Dr. Thomas Seyfried
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And the difference between cancer and epilepsy is we really don't know how ketogenic diets stop epileptic seizures. We know it changes the energy metabolism of the brain, but the clear mechanism is still under massive investigation. And it seems to work against a variety of different epilepsy.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So some people inherit an epilepsy, some people get it from a viral infection, some people get it from a bang on the head, some people get it from tumors. It seems like a ketogenic diet seems to reduce the excitability of the brain in many different interesting mechanisms, which are under investigation.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
But we do know that sometimes these children that have managed seizures for quite a long time, months, many months, all of a sudden take one sip of a Coca-Cola or a fruit juice or something, spiking the blood sugar, leading to an explosive breakthrough seizure, which is very clear.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So, my colleagues and I in the epilepsy field knew this, that how is it possible that you can have a child managed with seizures for such a long period of time, and all they have to do is take one sip of a fruit juice or a bite of a cupcake, and within minutes, they're blown up into a major seizure.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So, it was clear that you had to maintain low blood sugar, low stable blood sugar to manage an epileptic seizure. In cancer, we don't see an explosive growth of cells as the result of taking a bite out of a cupcake or a sugary drink. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you know it's happening.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
because we know the cancer cell can't live, one of the fermentable fuels is glucose, and sugar is fructose glucose, so it's broken down. So the glucose immediately goes to the tumor cell and is used for the growth of the tumor cell. But you can't say, well, you know, the guy says, you know, I've been ketogenic diet, I think I'm okay, let me just bite this cupcake.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
You can't see whether your tumor cell is gonna be growing like you can see a breakthrough epileptic seizure, it's very clear. But not a growing tumor cell. You just have to know that to manage cancer, you have to keep that sugar under control. And the second fuel is glutamine, which there's no diet. And everybody keeps asking me, oh, you know, glutamine is so healthy for us and all this.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And it is. People need to know that glutamine is not a risk factor for cancer. Glucose is for creating inflammation, but not glutamine. So you need specific drugs to target the glutamine for cancer. You can't do it with any diet. People, oh, you know, I take glutamine for weightlifting and all this other stuff. That's great. If you don't have cancer, don't worry about it.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So glutamine is an important metabolite.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yes. Yes. And the second part you said is absolutely essential. They have to know that the ketone bodies from the ketogenic diets are serving as fuel sources for the normal non-cancerous cells in our body, actually making them even healthier than they were.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Um, there's another interesting biochemical mechanism by which burning ketones, uh, enhances the health and vitality and energy efficiency of normal cells. Um, uh, so that's, that's one issue that is the normal cells burning ketone bodies get healthier when on that's, that's why one of the health benefits of ketogenic diet, I hate to say ketogenic diet, um,
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Because it is that, but it's more than that. It's a general health – it's a health system for the body.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
There's many other things.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah, well, I think you're right. I mean, you have to break it down into its various parts. Right. And ketosis in a diet can be achieved with carnivore diets, Mediterranean diets, even vegan diets, although not as effective, but they can still generate a state of ketosis.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
which is then putting pressure, making the normal cells healthy while at the same time restricting the fuel that's absolutely required for the growth of the tumor. So again, you have to bring the body into a more metabolically stabilized state. Once the body is into that state, then you can then use low doses of various kinds of drugs and procedures
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
that will work synergistically with this new ketotic state, making these tumor cells more and more vulnerable to death by putting them under metabolic stress. And that stress is enhancing the healthy cells of the body while slowly degrading and eliminating the tumor cells. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah. And some of these drugs, you know, can be used in very low concentrations because the tumor cells now, when they're under this metabolic stress, become extremely vulnerable to killing. So we're not saying we can throw out all these chemotherapies and all this other kinds of stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
We just need to know how to use it more effectively and in the right way so that a patient can just take a small dose of this stuff when the body is in ketosis and then eliminate the tumor without toxicity. We know this. So that's why some of my colleagues in the clinic in Istanbul are using very low chemo drugs together with ketogenic metabolic therapy.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
It's a process by which we're both enhancing the health and vitality of the normal cells while slowly degrading tumor cells without producing significant toxicity in the rest of the body. It's a beautiful strategy. You've just got to know about it. You have to understand what you're doing, why you're doing it.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And you have to understand the nature of the biological processes, which makes this metabolic approach the most logical and likely will be the most effective way to manage cancer for the majority of tumors.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
No, no, I think that's pretty good. I think you did a good job on that. And I think that during this process of mitochondrial dysfunction that happens gradually, The mitochondria throw out what we call reactive oxygen species, ROS. These are radical species that can damage proteins, lipids, and the DNA, the nucleic acids, RNA and DNA, can be damaged by these ROS.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So they come out of the mitochondria, Because as the mitochondria of the cell becomes more and more dysfunctional, they produce, rather than producing ATP, the energy that they normally would produce, they produce ROS. And the ROS are carcinogenic and mutagenic. So the mutations that you see in the cancer cell are downstream effects of the damage to the reactive of the mitochondria.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So the field of cancer is focusing their energies and their attention on downstream stuff that is not relevant to the majority of cancers. So when you hear people speak of the ALK mutation, the P53 mutation and all these mutations, they're all downstream effects.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
They're not the cause of cancer, they're the effects of the production of reactive oxygen species because the mitochondria have become abnormal. They're throwing out these radicals that are damaging lipids and proteins and causing mutations in the nucleus and the field, Almost the entire cancer field is focused on all this kind of stuff. And I'm saying, and others, and Warburg said, no, no, no.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
You've got to go back and figure out where the energy is coming from. Because you're collecting mutations in the nucleus that are largely irrelevant, but they're coming because of the acidification in the microenvironment. They're coming because of the reactive oxygen species. But the most important question is what is the fuel that is driving the dysregulated cell growth? What's the energy?
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
What are these cells using to divide? And as you said, when we go back in time, we find out that all of the cells that existed on the planet were using those ancient fermentation pathways because there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. So they grew dysregulated growth. And the interesting thing is they would grow without regulation
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
until the fermentable fuels in the microenvironment were dissipated, and then these cells would up and die. So that told me right away that the way you kill cancer cells is you deprive them of their fermentable fuels. And because that's what's driving the dysregulated growth. They're dysregulated because the mitochondria are no longer in control of the system.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
And now they're just growing as long as they have fermentable fuels, just like our ancestral cells 2.5 billion years ago. Now, why did biology start to have integrated action? And that was with the symbiotic interaction between one type of protistobacteria that could harvest the energy of oxygen in the cell, which led to metazoans, which are more than one cell. They're multicellular.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Multicellularity arose with the origin of the mitochondria in the cytoplasm. That led to regulated growth. So you have to go back really long in evolutionary terms to find such systems where preceded mitochondria in the evolution of organisms on the planet. And these cancer cells are going back that far.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So they will grow out of control as long as they have fermentation fuels in their micro environment. And as we have shown, and Warburg had shown, glucose is a prime fermentable fuel in the micro environment of the tumor cell. And as we have now shown, the amino acid glutamine is another fermentable fuel in the tumor microenvironment. So the solution to the cancer problem now becomes very clear.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
You need to restrict the availability of the fermentable fuels while transitioning the body over to fuels that cannot be fermented, like fatty acids and ketone bodies. So this is a clear strategy to manage cancer without toxicity. You target simultaneously the two fuels that are driving the beast, both fermentable fuels, and you transition the rest of the body over to...
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Glucose and glutamine are the fermentable fuels in the microenvironment. And then you transition the body over to ketone bodies or fatty acids, which cannot be fermented. So these two fuels cannot be fermented by cancer cells, which require fermentation for growth. So it becomes very clear. But ketones do not kill cancer cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Ketones and fatty acids are for the good of the normal cells of our body. They don't need glucose and glutamine if they can respire fatty acids in ketone bodies. They don't have dysfunctional mitochondria. The cancer cell does.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So we can marginalize the cancer cell simply by depriving it of its fermentable fuels and protecting all of the normal cells in the body by shifting them over to ketone bodies, which now becomes a non-fuel for the cancer cell.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
Yeah, but Wilder studied epilepsy, but he realized that if you put kids on water-only fasting, the seizures would go away. Right. But he realized that when you don't eat food, what's the major changes in the blood? And the blood sugar goes down, and ketone bodies, which are water-soluble breakdown product of fats. So the fats in our body- or mobilized these fatty acids then go into the bloodstream
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
They go to the liver and the liver chops them up like a wood chipper and makes small molecules called ketone bodies. And these are water soluble products of the breakdown of fatty acids. And they go to the brain, they can replace glucose in the brain. They can be burned by the heart, by muscles. So the combination between ketone bodies and fatty acids can be respired.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
If you have a good respiration system, With respect to epilepsy, now here's the interesting thing. So Wilder says, well, we can't cure epilepsy by starving people to death. So let's build a diet that does what a normal water-only fasting would do. And if you eat diets that have very low carbohydrates in restricted amounts, blood sugar goes down and ketones go up.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
So it was kind of a calorie-restricted fat diet. You know, you can eat avocados and you could eat certain things that would give you fats. And that seemed to manage epileptic seizures. And then, of course, in the 1930s, certain drugs came on that made it a lot easier for patients to say, oh, we have a drug now that can do what a ketogenic diet does. So let's forget about the ketogenic diets.
Dhru Purohit Show
A Controversial Yet Promising Approach to Cancer: Is This The Future of Cancer Treatment?
But Jim Abrams and his son Charlie started the Charlie Foundation. because his son Charlie Abrams was almost killed by various drugs and treatments that he was taking when he could have done a ketogenic diet. So it was resurrected at the late 90s by Jim Abrams. And we were all working on epilepsy and we found no uncertain terms that management of seizures was directly linked to the blood glucose.