Robin Daly: Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show here on UK Health Radio. I am Robin Daly, host of the show since it started over five years ago and founder of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity. Today, I am welcoming back a specialist practitioner who has been my guest on the show before and who clearly has a great passion for understanding human health and the instigators and drivers of chronic disease. Mark Bennett is a functional medicine practitioner, a certified gluten practitioner and a registered Nutra genetic counsellor. I am speaking to Mark over the internet at his practice in Berkshire. Mark – welcome back to the Yes to Life show.

Mark Bennett: Thank you Robin, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Robin Daly: We decided to call today’s show ‘Piecing Together the Puzzle’, as what we want to talk about really is the exact opposite of the sensationalist media is looking for: the silver bullet answer to cancer. Would you start out by making the case for a nuanced multifaceted protocol for chronic conditions like cancer.

Mark Bennett: Absolutely Robin, as you know I am a nutritional therapist working in clinical practice with clients that have chronic conditions. When we use the word chronic, it means long term health conditions. A number of my clients I work with have cancer and I always am working with them on an integrative, complementary basis. This is not alternative and I think it’s important to stress here that this is not about working with somebody on the basis of doing something and shunning the conventional treatment of cancer.

No, this is about enhancing the outcomes of the modern medical approach, which to be honest with you, given the amount of energy and money that we put into the standard approaches to treating cancer – chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery – the success rates are actually pretty poor when you consider how these are viewed as the only choices when it comes to this type of condition.

And of course, there are more and more people developing this type of condition. One in two of us at some point in our lives are expected to develop cancer. Clearly if 127,000 people a day are dying of this condition globally, you have to start questioning whether we are actually progressing down the right track when it comes to treatments. This is about actually broadening one’s horizon on this and saying, what are we missing here?

What can we do to enhance the outcomes of these standard treatments?

There is a lot that can be done, and I think that is really where we are now looking when I’m working with clients with any chronic condition. It doesn’t matter whether it’s MS or dementia, it is never a silver bullet. There is never a silver bullet that will solve the problem because disease does not manifest that way. It’s just not the way that biochemistry works.

Robin Daly: It was great to hear you say that. This is exactly the kind of thinking of Yes to Life as a whole. We are trying to augment people’s approach to cancer to give them new ways of looking at how they can tackle this situation and get themselves a good quality of life and a long one. So, can we start to pick things apart a little. I really want to start at the foundational level with the things we know, about the ways in which cancer cells behave and spread, the things that set them apart from what we might call their healthier neighbours. These were famously summarised, as we’ve stepped into the 21st century, as the hallmarks of cancer. These hallmarks came out and they made a big impact at the time. I just wondered if you could spend a few moments going through these. Originally, they came in six hallmarks and the first of those was self-sufficiency and growth signals.

Mark Bennett: Cancer cells, as we know, continue to replicate and they have no self-control mechanism or not controlled by their neighbours. But at the end of the day, when I look at my understanding of how cancer really starts and kicks off, I really do believe through the science that I am reading that mitochondria – the power plants of our cells in the cytoplasm – are absolutely fundamental to the whole process. This is really based on the work of Dr Thomas Seyfried, who is an eminent biochemist. He is not a medical doctor, but he probably is one of the utmost knowledgeable biochemists on the planet when it comes to how cancer manifests.

Interestingly enough we go back to Otto Warburg’s work back in the 1930s, we are talking nearly a hundred years ago, and he famously got a science prize for his work on how cancer cells feed off glucose sugar. There were bits missing from his equation, and a lot of other scientists around him at that point in time were trying to debunk his approach or his theory. What we now know through the science that we’ve now got is that actually he was bang on the money. And so, this really ties in with this whole concept that cancers ferment glucose sugar, or glutamine, which is an amino acid. They can switch between the two, but they cannot deal with ketones. This is about mitochondria going wrong. There are some incredible experiments that have been done where you take dysfunctional mitochondria and put them into healthy cells and vice versa and quite frankly, it validates entirely that whole theory.

Robin Daly: Those are fantastic experiments that are largely ignored by mainstream medicine, but they are pretty conclusive. The second one is resistance to anti-growth signals.

Mark Bennett: I am not able to say exactly what is going on there, Robin. Resistance to anti-growth signals is not something I’ve got huge amount of knowledge about.

Robin Daly: Nonetheless, it is a characteristic that they are able to do this.

Mark Bennett: Yes, it is a characteristic, but I would not be able to understand the biochemistry behind that.

Robin Daly: Then evasion of apoptosis – this is their immortality, which most normal cells do not have. That is obviously a key point.

Mark Bennett: Absolutely so the cell basically becomes immortal and it just will not terminate or control itself. I think the important point here is about the neighbouring cells. I have been listening to Dr Zach Bush. I don’t know whether Bush has been a guest on this show?

Robin Daly: No, I don’t know of him.

Mark Bennett: Dr Zach Bush is an extraordinary doctor in the US, a triple certified board physician. He has some incredible podcasts out there, which are well worth listening to. He talks about how cancer cells run away with themselves. They just will not terminate. They won’t roll over and say my time is up. He talks about the failure of communication between neighbouring cells.

Cells communicate with each other using fibre optic cables, effectively. Light is transmitted between the cytoplasm of adjacent cells. It’s when the cell becomes isolated, ie communication links with neighbouring cells are severed, that the cell literally loses control of itself and is unable to be controlled. Communication within the context of the family of other cells around it is fundamental. Dr Bush is very much into this whole principle of glyphosate being sprayed on crops and the devastating effect that has on gut health. He also is really hot on the link between the microbiome and cancer types. He is effectively a cancer specialist, endocrinologist and palliative care doctor, triple board certified. So, this man really knows his onions and it’s a fascinating listen.

Robin Daly: Next is limitless replicative potential. So, they have an unlimited spread once they get going?

Mark Bennett: Yes, that is a hallmark of cancer, clearly. So, we are talking about metastasising cancer, but at the end of the day, this is about the environment that the cancer lives in.

This goes back to the joined-up thinking approach, which is if you don’t have a strong environment, your biochemistry is on the back foot. Then these cells start to take advantage and your immune system is not able to police what is going on. We know that cells go wrong and we have the potential to develop these conditions in each and every one of us on a continuous basis. But the body patrols this and correct these imbalances. I think this is the whole point about functional medicine and using functional testing.

It doesn’t have to be expensive. If you listen to Dr Nasha Winters, we are talking about some simple tests that really identify if you are starting to develop an environment which could lead to such a disease, or any disease for that matter. It doesn’t have to be cancer, but the scary chronic diseases. Dr Nasha Winters, as you know is a naturopathic physician, she talks about using things like simple blood chemistry markers, looking at neutrophil to lymphocyte ratios. What you want as an ID is a two to one ratio of neutrophils to lymphocytes. Well, if that ratio gets distorted or even inverted, then you know you are starting to get problems within your system.

And of course, that also will have an impact on your ability to react to immunotherapy. The modern immunotherapy approaches, which have a 20%, successful outcome, can also be incredibly dangerous, but maybe that is because the immune system is dysfunctional in the first place. Other markers like the humble platelets – if your platelets are starting to be raised significantly, then this is a really significant market for this type of condition, lactate dehydrogenase. This absolutely links into, for example, mitochondrial dysfunction, which goes back to what we talked about a minute ago. If LDH, lactate dehydrogenase, is elevated above the reference range or within the functional range then basically that signals that the mitochondria are off. These tests are not expensive. These blood tests can be run by your GP. They run on a standard basis, but very rarely do I find any oncologists that I am working alongside or with ever giving any credit to those tests, or even looking at those markers.

Robin Daly: Okay a few points you made there which we are going to come back to. The last of the first six hallmarks was sustained angiogenesis. Do you want to just explain what that means?

Mark Bennett: Yes, sustained angiogenesis. We’re talking about blood supply being supplied to the tumour, and essentially the tumour then feeding itself with the nutrients that it needs to grow even more. Of course, this again comes down to growth factors and vaso-endothelial growth factors, for example. This is actually interesting because if you start to look at conventional treatments, this is a slight aside, but it sort of connects it to the point you have asked me to comment on. If we look at, for example, radiation therapy one of the standard parts of modern medical treatment for cancer, we know that if your vaso-endothelial growth factor is raised, then the chances of the radiation delivering the outcome is greatly reduced. Why don’t we think about these things? When we’re applying the three big hitters – the chemo, the radiation and the surgery – maybe the success rates which I mentioned previously we would go up. Radiation has a 12% success rate – and that is not a cure by the way. The word ‘success’ is used in inverted commas; it doesn’t mean that you are cured. It means that you are put into remission for a while. Actually testing for a vaso-endothelial growth factor, is actually quite easy to do. Why we are not doing this more as part of the process?

To expand on that point, it is a fact that radiation is far more effective if the client has lower insulin and glucose levels. Cancer cells are effectively desensitised to radiation if they are bathed in sugar. This stuff is relatively simple and I know the outcomes will be improved if we could just do some really simple tests and then prime or work with the client on a more holistic, helicopter perspective – look at this from multiple different angles, functional perspective, and actually get the client in a much better metabolic situation before we start to unleash these very significant treatments.

Robin Daly: Makes complete sense. The authors of the hallmarks came in with an afterthought a little bit later, a couple of extras which were abnormal metabolic pathways and invasion of the immune system. That first one, I think that most more holistic doctors would have put that one in the first batch, for sure. But anyway, do you want to say a bit about those two?

Mark Bennett: Yeah, we have touched on this about the metabolic function. We know that cancer cells effectively ferment, glucose, sugar, or glutamine. And of course, glutamine is the one that a lot of people don’t understand or don’t consider in the equation.

When one looks at ketogenic diets – I don’t like the word diet – these are therapies, these are medicines. They should be classified as medical approaches. It is not about just about buying a ketogenic book and having a little bit more fat in your diet and putting some coconut oil into your smoothies.

We are talking about measuring the GKI ratio, the glucose ketone index, and getting it to a therapeutic level. And this is where you have got to work with somebody who understands, people such as myself in terms of nutritional therapy, specific dietitians, people who really understand how you put the body into a ketogenic state. And of course, the whole principle behind the ketogenic state is that cancer cells cannot use ketones as a fuel source. If you take any living organism and you starve it of its food, of its energy sources, then clearly that organism is not going to survive.

Human cells, in basic terms, can switch because of metabolic flexibility, which a lot of us don’t have the ability to do very well, but that’s another discussion. But once you start to achieve more metabolic flexibility and normal, healthy cells can switch into a state where they consume ketones fast, as opposed to using sugar or glutamine which is what cancer cells effectively can only use as fuel source, then you are starting to starve the cancer cells. Now is this the bleeding edge of the mitochondrial dysfunction concept Dr Thomas Seyfried is talking about. We know how to shut down sugars. We can do that with a ketogenic diet –take sugar an carbohydrate intake down to three percent of total calories. People do that and that’s relatively simple to do if you’ve got somebody who wants to do it.

But then there’s the glutamine aspect, which is the elephant in the room because glutamine is everywhere in the diet. Yes, you can try and reduce glutamine load. Glutamine contains amino acid and it is going to be therefore prevalent in meats and protein. That is why a ketogenetic diet moderates protein consumption. But glutamine is not evil by the way – it is needed. It’s absolutely essential for immune function. At the end of the day, if you suppress glutamine and they are drugs that will literally shut down the uptake of glutamine, then of course you can then end up in a really difficult situation because that actually is counterproductive. It’s that press-pulse concept that, no doubt, you talked to Dr Thomas Seyfried about.

Robin Daly: So this is an on/off approach to treatment is you are describing here. These hallmarks came out and they kind of created a shopping list of targets for the drug industry which set out to find ways of interfering with this one or that one. In some cases they have been quite successful in achieving that, but in terms of benefits to people with cancer over the next couple of decades it doesn’t seem to be so significant. I think this brings us back to the kind of number the matter, which is you can find things which will affect cancer’s ability to progress sometimes quite dramatically, but in the long run, any kind of single strategy approach generally seems to fail. Or let’s say it fails for most people after a period. Is that your experience?

Mark Bennett: Absolutely. It’s fundamental to my training and it’s fundamental to my practice and it doesn’t just apply to cancer. It doesn’t matter what chronic condition you have. One of my specialisms is autoimmunity. You deal with a 100+ conditions, all kinds of issues. Autoimmunity is a huge part of chronic disease load on the globe at this point at time growing at a phenomenal rate. The answer to autoimmunity is not a single silver bullet you have got to find out what is triggering and mediating from a functional perspective: triggering, initiating, and mediating – meaning perpetuating or energising the disease, the condition, the imbalance. We know that there are so many variables that can be part of that equation. So at the end of the day – is it a toxic load?

Is it something to do with the history? It could be asbestos, it could be mercury, it could be any number of things in your environment or previous exposure. It can be obviously smoking or those types of things, which we know are linked. We have links to obviously specific types of cancers. We understand that, but it is not just that. It’s also about the balance of the microflora. Going back to Dr Zach Bush, he said something in one of his podcasts some time ago, that there isn’t a single cancer that is not connected to either a bacterial species in the gut missing or having something in there that you shouldn’t have.

These are amazing statements – those are not my words, by the way, these are outcomes from conversations that he is having on podcasts and if it’s genuinely the case then all roads of hell lead to the digestive system. And to be honest with you, whether I’m working with a client who has got Parkinson’s, MS or cancer, we always start with the gut. The gut is where you start from because that is the basis upon which you build your house. You have got to look at so many different aspects. Gut health is dependent upon your history: how you were born, when you were weaned, were you breastfed or formula-fed? Did you have food poisoning? What type of foods were you fed as a child? What was the health of your mother’s microflora at the point of birth? It all sets the scene and then you have got stock. Because obviously if you then have an imbalance in the microflora, then you potentially lose immune tolerance, which causes fundamental to autoimmune issues.

There is a sort of similarity here. Autoimmunity is where the immune system basically goes beserk and starts to attack oneself, but immunotherapy principles are applicable to both cancer and autoimmunity. So, you start looking at the use of medicinal mushrooms, for example, or high-dose vitamin D, getting vitamin D levels up to an optimal level. I am not talking about 18 nanomoles per litre, we are talking 150 nanomoles per litre.

It is really interesting because in the autoimmune world, I have actually got to the point now where if a client wants to work with me on an autoimmune basis, and who is to say there is not autoimmunity connected with cancer, I would actually go so far as to say that I am not prepared to even start the process until vitamin D levels are optimal. Because you’re not going to get the results. We know through the science, and you know this as well as I do, that there is a very strong, scientific evidence base suggesting that vitamin D is fundamental to outcomes with cancer. At the end of the day, the point of diagnosis, the higher vitamin D levels, the more likely you are to survive the condition.

So, therefore it sorts of ties up. It is that multifactorial approach and it goes back to something, I think I said last year when we last talked, which was that you look at Professor Bredesen and his approach to dementia. It’s a 36-point intervention. There is no single silver bullet.

And cancer is no different. This is how biochemistry works – you look at the imbalances. You have got to use sensible testing to identify those imbalances, whether that is the blood chemistry work I talked about, which is simple and cheap to do. Or whether we start to dig deeper into things like food sensitivities but doing it properly. I am not talking about just getting a finger prick test, testing one part of the adaptive immune system. I am talking about doing this across multiple parts of the immune system. Are you fuelling an inflammatory response when you eat certain food proteins?

Well, the chances are you are, and if you are feeling inflammation, that inflammation is the bedrock of all dysfunctional disease, including cancer. It’s looking at the microflora. It’s looking at food sensitivity, as those are inextricably linked anyway. And are ketogenic diet appropriate or are they not? For some clients, if you’ve got an exceptionally leaky gut, if you put a lot of fat into somebody’s diet without understanding permeability, that could also be dangerous. There is something called lipid raft transcytosis – you can actually shift LPs, which is like the exhaust of bad bacteria into systemic circulation on the back of fat molecules. This is because if you have got leaky gut, clearly you have got to heal the gut first before you just start to apply those principles. So, I suppose where I’m going with this Robin is that it is not an easy equation to get right, and every day, I realise how little I knew the day before.

We have got to be humble as practitioners, understanding that we only know what we know, but what I do know is that the answer to the problem is categorically multifactorial. There is no other answer to a long-term solution to cancer or any other chronic disease, full stop, end of story.

Robin Daly: And all of this arrests very much on this kind of seed and soil – the difference between where the attention is put. Rather than being completely and utterly fascinated with the cancer itself, being maybe a lot more interested in the place in which the cancer grew and adjusting that.

Mark Bennett: Yes absolutely, I asked the question to my cancer clients has anybody discussed or even tried to understand why you developed cancer in the first phrase? And often the answer is no. All we are talking about is if we are going to cut it, burn it or nuke it. So basically, it’s that approach of we have got to get rid of the problem, the problem is there, it’s physical and we have got to get it out. And I understand that, and I am not saying that is the wrong approach, but clearly if you don’t address the fundamental reasons as to why it developed in the first place why would logically you believe that that would not come back? It does not make any logical sense at all. And it’s the same with – let me use another medical analogy – small intestinal bacterium where the small intestine is overgrown and effectively has an infection of bacteria that shouldn’t be there. And you can use Rifaximin, which is a particular antibiotic that is designed specifically to go into the small intestine and take out pathogenic bacteria. Great, but at the end of the day, if you do not resolve the fundamental reason as to why those bacteria are in the small intestine in the first place, then you take them out – but what then happens is they come back. The rebound rate is huge. So you’ve got to look at causation and rectifying the fundamental reasons as to why any imbalance exists. And of course, at the end of the day, cancer is just a massive alarm bell of the body telling you that you are seriously out of balance.

Robin Daly: Thank you for that so now we get to the piecing together the puzzle part. Is there some kind of way we can at least group the pieces together before we start, like we put all the edge pieces together for sky, the grass in this puzzle – types of strategy that are broadly similar in their effect.

Mark Bennett: We have touched on quite a number of these things, but in terms of how I approach my clinical practice with the clients that I am privileged enough to work with, we always start with the gut. The gut is ground zero and the reason it’s ground zero is because the research just continuously shows that actually, if you have a biodiverse group of microflora and you don’t have parasites, and you have optimal stomach acid, and your alpha is working well, and your digestive enzyme status is good, and your migrating motor complex in the small intestine is working properly, then you are in a much better place.

And to be honest with you, I have not seen one client with a chronic disease, whether it’s cancer or anything else, that doesn’t have dysbiosis – an imbalance in bacterial species of the gut or poor digestive capacity. And by the way, they don’t have to have overt digestive distress to have these issues.

You can have perfectly, relatively normal output, but still actually have considerable imbalances. And in fact, you do not have to have diarrhoea or constipation or alternating or reflux or whatever else, but obviously those are very overt symptoms of dysbiosis. But then if you look at dysbiosis, then clearly drives lack of nutrients absorption, and so people say you are what you eat. Well, I disagree. You are what you absorb and there are lots of people who eat relatively well, but they just don’t absorb properly, and the absorption issues are based down to digestive capacity: stomach acid, I/R flow and chronic enzyme status, undiagnosed celiac disease, which damages the villi in the small intestine, which then can lead to histamine issues. Histamine drives inflammation and histamine drives autoimmunity. Quite frankly, a lot of my cancer clients have very high levels of histamine.

And again, that is driven by the treatments that they have been using. So it’s not to say ‘don’t do the treatments’, but the side effects of using those chemotherapy agents, for example is, is actually poor gut health. So ultimately, you are playing this game of trying to get some short-term wins and gains, but then how much damage is that doing in terms of your long-term health? We know that through survival rates – the longer-term health of cancer patients using these treatments can be compromised due to the treatments.

So, going back to your original question about how we group these things, the gut is fundamental because that then leads to absorption and nutrients and nutrient status. If you boil this down into its basics – we’re a collection of 36 trillion cells organised into organs, hearts, lungs, and all kinds of bits and pieces. And why does cells malfunction? Why does a cell go wrong? Why does it become dysfunctional?

And actually, at the end of the day, my belief is that actually there are very few reasons for this actually happening. One of the big reasons is lack of nutrients. We need 250+ micronutrients to be delivered to the cells in order for the cells to do their job properly. We need the essential fats, all the micronutrients and all the iron and copper and everything that you need. Micronutrients should be at the right levels. And of course, most people A – are not eating the right foods and they’re not eating nutrient dense foods and then B – they’re not actually breaking those foods down properly. So they are not absorbing properly and C – they have dysbiosis and therefore they are not even able to transport those nutrients across in an appropriate way, or they may have undiagnosed celiac disease, which is one of the most common lifelong disorders North America and Europe, and only one in eight are ever diagnosed. The list goes on.

So you start to look at the gut. You start to look at nutrient status. You pull out historic reports that doctors have run on blood chemistry markers to look at the things that we talked about earlier on – the neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio. Lactate dehydrogenase is not normally on there but you can get that run as an additional item. Platelets, the things that we discussed. And, then look at food sensitivity because of the issues about what foods are driving inflammation every time you eat them. Is dairy good or bad? I mean, dairy I would question anyway with respect to cancer, irrespective of all the food sensitivity test but what I am saying the thing is, how do we know that you’re not reacting to beef, for example, or chicken? We don’t. We can only guess these things and of course can’t take all food out of people’s diets. And therefore, if you are pushing somebody towards the ketogenic diet, is that diet actually the least immune-stimulating diet or approach for that client so that you don’t fuel an inflammatory explosion or load. By piecing together the gut nutrient status and food sensitivities, those are the fundamental parts of what I do from a nutritional perspective and physiological perspective.
But then also we are talking about the additional items around the outside. So it’s like quality of sleep, which is connected to nutrient status and/or histamine load, exercise, movement, stress levels, toxic load, the environmental load, what mattress are you lying on – all these things have got to be considered.

Robin Daly: Well, absolutely. It’s quite a web and presumably you look at your role as focusing and facilitating that central area you were talking about – nutritional intake. But you’re also pointing people out towards these other parts, if you feel that they should have a particular reason to take a look at them.

Mark Bennett: Absolutely. I’m effectively a nutritional scientist and I am focusing on the nutritional aspects of any protocol. But the more I do what I do, and the more I look at the lifestyle medicine aspects of this. This is very much about sleep and, dare I say it, cold showers.

I mean, cold water exposure can be incredible looking at near infrared saunas, using that as a mechanism for photobiomodulation. Going back to mitochondria, the evidence base on near infrared light and what it can do to enhance mitochondrial function is just irrefutable. You can’t look at that evidence and say that doesn’t happen. It does happen. Detoxification, trying to eliminate toxic load through the skin, which is a classic detoxification organ, a huge detoxification organ and mobilising toxins, and allowing them to be pushed out. If you combine near infrared solars with cold water exposure straight after, that is actually the best outcome you can have.

So, clearly, you’ve got to put that within the context of the client. If you have got an 88-year-old, and suddenly ask them to leap into a cold shower, you have got to work it to the client. But what I am just trying to get across is there are lots of things outside what we eat and drink that can have considerable impact.

And I would even go so far, and this is a very thorny, big subject – EMS, electromagnetic fields. There is a huge amount of data out there on the negative impact of EMS on human biochemistry. And we just go and look at the research. This is not conspiracy. This is about why would you leave your wifi on at night?

No one is going to be up surfing the internet in the middle of the night, well they shouldn’t be, so turn your wifi off at night. I am not saying don’t have wifi in your house. But what I am saying is, is why sleep bathed in wifi? Why have a mobile phone in your bedroom switched on? Put it on to aircraft mode. Why leave electronic equipment on at night? We know through the science that melatonin levels are reduced by excessive EMF exposure, and melatonin levels are known in breast cancer to be low. So maybe there is a link there.

Robin Daly: Yeah, the pieces of the puzzle.

Mark Bennett: It is all about those little pieces. When you start to talk to clients about these and they clearly just have not considered this stuff. And of course, I don’t want to turn people completely paranoid about the environment, saying ‘oh my god, using a mobile phone, please stay away from me.’

No, it’s not about that, but it’s just doing sensible things. It’s the marginal gain stuff that we talked about last. It’s a marginal gain. If you do lots of small things and join them up together, you have a much, much greater chance of pushing yourself quite a substantial way forward.

Robin Daly: So I just want to move back a bit. You’ve said a fair bit about standard treatments and their place in things and there’s a raft of treatments, which would include surgery, radiotherapy, ablative techniques using heat or ultrasound, all these kinds of things. These are kind of direct cancer cell kill techniques. They see cancer as the enemy and kill it.

They have their place in the puzzle. But how do you see it as fitting in?

Mark Bennett: Well, I mean, I think this is absolutely ground zero. Clearly those particular techniques are used and have been used for a long period time. But going back to the opener that we talked about, the success rates are not good enough.

This is a disease that we have spent vast sums of money on globally, and yet 127,000 people today and tomorrow globally are going to die of it. If those approaches are good at what they do, we should not have those death toll numbers. The reality is that we are using it as our main tools to deal with this condition, but at the end of the day, what else can we do to enhance outcomes? I want to see a world where there is a choice about what you do. You should be offered options when you sit in front of your oncologist.

It is not to say ‘don’t do the chemo, don’t do the radiotherapy, don’t do the surgery’. There’s evidence to suggest that doing chemotherapy at 10% of it’s normal dosage can actually be beneficial if combined with a ketogenic diet. This is about using other modalities to enhance the outcome.

And we talked about this with respect to radiation. Radiation, if your insulin levels and your glucose levels are lower, basically the cancer cells will be affected far more by the radiation. In fact, there is some convincing data to show that combining radiation with hyperthermia, an elevated thermic state, on the same day has (and I quote) extraordinary results. Well, why are we not doing this on a general basis? We should be. Everybody should be offered this. The science moves on really slowly. We know through studies that it takes between 15 and 25 years for primary literature to become mainstream medical practice. It’s too slow.

Robin Daly: It’s true.

Mark Bennett: It’s not good enough. Our current approach to cancer is just simply not good enough. It’s not a criticism of the current approach or the point of view of saying, you should not use the chemotherapy or radiotherapy, because I know there are people out there that say ‘you must not do that’ or ‘you must now just go natural alternative’. No, I am not saying that at all. I would never do that with a client because this is about a complementary approach. You need to be provided as the patient, as the client, with options. Options that you can then assess and say, ‘do you know – what I would like to try doing a ketogenic diet alongside my radiotherapy.’ Or ‘I would like to do hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatment, but in a ketogenic state with my chemotherapy.’ Or ‘I would actually like to use high-dose medicinal mushrooms, which we know 5,000 studies out there that show the benefit of using mushrooms when it comes to treatment cancer outcomes. Well clearly if you haven’t got a sensitivity to mushrooms, which you will identify through testing, as long as your immune system isn’t over-responding to the mushroom proteins, then that is a very sensible course of action and can absolutely mean that you don’t get the side effects associated with taking the chemotherapy. If, as a client, as a patient, you don’t get the side effects associated with chemotherapy, then you’re likely to finish your chemotherapy course, which means you’re more likely to get a beneficial outcome. But if the mushrooms also enhance the chemotherapy and actually improve its efficacy, then everybody wins.

Robin Daly: Look, we are coming to the end, but I just wanted to ask you: although you must feel that there is a growing mass of solid ground to stand on in this work, around the edges there’ll be continuously shifting sands, like you mentioned at the beginning as your understanding grows. Do you find your thinking has to change all the time? And how do you decide on which avenues look the most promising?

Mark Bennett: Well, to answer the last point first, how we decide to approach a plan is based on the individual’s biochemistry. We would look at the individual and we would do a raft of functional tests that are certainly not being done, or even considered through the standard care approach.

We would do food sensitivity panels, and only if that is possible. A lot of cancer clients are on immunosuppressant medication. You don’t even have the option of doing that because their immune systems are completely trashed by the chemotherapy. So, you can’t do that within 60 days of taking any immunosuppressive, because obviously you are going to get a whole bunch of false negatives. But if you can, you look at the blood chemistry markers, you look at food sensitivity, you look at stool test data, you look at micronutrients. This is fundamental, doing a proper micronutrient test, measuring, not serum magnesium, but red blood cell magnesium, working out zinc. What about their calcium levels because they can also be elevated with cancer. All these different things, looking at toxic metals, maybe using some hair mineral analysis, which is great for toxic metals, in terms of excreting toxic metals through the hair: mercury and arsenic and cadmium and nickel and these types of things.

It’s really identifying through a sweep of testing as to where the really big points are from the point of view of the client. Then we therapeutically go in and try help correct those imbalances. And the key point is that if you have measured something, you have got a stake in the sand and three or four months later you can then say, ‘okay, how are we doing? Are we now in a better place than we were when we first measured?’

The approach is always unique to the client. There is no one standard suite of things that we do for every single individual that walks into the clinic. No, it’s based on their symptoms, their history, the type of cancer they’ve got. Basically, we look at this stuff from the point of view of their individual biochemistry and then we work around that data.

In terms of how the land shifts – I am always changing my approach to this, because as I said to you, I learn stuff every day. At the end of the day, you use the knowledge you’ve got to the best of your ability. Nobody has got perfect knowledge. You only know what you know, and you don’t know what you don’t know, which is pretty obvious, but you’ve got to be humble when you are practicing with people because you can only do what you know you can do. I am, for some reason, completely obsessed with human biochemistry and chronic disease. You read and you constantly scour the primary literature and it’s amazing what you pick up. You listen to really capable doctors who are pushing the envelope, such as Dr Nasha Winters and Dr Thomas Seyfried. You also listen to Dr Gundry and his whole thing about lectins. That is an interesting one – lectins in cancer.
You have just got to expand your knowledge and realise that yes, fundamentally the answer to these conditions, cancer and any chronic condition, is a multifactorial approach. It’s about identifying what triggers, mediates, initiates, and energises the condition. If you can identify those things, you have a much better chance be able to achieve the health goal for the client.

Robin Daly: Fantastic summary and that is where we are going to end it. I just want to mention that you are one of the many amazing speakers appearing in our spectacular two-weekend online event, Your Life And Cancer 2020, this autumn. Thanks for helping us to make this into probably the most integrated medicine and cancer event of the season.

For listeners, I will give out full details at the end of the show, but thank you Mark so much for sharing your thinking around this endeavour to piece together the puzzle of cancer. Fascinating stuff. Extremely important to anyone looking to live a long and fruitful life after a cancer diagnosis.

Mark Bennett: A real pleasure, indeed Robin. I’m glad to have been able to contribute my little bit.

Robin Daly: I look forward to seeing you at Your Life And Cancer!

Mark Bennett: Absolutely. Robin, thank you very much, indeed.

Robin Daly: Mark’s passion for, and depth of understanding of biochemistry are unavoidable.

As I mentioned, I am delighted he’s one of over 40 top international speakers at Your Life And Cancer 2020 this autumn. If you are not already aware of this event, just go to yourlifeandcancer.com and click on ‘speakers’ in the main menu. It’s an incredible world-class line up. On the site you can also see full details of the two weekend programs, and of course you can register.

And if you would like to hear more about the event from the organisers, and you missed last week’s show, be sure to pick it up on listen on demand at yestolife.org.uk/radio-shows. There you can also search through more than five years’ worth of shows, particular guests, for example Mark’s last interview is there, or by topic or keyword. Thanks for joining me today. I hope you will listen again next week, and I will be back with another Yes to Life show here on UK Health Radio.

Goodbye.

Kindly written by Literary Transcript Editor Maria Mellor