Is Cancer a Fungal Disease? Rethinking Prevention & Treatment

In this episode of Ultra Life Today, Mark Lintern expands on the Cell Suppression Theory of cancer, exploring how fungal pathogens, metabolism, immune response, and inflammation may work together to shape tumor behavior. 

The conversation dives into prevention, metabolic health, fasting, antifungals, and why supporting the body—not attacking it—may be the missing piece in cancer care. 

This episode challenges conventional thinking and reframes cancer as a managed biological environment rather than a random genetic failure.

Listen the the full episode now or watch it here: https://youtu.be/QLKett5nBGw .

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Adam Payne): Things you can do for prevention against cancer. It's up to about 60%, I think the figures were for preventing cancer. If you exercise past a certain amount, because you're literally growing your mitochondria in the body, you're enabling them to utilize oxygen to defend the cell whenever they need. They're strong, they're healthy. You're making your immune system healthy. So it really is. It's not rocket science.

0:00:32 - (Kyle Drew): All right, everybody. Welcome back to ultra life today. Ultra life today. Adam Payne is right here. My name is Kyle Drew, and we have been joined for a couple of different episodes with a new friend of ours, Mark Lintern. He is the author of the cancer resolution. The cancer resolution. And you can find his work on his website, cellsuppression.com the reason it's called that is because his. The theory that he's been working on is called the cell suppression theory of cancer.

0:01:06 - (Kyle Drew): It comes up alongside some of the other theories that he's friendly with, like the metabolic theory, popularized by Dr. Thomas Seyfried. But it really works mostly in contrast with the idea of the somatic mutation theory or the idea that, well, our DNA just breaks at random and we don't know why, and so we need to repair it that way. And it has been a riveting couple of conversations we've had, Adam. And so the place we wanted to go today, Mark, is where do we go from here?

0:01:39 - (Kyle Drew): Now that we are saying, okay, we need to be looking at a pathogen, perhaps fungi, maybe others, but let's look at fungi. And how does that affect the way that we should be thinking about cancer treatment? Give us a quick overview so that we can think through this a little bit together.

0:02:01 - (Adam Payne): Okay. So I suppose the difference really, between my theory and a number of others is this malfunction and suppression concept paradigm. Most of the theories view the fact that. Or assume that the cell has gone rogue, it's been damaged, and it's now the problem. It's now essentially a new species. It's grown out of control. It's doing whatever it wants. Where my. And that that suggests that we've got to target, We've got to attack it with drugs, and we've got to kill it.

0:02:28 - (Adam Payne): Well, my concept is that actually the cell's being suppressed by an external influence, namely a fungal pathogen. There are bacteria involved in tumors. We know that. So they could have an influence. However, the suppression model suggests that actually our cells are doing everything they can to eliminate the. The threat of this external pathogen, and that's now living intracellularly within the cells.

0:02:51 - (Adam Payne): And so our cells aren't at full. So the paradigm now shifts from attacking the cell to supporting the body, supporting the defense mechanisms, the immune system supporting the cell, supporting mitochondria. So you want to be. You want to be doing all sorts of treatments Associated with improving the holistic health of the body. Now, I think the issue is not to really rest on one particular theory. And the other thing I want to point out, when patients are.

0:03:19 - (Adam Payne): Are coming into these sort of conversations and trying to understand what else they can do to help themselves, It's a minefield. It's overwhelming, and there's a lot of contradicting information out there. But I've not heard anyone really talk in the way that I'm about to speak about theories. And that is that you can use cancer theory as a practical tool to help you decide on what treatment approach to use.

0:03:43 - (Adam Payne): One that's going to be possibly the most effective. Because we don't know what the cause of cancer is yet. None of the theories that are out have been proven effectively. But what we do have is a set of theories that can be that the accuracy of which can be measured against the hallmarks of cancer. Basically, the theory that explains more hallmarks Is technically more accurate and is more likely to have identified a key mechanism of the disease.

0:04:09 - (Adam Payne): And what we find is that my theory, on paper at the moment, explains all 10 very cohesively and very coherently. The metabolic theory explains at least seven. There are three in contention that I suggest need to be fully explained. Proponents of the metabolic theory will suggest that they explain all 10, but there are these three contentions. So that's something for people to decide for themselves Whether they think those contentions are significant or not. However, what we have here are two main theories that explain the vast majority of the hallmarks. Then you have the tissue organization field theory, which is pretty much dealing with the inflammation of the tissue, Making sure the tissue's working together effectively. So you've got to reduce inflammation, essentially, and that explains around five of the hallmarks. So that's good. So you want to take that into account. That makes sense anyway. Reduce the inflammation that gives rise to the disease in the first place.

0:05:02 - (Adam Payne): And then you have the cancer stem cell theory. And we know that stem cells play a major part in the regeneration of the tumor, Unlimited growth, and chemotherap distance. So you know, that explains around five as well. But you have the somatic mutation theory, kind of like at the bottom of the scale, which only explains two. So as a patient looking at this, I would argue what you need to be doing is going, okay, well let's have a look at these theories which are the most accurate.

0:05:31 - (Adam Payne): And why don't I target the mechanisms of theories which appear to be the most accurate at this moment in time. And really, so it's for me, it's the cancer stem cell theory, it's the tissue organization field theory, it's the metabolic theory, and it's the cell suppression theory. So that's targeting the fungus, targeting the metabolism of the cell as well as the cancer stem cells as best you can. And the terrain.

0:05:56 - (Adam Payne): Now the beauty of this is that my theory and the metabolic theory and all the other theories, they overlap in what they're targeting. So you have a lot of off label drugs, say that target the metabolism of the cell. We're trying to target all these different pathways that are alleged to be singularly driving the disease and starving the cancer of glucose and sugar and possibly glutamine.

0:06:19 - (Mark Lintern): Right.

0:06:19 - (Adam Payne): Well, when you do this metabolic approach, a ketogenic diet and what have you, what you're actually doing as well is you're undertaking an antifungal approach, antimicrobial anti pathogen approach. Because glucose is the fungal pathogen's primary fuel source. There are one or two pathogens that feed more on fat. However, it's been shown when you undertake a ketogenic diet, you actually reduce the fungal or pathogen burden within the body because you're reducing the availability, availability of the glucose that causes inflammation and also feeds those pathogens.

0:06:52 - (Adam Payne): So a metabolic approach is also antifungal. And a number of the off label drugs that are used, say metformin or statins, to target metabolic pathways in cancer. What I found is that they're also antifungal too. A secondary effect is that they're antifungal. In fact, pretty much every drug that I'm seeing showing efficacy, some sort of efficacy against cancer is antifungal. And then you've got the antifungal drugs themselves.

0:07:19 - (Adam Payne): So itraconazole and various other antifungal drugs have shown efficacy against a broad range of cancers in pre clinical studies and in a number of case studies as well against live cancers. So and the thing is with Itraconazole, for instance, it also targets metabolic pathways. So here you have two major theories that are saying target metabolic pathways. And I'm saying also you want to now consider the fungal pathogen, because it might be the fungal pathogen properties of these drugs that is actually making them effective.

0:07:49 - (Adam Payne): Regardless, either way, you choose either of These off label drugs or fungal drugs, you're also targeting the metabolism of the cell as well. So you're hitting two stones, two birds with one stone, effectively. Why would you not choo the extra additional fungal drugs or fungal. I wouldn't say fungal drugs necessarily, but natural means of targeting fungal pathogens as well, so.

0:08:11 - (Kyle Drew): Agreed. And it, it begs a question mark. If you had the authority to do so, if you were given full freedom to write your own prescriptions and to choose your own diets and to take whatever you want without authority of the state or the medical establishment, et cetera, begin with prevention. This is not going to be medical advice. This is just two friends talking about what they do or what they would do. If you were set out to prevent that skin cancer from recurring or any other cancer, what would be some of your day to day approaches that regular people would also do? Not that you're telling anybody to do it, but what about you?

0:08:57 - (Kyle Drew): What might you do?

0:08:59 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, so I'm not a clinician, so I can't give medical advice. And this is just for information only. Well, I mean eat healthily. One organic food. Reduce the amount of processed food, especially processed glucose in the body. I mean obesity is one of the highest risks for developing cancer for a reason. Reduce anything that causes inflammation. You want to be living a life where you are eating fresh, locally grown organic food as much as possible.

0:09:29 - (Adam Payne): Also meat. I'm not saying because a lot of people say just choose a vegan diet and what have you. And yes, plants are very effective because they have phytonutrients in them which can target pathogens. So we have that process that can aid the body, eliminate pathogens or target them. But we do need to eat a balanced diet as well. Meat is more bioavailable for some people. It depends on your microbiome. This is the thing. It's not a one size fits all for everybody. So you've got to really understand that you've got to keep your microbiome healthy, reduce inflammation as much as, as possible and exercise. Because exercise is one of the greatest things you can do for prevention against cancer. It's up to about 60%. I think the figures were for preventing cancer.

0:10:10 - (Adam Payne): If you exercise past a certain amount because you are literally growing your mitochondria in the body, you are enabling them to utilize oxygen to defend the cell whenever they need. They're strong, they're healthy, you are making your immune system healthy. So it really is, it's not rocket science, but things get complicated in the day to day because we're so busy and it seems so much, so easy to pick up terrible food that is processed and it's not doing us any good. You've got the wrong type of oils in there, which is causing inflammation throughout the body, and really it's reducing inflammation.

0:10:43 - (Adam Payne): Exercising, eating local and just healthy, nutritious food.

0:10:48 - (Kyle Drew): You know, one of the things about the food piece of this, and I'd like to get your opinion on it, there was a. There was a study or a paper that came out in the Journal of the American Medical association in 2002 by Dr. Ruth Etzel. And it was talking about, at least in America, the American food supply and which foods, which crops are commonly contaminated with mycotoxins. And so she was talking about peanuts and wheat and many of the grains, and in the case of corn, she said it is universally contaminated with mycotoxins.

0:11:30 - (Kyle Drew): And so some of us have also peanuts and peanut butter and all of that, and cereals and toast and all of this. And some of us have taken that information and we've said, you know what? I'd like to kind of reduce my. Mycotoxin exposure by adjusting what I'm putting in my body, not just what's feeding fungus that's already there. Do you have an opinion about that kind of thing? We talked about mycotoxins a little bit in the previous episode, but reducing the amount of mycotoxins that we're actually ingesting by making certain choices based on the foods that we choose to ingest.

0:12:11 - (Kyle Drew): Any thoughts on that?

0:12:12 - (Adam Payne): Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the problem is that, um, there aren't that many tests that are being done for identifying mycotoxins. There's only a five or six or maybe even 10 that are commonly screened for. But there was a. There was a study done that was looking at the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, right?

0:12:32 - (Kyle Drew): Yeah.

0:12:32 - (Adam Payne): And they found over 200 different toxins present in. In that blood. So the newborn baby and. And I think was over 180 were carcinogens as well as mycotoxins. So, yes, unfortunately, peanut is absolutely gorgeous and very tasty. There was. There was also a study done, I think it was in China, where they. They couldn't work out why a specific group of children were getting cancer at a high rate. And they re. They found out that it was due to them eating peanut butter because the high rate of afetoxin that is within the peanut butter. So, yes, is becoming aware of what grains and what products are actually high in mycotoxins. And the other thing I would just would like to point out as well is fasting.

0:13:22 - (Kyle Drew): Oh, boy.

0:13:23 - (Adam Payne): If you want to look at it very simplistically, the body has two states, an anabolic state and a catabolic state. And when you're consuming primarily carbohydrates, far too high, essentially, you're up regulating insulin to such a level because the body wants to get rid of the carbohydrate or the glucose in the blood. You're upregulating insulin to a certain level. And that forces the body into an anabolic state, which means we've got, we're in a period of abundance. There's loads of food, so let's store that excess glucose as fat just for when winter comes around. And we might need to, you know, rely on less food.

0:14:00 - (Adam Payne): We can then burn it. And if you're not, if you're over consuming, then you're going to be constantly in an anabolic state right. Now, the benefit of the flip side of that is when you have a catabolic state, that's when you don't consume too much too many calories, and you don't consume too many, too much glucose. Insulin drops below a certain threshold. The body starts realizing that we need to increase the amount of glucose. It breaks down that glucose from fat. That's the catabolic state.

0:14:28 - (Adam Payne): What's what happens when you get into a key ketosis? Yeah, but what, what's happening there is you imagine the two states. You have one, which is an abundance. And if the analogy is you have an environment where a financial company or that grows and grows and grows because it's in a financial situation where there's financial abundance, everyone's spending money. You accrue employees that possibly aren't as efficient as they could be.

0:14:52 - (Adam Payne): This is the same as ourselves. You have cells that are accrued and they might not be as efficient as they should be. So what happens is when you fast or when you lower that threshold and you turn into a catabolic state, the body goes, we're not eating enough food to survive, necessarily. So we need to break down the food that we've got and it makes the body more efficient. Just like when there's not enough money in the economy, you start cutting back on all those jobs that were really unnecessary.

0:15:18 - (Adam Payne): The body does that. It's called autophagy and mitophagia. And you're breaking down the unnecessary cells of the body in order to make the body more efficient. So that needs to be a process of prevention as well. Understanding that you should be fast, however long you know it's up to you. Depends on your microbiome and your health. But that's a process that needs to be recognized that is as healthy.

0:15:37 - (Kyle Drew): What do you feel is the role of actual prescription antifungals? Again, you're not a clinician, you're not giving medical advice. But again, if you had a magic wand and you could choose for yourself, where do prescription antifungals and natural antifungals come into play in your mind?

0:15:56 - (Adam Payne): I would go for natural antifungals as much as I can, as I could. But you might need that extra bit of help. The problem with antifungals is that they're kind of outdated. We haven't developed many new ones recently, and they're very toxic to our cells, so they can't be used for prolonged periods of time. The other thing is that a lot of them are fungistatic, not fungicidal, so they don't kill the pathogen. And this is where the issue comes in. A lot of people will say, oh, I've taken antifungal drug, it hasn't worked, so therefore fungi must not be driving my cancer.

0:16:26 - (Adam Payne): Well, part of the problem is the immune system needs to finish it off. When you use itraconazole, we will inhibit the fungal pathogen, but the immune system needs to come in. And one of the major problems with the tumors is you have this switch to a TH2 phenotype or an M2 phenotype as well. And that's where the immune cells have switched to a phenotype, where they're just interested in repairing the damage to cell tissue. They're not interested in attacking pathogens. You need a switch Back to the TH1 response in order to do that. So if you are going to use, say an antifungal drug, not even with an antifungal drug, you still switch the immune system Back to a TH1 response, which is where you have a mu immune phenotype that can target intracellular pathogens. And incidentally, fungi transition the immune system to a TH2 response in order to evade the immune system. That's just another correlation, you know, so it's trying to address that and possibly using medicinal mushrooms, you know, that's one of many different mistletoe, many different approaches that can be used to modulate the immune system to help the drug itself, if you get it.

0:17:28 - (Kyle Drew): What about the growing popularity of the antiparasite drugs, Fenbendazole, ivermectin, for example? At least those are the two In America that seem to be getting the most play.

0:17:41 - (Adam Payne): Yeah. So they inhibit the microtubule formation in the cell, which effectively completely inhibits the entire process of absorbing nutrients into the cell over a period of time, which would block everything off. But I certainly feel there is an aspect of parasites that are involved in facilitating cancer progression, as there are with bacteria. However, they're facilitating the process of fungal infection, which is the key driver for me.

0:18:09 - (Adam Payne): Those particular drugs are also antifungal for common fungal pathogens. So there's that link. They're inhibiting the metabolism of the cell and they're also able to target the pathogens.

0:18:22 - (Kyle Drew): I love your perspective, Adam. Do you have any thoughts before we bring this in for a landing? We've kept them for a little while.

0:18:29 - (Mark Lintern): What's fascinating to me about the fungal influence in tissues is that mostly fungus does not sit. It sits in the extracellular matrix in our bodies. It doesn't actually invade cells, except in a very rare circumstances when it's actually harvesting or trying to infiltrate highly damaged or dead tissues. It actually is found intracel. It's in the extracellular matrix that we see the hypha, which is kind of the feeding tubes of the tumor and of the fungus.

0:19:02 - (Mark Lintern): And we see this in nature too. I mean, fungus, it causes burls on trees, it farms and changes tissues that it invades. It also, it's highly astute. There's a guy named Dr. Juhevitz out of the used to be University of Oklahoma with the largest fungal lab in the country, actually harvesting fungus from the environment and looking it grows and invades and changes the environment within which it grows.

0:19:31 - (Mark Lintern): And he told me, he said, while I was sitting down, just talking about fungus. He said, fungus has so many. One fungus cell has so many different forms that it can take. It adapts, it changes, it morphs in response to the environment, the kind of nutrients it's able to gain. If it feels like it's being attacked, it responds. It actually changes its chemical nature and creates a defensive posture, which is why we have fungus that creates biofilm.

0:20:07 - (Mark Lintern): It's extremely, extremely hard to take fungus out of tissues. But there are things that I think that marry what we see with the metabolic approach to cancer. Like what, Mark, you're suggesting, you know, fasting it reduces glucose, and we can actually not only weaken the cancer cells themselves that are stuck to aerobic glycolysis and are only able to make inefficient ATP with glucose. But also, fungus is not only eating the lactic acid, but it's Also eating glucose. So if we weaken its ability to use glucose and the byproducts which it loves, lactic acids, et cetera. Boy, you know, fungus is a.

0:20:56 - (Mark Lintern): It's not just a participant in. I think it's a very adaptable organism. There are things called epigenetic factors that fungus are very adapt at producing that actually change and terraform the environment within which they exist. One of the things that Dr. Juhevitz was just rapped about was that fungus is an expert chemistry lab. It's an expert at producing chemicals that specifically change and adapt the environment around it.

0:21:34 - (Mark Lintern): And so I think we're. Mark, I think we're still at the early edge of understanding how fungus is terraforming its environment. It's not a passive participant in the cancer expression experience. It's an active instigator. The things that we're talking about, like antifungals, were still. We're still learning. And in fact, if you talk to a doctor and say, hey, how about prescribing an antifungal in the context of my cancer? They'll tell you that you're absolutely insane. Antifungal drugs are toxic to the human body.

0:22:12 - (Mark Lintern): Why would I prescribe a very toxic compound to somebody that's dealing with cancer? We need to treat the cancer, right? And so that's why antifungals have not been used extensively. I think, in the context of cancer until now, we need to take a very systematic approach to understanding. Now that we understand this approach, what are the therapeutic implications for helping somebody overcome this awful disease?

0:22:43 - (Mark Lintern): Mark, any final thoughts on this? You know, now that we've discovered this theory, and I don't call it a theory anymore, I think this is really the underlying paradigm of what's really going on in cancer. Your approach marries not just a number of things that we're seeing coming in in these papers. Not just the Narunsky 2022 cell paper, but also many other papers that are showing that the fungal biome or the fungal bacterial biome is present.

0:23:14 - (Mark Lintern): But it really answers the overall overarching paradigm, and it's compatible with the Otto Warburg metabolic approach to cancer. You know, the folks out there that are the Naysha Winters that are using the metabolic approach to cancer, they're seeing results. Because I think doing a metabolic approach actually resolves all of the fungal. Most of the fungal issues, but not all.

0:23:39 - (Kyle Drew): Well, Dr. Winters wrote the foreword, did she not? Or the introduction to your book? Mark?

0:23:45 - (Mark Lintern): No, she knows. This is all part of the whole thing. Mark, where do you Think that this leaves us, leave us with some nuggets here.

0:23:56 - (Adam Payne): In terms of the future.

0:23:58 - (Mark Lintern): Yeah. The future, yeah.

0:24:00 - (Adam Payne): Well, I think it's exciting. It's exciting in the sense that, you know, it's all. It's providing us with additional options, especially for patients. It's going to provide them with hope. It aligns with the other theories that are out there and it provides us with options in terms of where we go in testing the theory and developing new treatments. Hopefully treatments that can target both the metabolism and fungal pathogens in different ways, but also diagnostics, because we might be able to learn or identify certain cancers based on the microbiome or the tumor microbiome or whatever metabolites are being produced within the tissue. Nagalase, like I say I mentioned earlier, is one that, you know, increases with the volume of the tumor, essentially, and it's only produced within the tumor itself.

0:24:48 - (Adam Payne): So I think it is very exciting, but we just need to, it's, it's getting people to come on board is the issue, I think, because it's so novel. It just, just the self suppression side of things is novel because everyone's kind of locked in this idea that the cell's the enemy. When I'm saying it's not, it's, we've got to work with the cell because it's just hijacked by a particular pathogen.

0:25:10 - (Mark Lintern): Hijacked, that's a good word.

0:25:12 - (Adam Payne): And the other thing is, you know, the pathogen's interest in intracellular and it's in there and it's absorbing all the nutrients that are being absorbed into the cell. It's, it's sequestering the nucleotides in the cell in order to, you know, create more of itself, essentially. So the cell, because it's now the, the cell death mechanism is blocked. The cell is acting on autopilot effectively and it's, it's trying to always come back to homeostasis. So if you've got depleted purines and pyrimidines in the cell, or glucose or arginine or glutamine, the cell is now wanting to absorb these nutrients, primarily glucose and glutamine, in order to then create the nutrients to, to replenish those nutrients being absorbed by the, by the pathogen. So it's for the benefit of the pathogen to stay intracellular and survive within that environment.

0:26:02 - (Adam Payne): So it kind of explains a lot of these other things and we can target all these different mechanisms, but fundamentally it suggests that we do really need to focus on what fungal pathogens are present in the patient, possibly in their tumor, and then we have a more directed way in which we can target them.

0:26:19 - (Mark Lintern): Well, guys, the discovery of fungus and tumors doesn't replace genetics or metabolism. It really completes the picture for us. Cancer begins to look less like a random failure and more like a managed biological environment. As metabolic theory, immune suppression, and the fungal biome converge, a more complete understanding of cancer emerges. This conversation, I think, marks the beginning of that shift.

0:26:45 - (Mark Lintern): Mark, thank you for joining us. And we really appreciate all our listeners joining us today. Kyle, thank you for being with me today.

0:26:53 - (Kyle Drew): I've loved it. Thank you.

0:26:55 - (Mark Lintern): It's been a real treat. Thank you for joining us here at Ultralife today. Please join the conversation online with us. Reach out to Mark Linternell suppression.com Mark, thank you for joining us. This has been a real treat.

0:27:12 - (Adam Payne): Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Adam. It's absolute pleasure to talk to you guys. And I look forward to hopefully talking to you again in the future.

0:27:19 - (Mark Lintern): Yeah. We'll see you at Annie Appleseed.

0:27:21 - (Adam Payne): Oh, yes, you will. Yeah. Fantastic. Looking forward to it.

0:27:23 - (Mark Lintern): Yeah. Take care. Thanks, everybody. Ultralife today.