that includes exercise, I mentioned before this concept of forest bathing, and  I don’t mean taking a bath in the forest;  immersing yourself in the woods, seashore, or whatever. letting nature flow all over and around you. Sometimes there is a physical effect in the forest because the pine trees, the other trees, the aromas, and so forth are very healing. But this is very important. It’s important, in my opinion, not to just exercise mindlessly. You see, people could be on a treadmill, in a gym, or running along the side of a busy highway. I don’t believe that, in the long run, that’s going to be beneficial. It’s immersion in nature. That is, there is at least half of the value. The other half, of course, is getting your body moving, working, and so forth. That’s a big part of it. The other thing is, these functional foods—and I don’t want to give them away—the store tells you exactly what they all are. But there’s, let’s say, about less than a dozen of them that have come to my attention, meaning these are not things you would buy as supplements preferentially.

You preferentially would buy these as foods. But you’re going to have to dig a little bit, and you might have to dig in your pocket a little bit. Because of what I learned in doing this research, it occurred to me. I don’t have the perfect metaphor for this, but you’ll understand what I’m trying to say: that a thing is not the same thing as a name. You could have, let’s say, a fresh glass of orange juice, or you could have a can that’s been sitting on a shelf for four years or was sitting in a tanker off the coast of Venezuela for a decade. Both of them are orange juice, and the FDA would accept them both as oranges. But there’s a big difference—a huge difference—between the highest quality of products and the ordinary quality or the low quality. for many things,  I don’t, I’m not on the vital list. I don’t think that there’s some mystical, unmeasurable quality to live foods. I just think that the freshness and purity of certain foods matter. When I started to get into this question of functional foods, it struck me how many of them are living their foods. You don’t think about that when you go into the store, into the grocery store, or into or into the supermarket. How many of the things you buy are still alive?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Nothing on the exterior and nothing on the interior, that’s for sure.

Ralph Moss, PhD

It’s all around the perimeter. You can fill your belly with all kinds of foods, but again, just because. Just because it has the name green tea, the variety, the difference between the quality of the high quality versus the ordinary quality that many people are having, is incomparable.  When you look at the studies that show the benefits of different phytochemicals or different functional foods, let’s say you’ll notice that those are the people who had the best response; they were getting a very high quality of those things.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

It’s quality that matters. Interestingly, what you’re bringing up is that one of my other passions is the regenerative organic farming movement. The hospital we’re looking to build is going to be on a 100-acre organic farm. I have the absolute pleasure, delight, and honor of presenting at an annual conference called Acres, which is a whole movement. It’s at this point, over 50 years old, and its inception as well, of taking farmers and taking us back to the quality of the soil, to produce quality food, to give us the quality of our inner soil, and there’s a huge movement happening in this. Interestingly, there’s a lot of dogma, food, and diet wars in the cancer space, but what I’m not hearing them talk about, which we should be discussing, is the quality and where it’s coming from. To your point, because you said, you could go and eat a low-carb diet and Jack in the Box, but is that a good idea? You can go and eat a beautiful squeeze of juice that you said, since it may look good sitting on the shelf that’s, not the fridge. It’s still juice. I’m drinking this. This is better for me. This is it. I love that. There’s something in the farming world for each value. We can look at the absolute antioxidant levels. You can look at Brix scores, which show, for lack of a better word, the vitality and the nutrient density of a plant. There’s a colleague of ours, John Kemp, who’s well known. The person in this space. He’s created a technology that goes out into the field in real-time and measures the nutrient density and vitality, knows what’s missing in the abundant soil in this bowl, and adjusts accordingly in real-time.

Ralph Moss, PhD

That’s great.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Produce. It’s the testing and assessing in the field we do in the body. I’m fired up that this is something meaningful to you because it is the future of this quality piece of functional food. The pharmacy has an F.  Big difference. I love that this is one of your passion projects as well.

Ralph Moss, PhD

And, of course, I have believed this since the days that I, my mother, listened to Carlton Fredericks on WOR in New York. I’ve been hearing this since the 50s, but it’s a revelation to realize how the research, the PubMed, listed research syncs with things that we have believed with that part. With our intuitive brains, we knew this to be true. But to understand this intellectually is another thing entirely, because unless you understand it and explain it intellectually, you’re not going to win over anybody in the scientific community.  that was the challenge. But I must say, after this long process of writing this big book that I’ve written, I came away more enthusiastic and more convinced of the logic behind naturopathic medicine than I was even when going in. Now I try to restrain that because I do want to be honest and provide a clear window for the average person to see through and be able to see what the pluses and minuses are. But I feel confident in that. The other thing is that I left out or didn’t get to. the last element in the Moss method, which is the selective use of food supplements or things that I wouldn’t necessarily classify as foods as you wouldn’t eat them as foods, modified citrus pectin for fermented wheat germ extract, vitamin D, it’s hard to say, you’ll get some from sunlight, but you might very likely need to take a supplement. Some things don’t quite fit in in terms of being entirely unprocessed. I’m not a natural, but there’s still so much good research done on behalf of them. And, berberine, things that we’ve, we should talk about in terms of metabolism. There’s that category. But when it’s possible to get something through food, I prefer that over getting it through a supplement.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Amen on that. That’s huge. That’s a big one. I love that you highlight that so much. I can’t wait to dig into what those secret foods are or what. You’re not so secret, but things that you find have compelling evidence behind them. One of the things you’ve talked about is that we’ve talked about the Moss Method book that’s coming and alluded to other books that you’ve written.  folks, I want them to go back into the archives and read into that. But things it’s also important to note in this segue into your own story here are that your Moss reports, which were these curated unbelievable monographs if you will, cancer-centric monographs about all the research out there that was the diagnosis, specific condition, all the what’s relevant to that condition, have been life rafts for many of my patients over the years. Like, unbelievable. I cannot even tell you how many opportunities I had to walk through one of these giants. At that time, they were in three-ring binders.

Ralph Moss, PhD

Just exactly this.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

It does look that way. This is heavy. But it was great to sit down and go through that with patients, their families, and their loved ones, especially those who were on the fence about whether I should take an integrative approach, an alternative approach, or a standard of care approach. What are the what’s the evidence? Because if you try to do everything, it’s overwhelming. If you try and do nothing, it’s overwhelming. If you just depend on one or the other, it’s problematic. You give people informed consent information, and you even prioritize, like, these seem to be the heavy hitters. Then you show the other things, like, This is good, but you’ve got the bandwidth, you’ve got the financials, and you’ve got the real estate in your belly to take more. I say that because one of the things that has happened for you since the time you started bringing these mass reports to fruition is that you’ve had your journey with cancer. You’ve joined the band camp for this. What would you say is the biggest thing that changed for you in the way you presented this material to the outside world after your diagnosis and walked us through that process, leading up to that moment, what you learned, what clicked for you, how you applied it to yourself, and maybe how it influences how you share today?

Ralph Moss, PhD

I was diagnosed in 2015 by a very unconventional test, a test that nobody took seriously, called Anchor Blood. Very few people knew about it or took it. I took it seriously. I had conversations with the inventors of the test, and I had them run it just because there was somebody else in my family who was suffering from cancer at that time. My wife and I were, getting a little nervous. we decided we’d have the test done, and hers was fine. mine turned out it said prostate cancer. My urologist just scoffed at it. I insisted on having an MRI. I went to Philadelphia. I was living in Pennsylvania at that time. I went to Philadelphia to have the test and the MRI done, and it wasn’t good. I had the meeting with the oncology, with the urology urological oncologist, there at that hospital, top hospital, by the way. I’ll spare them by not naming what it was. It was so traumatic that, I barely, I’m exaggerating to say that I still have a little PTSD from that encounter, so that,  he told me that it was incurable, that it had already spread throughout my body.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

I told you that the test was bunk and that you then still did it, pushing for your advocacy. Correct. now I’m telling you, you’re a dead man.

Ralph Moss, PhD

It is a different person, but it was different in person. But it was the same thinking, the same mindset. He would have said it was bunk. Also, they couldn’t even do, the testing that I needed. But this man told me that I was a goner. I said if I do this treatment, they are going to do just palliative radiation. What are my chances of being rendered incontinent, having urinary incontinence, and being sexually impotent? I and he said 100%, and I swear to you, this is the part that still echoes in my brain. My wife was there, and she could attest to this. He sounded glad about it. It was something almost gleeful, like, I’ve got such a powerful machine that it’s going to make you incontinent and impotent. I don’t know; I can’t interpret what was going on there. I asked him because I had read the past pathology report, or at least the MRI report. and it was not my interpretation that the cancer had left. They had broken out of the capsule. I said, Could you, could you show us on the screen? You’re looking at the screen condition. He refused to do so. He said I’m a urologist, not a radiologist. then I was at the lowest point cancer-wise in my experience. This was a top hospital; it was rated in the top five, five, or six urology departments in the country at the time. I see they’ve since slipped many degrees back. But it was awful. Luckily for me, I remembered that I had a friend who was a naturopathic urologist. Geo Espinoza may be the only one.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

One on the summit as well.

Ralph Moss, PhD

Good. I called Geo, and he called me back. It’s good to be friends with people. He’s at NYU Langone, which is my undergraduate alma mater. I was getting ready to go to my 50th reunion when all this was taking place. Instead of going for my reunion, I went for an MRI and biopsy at my old place, and they did everything that the other place wouldn’t do. They were kind. They were nice. They did a three-Tesla MRI with no question that we did it. And then they and then the doctor did the biopsy, and there were two large tumors one of them was a Gleason eight, which means highly aggressive. The other was a 4.37. I had two large, aggressive tumors. But one of the reasons I went to NYU was because,  as a patient, the doctor offered cryoablation, which appealed to me very much. There aren’t that many places that do it. What I wound up having done was an outpatient procedure in which, under anesthesia, two cold pro-cold probes were put into the prostate, and they zapped it with cold. Then I walked home. Barely, but I did manage to get back to the hotel, and the next day I was able to walk a mile down to my favorite bookstore in New York, Strand Book. The Strand bookstore is on 12th Street. And that was my experience. That was nine years ago. It was just a month or two ago I had another follow-up MRI. Again, the situation is identical to what it was after I had the cryosurgery. No change.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Kept it in check.

Ralph Moss, PhD

It’s an amazing thing because I didn’t have any of the side effects associated with conventional treatment, and I was in that group, probably about 80% of those who’ve had it. It’s all over once you get the procedure done; you’re you, it won’t recur. There is a group. There’s a smaller group for whom it does recur, who could then have a re-ablation. It wouldn’t be fun to have to do that, but I always know that I could if push came to shove. I could still do that. But there’s no sign now that I need any further treatment. What are the lessons? First of all, it was the first movie I ever saw, The Wizard of Oz. when it went from black and white to Technicolor when Dorothy wakes up in Oz. I felt I had woken up in Oz, but it was a disaster. Not it wasn’t; I wrote Oz was too.  I felt now.  now I get it. Now I get it. That was a feeling. It’s not knowledge that you would go out and seek to have. It’s nothing I would ever recommend to anybody. If you’re going to be a quote-unquote expert on cancer, you should know a little bit about cancer from the inside out and what patients go through because, oh, that might change your life. I speak here to the fact that practitioners need to go and do that. But you can learn from experience, which is a great teacher. But it doesn’t have to be your own experience. You can learn if you’re wise; you can learn from other people’s experiences. I learned from my own experience, and you can learn from others. I learned from my experience that first of all, the choice of the hospital is super important because if you get in, if you’re in the hands of care, people who don’t care, sadistic, or whatever, get out, find a different place. I know it’s hard to do, but you should do that. Secondly, there are options out there. You have to look for them.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

But there are you on a silver platter. You’ve got to have some curiosity to do it.

Ralph Moss, PhD

And the crazy thing is that Medicare and the EFT approved cryoablation. It isn’t an alternative treatment, but it’s stuck away in the nooks and crannies of a few very good hospitals. I was lucky to find that. I was very lucky that I had Geo as a friend and advisor, and I still consult with him. That was the main thing. The other thing was that I started on a naturopathic partial way onto his prompting, but also based on my knowledge, the same people who invented the anchor blood test, Jim and Dorothy Morre, professors at Purdue University, have since passed away. But two wonderful people, brilliant scientist Jim had been the ten years head of the cancer center at Purdue. These were top-notch scientists and inventors. They found that when they looked at a whole array of different subsets of different food factors, the ones that were the most effective were, first of all, green tea, and then how to come up with a natural way to enhance the effectiveness of the green tea. I did that religiously for six months after my procedure.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Oral depository.

Ralph Moss, PhD

I was taking capsules, but now I drink green tea every morning, and I drink it in a special way that I’ll talk about in the book. There’s a spa, and there are certain, again, green tea versus green tea. Not all green teas are created equally, but I still believe in it so much that I do it the way that I talk about in the book, which is not at all difficult, and I do this every morning. Since I also do intermittent fasting every day, I don’t want to eat anything, but I’ll have the green tea, just first thing in the morning, and then I’ll wait a few hours till I have my breakfast. This is still, for me, one of the backbones. But there are some others, too.  there are other things, but I was, came away from the immediate experience of realizing, you’ve got to do something to keep the wolf from the door. That’s what I did, and that’s what I chose to do.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

I’m thrilled because, as I said, you have been the life raft for so many. I’m so grateful that you had the resources on your own. But you also knew. Here’s the expert, you guys. Here’s an expert who helps guide other people who know they need to go ask somebody else for help. That’s something else that’s important, especially if a clinician is listening or someone here who thinks they can just go out and do it by themselves. You need and want someone to support you, advocate for you, and look out for you, because when you have that diagnosis, it can be very unsettling. You are reactionary versus responsive, choosing things out of desperation and fear or lack of knowledge versus things that are very thoughtful, personalized, and precise and fit you personally at this moment at any given time. That’s one thing you’ve always done well in your reports, and what I’m very excited to read about in your new book, as well as the fact that you just highlighted for all of us, your reality, that you did not just go it alone. Granted, this is the man we all go to for resources. You knew to reach out from that, and you continue to learn and apply it. One of the tenets that you’re going to read about in your book is all about the metabolic aspect of cancer, which is also coming to be. For you, that was a big part of your journey—this metabolic imbalance and this diagnosis—and I would love for you to take just a brief moment to speak about what relationship you think it had in your cancer diagnosis.

Ralph Moss, PhD

I didn’t say that the year before I had the cancer diagnosis, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and my blood sugar was 372, which is very high and easy and shouldn’t be more than 100. This was not fasting, but it was a post. It was in the late afternoon. I hadn’t eaten in quite a while, so it was about three or four times what I would want it to be. But being a stubborn person, I didn’t want to just do the ordinary thing; I didn’t. My grandfather had died of diabetes complications, and I know a lot about it from personal experience. I decided I was going to do this naturally. I was very lucky. First of all, I have known Dr. Robert Atkins. Quite well, quite well, because I had been on his radio show maybe ten times. We were very close. I was well aware that there was a whole other approach to diet than the standard. or Ada’s diet. That was the first thing. The second thing was that I discovered a very good book, which was Dr. Bernstein’s Diet Solution, which was a low-carb diet adapted to the diabetes situation. That was my Bible. Within the year I had, I had normalized my blood sugar. and I did that entirely with a ketogenic type of diet. I’m not sure; I don’t remember whether I was technically in ketosis or not. I’ve since been in ketosis and I’ve been out of ketosis, and I just go back and forth; it’s doable based on my experience and what I’ve known, you have also known dozens, if not hundreds, of other people who have done this. But when my doctors look at me, I am a freak of nature, or else the biggest liar they’ve ever come across, because they’ve changed their tune over the past ten, ten years. Now it’s become. That’s one way of doing it. But yes.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

But I wrote under the bus.

Ralph Moss, PhD

But the way that they’ve set up this diabetes field is that they give you a diet that is, quote, unquote, healthy. But the healthiness of the diet is pegged to young, healthy adults, young athletic adults. Who do they test, and how likely are they?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Flexible, healthy, and active.

Ralph Moss, PhD

But a lot better than I did.  do you think about where these studies come from—colleges and universities? Who are the guinea pigs that get to test whether the glycemic load is high or low? There are students. They’re healthy sometimes athletic students. They’re going to have a fasting glucose of 83 mg per deciliter. Even if they’re eating pizza and popcorn all day, it doesn’t work that way as time goes by your body loses that flexibility. Not everybody, because they’re only half the population.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Now, say, 93.7% of the population acts metabolic flexibility.

Ralph Moss, PhD

If you look closely enough, that’s about right. I wanted to keep it. I don’t take any pharmaceutical drugs. I passed 80. I don’t take one. and I keep that record because I like the bragging that comes with that. I didn’t want to do drugs, and I and some nurse said to me just very casually, Are you on insulin yet? That word has yet to get to me.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Expectations are there.

Ralph Moss, PhD

Why? Because if you tell people you can have three to six portions of fruit per day, for a metabolically healthy young person, that would probably be a nice thing to do. It certainly would taste good. But if you’re in my situation, either ten years ago or now, or that of at least half the population that’s diabetic or pre-diabetic, according to government statistics, then three to six portions of fruit— an apple contains 14 to 16 or maybe more, grams of carbohydrate in one apple—you multiply that by six, and you’ve got about, almost 100. I do the math, but for grams of carbs, each of those grams of carbs would raise my blood sugar between three and five points on this meter in milligrams. Each gram is going to raise your blood sugar. My blood sugar by five mg.  Now I’ve got to dispose of 500 mg of glucose in my blood. That ain’t easy. You’ve got to do a lot of running and a lot of weight-labeling.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Exactly.

Ralph Moss, PhD

A lot and it’s just not doable. when the nurse said, You want insulin yet? She was just being realistic. Because if I followed what was then at least the American Diabetic Association’s recommendations and is still highly recommended for many people, the dietary goals for Americans, for instance, say three to six. For then, I would have an enormous struggle. There’s no question that I would wind up going on either insulin or some other drug that’s, there are other side effects, by the way, even metformin, the drug of choice for naturopathic-type people that I tried three times over the last ten years. I’ve tried it three times, and I was not able to tolerate it at any time.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

The gut destroys your methylation and wipes out your B12. For some people, they had single nucleotide polymorphisms that made it a pharmacogenomics fit. You are likely on all of those paths. amazing.

Ralph Moss, PhD

I could put it in very gross terms, but I won’t. But it’s very simple; let’s put it this way. I had a neighbor who was on. They put him on metformin. He didn’t even have diabetes. It was a complete mistake. He couldn’t leave home because he couldn’t be far. He wouldn’t even be any distance from a toilet.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Frustrating.

Ralph Moss, PhD

It’s not so easy to talk about medications. so you’re much better off if you can get it at the root. What’s the root? It’s so obvious to me. This is a disease where your body is having a problem absorbing and utilizing carbohydrates. Why would you put a carbohydrate? Because supposedly carbohydrate is a source of energy. Look at me. I had no carbohydrates this morning. I had a breakfast that was entirely, well, a little smidgen of a cracker of a seed cracker. But other than being entirely fat and protein, I don’t seem to be lacking in energy. ?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

You’re running laps around me, that’s for sure.

Ralph Moss, PhD

I don’t run.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

I run, and you run this thing. This is why you run so beautifully. And, I’m just so grateful for, as I said, you have been a life for so many. And. your.  This next series is coming to us with your book, The Moss Method, with your mass reports now available.

Ralph Moss, PhD

Is it online, online at Amazon or our website?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Huge price reduction. You are bringing this wisdom to the living rooms and lives of millions and millions of people. I’m just forever grateful for you, for your ongoing, thriving health, and for you walking the walk as well as the talk. Dr. Moss, thank you.

Ralph Moss, PhD

Thank you. It’s great talking to you, as always.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO

Always.