What if Cancer is not a "Disease" ?

[Kurt Annaheim]

What if Cancer is not a "Disease" ?

Patrick Coles joins me to ask a question mainstream medicine rarely lets us ask: what if cancer is not a disease, but the body's last line of defense? In this conversation, we dig into his Toxin Sequestration Theory - oxalates and other toxins quietly building up from "healthy" staples like spinach, almonds, and even vitamin C - may be fueling tumor growth from the inside out. We talk through why your body might be building cancer not to attack you, but to protect you - sequestering decades of toxins and toxic buildup much like it forms a kidney stone to survive what would otherwise kill you. We also get into chronic inflammation, an overworked immune system, and why cancer shouldn't be written off as bad luck or broken genetics. It's a different way of looking at disease - less about fighting your body, more about understanding what it's been trying to do all along.

Transcript:
Cancer is in fact not a disease. Rather, it is a symptom of toxic overload. They represent the body's defense mechanism against it. There's medical research saying that oxalate is stored at a 10 times higher concentration inside of breast tumor cells. It also they found vitamin C at higher levels in cancer cells than in normal cells. People have touted vitamin C as an antioxidant, but it actually switches from antioxidant to prooxidant when you go from low dose to high dose.

Vitamin C is a Trojan horse that delivers oxalate inside of cells. The cells pick it up as vitamin C and then it degenerates and oxidizes into oxalate within the cell. When people use high-dose vitamin C IV to treat cancer, there's often a rebound cancer.

There has been a phenomenon in the medical literature called spontaneous tumor regression, STR. They've taken patients who got a cancer diagnosis and those patients abstained from conventional medical treatment, but instead...

This is a special event today talking with Patrick Kohl's about theories about what causes cancer and the possible connection with problems like oxalate accumulation in the body. Welcome Patrick. Tell us about your work and what you want to share with us today. We're looking forward to it.

Great. Thanks, Sally, for having me on. I am a scientist. I'm chief scientist at a tech company. I sort of got interested in chronic disease because I am a carnivore. I've been carnivore for a year and a half and naturally I went through oxalate dumping. I got familiar with toxicity. Interestingly, there appears to be a deep connection between toxicity and chronic disease and we'll talk more about that today hopefully. I especially want to talk about this new theory of cancer which will be unconventional but nevertheless looks very promising. So I'm looking forward to talking to you about that today.

Super. So, how did you get interested in the idea of cancer and, you know, bio-accumulation and cancer development?

I was noticing that going on a carnivore diet seemed to heal a lot of different chronic diseases and I was just curious why that was. I was trying to dive deeper to understand the connection between diet and disease. And like I said, that's where I did get into toxicity. I started to basically look into what are the causes of different diseases like Alzheimer's, autism, Parkinson's, etc. And when I actually was looking at the medical literature, there's literature connecting each of those diseases to toxins. And it was just fascinating that toxins seem to be appearing everywhere in each disease. I was starting to formulate basically a toxin-based theory of chronic disease.

And of course I was already familiar with oxalates from your work. That's kind of what got me started on things.

Nice. Yeah. Basically I was also listening to a podcast between Anthony Chaffy and Stephanie Senf. Stephanie Sen is a MIT professor and she had her theory of cancer which was based on deuterium and which is heavy hydrogen and she was noting that cancer cells actually sequester and store and hoard deuterium which really was shocking for me to hear because after all the mainstream view on cancer is that it is selfish and she was presenting a completely opposite story of cancer actually being an unselfish team player. That's, you know, sort of what got me started on this journey of, you know, asking like, oh, are we thinking about cancer in the wrong way? And I, uh, also was listening to another uh, podcaster, a guy named Garrett Smith who's a medical doctor, and he was talking about toxic metals.

He was basically stating the exact same theory, but from the perspective of a different set of toxins, saying that toxic metals, things like heavy metals, etc., were accumulating inside of cancer cells. When I heard that, I was saying, "Okay, there must be something in common between deuterium and heavy metals." And sure enough, they're both toxins. But when I dove further, I found a common mechanism between them. And it appears that all toxins actually behave in the same way. Um they manifest their toxicity through something called oxidative stress which is basically free radicals like these things called reactive oxygen species end up damaging biomolecules. And so I was able to kind of piece together the puzzle of these different toxins having a common underlying mechanism of causing oxidative stress. Sure enough, I'm not the only one to have this idea. There's a doctor named Thomas Levy. He wrote a book called *The Only Cause of Disease*. And there he identifies toxins and their resulting oxidative stress that they cause as the key driver of disease.

And so that's actually how he defines what a toxin is. So if you have a chemical that you think might be a toxin, say oxalate, and then you want to ask is that a toxin or not, you can ask does it generate oxidative stress via reactive oxygen species? And it turns out in the case of oxalate it does. Similarly you could ask another chemical like cholesterol is that a toxin and the answer is no because cholesterol does not generate oxidative stress. It does not generate ROS in the body. And so this is a way to figure out does a chemical behave as a toxin or not.

You know when I heard Stephanie Senf's theory for deuterium and Garrett Smith's idea for heavy metals I tested out myself for oxalates. I was already well aware of your work on oxalates and I said okay well I typed in to you know basically a search engine does oxalate create ROS and yes it does and then the next question that I asked was is oxalate preferentially stored inside of cancer cells and the answer I got was fascinating sure enough there's medical research saying that oxalate is stored at a 10 times higher concentration inside of breast tumor cells than in normal breast tissue, showing that oxalates accumulate inside of breast cancer cells. And so that's very weird. You know, why would cancer want to hoard oxalate? It doesn't really make sense from a selfish perspective.

And then I went a step further and asked like, okay, well, let's look at some industrial chemicals. And sure enough, the exact same pattern held for things like pesticides and car exhaust and benzene, which is an industrial solvent. In every case, those industrial chemicals were being hoarded by cancer cells. They were basically being sequestered and stored by these cancer cells even though they are toxins.

That's what led me to propose this toxin sequestration theory of cancer or TST. That's the name of this new theory. The theory has basically three principles.

And I always preface this by saying that this theory doesn't downplay the serious nature of cancer or the harsh nature of cancer, but it's just trying to provide a deeper insight into why it is that we have uh cancer tumors. And the first principle of this theory is that cancer is in fact not a disease rather it is a symptom of toxic overload. And the true underlying disease is toxic overload.

Principle number two is that cancer tumors do not represent selfish, malignant, uncontrolled growth as they are presented in the mainstream. Rather, they represent the body's defense mechanism against toxic overload. And they are extra tissue that the body creates on purpose in order to sequester, store, and process toxins. In other words, you can think of a cancer tumor as a detox organ. It's like a backup detox organ.

The third principle is that how we define a toxin is whether the chemical creates reactive oxygen species or not. So those are the three principles of the theory and the underlying message of this theory is that the body is amazing. Uh the body is brilliant, the body is strategic and it doesn't make mistakes. And if you think about mainstream medicine and how they paint our bodies, they typically say that our bodies attack ourselves with autoimmune conditions. Our bodies have genetic faults, our heritage is faulty, and you know, we have malignant tissue. And so the the repeated pattern that we see in medicine is that our bodies are faulty. But this theory is saying the exact opposite. Our bodies are amazing, strategic, and brilliant, and they know exactly what they're doing. We just have to get out of the body's way. So that's the basic idea of this new theory.

It's fundamental that we recognize that the body is designed to handle challenges to a point and more and more as we get into modern life that we've really overloading the body in so many ways. And some of those ways we have a lot of control over. And I think it's important that we make peace with the body and start agreeing to be the caretakers in in a more profound way rather than be at war with our bodies or start, you know, calling ourselves defective whether it's personally or as a species. You know, we've it's amazing how far we've come and, you know, the the science isn't all there yet.

Everybody has to understand that there's various studies are having competing ideas of what those fundamental mechanisms are. And we spend a lot of time fighting about the mechanisms and what's been proven and what hasn't. But fundamentally, you have to have a principle of trusting in biology and trusting that it's more simple than than we're being told. If we could think in more elemental ways about truly what's going on under the hood and look at causative factors and then start to take some dominion over those factors rather than trying to control the body or control biology with gene editing and all kinds of things. We can allow the natural brilliance of the body to flourish and we can thrive again as a species.

Though is so fundamental to just kind of get our attitudes right and not necessarily have to fight over the mechanisms because I can tell you in the oxalate and cancer story different studies have different ideas about what the process is whereas they're saying this the ions of calcium oxalate or really what that is is oxalic acid ions are the most toxic form others says it's the nano crystals that form and others are saying it's really after the body sequesters crystals that start accumulating in tissues and and breast tissue would be particularly susceptible because it's a calcium concentrating tissue like bone is and so it's trafficking a lot of calcium and oxalate follows calcium around in the body. So it's it's a tissue that's particularly prone to the attraction of oxalate. It's also a very metabolically active tissue that does a lot of turnover. And that turnover involves handling these deposits of oxalate which turn on inflammation. And it's that process of trying to dissolve crystals and turning on the inflammatory attacks that can become chronic in any tissue where you trigger the disease processes where you have uh kind of a warfare that you're creating with the immune system trying to protect you and trying to deaccumulate the toxins. So you become sort of a super fun site at all kinds of levels whether it's your oxalate load or other toxins like the heavy metals, the glyphosate, the deuterium, even maybe the tattoo ink. You know, there's so many places where we're overloading our system and asking the immune system to handle this. And immune system gone wild and being asked to overwork, overwork will eventually lead to syndromes that involve pain and inflammation and even a failure of tissue maintenance where you get fibrosis instead of tissue maintenance and repair. And this interruption of the proper use of the genetic code and ability to turn this process on and off properly where you get enough rest where you don't get so much tissue damage.

The added insight that you're bringing is that as the body sequesters and holds on it's protecting the surrounding tissue. The body is and the immune system are working hard to protect tissue so you can carry on as if nothing's happening and you can save yourself and feed your family, reproduce and grow old and so on. All the things we want to do in life are dependent on the body's protective instincts and mechanisms. And this protective instinct and mechanism is being asked to work too hard.

That's exactly right. So there's a lot of protective conditions that have been mislabeled as diseases in my opinion. And now I do highlight that conditions like Alzheimer's, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson's, autism, those are real legitimate tissue damaging situations where the toxins are driving tissue damage. And the idea there is that we give the disease a different name whenever the tissue damage occurs in a different organ. But nevertheless, the underlying root cause is toxins creating oxidative stress which then damage the biomolecules which then destroy the tissues. And you know it's cardiovascular disease whenever the damage is in the arteries. It's Alzheimer's when the damage is in the brain. It's Hashimoto's when it's in the thyroid. But in any case, those are real legitimate diseases. But I'm saying that yes, cancer on the other hand is the oddball. Cancer is the the unusual one because that actually corresponds to the body building extra tissue. And the argument is that the body is brilliant. It is amazing. And whenever it decides to build extra tissue, it's doing it for a reason. Uh and uh that in this you know we can think about what happens when a tumor forms. The body uh doesn't just allow the tumor forming passively. It actually actively supplies new blood vessels. It builds new blood vessels called angiogenesis uh where it it supplies new blood supply to the tumor. It also builds a mechanical scaffold to physically support the tumor and hold it into place. So, it's using all the good nutrition that we're eating to actually build new blood vessels like a construction site and build a mechanical scaffold. So, why would it invest all that infrastructure into something that was the enemy? And so, that's part of my argument here, which is that there is a clear symbiosis between the tumor and the body. The body provides infrastructure and the tumor provides a detoxification service. And of course we can understand why the body has to provide blood supply because it has to detoxify the blood. Many of the toxins are in the blood itself and so it has to pull toxins out of the blood.

We can dive deeper on this by looking at some of the toxins that cancer tends to sequester and store. It's quite a long list. Uh we've already talked about oxalate and just to reiterate that point, oxalate is a toxin. And it creates oxidative stress and it has been shown to accumulate at higher levels in cancer tissue than in normal tissue. And by the way, it's not just breast cancer. It's also kidney cancer, colorectal cancer, and thyroid cancer. There's been studies on each of those cancers and they've found that oxalate accumulates at higher levels inside those tumors than in normal tissue.

And we can move on to, for example, industrial chemicals like microplastics. Of course, you know, if cancer was selfish, surely it wouldn't want to hoard microplastics. But it turns out it does. Microplastics are indeed a toxin. They create oxidative stress. And there have been medical studies showing that microplastics accumulate at very high levels in cancer tissue relative to normal tissue. And it isn't a passive process. They actively pull in the microplastics through bulk endocytosis. So endocytosis is a process where the cancer cells drink the extracellular fluid. So they basically engulf the microplastics and pull them in. And it's well known that cancer cells upregulate their endocytosis to pull in these microplastics.

The same is true for mold toxins called mycotoxins. Those also create oxidative stress and it's also been shown that they accumulate at high levels inside of cancer cells. And it's the exact same mechanism endocytosis by which they pull in the mold toxins. And it's also true for forever chemicals. These um PFAS which are found in the non-stick pans. Uh these they actually store at high levels inside of cancer cells inside of lipid droplets. Uh it's well known that cancer cells are packed full of these lipid droplets. And interestingly, if you look at brain tissue, normal brain tissue has no lipid droplets, but brain tumor tissue is packed full of lipid droplets. And um interestingly they cancer cells use lipid droplets to store lipophilic toxins that is fat soluble toxins. And a good example are the forever chemicals. But another great example are the seed oils.

So linoleic acid which is in the seed oils is a toxin. It creates oxidative stress through a process called lipid peroxidation. And sure enough cancer cells are absolutely packed full of seed oils. They're filled to the brim with seed oils. They store the seed oils in the same lipid droplets that they store the forever chemicals. So these droplets are just floating around inside of cancer cells and they're not making any use of it. So just to compare to the mainstream view, they would argue that somehow cancer cells might be making use of these things. You know, of course it's hard to imagine making any use out of microplastics or forever chemicals, but they're not making any use out of the seed oils either. They're literally just storing the seed oils for safekeeping.

And there's a couple other examples that are instructive. Excess iron, in particular, non-heme iron can behave as a toxin. This is the type of iron found in the plant-based foods in the spinach. And it's also found in iron supplements. And uh heme iron is fine, but the non-heme iron creates oxidative stress uh through something called the Fenton reaction. And basically there's balls of iron floating around inside of cancer cells. So cancer cells are packed full of balls of iron. There's about 4,000 iron atoms per ball and then they just wrap up the iron in a ferritin shell and they store it for safekeeping. So they're not using the iron for growth. They're just literally storing the iron in these metal balls.

Those are the toxins that cancerous cells kind of store for safekeeping. But there are some toxins that they can actually process that they can actually detoxify. And you know good examples of those would be things like uh ethanol, drinking alcohol, as well as fructose. It's well known that both ethanol and fructose are normally processed by the liver. And I don't think of it as metabolism. I think of it as detoxification. Both fructose and ethanol act as toxins that create oxidative stress. It's well known that sugar is linked to cancer. And it's also well known that chronic alcohol consumption is linked to cancer. Many people for example who have chronic alcohol consumption often have liver damage. So in that case their primary detox organ is is sort of shot. In this theory we like I said cancer is like a backup detox organ, a backup liver basically. And so the body would then build a tumor to help detoxify fructose and ethanol. And sure enough, it dramatically upregulates its fructose transporters to pull it in. And it upregulates the enzymes needed to detoxify fructose. And then similarly with ethanol, in alcohol-driven cancers, the cancer tumor dramatically upregulates the enzymes needed to detoxify ethanol. And it's interesting that cancer seems to adapt to the toxin because in smoking related cancers it upregulates the enzymes needed to detoxify cigarette smoke which are different from the enzymes needed to detoxify ethanol. So in alcohol-driven cancers there's a different set of enzymes that are upregulated than in smoking related cancers. So it upregulates the enzymes that it needs to detoxify the toxins that are present. So that's the idea of cancer, you know, both storing toxins as well as processing them as like a second detox organ.

What you're saying is it can be either a storage bin or an adaptive new organ. It is basically creating new metabolic powers by having this cancer like character which is maybe this is why there's so many kinds of cancer because there's a different kind of metabolic organ needed for a particular set of toxins. So it it's very fascinating to hear that if they can't come up with a a way to adapt to the toxin, they'll store it. But when there is some inherent ability to produce enzymes and so on that can break some of this down, you'll get this activity to try to break it down. Where the oxalate is on the same side as the alcohol and the fructose, it's a known chemical that's been in nature forever. And so it's got a way to handle it to a degree and is probably upregulating that in the case of the oxalate is really inflammation and producing lysosomes with acid and it's very disruptive to cancer signaling in cells and very disruptive to cell's ability to function. So it's really important to sequester it but it's also very difficult to handle it and handling alcohol and fructose would be much less toxic than handling something like oxalate and trying to break it down.

Yeah. And you mentioned there the idea of things getting mapped to different types of cancers. And part of this theory is trying to explain why tumors occur in different organs. It's well known that there is an asymmetry. Certain organs are chosen more than others. Prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, skin cancer, those are some of the most common cancers. But heart cancer practically never occurs. It's very rare for anyone to ever have heart cancer. And it's hard for the mainstream theory to explain this because from the mainstream theory, cancer is random. It's due to random genetic mutations that cause cells to go haywire. And you would expect if that was true, if everything was random, then heart cancer should be just as frequent as prostate cancer. But that's not what we see in practice.

We can try to explain this from the fact that there's kind of two key principles that the body uses. Number one is that the body tends to create tumors in tissues that are already heavily burdened by toxins. Uh number two, it tends to create tumors in tissues that are really good at sequestering toxins. And then there's sort of one final kind of obvious principle that it tends not to create tumors in tissues that would threaten its survival if it did create a tumor there.

There's a very highly specific structure in a muscle cell and muscles generally not just the heart are seem less prone to cancer and it is maybe too specialized a tissue to become an adaptive detox organ compared to a glandular cell or cells that have lots of turnover. Things like the endometrium and the uterus and breast cells are very active. So, and gland cells are highly active and they gland cells are what I call sweeper cells because they produce product and so does a breast produce breast milk and so on. So, it they bring in a lot of whatever's in the bloodstream. So if you're loaded with toxins, they're naturally going to be more metabolically active, more bringing what I call the receiving, the shipping and receiving department is really big on those cells versus cells that don't produce substances.

Absolutely. And that gets into the explanation for why prostate cancer is so common. So the prostate is one of the best organs at pulling in and storing fat soluble toxins like seed oils. The number one toxin connected to prostate cancer is seed oils. And we can understand that from the fact that the prostate is fantastic. It has all the transporters as you were saying, all the transporters needed to pull in the seed oils. And I do want to be very clear that this is not a passive process. The toxins do not get into cancer cells by accident. So I want to debunk that idea because the cancer cells dramatically upregulate the specific fatty acid transporters needed in prostate cancer to pull in seed oils. So they are intentionally pulling in the seed oils and that's and that's just one example.

The same is true for the toxic metals. The same is true for these other things as well. So it is intentional and so the prostate cells are well equipped to pull in the seed oils and store them. And that explains why prostate cancer is so common. The other fact is that prostate is not the most essential organ and so the body is sort of okay with sacrificing this organ you know for the greater good because it doesn't necessarily threaten the immediate survival whereas as I was alluding to with the heart if you were to build a heart tumor it would immediately impair the body's ability to pump blood and that would threaten the survival of the organism. So the body being brilliant and strategic avoids building tumors on the heart.

I'll just mention also that there are certain tissues that are heavily burdened by toxins. As you can imagine, the lungs are heavily burdened by all the inhaled toxins. Uh and so the why one reason why lung cancer is so common is that the body decides to build a tumor where the toxins are already located because it doesn't want the toxins to get into the rest of the body. It's kind of like walling off the toxins locally before they impact the other vital organs. And so it chooses the lungs because the lungs can wall off toxins and prevent them from getting into the rest of the body. And it's also where the toxins are. Uh similarly, the liver is the body's primary detox organ. So that's absolutely full of toxins. So liver cancer is very common just because that's where the toxins are. And so the body's like, "Well, let me build a tumor here because that's where the toxins are." Same is true for some of the other ideas like kidney cancer just bringing it back to oxalate and so and it's well known that oxalates are linked to kidney cancer so it's going to potentially build a kidney tumor to just sequester those oxalates you know in the case of breast cancer the key toxins linked to breast cancer are excess estrogen and oxalates as well as some of the sort of co-toxins there so excess copper is also linked to excess estrogen they tend to go up together but in any case you can think of, believe it or not, breast tissue as kind of a more peripheral tissue. It's kind of like and this is also explains why skin cancer is very common because skin is also a very peripheral tissue. The body likes building tumors in peripheral tissues, tissues that are far away from the vital organs. Um, skin cancer, by the way, is the number one most common cancer in the world. And we can understand that from it being the most peripheral tissue, the body's frontline defense against external toxins. And in the in the in the breast cancer case, as you said, uh it already has the calcium there locally in the breast tissue. So, it's a good place to put the oxalates in because it's kind of a good way of trapping the oxalates. What the body does not want are those toxins roaming freely throughout the whole body. So if it has a way to trap those toxins like with calcium in the case of oxalate then it's going to use that strategy to trap the oxalates keep them in the breast and you know potentially store them in the tumor.

Yeah. And so you're going to see probably some combination of intentionality and kind of accidents where things are just happening all at the same time where you get certain timing and certain other predisposing factors that have this look very different in different people you know because you don't see like everybody that smokes a small percentage of them get cancer so we don't have a complete explanation for that but they get COPD and they get other kinds of problems or they get mouth cancer instead. So there's a lot of other factors that complicates how this plays out which adds to this kind of mystique about what's going on, you know, and I and I think that you can have multiple theories true at the same time because we know the kidneys get a process going called nephrocalcinosis where they have generalized oxalate deposits in the non-tubular tissue. So that they pull it out of the tubular areas where the urine is flowing because it's so important to keep those tubules flowing freely so you don't get backups in urine flow and then hence an infection that was literally deadly. It used to be that kidney stones would kill a person because we didn't have antibiotics. Now it's no big deal. You have a kidney stone, go home and suffer. You go to the emergency room and they're like they oh it's only kidney stone. But in the old days a kidney stone could mean your death. So the body has to have ways to prevent you from dying and does things like holding on to the oxalate and with that nephrocalcinosis or with the constant stress and a tubular tissues you're going to have a setup where some another adaptive strategy might be needed like like it becoming a cancer problem.

Yeah. So from my perspective, and I recognize that my theory is trying to change hearts and minds, but I'm sort of arguing that cancer is a defense mechanism against chronic disease and some of the other things that you mentioned like COPD would be an actual legitimate uh disease. While some people smoke and get cancer and other people smoke and get COPD, my explanation is that the people who get the cancer are actually better off because it prevented the COPD. It prevented the real disease. And there's actually evidence, for example, I've heard that, you know, people who have say toxicity in their brain can either get Alzheimer's or a brain tumor. It's better to get the brain tumor, believe it or not, than to get the Alzheimer's because the Alzheimer's is the real tissue damaging disease. The brain tumor is the toxin storage vault. And the people who are good at sequestering toxins are sort of the the people who are better off.

Yeah. And from an oxalate standpoint, that's really interesting because you have different expressions of how much oxalate is causing disease-like symptoms where you have rheumatism and arthritis and bone problems and osteoporosis and so on where you have more symptomology in some people versus maybe the people without symptoms are better at sequestering oxalate.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense indeed. I thought also I could talk a little bit about like other theories. So there are of course other theories out there. I've already mentioned the mainstream theory of cancer which I call the selfish genetic theory of cancer and that's saying that cancer is both selfish as well as genetic in origin. There is an alternative theory that's very popular in the keto carnivore space from Thomas Seyfried. That's the metabolic theory of cancer. That theory says that cancer is still selfish but it is metabolic in its nature that is uh that the changes in the cancer cells are metabolic rather than genetic as the root cause and I want to highlight really the pioneering work of Thomas Seyfried really he's done amazing work to both debunk the mainstream medicine's theory of cancer he highlighted these so-called nuclear transfer experiments that basically showed that it really was not the genetic material behind the root cause of cancer. I fully agree with that perspective and I largely believe that those nuclear transfer experiments which basically took the nucleus out of a cancer cell and transported it over to a normal cell and showed that it did not make the normal cell cancerous that implied that it wasn't the genetic material the faulty genetic material that was causing the cancer. So Seyfried was the one who really kind of popularized that idea and made it public to everyone but he also highlighted the key role of diet in cancer right so he was the one who really pushed for the ketogenic diet these low sugar approaches and um you know definitely I think this this was really revolutionary and important to highlight how diet was such a huge factor in cancer I I just argue that Seyfried just didn't go far enough in a sense he basically took the mainstream theory and did like a 90° turn where he kept the selfish part but he dropped the genetic part right whereas in my theory I'm doing like a full 180° turn dropping both the selfish part and the genetic part.

What I have noticed is that mainstream medicine when they are wrong they tend to not just be partially wrong but they tend to be quite wrong like fully wrong. Dive a little bit further into Seyfried's theory he proposes two key fuel sources for cancer growth, which is glucose and glutamine. And he argues that these are the key fuel sources that cancer cells require in order to sort of grow, grow, grow grow in their selfish ways. I feel like it's important to really address that point because, you know, my theory as well as I want to highlight the fact that my theory is building on, you know, Stephanie Seneff's work, Garrett Smith's work, etc. And I'm not, by the way, the first person to have this theory. This theory dates back 2,000 years to traditional Chinese medicine. It's in the traditional Chinese medicine textbooks from 2,000 years ago. Then more recently, Stephanie Seneff, Garrett Smith, Tom Cowan is another doctor who pushed this theory forward. Aajonus Vonderplanitz, he wrote a whole book on this. He had cancer himself and then he healed his own cancer with a raw carnivore diet. So he's famous for founding the raw primal diet. Anyway, so there's been multiple people that have had the same theory. My theory has just basically kind of unified these people's perspectives and given all the biochemical details behind it.

Glucose and glutamine, which are the two key fuel sources for cancer growth in Thomas Seyfried's theory. How do we think about those in toxin sequestration theory? Well, glucose is actually surprisingly straightforward. So, there's actually a lot of literature out there connecting glucose to tissue and organ damage. It's well known that people who have diabetes, which is a case of, you know, chronically high blood sugar, they have damage to their eyes, retinal damage. They have damage to their kidneys. They have damage to their peripheral nerves, and they have damage to their arteries. And those tissue damaging complications, those are called diabetic complications. That's the technical term for those tissue damaging phenomena. And they are a direct manifestation of glucose's toxicity. You know, of course, if you just type into an AI, is glucose a toxin, you're not going to get a good answer. But if you type in, does glucose create oxidative stress in the body by creating these reactive oxygen species, then the answer you will get is oh yeah, it has like four different pathways by which it creates oxidative stress in the body. It does damage the body's tissues. And so we can understand that instead of thinking of glucose as a fuel source, we can think of it as a toxin.

And once again, just like how I was talking about cancer cells trying to detoxify fructose, similarly they upregulate all their glucose transporters on their cell surface to rapidly pull in glucose out of the bloodstream because high blood sugar is a toxic situation that causes tissue and organ damage. And cancer being a detox organ says, "Oh, I have to help the body out. I have to pull in the glucose out of the bloodstream in order to try to reduce the blood sugar so that we don't get tissue and organ damage." And so it's acting as a detox organ for sugar, they might say, "Oh, but maybe it's still being used as a fuel source." Well, if it's being used as a fuel source, it's not being used very efficiently because whenever you do cellular respiration, which is the normal way of metabolizing glucose, you get 36 ATPs out. But cancer cells use fermentation and they only get two ATPs out. And so they're not really caring about the actual energy. So they're not trying to behave as a power plant because they are losing 94% of the energy of glucose by switching their metabolism from respiration to fermentation. And we can understand that from the fact that this is a safe detox pathway. Trying to go through the usual cellular respiration for glucose would generate tons of oxidative stress. It would generate all these reactive oxygen species. In contrast, by switching to fermentation, then they end up reducing the amount of oxidative stress they create. In other words, it's a safe precautionary measure to detoxify glucose without generating oxidative stress. So that explains the Warburg effect. So that was just like an explanation for something called the Warburg effect, which is why do cancer cells change their metabolism? And it also tries to clarify that I'm thinking of glucose as a toxin rather than as a fuel source.

Glutamine. The story is maybe even more interesting because, you know, as a carnivore, I do eat a lot of glutamine because, you know, I eat tons of animal meat and glutamine is high in animal meat. And that always bothered me because I got very good health on a carnivore diet. From, you know, the metabolic theories perspective, the glutamine that's in your animal meat is driving cancerous growth. So, that didn't sit well with me. And so, I tried to push further and see, well, what the heck is going on with glutamine? What does the body use glutamine for? And it turns out that glutamine is the body's safe way of transporting ammonia in the blood. Now ammonia is a toxin. It is a small molecule with four atoms NH3 and it is a toxin. It does cause damage to the arteries, the heart, the brain etc. It is naturally produced in the muscle and the body has to transport it from the muscle cells to the liver for detoxification and then it gets excreted in the urine as urea, right? But you can't just dump ammonia into the blood. If you were to just dump ammonia into the blood to go to the liver, then you would damage the arteries in the process. And so you have to package the ammonia in a safe envelope called glutamine. And that's the idea is that glutamine is the safe transporter for ammonia in the blood. Inside the muscle cells, the body just attaches the ammonia to glutamate to make glutamine. It then sends off the glutamine in the blood to the liver. The liver pulls in the glutamine. It rips off the ammonia and then converts it to urea for excretion and that's the detox pathway for ammonia. So, so glutamine plays a central role in the detox pathway for ammonia.

But many people who have cancer have liver damage. It is very common because the liver is the primary detox organ to have liver damage. When you have liver damage, then all of a sudden you're not very good at detoxifying ammonia anymore. And so the basically the body reroutes the glutamine from the liver instead of sending it to the liver, it sends it to the cancer cells and it says, "All right, I need cancer cells to pick up the slack. I need someone to detoxify this ammonia." And so instead of sending it to the liver, it sends it to the cancer cells. The the cancer cells dramatically upregulate their glutamine transporters to pull in the glutamine. Once it's inside the cancer cells, it rips off the ammonia and then detoxifies the ammonia. So that's the idea of instead of thinking of glutamine as a fuel source for cancer growth, we're thinking of it as the body's safe way of transporting ammonia and cancer is trying to be a team player to help out with the ammonia detox process.

Yeah, that's interesting. And I don't want to bore the listeners with fussing with how that's done, but it's interesting to think about what cancer cells are doing with the ammonia molecule, whether it's for their own metabolism or just a matter of literally changing its toxicity.

Well, it does not necessarily use the exact same pathway as what the liver cells do. It the first step of the pathway is the same. That is, it does rip the ammonia off of the glutamine with the exact same enzyme that the liver uses. So that step of the pathway is the exact same process. There are many ways to skin a cat. There are many ways to detoxify ammonia is the idea. It doesn't have to use the exact same pathway as the liver uses. The first step is the same, but the rest of the pathway is not exactly the same and it does use some of the ammonia in, you know, for precursors to biological molecules, but nevertheless, it's still neutralizing the toxicity of the ammonia. It still ends up the net effect is neutralizing ammonia's toxicity in the end.

I'm curious what you think about when people can smell ammonia on their own secretions of sweat and so on, body odor.

Of course, you know, there are various ways to get exposed to ammonia. It's in cleaning products. So, everyone should of course check their cleaning products and throw them out if they have ammonia in them. I believe the number one cause of ammonia toxicity is liver damage. So because that's the primary way we detoxify ammonia. You can also get ammonia toxicity from you know prolonged intense exercise also imbalances in your gut bacteria because some gut bacteria produce ammonia whereas other gut bacteria kind of deplete it. So having sort of dysbiosis can also impact ammonia toxicity. So there's several ways to get it. Obviously, if people are smelling ammonia, that's a warning sign, of course, that that they have ammonia toxicity, and that should get people to wake up because, you know, number one is liver damage is the primary cause of ammonia toxicity. So, it could be a warning sign that their liver is damaged. If someone has that ammonia smell, it could be a sign, and there's many ways to damage your liver. All the toxic metals, it's all the lipophilic toxins, the seed oils, the fructose, the ethanol, drinking alcohol. So there's a hundred different ways to damage the liver, but it is a sign that the liver could be damaged. That's what I would take it as. Yeah.

I wonder about if you're in a metabolism that's attempting to burn too many amino acids for energy.

Yeah. There's like rabbit starvation. So rabbit starvation is that case where you're just solely eating protein and nothing else. And that could be a situation of ammonia toxicity if that's like the only macronutrient that you consume. Well, and some carnivores can get themselves in trouble that way. I think being afraid to eat enough fat and cutting out all carbs and and you know, we probably should swing back around and look at the glucose as a toxin theory because it's possible with anything that in one condition it's not a toxin, in another condition it is. And it's a matter of often it's a matter of concentration. You know, diabetes particularly is blood sugar out of range versus the body's wanting to keep blood sugar in a certain range. It doesn't want it to go too low anymore than it wants it to go too high. So, the body's acting like it needs glucose and so many tissues. And yet, when it's out of range and you know, it's either with or because of, you got this oxidative stress going on where the cells really cannot generate their own self-protection anymore. And so things like glucose become more toxic when you've got oxidative stress. If you if your cells have the nutrients they need so they can generate enough glutathione, then its tolerance for things like glucose is much better.

Yeah. I would just point out that the modern diet is so ridiculously overloaded in glucose that most people are in this glucose overload state. Our ancestors weren't eating candy bars and they weren't drinking sodas. And so it's not ancestrally relevant the kind of foods that people are often eating nowadays. Of course you can have gluconeogenesis and make your own glucose. I'm not denying the fact that glucose plays a physiological role. Of course it does. But um you know in modern at least in the standard American diet people are often overwhelmed with glucose. And uh I think this is an important point because glucose isn't the only toxin that people are overloaded with. So imagine now we add in seed oils, we add in oxalates, we add in all the other plant toxins, triple whammy, oxalate, seed oil and excess sugar.

Yeah. In that case all the sort of protective structures eventually get damaged. So for example, chronically elevated high blood sugar damages the blood-brain barrier and now all of a sudden the toxic metals and the oxalates can better get into the brain to cause brain damage. So these toxins can synergistically overwhelm the body and you know we've already talked about liver damage, right? So like you get liver damage from alcohol consumption and that leads to ammonia toxicity. So that the toxins have a cumulative effect.

Well, and we have so much to learn because you know we were raised on the idea that this blood brain barrier was such a great thing and it was so terrific. But more and more science is admitting like it's not quite all it was meant all we thought it was like it toxins get into the brain and the way oxalate gets into cells and tissues is not really understood. Um, but one thing to note that you can turn something you think is good for you into a toxin like vitamin C. Vitamin C is a Trojan horse that delivers oxalate inside of cells because the cells pick it up as vitamin C and then it degenerates and oxidizes into oxalate within the cell. So I mean that that whole process is like sequestered in a small number of research studies focused on vitamin C and oxalate toxicity but has not been taken as an understanding of how oxalate ends up in tissues and becomes this overwhelming burden for like the brain and it's clear that oxalate gets into very critical areas where this dementia and other things happen and that it's a promoter of inflammation that just has your day-to-day function of your brain sometimes be at high risk, which is hard in this world now where we're asked to do intellectual jobs. Most of us have to function on the internet and and typing and thinking and reading and at levels that was that are it's kind of unusual in human history to have to spend so many hours of your day thinking and yet so poisoned at the same time.

Yeah. And I fully agree on the vitamin C point. I have written a blog post on how high-dose vitamin C acts as a toxin in this theory and it becomes prooxidant at mega doses at these very high doses and like you said it actually has more than one pathway but one pathway is just it literally degrades into oxalate um so an oxalate is a toxin so some no matter what some fraction of vitamin C will always degrade into some amount of oxalate um but you know vitamin C also independently on its own can also generate the oxidative stress as well. Um and and uh you know people have touted vitamin C as an antioxidant but it actually switches from anti antioxidant to prooxidant and when you go from low dose to high dose and sure enough it fits the exact same pattern. When you mega dose vitamin C, cancer cells dramatically upregulate the transporters that you need to pull in vitamin C and they pull it in and they store it and they process. And guess what? They have found in higher concentrations inside of cancer cells, vitamin C. So they found vitamin C at higher levels something like three times 3x higher in cancer cells than in normal cells. It should become a cancer cell killer and potentially could. It might be one one ways cancer regulates itself where some of this toxicity actually interferes with the cancer proliferation which is something we haven't addressed yet. How does is it just the perpetual demand for for toxin sequestration, toxin processing either way that continues to have tumors grow. And you can see how chemotherapy and all the things we do when you have cancer add a toxic burden to the diet including more vitamin C and more high-oxalate foods that go when you have cancer you're going to have more vegetables. So you know and go keto because everyone's afraid of sugar so you better have almonds a high oxalate food. It's not it's not a good tradeout. It just makes it worse. And you see when people use high-dose vitamin C IV to treat cancer there's always a rebound cancer. So the body does a sequestration which controls the cancer proliferation in theory but then you have the oxalate deaccumulation that starts happening and then the cancer proliferates again.

That's exactly right. Yeah, I fully agree with everything you just said. The chemotherapy is surprisingly similar to high-dose vitamin C. There's a lot of alternative medicine treatments that behave very similarly to chemotherapy.

The principle behind chemotherapy is that cancer cells are sensitive to oxidative stress. Now, of course, they are because they're full of toxins. So, and the toxins produce oxidative stress. So, they're kind of in a precarious situations. They're they're full of toxins. They're at the edge. And if you just add more toxins, more oxidative stress, you can push them over the edge and kill them. And that works. Although, of course, the problem is that it also damages the normal cells as well in the process. But yes, it is true that you can shrink a cancer tumor by giving more toxins. And that is the principle behind chemotherapy. It does shrink cancer tumors. It is the exact same principle but behind high-dose vitamin C. It's the same principle behind some of these other alternative medicine treatments.

Ivermectin does the exact same thing. All these people promoting Ivermectin, it actually adds oxidative stress. It's a toxin. And then there's other things like high-dose EGCG, high-dose melatonin. All of these things when in high doses create oxidative stress. They push the cancer cells over the edge and that causes them to die. They have apoptosis. They they literally just burst because they're already under so much stress filled with all these toxins. And but like you said, it leads to rebound tumors because the body says, "Well, uh I just lost my storage vault. So what am I going to do with all with this toxic spill? It just had a toxic spill where it storage vault burst and now the toxins are floating everywhere. It has to build a new storage vault for these toxins. And that storage vault might have to be even more aggressive because it's now it's dealing not only with the toxins that were sequestered, but also the toxins that people added with the treatment. Now it's more aggressive. And that's also your point, which is that what does aggressive really mean? Aggressive just means that it's forced to grow because of the toxic load. I obviously in my theory don't really like the word aggressive. I think of it as the body saying, "I need more help. I need more help. So, I need you to get bigger to store more toxins."

It's kind of the vigor of attempt to survive.

Yes, that's right. And you know, and we can get into the question. It's very common for people to ask, well, if my theory is right, then how is it that people actually die from cancer? And of course, this does not downplay the serious nature that cancer is a symptom of toxic overload. So, it means that if you do have cancer, you have toxic overload. And toxic overload is the cause in this theory of every single chronic disease. It's the cause of tissue and organ damage. And so that means that your body is trying desperately to fend off the tissue and organ damage with this storage vault. At the same time, this the mainstream treatments as we just discussed add more toxicity to the situation. And so uh if someone already has toxic overload and then we add more toxins in the form of of treatments, then that can push people closer towards mortality. And then we can see why, you know, obviously this is a controversial statement, but I'm basically arguing that the treatments themselves can push people closer towards in my theory, it's not the tumor itself that's really causing death. It's really the toxins that are causing death. And it's correlation that when you have a tumor, you have toxic overload. And so you so that's why it's a precarious situation.

Yeah. And you you've got not just this what ends up in the long run being maladaptive approach of this kind of compromise with the devil of okay I'm going to sequester your toxins and try to detox them with this new organ and new tissue I'm developing as these tumors but you've got the side effects of the acidic metabolism and the constant inflammation generally and if you're not approaching all of that environment it's we could see how we really could give more credence to the idea a of lowering toxic exposure, using sauna, using alkalinity and and other ways of helping the body have immune system rest so that the cells can have the nutrients. We have to make sure cells have all they need, normal cells that can reproduce to produce normal tissue repair and recovery so the body is strong. You have to have the right nutrients in place and a low level of toxicity. So because there are other forms of sort of tumors that is just fibrosis where the cells the normal cells in the body are not able to maintain tissue. So you've got fibroblast producing aberrant collagen to replace just to hold you together so that you got the fibrosis holding you together. You got the tumors over here working hard with the toxicity and you've got less and less vitality in the system to deal with what is you're becoming a toxic super fun site that can't handle it. But there I think the good news for listeners is that it's not as scary and we've made cancer the scary one. We're not as afraid of fibrosis and inflammation and even aches and pains and what they represent or you know kidney stones and so on are signs of toxicity and we're not seeing understanding that these very simple principles that you need nourishment and you need as low a toxicity as you can do and and anything you can do in your own life to drink cleaner water and quit with the plastic and quit with the high oxalate foods and have clean air in your home and environment and care about what kind of chemicals are in your life and stop buying microplastics and you know all that. These are pretty much in our choice making. Like cancer has always been seen as a lifestyle disease in the holistic and integrative world, not just Russian roulette with God and bad genetics, which is what you hear from the mainstream. But in holistic medicine, we've always said for many, many, many decades that it's some assault, some deprivation and harm to the body that the body is adapting to that. And if we could support the body, reduce that harm, incoming harm, and improve the delivery of nutrients needed, the body can right the ship and restore itself.

People often ask me, and of course I'm not giving out medical advice, but you know, they would say, well, if my theory is right, what would be the best solution, right? And to your point, reducing the toxic load can make all the difference. And there has been a phenomenon in the medical literature called spontaneous tumor regression STR. And that is well documented where they've taken patients who got a cancer diagnosis and those patients abstained from conventional medical treatment but instead what they did is they changed their diet and their lifestyle to dramatically reduce their toxic load. They got on a low toxin diet and a low toxin lifestyle. And many of those people had their tumors just spontaneously disappear or regress. And that is documented in the medical literature. They have case studies of this. And the medical literature can't really explain this. They just call it a miracle. They just don't they say, "Oh, it must be some weird miracle that it just disappeared on its own." From this perspective that I'm offering, uh, it's pretty straightforward and simple. It's that, well, when the body is not overwhelmed with toxins, it no longer needs a toxin storage vault. And so it can decommission its existing toxin storage vault whenever it's no longer needed. It doesn't need that resource anymore. So it's just decommissioning its resources. So that's the idea that you know if you can cut out these toxins out of your diet, out of your lifestyle, you can naturally reduce tumor size. And that's the difference between natural tumor regression versus unnatural tumor regression. Unnatural tumor regression is where you literally attack the tumor with toxins, right? And that's the standard approach. You attack the tumor with toxic chemicals. The natural approach is to reduce your toxic load so that you don't need the tumor in the first place.

Well, and if I could just add from a public health perspective, preventing toxicity is the best way to go. You don't need to form tumors if you don't poison your body with things like oxalate and plastics and pesticides and so on. So it's asking people to take more responsibility which is a little unfair because the toxins are being delivered by our messaging, by our culture, by our industrial ways of doing things. We need to ask as a society and as an era in human history, when are we going to start really respecting this toxicity problem in our own biology?

Yeah, absolutely. And I totally agree that it's an unfair situation that we've sort of been set up for failure. It seems not only from the toxins being inside the foods but also the misinformation around what is a toxin and what isn't. Obviously the title of your book is *Toxic Superfoods* which is an oxymoron. The idea that superfoods are actually toxic. So the misinformation around out there you know has been horrible. I just wanted to also mention you you also highlighted the idea of some of these other growths as being warning signs. In my theory that fits in perfectly. Basically the idea is that the body doesn't just jump straight to cancer tumors. It has like a hierarchical approach. It has like tiers that it goes through and cancer tumors are kind of like one of the top tiers. But beneath cancer tumors would be small growths like nodules or skin growths. Things like moles, pimples, cherry angiomas, lipomas, age spots, skin tags, cysts.

Yeah. As well as the nodules. So the thyroid nodules, the lung nodules. Yeah.

So these we can view as kind of mini vaults, mini vaults and I have looked into the skin growths and there's actual literature connecting them to toxins and saying that for example a lot of the skin growth like pimples and lipomas and cysts are connected to the lipophilic toxins. So the seed oils, the damaged polyunsaturated fatty acids as well as um some of the the heavy metals and the uh forever chemicals and the microplastics. They've actually found these toxic chemicals inside the skin growth. The moles in particular are for the toxic metals. So all the heavy metals and everything. And that's because melanin is really it's a metal chelator. Melanin is a metal chelator and it's really good at binding the heavy metals. And the moles are and the age spots. You mentioned the age spots. Those are also melanin based vaults. So the moles in the age spots are melanin based vaults and they sequester the heavy metals. But now we can understand why is it that moles sometimes turn into cancer, right? They're always saying, "Oh, check your moles. Make sure you like monitor your moles." It's because it's on a tiered hierarchy. When the toxic load increases, the body makes its strategy more sophisticated and more complicated. And that's why moles are like maybe a first line defense and then it can escalate to a cancer tumor in the skin whenever the toxic load increases and it needs more support for those toxins. So it's all kind of like on a continuum like we can think of it all on a continuum there.

Well, you might be interested to know that when I was adopting sweet potatoes as a daily staple for starch, when I moved from a vegan diet to a more mixed diet, I quickly developed age spots all over the place and they faded later when I went on the low oxalate diet. So, I think that kind of illustrates the point.

Wow, that's fascinating. And that suggests that there is spontaneous regression. Once again, spontaneous regression when you reduce the toxic load. That's fascinating.

Yeah. And I think it can come back as the toxins come to the surface because the skin is the largest organ. It is an organ of detox and is an ideal way to move toxins out because skin is so renewable. A lot easier to renew your skin than your kidneys or your colon or other hard workers who are trying to get rid of stuff. So it it makes sense that we see with oxalate contamination, oxalate toxicity that there's a long arc. I'm still seeing signs of oxalate deaccumulation in myself in year in my 13th year on a low oxalate diet. So there's a continual cleanup process. There may never be an end. You do need to keep your house dusted and swept out every day. You're accumulating dust and toxins is a part of life. But just even these old ones, this oxalate that I ate for 49 years, uh, is still a thing out here at age 62. But I can tell you that it's a lot nicer. It's not It's a better life to live and it's easier than you think. It's easier to have less oxalate. It's easier to have less pesticides. It's easier to have better quality water than you think once you figure out the basic tools. And I really want to encourage people. You can't necessarily make all your friends and family do it, but learn to do it for yourself and help us fix our culture that is acting like this doesn't matter. It does matter.

Yeah, absolutely. It it is important and it looks like it is the primary cause of disease which is toxicity and you know just to back up you know what you said I've been a year and a half oxalate dumping and um I'm down to my last symptom which is my arthritis in my fingers but fortunately my kidney pain is gone painful urination is gone so I'm just left with my last finger based symptom I'm making progress on my oxalates and thanks again for your amazing work by the way in in helping to educate me on this topic. We have to get the word out about toxins. You know, I've been through the, you know, like yourself, the the best universities and I never heard the word oxalate once in my entire education. You know, there's a serious problem that we have where people don't know about these toxins.

You know, just to bring it all back. So, like my my broader theory is just that the body's amazing. It knows what it what it's doing and we just have to kind of get out of our body's way. And it looks like the best solution is to just eat a low toxin diet and do nothing else. And the scary thing is that the moment you deviate from that idea, you get into all sorts of trouble because people have all these weird goofy treatments. They have their ivermectin, their high-dose vitamin C, their whatever. And each of these treatments unfortunately could be toxic in themselves. So you have to really be careful about trying to do these unusual treatments and just focus on low toxicity. That is the key message and allow the body to kind of do the rest. And that is really the secret in my opinion to dealing with cancer but also dealing with chronic disease more broadly.

Wow. It's a big topic. I'm so glad that you're sharing your ideas because I think from a practical level for those of us who don't yet have cancer and we want to keep it that way. It gives us reassurance that it's really the simplest things have the greatest leverage. And if I could just share one analogy with everybody before we finish up, you know, if you if you think about a projectile, like maybe you're setting up a sprinkler in the yard, a 1% shift in your angle, 90° versus 91, when you're talking 15 feet out of the stream of water, it's way off in the wrong direction. And you can see that with professional landscaping where sometimes they're spraying the road instead of the grass because from the origin point, it's just a few percentages off. But from a distance of time and space, it's way off. And so little things can start early in life and become big things. And little choices in life can explode into big things. And so little adjustments, it's not too hard to go a couple degrees this way and you get a huge different outcome down the road.

Absolutely. Fully agree. Yeah. It's it's it's a chronic thing. We have to be always every day making the right choices because every day things add up.

They do. So, thank you so much for sharing your ideas and I look forward to seeing what kind of conversation it generates. But people can comment on this and generate a conversation to keep encouraging each other to make great choices and to not be so afraid of big scary words like cancer.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Sally, for having me on. And if people want to learn more, they can check out my Substack blog post as well as my YouTube channel. Uh my my YouTube channel, by the way, is named Oxit Warrior. So I actually named it after that because I'm fighting my oxalates. And then uh also my substack blog post people can learn more about this new theory. Yeah. And we'll share the links below. All right. Thank you, Sally. Take care.