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Nathan Crane is an award-winning author, inspirational speaker, plant-based athlete, event producer and 18x award-winning documentary filmmaker. Nathan is the Founder of The Panacea Community, Creator of the Global Cancer Symposium, and Director and Producer of the documentary film, Cancer; The Integrative Perspective. He is also the Director of Strategic... Read More
Liliana Partida, CN (Clinical Nutritionist) has been in the Health and Fitness Industry for over 23 years. She started her career early in life by winning the State Championship in the 400 meters run. This launched her dedication to the Health and Fitness industry becoming a perpetual student of continual... Read More
Liliana Partida, CN (Clinical Nutritionist) has been in the Health and Fitness Industry for over 23 years. She started her career early in life by winning the State Championship in the 400 meters run. This launched her dedication to the Health and Fitness industry becoming a perpetual student of continual education.
Nathan Crane
Hey, it’s Nathan Crane, Director of the Health and Healing Club and Host of the Conquering Cancer Summit, and today I am honored and excited to welcome you to a very special interview.
And I am joined again by Liliana Partida who is a clinical nutritionist here at the Cancer Center for Healing in Irvine, California. We just finished a fascinating conversation on emotional healing and the technology they use here called EVOX which is really helping you identify some of the root causes of emotional traumas that could be affecting your healing process. So, I encourage you to go and listen to that interview it is very informative and inspiring to say the least. So, Liliana thank you so much for joining us again. You are a clinical nutritionist here, you work with the patients in helping to design personalized nutrition programs to support each patient on their individualized healing journey, right?
So, let’s talk a little bit about what that looks like and what people need to understand about nutrition and success in nutrition when it comes to dealing with cancer.
Liliana Partida
Okay. So, most of our patients are very educated when they come here. And oftentimes they’ve exhausted conventional medicine and they’re not really getting the right advice. Many of my patients I’ve said, “Well what have you done in regards to your diet? How have you changed it?” They said, well, you know, “I asked the oncologist and they said, you know, just keep your weight on don’t lose weight and you can eat whatever you want”, right.? And so again, I think that that’s sad because there’s so much information now that we realize that, you know, cancer thrives off of glucose and of course, so does the brain and the body and so of course we want the right kind of fuel. And so, one of the things I do is I meet patients where they’re capable of creating and starting a way of living. Not everybody’s ready to make radical changes. I mean, oftentimes the doctor will say, “Oh, you need to be a vegan or you need to go raw, you need to do this”, right. But again, they’ll come in my office and they’re like, “Oh gosh, they just took away everything and I hate being this way and I don’t wanna be that.” Well, that by itself won’t allow them to heal. If I have a belief system that I, you know being a vegan is not good for me. Then I will guarantee you in a couple of months we’re gonna see their blood work will not be good.
Nathan Crane
Yap We talked all about the biology of belief in the past interview and how it directly affects your body’s ability to respond to the beliefs that you’re having and can either instigate the proliferation of the disease or actually help healing. So, this belief that you’re talking about in the diet itself, I think that’s a piece that not a lot of people think about.
Liliana Partida
Yeah no they don’t, absolutely.
Nathan Crane
But it’s like, “Oh, I hate that. I don’t wanna eat that. I hate this salad. I don’t wanna eat this salad. I want a cheeseburger. I hate this.” Well, you might be getting some nutrients from that but you’re just adding fuel to the fire with these negative beliefs that we know are so powerful.
Liliana Partida
Absolutely, and so I’m really big on swap outs, okay. So, if I’m going to ask you to entertain the idea to give up grain or to give up dairy because a lot of these foods have high lectins in it which can cause an inflammatory response to the gut. And of course they don’t realize that, okay, a cup of brown rice or quinoa has got about 40 carbohydrates in it. And a lot of our patients, we put them on a modified ketogenic diet. Now again, any diet shouldn’t be like for the rest of your life. Everything, because we have such biological duality, what works for a couple of months, may not work for you at all and may start reversing situation. So, we have to do the lab work on these things.
Nathan Crane
With Ketogenic diet, for example. I wanna talk a little bit more about that because I know you… So, you put people on these shorter term diets and then you’re switching them, right. So, you’re not saying I’ll be on ketogenic for a year or six years or the rest of your life.
Liliana Partida
Yeah, that would be very unhealthy.
Nathan Crane
Right, ’cause I mean the literature, you know, I’ve done so much research on ketogenic because it’s this huge thing that’s blown up all over, right. I’ve interviewed world-leading experts on this topic and people working hands-on with cancer patients. And there are a lot who were saying, do not give cancer patients ketogenic diet, right. Because yes, we know that cancer thrives on glucose, so you starve it. But we also know cancer can start utilizing ketones as energy, right.
Liliana Partida
Oh, absolutely. You know, it’s got…
Nathan Crane
And some cancers thrive on ketones. So, you have to know what cancer first, right.
Liliana Partida
Right, and so we have the RGGC that can give us a pathway in which cancer is getting its uptake of nutrients. So again, if we have high insulin levels and it’s using the glycogen, the glucose pathway then I know, and they have got diabetes oftentimes then I know I’ve got to put them on a very, very low carbohydrate diet. And so, I start them off… And it’s a modified ketogenic. So, for women I might put them on 36 grams of carbohydrates and a man anywhere between 45 and 60.
Nathan Crane
What percentage is that?
Liliana Partida
So, it’s about, I’d say between about 12%, honestly.
Nathan Crane
12% cabs, what percent proteins?
Liliana Partida
20% protein and then I do 12% carbohydrates. And then if they’re vegans, I do 15. And then I do the rest in good healthy fats
Nathan Crane
So 65% fats.
Liliana Partida
So yeah, because keto is usually between 80 and 85%. Yeah, and then your carbohydrates will like between five and 8%, which is really low. Yeah, two carrots is 18 carbs, right. So, again you’ve got to be realistic. I mean, that’s just the bottom line. And then of course we can do intermittent fasting which I love to do, because then that’s just another way to not only reduce the calories but also start to heal the cells metabolically especially if they’re in a pre-diabetic or diabetic state. It very important to heal the pathways, it allows energy to come in. So, when I see a patient, you know I’ve got all their blood work I’ve got the advice that the doctor is suggesting, you know if they’ve got breast cancer, a lot of times Dr. Bita will want to put somebody on a vegan diet. Okay. And so then I always say, okay, well how can we compromise a little bit? So maybe we can do fish a couple of days a week and slowly…
Nathan Crane
And somebody is like, “I need my meat”.
Liliana Partida
Yeah, you know. Yeah, ’cause I really want my patients to be happy.
Happiness is like I said, one of the best antidotes you can have for healing. And so…
Nathan Crane
So true.
Liliana Partida
So, then basically, you know, we kind of say, “Okay what are you willing to do? I know what you’re capable, but what are you willing to do?”
Nathan Crane
Yeah, so do you say like, “Here’s what you should do, here’s what we recommend”? You give them kind of the blueprint.
Liliana Partida
Yep, so I talk to him about the science of food. I go, “Okay, so this is what I’m gonna do…”
Nathan Crane
And what is those principles? What are at least the base principles for most people dealing with cancer?
Liliana Partida
Yeah, so basically we say, okay, there’s the macronutrients, right? And so for example, you’ve got your protein. And I say, okay, anything that comes from something that has eyeballs on it is going to be a protein source. If we’re looking at animal proteins, okay. Whether it is milk coming from a cow or eggs coming from a chicken, you know, that’s gonna be proteins. And there’s protein in carbohydrates like beans but then it’s gonna have both protein and carbs. So, let’s look at that. And then we have the carbohydrate family, which is everything from the plant kingdom. So, whether it’s vegetables, fruits, beans, or grains those are all glucose component foods. So, then what I say is, okay, if a food after you cook it does not have any water in it, it’s a high sugar food. So, your potato, your carrots, your peas, your corn your butternut squash. So, I said, “Okay, let’s look at it this way. Let’s keep the ones that are highly nutritious. And let’s just give those ones up that are a little bit what we call filler foods.” And the filler foods, in my opinion, are the grains. Anything that expands when you cook it, is gonna be the highest glucose. So, when I have rice, it gets, you know, it’s expands or bread expands or pizza expands or bagels expand. We don’t want expansion, we want contraction when it comes to reducing our situation. If I cook something like spinach, it’s excreting water. If I cook, you know, zucchini…
With these foods that excrete water are giving you something and they’re still gonna retain their minerals. Even if you cook it, you don’t need to eat raw all the time ’cause then you start building the enzymes that are important for all the foods you eat. A lot of bloating, a lot of gas and things of that nature when they’re not used to it cause they don’t have…
Nathan Crane
And Some things you definitely wanted.
Liliana Partida
Oh yeah, you want raw.
Nathan Crane
Some things you definitely wanna cook and some things are better raw, right?
Liliana Partida
Yeah, I kind of say 50 50 split. Okay, let’s always have a really big salad on there. So, you got a lot of chlorophyll, rich foods in there. So, you can kind of support a little bit of the heterocyclic amines of the meats. So, you know, high chlorophyll and then your cooked vegetables. Especially cancer patients need oftentimes to have more warm foods and a lot of these juices and raw foods is very cold ayurvedically.
Liliana Partida
And so, it’s not beneficial to the gut.
Nathan Crane
And so, in terms of the proteins, right. You’re talking more than the animal proteins, for example obviously we know we can get plenty of proteins from plants. But in terms of animal proteins, what’s your take on, you know, all the, I mean, decades of hard science, hard literature on their inflammatory, right? They are carcinogenic in many cases and especially processed meats, right. And they can directly contribute to cancer. So, what are your take on meats in general?
Liliana Partida
eah, so I think, you know eating is an inflammatory response in and of itself, okay. And of course we wanna keep the body as alkaline as possible. So, I tell my patients if they are gonna consume animal protein, no more than once a day. The other two meals need to be vegetarian, vegan, okay. And if we could compromise, maybe just do two to three times a week would even be better. So, I’m a very much a proponent of having more vegetarian meals. And so then we can get our protein. I love hemp seeds. I know three tablespoons of hemp seeds is almost the equivalent of two eight. So, I tell my patients, hemp seeds and some sunflowers seeds.
Nathan Crane
What about flax?
Liliana Partida
Pumpkins seeds.
Nathan Crane
Flax and chia.
Liliana Partida
All those, those are great for like morning cereals. I love to do like a nut cereal with the chia seed and the hemp seeds and so forth. So, I give them options, I say, okay. But then after a while people can get, “Oh my gosh, I’m sick of this. And I can’t have tofu because of, you know, the estrogenic components.” So, I say, “Okay let’s do beans”, okay. But then again, I say, “Let’s do it for your blood type.” So, depending on what blood type you are, there’s gonna be specific beans that are going to be more beneficial in terms of digestion. And then I teach them how to cook them. Okay, let’s soak them with a little bit of Apple cider vinegar, drain it. Yeah, exactly.
Nathan Crane
It actually becomes super healing, first the fiber and the minerals.
Liliana Partida
Exactly. And then I tell them well, if you really wanna do it, you know, with the highest benefit is let’s turn them into a resistant starch. Don’t eat them the day that you take them out of the pressure cooker. Put them in the refrigerator. They’re gonna shrink a little bit but they’re gonna lose about 10% of their glucose. And then if you even eat them cold on a salad , they’re still gonna even be less sugar but they’re gonna have all the fiber, there’ll be a resistant starch. So, even with sweet potato, I do the same thing, you know, steam a sweet potato, and then, you know keep it in the refrigerator. So, when you make a beautiful salad, you’ve got texture to it. It’s just not lettuce and leaves. I mean, people are like, “I’m not a cow, you know, I have a double stomach, I don’t wanna eat grass all day long.” I hate that.
Nathan Crane
What you’re saying is, follow the foundations you know, plant-based, organic, are you telling them organic?
Liliana Partida
Oh, a hundred percent.
Nathan Crane
Cause you don’t want the chemicals, pesticides herbicides. Much more plant-based, more vegetables, more greens, right? All these things. If you’re gonna eat meat, reduce it as much as possible.
Liliana Partida
Absolutely.
Nathan Crane
Right. Now, what about, you mentioned diabetes a couple of times, right? So, have you seen all the research done by the Mastering Diabetes Group? Not done by them, but compiled by Mastering Cyrus and Robby Barbaro. Have you seen the mastery in diabetes…
Liliana Partida
No, I have not. I haven’t seen that.
Nathan Crane
It’s really fascinating because they’ve actually compiled like the most research on diabetes which also correlates over to cancer, right. In terms of all of these diets. But they actually put, and they’ve helped tens of thousands of people reverse type two diabetes by actually putting them on a high carbohydrate, healthy carbohydrate. Now not talking grains and things like that. We’re talking vegetables and fruit, right. And actually reversing type two diabetes in about 90% of people and low fat actually. So, it’s like the opposite which is really fascinating to me. And I know a lot of doctors are now, you know, prescribing that in terms of healing cancer as well because what they’re finding is with, you know, all of these, you’re getting all the fiber, right? Which is from the gut, right? All the vitamins and nutrients, all the amino acids, all these things that they put them on a plant base, right? And they’ve just seen extraordinary results.
Liliana Partida
And I love it because I tell everybody you have to become your own personal experiment, okay?
Nathan Crane
Like I’ve been a laboratory of myself for 15 years.
Liliana Partida
We’re all bio hackers. So, what works for this person may not work for you because it has to work with all components of who you are as a person. And so, I think it’s great. I like Joel Green’s work, you know, “The Immunity Code. And he’s blasting everybody, you know, in regards of what we thought about really nutrition. And so again, it’s all about once again, healing the gut. And as I was telling you earlier, that we have this neutral evaluation that can really identify what we’re deficient in.
Nathan Crane
Is it a blood test you give?
Liliana Partida
It’s a blood test. It’s a blood test, we do here. It’s very comprehensive but it tells us everything you’re deficient in. Vitamins, minerals, amino acid, your gut, your toxins, heavy metals. So, even with that, I can see right away someone’s got a leaky gut issue. Well, you’re not gonna get healed if we’ve got permeability going on there. And so, really my focus is on the gut. Okay, let’s really work on the gut. And this is why I like…
Nathan Crane
What are your top things you do for the gut?
Liliana Partida
So, for the gut, first of all, we look to see and we have bio communication feedback on this as well is we say, what is compromising the gut? Number one. Do we have candida? Do we have parasites? So, we wanna get rid of the bugs as best as we can. And then we wanna, you know, bring in an army, bring in the enzymes as far as to break down foods. So, it depends on a person and what their issues are. Maybe they’ve got SIBO, maybe they’ve got, you know, H.pylori. These things need to be remedied in order to go forward. Otherwise you’re just band-aiding things.
Nathan Crane
They’re causing chronic inflammation, taking away energy from the immune system to heal the cancer.
Liliana Partida
And that’s where your immune system is. And your immune system really is in the gut.
Nathan Crane
70% at least is in the gut.
Liliana Partida
At least, right. And so, again, that’s, my focus is let’s work on healing the gut, let’s get the bad guys out there. Let’s, you know, start to heal, you know, unfortunately, the cancer patients we can’t give them glutamine, which is one of, you know an amino acid that’s very, very healing for the gut. So, you’ve got to go around that, you know, with other other components, aloe Vera, and you know, berberine, a lot of things…
Nathan Crane
What about plant sources that have glutamine in it?
Liliana Partida
You can have that. So, you can have…
Nathan Crane
You just don’t give them the supplement.
Liliana Partida
– Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, again, we just wouldn’t give them, you know, a pill or an IV or anything of that nature, like glutamine is one of those.
Nathan Crane
– Because cancer can adapt to that pathway and cramming.
Liliana Partida
Yeah, it can utilize it. So, but in food it’s fine, you know, ’cause you’re gonna have all kinds of amino acids in all foods, whether they’re vegetarian, plant-based or not. And those really aren’t the problem, it’s at that they’ll actually be doing a therapeutic dosage that becomes a problem.
Nathan Crane
It’s the high dose exactly.
Liliana Partida
Exactly. So, you know, the whole marshmallow root and all that kind of stuff is really important for healing the gut. So, we’ve got lot of things
Nathan Crane
The marshmallow root, what are some other ones that you love?
Liliana Partida
So, I love the marshmallow root, I love the glutamine of course, but we can’t use that.
Nathan Crane
You said Aloe vera.
Liliana Partida
Aloe vera, I like that a lot. I love to try to reestablish the butyric acid in the gut as well.
Nathan Crane
How do you do that?
Liliana Partida
Well, you know, it’s with the way you cause some of the components of the things that you eat can actually re-establish because this has butyric acid, allows you to make the B-vitamins and without B-vitamins we’re not gonna heal very well.
Nathan Crane
Right.
Liliana Partida
Right? And this is what I love about The Healing Code. He’s got a really great protocol in all of these aspects, whether it’s, you know to increase the butyric acid or whether it’s to decrease IO6 or any of the inflammatory cascades. It’s great. And I’m like, “Wow, this is really, it’s new, right. I mean, he’s even talking about COVID. I go, “When did he bring this book out?” Because I was like, COVID was a year ago, within this year. So again, I love berberine too. I think that that’s really important because it has three different pathways. You know, you’re dealing with, it helps for blood sugar issues. It helps for cholesterol issues and lower bowel bacteria issues. So, we have a lot of different formulas that we like to use. But that’s the main thing is let’s work on healing your gut, let’s get your mindset in I’m not giving up anything, what I’m doing is I’m adding all these wonderful foods that I feel absolutely fantastic on. And if there was any weight to lose I’m losing that weight too. I have more energy, more mental clarity, I’m sleeping better, I’m not bloated, I’m not gassy, I’m not mucusy. So I say, “How can you lose?” You know? And I think get your family if they’re willing to engage with you.
And they’re like, that’s the byproduct, “Oh, my cousin lost you know, 15 pounds or gosh, you know my husband who has dementia, he’s actually getting up and wanting to talk. And so again, it’s beautiful. And so again, everybody’s a personal experiment. And so, like I said, like you, you know, you’re very educated. So, you don’t wanna eat animal products, okay. So you wanna say, “Okay, well, I won’t even go there.” So, then I’ve got to say, “Okay, well, how do we help you with the highest nutrition so that we can keep a balance?” And of course, they’re gonna have to have a lot more things that are carbohydrate, glucose oriented. But like what you said, you have the ones that are high fiber oriented, that have good antioxidants. The fruits, the berries are fantastic. The Apple peels, apples, things of that nature.
Nathan Crane
And then cruciferous vegetables. We’re going into the feeling side of vegetables, all the dark leafy greens.
Liliana Partida
Yeah, you know, all those, you know sulfur type foods that really support the body in detoxification. And so, then once the patient really understands that wow, they’ve got such a variety to choose from, I’m not really giving up anything, I have a swap out. I have a cookbook coming out here pretty soon. I’m in the last phase of editing. So, it has half vegetarian and half kind of, you know, animal protein. But you know, it, it really covers so much of everything. So, it’s great. It’s important. ‘Cause that’s everybody. ‘Cause I talk, I have such a passion for food. I love cooking.
Nathan Crane
Right, I cat tell.
Liliana Partida
And you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m so hungry.” You’re making me so hungry. And like, “Don’t you have a cookbook?” And I’m like, “It’s on its way. So, that’s gonna be, you know, really fantastic, yeah.
Nathan Crane
You have a name for it yet?
Liliana Partida
Well, it’s just called Liliana’s Keto Kitchen.
Nathan Crane
Cool, you’ve got a name for it, there you go.
Liliana Partida
And then I’m also gonna be rolling out, which we’ll be rolling out here in the Center for New Medicine. It’s a six pillars to kind of key to stocking. So again, starting off with that but then switching it over to a maintenance. I don’t think I missed anything from coffee enemas, to gallbladder liver flushes, to the emotional.
Nathan Crane
Green juices.
Liliana Partida
Some green juices as well.
Nathan Crane
What’s your favorite green juice recipe.
Liliana Partida
So, my favorite green juice is going to be celery and cucumber as the base because they’re very low in sugar, very high water. I love spinach because it’s not that bitter. And we can get a lot of, you know, good iron and sulfur in there. And then I like to do a little bit of ginger lemon, turmeric and I say, put things like it was a salad, throw a whole thing of, you know, romaine lettuce in there and some fennel in there. So, I try to get patients not to go too high on the bitters because then they want the sweet.
Nathan Crane
And then they won’t drink it.
Liliana Partida
They want the Apple and the carrots. And I said, you know, use the carrot, use one carrot you know. Carrot or beet are my favorite. I said, but don’t use carrot, beet, and apple because then it might be too much glucose.
Nathan Crane
And that’s just pure sugar.
Liliana Partida
Right, exactly. So, there’s a place for everything in regards of how we look at it. And like I said, you know, we got to switch it up because what might really work well for somebody a couple of months later might not work for them.
Nathan Crane
So you gotta keep an eye on it as well and see how your body’s responding
Liliana Partida
And I tell my patient, you need to give me information so that I know what’s happening. What does your bowel movement look like? You know, do you get distension and bloating after you eat a meal? How do you feel? How’s your energy, how’s your sleeping? So, I really connect with my patients in regards to you matter and what you feel matters to me so that I can shift and create this uniquely to you.
Nathan Crane
Yeah.
Liliana Partida
Yeah.
Nathan Crane
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for this great wealth of knowledge. I mean, I know we could talk for hours but I think hopefully some people got some great tips and tools and takeaways here. Obviously, you know if you wanna get more extensive information on your own, maybe nutrient profile, what you’re missing, even food allergies are an important testing to get right. And then really have, you know, expert support from somebody who knows what they’re doing. Like the team here to help you identify, you know, the foods that are gonna help you be as successful as possible on your healing journey. So thank you again. I really appreciate it.
Liliana Partida
You’re welcome.
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