Recover from Cancer Against All Odds

Introduction and life-changing book 0:00

Welcome back to the Beyond the Breast Cancer Summit. I am like I literally have goose bumps right now because one of my heroes is with me today. And I want to talk about how she came onto my radar, because when I was a surgeon at the top of my game and literally, like immersed in what I thought was breast cancer healing, and I got sick and had my own eye opening experience and was introduced to functional medicine and learned about functional medicine in the context of kind of creating health, but not understanding that it could really have a role in cancer care.

And then someone told me to read a book called The Metabolic Approach to Cancer, and it was like every word was in. There was my instruction for the rest of my life, and I did not understand on any level that I could continue to fulfill my life's purpose, which was to end suffering from breast cancer, but actually create health. Until I read this book. So this book literally changed my life and it's author who I am so delighted to have here today. Dr. Nasha Winters You changed my life and as a result, God willing, I will change breast cancer for millions and millions of women.

So I am so grateful to you and to your brilliant mind. And I know that the same way that God put me on an unexpected journey, God also put you on an unexpected journey. So I know that you're a naturopath by training, but you you got an education outside of your education. Yeah, but it beautifully. Yeah. And I would be so honored if you would share that, that part of your journey with us because I think a lot of people

Dr. Winters' early illness and diagnosis 2:54

think it's easy for us to say, do this, do that, and they don't understand that we we walked the walk and that we know that true healing is is, you know, you can potentially heal. It is possible. But we know that because we did it. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Well, first of all, I before you started recording, I was amazed at the fact that we've never met in person, because as I was telling you, I've been stalking you for some time and I didn't even know this part of your I mean, I knew your journey, but I didn't know that there was any role that I might have added to the process, to my incredibly humbled and incredibly touched and incredibly honored.

And when you said that the paying it forward through what you read for me is now going out to millions that just rippled through me with such truth and such potency that I have no doubt of the of the being that you are. And what I've witnessed you to be doing, that you've already made that difference. The ripple is already begun. And so I'm super excited to be here with you. And as you noted so beautifully, a little bit of an education prior to the education you got your education then went back to school.

I got my education and went to school. So we're just not at the same at the same angle all these years later. But while I had to be reeducated, I'm being honest, right? Because my my first education was pretty lacking. And it's I think that, you know, most people in traditional medicine would would consider that blasphemy and really despicable. But the truth is that and I still see it every single day, like traditional medical doctors are so lacking in understanding about disease, disease development, and for sure, they don't know how to kill anyone.

And that makes me sad. And I really hope that that's the ripple that I leave on this world, is that we can truly create, you know, take medicine, kind of like reclaim it for what it was supposed to be, where it really did. But what really drew people into the healing arts to begin with, and yet a system outside of medicine has dictated the way we approach health or disease. And so that's really sad to me and I'm really excited about conferences like this, summits like this, people like you who can use your background to help people understand that the MD.

behind your name is just just initials. What you do with it is what's really powerful. And so you are really taking that to another level. And I'm really grateful for that. And, you know, you said like, where did this start for you in your journey? I was I was I did not know health. I didn't even know that I didn't know health. You know, I know I've heard you do podcasts about this as well, but you don't really know how sick you are until you're well. You know, it was like that's a whole process by itself.

And yeah, my mom will tell the story that the doctors told her when I was an infant, that me pooping once a month was normal because it was my normal, it was my pattern. So right away we had problems. They started putting me on like gas sacks and all those types of pills as a baby because I couldn't digest anything. They tried every formula you can imagine and finally settled on good ole soy formula back in the seventies. And that's probably why I started bleeding at nine years old. That's probably why I was diagnosed with endometriosis by the time I was 11.

That's probably why I had to have cervical dysplasia scraped by the time I was 14. And again at 16 as it moved into an early stage. Cervical cancer. That's probably why I was diagnosed with Polycystic ovarian syndrome by the time I was 14. Early stages of rheumatoid arthritis in my late teens, which they thought was initially an injury from a volleyball game. But it turned out to be that it was much more than that. And so this layer cake effect, it was just the way it was. No one considered that even a disease.

I wouldn't have even known those as a disease in a patient intake form. So when I finally landed in the ER after visiting the ER multiple times over many months and being sent home with another script or just kind of patted on the head like you're just a histrionic teenager. By the time I landed there, my roommate had taken in because I had lost consciousness. And when I got to hot to the ER a pulse rate like almost nine you're like in the two hundreds cause my body was trying so hard but my oxygen levels were in the seventies.

I had a belly the size of a nine month pregnant woman. They thought I was pregnant when I came in, learned that that was society's that was completely hectic. I had a bowel blockage, my organs had shut down. And when they finally did the proper testing they should have done months ago, unfortunately, they found that I was in end stage ovarian cancer at 19. And so fairness to them back in 1991, no one was seeing a 19 year old with stage four end stage ovarian cancer. Sadly, fast forward 32 years, we see this often and that's not that should say something right there.

But ultimately I wasn't even offered standard of care because they knew that one single treatment would kill me outright because my organs had failed my kidney

Reframing cancer as a terrain problem 8:12

in my liver warn in failure. I also couldn't have all the fluid pulled right away because it would have killed me from the electrolyte imbalance, the fluid imbalance because I was so sick. And electrolytes so wonky. And that fluid that you're talking about as a side is built up in your abdomen. Yeah. It's like fluid where it doesn't belong. Yeah. Like, just build the space. It also fill some of my lungs and it filled the lining around my heart. So it was a dangerous time, to put it mildly. Yeah.

So they sipped a little bit of out, you know, sent me home, sent a little bit out, put me in more pain that, sent a little bit out. And over a course of about two months, I think I had about eight taps during that time. And so they still didn't expect me to survive. They still didn't think I was strong enough to even take on chemotherapy. I didn't even, frankly, have a will to live. In fact, I saw cancer as a great murder. team, Opportunity to check out. And so what it did for me, though, however, is sort of when they said there is no way it fired up my little tenacious little girl inside of me, that said, you know, don't tell me what to do.

So instead of thinking I was going to cure it, I at least wanted to understand it. I wanted to be able to tell them, like, see, you screwed up. You should have caught this months ago. You should have figured this out. And instead I've been on that journey for now. It'll be 32 years in October 2023 of the official diagnosis and I am still learning and I'm still showing them, you know, let me show you how this is. So it's been a really wild ride. Nothing. I mean, I can look back now, you and I especially where we are in our careers now, and especially where we are with medicine and sciences, especially in the cancer world, the metabolic cancer world, the integrative cancer world.

More has happened in the last five years than happened in the previous 27 years collective. And so hindsight now is like, Oh, it was amazing and a miracle that I had to fast because I had a bowel blockage. And that's likely one of the first things that saved my life. So we can kind of retrospectively look at that, right? Then we look at the things I started learning because I switched my degree at that time from biology and chemistry as pre-med to psychology and biology as pre-med and created kind of a self constructed psycho neuro immunology.

Because I did have the wherewithal to understand the trauma that I come from, had some role in this. This is at a time in 1991 where the concept of psycho neuro immunology was new to the new to the field. Right. And and there was really still kind of pooh poohed it, despite Candace Pert and, you know, Bruce Lipton and Robert Ada's work and all. These, like it's all in your head. Right? Exactly. And so that on the head intrigued me, though. I still didn't give up. I still wanted to understand that.

And so in that part of my healing was I did a family fast for two years. Not only was I fasting from food for a few months because I couldn't eat, but I also somehow knew that to survive I needed to fast from my family of origin. It was a pretty toxic environment and I needed to remove myself from the soil in which I got sick. And so that kind of began my journey and to saying, Well, God, I'm still here. Now what? You know, like everything is like still here. Now what? Still here now what? So yeah, I feel like I still say that sometimes.

I still feel like I wake up and I'm still here now what? Yeah. And so that. That's what brings me in front of you and all of your amazing listeners today. So of course, that is an awesome story. And your now what took you through many metamorphic seas, right? And ultimately you landed at at what you're doing now. So I actually didn't realize at the time when I read your book, which is the year that I got sick, which is 2017, which is, you know, by the grace of God, the year that your book was released.

And while I, I certainly don't believe in any accidents and I know very well the reason that I got sick was because I was not on the path that God meant for me and that as a surgeon, I was able to intervene. But on such a minuscule level, whereas as a functional medicine physician, I can affect millions just like you affected millions. So in 2017, when I read your book, I had no idea who wrote the foreword. Oh yeah. So fast forward now and Doctor Kelly Turner of Radical Remission and Radical Hope wrote your forward and she talks about your own radical remission, your recovery against all odds and she has a quote in there from you that says It's all about the underlying conditions.

And she remarks about how you talk about the body as a terrain, as if it resembles a garden. And it's such a beautiful metaphor. And I really like to dig down into that. And for you to talk to people about the metabolic approach to cancer, about what you mean by a terrain, and how you look at those underlying conditions to help people to restore their health, just like you did, because it is possible. Right. And it's not over till it's over, but it's certainly not going to get better if you don't acknowledge those underlying conditions and you don't improve that terrain.

Absolutely. So can you take us through that? Yeah. Yeah. So first, I love that Dr. Kelly, you know, I've had this beautiful laboratory. I mean, her her book was very I loved radical remission. It was so transformational, even though I was well into my journey, it still landed so beautifully and it became a kind of a recommended, even required reading for so many of the patients I was caring for during that time and continue today. So that was really a huge honor for her to write on that and that she also picked up from multiple conversations we had.

I even got to be part of a co facilitation of a of an amazing retreat. She did it in upstate New York, and it got to be in her presence to see that she so compassionately leans into this and is such a beacon of hope for so many. So it meant the world for her to write about this. But the fact that she picked up on the way I see it and really articulated it beautifully about it being a garden is just part of, I think, how I have processed this in my own life for the last three decades, three plus decades, is I did not get seduced.

And this is my process, my journey. So I want to acknowledge that, that everyone has their own ways right now that for me, I never could understand the analogy of this being a war that needed to be waged, that I had to somehow kid gets asked, that I had to like, you know, the F cancer mantras and all those things. I never got that. I never got bitten by that bug. I never understood that because I somehow, even at the young age of 19, even though is pre-med and learning a lot of things in my bio biology and chemistry and biology, I still knew it was us, it was still our cells, it was still something within us that lost its way.

And so can you can you elaborate on that a little bit? Because I do think that that is a major issue and a major impediment to a lot of people is that they think they're waging a war and they don't realize that they're fighting themselves and probably making a bad situation worse with that approach. Yeah. And I don't know if it was the filter that I started going down when I moved my major into the psycho neuro immunology world. When I started to understand that our cells are very we're receptive and responsive to, of course, what we're putting in on and around them, but also our thoughts.

And that's when the molecules of emotion book, candies book was out and I was being blown away by that and the biology of belief work and D top Deepak trapeze work of quantum healing and my mind was getting all these new neural pathways of understanding that this is just me and I need to do something about it. And if I wage war on it, I only harm myself further. And so I had already come from an environment where no pain, no gain, where everything was a war. It was all about survival, it was all about trauma.

And I knew the only way I could change that for myself was to get out of that mindset, to remove myself physically from a war zone and put myself emotionally into a safe zone. And that was a huge understanding for me and what it helped other patients see along the way. But it's super clear that when we're under stress and I know that your previous lecture with Katrina photo was all about that and the cancer process. When we're in sympathetic nervous system mode, which is the fight or flight mode, folks very aptly named, we can't heal, we can't our physiologic processes cannot be as efficient and effective and can not be carried out in that state, which means that you might be throwing all the best therapies, the best chemo, the best surgery, the best supplements, the best IB therapies, the best diet, the best lifestyle modifiers.

But if you are still in a perpetual place of thinking, this is a battle that needs to be won, but it's a fight for your life or something along those lines. You're in fight or flight, which means you can't even receive the healing being offered to you. Yeah, that's really integral and I see that a lot. People don't even know where, they're not even aware of how much that's playing into their ability to utilize any of the therapies, whether they choose all standard of care, all alternative or some beautiful blend of the two.

It's an impossibility to get you where you need to go in that fight or flight stage. Yeah. And yeah, I would I would really agree with that and even go so far as to say

The ten terrain factors 18:30

like it's pretty impossible to heal if you're in that sympathetic mode. You're just not in a chemical state that allows for it. Right? Because the processes that are being turned on when you're in that sympathetic mode, right. You're we are modern beings living on a very old gene code. We really only understand a couple of scenarios. Right. Like we we understand needing to cross a desert, right? We understand being nomadic. And that's when our sympathetic modes are turned on because we have to cross a desert or an ocean or something like that.

We understand having to fight off or run away from a saber tooth tiger, but what we were never meant to do is run away from that tiger for three weeks or three months or three years. Like, we're just not built for that. And so when we're in that sympathetic state, know our our blood is all we're increasing our blood glucose, which is one of the metabolic things that you that you discuss at length. And we're we're supplying the blood to the muscles so that we can run away. It's a very physical state.

Exactly. Exactly. But what what needs to happen in order for us to get into that physical state is that we have to cut off other things. And so what's cut off our immune system is cut off, right? Because if you're running away from a tiger or you don't need to fight off a cold. Right, right, right. Right. And you know, your immune system says I'll deal with that if you get a tiger, like I'm going back to sleep, wake me up if we live. Yeah, right. And that's what's going on. And so unfortunately now we don't have saber tooth tigers, but we have cell phones, have difficult relationships and we have things that last way longer than the encounter with the Tiger.

Yeah, we meet so many more dangerous in our psyche experiences today that are physiologies responding to in the exact same way as they did to that saber tooth tiger that is just frankly relentless and it's compatible to life, much less vitality. So I really appreciate you underscoring that because it really is. It's such that it's foundational along with food or nourishment. It's very foundational to how someone can thrive or die and this process. And so when I think terrain, I have to start by explaining what isn't terrain.

And that's where our entire medical system since 1914, when we decided that cancer was a somatic mutation theory of genetic disease, which we've disproved over and over by simply exchanging the nuclei of a cancer cell in the nuclei of a healthy cell and replacing them with each other. And if this were genetic, you would turn that that cancer cell into a healthy cell with the genetic data, and you turn the healthy cell into a cancer cell with that genetic data. And we've not have, you know, anything about it.

So it's like, what's the swimming pool? Those cells are hanging out in that sort of like what is the terrain of that cell at that level? Some call it the extracellular matrix, some call it the tumor microenvironment. I call it the terrain, which is adopted from some old discussions or seed soil theories from the 15 and 1600s into Beauchamp theories, you know, into the 1800s and beyond, where people start understanding our bodies as sort of a garden and the practices of Ihr beta and Chinese medicine.

They always have compared us sort of to our environment, the seasons, the temperatures, the light, the dark phases. We've always had resonance and coherence with the environment around us. And I so appreciate that you talked about how living in modern times today does not match the genetics of what we all came from to be here. There's this mismatch, this incoherence that also creates a level of of difficulty in achieving really optimal health. And so keeping that in mind, that that's been our medical system of somehow that this is a genetic problem and therefore we're going to find the gene and we're going to attack that particular gene and turn it off or on, depending what's needed.

That's been a really interesting experiment, but it hasn't panned out. And so a couple of years after that is when I'm going to will Otto Warburg start to realize that before the gene gets activated or deactivated, there's something else going on. It's happening at that mitochondrial metabolic level. And so that is, you know, simply put, I like to I always explain to patients that the cell, the respiratory biochemical process that's happening within that mitochondria, the little organelle within the cell, I tell folks, basically that cell stops breathing.

Okay. You can't survive if you're not breathing. Right. Simply put. And so that starts to shift the body into a different state. And it's kind of revs up all of those things, that hyper activity of fight or flight that I need to I'm starving. So I'm going to take all the resources for myself in the gate. You know, I'm going to stop listening to other signals. I've kind of lost my mind. One of my colleagues in a case or a really well-known fab new fellow American board of naturopathic oncologist, she calls cancer cells sociopaths because they really have no regard for their host and themselves because eventually they die, too. Right.

So it's an interesting process. They're like the kind of just lose all rational thinking. So that's where Dr. Warburg and others think, God sense start to realize. If we go at that fundamental metabolic mitochondrial level and we start to help that cell return to respiration, return to breath, return to life, then we can slow the process and even reverse the process, or better yet, prevent the process from the beginning. And so that's where our medical system is still geared towards looking at and understanding and addressing the tumor, which will only get you so far and only if you are simultaneity asleep addressing the terrain in which that tumor sprouted, which that tumor arose.

And so the things that really impact you've already touched on some of the biggies of what impacts the terrain health. And in my book I talk about sort of the ten major drivers. Okay, so epigenetics, this means above the gene. This means this could have been coming from 12 generations up from you that have propensities or potential of certain expressions, but ultimately, it's still up to you to express or suppress that information based on your dietary and lifestyle choices. Right. So epigenetics is actually we're far more powerful than were led to believe and so we can do something about that.

So that's still though, like you might have to work a little bit harder of every single person in your family of origin had this condition right? So what you're working with, so you can also know what tools to just to change it to change those out. Yeah. So to me it's like helpful. It's like it's sort of like astrology reading, you know, for my cells it's like, okay, now I understand where I came from, so now I know what to do about it. Now I'm empowered and I have a personal will to do something about this.

So that's pretty empowering to me. And then the second drop is the metabolic. So that's that. What are we nourishing ourselves with? Okay. So we all, you know, have evolved again from a very different diet than what we eat today. And ultimately, we were all hunter gatherers until just a couple thousand, 10,000 years ago, and then we became neo agriculturists, which we still do work really hard to grow, grow and raise our food. And then we went into the mid 1800s when we moved into the industrial food revolution and then things really went weird right then.

That's when things we started really influencing man made impact on the way we nourish ourselves today and today we're really overfed and really undernourished more than ever before. And so that is directly dumping into the mitochondrial respiration chain and that's really clogging up the works faster than ever. But so is the third one, which are the drops in the bucket of toxicity. I know you talk about this a lot. It's very, very difficult to live healthy on an unhealthy planet. Now, it's no longer if you have toxicity, it's how bad is it and how does it interface with your personal terrain, your personal blueprint?

And then we talk about the microbiome, which just a couple of years ago people were still pretending, didn't really exist or mean anything. We now even understand that certain kind of chemotherapies or checkpoint inhibitors, the immune therapies won't even work well if somebody's microbiome is not intact, not functioning. And we spent the last hundred 50 years mono cropping our planet. We've also mono cropped our GI tract and that has made us less resilient and responsive. Right. That's a biggie.

And then it moves into the immune system, which if you live under a rock, the last couple of years, we've all really gotten to be shown a bright light on how ineffective our immune systems are. Either overzealous or under zealous or just confused all around. And yeah, cancer really is a there's multiple signaling pathways, but the immune system is one of the things that keeps it in check when it's working well. So that's a big one. Inflammation. You mentioned that it's like we are the inflammation nation living in modern times.

So many things inflame the heck out of us, including food, including toxicants, including emotions, including all the things, right? And then we get into oxygenation and blood flow. So like where you know, how are you circulating? You know, that's that's another big one. If we're if we're really deep conditioned were causing problems and if we're over conditioned, we're causing problems. So our our extreme athletes are causing just as much damage as our couch potatoes. Yeah, I think that's such an important point.

I can't tell you how many people come to me and say, like, I don't understand how I could have had how I got breast cancer. I am so healthy. I'm a marathon runner. And I'm like, you're like me. You're like, well, you nailed it earlier. You said, like, when you're in that place, your body still thinks you're running from a sabertooth tiger about five k. So if you're alive, all of the the cortisol, the adrenaline, the estrogen, like, it just picks up everything. Cortisol, insulin all go up. Estrogen, not the way you want them to because they're trying to grow more muscle mass.

It's like everything gets activated. So you can run longer, faster from that sabertooth tiger and then you crash. It suppresses the immune system. It white, it creates oxidative stress and inflammation. I mean, it is the worst possible scenario. So I always cringe. And I mean this because I'm sure you bet. Listeners here when they're like, I'm now I just ran my marathon after ringing the bell, finishing my radiation, and I'm thinking, Oh, I don't ever wish this on anyone, but I don't I know I'm going to be seeing you again soon.

Like, it's just the way. It's just a natural progression. Yeah, that does. Yeah, yeah. And we need to be able to literally or like. Yeah, you're spending your life running from a saber to tiger and you're always going to do that at the expense of something else. Always your immune system. But I mean, even even running for more than an hour has profound effects on the microbiome. We know that. Yes, that's a those are some very compelling studies to see to see that. And it's just incredibly put yourself on a glucose, you know, a continuous glucose monitor, get yourself on an RV and see what overtraining does to your body just as much as under training, you look like the same person.

It's like cut from the same cloth of how disregulated the whole process is and sometimes the hardest like it seems like people, I think think it's going to be harder to get somebody up off the couch. It's actually harder to get them back onto the couch. Yeah. You have a literal like a big a good on. Yeah. And I'm like what a how celebratory is it to go out and run the marathon. Like there's so much camaraderie and kind of tribal culture and accomplishment and accolades around it. And what if you told them it's like you just went and smoked 12 packs of cigarets and drank a fifth of vodka?

They think you were crazy, but you know, Emissary doesn't know the difference. I know. And it defies logic, which is why people take so much exception to it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's really big. And so that goes into that level of that. And then we talk about like hormone modulation. I mean, jeez,

Mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic disease 31:00

if you're already airborne, you've got some hiccups in your epigenetics of your hormones you're already having problems with, you're dealing with your own endogenous hormones, but then let's take us and dip us like a chocolate dipped banana into the swimming pool of exhaustion. This is, you know, estrogen toxicity. Literally is happening. It's happening every day, all day. And and the amount of greenwashing that's happening that that people who want to do the right thing are so unknowingly doing the wrong thing over and over and over again.

Right. Pain. And you're so right about that. And it's tough because we're looking at I mean, like I said, I went back in the late seventies, early eighties, when I was, you know, put on birth control pills at 11 years old. That was completely abnormal. But today, it's not abnormal to see nine year old. All right. Time one of the time I it's crazy. I'm one of our oncologists who joined my training program. He did. So he was trying to retire until we ended up sharing a few patients with stage four ovarian cancer all under the age of ten.

That's when he's like, I, I can't stop yet. This is ridiculous. This is awful. And that's when it's like, we aren't asking the right questions. We aren't exploring the right things. We're not, you know, evaluating for these things. It's like we have. Yeah, and you nailed it with a circadian rhythm and stress response, that one falls into one big drop in the bucket, which is we could do entire episode on that. And then the final one is the mental emotional piece. And those ten drops will make or break the health and wealth of your soil, the health and wealth of your mitochondria, and then make you resilient to disease, process and prevention of disease process that also give you the fortification you need to be, you know, to help bring the harmony, bring the balance to homeostasis back into your system and reconnect those communications that were lost and help those cells realize you're part of a healthy tribe.

You're not part of an outlier tribe anymore. Bring them back into balance. And then that's also what's required to help keep you there. After the journey of ringing the bell or whatever is over, that's just the beginning. I tell people when you ring that bell at the end of chemo and radiation, that is not the end of your journey. That's the beginning of your journey. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's where I think that, you know, I come across as maybe provocative or kind of scary sometimes to people. But we, you know, I remember 20, 25 years ago, you remember this at some point they used to say all moderation, moderation, including moderation.

We don't have that anymore. It doesn't exist. Well. Don't even like that because you know, when people say moderation is key, I said, really? Are you going to be a moderate heroin user? I mean, like, where do you draw the line? Where where does the moderation not apply? Because people don't realize. But we have so many like modern day heroines, we hide in there and. You're nailed it. It's like the dopamine impacts. The dopamine impact of your social media likes the dopamine impact of each time you take a taste of that sweetness of something that you ingest, the dopamine impact of your exercise routine that gives you that hit the dopamine impact of, you know, you know, that shopping, like all of those things, it's impacting the same.

It is the heroin mindset. We are impacting that over and over and yet we're also in a crisis of times where our in the United States or longevity is dipping every year, where the rest of the world is improving or stabilized. We are the fourth or fifth year in a row now. Longevity going down thanks to suicide, an opiate overdose. So we're like we're just passing one around. It's like when when the world gets overwhelming, your dopamine and serotonin are going to be off kilter. You're not going to have the rational thought to be self preserving for your life.

And that also means in the risky behaviors you take in all kinds of things, be it jumping out of airplanes or, you know, going on a bender in Vegas or whatever it is. Like if people think that it's like just putting a gun against your head. But it's so much of these places where we're trying to up the dopamine stakes every single time that it's I mean, like porn addiction is a really good example. People can't even have connection anymore because the dopamine is so up like that. So changed because of just watching that for a moment that it changes the way your brain can even connect with another.

And it's like, oh my goodness, we've come far from what we were wired to be on this planet. It's so it's so sad. So I want to I want to go back to two things that you said, because I think they're really important for people to understand. First of all, you talked about us being overfed and undernourished and I think so many people don't understand what that means, that we have an obesity epidemic and people don't understand that connection because we are overeating, because our diet is so devoid of nutrients and it's just your body craving out for more and more and more.

And we don't we don't recognize that we have an epidemic of undernourishment, but that's really happening, isn't it? It is. And so, my gosh, there's so many reasons as to why. I mean, the regenerative agriculture community could just riff on just what's happened to our soil. You have to eat like three times the amount of vegetables today just to get the same nourishment you got in those same vegetables 50 years ago, know. So like that's one deficit. Our soil has lost all of its minerals. I mean, our nervous system is dependent on magnesium, and yet 80% of the population is magnesium deficient.

And that's thanks to the loss of our topsoil and these other pieces. We also have really again, we talked about the mono cropping and we've monoculture to the point where, yes, we've lived on some of these grains over the time. But we've changed the nature of the grains. Right. And we've changed the nature of the legumes, wheat. And you talk about what that means, because I'm not sure everyone understands what mono cropping is. Mono cropping, as we went before, like before the 1850s, we had thousands of varietals of vegetables and grains and legumes and fruits that were planted all over this planet.

And then over time, we started to lesson, lesson and lesson that number as we started to simplify and try to get more, you know, get more, get more out of the crop and things like that. We started to push in that direction, but after World War Two is when it really changed. That's when we realized that food was a commodity, not a nourishment. And so it changed from being something you all had a garden, you know, a liberty garden and everything. For all those years, everyone raised their own food too suddenly.

Now you depend on somebody to feed you the big, the big, big farmers out there. What they did is also because of the Cold War and some things coming out of World War Two, we started to focus our attention because we were no longer getting our our grain, our wheat, specifically from Russia. We had to grow something fast. Then we had to replace it quickly. So we paid we subsidize farmers to stop growing all those other varietals in order to grow this fast turnover higher gluten content, wheat that had never existed here.

We started to subsidize farmers to grow more corn, soybeans and oats. So that we could start to feed ourselves with that and not depend on other countries to feed us. And we paid them to stop growing the things they've been growing for generations. And in doing so, part of how our our planet thrives is rotation of crops and resting of crops. And so the over planting, the over tilling, the destruction of the microbiome of the planet and those little micro rise out of the planet, which is like the Internet of the planet, caused all types of other problems to go awry.

Because of that, the soil became sick and became more prone to disease. Does this sound familiar to me? And so then we're like, Oh, the cure for that is we'll take all the leftover chemicals from World War Two and we'll turn them into fertilizer to help grow those plants that are now sickly faster. And we'll start to make chemicals like pesticides, organophosphates, things like chemotherapy that turned into what we are of these like war, chemical warfare, that we then turn into chemotherapy and products to put on our agriculture.

That's, that's a good recycling program. Yeah. Right. And then. Then that didn't pan out after a few decades that the land and the critters got wise to that and then they had to start to bring in heavier hitting artillery. So that's when you start to get the glyphosate that started coming out in the sixties, seventies, and became so ubiquitous in our soil in the eighties. And then the GMO crops well and then the GMO ready crops. It's like everything. It's like we come up with another chemical to clean up the mess we made with the previous chemical.

Yeah, it sounds familiar. Yeah. This is our agriculture system and our, quote unquote health care system are in the same bed together that there is no impetus to change that out. Right. And so there's all these undercurrents. So in the agricultural world, they're organic, regenerative farmers and in our world are like functional naturopathic doctors like we're doing. We're coming in quietly, literally grassroots movements and literally for that, trying to restore the health of the soil outside of our body, to restore the health of the soil within our body.

And therein lies the problem is all those chemicals jam up our communication systems within ourselves, within our terrain, within our hormone signaling pathways, and they that make us hungrier because we're malnourished. They also make us hungrier because they're pushing on the dopamine. They also jam up signaling pathways because now we're like, I'm up late because I'm working late in front of a computer screen, so I'm eating pizza at 3 a.m. because I can and you know, all the things we're away from our normal fasting and feasted times of the year were further away seasons and rhythms.

Most people don't even know when the sun rises or sets or when a full moon or a new moon is like that. That's the crazy part Americans spend less than 15 minutes outdoors on. And what we've become so detached from nature. Exactly, which is we're detached from our own nature, which also means that when we do finally, because it's inevitable, when we do finally get sick, the illness is actually the messenger. It's actually the opportunity to help restore you back to what you were meant to be. Wow.

Healing, relapse prevention, and closing reflections 42:00

And that's the piece here. There's this opportunity in that diagnosis, but not everybody will heed that call. Yeah, I love that. It's the opportunity to restore you. I do want to go over I have a quote. When the mitochondria in a cell fail cancer follows. Hmm. I think so few people understand what mitochondria are, what they do. I know that you've sprinkled it throughout the talk today, but it's still like that thing that evades people. But, you know, that quote really says it all. So can you can you expand on that so that it's it's something that is tangible for people?

Absolutely. Now, we all remember learning about it, like sixth grade biology at the mighty mitochondria, the little ATP factories. That's literally all any of us were ever taught. And even today, through undergrad and grad school and medical school, that's still all that's being taught. Yet outside of that, into the laboratory environments, into the research environments, we understand the mitochondria are far more sophisticated than that. In fact, our how much do we invest in longevity medicine like especially like the functional medicine community, they are all about longevity.

The Biohacker committees are all about longevity. And the funny thing is, is I don't even know they recognized that at the crux of your longevity is the health and wealth of your mitochondria. Your mitochondria are, your are your fountain of youth, right? And so at that they are what signals the cells that are broken, destroyed, tired, defunct. They sell them to die. It's like your time. Next move on. Let's bring in something fresh. Right? Their job. Your. You don't have apoptosis. You don't take out the garbage if you don't have functioning mitochondria.

That's a pretty profound piece. The mitochondria are also understood to be these like these beautiful, like signaling, like they take in all information they're taking in light, they're taking in sound, they're taking in food, water, soil, air organisms. But they're also taking in toxins, pharmaceuticals. You know, they're taking in rage. They're taking in screen time, they're taking that all in. And they're like putting it through their own, you know, I platform, they're saying, okay, I put this information in and because all of us have our own particular blueprint of our own mitochondrial expression, some of us might be more efficient and effective at sorting out that material, you know, kind of separating the turbid from the clear.

You know, others may not have as much as many skills in that area. Right. Maybe they're how to put it all in. And it kind of weighs down to things like fibromyalgia. You know, those types of patterns are like garbage. That's such a classic example. I just knew how to take out that garbage. And then I people change it through so quickly that you would never even know, like my husband could huff diesel and be like, that was great, you know, like, we just didn't faze him. And it gives me a wicked headache.

So we all have a little bit of a different kind of threshold of how we deal with that. But they're, they're the taking in of the information. Then they translate that information, then they send the signals out to the body. They are basically the Wizard of Oz. They're telling everybody they're happening behind the curtain and they're making everything happen around you. And it's happening constantly without your awareness. And ironically, you can place your awareness on them and they will to heed that as well.

They will take that information and utilize it to help them process even more effectively and efficiently. So the another thing that you talked about, I want to get to my first page of notes is that what we talked about a little bit, why mitochondria fail? Because there are, you know, any number of things that can end up adversely affecting your mitochondria. And though cancer is one manifestation, there are often manifestations along the way. And what I talk about is that the traditional medical system really doesn't acknowledge you until you've failed.

Exactly right. Because then we're really in trouble. Because then we're really in trouble. So what are the kinds of things that people can say to themselves to know like, oh, I'm not. I, I'm I'm on the wrong path. I'm on the wrong road. Like, how do you know that your mitochondria are failing? Love this. Well, if you have the diagnosis of cancer, that's one. If you have got Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and basically any autoimmune condition, you definitely have some problems with your mitochondrial function.

So those labels of the chronic illnesses are typical of mitochondrial dysfunction. There are many mitochondrial diseases, but those are very rare and those are known at basically that a newborn, you know. Very early. Exactly. So all these things that people like associate with bad block, these are actually mitochondrial this is mitochondrial failing that by and large can be reversed. So you have to pay attention to those things that we talked about. So I know I know I have limited time with you.

So I do want to summarize that this what was for you is usually true for other people. This is a layer cake effect, right? It's not one thing. It's a number of these things layering on top of each other that end up as some major diagnoses. And this signs are there. So you can you can notice them if you are kind of awake and paying attention. And if your doctor is not acknowledging these things, it's time to look for another doctor because you shouldn't let it get to the point where you've failed.

So if if you've had a cancer diagnosis before, unless you really deal with these with this layer cake that you that you discussed there, what is stopping it from coming back again? Right. And we do have to restore ourselves to health and the attitude that, you know, when you were told that there's kind of nothing to do and you talk on the let me show you attitude. That is the attitude that all of us need to adopt. Right. We all need to be in that. Let me show you. Because health can happen no matter where you are.

Health can happen. You said that fasting probably saved your lives. I love that. And you know, we all need to take a page out of our child's book because they're sick. What did they do? They don't want to eat. And we try to force feed them and they're like, no, I don't want it. Right. Left gasping is such a huge part of healing. And I know you go into more of that in your book. The Role That Trauma Plays because it played a significant role for you as it does for so many women on this journey. And part of your fasting was a family fast and you know, maybe for someone else it's not a family member, but it is some kind of toxic relationship because these can have the same impact on you as the but as these things that are not invisible.

Right. That is an invisible toxin. That is just as toxic. Your attitude of I'm still here now what? And that is a lesson that we all need to adopt, right? Like we every single day, we have the opportunity to do more heal, more improve because we're still here. So every day you're still here is an opportunity to do more. We talked about your the seed and soil and the terrain, and we talked about when the mitochondria in the cell fails, cancer follows. And so this ultimately is about mitochondrial health.

We talked about your ten terrain factors, what not to do after you ring the bell. Right. Like don't don't get complacent. Yeah I'm a marathon runner because unlike over conditioning and under conditioning are equally as bad and will cause problems in the mitochondria, cause problems in the microbiome. And and ultimately cancer is a metabolic disease, which is why you wrote The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. It is required reading for anyone with chronic disease. As far as I'm concerned, that it doesn't have to specifically be about cancer because the things that you're talking about apply to anyone with chronic disease.

Thank you. Wow, I'm going to I'm going to hire you as spokesperson because you nailed it. What a beautiful synopsis and so grateful to you and all you do and so grateful to see you thriving. Your mitochondria are doing your happy dance right now with everything that you're doing and that you continue to inspire this as well as inspire hope and empowerment in those that follow you. So grateful to you and grateful to all of your listeners. I look forward to hearing other people's stories along this journey.

Yeah, I. Have to say, probably the best thing about doing a summit is to get to hear everyone's stories because they are so awe inspiring. Yours being among the best stuff for sure. I am so excited and honored that you came to spend time with me today. It was such a pleasure to meet you and I can't wait for our next meeting when I get to meet you in person and give you a big hug. Back at you sister. Thanks so much for everything. All the best to everyone. Be well. It's Dr. Jenn. Bye for now.