Robin Daly: Welcome to the Yes to Life Show on UK Health Radio. I’m the host for the show, Robin Daly, and I founded the UK charity Yes to Life that works for patients with cancer to improve access to the many benefits of integrative medicine. Today I’m honoured to have a brilliant integrative oncologist as my guest to talk about the crucial topic of inflammation. Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi is speaking to me today from her home in Egypt. A big welcome to the show.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Thank you very much. I’m very happy to be here.

Robin Daly: So you’re Egyptian, I think this is a first for the Yes to Life Show. I believe you’re very familiar with the UK and with our NHS?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Of course, I have worked with NHS as a visiting doctor for almost a year and my brother has been a resident in the UK since 1997, so London is my backyard. I love every little piece of it.

Robin Daly: Wonderful. I think it’s fair to say that you’ve got some very broad views about what cancer care should look like, but that they’re not really representative of general attitudes to cancer care in Egypt.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes, it’s different how doctors oncologists look at cancer in the middle east, in Europe and in the States. Here in the middle east, we just go with the conventional, the straight-forward, according to international guidelines, following the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the European Society of Medical Oncology, or the NCCN guidelines, which is the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. The latter one has a part for patients to learn about their disease and for the doctors as well. So it’s just straightforward recommendations, however, after 13 or 15 years of working as a conventional oncologist, I finally had a wake up moment: there is more. Rather than bombarding my patients with chemicals and radiation, which is actually very important in acute cases, we should take a look at the body and its miraculous healing powers and give the body the tools to heal and actually help you get over cancer.

Robin Daly: Brilliant. The subject today is inflammation. It’s a word we hear a lot these days, not just in integrative circles, it’s talked about in the mainstream now in connection with a lot more than just cancer. Would you start out by putting inflammation in context and saying something about the relationship between inflammation and chronic disease?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Inflammation is actually a contributor in most diseases, like: obesity, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. Inflammation is not just like a fire increasing the level of toxins or attacks of inflammation. The way that we tackle inflammation, from the conventional point of view, is using ibuprofen or anti-inflammatory medications, but you don’t actually reach a resolution of inflammation, and that leads to the chronicity of inflammation where the cells die and weather, and that leads to immune disturbances. For instance, if you have an ulcer in your oral cavity, in your buccal mucosa in your mouth, due to a tooth that is not aligned properly with the rest of the teeth. It will irritate the buccal mucosa [so we] give an anti-inflammatory or an anti-ulcer medication, but the root cause is the tooth. So if we remove the tooth, the inflammation will go away. If the tooth keeps irritating the buccal mucosa, it will lead to chronic inflammation. The immune cells will not be able to heal that inflammation, and that might need eventually to either a chronic ulcer or up to squamous cell carcinoma in the oral cavity.

Someone who has acute trauma arthritis, this is inflammation of the joints. So we have to know why did that person get inflammation in his joints? We [typically] see rheumatoid arthritis in the eighties and nineties, why is it happening in the twenties and thirties?

Robin Daly: Good question. So, it’s easy to characterize inflammation as the bad guy, but of course it does have a positive role. Do you want to distinguish between good inflammation and bad inflammation?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Absolutely. So the five cardinal signs of inflammation are, as the Greek said, are: tumor, rubor, calor, dolor, and penuria. So if you hit your elbow, it will swell. It’s a tumor. It will become red and hot. The redness and hotness indicates that the immune system is causing inflammation to heal the injured tissue. Then the pain comes from inflammatory cytokines that are also part of the healing process. This is a benign, or good, inflammatory process to heal the injured elbow. Then you go to the doctor, he fixes this elbow for you, and a couple of days or a week pass and the inflammation goes away. If this inflammation doesn’t go away, or if that person is eating inflammatory food, or has an inflammatory lifestyle and or inflammatory environmental factors. If that person doesn’t treat his inflammation properly, what will happen is persistent inflammation in that elbow that might heal by fibrosis and then loss of function.

So acute inflammation is extremely important. If you talk about inflammation in the respiratory tract, like someone has like an acute cough, et cetera, you give him steroids. Steroids are a brilliant anti-inflammatory, however, we should always treat that in the acute phase only, and not use steroids on the long-term because in the long-term it suppresses the immune system.
A doctor in the middle East, we call the doctor Hakim. Hakim is the wise man who uses nutraceuticals or medicine in the right amount at the right moment to prevent like loss of function or loss of the good part of that medicine. We use the steroids, in the acute phase and in the chronic phase, something like bronchitis asthma, for instance, kids use these the long-term. However, from the functional medicine point of view, if you just go back and see why that patient has bronchial asthma, you can give omega-3 fatty acids and nettles and natural components that actually have an anti-inflammatory and anti-asthmatic effects so that he wouldn’t be using an immunosuppressant lifelong.

Robin Daly: Well, it’s interesting because it’s very often said that conventional medicine is absolutely excellent for acute situations—if you have a heart attack, it’s brilliant. You’re saying the same thing: there can be an acute phase of a chronic condition, which needs to be dealt with, but then it’s not the answer to the chronic condition itself.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Exactly.

Robin Daly: So inflammation is kind of a good thing that gets out of control and this seems to be a picture of chronic disease that is becoming increasingly common. Some aspects of our lifestyle are fueling a normal function to become overactive and that can lead to serious issues, particularly when it’s over a very long, extended period. I’m thinking things like diabetes, and auto-immune disorders, which are similarly runaway conditions.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Lifestyle, for instance, if you have a bad dietary intake, if you’re eating sugar, gluten, dairy, there is the evidence behind why these foods are inflammatory.

If you’re a tobacco smoker, and don’t have the gene for detoxifying the tobacco properly. If you have low physical activity, if you abuse alcohol or drugs, those things affects the heart, diabetes, total cholesterol, and in the long run can cause something called a global burden of disease.

So, if someone has an acute heart attack, convention says yes of course he has to go to the hospital and do those tests to see if he needs an angioplasty right away, or he should wait. They give him blood thinners, et cetera. However, we should take a step backwards to discover what caused the heart attack. Was it inflammation in the vessels around the heart, the coronary vessels? And what caused this inflammation? Is it high cholesterol? And what caused that high cholesterol to begin with? Is it bad food? Is it high sugar or high bad fats? We should go back to the root cause of the disease because they always blame high cholesterol as the bad guy when it isn’t always.

Robin Daly: I want to talk about the signs of inflammation. Firstly, what are the points that we can pick up ourselves? Things that we can see or feel in our own bodies that could be symptoms of underlying inflammation.
Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Absolutely. There are the five cardinal signs of inflammation as we have discussed: swelling, redness, hotness, pain, and limitation of movement. This is inflammation.

If someone has a rash, is it an allergy? Intolerance? Stress? If we have palpitation, is it the thyroid or the heart? If you have numbness in the hands or feet, is it diabetes? Sometimes you can have inflammation in your gut which leads to diarrhea and people call it inflammatory bowel disease. Sometimes you can have inflammation from eating a lot of sugar and then you have headaches and brain fog.

So are there different types of inflammation but to pinpoint the signs and symptoms, you just have to listen to your body and see why it’s not in sync.

Robin Daly: Okay, and how about actually measuring it? What is available within and beyond conventional medicine that can tell us how established inflammation is?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: So we get a CBC, in the UK, it’s a FBC, or full blood count. We check the white blood counts, if they are elevated, then there is something called differential counts, and that can actually tell us if it was a bacterial, viral, or parasitic infestation.

Then we have the CRP, the C-reactive protein, we have the ESR, the erythrocyte sedimentation rates, we have the ferritin ratio. I know that ferritin is a reflection of the iron stores in the body, however, when the ferritin is high this is an acute phase reactant. We have many things to measure inflammation, those are like the mainstay or the main ones that we measure inflammation with.

Then according to which organ is affected, for instance, for alcoholism, we measure the liver functions, or for the heart, we measure the homocysteine levels for the coronary artery inflammation because the homocysteine can reflect the endothelial lining of the blood vessels, if it’s inflamed.

Those are the main indicators of inflammation in the blood tests.

Robin Daly: Those are all available within conventional medicine?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes.

Robin Daly: So, if we suspect there’s something untoward, we can get a full blood test and it should pick up anything like that?
Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: If you’re going to pick two tests to measure inflammation, that should be the CRP and the full blood counts.

Robin Daly: The CRP is what?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: The C-reactive protein, which can actually be elevated in rheumatoid arthritis, it can be elevated in a sore throat, it can be elevated if someone sprained his ankle, it can be elevated in a chest infection. It’s very sensitive, so it’s one of the most important things if you want to see if it’s bacterial or viral. If it’s viral, then you will have more lymphocytes, unlike COVID 19, it has lymphopenia in the complete blood picture when we see it. If you have a viral infection like Epstein-Barr virus or CMV, they will have monocytosis, increased monocytes.

Robin Daly: Right, so it’s like a first step. You need to do more investigations afterwards to find out exactly what’s causing that reading.

I’d like to get a bit specific about the relationship between inflammation and cancer. Firstly, do we know if inflammation is a component of every cancer?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Not always. C-reactive protein actually can be elevated when tumor markers are not. I know that you had Dr. Nasha Winters on your show and at your conference, I’m actually working alongside Dr. Nasha these days. We checked some people that have the trifecta: CRP, ESR, and LDH. If the three of them are elevated, two of which are inflammatory markers, CRP and ESR, and the LDH actually is a marker of how your mitochondria is suffering. So the three of them, then there is a cancerous process happening in your body.

Robin Daly: So you need all three to give you the full picture that it definitely has something to do with cancer. The third one, the mitochondria, that is to do with energy of the cells and how well they are functioning, is that right?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes, it’s called lactate dehydrogenase enzyme. There is something called the Krebs cycle and Krebs cycle happens inside the mitochondria where the energy comes out. In the metabolic theory of cancer, cancer is not a genetic disease, and if your mitochondria, which are basically the batteries of the human body, are not working well, how can the body repair itself and heal whichever disease it’s facing?

Robin Daly: Okay, and another question, is inflammation implicated more heavily in some cancer cases than others?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes, this might be true. There is a saying: genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger. So inflammation, in a genetically susceptible person, can make him at a higher risk of inflammation.
For instance, someone has IBS like or inflammatory bowel disease, who has polyps in his colon, and is not eating properly or has a lot of bad dietary habits, a lack of exercise and genes that promote colon cancer. Then he is more susceptible to getting colon cancer because of the inflammatory lifestyle and food that he is having.

If someone has a benign prostatic hyperplasia and multiple urinary tract infections all the time, and he has the most susceptible detoxification effects or the gene, then he would be more susceptible to having prostate cancer.
For breast cancer in general, it’s mainly about the detoxification of the blood estrogen metabolites.

So inflammation can be really implicated in a lot of cancers. You can say skin cancer, not melanoma, but superficial skin cancer, it can be an inflammatory process as well going on that was not treated properly, led to chronicity, and then dysplasia. Instead of the cell renewal or regeneration in a normal pattern, they have regenerated in an abnormal pattern. If the body did not detect this abnormal pattern, it will keep on reproducing that abnormal pattern and leading to cancer. So dysplasia, and then neoplasia, which is cancer.

Robin Daly: So dysplasia just means not a normal pattern and neoplasia is actually cancer?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes.

Robin Daly: Okay. Good to get all the words right.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Surely you know that one by now!

Robin Daly: Well I’m just a member of the public and I don’t study this stuff. I took a great interest of course, but I’m no expert whatsoever. I always like to take the perspective of a member of the public. You know, people can get too technical.
Let’s be clear because it’s very important that people really understand this stuff in order to feel empowered to make decisions.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Of course, absolutely.

Robin Daly: So, how much do we know about the exact process of why and how inflammation can lead to cancer?
Is it well studied and mapped out, or is it still an area of new research?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: No, actually, if you study the molecular pathways, the epigenetics, how the genes express themselves, there is a very important gene in inflammation called nuclear factor kappa beta, and there are other nuclear factors.
In a way, it’s like if your house is on fire and you can’t put off the fire—what will happen? Abnormal cells start to evolve. There are a lot of genes responsible for inflammation that are heavily studied in cancer.

We are using nutraceuticals like curcumin for instance, ginger, and sulforaphanes, as anti-cancer nutraceuticals and an anti-inflammatories to modulate this gene.

Robin Daly: Interesting.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: In mentioning curcumin, there have been a lot of studies that actually look at the how curcumin blocks 90 pathways for cancer development. So for me, as conventional doctor, we can give immunotherapy or one drug to block one pathway, but if we use curcumin alongside chemotherapy or radiotherapy, or even by itself in larger doses, according to each patient, then it can actually block 90 pathways for cancer development. Amazing, isn’t it?

Robin Daly: It is amazing. With cancer, once it’s put under stress, it always looks for a new route. The other thing that’s interesting is that the genetic information you’re talking about, we are always talking about the what’s happening to the person and then what their genetic makeup is. The two things are very important.

In the past nobody could really explain why one person could drink three whiskies a day and smoke 40 cigarettes and live to 95 and somebody else dies of cancer in their late thirties for apparently the same reason. Why didn’t we understand this?
Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Well the new genetic information is vast and there are actually two types of genetic information that you can get for a cancer patient. You can get information to tell you which chemotherapeutic agents or immunotherapy that that person can use. Also, there is other genetic information that can tell you what went wrong in the body that has led to that cancer.

Robin Daly: So they are like genetic witnesses?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Exactly, so we get both. I rely on the root cause of cancer. For instance, when a lady has a breast fibroadenoma, which is a benign tumor lump in the breast. I used to have a thousand people coming to me early [worried about] fibroadenoma, it never turns malignant. We have always said that and it’s written in the literature all over. However, if that lady I did the genetic testing on has the sip one B one gene—that actually promotes this benign fibroadenoma to become malignant.

Robin Daly: Wow, so it’s really important information.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: It’s due to very technical details about how the body takes the good estrogen and gets rid of the bad oestrogen in the body.

Robin Daly: So you said at the beginning “we” get both. Who is “we” in this case? Are you talking about conventional doctors or functional medicine doctors?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: It’s me, because I am both. So, for instance, if I have a tough oncology case to treat and I wanted to give her chemotherapy and that person had several rounds of chemotherapy with failure, I would do that oncogenic molecular profile to see which chemotherapy is suitable for that person.

There is a very big foundation upon which several other genetic companies have actually manufactured this algorithm for those genes that work better with that chemotherapy. For breast cancer, you can check the hormone receptors, there are two receptors, and then just give them this chemotherapy.

I check which oncotherapy should be given and which natural products should be given so that when that person gets the conventional treatment, they would get the best efficacy of that chemotherapy with the least toxicity on the normal tissue. This is what every oncologist should do—integration with a naturopath or study himself integrative oncology.

Robin Daly: We had a very interesting guest on the show a few months back who was a scientist and he was talking passionately about the need for gene testing before chemotherapy. He was saying literally there are some patients where it is guaranteed to do no good whatsoever, and also other patients for whom it can be lethal, and still others where it can help.

The diversity of response to the same treatment is enormous. If you don’t know and you give it to everybody who has that particular cancer inevitably there’s going to be terrible fatalities and damage, so he is campaigning for people to take this seriously, or at least while it’s not being taken seriously by the health service, patients themselves should do their homework and get the tests.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes, absolutely. I have seen patients that get horrible side effects from the anti-hormonal for breast cancer, then when I do genetic testing, I find out that they cannot metabolize the drug. So the level of the drug is increased dramatically in their blood serum so it causes them severe side effects without the benefit that it should have been given to them.

Robin Daly: We can see this kind of stuff in action day by day. Some people have a cup of coffee after lunchtime and they’re up all night and other people have an espresso after their dinner, late at night, and straight to bed. That must be just a difference in the ability to detox the caffeine?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes, absolutely. That’s me—I’m a fast metabolizer of caffeine. I have a sip one A two gene so I’m a fast metaboliser so I can drink coffee and go straight to bed.

Robin Daly: Interesting. So now we’ve got a picture of the ways in which inflammation fuels chronic disease and cancer. Inflammation, in the very graphic description that you can picture, is slowly cooking up a problem a bit like a car engine or a computer running too hot all the time.

So what I want to do now is to look at the ways we can tackle inflammation at various stages. Firstly, and probably most importantly, prevention. What are the aspects of normal lifestyle that can either fuel or discourage inflammation?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: First, it all starts in the gut. We have to heal the gut if someone has a problem with digestion. We start from the beginning: mastication, chew your food properly. Make sure that you have good acid in your stomach to digest that food. It’s done simply by drinking lots of loss of water early in the morning with a big scoop of sodium bicarbonate, if you burp before five minutes, that means that you have good acid in your stomach. It’s very nice actually. There are some bacteria, like Helicobacter pylori, which resides in the stomach, and that needs low acidity. When you have low acidity, you won’t be able to digest your food properly and get the proper nutrients that your body needs to heal.

Then go down from your stomach to your colon and see if your colon is okay. Check your Bristol score for the stool. This is a scoring system for the stools that I show to every person that comes to me. You have to poop snakes as Dr. Terry Walls says. If someone has an active problem, like they have abdominal distension, or are not pooping snakes, for people who have stones or have constipation all the time. That means that his colon is not healthy and he should get more good fibers, have a high diversity probiotic and heal that leaky gut, whichever the cause is. This is like functional medicine, because there is a whole picture about leaky gut, intestinal permeability, It’s like a whole lecture.

When you fix the gut, when you eat properly, sometimes I need to know the blood type of that person, because if you’re a blood type A then you heal better on a vegetarian diet. However, one of the best diets that I have seen, from one of my mentors, Dr. Neil McKinney, is a Pesco-Mediterranean diet, freshly caught fish, organic eggs, and a vegetarian diet with lots of olive oils, and good fats.

Good fats give you a lot of energy and it actually fuels your mitochondria, your batteries. One thing, avoid sugar. Totally. One teaspoon of sugar paralyzes your immune system for five hours. This was found in a scientific paper that was published in 1973 and nobody takes a look at it because people don’t get it, like we’ve got cancer or we have inflammation, or we have this viral infection, why should we stop sugar? Because sugar actually paralyzes the activity of the white blood counts to attack and defend your body.

Robin Daly: That’s a different kind of standpoint for avoiding sugar than the usual ones that are talked about, but a very important one, nonetheless.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: I have to put my conventional hat on and my integrative hat on every now and then, but for instance, if we want to know where cancer resides in the body and the cancer is size is more than a half a centimeter, we give people intravenous radioactive sugar. This is the PET CT scan, the positron emission tomography scan. We give them sugar in their veins, intravenously, wait 45 minutes and have the scans. If something illuminates in the body, this is cancer eating sugar. I have a lot of friends, they get me data from Dana-Farber and from the ESCO, they ask why should a cancer patient stop eating sugar? And they’re telling me no, you’re absolutely wrong here, a very reputable organization says that people should eat sugar, but sorry, I have evidence, so whatever they say, I’m not buying it.

Actually sugar makes our mitochondria sick because it causes a very high influx of oxidation. We are always talking about eating anti-oxidant foods like dark green, leafy vegetables, berries, kiwis, apples, all these low glycemic fruits. The high sugar foods decrease the immune system. It worsens both the mitochondria, the insulin resistance, and metabolic diseases in general. So even with cardiovascular or a heart condition, you shouldn’t be eating sugar.

Sugar and gluten. Wheat, barley, and all gluten, but mainly wheat. It actually causes so many diseases that we should like make a lecture about that—an anti-inflammatory lifestyle lecture with what to eat, what not to eat and why, and I can add the scientific evidence underneath it so that people can go and read about it.

Gluten causes every inflammatory process in your body: inflammatory bowel syndrome, headaches, behavioral changes. It affects autistic children and it affects the sinuses and all the mucus membranes. So from the nose to the lungs to the GI tract, everywhere. Why is that? Because our body is not designed for gluten.

So, if you have like a flash memory, you put it into your computer and your computer does not understand what’s in that, it will attack it. This is what happens when you eat gluten, because it’s genetically modified, number one, and number two, they heavily spray it with pesticides and herbicides before harvesting so that the machines would have an easy harvest. So we actually get genetically modified content that is heavily sprayed with glycosides and herbicides, which are horrible poisons and toxins to our gut.

Then you have to optimize your vitamin D levels, especially living in Europe, because you don’t have a lot of sun sunshine. Please don’t use a sun block or a sunscreen, just stay in the sun whenever possible. Vitamin D for cancer patients should be between 70 and 80 nanogram per milliliter, and I think that’s a 200 nanomoles per liter. It should be in the eighties because vitamin D is a super immunomodulator and in a higher level, it’s an actually an anti-autoimmune agent. We have seen the scientific evidence about COVID and the vitamin D levels, if someone gets the vaccine, while his vitamin D is very low, if he gets double the live attenuated vaccine, he might actually encounter COVID because he has a very low immune system.

Robin Daly: Yes. We haven’t got much time left at all and we have loads more like to talk about. I thought that was going to happen with this subject, but let’s try and cover as best we can within about treatment.

Unfortunately, the majority of conventional treatments for cancer are in fact of course, highly inflammatory. I think this can be said of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. The three kind of mainstays of conventional cancer care. I’ve seen some interesting studies over the years involving simple adjunct therapies, natural or an established anti-inflammatory drug, making a really significant differences to the long-term outcome of breast surgery—just take an anti-inflammatory at the same time and the rates of recurrence plummet.

Are there safe ways to mitigate the pro-inflammatory effects of cancer treatments, for all types surgery, radiotherapy chemotherapy?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes. First of all, stop sugar. This is number one. When patients are taking chemotherapy, they should be stopping the sugary food, sugary drinks, et cetera.

They should optimize their vitamin D levels and fast the day of the chemotherapy. I don’t want to go into a ketogenic diet because it’s for certain types of cancer. However, when you have a low blood sugar that sensitizes the cancer cells to be more vulnerable to chemotherapy and even radiotherapy. On the day of chemotherapy, you should be fasting at least 12 hours, ideally 12 to 16 hours. There is a beautiful nutraceutical that we can use, which is mistletoe. Whenever a patient starts chemotherapy, or even radiotherapy, if he takes mistletoe, he doesn’t have a drop in his white blood counts throughout chemotherapy cycles. It’s amazing.

It increases your interferon and improves your sleep rhythm and the general condition of patients. The melatonin is very important. The hygiene of sleep, a very dark room, melatonin supplements, especially before the chemo and radiotherapy sessions.

There are a lot of things that can be done. However, if people are using vitamin C, or high antioxidants supplementations, so that the conventional oncologists wouldn’t freak out, we just stop those supplements the day before, on the day, and one day after chemo.

Robin Daly: Well, that’s kind of a whistle-stop tour of something you could say a lot more about, but we haven’t got the time unfortunately.

I’d love to talk about post-treatment as well because it’s a hugely important topic, keeping inflammation in check. That will be for the next show: inflammation part two!

Thanks for a fascinating delve into this topic, there is certainly a lot to be said about it and a lot to understand. I suppose after hearing what you’ve said about it, I have a greater appreciation of the signs and the long-term dangers that inflammation could have a massive effect on public health generally, would you agree with that?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Absolutely, because it doesn’t just impact cancer. It impacts heart disease, liver disease, bronchitis, kidney, all the organs in your body. We have to learn how to be in sync with our body listen to the signs of inflammation and help it accordingly. There is a Hippocrates saying, and this is extremely important, the saying “before you heal someone, ask him if he is willing to give up the things that made him sick.”

So when someone comes to me, I ask how ready are you? How willing are you to give up the things that have made you sick?

Robin Daly: He was a smart guy that Hippocrates, wasn’t he?

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: Yes—and that, that was like a very, very long time ago, and we’re still facing the same problem.
Robin Daly: Many, many, thanks for a very interesting talk.

Dr. Wafaa Abdel-Hadi: You’re more than welcome and I’m happy to be on board. Have a lovely day.

Robin Daly: I hope the contribution to the recording by one of Dr. Abdel-Hadi’s children didn’t detract from your enjoyment of that brilliant interview. One of the many hazards of lockdown life these days.

There certainly was much more to say about inflammation, so I shall make a point of speaking to Dr. Abdel-Hadi again on the subject, not too long from now.

Coming up at the end of March, the 27th and 28th to be exact, is our spring Congress: Nutritional Science and Cancer exploring the increasing consensus and unanswered contradictions. It’s an online event. It’s very accessible. Yes to Life events and all the live conferences, the lineup of speakers is impressive. If you want to find out who is speaking and what they’re speaking about, go to the Yes to Life website. That’s yestolife.org.uk and click that “tell me more” button that’s on the rotating banner at the top of the homepage. This will take you to the dedicated event website, which has full details of the two days. You can book your place there.

If you enjoy the show, you’ll be interested to know that we recently added a new feature to the Yes to Life website: a search tool to look through the vast array of past shows that are all still available to listen, to go to yestolife.org.uk, scroll down and click the link to the Yes to Life Show, and you will find details of all the shows as well as the facility to search by guests, by topic, or by keyword.

Thanks a lot for listening today. I hope you’ll be able to join me again next week.

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Kindly written by Literary & Transcript Editor Amy MacLennan