258: The Metabolic Approach to Cancer
with Dr. Nasha Winters
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome an incredible person, Dr. Nasha Winters. Dr. Nasha has turned a personal journey of overcoming cancer and she’s turned it into a purposeful career specializing in integrative oncology and cancer prevention. She’s here today to discuss how to avoid becoming a statistic. She’ll explain why we’re seeing more cancer than ever before. She’ll also offer helpful tips about what we can do about it.
Before we get started, I’d like to share a bit more about Dr. Nasha. Dr. Nasha Winters is a sought after luminary and global healthcare authority in integrative cancer research. She consults with physicians around the world. Her focus has always been to seek integrative modalities for treating cancer in addition to or in lieu of conventional standard of care in order to enhance outcomes and offer hope in a dismal prognosis. She now trains practitioners in her methodology presenting at medical conferences globally and sharing her passion and purpose to be a beacon of hope for thousands. Dr. Nasha is the best-selling co-author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. She has a second book in the works on the therapeutic diets for cancer. You can check her out at dr.nasha.com.
Practitioners, please be sure to check out HCF’s Live It to Lead It seminar in Nashville where Nasha Winters will be a speaker along with a lineup of top health experts in this field. Go to hcfevents.com for more information. We have some exciting news. We have opened up one day of this conference to the public. Please go to events.drpompa.com if you would like to attend and hear amazing speakers like the lovely Nasha Winters. We hope to see you there. Alright, so let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Nasha Winters to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Nasha, welcome to Cell TV. I’m very excited. I’m very excited to hear your story because I’ve heard about you and about your story. You reminded me actually that we met at Low Carb USA briefly, right?
Dr. Winters:
Yep, sure did. We were also laughing because we also apparently go to the same hairstylist as well which makes me very happy.
Dr. Pompa:
We were laughing off air because I had just got my hair cut. You had just got your hair cut. I was so tired of my hair being long. You moved to a warmer climate for three months, got yours cut. We both showed up like this.
Dr. Winters:
I love it. It’s a fresh start for the fresh year.
Dr. Pompa:
I said you look like my sister. You do anyway and then now that we have the same hair.
Dr. Winters:
Thanks for having me here. I’m very excited to hear your work. Your persona I’ve been following for some time, so it’s an honor to be here with you and your guests.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, you have a great story. You’re going to be actually—you’re actually one of the speakers at our next seminar in Nashville. Actually, I should really tell my audience we’re opening up a whole day for the public. The reason is because of the main topic is cancer, which is our topic today. I think if we polled our audience, everybody here knows somebody very close to them, a friend or family with cancer or at least battled cancer.
This is a topic everyone needs to hear about, so we decided to actually open up a full day really around this topic. Those of you who’ve been wanting to come to one of my seminars because they’re only doctors, not anymore; you get to come. I’m speaking to Ashley who’s—she’s my team member here. She’s actually not on camera, but she hears me. We actually put that invite here.
Yeah, you’re one of the guest speakers because you came recommended by so many people. One of the things that I love is my story’s from pain to purpose. I said it today to one of my clients; I could never even speak this way to you if I didn’t feel what you feel, go what you went through. It’s been many years now, twenty-some years since your story like myself, but still close to heart. I actually was speaking that to the person that I still have this post-traumatic feeling sometimes when I think about that. I’m sure you could reflect that. Tell your story.
Dr. Winters:
Yeah, well, that’s just it. We were talking right before we went on that I had just gone off after my 27-year out mark with a terminal diagnosis, not given any options, any opportunities to heal per se. In some ways that was a lucky strike for me because it prompted me to look after myself. It prompted me to get creative. It prompted me to become resourceful. Now, we didn’t have Dr. Pompas at that time. We didn’t have webinars and resources. We didn’t have Dr. Google. This is back in 1991 for crying out loud.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my gosh, but she looks amazing. You don’t look like you could be living back in 1991.
Dr. Winters:
You’re so sweet. I appreciate that. There’s your $20 bill. We’ll carry later. At that time in my life in my world, I actually tell people, I look and feel healthier today at 47 years old than I did in my late teens, and my twenties, and my thirties because I learned how to care for myself.
Dr. Pompa:
Me, too.
Dr. Winters:
Exactly; and it was thanks to—I love your concept of pain to purpose. That put me on a journey of seeking for self-care which then turned into supporting others on a journey. Now, it’s turning into supporting doctors to support others on a journey. When you’re given a diagnosis after many months of in and out of hospitals, ERs, and being misdiagnosed over and over because of my age—I was the zebra that we talk about in medicine that no one was thinking ovarian cancer in a 19-year-old. At that time, I’d had a lot of health issues. I’d had life long GI issues. I had life long hormonal issues. It all just blended into the mercury soup of what I had known for the first almost 20 years of my life.
By the time they figured it out, that time I landed in the hospital with—they thought I was having a terrible arrhythmia process. What was happening when they walked in is a doctor, he was on call that day, happened to recognize the signs of end-stage cancer. Finally did proper testing, proper diagnostics, proper imaging, and realized that my electrolytes were so far off because I was so cachectic. Meaning my muscles were wasting terribly. Meaning my belly was extremely bloated full of fluid, liquid cancer cells basically, and that my organs had decided to go on strike.
My kidneys and liver had basically stopped working. At that point, I was so far gone, so sick, so malnourished, so hopeless in their eyes that they were even afraid that a single dose of chemotherapy would end my life abruptly. They at that time told me I had three to six months. Now, as a doctor looking back, I realized I was probably closer to three to six weeks from what I know of this state where I was then.
As I was telling you before we dove in or right at the early part of our conversation, being told there’s no other way pushes you to seek a way. It pushes you to drive all of the resources you can possibly muster up. I had to do it by myself. Like I said, I had the Dewey Decimal system. I didn’t have Dr. Google. I didn’t have resources online. Back then, the information obviously for treating cancer was incredibly limited. Because I went to a very small, financially lower to the ground four-year liberal arts college, my library was also filled with outdated textbooks which was to my benefit because the main textbook—
Dr. Pompa:
You probably used something called microfiche. Do you remember?
Dr. Winters:
Microfiche, Dewey Decimal cards, all of those things. It was crazy, but because of that, because of the old-school way, I stumbled upon some literature from the 1920s and ‘30s by a guy named Otto Warburg.
Dr. Pompa:
Man, were you lucky or blessed; oh my gosh.
Dr. Winters:
Seriously; guided I think is really it. It made the most sense to me of anything else I was running across that this was a metabolic process. That knowing my background and where I was came unglued, unhinged if you well, over a period of time, I thought to myself, well, if I can get broken, I can possibly get fixed. Now, mind you, at that time, I had no expectation of surviving this. What my expectation was, learning as much as I could to understand and be present in the process.
Each week, each passing week, each passing month that I happened to still be kicking it, I kept learning more and more. I felt like every time I was alive another week or month, I’d stumble upon a new piece of information, and then another, and then another. Here we are 27 plus years later and the times have changed so much which is why I appreciate your conference you’re getting ready to have in that for about the past 25 years, we learned this much about oncology. In the past five, six years, an explosion of what we’re knowing and understanding and having a new way to look at it. We’re still trying to function from a broken, outdated model, but the conversation is there. Frankly, the hope is there for the first time that I’ve ever seen since I’ve been on this journey.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I want to hear more—okay, a lot of people watching, I have interviewed, and we can put those interviews up here, Thomas Seyfried, who really took Warburg’s work into the modern era; same concept. As a matter of fact, his book is called, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. That’s what you discovered from his work. Okay, great; what did you do about it? Talk about some of the things that you did because like you said, you were on your own.
Dr. Winters:
Totally; I think about the work that you guide your patients through today, it was very much a very organic, simple process. The way I had been eating, a latch key kits standard American diet: a first-year college student living off Roman and boxed mac and cheese, not a single live piece of food in the mix. My first jump was actually to a vegan raw food diet because that’s all the data that was out there. Now, in my chemistry where I was, that was very beneficial at the time. It cleaned up a lot.
Dr. Pompa:
I would think it would, yes.
Dr. Winters:
Like a lot; and in fact, because of the amount of paucities I had, I had a belly that looked beyond nine months pregnant and had over 9 meters of fluid pulled over a period of time, I didn’t have room to eat. I also naturally fasted a lot because I didn’t have hunger which is part of the cachectic process. I didn’t have room to fit food in the small amount of real estate I had left from the fluid pushing against my organs. I was very nauseous. I was very sick. My kidneys and liver were shut down, so I did not heal well. Food did not sound good.
A lot of that initial first few months was a lot of fasting and then starting to eat live, real food. At that time, mostly—in fact, all plants. That made a monstrous difference in that end-stage game for me, but over time, that wasn’t enough. Over time, I was still fighting the cancer. Cancer was still active in my body. It was still taking root. What I didn’t know, even though I was learning about the metabolic approach or Otto Warburg’s work was that everything I kept putting in, all that well-made food was also pretty much all sugar.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, stop right there. Let’s give people that don’t understand Warburg’s principal or what I interviewed Seyfried about, without confusing them in the science, which we—it’s easily confused people here. Tell them a little bit about what we’re talking about in saying what was Warburg’s theory? What are we talking about? Why would sugar be such a negative to people, even healthy sugar? Explain that.
Dr. Winters:
Beautiful; very simply what I tell the people that I work with is that we were meant to be a hybrid engine. We were meant to be like human Priuses, okay. That’s what we were built to do. Until about 1850, the year 1850, we were all “low carb” which is a big hot topic today.
We ate about 30% of our calories from carbohydrates. That included fresh fruit, grains, honey, maple syrup. You name it, natural, healthy sugars, up until we started milling and processing sugar and flour in the 1850s. Once the industrial food revolution came on, we were all low carbers.
We had been functioning that way for millennia, alright. In a relatively short period of time, we overwhelmed our system taking us from that hybrid engine of being able to burn fat or sugar as needed in our healthy cellular metabolisms depending on availability of our resources. We suddenly had our resources available to us all of the time and a lot higher amount. That’s the simple term. What happens at the cellular level is when you overwhelm the cells with that much carbohydrate, they basically start to ferment, and not like the good sauerkraut fermentation.
How I tell my patients is our cells are meant to respire. They’re meant to breathe, to move these biochemical processes, to create our energy, our ATP. As the gas tank if you will gets gummed up, our mitochondria get gummed up. They start to ferment and they stop breathing. They stop respiring which perpetuates the fermentation more which then changes the environment around those cells which then draws in more toxicity and more inflammation, yadda, yadda, yadda, then we have a problem. That’s basically what Otto Warburg said is that the problem isn’t acidity in the outside body affecting a cell; it’s what’s happening at the mitochondrial level that starts to breakdown that starts to change the communication to the rest of the body around it.
Dr. Pompa:
Stop right there because that’s a very interesting point that drives me crazy in the cancer thing. Because of Warburg’s work, we have everybody running around trying to alkaline. That’s not what he meant. He didn’t mean that acidity was the problem; he meant that the cell is going through this process of using only sugar in the presence of oxygen when it should be using oxygen. That’s what I’m saying; it’s not breathing as you said.
Therefore, it’s creating this acidic environment. You don’t force the alkalinity down; you fix the cell to get well. That’s the point. The whole alkalinity thing really took off on a false understanding of what Warburg’s principal was.
Dr. Winters:
You got it. I love that you bring that up because I look at the push for alkalinity almost as bad as the push of just cytotoxicity because neither of them are addressing the problem, neither of them are getting to the root. You’re correct in that in that also at the time in 1991, the only information out there was about the juice thing, and the raw food, and the pushing alkaline diet. That made me sicker and sicker and sicker after it initially rescued me. Then my body started to actually breakdown again. I ended up getting a resurgence and an aggressive pushback of the cancer over time. I tried to eat this alkaline way of being.
From that is where I started learning more about, oh gosh, this is a sugar burning system problem versus being a dual engine problem. That’s when I started to really change my diet that it was still and still is today incredibly plant-based. I want people to hear is that I still eat 10 to 15 servings of vegetables every single day and I still maintain ketosis or metabolic flexibility in a profound way. I’m not eating that much meat. I want people to hear that, too. It’s not a meat diet as it was promoted. Eating a lower carbohydrate diet was the key for me.
I will tell your listeners, it took me even understanding that from a textbook level. I was still going by the recommendations and the ideas of what a low carbohydrate diet was. At that time in the literature and even in my early medical school training that I began in 1996, we were having diabetic patients on 150 grams of carbohydrate a day and telling them that was a diabetic diet. Guess what; that is only now changing today. Still 22 years out, we’re finally still having that conversation. Still eating “low carb” for the diabetic patient in the ‘90s was still far too much sugar.
Dr. Pompa:
A lot of the studies that people say, well, the study on low carb diet, you look at the grams, it was 150, 180 grams of carbs. That was a study they were doing on low carb diets. It's like oh my gosh; if I get 150 grams of carbs in, that’s me purposely trying to hit high carbs for a day.
Dr. Winters:
Yeah, seriously, and that’s hard when you haven’t done it for so long. Even the RD nutritionists are telling us that we should not max out at 100 grams of carbohydrate a day. For men, 25 grams of that being sugar, and women, 20—or excuse me; 20 grams for women—excuse me—25 grams for women and 20 grams for men of sugar each day. We are doing that by the end of breakfast each day on the standard American heart-healthy breakfast.
Dr. Pompa:
Oatmeal, a bowl of oatmeal, a bagel, and god forbid a bowl of regular cereal. Honestly, just that alone.
Dr. Winters:
There it is; you’ve blown your carbs for the next two or three days with that in some cases. Especially if you add a banana, some low-fat milk, and orange juice, we’re done.
Dr. Pompa:
One glass of juice, but it’s 100% orange juice though.
Dr. Winters:
Exactly; that you have to remember is we didn’t have people like Dr. Feynman and all these others out there paving the way for us to understand. Frankly, there wasn’t much research and still isn’t today in nutritional biochemistry. Because I happened to meet and fall in love with a biochemist at the time of my diagnosis who was crazy enough to stick around at 22 years old with a 19-year-old who now 27 plus years later, we’re still together and married.
Dr. Pompa:
He’s somebody in the room because he’s an expert in epigenetics and genetics. He’s the guy that they were—
Dr. Winters:
They were consulting right now on it, some epigenetic cases. This is what we do for fun now at our house, Doc.
Dr. Pompa:
I get it.
Dr. Winters:
That was someone who could actually walk me through the biochemical reasoning behind it because biochemistry frankly terrified me at that time. I made it through organic chemistry simply because I had a live-in organic chemistry tutor, but I understood the theology very well. That was my cup of tea. Now, years later, I can look back and understand the biochemistry because we weren’t taught in the way to help us understand how to apply it in real life, how to apply it clearly.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s different when you have a need you see. When we were going through biochemistry, all we needed was to get through school. Then we needed it later to save our lives; very different.
Dr. Winters:
It’s very different. At that time, what I started to learn about just piece milling it together as you can imagine was just like how do I start to gently and effectively upregulate and clean out my cells one by one? Because if I went hardcore, it backfired. If I just ignored it, it backfired. It still took me another 20 years. Yeah, in 2013, 2012 when I got my epigenetics run to understand even further ways that my body was challenged in the way that it mentholated or detoxified to even understand it further.
Ultimately, I started to learn and carve out a path for myself. Then luckily had many willing—thousands of willing participants to learn from and with over many decades at this point, two, three, almost three decades later to watch this process unfold. That’s where meeting people like you, you’re taking it to the masses now in a way that did not take 27 years to figure out. You’re making it accessible right now. They don’t have to wait and figure it out for a good 10, 12, 15 years on their own. They’ve got folks like you and I today guiding them.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. When we look at the statistics right now with cancer, remind people of where we are with some of the cancers. They’re a little different per cancer. Then let’s move into the conversation. Obviously, you’ve learned a lot. This is your passion. My desire for this is okay, let’s speak to people on how to avoid these statistics.
Obviously, my recommendation for those people who have a loved one, family member, going through cancer, get your book because you made it more simple: The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. I’ve recommended Thomas Seyfried’s book to people. They’re like okay, I got through like Chapter One and I’m done. I think you’ve done a much better job. Tom, if you’re listening—but I think you would agree that you do a better job of bringing this information. It’s loaded with facts on here’s what to do, here’s what to eat. Get the book. I’m sure you can get it on Amazon.
Let’s talk about some things that people can do to avoid not becoming a statistic. The obvious right now is lower your carbohydrate intake but go ahead. Let’s talk about that. What are the statistics?
Dr. Winters:
Yeah, well, I appreciate that because the statistics I think are the wake-up call. It’s the call to action. The statistics currently are 1 in 2 men and 1 and 2.4 women are expected to have cancer in their lifetime in the United States. Okay, so that’s our US, but it doesn’t differ that much globally anymore. That’s Number One. Number Two, what’s very interesting is we have said for years that it was one in eight women with breast cancer, but that is getting ready to be updated to one in three. That’s the unfortunate reality.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow, I’ve been using one in eight still because I—knowing that it’s going down, but I didn’t realize one in three.
Dr. Winters:
Boom; yeah, one in three. By 2030, they’re expecting cancer is to double. Another interesting statistic is that there is a 300% increase in just secondary, brand new cancers in people who were previously diagnosed and treated with cancer since the 1970s. That should give you a clue about the amount of toxicity, cellular toxicity those folks are still contending with after treatment.
In the fastest, there’s two interesting stats that also intrigue me about again that ties into the work you’re doing and what we’re going to talk about next is the fastest growing cancer in people under the age of 35 is glioblastoma which is a form of very aggressive brain cancer. That’s what took the life of Senator McCain. With all the resources in the world, he still followed the exact statistic and the exact time frame of his expected life expectancy having the access to the best of the best healthcare because frankly, they missed all the things they could have been doing which makes me very sad. I know people like Adrienne Scheck and others reached out to their family which is in their own backyard, but—
Dr. Pompa:
Adrienne Scheck spoke at my seminar.
Dr. Winters:
Good, she’s so outstanding.
Dr. Pompa:
She got a standing ovation.
Dr. Winters:
I’m standing ovating her right now. That being said is like we have information that’s out there with different outcomes. People like Seyfried, people like Dominic, people like Dr. Scheck have seen different outcomes, and so have I in our clinical experiences, but it takes a different approach entirely. That cancer, glioblastomas, I believe so much because it’s a very sugar sunk cancer type, a very glucose uptake type of cancer. Also, think about what we have on and near our heads at all times. When I ask the patients about which side they wear their Bluetooth or where they use their cell phone, it is almost always on the same side as their phone use, the site of the tumor, so that’s unfortunate.
The other cancer fastest growing and this is under the age of 24 is colorectal cancer. That should clue you in that precisely what we choose to put into our mouths and travel through that tube is having an impact. That is so challenging to see young, healthy people diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancers more and more every day.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, scary; just absolutely scary statistics. When you look at statistics like one and two, if you don’t think it’s going to be you, you’re fooling yourself. Here’s the problem though because right now, if you interviewed most of the public, they’re hoodwinked into believing that it’s just they’re unlucky. That it’s their genetics, not your—your husband is a genetic expert. He would tell them differently. It’s not your genetics; it’s epigenetics. Meaning that there’s certain stressors like toxins that turn on genes of susceptibility.
Here’s the point. What’s going on right now in oncology? What’s going on in medicine? Meaning is there a shift? Because they still are spending billions of dollars on genetic therapies when we know it’s not the cause of cancer. What’s your thoughts?
Dr. Winters:
We got all excited when the Precision Medicine event came through with Dr. Bydon’s work. Everyone was thinking, this is it. Unfortunately, it was basically for—it sounds a little bit rude, but basically putting lipstick on a pig because we were still following the same path; we were just giving it a different filter to move through. We started getting really aggressive about genomic testing; we’re forgetting about epigonmic testing—or epigenetic testing and still looking for a single target with a single treatment and spending billions of dollars on therapies. Even the American Cancer Society will tell you that cancer itself is a collection of hundreds of disease. Why do we still keep spending our valuable resources on single cause, single cure? It doesn’t exist.
In fact, I’m the—really a bearer of bad news; I do not believe there is a cure for cancer because I think and believe as do the researchers out there that cancer is part of us. It is around us. It’s what our terrain is telling it that keeps it in check. I’m not looking or interested in curing this or fixing this; I’m curious about keeping it dormant, keeping it part of who we are. That’s the place.
We’re still in that in battled—that battle cry, that war cry on this that if somehow some exoduses that we have to kill or extricate from our self to heal. Yet, I will tell you, and you will—your other docs who will be speaking at this conference will tell you, there are multiple reasons why someone’s terrain starts to let the cancer take hold and pick up momentum. Yes, can you get lucky enough? Yeah, about 3% of the time with an absolute “cure” with chemo, or about 12% of the time with radiation, or about 50% of the time with surgery. Yet, 70% of the time, there will be a reoccurrence. These again are American Cancer stats.
If someone’s not taught the why they got there to begin with, and the how to prevent it from coming back, they might have been lucky enough to take the first chemo and have a nice response, but when it comes back, it tends to be bigger, more aggressive, and less responsive to those previously cytotoxic therapies. Unfortunately, people like me, people like Dr. Hermiz and others that you’ll have at your conference later in March, we’re accustomed to seeing people who are maybe on their second, third, or fourth reoccurrence of cancer after multiple treatments that have left their cells, their mitochondria even weaker than they were prior to their very first diagnosis. That becomes much more of an uphill battle. My goal is to catch people well before because really the only cure is prevention.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right; yeah, absolutely. It is, it’s so sad because I think that people believe that we actually are making headway in cancer because that’s what the commercials tell us. That we’re blessed to live in this day in age when wait a minute, the statistics are getting worse; not better despite the billions of dollars being spent. I think if logical people knew the real facts, they would say, well, wait a minute. If that’s the case, we’re spending billions of dollars with smart people researching, and things are getting worse, what is going on?
Maybe, just maybe we’re looking in the wrong area. Maybe this approach needs to be radically changed. Yet, we’re still seeing billions of dollars being spent on these genetic therapies. Yet, they keep crying out better testing. We have better testing. Yet, the numbers are still getting worse. What the heck is going on? Is there hope? Help me out here.
Dr. Winters:
Yeah, and it feels—believe you me, I’ve been at this for long enough, there has been so many times where I’ve probably been in a heap on the floor with my husband trying to console me feeling quite hopeless and helpless in these situations. Part of this is perpetuated. Just in the last year, we’ve had two studies coming out of I believe Harvard basically saying, it’s just genetic roulette. It’s just bad luck. You’re a sitting duck. You’re screwed. You have no impact on this.
Yet, just down the hall, you have people that are actually telling you completely otherwise. These are the people seeing this as a metabolic disease. Even within our brilliant academic institutions, we’re having infighting. You have to look at who’s funding a lot of those studies.
Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s the bad part is that there’s an inflame because there’s doctors that know the truth. Thomas Seyfried was 26 years in this. He pulled out and he got crushed. He lost all funding. Drug companies have the money to fund the things, so the scientists that are still doing it, they’re getting funded.
It’s like the moment you step out of that arena, now you’re on your own. Now, it’s where are you going to get your funding and make a living? People have to understand that, it all boils down to dollars and cents of why the money is going to drug companies. This is a cash cow. Cancer is a cash cow for drug companies. The fear is the greatest thing that people will pay for. To step outside of that, it’s just suicide if you’re a scientist.
Dr. Winters:
It’s interesting; my husband because of his epigenetics and his family of origin, every—they’re actually a case study at Creighton University. That’s how much cancer has afflicted his family of origin. He’s the baby of 10 children. His eldest brother died of pancreatic cancer. His middle sister had ovarian cancer. Another sister with endometrial cancer, another with ovarian. It’s just everywhere. His parents died of cancer; just on and on and on.
He was interested and went into drug cancer design in grad school and was one of the main people, one of the main researchers and players in the KRAS protein. That won’t mean much to some people here, but a few of your listeners might go, oh my gosh; this is 25 plus years old information that got buried because it wasn’t a blockbuster drug. It’s being dusted off and repurposed and tried again because nothing else is working. As my husband can tell you, it’s going to fail and fail miserably because the side effects and the profile that are so damn terrible. They did great for animal studies, but once you got into humans, all broke lost. It was just terrible.
He left that world thinking he could do more outside of the industry. He thought he could change it within; left it realizing he could do more out. It’s people the Believe Big Organization who funded, who went out and funded The Mistletoe trial happening at Hopkins right now for instance. It’s becoming more philanthropic donations to actually non-industry driven research that may actually be what changes us out of this mess.
People are like, I just want to know. I just want to learn. I want to see what could work. Let’s see what we throw at it and what sticks. That’s very different than saying, we’re going to make this billion-dollar drug. We’re going to make it work no matter what because the industry is driving us to do so. We’re going to keep our funding so we can do this. That’s a very different ballgame.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. What are some other—obviously, you’re on the front lines here in the cutting edge. What are some other things? We were talking about diet. I believe without what we’re talking about you teach in your book, you’re not going to really get your body in this state of balance like you said. We all have cancer cells, but a healthy body is able to constantly get rid of the bad ones. Fasting and the low carbohydrate diets, I think ketosis, this is key. What are some of the other therapies right now? There’s some other things on the horizon that you recommend that you have—that are real.
Dr. Winters:
Yeah, well, Mistletoe is probably the most studied integrative therapy that’s been out—
Dr. Pompa:
It’s not just about kissing under it.
Dr. Winters:
Exactly; coming right out of the holiday season of this, but it is an injectable form. We’ve been using it for continuously for 100 years. It’s a subq injection taught to the patient by their physician. It’s prescription only. It’s probably the most utilized integrative therapy worldwide both in subq, intravenous, even intertumoral, [00:34:12]. We’ve even put it right into the ascites fluid in peoples’ abdomens to dry up ascites fluid. It’s an incredible therapy that is used as an adjuvant therapy to enhance outcomes of standard of care treatments be it radiation, surgery, chemotherapy.
Also, in many patients, it has some direct cytotoxic impact to actually help kill off cancer cells. Mostly, by modulating, upregulating the impact of the immune system which is another key player. A metabolic balance is key. That’s the foundation. Then the immune function is also key.
For instance, if you have a teaspoon of sugar, you suppress your IGA and a lot of your immune cells for seven hours for each teaspoon you take in. Yet, we’re all living in that sugar burning state, so of course, our immune systems are completely downregulated. Getting low carb, upregulating your immune system, I know you have a lot of other speakers who are experts in how they do that in their practices. Even a three-day fasting will upregulate your immune system entirely. It’s like a total rebuild.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s autophagy; your body is eating the bad cells. It’s that simple. It knows the cancer cells. It’s going to not go for a healthy cell; it’s going to go for a cell malfunctioning. That’s the point. Then it upregulates the stem cell.
Dr. Winters:
Exactly, you’ve got it; exactly. Then the third part—there’s lots because we have 10 factors we talk about in the book, but if I had to choose the Top Three that you could get your hands around right today would be what we’ve already covered: the metabolic, the immune upregulation. The third big one that goes really underappreciated in our culture is stress modification. Stress is the key driver to—having your body in a sympathetic fight or flight process is what encourages the cancer cells to move about the building. It drives metastases. It drives the cells to embed into surrounding tissues and into the vasculature in the lymphatics.
That’s what starts to get a problem. We don’t die from primary tumors unless the crop up in a very vulnerable place like right against a vessel or right against a particular organ. We die of metastatic processes that change the metabolic expression of our body and basically starve our healthy cells to death. Most of us die from cachexia which is not about calories; it’s about metabolic inflammatory angiogenic process that cannot be cured with Boost and Ensure. I can assure you that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and sugar. By the way, that’s a take two though, and then people are eating sugar.
Dr. Winters:
Oh, yeah, the sugar—I have patient after patient who have taken photos of the chemo room that is just—it’s like, Coca-Cola is hosting this event in their hospital. There’s cookies spread out everywhere and ham sandwiches on extreme crappy white bread just all around you. It’s impossible to get away from. If you’re trying to fight against that dominant belief system, and you’re in there by yourself eating your hardboiled egg or nothing at all, everyone around you is making you feel like a freak.
That makes this even more challenging for well-meaning, well studied, thoughtful patient who’s trying to do it differently. They’re literally being asked, do you need something to eat? Can I get you something to eat? Here’s a cookie. Everyone’s saying, you need to eat something. You came from an Italian family. It’s like, eat. It’s our language of love.
Dr. Pompa:
You need to eat something. I grew up with that. My grandma, you need to eat something, so I’ll eat a cookie. When the reality is, no, eating nothing is actually better. Then when I do finally get hungry, then I’ll eat very good food.
Dr. Winters:
Exactly; that’s just where we’re at. You asked earlier about hope in all of this. Now, what’s beautiful is conferences like yours, conferences that are getting ready to happen at the end of January, the Metabolic Health summits at Low Carb USA, and all these others. We’re starting to get likeminded consumers, likeminded researchers, likeminded clinicians, likeminded industry leaders, and tech people, and data people.
In fact, engineers have been blowing my mind at all these conferences. The tech world seems to be moving us further down the road of medicine than doctors. I’m celebrating them for sure. These gatherings are picking momentum and we’re finding each other. We all used to all be weird little islands, but we’re finding each other now, and it’s changing. Though I can’t say much about it yet, I’m hoping in the next few months I can talk to you about some exciting things that are happening at the level of our standard of care medical system that I am starting to see a glimmer of hope down the line on the horizon in the realm of cancer therapy.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, that’s good to hear because oftentimes I think—sometimes I get negative because I see the money coming in from the drug company. I hate how we do that. You’re right though; these conferences are getting more and more. At this conference we have Dominique D’Agostino talking. Just so much great information. He’s worked with Thomas Seyfried. I’m sure you know him well as well.
Dr. Winters:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
The answers are out there. It’s just a matter of doing more of these conferences. Ultimately, when enough people start getting cancer, you’re right, the private funding will start to come in.
Dr. Winters:
That’s who’s funding some of these future projects I’m talking about where people that were big in the industry that lost a loved one, that said how is it possible with all this money, and all this effort, and all this time, and all these brilliant brains we aren’t further down the road in this who have pulled out their resources and said, let’s put it elsewhere. You’ve probably heard of Dr. Slocum and their group, Chemothermia in Turkey. This is a group of doctors all extremely conventional oncologists who a few years ago had a colleague diagnosed with pancreatic cancer who died within 20 days.
Here’s these men who are looking back at there colleague going how? How is this possible? Then they stumbled upon the work of people like Seyfried and whatnot and started to incorporate into a very conventional chemo driven Western standard of care oncology environment, these metabolic therapies, and are now having outcomes far greater than they experienced in the previous 50, 60 years of their careers. It’s pretty cool, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it is amazing. Let me tell you something; the people that I have seen and I’ve interviewed many here on this show that have beat cancer. I say lasting because a lot of people will do chemo like my mother-in-law. She did the standard of care, and then 10 years later almost to the day, she ended up with—from breast cancer to uterine cancer. It happens all the time. Of course, they weren’t connected, no. That’s what the doctors told her. The ones that do beat it are the ones that are doing the things that we’re discussing here.
Okay, so where would you—I want you to address two groups of people watching this. The group that has a diagnosis, has cancer, and the group that has a friend or a family member with cancer. Where do they start? Meaning the group with a friend or family member, what can they do to say, okay—delicately say maybe there’s another answer. What do they do? What about the person who has cancer? Where do they start?
Dr. Winters:
Such good questions. First of all, Number One, this is not a medical emergency unless it showed up in a very vulnerable place that made it so like it showed up and it’s pushing against and obstructing your colon. Obviously, that’s an emergency. If you just find out, oh my gosh, I have a lump, or I’ve noticed this, or they’ve caught this on an x-ray, or my bloodwork was weird, what happens then is you get thrown into an assembly line: one that’s very aggressive and one that’s very standard of care.
You’re basically a number. You’re treated the exact same way in many situations whether you’re a Stage 0 or a Stage IV especially in a smaller medical environment, smaller towns, not in a more savvy testing research environments. Number One, I remind people, take a breath. Stop; if you can avoid it, do not get immediately on Dr. Google and start looking for everything because most of the information you’re going to run across is likely misinformation in the beginning.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would say on both sides. The medical side and the alternative side, you’re going to get bad information.
Dr. Winters:
Exactly, you nailed. That’s it exactly; it’s both. Then it’s going to be even more confusing. Number Two, it took you an average of 7 to 10 years to have that cancer collect enough cells to get big enough and loud enough and capture our attention and get the diagnosis. Seven or ten years, you’ve got seven or ten days or seven or ten weeks to do some due diligence, do some research, get a second if not third opinion from your standard America—standard of care team. Find out what their thoughts are.
While you’re doing that if you have the—if you’ve had a biopsy, have that sent off for molecular profiling. Get a tissue assay always. Every patient should have this offered. It should not be asked for. You only get it offered in places where they were doing research for a treatment for that target, but people like myself, we can look at the targets and still know what’s in our toolbox and what the metabolic personality is of that tumor. For instance, it might be high in the PIK3C, which is very much a sugar sucking cancer type of thing, or a P10 process, or some of these others that might help us say, yeah, you really need to get on the low carb bandwagon right away.
The other thing is to get some basic labs because the only thing they’re interested in is to make sure your white blood cells are high enough to be able to get your next chemotherapy infusion. There is a lot more going on under that hood that can be easily seen on basic blood tests. The basics, if nothing else I want people to get a CBC with differential, a metabolic panel preferably that includes a GGT because that can show us what a cytodetoxification status. It’s a particular liver enzyme. Also, a C-reactive protein, which is a prognostic factor in all cancer types. An LDH which used to be run as part of our chem panels but has been left out for the last 10 years or so, lactate dehydrogenase, which actually shows me the state of your metabolic health in general and an ESR or a sedimentation rate. It goes by both names.
When those three tests, the last one’s ESR sed rate—or excuse me, ESR, LDH, and CRP are all elevated, that is a metabolic tsunami going on in your body. That’s why I know cancers more in the driver seat than you are. If you have all three of them within functional, normal ranges, then no matter what the diagnosis, what’s on the scan, and what’s on your markers, you are still in the driver seat. You have not been taken hostage. That information lets me know how aggressive we need to be with whatever therapies: conventional, non-conventional, combination. That is a simple step. That out of pocket testing runs about $105 in most walk-in labs.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow, no expense.
Dr. Winters:
It’s like seriously; there’s a nice dinner out with your loved one. Go and run some labs. Then your next important step is to put together your dream team, period. That dream team may include a standard of care oncologist, your surgeon, or radial oncologist. That’s absolutely critical because we need diagnostics, we need testing, we need to know where we are.
I would not want to come to me and ask me automotive advice when I’ve never worked on a car in my life just like I would never ask a physician nutritional advice who’s never had—when less than 25% of all medical schools were even offered an elective course in it. Please don’t ask for medical advice from doctors unless they’ve been specifically trained above and beyond RD nutrition. Frankly, I’m going to upset some of your listeners. RD nutritionist, because they’re industry driven nutrition—we have a lot of recovering RD nutritionist. I know a lot follow you and we see a lot of them at these conferences. They’re funneled into a particular belief system and value system that is frankly not therapeutic. It’s just enough to keep you from getting scurvy. You need a therapeutic nutritionist.
You need someone who’s going to help you work on the stress of all of this whether it’s a life coach, a friend, a pastor, a therapist, somebody who’s going to help you navigate the mental-emotional. If you’re someone who knows that you’ve got some good, reliable, trusted resources of an integrative oncologist, or integrative naturopathic, or functional medicine, or chiropractic, cancer centric practitioner, that’s a bonus, but there are far and few between. Hopefully, in the next couple of years, that will be a different story because I imagine it to be on everybody’s cancer team in the not so distance future.
My point is, do not put all your eggs in the basket of your standard of care because you will only get the standard. You deserve a lot more than that especially if you do not want to be that statistic. It’s folks like us who can help you navigate this territory.
Dr. Pompa:
You need someone on that side who understands, truly understands the low carb thing, that understands fasting, when it would be beneficial, when it wouldn’t. Really, you need that. Then the detoxification down at the cellular level, critical.
Warburg, his original cell—he talked about environmental toxins, how that is affecting the mitochondria where the respiration goes bad. He even said, he said, I don’t quite understand it. I don’t understand its role quite yet, but I know it’s a factor. I don’t even know to what degree. He knew it was a factor. Now today, we know it’s even more of a factor than what we think of what can cause the cell to go bad.
Dr. Winters:
Big time; and that’s what I thought was so great is this is 1920 he was saying something’s off. People like Weston A Price, and the Pottenger, Dr. Pottenger were also in the background saying, oh my gosh, we’re killing ourselves with our diets. This is in 1920 only a few—50 to 75 years past the initiation of the industrial food revolution. A hundred years later, we’ve really got ourselves in a pickle.
When you talk about my husband being a biochemist, he’s also—he’ll tell you and others tell you that arsenic and mercury are about the worst mitochondrial poisons out there. They’re just everywhere: hydrogenous corn syrup, coal-burning plants, our water source, a lot of our food sources. Yeah, I was waiting saving that for last because that’s the most obvious. It’s incredible to me that we are as—my friend, colleague, and mentor, Dr. Walter Crinnion, who’s an expert in the field of environmental medicine has said it’s not about if you have toxicity; it’s about how much and how you biochemically, individually process it based on your epigenetics and other factors.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’d love to interview your husband on the show because a lot of people are doing the SNP testing. There’s benefit; it shows weaknesses, etc, but it’s the epigenetics that really is much different. People don’t understand the differences. We’re not going to define it here. The point is, I would love to interview your husband.
Dr. Winters:
Yeah, and everyone loves him. You guys, if you thought this was fun, you wait until you talk to Steve. You guys will really have a hair—a fast yourselves again.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s great. I would love to because people don’t understand epigenetics and epigenetics is really the key. Toxins and stressors trigger these genes. That’s the key. I teach a lot of that in my stuff because we want to turn off the gene. It’s part of what’s important, but you won’t turn off the gene for whatever cancer susceptibility you have if you still have the stressors and toxins being one of them.
That’s why you have to put your team together, folks. I hope you heard that because, in these things that we’re talking about, it’s not just one person. When I get on these teams, I know exactly my role. It’s like my roles not over here in diagnosing. My role is not even over here on trying to kill the cancer cells. I stay in my own lane.
I thought that was—okay, the last question was, what do we do with the person that’s watching this that they want to tell their mother, their loved one, their friend about this. This could go south real quick. What’s your advice to them?
Dr. Winters:
It’s interesting because I get this question a lot especially through my social media. Someone’s like my aunt’s—I’m scared to tell them. First of all, I think the way you—the tone in the way you approach it is, hey, I heard this great podcast, or hey, I read this book. It was very interesting to me. If you’re interested, I’m happy to send you a link or send you a copy of it. More of just an invitation I think is there.
Sometimes the best place to start though is to say, what do you need? What resources do you have? How do you feel most supported right now? How can I most support you? That might be your perfect opening is more start it out as a question of, hey, what do you need?
If they’re like, I’m just overwhelmed. I don’t even know where to start. Then it’s something like my book or even when you talked about Dr. Seyfried’s book, I often tell them read Travis Cristofferson’s instead. I’m like, Travis’s book is like the cliffs notes of Dr. Thomas’s book. That’s an invitation. Or luckily, it’s conversations like this, podcasts like this that are out there, that people can watch in a matter of less than an hour and learn a lot. Then see if that resonates with them. If it does, tell them to come find us.
Dr. Pompa:
I should have gotten Travis at the seminar. Ashley, maybe we have spot.
Dr. Winters:
There you go. I could get up there and we could do a little duet.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, if you have his email, give it to Ashley.
Dr. Winters:
I will.
Dr. Pompa:
I should reach out to him because you’re right; he does make it simple. That is a great book. Unfortunately, I read it after I read Seyfried. It was a breeze. I was like, oh my gosh. I should have read this first.
Anyway, what a great show. Thank you so much for I think inspiring our listeners and our viewers here because I think you give the hope that people need. There is an answer. Probably just your story alone, like mine, is enough hope. There’s a different way. There’s an answer.
Folks watching this, share this with as many people as you can. Because as you pointed out, it’s these podcasts, it’s the seminars, that’s the key if we can keep getting this message out that there is, in fact, another way and just another view of this whole thing that you won’t cure cancer. There is no cure. By the way, that sounds negative to people, but it’s actually a positive when people understand it. Share the show. Thank you so much. What a blessing you’ve brought our audience, no doubt about it.
Dr. Winters:
Thank you so much; what a pleasure.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Practitioners, don’t forget to check out Dr. Pompa’s event in Nashville where Nasha Winters will be a speaker along with a lineup of top health experts in this field. Please go to hcfevents.com for more information. To the rest of our CHTV audience, please check out events.drpompa.com if you’d like to buy a one-day ticket for a special day of public attendance. We hope to see you there.
We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone who may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
