August 27, 2017

The podcast episode “How To Cure Yourself Of Cancer: An Epic Interview With A Man Who Defied Conventional Medicine & Cured Himself Of Prostate Cancer.” was one of the most popular and comment-filled episodes that I've ever released on alternative methods of healing cancer.

It was so popular, in fact, that I decided to approach Eric Remensperger, my guest on that episode, and propose that he address the host of comments and questions that materialized after that original show. He was kind enough to do so, and in today's special Premium episode (available as a part of 300+ additional special episodes, videos and pdf's you can access here), Eric delves into the following:

[00:00] Introduction

[01:57] Coffee Enemas

[05:39] Using Nystatin

[08:10] Wim Hof’s Breathing Techniques

[12:38] Emotional Blockages

[15:44] The Budwig Protocol

[21:21] Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide

[23:37] Acupunture

[24:24] Sulforaphane

[26:56] DCA

[30:47] Laetrile

[33:52] High Dose Vitamin C

[40:26] Children With Cancer

[43:19] Fitting In With The Regimen In Your Everyday Life

[46:23] Cancer and Lymph Node Removal

[48:08] Eric’s Diet

[57:58] End of Podcast

Introduction:

Thank you, Ben.  The questions posed will include the following: a discussion on coffee enemas, the use of Nystatin as an anti-fungal agent, Wim Hof breathing techniques and oxygenation at a cellular and tissue level, the Budwig Protocol, sulforaphane, Laetrile or vitamin B17, high-dose vitamin C, and balancing oxidative therapies with antioxidants.  But before I begin, I have to make my usual disclaimer.  I'm not a doctor and I don't give medical advice.  I make no recommendations.  All I’ve done is looked at the data, and as an attorney I kind of applied my own kind of skill set to looking at evidence, and come to my own conclusions.  And I'm sharing information with you so that you can have the same perspective that I came to when you're trying to sort through and make your own decisions.

Let me also mention that in the process of coming to my own theories and conclusions, I've formed what I consider to be some foundational elements for moving back from a cancering state to a healing state over and above kind of nutrition and supplementation, which obviously a lot of us spend a lot of time focusing on nutrition and supplementation, but these other elements include, there's really four of them that I kind of list down here: one is oxygenation of the cells and tissues, number two is proper cellular communication because in my view all we are are our bags of cells, and cancer are cells that are not functioning the way they should within that community of cells.  And so we do really need to kind of focus on proper communication between the cells.  Detoxification, which includes physical, environmental, and emotional, and energetic wellness.  Those are kind of the four underlying foundational elements for all of the protocols and the pillars that you'll see if you go on my site.  So let's go ahead and get started.

Coffee Enemas

The first question I'm going to address comes from Kathy.  Kathy's concerned about whether or not coffee enemas might be contraindicated for her because she had several lymph nodes removed as part of a treatment for cervical cancer, and she asks whether she should be concerned about doing enemas without lymph nodes.  And I think before answering that question, it might be useful to talk a little bit about coffee enemas generally.  Let me mentioned for those of you who haven't already seen it that Ben has a great blog post on coffee enemas entitled “The Bulletproof Coffee Enema: Everything You've Always Wanted To Know About Coffee Enemas But Were Afraid To Ask”.  On that blog post, he goes not only into kind of how to do an enema, but why they do an enema and that sort of thing.  So if you haven't or are not familiar with doing coffee enemas, I highly recommend that as a good source to go to.  But just kind of briefly, enemas are traditionally done to clean out the bowels of your colon.  Coffee enema, although this is an enema, it's quite different, it's done to help the liver do its job of detoxification.  As we all know, the liver is not just a detoxifier, it's the ultimate multi-tasker.  It does everything from converting protein into glucose, storing vitamins and nutrients, regulating hormones, making bile, et cetera.

When a coffee enema is done, the caffeine from the coffee is absorbed into the system, where it goes into the liver and acts as a detoxifier.  It works there because there are these entrohepatic circulatory veins that carry toxins from the sigmoid colon to the liver for the detoxification process to run.  Coffee enemas also cause the liver to produce more bile, which as you probably know is stored in the gallbladder.  And as a footnote, I've discovered this recently, removal of the gall bladder is the number one surgery that's done involving your organs.  But by producing more bile, the bile is necessary to move and provide for the process of elimination.  So the coffee has this affinity for the liver, and when it's absorbed into the liver, it frees the liver up to do its job, which is processing toxic materials.  In addition, the coffee itself contains alkaloids that stimulate the production of glutathione s-transferase, which we're going to talk about a little bit later on.  There's a question that comes up on sulforaphane.  Glutathione s-transferase is an enzyme that's crucial for these detox pathways to work properly.  So in short, a coffee enema will speed up and benefit the liver's role in this entire detoxification process.

So to get back to Kathy's question, I think, obviously speak to your doctor, Kathy.  But I would say rather than being contraindicated, it might be even more important if you're short some of your lymph nodes to make sure that your liver's functioning at its highest level because the two major detoxification processes the body has are lymphatic system and the liver.  And so I would also suggest that you, 'cause you still have plenty of lymph nodes, I think you mentioned 30 in your question, there are hundreds and hundreds of lymph nodes in the body, but obviously not having those lymph nodes means that that part of your body has less clearing capacity, and I would suggest that you do the dry skin brushing, and the rebounding, and all the other things, like exercise, movement to make sure your lymphatic system is functioning well.

Using Nystatin

Kathy also raised the next question, and there’s a few others actually, I think flagged this as a question as well.  She raised the impact whether or not Nystatin would be indicated for somebody like her in the impact, in particular the Nystatin might have on her liver.  She asked if she'd be concerned about this.  And in response, I should say that I am not a big fan of pharmaceuticals, and thus the decision to take Nystatin was a real challenge for me.  For those of you not familiar with it, Nystatin is an off-patent prescription drug.  It's commonly used to address candida overgrowth and it's been around quite a while.  I was told by my integrative doctor that, and she's very cautious about prescribing integrated drugs, she's an anthroposophical doctor, but she said as far as prescription drugs goes it's about as safe as you get.  I'm not sure I'm necessarily convinced that that's 100% true, but I do know that it's, I did some research and the drug is designed not to leave the gut, it's not designed to have any effect in the bloodstream.  It does what it does within the entire intestinal tract.  So therefore, it shouldn't put the liver at any risk of damage by virtue of Nystatin itself going to the liver.

But you need to be very aware of the fact that the way Nystatin works is it literally blows up the organism.  So the fungus or the candida is literally blown up.  And this results in cellular die-off or residue of what was left to those organisms, which are then toxins that are distributed throughout the body.  And so this die-off, which is caused by Nystatin can be quite severe, and I don't know how that might impact the liver.  I know some people have difficulty tolerating Nystatin because of the die-off if they have extremely high levels of fungus.  I didn't have any issues.  So I think again it's very important to make sure that both the lymphatic system and your liver are functioning at their optimal level.  So again, please talk your doctor if you're considering fungal control therapies generally.  For those of you who might be interested in alternatives to pharmaceuticals, I think there are some natural agents that can be used that have anti-fungal properties and they include garlic, caprylic acid, grapefruit seed extract, and olive leaf.  Those are all effective anti-fungal, natural agents.

Wim Hof’s Breathing Techniques

The next question comes from Ben and it concerns Wim Hof's breathing techniques.  Ben asks if the controlled hyperventilation and breath holding, which is intended to raise blood oxygen levels and also raise pH, might along with meditation, slow down cancering and help convert to the healing state. What do I think? Ben, the first thing I would say is I think Wim is an amazing guy who's done amazing feats using his breathwork techniques.  And as I mentioned earlier on, oxygenation in the cellular and tissue level is at the core of my protocols to address cancer, and therefore I was very interested once I heard about Wim's techniques.  And so I did actually take his course and practiced some of his techniques myself, including the meditation and the breathwork.  I didn't actually do the ice baths.  I didn't get quite that far.  But I thought it might be a good way to kind of help facilitate oxygenation of tissues, particularly in the prostate.  And I took the time, but what I found was that I didn't really kind of understand the science behind it and so I really needed to get into the weeds a little bit to better understand exactly what it was doing within the functioning of moving oxygen into your lungs, then from your lungs into your blood, and then from your blood into your tissues.

I think that question was answered when I came upon a book which Ben referenced in one of his podcasts by Patrick McKeown called “The Oxygen Advantage”, and I should mention just as an aside, since my original podcast with Ben and this particular taping, Patrick McKeown has appeared on Ben's podcast.  And so if you Google Ban and “maximize oxygen utilization efficiency”, you'll find the blog post on that and the posting for that particular podcast.  And if you haven't already heard it, I would suggest you give it a listen 'cause I think it's well worth a listen.  But in his book and on the podcast, Patrick makes it very clear that deep breathing does nothing to increase oxygenation in the tissues themselves.  He promotes, in order to best oxygenate your blood, the use of the diaphragm as part of your breathing process, which is used far more if you breathe through the nose than it is if you're panting through the mouth.  And so doing that kind of diaphragmatic breathing, slow breathing, brings in through your nose, brings in nitric oxide, and this allows for what he calls ventilation profusion.  Because when you breathe in through the nose, you're bringing in the air from the upper part of the lungs than lower.  And since most of the concentration of blood is in the lower lobes of lungs and breathing occurs in the upper lobes, you need nitrous oxide to bring blood from the lower lobes to the upper lobes.  And ventilation profusion apparently does this.

Getting oxygenation into the blood is one thing, and it really does you no good unless you can get that oxygen out of the blood and into your tissues, and that requires carbon dioxide.  And this is the rub here for me, to get those levels of CO2 up, you need to have controlled breathing.  What I am familiar with, 'cause I'm a big fan of yoga and done a lot of yoga, we call it Ujjayi breath.  Very controlled, through the nose diagrammatic breathing.  Now classic Ujjayi breathing includes moving the [0:11:38] ______, making that kind of ocean sound in the back of your throat, that's done really to bring heat into your body.  So if you're doing yoga on a really hot day, you don't have to make the ocean sound during your Ujjayi breath.  But the whole idea is to really get your breathing down to an extremely low, controlled state.  And what that does is it raises your level of carbon dioxide, and that effectively allows for the movement of oxygen out of your blood and into your tissues.  I think the deciding point for me in ceasing any more of the Wim Hof methods were when I stumbled upon an [0:12:11] ______ that breathing hard increases the bond between oxygen and the blood cells.  And in fact he mentions in the podcast then that the amount of oxygen in the brain is actually reduced, not increased, which is why you get that lightheaded feeling.  So over breathing to me is probably not the best, at least for therapeutic purposes, there might be other reasons to do it, but certainly not for getting oxygen into the cells.

Emotional Blockages

The next question comes from Pete who asks about emotional blockages.  He says, and I quote, “Does sexual activity always play a role in what processes work to address blockages?”  Well at first blush, this might seem like a bit of an odd question, but he might be kind of tying back into some discussions that I've had on podcasts about the theories Wilhelm Reich, who was a brilliant German scientist who came up with this whole Orgone theory of life and created this Orgone machine.  And the word Orgone ties into orgasm 'cause he was a very firm believer that sexual health really played a major role in physical health.  And so if there were any kind of serious dysfunctions at a sexual level, it would manifest itself at a physical level.  I'm not sure necessarily you need to buy into that perspective to still understand the importance of kind of just maintaining energetic flow.  And I think sexual energy is just one of many energies that in Chinese medicine we call “chi”.  This particular element of the various protocols has been a real challenge for me because I think when it comes to this emotional, sexual energetic low, I've fallen down a bit.

To answer Pete's question, I don't think so, no.  I think the sources of cancer are really all over the map.  In my view as a non-scientist but someone who has looked at all the evidence, I think cancer is caused by defects in respiration, which could be the result of many factors.  It could be environmental toxins, it could be sexual and emotional blockage, they could be excessive radiation, EMFs, all sorts of different things that can interrupt the ability of the mitochondria to respirate the way that it should.  And so, anything that kind of interrupts that respiratory capacity could result in cancer.  I think chi is the obvious one 'cause that's kind of the source of what we considered, at least in the annals of Chinese medicine, it's considered to be kind of the source of all life.

So bottom line, not to get too woo-woo here, it's really important to just pay attention to your attention, where you're putting your attention.  Pay attention to your thoughts, see how much of your energy is being wasted chasing ghosts with your monkey mind, and just keep in mind that it's about that awareness and where you put your focus or attention is where your chi, your life energy actually flows.  So just be very cognizant of that.  And if your sleep is good, and your energy is good, you feel some real passion, you get out of bed every morning and conquer the world, I think you're pretty much there, and just do the best you can in all times to keep things kind of fresh.  Like changing up every now and then, don't let things get too stale, don't let things stagnate.  If you feel like you need to say something, say it.  And the best way to address blockage is just to remain present, focused, [0:15:33] ______.  Don't find yourself be distracted, frustrated, discouraged, depressed, or disappointed.  Yeah, it's not just sexual.

The Budwig Protocol

The next question comes from Rob who asked about the Budwig Protocol.  He says, and I'm going to actually quote his question here because he does raise several things that I had others bring to my attention as concerns when it comes to the Budwig Protocol, and I think these are all valid concerns and I can kind of go through why I don't think that these challenges warrant me not taking the chance at doing this protocol based on what I view as kind of how it ties into my theories.  But he says, “I did the cottage cheese, flaxseed for a while, then got concerned because I read somewhere that flax was high in estrogen and omega-6, and the omega-3 wasn't as bioavailable as animal-based omega-3.  This is correct.  I also have heard, I think from Rhonda Patrick, that casein in higher protein dairy foods like cottage cheese exacerbates cancer.  On the plus side there is supposed to be a reaction that takes place to create a sulphurated protein, is that right?  Can you comment?”

Well, I think let's start by just talking about Johanna Budwig who came up with these protocols and kind of who she was, I think it's an interesting story if we know the purpose to raise it.  She was a student of nursing at a large hospital, a thousand beds, and it was also a pharmacy boarding school where she studied pharmacology, and she later went on to study chemistry and physics.  And in that process, she became an expert in lipids.  So much so that after World War II, she was appointed that Chief Expert For Drugs And Fats at the Germany's Federal Institute For Fats Research, which was at the time in Germany the largest office issuing approvals for new drugs, very much like our FDA, and she discovered that fats played a very crucial role in cellular respiration, and I would say communication too, cellular communication.  But she focused on the respiratory issues.  Her opponents, interestingly, as an aside, really came down hard that she wasn't qualified because she wasn't a doctor.  So at the age of 47, she went back to medical school and became a doctor.  Clearly this woman had a love of science and really never had kids or had a family, she just loved her science.  That was her life.

But she was convinced, and I think we all know this now, not a big stress to come to this conclusion, that highly processed foods, hydrogenated oils in particular, block this oxidative process.  For those of you know the work of Jack Kruse, what he calls quantum tunnelling.  And that's what leads to the development of cancer, which ties in perfectly to the Warburg Theory, and Wilhelm Reich's theories, and the other.  While doing her job as the Chief Expert For Drugs And Fat, she observed that cottage cheese or cork, contains the same sulfhydryl groups as those found in the cancer treatment drugs that she was being asked to look at in her official capacity.

The sulfhydryl groups are cysteine and methionine amino, methionine amino acids.  And she established that essential polyunsaturated fatty acids are proof as a crucial for properly functioning cellular membrane.  And of course without a proper cellular membrane, this respiration itself is impaired.  She flagged, which we now know as omega-6 and omega-3s, two of which he considered essential polyunsaturated fatty acids that are absolutely critical for cell membranes [0:19:10] ______, that’s linoleic acid and linolenic acid.  Linoleic being six and linolenic being threes, and the chemical reaction takes place when sulfhydryl in the cottage cheese binds with the unsaturated fatty acids in the flaxseed oil.  And this allows the flaxseed to become water soluble and enter a cell to supply energy.  So if I were to draw a metaphor, I'd say imagine the cells in the body are like a battery in a car and they require electrical energy in order to run and provide energy for other biological functions.  If your car battery is not functioning as it should, is dead and needs jumper cables, and apparently this combination of cork and flaxseed oil work together to kind of bring back that energy, it kind of helps facilitate the flow of these electrons.

“Know that part of the protocol is particularly effective when coupled with sun exposure.”  That's a quote from her book.  And she said of all living creatures, the human being has the highest concentration of photons from the sun's energies.  So I think in my view, this all kind of squarely within my theories that underlie not only the respiratory issues, but the cellular communication issues, and getting that stuff to function properly is really important.  And so I did bring Budwig's Protocol into my daily routine.  I was doing it early on in addressing my cancer.  I did it every day.  I now do it probably three or four days a week, on days typically when I'm getting a lot of sun because I have like that kind of marriage of the photons from the sun, at the same time I'm consuming this electron-rich mixture, which I'll get into it on my website but we need to do it here, but I actually make it, so it tastes good because if you just have it plain, it's not the tastiest thing in the world.  But you can doctor it up and make it quite delicious.  One way I'm making it taste almost like cheesecake. So hope that answers that question, but I do think that you raise some good concerns.

Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide

Moving on to the next question, Wayne asks about the use of food grade hydrogen peroxide, specifically about grade and dosage.  And again I have to make a disclaimer, 'cause hydrogen peroxide is an extremely caustic substance.  You got to be very careful that you're not doing this without the proper advice and guidance of your healthcare professional.  But that being said, the supplement, maybe about the theory first, hydrogen peroxide, as the theory is, the folks that promoted it have the understanding that it really is a way of killing all pathogens.  Viruses, cancer, fungus, they're all anaerobic and cannot survive in the presence of hydrogen peroxide.  It's the absence of oxygen that really kind of helps these pathogens survive.  And so again getting too highly oxygenated environment is really important, ties back into a lot of the protocols.  So more oxygen slows the progression of cancer and less oxygen will allow for faster cancer growth.  That's kind of one of the underlying themes.  And so hydrogen peroxide does fit into that.

There's two ways that I do it.  I do it using hydrogen peroxide, and I'll tell you in a minute kind of how I do it, but I also do it through the high dose vitamin C done intravenously because that, I'll get to in a second 'cause we're going to have a question on that in a little bit, asking about high dose vitamin C, but it actually converts to hydrogen peroxide.  Don't even consider the 3% that sold at your local drug store.  That's a pharmaceutical grade, it's not to be ingested and it has toxic stabilizers.  You can only use food grade, whether you're ingesting it or using it in your bath.  And I use 35% food grade, it's available on Amazon.  And the two ways you can take it, you can take a cup of it in a bath of hot water and soak it in for 20 or 30 minutes.  Or you can put, what I do is I put eight drops into a glass about eight ounces of aloe vera juice.  You can also use distilled water.  Some people say you can put it in regular water, but others say that if it has too many minerals in it, it kind of causes some issues with hydrogen peroxide, something I'm not familiar enough to speak on.  But I just use aloe vera juice myself.

Acupunture

The next question comes from Horatio who asks, “You mentioned how early on you had problems with waking up a few times at night to urinate, throat phlegm, coughing, and runny nose.  Was it acupuncture that remedied those?”  This is an easy answer, Wayne.  Yes.  Next question, no, I'll just quickly mention that I also did some dietary changes and took some Chinese herbs as part of my treatment protocols.  But acupuncture was done, in my view, is it is extremely effective for these types of chronic ailments.  The only, I think, footnote or caveat to that is you need to find a good acupuncturist, and that's not an easy task.  So my suggestion would be to ask for referrals and try more than one acupuncturist until you stumble upon one that you think really can do the job.  That really works.

Sulforaphane

The next question comes from Rob, a listener who's been using many of my same protocols, and he's been using them just to keep his PSA level down.  And Rob asks, “What is your take on sulforaphane from broccoli seed sprouts?”  Okay, he mentions Rhonda Patrick, who's a big fan, and cited a French study where prostate cancer patients reduced their PSA in doubling time.  Yeah, I would suggest, if anyone is interested in sulforaphane as a medicinal and therapeutic element, you should take a good listen to Rhonda's podcast 'cause she does a really deep dive on sulforaphane and its effect on cancer.  But in the trial that Rob references, which Rhonda talks about on her podcast, they discovered that prostate cancer patients who were taking sulforaphane had a significant drop in the doubling of the PSA marker of prostate cancer growth.  It was something like 86% just taking 60 milligrams a day of sulforaphane.  So yeah, it's an isothiocyanate and it has a considerable impact on the progression of certainly hard tumor cancers.  I don't know any test that they'd had done outside of this one.  I think if you want to learn more about it, you should just go ahead and get Rhonda's podcast and listen.

In the podcast, she also gets into the phase two detoxification enzymes and the NRF-2 pathway and its role as an antioxidant response element.  And guess what is the phase two detox enzyme?  Glutathione s-transferase, which we talked about when we were talking about coffee enemas.  What it does, the glutathione s-transferase, is inactivates the pro-carcinogenic agents by transforming them into water soluble compounds, which are then able to be excreted in the urine and bile.  Personally, I take three forms of sulforaphane.  I do get broccoli sprouts from my local farmer's market whenever they have them.  They don't always do, but typically they do and I get about six ounces for the week.  And I also take daily a supplement called Crucera-SGS, manufactured by Thorne, which has 50 milligrams of sulforaphane in it.  And finally, I put moringa in the powder into my new smoothie, which I don't do every day, I do it two or three days a week.  And that is also extremely high in sulforaphane.  I think moringa powder actually has more sulforaphane than broccoli sprout.  You can also get sulforaphane from regular broccoli and cauliflower, but I don't think the levels are high enough to have any real therapeutic benefit.

DCA

The same listener, Rob, asks for my thoughts on dichloroacetate, which I'll refer to as DCA.  And I should mention before I get too far into this that there's a great article that was published in the British Journal of Cancer back in 2008 that you should take a look at if you want to know all about DCA.  I found it fascinating not only because of how it kind of walked through efficacy of DCA and its impact on the progression of cancer, but how all of that kind of laid into the same foundational elements that fit into the protocols that support my own theories of cancer.  So I guess we can sidetrack for a moment on my own theories of cancer, which is that, and again I apologize for repeating myself, but for those who maybe haven't yet heard the [0:27:46] ______ podcast, at least solid tumor cancers like breast cancer and prostate cancer, these are all characterized by aerobic glycolysis.  They use glucose for energy even when oxygen is available, and this is a far less efficient means of energy production than the mitochondria-based glucose oxidation which is the normal ATP process.  I think they produced two rather than 36 ATP per glucose molecule.  And thus, cancer cells can only thrive when there is significantly increased levels of glucose, significantly increased glucose uptakes, which obviously need glucose to do.

I have also concluded that, at least for solid tumors, a hypoxic environment can result in the transformation of a healthy cell into a cancer cell.  And cancer cells kind of revert back to their pre-oxygen based life form way of respirating whenever they're exposed to a hypoxic environment.  It's almost like a method of the cells to kind of preserve themselves.  If they don't get enough oxygen, then they revert to this other form of providing energy.  And in the study that I referenced on DCA, they specifically noted that in this hypoxic state, the cells express pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase, or PDK, which promotes or facilitates the conversion to aerobic glycolysis in the cytoplasm in the cell by metabolizing pyruvate into lactate.  And this lactate acidosis facilitates tumor growth and activates angiogenesis in the breakdown in the surrounding tissues.  So what DCA does as a drug is it increases the delivery of pyruvate into the mitochondria, which allows the cells to once again function the way they should, including returning to glucose oxidation and the functioning of apoptosis.  The way it functions not by inhibiting aerobic glycolysis, but by announcing glucose oxidation.  If it were the former, it would actually be fatal to non-cancer tissues that use aerobic glycolysis for energy production.

It does this again by bringing pyruvate into the mitochondria.  It's been around for about I'm going to guess maybe a decade or so, maybe more, this trial was a while back, and there have been other trials done that indicate this same reference in this particular trial that indicate their concerns about peripheral neuropathy with DCA.  I don't know that any of them concluded that that is something that won't resolve itself if you stop taking DCA.  But I think there has not been enough clinical trial work to really know what the right dose strategy should be or how to manage any potential toxicity.  And unfortunately as this is now a generic drug, the likelihood of pharmaceutical industries coming in to help fund tests is very, very unlikely.  So if I ever decided that I had to kind of pull all the stops and use even some experimental pharmaceutical drugs, I think to answer to the question DCA would be on my short list.  No question about it.  But for now I'm just kind of adopting a wait-and-see, and I seem to be doing fine without it.

Laetrile

The next question comes from Steve who asks about the B17, also referred to as laetrile, and whether I take it.  And the quick answer is: yes, it is.  I do.  It's part of my stack.  But I do take it in its natural state, i.e. apricot pits rather than taking a supplement form.  You can get it both ways.  I think there is even a version you can do via IV.  I'm not familiar with them, how to access that, or how that works, but someone mentioned it to me in the course of discussions I have had on laetrile.  One thing again I have to caution you on is that it's not approved for use within the United States, and the National Cancer Institute has come up very strongly against laetrile.  So this discussion again is just for informational purposes.

How does it work? Well normal cells have an enzyme called rhodanese, which neutralizes benzaldehyde.  The benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide are what's found in B17.  So normal cells have this enzyme, rhodanese, which render these two potentially toxic agents neutral.  Apparently this enzyme converts them into harmless compounds such as benzoic acid.  Cancer cells don't have rhodanese.  They instead have an enzyme called beta-glucosidase.  Beta-glucosidase is an enzyme that's only found in cancer cells.  And this enzyme releases the benzaldehyde and the cyanide from the glucose, which then kill the cancer cell.

There was another listener who I have to give a shout out to, I don't have his name in front of me, but he referenced a documentary called, “Second Opinion”.  Hold on a second.  Let's see if I have notes on this.  I don't.  I think it's worth a listen to.  It's called “Second Opinion: The Sloan-Kettering Study”.  Anyway, in that documentary, they apparently did animal studies back in 1974 at Sloan and Kettering, and they took some specifically engineered tumor-bearing rats, rats designed to create cancer in their bodies.  In the control group they were testing for lung metastases and they found in the control group that only 25% of the rats that were given B17, or laetrile actually had lung metastasized cancer.  In the placebo group, 75% actually had metastases.  So you can see there's almost an inverse.  Fairly high significant difference.  So that's kind of the story on laetrile.  There've been some other kind of studies that have concluded it has no benefit, but those studies, I think the most recent one is far back as 1982, I found extremely suspect.  There were no control groups, there was no peer review, there were no experts, the people had no experience with laetrile.  It looked to me like it was kind of a functional equivalent of what we call fake news, just pure pseudoscience.  So I didn't give those any credence at all, but you should draw your own conclusions.

High Dose Vitamin C

Next, I want to conflate two questions because there's a bit of an overlap here.  The first comes in from Dave, both are normal patients who's been using some of the protocols to keep cancer at bay for about four years, and he asks about hydrogen peroxide and mentions having taken as much as 125 grams IV of vitamin C.  That's very high.  I've done 75.  And two other Ben listeners, Meg and Steve, also raise concerns about the use of antioxidants concurrently with using oxidative stress therapies.  And that's an excellent question because that's something I think people kind of gloss over.  They don't really think about the fact that if you're doing highly oxidative stress therapies, you don't want to be taking a lot of antioxidants.  It just doesn't make any sense.  One's going to cancel out the other and you're going to get good benefit from either one.  Let's kind of maybe drill down a little bit on this.

Let's start off just talking about antioxidants generally, kind of when you think about antioxidants, I think probably the first two that come to mind are glutathione and vitamin C.  And I think it's interesting to note that if we kind of circle back for a moment on laetrile, tumors amass high concentrations of glutathione in order to protect themselves against chemotherapeutic attacks such as the hyperoxidative stresses in one of my protocols.  And those tumors need cysteine in order to produce that glutathione.  And what depletes the supply of cysteine?  Cyanide.  So laetril actually releases cyanide in the tumor cells, and one of the ways I think it destroys the cells is it reduces the cysteine levels and thereby reduces their intercellular concentrations of glutathione.  So we kind of think of glutathione as being nothing but a protective shield, but it can have other impacts.  It does with it needs to do, which is to offset oxidation or oxidative stresses.

So you really need to be careful when you're trying to balance antioxidants while doing these oxidative stress therapies.  And I think probably the most clear and understandable way of looking at this question is to kind of take a look at and understand the redox effect.  ‘Cause the redox effect is what you're striving for, and that's where we're going to kind of mention now when we get into taking high doses of vitamin C intravenously as a therapeutic intervention.  Linus Pauling, I'm sure many of your listeners know the name, he's kind of the grandfather on the use of vitamin C as an orthomolecular medicine and he kind of set the stage for a lot of the science in this space.  All the materials that I've looked at that talk about high dose vitamin C as a therapeutic intervention intravenously evolve, come out of the Riordan Clinic here in the US, and so that's a good place to go if you're looking for more information.  In Japan, they do an extensive amount of, they use high dose vitamin C as a therapeutic intervention extensively.  So there's also been an extensive amount of research as well, I would imagine, out of Japan.

And getting back to the redox effect, this is kind of where it gets interesting.  ‘Cause vitamin C, we think of vitamin C as antioxidant, and when it's taken in normal doses in fact, it is an antioxidant.  But when it's taken in extremely high doses intravenous, it actually turns into a proactive.  It has kind of an oxidative stress effect.  Dr. Riordan did a lot of testing and in his lab, came to the conclusion that you really want to get to between 350 and 400 milligrams per deciliter after getting an IV in order to really induce apoptosis in the cancer tumor cells to this highly oxidative stress.  I started with 25 grams, then went 50 grams, and then to 75, so that's kind of where I am now.  And I do my IVs now every other week.  I was doing it once a week.  And when you take doses that gets you into the 350 to 400 milligrams per deciliter level, the vitamin C actually has a significant impact on the impact between the iron and oxygen in your tissues.  And in doing so, it kind of generates hydrogen peroxide.  And that's what's so lethal to the cancer cells.  So it's kind of a way of doing hydrogen peroxide without putting hydrogen peroxide in your system your body's creating.

And so, what we're doing here is I would say we could call this redox therapy.  And getting back to Wilhelm Reich, his theories, all of life has these pulses, these ebbs and these flows.  This is like the ocean, our breath, things are constantly moving and what we're talking about here are really just an ebb and flow of electrons.  Oxidation is a loss of electrons and reduction is to gain electrons.  And so it's a cycling effect between the two is what kind of we know as like life energy.  You need this ebb and flow.  And so hydrogen peroxide generates free radicals, and the cancer cells just can't handle the oxidative stress.  That, I hope answers the question.  Another interesting point about vitamin C that's worth mentioning, and as it's made from glucose, which we all know through Warburg studies and everything that's happened since Warburg, that cancer feeds on glucose.

And it's also important, I think to note that these molecules, the glucose molecules that are used are derived from corn products.  So you want to make sure that whoever is getting your vitamin C from is using clean, non-GMO, healthy sources of corn.  And if you ask your doctor, I'm sure you will get, make sure that before you take it, ask your doctor and get some comfort on that.  If not, find another doctor.  Mine said they're very careful about where they source it.  Another corollary to this might be in others' thought processes on vitamin C is this whole issue about liposomal vitamin C, which is kind of the newest thing, and there's a ton of products out there.  Dr. Mercola has one, I take it as part of my normal daily stack.  That's not high dose.  I take 2 or 3,000 milligrams a day.  It's being studied as a potential alternative to IV vitamin C, but I don't know there's anything out there that you could point to answer questions about whether it's an effective alternative.

Children With Cancer

The next question comes from Randy who raises an interesting conundrum.  He says, “Eric, and I agree with everything you said.  But if cancer is largely caused by stress, lack of creativity, drive, and general malaise, how do we explain the hundreds of thousands of two, three, and four year old children who get cancer every year?”  When I saw that, I said, “Wow.  This is a tough one.”  I totally get it. I totally get it, Randy.  You touch on a very important point.  In my view, there are several things at play, and again this is just my opinion, there's no clinical evidence to back up what I'm about to say.  But first of all, cancer cells proliferate quite well when the environment is full of nourishing fuel.  Which could be one reason why it's much harder for even kind of traditional doctors who are doing cancer treatments to have success with young kids.  They have better success with old people because young kids have so much chi, or life energy, so the cancer is much easier, it has much easier time proliferating, and growing, and spreading.

And I also, as a footnote, think that this could have played a role in my own cancer.  Because if you may recall from the prior podcast, when Ben and I met, I was constantly flooding my body with excess nutrients and not giving my body a chance to kind of clean itself out.  I was never going into the autophagy state, or allowing apoptosis to fully run its course.  And I think that probably contributed certainly to the aggressiveness of the disease.  It probably didn't cause the disease, but it caused me to have a far more aggressive and prolific version of it.  I think another point worth raising is that young kids today are really exposed to environmental toxins that we simply were not exposed to in the past.  EMFs are an obvious example.  I mean every school classroom now has WiFi, and our bodies are clearly designed to heal themselves and deal with stressors, but there comes a breaking point when it can no longer remain in its healing state, it just has too many stressors to reverse its cancer state.  So I think these environmental toxins are a big problem.

And finally, I think kids are just not immune to the energetics of their parents.  They have the same genes, they grew up in the same environment, and they're little sponges that pick up on everything they're exposed to in the first two years.  So you know if there are any energetic deficiencies within the household, the kids are going to suffer from that.  And I think that coupled with the whole concept of Pottenger’s cats which show the impact of epigenetics on health and genes might also be a play too so that you have epigenetic impacts affecting future genes that end up having expression in subsequent generations.  So while it's impossible to say what one element is, I think if you take a look at all these perspectives, you can kind of see why there might be this problem that we see with cancer in young children, which is unfortunate. Yeah, that's a real downer.  It stresses me out to even talk about.

Fitting In With The Regimen In Your Everyday Life

The next question comes from Jackie and she raises probably one of the biggest challenges that anyone faces who's trying to do alternatives to sanative care and it says, “How you manage the time involved in getting all these protocols in.”  I'm going to quote her.  She says, “Do you find yourself stressing out about everything you must do to manage your heath? It seems like you're doing a ton of stuff.  I find myself getting overwhelmed try to fit everything into my schedule, like meditating, coffee enemas, energy work, going to appointments, so on, et cetera.  All that on top of having a job and a social life.  How do you fit everything in?”  That's a great question.  That's a really good question.  It's interesting when I was originally was kind of asked about the challenges people face in addressing alternative treatments.  My initial response had always been, “Well, it's unfortunate and I'm really, really upset over the fact that our insurance companies don't pay for most of these treatments, hardly any of them.”  And so people that don't have means or have to rely on insurance to cover them, [0:44:19] ______ we don’t have the option.  But a lot of the treatment protocols don't cost much, if anything.  I mean sunlight's free, grounding's free, hydration is next to free, oxygenation, these are all things that really you just have to kind of, how you feel about yourself and how you feel about your life and all those things.  Those are not a problem as far as finances are concerned.

The bigger issue, the one that we're touching on here, Jackie, is how do you fit it all into your schedule.  And that is a real challenge.  And I think the only way that I could maybe suggest that you approach this question is, first of all, you have to decide if you're all in.  And you have to be all in.  In other words, you have to say, “Look, no matter what, I'm going to do what it's going to take to heal myself” 'cause that's the most important thing.  And that will mean that you may have to take some time sacrifices and take a period of time where maybe you're not traveling, you're not seeing your friends, you're not doing anything because you're just kind of putting down and focusing on some of these things.  Eventually you will get to the point where a lot of these protocols get to be part of your daily routine, and when that happens, it's going to be a lot less time challenge.  ‘Cause anything you add that's new to your routine, the first time you do it, it's going to take a ton of time because you procrastinate, it is going to take a ton of time because you have to learn how to do it, it's going to take a ton of time because you have to buy the equipment and whatever it is you're using in order to do it, it's going to take a ton of time to figure out how it best fits into your daily schedule.  All that stuff obviously eats up more of the time than it takes to actually do the protocol.

So the idea is to get as many of these into your daily regimen, your daily routine.  I personally like to get them all done early in the day if I can, so I get up very early and I get 'em all done.  And there's probably a period of 4 hours between the time I wake up and the time to actually kind of, “okay, I'm going to take my coffee now, I'm going to the office, I'm upstairs in my office and get some work done.”  And so, it's that period of time when I can really deal with most of these protocols.  And others, you kind of just figure out how to work it into your timeline.  But that's a really good question.

Cancer and Lymph Node Removal

Moving on to the next question, Steve asks whether removal of a lymph node, which is an unnecessary surgery I had about 20 years ago in reference on the podcast, may have contributed to getting cancer.  And I think the answer Steve is, no, I don't think so.  And there's no way to know for sure, but because we have so many lymph nodes I don't think that that would have been the cause.  But as mentioned, like I mentioned earlier on this particular recording, I think to get back to a healing state from a cancering state, you can really have to focus on getting your lymphatic system optimized and functioning.  And having a good, healthy lymphatic system is absolutely crucial to remaining in a healing state and clearing up the die-offs and everything else that occur when you're uncancering yourself, you're getting back into the healing state.

And so, I would caution those of you who are being advised to remove lymph nodes, obviously if you need to do it, do it, and I'm not suggesting you shouldn't.  But do it judiciously, make sure it's necessary.  Even if they're saying, “Well, I have cancer.”  Well yeah, that's what lymph nodes are designed to do.  They're designed to absorb toxic things.  I'm sure my lymph nodes had cancer 'cause my prostate had cancer and they were trying to keep that cancer out of my system.  So I didn't have them removed, they're now normal and they seem to be functioning normally.  I'm not saying that everyone's going to have that same result, but I'm saying that be judicious about it.  Understand what the lymph is doing and really talk to a doctor and say, “Okay, Doc.  I get it.  I don't want to do anything that's going to make it worse.  I know once it's in the lymph system, it can spread throughout the lymph system.  These are all things that I'm well aware of.  Please advise me as to whether or not I can adopt more of a wait-and-see attitude or whether I have to do this right away, et cetera.”  So that's just my advice.  Again, I'm not a doctor.  Talk to a doctor.

Eric’s Diet

Finally, Lisa asked me to drill down a bit on the diet.  And I think this is probably a good place to wrap this up.  There's two parts to her questions.  The first one, and I'm going to read part of it because I think she raises something that I struggled quite a bit in trying to decide what dietary therapies I would adopt, and that is, she raises a question to kind of how can you reconcile the difference between Dr. Charles Majors' juicing vegan versus the ketogenic diet, how could they both be equally efficacious.  I heard that you said you're in therapeutic ketosis, but you have a highly plant-based diet.  What are you doing?  Are you doing juicing, et cetera, which I'm going to get into.  Thank you, Lisa, for that question.  And her second question was she asked about my super smoothie, which Ben referenced and actually put out a blog post on.  And she said, “Do you think it contributed to your disease?  Are you still doing it?  And if you're not, why not?”

Let me first kind of jump to the second part of that question and that's about my smoothie.  Yeah, I mentioned this just a few moments ago.  I was of the view that if a little is good, a lot is great.  So one of the reasons why I think I ended up where I ended up in this not-healing state is because I wasn't giving my body a chance to clear itself out and I was flooding myself with far too many nutrients without really doing any blood work determining whether or not I really needed to be in these nutrients.  And so to answer your question, Lisa, I'm not doing that shake anymore.  I also had a lot of ingredients in the shake that were intended to raise my testosterone levels.  And obviously with the types of therapies that you're dealing with prostate cancer, you don't want to do that.  So I had to take all those things out of my shake.  And I just also changed my diet generally across the board, and so I kind of incorporated a lot of my new protocols or new dietary theories into a different version of that, which I now do on an intermittent basis.  And so that's the answer to your second question.

Now let's kind of go ahead and focus on the first part, and that is kind of about the diet generally.  Because I'm a firm believer in this whole Warburg theory on cancer and the works of you know Dom D'Agostino, and Tom Seyfried, and Travis Christofferson, and others who have really focused on cancer as a metabolic disease, and there's a lot of stuff coming out on this now because obviously ketosis is kind of the hot thing.  I'm a firm believer that glucose is to be minimized if you want to get over cancer.  Period.  Full stop.  No further discussion necessary.  And so that definitely pushes me squarely into the ketogenic diet space because I don't see how you could possibly do a plant-based diet and get enough fuel or energy in order to function unless you have extremely high levels of fat, and it's hard to do in strictly plant-based diet.  Which is why most of my friends who are vegan and vegetarian end up consuming a lot of carbohydrates.  I've been to restaurants with them, these are great vegan restaurants here in LA and they have very tasty food, but I'm telling you, it's nothing but carbohydrates.  And I don't eat carbohydrates, so I walk out of those restaurants hungry every time.  That kind of forces you out of the more vegan approach to cancer and forces you more into the ketogenic, therapeutic ketogenic theory of cancer dietary modality for addressing cancer.

So, what I've done is I've kind of straddled both a little bit, and I've done this for intensive reasons too because I've read a lot of works that talk about the problems with too much animal-based protein is mainly contributor to the insulin growth factor, IGF-1.  I don't think that eating healthy animal protein causes cancer.  I'm not one of these folks who think red meat causes cancer.  I do think eating factory farmed red meat, with factory farmed red meat fat full of factory farmed toxins in the fact could very well contribute to the, not the creation, but certainly the progression of the disease.

So obviously you want to source all your animal products from very, very clean sources.  And I do that, and others can, if you don't have access to something locally, you can buy stuff now frozen from the mail, from all sorts of inventors.  But again, you don't need much 'cause your body can't assimilate more than a certain level of protein.  So you want to keep your protein down to whatever you need to kind of maintain muscle mass.  And in my case, that ends up being about three or four ounces of protein a day, of animal protein a day, which is not a lot.  I may, if I go to a nice restaurant, have a really nice prime rib.  I might do five or six ounces, but that's rare.  When I'm eating at home, I keep the portions very small.  And then I have a ton of vegetables, which I think are great sources of fiber, which is great for the probiotics in your system, and they also have some micronutrients, but they're a great place to put all your fat.  You need something to hold all that olive oil, or all that butter, all that wherever you get your fat from.

So I would say that my own version of the diet could be called a high fiber ketogenic diet, or perhaps a deuterium depletion diet because both the vegetable diet and a high fat diet are diets that are very low in deuterium, which I talk about briefly and I can talk about more perhaps later, but it's a fairly new science.  It's a hydrogen molecule that's double the size of a normal hydrogen molecule that is found in trace amounts in the environment.  It's in food, it's in water, it's in the air, it's in the environment.  And when it gets into mitochondria, it's much of the works.  So by depleting the amount of deuterium, you're actually improving the function of the mitochondria, which gets back into the underlying tenure of [0:53:57] ______ protocol.  I get a lot of plant sources of fat, coconut oil, palm oil, MCT oil, avocados, I eat tons of avocado a day, olives, olive oil, nuts, et cetera, with a little bit of animal fat.  I do have butter, I do use ghee in my cooking.  I make my own Bravo yogurt out of goat milk, which I buy that's raw.  I don't know why I buy it raw 'cause I actually get to boil it before you make the Bravo yogurt, but that's what I do.  It's organic, it's clean, comes in a glass bottle.  And I do consume carbohydrates, but they're all from above ground vegetables.  I don't eat any starchy carbohydrates other than when I have sushi with friends, I'll have a little bit of rice with the sushi.  And all my animal proteins come from clean sources, mostly fish, shellfish.  I do have some ruminants and fowl, but again very much in its moderation.

And so my typical day goes something like this.  I have water to start with, about 30 to 34 ounces roughly to start with in the morning over about a two hour period.  And that's all I have when I get up in the morning is just water, is just clean water.  I do have electrolytes, I do supplement with salt and some of the electrolytes.  Matcha green tea or coffee is what I'll have kind of as I'm getting ready to start the day as far as work is concerned.  And the coffee, I drink at home.  I make it a version of decaf, kind of a Bulletproof decaf coffee with butter and MCT, Brain Octane.  The reason I do that decaf is because, first of all, it's Swiss water organic, let's be clear, decaf.  It's not the garbage you'd buy if you went to Starbucks and asked for decaf.  The reason I do that is because coffee has that, the caffeine in the coffee has a very powerful diuretic effect and you really want to make sure your cells are being properly hydrolized.  And you can't do that if you drinking too much caffeine 'cause you're just peeing it out.  So if I go to a coffee shop, I would just get a regular coffee 'cause I'm not drinking that much coffee, one cup of coffee.  But if I drink coffee at home, I use decaf, but I have a large pot.

And then my first meal would usually be the Budwig blend, or my new smoothie, or a big salad if I'm out.  I go to a restaurant and get a big salad.  Or some leftovers.  And my dinners are kind of the main meal of the day.  And there I make myself a soup that's made with bone broth and a lot of curcumin, turmeric.  I make a giant salad with steamed vegetables, add some sardines or anchovies on it, and all sort of goodies.  I cook a ton of veggies with a little bit of meat and a lot of fat.  I put olive oil and everything.  The diet, you couldn’t say what you eat in a typical day 'cause I don't eat the same thing every day.  I do have kind of a fairly straightforward approach on a weekly basis is how I rotate through things, but I would say just take all the stuff I eat, just plan it out on the table, you'd see a big pile of vegetables, you'd see a couple of cans of coconut milk, full fat stuff, not the stuff you buy in a milk carton, you would see some ghee, you'd see some butter, you'd see some goat milk, you'd see a bunch of bone broth, you'd see maybe two cans of sardines, maybe a can of anchovies, maybe half a dozen eggs for the whole week.  I'm not just heavy on the protein, but I do have some animal-based products in there.  It's just that I don't have 'em everyday.

I don't juice, to answer the question, and I think it's probably going to end up becoming my next major project on my side is to kind of lay all the stuff out so people can understand it.  I hope that you found that informative.  And I want to thank Ben for giving me the opportunity to reach out to you.  And if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to me.  And if you haven't already done so, go ahead and pay a visit to my site, it's questtocurecancer.com.  There's a subscribe button there, just put in your e-mail address and you'll be plugged in.  Thanks again.

Remember, you can grab the audio for today's special Premium episode by clicking here (available as a part of 300+ additional special episodes, videos and pdf's.).  Do you have questions, thoughts or feedback for Eric or me? Leave your comments below and one of us will reply!