I’m JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science. Science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can.

And that’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness. From personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism, to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness.

Join me on the journey to better health, so you can love how you look and feel right now, and have the energy to play full out at 100. Approximately 1. 9 million new cancer cases are diagnosed in the U. S. annually, which means that, on average, over 5, 000 people receive a cancer diagnosis each year. Every single day.

But what if I told you there’s a whole world of integrative approaches that can not only improve quality of life, but potentially dramatically change outcomes? Cancer can be a scary subject, but stick with me because we’re going to explore groundbreaking approaches that are changing the game in cancer care.

To guide us through this critical conversation, I’ve invited someone who’s not just studied cancer. She’s lived it, fought it, and now helps others do the same. I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Nasha Winters to the show. In this episode, you’re going to hear Dr. Nasha’s incredible personal journey from receiving a terminal diagnosis to becoming an internationally recognized cancer expert.

We’re going to dive into why the conventional approach to cancer

We’ll talk about the surprising connections between your lifestyle, environment, and cancer risk with plenty of practical, actionable steps you can take right now to help create an anti cancer environment in your body. We’re also going to talk about the truth behind common cancer screenings. If they’re really helping or if they could potentially be causing harm.

And just wait until you hear about some of the cutting edge therapies and diagnostics that are giving patients new hope. Whether you’re a cancer survivor, currently battling the disease, or want to do everything you can to protect your health, this episode is packed with information that could literally Save your life.

And the best part? Dr. Nasha’s approach isn’t about fear. It’s about empowerment. She’s going to show you how to take control of your health destiny no matter where you are in your journey. Let’s dive into this life changing conversation with the amazing Dr. Nasha. Dr. Nasha Winters.

Dr. Nasha Winters, welcome to Well Beyond 40 here at the Health Optimization Summit. Perfect. I am so honored to be here with you. Thank you. Well, I’m thrilled we could do it in person and that we had to go across the pond. Yeah,

exactly.

And what we were talking about offline, I think is a great place to start was you were talking about how you went and walked the El Camino.

Yeah, the

Camino.

But you went and did it because Ah,

so I went and did the Comino de Santiago for my 50th birthday, which was just shy of three years ago. And it was a celebration. I’d been planning it. It was basically like, if I’m still here. When I turn 50, this is what I’m going to do. So I’ve been thinking about it for a good decade or more.

And it was my 30th anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. It was the 50th anniversary of, um, the claimed war on cancer from the Nixon era, um, 1971 Nixon era. It was, 30 year celebration of my relationship with my husband who joined me at the very end of the journey for the last hundred kilometers to walk me into the city.

And I know I’m missing one other big one, but, uh, oh, well, this is my 50th birthday. So it had a, it, you know, that was a big one.

You know, I always joke that if I could have just skipped from 20 to 50, I would have totally done it. Oh my gosh. And this is why I love

that you’re doing this conversation about like fabulous beyond 40, because I promise you it gets better every decade.

Especially when

you’re through menopause. It’s like,

well, I finally crossed that bridge a year ago. And so it was like, please, for the love of God, just get me on the other side. Cause it was pretty smooth until those last couple of years. You’re like, okay, now I can create a whole new me.

Right. And that’s really it.

So I was not aware that you had a fatal cancer diagnosis. Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. I was, I’d had, I was basically born with health issues, so, uh, probably TMI, but the doctors would tell we love TMII know. Go you. Yes. The doctors would tell my mom when I was an infant that it was fine, that it only pooped once a month because it was just my pattern.

Right? I’m like, what, what, and so my poor mom, you know, first it just in this like shock of, okay, like trusting. And then by the time I was two, they had me on what is equivalent to things like Gas X because I always looked like the giant, giant belly with the tiny little skin. Stick legs. Um, and then by the time I was nine, I’d started my period because of course wow.

We didn’t know until many years later that soy formula they settled me on was probably a bad idea. . Um, by the time I was 11, I was on birth control pills for endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. By the time I was 14, I had my first, uh, the cryotherapy for cervical dysplasia. 16 cervical cancer, uh, by the time I was diagnosed by that time by IBS, uh, rheumatoid, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

Um, uh, we figured I had some thyroid things going on. Cystic acne, which we later learned that was related to polycystic ovarian syndrome. I was a hot mess. And so that’s a little bit of an understatement. But the thing is, is that it was normalized. It was just like, just take this pill, take this thing. And just put on massive amounts of makeup to cover it.

Just do all the things to, to put the mask on and be out in the world. And I didn’t know. How sick I was because it was just take a pill for that.

Well, right. And you’d always been sick. And that’s why you’re normal.

Yes, exactly. So my normal was unfortunately not, uh, the bar was low. And so by the time I was 19 and this summer before my sophomore year in college, I started getting sicker and sicker and, uh, going to the ER was becoming incredibly, uh, severe, severe pain.

And they just said, Oh, it’s just your endometriosis. Take this. Oh, it’s just your rheumatoid arthritis. Take this. Oh, it’s just your IBS flaring. Take this. And by the time my roommate found me unconscious at home and rushed me to the emergency room, oxygen levels in the 70s, um, by the time they finally did a proper workup instead of treating me like a histrionic teenager, um, realized I had a hundred percent bowel blockage.

My kidneys were in failure. My liver was in failure. I had a grapefruit sized tumor on my right ovary. I had a nine month period. Um, enlarged belly full of ascites, which is malignant fluid, where fluid ends up in places where it shouldn’t be. Um, I was severely cacetic, meaning sarcopenic, but extremely malnourished and I was dying.

I was dying. And they gave me, and finally when they worked it out, they realized I was end stage ovarian cancer. This is 1991. So no one, I was the zebra. No one was looking for cancer in a 19 year old in 1991. Now, fast forward today, this is unfortunately one of the most common stories I hear today, and it breaks my heart, and that was never the case.

Why do you think that is? You got a week! Pandora, here we come. Um, gosh, it’s the changes that have happened in such a short period of time in human evolution. I mean, when you think about it, we went for tens of thousands of years as hunter gatherers. And then about 11, 000 years ago, we thought, let’s, Put down a few roots and become Neolithic farmers and maybe just kind of raise our own food very locally and very laboriously.

We had to expend a lot of energy, right, to grow things. And then that, those were, that was the biggest shift. We brought on new genetics at that time. Fast forward to the industrial food revolution of the 1850s, another big change. So then we started to industrialize our food process, sugar, flour, salt into everything.

Games started changing then. We also, a few years after that, some refrigeration. So now we had an ability to eat things out of season and out of rhythm. With our ancestry, with our genetics, that added some stress and people like Weston A. Price and others started sounding the alarm then going, Oh, there’s this a problem.

Can you imagine what those poor guys would be saying today?

I’m just stepping out. I’m quitting this one. Yeah, that was pre pop tarts. Oh my gosh, exactly.

Pre everything. And the bigger, the next big kablam was post World War II. And we had all this leftover ammo and some guy behind a desk said, This would be great.

Let’s do this. Let’s put this into our agriculture and into our pharmaceuticals. Let’s, let’s take all of this war con, you know, consciousness and apply it into our food systems and our healthcare systems. And kind of a way we’ve gone. Yeah. Now we now have a Thousands, you know, I think the last research I saw was 80, 000 new chemicals have been introduced to the market since World War II, and less than a few hundred of those have been properly tested.

Wow. And they aren’t, I remember doing a toxic lecture and well, it was because someone asked me to do a prenatal lecture. And as I dug into it, I went, Oh, this is not about prenatal. This is about. Pre pregnancy preparedness. You should not even think about getting pregnant until you’ve done all this. And then I started to dig through and I went, well, not only do we have all of these chemicals and they haven’t been tested, but the few that have been tested, haven’t been tested together and they haven’t been tested for accumulation.

So while this one on its own and this amount might be safe when it stores in your tissues and it’s combined with these other two, you got a whole new animal. Hundreds. Okay. So we’ve got the chemicals, we’ve got, um, Food that’s not food. Yeah,

it’s a factory food. Yeah, we’ve got more ingestion of carbohydrates without the exponent, you know, expenditure of energy than ever before.

We

don’t like, look at even housework. Now that we have, is it a Roomba, a Zumba, the thing? Oh, but there’s like a Zumba running around this place. I was like, wait a minute, what? I was like, I can’t do that with little dogs. I think the dog would get sucked up. That would be traumatizing for

all. But yeah, there’s just, and this just, um, I mean, from my, I just, one of my friends or kids are in junior high now, they don’t have recess anymore.

Like there’s like these weird things like gym class. You remember that? I mean, it doesn’t, those don’t happen anymore. It was like the strange things that we’ve, uh, prioritized has taken us further and further away from our natural rhythm. So, uh, the average American spends less than 15 minutes outdoors every day.

When I speak at regenerative ag conferences, even though these are the farmers that are trying to rebuild our soil and our food systems, I’ll ask them, when was the last time you watched a sunrise or set? Do you know when, what the moon cycle is? Even these days, because so much of farming, even in the regen space has become so computerized and like, um, automated in some form or fashion for scalability and our whole life, like all the things we do for efficiency and scalability is killing us.

And so that sort of sort of. Slow going back to the most fundamentals. There’s so many amazing, sexy things we can do now, but if we don’t have the fundamentals in place, we it, it kind of falls flat.

Yeah. So we have all of those risks along with the risks of artificial light. Oh goodness. Keeping us awake when we should be asleep.

Yeah. Yeah.

All the.

Yeah,

the EMFs. Got it. The TAC.

Yep.

It’s almost like, why not cancer? Why not more than ever? Well, what, it’s the second

biggest killer, right? It just took over as the first killer. It’s now surpassed cardiovascular disease in all westernized countries. So US, UK, EU, there we are. So good on you, cancer, being number one.

But the key point is that in all the westernized countries. Exactly. So that should also be, that should be an intuitive moment right there, but it still falls so flat. I mean, there was a study, I spoke about this yesterday in one of the lectures, um, March of 2024 in I believe Nature Magazine was the whole title of the article was why are more young people than ever getting cancer?

When I pulled up this slide that showed probably 30 little bubbles with things like sitting, you know, uh, glyphosate and all the little bubbles that filled in, um, I took that list directly off something called IARC, the International Agency of Cancer Research, which is a third party research organization to evaluate for carcinogens.

And they’re, they’re, they’re tiered. It’s sort of like the known carcinogen, the possible, the probable, and the questionable. And when you add all of those up, there’s over 1200 that they’re saying are likely a problem. And what I highlighted on the screen were the top 10. And I looked around the room and Mark was in the room.

I’m like, we’ve all adjusted or been exposed to most of these this morning of the top 10. What are the

top 10? We’ve got good news coming.

We do. Well, one of them was this. So I, my very first experience getting into the VIP room, I wanted a nice cup of coffee. It had been a long day or long travel. And I went to grab something to put in my coffee and I see oat milk.

I just want to cry because oat milk is about as toxic as it gets. The amount of processing you have to do to get. An oat into milk. Like if you made it at home, that’s probably one thing, but then to put it in a package and sell it is another level of, you know, clean up or whatnot. So it would

absolutely qualify as an ultra process.

Very

ultra processed. And then the seed oils they do to emulsify it. So, and seed oils is one of the top 10 of the IRX carcinogens. Wow.

And seed oils, when we talk about seed oils, are we talking And this is where I was going to go. Okay. Wait a minute. Yeah. Avocado oil. Is that from that? And sesame seeds, like all seed oils?

Is it industrialized seed oils? Is it the way it’s processed? What is it? Good question.

So in the

selfish,

selfishly wanted it. I know. Right. No. And it’s, it’s a good question because it’s like, is it all? And so when you look at those, the seed oils we’re mostly talking about here are, um, canola.

Oh, this is a funny, okay.

I Oh, and we go out with our friend, Harry Massey, and they’ve selected the restaurant. And I know Harry is absolutely pristine with how he eats, so I’m like, this’ll be fine. We check, it’s Mediterranean. I’m like, we’re safe. Even better. Yeah. And you’re thinking easy peasy on the oils. I’m like, this’ll be great.

So we sit down and Harry goes, so, you know, we’re assuming, of course you use extra virgin olive oil. You’re a Mediterranean restaurant. What kind of, what kind of oil do you use? This woman very proudly says, We use rapeseed oil and I’m like, oh no, everyone at the table gasps. She’s like

Oh, they’re going to be

this table.

But you should be, because you might just be saving this woman’s life because you’re helping her be aware of one of the top 10 carcinogens. They all

thought they were doing great, you know? And so for anyone listening who didn’t know, they changed rapeseed oil to canola because who wants to eat rapeseed oil?

So we made it pretty sounding.

Isn’t that hilarious? And of course, have you looked at a field of canola flowers? It’s one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen. This, it’s like the color of my pants. It’s fun, like. Fields of fields of fields, but then the amount of chemicals they use to dump on those fields, and then the processing used to turn those into oil.

It’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s an absolute destruction of our planet, of what it’s doing, not just the people on the planet, but the planet itself. So that’s a big one. Soybean. It’s the second most common oil. It is so difficult to, uh, pick up a package, even some that’s organic or keto or like whole foods. You can’t eat anything on their salad bar or their food prepared food things.

Which is wild, isn’t it? It’s totally wild. So in my husband, we have this, like, we just come through and be like, One of these days we’re like, ah, like we’re going to like throw it across the room. It’d be a great reality show. Right? Thieve the food. So those are the big ones. But we also do when we start to get in and everyone’s like, but these seed oils, you have to remember these other like pristine seeds.

They’re very volatile. They oxidize very easily. And unless you were as close to the original source as possible, and you know exactly how it was processed, you probably should avoid those. And that’s, again, our ancestors did not have these kind of oils. They had lard, tallow, butter, ghee. That was it. You know, all the things we’re told are bad for us.

Terrible for us. Uh, yeah. Oh my goodness. And so those are things that, again, we think we all thought we were doing better. I mean, my grandmother switched into Crisco. Oh gosh, Crisco. You know Crisco, and it’s still around. I’m always shocked. Crisco and margarine are still around. I know. How is margarine

still around?

I

don’t know. My husband’s a chemist and he’s like, this is plastic. It’s a plasticizer.

It is wild. I had an aunt who was very interested in her health, very focused on this. And she got the worst rheumatoid arthritis. She would only eat margarine and whole grain bread. And I remember at one point going, And Could they be related?

Antie Aline. Wow. Yeah, that’s like margarine in action. Okay, so we’ve got, what was number one again?

Well, there’s, it’s kind of like on the, the chart will change, but basically you’ve got the obvious of known carcinogens are like tobacco, smoke and whatnot, which I’m laughing. I, I. This is not to be harsh, but we’re at a biohacker conference.

It’s all about optimizing

smoking. Thank you.

There was one person yesterday. I very highly influential person in this space who was very known for his approach. I will not mention names, but I wish I had videoed it because it, it actually made me angry. Oh. ’cause he’s out there smoking on one of his, which are even worse, like

the vapes we were talking about that like, these vapes are gonna take out our teenagers.

Uh, they

are. And they’re taking out our adults too. I mean, you’re like passing, it’s like jumping from one frying pan into another and I was so horrified. Because his message is very out there. He has a huge reach. And I thought, okay, first of all, this is either hypocritical that people, you hide this, he was kind of hiding in a corner.

Um, or you still think that all of the other things you do are going to prevent this thing from causing a problem. And what people need to understand is it’s a cumulative effect. And I really appreciate, yeah. And I appreciate you brought up that one of these things are toxic, but when you put them down, we don’t, we’ve done literally one study.

IARC did that study. This was probably 2000. 16, 17 on what happens if we mix a few of these things together that are benign. So non carcinogens all clumped together with other non carcinogens made a carcinogen. And so, but we have stopped that because it’s an enormous amount of money and, and, um, to put into that type of study.

But the one basically said, yeah, we don’t even know what kind of soup we’re floating in. And so that’s a big one. Of course, they, they always complain about it. This is the other one. So they put that there, but what they need to qualify as UV light is only as dangerous as the environment in which it’s being collected in.

So if you are living on seed oils, you are absorbing that radiation and your cells are being damaged by it.

That is so interesting.

Yeah. And so married to an Irish, a German Irish, who’s mostly Irish and that’s, there you go. He’s got the same. And Steve used to be, he’d look at the sun and turn into a lobster.

And in 2009 when he joined me on a journey, cause we were both recovering vegans. And, um, aren’t we all recovering

vegans?

Yeah. So we were, and he was just R and D. There you go. We were living laboratories and he was also a professional triathlete. So imagine that combination. Yeah. Um, and, and at that point, I mean, he would just blister.

I mean, the, the, the weirdest joy for me again, TMI is I love to peel his sunburn. My grooming, my, my ancestry, ancient ancestry came through my grooming. Um, I don’t get to do that anymore because he gave up all the horrible seed oils and all the grains and all the sugar and this man is like golden. All the time.

And we’re out every morning, we, you know, greet the sunrise almost every single morning on a paddleboard, you know, and on the Bay of Banderas in Mexico. And, you know, it’s sunny all the time there and there’s no burning. And he hasn’t had a sunburn probably since 2010. And so, and as a big surfer and sat, you know, all the things.

And so it’s what it’s received in. And so we, it’s like, we’re demonizing We’re demonizing the sun for what the container that the sun is nourishing or is feeding. So it’s very interesting and so that’s a big one that still shows up, um, on the IARC as well. But, you know, it comes down to the, uh, the circadian rhythm disruption, known carcinogens.

I appreciate you brought that up. Tons of studies on this. I know it

from the weight side, you know, it’s like try to build muscle, lose fat and not sleep. It’s nope.

Exactly. I mean, in the cancer side, which is very, they’re very sim, simpatico here, insulin growth factor, two nights of bad sleep. Stimulate your insulin growth factor, which is Great if you’re like a growing child that needs to grow a lot of things, an anabolic aspect of it, but not great if you’re a human trying to cut weight or stop, starve cancer processes.

Um, we, we’ve got to turn that off. And so sleep regulation is huge. And then all of our folks out there, um, sitting is now a known carcinogen.

Yes, and that is one that I think is really interesting is, you know, the research coming out that looked at, okay, you’re exercising every day, but if you’re sitting the rest of the time, you’re basically like, I’m doing it all.

Erased.

Exactly. Or even, they even showed that the folks that were just like the weekend warriors who go out and do hit it hard that like, I went and did a marathon this weekend and I did this and then do nothing the rest of the week. They die faster than those who do at least a little bit of something every day.

And now it’s not just every day, it’s all throughout the day. Exactly. Which makes So much more movement. Anyway, they’re calling ’em exercise snacks, and I literally can’t stand that. It’s kind of cute. It sounds, it’s cute. Except that the first time I brought it up, someone goes, we get to eat while we out.

Oh God. And I’m like, okay. Nope. I’m called Microdose . I’m just gonna call a micro that Even better. Yes. Okay. We get those. Okay, so we’ve got the movement, the circadian rhythm, the oils, the smoking, gosh, the, the UV. I’m just disregarding that. I appreciate

that. I want people to just have a context around it.

I’ve never understood

that. Like, I don’t, I don’t, I only put sunscreen on my face cause the Vandy side of things, but like, we’re in Florida. But even then, it’s like, this

is who you are. And I don’t use

that crappy sunscreen. Exactly.

See, I was gonna say, you probably are very picky about what that is. Yes, yes, yes.

And then that’s actually one of the other carcinogens are all the things that we put in our, you know, a typical woman walks out of the house with over 60 chemicals on her skin. Yes, that’s a lot. And this is like the largest organ of absorption and elimination. And they’re just lubing up with all these things that feel good, smell good, all the things, but it is just coming in and setting off all kinds of little hormonal signaling.

Do women have higher rates of cancer than men?

Right now we’re 50 50. We’re the same across the board because what’s happening is interesting. Men are having just because we used to, women had a lot more issues because of the The estrogen, your internal estrogen does not cause the problems, but when you jam the signaling with all the other endocrine disruptors in our world, then your own body can’t process your own hormones, much less anything else that’s coming your way.

Well, the same thing’s happening for our men. And so because of the work I do, I’m testing, I’m telling you most men out there have a lot more estrogen than the women I care for. Wow. It’s trippy. this from? Life on planet earth. So, from the, uh, the foods they’re choosing, which are a lot of the foods, like anything, glyphosate is one of our biggest endocrine disruptors.

So if they’re eating grains and legumes that sequester the glyphosate. Is it

possible to get, like, the organic grains and legumes, is it even possible to get them without glyphosate just because of the fact that we’ve got glyphosate? Seeds blowing and water flowing, everything else.

I love that question.

And no, it isn’t. Now it’s going to be a lesser residue, but it’s in our rainwater now. And so even if, and the thing is, is I try to explain to people, if you really are trying to avoid glyphosate entirely, you’re going to have to also unfortunately very much limit or remove grains and legumes. From your diet, because even the organic, they’re chelators to the soil and glyphosate is taken right into that.

So chelators mean it’s, it’s one of these things that’s gonna pull that in. Yeah. It’s like a little sponges.

Exactly.

Oh, that’s bad.

And then, and then let’s take this to the next level,

the juicing frenzy. Uh, well, so, you know, I come from the weight loss side. I’m like, yeah, why are you unwrapping the fruit, taking the fiber out, leaving the sugar?

You know, especially something like apple juice. This makes me the craziest.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, we were at that dinner the other night. They had a collagen thing sitting at the table. Yeah. Oh, I saw you break it into it. Yeah. Tim breaks into it, takes a thing, goes, here, try it. He puts it in my mouth. All of a sudden I go, what, what, what is this?

Cause it’s. Certainly tastes great. And he’s like, Oh, I turn it around. It’s apple juice concentrate. I’m like, Oh, no, I mean, it’s just

pure. Come on. We’re at a health conference. Wow. And of course, I don’t know if it’s organic, but if it isn’t apples are in the dirty dozen. Right. Right. So people are like, why the cancer?

Like, well, let’s see here. Our entire food source, like literally from the soil to the soul is poisoned today. Um, our, our cultural lifestyle is poisoned today. We’re all geared to be like, do, do, do go, go, go, instead of BBB, you know, and breathe, breathe, breathe. That’s the other. Those are the things here. So these things just accumulate.

And that’s where the things we have, I mean, the, the amazing brains of human beings of what we’ve created on this planet. Theoretically make our lives easier, have that other end into the pendulum. Yes. And we’re seeing that in full force. It’s been an interesting 150 year experiment, 175 year experiment.

And, um, it’s,

it’s killing us. And, and it feels like with the advent of technology, ai, social media, that it is exponentially increased.

It is. It is. And you know, this is, I know this is so controversial. Um, we love controversy. I know. I thought, but I’ve decided from here on out, I’m completely going to do it.

Well, and that’s, you know, I, I’ve been on, I’ve been on this journey for my own, my own saving my own, my, my patients call it S Y a university, save your ass university. So I’ve got a couple of degrees from that at this point, as many of them do. And in, you know, when I had my diagnosis, They gave me a few months to live.

They said, you are, everything is so shut down. And you were how old when they gave you I was 19, well, 19. I was 19 when I landed in the hospital. And because in 1991, small town America and technology available then Where were you? Durango, Colorado. Oh, okay. Um, it took until the 21st of October for me to actually get the official diagnosis.

They knew by ca 1 25 was over 15,000. They knew by the imaging what was going on. They could tell by the ascites. They had to keep draining ascites every few days and it was very malignant, like bloody ascites with TMI. But it’s like, it was, they knew. It was bad. They knew and they had a feeling because of the tumors on the thing that was probably of ovarian origin.

It took until the pathology came back, which took weeks at that time to get the official diagnosis. And they told me on the, like around the 20th of September that I wouldn’t see the new year. And because my organs were already in failure, they couldn’t even give me a single dose of chemotherapy. And there was just like, we just want to make you comfortable on your way out.

And so gathering a few more opinions, that opinion didn’t differ. And I was sent to hospice at that time, wasn’t in my town, but what was the equivalent of like palliative care? And so as I was set out on my own, um, Some accidental things happened and this is, um, this is relevant to what I’m getting rid of, talking about what we were leaving off from, but I couldn’t eat because I had 100 percent bowel blockage.

So even small amounts of sipping liquids caused such excruciating pain and nausea that even that was difficult. So I had enough fluids basically to keep myself alive. It’s a sip, but no salt. There was no way of solids or the most like no soup, like broths were too rich, anything too much. So you were on a

fast?

A two and a half month fast. Wow. And the interesting thing, of course, we didn’t know, I didn’t know any of this stuff. Even the last few years, I, this has probably been the most significant tool I’ve continued since then in my life and applied to my patients. We fasted patients 1960s until someone said, we really should, we should not take anything more from them.

And we should just. Just feed them and fill them up and no matter what, don’t lose weight and the American Cancer Society is like, eat as many cakes and ice creams and shakes as you want. That’s their recommendation to our patients. Still. Today. No matter what, don’t lose weight. And yet the majority of patients with cancer, even our skinny patients, need to lose fat.

I was like going, wouldn’t it just be hold on to muscle? The rest really Thank you a hundred percent, because where is our,

you know, I’m a, I’m a believer that cancer is a metabolic mitochondrial disease. And so you’re going to want to build your mitochondrial reserve the best you can. People die, most, 50 to 70 percent of patients diagnosed with cancer will die from cachexia.

This was what, when my son was in the hospital with his brain injury and he’s going from, you know, thankfully he went in really strong, um, but I’m watching it and I’m like, Oh, so I just got, I got these amazing aminos from Italy. I was like, Oh, I was doing this stuff. I was doing, the nurses are like, We just want to write down, cause I was hiding it all and sneaking it in.

And they’re like, you just want to know what you’re doing. So I can do it for my mom on this, but I mean,

yeah,

like that was my fear. Yeah. He was just, I was watching him waste away and I’m like, Oh no, no.

And the crazy thing is your doctors, they know that is what will take your life, but they don’t know how to, they don’t understand.

It’s a metabolic condition. And the weird thing about cachexia and sarcopenia, you know, this I’m preaching to the choir here a bit. Maybe others don’t. Specific to the cancer world. Um, you could give a cancer patient 15, 000 calories a day and they will still drop weight massively. And they’re not dropping fat or, you know, they are dropping muscle mass.

It’s the body is using up all the muscle stores for the glutamine to feed the cancer. So you have to keep like our cancer patients. I love all the studies coming out, showing exercise. And it is required for good outcomes of cancer. And like, by the way, for everything. Like they’re now showing, oh, oops, the

bedrest thing we talked about.

They had my son in bed and we were finally like, you know what?

We were I mean,

we had a crushed heel, but, um, the minute we could start, I’m like, I at least got him up. I started having throwing things. I started, I was like, whatever I can do to get you moving, you know, standing, thing. Your story is so much

like some, it’s like you had, you had to, you had to figure it out by yourself and like hearing your story and like a lot of the people that are at this conference in our circle out there in this sort of the, the world of optimal health, we all came from like a pain to purpose here.

No one was doing it for us. None of the medical systems in place were figuring this out and giving us the tools. And so you being the mama bear that you were like, you’ve changed your son’s experience has changed the lives of millions. Right. That’s what’s so amazing to me. And as I stayed alive one more day and one more day and one more day and one more day and kick that can down the road a little bit further, I’d learn something new and then I’d be alive a little bit.

I’d learn something new. And by the time it’s like, I’m still 33, almost 33 years into this. I’m learning something new every day for myself and for my patients and that they teach me. I love it. And how cool that the things we might have been doing or thinking or studying or applying 30 some years ago are now being studied.

And like, now it’s like,

Oh. Always been. This is what’s so important because it drives me nuts in the placebo control, double blind, randomized control group. That’s like, well, there’s no study. I go, you know what? I’m not going to wait for a study for my son because he will be dead. I said, I’ve got enough on the mechanisms and you know that I’m just going to go for it because the risks,

you

know, it’s like I look at the reward and the risk and I’m like, I’m going to go for it because His risks of dying are really high.

So let’s go do everything we possibly can. And, and so we’ve got to balance that. I

love that.

With all of this, right?

So I love that. When we get the naysayers, oh, there’s no RSC. I’m like, um, My patients have never once asked me, well I take it back, the few patients that have asked me, um, I’m, I said, well, how are those other RCT study trials or treatments that you’ve done prior to finding me when nothing else has worked, how they served you?

Yeah. So, um, I would love, like if people were willing to fund these studies, we’d do them left and right. If we could create new models of study, we would do them left and right because the current systems are very much, here’s the one target, here’s the one treatment. We are going to completely get rid of every other possible intervening in, um, you know, uh, um, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Like, uh, some of the other therapies. So like, yeah, we’re even like, what’s going to be like, okay, we’re going to put you in a false environment. And we’re going to keep it in this container. No one lives that way. Now we can’t

really use it. So I will tell you my dad had lung cancer, which was, well, my dad smoked like a chimney.

All right. So then he had a cough for years. I’m like, got to get that checked. But, um, and of course it was cancer and he’s going to fight this thing. And I go, dad, I’ve looked at the research of, DEXA, bio impedance, subscribetojj. com, DEXA, bio impedance, subscribetojj. com, DEXA, bio impedance, And in the drug trial, he starts breaking out in boils.

Oh, yeah. So he gets taken off the drug trial, you know, because, and they tried to make it as a, like, I forget what they did. It will never show up in the trial. Cause he’ll pull,

he’s out. He’s there. So you don’t even get his story in the trial. Nope. And I was like, wow. Yeah. You only cherry pick that data in a way to help patients is, and this sounds harsh, but a phase one clinical trial is not about saving your life.

It’s about drug toxicity. It’s about what will this drug outright kill you. That’s a phase one trial. A phase two trial is what’s the maximum tolerated dose we can give you. It’s still not about, is it going to save you? It’s the phase three trials that say, can we extend life? on this medication. And we should also

ask, can we extend life in a quality way?

Me too. Yeah. Because that was my dad. I’m like, dad, you Same amount of time, but you’ll feel like crap. Yeah. Which, which you choose. So here you are, you’re doing your fasting, you’re starting to get better. So, Mm-Hmm. What?

Well, I just, what happened between there and now? You’re here. Well, I, I fell in love with it.

It was just a crazy man fell in love with me and me with him at the time of my, of my diagnosis. We were both pre med. Um, we basically Were you pre med before your diagnosis? I was. And I was so disenfranchised by how I was treated by standard of care, um, for the months leading up to my diagnosis. And basically everyone was like, we have nothing for you.

Go home and die. Um, I was just left to my own devices. And I was also uninsured. I came from extreme poverty. I didn’t have resources, so I had to become very resourceful. And weirdly, my partner, now my husband, um, he didn’t think it was weird because he, at 16, his brother was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and given three months to live.

And Bob lived another 24 years beyond that with no standard of care. 24 years.

So maybe what’s killing him is standard of care.

There’s some studies that show like certain things like TGF beta and whatnot, and certain, which is a particular growth factor, um, can be stimulated by things like radiation, chemo, and surgery.

And so maybe that was part of my strategy, but I work and support tens of thousands of patients who do the best of both worlds. And we can make standard of care work better for them with less toxicity, and we can support the terrain around the tumor to, um, enhance quality of life, but also clean up the environment in which the cancer took root.

And we do that as a parallel path. Now, some people, by the time they come to me, they’ve exhausted all what standard of care can offer. Some people come to me refusing standard of care, even if I’m saying, you know, you probably need a little standard of care. Um, but people need to have some autonomy in this.

And so for me, I just kept learning things. I had a partner who was supportive and he’s also a biochemistry. He was a cancer drug design, uh, study, or he now runs a metabolic lab. I mean, we’re just geeks. It’s like for fun. This is what we do is talk. So we’re voracious learners, voracious studiers of this.

And I was blessed enough to go and study with and be treated by some of the most amazing clinicians, researchers, healers, because I went beyond just, you know, all the meta, you know, the things around the world. So I’ve learned that, um, every time I think I know something, I feel like I get humbled right away to realize I know very little and that it’s constant.

Don’t

you feel like that the more you learn? Yes. Is this like a, is this like life’s joke, but it’s fun. It’s like, the more I dig

into, I’m like,

Oh,

I know. It’s like, it’s so humbling. Cause this is what the extraordinary, like this, this is amazing. You know what it is that we have going on and what we can impact.

And for me, another really early on. So that the accidental piece of the fasting, the other thing is, Um, again, just TMI a little bit, but just, I came from extreme trauma. So on the ACE scores, adverse childhood events, I was a 10 out of 10. And what I left, and tell

everyone what the ACE score is. I’m glad this is coming back.

We’ll, we’ll post the, um, interview we did with Dr. Sarah Gottfried on this. Oh

good. Yes. We love our Sarah.

Um, but it’s, I think it’s so important for people to recognize this. I’m still trying to find the person who’s a zero.

Yeah. Well, I know. I, yeah. I mean, most people are like, you know, I, I’ve met a couple ones and twos, but the majority of people who come to me in my world, we’re talking six, seven, eight.

To 10,

it was like, I think I’m a, I was a four or six and I was like, oh, I’m okay. I’m not a 10 . Sarah’s like, no, honey. I’m like, oh yeah, because

every, like, every one increases a certain percentage of your risk of chronic illness and cancer. And so, and this score is again for your listeners of, there’s 10 questions of things you were exposed to before the age of 18.

And the studies have been mold, I mean, we had. Dozens of studies over several decades that, um, those experiences rewire your physiology in a particular way to make you more vulnerable to stress in general and to vulnerability of just your immune system, the impact on your immune system, the impact on your neurotransmitters, on your hormones, your metabolic health, your microbiome.

Those things have very tangible physical impact and yet it is the last thing we want to talk about in our culture, in our medicine. Um, it’s like the, we don’t talk about it and people get mad if you talk about possibly you had some trauma. And so it’s become such a, we’re like, Oh, you got trauma, but we’re not helping people understand big traumas, little traumas, life experiences, and how you need to just be aware of we all have it, but how are you metabolizing it?

Yeah. How are you dealing with it? Are you burying it? Are you emotionally shitting on people with it? Are you like integrating it and processing it and, you know, working with it and through it? And so that was a big one for me. I did a two year family fast, which was part of my healing journey. And that was probably integral to saving my life.

I’ve never heard that term before. And, uh, and I, uh, with that time, because I was, I went into the vegan world. And I’d already been a vegetarian because I think it’s the gateway vegetarian. I was a vegetarian

before vegan. It’s a gateway into veganism.

And I was 16 when I decided I didn’t like the cruelty to animals and became a vegetarian.

Teenage girl, right? We all go through that. And it’s huge. This is actually the demographic where it takes root the most. And, um, but of course I was eating Velveeta cheese, white bread and velastic pickle sandwiches every day. American cheese

on wonder bread. Well, there you go. Cheese melts.

And I need a miracle whip too.

seed oil on

seed oil.

Boy,

yeah, so that far.

So that was like my food group. And then I worked at hot dog and a stick.

Well, I worked at Swenson’s ice cream, but I went to a Derwiener Schiffel all

the time. People, I think, meet us today and they think we’ve

always eaten this way. My nickname was Poppy growing up because I ate Pop Tarts every day for breakfast.

I love this. Unless there was Coco Puffs

or Cap’n Crunch. And Cap’n Crunch was my favorite cereal. Right, no Crunchberries. Okay. So, but these are things I learned, like, accidentally learning. And so what was wild is that’s when I started learning about high dose IV vitamin C and started applying that into my mix.

When I started learning as it’s a chemotherapeutic agent, people don’t understand that. And now there’s a concept in the last few years, people have learned about this concept of ferroptosis, which is harnessing our endogenous iron stores and turning them into smart bombs directed at our cancer cells.

And we didn’t know That high dose IV vitamin C was one of our best ferroptosis agents. And so now we under, we’re understanding what that means for everybody. You just rolled that word out. And so basically, uh, high dose IV vitamin C can help harness that iron to direct it to the cancer cells to create apoptosis, to create cell death, to kill the cancer cell.

And We’re like all these therapies that have been used for millennia in Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, naturopathy. There’s no studies. There’s no studies, but now we’re doing studies. Right. Now we look back and go, Oh, why did that Chinese herb, um, skullcap, Scutellaria have such a powerful anti cancer effect.

Oh, how did we understand that mistletoe, that even, um, uh, you know, our, our ancient medical philosophers, you know, our Hippocrates, Dr. Hippocrates, you know, Hippocrates, father of modern medicine, use this as one of the most powerful tools of cancer back in the day, the most studied. Integrative alternative cancer therapy in the world.

It’s even part of the medical repertory in places all over Europe, South America, India, Canada, the United States is like, wall this off until we published our data from Johns Hopkins and are going into phase two and three, despite the fact that safety has been established for thousands of years on this remedy.

Wasn’t that what

Suzanne Summers used? She used it a ton. And everyone went after her about this and she, look how long she thrived. Yeah. 26 years of stage

four.

Yeah.

And they call that a failure.

Yeah. I was like, right.

Right. Or David Schreiber, who wrote the book anti cancer, who, when he died 17 years later from his glioblastoma, they said, see, that didn’t work.

And so I had for, I didn’t tell my story, JJ, until about 2012. My diagnosis was in 1991. I first, I was never going to work with cancer. I was like, Nope. I want that so far out of my rear view mirror. And then my very first patient of my first week in practice, brain tumor, lived 18 months. I mean, he was, he was dying.

I mean, he came in for end of life. He pushed me into this field and then everyone started coming to him and suddenly it became that. But I still kept my story. People knew I had a history, but they didn’t know the details. I think everyone thought maybe I had a little skin, skin cancer or something like, I think they thought it was sort of cancer light.

No one had it. And I just, it was so traumatic. I didn’t talk about it. Plus I had this belief system that if I talk about it, I will die. Oh, wow. So when Svea Scheiber’s book, not the last goodbye, which he published after his death. He didn’t even tell people he had a recurrence because he knew he was like, if people know what’s going on with me, they will call all of my life’s work a failure.

And I saw, I even say it now and I’d be like, I sobbed my way through it. I’m 33 years out in October from this diagnosis. And if I died tomorrow, everyone would call this a failure. And yet here I am. I didn’t only get to see my 20th birthday. I have gotten to see, I’ll get to see my 53rd birthday. Unless I get hit by a bus tomorrow, but this is what’s so weird about our culture is we ignore the anecdotal.

Yeah. And yet I am one of, I mean, I can look around. I know one other person in this room that. Should not be here. And there are probably, I’m going to guess 50 people walking around this place that have had the same story that have come through my program or come through one of my practitioners, one of my advocates that were sent home to die or had no expectation of living beyond a certain amount of time.

That’s just here at this conference. And this is where we have these stories. It’s everywhere. I see miracles every day, and what’s so sad is my colleagues in standard of care don’t.

Well, and here’s the other part of it, because I strongly believe, and it was, it was the night when they told us to let my son die, and I’m like, it’s gonna be 110%.

Like I, I am such a believer that thoughts create and that you create your reality. Um, that like, you know, when you said I couldn’t talk about it because I was afraid I would die, like, I will not, like, everything has to be so clear, you know, you’re going to be 110%, you’re going to live to a hundred, you know, all these things, right?

Because whatever you believe, that’s why if someone comes in and they really believe they need to do standard of care or they don’t need to do standard of care, you know, you That’s true. They need to do whatever they believe is going to help.

And that’s why I really want people, I think people think, Oh, you’re a naturopath or an integrative doctor, but I would say 90 percent of our patients are doing some form of combination of the, of the two.

And

why not use the best of everything? Thank you. A hundred percent. That’s what we, like with my son, people are like, Oh my gosh, he’s using Medicare. I’m like, he’d be dead. Exactly. We’re going to use everything that we can.

All the gifts that we have on this planet are available to us. And what we get to determine is what’s best for each of us individually.

Absolutely. And that’s what I love about this is it’s not about a protocol. Like my approach, why I’m alive today is different than why Mark might be alive or somebody else might be alive today. We didn’t use a protocol. It wasn’t a treatment, right? It’s like, okay, exactly. And so it’s like, we can dig in, especially today.

This wasn’t available 30 years ago, but today in the last few years, I can know every bit of the personality of your tumor. of your tumor microenvironment and of your terrain environment. And then I can know, okay, where are the, where are the cross points that we can target and what tools can we choose to target that?

And then what metrics can we use to see if we’re on the right path? And if we need to pivot, it’s pretty simple. It’s not even the tools, it’s the methodology that works. Test, assess, address, don’t guess. And one of the biggest heartbreaks is when I have a patient who’s gone to Mexico or Germany and spent 150, 000 on alternative cancer care, and they come back, they come back penniless and cancer exploding.

And I’m like, why was that treatment chosen for you? It’s just as bad in the alternative world as it is in the standard of care. I’m so

glad you’re out training people. We have. You are, right? You’ve got a whole train. Thank God. We’re going to put that in the show notes for the practitioners. Thank you.

Someone. You know, when you talk about this now as being the leading cause of death, I would still think that the Best way to approach this is to prevent it in the first place. Thank you. The only cure for cancer is prevention. Yeah. That would be like, like looking at the most common causes and doing everything you can to not, not avoid those.

But the other, if you can’t do that, I would think the second one would be early detection. Yes. So what are the tests that someone should be looking at?

Well, first of all, um, the JJs of the world, which, you know, you guys are amazing. You are all about metabolic health and that is our prevention. Which is

our biggest problem we have in the States now, is it now?

Cause I heard the latest stat I was looking, cause one said 12 percent of the population was metabolically healthy. Another said 6. 8. And then I looked at what they considered to be metabolically healthy. And I’m like, but that’s not metabolically healthy.

You’re like, Oh, your blood sugar is a hundred.

You’re good. Oh, you’re, you’re at 150. You’re fine. I’m like, I was always

thought it was. 75 or less what happened here. Thank you.

And that’s what’s so funny is that’s their step, their parameters. Remember, our labs are based on the average of the population, so we, it just keeps getting s the same in body

composition.

When I was in doctoral school, we were taught that normal healthy body composition was 18 to 22% for a woman. And that 25% the most. But when you got to like 29% or higher, you were metabolic, you were metabolically unhealthy. Are we heading there? But now I was like, wait a minute now 30% healthy. I’m not going there.

Like, I’m sorry. This whole idea that health at any size and like, nope. Cause it’s not, I

mean, we’ll look under the hood. It’s not about a body shaming. You got to do that. You’ve got to check the metrics. You want the truth. Exactly. We can handle the truth. We can. All

right. So back over to how do we know? So

there’s the, like metabolic is your prevention.

Right. And then once you. And what do you

consider to be metabolically healthy? So what

I consider to be metabolically, so using standard of care parameters first is I want my lipids. I want my, I’m not, I don’t care about your overall cholesterol. That’s. That’s a whole nother topic, but I want your triglycerides under 90.

I want your HDL above 60 for men, above 70 for women. So those are my big ones, like right there in that piece, you’re, you’re, do you care about particle size in there? I’m not a big, I don’t like, it’s not like unless there’s a strong, strong family history or whatnot, but because we work on inflammation, those particle sizes change and we get them off the seed oils as particle sizes change.

So our whole approach seems to negate that. And then we look at, um, the body fat composition. Thank you so much. BMI is BS. Yeah. And so looking at it and then I love that we have imaging. You talked about some of the testing. We have some provocative imaging today. Now, granted it’s for people with funds, but you can do like a prenuvo and there’s others that are non, non contrast dye, non radiation to actually look at your visceral fat.

Right. Just so, I mean, at the very least, cause everyone’s concerned about their body fat. I’m like, it’s where your fat’s located. You got the fat thighs. It’s not going to kill you. But

yeah,

you know, at the very least a waist circumference is going to be, it give you a lot.

Massive. And that’s, you know, one of their big ones, like is your waist smaller than your hips?

That’s a starting, then the measurement, then you go, you know, get more myopic there depending on your bones or all those things. But that’s a big one. Glucose. I love that they test glucose. Glucose is also means nothing. It’s so variable. And so insulin is the key. And I kind of talk about this. Why aren’t they doing a fasting insulin test on everybody?

By the time your blood sugar is whacked, you’ve been so insulin resistant. That’s because an insurance company says until your glucose is high, we won’t test your insulin. Crazy. So, so our rule of thumb in the labs is if an insulin is under five for a healthy individual, like cancer, I actually take them even lower than that.

So if your insulin is under five, your hemoglobin A1C, the average of your blood sugars over three months, and basically the measurement of how much your glycosylated or rusting on the insides. Um, if that’s below five, If a GKI, which is a glucose to ketone index is under five, just so your listeners know the average American diet, uh, the GKI is 25 to 30.

Wow. Yeah. Right. So, and if you’re uric acid, which is a marker of fructose overload, a marker of methylation issues, a marker of, um, uh, oxalate issues, a marker of inflammation and a marker of dysregulated metabolism, if it’s below five, you’re doing pretty damn good. Like you, you basically try to make somebody like me obsolete.

And so that Plus if you’re exercising. Oh, exactly. Which will of course impact all those fives, right? And so I like that kind of rule of five. That’s a good one to start looking at for yourself. And it’s like, if you’re doing that, you are getting your metabolic mansion in order. Right. And then everything else is bonus on top of that

metabolic mansion.

And then, um, any other tests like, uh, I think what, you know, the, the gallery or any of these other tests to look at, are they worthwhile?

We were super excited. And I loved it. I mean, I still think gallery is a great test, but they do in their own, um, uh, Admission say that they, there’s some false positives and false negatives, you know, and they’re about a 76, if I remember correctly.

And if I hope they’ll correct me, which they will, if they hear this, um, at like a 76 percent accuracy rate, which is great for early detection. Anything will help. There’s another company that was, um, came to the United States and globally as an early detection called Datar that came out in November of 2023.

And they, uh, purport a 90. To 95%, uh, sensitivity and specificity of early diagnostics. So those are really exciting, but they’re 900 bucks. You know, there are some insurances starting to consider changing these. There are some corporate medical plans and a lot of these are starting to move into corporate environments to say it’s cheaper to screen all your patients for 900 bucks a pop than to pay for their cancer care when it’s like late stage, right?

And then companies like Prenuva, which I think you’ve done, um, or Ezra. I have not done it yet. Oh girl, you’ve got, yeah. They, first I’m sure they’ll, they did. You take care of her. They

told me to do it. So, um, haven’t gotten to it yet because I did the

gallery. Yeah. And there’s, and there’s so, they give you so much information.

Um, and

so

there’s a couple of different

ones, right?

Isn’t that right? And, um, and then there’s a QT imaging, which is just breast imaging. Yeah.

Dr. Jen’s Jen is into that one. Yeah. Is, um, doing that big time. So we’re excited about that. And they’re non radiation, non contrast dye. And let’s talk mammographies.

Cause I. Stop doing those completely like mammographies and colonoscopies. Let’s just touch on those.

Oh boy. I’m already getting the hate mail from this one. All right. So I’ve just stopped

being concerned about it. I just don’t care anymore. Cause you know what? We have to get the truth out there. And so, you know,

that’s it.

There’s so a couple, a couple, there’s a woman, Susan Wadia Els wrote a book busting breast cancer and it is loaded several years old now, but it’s still quite relevant. It is loaded with all the resources as to why not. Why do not, why we don’t do mammography. Um, but basically just simply put 70 percent of all breasts on this planet are not appropriate for mammography.

Well, we’d also had Dr. Felice Gershwin.

So we have her, we have Dr. Jen Simmons. So we’ll link to those in the show notes too. Good.

Um, 70%. Yeah. Cause if you have small breasts. Dense breast, augmented breast in any way, either it was a reduction, an implant, a biopsy, anything you’ve done to that breast tissue, you’ve now given, it’s hard to either read or it gives you bad information.

Like women who’ve had a biopsy and they put a clip, that area is always going to be infiltrated with calcifications and always look like it’s cancer. Because it’s, it’s a foreign object in the body that the body’s trying to remove and trying to deal with. Drives me knocking futs that we still put clips.

I beg women to, there’s some people will, you know, will allow you if you write a release. So women listening, men listening with clips, refuse them because they will, you will inevitably see recurrence back at those spots over and over again. And no one’s talking about the elephant in the living room on that.

But then we have, The fact that once you have been diagnosed with breast cancer, you should never even consider a mammography ever again. Do you want to continue smashing and radiating vulnerable tissue? So if that’s the case, so for me, it’s a no go ever. When people are pushing, you’re like, well, let’s get down to the brass tacks.

There might be 30 percent of the women that might be served by it with like nice floppy, fluffy breasts. But we have PT imaging that we’re going to be able to get. But even a frickin ultrasound. Is more impact impactful. Now, people ask me all the time about thermography. They’re great about showing you temperature changes and like terrain response, but they’re not sensitive and specific and measurable enough to know what’s going on.

Then we’d look at the ultrasound to isolate and measure. And then we’d What we’re looking at. You could

just do the ultrasound. You could

to start, like, start with that. And then you can move into more diagnostics, which gets in, like, Ultrasound is more screening. The diagnostics would be like the QT or a breast MRI, but the breast MRI is still use contrast dye.

And for somebody like myself, from all the MRIs and the contrast I did early in my diagnosis, my kidneys are, they struggle. I have 30 percent and 70 percent function and they’re, I have to be tender with them so I can never do any contrast dye ever again. A lot of people have, there’s a book called more than meets the eye.

It’s the MRI of all about gadolinium poisoning. Very good book. People should read.

Sadly, we had a girlfriend who with cancer who that was the thing that pushed her over the edge. It’s gone. I see

it so often. You’d be shocked at how often this is. And when doctors say, Oh, it’s so rare, I’m like, where, what universe do you live in?

Wow. But, um, I love like if you have to, if you’re a patient who you have to be limit, uh, attached to the medical system and the insurance model for your resources. Even though you’re getting contrast dye, we have handouts and things to help patients even clear the dye, prep them for it if they have to, because that’s the gold standard.

Even in standard of care, that’s the gold standard. So if you have the funds to go and pay for something like prenuvo or QT imaging, you’re doing, those are MRIs. But without contrast, I, but they have to be cash paid. And so this is how we look, but no, I’m a absolute no one on mammography for so many reasons and then colonoscopy.

And by the way, the other thing about mammography is all the BRCA gene. So the BRCA, so I’ve got BRCA one and two, and the BRCA gene, um, is one that they push you to do mammography every six months. And BRCA is incredibly sensitive. It’s about BRCA. The BRCA mutation is about Inability to repair your DNA.

What is the number one cause of DNA damage? Fucking ionizing radiation. Unbelievable. So we’re smashing and radiating. It makes me want to cry. Every six months. So of course you’re going to be my patient in the future. It just, I’m like, it just, it just gets me like, this is why I do what I do and I get, I’m considered controversial.

I’m telling the truth. I

love controversial. Like we, that’s what we are going after. We have decided like in Mindshare what Tim is going after is big food, big pharma, big healthcare, big insurance. I’m like, all right, let’s go

there. So they should. Absolutely limit their radiation exposure. Wow. So don’t do CT like I want them to use prevo.

I want them to refuse contrast dye and radiation to limit their exposures. We can test their urine for eight oh H dg, which is a marker of DNA damage. Mm-Hmm. right off the bat. And you can watch them go get a ct. Watch that. That’s a cheap low test. It’s a cheap little test. So someone with the BRCA

genes, how.

Like genetically, how big is the genetic piece now? I love you. I would assume, because what you just said is how cancer’s going sky high. It’s just like when the, when that doctor got on and said, obesity’s genetic. I’m like, give me a break. Give me a break. Did our genes change in the last hundred years?

Well, the best part is he’s

right. It’s genetic, but it’s epigenetic above the gene, meaning we have control over the expression of those genes. So he’s, Sort of right, but not, and it’s a similar thing. So. BRCA, BRCA, um, these BRCA mutations, ATM mutations, Lynch mutations, P10 loss, Cowden’s syndrome, CHECK2, GATA3, these are the main, what they call high penetrance familial genes for cancer.

All of those I just, right there on the table are all about how you methylate.

Methylation doesn’t come from a pill. Methylation doesn’t come from removing of body parts. In fact, just removing the body parts, I’ve lost seven patients to prophylactic surgeries because of the BRCA gene, who died later of the very cancer they removed body parts to avoid. Wait. So, just because you don’t have breasts doesn’t mean you can’t have breast cancer.

Remember, we all have cancer all the time. And our cells, by the time you’re actually diagnosed with even a stage one breast cancer, you already have metastasis. And so what happens with people who do those prophylactic surgeries is they often have false peace of mind and they don’t do what they need to do to make sure their terrain is healthy.

And so they literally, I’m good now, I’ve removed the place where the cancer can land, but they didn’t clean up the soil in which that tumor can arise. And oftentimes that false sense of security creates a little bit of recklessness. You know, in their choices of their life, because like, I’m fine. I cut off the boobs.

I took out the ovaries. You know, it’s like, those are the pieces here. And so with BRCA, people with BRCA mutations, first of all, they’re 5 percent of all cancers. And I also want your listeners to know that they have no higher rate of death, death to cancer than someone without the gene. So they don’t make a difference in overall survival, having that genetic predisposition.

And so this whole idea of this prophylactic, which Angelina Jolie, we call it the Jolie effect. Yeah. Well, I mean, it is scary how much I would go, this is a celebrity, not a healthcare practitioner.

I know. And you should have seen the stock go up in like breast implants and surgical robotics and in all the different prophylactic, like screening companies for BRCA.

It was swollen, like. Yeah, very interesting. But this is where, when I have folks who have that genetic predisposition, we are like, okay, well, let’s explore your terrain. Let’s see where your blind spots are. Let’s do what you should

be doing anyway for whatever, whether you have it or not. A hundred percent.

Okay. Colonoscopies. The final, the final round. We’re bringing, we’re bringing this around from

the upside in. So colonoscopies. So I actually, um, First of all, we’ve got an amazing screening test for that today. So Cologuard is one of them. There’s a few others that are just a poop test that if you have a personal or family history of IBS, ulcerative colitis, colorectal cancer, um, lots of issues with like a long time issues of gut, you know, of irritable, um, like irritable bowel and constipation, you could do this poop test at home, which is your first screening.

And it’s measuring, you can look at that, which looks at a few different proteins that show up if there’s, uh, and they’re, they’re pretty accurate. And so oftentimes they’ll still say, if it’s positive, go get your colonoscopy. Um, and if you are going to go and put a camera in there, instead of using their radiator fluid to flush your system, which is also a known carcinogen, um, we have way we prep patients.

Basically you put them on tons of magnesium and When I, I

will not do another colonoscopy, but the one I did, I was like, I’m not going to do this stuff. I just took a load of magnesium and vitamin C. And

what happens with that, the wash, the prep? It takes out 99 percent of your microbiome.

Oh my God. Is that a good idea?

I never knew this. You didn’t know? Oh,

it’s perfect. It’s great evidence, like great research out there. So then you sit there and think, especially like, let’s say you do have ulcerative colitis and now you’re getting colonoscopies or you have Lynch syndrome and they’re recommending every six months or a year, what are you doing?

You’re wiping out that microbiome. it then. And then you will, that is. This is where all the research is in oncology today, is the microbiome, the tumor microbiome. This is what is our immune system, our neurotransmitters, the way we process medications, the way we process foods, our nutrients, our main nutrients that protect us, vitamin A, D and K, all our fat solubles.

Totally dependent on our microbiome. Those are anti cancer agents. So no, I’m not a fan. Like start with the screening in other ways, do pre nuvos, do the things that are using less toxic. And if you do have to get one, use a different method of prep and, uh, you know, take it very thoughtfully eyes wide open.

Just knowing the damage you’re doing to the typical prep for the colonoscopy itself to me is more damaging than the camera up your ass.

And I would assume that you would do it only if they, like, You are at a higher risk. Exactly. All the other stuff had shown up and maybe you want to get rid of the polyps.

Exactly. And even that with polyps that we, we do, we do pre follow up imaging all the time. Our polyps go away as soon as you deal with all the terrain by themselves. You do not need to go in there ever. Never need to snip those babies. They go away. We see this all the time. And we, and we were talking within six months to two years, right?

They’re gone. I get people like, I can’t believe they’re gone. I’ve had them for decades. So you get those. But the other cool thing is we can run things like calprotectin and, um, Uh, uh, lactoferrin, which are poop and blood tests that you can run, which are also early diagnostics and a lot of our even functional medicine gut testing run those tests.

And they’re out there often elevated in a lot of GI inflammation. So again, trying to head people off at the past to deal with this before, you know, deal with the smoldering ember in the basement before it’s a building engulfed in flames. And what we’re pushed in our standard of care mechanism is we don’t even address you until you’re a building engulfed in flames.

So they’re a disease management system. It is. And I don’t even, it’s so funny to even say healthcare. I’m sorry. Right. But isn’t that funny? That’s everything in sick disease care. Weird dynamic. Let’s wait until we can give you this. We are the healthcare. We are the health creation. We are the wellness. We are the prevention.

You know, aspect of this. And so the final piece, when I talk to people about how I really navigate cancer for myself, both in prevention, treatment, and survivorship for anybody on this journey is my version of the CDC. So, you know, my center of disease control is around circadian rhythm, diet, what, however that is changing your metabolic flexibility and community.

Those three things, if you’re working on those diligently, you’ve got a pretty good running, like runway of creation of health. And then the rest are the nuances to your biochemical epigenetic individuality that can be tweaked to change it. You know what’s great about this is,

you know, the more I look at all of this and, and, and I’m really fascinated by Brian Johnson and all of his stuff because I’m like, yeah, this guy’s going to spend 2 million a year and have this research team on it.

Excellent. You know, let’s look at it because the more you unpack all the stuff you’ll, oh, exercise, community, good for like, actually all the things that really make the biggest difference, the biggest needle movers do not cost money. You could just go spend it, but like we’re at a biohacking thing. You could go buy all the stuff, but Actually, you’ll make a way bigger change doing.

These things that are free or very low cost.

And it’s funny, I’m at a biohacker conference where I should feel better. But the, you know, the food has not been as the quality I would eat at home. The lighting, even though it’s better, we have some natural light here, better than most conferences, but being indoors all day, my voice, I sound like I’ve smoked a pack of cigarettes just from the false air and light.

What feels good to me is to then go outside in the evenings and walk and get up early in the morning. Exactly.

And

like, here’s all these sexy jillion dollar tests and toys and things to play, which I love. It’s fun, but it’s like the real thing that nourishes me is like you said, free and accessible by all.

And so when there are people complaining, Oh, what you do is very expensive. I mean, you should remember 19 years old, no money, uninsured. I cleaned, I traded for all my health care. I lived in a teepee for two years. Like, not even a yurt. Not even teepee. We chopped wood and carried water to trade for our rent on that land.

And these are probably things that saved my life.

Yeah. Wow. That’s, that’s

Yeah, nothing sexy.

So we are going to put, um, everything at jjvirgin. com forward slash Dr. Nasha. It is N A S H A and it’ll be D R. So D R Nasha. And what we’ll put there is all the links for healthcare practitioners for, uh, For prospective patients, you also have a guide.

I think six, six things you can do if you are diagnosed with cancer. I mean, what I, what I love most about this conversation is I think that cancer is probably the biggest scary out there

and

it doesn’t need to be. And I almost feel like they try to make it more scary. So people will feel they have to run into that.

You just nailed that one. So, so your message is that message that I love so much is the message of empowerment. And, you know, what you can do if you really take your health into your own hands and, and just take a moment. You don’t have to do anything immediately. Just take a moment and breathe, right? And do your research.

Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being so courageous. And thank you for being such a hero here. Go Shiro, go. Go, go, go. Thank you. Thanks

JJ.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jjvirgin. com. And make sure to follow my podcast at subscribetojj. com so you don’t miss a single one.

And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in. And I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

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