What is up my friends? If you have ever been curious about what I eat on a daily basis, the simple answer is Butcher box if I were to guess more than half of my weekly calories are from butcher box because I am fanatical about my diet and my health and because of my wife Lisa's gut issues, she might be even more invested in the healthy diet than I am. And that is saying something. And there is a huge difference is we've discovered between grass-fed and grain-fed meat, you absolutely should be eating grass fed meat. But it's
Not always easy to find and you don't want to go searching through a busy grocery store especially right now. So you should be able to get it delivered conveniently to your front door and luckily that's where butcher box comes in with butcher box. You can find 100%, grass-fed beef, free range, organic chicken Heritage breed pork and wild caught Seafood. Which I have recently become fanatical about Lisa. And I always want to ensure that we're eating the highest quality meat, which is why butcher box is our go-to
For the meat that we cook at home, but your box sources from Farmers and Fishers, who meet the highest standards for quality and it is truly an unbeatable value. When you're averaging lessons, six dollars per meal, put your box is also incredibly flexible with box options and delivery frequencies to fit your needs and you can cancel anytime. With no penalty, you can choose your box and delivery frequency. They offer five different boxes for curated box options as well as the popular custom box. So you
so you get exactly what you and your family love, but your box ships, your order Frozen for freshness and packed in an eco-friendly, 100% recyclable box. Butcher box is great, tasting meat. You can feel good about delivered, right to your doorstep with free shipping and for a limited time, new members can get a free Essentials bundle in their first box. That's three pounds of chicken breast, two pounds of pork chops, and 2 pounds of ground beef, all for free in your
Box by going to butcher box.com forward slash impact. Again, that's butcher, box.com forward slash impact to get a free Essentials bundle. All right, guys, give this one a try. I'm telling you, they are amazing. Take care and be legendary when it comes to our daily food consumption. Snacks are the enemy, my friend. So many of the items we try to snack on throughout the day are loaded with sugar and chemicals.
And when you're in the midst of a very busy day, you need to have healthier Alternatives. A great solution is a healthy snack, that our impact Theory, team is enjoying on a daily basis. Paleo valleys, grass-fed beef sticks. Some of our impact Theory team members were looking for a healthy snack during a long work day and the answer was from paleo Valley. Paleo valleys 100% grass-fed beef. Sticks are the only beef sticks in the USA made from 100% grass-fed grass-finished.
Finished beef and delicious organic spices that are naturally fermented. One of our impact Theory. Team members will snack on a Paleo beef stick throughout a busy afternoon. And so now he's moving away from the sugary snacks and paleo, valleys beef sticks were the perfect option for Aikido friendly alternative. Paleo valleys, grass-fed beef, sticks. Contain an ideal ratio of Omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, which is vital in helping control and reduce inflammation and 100% grass-fed
Fed beef from paleo Valley, beef sticks, contain more calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, phosphorus beta-carotene and iron than grass-fed beef. Paleo Valley is committed to making the highest quality clean products that are free from problematic ingredients. And if you want to try paleo valleys grass-fed beef sticks. They have a special offer exclusively for impact Theory. Listeners, visit paleo valley.com and enter code impact for 15% off.
Your first order that's paleo valley.com and enter code impact for 15 percent off your first order. All right guys take care and be
legendary
Counting calories, simply does not work at all and people will say, oh but it does, it does it does? Well, if you look at the scientific studies, it doesn't
Hey everybody,
welcome to another episode of Hell Theory. I am here with nephrologist and best-selling author. Dr. Jason Fung. Jason, thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me great to be
here, dude. I am really excited to talk to you about two things that I think are really revolutionary that I don't see anybody talking about, as well as you or maybe even at all. And that is you've really pushed for a paradigm shift in the way that we think about both.
Insulin and its role in longevity, obesity, diabetes and on and on the list goes and then this whole idea of cancer Paradigm 3.0, which I find really, really interesting. I want to start with the role of insulin in weight loss in disease. Mitigation, what is it? That was sort of that key insight for you that got you thinking about this in a different way? And how exactly is it that you think about it?
Well, it's interesting because the question of weight loss is one that has really become more and more important as we've had more and more Beast. So, over the years, we've seen more people with obesity, which has led to more people with type 2 diabetes, which has led them to get kidney disease, which is where I kind of come in, because I'm a kidney specialist, so it become a bigger and bigger part of the practice and it sort of dawned on me that eventually got through my thick skull that
Really weight loss is sort of really critical to keeping people healthy because it's sort of obvious. Like, it needs to type 2 diabetes, which is a huge risk factor, not only for kidney disease, but for heart attacks and strokes and cancer, and it's a leading, cause of blindness, and amputations, and diabetic infections, and all kinds of bad things. So almost like, you know, fifty percent of what I do is related to type 2 diabetes, and
the point was that if you can reverse your type 2 diabetes, then you're not going to get these diabetic complications and in order to do that, you need to lose weight which is why I go became very interested about 8 years ago in the question of how to lose weight and I didn't know much about it at the time but people were always, you know, what? I had learned in medical school was all about sort of calories in calories out sort of thing. But the more I looked into it one. It's a very very unsuccessful way to lose weight counting calories. See
Lee does not work at all and people will say, oh but it does, it does it does? Well, if you look at the scientific studies, it doesn't every single study. That's looked at sort of say, you know, trying to restrict calories leads to at best. A couple of pounds of weight loss over like 8 years.
So you acknowledge that, if you, if you take calories out of somebody's diet long enough, they are going to get lean regardless of anything else. So where is where
Where does that Paradigm breakdown in reality? And is it just will power. The people aren't sticking to it or is it something else?
Well, it's something else. And the point is that it's not the number of calories. It's what your body does with those calories. Because if you take a hundred calories, if you eat a cookie, for example, you take a hundred calories, your body has a decision to make. Do I store that as body fat or do? I burn it for energy and say, increase body heat generation?
For example, and that's the basal metabolic rate. That's the number of calories that your body uses in a day, so which your body does. So for that same hundred calories, you can either become fatter or you can have a bit more energy during the day and which one your body does really depends on the hormones that are associated with the foods that you're eating, and that's the real key. Because if you simply cut calories, and this is the way that, you know, I
Has taught and everybody was taught you. Simply cut the fat less fat because fat is very dense. In calories, you get less calories and therefore your body is going to lose body fat but that's not necessarily true. If you eat 500 calories, less your body could simply decide to burn 500 calories less and you won't lose any body fat. And it's not a matter of thermodynamics because that's that whole idea that it's just about, thermodynamics assumes that your
On metabolic rate remains absolutely rocks table. That is, if you're using 2,000 calories a day, today, you go on a diet, you'll still use 2,000 calories a day, but you won't, we know we've known that for at least a hundred years of basic research, that your body will actually use less fewer calories. So cutting 500 calories a day which has been the standard device is very unsuccessful because if you don't change the hormonal system in your body, the the the
In different foods contain different hormonal instructions. Your body could simply decide to burn 500 less and you will not lose body fat. So it's simply false to say. If you cut, 500 calories a day down, you will lose a pound of body fat a week. It's actually not true in any way shape, or form. Just like, if you say, well, if you make an extra hundred dollars, you know, this week that you'll be
There's richer, you might or might not be if you make $100 more and you spend a hundred dollars by going out, you're not richer same thing with your body. You you, you take 500 calories or less that day, but you burn 500 last because your metabolic rate goes down, you're not losing body fat and that's the whole point. So it's it's not the total number of calories, that's important. It's what your body does with those calories and that depends on hormones. And in fact,
Act have everything in our body runs on hormones. Those are the instructions that we give to our body as to what to do. So everything your body does or doesn't do depends on hormones. Those are the sort of mediators, do you
have any sense of why different foods have different hormonal cues? Like why is it that carbohydrates signal the body to secrete insulin? I think the most out of all the macronutrients given that, that is the signal to the body to store.
Like why doesn't protein for instance signaled, the body to store why is it specifically
carbohydrates? Yeah. Actually protein does stimulate insulin as well and because the male's some of some proteins can actually stimulate quite a bit of insulin, it doesn't work, so if you eat carbohydrates or glucose goes up and then your insulin goes up and protein, your glucose doesn't go up, your insulin does go up and its really to do with the way the body metabolizes, so insulin.
A more General sense is a nutrient sensor. So that tells your body that, hey, food is on the way in there. For, let's switch over to storing calories, as opposed to burning calories. The reason dietary fat doesn't do that is that it doesn't get metabolized through the liver. Dietary fat actually gets absorbed through the intestines goes into the lymphatic system and sort of goes directly into your fat stores, so because it doesn't go through that.
A processing through the liver. It actually never metabolizes and therefore, doesn't really need insulin for that. But one of the things is that insulin, you know, different hormones. Our body needs to know what's coming in and What proportion. So insulin is a nutrient sensor but so is something called mtor, which really is very specific for proteins. It goes up quite a lot tells your body that there's a lot of protein coming in and there's a lot of associated things, but one of the things that's important is that these nutrients sensors are also,
Linked to growth Pathways. So therefore your body really only wants to grow when nutrients are available and therefore when you do get take a lot of carbohydrates or even protein, your body senses that there is food coming in and therefore will turn on growth path ways to grow muscles to grow, you know, stores of body fat. That kind of
thing is the key in this then because the thing that I found most interesting about what you talk about is a focus on insulin, at least that's been sort of
My read on what you talk about moving away from you know, for a long time you hear people talk about glucose blood, glucose the body, tightly regulates that but this idea the analogy that you use of the suitcase, right? And sort of where this starts to become, a problem, is what we call insulin resistance is probably not the right way to think about it. We'll get to that in a second. But first, I want to talk about low carb diets, right? So, low carb diet was wildly effective for me, in terms of reducing the body fat that I had.
That's certainly something I've heard you and other people say that reducing your carbohydrate intake is going to have a disproportionate response in terms of body fat than something like, you know, dietary fat or protein, help me understand, then the relationship. If protein is spiking my insulin and insulin is the thing that's storing things into my fat cells. Why are carbohydrates more quote unquote, problematic when it comes to storing fat,
I think the comes down to several things. So proteins is actually quite complex because it's not primarily fuel. So carbohydrates and fat are primarily fueled, we burn it and we store it. So our body stores, glucose our body stores fat, but our body doesn't really store protein. So it's primarily a structural thing. So your body isn't. So even though insulin is stimulated there, it's actually quite complex because glucagon is stimulated, which keeps the glucose normal, but then
Protein also has very strong effects on satiety. That is there are certain other hormones that when you eat, for example, protein are going to tell you, hey, you're full, you need to stop eating. So if you think about eating steak, for example, you can eat a certain amount of steak. And then at some point you can't really just keep eating. You will actually just get nauseous as we've all done at the buffet when we've eaten too much,
You can't just say, oh, I'm that looks good. I'm just going to have another pork chop. It's really hard to do that because those the Tidy hormones are very powerful. The reason carbohydrates are very problematic is that they tend to be processed. So processing removes lot of these satiety signals. So even if you've eaten a huge buffet and somebody says, hey, do you want a few sips of my soda? You'd say sure, no problem, because they don't activate your satiety mechanisms.
And same for like a cookie. You can easily eat a cookie after after your full from dinner, where you would not eat another, you know, pound of steak. So it's a bit more complex because there's multiple interacting hormonal systems that regulate how we respond, when protein doesn't seem to be nearly as bad, even though it has a lot of insulin effect. It has probably a lot of these other hormonal effects that are just as important and really stop us from eating. Just like if you were to eat steak and eggs in the morning,
A lot of fat lot of protein. It tends to keep you more full than if you're to eat white bread and jam eat that. And then at 10:30, you're looking for low fat muffin, for example, and this is one of the things, which I always say is like, when you thinking about weight gain weight loss, really have to think about hormones because it's really a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric imbalance because the the calories and all these foods can actually be exactly the same, and that's why I'm not.
And you know not all carbohydrates are bad for you. Like clearly there have been many many societies that have lived primarily on carbohydrates yet, if you measure the insulin response, they're actually quite good. So something like that. They did a study in Catawba, for example, which is a South Pacific island and they measured their diet and is about 70% carbohydrates, but natural.
Gates and they didn't write eating all the time then when they measured their insulin, their insulin level was below, the 5th percentile of a reference, sort of Swedish population. So that means that even though they're eating a lot of carbohydrates or insulin levels are still very low so there's lots of things. Not only the foods that you eat but also the frequency which with you eat them, plays a really important role and the amount of processing that goes into it and you can see that effect in something like the glycemic index where when you eat white bread, things just spiked way.
But if you were to eat beans, which is all carbohydrate, the glycemic index is much, much much lower, and most natural foods are like that. You don't see that huge Spike that you get. So the processing of the carbohydrates, makes it especially pop problematic because it is a fuel source for our body, that our body is able to use very easily and it's highly refined so that you don't have any satiety. And then you're getting it sort of absorbed very quickly because you removed all the fiber, you can moved all the fat and that's
That's you know that's that's sort of what goes into it. But focusing on the hormones is really important because it leads you away from focusing on something like calories. The only implication of focusing on the hormones as opposed to calories is that some foods are more fattening than other Foods. That's really the only implication. It's like, boy, if you were to ask your grandmother great-grandmother, she say, well, duh, I hope you didn't have to go to university to learn that. Of course, some foods are more fattening than other
Like cookies are fattening. Like anybody could have told you that anybody with an ounce of Common Sense would have told you you don't get fat eating broccoli. Like these are just like things that we take for granted that we should know, but you get so people get so focused on, oh, it's all calories, it's all calories that they say ice cream this as fattening as salmon. It's like no obviously not if you've ever lived, you know, in, on this Earth,
You would know ice cream and salmon are not equally fattening for the same amount of calories, that's just common sense.
So this distinction between chronic caloric restriction, and fasting that I find really interesting and let us for the sake of this discussion, assume that we have a person who is willing to endure an unlimited amount of suffering and you even you've talked.
A
lot about the book Unbroken that you read about World War two people in Japanese concentration camps and they were literally being starved. And obviously, all of them got lean. So, what I want to understand is okay fasting seems to have all these tremendous benefits. Chronic caloric restriction, has some but also has like this, really damaging psychological component. If there was no damaging psychological component, would they be equal? Or is there still some difference?
It all
depends on how you do the caloric restriction. So because it's not just about the calories, it's about the hormones, right? So you have to sort of take it not to sort of this to compartment problem. You have to take it to like a three compartment problem, right? There's what's coming in. There's what stored and there's what's being used. Okay. So most people only think, of sort of the two compartments and then the storage is sort of leftover, that's not the way the body works if insulin is high.
Your body is going to store calories. Remember insulin is a nutrient sensor, tells your body that hate energy is coming in your eating. You need to store some of this, right it? So you eat breakfast. Lunch dinner
to get somebody on a low calorie diet. Like if you were on 700 calories a day but I gave you insulin. Could I make you fat?
Yeah, absolutely. Whoa, because think about it this way, if you have insulin your body. And so if you think about a physiologically, if you have insulin
Your body goes into a storage mode because it's a hormone insulin, the hormone it tells your body food is coming in. And even if you don't get food, if you just give insulin, you're going to switch your body into this mode, where it thinks that food is coming in. So it's going to store energy. So imagine that for example, you are a coal, you know, coal plants, right? The power plant. You get 2,000 tons of coal coming in and you burn 2,000 tons of coal. That's fine. We have a storage compartment to. So if you're you know, if you do
Thought experiments, they say, you have 2,000 tons of coal coming in but you divert the whole thing over to or thousand tons of coal into storage. While you only have 1000 left, so you're going to feel tired and cold and hungry and you're going to get fat at the same time, right? That's what's going to happen, but it's because of the way that you've diverted off the energy. So think about it from a human body standpoint suppose you have 2,000 calories coming in 2002, our he's going out.
Out. Now you artificially inject insulin. Well, you shuttle a thousand calories immediately into body fat and you have a thousand calories left to burn. Well, what's going to happen? Your body heat generation is going to go down. Your heart rate is going too slow. You're going to feel tired, you're going to feel hungry because you want to get more energy, right? That's the signal for you to get more energy, so that you can get more, you can burn more, guess what? That's exactly. What happens when you go on a chronic calorie-restricted diet,
And the point is that, if you do it correctly and you, you correct, that insulin part of things, so that none of it's going into storage and you can do that with chronic calorie restriction. You certainly can, we have to know that you have to do it properly. Like, cutting out, processed foods, cutting out, refined carbohydrates that kind of thing, but the all depends on that sort of, that sort of toggle in the middle that says, how much goes here. How much grease here, insulin, what it does.
Is it tells your body to store fat but also turns off fat burning. Remember, fat is purely a store of energy. It's a store of calories so you're immediately shuttling all your energy into storage and you have nothing left. So say you take 700 calories but you're pumping people full of insulin. So that energy is going to go into into storage and seven, hundreds. Probably a lower limit of what you could really do, but your body would then try to subsist on safe.
Five, 600 calories of energy. You get really hungry because your you've got no energy coming in. You'd probably wouldn't be able to last very long but you can still gain weight. There's a great experiment a few years ago where they actually took P, type 2 diabetics and they gave them a lot of insulin. So they went from zero units a day to a hundred units a day over a span of six months which is a lot and they dropped the number of calories that they ate by 300. Okay. So they're taking insulin but they're eating less.
200 300 calories a day less. So, over the span of six months on average that group gained 20 pounds 20 pounds by eating 300 calories a day lasts. Why? Because so let's take an example. You're eating 2,000 calories, you go down to 1700, but the insulin is shuttling, 700 of that immediately off to storage. So you're gaining body fat. Now, your body can only burn one.
Thousand calories a day. So you feel like crap, you feel tired, you feel hungry and you're still gaining weight. And guess what? If you do it wrong, which is constantly snacking and eating cutting out all the dietary fat and eating all refined carbohydrates which remember is almost precisely what we told people to do in the 80s and 90s. Oh I remember it. Well yeah actually I had a top of
licorice because it was fat free and I would just eat it and eat it. I'm not as fat free with what's happening. Why am I getting fat?
Yeah, that was a very confusing
time. It makes perfect sense from like, because, but you have to think of that additional step that is, what is the body actually doing? It's this sort of flip this switch, so when you eat, you're storing body fat, what you don't eat when insulin is going down, you're going to burn body fat. You're actually going to you can't burn body fat. If insulin is high in technically, we say it inhibits lipolysis.
Let's talk about Thrive. Did you guys?
Know that your gut is related to so many potential health issues trouble focusing bloating constipation maintaining a healthy weight and skin blemishes like acne and eczema. And I can tell you right now that if you aren't careful with your gut health, you can get extreme brain fog, which I lived through and it sucks, our gut communicates with our brain through nerves and hormones. And when your gut health is poor, it can directly contribute to these types of health concerns. My wife Lisa has struggled profoundly with
Got problems. So I know exactly how Troublesome this can be. Unfortunately, Lisa is not alone in this battle one in five. Americans are struggling with gut health issues. Thankfully, we can fix a lot of these issues with a better diet and the right probiotics and Thrive makes this process really simple by offering an at-home gut health test. So you can know the state of your gut health and what problems that may be causing you thrive will then use your results to develop custom.
To help treat these problems. These aren't the one size fits all probiotics. You will find your local grocery store. These are personalized to you based on the results of the test drive is easy, convenient and accessible Thrive sends the test, straight to your door. And based on your Thrive results, they will customize a diet and probiotic suggestions. Just for you. When you subscribe to thrives program, you can also save 10% on all probiotics and other products they provide. And as a special
Special offer to our audience. You can get 50% off your at-home gut health test. When you go to try Thrive.com impact again that's try Thrive.com impact and Thrive is spelled th r y ve go there right now for 50% off your at-home gut health test. Again, that's T. Ry th Ry v e.com forward slash impact. All right,
As take care and be legendary guys, as you know, I am all about, mastering your mind. If you can control your mind and how you react to obstacles, you can have a firm control of your daily life from top to bottom. And if you want to take control of your golf game, mastering your mind is absolutely essential. You cannot succeed in golf if you cannot master your mind. So if you love golf and you want to improve your mental game, you need to try this awesome app called imagine
Golf. Imagine golf is different from every other golf app out there. Imagine golf is entirely dedicated to your mental game. You can spend hours on the driving range and putting green, but if you can't improve your mindset, there is no way. You're going to improve your golf game with over 200,000, downloads 3000, plus five star reviews and a five star rating in the App Store. Imagine golf is the number one app for mastering the mental game of golf. And guys, I'm not joking. When I
They are always try to have somebody in my inner circle, that plays golf because there is an insane amount of business that gets done on the golf course. So if you want to up that game as well you need to up your golf game. All right, the Imagine golf app delivers. Snackable 3 minute audio lessons to help you think and play better. There are new audio classes, released daily that Spotlight. The big ideas from best-selling books, featuring some of the best golfers in the game like Tiger Woods, Ben Hogan and Gary Player. And imagine golf has weekly and monthly
Lee, give aways from the top golf Brands and if you want to try the Imagine golf app and get your mental golf game. In shape, check out there 7-Day free trial with absolutely no commitment. Download the Imagine golf app for free in the Apple App Store and check out their 7-Day free trial. Keep imagining what's possible and take control of your golf game. My friends with the Imagine golf app, the number one app for mastering the mental game of golf. Download, imagine golf for free in the app.
App Store and check out their 7-Day free trial. All right guys, take care and be legendary. Let's ask then the reverse question so I fully accept that all food is a signaling molecule. That's triggering a, Some Cascade of hormones. I know what to do. If I want to store a lot of fat, I'm going to eat a lot of processed carbohydrates that are going to remove all my Society mechanisms and it's going to spike, my blood glucose like crazy, my body's going to pump a bunch of insulin to make sure that that gets pulled out of the bloodstream. I'm going to get fat
Okay. Is there a diet that's optimized on the exact opposite side where I'm taking in very satiating amount of calories, but it's dropping my in sorrow failing to trigger my insulin as maybe the right way to think of it. And therefore I'm eating maybe more than your average bear, but I'm actually getting leaner.
Yeah, there's there's certainly lots of them there and the principles are much the same one as you want to avoid sugar because sugar
Or the way that we process fructose is sort of particularly bad and that's why sugar is particularly fattening, really? And that's, that's true. If you're a bear, you're eating a lot of ripe, berries and stuff because you're trying to gain fat and it's also true as anybody knows if you're eating a lot of cookies and brownies. So you're probably going to gain weight the, the other thing is, you can't eat all the time because again it's a cycle between feeding and fast and that's what we're supposed to.
To do. If you don't give your body time to burn off, all those calories, that it's taken in, which means the fasting period, you're going to overall gain weight. It's like a one-way valve. If you go in, but don't come out eventually, everything just gets bigger same thing that energy cannot come out if your insulin levels are hot. That's just the way it's designed and it's sort of like, you know, if you see a tanker, you know, those tanker truck on the side of the road,
Sometimes you think oh they'll never run out of fuel because they have all this fuel but they do run out of fuel of course because you can't access that fuel that's in that big container. Same thing with your body is that right? It's locked away. If you do not lower your insulin levels, you will never have access to those stores of energy. Once you lower it, hey, all that energy. Just comes flowing in and and for people who are, who are on Long, who have done longer fast,
And this is what's so interesting about the whole process. When you actually do it, is that the hunger starts to go down significantly. The psychological hunger goes up because people are like, oh, I really want to eat that but the physical hunger actually tends to go down. Meaning this
is dangerous by things like ghrelin or whatever
Ellen so hunger hormones and so on and people, you talk to people and you know, I've done it life. I know lots of people have done it and they all say the same thing by day. Three day four. The hunger is almost complete.
He disappeared. And why is that? Well, because you're fueling yourself from your body fat stores and therefore you actually have no, no need to eat. It's an interesting process which people never think about, but it's completely physiologic.
Yeah. So I've done my longest fast was five days. I've done many facets that are 24 hours to 72 hours. I find 72 while not pleasant. I find it relatively easy. I don't decline in performance.
But day four and five I do. And I'm super curious to know if I am doing something wrong. Like, am I supposed to be supplementing and I'm talking a true water-only fast. Should I be eating salt? Should I be taking magnesium? Like what, what is it?
Yeah, everybody's different certainly some people salt is probably the main thing people get into trouble with because we're on a relatively, high salt,
And then to go to a sort of 0 which is water. Only 0 salt is a bit of a transition sometimes with some people find that their pressure blood pressure goes low and that that makes them not feel so good. So a lot of people have found better from taking salt, either salt and water or just the salt the like a under their tongue, even magnesium's. Another one that can do know and some people find it helpful to supplement their as well. The other things
That people find useful is to take some broth, for example, which is going to give you, it's not a true fast. None of these are going to say that sounds like cheating to me. Yeah. They're they're sort of like I call them variance because they're not the water-only fast. Is really a true fast but you can get a lot of the benefits by taking some of these other things and it makes it easier. So it's just sort of a trade-off is sort of like Bulletproof Coffee which is of course not fasting but it's a very very
Pure sort of fat. And therefore, it's going to provide a lot of satiety and then that you go through the day, maybe allows you to go long and overall, you might wind up positive in terms of weight loss and so on. So a lots of people certainly have found that useful, not everybody, but certainly it's that, but water-only fast can be more difficult because of the associated, electrolyte problems. Your body is supposed to handle it but it doesn't
always sure.
So if we're looking at longevity and we want to prolong life as much as possible and anti-cancer, in fact, this might be the perfect transition into your brilliant synthesis of what's going on from cancer. Paradigm, 1.02 2.0 3.0 found that absolutely fascinating in your new book, cancer code, it was subtle and yet changes everything. And if you can just like give a quick sort of thesis on that 123 thing. I think that really helped people.
Yeah. Yeah. And and
You know, I'm not the one who made it up. I just was the one to sort of explain it sort of an accessible way and honestly it's the most fascinating story in medicine today I think is cancer because it's undergone this tremendous change in the last sort of ten twenty years and nobody even talked about it. And what I talk about is sort of the these modern paradigms of cancers the way that we look at cancer and the reason they're important is because
They determine what sort of treatments we use. So, the first sort of modern Paradigm of cancer is, sort of this cancer is a cell that grows too much. So you have breast cancer. For example, you have a breast cell now, something happens to that normal breast cell, okay? So it starts off as a normal cell, but somehow mutates into this breast cancer cell, or this lung cancer cell and this lung cancer cell, then grows and grows and grows, and then it moves around and spreads or this is called metastasis, then you die. So the first
Her diamonds. Hey, this is a cell that grows too much, so therefore our treatments are actually ways to kill cells and that's the sort of core of modern oncology is to cut it out. Which is surgery, you can burn it with radiation or you can poison it with chemotherapy chemotherapy is really nothing more than a selective toxin. It kills some cells faster than kills another cells. So that's why you have these horrific side effects, their hair falls out, they
Dated all the stuff you think about with chemotherapy is because the idea of chemotherapy is to kill the cancer slightly faster than you kill the patient. That's really it. It's a selective toxin. But that's the Paradigm that it makes sense from that pain, you know? Because if it's if it's growing too much then kill it, that's basically it. Now that reached its limits probably by the 60s and by then we were talking about genetic. So everybody started to look at genetics and then that's the
Of next, a huge paradigm shift is that we were trying to understand at a deeper level. Not, we weren't saying that cancer cells didn't grow. The question we're trying to ask is why are they growing? And so we said, well, the answer now is that they have genetic mutations that lets them grow too much. And sure enough, when we look we found these oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes with genes that control growth. And when this cell gets a mutation in one of these critical genes,
Ins then it would grow too much and that make perfect sense. So the point of something like lung cancer and smoking because we know smoking for, you know clearly causes lung cancer. Smoking is not a targeted mutation device, it's very nonspecific, you're just creating damage all over the place. So what they said was that this is a random genetic mutation. So you're just creating damage in the genome and if you're damaging a lot, you're getting a lot of chances to
At this critical growth Gene area and it's going to let cells grow. So this was the genetic Paradigm, which really has dominated cancer medicine for the last 50 years. And so, instead of trying to kill cells, this led to new treatments and instead of trying to kill cells, we're trying to correct, the genes that control day and the first few drugs of the sort of genetic Paradigm were just amazing. So by the to thousands we were like
Like we are going to cure cancer. So we did this whole Human Genome Project. We said all we need to do is map out all the jeans. Look at the cancers map out those jeans and see what's different. We're going to find one or two genetic mutations. We're going to find a drug to cure that one or two genetic mutations. Boom. We're going to cure cancer. And that was really what we thought at the time, it was a time of incredible promise but it didn't work that
Is like, if you look at the number of genetic treatments of cancer, that really made a difference, you're talking, maybe five, right. In the last 40 years, five really good drugs, that's not a lot. And that's a long way from curing cancer and the problem is when we went back. So they did the Human Genome Project. Then did this cancer genome, Atlas where they mapped out, all these kids, they took 30,000 cancers mapped out. The genes and said, what are the one or two critical genetic mutations? They didn't find one or two.
To each cancer had like 50 or a hundred genetic mutations, and it was crazy because if you had a Cancer Clinic where one patient had lung cancer. So patient a had lung cancer. Patient be had lung cancer. Patient has lung cancer. Had 50 mutations patient. Be had 50 mutations completely different mutations. So, how are you going to treat this? You can't get 50 drugs for patient a and 50 completely new drugs for patient. Be, it's just impossible and that's why cancer.
Treatment just sort of slowed to an absolute crawl. I was just, you know, a huge amount of disappointment. And that sort of spelled the end. It wasn't a random genetic mutation. So, it wasn't that genes were mutated. It was what is driving these mutations. And that sort of Spawn, this whole next paradigm, shift to cancer, Paradigm 3. Which so few people people talk about, and I don't understand why, because I find it endlessly.
Fascinating and what we were trying to do. We weren't trying to invalidate that the these genetic mutations because clearly these genes had mutations what we're trying to understand was once again try and get to that one level deeper, why why are these genes mutating and the totally fascinating answer that they came up with, is that it was an evolutionary process, not a forward-moving evolutionary process. It was a
Evolutionary process towards a more primitive form of our cell, which was there from Evolution. And what's fascinating is that if you look at pathologist, like the way that people who look under the microscope at cells, that is exactly how they describe cancer cells, primitive undifferentiated. I
got to use you use an analogy or metaphor in the book about a bear in a tutu that I thought. Oh my God, like it, lets you.
Optional eyes. What? This is so perfectly. Will you walk people through that?
Yeah, and the point is that the cancer is actually a reversion to a more primitive form of the cell and it's a sort of like if you have a wild bear you can raise it and teach it to dance and we're to to but it's still a wild animal. So if you provoke it he'll still kill you. Like if we're to to but he'll still kill you. So it revert to being that while.
Animal and our cells are very much like that. So we came from unicellular organisms so all of us sort of evolved from small bacterias and so on fungi. And so on and under the right conditions, these cells actually undergo, an evolutionary process back towards this more survivalist, sort of primitive cell. A single-celled organism, its primary mandate is to
To compete with other cells as opposed to a multicellular organism, which is mandate is cooperation and they are fundamentally against each other. As we move from cellular competition to Cellular, cooperation, we had to put on all these instructions on top. These genetic instructions to suppress all these competitive urges, when you cause genetic damage and strip away your damage, all these sort of controlling layers,
what shines through is that competitive nature, and then the cells, the cancer cells, actually behave exactly like unicellular organisms and that's fascinating again because our own immune system has actually identified these cells as foreign cells like there are, you know, immune cells in our body that identify sort of self our own Cells versus other cells or so you avoid Friendly Fire and
Your cells are actually identified intrinsically without being having seen them ever before your own body will identify these as foreign cells and Destroy them. And that's really the reason why we don't have cancer sort of with 99% of the population because when you suppress the immune system of course you increase your risk significantly of developing cancer because it's our immune system which is playing that anti-cancer role. So what you're trying to do is we doubt so our body has these very efficient. Can't I can't
Other mechanisms where we go around and were hunting down these sort of, you know, anarchists and stuff, trying to these people who are not going to follow the rules. Who are who are competitors? Not Co-operators. We try and hunt those down and we kill them so that we stay cancer-free. It's only at the end of, you know, only with time when stuff falls through or with chronic damage, such as with lung lung cancer, for example, a smoking that that you're damaging the genome and those controlling
Organisms and allowing it to shine through, which is called an activism, which explains a huge amount like that, this Theory just explains so much about cancer because if you think about say, let's take it lung cancer again. So you have a 50 mutations in patient, a 50 different mutations in cancer and patient be but their lung cancers. Look exactly the same under the microscope, how does that happen? Like if you have a hundred, mutations yourself should look completely different.
Than this other guy cell yet they still look precisely the same under the microscope. It's because it was the original sort of sell your simply stripping stuff away. You're not adding mutations on your actually stripping those away. And what's fascinating, is that the genetic? So all this genetic stuff that we've done. When you look at the mutations of cancer, they're all concentrated in this area, which is the the difference between
Unicellular and multicellular organisms. So they did these studies where they take all the genes and they say, let's rank them by evolutionary age. So, these are the ancient jeans. These are the not recent jeans and they put them on and then they say, where are the cancer mutations? And they're all clustered right around the point between unicellular and multicellular organisms and like that is so interesting. So then of course, the reason it's important is because
Now you have, if it is an evolutionary problem, if these are actually unicellular organisms, well now we have actually have ways to fight these unicellular organism. That's our immune system and that's led to this sort of explosion and interest in immunotherapy because we're not trying to kill cells with immunotherapy. We're not trying to, we're not trying to fix genetic. Mutations what we're trying to do is treat these cancers like a foreign species like in.
Base of foreign species and be able to identify them and also bolster our own immune system to attack them. But now you're getting a totally different Paradigm because you're the concept of what this disease is. It's an evolutionary disease which requires immune system to fight it because that's our own defenses. That's fascinating, like, that's a totally different Paradigm. And such an interesting way to
To look at it, and it's going to lead to all these new treatments. So in the book, I talk about immunotherapy, we talk about the absque opal effect, which is how radiation plus immunotherapy, may actually help. Unearth these things we talked about adaptive therapy, where perhaps, you don't have to give maximally tolerated doses of chemotherapy because you may not need it, it may be more effective to use smaller doses, all stems, from the understanding of The evolutionary paradigm.
Nine left, cancer as opposed to the genetic Paradigm of cancer where you would never be able to understand why these treatments that are coming up. Now, are going to be
effective.
Man this this is really feels and you talk about sort of the hope this brings in the book and it really does feel hopeful, you know, because if you've pursued something to a dead end, it's like until you have another path to go down. It's a pretty ugly place to be one of the things that you outlined in the book that I thought was really, enlightening is what it is. Exactly. The you talk about the seed in the soil. So what is it about our Modern Life that creates this soil? That stresses the
Just enough that it is like sort of in scramble mode of. Whoa. I have to I'm constantly looking for this new mutation or stacking mutations. It's going to allow me some path through this cigarette smoke this dietary problem, this, whatever if you can walk people through what we've sort of done to the soil and please, if you can mention the, when you talked about the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki how they were expecting a certain cancer,
But they didn't get it. And why the his father so interesting?
Yeah, I thought I thought so too. Thanks this concept is that you need both genetics as well as the environment like both are important. I'm not saying one is more important, but you have to have a seed which is obviously all the genetic material that you need to become a plant. For example, we have to plant it in the right soil. So you take a seed, you put it in desert, it doesn't grow put a seed, put it in proper soil and give it water grows. So,
Cancer. The seed, is there in every single one of our cells in not just us, but every animal practically that we know, has that seed of cancer, because cancer, of course, is our sort of genetic ancestor. That was the unicellular organism from way, way, way back. So that's so that's that. Yeah, exactly. The selfish sort of unicellular organism but that seed of cancer is there. Luckily, if we prevent it from growing,
I'm by using proper soil, we can actually prevent it. And you look at these things that cause you know, cause cancer they're called carcinogens turns out our diet, is one of the biggest ones. So other than tobacco smoke diet is sort of way up there and when you look at carcinogens the there's a specific sort of thing to have to Chronic and they have to be sort of sub Leafly damaging, which is the point about Hiroshima, that is radiation. We know
His cancer for sure. So when we they dropped the atomic bomb, they thought, man, we're going to get a lot of cancers coming down the pipes, but it was a single large dose of radiation. Not a chronic low dose of radiation, which does cause a lot of cancer. So they did these Atomic, they did these studies where they followed people for years and years. And there was a little bit of extra cancer but like on average way less. So when they estimate how many months of
You know, months or years of life lost. It was like two months, something like that. So keep these people were living like 82 years and they estimate that, that that Atomic radiation. Maybe cost them like two months of Life weigh less because we are thinking that these people are going to get, you know, cancers at age, 20 sort of thing and that didn't happen, because it wasn't this chronic thing. And that the reason it has to be chronic, is that cancer is an evolutionary process. If you do not have chronic
Pressure, you don't get this change. If you just have the
option to change the mutations and you need, they're going to be random and they need to occur over time.
They have to occur continuously because that's the way that selection Pressure Works. In an evolution in a population of cells. That is if you if you select for certain cells and do it once, that's not going to be that effective. If you keep selecting for those cells like you only take the the the cells that are sort of survivalist which are the
The sort of more primitive cells. Then you over time, you're going to select the population. That's going to have more of those sort of survivalists cells if you have a single event, there's no further selection pressure. That is if you look at, you know, if you look at evolution of species, it's the same thing. You can't simply have one event has to be continuous selection pressure. That produces that change, and that's why it has to be a chronic thing, sort of tobacco smoke.
For example, you look at viruses. So if you have a single terrible virus like hepatitis A which is causes fulminant. Hepatic failure, it kills you but it doesn't give you cancer as opposed to Hepatitis B, which is a chronic virus. It doesn't kill you, but it certainly does give you cancer H pylori and the stomach, for example, a very low-grade chronic infection is what gives you cancer. Not a single sort of filming an episode of
Inflammation, that doesn't give you cancer. So you know, all of these, these sort of things UV light and so on, they're all chronic damage and that's part of that soil and diet plays a huge role. And the promise of course is that if you look at traditional populations like when they look that populations, that lived very simply so very low sugar very natural foods. They weren't eating all the time, very little obesity, so people in Africa that they had studied Denis burkitt in
50s and 60s and then in the anyway, people which live in the far. North, for example, they use this, these Expeditions up to the Arctic Circle to find. Why these these native peoples? He's a new. We were immune to cancer, then of course they became civilized, we gave them. You know sugar, we gave them white flour because they didn't go bad, then they got all the same cancers turns out they weren't immune at all. It was there.
Environment. It was the soil. That was so important. But the promise is that if you can fix that soil, that means you could actually overcome the genetics not in all cases, but in many cases especially of these obesity Associated, cancers the breast cancer colorectal and so on. And that's the sort of really important thing in the sort of take-home message. For a lot of people is that the diet actually plays a massive role and by understanding it, perhaps, you can reduce your risk of cancer. And that's
Our fasting as a way, to control your weight, as a way to control, type 2 diabetes, which is a risk factor as a, those are going to lower the risk factor for obesity, which is a big risk factor for those CCD Associated cancers. But it's your lifestyle that's going to play a big role, not necessarily some drug, that's or anything like that. So it's all in your own hands. It's amazing. That
that is truly amazing. Now, as one sort of final point on this,
Is is The Chronic stressor, is that simply being tipped into growth mode? Or is it inflammation? Coupled with the fact that we're tipped into growth mode? Like, what is it specifically about our diet? That's causing this perfect soil for mutations over time, that leads to
cancer. I think they're I think both are correct. So, if you have a chronic hyperinsulinemia, insulin has a very powerful growth.
Inflammation as a cause of chronic damage in itself will cause cancer. So you look at the disease, such as culture and of colitis or Crohn's colitis, these are called the, the so-called inflammatory bowel diseases. There's this chronic inflammation in the bowel. And what you get is a super high risk of cancer down the down the line. So both inflammation and hyperinsulinemia and Newt obesity, all of them are risk factors. And this is the important thing is that there's
Is a lot of different things that can contribute to the risk of cancer. It's not just that if one is, right, then the other is wrong. I mean, both are correct. So, if you eat foods that are highly inflammatory, and a lot of people feel that, for example, omega-6, seed oils, perhaps are in, in these big doses that we take, perhaps those are highly inflammatory that even if it doesn't, cause obesity could be a factor because we know inflammation. Chronic inflammation can certainly do that. So,
Both can be very
important.
Who man, I really hope people read your book, the cancer code. It was very insightful. If people want to stay connected with you learn more follow your extraordinary clinical based thinking. Where do they
go? You can follow me on Twitter, my handle is at dr. Jason funk. That's the are Jason Fung. Also, my website is the fasting method.com and you can also find me on YouTube. My channel is Jason Fung and I haven't
Our videos on fasting and and other things. So, check me out there and you know, I hope, you know, and then my books of course they'll be C code. The diabetes code the cancer code,
love it, awesome. Jason, thank you so much for joining me today. I really, really enjoyed our time together. And I really enjoyed researching you as well. So, super grateful. And speaking of things, you'll be grateful for, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friend's be legendary, take care.
