Cancer - Genes or Environment
January 5, 2019
What are some of the real causes of the increase in cancer rate? Is the cause of cancer from our genetics or from the environment in which we live? In today’s show, we have invited a cancer expert to join us to discuss this very important topic, including how our diet can impact our risk of cancer.
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Transcript
DAR: Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition. This is the first show of 2019 and we're starting this year out with a very important topic, cancer. Is the cause of cancer from our genetics or from the environment in which we live? What do you think the answer is? Is it our genetics or is it our environment?
MARCIE: Hmm. That is a very good question and I think they answer is going to surprise a lot of people? According to recent research, cancer has surpassed heart disease as a leading cause of death in many states in the United States, and the researchers have estimated that cancer is expected to surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death nationwide in the next year. The question we need to ask is why is this happening?
DAR: It seems like everyone has been touched by cancer. Either yourself, a child, a parent, a sibling, a friend, or a coworker. So today we've invited a cancer expert to join us to discuss this very important topic of cancer. I'm Darlene Kvist and our cohost this morning is Marcie Vaske. You heard her voice and we're both licensed nutritionists and work with a variety of clients who are seeking nutritional solutions to their health problems. And that is a new concept for a lot of people, a nutritional solution to health problems.
MARCIE: It sure is. Good point. I like that you pointed that out clearly for everybody today. And even though our company's name is Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we really are much more than just a weight loss company. And many, many of our clients are coming in, they're struggling with chronic illness and they're seeking those answers to help them restore their health. As nutritionists, we're always helping our clients to use nutrition to find the answer and to restore their health. And every day we do this and people are just amazed with the results.
DAR: We're always looking for the answer to chronic disease and there's many people with chronic disease these days. We're constantly reading research, reading books, attending seminars, and last fall at the Great Lakes conference that was held right here in in Minneapolis, I heard an amazing speaker who shared information about cancer and I just knew our listeners would want to hear that information so we invited Dr Robert Rakowski from Texas to join us today to share some of the key parts of his presentation. It was a long presentation. It was a great presentation. And we know we can’t share all of that. You might be thinking, hmm, who is Dr Robert Rakowski?
MARCIE: Let me tell you a little bit about our guest. Dr Robert Rakowski has been in clinical practice for over 26 years working directly with clients on a wide range of health problems including cancer, which we're going to dig into today. He has taught over 10,000 hours of seminars to doctors around the world. That is a lot. And has helped many people who were unable to experience help or relief through drug-based medicine. And of course he has many important letters after his name, but that isn't as important as his great passion to help people improve their health and his ability to communicate that passion.
DAR: One of the things that I really appreciate about Dr Bob, and that's what we're going to call him, is that he has the energy to dig down deep to find solutions for different health problems. Dr Rakowski, welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition. It is really an honor to have you on the shoulder this morning. It really seems new travel all the time presenting for a variety of conferences. Plus you really have a very busy clinic in Texas.
DR BOB: I do have a great patient base client base ranging anywhere from world champion athletes, Olympians, to people that essentially have had no success with medicine and some of those folks that even basically been sent home to get their affairs in order. 27 years running we've got great successes at turning a lot of these people around by doing exactly what you're talking about, focusing on health rather than illness.
DAR: Sounds great and that's what we want to talk about. How do you keep it all together? You're traveling all the time. One of the things that you talked about at the conference that was just, I don't know if everybody else noticed it, but I did. You mentioned at the Great Lakes conference that you sleep about nine hours most nights, so share with listeners some of the research about sleep and about Melatonin as a cancer prevention and I don't think many people would think about it that way.
DR BOB: Literature is emerging that sleep and the body's own production of Melatonin may be the single top, most universal and effective healthcare strategy. But let's take it from a little different angle. I'm gonna assume your researchers maybe know a little bit about Melatonin. But we tend to think of it as our body's sleep chemical because there's a nice portion of our brain that makes it. And at night we fall asleep. But the reality is our body and more specifically, our gut makes 400 times the Melatonin as the brain and we do make it and we make it from an amino acid called Tryptophan, and not to get too advanced for your audience, but Melatonin is very, very calming. When your body's under stress circumstance, it triggers something called the fight or flight response, and guess what? It shuts off or dramatically decreases the amount of Melatonin that's made and you look and the emerging data is powerful, but there's articles that have been published over the last decade, multiple times with a few changes, basically called the 10 hallmarks of cancer. And a very recent article says that Melatonin has an impact on every single one of those factors in a very positive way. So, when you ask the question, how do we keep it all together? I will go to Confucius. He says, if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. I love travel, adventure, contribution, and this is one great way to do it. And another quote is, if you don't take time for health, you'll soon have to find time for sickness. And so, I realized that for me, we all are a little different. Sleep is almost like shoe sizes. Some people need a little less, some people need a little more, some people need a lot more. But we need to find the right fit for us in terms of sleep and lifestyle so that we go to bed, fall asleep without much difficulty at all, without much challenge. We wake up refreshed without an alarm clock and ready to face our day. And we want to make time not just for sleep, but as I tell people, I call them the magnificent seven. You've got to eat right, drink right, think right, move right, sleep right poop right, and talk right every single day.
DAR: I love that every time you say that. One of the things that you've mentioned at the conference was that you actually take Melatonin on a daily basis. Tell us a little bit more about that because we have many listeners and many clients that think that taking Melatonin is harmful for them.
DR BOB: Well, they have animal studies where they can actually dose the animals with greater than their body weight of Melatonin, which is hard to imagine that they have the ability to do that, but for 60 to 90 straight days with no known toxic response and the benefits are pretty incredible. But one of the things that I like to talk about is I‘ll call it a stress reset or a Melatonin reset. One of the things we know that Melatonin does is it actually binds to our stress glands, the adrenal glands, and prevents our central nervous system, our brains’ drive on stress. And maybe we have some technical listeners, but it actually binds to what's called the adrenal cortical tropin receptor. And interestingly enough, since Melatonin is made at super high concentrations in our gut, it's very unlikely that it crosses the blood brain barrier. Think about it, if it did and Melatonin puts us to sleep, we'd all be asleep all day long. It has plenty of function in the body and a different function in the brain, in the body. It's going to put the stress on Melatonin, modulate the inflammatory process, have a positive impact on all of the hallmarks of cancer and just depending on how much detail we may want to go to in the end when we put the brakes on the stress response and I like to do it for about seven to 10 days with Melatonin every waking hour, we actually reset the body where it can actually start responding to its hormones. And this might be a concept worth talking about, but maybe someone in the audience is wearing a wristwatch or a necklace or maybe a ring. And the first time you put this on, you're very, very aware of it, but over time you don't even know it's there until you bump it on something and then you go, oh, it's there. Because our body actually ignores constant stimuli. In fact, I'm guessing most people have a little humming in the room or even the outdoors where they might be, but once we realize it's there, it's consistent, we just don't even pay attention to it at all. And it's like that with stress hormones, we know that our bodies actually stop responding to the stress hormones and sometimes people think stress hormones are all bad. No, they're actually life critical. They do a lot of great things for us, but it's just when they get out of balance, too much of them for too long that we create some real significant challenges.
DAR: And I think that’s happening to a lot of people. Dr Bob, if you'd kind of go back over the fact that you actually have people take a little bit of Melatonin throughout the day for 7 to 10 days. Is this like a milligram or two milligrams or three milligrams or what do you usually do?
DR BOB: A milligram is sufficient for almost everybody, but they will go up to three in some cases. And quite simply, once they take that Melatonin and it gets into the body, it's going to actually start immediately buffering the stress response. And there's a concept in the medical literature over the last decade called Cortisol resistance. I think a lot of listeners have heard of something called insulin resistance where insulin doesn't work as well anymore, so the body actually starts making more insulin and there's some challenges with that because they had increased fat storage and increased inflammatory process, but as the body starts to ignore the effects of the stress Hormone Cortisol, we start losing the benefits of Cortisol, which is a very powerful antiinflammatory, so the body starts making more and more and more cortisol. As the patient becomes less and less healthy, the body has a harder time clearing that and cortisol has a downside to too much of it. It actually breaks down lean tissue and then it stops or dramatically reduces its ability to control the inflammatory process and literally our brain and body can get more or less stuck in fight or flight with immune suppression, inflammation and just an inability to rest, recover experienced joy, and, and things that we needed on a daily basis to enjoy life and be healthy.
DAR: Dr Rakowski, we see that with clients everyday, don't we, Marcie? I mean, that's great. I know we have to go to break here in a second, but we want to kind of go back over some of that and help people understand that.
MARCIE: Alright, I'll take us to break. You're listening to Dishing Up Nutrition. Today, Dar and I are talking with special guest, Dr Robert Rakowski about the causes of cancer. Only five to 10 percent of all cancer cases can be attributed to genetic defects. Some of you may be surprised to learn that what does contribute to someone getting cancer is actually our environment. Sad but true. So, environmental factors to be concerned about are going to be daily stress you live with, the toxins you're exposed to, and inactivity. So let's stay tuned as Dr Rakowski explorers these factors in detail.
BREAK
DAR: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. As nutritionists, we often get these questions when we're doing consultation with people about cancer prevention. They ask can I eat red meat? Or should I juice to prevent cancer? Is Margarine or butter better? And we know there are many conflicting messages everywhere you turn about food and diet, but the bottom line is to support your immune function you should be eating real food.
MARCIE: Yes, we believe each of us is in charge of our own health and we need to work with our genetics to avoid getting in this disease state. Are you wondering how do I learn that? Listening to Dishing Up Nutrition is a great starting point, but maybe taking our Weight & Wellness series is a great way to get in a group setting. Making an individual appointment with one of your favorite nutritionists is the personal approach.
DAR: I guess ask yourself, how can I eat to be the best that I can be? And I don't know how many people ever think that way. How can I eat to be the best that I can be? Go to our website to check out your options. If you prefer to call and ask questions, we're happy to answer. Our number is 651-699-3438. And now we're going back to our discussion about cancer. And Dr Bob, I still think that people believe that cancer is a genetic problem and not an environmental problem. Can you talk a little bit about that just now? I'll turn it over to you.
DR BOB: We could talk about it at great length, but you can even review the peer reviewed medical literature. And it's pretty much universal consensus at this point that cancer’s maybe five to 10 percent genetic in between 90 and 95 percent environmental. And sometimes we want brand new references such as yesterday. But there was an article published in the Royal Society of Medicine that actually looked at the cancer incidence of people in England in the mid 1880’s. And that was a golden age of discovery. So they did autopsies on everybody back then and they actually estimated that about two percent of people in 1880 died of cancer. And about six percent died of cardiovascular. Now, that's not that long ago, and especially on the human time clock. Our genes have changed very, very little in that period of time, but yet there have been dramatic changes in the environment. I can share some data on twin studies, which is fascinating and probably the most telling study on cancer environment versus genes was published in 2015. It's likely that a lot of the listeners know that our genetic material is stored in a part of our cells called the nucleus. And when cells divide, they actually have to replace or repeat or redo the genetic material to create a new cell which has the exact same copy. This clever researcher actually said, okay, let's put this to the test. I'm going to take normal cells with a normal nucleus and I'm going to put it into a cancer cell with a cancer nucleus or cancer genetics. And we're just going to quite simply swap the nucleuses. But when they put the cancer nucleus into the normal cell, that cell actually remained normal. When they put the healthy nucleus inside of a cancer cell body, in other words, the genetic material was just fine, but the cancer cell body was sick, those cells actually replicated as cancer cells. So, in my mind, that should have really turned all of our research on its head, and hopefully in time it will, but different areas around the world are better at doing studies. And we look at Denmark and there's something called the Danish twin study and they took biologic twins that were actually adopted out and then they looked at what happened if they're biologic parents, in other words, apparently living in a completely different environment, died of cancer or died before the age of 50, what was the probability of the adoptive child in a separate environment dying of cancer before the age of 50? And there was no correlation whatsoever. Now, cardiovascular disease actually had a pretty high correlation there. To take that a step further, if the parent in the family they were living in, their adopted parents died of cancer before the age of 50, but then the child was actually 300 percent more likely to die from cancer. So, clearly it's the environment which is the biggest issue and we see it on the cellular level and we see it in human studies which are very well done.
DAR: So we need to get that message across over and over and over. That what we eat and what we do in our environment makes a difference whether we are going to come down with cancer or not. At least a big percentage of that. Like you said, like 95 percent of cancer cases are really related to what's going on in our environment. That’s still shocking for people think that.
MARCIE: Right and just that it's preventable. We have control over this. I think that's a really key thing.
DR BOB: There's a metaphor that I often use that makes this somewhat clear to people, but I was at a cancer lecture over 30 years ago. Absolutely brilliant researcher asked a question that was odd and his question was how does a hurricane start? And the answer he wanted back was the hurricane starts when conditions are just right. He then asked, how does a tornado start? When conditions are just right. How does cancer start? When conditions are just right. How does cancer go away? Change those conditions and the conditions are pretty well documented. Low oxygen, low nutrients, high acid, chronic inflammatory process, and suppression of the immune system, which is usually related to stress.
DAR: So, we want to talk a little bit more about stress, but before we do that, let's just talk about food a little bit for people. Some of the sugars and the process carbs.
MARCIE: Because this will all affect their immune system as well.
DAR: Yeah. can I just let you go with that one?
DR BOB: All right, well let's do it. First and foremost, there's some quotes that I love about nutrition and one is nutrition is not alternative medicine. Nutrition is the foundation of life. We can't live without it. And then you look at these processed foods and we might argue that there's some benefit, but there's been a lot of downside to it as well. When we eat processed foods that have chemical additives and chemical preservatives, and they've taken away some of the benefits to protect the body from a blood sugar rise, we know that there's one universally really sick diet put into any population on the entire planet and that is what we call the SAD diet or the standard American diet, which is just too many processed foods, too many vegetable oils, not enough fiber, not enough plant nutrients. And just going back to that study in the Royal Society of Medicine, you look back then, it was actually estimated that in 1880 people literally had 10x the amount of plant nutrients or phytonutrients in their diet than what we currently have. And again, we see that the cancer incidence was less than one 10th of what it is today.
MARCIE: I think we're going to take a quick break again.
DAR: And then when we do come back, let's talk a little bit about stress and the effects that it has on our bodies and on how it can really lead to having cancer.
BREAK
DAR: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. This morning we are speaking with our special guest Dr Robert Murkowski and we're discussing lifestyle factors that support our immune system and reduce our risk of developing cancer. And Dr. Bob, before we went on break, we were going to talk a little bit about how stress actually can affect our immune system and I know last week on Dishing Up Nutrition, we talked about how stress leads to weight gain and of course that perked everyone's ears up, but it also weakens our immune system. So, I’ll let you go with this one.
DR BOB: Oh, we could go for the rest of the show and beyond because this has been known for well over 50 years. In fact, it's generally accepted that chronic stress is just actually now documented to be the immune system's worst enemy. And, and as I tell people, the two biggest enemies of the immune system, number one is stress. Number two is sugar. But when we look at stress, there's a lot of different ways that we can think about that, but it really is much dependent upon our own perception of what's happening. So if you actually can take every moment is a gift and try to see the good in everyone in every circumstance, then you've created a stress resilient being and mindset and physiology. I would often put up fictitional characters that everybody can relate to. And I'm hoping that most people know of James Bond or have seen James Bond, but understand that he's being shot at and every bit of the world's future is resting on his shoulders and he couldn't be happier, because this is how he's trained himself and this is how he sees himself dealing with his role in life. And there's a solid takeaway from that. I'm a parent and you have kids and sometimes your kids can really push your buttons, but you just understand that they're on their learning pathway and maybe just apply that across the board to every single one of us. People always do the best they can with what they've got. And I do believe that's always. But sometimes the best they can do is put themselves in a circumstance to get a lesson that will have a bigger impact somewhere down the road. And how we perceive things is big, but there's another factor that's pretty insidious and that's actually artificial lighting. And it's hard for people to imagine that the light coming from most ceilings is actually of a blue wavelength. But that is the most powerful light to literally interfere with our body's production of Melatonin. And I like to tell a story because it'll keep people on path, but when Thomas Edison created the electric bulb, there was thousands of attempts that he failed that. But he just kept after it kept after it kept after it. And I read an article sometime this last year and I wish I kept it, but they said his primary reason for doing that was he was afraid of the dark. He really didn't want to be left in the dark. But let's go back to the idea that human beings evolved near firelight. Fire light does not have any blue hues at all. It's got orange, it's got yellow, and these are very melatonin friendly, very stress friendly, but the light waves coming from our light and especially our television screens or our computer monitors or our smartphones. These are things that are loaded with blue light and they can suppress body's Melatonin, which is the predominant buffer in our body against the stress response. Taking it further yet, we're mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, social, financial impactful beings and getting a meaningful course in every one of those categories can be one of the best stress buffers around. Mentally, we can meditate. Physically we need to move our bodies more, but not too much. Emotionally, I like to think of emotions as being our head and our heart connection and that's certainly going to have a huge impact on the stress chemistry that we relieve. Spiritual is massive. In my four hour lecture that I did on cancer and by the way I'll make it available to the listeners free of charge and if we can talk about that a little later and show how they can just log on and get it and listened to it, but people have a good spiritual circle, a good support system, are going to live better. Same thing with a social circle. When you're surrounded by people that love you you have more reason to live and your body rallies and lives more effectively. When we start looking at financial impactful, usually the number one stressor in families is either going to be money or the relationship with their significant other. We get rid of money, that's half of it. And then impactful. We're all here to make the planet better and we have our unique set of gifts and talents to do that and when people are on purpose actually doing that, by the way, without the expense of their being, because plenty of people that have ultimately got too connected to their mission and didn't take care of themselves. We want to have a balanced approach in all of those areas.
DAR: That sounds really good. I think if you take that a step further, there seems to be kind of a lack of understanding or knowledge about some of these very basic things. And as a nutritionist, I keep going back to things like, the kinds of fats that people are eating. They really don't understand the damage that they're doing to their selves when they're eating like soybean oil or corn oil or they don't understand the stress that they're putting on their pancreas when they're eating sugar, which then ends up putting stress on their cells and on their immune system. How do we help people get to that point in their understanding about life to get to that say, okay, I really don't have to eat that sugar. I don't really need that. So, I don't know if you've thought about some of those things. Dr Bob.
DR BOB: Many, many, many times, my three decades of working with patients, you said many things that were powerful, but let's go to sugar because they have really good ways of studying brain chemistry and functional brain MRIs and things like that, and studies are pretty clear. They show that 94 percent of rats prefer processed sugar to cocaine. It's tremendously addictive and once people get a little, they want more, they want more, and just like any drug of addiction, once you start getting acclimated to it, once your body's used to a higher level, it actually takes more intake to get to that same level. And food producers have realized that when they make their product addictive, they are actually going to sell more of the product. When we go to these vegetable oils, if we look at the studies of our ancestors and what they ate, and that's one of my favorite guidelines, eat what's your ancestors ate. Someone from Asia is going to have a different diet than someone from the rainforest is going to have a different diet than someone the Inuit Eskimos. And that's what your genetics are going to be matched for, but nowhere back in history did people get such a high concentration of vegetable oils and especially these processed vegetable oils. And I don't know how technical I want to get, but the Omega six content of vegetable oils, there's two essential fats that we need, omega three and omega six, we need them both, that's for sure, but it's generally accepted that Omega threes are purely anti-inflammatory and more flexible. Whereas Omega sixes are a more inflammatory. They create more inflammation in the body, they make our cells stiffer and they actually make us fat and inflamed and in trouble. It's something we need, but we need to get the right amount and so there's some dispute. They actually say that the ratio of Omega six to Omega three for people essentially evolving over time was anywhere from 2:1 to 1.5:1 and in our standard American diet, I think the lowest reference I've read is 10:1 omega six to Omega three and some are much higher than that, 25:1 so here's what that means. At the baseline we're five times more inflamed and less capable of repairing than our ancestors were just 200 years ago and for some people it may be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times more inflamed and less capable of repair. Everything we put in our body counts. I'll go to Jack LaLanne on this one. He said, “If God made it, it's okay. If man made it, don't touch it.”
MARCIE: Perfect. So stay away from those processed oils.
DAR: Another one of the things I would love to have you discuss a little bit is, and I heard you talk about this many years ago and you say estrogen is estrogen is estrogen is estrogen. You remember that?
DR BOB: I do still talk about it most weeks in my patient base.
DAR: Maybe talk about that because we have a lot of clients that still come in and may be in menopause and they think that they need to be on some type of medication that has estrogen in it. And I always go back to repeating what you said. Estrogen is estrogen is estrogen. And too much estrogen can certainly lead to cancer, can’t it?
DR BOB: Oh, absolutely. It's certainly one of the top risk factors and literally I read an article since that Great Lakes conference just in the last few months where they've actually studied the effects of estrogens that are in plastics and pesticides injected into animals and when they looked at the quantities that are found in people's bodies, and that's pretty scary. Everybody has these foreign estrogens in their body. They know they can be up to a hundred times more damaging to the cells than the normal biologic estrogens. One of my mentors who I did a series on endocrinology with years ago, made a statement that was powerful. He said estrogens, whether you make them or whether you take them, you need to get rid of them and every day. And I tweaked that to say estrogens, whether we make them, whether we take them, whether you're knowingly or unknowingly intoxicated by them, whether you're a man, whether you're a woman, you need to get rid of them every every day in a healthy way and the body does have 11 different ways of clearing estrogens and we know when people have a really good balance of especially cruciferous vegetables, Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, a high plant diet, a low inflammatory diet, and they manage their stress, then they can clear these estrogens and then there's clinical studies that show this up to 950 percent, 9.5x more effectively with the right nutrients and balance on board. And these estrogens are going to cause challenges for people. Whether we're talking about the central nervous system, whether we're talking about bad menstrual cycles for females, endometriosis, fibrous cystic breast cancer. And in the male, estrogen actually is going to be on some level something that combats testosterone production and is now known to be really, really bad for the male prostate. And we'll just take cancer a little step further while we're here. The top cancer in the world is breast cancer. A woman's lifetime risk is one in eight. Top male cancers, prostate cancer man's lifetime risk is one in six and both of these are powerfully linked to estrogens in our body and now especially these foreign estrogens, things like bisphenol a that are universal in our environment.
MARCIE: That’s incredible. That’s great information. How all that estrogen can relate back to some sort of cancer, especially in men and women.
DAR: I suppose we need another break.
MARCIE: You are listening to Dishing Up Nutrition and lack of sleep is a risk factor for cancer and we know that smoking is a risk factor for cancer, right? And lack of movement is another risk factor for cancer. Eating excess sugar or processed carbs is a risk factor. And is excess weight or obesity. And those fad diets just don't work over the long haul. Losing maybe a pound a week is what your body will really be able to maintain and if you want an easy program to live with, sign up for our Nutrition 4 Weight Loss plan, which starts the week of January 14th. And when we come back from break we will share how you can get started.
BREAK
DAR: Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. I encourage you to share this show and podcast with family members and friends. I mean Dr Bob has a lot of great information and we all need that information to avoid getting cancer. Taking our 12 week Nutrition 4 Weight Loss series is an excellent way to learn more about how to be in charge of your own health and to reduce that risk of getting cancer.
DAR: What if you live outside of the Minneapolis St Paul area? You can still take our Nutrition 4 Weight Loss series and we have an online class called Nutrition 4 Weight Loss Online and you can just sign up on our website.
MARCIE: That's right. And we want to thank Dr Rakowski for sharing his expertise and his passion for educating people.
DAR: And before we run out of time, I want to thank everyone who listens to Dishing Up Nutrition, who takes classes and Nutritional Weight & Wellness or sees any of our wonderful, wonderful nutritionists or Dietitians. And, may 2019 be a year of great health for all of you. And I'm surely planning on that. And Dr Bob, you talked about you have available a four hour class?
DR BOB: Yes, so that seminar that your team was at was recorded and I will make that available essentially to the world as a public service announcement. And I think what I can do is send you a copy to post on your website. I have a public figure facebook page, just Dr Bob Rakowski and people can connect with that easy enough and I'll post it there as well. I think the more good information that we share and you are just so good for our world with all the you share, the better we'll make everything.
DAR: Yes, I love that presentation that you made and I could listen to it many, many times.
MARCIE: And each time getting something new out of it.
DAR: Dr Bob, first of all, is there something that you would love to share with people that we haven't asked you? One of the things that we want people to kind of connect with is how sugar, we always hear that sugar feeds cancer cells. Maybe talk a little bit about that. One of the other things that I always hear is, should I juice? These are some things that we hear from clients. So, we've got a few minutes toward the end of the show here today. So just share what you think you would love to talk about.
DR BOB: Okay, well, it's even a stronger statement than that. Not only does the sugar feed cancer, but cancer cannot live without sugar. And there's even really good medical clinics now in the world that are realizing that if you put people's sugar at a very low level, and sometimes we'll even do that with injecting insulin. They call it insulin potentiation therapy. They'll put the cancer in a weakened where then they can use some things that are pretty harsh, like chemotherapy and have a greater killing effect. And that's very, very important. One thing that people need to understand is cancer’s appetite for sugar is so strong that as sugar and insulin increase in the body our normal cells begin to ignore it, but our cancer cells become more and more and more hungry and able to eat more, and they do it by actually increasing the receptors that allow sugar into the cell. So when you look at juicing, it definitely is a paradox because we know that people need a lot of plant nutrients and I'll go to one of the top researchers of all time. A guy named Bruce Ames who is a geneticist from Berkeley and he said quite simply, people that eat the most fruits and vegetables get the least cancer while those who eat the least get the most. People begin to think that if they put in tons of vegetables via juicing, they're going to be better off. But we need to look at this case by case. If someone's very, very sensitive to blood sugar, then that juice cocktail that they're putting in their system may really spike their sugar. And so certainly less of an issue with green juices and most people don't really crave green juices. I'm actually one of those people that does. I love a nice green juice and Kale juice and wheat grass and things like that, but people tend to put a carrot and apple and when you cut off the fiber, there's going to be a bigger blood sugar rise. And so one thing that I teach all my patients, those that want to lose weight, those that want to certainly control their sugar or their diabetes, they need to know indisputably how everything they put in their body reacts. So people now can get a very inexpensive sugar meter, glucometer, and strips and they can measure their sugar in a matter of minutes with a finger prick. And I recommend they do that literally to understand how everything they put in their body affects it. Whereas people will get a lot more plant nutrients, they're not getting the fiber. That's a challenge, unless of course they mix it in. And then they will have an elevation in sugar. The question is with their physiology, how much of a rise are they getting? And I'll tweak that a little bit. If you're going to do something that's going to elevate your blood sugar, the time to do it is after intense physical exercise because we know that muscles can actually take up sugar independent of insulin, but they don't do it if they're full. So you've got to burn out the sugar or the glycogen from the muscle within intense physical activity and then we know that you can actually replenish that faster with some type of juice, but for the average person out there, I'll just go out on a line saying anything other than a little bit of green juice for the average person may not be good for their sugar and their cancer risk.
DAR: I think that’s exactly what I would say too, and I think the whole thing about making sure that you're testing your own blood sugars, whether you've got prediabetes or not, you need to know how different foods affect your blood sugar. Perfect. I think one of the other things is one of the things that I hear all the time is that a cancer cell has more receptors for sugar than a normal cell. Can you speak to that a little bit?
DR BOB: Yeah, so the cells need a door. They need a door, a gate to let the sugar in, and so our normal cells are going to have those gates which are mostly regulated by insulin. Interestingly enough, muscle cells don't need insulin to get sugar in it, but cancer cells literally will increase the amount of doors, the amount of receptors that they let sugar in dramatically more than the normal cells of our body. So when people are getting too much sugar, our normal cells will not take in as much sugar, making more of it available to the cancer cell, which will eat and thrive off of it. And just to make one thing that sometimes will hit home, one of the biggest medical tests for cancer is what they call a PET scan. And they literally put radioactive sugar into your body and then they put your body under a scanner and the cells that take it up are those that have cancer. And now they know that some cancer cells can take up 50 times more sugar than the average cell. 30 to 50 times is the general consensus now. It's not a little bit more. It's a lot more.
DAR: That's amazing. Amazing. We, we just love having you on the show. Anytime that you're free, let us know.
DR BOB: Well, we're kindred souls. I just took a few moments to go through and look and see all the incredible value that you're adding to the world. And it's clear why you have such a great track record of success. You're connecting with people in a way they get the message and empowering them to succeed.
DAR: It's our passion. Thanks, Dr Bob, we love it. It was great having you.
MARCIE: It is our goal at Nutritional Weight & Wellness is to help each and every person experience better health through eating real food. It's a simple, yet powerful message. Eating real food is life changing. Thank you for listening, everybody. Have a happy new year.
