Cancer-Fighting Foods: What to Eat to Stay Healthy - Transcript
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. And vitamin d itself is anticancer. Lots of herbs and spices are also great. Rosemary, oregano, thyme, basil, bay leaf, garlic, parsley. Just think about it.
Your kitchen is your pharmacy. Your kitchen is your anti cancer headquarters. Okay? Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you.
If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Welcome back to another episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy and Health Bites, where we take juicy little bites into current health topics. I'm doctor Mark Hyman.
And today, we're diving into a topic that's crucial for all of us. How our diet can help prevent cancer. Cancer rates are on the rise, especially among young people, and understanding the connection between what we eat and our risk for this disease is more important than ever. We're going to explore the many root causes of cancer, including the significant role of chronic inflammation. This isn't just about big obvious triggers, but also the everyday factors, like poor diet, environmental toxins, and even stress.
But don't worry, it's not all bad news. I'll explain how you can use food as medicine to fight back against these risks. From eating a variety of colorful veggies and fiber rich whole grains, to incorporating antioxidant packed spices. We'll cover practical tasty ways to nourish your body and reduce your cancer risk. So join me as we unlock the powerful connection between diet and cancer prevention and discover how you can take control of your health with every meal.
So let's jump right in. 1st, let's talk about what drives cancer so we can better understand how we can use food as medicine to help prevent it. Now there are many root causes of cancer. Depends on the person, genetics, and everything they're exposed to throughout their lifetime. Something called we call the exposome.
But chronic inflammation is one of the most common drivers of cancer. Now this is chronic sterile inflammation, not infection. And it could be why cancer is on the rise in younger people. The development and the progression of cancer, it happens downstream of chronic low grade inflammation. So how does that work?
How does chronic inflammation drive cancer? Well, it creates a microenvironment that supports tumor development, tumor growth, and tumor progression. In other words, metastasis. Inflammatory mediators, things like cytokines, they promote DNA damage. They inhibit something called apoptosis, which is basically programmed cell death, getting rid of damaged cells.
So it stops the process of actually getting rid of all the cells that are gonna turn to cancer. It also enhances angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels that supply tumors with blood and nutrients for growth, which they need. Otherwise, they die if they have no blood supply. Inflammation prostheses can also cause changes to your DNA through something called epigenetic modifications. If you eat bad food, and junk food, and ultra processed food, you're going to be silencing something called the tumor suppressor genes, Genes that suppress cancer, or even worse, you're gonna be activating genes that cause cancer called oncogenes.
Oncology is cancer. Oncogenes are cancer causing gene. These are genetic mutations that turn on tumors, and it's caused by what we're eating. And that further promotes cancer development. Alright.
So let's back up a little bit and go into what causes chronic inflammation. So many things. 1st, living in our modern world, just being alive today is an inflammatory state. We have a constant exposure to environmental toxins, things that we never had before, like PFAS chemicals, bisphenol a or BPA, microplastics, and list goes on and on. We're gonna get into some more of those.
Poor diet, or ultra processed diet, or sedentary lifestyle, the open prescribing of drugs, just aging itself causes higher risk, leaky gut, food sensitivities, food allergies, hormone imbalances, and more. All these potentially drive inflammation. Now Hippocrates once said that all disease begins in the gut. And for the purpose of this conversation, we're gonna follow his advice and start in the gut. So how do imbalances in your gut microbiome lead to cancer?
Now this is really fascinating stuff. It's cutting edge stuff. So you're not hearing about this everywhere, but we're gonna get into it today. A healthy gut contains a whole diverse population of bugs, of microorganisms that play key roles in your digestion, in a nutrient absorption, and your immune function. Why?
Because 60% of your immune system lives in your gut. It's right underneath the lining of your gut. Why? Because you're exposed to the outside world, and it's trying to protect you from all the bad stuff inside your gut, which is poop and food. Now good gut bacteria make something called postbiotics.
You've heard of prebiotics like fiber or probiotics like lactobacillus, but there's something called postbiotics. These are molecules, metabolites of bacteria in your gut, and they can be good or bad. So they're called postbiotics, and they're made by what you're eating and feeding the bacteria in your gut. Now there's a lot of them, but some of them are really important in regulating cancer. For example, butyrate is a anticancer compound made by your microbiome when you have good bugs in there.
They also make other compounds like acetate and propionate. These are metabolized that are produced by bacterial fermentation of fiber and all the polyphenols, all those colorful compounds in veggies and fruits that supports the integrity of the gut lining. And the gut lining is so important because without a healthy gut lining, basically all that poop and food is leaking into your bloodstream and causing your immune system to go crazy. Now these metabolites, they're called short chain fatty acids. They have anticancer properties.
They regulate our immune system. They help fight inflammation. And when there's a good balance of these microorganisms, that's great. But when that balance is disrupted, it leads to an overgrowth of the bad bacteria and a reduction in the beneficial bacteria. So it's like getting weeds in your garden.
The good plants, they get crowded out by the bad weeds. Right? And bad bacteria are bad because they release poisons, toxins. We call them endotoxins. That just means an internal toxin.
And those endotoxins get into your system through a leaky gut, and they also cause a leaky gut, and they cause inflammation. And the imbalances in your gut microbiome that cause this problem is called dysbiosis. Now dysbiosis can compromise the integrity of the gut lining, it makes you have a leaky gut, and leads to something called increased intestinal permeability, and the the basic late term is leaky gut. Now basically think about your gut as one cell lining that protects you from the outside world. And the cells are stuck together like Legos.
They're they have something called tight junctions. When those are damaged, which happens because of bad gut bacteria and all our processed food and emulsifiers and additives and all this crap. You separate these cells, and and then the food and bacteria can leak in between the cells, and get into your bloodstream, and then right underneath your gut lining is your immune system. So that's why this is such a big deal. And when you have this leaky gut, it allows toxins and undigested food particles and and and pathogens, bacteria to enter the bloodstream, and your body is like, wow, this is not me.
That leads to an overactive immune system and chronic inflammation throughout the body. It affects everything, not just cancer, but everything. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, literally everything. Autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, autism, ADD, depression, the list goes on and on and on. And we're talking about cancer here.
Now the immune system responds to these foreign substances by what? By doing what it's supposed to do. It's like, this ain't me. It triggers an inflammatory response. So it's bad when you have bad bugs, and most of us have bad bugs in our gut.
So how does this standard American diet, the SAD diet, disrupt our gut microbiome? Well, it's because it's so rich in bad stuff, like ultra processed foods, which are energy dense, and they but they contain a lot of other stuff, like added sugars, sweeteners, refined grains, bad fats, toxins, actual literal toxins, chemical additives, preservatives, PFAS, phthalates, things that are just poisons that damage the gut. Now this feeds and grows the bad bacteria, and it reduces something called bacterial diversity. You want an ecosystem like a rainforest, complex, diverse, resilient. You don't want a mono crop cornfield that can go out just like that with some adversity.
And we are having a low bacterial diversity in our modern world. Now beneficial bacteria, the good ones, like bifidobacteria, lactobacilli, acromancya, bacillabacterium, and rosuberia, They're lower and you have to remember all those names, by the way. I'm just telling you because it's all the bugs that are the good ones. You can get to know them if you want. They're nice, actually, but they're lower in abundance when you have a western diet.
So when you have all these bad foods, you all the good bugs go down, and you get less of these good short chain fatty acids, less of these good anticancer compounds that your gut naturally produces. Now in in in the other hand, when you eat this processed diet, it increases the abundance of something called pro inflammatory bacteria. These like ruminococcus, proteobacteria, which produce pro inflammatory compounds called LPS. LPS stands for lipopolysaccharides, doesn't really matter. Basically, these are like poisons, and these bacteria produce these poisons, and they get into the system, they leak in, and they start creating an inflammatory response.
Now we can look at the gut in many ways, and I've seen so many stool tests. They used to call me doctor c every poop at my old job at Canyon Ranch, because I looked at every stool test. We look at a lot of different factors. We can look at levels of bacteria. We can look at levels of short chain fatty acids.
We can look at ratios of good and bad bacteria, but there's a ratio of something called Firmicutes to bacteroides. When you have a high ratio of Firmicutes to bacteroides, and these are basic categories of bacteria, it is is linked to obesity and diabetes and metabolic disease. But a high ratio has also been seen with breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and it's really important to consider as a broader picture of the overall microbial diversity and the your individual health and genetics. Now in a study that was titled intake of sugar and food source of sugar and colorectal cancer risk in the multi ethnic cohort study, blah blah blah, whatever, they're like these long names, The researchers noted that total sugar, total fructose, glucose, and fructose, and maltose, all different kinds of sugar, were associated with an increased risk for colorectal cancer, especially younger people. Now this is interesting because colorectal cancer is the number one cause of cancer death among men under 50 and the number two leading cause of cancer death in young women.
Now this isn't static. It's increasing by about 1 to 2% a year in adults under 55. There's also a strong link between type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, and risk for colorectal, hepatic, pancreatic, breast, endometrial, and lots of other cancers. Now there's something else that's really important here, which is we're all metabolically unhealthy. And there's an enormously strong link between type 2 diabetes, pre diabetes, obesity, and the risk for so many cancers that are most common cancers, like colorectal cancer, liver or hepatic cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, endometrial or uterine cancer, and many other cancers.
In fact, 48% of all cancers are attributed to obesity, but I think the the number is probably a lot higher. And obesity, if you're overweight, is associated with a 40% greater risk of early onset colorectal cancer. That's from the Journal of Gastroenterology. 45% of adults 59 and younger are obese. So a lot of people are at risk.
And studies show that diabetes significantly increases the risk of cancer, and that lots of people who have cancer have a high incidence of diabetes. Now get this, up to 80% of pancreatic cancer patients actually have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes or impaired glucose tolerance when they're diagnosed. This is a deadly cancer. It's caused by our diet. So what else do chronic diseases have in common?
Well, insulin resistance. That's what we've just been talking about, and you've heard me talk about it forever. I'm gonna keep talking about it, because it's the cause of everything, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia. So how does insulin resistance relate to cancer? Well, insulin is responsible for keeping our blood sugar balanced and stable.
Now insulin is a growth hormone. It causes your fat cells to grow. It causes your belly to grow, but it also binds to and causes cancer cells to grow. So eating a high sugar, high starch, high glycemic diet causes our cells to become resistant to the effects of insulin. And what does that do?
Well, that leads your body to produce more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. And these high levels of insulin, or what we call hyperinsulinemia, increases the production of another molecule called IGF 1, and it stands for insulin like growth factor 1. And it's a hormone that increases cell division, cell growth, and inhibits autophagy or cellular cleanup. Now, sometimes it's good, it's like Goldilocks, but when you have high levels of IGF 1 from all the sugar, it basically causes cells to continue to grow and divide, and prevents them from being killed. Okay?
Now high blood sugar is present in 39 to 99% of cancer cases. And that leads to insulin resistance, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation in the body. It also creates something called advanced glycation end products or AGES. Now glycation is a chemical reaction. You're familiar with it.
When your chicken skin is crispy, or your bread has a crust on it, or when you get that creme brulee, thing, it's got that crispy thing on top, that's called glycation. It's when sugar and proteins or other fats bind together and form this basically compound called AEGIS, or advanced glycation end products. When these, glycated products bind to DNA, they bind to proteins and lipids, it causes something called the Mallard reaction, the Browning reaction, you've seen this. But the problem is these accumulate in our tissue, and they when they bind to something called RAGEs receptors for advanced glycation end products, when they bind to those receptors, it activates a whole inflammatory cascade, and that accelerates not only, cancer, but also aging itself. And there's lots of sources of ages in our diet.
We actually eat them on a regular basis. Right? Ultra processed food is a big source. Dry, heat processing is is a one way. Baked goods, cooking at high temperatures, brown charred, fried, burnt foods, these AAGES create damage to your blood vessels, they cause oxidative stress, they reduce blood flow, they cause damage to your DNA, your tissue, to your mitochondria, they're just bad.
Now you can kind of measure this in the blood by something called hemoglobin a one c, which is essentially glycated hemoglobin. It's it's your hemoglobin, which you can measure easily in your blood and see how much sugar is bound to it, and that kinda gives you a rough idea. There's also an amazing new test called the insulin resistance score from Quest, which allows you to get a really good read on your degree of insulin resistance and how bad it is. Because hemoglobin a one c is is a late stage phenomena, and it's great that you can do this test now. And through function health, the company I cofounded to allow you access to your own lab data through, you know, just going directly to a Quest lab and getting your data.
Very simple process. You can go to functionhealth.comforward/marc to learn and sign up. But the Insulin System scores are really important because it really tells you what your risk is. Now the the test we commonly use in medicine now to look at glycation is called hemoglobin a one c. And if it's 6% or higher, it's associated with a high cancer risk in both diabetics and non diabetics.
And even a lower level may be a problem. We find that even levels down to 5 are probably optimal, but anything over 5, you're starting to increase your risk for heart disease and other things. So the cutoffs we have in medicine are arbitrary. We say 6, it's 6a half, used to be, and then 5.7, it's prediabetes, 5.5. I mean, it's it's all a moving target because, you know, we're finding that at lower and lower levels, there's a problem.
So basically, you want your hemoglobin to see as low as possible. Let's look at another big factor that causes cancer, fructose. Now fructose is something found in fruit, which is good, but it's not fruit we're talking about here. Epidemologic or population studies, which don't prove cause and effect, but they found strong associations between high fructose intake from sources like high fructose corn syrup, and increased risk of pancreatic and colon cancers. And after you realize we've never had this stuff in our food supply until the seventies.
There was no high fructose corn syrup. Now it's about 50% of our calories. It's in everything, and it's got not 50 50 fructose and glucose like sugar. It might have 55 to 75% fructose, which has all these adverse effects, and it's free fructose. Now there's something called the fructose transporter, and this is called GLUT 5.
It's not about your GLUT, it's it's called GLUT 5. And it's over expressed in cancers, like pancreatic, colorectal, breast lung cancer. Now when you have high GLUT 5 expression, it basically allows for increased in intake or uptake of fructose by cancer cells. And what does that do? That makes them grow because they they love the sugar.
It caused them to migrate and move around, meaning starting to spread, and invasion, meaning metastases. So where are we getting high fructose levels in our diet? It's not from fruit. It's from added sugars and sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and fructose as sweeteners that are in all the ultra processed food we eat. I mean, it's 60% of our diet is ultra processed food.
So fructose in high fructose corn syrup and all food ads is bad. So what else could be causing cancer that's in our sad diet? Well, food additives. Over 10,000 chemicals are allowed in the food we eat in the United States. 10,000.
And here's what's shocking, 99% of the food chemicals that have been introduced to our food supply since 2000 were approved not by the government, not by the FDA, but approved by the food and chemical companies that made them. It's like the fox guarding the hen house. Right? Since 2,756, new food chemicals have been added to our food supply through a loophole in the law called GRAS, g r a s. It stands for generally recognized as safe.
So it seems like, oh, it seems like it's safe. Well, it doesn't seem to be killing anybody right now, so let's just put in the food supply. Now this grass loophole is a big deal. Food chemical companies exploit this loophole, allowing them to make their own safety determinations for substances that they say they say are generally recognized as safe. Now the 1958 Food Additives Amendment intended for rigorous FDA review, meaning if you wanna add some new chemical to the food, the FDA has to review the science on this.
But this GRAS loophole basically has become the main approval route. You basically take the company's word for it that it's safe. How crazy is that? Right? When a company determines a substance is GRAS, it means they think it's safe among, quote, qualified experts.
So they get a bunch of experts they pay, or they say it's safe, and then they submit a notice to the FDA. But the process is entirely voluntary, and the FDA can review these notices and issue a, quote, no questions letter, but it doesn't actually approve these substances or even affirm the company's safety data. So there's all this crap in our food that got in there without any real oversight. Now due to this loophole, harmful ingredients have been added and continue to be added to our food supply. Let me give you an example.
7 carcinogenic flavor ingredients were approved as GRAS by FEMA. This is the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association. Not a government group, an industry trade group. This is a group that reviews and approves nearly all flavor ingredients. But these ingredients were later banned in 2018 after a petition by the Environmental Working Group for being linked to cancer in animals.
Now I'm on I'm on the board of the environmental working group, so I've been part of this. I get it. It's really bad. Now food additives are commonly used to enhance the flavor of baked goods, ice cream, candy, chewing gum, beverages, all kinds of stuff. And they got weird chemical names, Benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, pyridines, styrene.
Do you have these in your cabinet at home that you cook with? I doubt it. Right? The term flavor is this vague label that food manufacturers use to hide chemical names from consumers. It's deliberate.
It says it's got natural flavorings, artificial flavorings, blah blah blah. You don't even know what it is. Right? A lot of other grass substances, which are not approved in other countries, include BHA, which is classified as recently anticipated to be a human carcinogen by the National Toxicology Program. Right?
BHT or butylated hydroxytoluene, when you put that in your salad, it's in everything, and that has been determined to disrupt endocrine function by causing change to thyroid, and also affects animal development and fetal development. Now BHT isn't everything. It's in cereal, chewing gum, potato chips, vegetable oil, baked goods, cakes, biscuits, crackers, pastries, everywhere, And it's banned in Europe. We're gonna get to that in a minute. There's another thing we have to think about with food, which are the toxins in food, pesticides.
So and all other toxins. So how do you avoid those? Well, avoid processed and packaged foods. All that BPA is in the plastics, in the cans, in the packaging, phthalates, the forever chemicals, PFAS, microplastics that leach into our food from packaging, from the manufacturing processes. It's in our water, in our soil, make sure you filter your water.
In fact, Consumer Reports tested food products for phthalates, which is one of these toxic chemicals, from 67 grocery stores and 18 fast food chains, and found that levels vary dramatically. Some of the worst offenders for having these chemicals were Coca Cola, Fairlife, Core Power, high protein milkshakes, SlimFast, Yoplait, Wendy's Crispy Chicken Nuggets, Chipotle, and Moe's Southwest Chicken Grill, chicken burrito, Burger King Whopper, Cheerios, and the list goes on. Now I'll put the link to the article in the show notes so you can read it yourself, but I'm not making this stuff. This is real science. Now lab testing can really help you better understand your risk.
I recommend everyone get their lab test regularly, and and that's why I cofounded and I'm the chief medical officer of Function Health. The link is, function health dot com slash marc, and you can get, access. There's 50,000 people who members, but 300,000 on the wait list. You can jump the wait list with that code, function health dot com slash marc. Now why create those to give people access to their own lab data to democratize health?
There's over a 100 plus biomarkers that are tested for just 4.99 a year, twice a year testing, and you get comprehensive testing that gives you an idea of where you're headed, with your metabolic health. For example, fasting insulin is tested in less 1% of all lab tests by your doctor, but that's really important as we've just talked about. Cardiometabolic health, which looks at your your insulin resistance through through your cholesterol test, your blood sugar, your a one c, remember the glycated hemoglobin, your white cells, your red cells, your platelets, all important in looking at cancer. Nutritional status, which plays a big role in cancer, like vitamin d, and the omega threes, the b vitamins like homocysteine, highly linked to cancer. Zinc, iron, magnesium, really important.
B 12, all these play a role in your immune system. Looking at inflammation is important. High high CRP, because you can see we were seeing 46% of the population that we're testing have a high c reactive protein. That's terrifying to me that everybody's walking around inflamed, and they don't know it. And as we've talked about, inflammation is a huge driver of cancer.
We also look for other things that cause cancer, like stress, cortisol levels, uric acids, another important marker looking at your metabolic health. Sex hormones can be linked to cancer, like estrogen and so forth. Liver enzymes to show how well you're detoxifying. Heavy metals, we can see. We're able to do other things even like PFAS chemicals, BPA, we're gonna be testing.
All these tests, we're gonna be able to show you what's going on in your body. You You also may wanna look at other tests, like a microbiome analysis. You might want genetic testing. But we do also something called the gallery test. And this is something really important to me.
The gallery cancer test, we do at function. And we've seen a tremendous amount, a surprising amount of cancer in a relatively young population. In fact, one of every 188 people that gets tested with the GALER test has a positive test. And there is less than half a percent false positives, and it picks up the cancers when they're often missed by regular treatments. A year or 2 or 3 before regular screening tests will pick them up, and they could save your life.
So personally, I think this should be done every year starting probably about 40. I'm certainly doing it. I've had kid 2 cancer deaths. My father and my sister died. So I'm I'm definitely checking mine, And and the sooner you know, the better.
There are other tests to do. We do, for example, looking at toxin load, mitochondria, test in in Germany, I use called IGL. But this is really important to know what's going on in your body, to track yourself over time, to get your data, and to to kind of clean up your life so you can dramatically reduce your risk. So as we wrap up today's episode, it's really clear the power of food goes far beyond just nutrition. By understanding the root cause of cancer and the role of chronic inflammation, we can take proactive steps to protect our health, which is really important.
And remember, making informed choices about what we eat and opting for whole nutrient dense foods and avoiding all that ultra processed crap can make a huge difference in reducing our cancer risk. So I wanna thank you for joining me on this journey on this critical link between diet and cancer prevention. And I hope today's discussion empowers you to make healthier choices and take control of your well-being. Don't forget to check out the show notes for additional resources and information, and keep tuning in for more insights into how you can take control of your health in ways that empower and rejuvenate. And thanks again for joining me, and see you next Friday for another juicy episode of Health Bites.
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Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. And vitamin d itself is anticancer. Lots of herbs and spices are also great. Rosemary, oregano, thyme, basil, bay leaf, garlic, parsley. Just think about it.
Your kitchen is your pharmacy. Your kitchen is your anti cancer headquarters. Okay? Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you.
If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Welcome back to another episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy and Health Bites, where we take juicy little bites into current health topics. I'm doctor Mark Hyman.
And today, we're diving into a topic that's crucial for all of us. How our diet can help prevent cancer. Cancer rates are on the rise, especially among young people, and understanding the connection between what we eat and our risk for this disease is more important than ever. We're going to explore the many root causes of cancer, including the significant role of chronic inflammation. This isn't just about big obvious triggers, but also the everyday factors, like poor diet, environmental toxins, and even stress.
But don't worry, it's not all bad news. I'll explain how you can use food as medicine to fight back against these risks. From eating a variety of colorful veggies and fiber rich whole grains, to incorporating antioxidant packed spices. We'll cover practical tasty ways to nourish your body and reduce your cancer risk. So join me as we unlock the powerful connection between diet and cancer prevention and discover how you can take control of your health with every meal.
So let's jump right in. 1st, let's talk about what drives cancer so we can better understand how we can use food as medicine to help prevent it. Now there are many root causes of cancer. Depends on the person, genetics, and everything they're exposed to throughout their lifetime. Something called we call the exposome.
But chronic inflammation is one of the most common drivers of cancer. Now this is chronic sterile inflammation, not infection. And it could be why cancer is on the rise in younger people. The development and the progression of cancer, it happens downstream of chronic low grade inflammation. So how does that work?
How does chronic inflammation drive cancer? Well, it creates a microenvironment that supports tumor development, tumor growth, and tumor progression. In other words, metastasis. Inflammatory mediators, things like cytokines, they promote DNA damage. They inhibit something called apoptosis, which is basically programmed cell death, getting rid of damaged cells.
So it stops the process of actually getting rid of all the cells that are gonna turn to cancer. It also enhances angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels that supply tumors with blood and nutrients for growth, which they need. Otherwise, they die if they have no blood supply. Inflammation prostheses can also cause changes to your DNA through something called epigenetic modifications. If you eat bad food, and junk food, and ultra processed food, you're going to be silencing something called the tumor suppressor genes, Genes that suppress cancer, or even worse, you're gonna be activating genes that cause cancer called oncogenes.
Oncology is cancer. Oncogenes are cancer causing gene. These are genetic mutations that turn on tumors, and it's caused by what we're eating. And that further promotes cancer development. Alright.
So let's back up a little bit and go into what causes chronic inflammation. So many things. 1st, living in our modern world, just being alive today is an inflammatory state. We have a constant exposure to environmental toxins, things that we never had before, like PFAS chemicals, bisphenol a or BPA, microplastics, and list goes on and on. We're gonna get into some more of those.
Poor diet, or ultra processed diet, or sedentary lifestyle, the open prescribing of drugs, just aging itself causes higher risk, leaky gut, food sensitivities, food allergies, hormone imbalances, and more. All these potentially drive inflammation. Now Hippocrates once said that all disease begins in the gut. And for the purpose of this conversation, we're gonna follow his advice and start in the gut. So how do imbalances in your gut microbiome lead to cancer?
Now this is really fascinating stuff. It's cutting edge stuff. So you're not hearing about this everywhere, but we're gonna get into it today. A healthy gut contains a whole diverse population of bugs, of microorganisms that play key roles in your digestion, in a nutrient absorption, and your immune function. Why?
Because 60% of your immune system lives in your gut. It's right underneath the lining of your gut. Why? Because you're exposed to the outside world, and it's trying to protect you from all the bad stuff inside your gut, which is poop and food. Now good gut bacteria make something called postbiotics.
You've heard of prebiotics like fiber or probiotics like lactobacillus, but there's something called postbiotics. These are molecules, metabolites of bacteria in your gut, and they can be good or bad. So they're called postbiotics, and they're made by what you're eating and feeding the bacteria in your gut. Now there's a lot of them, but some of them are really important in regulating cancer. For example, butyrate is a anticancer compound made by your microbiome when you have good bugs in there.
They also make other compounds like acetate and propionate. These are metabolized that are produced by bacterial fermentation of fiber and all the polyphenols, all those colorful compounds in veggies and fruits that supports the integrity of the gut lining. And the gut lining is so important because without a healthy gut lining, basically all that poop and food is leaking into your bloodstream and causing your immune system to go crazy. Now these metabolites, they're called short chain fatty acids. They have anticancer properties.
They regulate our immune system. They help fight inflammation. And when there's a good balance of these microorganisms, that's great. But when that balance is disrupted, it leads to an overgrowth of the bad bacteria and a reduction in the beneficial bacteria. So it's like getting weeds in your garden.
The good plants, they get crowded out by the bad weeds. Right? And bad bacteria are bad because they release poisons, toxins. We call them endotoxins. That just means an internal toxin.
And those endotoxins get into your system through a leaky gut, and they also cause a leaky gut, and they cause inflammation. And the imbalances in your gut microbiome that cause this problem is called dysbiosis. Now dysbiosis can compromise the integrity of the gut lining, it makes you have a leaky gut, and leads to something called increased intestinal permeability, and the the basic late term is leaky gut. Now basically think about your gut as one cell lining that protects you from the outside world. And the cells are stuck together like Legos.
They're they have something called tight junctions. When those are damaged, which happens because of bad gut bacteria and all our processed food and emulsifiers and additives and all this crap. You separate these cells, and and then the food and bacteria can leak in between the cells, and get into your bloodstream, and then right underneath your gut lining is your immune system. So that's why this is such a big deal. And when you have this leaky gut, it allows toxins and undigested food particles and and and pathogens, bacteria to enter the bloodstream, and your body is like, wow, this is not me.
That leads to an overactive immune system and chronic inflammation throughout the body. It affects everything, not just cancer, but everything. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, literally everything. Autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, autism, ADD, depression, the list goes on and on and on. And we're talking about cancer here.
Now the immune system responds to these foreign substances by what? By doing what it's supposed to do. It's like, this ain't me. It triggers an inflammatory response. So it's bad when you have bad bugs, and most of us have bad bugs in our gut.
So how does this standard American diet, the SAD diet, disrupt our gut microbiome? Well, it's because it's so rich in bad stuff, like ultra processed foods, which are energy dense, and they but they contain a lot of other stuff, like added sugars, sweeteners, refined grains, bad fats, toxins, actual literal toxins, chemical additives, preservatives, PFAS, phthalates, things that are just poisons that damage the gut. Now this feeds and grows the bad bacteria, and it reduces something called bacterial diversity. You want an ecosystem like a rainforest, complex, diverse, resilient. You don't want a mono crop cornfield that can go out just like that with some adversity.
And we are having a low bacterial diversity in our modern world. Now beneficial bacteria, the good ones, like bifidobacteria, lactobacilli, acromancya, bacillabacterium, and rosuberia, They're lower and you have to remember all those names, by the way. I'm just telling you because it's all the bugs that are the good ones. You can get to know them if you want. They're nice, actually, but they're lower in abundance when you have a western diet.
So when you have all these bad foods, you all the good bugs go down, and you get less of these good short chain fatty acids, less of these good anticancer compounds that your gut naturally produces. Now in in in the other hand, when you eat this processed diet, it increases the abundance of something called pro inflammatory bacteria. These like ruminococcus, proteobacteria, which produce pro inflammatory compounds called LPS. LPS stands for lipopolysaccharides, doesn't really matter. Basically, these are like poisons, and these bacteria produce these poisons, and they get into the system, they leak in, and they start creating an inflammatory response.
Now we can look at the gut in many ways, and I've seen so many stool tests. They used to call me doctor c every poop at my old job at Canyon Ranch, because I looked at every stool test. We look at a lot of different factors. We can look at levels of bacteria. We can look at levels of short chain fatty acids.
We can look at ratios of good and bad bacteria, but there's a ratio of something called Firmicutes to bacteroides. When you have a high ratio of Firmicutes to bacteroides, and these are basic categories of bacteria, it is is linked to obesity and diabetes and metabolic disease. But a high ratio has also been seen with breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and it's really important to consider as a broader picture of the overall microbial diversity and the your individual health and genetics. Now in a study that was titled intake of sugar and food source of sugar and colorectal cancer risk in the multi ethnic cohort study, blah blah blah, whatever, they're like these long names, The researchers noted that total sugar, total fructose, glucose, and fructose, and maltose, all different kinds of sugar, were associated with an increased risk for colorectal cancer, especially younger people. Now this is interesting because colorectal cancer is the number one cause of cancer death among men under 50 and the number two leading cause of cancer death in young women.
Now this isn't static. It's increasing by about 1 to 2% a year in adults under 55. There's also a strong link between type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, and risk for colorectal, hepatic, pancreatic, breast, endometrial, and lots of other cancers. Now there's something else that's really important here, which is we're all metabolically unhealthy. And there's an enormously strong link between type 2 diabetes, pre diabetes, obesity, and the risk for so many cancers that are most common cancers, like colorectal cancer, liver or hepatic cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, endometrial or uterine cancer, and many other cancers.
In fact, 48% of all cancers are attributed to obesity, but I think the the number is probably a lot higher. And obesity, if you're overweight, is associated with a 40% greater risk of early onset colorectal cancer. That's from the Journal of Gastroenterology. 45% of adults 59 and younger are obese. So a lot of people are at risk.
And studies show that diabetes significantly increases the risk of cancer, and that lots of people who have cancer have a high incidence of diabetes. Now get this, up to 80% of pancreatic cancer patients actually have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes or impaired glucose tolerance when they're diagnosed. This is a deadly cancer. It's caused by our diet. So what else do chronic diseases have in common?
Well, insulin resistance. That's what we've just been talking about, and you've heard me talk about it forever. I'm gonna keep talking about it, because it's the cause of everything, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia. So how does insulin resistance relate to cancer? Well, insulin is responsible for keeping our blood sugar balanced and stable.
Now insulin is a growth hormone. It causes your fat cells to grow. It causes your belly to grow, but it also binds to and causes cancer cells to grow. So eating a high sugar, high starch, high glycemic diet causes our cells to become resistant to the effects of insulin. And what does that do?
Well, that leads your body to produce more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. And these high levels of insulin, or what we call hyperinsulinemia, increases the production of another molecule called IGF 1, and it stands for insulin like growth factor 1. And it's a hormone that increases cell division, cell growth, and inhibits autophagy or cellular cleanup. Now, sometimes it's good, it's like Goldilocks, but when you have high levels of IGF 1 from all the sugar, it basically causes cells to continue to grow and divide, and prevents them from being killed. Okay?
Now high blood sugar is present in 39 to 99% of cancer cases. And that leads to insulin resistance, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation in the body. It also creates something called advanced glycation end products or AGES. Now glycation is a chemical reaction. You're familiar with it.
When your chicken skin is crispy, or your bread has a crust on it, or when you get that creme brulee, thing, it's got that crispy thing on top, that's called glycation. It's when sugar and proteins or other fats bind together and form this basically compound called AEGIS, or advanced glycation end products. When these, glycated products bind to DNA, they bind to proteins and lipids, it causes something called the Mallard reaction, the Browning reaction, you've seen this. But the problem is these accumulate in our tissue, and they when they bind to something called RAGEs receptors for advanced glycation end products, when they bind to those receptors, it activates a whole inflammatory cascade, and that accelerates not only, cancer, but also aging itself. And there's lots of sources of ages in our diet.
We actually eat them on a regular basis. Right? Ultra processed food is a big source. Dry, heat processing is is a one way. Baked goods, cooking at high temperatures, brown charred, fried, burnt foods, these AAGES create damage to your blood vessels, they cause oxidative stress, they reduce blood flow, they cause damage to your DNA, your tissue, to your mitochondria, they're just bad.
Now you can kind of measure this in the blood by something called hemoglobin a one c, which is essentially glycated hemoglobin. It's it's your hemoglobin, which you can measure easily in your blood and see how much sugar is bound to it, and that kinda gives you a rough idea. There's also an amazing new test called the insulin resistance score from Quest, which allows you to get a really good read on your degree of insulin resistance and how bad it is. Because hemoglobin a one c is is a late stage phenomena, and it's great that you can do this test now. And through function health, the company I cofounded to allow you access to your own lab data through, you know, just going directly to a Quest lab and getting your data.
Very simple process. You can go to functionhealth.comforward/marc to learn and sign up. But the Insulin System scores are really important because it really tells you what your risk is. Now the the test we commonly use in medicine now to look at glycation is called hemoglobin a one c. And if it's 6% or higher, it's associated with a high cancer risk in both diabetics and non diabetics.
And even a lower level may be a problem. We find that even levels down to 5 are probably optimal, but anything over 5, you're starting to increase your risk for heart disease and other things. So the cutoffs we have in medicine are arbitrary. We say 6, it's 6a half, used to be, and then 5.7, it's prediabetes, 5.5. I mean, it's it's all a moving target because, you know, we're finding that at lower and lower levels, there's a problem.
So basically, you want your hemoglobin to see as low as possible. Let's look at another big factor that causes cancer, fructose. Now fructose is something found in fruit, which is good, but it's not fruit we're talking about here. Epidemologic or population studies, which don't prove cause and effect, but they found strong associations between high fructose intake from sources like high fructose corn syrup, and increased risk of pancreatic and colon cancers. And after you realize we've never had this stuff in our food supply until the seventies.
There was no high fructose corn syrup. Now it's about 50% of our calories. It's in everything, and it's got not 50 50 fructose and glucose like sugar. It might have 55 to 75% fructose, which has all these adverse effects, and it's free fructose. Now there's something called the fructose transporter, and this is called GLUT 5.
It's not about your GLUT, it's it's called GLUT 5. And it's over expressed in cancers, like pancreatic, colorectal, breast lung cancer. Now when you have high GLUT 5 expression, it basically allows for increased in intake or uptake of fructose by cancer cells. And what does that do? That makes them grow because they they love the sugar.
It caused them to migrate and move around, meaning starting to spread, and invasion, meaning metastases. So where are we getting high fructose levels in our diet? It's not from fruit. It's from added sugars and sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, and fructose as sweeteners that are in all the ultra processed food we eat. I mean, it's 60% of our diet is ultra processed food.
So fructose in high fructose corn syrup and all food ads is bad. So what else could be causing cancer that's in our sad diet? Well, food additives. Over 10,000 chemicals are allowed in the food we eat in the United States. 10,000.
And here's what's shocking, 99% of the food chemicals that have been introduced to our food supply since 2000 were approved not by the government, not by the FDA, but approved by the food and chemical companies that made them. It's like the fox guarding the hen house. Right? Since 2,756, new food chemicals have been added to our food supply through a loophole in the law called GRAS, g r a s. It stands for generally recognized as safe.
So it seems like, oh, it seems like it's safe. Well, it doesn't seem to be killing anybody right now, so let's just put in the food supply. Now this grass loophole is a big deal. Food chemical companies exploit this loophole, allowing them to make their own safety determinations for substances that they say they say are generally recognized as safe. Now the 1958 Food Additives Amendment intended for rigorous FDA review, meaning if you wanna add some new chemical to the food, the FDA has to review the science on this.
But this GRAS loophole basically has become the main approval route. You basically take the company's word for it that it's safe. How crazy is that? Right? When a company determines a substance is GRAS, it means they think it's safe among, quote, qualified experts.
So they get a bunch of experts they pay, or they say it's safe, and then they submit a notice to the FDA. But the process is entirely voluntary, and the FDA can review these notices and issue a, quote, no questions letter, but it doesn't actually approve these substances or even affirm the company's safety data. So there's all this crap in our food that got in there without any real oversight. Now due to this loophole, harmful ingredients have been added and continue to be added to our food supply. Let me give you an example.
7 carcinogenic flavor ingredients were approved as GRAS by FEMA. This is the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association. Not a government group, an industry trade group. This is a group that reviews and approves nearly all flavor ingredients. But these ingredients were later banned in 2018 after a petition by the Environmental Working Group for being linked to cancer in animals.
Now I'm on I'm on the board of the environmental working group, so I've been part of this. I get it. It's really bad. Now food additives are commonly used to enhance the flavor of baked goods, ice cream, candy, chewing gum, beverages, all kinds of stuff. And they got weird chemical names, Benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, pyridines, styrene.
Do you have these in your cabinet at home that you cook with? I doubt it. Right? The term flavor is this vague label that food manufacturers use to hide chemical names from consumers. It's deliberate.
It says it's got natural flavorings, artificial flavorings, blah blah blah. You don't even know what it is. Right? A lot of other grass substances, which are not approved in other countries, include BHA, which is classified as recently anticipated to be a human carcinogen by the National Toxicology Program. Right?
BHT or butylated hydroxytoluene, when you put that in your salad, it's in everything, and that has been determined to disrupt endocrine function by causing change to thyroid, and also affects animal development and fetal development. Now BHT isn't everything. It's in cereal, chewing gum, potato chips, vegetable oil, baked goods, cakes, biscuits, crackers, pastries, everywhere, And it's banned in Europe. We're gonna get to that in a minute. There's another thing we have to think about with food, which are the toxins in food, pesticides.
So and all other toxins. So how do you avoid those? Well, avoid processed and packaged foods. All that BPA is in the plastics, in the cans, in the packaging, phthalates, the forever chemicals, PFAS, microplastics that leach into our food from packaging, from the manufacturing processes. It's in our water, in our soil, make sure you filter your water.
In fact, Consumer Reports tested food products for phthalates, which is one of these toxic chemicals, from 67 grocery stores and 18 fast food chains, and found that levels vary dramatically. Some of the worst offenders for having these chemicals were Coca Cola, Fairlife, Core Power, high protein milkshakes, SlimFast, Yoplait, Wendy's Crispy Chicken Nuggets, Chipotle, and Moe's Southwest Chicken Grill, chicken burrito, Burger King Whopper, Cheerios, and the list goes on. Now I'll put the link to the article in the show notes so you can read it yourself, but I'm not making this stuff. This is real science. Now lab testing can really help you better understand your risk.
I recommend everyone get their lab test regularly, and and that's why I cofounded and I'm the chief medical officer of Function Health. The link is, function health dot com slash marc, and you can get, access. There's 50,000 people who members, but 300,000 on the wait list. You can jump the wait list with that code, function health dot com slash marc. Now why create those to give people access to their own lab data to democratize health?
There's over a 100 plus biomarkers that are tested for just 4.99 a year, twice a year testing, and you get comprehensive testing that gives you an idea of where you're headed, with your metabolic health. For example, fasting insulin is tested in less 1% of all lab tests by your doctor, but that's really important as we've just talked about. Cardiometabolic health, which looks at your your insulin resistance through through your cholesterol test, your blood sugar, your a one c, remember the glycated hemoglobin, your white cells, your red cells, your platelets, all important in looking at cancer. Nutritional status, which plays a big role in cancer, like vitamin d, and the omega threes, the b vitamins like homocysteine, highly linked to cancer. Zinc, iron, magnesium, really important.
B 12, all these play a role in your immune system. Looking at inflammation is important. High high CRP, because you can see we were seeing 46% of the population that we're testing have a high c reactive protein. That's terrifying to me that everybody's walking around inflamed, and they don't know it. And as we've talked about, inflammation is a huge driver of cancer.
We also look for other things that cause cancer, like stress, cortisol levels, uric acids, another important marker looking at your metabolic health. Sex hormones can be linked to cancer, like estrogen and so forth. Liver enzymes to show how well you're detoxifying. Heavy metals, we can see. We're able to do other things even like PFAS chemicals, BPA, we're gonna be testing.
All these tests, we're gonna be able to show you what's going on in your body. You You also may wanna look at other tests, like a microbiome analysis. You might want genetic testing. But we do also something called the gallery test. And this is something really important to me.
The gallery cancer test, we do at function. And we've seen a tremendous amount, a surprising amount of cancer in a relatively young population. In fact, one of every 188 people that gets tested with the GALER test has a positive test. And there is less than half a percent false positives, and it picks up the cancers when they're often missed by regular treatments. A year or 2 or 3 before regular screening tests will pick them up, and they could save your life.
So personally, I think this should be done every year starting probably about 40. I'm certainly doing it. I've had kid 2 cancer deaths. My father and my sister died. So I'm I'm definitely checking mine, And and the sooner you know, the better.
There are other tests to do. We do, for example, looking at toxin load, mitochondria, test in in Germany, I use called IGL. But this is really important to know what's going on in your body, to track yourself over time, to get your data, and to to kind of clean up your life so you can dramatically reduce your risk. So as we wrap up today's episode, it's really clear the power of food goes far beyond just nutrition. By understanding the root cause of cancer and the role of chronic inflammation, we can take proactive steps to protect our health, which is really important.
And remember, making informed choices about what we eat and opting for whole nutrient dense foods and avoiding all that ultra processed crap can make a huge difference in reducing our cancer risk. So I wanna thank you for joining me on this journey on this critical link between diet and cancer prevention. And I hope today's discussion empowers you to make healthier choices and take control of your well-being. Don't forget to check out the show notes for additional resources and information, and keep tuning in for more insights into how you can take control of your health in ways that empower and rejuvenate. And thanks again for joining me, and see you next Friday for another juicy episode of Health Bites.
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