The ketogenic diet was developed in the 1920s as a cure for epilepsy, but when epilepsy medications hit the market, the diet was entirely forgotten. Thomas Seyfried remembers that 35 years ago at Yale University, the challenge was to do something about epilepsy. At that time, it was a prime area of research in neurology. From mapping epilepsy genes, he studied ketogenic diets and how lowering blood sugar and elevating ketones could help manage epilepsy and even cancer.
For years, there has been resistance towards metabolic therapy as it's not a standard of care. However, Thomas is optimistic that this will shift soon due to an increasing body of scientific evidence and testimony from patients who have survived the treatment. He goes into great detail about how the ketogenic diet aids in the management of epilepsy, how metabolic therapies function, and why the diet and lifestyle of today are the cause of the prevalence of cancer. It seems like he squeezed a semester's worth of lessons into this jam-packed episode. You might find yourself wanting to sign up for his class as well.
Quick Guide:
00:59 Introduction
02:03 Getting into the study of epilepsy
11:53 What happens when you saturate your body with fats
20:17 The knowledge transfer and moving the field forward
25:02 How metastasis happens
30:33 Metabolic therapies will soon be the standard of care for managing cancer
37:24 The downstream effect of altered metabolism
44:11 The need to keep the mitochondria healthy
49:32 The protocols and the benefits of metabolic therapy
Get to know our guest:
Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D., is a professor at Boston College and has worked on various research on how metabolic therapy can manage epilepsy and cancer.
“If I develop the drug in my lab that can do what metabolic therapy can do, oh, you'd say you cure cancer. Yeah, this is the best thing in the world. They would be just running over each other to get this drug. But it can happen. But it's not happening from a drug. It's happening from an entire physiological change. And the body is a healing machine. The body can heal itself if you give it the opportunity, don't stand in the way of the body's ability to heal.”
Connect with him:
Website: https://tomseyfried.com/
BC profile: https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/biology/people/f
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
The ketogenic diet was developed in the 1920s as a cure for epilepsy, but when epilepsy medications hit the market, the diet was entirely forgotten. Thomas Seyfried remembers that 35 years ago at Yale University, the challenge was to do something about epilepsy. At that time, it was a prime area of research in neurology. From mapping epilepsy genes, he studied ketogenic diets and how lowering blood sugar and elevating ketones could help manage epilepsy and even cancer.
For years, there has been resistance towards metabolic therapy as it's not a standard of care. However, Thomas is optimistic that this will shift soon due to an increasing body of scientific evidence and testimony from patients who have survived the treatment. He goes into great detail about how the ketogenic diet aids in the management of epilepsy, how metabolic therapies function, and why the diet and lifestyle of today are the cause of the prevalence of cancer. It seems like he squeezed a semester's worth of lessons into this jam-packed episode. You might find yourself wanting to sign up for his class as well.
Quick Guide:
00:59 Introduction
02:03 Getting into the study of epilepsy
11:53 What happens when you saturate your body with fats
20:17 The knowledge transfer and moving the field forward
25:02 How metastasis happens
30:33 Metabolic therapies will soon be the standard of care for managing cancer
37:24 The downstream effect of altered metabolism
44:11 The need to keep the mitochondria healthy
49:32 The protocols and the benefits of metabolic therapy
Get to know our guest:
Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D., is a professor at Boston College and has worked on various research on how metabolic therapy can manage epilepsy and cancer.
“If I develop the drug in my lab that can do what metabolic therapy can do, oh, you'd say you cure cancer. Yeah, this is the best thing in the world. They would be just running over each other to get this drug. But it can happen. But it's not happening from a drug. It's happening from an entire physiological change. And the body is a healing machine. The body can heal itself if you give it the opportunity, don't stand in the way of the body's ability to heal.”
Connect with him:
Website: https://tomseyfried.com/
BC profile: https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/biology/people/f
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
S3E10 Thomas Seyfried
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cancer, people, epilepsy, glucose, macrophages, metabolic therapy, eat, ketogenic diet, mouse, cancer cells, fasting, cells, glioblastoma, patients, fat, metabolic, managed, disease, human, papers
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Jack Heald, Dr. Philip Ovadia, Thomas Seyfried
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:20
Welcome back, this is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm co-host, Jack Heald, and I am absolutely thrilled today with this guest you've landed for us, Phil. Give us a brief introduction about why Dr. Seyfried is here, and we'll just get this conversation going.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 00:59
Sure thing. We are really honored today to be joined by Dr. Thomas Seyfried. Dr. Seyfried is a professor in the Biology Department at Boston College, and really has been at the forefront of research for metabolic diseases for almost 40 years now. So, really excited to hear what Dr. Seyfried can share with us. His career in his research has increasingly focused on cancer as a metabolic disease. He has a definitive textbook on the subject, written about 10 years ago, on cancer as a metabolic disease. So welcome, Professor Seyfried, and if you wouldn't mind starting just with a little bit more background as to how you got interested in metabolic diseases and kind of where that has led you to today.
Thomas Seyfried 02:03
Well, thank you very much. It's great to have the opportunity to share with you some of my ideas on cancer metabolism, and the metabolic underpinnings for a variety of different situations. Well, when I was at Yale University 35 years ago, I guess, epilepsy was the prime area of research in the neurology, the Clinical Department of Neurology. And folks said, if you want to hang around, you better do something with epilepsy. So, we had been studying gangliosides, glycosphingolipids in the brains of mice. And I had also recognized that there were a lot of mouse models of epilepsy. So, this fit dovetailed wonderfully into the idea at that time that there might be genes that could control epileptic seizures, and we could use mice as models for this. So, we were mapping epilepsy genes. We did a number of studies on this, published many, many papers with Gil Glasser, who was the chairman of the Neurology Department at that time. And I did a lot of that and biochemistry of gangliosides, related to epilepsy, related to brain development. And I took that entire project with me when I took the faculty position at Boston College in ‘85. And we built a big program here, mapping epilepsy genes and looking at glycolipids and things like this. But it turned out that even though you were mapping these epilepsy genes, published papers in science and wherever. Everybody liked bringing everything down to the molecular level, but it wasn't helping anybody in the clinic. And then one of my students said to me, “Hey, there's a big interest in ketogenic diets for managing epilepsy.” Well, when I was at Yale, I saw that potential. I wrote an internal grant to the medical school to study ketogenic diet and epilepsy. And they turned it down. There's nobody's interested in this. This is like, okay, so not having that much background, I just said, “Okay, well, they don't care about that.” Then one of my students, when I came to BC, they said, oh, Jim Abrahams who started the Charlie Foundation, he was a movie producer, he made the airplane movies, they were kind of comedies and things. And Jim's son, Charlie, had a profound epilepsy and found out that they brought him to Johns Hopkins, and pretty much cured him of... He was almost dead from epileptic seizures. And at Johns Hopkins, they managed his seizure quite well. And Jim says, What the hell's going on here? And then they made the movie with his friend, Meryl Streep, “First, Do No Harm.” So, this kind of kindled a lot of interest, mainly because of Jim's notarized celebrity, I guess you could say. And the next thing you know, he's pushing this, like, why don't we know more about this ketogenic diet for epilepsy? So, my student went out there, Mariana Tran. And she came back and said, Whoa. I sent the student out there, because I felt that people aren't going to be interested in keto, then all of a sudden, Jim Abrahams, like, sparked this whole field. And then we got into it. So, we had all these epilepsy models here, some of the best there is. And I started putting them on ketogenic diets, calorie restriction and keto. And all of a sudden, the seizures are managed. And it was interesting, because...
Jack Heald 05:48
I wanna pause. Explain what “managed” means.
Thomas Seyfried 05:53
That seizures would go away. Okay, the management was the animal stop seizing. Okay. Now, the interesting thing is that it didn't make any difference what their genetic problem was. Like, oh, this mouse could have this genetic problem, the other mouse could have another genetic. But when you put them on the ketogenic diet, it seemed like it didn't make any difference. And then the kids in the clinic, all these kids have epilepsy for a broad range of reasons. And John Freeman, at that time, told me who has since passed away, he was the guru at the Neurology Department at Johns Hopkins, and he was telling me, he said, “Tom, we don't understand how you can take kids that have epilepsy from a bang on the head, kid gets a viral infection, some kid has an inherited thing, and you put them on this diet, and all of a sudden you get management.” So, and then I said, “What's the mechanism?” And they said, “Well, I don't know, it has something to do with ketones.” And so, I said, “What about glucose?” So, we did ketogenic diets with and without calorie restriction. And we found that if you did calorie restriction in the mouse in like water-only fasting. Well, Wilder in 1921, who developed the ketogenic diet at Mayo Clinic, said that, whoa, if you take epileptic patients, any of them and put them on a fasting water-only diet, the seizures would go away. So, what the hell was that? So then Wilder said, when you starve people, blood sugar goes down, and the body starts mobilizing fats for these water-soluble ketone bodies. So, he thought that it had something to do with elevation of ketone bodies. So, that's where it was kind of in the 1920s. And then all of a sudden, these epilepsy drugs came on the market, and ketogenic diet went out the window. So, nobody was really talking about it. And in the 1970s, when I was at Yale, I kind of like, “I looked into this, and I say, it's kind of interesting. Nobody's interested in that stuff anymore.” So, Jim Abrahams, the movie guy, with his son, Charlie, rekindled this whole ketogenic thing. And there was only one little group at Johns Hopkins that was putzing around, and that little group saved Charlie's life. They made the movie, “First, Do No Harm,” and all of a sudden, everything exploded in the epilepsy field. So, we were doing all this cancer stuff because I was looking at gangliosides in brain cancer, a lot of cancers and gangliosides or glycosphingolipids. And we have a strong dynamic reputation in glycosphingolipids biochemistry, that’s where I got my PhD at the University of Illinois in glyco lipid biochemistry. So, we’re looking at...
Jack Heald 08:44
“Glyco lipid?” That's sugar fat?
Thomas Seyfried 08:49
Yes. So, gangliosides are famous, mainly for Tay Sachs disease. Okay? There's a disease that affects the mostly Jewish folks, Ashkenazi Jewish population. The disease was recognized in the 1800s. And it affects mostly Ashkenazi Jews. And it causes an accumulation of these gangliosides in the brain, leading to profound mental deterioration and death. But we also were looking at these same molecules for asking, what the hell do they do? They're loaded in your brain, and we're trying to figure out what they do. So, my research was focused on that. But in looking at cancer with gangliosides, we found all kinds of abnormalities and gangliosides and brain cancer, you have to realize a research project is not a straight route. There's branches, things excite you for a few years, you lose interest, but there's a continuum of branching off like a main route. So, we were looking at gangliosides in the brains of epileptic patients as well. Epileptic mice, we were looking at them for a lot of reasons to figure about what they might do, and we were looking at them in epilepsy. And then the next thing you know, my student comes back and says, “hey, what about this ketogenic diet? It’s unbelievable.” So, I said, let's put them on the mice that we had on ketogenic diets, but we did a calorie restricted ketogenic diet and calorie restriction. And then I published this big paper, saying that I think the effective ketogenic diet works by lowering blood sugar and elevating ketones at the same time. So, I thought it was the dual purpose of lowering glucose because why John Freeman at Yale, at Johns Hopkins, told me said, Tom, we can have kids managed for weeks and weeks, managing their seizures on a ketogenic diet, no breakthroughs, beautiful management, these were kids that would have two or three seizures a day. And now they haven't had any for months. And all they do is take one little taste of the sugar, orange juice or a coke or a bite of a cake. And within minutes, they're exploding back into an epileptic seizure. So, I said, whoa, so and glucose is spiked. Glucose becomes spiked. And even that was some child on the Connecticut shoreline who has managed for almost a year. And the parents called John Freeman up in a panic. Joey just had a massive epileptic seizure. From what? So, when we looked into it, John did, it turned out that he was in the sun, and they took suntan lotion that had a glucose base to it. And the glucose went through this in and blew us big seizure on this guy, this little kid who had been managed for a week, months. So, we realized then that glucose can completely inactivate a ketogenic diet real quick.
Jack Heald 11:48
I'm staggered.
Thomas Seyfried 11:53
Yeah, no, we were all staggered. So, we didn't realize how fast you could fall out of the management by just elevating glucose just a little bit. So, the question was at elevated ketones, was it the reduced glucose or were some combination of these? And to this day, the field of epilepsy, and many of my colleagues are still struggling to find the mechanism by which a ketogenic diet, or low glucose or therapeutic fasting or all these kinds of things, can manage seizures. The cancer issue becomes far more clear and understandable than the epilepsy thing. So, when my student came back and told me about this, yeah, we started showing, and then Freeman told me, he said, every now and then, you get a kid who likes the fat. You have to take the ketogenic diet, it was like all kinds of triglyceride oils, and all this kind of stuff. And most kids hated, they’re crying, screaming, the parents sometimes have to put a food tube in because the kid doesn't want to eat the stuff, but his seizures are nicely managed. And then Freeman tells me, he said, he says, Tom, one out of 1000 kids, for some reason, loves to eat the oil, and take as much of it in his body as he can. And he said, those kids never have seizure management. He says, if they like the diet, you don't get managed from it, it's the kids who don't want to eat. It's like a calorie restriction. So, it's the calorie restriction, you don't eat much when somebody's giving you a lot of fat, so you don't eat much. All of a sudden, your seizures are managed. And these kids that love to eat all the fat, they would get seizures. And what we found is we gave the mice all the fat they wanted, and we couldn't stop their seizures nor can we stop their cancer. So, it turns out when you eat too much fat, you get insulin insensitivity and you maintain high blood sugar levels. I mean, the body responds to all these different things. You just got to know. This is, I'm telling you in a nutshell, decades, and decades of research that we have done published papers and looked into all this stuff. So, I know. I'm gonna build it as well.
Jack Heald 14:01
I want to drill down into something that I didn't understand that you just said, if you get too much fat, you get into a state of insulin insensitivity? That’s completely contrary to my understanding of how that mechanism works. Expand on it.
Thomas Seyfried 14:21
Well, you're overwhelming and you're overwhelming the body with so much energy and fat. In other words, your fasting and ketogenic diets should always be in a restricted state. So, we naturally get into ketosis by not eating, so water-only fasting, and that's why Wilder built the ketogenic diet in the first place. Because people can only do water-only fasting for a short period of time before you'd go into starvation, which is a pathological condition. So, therapeutic fasting or fasting is healthy. Starvation is pathological. So, Wilder said, is there a way we can keep the benefits of fasting longer? And he said, why don't we get a diet that has all fats and very little carbohydrates and minimal protein, and then we can keep the epileptic patient in a stable condition for a longer period of time. But if you eat too much fat, you get too much energy, and then you can't push the blood sugar into the tissues, insulin becomes elevated, and you get this insulin insensitivity. So, the key to the ketogenic diet is to represent therapeutic fasting, not over eating massive amounts of fat. So, people say, oh, man...
Jack Heald 15:40
This is deep stuff; this is really good. I just, I want to repeat it so that it sinks in. What you don't know, and this is part of the reason I'm so excited, I've had four epileptic seizures out of nowhere in the last three months. So, it's very pertinent to me. So, an excess of fat, when you go into ketosis, your body's burning fat for energy. However, an excess is providing so much energy that the cells which would, the mechanism by which we would ordinarily absorb insulin, where we make use of insulin in our cells to get sugar from the blood into the cells becomes desensitized. And as a result of that, even though we're not ingesting too much sugar, because of this triggered responsive in excess of energy from ketones, our blood sugar goes up. Am I getting that right?
Thomas Seyfried 16:58
Yeah, well, here's the situation, you're having a lot of medium-chain triglycerides. Okay, well, that's a glycerol backbone. So, two glycerol molecules can be conjugated into a single glucose molecule. So, what you have is an overabundance of glycerol backbones, and the process of gluconeogenesis is pumping out a lot of glucose from the liver. At the same time, you're saturating your body full of fat. And that creates, so, when you look at the blood work of a mouse, pounding down massive amounts of fat, you'd say this mouse should have cardiovascular disease, this mouse should be the most unhealthy thing on the planet. And that's what you see, if you're looking at a blood profile and a mouse that's eating ketogenic diet, uninhibited, and he likes it, like the kid that would not get benefit from epilepsy, their blood work looks like crap, it's terrible. So, you have to... Now here's the situation, you got to be very careful, you have to know the difference between different species, the human being, the basal metabolic rate, how we how we burn calories over a period of time in a state of rest is seven times slower than that of a mouse, or a mouse is seven times faster than that of a human, we have an internal regulatory system about eating fat. If we a little too much fat, we send a signal that the hormone cholecystokinin is triggered, which impacts the 10th cranial nerve, which shuts down the appetite center. So, when you eat a little too much fat, humans, I haven't enough, I've had enough, I don't want any more. The mouse... Cholecystokinin in the mouse doesn't work as well as it does in human. So, the mouse could possibly, because they're eating 20% of their body weight a day, so you have to be careful. A 40% calorie restriction in the mouse is the same as a human water-only fasting. So, 24 hours of a 40% calorie restriction in a mouse is like one week of water-only fasting in a human. So, we have to balance what we see in the mouse with what we see in the human. And then we mesh the physiological changes together to come up to a better understanding of how humans are going to respond to these diet manipulations that we do in the mouse. So, you really have to have a greater understanding of both mouse physiology and human physiology so that you can blend, you can make predictions from preclinical studies into the human based on knowing the differences in basal metabolic rate. Now, I learned a lot about this from George Cahill and Richard Veatch. These are our giants in the field of energy metabolism. Veatch was Hans Krebs’s last graduate student of the Krebs Cycle, the TCA Cycle. Veatch himself was a member of the National Academy. He was a big, a giant in the field of understanding. So, he was a good friend of mine, he passed away two years ago. And then George Cahill, the guy who studied starvation. The man was the leading expert in the world on human starvation. So, both of these guys
Thomas Seyfried 20:17
were friends who would come to my office and I would visit them and we would talk for hours about human physiology, ketogenic diets, fasting, starvation and all this kind of stuff. So, I had the luxury of discussing my ideas and learning from two giants in the field, who themselves have created the field. So, I always go to the experts and the guys who... And eventually then you become the expert, only because the knowledge transfer from one expert to the other, and then you absorb what they know. And then you move the field forward yourself. So, my platform was based on the knowledge base of giants in the field of energy, metabolism, brain, all this kind of stuff. So, we started to think what's the difference between man and mouse for this epilepsy managing seizures. A lot of my good close friends are all in the epilepsy field, the Charlie Foundation exploded now as a source of managing epilepsy with metabolic approaches. So, once I moved my research to the sight well of calorie restriction works so good on an epilepsy, what does it do to cancer? And Peyton Rous, can you believe this, he got the Nobel Prize back for his work on calorie restriction in mice with cancer. He showed that calorie restriction reduced angiogenesis, inflammation, all kinds of stuff. And I said, whoa, so what's the mechanism of action of how calorie restriction and ketogenic diets would manage cancer? Like what's going on now? So, I deviated. I turned the direction of the program, away from epilepsy to the cancer problem. So, Linden Nibbling, a nursing student at Case Western Reserve, published the paper in 1995. She took three little kids with inoperable brain cancer, or brain cancer that was operated on that didn't get it all out. And these kids were brutalized radiation and chemo and she put them on a ketogenic diet. And both of the kids that she published, one of them was so brain damaged that they had to have special education, the other person got well, and they all thought that these little kids were going to be dead. They gave her to her because they were considered hopeless cases. And she rescued both kids with the ketogenic diet. And in that article, she said, Otto Warburg, years ago, said that these tumor cells need a lot of glucose. So, one of the ways you can manage cancer, you should be able to reduce the fuel that's driving the cancer. And I've always heard of Warburg, everybody does, in off conversations and things like this. And then I said, Who's this guy? I mean, what did he really, really do? And this was like around 1999, maybe 2000. I started to look into what the hell Warburg was all about. And then I started looking in more and more. And we were seeing really good results on calorie restriction and restricted ketogenic diets for tumors. And I was looking at gangliosides and all this kind of stuff. And then I said, What the hell, man? So, I started looking deeply into what Warburg did, read all of his papers, had the German papers translated into English. And then I said... He started in the 20s on this. And he received the Nobel Prize in 1931 for his discovery of cytochrome c, the key enzyme necessary for oxidative phosphorylation, generating energy through OXPHOS. He never received the Nobel Prize for his work on cancer. He had been nominated. But the Hitler, during the war years, said no German could receive Nobel Prize. Sam Apple did a nice book recently called “Ravenous,” on the history of Otto Warburg. So anyway, I I'm looking at the, I'm switching from epilepsy to cancer, biochemistry, back and forth and back and forth. A lot of students coming through, we develop the best animal models, preclinical models for cancer, we define what the nature of the metastatic cell was. We know how metastasis works. Now we know what drives...
Jack Heald 24:51
Real quickly. Describe how metastasis actually works. We're talking to a layman here?
Thomas Seyfried 25:02
Yeah. Well, and I apologize for flipping from one concept to another without... Because I offer a whole semester classes on these kinds of things. And we're here on a short discussion. And I appreciate you stopping. What we found is that the metastatic cancer cell shares characteristics with an immune cell in our body called the macrophage, it's part of the immune system. They're called macrophage means big eater. And macrophages are designed to protect our body, and to facilitate wound healing. So, if we get a cut, or a lesion, these monocytes, immature macrophages come out of the bloodstream, harm a home right into the damage, they kill bacteria. And they help heal the wound together with the fibroblasts and the micro environment, make a scar, clean up the mess, and then they move back into local lymph nodes and hang out until the body is sure that this damage is healed. So, they have a natural ability to enter and exit tissues. They exist in the bloodstream. And when something goes wrong, in a particular tissue, that monocytes will come out of the bloodstream, go right through the tissue, and work together with another group of mac that called resident macrophages. And every organ in our body has these residents. They're like the local police department. And if there's a local tiny, like some cell up and dies, this thing here will take the cart away as carcass and a little kind of an insult. We have the local police department, which are resident macrophages in all tissues to handle a problem. And if the problem gets out of hand, then the militia that are in your bloodstream, the monocytes come in to help the local guys clean up the mess. So, these macrophages come from the bone marrow, and they go into the bloodstream. And then they recycled the ones the police department retires periodically, and they replace new policemen with all the old guys. So, you have liver macrophages called Cooper cells, you get alveolar macs in the liver, in the lung, and you've got microglia in the brain. These are all the local guys. So, what we discovered was that all the metastatic cancers that humans have, breast cancer, colon cancer, they all have these characteristics of macrophages. So, if you're looking at a brain cancer, a colon cancer, or breast cancer, and you'll look at the cells, they're all like card carrying macrophages. So, I said, what the hell's going on with this? And they're the only cell in the body that's genetically programmed to enter and exit tissues. So, what you do is you get a metabolic corruption of the mitochondria in one of these macrophages, and it becomes the neoplastic cancer cell. So, now you have other cancer cells that grow like crazy, but they can't spread. So, these are called stem cell cancers. So, a lot of people study, they grow rapidly. But they can't leave the local area there. They don't have the genetic apparatus to exit and enter the bloodstream. However, when you have a tumor, it's composed of all these different kinds of cells. It's just not stem cell proliferation. It's this metastatic macrophage proliferation. So, people say, oh, cancer cells, they inhibit the immune system, well, they are the damn immune system, wake up people. So, and a lot of people don't want to accept that, because they're locked into thinking about other things. So, we have clearly defined what the origin of metastatic cancer is.
Jack Heald 28:52
Okay, I want to make sure I understand. What you're saying is that a macrophage has gone bad is what a cancer is.
Thomas Seyfried 29:04
Yeah, we call them rogue macrophages.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 29:09
Hijacking the immune system to kind of work against us, and this kind of leads into an interesting fundamental discussion around many illnesses, I mean, heart disease, cancer, all of these common illnesses that we're fighting against, these chronic illnesses, and whether they are at their root metabolic problems which would then lead one to believe that metabolic therapies and changing the way we eat would be a powerful tool against them, versus I would say the more maybe modern concept that these are more structural problems that can be treated with surgery, or that these are basically deficiencies that can be attacked with medications as opposed to these, at their root cause, just being metabolic diseases. And I think you've certainly shown that very well in animal models. And of course, there's always, as you said, the conversation about how do we, how well does that translate to us as humans? And how can we translate that into clinical practice, ultimately?
Thomas Seyfried 30:33
Well, we're doing that, because we have two arms on our program. One is the preclinical arm, which troubleshoots a lot of the things that we think will work. And then we have the clinicians that are applying that in clinics, or in small groups of people, humans will do a hell of a lot better these metabolic therapies than the mouse, because the basal metabolic rate is less, slower. So, we have a much greater time to have all of this work. In the mouse, everything is like, supercharged, accelerated. So, but humans, we can we can adjust things. And we can ask the person, how are you feeling? We can't do that to the mouse, we can know whether he looked in sick or not, but we can't get verbal feedback. But in humans, we can. And we can adjust the therapies. Like, we do that in the mouse, but we don't get the verbal feedback, we can only say the guy looks like he's healthy. But with the person, we can do a lot more. And it works. I'll get into that, because the movement to manage cancer will be a metabolic one. There's a lot of firewalls that are preventing us from moving in that direction. But my first step is to solidify the scientific basis for why metabolic therapy should become the standard of care for managing cancer. But in order to do that, you have to be on a bedrock of scientific evidence. Because if the science tells us that this is the way to go, and you're not going in that direction, then there's something else going on here. You need to know that the platform upon which our approach for managing cancer is based on hard science and evidence is accumulating to show why metabolic therapy for managing cancer will become the standard of care, it's just a matter of time. So, we're focusing primarily on brain cancer, because the situation for that type of cancer is completely abysmal. There has been no major advance in 100 years. So, in my latest paper, like we have glioblastoma, it killed Ted Kennedy, it killed John McCain, it killed President Biden's son Bo, and it killed a lot of other people. And these people are all dying within 15 months to two years. And when you go back and look at the literature, in 1926, survival for glioblastoma was eight to 14 months. In 2022, it's eight to 16 months. So, in 100 years, I mean, we've got the Webb telescope, we've got all kinds of things that have happened in technology in 100 years, and we haven't made a single advancing glioblastoma. And I said, What the hell is going on with that? This is an embarrassment. This should be an embarrassment. We have people that are willing to take their lives, they go to Oregon, and they die with dignity, rather than going through the therapy for glioblastoma. I mean, Brittany Maynard did this. She has a big article in People Magazine about her decision to die rather than go through the standard of care. I mean, this shouldn't happen in 2022. So, I wrote a paper, several papers. Why is this the case? Why have we made no major advances and when you look at the survival curve for all the patients with glioblastoma, it's like beaut, you cannot design experiments more consistent and reproducible than how fast GBM patients die after being diagnosed. And the issue is it's the treatment itself that's killing the patients. The treatment itself, can you believe this? It's the radiation and the chemo. Well, yeah, but I have shown the scientific evidence to support it. I've shown how radiating the human brain frees up massive amounts of the two fuels that drive the fermentation metabolism of the brain cancer cells. The cancer cells can't live without fermentation, which is energy without oxygen. All of us are breathing. We get our energy from the oxygen that we breathe. The cancer cells don't use oxygen, they ferment. So, and again, they're macrophages. They're really invasive ones and what are they eat? So, all you have to say is what are the cancer cells eat that keeps them alive? Because without energy, nothing can grow. And people say how do you know? Take cyanide, see how fast it died, right? Cyanide gets dead instantly, why? You stopped all energy metabolism in the body and you die. Cancer cells live in cyanide. So clearly, they don't. They're not respiring. So, Warburg showed that years ago, I mean, you could pour cyanide on a tumor and it didn't kill the tumor, kills the host, but not the tumor. So, cancer cells don't need oxygen. So, they ferment. So, when you ferment, you ferment glucose and glutamine. Those are the only two major fuels and we published evidence on this. Okay, so if they need glucose and glutamine, how do you stop them? You stop them by taking away glucose and glutamine and transitioning over to ketone bodies. They can't burn ketone bodies, because you need good oxygen metabolism to burn ketone body. So, what do we do to the cancer patient? We irradiate them. Okay. So, when you irradiate somebody's brain, you free up massive amounts of glutamine in the micro environment. And because your brain swells from the radiation, you give high dose steroids and steroids raise the blood sugar level and your blood’s like almost like a diabetic level. So, the glucose is pouring in from the bloodstream. The radiation causes blood sugar to go up anyway. And then you you're freeing up all this glutamine in the brain, and then they wonder why everybody's dead. I mean, it's so clear. And then when we took one guy, Pablo Kelly, who has a podcast and said, Pablo said, I don't want any of that crap. He said, I'll just assume take life into my own hands. So, we put him on metabolic therapies out, he's out eight years. He was considered terminal. And everybody says, Oh, he's a fluke. Yeah, okay. He's a fluke, right? Well, how many other flukes would you like to have? Because we have them coming down the pike, one after another. As I said, if you threw 100 guys, 99 guys out of an airplane with no parachute, you put a parachute on one guy, and you say, Oh, he's a fluke. He's not a fluke. You don't want to use that. You don't want to use that.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 37:24
Are two common approaches... Fine. One of the other interesting things that I think I've learned from you is that in cancer treatment, we're increasingly focused on mutations. And we have all these drugs coming out that are targeting specific mutations of certain lines of cancer cells. And I know one of the things that you have theorized and proven in a lot of ways is that these mutations are the downstream effect of the altered metabolism.
Thomas Seyfried 38:01
Yeah, they are. So, and how do we know that? Because the cancer cells produce tremendous amounts of reactive oxygen species, ROS. These are radicals. They damage DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids, in this kind of stuff. Well, they pour out of these cancer cells, and they cause the mutations. They're carcinogenic, and mutagenic. So, the damage cell respiration in time, it happens. It's a protracted event. So, the cell tries to stay alive by respiring. And that is the respiration capacity becomes lower and lower with a compensation from fermentation. Because with that, you gotta have energy. So, where's the energy coming from? In our bodies, it comes from oxidative phosphorylation to breathe, we breathe air, we exhale CO2, the oxygen in the air is giving us the energy to produce ATP. The cancer cell is getting, it gradually loses the ability to generate energy from oxygen, and acquires the ability to generate energy from fermentation, which is energy without oxygen. And...
Jack Heald 39:09
I want to underline that make sure I got this, a cancer cell, which is we've already determined is a rogue macrophage,
Thomas Seyfried 39:18
Well, that's the metastatic the metastatic one, you have a lot of stem cell cancer cells that grow like crazy, but they can't metastasize. So, they'll kill you by mass offense, but they don't spread. But in the real world, you have both kinds of cells.
Jack Heald 39:34
Okay. And the commonality of these two types is they have lost the capacity to utilize oxygen for energy production. And as an adaptive response, they instead move to fermentation.
Thomas Seyfried 39:55
Yes. And then they have to say, well, what are they fermenting? So, we went through all of the fuels that a cancer cell can ferment. It's only two, the sugar glucose and the amino acid glutamine, nothing else. So now that tells us the strategy for killing these things.
Jack Heald 40:17
I just want to make sure that I'm not mistaken here. This is common for all types of cancers.
Thomas Seyfried 40:26
Yes. Why? And I can tell you why. Because the mitochondria are defective in all types of cancers. All cancers can live without oxygen. Why? Because the mitochondria that's responsible for generating energy with oxygen is defective in all cancers. So, we go after brain cancer, only because they have nothing. There's nothing to say that, oh, we have something better. No, you don't, you don't have anything. So, all we do is show that we can take GBM patients and keep them alive far longer than what would have been expected. And people say, do you think that will work in other cancer? Of course, it will. I mean, we have Brink breast cancer, we have colon cancer, we have all these cancers, that all do the same thing. They all ferment. Now, this is this is why it's so dangerous. It's dangerous, because it's a very simple approach that can manage all major cancers, regardless of their genetic mutations, which are largely irrelevant. They're all downstream stuff. So, all this precision medicine, all these things you hear, it was all bullshit. To be perfectly honest with you. I mean, and is it working? No, we have 1600 people a day dying from cancer in the United States every day, and it's getting worse year in and year out. And then you say how many of these poor people are dying from the treatments, and a lot of them are dying from the from the treatments. So, you're saying is you're treating cancer with therapies that are not based on the solid science that underlies why the cancer is dysregulated in growth in the first place. So, and who understands this? The common guy, the layperson can understand this far better than the oncologists working at the top medical schools. I mean, it's a mind blower. I mean, you can't write a script like this, right? And then when the common guy goes into Dana Farber, MD, and says, I want metabolic therapy. That doesn't work. And besides it, we don't know about it. Oh, for crying out loud. How are you working on a disease, but you have no clue as the biological basis for the disease that you're working on. 1600 people a day dead from cancer. So, when you start to put it, it's a tragedy. Once we realize, once people understand what I'm saying and act upon it, we develop it like Dr. Claffey and all these other guys that are going to be out there. We're writing up huge protocols now. Instruction Manual, basically how to treat cancer patients with metabolic therapy. And once you start seeing everybody like Pablo Kelly coming out and saying, hey, I should have been dead. I'm getting the family here. What's going on? I didn't lose my hair. I didn't have any bleeding gums. I mean, oh, everybody say I want that, can I have that? Let me have that. Why you want to go and get your brain irradiate? This is nuts. I mean, nobody should ever have their brain irradiated. This is nuts, you don't do that to another human being. So, and that's because of the lack of knowledge. So, these guys lack knowledge. They're clueless as to the underlying mechanisms that drive into the cancer, and they create, and they're using therapies that actually make it worse. And the evidence is all in the literature, perfectly death, everybody's dying at approximately the same time. Rarely do you get any survivors, what the hell? For 45 years, we're doing these, 100 years and no progress and you continue to do the same stupid thing that you've been doing over and over again, and you're resistant to something new. You tell me the time and guide; you tell me what's wrong with this picture?
Jack Heald 43:45
I'm gonna ask you now to stop talking to me and speak directly to this audience, of people who are just interested in getting and staying healthy? Speak directly to them about what they should do, what actions they should take, based on your research, what you have proven in the lab.
Thomas Seyfried 44:11
So yeah, we have come to realize that glioblastoma and all major cancers for that matter, are the result of a chronic disruption of energy through the mitochondria. So, the focal point of cancer and health, by the way, is mitochondrial function, the function of the little organelles in ourselves that regulate the cell cycle that regulate the energy metabolism, if you can keep your mitochondria healthy, you should be able to avoid cardiovascular disease, cancer, type two diabetes, all of the different kinds of Alzheimer's disease, 40% of Alzheimer's diseases, diet, lifestyle issues. If you can keep your mitochondria healthy, you have the possibility of significantly reducing the risk for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular, you name it. This is why it is very, very dangerous about what I'm saying. Because this doesn't take, as Philip said, you don't have to treat with drugs. If you know how to keep your mitochondria healthy, you can avoid most of the stuff they're pouring on us. The problem is the diet and lifestyle that we have puts us in the path to having all these diseases. I mean, we lack exercise. I mean, we don't even have to get out of it. We don't even have to unasked the car to go in and get a hamburger. They hand it through the window. So, you can drive up and you get a doughnut or a hamburger, we don’t have to leave the car. I mean, I mean we have become so sedentary. We have we have become so filled with foods that are poorly nutritious and high in glycemic index, damaging mitochondria and putting us at risk for all of these different, what we call chronic diseases of Western civilization. So, people say well, what am I going to do go back and live like a caveman? The caveman didn't have hamburgers and frappes and jelly filled doughnuts and all this kind of stuff. They also didn't have cancer. Albert Schweitzer, the great physician humanitarian, was remarked about these African tribes have not having cancer. They have infections and other things, but they didn't have cancer. Same with the Inuits, the Eskimos, they didn't have cancer. Many of the Aboriginal peoples never had cancer was like, there wasn't even a word in the vocabulary. Now it's like, overtaking heart. And in China today, cancer has replaced heart disease as the number one killer of their population. And what is responsible for this? It's the diet and lifestyle. So, I think I'm not going to tell people don't eat jelly doughnuts and pizzas. I just would say, no, that it's okay. But every now and then you might want to do something that will give your mitochondria a break, give your digestive system a break. What do you do? You skip a couple of meals every now and then. Do more exercise. That'll reduce the risk significantly. But when you're told that cancer is a genetic disease, or you have a gene, that's all bullshit, because there's no gene that we know of that's 100% penetrant. So, gene is a risk factor for sure. Some people inherit like BRCA1, what does BRCA1 do? It damages mitochondria, but only 50% of the women that have BRCA1 really get breast cancer. What about all the ones that have the BRCA1 that don't get breast cancer, or leave from any or all of these other inherited risk fat people, oh, it must be genetic. No, it's not. The gene is just simply a risk factor, as is a chemical carcinogen, as intermittent hypoxia, as oncogenic viruses, they will attack mitochondria putting you at risk for replacing OXPHOS, respiration with fermentation. And if you can keep your brain cells healthy, in an Alzheimer's disease, you can prevent neuronal death. So again, now there are some genes that will give you Alzheimer's disease which you can't do anything about. But there's only about 5% of these people. The vast majority of people getting Alzheimer's disease from the same kinds of things that will give them cancer in obesity, type two diabetes and all this other stuff. Obesity has now moved to, instead of smoking as the number one risk factor for cancer diseases. So, you stop smoking, get fat and get cancer. So, cancer is still there, you just got to be far from smoking. Now you get it from too much fat.
Jack Heald 48:56
Now you have less fun as you get there.
Thomas Seyfried 49:00
I mean, you can't believe... I mean, when you understand the physiology and biochemistry of what's going on, it's just astonishing. And then you try to tell the medical establishment, this is what's happening and you don't know what you're talking about. Okay, so...
Jack Heald 49:12
So, talk to the person who's sitting here listening and they're brand new to this whole idea. And they've been diagnosed with some sort of cancer, or their mother or their friend or a family member. Talk to them.
Thomas Seyfried 49:32
Yeah, so in fact, I wrote it down, the great tragedy is that they hear what I say, they read my papers, they go on and hear the YouTube videos, and then they go to their oncologist. And the guy says, I never heard of this. I never heard of Otto Warburg. It must... Well, a lot of them haven't. So, and the other thing we have, we hear all the time at top medical schools, glucose has nothing to do with cancer.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 50:07
Isn’t it amazing when we use glucose to diagnose cancer, it's the foundation of the tests that we use to diagnose cancer, the PET scan, based on glucose metabolism, and yet we turn around and say, well, glucose has nothing to do with it.
Thomas Seyfried 50:25
Yeah, I can't figure it out. And then the guys that are getting irradiated, they're told to take in as much sugar as you possibly can because you won't lose weight. And I'm saying, wow, those cancer cells are fat and happy, they are loving the standard of care. What do you do? You burnout somebody, you give them all this poison, and then you pour glucose on top of it. I mean, it's like nuts. And I don't know what to do, because the cancer patients call me up and they say, my physician threw me out of the office. I said, I want to I want to metabolic therapy, and the guy gets so angry, so he goes somewhere else. So, we have a plan. We have it based on hard science. But we and there's so many physicians that are so good people they want to know about it. But they've never had the training in medical school to know about this. They're procedural. They're studied on procedures, and things written in the book, you do this way, you do that way. They're not known, they're not trained to know how to use food as medicine, or understand the metabolic origins of the very disease they're working with. So there has to be a complete retraining, or reeducation of the practitioners to know how to apply this to their patients. Why should a cancer patient come in and tell the physician I want metabolic therapy and the physician says, I never heard of it, or it doesn't work? That means it's nuts. I'm gonna give you radiation and poisonous chemicals. And no, this has to change and how long it takes to change? I don't know. So, the answer to your question, Jack, is that it's a tragedy, all these people get fired up, and they want to do metabolic therapy. And then when they go to, they need a practitioner. So that's why Dr. Claffey and others, they want the knowledge. And it's not only that. Matthew Phillips from New Zealand, and we have the group from Turkey, and we have another group, all these guys are learning real fast on how to do metabolic therapy. And we're writing up a treatment protocol as we speak. So that it will be a roadmap and a guide. So, clinicians can adapt. But then, on the other hand, if you do something that's not sanctioned by the standard of care, they could risk losing their license. So, it's the system itself that's holding this back. Okay, the system itself is not flexible, and standards of care, as I said, over and over again, it should have never been written in Granite. They should be modified when something new comes along. And one of the things that really baffles me is we have scientific evidence, surviving patients, we have all this. And yet, there's such a resistance on the part of the establishment to embrace it. If I had, if I develop the drug in my lab that can do what metabolic therapy can do, oh, you'd say you cure cancer. Yeah, this is the best thing in the world. They would be just running over each other to get this drug. But it can happen. But it's not happening from a drug. It's happening from an entire physiological change. And the body is a healing machine. The body can heal itself if you give it the opportunity, don't stand in the way of the body's ability to heal. We target cancer cells by taking away the fuel needed for their existence. And we allow the normal cells of the body to heal this situation, give the body the opportunity. Metabolic therapy does that. Radiation and chemo does not do that.
Jack Heald 54:13
But I don’t think that’s very ambiguous. That sounds pretty straightforward. I think I understand that.
Thomas Seyfried 54:18
I think most people who are not locked into the system understand that the system is preventing us from moving forward. So, I don't know.
Jack Heald 54:26
I'm trying to find the quote, and I can't remember who it was who said it, but the gist of it was, it's hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck to paycheck requires him to not understand it.
Thomas Seyfried 54:40
I thought that was Sinclair Lewis. And that's the truth. Because I had somebody tell me one time that if we did this, we'd have to close half the hospitals in the country. And I said, why? He said, well, radiation revenue brings in the most revenue for all these other things that don't make as much money. And if we stop irradiating people but we're going to have to close the hospital. I said, what about the patients, the patient doesn't have any say in this? So, it's that kind of thing. So, but that's okay. If some entrepreneur can figure out a business model for metabolic therapy, I don't really care. My care is how do we save the lives of all these patients that are dying needlessly, suffering immensely from a system that's inflexible in adapting another approach to management. And I find that most cancer patients would like this, because for the first time, they're asked to participate in their own healing process. And then we have fights between... It's tragic, I can tell you. I mean, the patient wants it. The other members of the family say, oh, no, he's nuts. The oncologist says, no, no. So, we have no cohesion between the advice of the oncologist and then we have contradictions within the family. Oh, no, go to him. They have a good reputation, referral wise. Look at why don't you look and see how many of the survivors and then if we have all these cancer survivors, people say, well, we have millions of cancer survivors. And that's true. But every almost, every one of those people has paid a significant price for that survival. They have hormonal imbalances, digestive and bowel neuropsychiatric problems. They didn't get into that scot-free. But metabolic therapy, you emerge from the treatment healthier than you were. And besides, you get rid of your diabetes, just like you get rid of a high blood pressure, your hypertension. Oh, by the way, your cancer is gone as well. Oh, this is terrible. This is like, this is dangerous. You get rid of all these chronic diseases along with your cancer. I mean, you can't have that.
Jack Heald 56:42
This is just fascinating. We had Chris Palmer on a couple of months ago. You familiar with Chris's work? He's a psychiatrist doing research. He's running the psychiatric...
Dr. Philip Ovadia 56:55
Right across town from your actual Harvard, he’s in Boston. Yeah.
Jack Heald 56:59
And he states flat out all brain dysfunction is metabolic dysfunction. And he's been treating these folks with brain disorders that were considered utterly intractable, strictly manage them. Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, I can't remember them all. But he had a patient who came to him and said, hey, Doc, I see you lost a lot of weight. Can you help me? And Chris had lost weight by getting into ketosis, metabolic and he said, Yeah, I'll help you. And all he was trying to do was help his patient lose weight. And after several weeks, in ketosis, his schizophrenia disappears.
Thomas Seyfried 57:48
Mm hmm. I agree.
Jack Heald 57:51
It all it keeps coming. It's all coming back to the same foundational, fundamental problem that, I guess has the same solution. I get all wound up here.
Thomas Seyfried 58:06
I agree, I think you're right. If we're taking in food items that are nutritionally imbalanced chemicals, all kinds of chemicals, the brain is a biochemical machine, like many other organs that are neurotransmitter synthesis and release can be disrupted by all kinds of metabolic perturbations, leading to neuro psychiatric problems, behavioral issues, hyper behavioral stuff, and a lot of it is related to imbalances. And where do those imbalances come from? They come from what we're eating. We're eating stuff now that is very, very different from the million years, 2 million years that we existed as a species, only since the Neolithic period did we start growing our own food, and in producing large amounts of glucose and then we modified with technology, how to how to maximize the glucose. Glucose is sweet. We've always wanted glucose. But if you look at the brain light up when you eat glucose, it's like a cocaine for crying out loud. I mean, so a lot of us are addicted to glucose, and how you know that? Try not eating for three days and see what happens. Or try eating a diet that has zero carb just eat fish, a few vegetables or meat or whatever, no carbs, all of a sudden, man you don't know, you're looking around. You say what the hell's going on here. Yeah, until your body realizes that it's not coming. And then you enter into this new zone, where you recognized now, you're back like we were in the Paleolithic period. But don't forget Paleolithic period for us was very dangerous. We didn't have antibiotics. You get gored by an animal or cut; you die from an infection. But they weren't dying from cancer.
Jack Heald 59:57
The problems were external to our bodies, in other words.
Thomas Seyfried 1:00:00
Yeah. So, the Paleolithic approach is just trying to get us back into that situation. The latest paper we had come out of Greece, an advanced lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer patient who had standard of care and the tumor continued to progress. My colleague, Dr. Athanasios Stoyioglou put them on a ketogenic Mediterranean diet. As long as you keep your blood sugar low, and your ketones high, you can do that with any variety of different kinds of foods. Well, this guy is out 11 years now. And he was supposed to be dead years ago, he got on and published all this stuff. This guy is eating, his blood sugar, his blood ketones. So, it doesn't have to be such a draconian type of ketogenic diet, and that's another thing they throw in your face all the time. Oh, yeah, you can do with a ketogenic diet, but nobody can do that. Because it's too harsh. And it's kind of crap. This guy is doing really well in a Mediterranean ketogenic, Pablo Kelly eats the big Tomahawk rib eyes. I mean, it's like, and so does Dr. Claffey, I guess he's the big meat guy, right, the big carnivore. So, then you get the vegan guys. So, you do the talk with all meats, the worst thing you can eat, you gotta eat vegetables all the time. But you can still get into ketosis. If you want to eat vegetables, then the other guy comes along, you gotta eat rib eyes all day long, you're gonna get into ketosis. So, I don't balance, I don't care what anything anybody eats. As long as they can get into a low glucose ketone index, we call that the cancer management index. As long as the blood sugar gets low, we published the paper on this, and you use keto Mojo, or any of these blogs. And people can take their own and know what zone they're in. And if you stay in the zone, you're not going to get any of these for the most part you're going to be... So, everybody's running around looking fit, keeping their body and the so-called glucose ketones on the index. So, we published this, and people know about it. Now they can take charge. So, you asked me what's the best way to, just measure your GKI periodically, and if you're in the zone, you're going to be healthier, mitochondria going to be healthy. If you're out of the zone, get back into the zone, but you don't stay in the zone all the time. Dominic D'Agostino, I don't know if you know Dom D'Agostino. He's a big keto guy, the Keto guru. He's always in therapeutic ketosis, and he worked out with Wayne Johnson, the movie actor, they look the same. They got these giant muscles. And they're always looking to super fit. And Dom is always in ketosis. So, he has a diet lifestyle that keeps him in a Paleolithic. Kind of state not to say everybody could do it. Dominic does. But Dominic is really very, very healthy. He's done a lot of podcasts on ketosis and all this kind of stuff. He published his papers with me, we have a good group. But yeah, so you keep your mitochondria healthy. Use the glucose ketone index, or the cancer index, we call it now, the cancer management index. You can call it the happy index; you can call it a lot of different things. But it is a quantitative marker of your blood glucose to ketones measured with a little finger prick. So, you have to, it's like what a diabetic would do. But this is telling you your path to health. So, you keep your GKI low, and then you stay in this zone, and your mitochondria gets super healthy. And if your mitochondria’s healthy, you're going to avoid all these chronic diseases. I mean, that's just the way it is. So, you have a clear path, you just have to know what to do and how to do it.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:03:38
And do you think that this is as effective as a preventative strategy as it is as a treatment strategy?
Thomas Seyfried 1:03:47
I think it's both yeah, I mean, but most people don't do prevention. I'm gonna roll the dice. I'm going to eat this and I'm going to not exercise and I'm just going to do this or that. And I'm just going to hope I don't get cancer, or diabetes, or all these other things that you can get, but now, you have the disease. What are you going to do for me? Okay, well, Virta Health also created by some people I know, Jeff Volek, Phinney, and some other guys, they're curing type two diabetes using metabolic therapy, no drugs. So, I think you can manage cancer quite effectively. Alzheimer's disease. You got to get in earlier, you got to know whether you're at risk for Alzheimer's disease. So, knowing biomarkers in the blood can sometimes put like these eight Bowie for if you're homozygous for the marker, a bowie four that puts you at risk later in life for contracting Alzheimer's disease. So, knowing that early in your life, you could then impossibly and recognize and how am I going to keep my neurons healthy. And as I said, the neurons stay healthy, as long as the mitochondria and the neurons are themselves working well, without reactive oxygen species. And that's the beauty of burning ketones, it actually reduces the amount of reactive oxygen species, thereby reducing chronic inflammatory damage. So, you're essentially delaying entropy. Entropy is disorder or the second law of thermodynamics, we're all going to die, that the thing of it is some of us die sooner than others. And what you're gonna do is just delay the inevitable. But if you can delay the inevitable at a high quality of life, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So metabolic therapy is a form of delaying entropy disorder, and maintaining a higher quality of life for a longer period of time. And if you know what to do, you are the in charge of your own destiny. So, you're in charge of your own soul on this planet, if you have the instructions of what you can do, and if people say I know what I should do, but I just can't do it. Okay. But that's your personal choice, but some people get onto this, and they say, listen, this is my new my new way of living. And that doesn't mean you can't have wine. It doesn't mean you can't have beer, or whiskey or pizza or jelly doughnuts, you just have to know that if you do that stuff all the time, it's probably going to increase entropy. And have you exit the planet little earlier than you should. But other people, if they have the knowledge and know what to do and how to do it, I find a lot of people like it, they say, whoa, now I know what to do. Let me go after it. So, this kind of knowledge is power. And it gives people an understanding of what's happening. So, their diseases are within their control. And I think that's powerful. I think that's very important.
Jack Heald 1:06:58
I love that your diseases are within your control. You don't have to go, have an expert. I could go on and on and on. I don't want to rant. Well, Dr. Seyfried, I am going to direct people to your website. I think.
Thomas Seyfried 1:07:18
I don't have a website.
Jack Heald 1:07:20
Is that not yours?
Thomas Seyfried 1:07:22
No, it should be just my biology profile on the on the Boston calm? Well, is it a website?
Jack Heald 1:07:29
Tomseyfried.com. It's got tons of stuff, your tons of blogs out there.
Thomas Seyfried 1:07:36
Is it? Is it on the University page? Or is it somewhere else?
Jack Heald 1:07:40
This particular one is not I saw the BC page as well. Yeah, I just looked at Tomseyfried.com. And that led me to various... Well. I'll send you a link too.
Thomas Seyfried 1:08:00
Send me the link, will you? I gotta make sure things are right on.
Jack Heald 1:08:03
Cancer as a mitochondrial metabolic disease, selected media, we've got your press pulse video, which I was that wouldn't believe. Okay. So...
Thomas Seyfried 1:08:18
I’ll look it up, isn’t that crazy people, I know a lot of people are doing stuff out there. I'm spending all my time in the lab doing the research. And then you might invite me and I can tell you what's going on. Yeah. So, and I think the word gets out quite, quite effectively, it kind of spreads.
Jack Heald 1:08:36
Well, that's what we're doing here. We're want to spread the word.
Thomas Seyfried 1:08:40
Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
Jack Heald 1:08:42
All right. Well, Phil. Last words?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:08:44
Yeah. Great conversation, I certainly look forward to continuing it in the future as well, and really want to thank you for all the great work that you've done over so many years, that then people like myself can actually get out to the clinic and help people. It really gives us a foundation for being able to help people in a meaningful way.
Thomas Seyfried 1:09:12
Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much. I hope this continues. And once we get our patient trials, which we're starting small groups of people, and we publish, I published the case reports with some of my colleagues. And once we have the protocols, we'll start to see far, many, many more people improving from metabolic therapy, and then it's going to be a grassfire. And everybody's going to have to adapt to it, because it will become the standard of care. It's just a matter of time. But we're happy to be pushing this forward or starting it, let's put it this way, initiating this whole concept, and I think eventually will. So... And training will have to happen to the medical schools. So, they're aware of this. So, the physicians are coming out, at least having some knowledge of what to do and how to do it. And I'm not saying we get rid of all aspects of, men, not for sure, because we need surgeons, we definitely need a non-invasive imaging of tumors, we need all that to let people know whether metabolic therapy is actually working or not. So, there's a lot of diagnostic tools that have to be continued to be part of the overall process. It's just the way the patients are being treated that needs to be modified.
Jack Heald 1:10:35
We would like them to live.
Thomas Seyfried 1:10:37
Yeah, that's the bottom line. You're absolutely right. We like to keep that high quality of life and longer survival. As I say, that's the mission. That's our goal.
Jack Heald 1:10:48
I think anybody who's dealing with cancer would probably say, yes, that's what I'm interested in. I would like to postpone the date of my exit from the planet. Very good. This has been, I just want you to know, I am so pleased, so honored that I got to sit and listen to you. I wish I could sit and I would take that that semester long class. I'm trained as a musician. I don't have the scientific background, but I find that I just am fascinated by chemistry, and to hear somebody who gets it and really Grox the whole thing be able to describe it. Oh, it's so exciting to me. So, I'm being a little bit of a fanboy here, but I don't apologize for it.
Thomas Seyfried 1:11:39
So, thank you very much. I appreciate that. I really do. Thank you.
Jack Heald 1:11:42
All right. Well, for Dr. Thomas Seyfried and Dr. Philip Ovadia, I’m Jack Heald. I want to encourage those of you who are who have been in intrigued by this conversation to go to Phil's website, ifixhearts.com and take his metabolic health quiz. It's a real fast and easy way to just kind of get a quick measurement of “where do I stand? Where am I compared to where I could be?” And then, of course, in the show notes, I'll have contact information for all of Dr. Seyfried's publications and videos. I personally have found them absolutely fascinating. I didn't get a lot of work done this morning because I was plowing through a lot of his videos. All right. I think we're done. Let's call it a wrap. We'll see y'all next time.
Thomas Seyfried 1:12:36
Okay, well, thanks so much.
Jack Heald 1:12:41
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health, reduce your risk of heart attack, and stay off Doctor Ovadia's operating table. This has been a production of 38 Adams