So can you starve the tumor cell of their
fermentable fuels and kill them? And the answer is absolutely. It's an elegant, beautiful system. And when it's done it, you can't believe how
well it works. Problem is Sanjay. Nobody is doing that. Welcome to Target Cancer Podcast. My name is Dr. Sanjay Juneja, I'm an oncologist
known as the @theoncdoc on social media, and today I'm very excited to have Dr. Thomas
Seyfried, who is basically a wizard when it comes to metabolic stuff. And what does that mean? All this stuff that you hear about, are there
amino acids we can basically starve cancers with? Or what does it do to have a, like a keto
diet? And does that help? He's got over 150 publications. He's extremely respected in the metabolic
world, and we're just so excited to have you. So thank you for being here, Dr. Seyfried. Thank you very much for having me on your
program here. Of course. So I'm just gonna get straight to it, usually. The first question I get on social media where
people really passionate, right? And caring about either themselves with their
cancer or especially with a loved one. Ask the question, can I starve my cancer? And especially with limiting sugar and things
like that is true and not, right? We always have to go back to energy. Without energy, nothing can survive or grow. So you say to yourself we breathe air. We exhale CO2, we produce CO2 and water from
the foods that we eat. You and I are having a conversation. We're talking obviously there's energy going
on somewhere in our brains, in the rest of our body and that allows us to do what we
do. Now, if you and I were to take a cup of cyanide
and we would both drink it together, neither of us would have much energy. We would both fall and collapse right in front
of the screens. Hey, let me put it another way. If you and I both had tumors growing in our
body, And we were both drinking the cyanide together. And someone would say, whoa, what a catastrophe. These two guys that think they know what they're
doing just killed themselves, but they had cancer. So we're gonna take the tumor out and we're
gonna look at it, and the tumor cells would be fine. The cyanide would not kill the tumor cells. We say, whoa, what's going on? How is it possible that the cyanide killed
these folks but it didn't kill their tumor? And the answer is, the tumor doesn't use en
oxygen for energy. It uses fermentation for energy. So Warburg did those experiments years ago,
given rats that had tumors, cyanide, and the rat died, but not the tumor and the, and it
was clear evidence that the tumors are not using oxygen for their survival. So what are they? What are they living on? How are they growing and alive? If they're not using oxygen, and it turns
out that they use fermentation, so that fermentation is a form of energy that bipo bypasses oxygen. So that's interesting. They're fermenting, huh? What are the fuels that are driving their
fermentation metabolism? What are they using? And it's glucose. The sugar. Glucose and the amino acid glutamine. And those are the two fermentable fuels that
allow cell cancer cells to grow. So what the answer to your question is, yes,
cancer cells live they and can you starve them? Okay? So if we know they're fermenting and we know
that they can't live without fermentable fuels and you know that they're only two fermentable
fuels that are keeping them alive, then you target and take those two fermentable fuels
away. And they die. So can you starve the tumor cell of their
fermentable fuels and kill them? And the answer is absolutely. And then your question is if that's so simple,
how come no one's doing it? And the answer is because everybody thinks
cancer's a genetic disease. They're not thinking about what's keeping
the cells alive. It's.. Right. It's not that complicated. So interesting. When you say, it's, it, this applies to really
any kind of neoplastic tumor or is it just for some in particular? I went through all the major cancers. I spent a lot of time in our, my eye science
paper, and I looked at every one of the major cancers. But you have to go back and look at electron
microscopy and you have to look at biochemistry and you have to ask what is the, do the mitochondria
number and function and structure look normal or not? And every case, not. Respiratory systems, they're all like deficient
and all these kinds of things. So what I just described to you would be common
to all the major cancers that we know of. Is it possible that the fermentation process
is something that is physiologically adapted? Once you've broken a threshold of no longer
being able to meet the requirements of proliferation and growth in a plastic, traditional, non
neoplastic cancer cell way, as in the stuff that we are used to, blood flow and oxygen,
is it something that possibly, is taking place in the environment of injury, which is why
they'd say, okay, now we need to propagate a different mechanism. Or do you think it was something that originated
early on into the pathogenesis, was that almost a required tool to even permit it to become
into something that ends up being neoplastic or cancerous? Yeah. That goes back to the how you get how does
this process happen in the first place? What is responsible for the dependency on
fermentation? Because as Otto Warburg said, you can never
get a cancer cell that cannot transition from respiration to fermentation. And the evidence for that is we rarely, if
ever see neoplastic cells in neurons of the brain they just simply cannot sustain they
cannot replace oxidative phosphorylation with fermentation. You see it in glial cells, of course. Which those cells can, we don't see cancers
of cardiac muscle, rarely of skeletal muscle, because those kinds of cells cannot they can't,
they'll die without oxid oxidative phosphorylation. Oh. So that, that observation in of itself prompts
the, the thing like why is that the case and supports, exactly what you're saying. What are some of the things that. If you do deprive it of fermentation, would
take injury. Obviously we've just said unlikely, the central
nervous neurons and cardiac tissue, but is there something that may take an insult that's
not cancerous in your body if you've deprived those things? Oh, sure. If you go and try to knock out glucose and
glutamine fermentation by itself yeah, you're gonna harm the rest of the body. However, what we do with the cancer patients,
As we transition their whole body over to a ketotic state ketosis. So all the normal cells of the body, brain,
cells, liver, cell, they all can burn fatty acids or ketone bodies. Once the patient is in therapeutic ketosis. Then you can lower blood sugars down to mi
very, extremely low levels. 0.5, millimole, nine milligrams per deciliter. You can push blood sugars down to incredibly
low levels but as, but the brain and the rest of the cells are protected because they can
burn fatty acids and ketones and going back to fermentation, fatty acids and ketones bodies
are non fermentable. They cannot be fermented, so they become non-fuel
for the tumor cell. So obviously the answer to your question is
yes, you can damage the body if you just simply target glucose and glutamine without first
transitioning the body over to ketones. Once you do that, then the rest of the body
is totally protected and the cancer cells become marginalized and killed off without
harming the rest of the body. And why is it that they can't use when you
go into ketosis, why they are unable to use those to, to we know? You need a good mitochondria to burn ketones
and fatty acids. You need a good oxidative phosphorylation
system. And the common phenotype of all major cancers
is deficiency of oxidative phosphorylation. So it's, and from the structure in evolutionary
biology structure determines function. That's why when you look at the electron microscope
and ghost mitochondria, no Crista, dys, dysmorphic, mitochondria, they're not gonna be able to
generate energy through oxidative phosphor phosphorylation. They're gonna have to be de dependent on fermentation. Yeah. Very simple. Yeah. Not complicated. We pardon this interruption real quick. If you're enjoying this podcast or find it
valuable for what we discussed and the education and how people see and think about cancer
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can bring that information as maximally and broadly as possible. Thank you so much for listening. So this is just, me thinking out loud, but
when we use these things called for the, for people listening like VEGF inhibitors or endothelial
or vascular. Basically growth factors where tumors are
like, ooh, like especially the kind of juicier tumors that want blood flow, like renal cell
carcinomas and cholangio and liver. Like a lot of that, a lot of those lung even
want to be able to recruit blood vessels. Does that further inhibit the tumors, ability
and do you use them concurrently at all or does that. How is, why is that, why does that work in
these cancers? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. That's why they threw out all the anti-angiogenic
drugs. Even Napoleone Ferrara who said, who was developed
one of these says, this stuff doesn't work. Cancer cell doesn't need all that stuff. And don't forget Angiogenes, a downstream
effect of damage to oxidative phosphorylation. So when the cell can't res respir HIF-1alpha,
which is a powerful transcription factor turns on glycolysis and runs vascular endothelial
growth factor. So all that stuff is downstream. You don't have, that's why Avastin and all
these crazy things that a people are using, they don't work. They don't work because the damn tumor cell
doesn't need it, as long as it, it has in the microenvironment the necessary fuels. And that's why when you give brain cancer
to a, I told, it's like malpractice that beat treats somebody with Avastin. And what it does is it forces the cells out
into this. Into the neural parenchyma. You can't see them on PET scans or MRI, CAT
scan or anything like this. Those damn cells can, and they're also phagocytic. So you gotta know that they can eat engulf
stuff from the microenvironment, get glucose and glutamine from the microenvironment. Even if you, if even if you try to stop the
blood vessels and things like this. None of that stuff works, man. You gotta realize, how do you know that we
got 1600, over 1600 people a day dying and. Dying from cancer. So obviously all that stuff is not working
and it doesn't work because it's not focused on the essential proc issue that we're dealing
with fermentation. Yeah. They don't, they definitely don't like necessarily
cure cancers, but at least for renal cells, we really have two groups that are seemingly
more immune sensitive and more, and that's, so we use a lot of the TKIs now in combination
or without, with immunotherapy in that setting. But you're correct. Eventually there's a statute of, expiration
there where it's no longer usually effective. So very interesting. And so that is a way that, it's almost like
an agnostic treatment, tissue agnostic in the sense that we've said before where what
I'm hearing is it doesn't matter what the origin or the histopathology to some degree
is on where it originated. But really it's just a matter of, is it this
neoplastic thing that had to really know to exist without being able to use its mitochondria
functionally, and therefore wherever it is, wherever it originated. It sounds like you have a high, degree of
success. I guess if that's the right term. Just by putting yourself into that state. I think you have to recognize that we can
use diets to reduce glucose but we can't use diets to reduce glutamine. And glutamine is an essential amino acid for
the tumor cell. In fact, they call it a non-essential amino
acid. But really it's quite essential for our immune
system, for our gut health for the urea cycle. We need glutamine and glutamine is abundant. It's the most abundant amino acid in our body. So we have a situation here where our normal
cells of the immune system need. The same fuel used, the same fuel that the
neoplastic tumor cell uses. So we have to, that's why we developed the
press pulse strategy for managing cancer. You can press glucose down consistently because
you're transitioned over to ketones. So we eliminate the glucose issue, but we
pulse drug, we use drugs to pulse glutamine because if we're too aggressive, In targeting
glutamine, we compromise our own immune system in its ability to pick up the dead cancer
cells after you kill them, otherwise leading to infections and other kinds of adverse effects. So we use small doses of glutamine targeting
drugs. Once the patient is in therapeutic ketosis,
so we put 'em on just for a short time, dosage, timing, and scheduling, and then we pull 'em
off and let the immune system and the gut and everything come back to a normalcy. But you've already slaughtered a significant
number of tumor cells, and then the immune system, the, our immune cells aren't killed
by de deprivation of glutamine. They're just stunned. They're alive, but they're just like paralyzed. But once you pull the glutamine drug back
off our immune system reactivates and goes in and picks up the dead corpses and we have
to have a time period. While this process is taking place, and of
course when you add the glutamine back or don't remove the drug you will get the rescue
of some of the tumor cells that might be there, but they're not coming back very fast because
you got the choke hold on, on the glucose. So they're there, but they're growing extremely
slowly. And then once our immune system comes back
recovers itself from the small dose of glutamine inhibitor then we hit 'em again. With another small dose of glutamine inhibitor,
and we slowly degrade the tumor while the rest of the cells in the body are generating
an excessive efficiency in health. So we're, the rest of the cells in the body
are getting super healthy while you're degrading, slowly degrading the tumor cells that are
absolutely dependent on fermentation metabolism. It's an elegant, beautiful system. And when it's done It. You can't believe how well it works. Problem is Sanjay. Nobody is doing that. Yeah. I think that the first time I heard about
it on a clinical setting was Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. I think he's got a new project he's working
on for pancreatic cancer. I think more particularly for that, the glutamine,
metabolic, starvation process. But gosh, that is really almost like getting
goosebumps as a traditional, obviously medical oncologist. It, it makes sense on a cellular level and
I'm just like, part of me just wants to believe. If it's really fast replicating shouldn't
we sprinkle a little, cytotoxic chemotherapy just to accelerate the replication process? You can do that. Our colleagues in Turkey do that ul. They use the lowest possible doses of chemo
that's allowable by the profession, right? So you're not so you're not out of compliance. And once the body is in nutritional ketosis,
these chemo drugs also you can use minor very minimal dosages, and it just slaughters these
tumor cells and you've reduced the level of toxicity. My view is I'm not a against that because
I have seen spectacular recoveries of some people doing this kind of a strategy. But, why would we ever want to put any level
of toxic material into our body when we really don't have to? Yeah. I'm not opposed to people who say, let me
use the lowest doses of chemo once I get my patient into a nutritional state of ketosis. Because the toxicity levels are significantly
reduced and the therapeutic benefits are massively high. So this is why when we used our glutamine
inhibitor 6-diazo-5-oxo-l-norleucine, which was considered too toxic when it was used
by itself with not targeting glucose. Oh, it's toxic, but it's never been as toxic
as cisplatin, carboplatin, lustine, and all these horrible drugs. But once you put the patient in ketosis you
can use very small, tiny doses of this stuff, and it's just like a whack man. You just swack those tumor cells because you,
they don't, they're so vulnerable now. They're just like on the precipice, survival. And you hit 'em with another little bit of
a dumb, boom they're gone. The brittle. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, they're very susceptible. But you gotta put the body in the right state
before you can use this kind of stuff. You just can't go in there like a bull in
a china shop. You really need to know. The strategy of what we're talking about. So it's a graded process. Why we developed the press pulse therapeutic
strategy for managing cancer. It's a process and you have to know how to
use the tool, the tools to you have are diet and drugs used in the appropriate way. So you can't use glutamine inhibitor by itself. You can't use glucose inhibitor by itself. You can't use the diet by itself, most of
the time. You have to put the package together and know
how all the components fit together so you have powerful synergy without toxicity. And in what sequence. And that's, I think we, the. Yeah. Dosage, timing and schedule. This is where we are right now. We're perfecting dosage, timing, and scheduling
in our preclinical systems, and then we translate it directly into the patients with my colleagues
who have clinics that can do all this. That's amazing. It's a work in progress. We have a very singular goal. How long can we keep stage four cancer patients
regardless of what. Where, what or tissue of origin, how long
can we keep them alive with a high quality of life? If they die at 98 years old when they had
cancer at 38 years old, they were obviously cured with no recurrence. But you can't know that. When you say, oh, you can cure, I don't know
if I can cure cancer. All I know is we.. All I know is if you can live far longer than
you were expected to live with a higher quality of life, that's good in itself. And if you live to be 90 because you manage
this when you were 30, then then you can consider yourself very fortunate. But the goal is, how do we keep cancer paid? All these guys, oh, stage four, lung, brain,
colon, and they're all out. Many of them are out there doing well. Are they cured? I have no idea. But they're still alive longer than they would've
been predicted to me. That is something else. So I'm sure a lot of people are thinking this
and myself included. Is it conceivably correct if somebody said,
if they are constantly in a state of ketosis, the likelihood of having a neoplastic or cancerous
population of cells spawn in a constantly ketosis state is low. Yes, absolutely. And how do we know that? We know that from historical records and aboriginal
peoples, and we know that from our closest relative the chimpanzee, which are gene, he's,
the chimps are 98% similar to us in gene and protein sequences. And the aboriginal. Tribes that existed have been examined at
length. The Inuits from the Alaska and Canada regions,
the African tribes, the rainforest people, the ab Australian Aborigines. These folks never had cancer. And they're always in a semi-state of ketosis
because they're natural diets are very low in carbohydrates. So when you're very low in carbohydrates and
you have a significant amount of exercise, you're always in a low state of ketosis. You might have two you might have 0.5. Millimolar ketones circulating your blood
glucoses are low and it's very hard to generate a cancer if you have a very healthy mitochondria. The only way you can get cancer is damage
to the oxidative phosphorylation in the mitochondria. So whether that comes from drugs, diets, or
whatever. If you're in a state of ketosis, you're enhancing
the health and vitality of your mitochondria. It makes it very rare. That's why Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian
physician, looked at 40,000 people in the African. He never saw cancer in any of these patients. So he said, wait, no. What's going on? Why these Africans don't get cancer? Why the Inuits never? Now the problem is the Inuits are loaded with
cancer type two diabetes, cardio cardiovascular disease. As soon as the western diet comes in high,
highly processed carbohydrate foods, put your in a state of inflammation. Inflammation damages, respiration. So chronic inflammation can damage respiration
in a population of cells in some tissue. Eliciting cancer. We have an obesity epidemic. In fact, obesity is now replacing smoking
as the number, a number one risk factor for cancer. So what's going on with all that? Diet and lifestyle. It's all diet and lifestyle. You're not exercising, you're eating horrible
foods, putting yourself in obesity, inflammation and that puts you at risk for all kinds of
different cancers. And you're saying the inflammation, when I
always said it, Basically invites chances of error and inflammation obviously decreases
your good immune cells to be able to clear an area. You're saying in addition to that, if not,
almost most importantly it's that inflammation allows an environment for the mitochondrial
injury or dysfunction to occur. Yeah. And then what hap then what happens? So you put.. That's a chronic, it's chronic, it doesn't
happen overnight, obviously, right? It takes sometimes years. For that constant inflammatory insult, whether
it's intermittent hypoxia, chronic inflammation, all these, and then you combine that with
some low dose of carcinogens that might be in your body, and you put all that together. And then gradually ox oxidative phosphorylation
is replaced by fermentation. During that process and when the oxphos becomes
dysfunctional, it throws out reactive oxygen species. ROS. ROS are carcinogenic and mutagenic. So the mutations that you see in the nucleus,
all those somatic mutations are all downstream effects of the ROS produced by the damage
chronically injured mitochondria. So the cancer field, for the most part, are
chasing the tail. They're chasing effects. They're not focusing on the real issue. So you're looking at how many different kinds
of somatic mutations people have in their different cancers, which is largely irrelevant. All that stuff is largely irrelevant. The National Cancer Institute says cancer
is a genetic disease and nothing could be further from the truth. It's not a genetic, it's a metabolic disease. So why is everybody focusing on all these
crazy mutations when they're all downstream effects? You don't get the mutations until the mitochondria
become defect dysfunctional. So you put carcinogen, you can see the mitochondria
become damaged. They bio luminesce actually, and you can see
them throwing out ROS already. So it's a staged chronic process. It's very hard for the human body to get cancer. You can't believe how tough it is to get. We evolved to be completely resistant to cancer. So in order for us to get cancer, you have
to have a long-term self-abuse of your body by exposure to all these kinds of things. Because the aboriginal tribes and the chimpanzees
tell us how hard it is to get cancer. It's, it's just, yeah. It's hard to, we're just so deviated from
our stuff, it's just wow. It's so interesting hearing you say that is
interesting in a sense that I always say when people ask, frequently, What can I do to reduce
my chance of cancer and what causes cancer? And I basically spit a rally off a line of
things and I'm like, basically the same stuff that they recommend to do for cardiovascular
health and to not do for cardiovascular health. They pretty much like overlap entirely. Am I hearing that? Possibly because of what's called, when we
say vasculopathy or basically inflamed arterial disease. If you smoke, if you have diabetes, gly oscillation,
all the stuff that makes maybe impaired vascular flow. Is that in some way a super imposition of
why people get cancers? Because the delivery of oxygen and then the
increase of ROS. Are the things that are propagating or inviting
cancers, is that a fair statement? Yes. That's crazy. I think it's very fair. It's a very fair statement. And so that is why there's such an overlap,
is because of the mitochondrial injury that occurs to the impaired, blood flow because
of, again, diabetes, smoking, lack of cardiovascular health. Yeah. So what when you said, processed foods, obviously
I spent that off on the list as well as one of the reasons that can cause cancer. But say somebody was keto. But ate processed foods, like what is it about
the processed part itself that invites the mitochondrial injury? Which you're saying is the, like you're saying,
it is an absolute necessity, correct? To turn into a neoplastic, cancerous, malignant
cell. Like you have to have that is like the limiting
reagent. Okay. So yeah. That's the origin. That's the origin of cancer. And so. This damage to oxid, chronic damage to oxidative
phosphorylation is the origin of cancer, which can happen by any number of provocative agents. What, when you say highly processed, what
is highly process? So the issue, of course, is that these are
foods that are high in glucose, high in sugar, and they have no nutritional value. They're with minimal nutritional value, but
high in sugar. Now, don't forget, we evolved. As a strave species, our whole existence on
the planet has been trying to survive famine, trying to... we move around. We, we had to bring tools with us to to get
the food that, that we needed. Our physiology and our genome is ultimately
driven to store energy. Because we're always starving now, we put
ourselves. Within the last 50, 7500 years into a state
of massive amounts of carbohydrates that have no nutritional value. And that puts, that again, causes your inflammation,
your obesity, your type two diabetes, your cardiovascular disease. So you're absolutely right, Sanjay. This is all part of a continuum. And when we. In our metabolic approach to cancer management
and the folks that are following our instructions, many of these folks come in with cardiovascular
disease, type two diabetes, hypertension, and all these other kinds of things. And by the way, that all goes away along with
their cancer. You're talking about a very dangerous situation
here. You're talking and point in fact was the recent
paper that came out on the Mediterranean Diet, reducing cancer, dementia and cardiovascular
disease. And it's not the Mediterranean diet, it's
the absence of highly processed carbohydrate foods, which are not part of the Mediterranean
diet. And all of those not. Not complicated. Not complicated. So it's not the olive oils and all that stuff
as much? No. Yeah. It's the absence of the highly processed carbohydrates. You wanna neutralize a Mediterranean diet,
go out and eat a big subway sandwich or a eat a couple of dunking Donuts and you can
neutralize all the therapeutic benefits of a Mediterranean diet real quick. That's too funny. And it's so true. Cause. Again, it's just why is it a coincidence that
it's always the stuff that helps, reduce chances of heart attacks and strokes and they have
good cardiovascular health. Oh, and also they have like less cancer like,
like I love that we're actually really somewhat pegging. Bro, it's not just a coincidence there's a
reason. Those things almost always, yeah. Align or superimposed, I'll tell you, nobody really cares. Unless it's really pointed out like I just
did, and I tell you why, nobody cares because we have an obesity epidemic. If people really cared about preventing cancer,
we would not have an obesity epidemic. Yeah. Yeah. That's hard. I, you know what I think is just, Those things
are so distant. Like the concerns, which is, which hopefully
things like this and hearing this, I'm more motivated right now to be healthier and eat
less, less processed foods, than I've been probably in a long time, like just hearing
all this. Cuz now when you understand and hear it, you're
just like, I feel like. Again, that's why we're doing this, is that
it makes you now empowered instead of hearing oh, your risk will be higher. It's this is what's happening. This is where you have the, potential for
mitochondrial damage. This is why this is your arteries getting
all clogged up from X, Y, and Z, and then all these sugars or whatever. Now it's No, I'm doubting my lunch now. Yeah. But the other, the problem is, of course,
we have fast food stores on almost every corner in every place in the United States. It's so convenient and not only that, we're
saying, wow, geez, do you ever eat this stuff? Do you ever eat that subway sandwich? It's absolutely delicious. Yeah. It's, you ever have McDonald's hamburgers? I. All right. This stuff is like so good. A Taco Bell. Are you kidding me? Papa John's Pizza. These things are really tasty. They've been designed to make you want to
eat this stuff. They should put a skull and crossbones on
a lot of that stuff, just to let you know every now and then you shouldn't. Just if you do it all the time, I'm not saying
we should purge our society of this stuff because I enjoy it myself too, occasionally. But the problem is I think so many folks in
our society are just like, they don't know. That if you do that, if you're not, if you're
eating poorly processed, and it's not only that, it's our lifestyle. We're not as active as we were. Those aboriginal tribes that I spoke about. Those guys are out working in the fields. They're doing stuff all the time. They're not sitting in traffic listening to
the books on tape or sitting in front of a computer, chowing down a big blueberry muffin. It's our, it's a combination of the foods
that we eat, the lack of exercise, the mental and emotional stress that we have in the society. All of these things impact together to damage
the mitochondria in some population of cells in some tissue, putting you at risk for either
diabetes, cancer, dementia, let's go on to dementia thing. It's all part of the same process. Yeah. And we're paying the price. We're paying the price for tasty foods and
convenience. Yeah. And that. That people need to know. And it's a it's almost like it's not our fault
because we were made to ha like a pension for those things because we needed to know
when we were, absent brained and stumbled across some whatever on the field. Like we needed to know that this was a high
calorie thing so that we wanted more of it. So it's like a bottleneck effect over evolution. That's now. We.. That's why they say with intelligence and
greatness comes demise potentially or concerned for such. We're still stuck with the things that we
needed when we were very ambulatory and desperate. But the availability is of abundant. I like what you said about tying in really
the concept of having to move around and be like more physically active. It's not so much that we're saying like, oh,
be active to lose weight. We're saying that it's that activity that
really, burns things and burns fuels and makes you, I love that angle on explanation, on
saying don't just do it to lose weight or be healthy. It's the actual process. And one thing that I remember reading when
I used to, be a work, a junky kind of person, was that the best kind of cardiovascular health
you could have? And decrease your chance of heart attack and
stroke is even less than 60 to 80 minutes of cardio in a day is doing 10 minutes every
hour, every other hour of getting your heart rate up. And that goes into that concept of constant
burning it up and making you have to break into some of these chains and stuff to that
is the thing that, that protects your body, as ideally as regularly as possible. Absolutely. You're... you're making your mitochondria
healthy. You're giving them the oxygen they need. You're increasing the blood flow. You're just generally making yourself healthier. I wouldn't Yeah, I agree with you a hundred
percent. I don't think it's just to lose weight. I think it's just to keep healthy. Yeah. Walking swimming, whatever you're capable
of doing. Make your body need to make energy. Like at a moment make it dynamic. Make it, we are, yeah, we are very mobile
species. We would cover great distances looking for
food. It's, in the paleolithic period of our existence
before the cultivation of grains and the development of civilizations. Think about how hard it was to get something
to eat. You had to track down some animal. That was oftentimes bigger than you with in
team effort and drag its ass back and chop it up and eat it. And there's a lot of energy that goes into
this. Imagine, the reward too. And you're gonna, yeah. And then you're gonna gather what a few ripe
berries when they're in seasoned and you're gonna gorge yourself on those things, and
but that was our, and we survived. We actually survived in these products cuz
we learned how to use certain tools. We learned how to kill animals in a better
way. Now we can farm them, or they put 'em out
on a pasture and stuff like this. But we survived because we have Rick Potts
of the of the Smithsonian put it pretty clearly. We have this capability of adjusting to the
environment better than most other animal species have, and our genome and our physiology
is all geared into survival under extreme conditions. And now we put ourselves in a new environment
completely different from the environment we evolved in. And we have all of these chronic, different
kinds of chronic diseases, cancer included. So it's not that mysterious when you put everything
into the e concept of biological evolution. No. And that becomes very clear what the situation
is. So rather, and then we spend billions of dollars
trying to put a bandaid, on type two diabetes, try to put a bandaid on cardiovascular disease
and all, and cancer and all these kinds of things when we just have to keep our mitochondria
healthy and we won't have to deal with these issues in the first place. Yeah, that was very beautifully said. It's it makes sense on just a macroscopic
logic level. The more you like, get distant. From the very cellular and behavioral, adaptations
we've made to exist as a human race over hundreds and thousands of years. What the things we had to get selected for
the things that died off if they couldn't store their fats well enough or didn't have
the taste for fats and said, oh, I don't like fats. You're dead. Because that's that's the thing that's gonna
make you like the most likely to live. The fact that we had all of this, it's almost
irreverent. And then to say, let's go ahead and now live
a life that is very like, Divergent or like distant from exactly what this very, I mean
that the sharpest blade that you sharpened. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And now you don't even, you can just dri,
you don't even have to unask the car. You can just drive up and they hand you the
food right through the window. Yeah. You don't even have to get out of the car. Rather than walking in to get, do a donut
or something, oh no, I gotta drive around and wait in this car line, and then some guy
of hand comes out of the window. And puts a load of food into your lap. Thomas, I want it in my mouth. I don't want to take the wrapper off, take
it off and put it in my mouth. Then they wonder why we have obesity and cancer. What the hell's going on here? Oh, and, but again, one, the flip side, the
defender could say it's like we're the tragic hero or the anti-hero because it's like we're
also at the mercy of our own adaptations. I know you're oh yeah. That's called being an adult or being mature
and not being a mammal. It's, We are having to fight the very thing. That we are hardwired over time okay. I have, yes, I have one question though that
I had heard when it relates to ketosis and it blew my mind and talking about shortcuts
right in society and as we are, especially in this country, I hear that there are ways
that you could consume things and temporarily, so it won't give you a sustained ketosis,
but like a maybe a four to six hour ketosis or is there such a product that if I took. Six hours that I can have a ketosis without
having to do the upfront leg work because like I said, I want the burger in my mouth
like physically. Is there a way I can achieve that without
the two and a half days of supposedly a headache before I get ketosis? Listen no. The issue of course is yeah, we were talk,
we in the, I worked in the epilepsy field for years. And everybody's talking about can we get a
ketogenic diet or ketosis and a pill? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the big thing, right? So you really want that. Okay. You take one pill for breakfast, wash it down
with water, one pill for lunch, wash it down with water. Did you do that for three days? One pill for dinner? Yeah. And you do that for a week. That's hilarious. That is the holy rail of like marketing scheme. Cause it's true and you're not doing anything. But more seriously when you say can I get
into it, it's the sustained condition of being in some level of moderate ketosis that's really
the most healthy for your body and we're learning now from a lot of folks that are measuring
their, I we developed here at Boston College, the Glucose Ketone Index, which was for the
cancer patient to know when their blood sugar was low and their blood ketones were elevated
and they then become at the perfect condition for low dose chemo or target and glucose and
glutamine. And we built that. But now we realize that, you can stay into
those zones with a carnivore consuming of carnivore, with Mediterranean diets, with
vegetable vegetarian diets, as long as you don't eat too much and the foods that you
eat are very low glycemic you can get into these states of ketosis with not too much
difficulty. The only difficulty would be the restriction
of highly processed carbohydrates, and for some people, who happen to be addicted to
those kinds of things, because glucose is a powerful, addictive fuel. It's like cocaine. It's like opium. It's like nicotine. It can be very powerful on the brain, but
you're.. We evolved not to have very much glucose in
our diets. So we will fall back. Our bodies will recognize that we are back
in a semi paleolithic state, but we can get into these zones of ketosis. So we now, my colleague Dominic D'Augustino
from University of South Florida, and he's made ketone ester's solutions where you can
take that and jack your, just like you said but it goes away. It goes away. It's, you really want to get it to be sustained
and sustained Ketosis with low glucose is very therapeutic. And people can do this. At first we were saying, oh, you gotta do
water only fasting. Yeah, that doesn't go over real well. Nobody after a couple of days, you're outta
that. Hell, I'm. I'm gone from this, but with a carnivore diet,
with certain kinds of low-glycemic vegetables and things you can get into these and you
use the GKI to know whether you're not, whether you're there or not. So we we did it for the cancer patients, but
now we see all these young, healthy folks not cancerous, not cardiovascular, none of
these chronic diseases, they're all doing the GKI because they know that if they're
in this zone their mitochondria gonna be at the healthiest state. So they're using it as a prevention, as a
health benefit for their body. I want to use it, but yeah, GKI, Glucose Ketone
Index. You get it from the Keto Mojo and, and when
we made it, we had to ask people because you get blood sugar in milligram per deciliter,
and you get ketones and millimolar. So you have to divide the glucose by 18 and
then divide that number by the millimolar of ketones. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it is too little, too much. The Keto Mojo guys made a little chip in the
meter, so all you have to do is get the blood value and the, and you do the glucose strip
and then the ketones strip, and you push the button on the metering. Gives you the voila. You get the GKI right there. You don't even have to do the admin arithmetic
anymore. Dr. Seyfried, you were amazing. I would love to have you back. This has been so edifying and now I almost
have anxiety that I've been slacking for 35 years. But I, you definitely have catalyzed my thinking
on this, especially with young kids. And and I'm excited to do some digging, but
we appreciate you and and yeah, the, so where can people find you if they wanna read more
on your material? We've published our papers in peer review
journals. Cureus is one of them, for our case reports. But anybody can look my name up and see the
publications that we've written on PubMed, publication of Library of Medicine. Hi. Thank you so much.
