Colin Champ: Fighting Cancer with Food and Fitness

[Music] this lecture is being brought to you in part by the generous gifts of these sponsors thanks everyone it's great to be back thanks dr. Ford thanks to guys GMC thanks to you all for being here so I spoke here a couple years back and that talk was I presented a lot of my dad a lot of the studies we were doing on treating cancer this is going to be kind of the opposite so these are things that I do that I recommend to patients and that the current research promotes that we all do to help prevent cancer okay so a little different talk here some tangible takeaways a lot of this is less my research but more what what's available out there and as she said I'm coming down from Pittsburgh where my wife and I left when it was snowing and 22 degrees so needless to say it's it's great to be here and so by the end of this talk I hope to give you all some tangible takeaways to help fight cancer with with food and fitness actually before I go on Friday one of my most amazing patients gave me a call this this gentleman has had cancer several times and when I treated him it was several years back he had a cancer is the bottom and it was in the duct it was very similar to a pancreatic cancer and it was basically terminal he was in his later 90s so I treated with a small dose of radiation to open up his duodenum and to palliate it it was by no means curative and I let him know that and explained that it would likely grow again in the future and if it did if it was causing pain to call me and come in and see me and we could potentially do some where radiation he was in my office with his son who happened to be the neighbor of my uncle so there was all this connection so before I came down here he called me on Friday going through all the things I told him and he said yeah I just want to let you know that all those things you told me none of them happened and I'm 99 years old now and he said I'm doing amazingly well when is all one or all these bad things gonna happen and I said that's that's good that was what we were hoping for but I was just telling you the worst-case scenario and he said well I just want to let you know that none of that happened and he hung up and the not the funny part the interesting part during treatment he actually he got cuts on his forearms because again he was 97 he was in the basement as 97 year old do they keep a lot of their food products in the basement he was making crepes and so he was a miner said of course you were making crepes of all the people to be making crepes so and again he's 99 and he's doing great so there's two points to this story what I'm gonna tell you tonight is certainly not recommending that you eat crepes it's it's quite it's quite the opposite but keep in mind everything I'm saying here are just suggestions and there are things to help increase the odds you could do everything perfect and still get cancer right we're all rolling the dice you could do everything terribly and not get cancer we see these things all the time and my second point is if you're 99 you can do whatever the heck you want so what I'm going to talk about tonight I'm going to briefly in the red here go through the issues with food and lifestyle studies the the nightly news back and forth drive you nuts this foods gonna kill you this one's gonna make you live forever the issues we've currently recommended foods and there are quite a bunch and the issues with ignoring cellular mechanisms right so when we tell people to eat something or exercise or do something it has an effect in our body and we have to actually know what that effect is before we can make some sound recommendations other things going to talk about are some tangible mechanisms by which food in our health interact I'm going to try to convince you that stopping excessive growth is key here this is what we don't want is excessive growth that's cancer I'm going to convince you that stress is actually good yeah bitter is better than sweet and a good defense is a good offense my conflict again I write books none of that affects what I'm telling you tonight dietary wise anyone that gives you a talk on diet or lifestyle should tell you what they're doing because it's certainly going to affect what they're telling you that's a conflict in itself I to really diet and count calories and I believe the food pyramid was the largest public health mistake in US history and that will certainly affect what I'm telling everyone tonight so I'm going to my last couple talks this year I ended well on a negative so instead I'm going to start on a negative this is a paper we just published about two weeks ago my med student my resident and I did a you can do a Federal Information Act query to VA hospitals they have to tell you what they're doing so we wanted to see what they're putting in their vending machines we weren't picking on the VA hospitals but they have to tell you everything they're doing so we filled out this form and the guy sends us these these PDF pictures and he says these are what they're required to put in the vending machines by Coke and Pepsi half of them are owned by coke half for hunt by Pepsi in it at that point our heads exploded this is actually a picture of a vending machine at our government-run hospitals what they have to put in it so what we did is we went to the government nutritional recommendations and of course they recommend no more than ten percent of your daily calories being added sugar yet a single bottle of coca-cola single 20 ounce bottle will far surpass that it has about 50 plus grams of sugar in it so this is why I'm talking about the food pyramid why we really can't take to heart what unfortunate what our hospitals are telling us what our physicians are telling us because right now it's just it's a total mess the places where we're supposed to get our health care from are selling foods like this so a lot of what I say is going to conflict with that and again looking at this I have no problem conflicting with that because it's such poor information all right I'll be more positive now I apologize so Sir Richard all this does anyone know who searcher dollars so this guy was knighted he's a big deal he's a first person it's arguable but he's the first person who showed that lung cancer was caused by smoking and this was a 40 times higher risk of dying from lung cancer in people that smoke this was a big epidemiologic study he looked at all this data from England and he saw that the two were associated okay so these are the nightly news reports right coffee is associated with this cheese is associated with that well he's the first one to show this in quite a significant manner so a 40 times increased risk of lung cancer death is a big deal and smokers yet overall the difference was only 16% now I'm not saying to go out and smoke but that numbers not quite as big and we're gonna get into that in a minute what he did find is that for heavy smokers there was a 3,000 percent increase in dying of lung and death from lung cancer the importance of these numbers are we've never seen any numbers like that so that 40 times higher risk a lot of these studies on the nightly news they have like a point one five times risk okay not a 40 times risk or a 3,000 percent increased risk so he was knighted for this important information but when you hear about these population studies these are numbers we have yet to repeat and following this and the heels of this again he was knighted this was a big deal they said if we found the association between lung cancer and smoking what other associations are out there when we look at different types of food so they did a very big study looking at a bunch of countries around the world the data was mixed overall but they showed that fish consumption was associated with stomach cancer coffee consumption was associated with kidney cancer and fat consumption was associated with breast cancer and at the time they just showed again that lung cancer was associated with smoking so people thought Jesus this might be the real deal this has since been disproven the stomach cancer was from certain chemicals they were putting in the fish newer studies show that coffee may actually decrease most types of cancer which is great news because I drink about 30 cups a day and we'll talk about breast cancer a little more because I think it illustrates some important points that we need to keep in mind when we hear these kind of studies so following this Walter Willett who was who's head of the nutritional epidemiology department at Harvard said let's expand upon this let's look in a US population in ninety thousand nurses and let's see how much fat is associated with breast cancer doll and his group did it throughout the world now let's do in the United States they looked at ninety thousand nurses age thirty four to fifty nine without a history of cancer they followed them for a bunch of years and what they found was that the more fat they eat the more trend with a lower risk of breast cancer okay so was the exact opposite this was not statistically significant so really we cannot make any conclusions from this but again it showed a lower risk of breast cancer so not not really what they were looking for so then a couple years later in 1996 there was an additional six studies that were looking at the same same type of group of women there's 337 thousand women and again they found that fat was totally unrelated to breast cancer risk in their first study with those ninety thousand nurses they said well maybe they weren't eating low enough fat maybe they're all just eating too much fat or maybe we didn't follow them enough well at this point it was 1992 they're at eight years of follow-up and they found that fat was again unrelated to breast cancer risk and they also looked at fiber which was was uh all over the news at that point they found that fiber was unrelated to breast cancer risk as well 1999 they got their 14-year follow-up so the two things they said was maybe it wasn't long enough well now they had fourteen years they'll follow up maybe women weren't eating low enough fat and by that point we've had all of our heads pounded in with the low-fat recommendations from our doctors and everyone else so a lot of women were following a very low-fat diet what they found was that for every 5 percent that women decreased their fat and replaced it with carbohydrates they had an increased risk of breast cancer by 4 percent so again they're finding the exact opposite of what they're looking at now to be honest these studies are all rubbish so I wouldn't recommend them to anyone ah but again how many times can you look for something and not find and find the exact opposite before you give up well these papers all got published in big-time journals they all buried the results deep within so you really couldn't tell but it was repeated so often that it really started to make everyone think that fat was associated with breast cancer and there's really no good relationship in fact might be the opposite and even will it for all his issues that he's caused us has quoted as saying there was never any strong evidence for this idea but it was repeated so often that it became Dogma in the 1980s and 1990s so this guy who basically dedicated his career to showing this he even admits that we were wrong it's not related and these are very important studies to keep in mind because when we take Association studies right we take a hundred people and say what are they doing and say oh you know 20 of them are doing this this habit and they have a higher risk of cancer well that may cause that habit may cause cancer and that's not true and this is a great example of what happens when we assume things in 1985 that same group from Harvard looked at the same large group of women and they looked at those women on hormone replacement therapy that's what HRT is for postmenopausal women it's prescribed to help decrease some of the side effects that you get when the hormonal levels change they adjusted for all these differences between the groups so women that smoked or didn't smoke had diabetes had hypertension high cholesterol who women whose parents had a myocardial infarction and MI women who were on birth control and women were obese and what they found was that women on hormone replacement therapy after all that statistical manipulation had a 50% decreased risk of coronary artery disease and current users had a 70% decreased risk of coronary artery disease so based on that data which I mean they said it basically showed that if you were on hormone replacement therapy your risk of coronary artery disease would drop so for since 1985 until really only a couple years ago hormone replacement therapy was widely prescribed this was not a randomized controlled trial only after they started prescribing this and and I remember this I remember a lot of my family members that were on this only after they started prescribing it did they do a randomized control trial and a randomized control trial is when they take two equal groups of people put one of them on a medication and one of them on either nothing or a placebo and that's much better at telling us if something works especially in the in the cancer world that's what we hang our hat on what they found in 2000 - that they reported was women receiving hormone replacement therapy actually had a higher risk of heart disease a higher risk of breast cancer stroke pulmonary embolism a blood clot in the lungs and a higher risk of total cardiovascular disease the only benefit was a lower risk of hip fracture and this at the time there was a lot of legal commercials on physicians were getting sued it was a total disaster in that what they realized was when they look back at the data they could have done all the statistical manipulation that they wanted but what they could not account for was the healthy user bias so those women that were going to their doctors and asking for hormone replacement therapy were were these women that wear Lululemon and go to the gym 15 times a day and were so upset when their hormone levels dropped and they had any symptoms these are proactive women that were going to their doctors these were just healthier women that were doing healthier things overall and no matter how much the group at Harvard tried to account that statistically they couldn't it had nothing to do with the hormone replacement therapy and in fact the hormone replacement therapy that these women were getting was likely making them less healthy so that's how much more healthy they were in the general population so when we look at studies and say oh people that eat meat or you know have a higher risk of cancer yeah people that he meet also smoke more and do a lot of other bad things they don't wear helmets or seat belts and other I'm making that up it you know there's if you're told to do something for 30 years and someone gives you a questionnaire and you say you're not doing it you're obviously someone that doesn't follow advice and you know a lot of times that's that's probably good but in a lot of these studies it doesn't work out so well when you try to see what behaviors correlate with what type of cancer and so what we've been left with and we've all experienced it is this back and forth every night on the news there's just these garbage studies that barely show anything and you know my my mom calls me up three times a week oh your diets actually gonna kill you and you're gonna round and talking and you're telling people all this wrong stuff and you drink wine and that's terrible for you and coffee's gonna give you kidney cancer and it just never ends and these studies are generally quite poor so instead when we start making lifestyle recommendations we need to look at a couple things here so population studies are what we just discussed they're fine they're a great place to start but beyond that they don't tell us much then we need to say is there mechanistic support so if hormone replacement therapy lowered your risk of coronary disease why did that happen is what mechanism can explain that then animal studies so when we gave these two mice or rodents what happened and those aren't the best either but they're getting a little closer to us and then finally randomized human studies are by far the best way to know if something actually works or doesn't work and they're expensive and difficult to do and if you look back at Dahl and Armstrong in that study that showed with the kidney cancer and coffee and fish and stomach cancer and fat and breast cancer they cautioned several times in the conclusions as well that their findings may reflect some other variable correlated with economic development so in these groups people that were eating more fat in their diet a lot of these were in third world countries they were doing a lot of other bad things just like people that were drinking a lot of coffee were very westernized so they were doing things like smoking they weren't working as hard they weren't exercising they said the quality of cancer incidence data is significantly affected by economic factors that's something we still know today rich areas are some are good in a lot of ways but they sometimes do a lot less healthy things and as they said particularly as controlling for any of the food consumption variables can reduce this correlation so you don't see that three thousand times increased risk like with tobacco usage and lung cancer you start to see these tiny risks that don't even hold so backing up from a cancer point of view what can we tangibly say that that we need to do to avoid or at least increase our risk of avoiding cancer well one of the easiest ones is to avoid waking or keep a normal weight and again when we followed these are postmenopausal women diagnosed with breast cancer we followed a group of women and followed their weight over time we found that on the left here in the green these are women that past menopause lost ten pounds in the blue to the right these are women that lost five to ten pounds their risk of breast cancer dropped by 30% the risk of five to ten pounds loss of weight dropped by 10% women whose weight stayed the same risk of breast cancer stay the same and as you gain weight 2 to 5 pounds 5 to 10 pounds 10 or more pounds your risk of breast cancer goes up we have mechanisms to explain that body fat secretes estrogen estrogen binds to cells and tells them to grow it can cause breast cancer body fat also increases inflammation so triple negative breast cancer correlates high with inflammation we have a population study that shows it we have mechanistic studies to show it we have animal studies to show it we're not gonna have a randomized control trial because it would be two groups and you would try to make one group get over way no one's gonna do that but these are tangible recommendations that we could say whatever you can do to help lose weight should help you decrease your risk of cancer in this case of breast cancer and so we actually do have randomized studies in terms of weight loss in non cancer groups of patients and this was one that was published earlier this year and this was a bad study in many ways but a great study in many ways and they put patients on a low-carb or a low-fat diet realistically it wasn't so low-carb they gave him about 25% protein 30% carbs and 45% fat so it was low ish for the low-fat diet was 23 percent protein 29% fat and about 50 percent carbs it's a pretty high carb diet a lot of these government sources recommend more but the key here and this is again a randomized controlled trial so take this these results to heart this was unique in that they did no calorie counting okay they focused on quality not quantity they told people to eat nutrient-dense foods they told people to limit processed foods sugar bread and pasta even the low car excuse me even the higher Carver's they told to avoid these foods so again it was less an issue of of carbs or fat and more an issue of quality foods they told people number three there to cook all your foods all your meals eat with your family no snacking and never eat in the car finally they told him eat whole foods like grass-fed meat and this is revolutionary in the hospital to have them actually promote meat because this is something you never hear about and both groups lost 12 to 13 pounds at one year so again if we want to take randomized control trials I could say to everyone in this room and myself if you stop counting calories and focus on high quality foods based on randomized data odds are you're gonna lose weight and this study it was a tie because both groups lost 12 to 13 pounds what's interesting if you look back through all of the studies that exist in non cancer patients and there are quite a few randomized controlled studies where they told people to do one of two things to either eat a low fat diet where you count calories some of them are 1,500 calories which has been traditionally weight loss advice versus a low carbohydrate diet where you can eat as much as you want you just have to keep the carbs low they've tied 29 times in terms of weight loss a low-carb calorically unrestricted diet has 128 times and a low-fat calorically restricted diet has one never and I have to revisit these studies so often because I can't believe that this is possibly true but it is so again we have randomized control data that if you want to lose weight a low-fat diet is by far the worst for everyone and the nice thing is you don't have to chloric alee restrict yourselves if you if you do the opposite so these are again recommendations that I do myself that I tell to my patients and it's supported by phase 3 randomized studies so from a cancer point of view we want to stop weight gain just like with cancer cells we want to stop their excessive growth and the two parallel each other quite closely so adipose tissue grows as we give it surplus nutrients and cancer cells much like this vineyard this is a Santa Lorenzo Valley see this is where my great grandfather's from beautiful town up in the mountains and this is a what was maybe one day a well-manicured grapevine that now is growing like a cancer on to the neighbors property and we'll start pulling bricks off sooner or later but it's a beautiful picture so there's cellular explanations for this so everything on the left side of this of this picture I'm going to bring this picture up again and again and I showed a similar picture here a couple years back these are growth pathways in ourselves so on the left there is glucose in the middle is insulin the middle blue one and the right blue one is igf-1 these are chemicals while glucose is sugar and insulin is a chemical that's secreted by the pancreas to lower glucose to shuttle it outside of our blood indoor cells and igf-1 is a hormone that's secreted when we eat a lot when we do things like exercise that actually has some benefits here and the high-protein diets will increase it and in these three things can bind to the insulin receptor and insulin and both IGF can bind to the IGF receptor and what it does is it stimulates these cancer pathways we're not going to talk about a lot of these but a katie is one mTOR is one and it triggers cell growth and survival okay so we want to minimize cell growth and survival to a reasonable degree right we all have cells at a replicating that are growing too much of the left is a bad thing as we turn to the right it's kind of the opposite these pathways start to trigger to our body to decrease growth there's some ways this and I'm gonna really beat a dead horse here with this and we'll go through it but things like exercise fasting carbohydrate restriction and this thing called ketosis which I'm not going to get into too much but we've talked about in the past here it actually triggers the opposite to ourselves even again not counting calories even being in ketosis periodically triggers this thing called amp kinase and what this is is it's like the energy cashier of our cells it's calculating the energy in our cells non-stop as soon as they start to drop amp kinase pushes the panic button so all these growth pathways to my right here it blocks on that red arrow it blocks mTOR blocks all those growth pathways and it says we're not in feast here we're in famine and what we need to do is break things down so it does a couple process is called autophagy and some other things like that that's basically cellular recycling so breaks down the extra parts it stops cells that are cycling too much it basically activates all these anti-cancer pathways and in doing so it turns to our mitochondria for energy these are the power plants of our cells and if you think about it when you're turning the power plants on you're putting fuel in the furnace it makes heat heat in this case our free radicals free radicals are bad for you so when your cells are ramping up in producing free radicals there are components in the cells that know it's bad and it actually makes antioxidants this is getting a little nuanced here but everyone's heard about antioxidants they block free radicals they're very good for you if you take antioxidants they do not work okay it's most studies showing antioxidant benefit are negative however if you stress your cells to produce free radicals your cells will make more antioxidants than are actually required to offset those free radicals so you do things like live longer all right we're going to come back to this a couple times this is my most complicated slide I'm seeing eyelids getting heavier as I go through this so and so we see things like like this study this is from Pamela Goodwin this was in the Journal of Clinical Oncology this was almost twenty years ago at this point and what this showed was women that were diagnosed with breast cancer early stage breast cancer which is very curable we want to see the survival up there at a hundred percent on the Left women with low insulin and again insulins that hormone that your body secretes when your blood sugars too high women with low insulin about ninety five percent of them were alive at five years as insulin levels go up as you go further to the right survival drops by the far right women with the highest amount of insulin had the highest risk of dying from their cancer insulin is a growth hormone it tells cells to grow it pulls sugar in cancer cells like growth hormone so we need insulin but we don't want too much of it so we want to eat a diet that decreases the amount of insulin that's available and we'll talk about that in a minute the best way that I've conceptualized this in my head is with a study by Cynthia Kenyon and this is a study in in worms which is see worms were moving quite far away from humans but the similarities are absolutely uncanny and what-what she showed this gets a little bit confusing as well but in worms there's two genes there's this gene called DAF - and DAF - I call it the bodyguard of the nucleus it constantly binds to this guy daf-16 and stops - sixteen from going in here and turning on a couple of genes okay so stay with me here - sixteen wants to go into the nucleus and turn on these jeans she genetically modified the mice to turn this off this guy went into the nucleus and it turned on all these antioxidant defense genes just like we just talked about a minute ago with those free radicals and the mice lived longer and this was one of the first studies to show that you could simply cause a mutation and it would cause lifespan to increase so of course everyone wanted us and they want to try to do this in humans and unfortunately hasn't been successful at as of yet but what she showed in her next study was even if you mutate that gene if you feed the mice glucose they don't live any longer okay so there's something about sugar that activates a signal in this I said - I mean worms and in these worms that stops these antioxidant defense genes from being transcribed what she found was is that daf-2 that bodyguard parallels the insulin IGF receptor in humans so again just like I said that left side these this is it up here these cell growth pathways we want to decrease OCO so we want to eat foods that don't do things like stimulate insulin this is where we don't want to go overboard on on carbohydrates IGF proteins good we don't to go not to need a 100% protein diet and we see the same thing in humans as she's seeing in worms and this study is being replicated as we speak and this is why we see things like in this study this this was a group of women that had breast cancer and not the best study in the world but the only one we have they tested their cancer cells for IGF receptors so if you remember there's insulin receptors and there's IGF recep a lot of cancer cells have IGF receptors on them women that ate a high carbohydrate diet with IGF receptor positive breast cancer tumors had a 550 percent higher risk of their cancer coming back women that ate a low-carb diet had a 50% decreased risk of their cancer coming back so again we have to start looking at food at the quality of food right food there's something within food that triggers different results they're different chemical results there's something about if you eat a high carbohydrate diet it's going to stimulate the IGF receptor it's gonna stimulate the insulin receptor so we need to start looking past calories and look at what actually is in our food and what it's signaling so the best analogy that I've told myself when I think about this is you got to view your cells in your body as a garden and this is a picture from Puglia which is one of the biggest olive oil producing areas in the world and you see these olive groves I mean they're perfectly linear they're these beautiful giant olive trees yet there's no weeds in between them at all right there's like a little bit of grass in the middle there's a little stone there and this is what we want for our body we want to foster the appropriate growth we don't want it to be - we don't want to jungle with just weeds growing everywhere and we also don't want a scorched earth policy and that that's what we medicine have been promoting a lot of right you need to starve yourself you need to run 30 miles a day you need to do all these things that just totally tear your body down and don't even give it the ability to to fight cancer do much else this this is what we won and one way to do that again is to stress ourselves and instead of overabundance we need to look at ice pond they're wrong under abundance to basically push the scales on more of these things being activated instead of these things so we need to trigger to ourselves that even though we're eating because with each meal or our body wants to stay in homeostasis so if we went outside right now and it was 90 degrees out you would start to perspire your vessels would dilate your body tries to cool itself your body is constantly trying to stay the same well if you go and eat a giant meal right now again your body is a it's approached with a stress so it figures out what the heck to do with this food it's either gonna burn it it's gonna store it it's gonna do something and based on the type of food you eat it's gonna tell the body well maybe you should do this thing and so we want to push it over on this end to burn the food so the best way to help ourselves otherwise to fight cancer is to put them on the offense and the best defense is a good offense I googled who first said this and I've George Washington Machiavelli I found a picture of Jesus with a sword the alternate pass of this so even he believed that the best defense is a good offense so the other thing we find out that a lot of the chemicals in foods regardless of calories actually signal to ourselves to be better defense mechanisms to be better immune cells and if you look through all these very different foods on the top left there we have Brussels sprouts on the bottom left we have a bunch of different Indian spices and the middle we have wine from qohor which it's a it's a Malbec but it's a French Malbec and it's uh it's very high in tannins polyphenols and certain chemicals that are their defense chemicals and all these their defense chemicals so on the right here we have sushi with wasabi is everyone in here had wasabi wasabi burns your nose because of the sulfur in it and it's not oil-based so as soon as you bite in it goes into the air and it burns the top of your nose olives have it sorry olives onions have a type of sulfur in them as well that's why they burn your mouth and give you terrible breath all these foods all these plants use them as defense mechanisms they kill their fungicidal they kill insects and when you eat them they're actually toxic to our body as well and when your body senses it it up regulates its mechanisms and a lot of these mechanisms are anti can't see meant anti-cancer mechanisms so they train your cells to be better troops so in full-metal-jacket exactly so full-metal-jacket he's yelling in their face and he's not actually a threat but they perceive him as a threat they train harder and become better troops it is exactly what happens with ourselves so turmeric curcumin that's you know the that's one of the big spices now that's exactly how it works and that's why I want you all to favor bitter foods over sweet foods so sweet foods contain sugar and when they do things like increase your insulin increase your IGF stimulate all those growth pathways bitter foods over time will actually make you crave less sweet foods but they do things like again the Indian spices increase bee and t-cell modulation they also decrease inflammation when my joints hurt I think my wife's here she's Indian we increase the Indian spices and it it makes my joints feel better maybe it's totally my head I don't know but it works so I'm gonna keep doing it and again sulfur and a lot of different foods and cruciferous vegetables broccoli onions it actually signals it come a it's called nrf2 and we'll get into this in a second it's actually floating around in the the liquid of ourselves and the cytosol it signals to it that it's stress is coming that goes into our nucleus and turns on a bunch of genes just like Cynthia Kenyans study with the the DAF gene it promote it's a stress that actually promotes better health and it again it increases antioxidants the other thing it does is it detoxifies carcinogens and we're gonna get to this in a minute and then finally I tell people if you're gonna eat fruit eat berries eat the bitter fruits because they have all those chemicals as well they're in the skin of some bitter grapes that's why wine tastes the way it does they enhance the immune system and again they detoxify carcinogens which we'll talk about in a minute they have vitamins nutrients and minerals I'm not gonna argue with that but these are the things where we haven't really considered this one we recommend vegetables and from a cancer point of view this is likely where the benefit is and what was really interesting to me there's a lot of data a lot of studies coming out of Japan they call it forest bathing and they have all these benefits of just going out and walking around the forest which is you know it used to be called just going in the woods or hiking now they have medical terms for it forest bathing this is in between this is in Bellingham Washington it's about a two hour south of Vancouver and uh this is a amazing highway went on through the woods and if you look closer at these pine trees when they're damaged and the SAP pours out they have a aroma with them these are called terpenes and terpenoids chemicals of the trees those are toxic you know you don't want to answer things climbing off the tree they're actually toxic to them they do the same thing to you and a lot of these studies in Japan if they look at your immune system before and after going on a walk in the woods it will actually stimulate your immune cells so these plant it's also neat because it really pulls everything together right we're associated with the foods we eat our environment all these different things I'm what I like best about this is so again there's terpenes on the Left broccoli on the right has sulfur and then wine has tannins so I can tell myself that every time I drink wine I'm helping to fight cancer and and it it works really well and sometimes it works too well but um it again it decreases inflammation all of these pathways tumor necrosis factor interleukin map kinase these are pathways that cause cells to replicate and these are pro cancer pathways that we want to decrease and there's ways to do that through our food and there's also ways to do that through our activity if you recommend eating broccoli because it's anti-cancer it's really hard to not also recommend a low carbohydrate diet that's what's on the left there my wife told me it looks like a burrito we're not recommending a burrito and lifting weights stimulating contracting muscles actually you know working out intensely it does the same thing it stimulates that amp kinase it says our energy reserves are low stop growing we need to repair and break things down it increases the the fuel of our mitochondria it lowers insulin receptor pathway it lowers blood glucose and it lowers insulin again it pushes that cellular pathway picture more to the right than the left and this is my favorite study in the world this is from Francesca Sophie who is based in Florence which must be must terrible to be a physician or researcher there he did this study where he put people on ten weeks of a half pound of pecorino cheese per week okay and the the key here is you know this is a study that 10 20 years ago people would have said you're out of your mind you're giving people full fat cheese pecorino cheese is made it's from animals that are fed grass its sheep that are high up in the mountains so cheese it's our cheese it's made from animals that are higher like Alpine cheese's they have higher amounts of conjugated linoleic acid and anti-inflammatory fats and what he found was after ten weeks all three of these very important inflammatory markers when it comes to cancer lowered significantly so interleukin 6 dropped by 55% io8 dropped by 25% and a really bad player tumor necrosis factor even it even sounds bad dropped by 28% simply from eating a half pound of a certain type of cheese per week and again from a caloric point of view this would make some old-school physicians lose their mind but look at the results here you can't argue with it and again we want to eat certain foods and pathways that will stimulate our anti-inflammatory mechanisms not promote them and again we need to look at quality over quantity this is a busy graph but this is another study that was published in JAMA from 2012 where they put three groups of people on a low-fat a low GI index diet or a very low carbohydrate diet and they calorically restricted them that's a low fat low GI diet very low carbohydrate as expected the amount of energy people were burning at rest basically uniformly dropped right this is what happens if you cut calories you have less energy the interesting thing is your energy was different based on what your macronutrients are were so calories all the same yet you're burning different amounts of energy based on fat carbs the amount of protein etc what was really interesting was total energy expenditure was actually significantly higher in the very low carbohydrate diet so again if we want people to eat less but still have the energy to feel like exercising and doing the things they want to do we have to look at the actual randomized studies in humans and this is why I recommend either a lower carb or a very low carbohydrate diet for myself and most of my patients and in this same study they found that insulin sensitivity was enhanced so sensitivity means you need less insulin to pull sugar from your blood and into your cells and again people on the low-carb diet had the highest insulin sensitivity which means they'll have the lowest amount of insulin I showed you that data from breast cancer and insulin we want to have less of it floating around and so this is why we recommend or why I recommend a lower carb or lower carbohydrate diet again I can't I can't promote this enough we need to start looking at quality over quantity the the calorie counting that it really did a disservice to us all over the past 30 to 50 years the other amazing thing about it is and we start to look at quality we can go back to those foods those culturally sensitive foods that have been shunned for so many years like in the top left here this is a picture from Amalfi which I think I showed here a couple years back buffalo mozzarella it's local wine it's very high in the chemicals that we're talking about pecorino cheese on the top again you can't even compare it with other types of cheese and then that's a wine on the bottom from qohor which has much higher and bitter chemicals like canons and polyphenols and last but not least as I wrap this up I'll touch briefly on exercise now if you remember all these pathways that we were talking about exercise fasting carbohydrate restriction ketosis they all decrease the amount of energy available they all decrease amp kinase it turns our mitochondria on it makes free radicals free radicals tell ourselves to make antioxidants and we have improved longevity metabolic function it also turns on that that stress pathway again nrf2 and again that goes into our nuclei and tells it to increase antioxidant production what this shows is that the overlap between these dietary habits and exercise is remarkably similar so telling someone to eat a high carbohydrate diet and then telling them to exercise a lot are two very different things from the point of your cells so your cells will be very confused with that advice and the overlap here is is my last my last big point so in the top here we have self er a feign that's what's in broccoli and a lot of these vegetables that turns on nrf2 as does exercise and it turns on these different pathways glutathione is a very popular antioxidant and ql1 and hl1 it increases antioxidant defense but the other thing it does is detoxifies chemicals and there's actually studies there's a couple studies from China where you give people sulfur fain and instead of absorbing exhaust you actually bind it and excrete it out and that's exactly what NRF does when we encounter toxic chemicals often times we actually it goes through phase 1 conjugation and becomes a more reactive chemical so it can be worse and we need to shuttle it through to make it water-soluble once it's water-soluble we can excrete it in the urine we could excrete it with our bowels nrf2 increases the conjugation of these chemicals so these cancerous chemicals when we encounter nrf2 it actually tells our body to get rid of them ok we're exercising we're doing all these other things it doesn't need to mess with toxic and cancerous chemicals in the overlap there between lifting weights and exercising intensely is is quite profound flexing your muscle stimulating your muscle through intense exercise lifting heavy weights again it triggers nrf2 and these are studies in humans we're not animals anymore it triggers amp kinase it triggers our mitochondria and the the other amazing thing it does is it they're like our muscles are like sponges they actually secrete this chemical called il-6 it's a chemical that we don't want but muscle derived il-6 actually sensitizes our body to inflammation so that when you're not lifting the amount of inflammatory chemicals that are floating around drop so it increases our sensitivity so we need to not just go for walks not go for jobs we need to actually do some intense exercise every once in a while if you don't believe me on this this is a paper that doctor done in his group up in Canada this is a drawing from it where is it all this stuff's starting to look very similar right you eat phytonutrients those chemicals we talked about you exercise it increases nrf2 it increases free radicals they tell the cell that it's stressed out and rf2 goes into the nucleus and it up regulates all these antioxidant genes what's even more interesting is it's not necessarily just getting nrf2 in there so if you go and run for three hours you'll pull nrf2 into your nucleus it'll make antioxidants it's great newer studies are showing the shuttling of nrf2 in and out of the cell might be even more important so this would favor you know doing little bits of intense exercise periodically throughout the entire day so don't go chug away for three hours and destroy your knees you know do some kettlebell swings in your office or even just jump up into the air these kind of exercise activities may have better anti-cancer benefits so what I tell people is the activity EKG so this is a EKG this is your heart rate it blips every once in a while throughout an entire week we want lots and lots and lots of activity so just baseline walking being active being on your feet ideally and this is tough for a lot of people including myself ideally you would do some kind of jumping or sprinting or intense activity periodically throughout the week or the day to help increase all those mechanisms I said and everyone in this room that is physically able to including myself needs to lift weights do some intense training not just to get bigger muscles or look better any of those things but because it literally activates cellular pathways in our body that tell it to decrease growth in the risk of cancer so lifestyle advice that I give that I follow I tell people to eat foods that don't promote overeating that minimally stimulate insulin and igf-1 dense and vitamins and nutrients that incorporate social and cultural aspects of food we know from a randomized trial how important that is I'm from an Italian family my last name is actually team petit if you take the cultural or social aspect out of it it's not going to work we need to eat foods that stress ourselves to be better troops so the tangibles knew too in dense foods intermixed with no food so we could have talked about this it's a whole nother lecture but in term in it fasting these periods without food sugar drops insulin drops all these pathways drop were never meant to graze that was the eating six meals a day or that was the worst advice we've ever given and it's backed by no studies to support it so we want food and then no food minimized bread sugar pasta etc these these sugary addictive foods focus on quality over quantity eat foods with stressful chemicals and I want everyone to do background activity with some periods of intensity and I know the intensity is tough I struggle with it myself but it doesn't have to be very long last but not least this is a picture from our wedding in Florence my wife and I got married in May thing and this is our favorite restaurant we had a seven-course meal and it was totally low carb and ketogenic and we didn't tell anyone of course because we take so much heat from from all of our friends for ruining all these foods we did have way too much wine but by the end of it everyone was commenting how amazing the food was my mom's like oh this is like my my mother my grandmother used to cook and you know a lot of these foods that I'm recommending here these are very culturally sensitive culturally appropriate foods it for a lot of reasons have been pushed aside and it's actually it's really nice and rewarding that these are foods we can now eat and not feel guilty about it so these are not a change is difficult but these are not difficult foods to enjoy so if people tell you that they're they're just being difficult but um so so I try to speed through this to give to give people some questions but thanks everyone for being here [Applause] my uh oh there I am okay all right Christie's in the back and I'm in the front Colin you pick and we'll pass the mic there you go here I know next it's Gordon's fault he didn't bring it down with him from Pensacola we're gonna get it next time well obviously most people are not dying with cancer and so there are there I have a whole family people live into their 90's and never can't cancer so is that Jim there's their genetics different than all of the genetics you just described it oh there's there's absolutely people that have amazing genetics and there's I have a I have a patient whose family they all lived in their lower hundreds so there's um there's certainly again like I said in the beginning there's people that can do everything right and not get cancer there's people that can do everything wrong or replace reverse that so yeah genetics play a huge key and at some point we're probably gonna be doing tests 23andme tests in basically prescribing people's diets like the IGF study you know if you had an IJ F receptor on your breast cancer so you probably don't want to eat a high carb diet well it's gonna be more nuanced than that I think genetics are gonna have to play a role for sure the other issue is with the intermixing of of genes it's becoming more more difficult to know exactly who should be doing what if we are eating the right things and the right proportions and only doing three meals a day instead of grazing do you have recommendations on how what emphasis of amounts should be in the breakfast lunch and dinner meals do you mean you said amount do you mean like calories or macronutrient sir well I've murdered said eat breakfast like a king and dinner like a yeah in theory that's as the it's not good to eat as much late at night there's you're less insulin sensitive it can disrupt your sleep that being said I'm horrible at following my advice there you know the other thing I would say is for a lot of people not everyone but for a lot of people the foods that we're talking about here you don't have to you can just kind of eat till you're no longer hungry you know these aren't foods that if you make Brussels sprouts and you know a steak and you usually don't like like if I eat a basket of bread I turn into a mad person and you know I could just keep eating usually doesn't happen when you're eating a lot of these types of foods so I I kind of let how I'm feeling dictate that thank you doctor um I just wanted to ask question regarding something very specific about intermittent fasting the whole idea of fasting and not eating it's been said that that when one does that the body goes into a mode of you know like to protect yourself and your metabolism slows down is that the myth is that factual is it beneficial I think it's beneficial and it's normal I think to your point I don't think obviously I don't think we should graze you know when you fast a lot of different mechanisms are triggered you make ketones which have other benefits your blood sugar drops your insulin drops the whole thing about your metabolism dropping and that that's what why they started saying you should eat small amounts all day so it keeps your metabolism up all that really does is keep your insulin up so I think that's a that's a pretty big a pretty big myth and you know the other thing is these are mechanisms that have been put in place in our bodies over millions of years right we never we never grazed it doesn't make sense that our bodies are primed for grazing yet we've never grazed you know so there these are cellular mechanisms that are put in place for a reason and so I think I think fasting has benefits and we're starting to see it there was a the the the cancer studies aren't great but there was a study for breast in breast cancer patients they found that women that fast I think it was only 11 hours which which truly is not that much but they had a lower risk of their cancer coming back and some other things I think fasting is is a good move for most people there was to hear hi dr. champ thank you for coming out tonight it's been wonderful recently I had a family member diagnosed with prostate cancer we've done a lot of research and we have started with an ozone machine doing ozonated water do you have any comments or thoughts on ozone therapy it's it's a hot topic right now but there's just not a lot of great data so it's hard for me to say to say yes or no it doesn't seem like it's going to hurt anyone but there's not great data to say that it will make a huge difference about not eating after say 5 o'clock or something if that's good mm-hmm yeah I think it's generally good especially because it interrupts with your sleep cycles so for those of you that have track I have this tracker on and it yells at me every morning because it says your sleep cycles are interrupted because you ate too late but all but we also know that if you eat during different periods of the day it causes different results in terms of how your body secretes insulin and there's there's there's mouse studies that show that as well phew even though they eat the opposite but if you eat at the wrong time it can actually cause you to gain more weight right there thank you for your lecture um I just have a quick question just to be clear you personally besides contributing to the wine vineyards and and their growth and all the good things that happens to us so is your diet personally consistent of a protein and then you're eliminating the higher proteins I mean the higher carbohydrates like rice pasta bread potatoes and you're more in the fruit vegetable and protein so yeah each my meals it depends but so I don't know I I rarely bread or pasta okay like I don't think I had any any in our wedding but uh so I rarely that the only carbs I do eat are berries like we said sweet potatoes I will eat some white rice and I usually do it after I work out because honestly if you follow a very strict almost ketogenic ask diet you eat that when I lose if I lose too much weight and it actually happened it's one of the issues with putting cancer patients on academic diet but you can lose too much weight so I go up or down on carbs based on where my weight is I don't really count things but each meal generally has some amount of fat usually a little bit of protein and then usually some kind of leafy green or bitter bitter type of vegetable - there you said that a low-fat diet is not good I've heard that recently and you didn't really Express the type of fat mm-hmm and I know they said to people in Spain they're the highest living of any group of people in the world they use a lot of extra virgin olive oil but they also eat - yeah so all the Blue Zones so southern Italy Greece Sardinia even Japan there's they look at all the different habits that they do and they're pretty mixed the other issue is even a Mediterranean diet we don't really know exactly like where my family's from they eat a lot of organ meat stayed a lot of cheeses so it's really hard to make recommendations from that and even when they do eat pasta it's in small amounts there's no carbs like the carbs in the United States over in Italy unless you go to the tourist areas their name so inputs your original question I think the type of fat does count olive oil is great it's monounsaturated so it's it's a pretty good source so I use I recommend olive oil for garnishing things dipping vegetables in etc grass-fed sources of dairy seem to be have a lot of health advantages especially full-fat dairy seems to be where the benefit of dairy is not low fat dairy so grass-fed has higher amounts of conjugated linoleic acid it has omega-3s which are anti-inflammatory as well I don't I'm not so scared of saturated fats but I definitely don't need any trans fats and I don't eat any vegetable oils at all olive oil is not a vegetable of any processed oils I wouldn't I think there in terms of fat that's actually a pretty bad fad for people he asked he asked about coconut oil so yeah I think coconut oil is fine I know some professor from Harvard just said it's gonna kill everyone and it's worse than smoking or something uh-huh so the concern is there some saturated fat in it and under the old-school premise that all saturated fats bad for you then sure you would think coconut oil is bad but if you actually look at the the types of fat just like all of other types of fat and I think it's fine I would not you know you have people drinking it by the bucketload I'm not saying there has to be a reasonable approach to everything but uh so I think it's fine it's a good good fat to cook with too if you don't mind a taste of it it's a high heat cooking oil so I think it's totally fine and this will be our last question is it right okay yeah thank you for coming I was a big fan of your podcast back in the day so my first question is how is relentless Roger and my next question is are there any supplements you recommend for a healthy lifestyle I'm already doing the intermittent exercise on my bike and trying to eat healthy but how about supplements so great question thank you first off and Rogers doing well he's married as well as a child so he's doing well and fairly still and your question was about supplements so I'm not a huge supplement fan but what I personally take in the wintertime which you know you guys don't have a winner down here but uh for those of us where it's snowing I'll do vitamin D I do vitamin k2 it's it's in fermented foods it's in some high-fat dairy but it seems to be one of these things that we don't get enough of so I'll take that as well I'll take turmeric if we're not cooking a lot with it and again I don't we cook a lot with it so I don't know if it's superstition or or not but um I'll take that and then the would I consider a supplement I try to eat as much garlic as I can and because of that my my wife has threatened to leave me so I'll actually chopped up garlic put it in water and then take it like a pill because if it doesn't hear me out here you if you don't break it apart the the chemicals when they touch the mucous membranes in your mouth that's what causes them to stain and have that bad breath if you just swallow Mike a pill it doesn't cause any of that and you get all those benefits I know you're thinking it's crazy but a bunch you're gonna go do it and say that this was genius so that's that's one of the supplements I do the other thing I hear of people doing I eat liver I don't mind liver but I know people that actually will freeze liver and like a pill and then take it like a pill because they want the nutrient benefits of it but don't want to eat it I'm sorry I couldn't hear what kind of liver grant grass fed grass hard to get so down here oh well we may have snow but we have a lot of grass fed liver up there so trade offs ladies and gentlemen thank you so much Colin thank you wonderful lecture you

Channel: TheIHMC

Views: 69,766

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Id: gm8RSDpv_Jg

Length: 62min 28sec (3748 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/unibball]

Good overview of the issues, well presented.