What is Cancer? Beyond “Rapid Cell Growth” – The Truth About Why and How Cancer Grows

Introduction and Doctor Lahti's Background 0:00

Hey, it's Nathan Crane, director of the Health and Healing Club and host of the Conquering Cancers Summit. And today, I am honored and excited to welcome you to a very special interview. Doctor Thomas Lahti has been practicing medicine for over 34 years now, for the first ten years of his medical career. He worked as an internist, urgent care physician, and intensivist in ICU and CCU departments of various hospitals in New York. In 2002, established one of the first integrative oncology centers, and in 2005 founded an Oasis of Healing in Arizona, which is still active today.

I interviewed the current medical director there and Arizona doctor Nathan Goodyear as part of this series. We talked about really the the most important aspects of the cancer healing diet that they're implementing there. You should go listen to that interview right after this one. And their website is an oasis of healing.com. Doctor Load has been licensed as a medical doctor in the state of New York since 1987, and is a homeopathic medical doctor in the state of Arizona since 2002. Doctor Lodi is a founding member of the International Organization of Integrative Cancer Physicians, and an active allied member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Since 2012, he founded and served as the Chief Integrative Oncology Consultant for several cancer centers in Bangkok and Paquette, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Vietnam and Dubai and is currently the founding member and CEO of Oasis International. Paquette Thailand, which is actually where he is joining us from. A day ahead of us in the morning, and we're a day behind when I'm recording this in the evening. So I'm glad our timing worked out. Doctor Lodi, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. You're welcome.

It's glad to be back. Yeah. It's been, it's been a few years since we've connected. A few years. Yeah, I think originally, I mean, because I moved to Thailand in 2012. So I don't remember when you were doing the filming for the original. Was it before 2012? Most of it. It was a couple years after that. But we were doing some conferences there in San Diego that you were speaking at some online summits, magazines, all kinds of things that, you were a part of just because your work is so instrumental in, you know, integrative care for helping people with cancer.

So, yeah, I'm super happy. Excited to be connecting with you again. Okay. Me too. So let's dive in. The most simple but profound question I think I can start with is what actually is cancer? Yeah, and that's really a perfect question. It's a great question. And it's and, and I think once people understand what it is, some of the mystery, of course goes away. And, and, and we have to understand that a lot of fear,

What Cancer Is and How the Body Adapts 3:06

you know, it's just based on ignorance. You know, we don't have it. So knowledge brings the knowledge, shines the light on things and you understand it. Cancer is actually a very, simple, natural, homeostatic, which means, in biology, homeostasis is the, processes and qualities of an organism to maintain its functional integrity. And no matter what happens, you know, like, you get pushed, you have a biomechanical, homeostasis. Your leg goes out to hold you up so you don't fall. Okay? You're eating too many cheeseburgers and and, pizzas and your arteries are getting clogged up, but your your body knows you need to keep the flow of blood to your heart and your brain.

So how do you maintain flow with clogged up arteries? You increase the pressure. So you go to the doctor. You have a high. You have high blood pressure. Is that. No, no, no, no. The problem is the pizzas and the and the kabobs and the things like that. If I stop that yeah I won't. Yeah. So anyway, so the, the and that's the same thing with diabetes and cancer and all that. So we're going to tell you right. You go I just want to mention that you go to the doctor and they say you got high blood pressure.

We need to give you some medication to lower your blood pressure. And what you're saying is, no, that's not that's not what you're trying to do. Not trying to lower the blood pressure. You're trying to get rid of the things that are causing your blood pressure to be so high. Exactly. Because what what we're what we're identifying and what we're focusing on, and this is very important, is we need to eliminate the myth of disease. Okay? There's no such thing as an entity called a disease that gets into you like you have diabetes.

Where is it? You know, is it in my elbow or is it over here? You know that I catch it. Is is it an it? It's not an it. So in other words, what I'm saying is that the body is always and it's designed and not just our body. The dogs bodies, cats bodies, elephants bodies, trees. They're designed to, maintain functional integrity regardless of what happens. It's called adaptation. It's called homeostasis. So if I'm eating all this stuff. Right, and my arteries are clogged up and I need to keep the blood flow, my body will naturally increase the blood pressure to keep me alive.

Right now, that's not a long term solution, but it's the only thing that can be done at that time, right? So if I go to a doctor and I take drugs and those drugs actually dilate my arteries artificially so that the my pressure goes down, what's happening now? I'm now I'm not getting the blood flow to where my body intended it to go. So my brain's not getting it. So I have a low level hypoxia or low oxygen. I have a low oxygen level at my heart all over. And what we know now about people that have been on antihypertensive for 20, 30, 40 years now is that they have a higher incidence of cancer. Why?

Because they're continually even though it's low level hypoxia right around the body. So anyway, so in other words, the the body, whatever symptoms you have, whatever's going on is your body is already adapting to a situation. So you need to just change the situation. And then your body no longer needs to do that adaptive dance. It doesn't have to do the high blood pressure dance that the cancer dance or that. So what is cancer? The fundamental. The fundamental process that all cells, whether they're bacteria or elephants, need to do is produce energy.

In fact, 50% of the energy that our cells produce, our required just to keep the cell, function, just to keep, you know, we have we have we have what are called sodium potassium gates. And we have all these other things that keep the cells intact just to keep all that intact. So the before the cell does any work just to keep its shape and all that, 50% of the energy is used just for that. Now, if the cell is going to do any work and then have to adapt to something, it's going to need more energy.

Okay. So energy is the fundamental requirement. And that's why it's, it's paramount. So, in in our cells, we're not we're not like bacteria, but in our cells, and all the higher organisms, there are these little, organelles inside the cells called mitochondria, and they produce the energy. They grab glucose and they grab oxygen six oxygens, one glucose, and they produce a total net total of about 36 to 38 ATP. ATP is the currency of energy. Okay. And you can imagine we have we have hundreds of thousands of these little mitochondria in our cells.

And it depends on the organ. Like the heart needs more because it's beating. Right. You know, in one day, let's say you thought you did nothing all day. You sat on the couch all day. Your heart was beating 100,000. So. So that's pretty amazing, right? 100,000 times a day. You know, what's interesting about that as well is, I could because, I'm an athlete, I'm a CrossFit athlete. And so I use, you know, something that kind of tracks my heart rate, my rest, my recovery, my sleep, my calorie expenditure, all that stuff.

And I can be on a total rest day on a Sunday, do nothing. Just lay around all day and my body's still burning. You know, over 2000, 2500 calories in a day. And I've done nothing. Right? Right. The body's expending all that energy just processing, regenerating and doing all these things that you're talking about. Well, you know, a ten with 36 zeros after it. Okay. That's a big number, right? A ten with 36 zeros after it. That's the number of chemical reactions that are going inside of our bodies every second.

Every second. So you just, you know, if you think about that and then you realize there's like 60 to 100 trillion cells, you realize that this is an incredible, incredible thing. I mean, and who's the question I am because who's running the show? Certainly not me. You know, if I had to be responsible for my digestion, I'd be after eating, I'd be stuck in the room all day. Just. Okay. So, you know, you can't do. We'd be dead. We'd be dead if we had to be responsible for any function in our body. Right.

Can't do it. So anyway, it's pretty amazing. So anyway, now these mitochondria, because they use oxygen. Because oxygen is necessary to, get this high yield of energy from the glucose. You get what are called, reactive oxygen species. They break up and they're called free radicals. Right. Well, we in the process of getting the energy, those free radicals are necessary. They're useful. The electrons from those free radicals are used. Right. So that's how we gather energy. But what happens is they they begin to accumulate and they produce damage also.

So they can also. So they're kind of like a double edged sword. It's like oxygen is really, really important. Right. At 21%. Right. But you put a mask of oxygen on it 100%, and within three weeks you've got emphysema. Okay. Because you've just, you know, the oxygen will destroy. So we need, you know, without it, you don't live for five minutes with too much of it, you're going to get really sick. So in other words, that's, you know, it's like that with everything. But I'm talking specifically now about oxygen.

So in the mitochondria you wind up getting those, those reactive oxygen species which are like, free radicals. Now because of that, because of that, those mitochondria are the most vulnerable to whatever happens, whatever kind of, unfortunate situation happens, you know? So now, if you consider our lifestyles, we're and you can't you if you can't say what caused my cancer. Well, it's not one thing. It's everything. Right? So it's it's diet. It's, the time you go to bed, it's, the amount you exercise, it's the amount of alcohol you drink.

It's the relationships you have. It's your ability to, to to forgive. And I mean, love. It's how many deep lies you old I mean, I, I, you know, I, I've learned a lot in the last ten years about how important the mind is, but all of these things conspire to, challenge the cell. And the most vulnerable parts of the cell are the mitochondria. Well, when 40 to 50% of them become dysfunctional, okay, through a myriad of things, including EMF, we can't leave EMF AMF out. Right. And and now 5G, who knows?

But anyway, now the cell needs to survive. And what does it need to do? It needs to produce energy. So it reverts back to the only primordial way of making energy. And that's called fermentation. So it starts to ferment. And fermentation of glucose is how you make wine and cheese. And you know, that's just it's a fundamental way of making energy. But it's clearly I mean, it's extremely inefficient. Whereas with what we talked about before, the mitochondria produce 38 ATP for every one glucose with with, fermentation, one glucose produces only two, which means it's 19 times less efficient at energy production.

So therefore, in order to survive, in order to keep this, multi-trillion celled organism functioning with enough energy, right. All of those cells that get, that lose their mitochondrial function and have to ferment, they, it signals the nucleus to now turn on and turn off genes so you can have a new program for the cell that supports this new metabolism, this new metabolic requirement. Right. We're now going to deal with instead of a mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation, metabolism. We want to deal with a, what they call, fermentation.

I'll just call it fermentation metabolism. So it turns on certain things. One of the things it turns on is it up regulates the production of insulin receptors. Why? Because cancer cells need more, sugar. We need more glucose. Right. They're 19 times less efficient. So you can't change what's inside. You can't change the mechanism. So you have to give it more fuel. So you give them more. It's like, you know, you think of those old trains, those coal trains where the guy was shoveling the coal into the train.

Right. Well, the more he shoveled into the engine, the faster would go. And that's the same kind of thing. So the cell needs to get all that. So that's what happens. It up regulates that. It up regulates this enzyme. And that enzyme it down regulates all these in all those all those genetic expression changes are what we call uncle genes. So in the end, when you're sitting there and you say you have the this Marcus, you have whatever it is, whatever your p53, you know, or whatever it is, all these things are really, they're done to support fermentation.

So what cancer is, is a chronically fermenting cell. That's it. Nothing more and nothing less. The other question I don't think I want to jump into is that whether you have cancer in the brain or the breast or the or the pancreas, okay. The only difference is the first word, okay, location. The second word is cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, brain cancer, colon cancer. Okay. So now I want you to understand that you don't have a different kind of cancer. There's no different kind of cancer.

It's all the same. And it's the location that would make one more, serious than another. I mean, serious. I mean, more, has a worse reputation, like pancreatic because of its location. If it grows, even I have a centimeter. It's already in another organ. You're in stage for your cut from. Whereas a breast tumor could grow, you know, several centimeters and still be a stage 2 or 3. So that's without affecting physiology. So really I want people to understand that. So when you say, oh, I have this really rare cancer, rare means they haven't, found it beginning in this particular cell type.

Often that's all it means. But it's still the same, which is why the therapies to reverse it don't have to change at the same. So. And that's, that's true for whether it's lymphoma or it's, blood cancer or it's a tumor or does it bone cancer doesn't matter. It's the exact same process. It's just one might be, you know, a worse experience or faster or whatever than the other. Exactly. So so I want to I want to see if, if I got this correctly, if I follow along correctly, the fermentation process is almost like a built in redundancy to keep us alive.

Right? So that's like, we're not feeding our cells what they need. They're being depleted. They're being, damaged through oxidative stress, through mental, physical, emotional stress, Wi-Fi. You already named a lot of the causes diet, poor diet, too much, you know, not enough exercise, etc., etc.. The cells, the mitochondria start this functioning and they go into the fermentation process basically to keep us alive. But in the fermentation process is actually what's turning the those cells into cancer cells.

Right. But they're producing, some energy to keep us alive.

Mitochondria, Fermentation, and Cancer Metabolism 17:00

And so cancer is actually prolonging our life is that, I believe I've heard you even say that in the past, that it's an adaptive response. And and let's say, let's say a tumor in the breast. If that didn't happen, if it didn't, if it didn't adapt, it would have become dead. It would have died, the tissue would have died. And that tissue is called necrotic tissue and dead tissue is a is a becomes a nest for bacteria and other microbe. They love it. They would go there. You would get you would get a, horrible infection.

Probably get into the blood and you would die, you know. So I mean, it's really you have to understand that about cancer, but that's absolutely right. I wanted to, it's not only affirmative. It happens every day when you exercise, if you let's say, let's say you sprint up to the corner, okay? And you haven't been doing this in a while. By the time you get up three quarters of the way, you're starting your eggs, your legs are starting to ache. You get up there and you're going, what happened? Well, you, because you're not in shape, or even if you are in shape, then it might take a little longer to get to that place, but you will get to the place where you will have exceeded your ability, your, your, oxidative ability.

And now you start to ferment, your cells start to ferment. It's called glycolysis, right? I was there I did that this morning. And then the glycolysis, the the end result is, lactic acid. And that lactic acid is what makes your legs sore. So when you're feeling that soreness you're, you realize that your body's fermenting and then you go you blow off the carbon dioxide which equilibrate the. And then you're okay. Well with cancer you can't do that because even blowing off the carbon dioxide you don't have the mitochondrial to begin the that to begin that really efficient process again.

So you're stuck in permanent. So we can look at cancer as permanent or not permanent. But at least chronic chronic fermentation. And by the way, it can be turned around. So if our body's so going back to the exercise, analogy, if our bodies didn't have the ability to release that carbon dioxide and then allow our system to flush that lactic acid out, basically that would all become cancerous. Is that what you're saying? But it does become cancerous because because we're able to flush it out? No, because cancer would have to.

We'd have to destroy the mitochondria to get cancer because that's the whole thing. Yeah. So so it's like an initial fermentation process. It's not the full right. That's right. Right. Yeah. It's and it's fermenting. Not because it lost the mitochondria. It's just your cells got overworked and you know they're not quite efficient. So they temporarily had to start fermenting, you know. And then you have to slow down and get rid of the carbon dioxide. And now you can go back to being what you were.

And now your body has just adapted and you've, you know, increased your capacity a little bit. So the next time you do it, you can go a little bit harder, a little bit further. Exactly. Yeah. Training. Yeah. So okay, so, I love how you explain that. So it's kind of posed a couple of questions that's come up. Why then are all these cancers, you say the cancers, the cancers, the cancer, it's cancer. But why are they so different in terms of where they show up and why they show up in these different areas and these different types of cancer.

Right. Well, depending on the insults or the challenges that the cells had, will determine whether or not it becomes cancer. So let's say, Let's say that a woman is, living a, a lifestyle, you know, and you know, you know, I've got from the beginning, What's the word? Acknowledge the fact there's there's a there's another thing about cancer, too. Sometimes we don't understand it. I have had not all most people, you know, they've you know, what's happened in their lives. But some people come to me, you know, God, I grew up on an organic farm, and I was, you know, I was active and all of this, and I everybody's surprised how, like, why I cancer.

Yeah. So, so a lot of times we cannot identify what happened and that's, you know, and that's and, and, and and for the same reason, there's a small percentage of people who do all the right things, and it doesn't work. So those are very small. Yeah. You have to understand, when I'm talking right now, I'm talking about the the vast majority of people, 95% plus of the people. Okay. This is a small percentage that we just never understand it. Well. And that's you know, I've, I've found with people who I've talked to like that sometimes if you dig really, really deep, even if it says, oh, I had a great childhood or I had and you dig deep and it's like, oh, there was this huge traumatic event that they forgot to mention that's still with them subconsciously today.

That has been an underlying stress for 35 or 40 years. Right? So there's those things too that aren't really clear. Absolutely. Or if you dug down and that's and that's if we have a chance to talk a little bit about the mind later. But anyway, so if a woman, let's say a woman, is exposed to the normal lifestyle that we have here in the 21st century, and her hormones are not balanced, right? She's got too much estrogen, not enough progesterone. She's even got too much prolactin. She's that got that kind of thing.

Let's say she wears a bra all the time. She never, you know, she doesn't, you know, she doesn't, take it off. Except for when she sleeps, right? Which decreases the breasts. The ability to move is lymphatic. You know, we know there's actually a correlation between the number of hours a woman wears her bra during the day and her, risk of breast cancer, you know, so the less wearing it. You know, this is a relatively modern invention. It came about actually, with, Howard Hughes invented the bra that women wear today for Jane Russell in a movie called Gentlemen Prefer Blonds with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

And, in fact, Jane Russell, was given a contract. If you wear this bra in this movie, you will get $1,000 a week for the rest of your life. Oh, my God. And, you know, in the 90s, what, in 48 or whenever it came out, that was a ton of money. It's still not bad. You know, if you if you got $1,000 a week for the rest of your life. But anyway, that's where the new brought this bra came. And this bra actually decreases a woman's, her breasts. Because normally in a healthy, natural setting, as a woman walked her breasts and her breasts would bounce.

And as they bounce, they would, you know, the lymphatic system would circulate and all that. It's natural. Right? Is it reminds me of the Hawaiians, you know, back in back when the white men first came to white, they weren't wearing bronze, right. And they were not. And they were surfing and they were healthy and large. And we said, no, you got to wear bras. It's terrible because, you know, why in Hawaii they didn't think of the bra at the as the breasts, as sexual objects. They thought they thought breasts were for the babies.

No, not for the men. Right. So they had a whole different perspective on it. Right. But we came into the, anyway, so now we got really sick of Hawaiians, but anyway, so if a woman has that constellation of, you know, of the exposures and the hormonal imbalance, then it could show up in the breast. It's more likely to happen in the breast. Right? That's where it will happen. So there's always that. And for example, pancreas, we know the pancreas seems to happen with people who, not always but often people who eat a lot of cooked carbs.

Okay. So if you're eating a lot of cooked carbs and you've got all these kinds of stresses, and there's other things too that we might not be aware of. For example, microorganisms, we know that we have a dysbiosis. You know, we don't you know, one of the things about probiotics that is really important for everyone to understand, and that is you can take probiotics all day. All day, every hour. Oh, I take my probiotic. But if they if those if those bacteria once once they get into your system don't have the food that they need to eat, they're going to pass right through.

So in other words, you're the bacteria that exist in your gut. Are there will it will survive based on the food. So if you have a fast food diet, those are a certain set of species that will exist in there if you have a healthy diet, if you eat a heavy meat diet, you'll have a certain set of certain groups, species that survive in there. So don't have to worry about the bacteria, worry about the environment. That's your job. Your job is take care of the environment. So and that's that's where prebiotics really are probably more important than taking probiotics.

Right. Right, right. Because remember you've got you've got more bacteria in there than you do cells in your body right. You know they're going to replenish themselves. You can't knock them out. And that's you know we're talking anything with inulin fiber right. When we're talking about prebiotics. And that's pretty much fruit and vegetables to make it simple. Exactly, exactly. So the more that you eat them well, the more that you eat, the more of the kinds of species that we need for our health.

We'll survive. Now some if you're eating a different diet, you'll it'll be it'll be good food for a different sort of species which are actually pathological foods, which would cause us all sorts of problems. Okay. And we know that the gut and the brain are connected, right, in terms of thinking and feeling pretty good. So imagine you're eating a certain diet. So it's going to affect the way you think and you feel and you respond. It's all very, very important. What about the craz? Okay. So just to wrap up there, the reason these cancers are going to show up in different parts of the body as we're still learning some of those things, but like you said, you know, hormones out of balance more often than not, it's going to be in the breast if it's, you know, a lot of crude carbs could be pancreas if different reasons are causing it show up in different places.

A lot of meat has colon, a lot of meat is colon. That's kind of where I want to go next, which is, this whole craze about the carnivore diet. Like, I talk about that for a couple of minutes. Well, it's, it's astonishing to me that it even became. Well, I guess I shouldn't be astonished, because people are always looking for ways to justify their vices. Right? They're always. They love to justify their vices. Right. You know, and so, clearly it's not a sustainable diet. We couldn't do it because our.

Okay, first of all, when when you want to say what is the proper diet for any organism on the planet, right. You have to understand that organ organisms, anatomy and physiology. Okay, so you got, you got an elephant, right? With its anatomy and physiology. Will tell you exactly what it should eat. You've got an anteater with a long nose and the long term.

Why Cancer Appears in Different Organs 28:30

Right. And that, that and the. You know what it's going to eat. A tiger anyway, our bodies, our anatomy and physiology. What is there? She said the reason we have to debate about this is because we we were forbidden by our periods to be instinctual. We were not allowed to follow our instincts. Yeah, our our our parents insisted. And then we insist our children to be culturally appropriate. So all of our responses are cultural. We've been in culture, so we don't know what would be our natural diet, because if you're in Thailand, you're eating one kind of food.

If you're in Germany, you grow up eating another food. If you're in Africa, you grow up eating another food. And then each country thinks that their food is is the best and the only one that people should eat. And it becomes your appetite is what you crave and it's it's your emotional thing. So, but you know, that's, you know, that's what that's what happens with food. But anyway, our anatomy and physiology is such that we are if we look at gorillas, if we look at chimpanzees, these are our cousins, you know.

Why do I say cousins? Well, you know, we may have, what, 67, 65%, percent same DNA as a dog, whereas we have 99% same DNA as a chimp. Right. Doesn't mean we came from dogs. It doesn't mean we can't beat. It just means that we were designed on a similar structure. Oh you know we have four chambered hearts. So do they. They have four chambered hearts right. The heart lung apparatus, you know, the whole thing. The kidneys. That's a good system, you know. You know, why would God have to make several systems once one good system.

So anyway, so our cousins aren't in culture, so they eat out of instinct. Right. And think about it. Let's say you had a, 14 month old child, or you had one from every country, one from Ethiopia, one from Afghanistan, one from Kansas, one from Australia, all over China. And you put them each individually in this little, playpen with an apple and a rabbit. Okay, none of them are going to eat the rabbit. They're all going to be attracted to the round. Missed the redness or the greenness. They're going to like. It's round.

It's got the shape. It's got something that's intrinsically attractive to a young human. Right. And you're going to look at and taste it. They're going to play with the rabbit that's instinctually we're not instinctually there to do that, but we're forbidden that. Are our mothers saying and fathers no, stop. Don't know. Stop. Oh, don't do that. So by the time we're three, our appetites are formed. So you and you know this. You're a father. You can tell a two year old what to eat. You cannot tell a four year old what eat.

Okay. So by three appetites are formed. Right. And, that's the tragedy. And you have until three to get it right with your kids. Okay? If not, you're going to spend the rest of your time trying to fix it. Yeah, it's a really good point you brought up because my dogs, who I have trained as puppies to or not even trained, allowed them to eat instinctually. Right. If I put a rabbit in front of them, they will kill the rabbit and they'll eat it raw. Bones, skin, everything. When we're. When we're out running, they will hunt rabbit.

I never taught them to hunt. I didn't teach them nothing, I just I gave them, you know, meat, raw meat from time to time. And, I never stopped them from trying to catch a rabbit when we're out running and they'll catch it, they'll kill it, and they will eat it all of it. The pop, the, you know, the the intestines open and the stomach filled with crap. And that smells horrible. And they'll eat all of it and they love it, you know. And they that's a true omnivore right now, if we were true omnivores, like you're saying, like if we were meant to eat, you know, quite a bit of meat and maybe some plants, I think we would crave that.

Raw meat, the bone, all of it, just like my dogs do. But exactly. We, you know, you're exactly right. Dogs are, all omnivores have to be capable of killing an animal because the by the to the fact that they're an omnivore. So what does that mean? Well, that means, that they in it for mammals, they pretty much need to have a snout. Okay. So what are the famous omnivores that we know of? Dogs, rats. And who's the big guy? The bear. I mean, you know that the bear is like 80, 90% vegetarian, right? This big, massive thing.

But it's got the snout and it's got the claws. It's designed. So when it needs to kill, it will. So dogs are scavengers, you know, they're they're, The more scavengers you can actually, if you got a 12 year old dog and it's not, and it's kind of losing its energy, you can change it, switch it to a vegetarian diet, and you'll get another four years out of it because they'll live, because they'll be getting less garbage. I've done that a few times with dogs. Oh, now that's that's just not feeding them the the dead dry dog food.

You're giving them fresh, fresh food plant vegetarian. What about putting them on a like a raw meat diet with something like that? That's what I've seen now, is that that that's the best you put them on a Roman diet, especially from early on. And they'll they'll live long. We have to. Yeah. Anyway, so it just like it works for them. It works for us as well. Yeah. But anyway, so, you know, we can get you know, I won't. We? First of all, if we were carnivores, if we were omnivores, then we should, like you pointed out, should be attracted to.

I mean, we should see a cow walking in the, in the, in the pasture and go. No, we don't do that. We're not excited by that. We're excited by the steak. It's been removed. It's cooked. It's got a smell. It has sauces on it. We're not excited by a piece of bloody flesh. That's not what we even instinctually we're not like that now. Some guys that want to beat their chest. Yeah. There's some bizarre people that will do anything. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that's where humans are. And humans in general don't are not attracted to that.

And I think the origins of cooking came from meat because, you know, when we were eating, you know, broccoli and apples, you would just eat it, right? You just eat it. It's a good, but when it came to flesh, it's kind of disgusting. So you got to do something to it. So of course, heat. In our bodies. Our bodies are really designed like an herbivore, right? Our long intestines, our teeth that are made for chewing, grinding plants and vegetables and things like that. Isn't that true? I mean, if you really look at carnivore, omnivore, herbivore, our bodies are much more like an herbivore than than either the other two.

Well, we don't have a snout, right. These. You can say these are canines. They're only in the canine position, but they don't come below the inside there. So that's all they they function as an incisor. They're not piercer. They're not piercing. Dracula has that. But not not the average. Not non. Vampire. Okay, so vampires have it. Vampires can eat meat. Sure. We designed. Right. So we weren't, but, Anyway. Yeah, but the the the the the omnivore. The omnivore doesn't chew. They gulp, and their jaws only move vertically.

Their teeth are sharp, their tongues are thin. So they can, you know, they're long and thin.

Diet, Gut Health, and the Carnivore Debate 36:30

Their, digestive tract is short and straight. Their livers produce a lot of your cases. An enzyme that breaks down, uric acid, which is a byproduct of protein, is they have to have that, and, they don't sweat. They pant, they paint. Okay. And those are just some of the, some of the, qualities or aspects of, of of the omnivore and carnivore. Whereas the herbivore jaws go horizontal and vertical, we have to pull cheeks. Remember, dogs and cats don't have cheeks. They don't have lips. The reason is that's why when they're chewing something, it'll fall out.

They have to pick it up. You know, we're we have the cheeks, we have the lips, and and we have flat teeth for grinding. And our tongues are thick and muscular, and, and we have an enzyme in our, in our mouths to digest starch, not to digest protein. Okay. So and what is starch starches fruit. Right. And starches and vegetables and stuff like that. You know glucose that it that's. Yeah. How do you argue with that. Now what goes into a long I mean it's 10m or 30ft from mouth to rectum. 30ft. Okay.

So how tall are you? Six foot. So, you know, it's what, six times? You know, five times the size of your, your whole body. But, when we look at carnivores versus, herbivores, the torso, right in a in a in a carnivore, the torso or omnivore, the torso is three times the length. The the the intestines are three times the length of the torso. When we look at, what? We are herbivores. It's 6 to 9 times. So if you figure on me, this is probably about almost a meter, maybe three, maybe 2.5ft. Right. And 30ft of intestines.

There we go. Yeah. So that's a long way. So the problem is, when you eat meat, when you eat foods like that, that don't have feet and hands, like if you're eating broccoli and cabbage and things like that, it's got cellulose and digestible and it's got a it kind of moves its way through the intestines and it brushes it and cleans it, and that goes through there. Okay. Whereas something that doesn't have that, just gets pushed along and it's harder to digest and, and it's and as it, when it, if it sits around too long, it begins to picture by.

And then putrefaction produces these, these chemicals that are carcinogenic, that are all kinds of problems. And maybe, maybe even the most important thing is, is it's food for a different species of bacteria. And so our, our, our, our microbiome changes. So now we've got purified flesh sitting in our somewhere in that long 30ft tube with a different kind of bacteria, you know, and we're going, oh yeah, that was great. Right. And, you know, we have gas coming out of both ends. I mean, no wonder, no wonder.

So anyway, this long term I really want to see. And I've got a guy here actually at the our center. He and his father are like, they've got YouTube channels. They are carnivores. You're not. You can pretend you're a carnivore and you're going to see what happens. Your body was not designed for it. And there's it's not a long term solution, okay? It's just like ketogenic diets, ketogenic diet work really well in certain circumstances and can't be used, but they're not sustainable. You can't stay on a ketogenic diet if you let's say you're you do it for medical purposes.

You might I would say what I tell people with cancer, if we if we could we we've been able to develop a vegan ketogenic diet. Raw vegan. It's very difficult. But you do it for 4 to 6 weeks and you got to keep your glucose to ketone ratio at less than 1.0. Your glucose to ketone ratio. Okay. If you can do that for six, 4 to 6 weeks, then you eat for 2 to 3 months a healthy diet, then you do it again for 4 to 6 weeks. Then you eat a healthy diet. It's not a sustainable thing because in order to be keto, in order to produce enough ketones, you've got to be, you have to have an excess of these nutrients and not enough of these nutrients.

So it's not a it's it won't work. So really, you're our diet is a variety. Yeah. It's a plant based diet variety. Vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, herbs all of it. Right. Berries. The ketogenic that the reason you're doing, short term, you know, raw, organic, you know, plant based ketogenic diet is, is just to reduce, inflammation quickly. So is that the reason why you're doing it in those extreme cases? Right. That that and also cancer is, by reducing the glucose. Yeah. There's no reducing the glucose.

The cancer, has a hard time living right now. Remember? Cancer, the cancer has one other fuel source. It's called glutamine, which is an amino acid. So it can switch to glutamine. And that's the problem. And that's what you see. In fact, there are some cancers that don't show up by Pet scan. You know, Pet scan is where they inject the radioactive glucose. So there are some cancers like that and those are mostly glutamine. Right. So we have to, and what's the ultimate what's the only diet in the world that eliminates glutamine and glucose?

It's called H2O water, water, fasting water. And I and I have to tell you, I had a lady come here. Stage, stage four, breast cancer. Told she didn't have six months. Did a 41 day water fest. Went back to England, two months later to get a Pet scan. It was absolutely clean. So. Well, I, I mean, that's that's incredible. And and water fasting is, like, really intense. So you need to be with somebody like yourself. Professional guidance to help help you through it. Right. If you're going to go fast two weeks.

Yeah. I wanted to say to, you know, we we do have an interview with the founders of Mastering Diabetes. I'm just going to mention here, but I do encourage everyone to go listen to that interview. One of the things that that all the research shows and what they talk about is that and the reason why. One of the reasons I think, you know, as you're saying, junk diet is not sustainable is because that's the exact diet you would do if you want to create diabetes in the body, right? If you high fat is one of the fastest ways a high fat diet is one of the fastest ways to actually make your body diabetic.

So, you know, these people that are just promoting ketogenic diet, like as the life source, the best, you know, healthiest side on the planet, actually, all the research is saying the opposite. Like you're saying it can be good for short term for some of these, you know, chronic health conditions. Right. It's a short period of time, but not sustainable. It's got some really important, therapeutic, uses like, for fasting too, you know, just just real quickly is that, All nature was fasting is built into it.

No animal in nature eats every day. They might eat one, one, one day or two days, and then they run out of food for a week. So now that is intermittent fasting. I want to really correct term because people keep saying that if you eat once a day, you're intermittent fasting. That's not intermittent fasting is a fast is when you have not eaten for 24 hours. Okay. If you're eating once a day, it means you're eating healthy. If you're eating twice a day, it means you're eating healthy. So what I tell my people is, since insulin and glucose are, the dynamic between insulin and glucose are very fundamental to pathology, whether it's heart disease, liver disease or cancer.

Remember we talked about insulin and glucose and cancer. You know you've got to get you to be healthy. You should have a fasting insulin of three or less, a fasting insulin of three or less. Most Americans are 12 to 18. Some go up to 25. Right. It's got to be three or less. So the best way to manage that is to put a minimum of 18 hours between your last meal and your first every day. Now, that's not intermittent fasting, that's eating healthy. So you stop eating at 6 p.m., you eat again at noon, then you eat again at 5 p.m., done at six.

And you've done it. You've got all your nutrition, but you have 18 hours where your body is able to clean up, because when you're not eating, your body's cleaning and you're fat, your insulin requirements go down. Because remember, cancer needs insulin to push the glucose in. So all of that is very, very, very, very important. But it's not intermittent fasting when you fast every third day or you fast on Sundays. That's intermittent fasting. You I just that bothers me that people don't. It's gotten mis understood.

Yeah. So intermittent fasting you're saying is when you do a fast you know, every, every Sunday or every third day or whatever it is, versus just eating in a six hour window, right? You're just you're you're being healthy. You're allowing your body to do what it needs to do to clean itself out and heal itself. Otherwise you can say, look, I, I do intermittent fasting. I stop eating between breakfast and lunch, and then I stop eating between lunch and dinner. So I'm eating meals a day. So I mean, that's, you know what's funny about that?

You're in Thailand, right? Which is primarily Buddhist country. We were talking beforehand. I used to spend a lot of time at a Buddhist monastery in Escondido, and I. I don't know if if that's how it is there for for a lot of the monks,

Fasting, Ketogenic Diets, and Sleep for Healing 46:30

the monasteries specifically where you're at in Thailand. But at this monastery, I used to spend time at learning meditation and learning from the monks and, you know, just enjoying being around beautiful, healthy, happy, funny people. They only ate once a day. They had lunch, and that was it. And it wasn't based on some scientific research that it's good for. You'd only eat once a day. It was like they knew for however many hundreds or thousands of years that one of the healthiest ways to be and also, you know, detached from having, you know, I mean, there's also the philosophical side to it and so forth, but somehow, intuitively, they knew, like, yeah, eat once a day.

I haven't been able to do that yet, but but they certainly were very successful at it. I just find that fascinating. You know, science is great, helps us understand things more clearly. But if you look at our ancestors for thousands of years, a lot of the wise people, they've figured out a lot of this stuff on their own without our modern scientific tools. Right? Yeah. And if you're eating food that hasn't been processed, it's still has all of its nutrient needs, nutrients, it's nutrient dense. And if it's the proper diet for your particular species, which is human, so you have a nutrient dense meal, you've you've done it, you've taken care of your nutritional needs, which is the purpose of eating.

The purpose of eating is not to pleasure the tongue. Although that's a nice side of, you know, side benefit. But the real goal is to keep your, nutrients coming in for energy and for, for, structure. You know, that that's that's what we need. So if you can do that once a day and you have all that time I, I was up in Myanmar, Burma, when they had a flood. And I was up there helping them, and, I was up in the mountains and I went to a monastery where I had to take a boat for, I mean, this boat for hours.

It's amazing. Beautiful, incredible. Anyway, these monks, everybody on the monastery was monks, right? The whole place. So when you, Anyway, people over there don't wear shoes. They don't have devices. They're not at all. You know, it's not this century. They eat the food that grows around there, and they eat once a day. So I was there examining the whole village, right, to see how big everybody's health was. And here I am examining these 70, 80 year old men, monks. And they were that they had they had the bodies of 30 year olds. Wow.

They were amazing. They had no fat. Their bodies were, you know, they were tight, their muscles. You could, you know, they had a definition, you know, they weren't like, bulky, but they had definition. Their heart rates were I mean, it was amazing. And it's because they eat once a day and they eat. And the other you know, the other secret about eating is, if you're under 30, you have to stop eating three hours before sleep, under 44 hours under 50 and above, five hours before sleep. Okay? Because that's the reason for that.

And we can do another whole talk on it. The reason for that is because one of the greatest benefits of sleep is out of fashion. For our body to eat up and get rid of the the debris. It won't do that if it's still absorbing food that has glucose because it doesn't need to. So autophagy gets turned on by the lysosomal system in the cells when there's no more glucose coming in. But if you ate a meal an hour before, you're still absorbing it while you're sleeping. You're not going to get that benefit, right?

So, so and the reason there's three, four and five hours is because digestion slows down as you age, the ability to digest. Right. And and since you should go to bed at the very latest 9 p.m.. You have to start if you're 30 and under, stop eating at six. If you're 40, stop eating at 550. Stop eating it for you know and that's just. And then 18 hours. Great. Four times a year do a two week fast and that's it. You can't you know, you'll have to be hit by a bus. So, so so 50 and older, which is most people who are tuning in here to the symposium, you're saying at least five hours stop.

And that's that's whether you're 60, 70, 80. It doesn't necessarily keep going up. You're 80 years old. They stopped eight hours before. Or it would be. But, but but think about what the monks are doing. The monks eat. It depends on what country they're in. Either 11 a.m. to 12 or 12 to one around there. Right. So there they all have eight, ten hours, 12 hours before they, are ten hours. So. So you're just that that window of time, you're allowing your body to finish processing the glucose from the food.

So now it can start cleaning the debris out while you're sleeping, and your night will be fantastic. And if you're going to bed with the sun, as the sun sets your eyes close, if you're doing that which is a natural life, you and and that's a whole nother talk, a lecture. But you set up a whole system of hormones and your circadian rhythm, and you're in sync with your nature, your bio rhythms. You're just you become. It's amazing. In fact, it's the most important thing you can do. More important than eating. Right.

And the reason I say that is because if you go to bed early, you will then have something that you don't have when you go to bed late. And that's called willpower. Going to bed late. You wake up in the morning, you're on your third cup of coffee, you're driving by the donut shop or you're driving by or whatever it is that McDonnell, whatever it is, and you're going to say, yeah, okay, just one. But you woke up, you went to bed early, you woke up, you did your meditation, you did your reading, you did your exercise.

You're out the door. There's no way you're going to mess with that beautiful, wonderful feeling. You're going to say, no way. I'm not going to do that. So what I always let people know is that the train you get on tomorrow, you get on the train, you will be on tomorrow is the one you get on at the time you go to sleep, you go to sleep at 8 p.m., you're on the train. You go to sleep at 11 p.m., you're on the F train. And and it's only B, it's because you're not going to get restorative sleep. You're not going to be all right.

Yeah, you're going to get a lot of dreams, so you won't be crazy, but you're not you're not going to get restorative sleep that do that for sleep that you need. Yeah. At 2,020% plus a deep sleep at night which is beyond REM sleep. A lot of people think REM sleep is the most important. It's not the most important. It's that that deep restorative sleep. Right? Right. Two cycle. There's two cycles before our set point, which is around 1:00 am. Before that set point, we have 90 minute cycles. The majority of the cycle is restorative and a little bit of REM.

After that set point at 1:00 am or whatever time, whatever time it is for that your particular person, it's reversed. The majority is REM and a little bit of restorative sleep. So if you went to bed at 11, you only got maybe half a cycle or one cycle of good restorative sleep, and you got a lot of Ram. So if you don't get REM, you'll go crazy, you'll kill people, you'll be angry. Right? But so that's what REM is for. REM is get it's kind of like steam letting off psychological steam. But but the restorative sleep is what you need to to stay healthy and young and, your immune system and all that.

And most people are not getting it ever. I mean, how many people go to bed early? Very rare. Most people go to bed at least ten, 11, 11, 12. So anyway, yeah, yeah, we recently just started going to bed earlier here. Now especially it's winter here. Well, it's the time where we're, recording this. It's it's winter. The sun's going down earlier, so we're like, all right, so start going to bed earlier now. Now we're going about an hour earlier than we were. And, you know, it's kind of hard initially to, to for the body to start getting used to that cycle.

But once you do, then it's beautiful, you know, listen, I know we could go on for hours. You were such a wealth of knowledge and information and inspiration. We covered probably 20 things that we never even intended on covering. And I'm, you know, grateful for you just just unloading all of these, you know, nuggets of wisdom. I know it could do three or 4 or 5 different interviews on different subjects. I know I told people tuning in, make sure you're taking notes because you're going to learn a lot.

And and I think people really learned a lot. So Doctor Laurie, thank you. It's always a pleasure. I just appreciate you sharing and doing everything you do. You're welcome. My pleasure. Absolutely. And I want to thank everyone for tuning in to the Conquering Cancer Summit. Please share this with friends and family. Together, we truly can make a difference for the future of humanity in ending the cancer pandemic. Thank you and I wish you ultimate health and happiness. Be well.