Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well good morning everyone. Once again. How are you? Welcome to another live here this morning. Good to have you on. Let's talk about cancer. Okay? Now for years and years and years and years and even today, I don't even know if you'll ever be able to change anyone's mind, but they've always said cancer is genetics. It's a genetic disease. And I know cancer's complicated, but I never really believed there was a genetic disease. And now they're talking about cancer is a mitochondrial disease. At the cellular level, the battery packs are damaged, the energy packs in your body are damaged, and that my friend, is what they're saying today is the cause of cancer and they're related. So for example, when you look at the mitochondria, your energy, how your body uses energy, you get from there chronic diseases.
But let me be very specific with cancer this morning. I want to do a little bit of teaching because people have asked me about this for a little while now, and I want to break it down for you. When they say, okay, when you hear of mitochondrial dysfunction, what are they talking about? What happens? What can proliferate a cancer? Okay, so let me show you here. I'm just going to go back to school and did you learn the mitochondria in grade school or high school? I can't remember. Okay, I remember mitochondria. So now I'm just showing you a picture of a cell and you see those little orange things. See the mitochondria there? Those are your battery packs. Okay? Your battery packs within the cell and research is showing now that's what gets damaged. That's where cancer starts. It starts in the mitochondria.
Now, what can damage a mitochondria? Well, we got a lot of factors. One of them is chemicals. You and I live in a toxic soup. I think we'd all agree with that. One of the things that I talk about a lot is plastic, and we ain't ever getting rid of it. You're just not going to get rid of it. It's in the environment. It's everywhere. And we're accumulating on average about a credit card and a half of plastics a week that disrupts the microbiome and it damages the mitochondria. Okay? Now, oxidative damage, free radical damage, natural part of aging to some extent, all of us are going to age. You can slow it down, but it's inevitable. Okay? I'm 73 years old and I certainly don't look like I did in my twenties. I'm sorry. It just, some people get away with it longer than others, but at the end of the day, we're all aging, right?
That's oxidative damage. Cut an apple in half. You want to watch oxidative damage right before your eyeballs. Cut an apple in half, wait and see what happens. Doesn't take long, starts to brown. Leave it on the counter for a bit and you'll see what happens to it. That is a rapid oxidation, okay? So that's a big factor in the mitochondria. Bad food, sugar, glycates. I think sugar is one of the most destructive foods. Sugar is toxic, and I believe the bad oil foods, the processed foods, cooking food in the wrong oil, I think that's very oxidative, very damaging to the mitochondria. One of the biggest things too, this is me guys, I think I'm right about this. All the pharmaceutical people don't realize that. Medicine is beautiful except it's got a double-edged sword. I've talked to you over the years at nauseum about antibiotics, the greatest discovery of the 20th century and becoming the curse of the 21st.
We live in that. Who hasn't been on antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals all have side effects to them. So we have our environment, we have food, we have aging and premature aging, we have pharmaceuticals and leaky gut, toxins getting into the bloodstream can damage the mitochondria in your cells. Okay, so mitochondrial damage. Now here's the key so that you understand this, and we're getting to understand it a lot more today. In 1928, a man by the name of Otto Warburg came out with the Warburg Effect, and what he said was, cancer is fermentation. Fermentation and sugar. He said this in 1928 and won a Nobel Prize for it. Then they just sort dismissed it. He said that cancer is a process of fermentation and sugar is fermented and tumors grow by fermentation.
Now take it a step back again now, okay, guys, just get this, that mitochondria gets damaged and then it ferments through a process of fermentation, sugar. And we talked about it I think last week in the Q and A, maybe a couple of weeks ago, I don't remember, but fermentation. And one of the byproducts is glutamine. So you have sugar and glutamine in the fermentation process, and tumors use this fermentation. So even Warberg was saying cut out sugar. And people have asked me, well, what about glutamine? Well glutamine is different. It's part of the process, but it's actually not what you're eating and I'll prove it to you in a minute because people go, well, that's an amino acid. You shouldn't be eating any meat because that's where you get glutamine. No, it's not part of that, and I'll prove it to you in a minute. Okay?
So, a tumor grows in the process of fermentation. Sugar feeds it. I can tell you right here in our hometown of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, the cancer center, if you get cancer, they tell you to take Boost or Ensure that'll only boost your cancer. They give you sugar. It's the worst thing you can do in cancer. So a tumor by the process of fermentation needs sugar to grow. And I've been telling you guys this for as long as I've had a public forum, I've talked about, if nothing else, get rid of sugar to prevent cancer and to, especially if you have cancer, don't feed cancer. Okay? So fermentation, mitochondrial dysfunction, mitochondrial damage, fermentation, don't feed it. Don't feed it sugar.
And one thing a tumor cannot survive on. One thing a tumor cannot use, and this has been known for quite a while, but you don't hear about it, is that it cannot use fat. It can't burn it as fuel. Cancer cells cannot burn ketones, okay? They can burn glucose, but they can't burn ketones. So there's a lot of new studies now on putting cancer patients into ketosis. Remember Atkins was probably the, he wasn't the first, but he was the most popular to talk about getting into ketosis. And now you're burning fat as fuel. You're not burning carbs as fuel, you're not burning sugars as fuel. Now that's mitochondrial dysfunction guys. The process of fermentation. And look, we don't know everything about cancer, but we know it needs fuel, so don't give it fuel.
And by the way, tumors, and I've taught you this in the past, tumors okay though they can't use ketones, the tumor, not the cancer cell, but once tumors grow, they'll look for fatty acids, and that's why you want to introduce DHA, because DHA is a Trojan horse for a tumor. It comes in and it destroys tumors. Okay, so what do we do, guys? What do we do? As much as possible, what do you do? First, the thing you can control is cut out sugar in your diet, get on the reset. If you want to get into ketosis, you have to eliminate carbohydrates almost to nothing. So cancer patients, some of them have done it by fasting, they get the diagnosis and they go into a 48 or 72 hour fast. I'm not against that, okay? I'm not against fasting 48 hours if you have cancer, I'm not big on that long of a fasting. I know people that eat once a day and they do very, very well.
With cancer, if you could do that, hey, give your body a lot of time without fuel, but if your're burning ketones, if your body gets into a ketotic state. Look, ketosis depends on what you're eating. If you're eating an egg, there's not a lot of carb in an egg. If you're eating meat and not a lot of carbs and meat, if you're eating dairy, there's some sugar and dairy, but not much. It's not added sugar. You're not getting carbs in butter. There's very little carb in cream. So all I'm saying is guys don't feed the bears. And by the way, a lot of people are saying that all tumors are fungal or tumors are parasites. Maybe but everything I'm telling you right now is good for that too. I mean, if you got yeast or you have a fungal, a fungus and it's part of the tumor or the makeup of a tumor, well then don't feed it. It needs sugar. Don't feed it.
So cancer cells, through the process of fermentation, you want to put your body on. Well, if I was you, I would get myself into ketosis, and if you lower your carbs, you'll be in ketosis. You can measure it. But I always tell people, look, don't worry about it. If you're eating the right food, your body's burning fat as fuel. You're not burning carbs, you're not eating carbs. It takes a few days. Your body will change fuels, and I'm really big on fuel, burn the right fuel. Okay, so what else can we do? Obviously diet, start there. So if you have anyone in the family, friends, neighbors, try and get 'em to listen to this podcast. Just some simple things that they should be doing.
Now, whether they take treatment or not. Look, I work with everyone. When I was in practice, I worked with everyone, not always, but most often. I saw patients when they already had cancer, but nonetheless, let's build the body to fight cancer. So I tried to get them. I started always, always, always on their diet. I was a food guy, change fuels. I taught them that. Change fuels, cut out sugar, cut out the crappy carbs, do the reset for 30 days. Reset is no carbohydrates for 30 days. Can you do that? Well, not everybody wanted to do it. Not everybody bought it. You come to me, I'm going to give you my opinion. I tried to explain why I was doing what I was doing. I wanted your body to become a fighting machine. I wanted to build that immune system up to turn your body on that tumor on the cancer. I said, look, do everything you can put everything on your side. Okay?
So start with food, and here's some things that I wanted them to do besides change your fuel. Vitamin D, you knew I was going to say it, but I got to say it anyway, and I used to try and get these patients to get me their vitamin D numbers, okay? We know a lot more today than I knew 25 years ago about vitamin D, even though I was a big proponent of it. I've been a proponent of the sun since the cows came home. When they told people to put sunscreen on, I was telling them to stay away from that garbage and people thought I had two heads or three. What? Well, I'm telling you, you don't put that stuff on your skin, get in the sun and get vitamin D and when you've got enough of it, cover up, cover up. You need the sun. Your immune system will not work properly to fight cancer if you don't have enough vitamin D in your system, which is measured by dehydroxy 25.
In the United States, I used to like 80 ng/ml to a hundred even. If you really want to fight cancer, you have to optimize your vitamin D in the United States 200, 250 nmo/lL, your vitamin D numbers. So I used to try and get my patients to get me vitamin D numbers because you had to optimize it. 99% of people that get cancer have low levels of vitamin D. It's as simple as that. What has that got to do with the mitochondria? A lot. Vitamin D is a protector. It's an anti-inflammatory. It is antifungal, antiparasitic. It charges up your T cells, your navy seals of your immune system, vitamin D, vitamin D, because Linus polling talked about in the seventies. He talked about vitamin C and cancer. I didn't disagree with him. I just said, Linus, you're missing out by one letter in the alphabet. You are talking about vitamin C and I'm talking about vitamin D, and you know what? I was right, and even though he won a Nobel Prize in medicine and I didn't, I was right.
It wasn't that he was wrong, it just that I was more right than him. I like vitamin C, I like coffee. The real vitamin C, and I know people get confused, Dr. Martin, there ain't no vitamin C in coffee, but there's a lot more phytonutrients in coffee than there is in vitamin C. And I'm not telling you vitamin C is no good ascorbic acid, okay? I'm just saying when it comes to cancer, there's no comparison. If you can get an intravenous vitamin C for cancer, I like that. But what I like better is vitamin D. Get in the sun and you need to supplement and it's a science and doctors are so reticent to take your vitamin D levels. It's unbelievable. They just don't get it. There shouldn't be an oncologist in world that doesn't check your vitamin D status. It should be the first thing they check, but they don't, they haven't been taught, and unless you get a cancer doctor that thinks outside the box and isn't so narrow-minded with the blinders on just to get them stretched out, vitamin D, that's for your bones, and even then they're scared skinny of it.
Man, I tell you one thing, you got to give the pharmaceutical companies, you got to give them kudos. For what? For their marketing strategy. They fooled the whole world and the doctors too, it's unbelievable how good they are at it. They've taken over the medical schools. Well, obviously pharmacists, it's unbelievable and you can hardly question them and just try and get a doctor to think outside the box. I just so appreciate when I talk to a physician that thinks outside the box. Now, this ain't easy if you have cancer, but I'm telling you, it's unreal. You should see the research on building muscle, building muscle. Muscle is so, so good at the mitochondrial level and exercise and muscle building. It is just for everything.
We talk about it all the time in metabolic syndrome, but metabolic, it means how your body burns energy and muscle is so stinking good. And they've actually shown this by the way. They do traditional treatment. They put a group in and then they put a group with diet, diet and exercise, especially muscle building to the extent a patient can do it. And it's unbelievable how well that group with the food and the exercise and not the traditional chemotherapy and radiation and what oncologists do. I remember talking to an oncologist one time about cancer and I said, well, what's the five year survival rate if you do chemo and radiation compared to just leaving it alone on this patient? He said, well, there's no difference. I said, well, why do you do it then? Why don't you just leave him alone if there's no difference? He said to me, and I'm quoting because that's what we do here. I said, well, that's not good enough. That's not a good answer. You do it because that's what you do.
If you can prove to me that diet isn't significant at all in cancer, then I'll stop talking about it. If you can prove to me that diet has no effect on cancer, I'll stop talking about it. Manage stress. Big thing. Like I've been telling you guys for years and years and years now. Cortisol, which is your stress hormone, pours gasoline on the fire. It's an accelerant. And I've always shown you the link between stress and unmanaged stress. Everybody's under stress to some extent, but I've shown him cancer and research is bearing this out. But I used to talk about this years ago. I started talking about it in chronic fatigue syndrome, 30 something years ago that stress had a major effect on cancer. I talked about that 30 years ago. Stress and breast cancer, especially the direct link and unmanaged stress.
Now, it's not easy, right? Family dynamics, financial relationships, stress. I wrote a book about it. Two Hormones that Want You Dead, serial killers, insulin and cortisol, and cortisol is on your side till it isn't, till it's out of control. And you got to try and manage your stress. One of the best ways to manage stress is to get a good night's sleep. You need to prioritize sleep because that's the body's ability. If your cortisol's high, you won't sleep. If you don't sleep, your cortisol's high and you got to prioritize sleep. Now, I'm not talking sedation. A lot of people think I got to get to sleep no matter what. Well, if you sedate yourself to sleep, a lot of people do. Millions of people do every night, they sedate themselves. In my opinion, it's the worst thing you can do because now you're not detoxing your body detoxes when you're sleeping, not sedated. And I think I was the first guy to talk about that years ago. Don't sedate yourself.
You get an operation, you get sedated. As soon as you wake up from an operation. Oh, geez, do I ever feel good? I never had such a good sleep is when I was in an operation. Now you wake up and you're dying. Well, you had surgery too, but I would tell people, I said, okay, someone punches you in the head and you get knocked out. You get knocked out, you're sedated. Nothing good is happening while you're knocked out. You're not in repair mode when you're knocked out. You're just knocked out. Okay? That's sedation guys. So manage stress. One of the low hanging fruits of managing stress is sleep. If nothing else happens in your body, try and get a good night's sleep. Okay? Prioritize that. And I realize that's not an easy thing. I'm not trying to minimize that.
The other thing is, so you prioritize your vitamin D, fix leaky gut. Fix it. Leaky gut toxins. And this is why I'm so big on fixing leaky gut. It's garbage in the bloodstream and that travels everywhere. And it is an initiator of cancer. It damages the mitochondria, fix leaky gut. And again, when I used to talk about leaky gut, go back 30 years or so. Don't listen to that quack, Dr. Martin. He's a quack. And now we know leaky gut is a real major problem in our society today. Garbage in the blood that don't belong there. Okay? Reduce alcohol. Alcohol and cancer don't go together at all. Okay? So become a tea totoler, not tea. Coffee. Drink coffee. I mean it even in cancer and drink coffee.
And you know what? Let me say something else. Cancer hates. This is in my book. Sun Steak and Steel. Cancer hates steak. It hates it. Can't live on it. Cancer hates it. So you'll hear whatever you do, cut out red meat, you'll hear it. You'll hear it if you were traveling around on social media or whatever, and you'll, oh, red meat, red meat. And some of the people that I respect the most gurus in nutrition that I respect the most, I mean it, I love them, but they're wrong. I love them though because they're smart, but they're wrong. They drink the Kool-Aid on steak and brought to you by the vegetarians and the vegans of the world, which have taken over the nutritional guidelines and even in major schools of nutrition, and they taught me even the best thing in the world that you can eat are fruits and vegetables, the best thing.
And they always use the pH Excuse because cancer needs acidity. Therefore, fruits and vegetables are alkaline. Steak is acidic. Okay? In my head I go, don't they know? Don't they know? Your body has a whole buffering system. Your body produces sodium bicarbonate to make you alkaline. It's craziness. Anyway, I could go on and on and on. Anyway, I wanted to do a little teaching this morning. Okay, now, what's tomorrow? Q and A. Is it too late to get your questions in? I don't think so. Get your questions in to info@martinclinic.com. info@martinclinic.com. We love you. Talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!