The BITTER TRUTH About Sugar! (How It CAUSES CANCER) | Jason Fung & Mark Hyman

so the environment which is predominantly diet and nutrition plays a huge massive role in the development of cancer and something which very rarely we talk about welcome to doctor's pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman and that's pharmacy with an ffar macy a place for conversations that matter and if you or someone in your family or someone you know has had cancer this conversation is going to matter a lot because it's with an extraordinary physician dr jason fung who i know is a friend he's a physician he's an author he's a researcher and he's done some groundbreaking work uncovering the root causes of disease in science-based books about diabetes and obesity you might have heard about them the diabetes code the obesity code the complete guide to fasting which is fantastic and i recommend that a lot for people who are interested in intermittent fasting time-restricted eating long-term fasts he sold over a million copies and really challenged the whole idea that diabetes should be treated with insulin which is actually i agree with which is a problem because it's too much insulin it causes type 2 diabetes and we keep giving more which actually causes worse problems he's the co-founder of the fasting method it's a program to help people lose weight reverse type 2 diabetes naturally with fasting he has been featured on cnn time magazine the atlantic forbes the toronto star and lots of other groups and his new book the cancer code a revolutionary new understanding of a medical mystery is out now this is an incredible book it looks backwards on here but don't worry about that it's an incredible book that is leading the way in a new understanding of how we have to think about cancer because so much of our thinking about cancer is really outdated i call it the poison burn and slash method which is essentially how we treat cancer pretty pretty archaic we're gonna look back in 20 to 50 years and uh realize that we were on the wrong track so welcome to the doctor's pharmacy jason ah thanks for having me mark great to be here yeah so let's get right into it so cancer is is one of those things that is challenging to address uh and it's something people really fear i mean heart disease we understand diabetes we understand even alzheimer's you know for the most part we we do understand it cancer is still a mystery uh for many and and still even for science and how we approach it from a scientific point of view and there's been lots of theories about it a lot of them have turned out to be wrong and our approach has been misguided which is why you know 50 years after the war on cancer was started by president nixon we still really haven't won um [Music] right and so yeah so we really what is cancer what makes it develop um what causes it and why is it so common i mean one in three people right yeah it's and these are actually great questions because the thing about uh cancer is that there's all these paradoxes so we get stuck in this sort of genetic paradigm where oh it's this random mutation that causes cancer that's sort of the paradigm we've used for 50 years and it leaves a lot to you know a lot of sort of unexplained uh problems so i approach it sort of uh trying to see where we've come from and then where we sort of uh are taking it so you know getting back to the slash and burn sort of thing it's like i i call that sort of the first sort of paradigm of cancer and that was that cancer was the cell that basically grew too much and that was our thought so the logical treatment therefore is to find ways to kill cells and that's really what gave us surgery which is cutting and radiation which is burning and chemotherapy which is basically poison right and that's why it worked actually it worked very well in some cases but there's a lot of side effects right people were you know their hair was falling out they're throwing up stuff right and then in the 1970s the paradigm sort of shifted so we needed to understand cancer sort of at a deeper level so we said okay well yes we know that cancer cells are growing but why are they growing right that's the real question and as we started to unravel sort of dna and genes and chromosomes we said aha this is the answer here it's a genetic defect so if you have growth genes well if you have a mutation a random mutation in a growth gene you can get cells that grow too much so that's where the whole paradigm shifted and it's important because it changes the whole treatment so now instead of trying to find ways to kill cells we switched and we said let's fix those genetic problems and so through the 80s and 90s as you know we worked on these and some some incredible successes so we had imatinib which was used for a type of leukemia and really a game changer like just fantastic stuff right the the mortality from chronic myelogenous leukemia just fell and then there's transtazumab which was for breast cancer uh the her2 new uh receptor and so it also changed the game like it was a fantastic drug and so we thought okay you know this is great so all we're going to need to do is sort of figure out the one or two mutations in breast cancer one or two mutations in colon cancer we're going to find the drugs we're going to cure cancer right and that was the thought through most of the 90s and so on and then the problem was it didn't work out that way so as we did the in 2000 we completed the sort of human genome project and we sequenced all the genes and we thought okay well here we go we've got the road map to curing cancer but of course it didn't so then we embarked on an even more ambitious program which was the cancer genome atlas which sequenced not just one human genome but the cancerous so we took cancer from 33 000 samples and we took all the genomes like sequence the entire genome and say okay great like we've got a thousand cases of breast cancer let's compare them let's figure out what kind of mutations we have let's get the first top one or two we'll solve the problem and of course what we found was not one or two mutations so for breast cancer for colon cancer for these common cancer there's like 50 to 100. and it was just complete bedlam right so you'd have a patient in your oncology clinic which was you have patient a with breast cancer 100 different mutations and patient b with the exact same looking cancer 100 completely different mutations so that's not going to work because the whole idea of you know giving developing 100 drugs was just that wasn't going to work and that was sort of the death of the sort of genetic sort of paradigm and that's really why we made so little progress from sort of 1980 to sort of 2010 when this whole thing began to fall apart and that's really the problem so we've been stuck in this paradigm and now we've started to shift into a whole new paradigm of cancer looking at it from a sort of evolutionary standpoint and the whole idea of sort of this genetics i mean it's still persist if you go to the american cancer society and so on it says oh it's a genetic disease of gene mutations and so on but that that's whole process failed because you can measure it by how much useful treatments there are and really the number of useful genetic treatments is probably countable on like one hand sort of thing like all the early stuff we got and this is this is why cancer medicine has really fallen way behind almost every other area of medicine if you look at heart disease in 1960 for example so the number one and two killers of americans is heart disease and cancers that's always been number one and number two in 1960 heart disease killed about twice as many people as cancer and now they're like neck and neck which means they've made way more progress in the treatment of heart disease than cancer cancer is just almost as bad as it was when we started the war that's true and and this is the thing is as we move into this new paradigm and this is what i get into it's it's a really interesting story but i've had you know two members of my family that died from cancer so i get it and my sister had cancer twice yeah and so that's that's terrible and but but the thing about it is this new paradigm we talked about is important because when you talk about evolutionary medicine now you talk about the importance of the environment because that's what really drives evolution is the environment that you're in and for so long we've thought about this as a disease of genetic mutations we concentrate on genes and not on other things that are going to increase your risk of cancer so the environment which is predominantly diet and nutrition plays a huge massive role in the development of cancer and something which very rarely we talk about like yeah so i reviewed the study it was so in 1981 the us congress said okay we need to study let's figure out what causes cancer so they got the best people is updated in 2015 and they said okay let's calculate the population population attribution fraction which is basically how much of cancer is due to say tobacco smoke so about 35 of cancer is is caused by tobacco smoke well diet is actually at 30 percent so it's like it's almost as high as tobacco smoke yeah yeah way above everything else like the pesticides and the chemicals all the stuff we worry about you know wood dust and asbestos those all do cause cancer but on a population basis it's almost all tobacco smoke and we know of course to stop smoking but also diet is huge yeah you know jason i remember at 1985 i think i was on my rotation in oncology as a medical student and i said to the uh the cancer doc the oncologist i said so because i was always interested in nutrition and actually i remember in college i took a nutrition course and i had a little manual of scientific studies that was on nutrition and cancer back in 1980 right so i was sort of paying attention already back then and i said to the attending physician i said so tell me what do you think is the percent of cancers that are caused by or made worse by diet and i thought he would say oh 10 he said 70 percent and i was like whoa and i think when you you know when you think about functional medicine and the approach you're taking it's a very different model of thinking about cancer so yes if you have a tumor or something you might need to get it cut out you might need radiation or you might need some chemo at some point but the question that never really gets asked is one why did the cancer develop in the first place and how do i change those conditions and two how do i actually create a healthy immune system and a healthy soil and and to actually make sure that the cancer can't grow and i and as a functional medicine doctor i often say we're very much like regenerative farmers where we focus on soil health as opposed to industrial farmers which use a lot of chemicals pesticides basically antibiotics and glyphosate and herbicides to make the plant healthy and i remember being at this conference on nutrition i don't know why they invited me it was all the big food companies the big ag companies and i i was invited to give a talk which i did and i didn't hold back anything i'm sitting next to this guy at dinner i'm like so now what do you do he says well i'm in plant medicine like plant medicine i said what is that he said well we make pesticides so i think okay got it so i think you know this whole idea that you're bringing forth is so important so talk about this analogy of the seed and the soil and cancer and why we're ignoring soil conditions in the body and the environmental issues and diet and also lifestyle and stress and environmental chemicals all those factors so the the idea of the seed in the soil actually goes way back i mean it was written about sort of like 60 70 years ago but then of course i really forgot about it because the point is that you know genetics you know this whole focus we had on finding mutations in genetics really talks about the seed right it doesn't talk about the environment that you're in and um if you have a seed of course it it has the ability to grow but it needs the right conditions the proper soil to grow and what we always seem to not talk about is how certain populations that live a sort of traditional lifestyle almost never get cancer like other than the ones that we know that are say virally caused but if you go back so dennis burkett was this sort of legendary irish surgeon and he went to africa and you know he discovered burkitt's lymphoma and stuff and it's very interesting story but um you know he looked at these um africans were eating a traditional diet living a traditional lifestyle and he said boy these people just don't get cancer and the whites of course were getting colorectal cancer at the same rate as they were in the uk for example yeah and so they called these things diseases of civilization uh so obesity type 2 diabetes and cancer would come as people change their lifestyle but you see this actually all over the world so the inui in the far north they some people used to call them eskimos so again eating a traditional diet very high in say you know animal you know whale meat and seal blubber and stuff that's their traditional diet they never get those cancers that we get i mean they get some viral cancers but they don't get like colorectal cancer breast cancer in fact the university in ontario canada used to send an expedition to the arctic circle sort of every year to find out why these people were immune but of course they weren't actually immune because as soon as in the 60s 70s and 80s they changed their lifestyle to western sort of lifestyles with the sort of bread and sugar and all that sort of processed foods that we ate then you started to see all the cancers so clearly it wasn't a genetic problem because the gene pool of these africans or these inui were not changing but it was the soil that and it comes back of course to diet and lifestyle which is the most important thing because that's the main thing that's changing and these people come over that is what is the the biggest determinant of cancer you you know these these these enemies go from being considered immune to cancer yeah to high rates of cancer of course they're eating sugar all the time right there's tons of smoking all this other stuff um and you see this everywhere so you see this say in japan where you can look at a japanese woman in japan compared to a japanese woman in san francisco and of course the person in san francisco has about double or triple the rate of breast cancer compared to the japanese women in japan so it's like so this is clear evidence that the most important thing we need to focus on is not the genetics of the problem it's the soil problem right the scene my favorite story is the polish women who are from poland um eat 30 pounds of sauerkraut a year and they have almost no breast cancer and it affects their microbiome because it's a pre pre-probiotic food plus cabbage has all sorts of phytochemicals that fight cancer um and when they move to united states they get cancer the same rates as american women because they stopped eating all the sauerkraut yeah absolutely and these are the things that are really important because if you can figure it out of course then you have the ability to do the opposite you could take a woman in san francisco and you know cut her risk of breast cancer by a factor of two or three imagine how amazing that would be i mean with genetics and all this stuff we're talking about like you know you're making progress in inches compared to diet and lifestyle where you're talking about huge leaps and jumps like you're not talking about like ten percent higher risk you know in medicine how you go oh it's statistically significant there's a ten percent lower risk it's like oh you know these people just never get cancer right it's like it's crazy the magnitude of improvement you can get or on the other hand 10 it's 200 or 300 right it's like a totally different yeah it's a totally different order of magnitude and yet we focus all of our sort of resources on saying oh let's figure out you know this genetic condition which might affect like one percent of these cancer patients and trying to it's like okay let's let's not do that let's try and figure out the other stuff like what is it is it sugar is it pro is it you know fermented foods is it processed foods like what is that because that's so important but unfortunately it gets so little um sort of research money and you know you start talking people people want the other stuff right so people are listening and wondering okay this whole soil thing makes sense right you want to create a hostile environment for cancer to grow how do we build that hostile environment instead of a fertile one that most of us have for cancer yeah that's a great question and so i talked about in the book about um like what is it that makes cells grow and what's really important is sort of growth factors our body contains natural growth factors that increase the rate of growth and one of the big things of the last sort of 15 20 years has been the realization that our body contains nutrient sensors which are hormones that go up when you eat but they also are precisely the same hormones that our body uses as growth factors so the most important one is insulin so insulin of course is a well-known you know metabolic hormone so you eat and insulin goes up you know assuming you're eating carbohydrates and protein sort of a mixed meal you eat insulin goes up but more importantly what it is is a nutrient sensor it tells your body that food is available and the reason that's important is because your body only wants to grow when nutrients are available right so you don't want to you're so you don't want more cells to to continue to grow if there's no food available that's not a good survival strategy so you the body links them in fact if you look back in evolutionary times insulin was not a metabolic hormone it was actually a growth factor so when as we evolve we actually use the same molecule that we use as a growth factor for nutrient signaling as well so we know that insulin is a very potent growth factor there's this thing called insulin like growth factor or igf-1 and um valter longo actually described this this group of ecuadorian dwarves the laron dwarves who actually have almost no igf-1 so they're very short turns out they're also immune to cancer because if you don't have that growth signaling then the cells can't grow and the cells that are going to be the most affected are those cancer cells so what you have to do of course is say that okay if we have too much insulin then that's going to be a signal to our body that we need to grow so what can you do to sort of reduce that insulin signaling in the body by reducing nutrient availability which is two things one is getting rid of the hyper-processed foods which tends to really amplify the insulin response so sugar for example is especially bad because it causes all this insulin resistance which causes hyperinsulinemia a lot of the refined foods are very bad because they sort of take away all the other natural components and you you're left with this big spike even so like if you eat cookies for example well you know it's just gonna your insulin is just gonna spike up and the other thing of course if you eat very very frequently you're going to keep insulin high all the time so intermittent fasting is another strategy that you could use to reduce insulin and that's why you eat and when you eat yeah exactly so it's what you eat and when you eat because if you eat a high carbohydrate diet which people did like people in china for example used to eat a ton of white rice but almost zero sugar and they were okay so it's not necessarily just the carbohydrates well they they i lived in china for a while you're chinese i mean i traveled around i remember in 1984 i mean they they they had no accoutrements of modern living i mean they they had to cut a board they would use a saw to create boards they they would to grind the flower they would like literally walk in circles for hours with the grain in between two giant stones they would work in the fields for 14 hours a day with hard labor and yeah you can eat a lot of rice if you do that yeah that's true and it's also like it was very um it was like rice and vegetables like every day it was just rice and vegetables rice and vegetables well there's the the land of milk and honey the chinese phrase for it is the land of fish and rice so that's really what they think of yeah so so so you're talking about what is the problem which is the incredibly high amount of starch and sugar we consume and you've talked about this in the diabetes code the obesity code this is a central driver of almost all chronic western diseases heart disease cancer diabetes alzheimer's high blood pressure are caused by this phenomena of insulin resistance or too much insulin which is driven from our diet basically a highly refined processed carbohydrate diet and also this constant eating pattern this thing called snacking which i think is a modern invention we have a snack food industry but i mean i don't snack if you eat properly you're never hungry i mean if you don't have these spikes and insulin going up makes you hungry but what's fascinating is that what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer growth yeah hi everyone hope you're enjoying the episode before we continue we have a quick message from dr mark hyman about his new company pharmacy and their first product the 10-day reset hey it's dr hyman do you have flc what's flc it's when you feel like crap it's a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it's not normal or that you can fix it i mean you know the feeling it's when you're super sluggish your digestion's off you can't think clearly or you have brain fog or you just feel run down can you relate i know most people can't but the real question is what the heck do we do about it well i hate to break the news but there's no magic bullet flc isn't caused by one single thing so there's not one single solution however there is a systems-based approach a way to tackle the multiple route factors that contribute to flc and i call that system the 10-day reset the 10-day reset combines food key lifestyle habits and targeted supplements to address flc straight on it's a protocol that i've used with thousands of my community members to help them get their health back on track it's not a magic bullet it's not a quick fix it's a system that works if you want to learn more and get your health back on track click on the button below or visit getpharmacy.com that's get pharmacy with an ffarmacy.com now back to this week's episode so all of these diseases are actually diseases of too much insulin so if you look at obesity for example if you were to measure the levels of insulin people who are more overweight tend to have higher insulin same with type 2 diabetes hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are really sort of two sides of the same coin so one causes the other sort of hyperinsulinemia can cause insulin resistance insulin resistance and cause hyperinsulinemia so they're really the same thing and again uh the the the same thing applies to sort of cancer and this is the pattern that was noticed so many years ago that there are these diseases of sort of too much insulin which is uh that that sort of they all go together the heart disease and you don't see that in people eating traditional diets because they're not eating all the time so i remember there was a study this enhanced study which is a big sort of american survey of lots of things but they included dietary habits so in 1977 they found that most people ate three times a day so breakfast lunch and dinner and by 2004 it was almost up to six times a day right so it's like wow that's crazy and it was never this sort of deliberate hey there's good scientific evidence that we should eat six times a day it just sort of crept in there and i think part of it was of course the snack food companies wanted to promote it and you know people thought it was a good idea so then it was this sort of it became almost gospel oh you have to eat six months a day right and i remember thinking about it um a while ago and thinking where did that suddenly sneak here because did we have a big randomized controlled trial that i missed somehow because i don't think so it was just this gradual change in attitudes and you saw it because i start to think back to my upbringing in the 70s right so i grew up in the 70s and you know if you wanted a sort of after-school snack your mom said no you're gonna ruin your dinner right and if you wanted a bedtime snack your mom would say no you should have ate more at dinner and it's like that's just the way it was and of course people would have this sort of natural fasting period from after dinner which was say six o'clock because people ate a bit earlier back then to like say eight o'clock so 14 hours of fasting every single day without even we call that breakfast yeah exactly breaking the fast breaking the fast that is the word that we use and it's like somehow we quit from that where people didn't have the obesity problems type 2 diabetes problems because they have this natural fasting period built in that has always been there it's even built into the english language and then it's like oh you got to eat all the time and it's like oh you can't ever skip your breakfast you got to snack all the time right you see it in schools for example oh they go to school they get a mid-morning snack then they have a lunch and then they have their after school and then they have the dinner then you know you're playing soccer and they think that they need to have a snack in between the halves of soccer you know i played well jason you've written a lot about you've written a lot about fasting and and the effects of either time restricted eating which is you know 12 14 16 hour fast every day or taking a 24 hour 36 hour fast a week or even longer fast for diabetes and and i'd love you to sort of share why around cancer this is so important and um on my podcast soon we're going to have dr patrick hanaway who is my colleague and friend was the medical director at cleveland clinic who had cancer and used fasting as an approach to his cancer treatment he still got radiation but he also did it in a way that actually reduced all the side effects to almost none has kept him healthy now for well over a year and this cancer was not a great one and let him go through the process with really no issues which was really staggering and and really went on a ketogenic diet in order to do that which is a both using fasting and ketogenic diets to drop insulin levels to almost undetectable so can you talk about this whole idea of fasting cancer ketogenic diets why it's so important and how it connects to this whole idea of insulin resistance and insulin high insulin levels yeah so both fasting and ketogenic diets have the same sort of goal at the end which is trying to lower insulin because the difference between a ketogenic diet say and a low-carb diet is that you know you're sort of low carb ultra low carb for the keto but sort of moderate protein because protein can also stimulate insulin whereas some of the older low carb diets were like very high in protein you take protein shakes or whatever it is and that's definitely not atkins and so hydrogen is not always the best idea because you can get high insulin but you also get this high mtor which is sometimes not so good for cancer as well but the idea is to really drop your insulin levels and if these are diseases of too much insulin then that's going to be a very useful adjunctive treatment so fasting is is actually fascinating because there's all these different things we're discovering so one of the things is sort of autophagy so as you fast of course your nutrient sensors go down so mtor insulin go down and then you activate this process called autophagy where you actually start to break down some of your subcellular organelles and stuff so basically you're your body's just trying to clean house pac-man coming around and cleaning up all the garbage yeah exactly people think it's a bad thing maybe people know who pac-man was but that was the original video game that we all played back in the 70s very exciting though you can still find them sometimes but yeah the the idea is that people think that this sort of breakdown process is really bad for you but it's actually really good for you and in fact it's sort of one of the keys to rejuvenating the body that is you want to break down all your old stuff and then sort of rebuild the stuff that you need so the the whole idea of fasting is you're trying to put the body into this sort of regenerative maintenance mode because what we've recognized over the last little bit is that your body sort of has sort of you know you can go into growth mode or you can go into sort of the cell maintenance repair mode and it really depends on your nutrients availability when nutrients are available you want to grow when nutrients are not available you don't want to grow and you want to go into this sort of maintenance repair mode and everybody thinks growth is good but growth is not always good especially as an adult so i always say think about a car like if you have a sports car and you rev that engine and you're running it fast all the time you're going to go fast which is great but it's going to burn out much faster so you can't just keep revving that engine keep redlining it you go to sometimes bring it to the shop put it in the garage let it rest and all this stuff pit stop yeah exactly a little pit stop so so that's the point of the human body too you can either go for growth or you can go for longevity or cellular maintenance repair but you gotta you gotta have a bit of both it's a balance there it's not all growth and this is where you say oh edd well you're going to put your body your nutrient sensor can go up your growth factors are going to go up you're going to put yourself in growth mode but you don't want to do that especially for a disease such as cancer which is a disease where cells are growing too much you're basically feeding into that growth and that's going to be very very bad for you so what you do instead is you do the fasting and you put your cells into this sort of maintenance repair mode and it actually allows you to undergo the both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better because chemotherapy we have a couple studies on fasting and chemotherapy where what you do is you fast sort of just before and during and just after your chemotherapy and what they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from their treatment because what you've done of course is taken the cells of your normal body and you've sort of put them into a more quiescent state they're not trying to grow they're actually trying to slow down and chemotherapy the general way it works is it kills the fastest growing cells which are usually the cancer cells but it also kills like the hair follicles because they're fast-growing cells it kills the lining of the gi tract so you get nausea and your hair falls out so if you can put those cells into sort of a quiescent sort of repair mode it's not going to sustain as much damage from the chemotherapy and instead the cancer cells which can't stop their growth they're always trying to grow they can't do that so therefore they're going to sustain full damage from the chemotherapy while your body is relatively protected and that's one of the things that might be very interesting to use as an adjunct to sort of standard treatment i would never advise not to take the standard treatment because of course you know there's a lot of interesting work by dr mukherjee mukherjee and others looking at ketogenic diets and cancer and i've heard him present on this it's just fascinating he wrote the emperor of all maladies it's about cancer i'm sure you've read that and he said that to me he said mark you know we figured out the solution to cancer i'm like what is it it's this big discovery it's like in the cause and like what is it he's like it's sugar i was like yeah you know i guess that's not really news but uh maybe it's good you know that now and then he said we were studying ketogenic diets and seeing incredible results with pancreatic cancer melanomas stage four cancers that weren't responding to anything else in animal models they literally were curing cancers with ketogenic diets and now they're doing human trials can you talk a little bit about some of that research and how how it might be applied to people who are struggling with cancer yeah so this was the sort of big discovery of dr lou cantley who's uh discovered sort of this whole pathway the pi3 uh okay pathway that links sort of insulin and growth and cancer so the the important thing is that insulin it acts as that growth factor and therefore acts as a sort of pro-growth in there for a sort of pro-cancer agent sugar of course plays a big role in in the hyperinsulinemia and it's interesting because dr lou cantley in several of his um you know articles or whatever he goes sugar scares me right here is this guy who studies cancer for a living and he's like yeah sugar just scares me and that's the same sort of thing that siddhartha mukherjee is talking about too right and that's the whole point is that with ketogenic diets with fasting and of course fasting you have to cycle it because you can't obviously fast you can't fast forever right as opposed to ketogenic diet which is sort of very low carbohydrate you could sustain that for years and years you can't fast forever you need some some some food at some point but the idea is the same what you're trying to do is really reduce those insulin levels they're of course studying this in terms of drugs they're trying to develop these blockers to the whole pathway of pi3k and so on i think they've they've developed a couple companies for that but you know just like anything else it's like why would you want to do it with a drug when you can do it with your diet you know what's so striking jason is that you know often when people get cancer treatment their doctors make sure you keep your weight up eat ice cream eat milkshakes have cake you know and i'm like what are you telling them that for i mean that is death and yet it's it's it's i mean i actually had a radiation oncologist as a patient who worked at md anderson and he was very aware of these studies and these issues and he tried to tell his patients do the right things that all the nutritionists this is like the number one cancer hospital in the world are telling their patients to eat a lot of starch and carbohydrates and sugar to keep their weight up and it's just such a unfortunate situation uh that is going on right now so so when when we talk about cancer we're clearly talking about some of the risk factors right sugar there's other risk factors and one of the one of the things that i think is very concerning to me is these these obesogens which are environmental chemicals uh that not only are directly toxic and carcinogenic but they're actually causing insulin resistance so they're really creating a double whammy pesticides herbicides additives all these environmental chemicals that we're exposed to 80 000 of them that have been developed over the last hundred years what's your perspective on that and how do we reduce our risks well i think that stuff is really hard because they're not adequately studied i mean there's so many chemicals and what do we know about the effect on the human body for most of these like very very little right i mean you know they they have this classification as generally recognized as safe but you know i mean that just means it doesn't kill you within a month right i mean that's about it so and all of these chemicals that like the you know and even the ones that we eventually find out are really bad for us i mean they were originally approved and you know for you so you know we we trust our government to sort of keep us safe from all these sort of chemicals rudimentary like you do it and you test the toxicology and some rats and it doesn't kill them and hey nothing you know you get out there and it doesn't kill people right away so hey you're good that's the sort of uh idea that we have but yeah i think that unfortunately it's hard to know exactly what to say because one there's just so many of them they're changing all the time so like the classic sort of pesticide was like ddt remember it was yeah i dated myself here a little bit but ddt was this big big time pesticide was amazing killed everything right turned out it was like super super bad for us and you know causing cancer all over the place right there's all kinds of stories like that um now of course there's all these other chemicals in there and we don't even know what they are i mean they're not this yeah i mean the government did write the government did write a whole report on the environmental chemicals and how they're linked to cancer so i think that's a big thing and i i encourage people to check out ewg.org which is the environmental working groups website where they have guides on how to reduce your exposure through your food through household cleaning products through skin care products and many other ways to reduce your exposures household cleaning products so i think i think the more we can do to reduce our intake of these chemicals is a good idea so so let's talk about how to reduce your risk what can people do who are listening that you talk about in your amazing book the cancer code a revolutionary understanding of the medical mystery i encourage everybody to get a copy the cancer code it's out now because it really is a revolution and understanding of cancer that i think could help so many people so tell us what can we do to reduce our risk of getting cancer yeah i think the most important thing is to go after the sort of hyperinsulinemia because we know it's such a big risk factor so you can you know you can't always test it but you'll know because if you have if you are overweight for example then you want to try and get back to a normal weight and there's lots of different ways to do that sort of ketogenic diets are not the only way you can do you know all kinds of different diets and and you know vegetarian diets and sort of uh paleo diets there's also sorts of good ones and then the other one of course is the sort of reintroduction of intermittent fasting into sort of the normal schedule and i think that's really important because what we've lost of course is that balance between feeding and fasting right we've gone to a sort of feeding all the time model which is not so good for growth because we all you know you're always telling your body to grow more and of course if you have type 2 diabetes which is becoming a huge huge problem so if you look at pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes in america it's like just skyrocketed over the last 15 years and that too is a sort of massive massive risk factor for the development of cancer the world health organization actually classifies 13 different types of cancer as obesity related cancer so including breast and colorectal so that's actually prostate and yeah liver pancreas and interestingly if you look at the types of cancer so we've actually been doing really well for most cancers over time as you track them through the years most cancers are actually slowly declining except those obesity related cancers are actually going up so pancreatic cancer going up liver cancer going up all of these cancers are going up and they're not rare diseases so breast cancer for example is very very common colorectal cancer very very common and i think that this is one of the things that um we hadn't recognized so i went to medical school in the 90s we never talked about diet and you know canada it just wasn't even on the radar screen it was it was crazy except maybe a few people who are really into it but for the most part people just we just didn't talk about it and then it wasn't until sort of 2003 that the first large paper started to come out that said hey this is a big risk factor and then you multiply it by the millions of people who have it and that's why it's such a big risk factor so staying to a normal weight you know which includes getting your diet in order cutting out sugar cutting out the processed foods for the most part adding back the intermittent fasting which is part of a normal sort of regimen when you when you say that what do you mean you mean time restricted eating right you mean yeah so our 14-hour fashion five to 14 hours should be the your sort of baseline because that's just you know 1970s style uh eating when we didn't have so much obesity now if you're trying to lose weight or if you have type 2 diabetes then you can extend it to say 16 hours which is time restricted eating or you can even go further 24 hours or even multiple days of fasting and you know people always worry about that but you know that's that's why i talk about a lot because a lot of the stuff that we worry about simply isn't true people worry about oh they're going to lose muscle they can't work they can't concentrate i'm like all you're doing when you don't eat is that you're making your body rely on your body's own store of calories which is sugar right or body fat that's how your body stores calories so you're literally using the body fat for precisely the reason that you carry it so what could be wrong with that what is more natural than that if your sugar is high and you don't eat you're going to use up the sugar and your sugar will fall now that's great news if you have a high sugar and type 2 diabetes which of course that high sugar drives a high insulin which drives you know cancer risk and so on so something like that is a completely natural way to get this all of this back in order and if you're too far along the scale of you know you have too much insulin you don't have to stop at 14 hours there's nothing to stop you from taking your fast out to you know a couple of days at a time right and that's the thing is it's a free intervention it's a natural intervention it's been used for thousands of years right every every culture in history has used it it's crazy that we don't use this sort of thing well what you're talking about is just something so extraordinary and effective and the side effect is that it also prevents heart disease and diabetes and dementia and depression and i'm like pretty much everything so it's like a one-stop shop for staying healthy which is cut up the starch of sugar and and practice eating in a way that we're designed which is take a break after dinner and don't eat until breakfast or a little bit later in the morning uh it's it's so simple it's so obvious and it's so different than our current thinking but if you have cancer like if you already have cancer and we can do this to reduce our risk what about the screenings the cancer interventions the treatments that we have now should we still do those do we do we do how far can this go to really have an impact uh screening is a very interesting problem because it sort of gets down to the sort of seed and soil idea so all our all our cells in our body actually have the potential to become cancer right so your heart can get cancer your liver can get cancer even your placenta can get cancer you know it's crazy that every single cell in the body can become cancerous so the point is that that seed sort of lies everywhere and that aggressive screening we found you know may or may not be that useful so so this is the reason why people are sort of backing off a little bit on a sort of aggressive screening works very well in some cases like cervical cancer for example but taken too far it was useless of the thyroid cancer as an example where they screened people in south korea for thyroid cancer found a ton of ton of thyroid cancer it was like everywhere so the the the incidence of new thyroid cancer went up sort of 11 fold because of screening but the mortality was still just about the same it didn't impact because most of those didn't need to be treated so that's the point is that you have to there's a limit to the screening but you know there's there's well-established protocols that you know people study so breast cancer for example mammograms have been studied but they're rolling sort of they used to say oh maybe you should start at age 40 and they've actually recently been sort of moving it back down to maybe age 50 same with colonoscopy for example one of the big successes of screening has been colonoscopy and removal of sort of early cancers has made a big difference in terms of reducing colon cancer uh but they're also talking about you know maybe you don't need it they actually just rolled i think just last two weeks ago or something they actually said we should start earlier in part because i think that they're worried that with the obesity epidemic they're actually getting more and more so if you look at these obesity-related cancers we're actually finding them younger and younger because the younger and younger populations are getting more of this obesity so i think they just recommended instead of age 50 they actually rolled it down to like age 45 or something to get cold and awesome so i think it's still a good idea to do screening because one of these cautious things but you have to you have to be wary so certain things didn't pan out the way we thought psa is super controversial for prostate cancer thyroid cancer didn't turn out to be useful so but you pick and choose the big ones are going to be breast and colorectal of course so so given what you've learned about in this research that you did for the cancer code which is an amazing book and everybody needs to get it a revolutionary understanding of a medical mystery um what what does the future look like for cancer because you know it feels to me as a doctor you know someone says i have diabetes i have alzheimer's i have heart disease i have an autoimmune disease i have this i'm like great i got that cancer it's like you know not so easy so what what does the future look like in terms of prevention and treatment of cancer i think the there there's two different things so in terms of treatment of cancer of course a lot of these things that we talk about are not applicable once you have the cancer like you can't just use dye like i would never say to somebody you know just use the diet or just use fatty and it's like no you need to get that surgery or the radiation or the chemotherapy or whatever they're recommending for you because by that time you have a high risk of other other issues you can use it as an adjunct but the treatments have come a long way because again we've moved past now that sort of idea that we need to find the genetic cure for all these cancers and now we're sort of moving into the age of immunotherapy which is taking this idea that cancer is sort of this evolving sort of new species and saying well let's use our immune system to try and destroy it so we've been seeing some sort of incredible successes from a therapeutic standpoint with these new agents these sort of checkpoint inhibitors and car t and some of these other things so really very hopeful of course that depends on a lot of research dollars or very high tech sort of stuff yeah it's more exciting from a prevention standpoint because the you know the only real successes we have in cancer medicine are really in prevention so stopping smoking for example is sort of so far ahead of anything else we do for cancer but it's all through prevention same with colonoscopies and for colorectal cancer really you start to see as these things as you do more and more screening so as you go from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s to the 2000s for example you can see that as people start you know to accept that they need to do this screening that colorectal cancer mortality is slowly coming down um and and that's where the sort of future lies i'm hopeful because we're starting to bring into sort of a clearer picture that hey all of these things you know this these dietary things that we talk about are so important like stuff that you write about for example so well that hey this is great news that people are paying attention to it because those are the cancers that are rising in terms of uh numbers right those are practically the only cancers that are rising in numbers obesity related uh cancers so if we can understand that if we can make people aware of that of the dangers of sugar so for example sugar intake i think peaked at around year 2000 but prior to that was really going up very high right you know yeah or drinking their gatorades and stuff you know they were like oh yeah i just worked out so i'm gonna have a gatorade just full of sugar right people don't do that anymore like you know i look around like you know you'd be surprised you live in canada people maybe are are better over there i think you're in america and still sugarpalooza yeah probably probably i think that plays a big role i mean look 88 of us are metabolically unhealthy and and the translation of metabolic and healthy means you're insulin resistant so think about that almost 9 out of 10 americans are on track for these diseases caused by too much insulin including cancer yeah including cancer and all those other diseases you talked about alzheimer's and all that sort of stuff but um you know and part of it i think is uh you know if you look at the total number like total amount of sugar it has been going down but it's still very high i think that's that's the big problem there's a lot of um sort of corporate interests and so on like you know a few years ago coca-cola was revealed as giving like a million bucks remember this story they gave a million bucks to the university of colorado to develop the global energy balance network or something like that yeah i wrote about that in my book food fix yeah it was a big scientific uh it was like a mess it was it's it's a horrible story because here you have a university taking millions of dollars from coca-cola which you know obviously is peddling something very unhealthy and was ready to sort of go to war against people like you and me who keep saying you know look at food as medicine and what you put in your mouth is super important like they're you know the universe not just calories are all the same right exactly like who like this whole calories is the same like that always gets gets me all riled up because it's like you're telling me that 100 calories of cookies is the same as 100 calories of broccoli that's the dumbest thing like honestly well it's just because of the law of thermodynamics right so the idea is that it's calories a calorie because when you burn it it releases the same amount of energy and that's true it's absolutely true in a vacuum yeah but now when you eat it because when you eat it interacts with your microbiome and your hormones and your brain chemistry and and so many different factors that drive benefit or cause harm honestly it's crazy that we believe it because if you take 100 calories of cookies and eat it and versus the salmon for example or egg or whatever the hormonal response is completely and utterly different between those two foods same calories different foods completely different hormonal response like insulin shoots way up with the cookies right and and it's like you have to pretend that that's completely irrelevant like that's this is physiology right jason i just reviewed the endocrine society position paper on obesity and prevention and treatment that was published in 2018 and they were very clear that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie and weight loss is about energy balance and i'm like what is going on here are they not paying attention to the science because these are top scientists at the major medical universities and these paradigms get so entrenched and so stuck and we just get so off track it's really unfortunate you know it takes a long time for paradigms to shift it took 50 years from the time that the assemblewise discovered that we should wash our hands before surgery to prevent childbirth fever or death in in women who are giving birth because of infection 50 years before they actually started washing their hands before surgery and the guy died in disgrace these theories completely uh ridiculed uh because it just doctors couldn't believe that they would be causing an illness they would not they would never want to harm their patients so how could it be that they were causing it by not washing their hands so they was just we're in you know in a tough situation takes literally decades for paradigms not just that but remember the whole 1980s a low-fat era right so i i sort of did all my training through that era and there's those step one and step two diets if you remember from yes of course and it's like so if you had a heart attack you'd go on this low-fat diet if you had another one you had an ultra low fat diet right and and then it's like that made things worse things worse absolutely we talked about the french paradox about how these french are eating full fat milk it's like oh my god how cool butter and cheese and cream and right they're not having heart attacks and they're actually having like a third of the heart attacks of americans and then of course it was crazy because that whole paradigm took like 20 years before people started to say oh hey look you know here's some studies on nuts which are high in fat and they're really good for you and fatty fish really good for you and avocados they're really good for you and olive oil and it's like it took 20 years of us demonizing all kinds of fat before we finally said oh it's a healthy fat right it's like okay that took a lot longer than you think it should have taken it's the same idea like it's the same thing with sugar right sugar was fine because it was low fat right and that was the thing that you could find in the 80s snack bro cookies but it wasn't just that the american heart association was our head like saying oh cut the fat but eat the sugar and i was like oh it's still it's still in our recommendations you know it's so it's even our dietary guidelines are so contradictory on one hand they say we shouldn't worry about fat anymore on the other hand they have all these promotional education materials like the go slow foods like which were saying low fat and still recommend low-fat milk school lunches remember um all those uh you know those sugary cereals and they all had that health check on it oh my god american heart association yes it's uh fruit loops and uh tricks are for kids and coconuts are all heart healthy because they have no fat yeah and it's like they have like 50 grams of sugar in one serving right it was ridiculous so a long time and i think that calories thing i'm sort of um disturbed a bit to hear that they're they're still you know thinking that yeah i mean it's true it's true well your contribution understanding of cancer has been so great with this book the cancer code i encourage everybody to get a copy of it it's really fantastic jason you've really inspired me to even eat less sugar than i already do and feed myself right and create a healthy soil because that's the key here we know how to create a healthy soil and it's the obvious thing it's not just not eating sugar but it's also eating phytochemical rich food lots of fruits and vegetables lots of good fats nuts and seeds whole foods getting rid of all the ultra processed stuff exercise sleep relaxation stress reduction all these things are the things you need to create a healthy soil and also getting your nutrient levels up right a lot of us are nutrient deficient vitamin d which has been linked to cancer incidence and fear deficient so your book covers all this stuff it's just fantastic and uh and could ever get a copy jason thank you so much for being on the doctor's pharmacy been really a pleasure to have you if you love this podcast please share with your friends and family on social media i bet they want to hear it and uh if you want to leave a comment i'd love to hear from you and your thoughts about your journey with health and maybe cancer and of course subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy you

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 174,687

Keywords: jason fung, sugar, cancer, cancer research, avoiding cancer, mark hyman, health podcast, the doctor's farmacy

Id: UgUdBEXqE8E

Length: 57min 33sec (3453 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020