Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcription has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the second series of Cancer Talk, the podcast that explores the benefits of integrative oncology, an approach that brings together standard oncology practice for the raft of lifestyle and complementary approaches in order to provide broader, more holistic care to improve quality of life and outcomes for people with cancer. I’m Robin Daly, founder of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity, and one of the hosts for the podcast. Series 1 of Cancer Talk was aimed at initiating conversations about integrative oncology and bridging the gap between mainstream and integrative medicine practitioners. And the Series 1 episodes are still available from YestoLife.org.uk forward slash podcasts and major podcast platforms.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
Hello, I’m Dr Penny Kechagioglou. I’m an NHS Clinical Oncologist and co-host for the broadcast and in addition to treating patients with all the regular modalities in use within healthcare, I have a passion for integrating evidence- supported lifestyle and complementary medicine into patient protocols. I’ve witnessed first have the enormous benefits this can deliver to patients and their carers. So in Series 2 of the broadcast we are planning focused conversations with healthcare professionals, working directly with people with cancer and applying integrative oncology in contemporary clinical practice with the aim of strengthening the clinical voice and evidence for integration, influencing the wider community including academia and research and beating the case for an integrated UK model of care.

Robin Daly
Many delighted to be getting together again for Cancer Talk.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
Hi Robin, it’s lovely to see you and yes, we’ve got a wonderful guest today.

Robin Daly
We have. Well, these are in a high point of each month for me out there exploring the developments in integrative oncology and how we can move the agenda towards integration with really some of the most inspirational people in the field on our show. So really great. And I guess this month is someone who’s something of an international superstar when it comes to the metabolic treatment of cancer. Dr. Nasha Winters, she’s author, practitioner, educator and a leading activist in pushing for metabolic therapy to be available to everyone with cancer. So we’re about to fill in a lot more detail on all of that. But first, a big welcome to you Nasha.

Dr Nasha Winters
Thanks so very much. What an honor. I feel like you two bring so many important conversations to the masses and I’m just delighted to be yet another. So thank you.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
So fantastic to have you nature, everybody knows about you and I so much admire your work.

Dr Nasha Winters
Thank you, what an honor.

Robin Daly
Well, Penny, I know you’ve got loads of burning questions for now, so do you want to wait straight in?

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
I mean, Nasha, you’ve been an inspiration to many people, certainly to myself as a clinician in the UK. So I want to hear, and I’m sure many people want to hear about your story, and how have you been inspired to become a naturopathic doctor? You want to tell us a bit about your journey?

Dr Nasha Winters
Well, I think probably most of the folks you have on your podcast are folks who arrived in the oncology space because of a personal experience, right? Like we didn’t wake up one day and think, gosh, I think I’ll go into a career in oncology. That was never the plan. In fact, I will tell you, I very much was not going to work in this field. At the age of 19, I was misdiagnosed for many, many, many months. And by the time it was properly diagnosed, I was too far down the rabbit hole in stage organ failure, a full bowel blockage, a severe, severe malnourishment, and it was cancer kickaxia, pulse oximetry in the mid 70s. I mean, I was really not long for this world. I was very, very ill. And they unfortunately couldn’t even offer me any standard of care because they knew a single treatment of chemotherapy would take my life.

Dr Nasha Winters
I was inoperable. I had metastasis everywhere. The origin was an ovarian primary cancer tumor that had gone pretty much all about the building and left quite a storm in its wake. And part of that, I tell this story because what precluded that for a good decade was a multitude of diagnoses from IBS to polycystic ovarian syndrome to endometriosis to rheumatoid arthritis. So you can imagine why my symptoms were missed over and over as something more than just continuation of the same. And so by the time I was 19, just shy of my 20th birthday, when I landed in the hospital, my roommate found me semi-conscious and rushed me there. That’s when the truth was revealed when I finally had doctors doing a more deep dive into what was going on with me. And that’s how they learned. So here we are. Gosh, that was 1991. Just shy of my 20th birthday, it would still take a few weeks to get the official diagnosis, which came on October 21, 1991.

Dr Nasha Winters
And here we are 32 and a half years later, actually beyond that now. And I am someone who has been on a mission ever since to understand why a 19-year-old would be diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. As I started to say, I never, ever thought I would work with cancer. I just wanted to understand my own process. I was very private about it. In fact, Robin and I were talking right before the recording that the way one of our dear friends and colleagues has approached her diagnosis was very out in the world. I had the opposite effect. I was very internal with my process, very, very private. It was actually very private about my journey until about 2012. So a good 20-some years later, when I finally felt confident enough that maybe I did have some staying power and maybe I could talk about some of my experiences that I was in that realm and I really didn’t want to work with cancer.

Dr Nasha Winters
I wanted to do anything but the world had a very different ask of me. So that’s kind of the short, the long of the short of it or the short of the long of it. But that’s why we’re here having this conversation today.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
And I’m so glad that the world has asked you to work with people with cancer and educate so many physicians in the world. How do you think, what helped your training and what barriers did you find, or if any, educating other clinicians? Because I want to learn from that experience.

Dr Nasha Winters
Well, I think I really like that my barrier as a patient, it’s different than my barrier as a clinician. So I’ll start with the patient side. The patient side is first of all, you’re either in a situation like I was in where there were no opportunities or were no options. So I was left my own devices, I was sent home to palliative care. That’s one end of the spectrum, which unfortunately some people do land with their diagnosis at that state. The other end of the spectrum are patients who are just like jump right into treatment without inquiry, without evaluation of what options there are, and they get kind of pulled into like a river of movement that they don’t have any control over.

Dr Nasha Winters
And so suddenly they just go along for the ride of what standard of care is offering. And what people don’t understand is that we’ve come to the point today, maybe this wasn’t the case 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, but we’ve come to the point today where our technologies have caught up, our testing is caught up, our understanding is caught up that we actually can do precision personalized medicine, that we really can take a moment and really understand why someone has the diagnosis they have and choose a very thoughtful individualized treatment path forward. And yet rarely is that offered. Most people won’t be offered the alternatives, even in alternatives of standard of care until they have quote unquote failed, hate that terminology, but that’s how it’s noted until they’ve failed the algorithmic approach.

Dr Nasha Winters
First line of care, you failed it. Now we move you to second, you failed it. Now we move you to third, you failed it. Then to fourth, maybe at a clinical trials at that point, maybe into some off-label drugs at that point, where I believe we’re seeing the changes today in the patient care is that we have the opportunity to start with the precision personalized aspect versus waiting until everything else has failed us. So as patients, we don’t know that there’s other opportunities, other options and my situation was very unique in that most cancer diagnoses do not have that level of emergency or acuteness. We often have the time to decide a better, more sure-footed path forward. So those are the limitations there. The other limitations are the financial. So in the United States, we have insurance processes, but I was uninsured at that time. I was also, I ended up being homeless for two years in the early part of my diagnosis of camping the entire time to survive, only personal family to go to college.

Dr Nasha Winters
So I didn’t come from financial means, in fact, I came from poverty. I had to resource everything for myself and that was very arduous, that was very overwhelming and I treated, I worked in health food stores to get leftover food and get leftover supplements that I could take home and try. I cleaned people’s houses to get acupuncture and other body care products. I was very resourceful. I wanted to be comfortable. I didn’t expect to treat it, but I wanted to be comfortable on my way out. Other people don’t have even the luxury of knowing they have those types of resources. They just assume your insurance should all cover it or that you are just inherently wealthy to pay out of pocket for this.

Dr Nasha Winters
I was neither of those. And so that’s one other place that the patients need to understand. There are lots of ways that you can find, like where there’s a will, there’s a way. So those limitations financially and what the accessibility is and even knowing that there’s options out there, those are the patient limitations. The clinician limitations, if you are a standard of care provider and you deviate from the standard of care, you are at risk of losing all of your credentials. And so most clinicians, even if they know there’s a better way, they are not able or comfortable to go there because they know that all of their life’s work could go away in an instant by recommending something off label, by recommending something out of that algorithmic standard of care. So that means that they’re a slave to a very broken system, which is really unfortunate. So the limitations are massive there. And then a lot of these therapies that you and I are interested in today are not covered by our health care system.

Dr Nasha Winters
And so doctors also make that decision for their patients as to whether or not they think your patients would be willing to pay out of pocket for the proper testing or pay out of pocket and find ways to pay for therapies that go above and beyond standard of care. So you see these limitations can often be self-induced versus the reality. And my hope is that these conversations start to help you understand what’s out there, what resources are out there, what resources are on the horizon so that we all have accessibility to this care, that this becomes standard of care and that we don’t have to wait for decades or generations to have this accessible by all.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
really very resourceful. Robin, I want to take Nasha back when she was 19-20. How did you manage to handle the difficult diagnosis and get where you are today? Because it sounds as if you just took control of your life, didn’t you? You make the right decisions or the decisions that looked right for you. How did you do it?

Dr Nasha Winters
Well, there’s a couple parts to this. Prior to my diagnosis, I actually didn’t want to live. I actually tried to take my own life on a couple of occasions. I had come from a pretty significant trauma history. And so for me, a diet of cancer and sort of the promise that it would take my life very quickly, as I’d been told within a few months, seemed a lot more sort of heroic than dying at my own hand. And so that was my first instinct. That was my first moment of almost relief when I realized what was actually going on. The second thought that came to me, however, after they said, there’s nothing we can do, go home and get your affairs in order, it was like the door was shut so fast that there was nobody even wanted to have a conversation with me. The man who told me my diagnosis, the doctor who told me, he cried in telling me my diagnosis because I was the age of his daughter. It was too difficult to look at somebody, and this is back in 1991, very uncommon to see young people.

Dr Nasha Winters
Unfortunately, today, this is very common. So this conversation might be different today than it was back in 1991. He could really get the words out to even tell me what was going on. I consoled him, right? It was just one of those moments that it was just so surreal that nobody could believe it and that nobody had any tools to offer. So when they told me there was no way, this other aspect of me got lit that I knew I’d had. I knew I had this sort of thread throughout my life, which was sort of that double dog dare gene, sort of like, if it can’t be done, I’ll do it. So I had a little bit of that spark, a little bit of that sass inside of me, and when he said it couldn’t be done, I basically said, well, at least if I’m gonna die, I wanna understand why.

Dr Nasha Winters
So I got curious and I thought, well, I’ll just at least go learn. I’ll at least learn to understand why on my way out. That was the second part. The third part is I happened to have just started dating a man, a guy, a young man, all the right age of 22 at that time, who weirdly, how in the world the universe placed this person in my life at that time? A man who was, when he was 16 years old, his brother was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and given three months to live. When they opened him up, they realized it was everywhere. They closed him back up and sent him home to die. Bob lived another 24 years with terminal pancreatic cancer without standard of care. My now husband, who had just celebrated 23 years married and 33 years together, had that experience with Bob and also had an experience with a sister who was given terminal ovarian cancer diagnosis and was doing other therapies, including glutathione, IV vitamin C, mistletoe, because she was living in Europe at the time of her diagnosis.

Dr Nasha Winters
So for my husband, this wasn’t weird. The boyfriend I was in at the time wasn’t weird that I was going off script. So those three factors of, first of all, there was no fear of death because I tried taking my own life. Second of all, there was sort of this, if it can’t be done, we’ll get out of my way. I’ll figure something out. I’ll at least learn about it along the way, sparked a little pilot light in me. And then the third part is the person closest to me at that time was someone who was not freaked out by the fact that I was not following standard of care. First of all, standard care didn’t have anything to offer. So it wasn’t like I was going against something, but he certainly had experience. So I think that set the tone. And then there were two other things, and I don’t share this very often, but one of them is because of that bowel blockage.

Dr Nasha Winters
I could not eat anything for two and a half months at all. Even small sips of liquid caused excruciating pain and nausea. And when you have that type of blockage, vomiting is about the most painful thing you can possibly do. So you avoid that like the plague. And so I accidentally utilized a therapy that today we have research on what was happening. We have research as far back as 1909 from Dr. Marishi showing that fasting alone can debulk the tumor. And so for me, that fasting accidental forced fasting state shrunk a lot of the tumor burden in my body, but also helped dry up a lot of the ascites, a lot of the fluid buildup, even though I had to get drained every few days for the first few months.

Dr Nasha Winters
And then every few weeks, the next few months after, it started to fill up slower and slower, and my body started to resolve it on its own. And so those were an accidental find. And then the other accidental find in my effort state when I thought I was going to meet my maker within a few months, I got a little reckless. What I thought perceived was reckless, which is now funny because there’s lots of research. I ended up taking what we would call today a heroic dose of psilocybin cubensis mushrooms. And I’m pretty certain the paradigm in which I’d come from and the no resources and no opportunities. What we’ve learned in the psilocybin studies of modern times today is that they create new neural pathways to understand and have a different perspective on your circumstances and to face your mortality in a different way.

Dr Nasha Winters
I believe that too was another contributing factor. So what I want your listeners to notice is that there’s not one thing here, but a deep self-awareness, a deep self-inquiring curiosity, some accidental home run finds, and an amazing support system along the way. I think those five things kind of aligning very, very elegantly and very miraculously. It also took me from a place where I’d lost my faith and brought my faith back very, very strong for me. It brought this other part that brought peace and calm and a deep sense of resilience and safety in my body that I hadn’t had in a very long time, if ever. So I know that was a very long-winded story, but I think it is important that people hear that it wasn’t a thing I did. There wasn’t a treatment, was it some magic pill or potion? There might have been a few things that seemed pill or potion-y, but they were really not. It was more of a shift in my perception in a lot of ways.

Robin Daly
Very interesting. So, just your feeling about it, the change in perspectives that you got during that time, how much did that contribute to your recovery?

Dr Nasha Winters
I’m certain it still contributes to my recovery. I think it’s my way of being, that’s how I face this in all these decades later, is I have the ability to have a different perspective than most on any given situation. And I can be that sort of light on the path for a lot of folks who don’t have that perspective in that moment, whether it’s for a clinician, an advocate, or a patient.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
That’s amazing. I mean, the things that you have learned about yourself, nature, I guess, they’re remarkable and they’re coming out so strongly. But I guess your influence in other people’s lives throughout your career must have been, you know, amazing, very impactful. What would you say? I know that you have been educating doctors around the world about the approach to cancer. You’ve written a book about it. You’re obviously practicing it. What it means for clinicians now today. And, you know, obviously you mentioned about it’s not standard of care. I face difficulties when I discuss it with colleagues, possibly easier now because there’s more movements. But certainly two or three years ago, it has been quite difficult to have those conversations. But what would you say a modern clinician should know or should do?

Dr Nasha Winters
I love this because it was very interesting. I probably have wiped out forests with the amount of papers that I would print off to take two oncologists to say, here’s the reason why I’m considering this treatment approach for our mutual patient. I spent the first 20 years of my career when I did get sucked into the vortex of working with the cancer space to compel people and educate people and tell them that there’s another way. And boy, how do you… That resistance was massive. Very, very massive. No matter the person standing in front of us who was a miracle in and of themselves that were very much like me who should not be here, we always got labeled, oh, you’re just anecdotal. Oh, that’s just you were just misdiagnosed. Oh, that couldn’t be the case. Like the amazing amount of resistance was just startling the first 20 years. In fact, I can’t even… I never thought we would get to the point where you just mentioned, Penny, in the last couple of years that this would even look hopeful on the horizon.

Dr Nasha Winters
It’s just incredible to me. But what happened is as I lived, I am always curious by nature. I was pre-med at the time of my diagnosis. It pushed me deeper into going into literature. My boyfriend at the time, now husband, was a biochemist who became a cancer drug design in grad school while I was going through medical school. So for fun in my household, this is what we did. We studied, read everything. I traveled all over the world to learn from various healers, clinicians, researchers, amazing spontaneous survivors to know what paths they took.

Dr Nasha Winters
I was exposed to a lot of very traditional medical systems and very ancient medical systems along the way and started to realize that there was something to be offered in all of those environments. The longer I managed to live, the more information, the more research would come out and it would allow me to like kick the can down the road just a little bit further so I could apply it to myself and then I could study it a little bit more and then I could teach it and apply it to somebody else. So for the first 17 years, I was applying it to myself in real time and applying it to patients and then it switched when I ended up with a year-long wait list of patients trying to come see me from all over the world because they had to come in in person. That was the nature of the medical practice. We didn’t have the concept of telemed. I pushed the boundaries that I could have patients come in person initially and then do everything telemed after that was pushing the boundaries in many, many ways, but I did it.

Dr Nasha Winters
It was not reasonable for people to hop on a plane from England to come see me or Asia or South Africa or wherever they were coming in from. But it was in those moments that patients were literally dying in the waiting room and I realized I’m not the only person who needs to know this information or has to have these experiences with patients. I can teach others. And so I took 12 doctors that I had had a lot of relationship with and had a lot of patients in common with me and I invited them to basically be a beta test with me and like let’s try this out. Let’s see if I can teach you what I’ve learned over all these years. And within six months, they had a year-long waiting list. And it was just this moment of realizing there are not enough clinicians on this planet who know how to use the methodology I’ve created over these three decades and apply it.

Dr Nasha Winters
In fact, in the month of January, we had 35,000 people come to our directory looking for someone trained in the metabolic approach to cancer, 35,000 people, and we’re averaging that or more every month since. We just only started looking at those numbers recently, but about had a heart attack to realize, okay, we’re now over 600 clinicians in 36 countries. So clinicians and allied health professionals in 36 countries that we can’t serve all the people that are coming out of the woodwork for this care. And so to that point is what’s been incredible is we have a mass of clinicians, conventional oncologists, conventional MDs, DOs, naturopaths, physicians assistants, nurse practitioners, other allied health professionals coming out of the woodwork because of their own personal experience with cancer or that of a dear loved one or just a practice full of patients that they have been able to help with this approach saying,

Dr Nasha Winters
I want to bring in more resources to help these patients. I want to study. I want to send my colleagues to study all hands on deck. And so what we have here now is this one crazy woman who had this one crazy experience who really fought it to ever work in this space. And now we have a reach of hundreds of thousands of patients all over the globe with not enough doctors to serve them. And we’re working on that. But it’s incredible how that quietly, insidiously, over time went from preaching to no one, no one wanted to listen, no one wanted to hear, to today we don’t advertise and our cohorts each time get larger and larger of people that are interested in this training. And so I feel very hopeful that there is definitely a grassroots movement happening and conversations like what you do on it with Yes to Life and this podcast and these other organizations that are coming together.

Dr Nasha Winters
We are finding each other and we are linking arms and resourcing for our patients and clinicians alike and researchers alike to have a very different conversation than the ones we currently have in standard of care alone.

Robin Daly
Yeah. It’s one of the upsides, I suppose, of the horrendous cancer pandemic is that, of course, for people to isolate themselves from it is really not so possible anymore. And of course, yeah, you’re right. It’s clinicians are suffering just as much as everybody else. And that’s why there’s more buying, because as soon as you’ve got personal experience, the perspective changes completely when it’s your own wife or a child or you. Yeah. It’s completely different just telling other people to fit in the box.

Dr Nasha Winters
You know, 20 years ago when I was first starting to do public speaking about what I was learning in just different medical environments, I would ask the room, okay, in this room, how many of you have been personally impacted by cancer? And let’s say we had a room of 600 people, maybe 20, maybe 30 people raised their hand of people who were like directly impacted themselves or a close loved one. In the last 20 years, I had to flip that question around. And now I have to ask the question, how many of you have not been directly impacted by cancer? And in that same room, I have to really like look around to find a few hands in the air. That happened in a generation. And that is where, like you said, Robin, it’s like there is, you can’t ignore it. It’s not like tucked conveniently under the rug anymore. And when we look at, I mean, I present these slides at medical conferences all over.

Dr Nasha Winters
I’m getting ready to do some next week with you guys. Flatlined with our overall survival, we have not made it, we have more diagnoses so that it looks on paper like we’re living, we’re doing better because there’s just more of us diagnosed, but we haven’t changed the overall survival rate, really one iota. And even now, I mean, our rates are exploding, even the World Health Organization suggests that half of us will experience cancer in our lifetime at some point and that cancer rates are doubling worldwide by 2040. And then you guys, I’m sure, have had people on speaking about the latest research about the explosion of cancer among the young. This was a disease thought to be a disease of the aged. I remember even when I was in med school, the teachings were the average age of a person with cancer is 68 years old.

Dr Nasha Winters
By the time I graduated and really pushed away from resisted treating cancer but started working with folks, the statistics were 58 years old. A few years ago, the statistics were the average age were 48 years old and now we’re seeing it even lower than that, this explosion. And so we’re not asking the right questions. And this is what we try to impart on the patients, the patient advocates and the clinicians are to engage with different questions and to come to their medical team, to their conventional medical team, asking very specific questions about, okay, how are you looking at the rest of me? Not just my tumor. How are you dealing with my cancer stem cells? How are you testing? How do you know that I’m going to respond to this particular standard of care therapy? The doctors can’t answer that.

Dr Nasha Winters
And when patients were able to hire my services to consult on their behalf with their chosen doctor, I would get on a call with the conventional oncologist who would say, I don’t know why I’m here, but the patient paid for my time and your time, so let’s just get this over with. And every single time without fail, we get to the end of that hour and the energy of the room completely changed, the energy of the Zoom room would change. They would literally say, that was fascinating. Can we do a follow-up? Can I do this with other patients? Can I do this for myself? Because they saw in real time, I’m not applying esoteric ideology. I am very, very methodical. There is this process of test, assess, to address. Yes, we do deep dive analysis to understand exactly what that person needs at this moment to determine what therapy, what particular dose, duration, combination is warranted. And that may include standard of care.

Dr Nasha Winters
That may include kind of a repurposed version of standard of care. That may just be, quote unquote, perceived alternative care. We’re agnostic to what the tool is, but you need to know the patient in which you’re looking to apply that tool. And standard of care and alternative care both make the same mistake. They’re protocol driven. Both. Happens at both camps and it’s bad in both camps. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can really understand exactly what a person needs at any given, like understand why they got to this position, know exactly where they are in that moment and know a precise path forward. And it’s beautiful. This is what I did not expect to see in my lifetime and when I’m hopeful to see even more of in the future.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
But you’re saying, and Robin said that cancer is an epidemic at the moment, and as you say more young people are getting diagnosed with aggressive cancers. What do you think this is happening?

Dr Nasha Winters
Well, we talk about in the book, the metabolic approach to cancer, kind of these 10 major drops in the bucket that are contributing to whether our body is resilient to disease like prevention or whether it’s vulnerable to disease creation. And so there’s this, lots of studies have come out showing that really 5 to 10% at most of all of our cancering processes are actually of true genetic origin. And the other 90 to 95% are more about the things that we do day by day, our diet, our lifestyle, all the things we put in on and around our body. And really simply, there’s 10 major drops that I’ve come up with. This is just mine, but there might be somebody else might see seven of them or 12 of them. But the essence is this, there’s the epigenetics of the blueprint that you were born with that maybe has some proclivities or propensities that came down a long lineage through the maternal DNA.

Dr Nasha Winters
But it doesn’t mean that, hey, just because grandpa had diabetes, dad had diabetes, you have to have diabetes. Like it doesn’t have to be that way. These epigenes, the epigenome is about above the gene. So what can you do to change its expression? All right, so that’s one of the drops. Second drop is the fuel source. What are we fueling our mitochondria with? What are we fueling ourselves with? That’s changed drastically in the last 100, 150 years. The third is environmental. It is absolutely no longer a matter of if you have toxicity, it’s how bad is it and how does it interface with your personal blueprint. Number four is the microbiome. Just a few years ago, everyone ignored this. But now that we can monetize it and there’s tons of research, we recognize, well, this is probably important, even down to the point that certain pharmaceutical treatments will not work as well if the microbiome is disrupted.

Dr Nasha Winters
And we also understand now that our microbiome is where our neurotransmitters rise from and our immune system. And so that fifth drop in the bucket is our immune function. We’ve just come out of a pandemic that really showed the underbelly of our vulnerability in that arena of our dysfunctional immune function. Our immune system has three parts to it, three R’s, recognize, respond, and remember. When any one of those are off, all hell breaks loose. And we saw that, right? And so, but no one was asking, but why did all hell break loose? And there’s a lot of people suggesting that the microbiome, inflammation, and all these other things are impacting it. So sixth drop, inflammation, seventh drop is all about our oxygenation and perfusion. So this concept in cancer known as hypoxia, cancer for loves to live in a low oxygen environment. And our lack of movement today keeps us pretty poorly perfused and poor oxygenation. So a lot of people are kind of stewing in low oxygen environments.

Dr Nasha Winters
And then we get to the last three drops, our hormones, our hormone modulation. We swim in a pool of endocrine disruptors today. You live on the planet, you touch plastic receipts, you drink out of water bottles, you store your food and plastic items, you ingest an average of a credit card a week. Today is what they say we’re getting in our microplastic intake. It’s everywhere. And those are extreme endocrine disruptors which cause mayhem in our hormonal signaling pathways. And the big two last ones, stress and circadian rhythm is one big drop in the bucket. And the final one, which even though it’s the 10th, it’s probably the most important, just an even my own story that I shared is that mental emotional piece and that sort of trauma resolution piece. So these 10 drops are the drivers.

Dr Nasha Winters
What they’re saying in the United States, at least, this is a little bit different than the UK, but in the United States, we’re the only country in the world that’s actually losing longevity. Everybody else is either maintaining or improving. In the US, the scientists call it the era of despair. So in this country, we’re dying now from the hands of suicide and opiate overdose. So that should suggest some pain at a level of emotional despair and that mental emotional piece. But we’ve also had an epidemic that suggests the vulnerability in our metabolic health. Now that studies show that less than 7% of us are actually considered metabolically healthy and quick definition of that, what’s your waist to hip ratio? You need to have a smaller waist than hips. What is your blood pressure? What is your blood sugar? Your insulin levels? What is your triglyceride levels? What is your stamina and your overall energy and kind of recovery from any exercise?

Dr Nasha Winters
If you have issues in any of those arenas or if you have to take a medication to address any of those areas, you are metabolically broken. 7, less than 6.8% is what the studies show of us are considered metabolically healthy. That means that we do not require medications to achieve that state of well-being. The metabolic underpinnings to chronic illness of all kinds, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, dementia, Alzheimer’s, autism, all of that, including cancer, is the biggest change.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
So we live in a toxic environment. Yes. We are following not the kind of lifestyle that we should be. We are stressing too much. But we need to do something to change. Very much. So what do you think the future holds? I mean, you talk about the 10 reasons for how cancer develops, or the 10 risks. And then we’ve got the genetics. How can we bring that all together? What would be in your view, you know, what we know? How can we translate it into practice right here, right now?

Dr Nasha Winters
That’s a beautiful question. We’re told again and again the integrative space that there’s no data, there’s no evidence that what we’re offering could be of help. And yet there’s ample evidence. We just may not be having the means to collect it or perhaps setting up the types of trials, the way we typically do research. It’s not structured in a way because most of our research, it’s like you have to be very this target, this treatment with these parameters, with these variables very tightly controlled. This is not reality. We don’t live in a petri dish or in a laboratory or in a very controlled population. What is that saying? We plan and God laughs. This is where it gets so confusing. It’s like the more we try and tighten the parameters around it, the more variables actually try to do a workaround.

Dr Nasha Winters
So we need to come up with some different models of research, more of these translational tools where we’re collecting the data in like millions of data points in hundreds of thousands of patients and moving through this translational AI. This is where AI can have incredible utility to start to articulate patterns and start to articulate propensities of, well, this is interesting with this, plus this, this, this, we see this. And if we bring this and this and this, we get this. This is what is starting to happen in the field of medicine in general and in the field of oncology in particular. And the organization I work with, we’ve developed a data platform to take in all this information and move it to that translational AI space, which, of course, brings out meaningful data, meaningful patterns and metrics, but also creates a clinical decision making tool.

Dr Nasha Winters
It’s an opportunity to help clinicians know what to do with the information because we are doing a lot more testing today, but most clinicians, even in the alternative cancer space, not just the conventional cancer space, don’t know what to do with the data because our medical system, we get this all the time. A patient runs off, they spend the money or they have their insurance covered blood or a tissue biopsy. They get back all the information that says you’re not going to respond to this first line standard of care, but we’re going to ignore that and still give you first line standard of care because we don’t know what else to do because we don’t have an insurance model and a medical system geared to deal with the outliers or geared to deal with the N of 1.

Dr Nasha Winters
So, we’re hopeful that this model starts to help people understand that this is the better fit, the personalization of where we’ve come to. We’re at a crossroad where I believe what we’ll see in the next few years is an explosion moving into deeper dives into personalization. Let’s hope that’s the case. And in a way that helps the clinician be successful in doing so and helps the patient being successful in requesting this approach to their own care. So, that’s one of the things. The other thing is accessibility because when you know that more can be done, so for instance, let’s use the example of radiation. Radiation will be ineffective for patients who have an elevated insulin or glucose level because cancer cells are deactivated.

Dr Nasha Winters
They are desensitized to radiation when glucose and insulin levels are high in the body, which then makes those cancer cells even more vulnerable to the DNA damage and the other healthy cells more vulnerable to the DNA damage that can lead to further mutation and progression of disease. What we know in this metabolic integrative space is when we prepare patients appropriately. We help them carve restrict. We help them get into a being in a facet state. We help bring on exogenous ketone bodies, for instance, which will drive down that insulin and support the patient. You can take a patient who’s been living off McDonald’s drive-throughs and give them exogenous support to enhance their response to radiation. You can take patients who’ve already been on a good diet and you just need to rein it in a little bit more.

Dr Nasha Winters
On that, you’ve got ranges of how the patient can be and then you can get them into radiation that makes that radiation work harder against the cancer cell while protecting the healthy cells. And then even more so when a patient gets exposure to a little bit of oxygen therapy, be it a hyperbaric chamber, a little bit of ozone, rectally or nasally or vaginally, depending on what’s going on. We can then also potentiate the impact of radiation when you overcome hypoxia radiation works better. So if you were able to do that right before a patient goes into radiation, you make the radiation work better. And we have a lot of tools in our toolbox like melatonin. High doses of melatonin cause radio sensitization to your cancer cells. Do you hear me saying anything against radiation? Not at all. But why is it not every single patient is given at least one if not all three of those options?

Dr Nasha Winters
to support their radiation therapy. And everything I just described is super accessible, super cost effective, and free if you’re fasting or taking in very low cost, just melt in, right? Like that’s just one example of how all these tools come together to make something work better along the way and empowers that patient at the same time. This is the future of cancer care. It’s not, integrative oncology is not yoga. Yoga should be just, we should all be aware that yoga is good for all of us, cancer or not. That is not integrative oncology. Integrative oncology is what I just spoke to of doing a deep dive, understanding who this patient is before you, knowing what their patterns or propensities are, and enhancing whatever therapeutic interventions you’re bringing on board and stacking them in a way that’s going to get that patient the furthest, you know, run for their money the furthest best chance possible.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
That’s true integration.

Robin Daly
It is. And it’s coming. It’s coming. You described earlier as a grassroots movement, and you’re convinced that that’s the way it’s going to happen, in fact.

Dr Nasha Winters
Like I said, I spent 20 years trying to convince to the point where my own body, mind and soul took quite a beating. It felt quite futile. I felt that similar place of futility that I did prior to my cancer diagnosis. It felt like giving up and I will be really vulnerable and transparent with you and your listeners. My body tried to cancer, like it, cancer it again, like it, the ins and outs of that process. I was able to keep it very dormant and over, it took me about 10 years to get it very stable and then it was really strong for about 10 years. Then just my, the futility of it all was incredible how much it took down my system and how vulnerable it made me to be. Interesting. It’s very interesting, you know? And so I get to learn firsthand that how my mind affects my body and vice versa.

Dr Nasha Winters
But what I spent the last 10 years doing is what fires me up and gets me out of that every day and gives me seemingly superwoman powers to do all the things I do is to instead of trying to fix the old is to absolutely build the new.

Robin Daly
Right. Well, I think we’re going to have to stop there, I’ll be petty. We could go on the wrong side. I think this was pretty good at all, where you wanted to go today. We’re just getting going. We’re just getting going, but…

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
I think I could listen to you for four hours as you know it’s fascinating your perspective it’s just yeah mind-blowing yeah yeah the option

Robin Daly
Now, it’s been great to hear your massive plans. It’s very hardening to hear that. Now, yeah, I know what you mean. There’s a massive change we’ve got to make. It’s unthinkably big, but I’ve got to say, you are causing some quite big waves. So, it’s great to hear. All right, so thanks very much for being our guest today, Nasha.

Dr Nasha Winters
Thank you both for the opportunity.

Dr Penny Kechagioglou
Thank you so much.

Robin Daly
Thank you for listening to Cancer Talk. Do subscribe and look out for the next edition of our podcast. And if you have friends and colleagues interested in the development of UK Cancer Care, do pass on the details of Cancer Talk. Goodbye.