7 Foods That Support Mitochondria & Energy in Cancer Patients | Dr. Dino Prato

Ever wonder why you feel tired even after a full night's sleep?

This episode explores the vital connection between what we eat and our energy levels, especially for those undergoing cancer treatment. Dr. Prato highlights how proper nutrition and healthy food choices act as "food as medicine" to support mitochondrial health, the true "powerhouse of the cell," ultimately helping to boost energy and promote a more vibrant, healthy lifestyle.

🎯 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why mitochondria are important in cancer care
• How energy production affects recovery and resilience
• The role of diet in supporting cellular function
• 7 foods that may support mitochondrial health
• Why gut health and immunity are connected
• The impact of inflammation on energy levels
• Why consistency matters more than perfection
• How nutrition fits into a broader treatment strategy

📍 Envita Medical Centers – Scottsdale, AZ
🌐 Learn more: www.envita.com
📞 Speak with a care coordinator: 866-830-4576

“Energy at the cellular level supports resilience at the whole-body level.”

Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your licensed healthcare provider before making any medical decisions. Individual results will vary, and Envita Medical Centers does not guarantee outcomes. Some treatments discussed may not be FDA-approved or available in all locations. Testimonials are shared with patient consent and may not reflect typical results. Do not delay or disregard professional medical care based on the podcast's content. Certain treatments may be available only at Envita’s international clinic in Hermosillo, Mexico. No specific outcomes are promised or implied.
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Outcomes Disclaimer
The results referenced from Envita's Precision Cancer Care: 35-Fold Improvement in Response Rates are from a retrospective analysis of 199 late-stage cancer patients treated at Envita Medical Centers between 2021 and 2023, as published in the Journal of Cancer Therapy. These outcomes are not guaranteed and will vary based on individual factors such as cancer type, stage, genetics, immunity and prior treatments. Any comparisons to standard care or clinical trials are based on published data and internal analysis, not head-to-head studies. Individual results will vary.

You can read the full peer-reviewed study at: 

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=132493

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

When was the last time you woke up and felt steady, healthy, good, and energetic? You felt like you could push through the day, solve problems, had clear mind and thought. This is why food is important, especially if you're a cancer patient. You want to help the mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of your cell. We want to restore our mitochondrial health so we can get through the day and have more energy, feel younger and feel better overall. And sometimes the real issue isn't just motivation, but sometimes the issue is happening inside yourself through that tiny powerhouse we call the mitochondria. So, how much energy do you have? And how well is your immune system functioning? How well can you tolerate stress and treatments? And how resilient is your body to holding that remission? This is the power of the mitochondria. And so today I'm going to show you some foods that have been well published and studied, and many of you are going to know what these are. They're not a magic cure, but these are biological signals to help the terrain of our body, gut microbiome and immunity, because it's always a question I get from cancer patients. What should I eat? And you know, it's really more about what you don't eat, getting rid of the refined carbohydrates, sugars, toxins in the diet. But then it's about the quality of the food you're eating. It's not just for prevention. Yes, these things can help with prevention, but it's important while you're going through treatment so you have energy and most importantly that you have the right treatment. So before we talk about all the diet and you're going through cancer, oftentimes patients are on the wrong treatment. The patients we test when they come to our facilities looking for precision oncology, 90% of the patients are on the wrong chemo, on the wrong treatments, and they don't have the right targets. So before we get into diet, which everybody loves to spend their time on, make sure the treatments are right. Make sure using adaptive monitoring till you can see if your emission is holding. You're not just waiting and watching. And then we fix the gut microbiome, get rid of the toxins, the chemicals, heavy metals, infections, other things that might be causing the cancer, along with what I'm talking about here, getting the mitochondria healthy. So stick with me. We're going to go through this in a way that I hope is very helpful and powerful for you. I'm Dr. Dino Prado, founder of InVita Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have worked with patients who failed some of the top cancer hospitals across the country because they did not have precision targeting and they were missing the things they needed to help them. With deeper testing and targeted care, we've been able, by the grace of God, to help so many patients. Before we get started, make sure you're working with a doctor before you change anything. So why am I so focused on this mitochondria? Well, it's the powerhouse of your body. Your mitochondria can convert raw materials into usable cellular energy, ATP. So when mitochondria is functioning well, you feel younger, energetic, clarity, better recovery, less stress, better way to tolerate the treatment. And when you struggle, that's because you're fatigued, tired, run down, and you may have brain fog. You may feel like your healing is not as fast as you'd like it to be. You might have a lot of inflammation. So now this is where we want to upgrade that energy. And we can do that for the entire family because it's not just for the cancer patient. The whole family can use better energy and better mitochondrial health, not just to help us recover in cancer treatment, but also prevent it. So that's the powerhouse. We want energy. I think the most important commodity as we age is energy beyond anything. Everybody wants energy and mental clarity. So that's why we want mitochondrial support. We're not just talking about feeling better. We're talking about supporting the biology that helps your body regulate inflammation, feel younger. So let me be crystal clear. Food is not a replacement, obviously, for cancer treatment because most patients, as I've said before, are on the wrong regimens. They need to be on the right regimens. And if you're on the right treatments, you can microdose, go direct to tumor, and avoid a lot of the toxicity. But food can influence our immune system. It can change the environment in our body to help us fight cancer better and heal overall. And mitochondrial health is huge. Years ago, I remember many years ago, the talk was mitochondrial dysfunction and it's linked to cancer. And that's still a thing today. That's where the sugar diet comes from. Getting the sugar out of the diet, mitochondria works better if it doesn't have all that excess sugar. At the same time, mitochondrial dysfunction is caused by infections and then other issues like toxins that builds up in the body. So we want to get rid of the root causes, infections, chemical toxins, heavy metals. But then we want to feed the body good nutrients. We want to start with good electrolytes, not sugary products, but electrolytes, get all those multi-trace minerals in the body, get that mitochondria moving so we have the minerals in place, giving the body what it needs so the mitochondria can make that energy ATP. So think of it like this: it's like a circle that's moving energy through, almost like it's being plugged into a socket and the electricity is moving around that mitochondria. And we want to remove anything that's blocking it. We want to have those electrons moving so we have lots of energy. We want to repair, we want mitochondrial biogenesis. And that's what a lot of these foods I'm going to talk about do today. Here's a conversation that's not happening enough. We talk about remission. That's the goal for every patient. But a lot of people think remission is the finish line. They're done with treatment, they have remission, or they're feeling better. But that really isn't. It's just a new phase. Now it's time to rebuild, monitor, restore your body, bring it back to its useful energy so you can have a long and blessed life. And that goal is not just monitoring correctly, which needs to be done with adaptive monitoring so you can see leading indicators, not lagging indicators. The goal is keeping the immune system vigilant, strong, keeping the inflammation under control, getting our gut health really healthy, getting our metabolic flexibility working in our favor. These are the things that make a difference. And that's why mitochondrial health matters. That's why gut matters, because the gut is one of the biggest immune training grounds of the entire body. The gut microbiome produces the metabolites that influence immune tone, inflammation. And so by building a simple, consistent strategy with the right foods and diet can help our mitochondria, our gut, our immune balance. We can really do it all, but we have to learn how to eat. It's not about fad diets, it's about the foods that give us energy. So mitochondria food number one. I'm going to break these down for you and we'll get through them. Blueberries. And I'm talking about blueberries because they're loaded with antioxidants. They support the body's ability to handle oxidative stress. And they're relatively low in sugar. They have so much strength here to help with the mitochondria. This is a simple thing you can do every day. You could add blueberries into anything you're eating, and it doesn't have to be much. You could do a cup of frozen or fresh blueberries, add it to your yogurt. Blueberries also have respiratrol and they impact in a very healthy way to the gut microbiome. Number two, including some fatty fish. So these can be anchovies, sardines, salmon, wild caught, not farm raised with all the chemicals. They're loaded with omega-3 fatty acids. And this is so important for your cell membrane. And when the membranes function better, the mitochondria signaling works better. And so, yes, you could take fish oil here, but the cleanest way, I think, is to get some wild-caught fish into the diet. This is going to help your nutrition and your inflammatory pathways with your mitochondria. Do it for about three weeks. You'll see the difference. When you're cooking, you can use a little bit of olive oil, lemon, sea salt. I like to take some sardines or anchovies. I add a little apple cider vinegar, a little olive oil. And that is an ancient Mediterranean way of getting these healthy fats in our diets. This will make a difference. Let's move into food number three, leafy greens. We think about this for oxygen delivery. So you can sprout your own. You can take these seeds, sprout them. They're going to be the best because they're sprouted. And then you can have these microgreens all day long and have a little bit throughout your food. Here you can add legumes and lentils. We're very powerful for fighting cancer, but sprout them yourself. So they're fresh. And you can add those with a little lemon zest, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and you're starting to get this into the diet. And this will help improve that stamina, reduce that fatigue, help the clarity of the mind. Food number four, dark chocolate. Now, don't go crazy because all dark chocolate is not the same. A lot of them have heavy metals. You want a high quality dark chocolate. They're usually labeled as ceremonial cacao, and you want stuff that's really high, 80, 90%. This will support vascular health. So dark chocolate, just a little bit, a couple of squares, not milk. And we want like 80% cacao, at minimum 70, as high as 90. I like to go 100%. And I think it's fantastic. You make a hot chocolate drink with a little matcha green tea, it's gonna help that gut microbiome, give you energy. The number five food here is walnuts. Walnuts are loaded with glutathione and they help mitochondrial cleanup. Your body has a cleanup energy system. And if you don't clean up that dysfunction, your cells run worse and they're not optimized. Walnuts help with that. They help with gut metabolites, but they help with glutathione and they help the gut microbiome. They're also loaded with omega-3s and they're great for the brain. But again, these are little foods that you get at. So imagine how well walnuts go with a little bit of dark chocolate. That's a simple combination. And that's going to make a big difference. Let's move right along. Green tea or these teas that are loaded with antioxidants. They're anti-inflammatory. They're very good. So instead of coffee, I prefer this and just small amounts. You could make your own green teas and add them to all kinds of things. You could take matcha green tea and add it to dark chocolate or to other things that you're making. If you're caffeine sensitive, just start with a little bit. You don't need a lot of it. Very powerful. The seventh food is pomegranates. They're very important for the gut microbiome. You can just take them, especially when they're in season, open them up and eat them. You can put them on your salad, put them on your food. They support the gut microbiome. And all these foods are great for energy and mitochondrial health. You can do a juice shot of four ounces of pomegranate juice. These are all good things for the gut microbiome. Supplements to consider along the way here when we're talking about mitochondrial biogenesis or getting energy and replenishing your mitochondria, especially cancer patients, need lots of mitochondrial support at the core. So one of the first ones is not an actual supplement, but it's an off-label drug, methylene blue. It might be a great match for you, depending on your targets on the oncology side, but it also can be in low doses very helpful for the mitochondria. You can add vitamin C with it, and now you're pushing cytochrome C. Very powerful, very strong antioxidant. It helps that impact where cancer patients have issues with hypoxia. You really will benefit with methylene blue because it can help with oxidative phosphorylation. The next one, coenzyme Q10, very powerful for the mitochondria. Taking a high quality CoQ10, shuttling that helps your electrons, helps your mitochondrial health. Now remember, any of these things, particularly when I'm talking about antioxidants like CoQ10 and mentioning how they work well in the body, you want to, and they're antioxidants, you want to do them away from chemotherapy after the half-life because you don't want to prevent the chemotherapy from working if you're in the middle of treatment. But of course, after treatment, you should be on these every day because they're very helpful, particularly when you're looking at antioxidants and things like coenzyme Q10, which help with reactive oxygen species, the electron transport chain. Again, that energy moving through the mitochondria there. Consider it an anti-aging supplement and something that's very, very helpful for mitochondrial DNA. Another one I love is resveratrol. This is a really powerful one. And you can get some supplements in this area that are very good because resveratrol has a great impact on many cancers, but it works on the mitochondrial health. It has such a benefit in helping mitochondrial, metabolic, healthy tissue. I like resveratrol. It's very powerful in helping with ATP production. Another one is magnesium. So obviously, magnesium we know is very powerful for cancer. You can take magnesium glycinate or other forms, and these can be really good because they help your body in mitochondria calcium signaling, preventing the calcium flood that leads to premature cell death. Magnesium becomes really important in mitochondrial health. So this is the key. It's really about consistency. I've just mentioned a few things you can add to your diet: pomegranate, dark chocolate, the healthy wild-caught fish, et cetera. You know, it's all to improve your mitochondria energy and body's ability to remodel and be healthy. Give it about eight or 12 weeks of consistency and see how this impacts your energy and overall health by supercharging your mitochondria. This is relevant to every cancer patient, really, those who want to prevent cancer. But if we want to add a multiplier to this, we want to move, walk, rebounding, exercise, is one of the strongest signals for mitochondrial regeneration. If we want to add another multiply, we improve our sleep. We sleep those six and a half, seven, eight hours, particularly cancer patients. If you can do seven to eight hours of deeper sleep, helping the body rest. If you have very high cortisol, you can take a little ashwagandha here. You can do things like goji berry, golden berry. These were all help release your natural melatonin, get a little deeper sleep, help you dream, get that REM moving. That's a multiplier. And so when you know that you've done all these things and it's been about eight weeks, your energy's returning, you're feeling healthy. Pay attention to which one of those agents were the best for you. Because one of the things we like in precision oncology is to know exactly the things that makes our body feel good so we can repeat it and we can do it in a way that gives our body health and energy. That's the key. So I hope you found this episode helpful. I know that over 90% of you watching have not subscribed yet. Please subscribe to help us get precision oncology out there. And these are just some tools to give you mitochondrial health. You can also go into your AI tools like Chat GPT or Gemini or whatever you're using and go and look at mitochondrial foods that help boost your mitochondria, help your gut microbiome, help build your immune system. And you'll find a lot of these same foods that I've said. And it'll give you recipes and tools of ways to incorporate it into your own diet and lifestyle so you can have energy and health and healing and all the things that can help you restore your body's health. I hope you found this episode helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.