Cultivate A Metabolic Mindset For Your Health

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

How fun. I love that I get to hang out in your office with you today. It is cool. Thank you for that. You have a voyeur in here. Thank you.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

If you come, we will get the EBOO machine there.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

I know, I don’t know what I want to hook up with first.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Behind me, you get the Weber laser. We got.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

You are getting my language, my friend, all the fun stuff.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, for everyone out there, I know you do not need an introduction, but I am going to do it anyway. Dr. Nasha Winters is a global healthcare authority, bestselling author, and integrative cancer care and research consultant with physicians around the world. She has educated hundreds of professionals on the clinical use of Mistletoe and has created robust educational programs for both healthcare institutions and the public on incorporating vetted integrative therapies and cancer care to enhance outcomes. Dr. Winters is currently focused on opening a comprehensive metabolic oncology hospital and research institute in the US, where the best standard of care and the most advanced integrative therapies will be offered. I am so excited about that. This facility will be in a residential setting on a gorgeous campus against a backdrop of regenerative farming, EMF mitigation, and retreat, as well as state-of-the-art medical technology and data collection and evaluation to improve patient outcomes. This is going to be a groundbreaking thing, and this is going to be so cool and awesome. I cannot wait. Thank you.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

What a great, fun, and nice intro to slide in on, my friend! Thank you for that. I get excited that you are just as excited about it as I am. Thank you for that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Anyone who wants to be part of that project needs money, support, or knowledge. Know how? Yes.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Blood, sweat, and tears. It is all. We have already contributed so much to that part. We know that the tribes coming together are people coming out of the woodwork. Michael, this is what has happened. I am not even saying it is going to happen. It has happened. We are just putting that energy into the end of the universe. Thank you.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Cool. Tell me a little bit. Your cancer. We are all, and each one of us has a little different understanding of that. Tell me what you are understanding and what cancer truly is.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Yes. after having my visits by the Big C over, golly, coming on 32 years. Yes. As soon as I say that out loud, it just sounds so weird because it also makes me feel a little bit older. But anyway.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

It was in utero. That you. 

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Think. Oh, here’s your 20. Here it is. But, I will tell you, it is funny. I have no qualms about aging. I will be 52 this year, and my friends, who are all moving into their fifties, are all freaking out. When you did not expect to get through your 20th year on this planet, you celebrate every chin hair, every gray hair, every little smiley wrinkle, whatever you are. You wake up every morning. Thank you, gray hair, for getting me out of bed today. I love it. I am not against that. But that being said, with my own experience with it and, unfortunately, at the time of my diagnosis, there was nothing to be offered from the standard of care. It was too progress to even operate one single conventional chemotherapy because my organs had completely shut down. You do not want to add insult to injury. 

I was left to my own devices, which my mom would tell you is a dangerous thing in this world. But it served me well on this planet, and I have had the absolute privilege to start to see that cancer is something different from what we were all taught in the medical environment, partly because I live and work in a very small mountain town in Colorado, and I worked in a very low-income, liberal arts school at that time in the early 90s that did not have the best of the best, fanciest textbooks, and whatnot. I stumbled upon early in my diagnosis the works of Dr. Otto Warburg, and even though I was taking my physiology courses at the time, I was pre-med at the time, and I was being taught that cancer was a genetic disease and a two-hit theory disease, meaning that you get one genetic insult, then one big genetic insult comes in, and then all hell breaks loose. 

That just did not resonate, especially when you are, and we were also taught that this is a disease of the aged and the disease of the elderly. I was 19 and turning 20, so nothing was aligning. I went out on a mission to learn more and did not expect to survive. I am going to tell you all that now. But what I did was get curious, and I wanted to understand why. So that has propelled me into these 30+ years. I am still learning that from all of you out there. What I have come to understand is what we have all been taught to believe: that cancer is, is not, or at least is not the whole story. The genetic mutation theory of cancer, and you are going to have the best person on the planet to be talking about this soon with Dr. Thomas Seyfried. I will leave it to him to give the details of this. But ultimately, since 1914, we have been beating to the drum of the genetic mutation theory of cancer, and all of our medical systems, all of our research, and all of our treatments have followed that line down the road.

Whereas in the 1920s, this is where Otto Warburg started to say, It is not the gene. Let us back it up a notch and start a little more upstream. It is happening at the mitochondrial level. So you will hear me interchange mitochondria and metabolic in our conversation today because all of the metabolic activities in our body are determinants of the health and wealth of our mitochondria. Even when I talk about metabolism, you are not quite upstream enough. You have to get back to those fundamental little organelles that live within all of our cells that are being little sensing agents to the outside world, everything from what we are eating, drinking, and breathing, but also to what we are seeing, what we are feeling, what we are hearing, what we are experiencing, and what we are being exposed to on a day-to-day basis. Those mitochondria take in that information, translate that information, and send signaling pathways out into our bodies to respond to whatever it is being exposed to.

That can be beautiful things coming in and charging up our cells to be resilient and, at the ready, to have great longevity and great vitality. But it can also be disease-creating when they are given junk information, junk food, junk relationships, toxic environments, etc., that make them more inefficient, more damaged, and more likely to shift into a bastardized energy system that starts to prefer certain fuel sources over others that are most common, and 70 to 90% of cancers, depending on what research you look at, start with inhaling all the sugar that it possibly can. Sugar does not cause cancer, but it certainly does not help matters. Or maybe it does help matters about the cancer. That piece is that just when that metabolic shift happens because of those insults to the mitochondria, it becomes very greedy and hungry for certain fuel sources. It will start with glucose, and then as the tumor picks up momentum and metabolically shifts even further, it may start to sequester glutamine and some other things that we are finding in cell line studies that we still need to do some further studies on. But the glutamine and the glucose—we are pretty confident about their roles. 

That is the big picture of why I started understanding cancer more as something that could be prevented and supported. instead of going directly after the tumor, the tumor cell, or even the tumor pathways, which is where we are still hyper-focused today, even when that is a big advancement in medicine. We get excited, and it is sexy to target those with new drugs and whatnot, but it is still not getting us to the root. It is not getting us back to those mitochondria, and even these beautiful off-label drugs, these beautiful lower, lower doses of chemotherapies, and these beautiful alternative therapies can have damaging effects on the mitochondria. We have to always be thinking about how we are protecting those little buggers of our healthy mitochondria and how we are making the unhealthy ones die off to make room for new ones. That is an overly simple, simplified discussion about this process. But I started to understand cancer as a terrain problem, as a mitochondrial problem, as a metabolic derangement problem, and not as a genetic problem.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

One thing that you mention that is pretty fascinating is that we look at mitochondria as just an energy-producing machine, and here you are talking about it being a signaling mechanism as well, which I do not think that a lot of people understand. Signaling goes out both to your genetics and then also to the rest of your body. So, from what I understand, you are saying you can control that signaling by what information you are feeding it—both mentally, emotionally, physically, nutrition, and so forth.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Nailed it. I think what we were all taught in sixth-grade biology about the mighty mitochondria is that they just churn out ATP, which is our energy source and our energy currency. What we learn is that that is just one tiny tip of the iceberg of what these little buggers do. In our field, the integrative medicine field, all of our colleagues are striving for longevity, medicine, and anti-aging medicine. Some giant symposiums and conferences bring in thousands and thousands of people. The funniest thing to me is that your literal longevity and your literal anti-aging secret weapon are achieved by taking care of your mitochondria. So, it oversimplifies it a little bit there, but in fact, it has all these implications. It is also what is in charge of apoptosis, which is the garbage collection and disposal system of the body. 

When the mitochondria are not enough, we do not have enough of them for their damage, or they are sluggish, or they are behaving badly, or they are now deranged in a different metabolic category. They are not doing their job of taking out the garbage. They are letting garbage accumulate. In some instances, it can even switch on and help that garbage be fueled even more. Those are the types of things that get me excited about where research is finally starting to go, but it is just not happening fast enough. We have to work on that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

The mitochondria, because we are talking about the mitochondria then control apoptosis. It can not only control that, but it can also support oncogenic behavior within.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Yes. That is the thing: we have healthy cells. You should remember that what is happening in your healthy cells is different from what is happening in your cancer cells. When people read studies and are confused, I am so confused. This says that this causes cancer, and this says that this kills cancer. I am, and yes, you are, because in your healthy cells, there is an antioxidant. I hate that word because it is so misleading. The redox reagents that we take in completely help, support, and stabilize our healthy cells, while at the same token, driving the Trojan horse of what is helping target the cancer cells or driving therapies for the cancer cells. In one place where you might be, here is a good example: glutamine. You will hear this about her super glutamine in the lab and in the cell line studies, which is an incredible fuel source for cancer cells. Everyone, starve the glutamine. If you starve the glutamine, which is virtually impossible unless you do so through a pharmaceutical intervention, you will also starve the healthy cells.

 We are suddenly back in the same camp where we were trying to get away from or kill the tumor. Do not mind the host. Here is the place where I believe there is the best of both worlds that you can come in and you can press pulse, which is with some of the things that people have received. We talked about where you can temporarily starve it but then be flooded with all the resources to rebuild the healthy cells, push hard against the cancer, and then support that. It is a symphony; it is this process happening, and it is happening simultaneously. We have to be careful of siloing it out, but to be careful of getting too myopic, we have to shut down senescence. Well, if you shut down senescence in the whole body, you shut down healthy cells as well. Or, oh, the danger of apoptosis. Supporting apoptosis can cause cancer. Well, read the fine print. That is what is required for your healthy cells to be protected so they do not turn into cancer cells.

We have to be strategically hitting to simulate heinous pathways or two simultaneous personalities or beings, cellular beings of one that is in a healthy metabolic state and another that is in a deranged metabolic state simultaneously. This is something that, unfortunately, the standard of care does not do well, okay? It just does not. I do not think anybody would argue with me on that. They are focused on the deranged metabolic state and the deranged genetic expression that comes after that deranged metabolic state, suppressing or killing that all the way and to the detriment of the healthy metabolic state, which then encourages the flipping of that switch into further deranged metabolic processes. Even when a lot of our well-meaning integrative oncology colleagues get seduced by one target, one treatment, one metabolic pathway, or one treatment, we still get hyper-focused on the cancer-killing or the cancer treatment. We forget about the terrain and what is wrapped around it. This is the gift of what we get to talk about here, and what you do in your practice and what you are inspiring others to do is to be able to work both of those processes simultaneously. It is an elegant dance of knowing when it is best to do one or the other or both simultaneously.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

You gave me a little bit of direction as to how that would look. Cancer patients are looking for, and working with, a provider. They sometimes say, Because I always feel it is good for the patient to feel they are in control of their direction, knowledge, and understanding of what is going on are beneficial. What should that pushpole look like? What are some examples of that perfection?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Perfect. What is nice is that there are a lot of folks who might even say, Okay, push or pull across the board. Whether you have stage one breast cancer or stage four pancreatic cancer, somebody dealing with a glioblastoma, or somebody with a lung carcinoma, we might be trying the same approach and protocol across the board. It is going to have mixed results because we have to start trying to treat the disease, and we have to start to focus on the person who has the disease to understand where they are metabolically, energetically, spiritually, emotionally, and what their resources are on all levels—financially, emotionally, spiritually—all the pieces. Because that is going to determine a lot about the stage of the tumor, the bulk of the tumor, and how much of the tumor is in the driver’s seat versus how much of the train is in the driver’s seat, it will determine when, how, and how much we push and pull. Do the press pulse, the press push method of this.

If you have someone, here’s an example I just saw recently of a patient who has been on a long journey with a standard of care, and they have also, after that, not failed them. Notice my choice of words. It is often stated the other way around, but after those therapies failed them, they got wise and started to see an integrated approach. Because it was so aggressive and advanced, the nature of our psyche is that we feel we then have to meet it with as much force as the cancer is presenting itself. What happened with this particular patient was that they went to very well-meaning, very intelligent people who have all of the best tools, but they as patients were already so decompensated and fragile that their system was so napalmed that even high-dose IBC nearly took their lives. There was just too much oxidative stress in the process.

At that moment where our temptation is, oh, my God, the cancer is big and loud, by looking at the patient, these are some old-school things I learned along the way. Dr. Juergen Winkler revisited this conversation, and I presented a little bit of it recently at a conference, but we can only know if our patients are in this extremely oxidized state space or in a place where they can handle a little bit of a bigger push. So things scratching your arm—is it super demographic? Is your urine just the specific gravity of your urine at a certain level? Is the pH of your mouth and the pH of your urine matching up or separate? Those are clues that tell us if there is a big difference between what is coming out of your mouth and what is coming out of your urine. That’s a problem. If you scratch and it stays there for a while, that is a problem. If your specific gravity is very elevated, that is a problem. What this means is that you are overly oxidized, and pushing any harder is just going to push you off the cliff, as in the Thelma and Louise movie. We do not want that. We need to put out the fires, do a little nourishing and a little nurturing, and then reassess and act when things stabilize again. Then you can come in with a little machete, give it a push, and then come back and stabilize. That is more psychologically challenging for the patients, providers, and their families than it is. The reality is, as I tell you over and over in my career, the more we push, the faster we push people off the cliff. So that is across-the-board standard of care and integrative or alternative care. I want people to hear that and be mindful of that situation. This is a patient who would have done well and did well when we brought on things like a therapeutic ketogenic diet (DCA), low-dose naltrexone, more constitutional hydrotherapy, and some very gentle light therapies that were more nutritive versus oxidizing. Those are just some examples of ways you can cool the fire. You are still being assertive in the environment. You are still trying to encourage it back to a normalization of its metabolic processes, but you are not overly rubbing the engine. That is one example of where you want to stabilize it.

Most patients will stabilize within a matter of days. If you just pulled that back off that pedal to the metal, that makes a difference. Then you can come back in, and maybe you can be a little bit more assertive. See how they do. If they do, okay, maybe you push a little bit harder. Maybe you bring back the low-dose chemotherapy or the high-dose IV, vitamin C, or some high-dose ozone treatment, etc. Those are some powerful ways to get in there now that those cancer cells are a little quieter and a little more vulnerable. Now, that push process works much better and is way more elegant. Now, if you have a stage-2 cancer patient who is vital and strong, they do not have to be as restrictive in their diet. You still want to be carbohydrate-restricting to some degree. You still want to be clean. You still want to, and you still do not want to be out eating fast food, seed oils, and all that. But they do not have to be quite as restrictive, and they can also tolerate a little heavier punch early on. The weird thing is, in our temptation, when we get these diagnoses, we usually think, Do not hit it hard until you hit stage three or four.

The only reason we hit it hard—we hit stages three or four—is because we do not have anything else to offer. Yet if we take the opportunity, whether you are someone who is just going alternative or conventional, to hit it a little bit harder with supportive therapies and understanding why you ended up in that position, you will most often head off a stage three and four diagnosis with the corrective support of the system. This is where to get in and get out. They are going to support you, so this does not come back. We want to understand why. But by the time someone comes to us who is so exhausted from all the treatments, no matter what they are, there is a lot less time for us to work with them. We want to educate and empower the patient. In this moment, less is more. Let us take one step down the road. For me, in my journey, having been on it for over 32 years now, it was an accidental understanding of that. One baby step in Mexico, we say Poco y Poco, down the road, back, one foot in front of the other, and learning something new and giving my body the spaciousness that it can handle something a little more assertive. Then I got good at listening and knowing what was too much, or, Hey, I can push it a little bit harder. You are also engaging the patient to know their bodies, and then the clinicians are being taught these different metrics to evaluate for and not just getting freaked out at seeing high cancer markers or a high volume of disease burden on imaging. That is not where you are getting your information on how to support that patient. You are getting that information from tongue and pulse diagnosis, from being with the patients, from hearing what their psychological state is of hearing, what their feelings around mortality are, of their hope, of their desire to change their terrain, of their willingness to step in and be responsible and take accountability. But also, what are their resources? Do they have support at home? Do they have some financial resources to think outside the box and apply some things outside the box? We have to take in all we are: the mitochondria, the doctors, the mitochondria, taking in all the information coming around them. then we translate that and then give a signal back out to help that patient determine what they got to do next?

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it because, as doctors and integrative doctors, you are mentioning that we do get tumor-focused. We would think it was just a war on cancer. We are doing the Nixon motto; we are going to go and attack it. His war did not pan out well because it was still failing. It becomes so much more morale to recognize what you are doing, what you are educating, what you are driving to understand, and the terrain aspect. With that, we are dealing with the individual that the cancer exists within. But the cancer can only express itself in response to what the terrain looks like. If you have a stage 4, where the terrain is just in shambles, then obviously that is going to signal more cancer activity. So if we just drive that shamble, it is going to just get worse and worse.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

100%. It is interesting how many clients I have seen over the years or consulted on their behalf over the years who did all the best of the best therapies, be it from standard care or integrated care. But no one helped them handle the fundamentals. I am astonished by that. I think it is because we think it has to be complicated, sexy, expensive, and hard-hitting. That is something I think is interesting. then when I look at them, I am, wow, no one even asked them, How are you? What is your daily routine? Tell me about, just, do you have filtered water? Do you know what your food is? Do you fast? How do you fast, and what do you break your balance with? The simplest things can add an extra punch. 

It is incredible how much being in a fasted state completely potent ties to all of the oxidative therapies we throw at the standard of care otherwise, and yet we have been terrifying patients since the 1960s to start doing that. But luckily, thank God, some of the research is catching up. Voltaire, Longo, and others are showing that that does have a benefit in helping standard of care outcomes, patients having fewer side effects, etc. But it certainly helps with hypothermia. Hyperbaric oxygen expression—all of these pieces—respond to therapies, and then the funny thing is, when I hear myself back, when I listen to these types of things later, and when I talk about terrain for you and me, it is at second nature, other people. Oh, that we are both, whatever the people will get in that moment, okay, well let us go back to the work and research. What am I completing? I am a fangirl. Today I am going to stalk her, and she is going to know me, and she is going to be my best friend. I am just planting the seed now. However, Dr. Mina Bissell was one of the early researchers in the 1980s. She was shunned and still, to some degree, is today. However, the early researchers knew about the extracellular matrix. That was the way the magic was happening in both the treatment of and prevention of cancer, or even the progression or recurrence of cancer. Ultimately, what this one was saying back in the 1980s from her compelling research that continues to this day is that it is not at the tumor level; it is in the microenvironment that surrounds the tumor and the tumor cells.

That is where I am; this is what people called Virchow from a time ago. Beauchamp, even honors were Otto Warburg. They were all saying, Gosh, where we keep hyper-focusing on the tumor and the tumor cell in the tumor pathways. But what is making that tumor cell and those tumor pathways get up and move in is what is happening in the environment around them. As esoteric and woo-woo as it sounds to talk about the terrain, we have loads of evidence suggesting this is where we make or break our opportunity to heal or drive cancer further. So that is what I get to focus on, and that is what you get to focus on. A growing number, thank God, of colleagues are getting to focus on helping patients. Hopefully, number one, is prevention, because that is your only cancer treatment, as we all have it. Why do we keep it from ever getting big enough and loud enough to capture our attention, and then how do we support the body and the terrain while you are undergoing whatever interventions you are using? Because I think people also think, well, if I am just doing the alternative therapies, I do not have to worry about the rest of the terrain. No, maybe even more so in some ways.

Then, on the survivorship side of things, that is where a lot of people fall off the cliff. Even Dr. Block says in his book Life Over Cancer that the most dangerous part of the cancer trek is that, okay, you have crested the summit of Everest, you ring the bell, I am done with treatment, and then you fall on the crevasse and die. It sounds so dramatic, but that is what happens to so many patients, because a part of them does feel empowered while they are getting the chemo, while they are getting the radiation, while they are getting their high-dose IBC, while they are getting their photodynamic therapy, while they are in their hyperbaric, or whatever. But then suddenly, when those therapies stop, they are lost. That is where we can help empower them to understand why they got to that moment and how to change the soil in which they got sick so that they can change the future and not have to worry about having to hike that mountain ever again. What a different approach this will be for all of us!

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

We all know that if we have a dysfunctional individual in a certain environment in a certain neighborhood that then promotes that individual’s behavior, I am being criminal, being violent, and being a criminal. If we would instead have that individual in a nurturing environment where he is loved, supported, and given opportunities, we would know the change and how that individual is going to behave. Why would it not be the same with a cell? Why would it not be?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

That is beautiful and perfect. Again, we have data that suggests that on that socioeconomic level, we have data on that side of things. But we also have the data on the micro side of things. Candace Pert was doing the molecules of emotion and understanding that our thoughts are traumas, our stressors, our cells are listening deeply, and they react to those thoughts very, very specifically. They drive many of these metabolic pathways. They will also be contributing to the health and wealth of this. If you are left to your own devices of not changing that field as well, as you said, left to your own devices where you continue to live in underserved, extremely disparity environments and communities, if you do not even physically leave the soil in which you got sick, it is nearly impossible to change things. So that is where it is to realize, Okay, great, I can take somebody out of their environment.

We did this; we do this with retreats. We do their labs a week before we take them from a Friday afternoon to a Monday morning retreat. We do their labs the week after, and we monitor them. We would watch them, and they would be amazing during the shift. But the longer they were back home and falling back into the old routine, I did not care if these were people with extreme affluence or people with no means whatsoever. It did not matter. It did not matter if you returned, frankly, to the ghetto or the suburbs; if you are in a toxic environment, however, your body perceives that to be, you will quickly fall back into cadence with that vibration. So that is the point where I have jokingly said, sometimes you need a husband academy, sometimes you need a job academy, or sometimes you need a different change.

But in those environments where the underserved do not have access to say, I am just going to move, that does not happen. We need to come in and create some equanimity. in those environments to help give people an opportunity to change. So for my own story, I grew up in a place where I was the only person to go to college in my family. My ACE score and my adverse childhood event score are 10 out of 10. Read up on that later. You have somebody talking about it on this saying that, theoretically, I should not have survived. Theoretically, I should still be swirling around the toilet bowl. All the things were stacked against me, so down to the poverty, down to the abuse, down to the trauma, down to even the socioeconomic, down to the education, access to education, and there is still this inner resilience. There is still something that can be done. You can still break the cycle. You can still change the lineage from which you come. There are tons of resources for every single person on this planet to have access to. My hope, mission, and vision are to create more access to healthy, giving, and well-being environments so that we all have an opportunity to change the soil in which we got sick in a meaningful way across the globe, and that it is not just left for the affluent or the two percenters to have access to that; it is available to all of us. Just imagine the vibration of the world around us if we all could strive and truly achieve something better.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Talk about changing the terrain.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

On all levels.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Quickly before we close. When a person talks about the terrain, what are some of the things that they should consider regarding that terrain?

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Yes. Simply put, I have my ten drops in the bucket, so rattle those quickly. Okay, so your epigenetics—that might be what came down the lineage to you. That’s your blueprint, but you do not have to express those genes. Just because grandma had diabetes and great-grandma had diabetes does not mean you have to have diabetes. Just because that was wired into you does not mean you have to express it. That is one of those opportunities you have to change and break the cycle—that of genealogical trauma and cycles of disease as well. There’s that metabolic question: What are you fueling your body with? What are you putting into your mouth or too much time in your mouth if you are not in a fasted state? If you are, what is the quality of it? What’s the quantity? What’s the macronutrient ratio? You want to start thinking about being a label reader and simplifying your diet by keeping as close to the source as possible, and then, depending on your socioeconomic status, joining a CSA or volunteering on a farm again. We have so many cool things happening in urban areas and in food deserts around the planet, where we have beautiful access to high-quality food.

Those resources are there. You just have to look for them. Third, is the environment. Boy, Howdy! You not only become aware of this; you become an advocate, but you also become an activist. You need to start going through your cupboards. You need to start going through your sinks, your medicine cabinets, and your garages, talking to them, finding out what it is that you are putting in and around your body, and making those simple things. It is amazing what you can do with baking soda and vinegar. I am pretty much everything on this planet, from washing your body to washing your house to washing your dishes to being a natural pesticide—you name it. Those simple things that great-grandmothers used are incredibly supportive today. Then we look at the microbiome. Please stop eating conventionally farmed foods. 

That’s where you are getting the most damage. Probably the biggest travesty to our health is what we are pouring onto our crops, which then our animals eat, and then we eat. Then the vegetables that we eat are also coming in, which is just wiping out our microbiome, which is just putting Swiss cheese holes all over our gut and creating all of these immune disparities, which then leads to the immune drop in the bucket. Now we have all been terrified to go outside and go out into the sun. If you are just consuming so many seed oils that are high in Omega 6, you are a giant photovoltaic burn victim waiting to happen. But if you start to switch your diet over to higher omega-3s, you slowly integrate sunshine back into your life. You build this beautiful built-in solar protection and make sure your vitamin D levels stay up because that can do a world of good on pretty much all of the things that cause inflammation. All the things we just talked about create inflammation. But one of the biggest drivers of information is stress.

Just one of the other big drops in the bucket. Stress can be physiologic, anatomical, or psychological. There are all types of stress, and they all have the same physical or physiologic implications. So part of our stress is also about how we relate to the environment around us, specifically our circadian rhythm. Do you watch the sunrise and sunset? Do you go outdoors more than 15 minutes a day? Do you take in fresh air? Do you hang out in nature, or do you incorporate green into your life? When you engage with nature in a way that changes your biochemistry and then oxygenation, how do you breathe? Do you breathe up to here or read up to here? You breathe up to here; are you a shallow breather? What are your oxygenation levels? Do you move your body enough to move the blood and oxygen around your tissues and hormones? Again, when you start to look at your body care products and your food items, you start to look at your stress patterns and your sleep patterns. All of those things impact your hormonal health.

So getting back into a routine and a rhythm and cleaning up what you are putting in and around you will help your hormonal health tremendously. The biggest one is what is going on in your mental, emotional, and spiritual drop-in bucket. Do you have inner resilience and resources? Do you have external resilience and resources? How do you self-medicate? How do you self-care? Do you even know what that means and what that looks like? How can you take one baby step, poco y poco, to change it day by day? So those are the things for which everything I just described is available to all of us, all across the entire planet. There are ways to get as expensive as you want in the biohacker world or as inexpensive as you want to, just by competing with nature and everything in between. But here’s the opportunity: if we live it ourselves and model it ourselves, our patients will follow us.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love that. That is, to me, amazing. You gave the whole cookbook out in 5 minutes, and there it is. Take it and run it. You will be okay. What is important—what you just said—is that when we talked about the signaling that is taking place, we do not need all these powerful tools to hit it hard if we just shift how things are being signaled with the tools that you just measured or that you just mentioned. Then we can determine how the tumor microenvironment expresses itself. It just maintains itself as an inert, not aggressive, form of cancer in any shape or form. That is the power of what you just said.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

I love that you have also shifted people’s thinking that we are not going after every last cell and every last tumor. We do not strive for clean scans. If that happens, great. What we strive for is to turn this into a manageable disease process. Prevention is at its best, but if it is already speaking to you, then managing it is the next best. That is where the only way you can manage it is with the terrain support and the microenvironment support then occasionally, if it tries to act up in your vitality, it is in such a way you can push back a little bit, so that is a new theory. Your listeners can go and listen. What now? It is not so new. That is a decade or more old, which is the adaptive theory of cancer, where you just push back enough to give yourself a little more support, and then you invigorate the vital force, invigorate the terrain around it, and then wait and then just put in enough pressure as it is needed versus trying to napalm the whole field. That is where people can live for decades. Myself included, with stage-4 terminal cancer. That is the place where we want everyone to realize that they can live very, very well with cancer. When you are tending to your terrain, well, that cancer you are just symbiotic, yes.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. Well, Doctor Winters, it is always such a pleasure. You are such a cool girl. Thank you so much.

Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, LAc, DiplOM

Well, I cannot wait to come my way. I do. I will tell you, I love the light therapy. Zero the photodynamic because it is just kicking some sunshine in the main vein. I love that when you can take advantage of fun technologies, you guys at the center have all the fun toys and do not neglect the fundamentals. I appreciate that about who you are and what you do. Thank you for this opportunity.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Thank you. Thank you so much.