Redefining Immunity & Cancer Care: Beta Glucan, Resilience & the New Science of Longevity

Introduction and Summit Welcome 0:00

Hello, everyone. Thank you once again to, joining us for the Prostate Cancer Summit 2.0 today. What a pleasure. I'm with my co-host, Doctor Eric Zielinski, who you should know about. He's a public, health researcher, bestselling author, founder of Natural Living Family. And he currently serves as the lead investigator for BW Weeks Labs, where he conducts clinical trial evaluating. BW 85 is a beta glucan that we're going to talk about and its effects on immune function and biological age. Eric, you know, we've become good friends.

We've known each other for a while. We've become good friends with through the times and through the years, and it's such a pleasure to actually have you as a co-host on the Prostate Cancer Summit. Oh, thanks for having me, doc. It's, It's a blessing. It's a privilege. Love. When we get a chance to meet up at at events. And we're gonna have a great talk today. The research is coming out literally weekly on this, on this product, this topic, this idea around immune resilience and beta glucan and all this other stuff. And it's it's fun.

So for a researcher like me as Candyland, because our understanding of how all of this works together in the context of cancer is evolving rapidly. And it's it's exciting. So let's start with this. Let's take it to the most fundamental level. You talk a lot about the immune system as the number one predictor of longevity, even more than genetics. That's a big statement. Yeah. What are you explaining what you mean by immune resilience and particularly what it means, for a man that's struggling with prostate cancer?

Yes, yes. I, I'm going to I'm going to quote a couple studies here, and I actually want to make this when I read these research studies that have just came out. One came out just a couple of months ago, and the one that I'm going to actually quote, what immune resilience is, is, is just a couple of years old. Doc, I'm guessing when you went through your medical education, you were taught the traditional innate immunity, adaptive immunity, 101 type of concept. I'm guessing I could be wrong, but correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm really curious about this. Did they teach at all about immune modulation, for example, or immune training or trained immunity? Was that even a concept that you were taught? I would say it was, very basic overview. It was the one I remember was one year, one full year of, immunology. Yep. And, but it was it was a very basic overview. Certainly not distinguishing between, you know, immune modulation, immune resistance to, immunity, that, you know, everything of it was on the full spectrum.

Immune Resilience and Longevity 2:51

So it didn't go down to specifics, you know, like yourself, right? Most of us get a real education graduate, right? And we look more and we research more. So I can't wait to hear from you, to describe exactly what you're referring to as it relates to immune resilience. Yeah. And that's. That's disappointing for a lot of reasons, because trained immunity, for example, is a term that we'll cover in just a second. It's been in the literature for 15 years. Researched heavily. Heavily. Hundreds and hundreds of research articles to date.

Now discuss immune modulation mean resilience discussing things like immune resistance and immune tolerance and how immune resilience comes together. Basically, a resilient immune system just to define it, just so we're all on the same page, is the capacity to preserve or rapidly restore immune functions that promote disease resistance, which is immuno competence and control, inflammation, infectious disease, as well as other inflammatory stress. Just like we hear about a resilience all the time, how well do you bounce back?

How adaptive is your body? Is your mind? Is your soul right? So immune resilience is the same thing. But here's the here's the disappointing thing quite frankly, to date, as far as I know, very few medical schools teach these concepts of immunity. And this is what's really scary about it, quite frankly, because immunology immunology 101 teaches that your innate immune system, your your the immune system that essentially you have when you are an infant doesn't really adapt to its environment. It doesn't have any sort of memory.

That's where adaptive immunity comes into play. And that's really the essence of vaccination. And that's the essence for what happens to your body once you are infected. The something the adaptive immunity comes into play, which helps you not respond in a similar way in the future. So you're not going to be sick. That's basic immunology that's still taught today, which is wrong because we know through train immunity and using immune modulation as a key way of triggering that your innate immune system has a memory.

And this is important, you know, because when you're 20 years old, your immune system is fully developed, which makes sense from a biological and even an evolutionary perspective. Because you've already gone through adolescence, you've gone through about if you unless you're moving geographic locations consistently, traditionally speaking, you're living in the same geographic area for your whole life. You're exposed to the pollens, the viruses, the bacteria, fungi that are in that area. Right. So after about 15, 20 years, you've been exposed to about all that you're going to be exposed to for the rest of your life, essentially speaking again, think evolutionarily speaking. Sweat.

At 20 years old, your immune system is fully developed. From there on out. Immune function slowly starts to decline. When you hit 50 years old, immuno senescence is the age related immune function decline that drops, and then 60. It's like your immune system falls off a cliff. And that's why we see so much reoccurring infection in relation to prostate cancer and other cancers, specifically because the immune function, particularly the innate and the adaptive, both of them together, they're just not responding as well.

And that's this is why this is important. Because if we're not treating the body properly, if we're not recognizing that with trained immunity, we can get the innate immune cells to respond and to remember the threats essentially, your innate immunity has a memory called trained immunity, and it remembers things. As you get older, it helps prevent sepsis, infection, and cancer and how you stimulate that, how you I don't want to use the word boost because there's a misnomer there. How you trigger that is not by taking a bunch of vitamin C and immune boosters, because what we have found and this is decades, this is 15 plus years of research that we know this.

What we don't want to do is randomly increase immune function. Hey, I'm going to take my vitamin C is amazing. So my echinacea and all these things I'm going to high dose it because I want higher levels of neutrophils. I want higher level of whatever it is that we're trying to do natural killer cells because that's better. Well, that produces what's known as immune fatigue. You could literally fatigue your immune system and that could trigger autoimmunity. So what we want to do is we want balance.

And as crazy as it sounds, this is very much an East versus west mentality in the West. It's all about more and more and more. Hi, hi, hi. Ramp up ramp up. It's like. But in the east they've been studying and using immune modulation products for decades, especially with cancer. And beta glucan is one of the primary ones. It's been in a cancer adjuvant since the 1990s because what they found is, especially when people are going through chemotherapy, you had to be really careful, got to be really careful about, quote, ramping up immune function.

You want an immune system that's smarter. Meaning this it increases production as needed. It decreases production as needed. And how do you do that? You just don't do that by randomly taking the immune boosters that we see at the at the pharmacy. So this whole concept really has thrown oncology upside down because traditionally speaking, oncologists are recommending against immune boosting supplements during treatments, which is I can understand the concept behind why. But that that is relatively and I want to be respectful and uneducated on research recommendation because we need to be supporting your immune system during treatments to prevent reoccurrence.

And for people like me who don't want to get sick to begin with, how do I create an immune system that responds better, that responds in a more intelligent way? And so we could cover a little bit more. But the bottom line is this whole concept, this whole concept has ushered in the realization that people who have a more resilient immune system, which is essentially this ability to recover better, respond quicker, and to remember for the future. It has produced a 15 year increase in life expectancy.

And there was a study just done a couple of months ago out of Utah evaluating 17,000 people and the immune markers is is what we're looking at now as a researcher, because we just conducting the clinical trial to see how beta glucan helps with this. But we're looking at immune health grades like CD8 and CD4 profiles, gene expression transcription factor seven. We could see the mechanism of maintaining T-cell diversity, recovery from stress and inflammation resistance all through what's known as immune resilience.

And now people are indicating and saying, look, how your immune system functions is a better indicator of how long you're going to live. That's really becoming now the trigger. What's the difference between centenarians? Why does the Japanese have four times more per capita of people living to 100 than America? There's a reason for it. Their immune system's working differently than ours, primarily because of what they do, how they live. And that's what I hope we can talk a little bit about. And of course, they've been taking beta glucan for decades over their versus us.

It's been new in America. And so when it comes down to it, I, I want to stress the importance. And it's just not hey, it's flu and cold season. Oh COVID's coming around. Let me take my vitamin C and zinc. That whole concept needs to be reshaped. We need to look at the immune system like as what Peter Attia says, the fifth horseman now of longevity. He goes, if I could rewrite my book, I would, he just said in a recent podcast. I would put immune function, immune resilience. Doctor Joe Carnahan is talking about this all over the world.

Immune resilience as the new indicator, as the primary indicator of how long someone's going to live, but how healthy they're going to live. Beautiful. Well said. Thank you for that, amazing overview that I think that is, I think it'll be new for people to, to you know, you're right. We're focused primarily on immune boosting and words matter. Words matter. Immune. So immune modulation and immune resilience in your mind is the, these words I use hand in hand. Right. One produces the other. So immune resistance, let's kind of go through for people that want to geek out with me literally go this should be immunology 101 because this is now this is what should be taught basic definitions.

So number one is immune resistance. Immune resistance is when your neutrophils your white blood cells your natural killer cells are increased to resist and fight infection and disease. Right. If you keep on doing things to that's boosting your immune system. If you keep on increasing your immune function or the production of immune cells, that's known as immune resistance, if not tempered, will cause immune fatigue. And that can lead to autoimmunity. Immune tolerance too much of a good thing is a bad thing 100%.

Thank you. That's a perfect way of saying immune tolerance. Is this check? It's the governor. So you can't drive 200 miles on your car down the highway. Immune tolerance is when the immune system says, okay, we could tolerate a certain amount of bacteria, fungi, viruses. We could tolerate a certain amount of cancer knowing it's not going to kill us. But if we didn't have that upper limit, it would produce again that burnout. So immune tolerance is when the immune system literally says, okay, we're not going to keep on producing these natural killer cells, even though it does kill cancer because it could burn us out.

So you have immune resistance up, I mean, tolerance down, immune modulation immune modulators produce that balance. And there are several things that do it, quite frankly. I mean, things like rest, proper sleep, good nutrition, like common sense things. And you go to Japan and you look, what do they do differently than us? Well, they force bathe. They're outside in nature, they're enjoying things and they're just not taking 10,000. I use a vitamin D because it course boost immune system. That's not how they live over there. Right.

So this concept of immune modulation, what it does, it produces this immune system that is more resilient. And now as we get older, that's when everything starts to become much more important because we cannot rely on the immune systems that we had in her 30s and 40s. That's why there is a direct correlation between this is, you know, cancer rates, especially prostate as men age. Yeah. Essentially, when you're young enough, you can get away with anything because you have immune resilience. Naturally, as you get older, it changes.

So you're also suggesting that, hey, we're not just at the fate of, you know, we're getting older. Yeah. That's you know, it's the way it is. My my immune system will be depressed. You know, you die. You know, one of the big one of the most common deaths in the aging population is pneumonia, right? Which is an indication that the immune system is not, to use your term, resilient enough to to fight that at that point. Great. Thank you for that. And with that said, though, and with that said, I want to just encourage you all that study that came out of Utah again, this was in what journal?

Oh, I get to look up the journal for everybody. Oh. Aging cell the journal. I want to look it up. Aging cell look up journal. Aging cell. What they found was a 69% lower mortality rate with people that had higher immune resilience. Again, you can measure it. You can measure it by the CD4 CD8 ratios. You can measure it by transcription factor sevens. You can literally have a determination through your biomarkers how resilient your immune system has an age. We've all heard a biological age probably shouldn't.

I mentioned this ten minutes ago, this whole longevity Olympics thing, which is great, right? Everyone wants to live longer. You have a biological age. You also have an immune system age. So it's about knowing your immune age. And so here's the key though. They have found that people with higher immune resilience I said 15 years. The key is if you're 60 years old, you could have an immune system that functions like a 45 year old. That's the key I want. That's the concept I want to leave you guys with, especially the men out there that are thinking about prostate.

If you're in your 50s and 60s, you're on the decline of immune function. It's called immuno senescence. It's a hallmark of aging. There's nothing you could do about it. You have to just like just like sarcopenia, your muscle mass will start to decrease. Just by being older. You have to work out more. You have to be more physically fit minded to overcome that. Your immune system's the same way. So if you're 70 years old right now, and if you want an immune system of a 55 year old, you can't. And that the key is focusing on not just boosting your immune system, but what can I do to make my immune system smarter?

How do I make it create homeostasis, immune modulation? And then what does this mean for resilience. So that that's I guess the summary of it all, which is encouraging Geo, because I just turned 45 years old and my body's changing, man. Like it's crazy what the shift that I've experienced the last couple of years, just age related things that I had to do differently. And I'm even finding I can see my immune system starting to shift a little bit. You know, it responds differently to things than it did when I was in my 30s.

My muscle mass is much different than what it was in my 30s.

Inflammation, Toxic Load, and Cancer Risk 17:18

I got to be very more focused and much more intentional about how I live to counteract this age related decline, which is inevitable. So that is the other thing. Taxes, right? You can't live up taxes, can't get out of death. All this fun stuff. Age related decline is inevitable, but we can counteract it. I love it, I love it as a as a as a as a man who is in the age group where, you know, things start declining very rapidly. Unless I make the proper adjustments, I just turn 53. So I'm there, and it's one of the you hear people, right?

You hear men, saying, well, you know, I, you know, I can't do the things I used to do when I was 30, right? I used to whatever some guys, you know, I used to and I remember what I used to drink all night, go to work the next day, and now you know. Yeah, of course you can't. You gotta make serious adjustments so that you become, I love the word to become more resilient as you get older. Eric. What? So when we talk about immunity and immune modulation and immune resistance, resilience. There is a difference between your body's immune system trying to address a virus, a bacteria and cancer.

How would you differentiate between all three? And then we can get into beta glycans. The, I think at the basic level, one thing that's important, and this is something that I discovered in my previous work as I was researching essential oils, and that's something that I did for over 15 years before I really fell into this, this immuno senescence immune resilience research, which has been just a wonderful journey for me. One thing I realized at its base level, what we're dealing with is this concept of inflammation.

And we use our body's uses inflammation wisely to protect. Yeah. And so when inflammation runs rampant without that immune tolerance, right. Without the governor, the litmus like is said without the upper limit, if we let inflammation just run, it will produce much wear and tear on the body. That will end up producing harm and damage. And the problem that we're having right now is we're being inundated by so many threats. So at the basic level, the immune system really doesn't care if it's cancer, a bacteria, a phthalate, an artificial fragrance, a virus, it triggers inflammation.

And I think that's one concept I want to leave all the guys with here for just a quick minute. Is this your immune system only has so much energy to spend on keeping you alive and if our immune system is essentially being hijacked or compromised, monopolized, maybe even a better word by the things that we're doing to it. And I want you to think about what are you putting on your body, what kind of body care? Cleaning products? What kind of Cologne are you using? What kind of clothes are you wearing?

What kind of foods are you consuming? If any of this stuff which, unless it's all natural, chances are it triggers an inflammatory response because the immune system sees it as a threat and it's trying to get it out of the body, it's trying to process it, especially artificial fragrances. God help us. I mean, it's like the second hand smoke of our generation. People aren't seeing it. It literally is the second hand smoke. I'm being affected by the guy next to me in the subway because he has Aqua disco.

He just put ten sprays on and I'm being polluted. It causes brain inflammation, lung inflammation. It's throughout my body now. So at the basic level, this is an inflammation issue that we're trying to get under control. So yes there are specific nuances that how the immune system reacts to bacteria, fungi and cancer. But I want to leave people with this I think is a big picture idea is again, you only have so much metabolic energy, you only have so much metabolic power in your body. Energy stores to keep you alive, your heart rate, your breathing rate, your brain function.

A lot of this autonomic function is a huge, huge metabolic drain on the energy storage that you have. And then what literally have left over is supposed to help you be healthy, fit, digester food properly, be healed of whatever it is that your body's against. And so that's why in this situation that we're in where so many people are getting sick, I heard one oncologist tell, it's like your toxic bucket just overflows. There's only so much that the body can handle. And that manifest in cancer is like cancer cells just run rampant because the body cannot properly process.

And the natural killer cell production specifically isn't where it needs to be, because it's dealing with all the phthalates and the immune systems. Dealing with the bacteria, and the immune systems are dealing with this new viral outbreak that's around your neighborhood. And so I think that's one thing that I know. There's one thing for me that really open up my eyes is to see the natural limits that our body has, truly the natural limits that our body has. And then I felt the onus was on me. And then the power shifted.

There's like there's like the power shift in my head. I was like, wow, I literally have the power to put a drain on my immune system, on my body. Well, that is by the foods that I eat, right? The high processed foods. Again, I'll let the other experts in the summit talk about this stuff. And and I know you share and you have your protocols. I mean, we shouldn't have to teach people how to be healthy anymore, but it's so confusing. What do I eat? What don't I eat right? I'm trying to get to the fact of like, look, y'all, if you're using Clorox every day and Bath and Body Works products, and if you're down the cleaning aisle and getting stuff at Walmart, like you're really hurting your immune system, like we got to get beyond the chemicals, right?

The foods, the air that you're breathing like that, right there is a huge, huge step toward immune resilience is by reducing your toxic load. So now your immune system can function the way that it should. And we see people that reduce their environmental toxic load. They're so much more readily available to recover from cancer, not have reoccurrence and even prevent it from the beginning. And that really is when you look at the blue zones. And the Japanese study that just came out is, is what I've been referencing, because they just came out with the recent census and that's where they found like their their number of centurions, people living to 100 has increased.

And they're doing good over there. They're not perfect. But being an industrial country, they're doing really, really well. And it's because their lifestyle is a lower toxic lifestyle. And that's what I want to leave you with. I think at the end of the day, there's a lot of nuances of that that I'll let the the immunologist argue over and and discuss the concepts that I'm trying to take home with my children and the people that I work with and my friends and family is like, look, we got to live within the confines of the limits that we have just living in this earth suit.

And what does that mean? And if you start to flip the script in your head and every mouthful of food that you take, every spray that you put on your body, every time that you go for lotion or a potion or whatever it is, you think to myself, is this hurting your is is potentially harming me? Is this triggering inflammation? Does this have chemicals that my body doesn't like? Then my body's going to respond to? Then all you're doing is feeding the potential. You're you're only giving cancer a competitive edge now.

And that's what I wanted to give you that thought y'all, is let's give our body the competitive edge against cancer because it's unavoidable, right? Cancer is unavoidable for all of us. It's how our bodies respond to it, particularly if you live long enough. And prostate cancer, those things are changing. Yes. It, you know, it's known as the an aging disease, right? Like the very few 30 year olds get prostate cancer, though. You know, Eric, the only oncology I do, this is what I'm doing this summer is prostate cancer is the only thing I know from an archeological perspective.

And I'm seeing more and more younger guys, in their 40s, with, with prostate cancer and oftentimes advanced prostate cancer. So, and it, I would still call it an aging disease because some of the 40 year olds really have a body of a 60 year old right now for the reasons that we're highlighting here. Hey, I want to get into the beta glucan because I think it's a fascinating compound. And one that I've looked at for, you know, 20, 25 years as it relates to my degree in natural medicine. And, you know, there was a lot of focus on beta glucan for a while now.

Can you talk a little bit about it and, how how does it have an effect in strengthening, immune intelligence? Yeah. So what was this back in 2007? Jana. Not Jama, but Jana. The journal of the American Nutraceutical Association had a quote that really kind of struck me. It called beta glucan, the number one immune modulator in the world. Wow. That's a statement. And this whole concept, again, trained immunity going back, your immune system needs to be smarter. It needs to be able to respond. Your innate immune system has a memory.

It's called trained immunity, which helps counteract the fact that your adaptive immunity starts to decline as you get to be 50, 60 plus years old. So this whole concept is okay. We can do things, we can actively do things. And the key is immune modulation taking products that modulate the immune system. Beta glucan, specifically the beta glucan extracted from baker's yeast Saccharomyces be say it has this 1316 linkage that that connects specifically. It binds specifically with CR three and dentin receptors.

So you have this lock and key mechanism. This lock and key mechanism in the immune system. And beta glucan is very unique. It's very unique, especially when it's when it's processed in such a way where it's pure. And that is something that I think is really important, because when we're looking at the duct in one in this year, three receptors, there are several things that can bind to it which trigger immune function. Essentially, it's like a lock and key that says, okay, you guys do what you're supposed to do.

Natural killer cells, right? Go kill cancer. Neutrophils go macrophages go. Let's get phagocytosis. Let's engulf the bacteria and fungi that are hurting us.

What Beta Glucan Is and Why Purity Matters 28:30

When it comes down to it. And we could talk a little bit about the supplement industry as a whole, which I think is important because quality makes a huge difference in efficacy. And so when you're looking at something like beta glucan, it's purified from baker's yeast, which is in the cell walls of the baker's yeast. But beta glucan is also in mushrooms, beta glucan and algae. We love it. I love adaptogen mushrooms. I love other sources of beta glucan like oats. Right? That's what made beta glucan kind of famous in America 15, 20 years ago.

Maybe even more. Remember heart healthy Cheerios because the beta glucan in the Cheerios, they didn't say you had to eat ten boxes of Cheerios to get the medicinal dose. They don't talk about like that because you can't get that kind. But there was recently a study that that that covered oat beta glucan like just came out in 2025, like in this in the spring. Oat beta glucan has the unique ability because of the gel like structure and because of what it is. Essentially, it's a soluble fiber to help the body naturally detoxify from PFOA forever.

Chemicals. It's the first substance on the planet that was evaluated and found to help reduce forever chemical load. And a lot of people, if you haven't been familiar with Forever Chemicals, we're exposed to them all day long through our rain proof water boots and our umbrellas and ladies, your mascara and lipstick and the PFOA pans that we have in Teflon and forever chemicals are everywhere. In fact, 99% of all people have forever chemicals in their blood that we could detect from just randomized studies.

And nothing has been able to show, at least clinically, to reduce that toxic load from the body. But beta glucan, it's kind of Prom. That's promising. So on a side note, not saying you should do it or not. I don't know your grain grain free. This isn't a diet conversation, but you have to have three grams of beta glucan a day to reduce your forever chemical load by like 20%. And three grams is like a cup and a half of oatmeal. Or you take the supplement. So beta glucan from mushrooms and oats have been researched extensively.

But when it comes your immune function and there have been dozens of comparison studies, the beta glucan from all the different sources. Again, algae, oats, mushrooms, baker's yeast, the baker's yeast beta glucan has this unique ability to bind with the receptors in such a way is to stimulate all aspects of the immune system. I would say trigger all aspects of the immune system immune resistance, immune tolerance. I mean modulation, which all produce this train, immunity, which ultimately leads to immune resilience.

It's it's fascinating. And immunologist doctor Vaslav Medica from the University of Louisville, who's recently retired, he's the foremost researcher on this. So we did a deep dive on all that. He did over 200 studies just on beta glucan alone, testing all the different types and all the different companies and all the different brands. And he found something really interesting. So before everyone goes out and by the way, this is kind of interesting because the immune function aspect of beta glucan has been known in America really heavily since Covid because Doctor Oz and his Covid protocol mentioned beta glue camp, and that just sent sales skyrocketing for that early covet period.

I know because my my buddy owns a company that sells beta glucan. He's like like sales tripled overnight just because Doctor Oz mentioned beta glucan as part of the immune protocol. What? Doc, before you go out and buy whatever beta glucan on Amazon. Well, doctor Viveca found is as you're purifying this product, this product, again, you have this baker's yeast, the Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It's like the building block. It's the structure. It's the structural part of the cell. You extract that, you purify it.

So it has no allergenic properties. So people that are concerned about fungi or fungus, whatever, it's not going to trigger anything. It's not going to trigger Candida. Again. It's been purified naturally. What he found was that a 10% purity difference has an 800% efficacy difference, meaning this. So the 85 that we're testing has an 85% purity spec. And this company labs only sells and manufacturers beta glucan. That's 85% pure. And the question always is, well, like what's the other 15%? While this is residual stuff I mean, just you just think about your gasoline.

You'll never get 100% pure, right? There's always going to be residual little lit little things. I'm not talking proteins. I'm talking just like little fibers, little, little materials that you just can never get 100% pure of anything. Like, again, your vitamin C, you're still going to get a little bit of pulp. Even in the pulp free version. You can't filter out everything. Right? So 85% right now is the highest that's available on the market. He did neutrophil phagocytosis result studies and tested a product that was 85% pure versus 75%.

And he found that the difference was 800 times eight I'm sorry, eight times that 800% increase in effectiveness. Which means this like the products out there that are 75% pure are good. I'm not saying they're bad. They're not contaminated, not like they're there's nothing bad in them. But you literally have to take eight times the dose to equal one at 85%. And I'm mentioning this for this reason I've talked to dozens of docs that have used and people that have used beta glucan prescribed it. And one thing that they say is while the results are inconsistent, I it seems like patients, because you're looking at CDC counts are looking at prostate cell counts.

They're looking at different biomarkers. And they're finding well, I have my patients on beta glucan. They seem to improve and then they don't. Well what product are they using. And most products out there most supplements by the way y'all this is really important. Most supplements don't have purity standards. The supplement company typically sells whatever the manufacturer tells them to sell or offers them. Most companies don't say, hey, if this product specifically doesn't have this purity standard, we're not going to sell it to market.

Each batch needs to be evaluated. So what we find out on Amazon specifically and just in the Ethernet, right, we have or the interwebs, we have a lot of products out there that are selling a variety of different purity specs, and there's no standardization. And that's the big issue with supplementation. And when you're looking at something like beta glucan, which has been shown clinically to help cancer help with immune function, with help with a variety of different things, wound healing and infection, reoccurrence and the list goes on and on.

I mean, just just dozens of things that this product can help. What we need to do is be a little more scientific and the competitive edge, quite frankly, that pharmacies have and the pharmaceutical industry is they make sure the product is the same. The Advil you're taking today is virtually the same as it was 50 years ago by design. And I'm not saying take Advil, but if you're a clinician, if you're a doctor or if you're a patient, you want consistent results. You want something that you could rely on in the supplement industry, you typically can't because most companies, again, don't test every batch.

They don't have the specifications that they're managing, and they don't have these requirements. And so when Doctor Medica was doing these comparison studies, specifically cancer and immune function to help produce this immune resilience, which ultimately is going to help everyone with prostate cancer or prevent or whatever it is that people are looking at from cancer perspective. Be the glue can extracted from baker's yeast head above tails outperformed every other source of beta glucan specifically with immune function.

But when it came to the purity spec, that's where things shifted. And that's where it's like that became the eye opener for him and for others. It's like the amount of money that people have to spend on a lesser grade product. Maybe that's the best way of saying it. You know, you got your 87 octane, your 91 octane, whatever. The modern money that people have to spend on a lesser grade product becomes exponential versus having a higher grade product. And that is shocking because when they he did comparison studies literally a 85 he this product has been studied over 27.

Now clinical trials and or clinical evaluations specifically. They're doing more randomized control trials now. But the actual product itself was 85. Outperformed some products by 160 times, which is 1,600% efficacy, which means you'd have to take 160 capsules of one product that you're getting on Amazon to equal one product, a BWR 85. When I looked at that research deal, of course it was. It was validating for the research that I was doing with this company. But more importantly, here's what it did.

It opened my eyes to the supplement industry as a whole, and I started to dig deep into just how things are processed and how manufacturers make what they make and how it ends up becoming a product that me and my family are taking every day. And it shifted my entire mindset. The number one, what's the sourcing of the ingredient that we're taking? Number two, what's the purity standard of the product that I'm taking and what does that mean for my clinical outcomes? This kind of conversation I rarely hear about because quite frankly, because the FDA doesn't monitor or evaluate supplements, it's not under the purview unless someone gets hurt and someone reports something.

If I claim that a product can, quote, cure cancer and I sell it, while that's a drug claim, the FDA is going to go say, hey, you can't make that claim and now it gets involved. Other than that, the FDA is never going to get involved with any of the supplements that you see in the market. You'll and I'm not saying the FDA is or savior, but at least it's a check and balance of some sort to regulate what's out there. So the moral of the story is this. And I got this a lot when I was doing essential oil research, because 75 to 80% of all the essential oils on the market are adulterated.

It's just whatever the company wants to put in. They do add a little corn mint because it's sweeter and it smells nicer to the peppermint, and it's dirt cheap compared to real peppermint. Kasha use that instead of cinnamon because cinnamon bark is really expensive. How do we make it again sweeter? How do we make it smell better? These companies know what our bodies want. We want sweet. We want smell. We want right. We want certain things that that that light the the nervous system up. Because the brain is attracted to certain things.

And so the essential oil industry really open me up, like, wow, it's the wild, wild west out there. Anyone can sell anything. And yeah, hope you're getting a good result, a good reaction. So when it comes down to it, this whole discussion around immune function, this whole discussion around cancer treatment, this whole discussion around what products we take need to be centered at the core, the sourcing and the pure fee spec specifications. And we could talk a little bit more too, about, you know, this product, beta glucan has been used in Japan specifically as a cancer adjuvant alongside of chemotherapy because of that immune modulation concept that we just talked about, that oncologists didn't have to worry about random immune boosting activity that will counteract any sort of chemo.

It created that homeostasis that the immune system needed. So the Japanese have three decades ahead of where America is at right now. And now we're getting more like yourself, more integrative oncologists that are really understanding this idea and concept around how to target or how to how to use targeted supplementation to help support someone during their cancer treatment journey, and whether or not someone goes completely natural or allopathic or a mixture of the two. Doesn't matter. You should be doing something to support immune resilience and so I don't want to go on and on about it.

And I'm sorry, I kind of feel like I'm rambling, but yeah. Yeah. Actually, and before we wrap it up, a lot of the cancer in general treatments, they depress your immune system. Yes. Right. Yes. There has to be, some possible, positive synergy between taking, let's say, Ad5 and somebody undergoing undergoing, chemotherapy, for example, or undergoing radiation, as it relates to radiation, I mean, I'm not a radiation oncologist, but I see a lot of patients that undergo radiation for prostate cancer.

I don't think I would not think there's any negative interactions

Beta Glucan, Chemotherapy, and Cancer Support 42:30

between the radiation and the, BW 85. So can you speak on that? So, chemotherapeutic drugs doing the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish from an immuno, immuno resistance perspective? And, can people take these, at the same time? Yeah. And that's what that's exactly what the Japanese have been doing since the mid 90s. And there's several countries in Asia that have been doing it because that's why. Because to your point, the worry that most some colleges have is that a product like vitamin C, like essential oils, are going to stimulate immune function, which will then be counterproductive to the chemo.

So the general recommendation that most cancer patients get are you don't take immune boosting supplements. And to their point, yeah, you're right. You don't want to take immune boosting supplements. But that's where their mind is too. You know, they don't know about immune modulation. They weren't taught about immune resilience. And if they're not up on the science which is no offense to them, 15 years old at this point. Come on. They're treating people 20 year plus data. And the medical schools are decades behind, decades behind.

And which, thank God people like you that that on your dime on your effort, on your time, you're getting education outside of med school continually. Yeah. With updated information. Not going to see conferences that are regurgitating stuff from 15, 20 years ago, which by the way a lot do. Hey, let's go to Vegas. Let's have a good time. Let's go learn something that we learned 20 years ago and let's get her credits. I hate to say it, it happens all the time. Y'all. What do you think these things are?

It's a system that's built on outdated information. There are several studies that talk specifically about mushroom and baker's yeast beta glucan, and I want to really stress that baker's yeast beta glucan rises above the test above above all the others. But when it comes specifically, I'm going to quote a couple here. We got a second. I mean, we're talking just this year, this year, one article from the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms. Right. This is a mushroom journal exploring the potential of medicinal mushroom beta glucan as a natural frontier.

Seeing that how specifically medicinal mushrooms studies in prostate cancer cell lines and animal models modules have shown promising results for beta glucan inhibiting tumor growth, inducing DNA damage, and regulating tumor markers such as p53 and prostate specific antigen. And that was just on a mushroom. This is a mushroom journal. And what we've seen, again with comparison studies with doctor Vivica Maria glucan when it comes to cancer and immune resilience, specifically the beta glucan from Baker's use always outperforms.

And we see that from this particular study. Last year that studies show that particles derived from beta glucan sources from baker's yeast have an efficient anti-cancer activity, showing a dose dependent increase in cell death and PC three cells upon treatment. And what the thing is, and this is the cool thing about it, and this answers your question. The ability again, another study and the ability a beta glucan to counteract, to counteract this is the key to counteract, at least in part, a negative effect of chemotherapy on blood cell counts mainly relies on its chemo hematopoiesis enhancing capacity.

So in this regard, this water soluble derivative of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, this beta glucan, to advanced cancer patients has been reported to enhance hematopoietic regeneration. And so you think about this after administration, your total leukocytes red blood cell your platelet counts as well as your hemoglobin increased significantly independent. This is why I wanted to quote this, because I'm not going to remember all this independent of changes in lifestyle, habits of the patients. So when people are on chemo with the Japanese found 30, 40 years ago, was that obviously there's a lot of damage done to the body, including killing cancer, but it damages a lot of blood cell count and immune function.

What can we do to counteract that damage? And they found that beta glucan helps reverse the damage done to chemo. And the key is and they didn't know it at the time, they didn't know this 30 years ago is because of what it does to modulate the immune system and produce immune resilience. So that's the mechanism behind the entire thing. And so this this has been research again, this study I just quoted was from 2020 in the journal cancers. So just a few research studies, just a few literally of the hundreds, hundreds of few research studies.

And this is prostate specific that I'm talking about in addition to cancer as a whole. So, really promising because the last thing we want to do as practitioners and researchers is to medicate someone, to try to treat a disease without giving them some sort of antidote or to support, to recover. And that typically is not part of the discussion. Typically the discussion is my job is to kill the cancer. Right. Okay. Well, what about keeping the person alive and well, that's typically not part of the discussion unless people work with people like you, which is why I applaud you in your work.

But conventional oncology, they have one job, right? Get the cancer out at whatever cost. Eric, this has been, honestly, I think has been, educational for me as much as, everyone listening. Because, some of the nuances of what you spoke about, boosting versus resilience versus modulation actually is important. And the name of the game, certainly in my world and one of the key elements, or the horse is like RTA would say it is immunology is immune to, you know, the immune system. I think the, the, the interesting thing about what you've said is, is beyond strengthening the immune system, actually, you don't want to strengthen it too much.

You want to modulate it. So this was this was extremely educational. I think the audience is going to really love this. So thank you so much for this presentation. Any final words on first off, thanks so much for having me. Thanks for just, giving me the privilege and honor of being your co-host on this event. It's just, you know, we've we've lost some really close people, family and friends to cancer, as I'm sure everyone here

Closing Thoughts on Resilience and Hope 49:30

has been touched by cancer in one way or another. And it's kind of become cliche in our in our space that cancer is not a death sentence. Right? You hear it all the time. At least in my world. But it's true. And and it's something that we shouldn't be afraid of. And a lot of people are. And when you look back and you see how God created the human body to heal, to be resilient, it's a miracle that we're alive and well in this unbelievably toxic environment. Right. And I'm not here to go crazy over the purest food, the purest water, the purest air.

You're going to go nuts if you think that way. You're never going to live a nontoxic lifestyle. You can't. But we can do our best to live a lower toxic lifestyle. We can do our best to give our bodies a fighting chance. In my faith, and I see the people that do this, their bodies respond so unbelievably well to the fact that when you do get sick, you get you get back, you recover quicker. And if cancer does get the competitive edge, you're going to win. It's not going to take you out, not right.

And your quality of life is so much better emotionally, mentally, spiritually. So I want to leave you all with this. You have so much more power than you might think, and you give your body what your body craves and your body needs, and it responds so wonderfully well. So learn from all the wonderful conversations that Doctor Geo is having with the other guests. Learn from him. Consider beta glucan is something to modulate your immune system, to give you that resilient edge and just walk in freedom and walk in hope.

That was awesome. Thank you so much, Eric, and thank you, everyone for listening and watching. Prostate Cancer Summit 2.0 interview with the one and only Eric Zelensky. Again, it it was as close as possible to a masterclass on on 2025 immunology. Then then I've, I've had for ever. So thanks again, Eric. And I'll see you next time, unless you. Bye bye bye. See you too.