Stephen

I've had many leading experts on this show, including Matthew Walker, and they've all said the same thing about sleep. They've said it's the biggest positive investment you can make in your own performance. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you're consistently tired, poor decision making will follow and eventually cause other things to fail in your life. So if you're looking to optimize your recovery, you should start looking at what you're sleeping on. Our sponsor, Helix makes high quality mattresses tailored to your body. It doesn't matter if you run hot sleep on your side or need something firm. If you Helix has a mattress for you. And I asked them recently to send one to a member of my team and Juan received it and we travel a lot. So when he's home, quality sleep really matters. And he told me he's getting the best sleep of his life. And the data backs it up. With 82% of people in a Helix study saying they saw an increase in their deep sleep. And with a 120 night trial, you've got four months to prove it to yourself. You can get 27% off@helixsleep.com diary. That's helixsleep.com diary. You have an envelope in front of you there, that confidential on the front of it. What is in that envelope?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's a paper that's under embargo because the world thinks it's going to be very important and it's going to be a lead article in the Frontiers in Science because this is a strategy to manage cancer effectively and we have a lot of evidence to keep these people alive a hell of a lot longer. We have given hope to the hopeless.

Stephen

And you have a perspective on treating cancer and other metabolic diseases that others don't have?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yes, but the problem is the field doesn't understand what I'm saying about the origin of cancer. So everything comes back to the mitochondria. And all chronic diseases and cancer are the result of damage to this. And the science is telling us this, but the field of cancer has yet to accept it. That is a tragedy.

Stephen

Are you pissed off about this?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, who wouldn't be? There's 1,700 people a day in this country dying from cancer. That's 70 an hour. And it gets worse every single year. When is the people going to wake up?

Stephen

So give me a prescription of how I should live my life to keep my mitochondria healthy.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

So it all comes down to what you do to maintain the health and vitality of the mitochondria that reduce the risk. But we are now in a new environment where we have massive amounts of highly processed carbohydrates, inactivity, emotional stress, poor sleep habits, and you chronically damage this organelle. And then if you look at the domestic dog, cancer is the number one killer of the domestic dog. But wolves in the wild rarely have cancer. But the wolf is out running around eating natural foods, yet the dog is in an apartment somewhere, Gets a dog walker once a day, right? And the next thing, the dog is obese and full of cancer.

Stephen

And I want to give people actionable things that they can think about.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

So this is what's really important. This is a bioenergetic roadmap to health. This is what we call the zone of prevention. It's very hard to get cancer or chronic diseases when you're in these zones.

Stephen

So let's talk about that.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

So,

Stephen

guys, I've got a favor to ask. Before this episode begins, the algorithm, if you follow, a show will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Professor Thomas Seyfried. What is it that you've committed your life to doing, Thomas?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, we're right now committed our lives to managing cancer effectively without toxicity, which is based on the science that I and other others have done in this field.

Stephen

You have a perspective on treating cancer and other metabolic diseases that others don't have. The mainstream, should I say?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Oh, yeah, well, mainstream doesn't have it for sure, but it's based on science. I mean, my work is based on what Otto Werburg, the famous German scientist, said from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. He clearly showed that cancer was a mitochondrial metabolic disease.

Stephen

What does that mean? Mitochondri metabolic disease.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay. It means that the origin of the disease resides in the organelle called the mitochondrion. It's. It's in the cytoplasm of the cell. It used to be called, still is the. The powerhouse of the cell gives the cell the energy.

Stephen

I think we have a mitochondria could one of My team bring in a mitochondria.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, this is. You have a mitochondria in here. Oh, here we go.

Stephen

You've got one each here.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, well, see, this is the little organelle that you see. It looks like a bean shape, but it's actually a tubular network. These are tubes, and they respond dynamically inside the cell to both internal activities as well as external activities. So you have to realize that at the time of conception, all of the mitochondria for the developing embryo are in the cytoplasm from the mother.

Stephen

The cytoplasm.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

The mitochondria are not in the nucleus, they're in the cytosol. Oh, outside of it, Outside of the nucleus, but in the cell body itself. So all of the mitochondria, they determine our destiny. They will determine how long you will live on the planet. If. If you don't have an unfortunate accident or something like this, they have an expiration date. Different species die at different times. You don't find people living 400 years. Mice live about 2 1/2 years. Elephants live, you know, as long as we do or whatever. But that's all determin this organelle. So you can see I have wrinkles and this kind of thing. This is from living on the planet, and this is from wear and tear on this organelle, which allows us to make energy efficiently. So when this organelle starts to falter with age, you die. You die from old age. This organelle has to be protected and respected if you would like to live a normal lifespan. But in diets and lifestyles and way we are today, we damage this organelle and. And this organelle then can present itself damage to this organelle, which is a tubular network inside the cell. But let me say something else. It not only controls the internal environment of the cell, it also controls the neighboring cells. The liver neighborhood, the lung neighborhood, the colon neighborhood, the brain neighborhood, the glial neighborhood, the neuron neighborhood. But they all come from the same origin in that cytoplasm. And they determine the overall metabolic health of your body. It's a systemic. They communicate with each other across cells, across tissues. I'll tell you, this organelle controls a lot of what goes, what that nucleus does. It tells the cell when to divide, it tells the cell when to slow down.

Stephen

It's kind of like a brain, but also like an engine room.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's kind of like that. Certainly the brain part of it is really mysterious in the sense of how it controls the destiny of the cell in the body.

Stephen

So sickness, sickness Disease, cancer. What do we know about the role that this little thing plays in these chronic diseases and illnesses and cancers that so many people suffer with?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, well, this is the organelle that becomes damaged, and it can be damaged in many, many different ways. For cancer is what we have spent a lot of our time on. And now we've moved into the whole chronic disease issue, because each chronic disease can have different manifestations of ill health to the mitochondria in a particular population of cells. But in the case of cancer, which is what we call the most serious of the chronic diseases, creating the most trauma, the most emotional distress. But we have clearly shown, based on many, many works, that any multiple things from our environment can damage this organelle in a particular population of cells in a particular organ. For example, when you talk about carcinogens, it's a chemical that causes cancer. How does that chemical cause cancer? It damages the proteins and the lipids. These little squiggles are delicate internal membranes. They contain the proteins and the lipids that allows us to generate energy when we breathe. Okay, you're breathing, I'm breathing. I take in oxygen. Oxygen serves as a kind, a final acceptor for electrons that allows ATP to come out of this little. And don't forget, it's a tubular network.

Stephen

And ATP is the energy currency.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's the chemical energy currency. It allows us to enzymes to work, allows all the metabolic machinery inside of a cell to work optimally.

Stephen

So just to play this back to you so I know I'm clear, oxygen comes in because I breathe in. I then eat food in that mitochondria. It does a process and it spits out ATP as the energy.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, and the waste products of good energy metabolism would be CO2 and water. So when we burn gasoline in an engine of a car, we break down the octane, the carbon hydrogen bonds in an octane, and we have an internal explosion that drives pistons. Okay. The exhaust is a lot of waste products from breaking down. We're doing the same thing inside the cell. We're combusting carbon hydrogen bonds. And that combustion of carbon hydrogen bonds is a graded process. So it's not an immediate explosion. You're breaking down the carbon hydrogen bonds in a very precise way, producing ATP, which then drives the entire machinery of the neurons and the rest of the body. It can respond dramatically to energetic stress, emotional stress. Anyway, I gave you an example of a carcinogenic intermittent hypoxia. Like people who have sleep apnea. They stop breathing for 30 seconds or more in that general, and then they that creates ros. Ros, and that's what carcinogens do, ros. These are called reactive oxygen species. They damage those delicate membranes. And then what happens if it's too acute, too stressful, the whole cell will die. The cell loses its energy and we get apoptosis or necrosis, cell death. But if it's gradual, chronic, over years, months, years, this organelle loses its ability to produce sufficient energy. But the cell compensates, interestingly enough, by using these ancient pathways, heirlooms of our evolutionary past. So because all life on the planet evolved in an oxygen, without oxygen, in the dark, these cells grew like crazy. There was no. There were single cells. They were unbridled proliferation and all this kind of stuff. They didn't have mitochondria, they had bacteria. And the bacteria which this organelle came from was a fusion between one cell that had a nucleus and was. Was fermenting through the cytoplasm. And this bacteria, which is the mitochondria, came in. And now you have two different forms of energy. You have the energy in the cytoplasm, the ancient fermentation, and then you have this new form which can take in oxygen and generate energy much, much more efficiently than the heirloomic. Listen, one of our big discoveries, if you can believe it. But you see that space in the middle there?

Stephen

Yeah.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

That's called the matrix. And that's where the Krebs cycle, the TCA cycle, which breaks down the food that we eat. But they have an ancient part of a fermentation mechanism inside. Because before oxygen came, every. All life forms were fermenters. They produced energy without oxygen because there was no oxygen. We had to wait for those bacteria to make oxygen through a photosynthetic process. But all organisms were fermenters in the beginning. After this organelle came in and was able to take in oxygen, make energy really, really quick. But in that matrix they have in the cycle, there's a little pathway, there's. That makes energy without oxygen from the evolutionary past. So we have it in the cytoplasm of the cell because they can ferment in the cytoplasm. But this organ, our big discovery with the work of Christo Schoonopoulos from Met Semmelweis University. He's the world leader on that little pathway. When this organelle becomes impaired, these ancient pathways of energy through fermentation arise, okay, they. They try to replace the lost energy from the efficiency of this organelle. That space starts throwing out ATP from glutamine. It's another fermentation fuel. And, and it's making, it's making ancient energy in the sophisticated organelle that was, that was that, that evolved to make efficient energy. So let me, let me tell you, so you get, you asked me what about damaging this organelle and what happens if the damage to oxidative phosphorylation, which does not mean, which means energy through oxygen, is too acute, the cell will die. Cyanide is a perfect example of this. You take a mouse or a rat or a person and you drink Kool Aid, the cyanide laced kun aid, you die. Because what happens is that cyanide binds to the protein that's going to use oxygen for energy and the whole system shuts down, suffocates. You basically, yeah, you die instantly. And there are other things that can kill, can kill quickly, azide and a variety of the chemicals. But for chronic diseases, it's usually not an acute stress on this organelle. It's, it's a chronic stress. And in cancer, what happens in a particular tissue, whether it's bone, lung, bladder, brain, they gradually compensate with these ancient fermentation pathways. So, so this thing, this organelle signals to the nucleus, I'm suffocating, I'm not getting enough energy. So the nucleus turns on the transporters on the surface of the cell to bring in fuels that will elevate energy through what we call oxygen independent mechanisms. This is an oxygen dependent organelle. This gets most of its energy because we breathe. All of our cells are using oxygen and the CO2 that we're blowing out and the water that will be collected in the form of urine when you put other waste products in there, that's efficient metabolic homeostasis. This organelle makes not only the cell but the whole body in a state of metabolic homeostasis where all systems are working at optimal efficiency. But with chronic disruption. Smoking, lack of exercise. You can go right down the list of all of the different things that can elicit cancer. Any kind of carcinogens, microplastics, forever, chemicals, glyphosate, any of these kinds of things that would chronically damage the ability of this organelle to produce energy. Viruses, oncogenic viruses, inflammation, you have chronic inflammation. Any of those things damaged the sophisticated ability of this organelle to produce sufficient energy. That's why the oncogenic paradox which we solved.

Stephen

What's the oncogenic paradox?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

That was the paradox that was first put out by Albert Sint Georgi, a Hungarian scientists who received the Nobel Prize, I think for vitamin C. He said, he said he Was very interested in cancer and living systems. He said there's a paradox. He said, we know multiple things in the environment can elicit cancer. We've identified these oncogenic viruses, Chronic inflammation, carcinogens, intermittent hypoxia, rare, rare germline mutations. He said, we don't understand the common pathophysiological mechanism by which any of those provocative agents would elicit dysregulated cell growth, which is cancer. When you talk about cancer, what people say, what is cancer? It's cell division out of control. It's dysregulated cell growth. This organelle determines when cells should divide and when they should not divide. It regulates the destiny of the cell. So what happens when this organelle becomes chronically impaired? It falls back on these ancient pathways, these or these pathways that existed before oxygen came into the environment, where all the cells were dysregulated in the growth because they didn't have this regulatory system, which is the mitochondria, coming from a. From a bacteria.

Stephen

So let me play that back to you in a way, just so I, you know, make sure I understand.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

I know it can be kind of deep.

Stephen

Okay. So in this mitochondria here that I have in front of me, there is an ancient. Because this came from the bacteria, a fusion of bacteria a long, long time ago.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, that old bacteria, about several billion

Stephen

years ago, used to be very selfish. And just think about itself. It used to grow on its own and didn't communicate with anybody, had its own way of growing and multiplying that was really not in cohesion with anything else that is still in there somewhere. And although now in its modern form, because there's been that fusion, it grows. Thinking about the wider organism, when it becomes damaged, it falls back on that old selfish way of growing, and that's kind of what can cause cancers. So if there's stresses on this, which could be all the carcinogenic things you described, then sometimes this falls back on that prehistoric, selfish way of growing where it doesn't think about the wider organism.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's close in the sense of thinking. We don't know about that. We just know the consequences of what happens when it falls back on those ancient pathways. Now, here's the situation people knew from Otto Warburg said, Cancer is a energy problem in the cell. This. Why would the cells start to ferment and produce a massive amount of fermentation waste product, which is lactic acid. Even in the presence of oxygen, 100% oxygen, they're still fermenting. That shouldn't happen when you and I hold our breath or have a heart attack. Let me tell you something. This is really remarkable. And this is another piece of information that got us on this whole thing. When people have heart attacks, they stop breathing. The heart seizes, okay. The bloodstream immediately fills with these fermentation waste products, which are lactic acid and the other one, which we now know is succinic acid. Okay. Wow. These two waste products. Now, if you don't start breathing in a short period of time, you're going to be dead and you die. Because the neurons in your brain cannot sustain this kind of fermentation energy for very long. As soon as you use the heart, you give them cardiac massage and whatever, the guy's heart starts beating again. The lack the waste products of lactic acid and succinic acid go away. They disappear because you're breathing now. You don't need to ferment. When you have oxygen in the environment and it's. And the mitochondria can. Can utilize the oxygen in the environment. Cancer cells to Warburg said it's the weirdest thing. These cancer cells continue to ferment even in 100% of oxygen. Why are they doing that? And he speculated that this organelle was damaged. Irreversible damage to the organelle happened in these cancer cells. He didn't have an electron microscope at the time. He didn't have the sophisticated tools that we have today. So he projected that all on biochemistry. At that time, he was a biochemist. And he said, you should not produce fermentation if you have oxygen. Should shut that off and these guys should return to a normal metabolic homeostasis. And he said that's because there's something irreversibly damaged in this organelle. So a lot of people attacked him and they said, oh, we don't have any evidence for that. Here's the beautiful thing. Some cancer cells continue to take in oxygen and make ATP. Therefore, Warburg must be wrong. Aha. We showed that. We showed the cancer cell takes in oxygen, but it's not making energy through ATP in any great amount. It's using it for ros. These radicals that further damage and cause the DNA mutations that everybody is chasing. It's all downstream effects of damage.

Stephen

So what does this mean in simple terms? Because I'm aware a lot of my.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, it means I say, okay, so I have dysregulated cell growth. That's ultimately what the problem we're dealing with. We can't control how these cells are dividing. We're throwing all kinds of crazy stuff at them, trying to poison, irradiate, surgically remove them. We're trying to do everything to stop this dysregulated cell growth. So when we look at this organelle under the micro, under the electron microscope, we find these cristae are often missing. You have what they call ghost mitochondria. You got the shell, but nothing inside, or if they're inside, they're all deformed. So we know there's a foundational principle in biology, structure determines function. If the structure is abnormal, the function will be abnormal. This is known to all biologists except oncologists. They don't seem to understand.

Stephen

What's an oncologist?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Those are the people who study cancer.

Stephen

So what are you then?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

I'm a biologist.

Stephen

You're a biologist?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. I mean, when we know that if the organelle is damaged, you're not going to be able to produce energy efficiently by oxidative phosphorylation. Okay.

Stephen

I think you're a bit further down the road, Thomas, than a lot of my viewers are. For me, hearing that there's this energy engine in my cells that. And there's trillions of them or billions of them, and they also communicate with each other. And when this becomes stressed or hurt or damaged because of lifestyle choices that I make, energy production and inefficiency will change. And that could cause this to die or malfunction in some way. That is for me, I go, I've got it.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, that's a major step forward. And then we build upon that. Yes, now we build upon that. Okay, so. So here's the situation we've discussed. Cancer cells, all of them that we have ever looked at, have defects in the number, structure and function of that organelle. Okay. I have looked at. I published that big paper where I spent over a year of my time going through the ancient, the. Well, the early electron microscopy literature. Warburg didn't have that opportunity because that technology was not there for him. So he speculated that based on the biochemistry. But I went back and I looked at these electron micrographs of mitochondria in various cancers and they're all damaged. There is few of them. That riscristae are gone. I worked with some of the best, like Arismandi Murillo, was a world leader in beautiful electron microscopy of cancer cells. And you can see and all the damage under his. Magnificently beautiful. And we have a couple of papers. But let me tell you something else, Stephen. In the cytoplasm, these organelles are also in Contact with other cellular membranes like the endoplasmic reticulum. There's a lot of, we call, organelles inside a cell. You have the nucleus, you have the mitochondrion, you have lysosomes. There's intimate contacts between some of the other membranes, Mitochondrial associated membranes. We see. And they're also abnormal when you look at them under the electron microscope.

Stephen

The ones it's talking to are abnormal?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. The ones that you can see, the mitochondria are abnormal. And the membranes that contact them are abnormal. And that intimate contact. I'll get into the calcium signaling a little bit later. Which controls the destiny of the cell, why the cell is growing out of control? Well, first of all, it's fermenting. Okay. That means it's getting energy from sources other than oxidative phosphorylation. You can take a cancer cell and treat it with cyanide or azide or in absence of. And it's still living, it's still growing because it's not using the oxygen pathway. They're not using the oxygen. Falling back on oxygen. Independent mechanisms which are called fermentation.

Stephen

So I understand that to be that there's a malfunction in the mitochondria, which means that it no longer uses its

Professor Thomas Seyfried

oxygen pat necessarily as sufficiently as it should. There's always some residual level.

Stephen

And it finds another way to make the energy, which is how it survives.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yes.

Stephen

And then it stops communicating with the rest of the cell.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, actually communicates the nucleus to open up the floodgates to bring in the fuels that drive this fermentation energy.

Stephen

It gets more and more greedy.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It has to, because you're, you're taking an organelle that produces energy highly efficiently. Okay. Like 34 to 36 ATPs.

Stephen

With oxygen.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

With oxygen. And now you're, you're trying to replace that with fuels that give you two moles of energy.

Stephen

So it's inefficient.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Very. And then, and then you get, you get two out of the in. So you're getting four. So you, you, you have to take in. In order to make up the efficiency. You must have a tremendous logistic. You must have tremendous supply of, of the fuels that will give us energy. Which glucose the sugar.

Stephen

Yeah.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

And the amino acid, glutamine.

Stephen

Okay.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay. Our bodies are loaded with glutamine. That's the most abundant amino acid in our bloodstream. And evolution provided that for us. Because if we stop breathing, we use that fuel to keep the cells alive. Our gut is controlled by glutamine. Our immune system uses glutamine.

Stephen

What is glutamine?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's an amino acid. Okay.

Stephen

Which we make from food.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. Which we can make from food. True. Or they call essential and non essential amino acids. Essentials are from that we must eat. We must have certain foods that provide these. Glutamine is considered a non essential amino acid. It's an essential amino acid biochemically called non essential because we can make it from sugar. But basically it's the most abundant amino acid in our body.

Stephen

I think I get it now.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, feed me back. Let me test you.

Stephen

When we fall, the mitochondria falls to that prehistoric pathway where it starts making energy in a really, really inefficient way without using oxygen in the same way, it starts relying now on glucose and glutamine to produce that energy, which is a much less efficient source of energy. So it gets a bit more greedy and it needs much more to make the same amount of ATP, which is energy. So these, a cancer cell can be very, very greedy. It's not responding to oxygen in the same way. And they're a bit more selfish. They start sort of multiplying without thought of the broader organism.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yes, yes.

Stephen

So the question I have is how does this happen?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

How does this happen?

Stephen

The functioning of the. What is it that I've done? You know what, I asked this question.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, well, okay.

Stephen

It's because children can get these cancers.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Right.

Stephen

Or a 90 year old can get the cancer. And it doesn't appear to me that a three year old has necessarily made life choices yet that could impact.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

But as I said, when you consider forever chemicals that are in the environment, things that we have that we use in our technologically advanced societies can get through the placental wall and get these into the chi, into these children's organs. You know, you have to put it together. We usually. It's a constellation of things because don't forget I said carcinogens. Some of these carcinogens are fat soluble. Some of these carcinogens can get in and damage those during early stages of development. People always say how you explain brain cancer in a six month old baby. Okay, he wasn't smoking and drinking and partying all the time, but the mitochondria and a population of cells in his brain became damaged and that damage then led to this dysregulated cell growth. Because the organelle controls when cells should divide and not divide. And then where's the energy coming from? How do you take a highly sophisticated piece of an organelle and Making energy so incredibly efficient. And now we're using energy. So this organelle signals to the nucleus called mitochondrial stress response, retrograde signaling. The nucleus acts as a respondent to what this organelle wants. So the nucleus and oncogenes which, that you've heard a lot about, they open the floodgates to bring in the glucose and glutamine that allow the cell to grow in a dysregulated way. So we've, as you said, they go back to these ancient fermentation pathways where there was no regulation because this organelle was not part of the problem. So that's part of the situation, the regulation.

Stephen

So is there, what are the lifestyle factors that are causing this to drastically increasing the probability of this happening?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's not necessarily what the person did in all cases, it's what the person was exposed to that could have elicited this. That's the oncogenic paradox. So we have shown that inflammation produces the cytokines. When you have an inflammatory heat inflammation, they damage the ability of this organelle to make energy efficiently. Chronic inflammation is known to be a risk factor for cancer. Chronic inflammation, intermittent hypoxia, carcinogens.

Stephen

What's intermittent hypoxia?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Just like the sleep apnea, that kind of thing. Warburg had clearly shown that intermittent hypoxia on cells would damage the efficiency of oxidative phosphorylation leading to a compensatory fermentation. So you have to compensate because let me tell you, if you don't compensate, you're dead. I mean the cell dies.

Stephen

When we look at the populations around the world that have the most prevalence of cancer, it doesn't appear to be. Some of the countries like Niger, Gambia, Nepal consistently rank at the very bottom for cancer incidence. Conversely, high income countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United States have the highest rates of cancer. Why is that?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's because of our technology. We are still Paleolithic man and our biology has allowed us to store energy efficiently. Because of times of famine, we are now in a new environment where we have massive amounts of highly processed carbohydrates, inactivity, emotional stress, we have poor sleep habits. You, you pile all those together with availability, the exposure to carcinogens and whatever, and you chronically damage this organelle. And in some organs you can get breast cancer if it's a lung, if it's a whatever it is, that organelle becomes chronically damaged in some populations of cells in a particular, in a particular organ and you can elicit dysregulated cell growth as the result of that. You know, what I find is in the paper that we have with the chart, if you can keep your mitochondria healthy. Because don't forget Paleolithic man, our ancestors from 500,000 years ago, or modern men, like you said in these countries, living according to traditional ways, with minimal interference from modern diet and lifestyle issues, have lower amount of cancer in general. And this is what Albert Schweitzer found the. The famous humanitarian physician. He was specifically looking for cancer in African tribes. And he said, remarkably, it's extremely low. What are these guys doing where western society has a lot of cancer and these Africans have living according to the traditional ways. So they have a lot of exercise, they're eating all organic foods. They're not under the same kind of stress or exposure to chemicals that modern societies have. And you find out you have very low cancer. Like, for example, dogs are all evolved from the wolf. Wolves in the wild rarely have cancer. The domestic dog cancer is the number one killer of the domestic dog. What is the dog doing that? The wolf. The wolf is out running around eating natural foods. The dog is in an apartment somewhere, gets a dog walker once a day, right? And the next thing, the dog is obese and full of cancer. So it all. It all comes down to what, what you do to maintain the health and vitality of the mitochondria that reduce the risk. And that's what this chart I'll show you has reduce the risk of damaging this chronically. Okay? So that can explain in large part why modern societies are struggling with chronic diseases, not only cancer. We have type 2 diabetes, we have obesity, we have blood pressure, we have a whole even neuropsychiatric problems. If you can protect and keep this organelle healthy, you reduce risk. Now people say, well, cancer has to be genetic because we have inherited genes that put us at higher risk, like the BRCA1 for breast cancer and the Li Fraumeni for a variety of other cancers. Our paper in this pile done by Bob Kaplan, he went through and looked at all the genetic risk facts. Which paper is it? It's one of the ones published in Oncology. But none of These mutations are 100% penetrant, meaning that they're secondary risk factors. A primary risk factor would be every time that mutation is there, 100% of the people, because I work in Tay Sachs disease, I work in more areas of metabolism. Those mutations are 100% responsible for that condition. There's no gene mutation. That's 100%. You have that gene you're gonna 100% get cancer. Most of them are what they call incompletely penetrant.

Stephen

So what does that tell us about the nature of.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, and then we went back. What Bob did is he went back and he looked at what every one of those gene mutations in some way disturbs the efficiency of oxidative phosphorylation in that organelle.

Stephen

In the mitochondria.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

In the mitochondria. We looked at. We have all the evidence, all the risk factors, all the genetic. Just, just the front page there. I was going to show you the hard data, but you got. So anyway, all of them damage this, the efficiency of energy through, through, through this organelle. So that's like carcinogens, that's like viral infections. The viruses that hepatoma and papilloma, they, they, Their products will go in here and damage it or they will replicate inside this organelle, screwing up the efficiency, causing a compensatory fermentation, causing the dysregulated cell growth through abnormal calcium signaling, causing cells to no longer be responsive to their neighbors. Is that clear? If I can make you understand this, we can make everybody understand this.

Stephen

Yeah. So the reason I spend a lot of time asking why and asking for clarification is because when I do this show, I then go out into the real world and I meet the people that listen.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

And one of the groups of people that listens are young offenders. And when I went and visited them, I pointed at the episodes that I thought would help them.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

And a young. One of the young offenders said to me, I can't listen to that episode because the words you used were too big. And I remember thinking to myself, okay,

Professor Thomas Seyfried

I get that all the time, but guess what? Now we have AI and you can take this statements and put it into AI right on the. And they'll. And it'll, it'll. It'll dumb it down for you. So that's a tool that we previously did not have. So I use that all the time. I said, when you hear me speak like this, don't think I'm arid. Don't think I'm just. These are the terms that we use when you're part of the academy. Okay. But we can take those terms now and AI can do a wonderful job in synthesizing. Oh yeah, I know what he's talking about now. But without that tool, then it becomes, like you said, well, I can't understand anything.

Stephen

I've got 60 seconds and I'm going to show you how much I can get done because of our sponsor called Whisper Float. And for those of you that don't know what it is, it's a business I invested in that turns your speech into text in any app or device. I'm going to post into our Slack channel, which rewards whichever team member conducted the most experiments this week. Hi, everyone. Here is this week's experimenter of the week. Congratulations to the diary of a co trailer team, which is Ant, Liv, Dom, and Cam. You guys have one. Okay, now I'm going to open Gmail. So here is one of our founders on an email chain that I want to connect my team with. All I have to say is add my team's emails and Whisper will do exactly that. Now a quick message to Juan, who does my schedule every single week. Hey, Juan, could I record on Wednesday at 2pm? Actually, no. Do you know what? Let's record at 3pm on Wednesday. Whisper flow is four times faster than typing and it is incredibly easy to use. So if you want to give it a go, all you have to do is head to WhisperFlow AI Stephen to download it today. If you know me, and if you've listened to this podcast before, you'll know how obsessed I am with sleep. I've been on a bit of a journey with sleep. I see it as the single most important thing that I have the privilege of having control over. And that's exactly what our sponsor, eight Sleep, are. It's a very, very intelligent piece of material to sleep on. Here's what the 8 Sleep Pod does. It monitors your body while you're sleeping, and with that AI, it adjusts the temperature for you using billions and billions and billions of hours of sleep data. And members have reported up to a 34% deeper sleep and falling asleep up to 44% faster. Me and my fiance, Melanie, sleep on different parts of the bed and it adjusts my part of the bed to my body and her part of the bed to her body. So if you want to learn more about this pod, go to eightsleep.com Stephen Big opportunity. I am not kidding. Give it a try. I really want to Just make sure I tick off the box of cause factors. So you mentioned stress, you mentioned sleep. I currently don't have cancer, as far as I'm aware, God forbid. But I want to do everything I can to prevent the probability. And from what I've understood, that means protecting my mitochondrial function by living a lifestyle where I'm not creating this sort of crazy oxidative stress on the mitochondria. So give Me a prescription of how I should live my life to keep my mitochondria healthy.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, that's why we developed the glucose ketone index calculator, the first biomarker tool that can allow people to know the level of health of their mitochondria. Because when you shift from carbohydrate fuel to lipid fuel.

Stephen

What's lipid fuel?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Fat. So ketos ketones are a water soluble breakdown product of fatty acids. Okay, so we store adipose tissue, we

Stephen

store fat, which is the belly fat all over. We have fat on the outside.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, so on the outside that was there because as a species we had to survive in the most harsh environments. And we were. Food was not always there, so we had to survive all kinds of famine, all kinds of absence of food. Our bodies are. So it's a machine that was honed over millions of years to be super efficient. So glucose is gold sugar. Okay, you either burn it or you can store it as fat. Okay, that's, that's the key. But when you have, you're not bringing in sugar. That stored fat now moves into the bloodstream, goes to the liver. It's like taking a branch and putting in a chopper. And you out come these little soluble ketone bodies. They're breakdown products of long chain fatty acids. They can replace sug sugar for the brain, for the muscles, for most other cells in the body except erythrocytes. But they can replace, they can replace the energy of glucose. Okay, so, and that's how we evolved. But we're now in an environment where we have massive amounts of highly processed carbohydrates and we, we don't want to pee them out unless you have diabetes or something. So we store them as fat. So we have an obesity epidemic as the result of our evolutionary ability to store energy, which kept us alive as a species because if we were unable to store the fat in 500,000, we would have all been extinct. You and I, this conversation would never exist. We would never have existed as a species except for our ability to store energy. And we burn energy efficiently in these organelles. So this is all very highly efficient machine. So when we lose that ability, when we have so much energy in the environment, Stress, no exercise, all this. We store more and more fat. We produce an environment that's very damaging to this organelle.

Stephen

Wait, say that again. So how does stress impact that?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Stress elevates corticosteroids. When you're under stress, you get into a fight, into an argument, or you're stressed out by Business deal going bad, whatever. Corticosteroids elevate, elevate blood sugar, contributing to systemic inflammation. It's okay for a short period of time to be pissed off at something, but it's the chronic stress. The chronic, like looking at the cell phone, doom scrolling, all this kind of crazy stuff while you eat the big Twinkie. Doom scrolling, eating Twinkies, not moving. All of this creates stress on this organelle in some population of cells.

Stephen

It makes it work harder.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's damaging because you produce reactive species that damage the efficiency of this organelle to produce energy effectively. And that either will kill the cell gradually if it can't use compensatory fermentation or predispose you to cancer. So either way it's unhealthy. So we have chronic disease. Cancer is the number one big dog in the chronic disease world. I mean, it's the one that people fear the most. Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, all of these are part of damage to this organelle in one way or another. And like Isaiah said, for Parkinson's disease, when that organelle gets damaged, the cells of the substantia nigra die. They are incapable of compensating with fermentation, so they up and die. Cancer is very rare in neurons of the brain. Neurons, the glial cells of the brain form these brain tumors mostly. But neurons can't compensate with fermentation, so they die. So you either get compensatory ancient fermentation leading to dysregulated cell growth, which we call cancer, or we get cell death leading to chronic diseases.

Stephen

What about sleep then? What's going on with sleep that's causing

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Sleep is a way we can restore the energy efficiency of the mitochondria if we're well slept, if we have good sleep. Yeah, you know, everybody feels good. When you have a good night's sleep, your body feels rejuvenated because you're not stressing out. You're reducing the ability of this organelle to manage the metabolic environment. If you're up all night and you're like stressed out, you're never given this organelle in a particular cell, in a particular part of the organ of the body. You know, you get neuropsychiatric problems, you can get digestive problems, you can get cancer, you can get type 2 diabetes, you have a whole, and we put it in the paper. There are all the different stress, all the different things that can chronically or acutely damage oxidative phosphorylation.

Stephen

So sleep basically gives the mitochondria a little bit of a break.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yes. It's, it's, it gives your whole body a break, let's be honest. So, so, but you, you pile those things on together. Lack of exercise. Our ancestors, what do you think our answer? You know, how hard it is to run down and kill a big buffalo or a woolly mammoth? I mean, you're, you're exhausted after doing something. As a matter of fact, you chase these animals, you separate. And this is another thing was really interesting, came out of Israel, I think it was last year. They looked at the cavemen, what they were eating. They were eating the strongest members of the herd, leading to the indirect extinction of these animals. They found out that if you can eat the strongest member of the herd, you'll get the vitality of that, of that, or buffalo or elephant or whatever the hell they were eating, because they knew the marrow and the, and the, the physiology of that, of that organism at that point in its life could provide you with the strength that that had. Now, when you eat the strongest members of the herd because you want to be tough, you're putting the old and the young vulnerable to predators, leading to the extinction. And this is what a big paper came out of, out of Israel. They looked at these cavemen, what they were eating, like 500,000 years ago, or whatever we're doing. So humans indirectly caused extinction of other species, in part in narrow, in part because they were eating the toughest guys in the herd. So because they felt that if I eat those guys, I'm going to be strong too. And in a way, they're right. But all of it has to do with the energy efficiency of your muscles, your brain, your ability to be resilient, endurance. I'm telling you, these guys were chiseled. They, they weren't dying from type 2 diabetes, cancer. Right. Dementia. They were dying from infections and injuries and child mortality. We're mostly killing our Paleolithic ancestors. But when you bring your body back into a low glucose ketone, you're actually going back like you were. And this is why we developed the glucose ketone index.

Stephen

What is in that envelope in front of you?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, this is, it's a paper that's under embargo because they, they think it's going to be. The world thinks it's going to be very important. And, and it is. So, and what it is, this is a, a way to keep that organelle healthy. So this is a way to manage energy efficiency in the body.

Stephen

And this hasn't been released yet.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It hasn't Been released. Okay. It's coming out. It's a. It's going to be a lead article in the Frontiers in Science. And not only that, we. The paper. The paper was written for the scientists, and then the journal decided to make a second copy for. They call young minds. So letting kids that are like 8 to 12 or 14 years old synthesize it down. And one of my colleagues said that's probably what most people will be reading because they don't want to know about the bioenergetics that actually goes on inside this organelle. To explain why this chart means something

Stephen

and you've been working on this for some time.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, I built the gki so let me tell you the story. There was a woman, an American woman, a lawyer, Trudy Dupont, who developed a kind of a brainstem tumor. And after I wrote my book, that book there, that's my only book. Anyway, Trudy. Trudy wanted to use this metabolic therapy. She stayed alive much longer, over 10 years with this. We kept the. She eventually passed away, unfortunately. But so I was measuring because we knew that the tumor cells needed sugar to grow water out of Werburg show that, and many other people show that. And they can't burn ketones because. Because the fatty. You need a very efficient mitochondria to burn ketones for energy. Our normal cells can burn ketones for energy. And that gives us tremendous. We can actually breathe lower oxygen, more energy. If you have efficient. If you can burn ketones efficiently in this organelle. But if the organelle is damaged, they can't use the ketones. They can't burn fatty acids or ketones. Which stores lipid drops. It's one of these big paper, these. Stephen, you can't believe how people misinterpret information. They see droplets of fatty acids in the cytoplasm and say, you see, the cancer cell needs all that fatty acids. No, they can't. It's there to protect them. If they try to burn it, they blow this up and die. So there is a storage of fat. They can't burn fatty acids or ketone bodies. So I knew cancer needed glucose, and I knew cancer couldn't burn fatty acids or ketones because this organelle is broken. So I'm measuring glucose and ketones independently in Trudy, she's doing the finger prick thing, sending me the information back and saying, oh, here's my glucose. Here's my ketones.

Stephen

Okay. So I have a ketone glucose reader in front of me.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Right? Right.

Stephen

If I put my blood on this strip, it tells Me, my glucose levels, if I put my blood on this strip, yeah, it tells me my ketone levels.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Right? Right. But if you look at them independently, glucose is very volatile, very variable. And this is why I developed the glucose ketone ratio. Because Trudy had a parking spot that was for handicapped, because she had a cane, her brainstem glioma was preventing her from walking as effectively as normal people. So somebody took her parking spot. She was bullshit. So she ran upstairs and took her blood sugar and it was 186 milligram per deciliter. It was very, very high. So. And I know she was on a ketotic diet and, and she emails me and says, I'm going to die, my cancer is going to grow fast. What's going on? She said, my blood Sugar is like 186. And you know, it's supposed to be. You told me it was supposed to be 60 or, you know, 50, 65 in that zone. She says. So I said, what's your ketone level? Oh, it's still, you know, like you just had 0.4 millimolar or I think it was 0.9 millimolar. I said, well, that didn't change, right? No, just the sugar changed. So I said to the students that were working, Josh Weidenbauer, I said, josh, this, this trying to measure these two independently is a bullshit. You can't. This is hard to figure out. So what we decided to do in millimolar, because glucose comes out milligram per deciliter, whereas ketones come out in millimolar. So we had to convert glucose to millimolar and divide it by the ketone in millimolar and then you get a number that's not all over the world. It's very stable. So we were able to, because of Trudy, that one cancer patient, we developed the ratio of this. Then later on we realized that this ratio is a statement of how healthy your mitochondria actually are. So when you have these low ratio, you're a Paleolithic man. You're back in the zone where we didn't have chronic diseases because we didn't have damage to the organelle that would cause those diseases. So Paleolithic man, think, where are they getting their pastries? Where are they getting their cakes and sweets and all this other guy, they didn't have it. They weren't there because of choice. They were there because of circumstance. And we learned paleolithic man was always in some sort of a state of some ketosis because they wouldn't have Food for periods. They were very active in their exercise. They didn't have chronic diseases, but they had other kinds of diseases. So. So then my student Derek Lee, myself, and Christos Chernopoulos, we started to make a ratio chart. Now, these are the numbers that you get when you divide your sugar by your ketones.

Stephen

Okay, so my sugar by my ketones. So if I did my glucose measure now on this little reading.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, let's see what your GKI is.

Stephen

Oh, you want me to do it? Okay.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay. What? You had a glucose. You had a ketone with 0.4 millimolar.

Stephen

Yeah.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, what was your sugar? So we can divide. We can do the division right now and tell you what you have.

Stephen

You can get these little ketones.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Oh, yeah, it's a keto mojo. And you can also get them now for. For. Wow, this guy's skilled at doing this.

Stephen

I travel with one of these, believe it or not.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

So I have one all the time. Well, 90.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

90. Okay. So you have to. You have to divide. You have to divide. You're not getting it. Doesn't this give you the push button and give you the GKI right away? Because the new ones have it. So you have to divide 90 by 18 and you get a number 5. 5. So divide 5 by 0.4.

Stephen

12.5.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, so here you are, 12.5. You're down here in the. In the. In the prevention zone. Okay, so so you. This is where Paleolithic man mostly lived. Paleolithic man lived in the yellow green zones because they didn't have access to all of the things that would drive up your blood sugar and keep your. Keith, when your blood sugar goes through the roof, your ketones are really low because insulin is now driving it up. So. So that's good. 12, huh? So I did the carnivore diet for a week, eating big ribeyes. You like ribeye steak?

Stephen

Yes, of course.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

All right. Rib eyes, bacon and eggs, lamb. So I did it for a week, and I was able to get down to 10.

Stephen

Okay.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

And I could get lower, but I was loving the ribeye so much, I ate a little too much of it. Right. You have to have some level of discipline. But, people, this is what we call the zone of prevention. It's very hard to get cancer or chronic diseases when you're in these zones because you're keeping this organelle quite healthy.

Stephen

When you live in these zones consistently,

Professor Thomas Seyfried

you don't have to live consistently because humans, we evolved as a scavenger species. We would engorge ourselves because we knew it wasn't happening every day. Modern man is living in the feast every single day. And that's why we have all the chronic diseases. This is the red zone, is the zone of risk for chronic diseases and cancer. And when you look at the obesity epidemic, you look at all these things these guys are, and it's like, we can visit the red zone. We don't want to live in the red zone.

Stephen

So if I was to visit the red zone, it would look like meeting high carbohydrate diets, lots of sugar.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. No exercise.

Stephen

No exercise.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. And basically modern man.

Stephen

And also eating five meals a day, like snacking all the time.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. Oh, then you'd be, you know, we have this document cases, we have them up to 500. You can get. GKI is a 500. You have people with, you know, blood Sugar is about 4 or 500 milligram per deciliter. I mean, you could do the zero ketones. I mean, you, you do that. You do the math. It's. It's unbelievable.

Stephen

You're basically saying, I want to keep my, my blood glucose levels and you

Professor Thomas Seyfried

want to, you want to have some level of ketones and hot.

Stephen

And my ketone levels somewhat as high as I can.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, it's. You don't want to go, because people then have the physicians listening to go, oh, he's going to go with the ketoacidosis, people. Give me a break. Ketoacidosis is like when you have ketone levels of 15 to 20 millimolar. Are you kidding me? What is yours? 0.4. That's called nutritional ketosis. That's how we evolved. When you have type 1 diabetes, where you can't control sugar or insulin, you have no insulin responsive, you're going to get high levels of sugar and ketones. This is a pathological condition. Most of type 2 diabetes, these are all pathologies based on damaging oxidative phosphorylation. So what this chart does is for the first time, and we put it together because we did all the. In. The paper discusses the bioenergetics. What we're finding in cancer is that if you can get into the green zones where your blood sugar is low and your ketones are elevated, you hammer the hell out of these tumor cells because you're taking away one of their two primary fuels, driving dysregulated cell growth. Okay, and as the, and as the, and as the ketones go up, the rest of your cells in the body are getting super healthy. The tumor cells can't tap into the value of a ketone because the organelle needed in the tumor cell to do that is corrupted structurally and functionally. Am I clear about that?

Stephen

Yes.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay. So ketones will make you healthy, the normal cells of your body, but cannot be used to help the cancer cell because you need a good structural, functional organelle to burn them. So they become marginalized. And if the ketones go up, they're actually toxic to that. To that cell to some extent. So. But they're still alive. The cancer cells are now incapacitated. We showed you get rid of the abnormal inflammation, you get rid of the angiogenic, abnormal blood vessels. You're taking an angry tumor and making it much less angry, much less inflamed, more indolent kind of a tumor, but it's still there. It's not, because the other fuel that's keeping this cancer cell going is the glutamine. Okay, so now when you have the patient in this green zone, this is for management now, Stephen, this is prevention, is. Is never having to deal with what I'm talking about. If you're living in the yellow zone, the probability of getting cancer or chronic diseases is already reduced. Okay? But now you have some poor guy out there. He's living in the red zone his whole life. He wants to manage the cancer that he has. He has to get down in the green zone and try to stay there as long as he can. But the cancer will still grow because it has access to glutamine. Okay? And glutamine is always. Here's the bloodstream. Look at, look. You have this much blood. Cancer needs that. So you always have a surfeit of glutamine. So you have to come in now with drugs, and the drugs, like repurposed drugs to target the glutaminolysis. With this one here, this BMC big paper here. Okay? This paper and the new one we have with the ketogenic for the childhood high grade glioma for kids. So once you get down here, you come in with drugs that target glutamine. I've looked at one, and that's mbendazole. Okay. How did I come to that realization? People knew that embendazole had some therapeutic benefit about cancer, but they don't believe until you show the mechanism. That paper shows the mechanism. It targets glucose and glutamine. This one targets glucose and glutamine, the two fuels driving the dysregulated growth of the tumor. Okay, so here's the. Here's the mitochondria so it's getting the glucose in the cytoplasm from the sugar and making. It's fermenting that. And then also the. The amino acid glutamine comes in. You have to block the glycolysis and the glucose, these two pathways. You have to restrict availability of glucose and glutamine together at the same time. Yeah. I speak only about things that I have tested in my lab and publish papers on like this. So you have to real. The cancer field doesn't understand that the cancer can't grow without glucose and glutamine and can't switch to fatty acids or ketone bodies.

Stephen

That's still not going to kill the cancer though, is it? It's just gonna.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. We don't ever use the term cure because some of these tumors. Now let me tell you, we have people like Pablo Kelly from Devon, England. He had the glioblastoma. He didn't take any radiation or chemo. He just did metabolic therapy. He lived for 10 years. He was diagnosed with an inoperable glioblastoma. They wanted to irradiate and poison him with the drugs. He said no. He was one of these naturalistic kind of guys. And he lived for 10 years. And the tumor became operable. He had four debulking surgeries on an originally described inoperable cancer cut out four times. Because once we put the metabolic therapy, the circle, the demarcation of the tumor. Whoa. Neurosurgeon says, I think I can get this out. But he never, never got rid. He lived with it for 10 years, had a couple of kids. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage on the last debulking surgery. He never died the tumor.

Stephen

But you're saying, you're saying that the two work together in. In tandem.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yes.

Stephen

You're saying that the chemotherapy works in.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Now that's where. That's another thing. So what we do, this is very interesting. So if you put the patient in nutritional ketosis, the ketogenic state of nutritional ketosis facilitates the delivery of drugs to the tumor cell. It actually makes. You can use lower doses of drugs and you get bigger effect. The therapeutic benefit increases with lower dosing.

Stephen

So you want to be in ketosis when you do these chemotherapy, radiation therapy.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. And then you use much lower doses. This is what we're doing in Istanbul Clinic. We're taking pancreatic cancers. These guys live in four and five years. What are we doing? And advanced breast cancer and all these terminal cancers, we put them into some level of ketosis. And then you come in with the standard drugs, cisplatin, carboplatin, whatever you want to do. But you cut the dosages down big time. And then they have tremendous. And you put the, keep the. This is what the title of the paper is, Ketogenic diet as a metabolic vehicle for enhancing therapeutic efficacy.

Stephen

The current body of research suggests that being in a state of ketosis can act as a helper therapy, enhancing the cancer killing effects of chemotherapy while simultaneously protecting healthy cells.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Stephen

Progressive oncologists are currently using ketogenic diets alongside standard chemo to maximize its efficacy.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

That's right. That's what we're doing in Istanbul and also in Greece we're doing those same things. So you can use this.

Stephen

When you enter a fasted or ketogenic state, your healthy cells essentially go into bunker mode. They slow their division, conserve energy and build up their defenses. Cancer cells however, do not have this evolutionary off switch. They continue trying to rapidly divide when the toxic chemotherapy hits. Your shielded healthy cells survive it much better while the exposed rapidly dividing cancer cells take the full hit.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

Ah, okay. Interesting.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. In other words, you make with the tools you have work better. The problem in the field of cancer today is they're not using the tools in the correct way. Now let me give you another example. If you take immunotherapies, you hear about these things, chimeric acid and T receptor PDL, PD1, PD, L1 inhibitors, they're called precision medicines, right? So look, they're designed to attack a molecule on the surface or stop that cell from being resistant if you were trying to attack. And what they do, oftentimes they come at after you've failed chemo and radiation. They then come at you with an immunotherapy. The metabolic pressure shrinks down your tumor, makes it very indolent, non aggressive, and the rest of your body is healthy. You're not going bald, you're not bleeding gums, your microbiome isn't blown to hell. And then you can come in with low dose chemo immunotherapy. Because what's ever left in that remaining residual mass, they may all have something in common for having survived all this. Right, so now you can come in with a precision medicine and possibly resolution.

Stephen

I thought this was fascinating. It says chemotherapy creates massive oxidative stress, that is damage inside the tumor. To repair the damage and survive, the cancer cell requires massive amounts of glucose. So if the patient is in ketosis, the tumor's glucose supply is essentially cut off. It can't the cancer cell can't repair the DNA damage caused by your chemo, leading to faster tumor death. Yeah, interesting.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, don't forget, also listen to this. And as another thing people go in, what protects the tumor cell from chemo and radiation is the waste products of fermentation. The lactic acid and the succinic acid that are dumped out of this raging beast prevent these other therapies from working. So if you want your therapy to work, you got to target those two fuels together at the same time. And when you do that, now, this cell, the shield is off. These things are super vulnerable to even low doses of chemo and radiation. And the immunotherapies. Look at. If you have an immunotherapy, you try to attack the beast when it's at its strongest, you're not going to win. And this is what happens. You get only partial response. They. In the field of cancer today, they think living an extra six months is a major breakthrough. We're talking about living an extra five and six years. This is what's really important.

Stephen

I just, I was doing some research to figure out if oncologists, so cancer doctors are currently recommending the ketogenic diet. And it says the vast majority of mainstream oncologists do not recommend the ketogenic diet to the. To their newly diagnosed patients. In fact, if a patient brings it up, many doctors will actively advise against it. And the reasons for that, number one, is the fear of cachexia.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Cachexia?

Stephen

Yeah, cachexia. Cancer. Cachexia is a severe wasting syndrome where patients rapidly lose muscle and fat. It is a massive problem and a leading cause of mortality in cancer patients. Because the ketogenic diet suppresses appetite and often leads to weight loss, oncologists are terrified that a strict keto diet will accelerate cachexia and weaken the patient.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, that's because they. They have not heard what I just said with respect to the biology and biochemistry. Okay. Cachexia, there's two ways you can lose in cancer patients. Cachexia is the ability of the tumor cell to mobilize energy out of the muscles. It's taking the glutamine out of your muscles and feeding. This is one of the two fuels that's driving the beast, is glutamine. Where are they getting the glutamine from? They're getting the glutamine not only from the bloodstream, but they dissolve your muscles as part of that. Part of that process. So when you put a patient in nutritional ketosis, the weight loss is therapeutic. Weight loss, cachexia is pathological. Weight loss. Now the other way you can lose weight, you should take a high dose of chemotherapy.

Stephen

I travel all the time. I made a rule in my life that I'll only travel with a cabin bag. The problem with this is there's not much space. And here's the solution. It is called an extra 1% travel pack. And I teamed up with extra to make this. Typically I can only bring some of my black shirts and it's a trade off of which black shirt shall I bring. How many of these do you think I can get in here? So let's try 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. Let's try 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. Okay, so that's 24 black t shirts. Here's where the magic comes in. Zip it up, make sure it's nice and sealed. And then you use this little contraption, stick it on there. I can now take more than 20 black shirts with me, which will last me three weeks. So if you travel frequently and you want to get one of these so you can save more space and be away for longer, go to extra.com and use code DOAC for 10 off our collection. And I think some of the background context here is that mainstream oncology operates on the sort of somatic mutation therapy, which is the belief that cancer is fundamentally a genetic disease driven by DNA mutations. And because their training focuses on genetics, their treatments are designed to target DNA and cell division like chemo, radiation, targeted genetic therapies rather than manipulating cellular metabolism. And lastly, as mentioned, I think we talked about this earlier, mainstream medicine requires massive multicenter, double blind, phase 3 clinical trials before a protocol becomes the standard of care. So dietary interventions rarely get the level of funding. So oncologists lack the institutional green light to prescribe them to patients. And they tend to say to them, eat what you can.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

I, I don't blame them. They're good. Many of them are good people. The problem is the system doesn't train them to understand the biology and biochemistry of the disease they're treating. Some of them become very resistant to, say, get angry because if I, why didn't I, why wasn't I told this? Well, first of all, they're not reading these papers. You ask them about it. They, I never read it. Well, how are you going to know anything if you don't read the literature? Listen to this. The National Cancer Institute, the nci on their website, on their website says cancer is a genetic disease caused by what you just Said, okay, they. Well, I said, why don't they put the articles in there showing all the tumors? They can't find any mutations. The somatic mutation theory says that cancer is caused by random genetic mutations. So now, new sequencing of normal people like you and me are finding mutations in all these driver genes and cells in our body that aren't in dysregulated cell growth. Mouth. So we're calling them wild type cancers. What do you mean a wild type cancer?

Stephen

You lost me.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, the nucleus of a tumor cell. A raging tumor cell. What's causing him that cell to grow? Is it the mitochondria in the cytoplasm? Or is it the mutations in the nucleus? Okay, so according to the somatic mutation theory, it's the mutations in the nucleus that are causing the dysregulated cell growth. You take that nucleus and put it into. Into a enucleated cell. Normal cell.

Stephen

Yeah. And there's no cancer.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

No cancer. There's no dysregulation.

Stephen

It must be something else.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Then you take the nucleus of the normal cell and put it into the cytoplasm of a tumor cell, and you get dysregulated cell growth.

Stephen

So it must be something other than the nucleus.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yes, the mitochondria. Interestingly, it says so with mitochondria controlling our destiny. And the field of cancer has yet to understand it, accept it, and then say, well, we can't do any of this until we double line crossover. That's just. What do you mean? The science is telling us this. That's your way of protecting a broken system.

Stephen

Are you pissed off about this? Because you do seem pissed off about this.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, who wouldn't be, Stephen? There's 1,700 people a day in this country dying from cancer. I don't know the English. Listen, that comes out to 70 an hour. And it gets worse every single year. And the last time I was on this show, you guys used some old data. Look it up. Today, 2026. American Cancer Society says this year, in 2026, we will have 626,000 souls leave the planet from cancer. Okay? This 2026. And every year, it gets worse. So when you hear all the breakthroughs, we have television ads in Boston for the cancer center. Breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough. All these different. They come on. And. And. And all we do is get more dead cancer patients, raise money for cancer. Where's the. Where's the accountability for all the money you're raising? When in the world. When is the people going to wake up? You don't make someone healthy by irradiating and poisoning them. You've got to understand the biology and the biochemistry of the disease. I have the concepts and the proofs, but the physician who works with the patient on a clinic basis, they're the ones that must apply this to the clinic. So there's two different things here. There's the hard science, that's the, that's the bedrock for this. And then there's the clinical person who has the practice, that practice does that. Together. You get great success or better. I say say success better than anything that's out there today.

Stephen

The American Cancer Society recently released its latest projections for 25 and 26. And the data paints a fascinating dual sided picture. More people are getting diagnosed with cancer new cases. The ACS projects over 2.11 million new cancer diagnoses in 2026. This translates roughly to 5,800 new cases every single day. Approximately 626,000Americans are expected to die from cancer in 2026, right? About 1,700 deaths per day. Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death, projected to cause more causes, fatalities than colorectal, colorectal and pancreatic cancers combined. I also just wanted to pick up on a point we were talking about earlier, which is about the metabolic approach to cancers. It says here, and this is going to the point about, you know, people telling you to just eat whatever you want while you're, you know, managing cancer. Because the primary goal of the hospital dietitian is to prevent weight loss during brutal chemotherapy regimes, patients are frequently told to eat whatever they can and eat whatever they can keep down. It is incredibly common for cancer patients to be handed meal replacement shakes, which are often packed with corn syrups and refined sugars, ice cream, and high carbohydrate comfort foods just to keep their calorific intake up. From a metabolic perspective, this is a tragedy. While it keeps weight on the patient, it simultaneously floods the bloodstream with glucose and insulin, directly feeding the tumor. And while keto is not the standard of care, the landscape is beginning to slowly shift. There is a growing minority of integrative oncologists and specialized metabolic clinicians worldwide that actively prescribe therapeutic ketosis alongside conventional treatments. Those doctors use the keto diet and fasting protocols to protect healthy cells and sanitize tumors before administering lower, more targeted doses of chemo.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, that's what we developed. That's our plan. That's what we're doing. Okay. We do that because we understand the biology and biochemistry and that's why we're developing the new society called More the More Alliance Metabolic Oncology Research and Education. This is bringing together what you just mentioned there in a logical approach to manage cancer. This is a logical approach based on the hard science of decades of research initiated originally by Otto Werburg and then continued by our group at Boston College.

Stephen

The American Cancer Society says that breast cancer is increasing, prostate cancer is increasing, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, h. UV associated oral cancers are steadily increasing in the incidence of severe cancers.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. There has been no major advance in managing glioblastoma in 100 years.

Stephen

What's glioblastoma?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

That's the. The deadly brain cancer, okay, that killed Teddy Kennedy, from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy, John McCain, President Biden's son, Beau Biden. It's killed a lot of. Of various people and it's considered a death sentence. No, no, no, no. We're keeping these guys alive. Okay? We're not saying we cure the cancer, but we can certainly keep them alive a lot longer. Pancreatic cancer, always considered so bad. We're getting very excellent results in managing pancreatic cancer using metabolic therapies. We know what to do and we know how to do it. I have clinicians that work with me, dietitians that know how to manage cancer effectively. We can do it. For right now, today, if someone were to say, seyfried, get your. Get your group together. Let me see what you can do. I will put up our metabolic therapy against any trial from any of these pharmaceutical companies. We can keep these people alive a hell of a lot longer to participate in our society. We're not doing that.

Stephen

If you were made president today.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Of the United States.

Stephen

Of the United States.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Don't go there.

Stephen

I'm going to go there.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Those guys are not. Let's put it this way, they're not scientifically literate. I would have to be. Yeah, right.

Stephen

You're Professor Thomas Everett. You're now President of the United States, and your primary objective is to bring down this. 1700Americans that are going to get cancer a day. Is it get cancer or die from cancer?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

No, they die from cancer. Okay. Seventeen hundred a day, dying from cancer in the United. Seventy an hour. Think about it.

Stephen

You can put in place policies to stop this happening and to also help people manage it better. What is it you do?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

First of all, we wouldn't throw out everything. Just like I said, we have a strategy now to manage cancer effectively.

Stephen

Okay, so you're not going to prevent it?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

We're not. We're not going to get rid of the drugs that are making billions and billions of dollars. We're just going to use them at lower dosages in a different.

Stephen

But you also want to prevent it in the first place.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, preventing it, that comes back to our chart.

Stephen

I'm going to write down the manifesto. So what is, what do we do to prevent these 71 people an hour dying of cancer?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, that has to come from government policies.

Stephen

Okay? You just got promotion. You're now the king of the United States. So you don't even need to ask anybody. What do you do to prevent the 71 people a day dying of cancer?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It's going to be education.

Stephen

Education number one.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Education number one.

Stephen

Okay?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

You have to let people know that those. And now let me tell you another thing that's really important. It should not be any government or government official telling anyone what they should or should not eat. Okay? The power of this chart is personal. You're emboldening the patient. They have to know. We're not going to tell somebody, oh, if you continue to eat bad food, you're going to have at high risk. And that person, I don't care. I'll smoke cigarettes and I'm going to. Well, the government's not going to come into this guy's house and take away the bad food. No, no, no, no. That happen. Those foods are there because they give us pleasure, but they should be. The knowledgeable person would be to say, I like to have it every now and then, but I can't live in that environment. And the other thing we do terribly in this country, the poor people in these food deserts where you only get crap food, and there's a tragedy in itself to go to Whole Foods where they have the expensive rib eyes and all this stuff that's much more expensive. A lot of people can't afford the kinds of foods that will put them in these better, healthy zones.

Stephen

So we're going to make food, healthy food, more, cost effective, cheaper.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Those are easy words to say, but in practicality it's not.

Stephen

And what kinds of foods should people be eating?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, I think they should just try to avoid the highly processed carbs. Okay? You don't listen to this and exercise. There's a lot of things we can do that would mitigate the inflammatory conditions put on this chart. The goal here is we know what keeps us healthy. It's the efficiency of that organelle. We want to do everything possible to keep that organelle healthy. We will reduce dementia, we will reduce diabetes, we will reduce obesity. And they say, well, GLP I don't want to do and human beings are the kind that I want a quick fix for everything thing, right?

Stephen

Ozempic. How about some Ozempic?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Is this, what is this? GLP?

Stephen

GLP 1.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, we don't, you know, first of all, we haven't done any research yet to know where a GLP would put you on the chart. We do know one thing. It lowers blood sugar. How level, how high of a level would it bring to ketone? Because it's the ketones that keep the organelle healthy. So I'm lowering blood sugar, but am I raising the ketones that enhance the bioenergetic efficiency of the organelle? I don't know what number and hasn't been done yet. I don't, I haven't seen any papers coming out.

Stephen

Okay, so we'll keep the Zenpic off the table. But you're saying exercise number three. So I've got, I've got education. Kill the food does it so people can get healthy food. Yeah, Stay away from the ultra process stuff. Number three, exercise. We're going to give everybody free gym memberships and whatever else they need.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Reduce stress, emotional stress. You got to, you got to do that. There's a lot of ways. Music, therapy, there's a lot of different ways you can do meditation, friends, happiness, all of those reduce stress. So I had, I had a guy from Korea, I think it was Japan or Korea. We have a big meeting one time and he didn't tell me what to do. He says, you want to get cancer. If your job and if your goal in life is to get cancer, you got to eat crap food all the time. You have to have terrible sleep, make sure you never unass the couch, sit in front of the TV all day, look at doom scrolling, do all that kind of stuff. Make sure you never exercise and make sure you don't have any friends or be happy. You're on a fast track for, for not only cancer, but all these other chronic diseases. So, so that's the, what I just said is you need to not do that. You're doing a great job. You know, there's not many people are going to be measuring their GKI every day, but there are people who love to measure that kind of stuff. Now I would tell you another thing. Thing. So they put these things on your arm, these continuous sugar monitors. They're making continuous glucose ketone monitors. So apps are coming out now. Believe me, there's apps. I have my Lucas Liu and some others are making these apps. In my lab. And, and you can take your cell phone and, and photograph a particular food item and the food item immediately you put the places, you're put the food item on the chart so you'll know eating that, that we'll give you what zone you'll be in if you eat it. So it's really interesting. And, and these things are coming, we're using AI to so. But it's purely patient empowerment. Okay? The patient themselves, the person themselves make the choices. No government, president or king or whatever you want to say should ever tell people what and how they should eat. The patients should be familiar with this and have the knowledge to know. I'm going to test what I think. So people say to me all the time, just tell us what you can eat. That's all they say to me, okay, eat whatever you want. You figure out where on the chart you're going to be and then you'll know. So people say, well, I can't eat. Ketogenic diet. Well, our group in, in Greece, now you tell me they got the brain cancer. Tremendous success in keeping brain glioblastoma guys alive. What was the diet? It was a calorie restricted Mediterranean diet diet. Salmon, sardines, olive oil, avocado and exercise. Is that like. Oh man, that's the worst diet. What about the carnivore diet? What about the ribeye with a little sauce, bernays on top of it? This keeps your blood sugar low and elevates your ketone. If you want to do it with plants, everything, you got fish, plants, you got the vegans and all these kind of people. This is a bioenergetic roadmap to health.

Stephen

Health. Let me just give some specifics.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

So this is amazing.

Stephen

What about high fructose corn syrups and

Professor Thomas Seyfried

refined man, that's the worst kind of crap. You don't take that.

Stephen

What about, what about industrial seed oils?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, you know, people talk about seed

Stephen

oils, canola and soybeans, I don't know.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Listen, another thing too, you and I are different. We have an individual. Metabolism, age, race, sex, all the religion, all kinds of stuff determine what and how you live. And I can't be sure what you eat and what I eat or what you exercise. Where it's going to put us on the chart.

Stephen

Synthetic pesticides. I was reading here that it increases the chance of lymphoma by a staggering 41%.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

They all damage the oxidative phosphorylation, putting the cell at risk for compensatory fermentation, dysregulated cell growth. The problem, the field doesn't understand what I'm saying with respect to the origin of cancer, how it happens mechanistically, how this organelle controls the life of the cell. They don't know enough about the biology and biochemistry of the mitochondria. You ought to get guys on here like Nick Lane from England. I mean, these guys like Doug Wallace and some of these guys, they're mitochondrial biologists. They understand this kind of stuff.

Stephen

I want to give people actionable things that they can think about. So that's why I was asking you this question about you becoming king. Fasting protocols.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, okay.

Stephen

Intermittent fasting.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Let me, Let me talk about that just briefly. Do you ever try it?

Stephen

Yeah.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

What do you think you liked?

Stephen

Depends how long you're talking about.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay, let's go a week.

Stephen

I know I've not fasted for a week before.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay. You know, what is the call? The wall? This guy, he just sent me his book. It's coming out. Very nice guy, Varel Simak. He say people share things with me.

Stephen

Me.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

The wall is after about three days of not eating, just drinking water, you hit this wall and it's like, oh, man. I'm just. I can't deal with it anymore. It's just a terrible feeling in my body. I can't sleep at night. I got the jimmy legs. I got all kinds of problems. Screw it. I'm not doing this. He found out if you sip just tiny amounts of a grape juice, you can get, get through the wall. What we do for the cancer patients in the way we design our clinical procedures, which my clinical friends, we do a zero carb diet for about a week while the body is readjusting, getting, getting, bringing them out of the red zone, getting into the yellow zone. You can't believe the power of glucose as an addictive drug on the brain. It's unbelievable. It's like cocaine. And you know that when you start, you start shaking and you go, so. But if you don't eat carbs and just eat meat or whatever to keep you in a low gki, then when you jump off to the water, only fasting, it's much less traumatic to the brain. You've gone through the wall, the gate, so to speak. So once you know how to get through the gate, you make this whole process a lot, a lot easier. And that helps people enormously, especially those people that want to get rid of their chronic disease. Okay, because. Or some. You know, we have a lot of people out there that just like to do all this stuff, you know, you get these. These people that go overboard on everything. But, you know, right now we have an obesity, chronic epidemic, cancer epidemic. All of these epidemics are the result of an abuse of that organelle in one way or another. And we have a plan to mitigate that abuse. And at least people haven't. At least they're empowered to do it with the help of knowledgeable physicians.

Stephen

I want to just keep on this point of actionable feedback. So, Dr. Valter Longo's.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

Dr. His extensive research, clinical trials prove that fasting mimicking diets drastically lower IGF1, which triggers cellular autophagy and actually makes standard cancer therapies up to three times more effective by removing the metabolic shield of cancer cells. Yeah.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Which is the glucose, the waste products of glucose, which is the lactic acid and the succinic acid that all goes down.

Stephen

Would you recommend, again, if you're king, would you recommend that?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

I would never recommend any. I have to just give them the knowledge. Then the person has to make the decision themselves.

Stephen

Do you think it could be beneficial, of course, if you were king, to have everybody wear a cgm, one of those continuous glucose monitors, at least once? No, never.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

No. I think if you have cancer and you really want to stay in this green zone, to know. Right. Listen, I was down in Mexico not long ago. I was talking to one of the head physicians down there. He wore one of these things, right. He said, every time I wanted to go out and have a party, have a good time, this damn thing would be beeping. So what do you ripped it off and threw it in the trash. So you don't want somebody barking in your ear when you're having a good time. That's why what you're doing right now with this, you're choosing to prick your finger. You're the one making that decision. There's not something on your arm saying, stephen, don't do that, don't do that.

Stephen

But you know what? It was useful to wear it once or twice because it even. Yeah, I could. I suddenly realized that things I put in my mouth had an impact on my blood sugar and my blood. And also I realized that it had an impact in 10 minutes.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

Oh, and then. And then also when my blood sugar came back down and crashed, I thought, oh, gosh, I feel I could suddenly pair my behavior to my feelings.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yes. Well, that. Now I. I've seen that. And not only that, Andrew Scarborough from England, who's been doing this for either stage three Glioma, he's like 15 years out, he's done this so many times with the finger prick and all this. He knows now already when his body is in these zones from the feeling that you just described. But for the people at the beginning and who are given a terminal diagnosis, they want to get into these green zones and they want to use the things that are going to keep them alive on the planet for a longer period of time with a higher quality of life that is important. That thing on your arm can help you stay in that zone until you have this thing managed, at which time you can choose when to do that. So there's flexibility in this whole process. It's not one like, for example, we have the standard of care, which is written in granite, for crying out loud. They get all. If you do anything different from the standard of care, you could lose your license as a physician. Metabolic therapy is patient driven. It's driven on the patient.

Stephen

What about hyperbaric oxygen? Yeah, There was a study in 2013 that demonstrated that while a ketogenic diet alone significantly slowed tumor growth and systemic metastatic cancer, mouse models combining the diet with hyperbaric oxygen therapy elicited a profound synergetic decrease in tumor growth and drastically increased survival times.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, we published that paper with Dominic d'. Agostino. So we. We put mice. So listen. Hyperbaric oxygen will create oxidative stress in cells that do not have efficient oxidative phosphorylation.

Stephen

Ah, cancer cells.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Cancer cells. So you can kill cancer cells by oxidative stress, by irradiating or poisoning them. Them. Or you can put a patient into nutritional ketosis and then put them in hyperbaric oxygen, and the cancer cells are selectively killed. When you irradiate somebody, you're damaging the whole body with all kinds of stuff. And there's another thing, Stephen, you got to listen to this, and you listen carefully. When you go to these. Treat these. Standard of care. Standard. When you. Standard of care, radiation, chemo, whatever, they give you immunotherapies or whatever. So the patient client comes in and he says, I've been really working hard on this. The doctor says, oh, no, that doesn't work. Right. Gives you some radiation or gives you up into the red zone. The treatment itself puts so much stress on the body that the body itself starts going. You go into the red zone from the very treatments that you're giving to the patient, which is making. Strengthening the tumor cells.

Stephen

You're not against chemotherapy, though, are you?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

No, I'm positive about it. But it has to be used in the right context. It has to be used when your body is in this new state of nutrition. And you can use low doses so you don't force the tumor cell to become even more resistant to the treatment.

Stephen

The next thing which is actionable is what you talked about earlier, which is these microplastics and forever chemicals. In late 2023, the international agency of research on cancer officially upgraded these forever chemicals which are used in non stick pans and food packaging to a grade one carcinogen in humans. Cancer causing in humans. Based on strong mechanistic evidence that it induces epigenetic which is gene alterations and suppresses the immune system. So you'd ban the forever chemicals.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Okay. This is a beautiful paper. I went back and I took what all of Otto Werburg meticulously went through. All of his work showed where he was absolutely correct and where he just didn't have the new information that would make him. I talked about the forever chemicals. Microplastics. Guess what? They damage the organelle. They get into the break. They cause Ross and damage. It reduced the efficiency of oxidative phosphorylation, causing a compensatory increase in the utilization of glucose and glutamine and dysregulated cell growth. Everything comes back to this organelle. All chronic diseases in cancer are the result of damage to this organelle. That's why having this little thing here is so important. It's a great prop. I gotta get one for my class.

Stephen

You can keep it. The next thing is purifying the water supply. Heavy metals are found in local water supplies to run off and ultimately are carcinogenic in some cases. The IARC classifies arsenic and cicadium as Group 1 carcinogenics. And they're frequently found in unfiltered public water infrastructure that. So you clean up the water supply as well?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. You know, all this stuff is coming into our water supplies. People flushing down all these chemicals into the. Into the. Which then leach back into the water supply. And every one of the chemicals that we have looked at that has been linked to oncology or dysregulated cell growth all damage the oxidative phosphorylation chronically. So we're bringing the entire focus back to things. What can I do to keep this organelle healthy Even if I'm exposed to these chemicals? If I can get into these zones like you're trying to do. So even if you are exposed to these. This organelle has an incredible healing power in itself.

Stephen

What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that. We should have talked about Professor Thomas.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, I mean, you've covered a lot. One of the things I want to talk about is metastasis.

Stephen

What's that?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

That's the spread of the tumor throughout the body. Okay. So if you were to have a cancer that's just localized in one spot, you know, the probability of developing a therapy that would be long term is highly increased. The problem that kills people is the spread. So if the tumor is in the breast and it spreads to the liver and the lungs and the brain, you know, you've got a problem. Lung cancer spreads to the brain, the liver. Most of these cancers that. That spread to the brain or other organs become difficult, and that's why you use systemic chemotherapy. You're trying to stop. What we have found is that you have a stem cell. People love stem cells. If you ever hear the term stem cell tumor. Wow. Stem cell tumor. Stem cell tumors cannot metastasize. How do I know? Because I have stem cell tumors diagnosed as stem cell tumors with stem cell markers. I've grown them. They grow very angry. They get a lot of blood vessels, but they can't spread. Okay, how do you get spreading tumor cells in your body? The immune system comes in, recognizes that as an unhealed wound, and then fuses with the stem cells. And then you have these hybrid cells. They are programmed to move around your body. So they are a macrophage tumor cell hybrid. And they're very hard to kill. But we found they're remarkably sensitive. They're glutamine driven. So we know they're glutamine driven, and they need the glucose. And that's why metabolic therapy, done the right way, can nail those metastatic cancer cells, purging them. With a little bit of immunotherapy to go along with it, you might be able to get what we call resolution. Don't forget, my colleagues and I, Dom d', Agostito, Joe Maroon, we built the press pulse therapeutic strategy. I mentioned that on your previous show. That's the way you press down the glucose of the tumor, and then you pulse to kill the glutamine, which will target the metastatic cancer cells, enhancing the health and vitality of the organs already infiltrated by the tumor.

Stephen

I looked on our previous conversation, Professor Thomas, and it's quite heartbreaking because the comments sections are all people that are either struggling themselves with cancer or a loved one of theirs, their wife, their husband, has just been diagnosed with cancer. Is there anything for those people that have clicked on this video, because I imagine they are in the millions. Yeah, but you want them to hear.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, the thing of it is, is why? Well, this is a bigger issue. When you have the science and you have the strategy to manage cancer effectively with minimal toxicity, not to say we can cure, but to say we can manage it, why is it not being done? That's the question.

Stephen

But to them, to them who've tuned

Professor Thomas Seyfried

in, okay, so these kinds of conversations that we have are allowing the populations to realize that there is. Their loved ones do not need to be sacrificed for the good of industries that are generally considered profitable. In other words, the profitability of the industries are based on, on your sickness. And a lot of those comments came, oh, you can't do anything. Yes, you can do something about it. When you're armed with the knowledge and people ignore the knowledge, then there's a problem.

Stephen

Do people need to sort of self advocate to some degree? I think so with that with care providers, what do they.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, I think that's a very delicate question.

Stephen

Yeah.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

The oncologists never heard of this stuff. They have never read these papers. They were never trained in medical school to know the biology and biochemistry of cancer. It was told to be a genetic disease. Theories are so important in science. For 1,800 years, people thought the work of Aristotle. His comments and the mathematics of Claudius Ptolemy said that the Earth was the center of the solar system and all the planets and sun revolved around the Earth. The geocentric theory. Right. Copernicus struggled with the Ptolemy mathematics and realized that if he put the sun in the center of the solar system and made Earth just another planet, a lot of the mathematics made sense. Kepler comes in and says, these aren't circles, they're ellipticals. Galileo takes the telescope, sees the moons of Jupiter and was able to look at and quantify, predict where planets would be at a certain period of time. Then they took poor Giordano Bruno. You know about this guy Bruno? Oh, Stephen, you got to know Bruno. Your job is to know about the poor Bruno, who was burned alive by the Catholic Church for challenging the, the, the geocentric theory. And he became a martyr of science. So when you have established power structure, whether it's a religion or whether it's an industry or whatever, challenging that can be very, very hazardous.

Stephen

Has it been hazardous for you?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Listen, no. I mean, I do what I do because I like, I just collect more and more data to support. Hazardous for me would be getting blindsided. Blindsided would be somebody coming at me with a piece of new data. That I have never considered. I don't sleep. I. I think about this stuff all the time. To avoid the blind side. My students are on the, on the alert for any paper that comes out that says cancer. Oh, cancer cells can burn fatty acids and ketone bodies. Oh, really? Let's go back, back through and dissect out their control experiments. And you find in every case, there was always some glucose and glutamine in the media, making it look like the fatty acids. So, so that's what bothers me. What bothers me is getting hit with a piece of data that undermines what we're, what we, our knowledge base is. And so far we haven't had that. Okay. It's. We're standing on the shoulders of Otto Warburg, a giant in the field of biochemistry. He was thrown under the bus when everybody thought cancer was a genetic disease. This paper goes back and shows exactly where Warburg made his mistakes and where we have rectified some of that, bringing the whole field back on where it should be. It is a mitochondrial metabolic disorder. And we can account for all of the phenotypes and characteristics of that disease, knowing that now with that knowledge, logical people and people interested in helping others will take advantage of that. We're not throwing out all these toxic chemicals. We're learning how to use them in a different way. And that's where the success is going to come.

Stephen

So let's, let's conclude with a actionable takeaway for people who are suffering themselves with cancers or have someone in their family right now that is suffering from cancers. What is the actionable takeaway?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, I think the action will take. And once this paper comes out, they can start taking action if they are motivated enough.

Stephen

They can read about this.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

They can read about it and then try, just like you're doing no different, get into these zones and then work with their oncologists, knowledgeable people to, to, to treat them with standards of care.

Stephen

Yeah.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

As long as they can remain. And then we do non invasive imaging, PET scans, see MRIs.

Stephen

Okay, so specifically what you're saying is this paper. I will link it below in the comments section for anyone that wants to read it. This graph will be on the screen throughout this episode anyway, so people can screenshot it if they want to have a look.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

And the way, way that they test what their GKI index is is they can buy one of these keto mojo things which you can get on Amazon for 20, $30. You prick your finger, it gives you the glucose reading.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

You divide it by 18.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

No, no, the new machines have the. But you do. So even the people only have to do that.

Stephen

Okay, fine. And as you can see on here, this is an interesting way to sort of increase your. Your management. Improve your management of some of these.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah. And then there's a challenge to get into those zones. You know, I'm not saying this is easy stuff. GLP1 inhibitor, man, that's a hell of a lot easier than doing this.

Stephen

And I should probably say, always consult with a medical professional.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, I think because, you know, a lot of people, they have a lot of comorbidities. They have diabetes, high blood pressure, hypertension, cancer. They have a. It's not a perfectly healthy person with cancer. So before you go in to challenge that, you need to have what you look like. You might look. You know, you might have to be adjusted in some way. That's why the people who. The physicians that are working with this can do all that. I. I'm. I'm not in the clinical thing.

Stephen

And there are some people who respond poorly to the ketogenic diet and high states of ketosis. Because I've. I've received DMs before from a woman who said, my. My husband did ketosis and he collapsed unconscious. He took him to the hospital. He had some comorbidity.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing, too is you gotta be. Some people have carnitine deficiencies. Carnitines prevents fatty acids from being made into ketone bodies, so they can be. Carnitine supplementation can help them. But you need a physician to know this.

Stephen

We have a close on tradition, where the last guest leader question for the next. And the question left for you is on the subject of energy. What in your life has brought you the most energy and what was the biggest energy drainage you've ever experienced?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

This is bringing me the biggest energy.

Stephen

This.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Well, not this. The whole concept. The idea that you have found Mother nature has allowed you to look into the depths of. Of. Of what we consider the biology and biochemistry of how bodies work and knowing how to take that and apply it to people that are suffering from all these different chronic diseases and giving them the opportunity to change that. Because before that, it was mysterious. Oh, I'm in keto. What's your gki? I don't know. Well, now you have a quantitative opportunity that gets us. So we have a lot of evidence. I think people should feel encouraged. I think we have given hope to the hopeless, and I think that's empowering. And the goal here is not to make a billion dollars. It's just to know that you've kept all these poor souls alive longer than they were projected to be. To be. And I think this power. And that keeps us going because when we see more and more people coming to me, I get emails back from people three or four years ago and I said, gee, I thought you were a goner. And he says, I'm doing really well. I just came back from a vacation with my wife. Well, that's empowering. I said, well, that's good. And don't forget, Stephen, all of our research money comes from private foundations and philanthropies. So.

Stephen

So is that a way that people can help?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

And where do they go to help?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Oh, Travis Kristofferson's foundation. So we, in my papers, we have the foundations that support our work, private foundations.

Stephen

So I'll link that.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

And there are occasionally. Yes, please link. There are occasionally people I know and I, when I give kits of information to people, I say, please consider making a donation only if it works for you. Don't charge them anything or ask them to pay something if it's not going to help them. If you were told to be dead in six months and six years later you're alive, maybe you throw us a few shekels into the private found into the foundation supporting our work.

Stephen

I'll link that foundation below in the comments.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, we have a couple on breast cancer, on general support on the metabolic approach that we have. So we have a lot going. We're very excited. You can see all the papers we've published. And it's not like some of these are in top journals, some of them are in new journals. But, but the issue is we're, we're, we're, we're, we're publishing this.

Stephen

My thing is, you know, I. Great, great, great respect for science and doctors in the medical profession. Go, go get your information. Speak to your medical provider. There's so many tools out there now. Go and check for yourself.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah, well, I think in the oncology field, that's where we have this vast wasteland of misinformation or misunderstanding, put it that way. They don't understand these concepts where, you know, people who have done heart work and bone work and replacements, those people are at the state of the art with this kind of stuff.

Stephen

Well, the last conversation we had, it's reached about 15 million people. So on YouTube it's got 10 million views and then across audio platforms it's got another five or so million views.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

And when I went Read through the comment sections. It's just. It's so heartening for two reasons. One is you're giving people tools and science that they can think about and research themselves and speak to their medical practitioner about. But also, it actually just creates a community of people in the comments section, where, you know, this is a community of people that are searching for hope.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Yeah.

Stephen

And as some of them read through the comment sections, they actually commented, saying, it was so nice to. To speak to other people in the comment sections about what I'm going through and how it feels from an emotional level. So this is something I actually wanted to say in this episode, was if you're. If you're listening to this conversation now and you've gotten to this point, do feel free to go into the comment section and just offer some support and some love to other people who are struggling, because, you know, it can be a very lonely experience the minute you find out you've got a diagnosis. And off you go into the Internet, into podcasts, into AI to try and figure out what you can do. So, yeah, do share things that have helped you. Point at different resources that are rigorous and offer emotional support to those that are in the comments section. That would be a wonderful thing. Thomas, thank you so much for all that you do. You're an absolute warrior for pushing the science into the world and for fighting for these people that don't have the tools. And if you. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a comment section quite like it in terms of the gratitude that people have for the work that you're doing. It is remarkable work. Long may you continue to do it.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Thank you very much. And, you know, you play a very important part on this because this information is not disseminated to the population, and it's the population of people that will eventually make the change. So they're going to want this. Especially when we keep publishing more and more case reports of successful cases, and the cha. The system will change, and we just have to modify what we have to make it better. And I think that's what keeps us going. So I have no plans of stopping this anytime soon. My students are all excited about this. They're learning about it at Boston College. So this is a big emphasis that we have, and we continue to do it again. Scientific literacy is so important for how you navigate through life. And thank you very much for your show, and we'll keep pushing this as hard as we can.

Stephen

Thank you.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Mom, can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.

Stephen

Was she brave?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

She was tired, mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required. Did you have to find a dragon? Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually. Was it scary? Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.

Stephen

Did the car have a sunroof?

Professor Thomas Seyfried

It did, actually.

Stephen

Okay, good story.

Professor Thomas Seyfried

Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.