How To Biologically Engineer Your Life After A Cancer Diagnosis

Ryan Sternagel

Yeah, that is always. I think about that a lot. Am I grateful for the horrible thing that led to the awesome things that have come of it? I can never say that I am grateful that my son was diagnosed with stage four cancer. That was what led us to do everything we do today. Yes, 11 days before his first birthday, our son Ryder was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma, two cancers of the nervous system, mostly childhood cancers. We had a big, huge lump inside of and growing out of his spine, a couple of secondary tumors and metastasis to the bones, and all that fun stuff, and yes, fast forward. 

We did all the things that you are talking about in this event and fought with a slash, navigated the conventional medical system and the holistic medical world, and figured out how to make our way between the two and all those sorts of things and move states along the way. We were not getting along with the conventional team. Yes, we built a nontoxic house along the way from the ground up because we were super paranoid about environmental toxicity, which, I guess when you are and your child is born with cancer, is probably to be expected. But yes. Fast forward, nine-plus years now, and Ryder’s doing great. He is the healthiest kid I know and the healthiest and happiest kid I know because he lives out in the middle of the woods in our peaceful little compound we built with his chickens, greenhouse, horses, and donkeys, probably forgetting a few animals in there. Which all came from us doing everything we could to heal him and create the ultimate healing environment for him. 

Now, for the past several years, it has been our full-time mission to get to, talk about health stuff and work with different doctors, and do stuff with our podcast or membership group, social media stuff, website stuff, video stuff, and all that stuff. It has been, we are living; I could not picture a better existence than I get to do every day now. But it came at the cost of great suffering. not even mindset. Well, it was, of course, our suffering, but, if I could go back and trace what he went through, I would not feel my heartbeat. But that is the way it works somewhat.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Of course, but the truth is that it led you down a completely different path. What were you doing with your life before? Because you are doing this full-time now. You are guiding people full-time now.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. I was an outside sales guy for a commercial energy savings company. It was not a bad job, but it did not have a lot of meaning in it. I was listening to health podcasts and stuff at the time and even thinking, man, it would be cool to be one of those guys. Funny how the world works out. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Funny how the world works out. I want to be clear that you do not come from a health background, and all of your education came with Ryder’s diagnosis.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes, we were certainly, I would say, before Ryder was conceived, we started saying, Hey, let us eat more organic food, let us get rid of chemicals cleaning products. I started taking EMF, electromagnetic fields, wi-fi, and stuff like that more seriously. We were.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

That was pretty intuitive. How did you come to that conclusion and perspective?

Ryan Sternagel

If I am being 100% honest, listening to conspiracy-type podcasts and stuff like that, finding out how we are being poisoned and all that,

Jennifer Simmons, MD

It resonated with you, and we all can hear all of these things, but we are not open to that. But something allowed it to resonate with you.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. I am grateful that I was never too married to any preconceived notion. I have always been open to new information and letting that new information take me where it does. Also extremely blessed that my wife, Teddy, does this together with me, and it was obvious that we were locked arms and the journey and all that. But she is the same way, and it is just that it is neat that we were, and we are getting into arguments about dumb little things. But when it came to the big, life-changing, big decisions after your son gets diagnosed with stage four cancer, even before we were, you said, starting to make these life changes, blessed that we found each other to go through this for our son because we were always on the same page with everything.

It will always break my heart when we get so many parents and even just couples one of them’s been diagnosed with cancer or their child has been diagnosed with cancer. One of them wants to go into the holistic route, and the other just wants to listen to the conventional doctor, or not even just the pure, holistic route. No conventional medicine at any point. Dogmatic conventional people too. But yes, they go the conventional route, or the holistic integrative route, versus the pure conventional route. It is heartbreaking when two sides of that couple cannot come to the same conclusion. 95% of the time, it is the woman who, probably because you all have better intuition, wants to go the holistic slash integrative route, and it is the man who wants to shut up and listen to the conventional doctor. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

I think that scenario happens way more than we appreciate. I do not mean a man-and-woman part; I mean, the discordance between what to do. The patient, the person who is dealing with the diagnosis, has one notion, and the family, the friends, or whoever their support is, whoever their community is, has a different opinion, and it is a noisy time. I want to start with you. How do you coach people on how to find a practitioner? That is one of the main things that people face when they get a diagnosis: Who is going to help me? Who is going to guide me, who is going to take care of me, and who is going to lead me?

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. In the noisy time and all that, it is always heartbreaking when it is the patient themselves who does not want to listen to any new ideas. Well, it is heartbreaking either way. But it is sad because maybe it is the wife of the husband or whatever that wants to see their partner do all they can for themselves. Assuming you are open to going, the integrative holistic approach does not leave any options off the table route, which means if you are watching this event, then you are either open to it or already heading down that path. Good job.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Were you curious? 

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. But, I am saying, you have got the conventional team that is the conventional team that you were, and you went to whatever doctor you went to when things were not feeling well. Then they referred you to whatever hospital or oncology clinic or whatever it was that you eventually got the diagnosis through and now through. No deep-dive research of your own. That is your conventional team, which may be fine or not. There is a standard of care that a lot of them follow. You are going to get the same thing no matter where you go, to some extent. But then there are conventional guys who, even though they are conventional guys, still think for themselves and still treat you as an individual. Maybe they are not utilizing every tool in the holistic toolbox that we are talking about at this event. But yes, at least they are willing to treat you as an individual here and hear your concerns, maybe. That was our thing: we were not getting along with the conventional team that we first had. It is a lot harder for parents of a child to get a new team because that means pretty much moving states because there is only one hospital per state out there.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes. There are not a lot of pediatric hospitals.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. That sees children with cancer. That is what we did—we moved states. But for the vast majority of people.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

I think your point is valid, but in that, you describe it as not getting along, But it is not being heard. It is so important to be heard by your physician. They have to respect your opinion.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. Even, as I said, they are not going to have every holistic tool, and they will not know about a lot of stuff. But they should hear you, and they should be open to integrative stuff. That is why the team we eventually ended on said, I know you guys are doing all that stuff. I do not know anything about it, but I am sure there is merit to it. Good job, doing your research. That is who you want on the conventional side. For adults dealing with themselves, you have got your pick of oncologist no matter where in the country you are. You can shop around, and find a good one on that front. Then on the holistic integrative front, it sounds simple now that I say it nine years later, but you do not know what you do not know a lot of times: you need a holistic slash, naturopathic slash, integrative slash, functional slash, whatever catchphrase.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes.

Ryan Sternagel

That particular doctor wants to go by, and they are valid differences. But somebody that utilizes natural medicines alongside conventional stuff, but not just that, you need one of those types of practitioners and a functional M.D. or a naturopathic doctor, maybe a well-trained herbalist, or something like that. But somebody that specializes in cancer because there is a world of difference between the generalist naturopathic doctor that happens to be in your residential area that, helps people with their gut issues or whatever it is. A functional medicine doctor or a naturopathic doctor. Naturopathic doctors who specialize in cancer usually, go by naturopathic oncologist. World of difference between just your everyday functional medicine doctor and your everyday naturopathic.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Can you talk about some of those differences?

Ryan Sternagel

Well, cancer is just to say that if you can heal cancer, you can heal anything else. Those tend to be heard. If you have taken the time to know all there is to know about healing cancer, then you know all there is to know about healing. Healing most things. Because there is a viral component, There is a bacterial component. There is an emotional component. There is a spiritual component. There is a toxicity component. There are guts all of that. You have got to figure out all those things. pretty much fix them as fast as you can all at once in a cohesive, strategic manner. There is something you have got to do. You pretty much have to fix everything all at once. Mitochondria defects, the list goes on and on. But then, a good one, as I said, is going to know a whole lot about how to work alongside whatever conventional medicine you are going through as well, be it chemo, radiation, surgery, immunotherapy, checkpoint inhibitors, and all that stuff. They are going to know what natural therapies will work well with every specific type of chemo. Not only that, but twofold: make that chemo work better and protect your organs from the specific damage that that chemo does, be it neuropathy, wiping out your gut, or whatever. 

They all have their own different, particular side effects, so a good naturopathic oncologist or functional medicine doctor specializing in cancer is going to know about all that stuff. Even conventional medicine aside, there are a whole lot of different types of cancer. All those types of cancer are not the same. Of course, you will hear from the naturopathic doctor. Well, we just treat the person, not the disease. Of course, that is the fundamental approach you should be going by. But there are still very real differences between a tumor in your colon and leukemia and the way you should approach that.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

The timeline is different. The timeline matters to people. Familiarity with what cancer is, what is traditionally used, and just being comfortable with cancer is important because there are a lot of functional medicine doctors, naturopaths, and integrative practitioners who are not comfortable with cancer. That makes a difference.

Ryan Sternagel

A lot of them will know I respect the ones who say I do not take cancer. I have, and it bugs me when I see and hear about it happening all the time when somebody says, I already had a relationship with my naturopathic doctor. They have only, maybe, seen one cancer patient in the past, but they said they were willing to step up to the plate and help me through it. It is the wrong thing to need somebody with decades of cancer-specific experience. That is who you need. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

While we are talking about that, who do you think should be on your team? When you are building a team, what are the most important components to you?

Ryan Sternagel

We just listed off the primary. Your conventional oncologist and your primary cancer-specializing naturopathic or functional medicine doctor. The nice part about that is that these days, I would say that, the one good thing that came out of COVID is that telemedicine restrictions got vastly loosened to the point where most conventional and functional naturopathic whatever doctors could practice across state lines. That is pretty much been obliterated these days, and you have got your pick of where you can find the best cancer specialists in the country, and then you got your pick of all of them. Then that depends on if your cancer-specializing doctor happens to be in your area and you can go to their clinic then great. 

But if not, I would say the next thing you look for is a clinic in your area, functional medicine, naturopathic, whatever clinic in your area could be, it could be one of those more generic naturopathic doctors I was talking about. It could be a chiropractor’s office. It could be that there are more and more functional clinics with IV bars and stuff popping up. But somebody who can administer IV nutrient therapies, somebody with cool toys, ten-pass ozone machines, or the new kid on the block with ozone therapy is EBOO. Somebody with those types of therapies in their office to where they do not need to be your quarterback on the holistic side. You just need to find somebody who can administer whatever IVs or various therapies that your quarterback might recommend is a good thing for you at this stage in your journey.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

I think the things that you mentioned apply to ozone, IV Vitamin C, and Mistletoe. Several things do lead to better outcomes.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. Well, that is, do not get me on the soapbox there. Just go to PubMed, and type in vitamin C and cancer, or ozone, and cancer, or something as simple as curcumin and cancer. See the thousands of studies, and then tell me there is no research behind it. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Speaking of which, what do you recommend in terms of, do you generally tell people to work with a nutritionist, or are they getting that information from their functional medicine doctor?

Ryan Sternagel

I would say that it depends. Some doctors will have a nutritionist on staff, while others will not. I would go under the, my friend Chris Wark is a well-known cancer food personality—not just food, but I am thinking of him in this food context. It is his catchphrase, Flood your body with nutrition.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes. Chris Wark is there. 

Ryan Sternagel

He is on that. Good. That is the baseline. You find out that sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts is good for you, beta-carotene from carrots is good for you, and apogens from celery are good for you. You can even go on PubMed and just type plants against cancer, and there are a few just-listing studies. You see, it is easy to find anti-cancer foods, and you juice the heck out of them. If you eat as many salads as you can, if you have some of the harder cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, and stuff like that, pretty much anything that takes some processing power. There are all the raw people. But lately, I have been gravitating towards the idea that the Gerson Therapy approach was to or was and is to juice crazy because then you are flooding your body with that nutrition. But then, to add any more solid meals that cook or, my favorite, steaming or pressure cooking, because you are only losing about, maybe, 10, 15, or 20% of the nutrients, but you eat five times as much if you have a pressure cooker. You are still coming out ahead there. If you are going through cancer, your digestive system is probably compromised. It is almost certainly compromised because pretty much everybody’s digestive system these days is almost certainly compromised. You are not spending a lot of energy to digest that stuff. 

Whereas, if you make things as easy to digest as possible, then your body’s energy cannot go so far to digestion. It can be going towards rest, repair, healing, your immune system, and all that stuff. There are the basics, but as far as yeah, as far as it is, it is a good idea to bring on a cancer-specific nutritionist if one is not provided to you through your doctor or you do not feel comfortable asking your functional doctor, your naturopathic doctor. Are you the guy to give me cancer-specific nutrition advice, guy or gal, or should I be seeking that out somewhere else? Either answer is fine and then add on the auxiliaries from there. It is a good idea to see a chiropractor to get your spine and all that stuff straightened out because your nervous system is connected to your spine. That is a big part of your immune system. Just as your body talks to each other, it talks to itself. Go see a chiropractor every once in a while, go find your local acupuncturist, and get your meridians cleared and all that fun stuff. 

We worked with a couple of different types of energy workers along the way and profound things happened to work with those energy workers, energy healers, whatever you want to call them, people that do not even have to be in the same room as you and can use their mind and the way energy is connected throughout the world, and they can tap into that a little better than a thick-headed guy me can and, do some amazing that. There is no way this was a coincidence-type thing that happened while working with those people. You get your main quarterback on the integrative side. You get your conventional guy; you figure out what therapies you have in your area that you have access to. Chiropractors, acupuncturists, or energy workers, would be good additions there that I always do to say as well. When we talk about therapies and ozone, a lot of chiropractors and functional doctors stuff will have PEMF-pulsed electromagnetic fields in their offices. it hyperthermia sauna, things that. A lot of these things people pay, either will pay a hundred bucks, a couple of hundred bucks, a few hundred bucks a pop at a clinic or, they will pay 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 bucks to go to, one of those all-inclusive places in Mexico.

There is a time and a place for those places, do not get me wrong. But, I to see how much you can do at home. How about it, it is a bit of an investment to get an infrared. It is a bit of an investment to get yourself an ozone generator, and a bit of investment to get yourself a good PEMF, either mat or, there are a few different types of devices that you can get with PEMF. But, those are a big three. You pay a thousand or a couple thousand bucks for them at one time. Then you have that to use every day for the rest of your life, which is a lot. I do not know. Then there is that as well. Figuring out how much of the healing you can bring at home and not even need to go to. I would not give myself IVs unless I have heard of people doing that.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

I have heard people doing that too. It is crazy. But, let us dive into that a little bit because people often criticize the integrative side of it as being very expensive. How can you affordably do this?

Ryan Sternagel

Yes, of course, you have to note that it is only expensive because it is out of pocket. The chemo and everything is you are only getting the petroleum-based pharmaceuticals covered by insurance.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes. They will cover the poison, but the healing is on you.

Ryan Sternagel

Less and less covered by insurance these days. It is not even getting anything for free on the free in quotes, on the conventional side anymore. People’s co-pays are going up and out-of-pocket minimums and all that stuff. It is getting crazier and crazier. Those prices are artificially inflated, and so forth. As far as, the actual sticker price of, a bottle of supplements versus a bottle of pills or, a quote-unquote more expensive therapy IV, vitamin C versus, the IVs of chemo they give you, the sticker price on those is thousands every time. It is not more expensive. It should not be. 

Conventional people will criticize or will use that as a criticism. But in all reality, it is just the fact that the system is extremely warped towards the conventional stuff. But that being said, it is what it is and you do have to pay for this stuff or you do have to find a way to obtain this stuff one way or the other. it does add up, especially on top of all, the regular medical bills and things that. There has never been a more applicable use of the, worn out to where there is a will, there is a way mantra. But that was what my wife and I knew—we just knew whatever it was—whatever new supplement, therapy, consultation, or all those things. 

But whatever we felt strongly that we needed, whatever we were advised by the people, we felt strongly that we, that we trusted, that we needed, we did make it happen. A few of the ways we made it happen were: I think a lot of people get there. There is a mixture of pride and insecurity in being able to ask for or even receive help. I think that was our biggest thing. We were talking earlier about not being married, preconceived notions of how the world works, being able to change our worldview, and all that pretty easily. We were pretty easily able to throw the pride and the insecurity out the window because it was a life-and-death situation.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes, and it is your child.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. It is our child. Would you rather be too proud to ask for help, or would you rather have that new ozone generator, infrared sauna, or consultation with the doctor that is going to recommend, help you cut through the zillions of different supplements out there you can choose from, and figure out what makes the most sense for your specific situation? We wanted that. That is, the big mindset shift there is: just do not be ashamed of your story and do not feel you need to, hunker down and just keep it to yourself, and you can get through this on your own. I always prided myself on being able to be very self-reliant and not need help from anybody.

But, in this case, you just need more help. We used our story wherever we could in asking for discounts on things. I do not know how many heartfelt letters I wrote to two supplement companies. There is a little organic grocery store in town, and I let them know what was going on. We were having trouble affording all the produce for juicing, and the next thing we knew, we were getting all of their bulk produce at their cost, which was awesome. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Human kindness can be tremendous. But your point is well taken, and you have to ask.

Ryan Sternagel

You have to ask. You had to be sincere too. You cannot just just say, I can just add a little to the sentence, I have cancer. Can you give me some money, or can you give me a discount or whatever? It has got to be because people are getting hit up for stuff all the time. But, if you can make your little template of a concise but heartfelt story in the middle and then change it based on the situation. Just ask for discounts all over and I just mentioned supplements and organic foods, stuff like that. But your rent from your landlord or your cell phone bill—call your cell phone company and say, Hey, I got diagnosed with cancer. I got it canceled. Unless you guys can cut my bill by a third or a half or something like that, They will not do it out of the kindness of their hearts. They will do it to keep you as a customer. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

It is okay.

Ryan Sternagel

That is fine. But just as we are, look at every possible facet of your spending money and ask, How can your story help you with that money? Then, on the flip side, we were just putting everything we were doing out there. Not everybody wants to put their life story on social media and stuff like that. But the online fundraiser thing does help, especially if you stay consistent with posting your stuff. Do not get obnoxious about asking for money all the time; just post about your journey in general and what you are doing. Hey, here is me getting an IV infusion. Cool. Here is me, juicing and whatever. Just remind people you have a fundraiser to afford this stuff.  We got, I do not know how many, multiple thousand dollar donations from people that we had never met before. It is just that if you put yourself out there if you are genuine about it, you will resonate with the right type of people. The universe will provide. I did woo-woo stuff like that as well; just visualizing goodness and resources coming to that is part of my little morning routine. Every morning was just asking—not even asking, just knowing that—whatever. Summoning, summoning help from the universe. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

I always encourage people to be specific. I need a song to write about the universe; please send me a sonnet, and it works. That is.

Ryan Sternagel

Crazy.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes, it is amazing. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about it. There are many times, and I am sure you remember this when it is just so overwhelming. You are in information overload. You do not know what is true. You do not know what is not true. There are so many different opinions, differing opinions, and, not to mention, you do not know what is true for you. How do you help or advise people to sift through the information?

Ryan Sternagel

Yes, I would. More and more, I circle back to that holistic integrative function or whatever doctor specializes in cancer. Because of that, and now that I have gotten to talk to so many of them, I used to and I still do, but especially in the beginning, I used to pride myself on how many studies I could stay up till 2:00 in the morning reading on PubMed and blog articles and podcast episodes. Inform yourself and take in a bunch of information, especially because the more information you take in, the more commonalities you are going to hear. You are going to get at least the basics of what you need to be doing, and that is going to come to you. But then, as far as choosing these 10 supplements versus those 10 supplements. With all I know or with all I have learned in nine years, the more you add, the more you learn, and the less you realize you know where that saying goes. I can read 50 studies, or I can ask one of my trusted naturopathy oncologists, Hey, what do you think about this? The answer I get from them will be far more profound evidence-based and experience-based than anything I can get, no matter how many studies I read. There is that.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

I guess the only thing you can believe is that there is data to support whatever you want to believe.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. There is you, and you can work your way to any fairly logical conclusion. I think post-2020 taught us, better than any of us ever could have imagined, that people can come to wildly different conclusions based on available data out there. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

That being said, another problem in this space is that you can do a lot of research, but the truth is not always very evident because I think the narrative is highly controlled. This is my conspiracy theory. I think that the narrative is highly controlled, and the outlets through which most people are searching simply cannot get the information they are looking for.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. That is, a sad reality today is that even DuckDuckGo is better than Google now. It is not as far as finding good natural health information. The Internet today is a very different place than it was nine years ago when my son was diagnosed. The Truth About Cancer, that docuseries that first one just aired, I think two weeks after my son was diagnosed. We were sitting there with a pen and paper; just take it out and write everything down. Then and then, it became popular to blog about alternative cancer stuff because of the success of that series. You had the Internet, which was just awash with all sorts of wild alternative cancer stuff.

That was real information overload. We were trying to find peace between all these different alternative protocols out there and stuff like that. You search for alternative cancer stuff today, even somewhere like DuckDuckGo. You are getting articles by Memorial Sloan-Kettering in Harvard, and all these places that say that they give you a little sprinkling of, yes, there is some research behind it. That it is probably not worth your time or, maybe, whatever. It is the information overload that is almost underwhelming these days, which highlights the need to work with a naturopathic or functional medicine doctor to specialize in cancer even more. But, that being said, it is still a flood of information. You are still getting your friends. You are still reading the blog articles; you are still listening to podcasts, all that stuff. 

I always, outside of the doctor thing, you have got to make friends with your intuition and let that be. I would even let my intuition be the guide, the talk about automatic writing and just letting the words flow through you or whatever. There is almost automatic clicking, and PubMed studies and stuff like that. Well, where is my intuition taking me right now? There is, we have a pretty neat membership group. I just talked about this the other day. There is a gal who asks, us if we get a different doctor every week you have been on the call, Dr. Jenn. But she asked, every doctor, about this one particular obscure or supplement. 

Finally, just the other day, I was thinking, it is if you are asking every doctor about it, it seems your intuition is, it is your body, your mind, the universe, whatever is probably telling you that is the supplement you need. I do not know if I would ask any more doctors about it, or their opinion about it, I would just take that supplement. We have been trained to talk about the Western mindset versus the Eastern mindset, the conventional mindset versus the holistic mindset, or whatever. But we have been trained to just say, there is got to be science and there is got to be to that. You have got to find the thing with the best science behind it.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes, like being double-blind. 

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. There is certainly a place for that in the holistic world as well. You get into all the stuff about out, a supplement a company cannot afford a double-blind study, a multibillion-dollar drug company, and all that stuff. But even still, it is. You are in, even if they all could.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

The problem is the risk profile is not the same. When you are talking about a pharmaceutical and you are bringing it to market, there are real reasons to have to do that extensive research. It is because every single one of those drugs is going to have side effects, and some of them are going to be serious. The worst thing that will happen to you if you take too much vitamin C is that you are going to get diarrhea.

Ryan Sternagel

Spend a little more time than you bargained for in the toilet. 

Jennifer Simmons, MD

The stakes are so much higher, which is why studies are so important in the pharmaceutical space. But it does not generally apply. I am not going to tell you that there are supplements that do not pose any danger to someone. Of course, there are. But by and large, the risk profile is not the same.

Ryan Sternagel

But, that being said, if they could all have double-blind studies, even if they did, I am sure there would be hundreds of supplement companies that, if they had the resources to do it, then there would be hundreds of supplements with interesting, compelling double-blind studies that would come out. You would still be left with the same issue of choosing between all of these different supplements. Again, it is you who trusts your cancer-specializing naturopathic or functional medicine doctor. But then, they are going to say, Here are the things that you should take. Here are the things that, maybe there are a couple, supplements that do not get along well with cancer. They will tell you about those, or at least, questionable research.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

That thing. I hope they tell you about them.

Ryan Sternagel

Which, again, your generic naturopathic doctor probably is not going to know about what your cancer-specific one is. But then, it is they say whatever your budget allows, I am not going to tell you not to do that. That supplement in which you are interested may well be great for you; it sounds great. It looks great. I know about it. In that case, it is you have to just, go back to when we were opening ourselves up to the universe stuff, the more you can let your intuition guide you on that stuff and not just pay lip service to it, but it takes some practice and it takes them. You have got to be intentional about it at first, but the more you can just open yourself up to, the answer is somewhere within you because, going back to everything’s connected and we all share the same energy and you can get all, esoteric with it and whatever. But you do have access to the answer of what is best for you and the more you can just open yourself up to that and let your intuition be the final decision maker on things. 

My wife, I am more into, geeking out on different energy medicine stuff and energy workers and reading weird, esoteric books and stuff like that. I think it is to compensate for the fact that, my wife is not into all that stuff. Probably it is because she has a way better intuition than I do. I try to hack my way there. But, we always let her intuition be the final decision-maker. Whenever we went with that, we were so glad we did. Whenever we, logic our way into going against her intuition, 100% of the time we regret it.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Listen to your wife.

Ryan Sternagel

Listen to your wife. In an interview.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Before you spoke about building a nontoxic house, what does that mean?

Ryan Sternagel

Well, it is, I guess, part of the discovery process when you take a look at your life either, hopefully before you get diagnosed with cancer, but, after you get diagnosed with cancer and you start picking things apart and you start realizing, you start, as I mentioned, It is, I have been eating conventional food that has this glyphosate pesticide on it that is linked to cancer. It is poking holes in my gut and all that stuff. I am cleaning with these endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and I am getting all these heavy metals from various. I do not know. That unfortunately applies to buildings and homes themselves and most of the things in buildings and homes. The Presswood, be it particleboard or plywood, has been off-gassing formaldehyde for years and years and years, along with various other VOCs. The paint that is used is off-gassing, the insulation is off-gassing, your couch is off-gassing, your chair is off-gassing, and your cabinets are off-gassing again. Those are presswoods. They are off-gassing. Everything is off-gassing.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Mattress.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. Your mattress. That is another thing I talk about: Do I spend $30 to go to an all-inclusive clinic in Mexico or not? If you have 30,000 extra dollars, go for it. Get that turbo boost. But if you are going to spend every last penny on that clinic and then come home to the mattress that is off and the pillow that is off-gassing formaldehyde into your face every night as you sleep, I would get you that organic mattress.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Yes. Think about the things that you do most. You sleep on your pillow and your mattress for hopefully seven or eight hours every single day. That is meaningful.

Ryan Sternagel

Yes. I do not know. Not everyone is going to go to the extremes. We did. But, we got it, and then there is the electromagnet magnetic fields thing, The wi-fi cell phone towers are the cell phones in your house. We went to the extreme of finding a piece of land removed enough from its civilization but still close enough to civilization that we could get to it because we were still going to the hospital pretty frequently then. 

We found a best-of-both-worlds type situation that was not too far from the major cities and all that stuff. But at the same time, we do not have a lot of close neighbors, so, the property did not have any electromagnetic field readings on our geeky little meter. We worked with a building biologist to do that again. You can see there are a couple of green. Well, then you got to be careful with people using the word green because that could be all marketing there, too.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

A lot of greenwashing out there.

Ryan Sternagel

But I guess that the term you want to look for is building biologists. That is, if you are doing a project or building a new house, then it is great to work with a building biologist. But they can even consult on what you can do to improve your existing environment. But again, it is just that mindset once you realize that the default choice with everything is going to be toxic, be it food, medicine, or your living environment. Then you just have to look at everything and say, especially as you are considering purchasing something new, is this toxic or not? A simple exercise is just popping into a search engine, toxic silverware, and, you can get crappy silverware. That is going to leak heavy metals into your food, or you can get high-quality silverware. That is not going to be doing that. That is a good educational opportunity. Every time you are thinking about buying something new. Everybody should have an air filter in their house because there is not just one air filter. You just started your air filter collection. We started with just one, and we had it in Ryder’s bedroom, and then we moved it out to the living room. Then we were finally able to afford another one, and then he could have one in his bedroom and one in the living room. 19 years later, we have the Air Purifier Kingdom in our house and purifiers everywhere. But yes, that is going to mitigate a lot of it. 

Having a fan, or having your ceiling fan running, changes your furnace filter. There is a chance that if you ask most people, you have never opened your furnace one time, and you have never had anyone come out and look at it. It just runs. Go pop that bad boy open and take a look at it. Take a look. The filter in the thing, and that is, is what’s been circulating throughout your house. Yeah. Change that thing. Keep the windows open. You can; there is a paint line out there called Safe Coat, or AFM Safe Coat. That line of paints is designed to be not only nontoxic but also to seal in the off-gassing of all the building materials. It is short of building your own house from nontoxic materials, but there is stuff you can do there. There is also furniture.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

Most people are not going to build their own houses from scratch. use a building biologist. But what is the low-hanging fruit? What are the things that we should all make sure that we are doing?

Ryan Sternagel

I was going there with the air stuff because that is, a big one. A lot of emphasis is put on organic food. But think about how many times you eat versus how many times you breathe. You find out that indoor air can be 3–5 times more toxic on average, hundreds of times more toxic, and in many cases more toxic than even polluted outdoor, smoggy air. But that is the air stuff I just listed off there. It is always a good idea, even if you do not think you have a problem, to get a mold inspection. Just to be sure, you can find professional mold companies in most areas. There are various mail-order-type things that you can get. I am just trying out this mold product now where you just take an air sample and send it to them, and they will tell you how many mold spores are in your air. Mold is a big deal, and then, electromagnetic fields, um, all I can say is anyone saying that they are not a big deal, just that they do not know what they are talking about. They just do not. There is so much research out there showing a myriad of problems resulting from electromagnetic fields. It makes sense. The Earth’s natural frequency, that we have come up with over time is it is eight-something hertz. Now we are talking about, thousands and tens of thousands and millions and tens of millions of hertz.

Just that. Is common sense. If you are if you want to talk about logic and common sense, that is that is not that is not weird. We are energetic beings. Everything is firing based on electricity. That is why electrolytes are important, because we have electrical bodies and the electrolytes are conduits of or conductors of electricity. We are energetic beings. We are, we are tuned to a specific frequency or specific range of frequencies and these chaotic frequencies that, manmade thousands and thousands and millions of times more powerful than anything, wherever you are, of course, that is going to be a big deal. 

Anyway, that being said, the advice out there on turning your Wi-Fi router off at night, I do not think goes nearly far enough. I think the bare minimum is you have it on while you are actively surfing the internet and then you turn it back off. That is, I had to say that is the bare minimum for us. There are these amazing things called Ethernet cables. They worked well in the nineties before we had Wi-Fi. They still work just as we do even though we do not have the problem now because we do not have the Internet living in the middle of the woods. That is its problem. That is why you have to rent this office in town to come to once a week to do an interview. But even in our old house, when we had a router, we had to call the Internet company and make sure that they remotely disable the Wi-Fi and they wouldn’t know what you are talking about. You got to make sure that they do it and that thing.

But that is what we did. We had them disable the Wi-Fi completely, and then we just took the Internet cables, plugged the Ethernet cable in, and ran it up the wall across the ceiling, back down the wall to whatever, the computer was. I had those going throughout the house and I did it as neatly as I could up around corners and stuff like that. It did not look horrible. People did not notice until we pointed it out. Then we never had Wi-Fi on in our house whatsoever. That is a big deal to keep your cell phone in airplane mode. You do not always need to be reachable 24/7. Just in airplane mode, or somebody needs to get ahold of you. Text messages and voice mails are great. You will get the text message and voicemail when you turn your phone back on. It is just mentally better not to be reachable 24/7, always wondering when someone is going to text.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

I could not agree more. This has been so great, so useful, and so practical. I think that that is what people need, especially when they are overwhelmed. They need practical things that are going to make a big difference. Thank you so much. From the bottom of my heart, I am so sorry for the reason that you came into this space, but you are making a tremendous difference for people. I am sure you know that. Can you just share very quickly what you do and how you help people so that if they want to reach out to you, they can?

Ryan Sternagel

Yes, we have got a lot of things coming down the pipe. But for now, we put out a lot of great information on our so our I guess, family brand is the Stern method. The Stern method, our last name, Sternagel. But that is hard to remember or spell. it got shortened to Stern. As you can tell, we, methodize or systematize or, organize things the best we can because my wife and I were both not inherently organized type A drivers. But we realized we needed to get super organized. That is where the method part comes in. Our website, social media where we are having fun and more fun lately on Instagram and Facebook and those types of places, putting stuff out, YouTube, alternative channels, and things like that, and then firing it back up. By the time this goes live, our Anti-Cancer Revolution Podcast will be fired back up. It has been on hiatus for way longer than I wish it was, but we have got a ton of new stuff recorded there, and that is, just cancer-specific information—a whole ton of cancer-specific information—you are taking it here.

That is the Anti-Cancer Revolution, and then our membership I mentioned is our Going Integrative Plus Program where we get a top cancer-specializing doctor holistic, functional, and so on, like Dr. Jenn is here, and all of her best, and I do not even just have any cancer-specializing practitioners. I only have the best cancer-specializing practitioners on there, and it is just a fun two-hour Q&A that, our community members just get to ask whatever they want because that was one of the most valuable things that we could think of, that would have made a difference in our journey is just the ability to, as I said, you can go through that, God knows how many studies. But just getting to ask that one question to somebody who has been researching and practicing this stuff for decades every week makes a big difference. That is the Going Integrative Plus Program if you can share that.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

It is so important to have a trusted guide because, as we talked about, there is a lot of information, a lot of noise, and a lot of opinions. To be able to have a team that can help you determine what is best for you is so important, and you are so integral to that process. 

I thank you for being here today, for doing what you do, and for sharing it with the world.

Ryan Sternagel

Right back at you. Dr. Jenn.

Jennifer Simmons, MD

It is Dr. Jenn. Bye for now.