42 Interview with Theo Hanson The Vida Protocol and Vida Center.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
42 Interview with Theo Hanson The Vida Protocol and Vida Center.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
Hi and welcome to the Cancer Secrets podcast. I am your host and guide, Dr. Jonathan Stegall. Cancer is like a thief who has come to steal, kill and destroy. I have personally seen it wreak havoc on patients, friends and even my own family. But I am on a mission to change the cancer paradigm through the practice of integrative oncology cancer treatment that integrates the best of conventional medicine with the best of alternative therapies backed by science and personalized to each patient. You need a positive voice you can trust. This podcast will share valuable information to give you practical hope for a better outcome. So I invite you to join me on this journey as we seek to change the cancer paradigm together. Hello and welcome back to the Cancer Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jonathan Stegall. This is season three and episode number 42. I have a wonderful guest for us today. In this episode, Theo Hanson. Theo is a researcher and visionary. He's learned that diet and lifestyle interventions have a role to play in the treatment of cancer. Since his wife's breast cancer diagnosis five years ago, he sought to better understand why and how some of these diet and lifestyle interventions that most of us have been making can yield a really big benefit for some patients and less so for others. Through this process, Theo has made it his mission to educate the masses as to what he's learned, and he's going to share some of his findings with us today. So, Theo, it's such an honor to have you. Thank you.
Speaker2:
Oh, my gosh. The honor is all mine. I can't tell you. There's first of all, the fact that there's an integrative oncologist. It's like I found a unicorn, so.
Speaker1:
I appreciate that.
Speaker2:
Yeah, but I enjoy your podcast too. There's a couple of them that I've really enjoyed more than others. All of them have been great, but I really I was tickled the first time that you recorded a Methionine because it is such a cornerstone of a presentation that I have and that really if people understood more about nutrition than we would be less confused about what diet really is probably best for us in these times. So I really enjoy it. I really like the way you approach the challenges that we face in decision making because you have a real you have a good critical mind. You're your free thinker, but you're also your mind's not so open that your brain falls out.
Speaker1:
Well, thank you. You know, I'm just so thrilled to have you on the episode because we met a couple of years ago through a mutual acquaintance. And I remember just we got to chat a little bit at that time, just about obviously your story and and what you've learned. And I told you what I do here, and I just really felt like I'd met a kindred spirit just to someone like you, those who's the open minded skepticism I talk so much about, and people probably get tired of hearing me talk about, but I felt like you were really of the same mindset and that especially with cancer treatment, there's there's a lot of good out there, but there's also a lot we can do better. And how do we filter that information? And I know that's what we both try to really impart to, to, to our audiences is here's how we can better look at this and approach this in a way that gives us access to all the many good things out there, but also kind of filters out the things that we don't need to be incorporating.
Speaker2:
That's it. My, my my true mission in life is to seek out and find what is the MVP, the minimum viable protocol that everybody has to do. I don't care about all the billions of things you could do. What are the things that you really have to do when you're facing serious diseases like heart disease, cancer or even diabetes or others? What is it? What is that we really have to do versus all the products we could buy?
Speaker1:
Right. Absolutely. I love it. Well, let's jump in. So so your world changed a lot in 2014. Your wife, Kim, was was diagnosed with breast cancer. And a lot a lot changed for you. And my understanding from from what you had told me when we met a couple of years ago is you had a lot of really great things going on at the time. I mean, life was good and you had a lot going on in a positive sense. And then then this diagnosis kind of came out of the blue, from what I understand. Could you tell us a little more about how that came about and kind of what you were thinking?
Speaker2:
Yeah, it was crazy. First of all, you have to the visual is I I'm five foot nine. I was still five foot nine in 2014, but I was £267 and I'd already had a heart attack. Wow. My thirties. Yeah. And so living a life out of balance was the norm for me. And so I had done 63. I bought and sold 63 homes in 20 1213 in that year, stretch flipping homes. So you can imagine in the San Diego market, those are that's a lot of real estate to do. We had a big company and then we could see that the market was changing. So I'd headed out to Chicago and set a home up out there. So I was flying back to San Diego. It was my youngest was turning 18, Kim was turning 48, my middle son was getting married. My oldest was about to have their first child. And Kim says to me, I have a lump. And I was like, okay, well, like, let's just go to the the doctor that deals with lumps in the breast and let's go do that. And so that was really at the end of January, she didn't get diagnosed until March. And it was it was really, really hard to you're not really ready for it. I think that when the doctor calls and says, hey, I need you to get a pen and paper, I want you to write some things down. You should automatically be prepared, like take a deep breath and get ready, because it's not like all of your health markers are fantastic.
Speaker2:
They're usually going to tell you something that you need to know that's maybe feels like bad news. So it came as a shock. You know, Kim's been she has a low body weight. She's she's never had a you know, what I would think would be the normal risk factors. But now looking backwards, you see all the risk factors that are there besides excess body weight. But she just has a high metabolism. She's a thin girl. And so just didn't think that it would come in our family that way. But it wasn't the first time the cancer had visited us. I was in I was a pre-med major and a physics minor. University of California, San Diego. When my mom was diagnosed with myeloma and she had some other elements, other prolific syndrome and stuff that gave her a very short, anticipated life span, left her mortality was was predicted to be a number of specific number of months. Mom went on to do 13 years proving the whole world wrong and and it ended up my mom was the one was actually much more integrative and also looking at the holistic side. So that was a shock. I just wasn't I just thought, this is usual, I'll go home. And then we decided we went on a nice vacation and sailed for a couple of weeks around the eastern Caribbean Islands. And then we got home on May 31st, in June one, we decided we would we would start to address our cancer.
Speaker1:
So so between the time she was diagnosed and the early part of June, had you really started researching a lot at that point, or did you kind of purposely try to just stay away from a lot of it and enjoy your your vacation?
Speaker2:
Yeah, if I was going to have that really transparent, vulnerable, honest moment, I did what I think that most husbands and spouses do or anyone who has a loved one who's diagnosed is we immediately start a dialogue that says, Well, I'm not a doctor. I don't know what to do. And I just began to surrender what I would call a power. I just began to like, I don't know, let's just find the best doctor. And the problem is, there really isn't a great rating system. It's not like there's a review of like how many people are super satisfied with this doctor? How many times is this doctor lost their license? How many times is somebody attributed harm or something? So you just you just assume that every doctor must be equally as amazing, with the exception of maybe a handful that have won some prestigious award. So that crossed my mind and began to become part of my thinking. But it didn't last long because within about a day, Kim said to me, I feel like you're distancing yourself away from me. I feel like I've lost you. I don't know what's going on. And so I did what every grown man does. I pouted and I stayed up all night and I. I read everything that I could find in the literature because that was a strength that I had. As a pre-med, I was really interested. It's just it's easier for me to read because I can understand who the authors are. I can understand their bias pretty quickly, try to figure out what they were trying to look at and see. So I just sort of looking at it.
Speaker2:
And so she was estrogen and progesterone receptor positive. She had a high er score, her high score was also unattractive. Her, she was moderately differentiated already even though her tumor was 1.6 centimeters up at about 1:00 on the right breast and pathology kicked it back out. So we had a pathology. We know what we know what we've got. No, we're up against. So I dove in and I noticed that the suggested regimen was going to be Tamoxifen. I looked at the risks related to Tamoxifen and the sun rose, the sun came up. And so I went in and I kind of pulled on Kim's toes and I just said, Hey, I there's some things I'm kind of worried about. We should be asking the doctor. And she just kind of woke up like, Wow, when did you get up? And I was like, Why didn't you go to bed? Because, you know, because I care so much. And I really think it was it was that that pouty kind of thing that I did that actually changed our trajectory. And it would be the next when we went in the doctor's appointment and she, the surgical oncologist, comes in and she says, she says, Hey, I don't have all of your paperwork back. Look, looks at her medical records because Kim, like not even remembering Kim's name or anything and says, did you get the book? They hand you the booklet called You Have Cancer. And we're like, Yeah. And she's like, okay, well, you have cancer. We're like. Is this like a like a comedy skit or something that's kind of feels a little bit strange? I didn't understand.
Speaker1:
Camera or something, right?
Speaker2:
Yeah. So we don't have all of your labs back yet, all of your information back. But I want to talk to you about your treatment options. And you went right into Tamoxifen. So I asked her, what do you not have back yet? And she goes, oh, we don't have your estrogen and progesterone receptor positivity, your receptor panel back yet. Because. Well, then why are we talking about Tamoxifen if you're not even sure? Because there's a chance that it could be triple negative. It could be a single positive. I don't know. It could be something else. And she started spouting these statistics that didn't match up with the stuff I'd just been reading the week before. So I corrected her and I said, That's not what those studies actually said. No one study said what you just said. You actually connected three different studies and gave an aggregate value that isn't established. She goes, No. I go, Do you know that there's a small study that's 70% of 30% of women who are on a five year regimen of Tamoxifen would develop 30% would develop an endometrial cancer, and 70% would die of that cancer. She's like, No. I go, okay. And she goes, Could you send it to me? And I was like, Oh. So I pulled it up on my phone and I sent it to her. And I think that's when we realized that there was a Wrinkle in The Matrix, that it was like maybe we needed to be a little bit more proactive because you could feel the speed of the shuttle that moves a woman down the breast cancer track.
Speaker2:
It's really, really quick. I want them to go from diagnosis to mastectomy in a matter of weeks. They've got a breast navigator nurse that comes in and helps move them along. And so nobody was talking to us about any of those other options. And then we asked about a pending vacation, if we could take it. And she says to me, No problem, that was my thesis in school. It doesn't matter if you have wait for a DCIS, which Kim did not have ductal carcinoma in situ. It doesn't matter if you wait 30 days or 36 months. The outcomes are the same for treatment. I was like, Oh, wow. Okay. So we went on vacation and then we came back and she was gone and so was all of our medical records. We're like, Did she take them with her? And they were like, We can't find them. We're going to rebuild it. No problem. Come on in. We'd love to see you. And that's when we decided we would be a self pay and we would go out and seek out maybe, maybe the best in the field. And so we found a leading breast cancer oncologist, Dr. Chavez. So we started building a team.
Speaker1:
Okay. So so as you start to get more into the research, would you say at that point you were mostly involved in more conventional research in terms of chemotherapy, radiation, surgery? Or were you already starting to get more into some more natural alternative treatments?
Speaker2:
No, in the beginning, I was the big fat guy who had heart issues and snored all night and was developing narcolepsy. But staying up reading all these studies. No, I was really looking through I was relying 100% on the conventional model, just assuming that we would find some emerging, something Kim was Kim was hinting that she was interested in looking at a more complete approach, like maybe something a little less toxic, maybe something a little bit less painful to endure. But that was really what was leading us. It'd be it'd be a future event that would that would change our course forever.
Speaker1:
So you weren't you weren't one of these couples that kind of leans hippie anyway, and you're already kind of into that kind of stuff, and you just already kind of knew you didn't want to do conventional stuff. I mean, you were like you said, you kind of took the long route to get there.
Speaker2:
We were the least likely candidates to be, you know, to become communicators of diet and lifestyle intervention. We weren't living that life. We we had some awareness. Like, I think all human beings know you're not supposed to you're not supposed to eat and drink alcohol at the levels that we do in the United States. And I think that we knew that. But yeah, it was it would be it would just be like, I think God's grace, just that he'd have an intervention of his own, where he'd send somebody our way that says, Oh, you got to you got to call so-and-so. He had throat cancer and he cured it with a juicing protocol. I was like, Aha, not interested because I didn't want to talk to him. Kim doesn't have throat cancer and nobody cares. Cancer. The juicing protocol. Knock that off.
Speaker1:
So. So you and I are both Christians and a prayer was a big component of of this whole process for you guys. And so so tell us more about that. I mean, you'd obviously been praying for guidance and direction and and then here here's this this guy with throat cancer who supposedly had a good outcome. So how did all that come about?
Speaker2:
Yeah, thank you. It's so I am blessed to have had just so many wonderful people come through my life. And, you know, I think that God shows his hand in our lives if if we'll stop and look for it to see where he's been and where he's delivered us. And so I'm still friends today with my junior high wrestling coach, who was previously an Olympic wrestling coach, who decided to give of his time to help in the local community at the local junior high. And that set me on a path where I ended up doing really well as an athlete. Obviously it helped having a great coach. And so I went on, that was part of my high school in college and then, you know, so he was the one that said, Hey, you should go talk to this guy named James. And James is a PhD, but his PhD is not in the medical sciences and I really wasn't interested in doing it. So we're as we go to prayer, previously we'd already done I'd had about ten years of theological training. I got ordained. My middle son is also he's a pastor, he's graduated Southern California seminary. And so I my view is that God's not an ATM. Like I don't walk up and say, God, I'm a little short on rent.
Speaker2:
I need you to close that gap. And by the way, I have heart disease, diabetes or cancer, and I'd like you to cure that. I got to get down to the the local bar or to the to a big steak dinner. And so if you could hurry up and do that, that'd be great. I don't that's not been my relationship instead is my relationship has been to really understand that God has a design and it's our job to adjust to him, not ask him to adjust to us. So our prayer really was, Lord, we're scared. The stakes feel really big and high. We don't know what to do. And we'd like for you to to illuminate our path with the Holy Spirit. Tell us where to go, what to do. And we're feeling we were feeling more and more lost as we saw what I kind of call The Wizard of Oz moment, where you're like, Wait a minute, oncology actually doesn't have it going on. And then I ran across the World Health Organization document that stated At a 16 high income democracies, the United States ranks eighth for neoplasm survival, ninth for breast cancer survival.
Speaker2:
And all that clicked in my mind was I could literally move to another country and Kym's chances of surviving breast cancer go up. And I was like, Oh, man, we need to be vigilant. And that was. That was. It was that moment and then the invitation. So James reached out and said We needed to come to his house. Don't go to an oncologist. I was like, okay, and I'll show you what I did. And it was a beautiful moment. It was way more involved than I thought. He had a lot to share and say, and he was a survivor. 2000. He built it himself before the Internet. He put together an environmental exposures, diet and lifestyle changes, and he managed his own cancer stage for esophageal. He was his father and his uncle had both passed from it. And so why that was so prevalent in his in his world, he didn't know for sure he's still alive today. It's still amazing. Never went to those other things. Maybe he's the great outlier. But for me, all I thought was this guy is either a fraud or he's insane. But there's no way I'm going to not go to like there's no way I'm not going to the oncologist.
Speaker1:
Right? Yeah. So at this point, Kim had not started any sort of treatment. Tamoxifen had not been started, no surgery or chemo had been done. You were still kind of in the info gathering stage at that point.
Speaker2:
Yeah, biopsy only.
Speaker1:
And where were we timeline wise on the calendar because you got back from your trip into May, early June.
Speaker2:
Yeah. We met with James June 25th. We met with our new oncology team July, about about late June. But we had a they schedule an MRI. She wanted a new fresh MRIs. She didn't want to look at anything else. She wanted something to start fresh from because enough time had gone by. So July 26 about, we went in and had an MRI done and we'd been at that point we'd been we had made radical changes. So I no longer went back to Chicago. I took over everything that was that was stressing him out that I possibly could. We started really redefining what our separate values were together and how we would we would sort of navigate these waters, how we would communicate to others and what our expectations were preparing for end of life conversations. But also, Kim started saying something really strange. She said, Maybe God let me have cancer so I can go through this and then I can inspire and encourage others. And I was like the theologian me was like, That's not how God works. I would later find out that's exactly how God works, is that God has got us built this in a special way. But we started making some changes. We changed all the instrumentals and we did go on a radical dietary intervention. We went on a full time juicing protocol, which I feel like I, I feel like it creates confusion to say that with some people because it's like we didn't go on a carrot juice.
Speaker2:
I didn't go on a grape juice. We didn't do that stuff. This PhD had handed us a 28 ingredient approach to eating, and when I sat down and compared the nutrient value to a sort of a chronometer to go through, you're going to measure all of the nutrient value. I realized that there was this was definitely going to be an immune boosting approach. But at £267, I like to eat. And so I thought, Well, I'll do it with Kim. It couldn't hurt. And after about two weeks we were feeling amazing. So when that when we got that first MRI, we had an interesting challenge on our hands. The tumor was apparently 50% smaller in volume size, however, same breast, lower quadrant and in the axial axillary lit up. There was something that wasn't ever seen before. And then here comes that defining moment of like, did we create metastatic cancer with a juicy protocol? Or You just don't know? And so that was a big night for us. There was a lot of tears. Did we create this or we're doing the wrong things? Where do we go from here? And our onco surgeon was not interested in discussing. She just called it spontaneous regression.
Speaker1:
Been doing anything?
Speaker2:
Nothing.
Speaker1:
Even though you had made significant changes in the lifestyle, peace, diet, exercise, all those things in her mind, you had been doing nothing?
Speaker2:
Absolutely, yeah. It doesn't matter. Food doesn't matter. Diet doesn't matter.
Speaker1:
And I just want to remind our listeners, I mean, this was this was an aggressive cancer. I mean, you mentioned briefly that the Chi 67 I mean, that's a that's a measurement of the basically the metabolic activity of the cancer and its 0 to 100 and under ten is pretty slow. 10 to 20 is intermediate and anything over 20 is considered more aggressive. And this was a more aggressive cancer. This wasn't just one of those really low grade. You can just kind of watch it for a few years kind of things. I mean, this was a very, very aggressive thing. And so that was kind of the background, I'm sure, and how all of you were looking at this thing.
Speaker2:
Yeah, absolutely. Moderately differentiated, too. So you're already you're already seeing the cells begin to loss. It's lost its its known use or purpose. Right. It's become this morphed thing. It's dropping out elements of the cells. So it has its ability to reproduce much quicker. It can use fuel more efficiently. It's not obligated to as much. Yeah, it's the setup. I mean, it's the thing where you have to realize it's like not all cancers are the same. And luckily we had reached out to a pathologist for a second opinion and he was like, Your questions indicate that you have no idea what you're up against. And we're like, Wow, okay. And his name is Dr. Leo's. And Leo's said he said, you're asking questions like you have ductal carcinoma in situ and we're like, well, that's what we thought we have. And she's like, No, you have you have invasive ductal carcinoma and ductal carcinoma in situ and some in some area. But but basically you have a single tumor and here are the characteristics and you need to start doing something right away. And so it's pretty stressful. So we had to do a MRI guided biopsy 30 days later in August because they wanted to find out what was going on in the x x axillary and the the lower quadrant and Kim has implants. So and we go in for another MRI. Now, at this point, we've been on for 60 days. I've lost 45 or £50 by now and I'm feeling amazing. Kim Looks like all of our friends. Like, I don't know what you guys are doing, but you look like Benjamin Button. You're going backwards in time, and I'm having fun because I keep having to go to the thrift store to get clothes because I realize I'm going all the way.
Speaker2:
I'm going to lose all this way. So why buy new clothes? I just started buying used clothes because it made sense. And Kim and I were having a ball, but we were also getting a lot of static socially and then medically. I really wanted the oncologists to take a look at our intervention and just tell me if there was something I needed to change. And she was just like split it back across the table and said, I'm not going to talk to you about this. You're going to kill your wife with your baking soda ideas. And I was like, I don't even know what that means because I wasn't we didn't we weren't immersed in some movement. We were just fighting for Kim's life. Sure. And so we also happened to be self paced. So she tried to block us from getting the MRI results for that biopsy. So I circumvented and I asked the radiologist while she was there to please provide for me to set markers on the primary tumor. She resisted. It was really interesting. And I basically said to her, Great, then you and I are walking back in because I'm the customer. I'm the guy paying you and I are walking back in and we're going to go set the markers on that. I want to see what it is. And so it was another 44% smaller than it had been the month prior. So in total volume, if you do a volume calculation and but we know we're facing these Mets they stuck that that biopsy through her implant twice that day. And so now we have a ruptured implant and then she did a mammogram that same like two week window and something wasn't right that left breast started to deform out of nowhere.
Speaker1:
So you can usually see.
Speaker2:
It, so you can visually see that breast changing shape. And so we go back in for another MRI because they've got to try to figure out, do we have silicone leaking and they want to go ahead and get back in that armpit again to see if there's anything up in the nodes. It's either silicone and there is both breasts are leaking. And so but now the tumor is another 34% smaller than it was the month before. And so now the only conversation you can have in a conventional model is a bilateral mastectomy. We're like, why? Why are we talking about this even make sense to us? Why don't we just just do a lumpectomy? Well, X plant, we'll figure it out or whatever. And they're just like, no, no. Given all things, this is serious. You don't understand. Silicone poisoning is real. You should just do a bilateral mastectomy. It'll be so much better. And Kim's like, I having a problem with that because at 1.6 centimeter tumor has gotten quite small by now. This doesn't really feel like where we want to go. So it was a tough place to be to really realize that medical injury is real and that good, meaning people can find themselves in awkward positions even if they have good intentions, you know?
Speaker1:
Well, and this just highlights for me the frustration with, you know, we talk about the importance of data in medicine. I mean, all all of us who go to medical school in residency and fellowship are trained in, okay, here, here is basically your your verified data. It's labs, it's imaging, it's it's all these kinds of things. Well, the imaging was showing progress. So it's kind of funny how that progress was was questioned, even though it's right there in front of everyone to see on on on a very appropriate imaging choice, which was an MRI, that things were improving. But yet there was this resistance to accepting that simply because you weren't doing what they wanted you to do.
Speaker2:
Yeah. And it was interesting that was they that first night that we had been told that there was metastatic evidence. You know, we went back to the Internet and just said, well, maybe somebody else has gone through this before us. So in 2014, anybody that was on the Internet was not somebody you could relate to. They really seemed quite like they were they were wackadoo, to be honest. I was like, I'm not listening to that person. I'm not I don't care. How about I want something? Common sense is saying that that person's claims and statements defy common sense. And I ran across a website of a guy who had had colon cancer and had a resection and declined chemotherapy. Does it sound familiar? So it was Chris Ward. He did not have a single video interview at the time. There was just a blog and I thought, Oh, this is interesting. And there was something like I just as I kept searching, I ran across Patrick Quinn's book, How to Beat Cancer with Nutrition. And I'm a reader. So I sit up and I read it all night. It just took me all night. It's a it's a comprehensive book.
Speaker1:
And then back behind me on my bookshelf here.
Speaker2:
Yeah, I've got I've got.
Speaker1:
It, too. So as Chris's book, both books are right.
Speaker2:
There same and and so it was it, it felt like a confirmation that we weren't insane, that maybe we were seeing something, but, hey, this is Kim's life. We're not here to prove anything. There's no movement. There's no there's no truth about cancer movements. There's none of this, like, polarizing stuff that's going on. That's 14 in 2014. It's it's a wasteland. There's just it's a desert. There's nothing. And we couldn't get a decent conversation. So we found a couple of survivors who had taken either integrative approach or in their journey had broke from the norm and that they were thriving. And so we ended up finding one that was local. She runs an awareness website. We're still friends today. Her name is Donna Pinto. She's amazing. She just shared that she had three lumpectomies and never got margins and she finds us that I can't do this anymore. And so she adopted diet lifestyle. And lifestyle is the it's the most misunderstood or ignored part of a two word phrase, right? Diet and lifestyle. Only thing you probably can hear is diet. It's like nobody eats their way out of cancer. Nobody, I'll repeat that. Nobody that I've ever met ate their way out of cancer. That's not not a true statement. But nutrition is the cornerstone of a healthy body, of a body that can heal and do its functions. You can't you can't ignore it. But it's it's just a cornerstone. So lifestyle is really where we should be focusing so much of the conversation because the scientific debate over diet needs to stop. There's no scientific debate. There's just a social media debate. Right. The science is relatively settled. Ornish, Esselstyn, Furman, McCormick, McDougall. I mean, hands down the epidemiological study of the event itself. We got to stop arguing about risks and disease, reversing foods. Stop. That's that's already that's clear. And if someone says it's not clear, it's like, what are you looking at that is clear? Because that's that's some of the simplest stuff to look at.
Speaker1:
So absolutely. Absolutely. So I'd like to just take a minute to to segway a little bit into juicing. So you mentioned earlier that you went on a basically an all juicing diet. So you were you were eating exclusively liquid meals that you made yourself for a long period of time. And let's just talk a little about what juicing is. I know there's a lot of misconception. Is it the same thing as a smoothie? Does it just mean you're going and buying juice off the shelf like orange juice or grape juice? What does that actually mean? A lot of people are confused by that. So if you could just explain what juicing is and kind of how you came up with different recipes you used.
Speaker2:
Yeah. So the first initial recipe was gifted to us by the gentleman who had gone on his own journey. And it was comprehensive, but there were some there were some gaps in it, you know, the use of eggs. And if you start looking at the data around methionine, it was like instantaneous was like, oh, we can improve this. So we made adjustments to it, but. When I say juicing in the context of our journey, I'm not talking about a cold pressed juice you bought at a store. I'm not talking about something. You stuck in a blender and chunked up or whatever. You put in a magic bullet or a bullet or whatever the different device names are. I'm not talking about that, and that's fine if somebody wants to add that to their life. I'm super glad for people to get more plants into their body. But what I'm talking about is taking 28 ingredients, the ones that should go through a slow speed juicer, go through a slow speed juicer, lemon lime, apple, orange, garlic, ginger, turmeric. All these things you can put through that are just. We're not like there seems to be a reasonable consensus around most reasonable people that those foods have benefit. They have we know they have terpenes, flavonoids. We know that they have phytonutrients. We know that they have very active compounds in them.
Speaker2:
But much of the science that people like to refer to in food is really about isolates and compounds that have been extracted, and it's not tit for tat. Those are very different. That's not an apples to oranges, but you run everything through the juicer that should go. You pour that in the blender and in the blender you add strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, any any of those types of fruits that have berries, that have seeds on them, that are that have anticancer nutrients. And then that we do want to ingest that we don't want to lose, but we also want to try to break this shell out, if we could. And then if you're like whatever your powder attitude is around spirulina or corella and if you like Amla or whatever, but put those things in there and I like my stuff a little colder than warm. So you can throw a little ice in if you want to and you juice that. But you also put in ground flax, ground chia and ground hemp seeds because you have to look at a whole diet based on the best disease. Reversing is always going to be lower on the protein side, so it's going to be low to moderate on the fat. And so it going to be Whole Foods and those carbs are always going to be in a whole food form, non refined and they're not going to be on the heavy starches.
Speaker2:
It's not the only person ever fights for us. High starch meal is going to end up being like McDougall with his fascination for proving the potatoes, not the enemy of the world. I'm like, Oh, right. But we also have amino acids, right? We have we have omega acids. We want to look at those three six ratios. So fiber, though, every person who wants to be fanatical about juicing needs to explain to me, what's your fiber strategy? Because the human body needs 30 to 40 grams of fiber a day in order to execute, in order to manage blood sugar or to do a bunch of different things. So again, that's where grinding those seeds and nuts and adding those in those other powders, measuring what's going on, using a slow speed juicer, use a high speed and slow speed. And then tell me, look at all that fiber that's left over and say, where does all that stuff go? Like, if you're more if you have a more efficient machine that has less waste, it's you consumed it. I mean, it's kind of just simple math. It's like half of that went into me and then I just looked at calories as well for Kim because she needed to maintain body weight.
Speaker2:
I played around with a lot of things. I looked at being chaotic long before there was a keto conversation. Like what? Because I had fun. I lost £110, you know, in all. And it was a beautiful place to be. And for Kim, we didn't want to lose any weight. We needed to keep it on. So juicing for me, what we chose to do was try to stuff as much nutrition in her and then to really to monitor. I did not know that my wife, she's been married 27 years now, but at 27 at the time I didn't know that she didn't have a bowel movement every day. Like I didn't know that. And so as I'm doing this, I'm looking at the nutrition research, bowel movements are everything. I mean, it's so important, especially if you have an estrogen receptor positive cancer. Estrogen has moved out to the bowels. So if you're not eliminating well, your intestines will reabsorb that and bring any one of those e one, e two or three to bring it right back up. Whatever's left now, you have excess. What we're trying to eliminate it. So we just started fine tuning at that point and had a lot of fun with it. And then we ultimately just yeah, we left the system.
Speaker1:
Well, well, since you mentioned bowel movements, I'd like to just add on to what you said, because I'm glad you mentioned it. I mean, I think in our communities, I mean, people are aware of, you know, the bowel health is important. And obviously gut health and probiotics are are are the you know, they're the hot topic. They have been for a couple of years. But, you know, the conventional mindset and this is what I was trying on coming through my training was normal bowel habit ranges from three bowel movements a day to three bowel movements a week. So that's a pretty wide range going three times a day versus once every three days or so. That's a big range. And I would say that we want to air more toward at least one a day. I mean, you don't have to be having three or four necessarily, but you need to be going at least once a day. If you're not you're not you're not getting rid of what you need to, as you said. And the other thing is, just look at your poop. Like people are always amazed when I ask, well, what does it look like? And some of them I'm like, I've never looked at my poop. You should always look at your poop. Turn around, look at the toilet, see what it looks like, see if it looks any different than it used to. We're all family here. We can talk about that. But I think that's such an important part of health. I mean, even more important than making sure you take a probiotic and all that kind of stuff is look at your poop, look at your bowel habits. You know, if you see a big change, that's important, whether you have cancer or not. So just wanted to get that in.
Speaker2:
I 100% agree with you. We tried a couple of probiotics, but the data because now by now I'm in looking for published literature. I'm trying to marry two crazy ideas together. I'm trying to find where's the intersection with published literature. And by now you can hear the the the machine spinning up. That's like the government is hiding the cure to cancer. The government's not hiding the cure to cancer. If you got caught saying that, stop saying it. If you believe that, stop believing it. Anything you want to look up has been so well studied, with the exception of a couple of combinations. Right. So I think you said it in one of your previous podcasts. What we're looking for is when the hole is greater than the sum of its parts. Right. And so we have a couple of gaps about where the synergistic effects are of a couple of things or really what happens when we take something out or puts something in. Like we're still places in that. But like vitamin C, it's been studied at nauseam. Like, like what do you want, a coffee enemas? I'm so happy when people send me all the evidence of a coffee enema and I send it back to him and I go, Hey, eight out of nine things you sent me were oral intake. Thank you for proving my point that drinking a cup of coffee is actually associated with improvements and reduction in risk, but excess coffee is dangerous. Sticking it up the other direction does not negate any of that. It doesn't create something new. And if it brings you joy, if you're happy, I would say it's probably the first time that anyone's ever sat still for 15 or 20 minutes.
Speaker2:
So that's probably the biggest health improvement is just calm in the heck down. But but again, I'm not making fun of people who really believe that that's the great differentiator. I can just tell you after, I don't know, five dozen and six dozen people we've worked with, we're not doing coffee enemas. And so many of them have come and said like, oh, you know, I'm doing everything right. And I'm like, great 70 supplements a day. What? Like, why do you need those? Oh, because so-and-so says so. It's like, Yeah, but why does your body need those? Why do you think your body is deficient? Why aren't you getting that from food? If you're not getting it from food, there's a way to look into test, right? You're looking at Nova's nutritional and GI effects or any doctor's data or any of those. We can you can see if somebody's got a digestive issue that needs to be addressed. So probiotics for us were very varied and diverse, but I was floored that while sauerkraut, sauerkraut that you make or you go to the farmer's market and make market and buy that those carry with them naturally occurring bacteria that are oftentimes on the low side in people who present with cancer, or at the very least, they're definitely useful for digestive digestion and immune function. So we started looking heavily at we just started making our own sauerkraut and Kim became a pooping champion.
Speaker1:
I love it. That's great. So you stayed on this using diet for a while, right? And this wasn't just something you did for a month or so, I mean, which is still a long time. But you kept doing this right because you both felt well and scans kept improving and. Stay the course, right? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Speaker2:
I would have we would have probably continued on forever, had a couple of things not happen for us at 100 days. The tumor was now so small, but we had leaking implants. And so we finally convinced the surgeon because she had been recruited to your area, to go work in a hospital environment near you. And so we were we were one of two last patients that she was obligated to do something with. And so she was like, I want you to do radiation. Or she wanted a bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy. And we said, no, we're looking at breast conservation at this point, but we're going to X plant. What you work with the surgeon, we'll do it all at the same time. So we went and visited two of her surgeons, plastic surgeons. They said No dice, go for the thing. So we went back, we talked to some other surgeons and we went back to her and we said, listen, lumpectomy, we'll consider radiation, but that's a hammer. And if we get the whole thing with margins, we might want to save that hammer as as for recurrence, because there's some characteristics her age we're making. We're seeing that the body has some ability to be involved. We're not sure what that means. So we'd be good with the lumpectomy. We're not so sure. And she said, okay, as long as you're willing to sign off on it, it was great. So we did a lumpectomy with margins, which is fantastic because the radiologist comes out and says, What are we doing today? And we're like, Well, we're prepping her for surgery.
Speaker2:
And he's like, Not this patient. And we're like, Yes, this patient. And he's like, I've got to talk to the surgeon to have a meeting. He's like, Why are you want you want me to put a guidewire in this one? Do you want me to tell you like I'm not? I don't feel comfortable. Like I'm telling you this is too small. Like, I don't know that I can get that wire where it needs to go. So we went for it. He inserted the wire, surgeon went, we got margins. Everybody was super amazing. We're super grateful for them because there was no mistakes. They just did a beautiful job. They were caring. She was a little bit aggressive on how much tissue she took out for such a small dot. But I'm still grateful. I'm grateful that there's no like narrow margin. It's margins. We're super clear what was left behind. So that was about 100 days. So we continued on for a total of 11 months. And really the only reason that I stopped was I had been headhunted in April of 2015 to join on as chief operations officer for a new medical meal startup. And for me, this is the embarrassing part of of what I call bad science. I was running around saying you can cure cancer with the juicing protocol, bad science. I was repeating what I thought I saw, but I wasn't putting scientific rigor. I put blinders on.
Speaker2:
So I was I was head on it in my job was to put together a medical advisory team, so the first to join was firm. Then we got Michael Gregor and then we got Esselstyn, Ornish, Klapper and McDougall to all consult and advise us through. I spent 300 hours in continuing medical education on the role of food sciences and genomics and nutrition. And so all of a sudden, scientific rigor is now my thing, right? I'm going to reject all the BS because you have to, because that's the best way to do it. And then at the end, Dr. Hans Deal joined on and then I left the company because they really, in order to do what they needed to do, they needed to look at an all cooked, frozen platform. And I'm like, the science is 75% raw, 25% cooked until you show me that. Something that beats that, that's the only conversation I can have. But Dr. Hans Deal, I got to spend some time with him and he's the one that ran the Adventist studies. Really a brilliant opportunity to be able to sit with somebody who looked at the data of 95,000 already low risk, relatively healthy people from San Diego, California, all the way to Victoria, Canada and Ireland. And looking at 95,000 Adventists and the role of a little bit of meat, a little bit of chicken or a little bit of fish, a little bit of egg and dairy or not at all. What was the reduction in risk of developing or dying of diseases? It's like, wow.
Speaker2:
I mean, it's just kind of like that was that was the gold standard. And so one of the doctors said, do you eat your own food? And I was like, No, I'm a raw vegan libertarian. Like, so I was like, so I tried the food. It was great, but I competed in a Spartan 300 hundred after 11 months, still as a full time juicer. And I was the oldest to enter and I was the only one that could do it in under 20 minutes, which was a requirement. And so it was great to to take the podium. But then I started eating it. I ended up getting back some weight, which was interesting because I'm a food addict and you don't realize how strong the mind is in the way that we eat. And so you can see even eating plant based, I could still manage to get bigger. And by the way, I love that you called out on one of your previous podcasts. I really wish in the cancer conversation we would stop saying vegan. It's so inappropriate, inaccurate and not useful. It's misleading. We have to look at a Whole Foods plant based diet. That's the diet. Vegan diet doesn't mean anything. Thank you. If you want to be a vegan, I'd love for you to be compassionate. To the suffering 9.3 billion land animals a year. It's nuts, but that's a different conversation. Science leads me to my distinctions, not political or social reality.
Speaker1:
Right. I'm tired of the the agendas and the the movements and all this stuff. I mean, to me, plant based, plant focus, whatever you want to call it, it's eating more of nature's food. You know, it's eating more fruits and vegetables and beans and grains. You know, people get hung up on, oh, well, did you did you have an egg or did you do you occasionally eat filet? I personally don't think it makes a big difference if people don't do that stuff occasionally. But when you have cancer, you need to focus on the right things. And if you if you mess up here and there rarely and you have something, maybe that's not as good for you. It's not going to give you cancer again. It's not going to cause a problem. It's when that stuff becomes a habit. So that's that's kind of why I say, listen, start with a plant based diet. Focus on that, especially if you have cancer. Go from there. But but that's where the research points us in the finer details of, well, how often can you have eggs or how often can you have animal protein? I mean, I don't think we know. I mean, the more you have it, the greater your risk is. Right. But we don't know what that cutoff is of. Can you get away with it or not? So just start with plants. Go from there, you know?
Speaker2:
Yeah. I think the Adventist Health Study Dash two gives us an idea of what the risk really is. And so there is an identifiable risk in a healthy population who has a deep sense of purpose, who eats from the community garden and their church garden in their own garden. They're very physically active. They don't they're not involved in high risk behaviors. They don't smoke. They don't drink alcohol. So, I mean, like in that group, you can measure, but this is what we don't know is our bodies are amazing. We can be relatively abusive as long as we don't get too abusive. It's just, you know, it's cancer being multifactorial. I know we've talked about this before is that I don't I'm not finding a single causation. Right. There's definitely like smoking can contribute, but even by itself, how is it that one person is more susceptible than another? There's lots of other mitigating factors, digestion and the microbiome and genetic history and telomerase. I mean, there's just so many different things that are happening. And then also how do people process the rest of it? Because as much as I love being an expert in food now, you know, go try doing some medical studies, some practice based observational studies. The next thing you know, you're like, Oh, food is important, but nobody ever ate their way out of cancer, you know? That's right.
Speaker1:
Right. And I think with our system, too, it's based on researching and isolated thing. Is it this vitamin or this mineral or this intervention? And you can't really do that. I mean, you can try to do it, but it gets back to your overall message earlier with eat whole foods, eat mostly plants, get these things in their natural form because there's a lot of stuff involved in that that we can't isolate and measure. But we know it's good for us. I mean, we know that when we look at total encompassing lifestyle endeavors, that people who do these things that eat a certain way, that exercise a certain way, that lower their stress a certain way, have way less risk of getting cancer. And those that do have cancer have a way lower risk of dying from it when we do these things. Now, what portion of that is the big contributor versus not? We don't know. Or is it a combination of all those things, which is what we think it probably is. But, you know, conventional medicine wants to isolate something out and say, well, this is what it was. Well, what if it's not just one thing? What if it's a combination of things that we'll never have a study on? Because you can't do that? And that's my hunch. And I think that's probably yours, too.
Speaker2:
Absolutely. It's the obvious observation. If you look at somebody who's been a plant based eater, vegetarian or vegan or clear Whole Foods plant based, they're physically active. They have low body weight and they develop cancer. Answer me. That didn't tell me. So you're saying that like, what's the role? It's because you have to look at everything else. Fungal viral, bacterial infection history. You have to look at digestion. I mean, there's just so many parts and pieces to it. And then the other one is look at the five blue zones, right? So four of them are relatively poor. Each of them are very interesting in themselves. The fifth one is Loma Linda, California, which is the highest concentration of Seventh Day Adventists. Like we're right back to that same conversation. What do they all have in common, really is they don't eat too much. They eat from the earth and they eat a reasonable amount of if animal products included. It's very modest and moderate. They have a strong sense of community. They don't stress like we stress in a normal industrialized living. They just don't they're not running around thinking, do I measure up and I buy the new Mercedes because then my neighbor will think I'm really arrived and I've got it going on. I mean, right. So I need to have two boys. Two girls. So it balances out and looks good on the outside so that when we're all dressed up, we all look right. And I just it gets really weird what we go through as a society and where we spend our time.
Speaker2:
And then I think truthfully, you can eat excellent. But if you're afraid that you're going to die and you're afraid you're making bad decisions and you're afraid that people are going to make fun of you for. Having gone off the common conventional path, then it doesn't matter what else you do, because that part right there, all these things work together. It's the sum, it's the whole, it's the sum of the whole versus what the parts are individually. So if you if you think that you can eat your way out of cancer, you're wrong. If you think that stress isn't doing something. Look at the P 53 gene mutation. It's inputs, stress, lack of sleep, isolation, smoking, diet, all those things. So which ones are you supposed to stop? All of them. Change them all. Change everything that's in your power. And I think that that's for me, one of the great discoveries was the most broken part of our current medical system isn't the medical system. It's the individual that walks in the door and asks for the absolution wafer or super pill, like I've just been living life with no, no care or ah, commitment or obligation, but I need you to just give me a prescription that I can take for a 60 or 90 days, and that will make it all go away. That, that there is if you if you change that we change medicine. Right? If we just do.
Speaker1:
Absolutely. And the thought that just came to me as you were talking is we have all this research, which is great, but it's interesting. Where does that research lead us? Well, you need to eat more plants. You need to get out in nature more. You need to embrace family. You need to not live in fear and be overwhelmed by stress. Well, that's what the Bible tells us, right? I mean, we go back to the Garden of Eden. I mean, that's right where we are right now. When we look at all this research, it's confirming all that.
Speaker2:
Yeah.
Speaker1:
And we lost our way. I mean.
Speaker2:
I love how you said it, because if I could sum up, after interviewing hundreds of people that are thrivers and then interviewing those who struggle to survive and many of them have passed since, what shows up in common among thrivers? Because, I mean, there are so many people, there are so many crazy journeys. Right. But what the all four really had in common so far that I've been able to see, I just didn't get the ratios right until we started doing a practice based study. But the four things that showed up where everyone changed their diet, they start, they move to the other side of the spectrum. The people who heal the fastest were the people who ate on the good, better and best scale. They ate the best. They chose to go to the best. Those are always going to be your faster healers. There were people who radically changed the amount of mental energy, conscious and unconscious that is just being burned up in disease or distress or anger or your fear, frustration. And then they also changed the way they connected with people. So it's like nurture, breathe, love and support. So how do human connections work? Because the nature of most people is to withdraw. I don't want to be a burden on anybody.
Speaker2:
Oh, my gosh. We have limited resources. I don't know that that would change our finances. Hey, cancer changes everyone's finances. Picking out your path for survival is the best investment you can possibly make. It doesn't even make sense. It's like. Like. So nobody needs you. You're such a giver that if you were gone, somebody would have to, like, wipe their own butt or wash their own laundry or make their own food. You're just like, I'm like, you're such an integral part of your family because I work with a lot of women, clearly, but love and support. And then so so people had to rework their team around and realize when your friend's telling you that they think you're making a bad decision, that's okay one time, because we want to have honest dialogue. We don't need an echo chamber. But if that person creates stress for you and can't understand why you're making the decisions you're making, replace them. Push them off for a time. Take a break. You know you want a static free support team and you've got to be able to believe it. And that's going to be complicated in the medical side because there's not a lot of support if you deviate off the path. The conventional model is in constriction. They're terrified of us.
Speaker2:
They are super terrified of our ideas because they don't know where they fit and they don't think that they're going to work or they want to defend what they've done. And then the last and final was belief. So the fourth thing that I saw every single thriver have is they believed in themselves, their worthiness and ability to heal. They believe in their team. They believe in the medicine choices. Placebo, nocebo, is anybody not? I mean, how could you be confused in today's day and age of studies? You got to believe in what you're doing. You've got to believe in what you're doing, period. And when you stop believing, stop doing it or reconcile why you've lost that confidence in it and then believe that cancer is temporary and then believe that it's part of a bigger purpose. So when Kim said, Maybe God let me have cancer so that I could go through this and then I could inspire and encourage others. She saw herself in the future with a voice contributing, wanted welcomed. I mean, this is like that's the human experience, right? And so from a biblical perspective, eat from the garden, just like we just talked about. You cast your cares on him. Don't take him back. Like, Oh, Lord, I'm terrified.
Speaker2:
I need you to come comfort me like I'm scared. I'm going to trust you. And then as he's got it, you're like, I should probably put that back on and carry that right, like. Take it back. And then, if God could love you long before you loved him, why are we so conditional in how we look at love? If someone doesn't do something the way that I want them, they don't love me. It's like, whoa, that's not true at all. That's not that's not how any of that works. And then God knew you before he hit you in your mother's womb. Right? And he knows how many hairs you have on your head. And if he'll if he'll take care of and feed the sparrows and clothe the lilies of the field, don't you think he's got a hand in where you're at? Like this is part of something big. So from a biblical perspective, if we would adopt and abide in that, then what happens is all of the body's chemistry becomes favorable and becomes inhospitable to cancer. And then it is much more helpful in the management of every disease. And by the way, you feel amazing. You start feeling way more loving and kind. You're a better human being and you're a better Christian.
Speaker1:
Wow. Amen. And what you just said is bigger than any any threat out there. I mean, cancer or anything that we feel like tips the scales toward cancer, whether it's bad decisions people have made in the past, whether it's that that toxic environment out there that we all know exists. I mean, a lot of people are living in fear and regret over those things and God's bigger than all that. So thank you for sharing that.
Speaker2:
Well, thank you. But and we have an opportunity this is our chance to reset. We can, I think, an integrative medicine, you know, and I think I would hope your audience has the clarity. I love clarity. An integrative medical doctor is a classically trained doctor who has the ability to use that observation to look at evidence based adjunct therapies and say, there's a place for these in my practice, right? And so so many people I meet go, Oh, my integrative oncologist is promoting that. I consider that I should go get radiation, chemotherapy or surgery. It's like, right, because you went to an integrative doctor, you went to a doctor who's saying to you, My classically trained perspective is this, and we've got to be mindful of that, right? We have to be super aware. And I think that people are a tad bit confused when we have that conversation. And if you're going to somebody who's fully holistic and and nontoxic and natural, then I would say to this, if you can't figure it out in 90 days, you didn't figure it out. You got to you've got to switch the sales quickly because cancer doesn't care about your calendar and efforts and intentions.
Speaker2:
Cancer marches on. And so I would tell you, because a lot of people know that 90% of my energy goes into the non-toxic and natural discussion, but 10% of it goes into off label drugs, sensitizes like hyperthermia and other things like that. Looking at combinations of high dose, low dose, modest dose, like we're looking at everything, right? Because we should all have an open mind. Marcus Aurelius The ability to come to take into observation, take into consideration all the things that we observe, to have that ability to look. And that's the thing that pains me about the medical industry and about the crowd. The alternative crowd is neither one of them is willing to look at what is obviously and painfully sitting in front of us is that the answer is going to be when we work together to figure out what is and we get rid of all the the really bad ideas, like there's so many bad ideas. Please don't drink baking soda. If anybody's drinking baking soda, you don't know how your stomach acid works. You need to digest your food. If your pee is moderately acidic, good for you. You're not going to have a urinary tract infection, right?
Speaker1:
The kidneys are doing their job. Congratulations.
Speaker2:
Yeah, congratulations. Just super healthy. You know, your poop floats. Stop eating so much fat back to the poop. It's just like, you know, you're going too quick. You're not. You've got to change your your inputs. So, yeah, it is painful that there are so many fallacies, but it's I'm excited because I'm the idiot that was walking around saying, you can cure cancer with juicing 2014. And today I'm like, Oh, you know what? The sum the sum of the whole is greater than its individual parts when we put those four together. But I've never met anybody. That's one of those incredible, great stories of thriving, who did not capture the ability or develop the ability to manage those four simultaneously. I've never met someone like I did. Three out of the four really well. Didn't do the fourth. It's like, no, it's always the sticking point is always when we can't. And after seven months of having a center in which we've been monitoring and tracking and and some interesting scenarios, I have real great control over people for 21 days where I get to feed them and house them and support them, communicate with them. Yeah. The mind plays, that's the big one. It's, it's the mental mindset really is.
Speaker1:
A field of the mind.
Speaker2:
It's, it's powerful. It's super powerful. And I really feel like it'll be the next frontier. As we begin to look at psycho oncology and bio, psycho social and bio psycho chemistry changes, things that we're going we're just going to keep seeing. The way we get through this is by changing our mind about a lot of stuff, right? And that's no way to change your mind, change your thinking about something it says in the Bible. And it was always the object was Christ. But I hope that more people will continue to look beyond that. I'm grateful that you you're stateside taking a big risk because your exposure is different when you're willing to take evidence based approaches and help people to look at opportunities that aren't really mainstream. And mainstream doesn't appreciate pioneers and early adopters, they just don't like it. So thank you for being willing to do it.
Speaker1:
Oh, well, thank you for saying that. I mean, it's my honor. I mean, I love what I do. And, you know, it's interesting because in talking about integrative oncology, I mean, we we embrace both sides, so to speak. And, you know, you're part of that as well. And it's funny because we we kind of offend everybody, right? I mean, the conventional folks don't like that. I talk about, you know, lower doses of chemo and off label medications and diet and things like that and stress reduction. And then the alternative folks don't like that. I talk about chemotherapy and surgery and and sometimes even radiation if we need it. And so it's just kind of funny. It's like you kind of speak some of the language that that that people like, but then they also say stuff that they're just so much against. And I just feel like that's what we need to change in medicine. We need to stop being so against things. A lot of patients even contact my office and they like what we have to say. We're like, Oh, well, I don't want chemo or Why not? I mean, chemo is a tool. I mean, understand, you don't want full. Of those chemo. The chemo itself is not bad. It's just how you use it can be bad. Just like to the conventional folks, nutrition is not bad, but. But how you use it can be bad. And I'm sure they've seen patients that don't use it in the right way, but they're all just tools and we can easily use them in a good way or a bad way. But having more tools is always a good thing, and then being able to selectively use those tools for each patient sitting in front of us is the real key, and that's the art of medicine. And it's just I get frustrated that that doesn't make sense to everybody that hears it. But I know you and I are fighting the battle to change that.
Speaker2:
Yeah, sure. And you and I, it's funny because I think even you and I represent two ends of a spectrum that it's so narrow and close in a big world of two bizarre spectrums, where you and I look each way and we're thinking, did they just say that? Does that like, that's so insane. But I never get invited to the oncology dance party. But I always I was teased and I'm not popular at the Alternative Cancer Dance Party because I speak out. My truth is my truth. And when somebody is reaching out for you and they're not comfortable with chemotherapy drugs, then I would love for them to reframe and understand. We're talking about cytotoxicity. What do you think high dose IV vitamin C is? It's I mean, it's like you're just like you are for it. You're just you're attached to story, to chemotherapy. So if we actually unbundled, we're like, what are you saying? You're afraid you're going to lose your hair? Are you afraid that this is going to hurt you somehow? Like, yeah, we understand that. Like if we could have a better, more productive conversation around it, because at the end of the day, I've seen bodies heal. But I can tell you it's complicated and I can't figure out yet the who which group is always going to respond and which group is not going to respond. Right. My my sort of kind of functioning hypothesis right now, based on current and recent observation, is it has everything to do with the ability to see yourself in the future and what we call eudaimonia.
Speaker2:
So they're called the monarch studies. They were psychology studies, but then they did in oncology. And this takes 2 seconds or one quick minute. So they wanted to see how much longer I'm going to kick cancer's. But like how much longer do those people live than people who were a bit more passive and just like, I'm going to do what my doctor says and hope for the best. And then they had to stop the study, reconstruct it, because there's a third group that says really stupid stuff, like maybe God let me have cancer so I could go through this, inspire other people. Or they said things like, Oh man, this is a wake up call. What a great opportunity to reevaluate my life and get back on track and start doing the things that I really want to do. I want to have a deep sense of purpose. I want to do something for other people that they say, stuff like that. They call them U2 monarchs because they were flourishing as they saw themselves flourishing in culture and community flourishing. And those that were fighters, they call them hedonic or hedonistic because they were only about self preserving. I'm not ready to go yet. I have things I want to do. Yeah, that's great. And then the other is being passes the this is conventional. You look at this setting and this one study showed that there was no statistical significant statistical difference between fighters and passives.
Speaker2:
Sometimes fighters didn't live longer, sometimes they live less. But those darn U2 monarchs, this idea of being a flourish are 4 to 10 times longer, depending on cancer type and a full conventional environment. So, you know, a great diet is mandatory, but it's not. If you're relying on a fantastic diet and you're going all natural, I'll just tell you how this turns out. You're going to die. I don't mean to mince words like you cannot rely on. That is is a silly it's a fallacy. You can take as many supplements as you can possibly swallow. There is no supplements that have ever cured anybody. Those supplements can be bolstering. They can be useful, but they should be administered. And you should have a you should have a gap or a need for them. And you should understand which ones are competing for mode and what's their mechanism. Their mode of action is one better than the others. Then don't take them both. Take the one that's better or change it up. But consuming them both. You might just be consuming like vitamin C orally, but at a certain point you're just pooping it out. Welcome to wasting your money on vitamin C. There's only so much you can take even if you're not getting diarrhea. It's like, whatever, 150 milligrams or something like that. The absorption was 50% every 50 milligrams above that it's 150 milligrams. You're just putting it in and it's just going out.
Speaker1:
Right.
Speaker2:
Now.
Speaker1:
So congratulations on your expensive urine, right?
Speaker2:
Yes. Yeah. Both ends. It's coming out front and back.
Speaker1:
But it's expensive poop as well. That's right.
Speaker2:
Yeah. I feel passionate about it and obviously exercise. You know, I think that exercise, the microbiome and emotional release or trauma release for trauma management is important in the long term, but thrivers do not have that. That's not what the Thrivers focused on those first four that we talked about. And then I think in order to what my observation is, in order to avoid recurrence, we have to make sure that the things. Art. I don't know if I want to call them traumas, but things that have visceral emotion, visceral, emotional response to when we think about them, parts of our lives that have pain and hurt to them. We need to we need to work with somebody to get those things out and sort of unpacked and repacked and figured out in the long term. I don't think we should be diving to them into them though, in the short term because it just upsets the body and the chemistry and now we're all in kinds of angst. I think that we should just focus on that which is in front of us. And we should we should be making big plans. We know when people are coming to the Center for Advanced Medicine, they should be they should be writing out their two year or three year, five year dreams and goals. They should be making big plans for thriving and being in cancer shouldn't be one of them.
Speaker1:
I love that. That's our goal. I love that you said that. Thank you. Yeah. Let's talk about your center a little bit. You're your center and the Vita protocol, the Vita center. Let's talk a little about that. I know you mentioned that you have that, but but that's you recently just moved that to Costa Rica, right?
Speaker2:
Yeah. So we thank you. We we've always been open source. So the vita protocol vita the vita protocol dot com is always open source. That's where we just share everything for free. Like here, this is our observation, this is what we're learning. So a lot of the content that's there just represents the last couple of years. And now I get to redo or update it a little bit because there's just new observations. But we have thrown a number of retreats and events over the years and have really enjoyed bringing doctors and thrivers together with people that are in the journey to have like multiday like five day events, seven day events where people can ask questions like were these thought leaders and luminaries aren't leaving, they're staying with you, they're eating breakfast, lunch and dinner. We're having fun. So we had this inspiration that I think that God gave us the Holy Spirit land in our heart, which was really to either try to help alternative cancer centers, to embrace the the information that we were seeing or to to have the courage, if we needed to, to go to Nineveh and to open our own center. And I call it Nineveh, because as a capitalist, no man opens a cancer center to make money. That's this idea, especially if you do it the way that we do it. But in April of last year, we did a test. We took a group down to Costa Rica and we rented it. A property I wasn't planning on renting. We actually had two nice houses. We were going to rent it and say we rented a luxury property and it was nice.
Speaker2:
The way that it happened just kind of really felt like the Lord had a hand in it and we ended up buying that property. But in that event that we did, we, we wanted to introduce. The best that I could for a program that addresses the mind in its management in cancer. I wanted to look at disease or discomfort in the mind, and so we ran it. It was incredible. It was well received. I felt like we hit a home run and we continued to work on the program. And then in September we opened the Vida Center, Vida, the voice intercom, and then Vida research opened and we enrolled. So we started enrolling breast cancer patients. First time diagnosis before conventional treatment, breast cancer diagnosis after post post conventional treatment and then recurrence. So women who had already had treatment and then recur but had not weren't seeking out conventional. And then the fourth one will be non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I've just done really well in both lymphomas. Hodgkin's lymphoma is a non-Hodgkin's nodular sclerosis or follicular B-cell. These are a lot of these diseases do have a very strong connection with state of emotional being that that distress seems to be triggering something in the genetic scaffolding. I'm not really sure where it's at yet. We have some ideas, but it's complicated. The world is so complicated. So the VIDA Center was our effort at what would a faith based center look like if you weren't shoving Christianity down anyone's throat, but you were willing to stand your ground on what we think is a biblical model for healing and then to ask the questions, What if we collect that data? What if we were good stewards of it and that we then try to compile that? And could we answer an important question is what is the role of diet and lifestyle in the treatment of cancer? So it's not an easy thing.
Speaker2:
We can only hold five people and it's the least expensive place in the world right now that's going to change, but it's the least expensive place in the world. 21 days, all inclusive, but we don't do cytotoxic therapies. That's that's the container we're holding is a 21 day reset. Like what's it like to be loved, to be cared for, to be educated, to be trained in the kitchen for. So we do like to lunch and one dinner culinary classes every week. We empower them with recipes so that they can go home and eat. But we also provide them a juicing platform as a basis. But we look at like massage, relaxation, adventure, social elements and things of that highly engineered, and I'm excited about it. I love it and it has huge benefit. But then you also have to have that honest conversation. When you start collecting the data, you're like, Oh, data is data for real? Because I think a lot of times it's we all want to we all want to find the value that we create in the world or that our ideas are right. And I've just been blessed that I don't have a dog in the fight. I'm not actually doing any of this for self.
Speaker2:
I'm doing it out of service. And so therefore all I have to do is find out what is not. I don't have to prove that what I think is right. I just have to go find out what is. And it is a relaxing place to be, my friend. It is super relaxing to to not have to defend. But as you know, when someone's life is in your hands, you'll stop saying silly things, bad science, you'll just drop them because everything that you say or do with that person is going to become a part of their belief system as they go through their journey. And the end goal is not to be anti anything, it's to be pro patient outcome. And that means we've got to ready them up and empower them to re-enter their medical system. And how do you pull back in your conventional doctor so that you can run car markers, markers. You can get all of your blood work done, you can monitor liver and kidney function. These are all basic things that people should be doing. And so I'm grateful for it. And then I was I was at my wits end, to be honest. In February, I was just exhausted and I was watching the the coronavirus COVID 19 outbreak. And I just I had to make the call. I can see the handwriting on the wall. Society is responding in a certain way. We need to close the center. So we had to pause it. I made the decision and then the country of Costa Rica a few days later helped us make the decision by closing its borders.
Speaker2:
Wow. So, hey, I get a break. So I made my way back to San Diego eventually to join Kim and to be here. And I just feel blessed in this downtime has been amazing to be able to really ask questions, to look at the data. And I feel like this year and next year I'll be able to emerge out and tell people wholeheartedly that I do believe that we have the ability to take our thoughts captive. We do have the ability to exercise the mind. We do have the ability to move things around. Hopefully we can get good at helping people to bring that back and how to build their teams and how to communicate with their teams because it's unfortunately, it's still going to be the person with the. Diagnosis, it's still their obligation to be the leader. I know they want. They just want to surrender. They want somebody to help them. But they've got to take an active role. And if they can't, they need somebody close to them that can to help them sort through that information. Because once that power comes back, you'll realize that no one person will deliver you from cancer. A team will help get you there. Poison can help get you there. Food can help get you there. Relaxation can help get you there. Adventure can help get you there. But ultimately, if if if I if I'm diseased and I cut off a diseased part, I'm still disease. I just cut off the diseased part. Yeah, true.
Speaker1:
Very well said. And you just mentioned COVID 19. For those listening to this later, we're in the midst of COVID 19 right now. So you and I have both been self isolating for a while. I mean, obviously I come here to work every day, but other than that, I'm at home and I know you're home and we're both excited to get back to normal life here, whenever that is. But but we're still working because, you know, we cancer doesn't stop. I mean, I told the patient the other day that, you know, the world kind of stopped for COVID 19. But but cancer's not stopping. It's still doing its thing. And so I know what you've shared with us today. A lot of that can can be incorporated by people right now. They don't have to wait and wait until wait until the world opens back up again before they can start doing a lot of these things that you shared with us today.
Speaker2:
Yeah. Amen. Thank you. And all all things. This, too, will pass and we'll learn. Hopefully we'll learn. And, you know, my heart goes out to to loss of life and to suffering, to fear and all those other things. My prayer is that we would have the wits about us to take a look and look at those people that we consider currently at high risk. And we would recognize that diet and lifestyle is the linchpin for those those that are at risk, the highest risk the large population are for those that don't understand that don't I guess haven't seen forks over knives or haven't realized or taken a look at the role of these things. But if we would eat more sensibly, if we would give up on stress or at least address it, and if we would love with a reckless abandon and we would be excited about the future, I think that we would see a smaller at risk group because this isn't going to be the last infectious disease that that hits the planet. It certainly wasn't the first. And we'll understand its gravity post. But right now in the middle of it, you know, it just feels it feels big and it just feels confusing. That's where I'm at right now as I look at the data and I'm just like, it's really difficult to tease out reliable info other than what we know for sure is that people who who are physically active, who are healthy, who are not angry and bitter, who are excited and have a deep sense of purpose, are not on ventilators. Right. That's true.
Speaker1:
And I don't I don't know if this rings true for anybody, but I just want to say it. I mean, you know, it's easy to get overwhelmed right now with with all the news we're just bombarded with in terms of the number of new cases and the number of new deaths. And, you know, and it is significant. It is big and it can be really scary. But I would just encourage people to be informed. But but be nice to yourself and give yourself a break from all of that. If if you're finding that it's making you feel anxious and fearful. And I even last the last couple of weeks here in my office, I just said, okay, this is a this is a COVID free zone. Not only are we doing all we can to keep it out of the office in terms of wearing we all wearing masks right now I'm wearing scrubs at work. I usually wear a shirt and tie. You know, we've made a lot of those changes. But also, let's just not talk about it. Let's let the time when when we're here in the office, whether we're we're staff or whether we're patients, let's let this be a COVID free zone. Let's let's get back to this being a place of healing and not a place where we're coming to work, talking about COVID, talking about our fears and our worries. And for us here, that's really been helpful. And that's not to say I don't go home and still flip on the news or or check the stats for the day. But but, you know, for a lot of people, I think there's this temptation to get overwhelmed and just I would encourage people to turn it off. If you need to take a break for a few days, if you're already doing all the right things, you know, you're keeping your distance from people and you're isolating all those things we need to be doing right now. Know you're eating while you're exercising. That's still going to be applicable a few days from now if you just turn off the TV or the Internet for a little while.
Speaker2:
So I think it's brilliant and I'd say this I said to somebody is dose matters and everything. It doesn't matter what we're talking about, right? If you don't drink enough water, you'll die. You drink the right amount. We're good. You drink too much. It's called drowning. And fear is the same way. A little bit of fear keeps us from grabbing something hot or falling off a cliff or getting eaten by a big animal. But too much fear can kill you. Genuinely can kill you really genuinely can kill you. Fear can kill you. It can. It leaves you susceptible. When it robs your immune system. And so we should always be respectful of cancer. I think that we have to understand that that's the pandemic that we're not talking about. You think that a corona cold virus is not going to crap out of the world? What about the 680,000 people that died in the United States last year from cancer? I think that really that pandemic that is now hitting the world. We have control over it. We do have the ability to affect it. We can change those numbers. We can change the cost. We can change the experience. And for Kim and I, please don't think that we're being flippant, that we feel strong, that cancer was the best thing that could have ever happened to us.
Speaker2:
Like, I'm never going to have a heart attack again because, you know, now when I go to my cardiologist, he laughs. He's just like, again, you can't do those things that you think you can do because statistically you're not supposed to do them, but physically you can, and I understand that, but you shouldn't do those. And so it feels amazing to have that life. And by the way, my capacity to receive love and to give love radically changed when I shifted where I put my time, energy, my patterns, my behaviors, where I ate and my desire to help my brothers and sisters on the planet is at an all time high. And I really attribute that to that gift of cancer being that awakening of like, who are we going to be? And then I can't wait to take my last breath here, my first breath in the face of Christ, and it goes, stick a bunch of stuff in the fire and see what comes out the other side and just be like, Great man. Some things I thought were going to be bigger and some things I didn't know are going to be huge. But I think that for those who are listening, who have cancer, is, first of all, stop being so afraid of death because death is inevitable for all of us.
Speaker2:
So let that part go and and be done with it. And don't be afraid of making a decision, because you can only make the decision on the information that's in front of you. So take peace that you're making wise decisions. And when did you get more information? You might make a different decision, but regret or shame is not serving you. Like let that go or fear of of people criticizing your decisions, like if you're feeling inclined. And that's why I'm so grateful and always happy to recommend people to you as well is because it's like I tell people, hey, if you if you were to go to your conventional oncologist, what they believe your insurance company is greater than what Dr. Segal would charge you to take care of you. And he's four for him. You're not a number. You're a human being who has a family, who has an outcome. And I think the conventional care is very much too. But the patient load on the average oncologist is hysterical. I'm like, Wow, that's amazing that like, I love that she walked in and looked at the clipboard, looked back at Kim and said, Look, she just said Hi, Kim. Like she just didn't even know her name. It was like you couldn't do that outside the door.
Speaker1:
Right? At least Faki look at it in the hall, right? Yes.
Speaker2:
But so thank you for for being you. And I really do appreciate you. And I know that that you and I are on slightly ends of spectrums, but so close to the center of each other. And I really feel like that's what iron sharpens iron. And I'm grateful that any time I have questions, you're always glad to answer them on email because I know that you're doing things that others aren't so that we'll have information that we wouldn't otherwise. So thank you for always being so willing to share.
Speaker1:
Well, and likewise, I mean, you taught me a lot and I learn a lot from you. And yeah, iron sharpens iron. And and I think we, we help each other a lot from our different perspectives, you know, and that's the thing. I mean, we're both able to say, okay, I don't know everything about everything. Let me let me learn from somebody who may know this part better than I do. And so I thank you for being the way you are and being who you are.
Speaker2:
Oh, thanks. But I did. Oh, man, that means a lot, especially coming from you. I hold you in high regard. And for anyone, if this is their first podcast you've ever listened to of Dr. Stegall, listen to all of them because I mean, they're all great. I mean, you don't have a there's not a bad one in the mix, man.
Speaker1:
I'm not paying you to say that, by the way.
Speaker2:
No. And by the way, I'm not a person who likes to listen to podcasts. I don't drive to work. So I don't usually have that that same time. And so there's only a few that I can listen to. And I'm always excited when I get the alert that you've got a new one out. And I'm just always like, Yeah, I've got to make it a priority. And so it's, it's good to really enjoy again. The thing with, I mean, if no one's ever heard it, I heard your first one and your second one, you go do it. It's like you've got to understand it'll help you. Just those little things can make the difference to me at least. Sure.
Speaker1:
Thanks. Helping people. Thank you. Yeah, well, Theo, I don't want to take up any more of your time. I know you're a busy guy and you've got a lot of things going on, so I'm. I'm honored and humbled that you could spend this time with me today. And I know our listeners agree, but there's one more time. How can our listeners learn more about you and connect with you?
Speaker2:
Yeah, the easiest way to connect and just follow is to go to the Vida protocol Vida, Vida and Vida's life. For those who don't know what that word means, it's life. Life abundantly right? As a believer on ten.
Speaker1:
Ten, right?
Speaker2:
Yep. The God brings it and brings it abundantly. So it's called the VIDA protocol. And then if you want to check out the center, it's Vida Center. And one of the best things you can do if you're somebody who is facing cancer is to really look at what would it be like to work with both Jonathan and I for the. To be able to receive that support that you offer and then to come and restore and regenerate with us because it really is it's not an either or. There really is a place for us together in the space. And then. And then again, you can always email us at the websites and stuff like that. But I'm super happy to share. I'll do my best. But it is. As you know, there are more people in need than there are hours in the day. So sometimes my email inbox gets a little full and I still have to figure out how to always answer it. And then I'm a science geek. So the first time, every time the pub crawler announces that there's more studies that fit my parameters, then I'm just spending days sorting through the literature to see what's being published so that we understand what's what is happening. And I think great things are ahead. I think it's people like you that are helping to make the evolution in Western medicine happen, and I'm glad to be a part of that, but I think it's really going to happen at the practitioner level. So again, thank you for just being that visionary that was willing to step out and honour your your convictions to say that there is a better way to do cancer, but just is.
Speaker1:
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here today. I just again, I'm just so honored that you spent all this time with us. And I'm excited to get this episode out there because I know a lot of people are going to really benefit from it and learn a lot from it and just really be touched and edified from it. So thank.
Speaker2:
You. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. I appreciate it. It was my pleasure.
Speaker1:
And just to remind all of our our listeners, if you haven't subscribed to the Cancer Secrets podcast already, please do so. Our podcast is available anywhere you listen to the podcast, iTunes, all the different platforms we're on all of those, and we'll be having more great content coming out as soon as we can. So thank you again and thank you, Theo.
Speaker2:
Well, my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker1:
All right. We'll talk soon.
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