The New Science of Why We Get Cancer with Dr. Jason Fung

this is not just a genetic disease because for years we've been sort of thinking about it as a genetic disease so we think well it's just sort of pre-programmed into us but it's not because the rates of cancer depend on your environment more than than it does on your genes hi everyone drew pro here host of the broken brain podcast today we are asking ourselves the most fundamental of questions which is what exactly is cancer you may think you know but my guest today dr jason fung is going to help you completely reimagine it and understand it because he's going to summarize the history of cancer most importantly focusing on the last 15 to 20 years which have completely changed the way that we think of cancer is cancer this random disease that randomly attacks the human body or is it part of our evolutionary response is it a survival mechanism baked deep into our human genome and is it something that helps us survive toxic environments well we're going to go into all that and more in today's episode if you care about cancer if your family has been touched by this horrific disease you won't want to miss this episode stay tuned welcome to the broken brain podcast where we dive deep into the topics of neuroplasticity epigenetics mindfulness functional medicine mindset and more i'm your host drew pruitt and each week my team and i bring on a new guest who we think can help you improve your brain health feel better and most importantly live more this week's guest is dr jason fung dr fong is a physician author and researcher his groundbreaking science-based books about diabetes and obesity the diabetes code the obesity code and the complete guide to fasting have sold over get this one million copies and they've changed significantly the conventional wisdom that diabetics should be treated with insulin as a primary method of intervening in improving their health dr fung is the co-founder of the fasting method a program to help people lose weight and reverse you heard that right reverse type 2 diabetes naturally with fasting his work on fasting has been cited in all the major media outlets cnn time the atlantic forbes toronto star and many many others his upcoming book which is what we're talking about today the cancer code a revolutionary new understanding of a medical mystery will take you on an incredible journey on the history of cancer and the potential of where we're going so you can improve your health it's out on november 10th dr fung welcome to the broken brain podcast thanks for having me great to be here i'm really excited um many of our listeners know that my uh my family like a lot of families out there has been touched by cancer my mom a few years ago about 10 years ago was diagnosed with breast cancer i've had ants that have been also diagnosed with breast cancer and my grandfather passed away of uh of uh cancer bone cancer that was there so i think i'm representative of a lot of people who have been through this journey supporting family members and are just curious not only for their own health and their family's health but curious about what is this thing and i want to first start off by saying you know your books and the way that you approach writing i really appreciate because you are taking a premise and idea that people seem to hold as true and you're bringing a new contrarian thinking we used to think of fasting as being this restrictive thing potentially dangerous and you highlighted the research around that field that helped us understood that fasting is actually central to healing inside of our body with things like diabetes and other diseases and you're doing it again with cancer by questioning the basic premise and i want to pull a quote from your book to start off the conversation um which is you say and you start off in the book you say the most pressing question in cancer research is the most elusive question what is cancer so can we start off there because it's still a question that we're asking today which is what exactly is cancer yeah and that's sort of uh the most important thing is to understand a disease you really have to understand what it is like what causes it what you know what the disease is and really for the of the common uh diseases cancer stands virtually alone because we had no idea what this disease actually is so you look at other diseases like covid or you know infections so we've identified viruses we've identified bacteria we've you know figured out fungi and so these are external invaders for heart disease and stuff these are you know blockages in our blood vessels which starve the heart or the brain of blood so you get heart attacks or strokes so we sort of understand what the disease is how it develops and that kind of thing but for cancer this is sort of a very very strange disease so it's it's unlike any other disease we've ever faced it's not a vascular disease like heart disease it's not an external invasion like bacteria or viruses um you know it's not a you know stones and stuff there's all these other diseases but what is this strange disease and it's not that it's one of these sort of rare diseases it's unfortunately extremely common so the lifetime risk of cancer is somewhere around one in 10 and it's gonna you know affect everybody's life in that if you don't get it you will know people who will get it almost everybody does but we don't know what this is and this is the whole sort of discussion in the book is what is this disease because it's a disease where the you have a normal cell which is part of your own body because it's derived from your own body and for some reason this normal cell breaks off and becomes cancerous to the point where it can kill you and it kills of course many many people it's the second biggest killer of people so our concept of what this disease actually is has been changing so you know it's changed throughout history but really even in the last sort of 10 years there's been this massive change in the way that we look at this disease and this is what i call the paradigm of cancer that is you know i'm not arguing about oh this you know this is how to treat cancer like we've done lots of studies on how you know use this drug and this drug and these drugs in combination with surgery and chemotherapy and radiation you put them in this sort of regimen and you can treat cancer and i'm not disputing any of that but in the end it doesn't help you answer the question of what is it so if you want to understand what it is then you have to start a start sort of from the beginning go through it and say what is this disease and that's where we've really made a lot of progress within the last sort of 15 20 years and most people haven't even really appreciated that and that's what i wanted to bring forward is that sort of recent research and bring it to the people so they at least understand what this disease is that that is affecting so many people and you do that we were chatting a little bit before the interview started you do that so eloquently in there and you've outlined basically the three major paradigm shifts that have been there in the world of cancer and before we get into kind of like the central thesis of you highlighting the work that really has been understood in the more recent years let's take the listeners of the podcast through this this journey right let's take them through the paradigm one two and then eventually number three so they can understand and really go back to that central question which is what is cancer yeah so this is such an interesting story because this is sort of the the whole crux of the mystery that is cancer so where we started was you know the question is saying what is cancer because cancer's been around a long time you can go back you know to mummies and stuff and you'll still be able to find archaeological evidence of cancer even back in antiquity so it's been a it's a disease that's been there forever um and the first sort of modern paradigm so we start you can start actually even before that with the ancient greeks and the ancient greeks thought it was this sort of excess of uh this humor so they believed in the humeral theory where all diseases were caused caused by an imbalance of the four humors and too much black bile was caused by cancer that turned out not to be true but they did give us the name cancer which is derived from the word carquinos which means crab which is very interesting because you know the cancer does sort of tend to scuttle around the body and metastasize then through the 18th century 19th century they developed a microscope so they really focused on the cell and they could see that this is this cancer cell is related to a normal cell but bizarre and different in certain ways and they're able to categorize the ways in which these cancer cells were different than normal cells so for example if you had a lung cell normal lung cell you could you could look at it under the microscope and then you could look at a lung cancer cell and you'd identify the differences even though there's a lot of similarities between the two because the cancer cell is originally derived from the healthy cell so that was the first big sort of paradigm of cancer was well these are cells that really just grow too much so normal cells don't grow like if you have a normal lung your lung does not just keep going bigger and bigger until your head pops off your neck right it just sort of stays the same size which means that the number of cells that are dying is equally matched by the number of cells that are being born every day and there's about there's a lot i mean the body has maybe 10 trillion cells that are being sort of born every day and that many have to die every day in order for us to maintain a normal sort of lung for example so that it doesn't just keep getting bigger a lung cancer of course is totally different that is it will just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it affects everything around it so that's the big problem with cancer is that it just grows and then after it grows for a while it actually spreads around the body and then by by spreading it affects the normal function of those organs or just by the shear size it's going to affect other things so that was the first great paradigm was this is a disease of cells that grow too much and that by taking that paradigm you can say this is our understanding of what the disease is and therefore you design treatments around that paradigm so if this is a disease of too much growth then this logical solution kill cells right that's it so the the treatments that we derived were surgery so basically cutting out the cancer it had radiation which is a more sophisticated way of burning the cancer and that developed in the 1910s 1920s for example and then in the 1930s 1940s 1950s you started to see the beginning of chemotherapy which are basically selective poisons so they kill certain cells faster than they kill other cells so the the the idea is to kill the cancer before you kill the patient these are all poisons like don't be you know don't don't not to put too fine an edge on it these are all indiscriminate ways of killing cells and burning in point almost almost a little bit like you you sometimes give the analogy of like like warfare right we talk about the war on cancer this is warfare on parts of our body that we've deemed to be out of control exactly so what what we're doing is we're taking this sort of paradigm of excessive growth and applying logical solutions to excessive growth which is ways of killing cells so that makes a lot of sense and it's not to take away from this paradigm these are still the basics of treatment today like even though this was from a while ago we still use chemotherapy we'll do your surgery we still use radiation all the time these days it's sort of the backbone of what we do but it very soon came to the limits of where you could go so 50s 60s 70s there's a huge explosion and the number of chemotherapy agents the way you combine them so that was a huge advance for example when you're able to combine two or three different ones in specific ways so you get this and this and then three weeks later you get this this is this and then three weeks later you get this this and you can combine it with chemo you can combine it with surgery you can combine it with radiation and come up with this whole sort of cocktail and regimen that you go through and survival of cancer especially pediatric cancers really improve dramatically through that period but it reaches a limit and just to jump in pediatric cancers because again kind of like in the book you talk about there's always consequences with these items so pediatric cancer these young children who tend to have in general more resilient bodies more ability to produce stem cells can wither the storm of this warfare on their system compared to somebody who is much older who's going through these treatments yeah exactly and so that was one of the things because if you're able to give a higher dose of these sort of poisons and so on because children are more resilient than an 80 year old for example then you're going to be able to kill off these cancer cells sort of more successfully and but it should reach this limit so the the you know you could really go no further because it didn't answer the question so this this paradigm of cancer as a disease of growth is good but it really leaves the question of why like why are these cells growing so much like we don't know the answer to that right so you have to take that next step and say well what is it that's causing cancers and what is it that's that's driving these uh things to grow so much so that was throughout the 70s we had this revolution in genetics so genetic engineering and genes and dna and chromosome that all came uh through the 50s 60s 70s as they identified dna and so on and this seemed to be the answer so we knew all these things caused cancer so we knew smoking for example caused cancer renewed as best as caused cancer we knew radiation caused cancer we knew you know lots of these different things that cause cancer we identify viruses that cause cancer and but the question is okay why are these separate things so tobacco smoke and viruses for example which have really nothing to do with each other why are they causing cells to grow too much like it's it doesn't make any sense why would that even happen and this is the the second sort of huge paradigm shift which was the genetic paradigm that is uh within each cell you have genes that basically control everything so they control the color of your eyes the color of your hair and everything is controlled genetically but a cell is going to have certain genes that turn on growth that is and there's also genes that turn off growth so if you have a mutation in this gene that causes growth that is either that it tells the cell to grow too much or the gene that stops the growth is turned off so either you're basically hitting the accelerator for growth or you're taking your foot off the brakes right there are genes that you know slam the brakes on growth and if you take the foot off if you immobilize if you you know negate that gene it will also be pro growth so this was sort of was a fantastic paradigm like it was such a sort of huge advance because it took this first paradigm of cancer and answered the question of why well it's a disease of genetic mutations that cause too much growth and the question would be like well what's causing these genetic mutations well these are random genetic mutations caused by things like tobacco smoke and viruses which are basically causing damage to genes right so as you damage a cell you're going to damage the genetic material and this virus or tobacco smoker asbestos if by chance one of those mutations hits a growth sort of sensitive area of the gene you're going to get increased growth which is going to cause cancer because it's a disease of too much growth so it wasn't sort of negating the second paradigm it was sort of building right so it was building an extra layer of understanding on this first paradigm and also that layer of understanding started to help at least some parts of the question which is why do some people get cancer and why do they not where previously it was a little bit of a crap shoot you know you weren't exactly sure why was it that one person got it versus another i mean cultures had superstitions you know that some people were evil or deserved it or whatever it might be you know spirits inside the body and now through science we're starting to understand that no actually there are some factors that are playing into why some people get it and some people don't yeah exactly so then we could identify these genetic syndromes for example where cancer was a very big part of it um but then the question is say for tobacco smoke well that's not purely genetics it's not targeted genetic you know damage right when you smoke you have damage all over the place why is it damaging these specific parts of the gene and the answer in this paradigm was that well it's not really it's just that um by chance it's hitting that that gene because you can't say that asbestos is not isn't it it's not genetically targeted like the way we can do with genetic engineering go in and specifically target an area this is just sort of random damage to the genome but what they're saying is that well because tobacco smoke causes damage the more times you damage the more likely you are by chance to hit this critical area that is just like uh if you buy a lot of lottery tickets you have more chance to win the lottery right but in the end it's sort of just by chance or sometimes some people may not get a lot of smoke but just by chance it has it's a critical area so throughout the you know 70s 80s this genetic paradigm sort of took over from the uh sort of first paradigm which is just excessive growth built on that knowledge and this is what a lot of people still say today that is um you know if you look at the american cancer society website they say oh cancer is a disease of genetic mutations that causes too much growth this is sort of the paradigm that that that's that we've sort of lived through most uh recently so there's a huge huge optimism so clearly this was true we could we went to the cancers we found a lot of genetic mutations we said this is it this is the the answer as to why we're getting it so the first few treatments of this genetic paradigm so now we're saying this is a disease not of excessive growth that's just sort of the effect of that where this is a disease of genetic mutations let's go in and find these mutations and fix them so the first drug of the sort of genetic paradigm was imatinib which was used in a disease called chronic myelogenous leukemia and it was incredible like it basically just cured the whole thing it was ridiculously good this drug um and sort of was one of the and you know was was everything that was promised uh in this so this was fantastic right so we developed this new paradigm then we applied that knowledge to bring a a drug which it wasn't an indiscriminate killer of cells it was a fixer of genes and therefore that's how it worked and this first sort of validated the whole paradigm and then shortly after did that there's another drug for breast cancer uh called transtrusomab which was fantastically successful it didn't apply to all breast cancers but then what they did was they developed the genetic test to see if you had this mutation and if you had the mutation you would get the drug and again just incredible what they're doing was sort of just incredible so really a huge advance so what the thought was is that hey we're just about to cure cancer this is the 2000s so it's interesting we're on the verge we're on the verge like it was the excitement was like palpable it's like we are very very close because this is genetic disease we figured out what this disease is and now we're going to use you know our sort of ingenuity to find it so all we have to do is find the three two or three mutations that cause each cancer find the two or three drugs that will go in and fix those and that that's it right so if you have uh liver cancer for example we'll find the two or three genes that are responsible for growth and then we'll design drugs or antibodies to go in and fix them and that'll be it they'll you know done cancer will be done and so that was sort of a huge uh sort of thing but it took a lot of time so there's the human genome project so remember at the time the gene sequencing technology was very very primitive so there's this project called the human genome project where we're going to sequence the genes of an entire human and that finished in 2000 and was a huge deal it took millions of dollars and actually you or i could do the same thing for like 20 bucks right now right it's like you go to 23andme or something like that right but you could probably get your whole genome sequence for like 50 bucks that's how far the technology has traveled but back then it was a huge deal so we're like okay well we're going to sequence the genes of one entire human being and that's going to lay out the map of what we need to fix we're going to be able to pinpoint these growth genes for each specific cancer boom done it didn't quite work that way so then they went sort of double down on this genetic paradigm and we went to the cancer genome atlas which came about sort of in the mid 2000s so by the mid 2000s this technology had advanced and we weren't going to sequence one human's genes we're going to sequence cancers and we we're gonna sequence thousands of them so you could take you know say breast cancer and take the thousand samples of breast cancer and then just put them all together and look for the commonalities like this is the this gene is is what we need and this gene and this gene and then you find the drugs to block them and then you're done um that also didn't pan out the way we thought because what happened was that what we discovered through these huge genome sequencing things is that there weren't two or three mutations in a specific cancer there was like a hundred so if you took a colon cancer for example and you said okay well what genes are important for colon cancer there was like 100 different genes that were mutated and worse the patient next to that you know if you have patient a with a hundred mutations patient b with the exact looking same looking cancer would have a hundred completely different mutations and it's like whoa okay well this is tough because my paradigm has just been like stymied because you cannot develop a hundred new drugs for one patient and then have a hundred different new drugs for the second patient like sitting right next to him we were hoping to find a few commonalities and yet there was all these differences that were there exactly and the constant time of drug drug development being hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple years so side effects too so you really couldn't do that because the thing about the first few drugs like um imaginib for cml is that virtually if you took you know cml that disease you would find that one specific sort of genetic difference in like 95 of cml sort of thing right so that's one specific change in the whole cancer which is what which is why you could develop such a great drug if you go to colon cancer and you say okay well what are my you know how many different mutations it's like well there's a hundred it's like well that's a lot harder than one and it's like that one mutation may not affect all 100 of colon cancers it may affect like 0.5 of them right so you're going to develop a drug which is effective for 0.5 percent and 99.5 of the percent of people are not going to benefit that's not going to be worth your time even if you could do that right it's just not feasible so in 2018 if you look at the sort of they have to have this database of all the genetic mutations of cancer the last number was somewhere close to six million six million different genetic mutations incredible in cancer so this whole idea you're gonna find two or three different mutations and then you're going to be able to cure them was it and this is the reason the genetic paradigm completely failed to bring new treatments because the success of a paradigm is to bring new and effective treatments and it started out really great but then what happened was that as you started to look deeper and deeper those were the exceptions and not the general rule the general rule was that there's tons of mutations in these cancers and if i could read a little excerpt from your book that i feel like just so eloquently shapes this sort of in the second paradigm you say cancer paradigm 2 had hit rock bottom cancer was still undefeated and the situation looked bleak millions of cancer research dollars over several decades produce an abundance of drugs some truly great but most marginally effective yet fantastically and this just goes to the cost of you know me jumping in the cost of cancer care so back to your sort of statement but most marginally effective yet fantastically expensive benefits borderline toxicity high and cost still higher yeah that's unfortunately what happened because when these drugs sort of fizzle this paradigm sort of fizzled a little bit there's still drugs that are still you know mar they're not very useful but the the the way that the cancers are if you have so many different mutations each different drug is going to be much more uh much you know more marginally effective like it's just not going to make the same difference so in order to recruit the costs and to make money they just kept raising prices and that was you know sort of where we are today unfortunately so they got these drugs they didn't work that well so in order to make up they just you know just kept praying of the cost and so now uh if you look at the drugs sort of 20 years ago in 2000 those drugs that were developed like imatinib they came out you know at a certain cost the cost of that drug just kept going up and up and up and it was ridiculous because the cost of drugs should go down it's like your iphone right if you have a or you know an original iphone the price of that technology goes down over time like computing power right it goes down over time with drugs that drug is now sort of like five times the cost of what it was in 2000 yet it's the same drug so why are the costs so high because there's no more research into it there is no more technology to make this drug the reason is they just want to make more money and every drug company sort of said well it's a lot more profitable if we just keep it going than if we were to compete with each other on price let's just keep racking up the prices so now you have drugs that are like a hundred thousand dollars a year sort of thing and unfortunately which would be fine if they worked right if you look at how well they work it's very very very limited usefulness so they took i think 15 or 16 drugs in one study and said well what's the average increase in survival with using these drugs and i think it was 2.1 months or something like that it was very low and if you think about it so remember that cancer affects mostly older people so you have to think okay say you're 80 years old and you see you get a cancer and you take a drug which is going to cost you two three hundred thousand 000 and so you will live instead of living from 80 to 81 you'll live to 81 and two months and you'll have waste you'll have spent like 250 300 000 you'll have sold your house you'll have bankrupted your family is that really worth it the side effects of autism every additional drug that comes in especially when people are considering quality of life at that end point yeah and remember that that those dollars that go towards paying those exorbitant sort of fees are dollars that don't go into other things that could make a difference that is uh you know nursing care physiotherapy you know personal support workers right that that will make a difference to your quality of life right instead you're just paying that money i mean that's why you have that show breaking bad where the guy wound up selling cocaine to afford his lung cancer treatments right it's so expensive and everybody knows it that it's basically out of range of the system and and there's a lot of reasons for that i get into some of them in the book you know one is that they you know there's a change in the way they approve the drug so you could get drugs approved with much more marginal effectiveness than before so the food and drug administration normally has a certain bar that you have to cross before you get approved for use and that bar got really lowered a lot because people wanted to see new drugs so their answer to getting new drugs is to lower the bar for effectiveness so you got new drugs you just didn't get more effective drugs and the problem was of course the paradigm that they were under just looking at these sort of genetic treatments just didn't really work and that's where i said you know that's where we were in about 2010 it was rock bottom like that the whole thing was like okay cancer is still just as bad as it was because the treatments we've developed were not that effective and the entire field was basically going it was just spinning around in circles because they couldn't find this they needed to replace that paradigm because that paradigm was not leading them to effective treatment right and they weren't necessarily sure where it was going so they just kept on doubling down on the things that they thought were working or in some cases business decisions you know driving uh driving the the road map for for research exactly and that's why understanding the paradigms are so important because if you get the paradigm wrong then you're going to go in the wrong direction so all those drug companies which are spending money to really look at developing great drugs for cancer and it's billions of dollars it's not like chump change but if you get that paradigm wrong and you're just choosing you know phantoms right so if you're not facing in the right direction it doesn't matter how fast you run you'll still never get there uh there's a architect uh his name is william mcdonough very renowned uh gentleman who does a lot of um you know uh he wrote a book called uh cradle to cradle about building uh building buildings like really with the environment in mind and not just sustainability but buildings that are good for the environment he says this analogy says you know if you're in a car and you're driving 100 miles per hour towards canada but you really should be going towards mexico it doesn't really do you a lot of good if all of a sudden you just slow down 60 miles per hour if you're still heading in the wrong direction yeah exactly that's exactly right and this is the whole idea is that you need to set a direction so if you're doing research if you're looking for a drug you have to set a direction and say okay i'm going to attack the genetics of this problem but if the genetics were not the main issue then you're going in the wrong direction and you'll no matter how much effort you put in you'll still never get to where you're going and that was the reason from about 2000 to 2020 uh you know they're 2010 you know they're you know because these some of these new drugs they're developed sort of in the 90s so for for for years there's just nothing coming out that was making any difference and that's where the sort of that's where that's where most people think we are but it's the sort of untold story is that you know there's this new paradigm that's sort of changed and this is what's really important is that now we've got this new understanding which is hopefully going to lead us to better treatments and it already has in some some degree so that's sort of cancer paradigm 3 which again takes the core of what the genetic paradigm was cancer 2.0 and again expands it to try to understand what the point is of these diseases so if you look at what happens to the um you know to the to the paradigm first paradigm was cancerous cells that grow and the question is why so you get genetics and it's genetics now you take the same sort of extra layer of understanding and say well why are these genes mutating so the answer in cancer paradigm 2 was that they were randomly mutating and that was clearly not true like it was obviously not true because remember that these cancers that come from you know say to have a breast cancer if you have a breast cancer in a sort of american woman in 1920 versus a japanese woman in 2020 they're half a world apart they're a century apart and they will look exactly the same and yet they've derived themselves from originally normal human breast tissue so they look come to the same point that is they look exactly the same so there is nothing random about it that is if you have you know a colon cancer which affects say a million people a million people have independently generated this cancer which looks identical on pathology there's nothing random about it it's sort of like if you have you know you have a classroom of children and you say paint a picture well you're going to get all different types of picture right you're going to get you know some will draw a house and some will draw a flower right you're going to get all different pictures but what if every single picture was a picture of a white elephant or something like that right that's not random right that's when you're laughing something bigger is going on something bigger is going on there's something clearly guiding these mutations towards a predetermined spot so if you go to a classroom analogy maybe those those children pulled out a picture and the the picture was already drawn right it's already there and they simply color it in and that's why everything is exactly the same right so this is the point is that this was not this was not random at all this is something that is guided and what is guiding it towards this thing and that's where we started the understanding of the next paradigm of cancer which is the evolutionary sort of ecological view of cancer so it starts back in 2000 so a couple of researchers were talking about cancer and what they decided was that what they wanted to do was determine basically a sort of consensus on what is cancer so they they met and they said you know what's interesting is that there's different types of cancer there's breast cancer there's lung cancer there's liver cancer there's all different types of cancer and you know we look at the differences between these cancers but what's the same about these cancers what's the same about breast and colon and liver and pancreas and leukemia what's the same about all these cancers so in in in terms of a problem this is called the lumper splitter problem sometimes that is when you're doing classifications do you lump categories together or do you split them apart so say you have mammals you could put whales chimpanzees and humans all in one category because we're all mammals we all breathe air so you lump them all together you can also split them apart and say well you know chimpanzees and humans live on land and whales live in the water so you can split them apart so you can split categories you can lump them together they give you different information so the lumping together highlights the similarities and when you split them apart it highlights the differences so cancer medicine had always split breast cancer versus colon cancer versus lung cancer versus whatever what was different about this paper than anything else was it was really the first attempt to lump them together and say what is the same about all these cancers and therefore this wound up being the most cited paper in all of oncology so it was basically the most important article in research article in in cancer history so it was seeing how all these cancers are the same and what they came up with a list of eight hallmarks but it basically comes down to this cancer cells differ from normal cells because they grow that is they don't stop growing whereas normal cells should stop growing right second thing was that they they are immortal so that is if you take a cancer cell you can actually keep growing it and growing it and growing it enough and you can do it forever if you were to take one of your normal cells and try to grow grow and grow it will only grow it will only divide a certain number of times before it stops and that's called the hayflick limit it'll just stop it'll die off so it's not immortal it's it's mortal cancer cells are completely immortal so they'll just keep going third thing is that these cells tend to move around a lot that is metastasized that is a lung cell stays in the lung it doesn't go around into your big toe or something whereas a lung cancer cell will float around and go wherever right and then the fourth thing is that it uses a different way of ener energy uh which is glycolysis so those were the really core important thing there's always differences between the cancers of course but the core things that link all cancers together the best sort of scientific consensus of what cancer was was these sort of hallmarks of cancer so in 2000 they sort of started to say okay well this is what cancer is from a scientific standpoint and how does this develop and so they you know in about 2010 or so they brought in some sort of scientists from the outside and the idea the national cancer institute had asked all these other places physicists and astrobiologists and so on about you know give us some insights into cancer so they asked this astrobiologer by the name of paul davies uh he studies life on other planets that's the things like i don't know anything about cancer and they're like great so from an outside point of view we want to see what is your take on it because physicists look at things differently than say a biologist will and so the first thing he noticed was and this was you know very interesting because it's so sort of fundamental is that cancer is not a human disease so it's actually a disease whose origins run way past humanity that is you know if you look at more evolutionarily primitive animals they still get cancer in fact almost every multi-cellular animal in existence practically gets cancer that is dogs get cancer cats get cancer rats get cancer even the most primitive organism which is called a hydra they found hydra is this microscopic thing you look at in the microscope um and even that gets cancer so if you're maybe not at the same rates as human beings but they all still get cancer yeah exactly the ability to get cancer the ability to get cancer and this was what's so interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any multi-celled animal that can't get cancer like virtually every cell in your body can become cancerous that's very strange because it's not like you get the same thing with other diseases right so a gallstone is a gallstone doesn't affect your you know thumb or something like that right but every cell your skin cells can become cancerous your eyes can get cancerous your uh you know heart can get cancer your lungs can get cancer every single cell even the placenta can get cancer so it's like okay every single cell can get cancerous not only in the human body but practically every cell in a multi-cellular animal has that ability to become a cancer so whatever this thing called cancer is is embedded extremely deeply way past humanity and human genes so don't look in your human genes because the origin of cancer went way back to evolutionary times and this was the sort of insight that set into motion this sort of next understanding of cancer as an evolutionary disease so if you look at the differences between a single-celled organism and a multi-celled organism there's a very fundamental jump that needs to happen when you go from a single cell to a multi-celled organism that is single-celled organisms compete with each other for food so say you have a slice of bread and you have mold on a slice of bread which is a fungus right this mold will eat with each other compete with each other until the food is gone then they'll die there's no cooperation but they just are basically each each mold or each fungi or each bacteria they're all basically out for themselves so they compete with each other when you get into a multicellular system there are some important changes in that you have to learn how to co operate together so when you have several different cells you have a lung cell which does one thing and a liver cell which does another thing but they need to coordinate because the liver can't get oxygen and the lung can't detoxify so they rely on each other but what you can do is you can specialize and you can dominate your environment and that's the advantage is that you have specialization you have you know you can get bigger and so on so you're going to compete more successfully so it's the difference between competition which is the domain of the single-celled organism and cooperation which is a multi-celled organism so the cells within a multicellular organism they have to cooperate so it's like the difference between say an individual like who plays an individual sport like tennis everybody else is a competitor right you can't have five winners of the french open or whatever like you only have one winner that's individual sports when you get to a team sport what happens is that you have to learn how to cooperate with your other team members so say you play um soccer or something like that right then what's going to happen is that you specialize you have forwards and defense and midfielders and goalies right and it gets bigger but you have to learn to cooperate the other workplayers the system the more cooperation that's needed exactly so that's a huge fundamental shift in the way that multicellular life is done and there when you compare cells in a multi-celled organism compared to what single-celled organisms do they differ in several fundamental ways because of this you know competition versus cooperation so if you look at single-celled organisms they tend to grow they will grow and grow and grow and they will never stop until they sort of run out of resources the second thing is that they move around so single-celled organisms if they exhaust their food source they need to move around right nothing stops them from moving around in multi-celled organisms you want people to stay in the same place because your lung depends on your liver being in a certain place and they have to be in the same place and they can't grow you can't have the lung keep growing and growing and growing right the third thing is that they're more they're immortal so if you look at bacteria they're completely immortal you can grow a bacteria in a flask in a lab and just keep growing them and growing them and growing them as long as you keep putting in fresh fresh medium you're going to keep growing so they're immortal whereas cells in a multicellular organism don't they will die after a while and then the fourth thing is the way they generate energy bacteria tend to use glycolysis which is a you know which is different from this thing called oxidative phosphorylation but if you look at it it's like wow the way that the cancer cell differs from a normal cell it's exactly the same way that a multi that cells in a multi-celled organism differ from a single cell organism that single-celled organism is the evolutionary ancestor of all the original cells that is all that programming in that single-celled organism to grow to move around to become immortal that's all there that was never in evolutionary time that was never changed they just built new programs on top of it so that old original sort of kernel of programming of that single cell sort of survivalist uh mentality all still exists in all of our cells the the source code has been there since the beginning right exactly and what's happening is cancer cells exactly and and so what people said was that well this is not a coincidence because what's really happening now is that you have that original source code that's very deep and you have all this other programming on top which subverts all your programming to to change the sort of competitive nature to a cooperative nature but when you get damaged to all of this other code then this original source code sort of comes through and that's why all the cancers in history all sort of look the same because all of it was buried there already whether you live in japan or whether you live in america whether you're in 2020 or 1820 this stuff goes back millions of years all the way back from the jump from unicellularity to multicellularity that's because cancer is com is is the way that cancer differs is fundamental that that difference is fundamental to the way that life evolved on earth right that's why it affects everything and and you know jumping a little bit ahead but part of the question that comes along with it is that is cancer something that happens to us or is it a survival mechanism right that's not maybe the words that you would use but just using like words for the sake of this conversation is this an inherent sort of thing that was programmed it's in all cells not just human beings and is it some sort of survival mechanism that cells have yeah i think that's exactly right so it's actually the the most sort of survivable way that a cell can be so a lung cell if you stretch back from the original cell from when it originally came from a single cell to a multi-cell there's all those genes that are programmed in there which are sort of survivalist genes these are the genes that will survive on its own uh not being part of us this sort of cooperative team and when all of this damage happens to everything else you start to activate these sort of survivalist genes and that is the way that cancer develops so the reason that a lot of these um you know these things like tobacco smoke and viruses and stuff what they do is that they exert a sort of selective pressure it's it's got to be chronic and it's got to be a sublethal damage so that you're you're basically providing the environment that is necessary for this sort of survivalist tendency to succeed that is the only the only powerful the only sort of thing that is powerful enough to drive this change in cancer from a normal cell to a cancer cell is evolution so what you need in evolution is a selective pressure and that's what these chronic carcinogens so chronic exposures cause is a selective pressure that is it has to be chronic because it needs time for evolution to happen and it needs to be sublethal because if you just kill all cells then everybody's dead right nothing survives to become cancer if it's too weak it just gets it's just not strong enough and it's actually somewhere in the middle so this sort of chronic damage to a cell like you get with tobacco smoke with tobacco viruses ultra processed food that that is known to be have a carcinogen effect air pollutants that are there lead arsenic like all in that same category exactly so these chronic uh sort of sublethally damaging things will actually cause the cell to say okay well now you know how am i gonna survive right if i if i just keep doing what i'm doing i'm gonna die so therefore i'm going to start to activate some of these this old programming which is sort of in the way back and i'm going to activate those genes that are similar to being a unicellular organism so in other words the the the cell is actually evolving sort of in a backwards manner which is called an activism towards its sort of original form and that's what the cancer is is basically a single-celled organism because that's that's that's what was programmed in all of us and explains actually a lot of the phenomena that we see in cancer that is why does it affect so many people that is because it's in all of us the seed of cancer actually lies in every single one of our cells and that's why it's so common in terms of it affects all animals all multicellular animals and infects every cell every different type of cell in our body can become cancerous why because that was there from the beginning and makes it and if i just one context layer for our audience that's there it's not just why does it affect so many of us but it also starts to explain that now we understand okay the source code was there from the beginning but it's activated by these pressures it then starts to explain why did we seen an uptick in these cancers in more modern history well the pressures have increased and just being mindful of your time since i know i only have a little bit of you know more time with you i think this is a perfect opportunity to jump into you've sort of set the stage for this kind of central point that comes into okay so now that we understand this and part of paradigm three you use this sort of seed and soil you know analogy and i'd love to set that up just to make sure that we get to that while i have have you been yeah so that's exactly right so if we understand now this is an evolutionary process which goes back towards our origins then you have to say what drives evolution and it's not just genetics so if you think about evolution darwinian evolution which is the survival of the fittest for example so what he had observed was that in the galapagos islands he had these birds and if they had these short beaks which were really ideal for eating nuts and their birds that these had these long beaks that were really good for eating fruit and in the areas where there's a lot of nuts you found a lot of these short beaked animals and where the areas you had a lot of fruit you had a lot of these long beaked animals and that what he said was that's not a coincidence what happens is that the environment selects the genes that are most successful so if you have a lot of nuts you select for the genes that's a selective pressure which favors the survival of those genes that produce this short thick beak and the areas that have a lot of fruit have uh exert a selective pressure on the genes that give you the long narrow beaks right that makes sense that's just sort of basic uh evolution and cancer does sort of the same thing so if it's an evolutionary process towards this sort of original being caused by chronic damage to the cell then it's not the genetics which is the important part but it's the environment right and that is the seed of cancer is there but if you don't provide that environment that you know selects for this sort of survivalist cancerous sort of uh you know story then you're not going to get cancer so yeah what you have to do then is to say this is not just a genetic disease because for years we've been sort of thinking about it as a genetic disease so we think well it's just sort of pre-programmed into us but it's not because the rates of cancer depend on your environment more than than it does on your genes that is if you look at say breast cancer breast cancer if you go from japan a japanese woman in japan when they when you move that person to san francisco their rate of breast cancer like doubles or triples within a couple generations crazy it's the environment but that's fantastic because then if you can figure out what part of the environment is what's selecting for the damage so in you know in some cases we know it's smoking it's tobacco it's viruses right in many cases we don't know breast cancer colon cancer what's the damage prostate cancer we don't know there's if we can figure out what part of the environment is driving this evolutionary process then that's how we're going to reduce the risk of cancer and so the question is what is it in our environment so they've studied this question for a long time so back in 1981 they did a study where they're going to estimate the risks the so we do something called a population attribution factor which is what percentage a certain risk factor will contribute to cancer so tobacco smoke is the biggest 35 so tobacco is responsible roughly for 35 of cancer overall but number two was the diet at around 30 right so really like very very close to tobacco and dwarfing almost everything else so all the stuff like the pesticides and the chemicals and stuff that's like one or two percent radiation one or two percent but cancer was caused in large part due to one tobacco which we know about and two the diet the question which never really got that like people didn't get that you know like something they didn't get that and and and and so they were looking for what part of the diet that was what the tricky part was so if it's diet then what part of the diet is causing cancer right so they looked at fiber that wasn't wasn't the case they looked at dietary fat it wasn't the case they looked at vitamin deficiencies and we've done so many studies like vitamin a vitamin b folic acid vitamin c vitamin d vitamin e you know omega-3 fatty acids selenium we've tested all of those in multi-million dollar trials and it wasn't deficiency of vitamins that was causing cancer and the answer came somewhere around and what part of the diet was the most important and we didn't know this really until about 2003 and it turns out that it was obesity was the biggest biggest driver of cancer and probably more specifically is that it was the hyperinsulinemia that is the too much insulin which is very typical of obesity is probably the the what's driving cancer in those cases and the reason i say we didn't know is because uh so i went to medical school in the mid-1990s and we never talked about this stuff but in 2003 a very large study came out which showed that obesity actually raises the risk of all kinds of cancers so now the who classifies 13 different types of cancer as obesity related including breast cancer and colorectal cancer which are after lung cancer sort of the most common cancers so really really important causes and this is what's important is now you know what we're doing is we have to go past again so this paradigm which gets us to evolution which gets us to the seed and the soil which is this sort of evolutionary ecological ecology being the the study of how the environment interacts with an individual how you can change that environment in order to prevent cancer and that's uh sort of what's sort of exciting about this is that now hopefully we can start to understand and then make some changes that are going to minimize our risk of developing these types of cancers and you know hopefully preventing them in the future yeah and i mean and even question basic premises you know i was on the mayo clinic website in preparation of this interview you know there's like a myths and uh there's like a myths in fact section on cancer and diet and like one of the questions inside of there was sugar you know somebody saying you know does consuming less sugar have any impact on cancer right and it was like there's no research there's no evidence at all that consuming less sugar has anything to do with cancer and again mayo clinic well-established place they're doing the best they can based on the research and the evidence that's out there right now and part of the thing that you're bringing in is that highlighting especially with your previous books that we're really talking about you know insulin resistance and what that relates to you know diabetes especially type 2 diabetes is well if we know that obesity through this big study that you were talking about plays a major factor and then what is it as part of that also contributes obesity and how do cancer cells get their energy then of course we're going to want to pay attention to the level of you know sugars as one example that we're having inside of our diet because that's going to cause a whole chain of effects that ultimately supports the growth of cancer yeah exactly and um so one of the so dr lou cantley who's a very prominent researcher cancer researcher you know he was one of the ones who sort of uncovered the link between sort of what sugar does which is you know it contributes to this high insulin state and insulin other than being a metabolic hormone is actually a very very potent growth factor so it tells cells to grow and if you're going to tell cells to grow then you're going to tip the scales in towards uh you know increasing growth of cancer cells for example so you know here's a guy who's sort of like one of the most prominent cancer researchers and he's like sugar scares me you know that's what he says in one of his uh articles he's written it's like okay well that's all i need to know right totally and and also too on the basic premise of like what is chemotherapy right yeah could could you explain like that link on that like how do they get these well-intentioned poisons into cancer cells uh can you explain that to like our audience through you know like exactly like what goes into chemotherapy that takes advantage of exactly that that we're talking about yeah so yeah exactly so when you look at the cancer cells you can do something called a pet test which is a positron emission test and it basically looks at how how avidly cells take up glucose so when you do these tests things that light up are eating a lot of glucose and those are what are identified as cancer so they're taking in you know like five or ten times the amount of glucose which is a type of sugar compared to compared to normal cells so it's like okay when you look on these sophisticated sort of scans you can see the cancer cells basically devouring sugar like there's no tomorrow and it's like well you know if i had cancer i certainly wouldn't be trying to eat too much of the stuff because you know that the one place in the body that loves it 10 times more than the next guy is the thing right and then you have certain chemotherapies which take advantage of this they try and get in you know by because they're you know they mimic the sugar and that's how the they do it on the positron emission tomography testing for example they mimic the sugar so that the cancer takes it up and then it lights it up and then people are trying to use that to sort of target the cancers as well but interesting uh you know it's it's an interesting story of how this sort of this new paradigm explains so much more about the phenomenon of cancer and how you know what implications it has for screening and this sort of evolution of and this is sort of the promise of this cancer paradigm 3.0 is that if you now understand that what is happening now is that the cell is evolving away from normal cells evolving into a foreign species because and and people always think oh that's so weird right but that's the way the body actually looks at the cancer cells so when our immune system looks at a cell it has a way to tell between self and non-self that is the the immune system is a very powerful weapon you don't want to use it on its own cells that's like friendly fire right behavior exactly and it's very very bad if that happens so your body has these ways to distinguish between your own cells and everybody else so bacteria viruses it will try and kill it and when it sees a cancer it will try and kill it that's just the way that's what happens so it has evolved this cell so say you take a lung cell this lung cell which was originally your own cell has evolved into basically a new species that is foreign that's why frankenstein in your own body exactly and that's the reason that instead of trying to the third paradigm which is like okay now we have these these cells that were originally part of us but they've basically broken away and they've become their own sort of you know invader now you say well instead of trying to just get indiscriminate killing which was paradigm 1 or genetic targeting which was paradigm 2 now what we're going to do is enhance the immune system to identify it so basically you have these sleeper cells like you know you have terrorists sleeper cells of terrorists in your city and now what you're trying to do is uncover them so that you can get your police and your swat teams in there to kill these sort of domestic terrorists that's what we're doing with immunotherapy so these new drugs these check inhibitors are basically uncovering so they there are certain ways that these cancer cells hide and they're basically trying to uncover them right and this is the new paradigm what we're going to do is trying to uncover these sleeper cells these hidden sleeper cells so that they can be identified targeted we can you know direct the immune system so something like those those new drugs you're talking about the um you know those checkpoint inhibitors then you get car t where you're actually going to take the cancer and then engineer a sort of a swap team that is going to identify and kill them right that's a new therapy based on this immunotherapy but it's based more specifically on this new paradigm of looking at a cancer as a new foreign species and it's very very interesting because you know it's it's the promise is sort of immense like we're not there yet and you know i hope that there's a lot more to come but it's a totally new way of targeting cancer and treating it based on a whole new paradigm and that's what gives me hope for the future that there's more going to be able to be applied because you can apply these lessons of evolutionary biology and say well you know what can i do to to change the environment for example because that's evolution that's biology so things like losing weight and you know intermittent fasting which is another way to lose weight you know trying to reverse your type 2 diabetes type 2 diabetics of course get much higher rates of cancer because it's also hyperinsulinemic so getting reversing the type 2 diabetes that's going to likely reduce your risk you know to other things like chemo preventative agents so there's not a lot they've been studying stuff to try and prevent cancer but there's not a lot so the only things that might work that farming gets a lot of research which is a diabetes drug may be useful and then green tea probably a very small effect but there's some data from you know from japan where they do drink a lot of green tea that some of the the compounds in that are maybe may be effective so hey maybe that's a great you know great thing to do drinking green tea is probably good anyway and really the the the two central themes that i got out of your book after really going through that history is one the future is hopeful in a way that is really understanding more of that central question coming back to how we start off the podcast which is what the heck is cancer so we're better shaped for what we're developing in terms of treatments and drugs in the future because we're we're more we have a we have the most robust answer that's actually getting to the source and the root of what is cancer and the second component is exactly kind of what you were just talking about which is what are the things that you can do today to both enhance you know uh whether it's some of the work of like walter longo or other people that are out there that are showing that fasting could support right targeted fasting especially before chemotherapy can support and enhance the the potency of of these drugs if somebody actively has cancer cutting off the source of the supply of food which is significantly reducing the amount of glucose so that we're not in this place of you know hyperinsulinemia and if you don't have cancer right now and this is something that you're paying attention to in the future what would be your biggest recommendations you know somebody who's healthy who's listening to this podcast right now and they're like wow this is all super fascinating i've never understood this before but now i get it it's almost like you just gave us a master class on cancer what are the one or two things to do today besides not smoking that will help us be the most resilient to potentially avoid this disease in the future or greatly minimize our risk yeah and and so yeah you get back to those sort of um attributable risk which is number one is tobacco smoke so of course that's probably the single most important thing and still is is to not smoke and then two is the diet so avoiding hyperinsulinemia which is that sort of what i talk about more in the obesity code in type 2 diabete in the diabetes code is that insulin is this hormone which tends to make us gain weight and also causes insulin resistance and uh too much insulin is a bad is a is a very prone growth factor so that's gonna so if you're you know you want to avoid things that are going to try that are going to raise insulin which is eating a very uh a diet that is very high in refined carbohydrates for example sugar is probably something you should best take you know in in small amounts and then this other idea is that you really should be having a regular period of fasting every day that's really sort of basic it's the word breakfast it's the meal that breaks your fast because really you're supposed to be eating at say dinner time which is say six o'clock and eating at breakfast time which is maybe eight o'clock so you're getting somewhere between 12 and 14 hours of fasting every single day that's what's supposed to happen that's what that's buried in the word breakfast right break fast that is what's supposed to happen every day that's not what happens to most of us in 2020 because if you look at sort of societal norms and stuff instead of having three meals and then no snacks we sort of graze throughout the day believing that it's actually healthy for us i don't think it is because every time you are eating you're stimulating your insulin which is giving growth signals to the cells including the cancer cells which love insulin um you know you look at a breast cancer cell for example has like five or six times the number of insulin receptors compared to a normal breast cell they love this stuff they love insulin they love glucose so therefore you want to ignore it so eating sort of whole pros unprocessed foods is important that's probably the most important thing not eating all the time is the second probably the second most important thing and you know maintaining a normal weight as best as you can i mean that's not always the easiest thing to do but if you are overweight then try to lose that weight if you are type 2 diabetic try to reverse that type 2 diabetes and that's the two you know the the tobacco and the diet are so overwhelmingly more important than everything else like you could also you know look at the viruses for example you can get the uh you know try to avoid the hepatitis b and hepatitis c which causes cancer and human papilloma virus but those are sort of givens but the diet and the tobacco are sort of in a class of their own everything else is like two percent and they're at like 30 35 and you know i i think i just want to say from somebody from the outside who's been an observer of your work and and consuming it and just super appreciative the the cigarette is pcz you know tough to break but actually there's really a lot of really interesting stuff that's coming out of johns hopkins and other places of using psychedelics to help break cigarette succession you know maybe those things will incorporate and we'll figure out new ways to help people i think it's about 15 of adult population smokes here in the united states so it's gone down massively and cancer rates have gone down for that the diet sometimes people listening here if they're not familiar with your work can think okay he's just talking about eating healthy but really you're talking about getting out of this central paradigm to use the word where we're eating sugar in all its other forms so people who are listening are like i don't really have a lot of sugar in my diet you know maybe a little bit in my coffee some birthday cake here and there when i'm at parties but you know how often are you eating those meals of refined starches that are a regular part of our daily life the big bowls of of rice or ultra processed foods or or breads or other things like that that fine you know have those things every so often as you know parts of your diet but when they become the norm now you understand why uh so much of america is in that pre-diabetic state where they think they might be eating healthy because they're just a little bit overweight but actually their diet is constantly spiking their blood sugar which leads to all these problems with insulin that you're talking about so you're not just talking about eating healthy let's be a little bit more mindful you're talking about really actually leaning in and getting your blood sugar under control yeah exactly and and you know one of the ways i mean a lot of people talk about diets and there's all these different opinions on diets but what people hadn't focused on um really at all i think until a few years ago was this meal timing that is is eating all the time really the same as eating you know a few times and i think the answer is no because the point is that you need to let your body sort of digest let your insulin levels fall so that you don't get all these problems with the insulin resistance and so on because insulin is not intrinsically bad but it is a hormone that goes up when you eat so if you eat constantly is that a bad thing and that's not been talked about a lot and that's what we i've really focused on is that i think it's actually highly detrimental to be eating constantly it's just not the way that you're supposed to be doing it and she's never done it which was a little bit of the trend of some of the advice especially in like the 90s and 2000s eat six meals a day you know throughout the day and and really you know we're backing away from that largely through the work that people like yourself are doing and just educating well let's actually look is this actually helpful or could it be harmful and it's looking like it's not supportive of our overall health goals inside the body yeah i mean i think the whole idea was sort of silly that you should eat eat eat eat to lose weight and it's like well how's that going to work exactly right if you're eating all the time how are you expecting to lose weight and you know of course that if you eat a little bit and then stop that doesn't suppress your appetite it increases it that's what an appetizer is it's a small portion of food to make you more hungry not less hungry more hungry right so if you're going to eat small portions of food you're going to stimulate your appetite then you're going to stop right it's like it's like when you start urinating you just want to finish right when you start eating you just want to finish if you were to to go pee and you just stop and start and stop and start it's like why would you want to do that like that's the dumbest thing ever right so it's like you're going to make yourself hungry by taking a little appetizing portion of food and then you're going to stop right it's like oh well that's not really useful and then you're going to do it again and again and again six times a day well why would you want to do that that's ridiculous because it's never been done before because prior to like 1977 nobody did that so why would you even think that it's a good thing to do like why would you even why would you even come up with that and and the answer is that there was no real scientific evidence that it actually helpful it was just sort of made up people just thought it might be good and they just said it and that's it sure well you know there's that old saying that i don't know who discovered water but it probably wasn't a fish sometimes we're so in the cultural norms of the way that things have been done that it actually takes a lot of courage especially for somebody in your position to step back and say wait does any of this make sense let's start with the basics and let's question the premise and then go from there if not we're in this rat race where today still in the u.s unfortunately number one reason for bankruptcy is medical bills cancer rates are continuing to go up quality of life is not increasing uh out of 90 of our insurance dollars that we pay in young people old people everybody uh out of all the insurance dollars that we pay in ninety percent of it is used in the last six to eight months of somebody's life to try to keep them alive through these expensive treatments a lot of them well-intentioned a lot of them well-intentioned that are there some maybe coming from business perspectives but it's not a winning race we have to take step back and we have to question the basic idea and that's exactly dr fung what you do inside this book and i want to thank you for really putting together some strong material i hope progressive medical medical schools out there start to make it require reading because you know as we all know on this podcast is that it can take 12 17 20 years for what's the latest literature to end up becoming part of the practice that's out there so kudos to you for writing an incredible book i want to just take a moment here again trying to be mindful of your time for you to talk about some of the initiatives um the book is out there by the time this interview is going to be out there so we'll have the link in the show notes uh but you also are involved in a couple other initiatives and i'd love for you to get a chance to explain those to our um audience especially the ones around fasting yeah so um i have a website called thefastingmethod.com and there's a lot of sort of uh free materials so i have a blog and there's probably like six or seven years worth of blogs sitting in there so there's a ton of information all there as well as links to youtube videos which have lectures and um you know that kind of thing and you can also follow me on twitter where or instagram that's at dr jason fung that's dr jason fung and then um the fasting method also has a paid program where we try to provide the sort of help for people because people you know might have good intentions of fasting to lose weight and reverse type 2 diabetes on but they need some help to do it so this is hopefully providing some of the sort of necessary necessary you know tools the community supportive community sort of answering questions provide the education necessary you know what do i do if this happens and what do i know if this happens so really trying to provide that supportive um the supportive uh you know environment that people can succeed in it um and then i also worked with a company called peak tea which provides the uh a line of fasting tea so i love them great i think uh they're yeah they're really good i drink i drink them like every day almost and um you know it comes as these uh packets of um tea so it's crystallized tea so they brew the tea and then cold brew crystallize it so there's actually higher higher levels of certain antioxidants called catechins which are thought to be appetite suppressing and so on so that's why it might be a little bit useful and very useful adjunct to fasting if you're having difficulty so they have a whole line of fasting tea which i worked with them on and that's that's you know hopefully you know all things trying to help people do the fasting fasting itself is very easy and if you can do it great if you need some help to get healthy to reverse your diabetes to lower your weight which will ultimately hopefully reduce your risk of cancer those are all great things yeah and i would say that these are all great resources even if you're in the pre-diabetes state which is where so many people are right we have so many people in that state so you don't just have to have diabetes if you notice that you're gaining belly fat you know you're getting a little larger as your years increase you know and you have looked at your your blood work and you see that you're in that pre-diabetic range which we talk about dr hyman talks about you talk about fasting is a central tool for uh addressing that before you don't have to wait till you get diagnosed with diabetes you can embrace some of these tools and support systems that dr fung has set up uh fantastic interview really thank you so much for taking the time to take us on this journey in this educational history the cancer code it's out a revolutionary new understanding of a medical mystery we'll have the link in the show notes dr fung thank you for being with us on the broken marine podcast thanks for having me it's great

Channel: Dhru Purohit

Views: 287,032

Rating: 4.8576016 out of 5

Keywords: broken brain podcast, Dhru Purohit, Dr. Jason Fung, The Cancer Code, Cancer, Cancer Prevention

Id: nrqXKf3tprE

Length: 84min 2sec (5042 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020