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 Yes To Life show on UK Health Radio. My name’s Robin Daly, host for this show and founder of Yes To Life, the UK charity that’s been helping people with cancer to access and learn about integrative medicine for the past two decades.

Robin Daly
As regulars will know, we have a huge range of experts on the show talking about everything from Qigong to photodynamic therapy. But we also don’t fight shy of digging into cancer science to find out what fresh thinking there is about the mechanisms of cancer.

Robin Daly
That’s where we’re heading this week as I’m speaking to functional nutritionist Dawn Waldron who has been doing a lot of delving recently and has made some new connections that she’s very excited about and is keen to share and explore with others.

Robin Daly
Hi Dawn, welcome back to the Yes To Life show.

Dawn Waldron
Thank you Robin nice to see you again and thank you for inviting me.

Robin Daly
I’m looking forward to this conversation very much. Firstly, because I always enjoy chatting to you anyway, but particularly because we’re going to be talking about some fresh thinking you’ve been having about cancer and chronic disease that I’ve got some sense of, but I want to understand a lot more about.

Robin Daly
So this is going to involve diving into the microbiology of cellular energy systems quite a bit, but just to reassure anyone listening who’s primed to be involved by such a thought, regular listeners will know that I’m no science geek myself.

Robin Daly
So if we talk tech on the show, I like to be able to tease out a layperson’s understanding of what we’re talking about. And as for why regular people with cancer should be interested in this kind of stuff, well, why don’t you start off by telling us?

Dawn Waldron
Okay, that’s a great place to start Robin, and actually just before I do, I’m just going to reiterate that in a way, you and me both, these areas are so complicated that I think it would be, it wouldn’t be right for me to claim to have an in-depth knowledge.

Dawn Waldron
I’m very much learning as I’m going along here, and I would say sort of like learning and unlearning. That’s what we do all the time, isn’t it? We go through learning phases, and then we have to sometimes step back from the things that we thought we knew or update our knowledge.

Dawn Waldron
Since I’ve stepped back from doing one-to-one clinic, to semi-retire, I’m actually doing a lot more learning than I was in many ways, so that’s good. Why should people with cancer be interested in this?

Dawn Waldron
I think the answer is because we all know that we haven’t got enough answers for cancer. Everybody’s out there doing their best. Everybody’s trying to stop cancer in its tracks in all our different ways from all sides of the equation, but there are still things we don’t really understand, and I’m always interested that a lot of the things that we think of as anti-cancer agents, whether they’re medicines or whether they’re things like turmeric,

Dawn Waldron
we don’t always fully understand how they work. We can see good results from them, and we can do clinical trials with hopefully human beings and say, well, this person survived a bit longer when we did this, but we can’t always say, well, that’s because, and I’m interested in that, and I think anybody who’s interested in cancer itself would love to one day be able to say, that’s because this is happening.

Dawn Waldron
So, I’m always digging away, reading things, and seeing if I can add a little bit more to the because story, I suppose.

Robin Daly
Very good. Okay, well look, the background or the context of your thinking is important to the understanding of where you’ve got to now. Would you like to explain a bit about our collective understanding in regards to the evolution of our cellular structure and our relationship with our environment, starting right back in the prehistoric sludge?

Dawn Waldron
Oh, okay, then, yes, yes, I would. And again, forgive me for not, you know, I would say almost not having an expert view on this. I cobbled together from reading around research papers. It’s an informed view.

Dawn Waldron
And really, it’s this sort of understanding that it all sort of happened by accident in many ways. And yet it was an accident that had to happen. And I’m reading at the moment a book by Nick Lane, who has written many incredible biochemistry books, some of which change hands at first edition for hundreds of pounds these days.

Dawn Waldron
But I’m reading his latest book, Transformer, where he actually is really going back to the whole origins of life. And he’s doing a little bit of a chicken and egg thing, which came first, metabolism or genes, genes or metabolism.

Dawn Waldron
And that’s quite fascinating. And he’s arguing that it’s metabolism, and that we had to have metabolism first, before we had any sugars or light pins or things like that, that could even form a cell.

Dawn Waldron
And then in that case, then we went on to form more complex molecules like DNA later on. So, you know, very quick insight into that. And then go forward a little bit further, we’ve got single-celled organisms running around, and we’ve got some bacteria.

Dawn Waldron
And one day by accident, one of these single-celled organisms engulf a bacteria that was a bit too close, I guess. And they actually formed an extremely useful cooperative relationship, to the extent that we might say that in the longer run, the cell thought, right, okay, I can leave the bacteria over there to make the energy, and I can do some higher functions over here.

Dawn Waldron
So there’s this sort of symbiotic relationship between the cell. And that’s the beginning of what we call a eukaryotic cell, as I understand it. And so we have a cell with a nucleus, and inside this nucleus is originally one of the engulfed bacteria that ultimately ends up being what we now think of as mitochondria.

Dawn Waldron
And there are thousands in most of our cells. So that’s the sort of issue like the original accident. And what I love about this is that, as I’m starting to read at the moment, our understanding that mitochondria are, in fact, ancient bacteria, makes it, I suppose, entirely logical that the bacteria in our gut are able to communicate with the bacteria in our cells.

Dawn Waldron
And that’s one of the areas that I’m really fascinated with at the moment.

Robin Daly
Okay, we’re going to get into that. Yeah, very interesting. So there’s this symbiotic relationship, which kind of was the dawning of us. We were only possible because of these two things getting together, a single cell organism and a bacteria.

Robin Daly
And yeah, by engulfing the bacteria, they then had a separate energy production system, which enabled them to get on to some other stuff. We know all about that these days. You get a machine in that does the dishwashing for us and we get on with something else.

Dawn Waldron
Precisely. Specialization, yeah.

Robin Daly
Yeah, interesting. So, you know, it’s quite a thing to go back and look at ourselves as having come from that accident, as you put it, these two things coming together, but very interesting. Something you wrote here, I just quote, where you say these new multicellular lifeforms or their dark secluded digestive tracts provided the perfect path for oxygen-phobic anaerobic bacteria to take shelter.

Robin Daly
That’s interesting. You know, another kind of view is a different view, if you like, of cellular biology, which is very interesting that, yes, is kind of a nice home for them.

Dawn Waldron
Yes, it’s hard to imagine that right at the beginning of life on Earth, oxygen was in short supply. Yes. And the early organisms didn’t rely on oxygen, and they might well have been metabolizing hydrogen sulfide or hydrogen itself.

Dawn Waldron
And so a lot of life forms, actually, as we evolved and started, and as plant life evolved, and the atmosphere became full of oxygen, it was too rich for some. The idea that the air is full of 20% oxygen is pretty improbable anyway, because it’s a highly reactive gas.

Dawn Waldron
And so it’s all a bit of a miracle, really. But certainly some organisms don’t want to live in that environment, and they love to live in the relatively oxygen-free environment of our guts. And then they do nice things for us, they help us.

Dawn Waldron
And we’ve evolved alongside them. That’s not really an accident. We’re all familiar, I think, if we’re interested in health, there’s this increasing idea that the combined set of genes of the microbes in our gut, which we tend to shorten into the microbiome, is both there are more genes there, and actually might be more powerful in some ways, in many ways, than our own genes.

Dawn Waldron
And that’s quite a… I think it’s easy to say that, it’s really easy to say that, but if you actually start to think about the implications of that for health and for modern medicine, the idea that you really…

Dawn Waldron
You know, we’ll spend a lot of time thinking about, well, forgive me for saying something sort of a bit crass, but you don’t want the genes for heart disease, or you don’t want the genes, even though we don’t really understand it like that, there isn’t a single gene that causes heart disease.

Dawn Waldron
But we do understand that we want to be born with the right genes. Everybody is sort of about to speed with that sort of concept. Well, the same applies to your gut flora. You want the right genes in there too.

Dawn Waldron
You don’t want to be wiping them out. You don’t want to be fading them with the wrong things. You actually want to cultivate the right genes inside your gut in the same way that you cultivate the right, that you want to have the right genes or support the right genes in your body.

Robin Daly
We’re getting to what you might call a major rebrand of bugs here, where in the 1950s and 1960s, they were something to be eradicated as quickly as possible, wherever they were, whatever kind they were, you would get the mess toss out and kill them.

Robin Daly
We’ve gone from there now to looking, well, there’s two examples we’ve given here. One is that actually we came from the combination of a bug with a cell. That’s us. I mean, that’s pretty stark, but now we’re talking about this microbiome, which is seen as now absolutely essential part of our well-being in so many ways, about more and more ways every year.

Robin Daly
There’s more and more being discovered. There’s this real feeling of the tip of the iceberg at the moment that we’re just beginning to understand how important our microbiome is, how much we rely on these bugs for our well-being.

Robin Daly
It’s just extraordinary. I get stunned by the science. It’s staggering, yeah.

Dawn Waldron
I agree. I mean, I’ve been a nutritional therapist for 20 years and I have to put my hand up and say that my appreciation of the importance of the microbiome, to put it positively, would say it’s growing.

Dawn Waldron
But I would have to say I didn’t always appreciate how important it was, how critical. And one of the things I feel, I am a big picture thinker, always have been, and sometimes I’m a bit impatient with the detail, I would say, as a scientist, if you like, if I can call myself that.

Dawn Waldron
And I’ve always in terms of cancer thought, well, there will be a sort of, when we find out what’s going on with cancer, it will be a natural progression in terms of what we’ve done, how the world is moving.

Dawn Waldron
And one of the thoughts that hit me when I was doing this new thinking that I’ve been doing is that to the extent that we sort of were very successful in eradicating infectious disease in the 20th century, you know, you go right the way back to typhoid Mary and sort of understanding we need to wash our hands in maternity units and things like that.

Dawn Waldron
And yes, how incredibly important was that for saving lives and the change in infant mortality and all that sort of thing. But again, it’s so easy to take these things too far or for the pendulum to swing too far.

Dawn Waldron
And I think possibly that’s what we’ve done in in seeking always to be sterile, both in our kitchens and in our hospitals and in the obviously the widespread use of antibiotics, which we know is not always a good idea, particularly the broad-spectrum ones, very necessary sometimes, but I think we would all agree that they have at times been overused.

Dawn Waldron
Then we haven’t, we have wiped out colonies of bacteria that we actually need. And along with that, I would say nutrition science generally, as we understand it over from the 1950s onwards, has really paid no mind if you look at the UK well played tool.

Dawn Waldron
You know, any of the really big studies that are quoted around nutrition, the microbiome is nowhere in that understanding of public health at the moment. And so yeah, I think to the extent that we wiped microbes out successfully in the 20th century, we may unwittingly have set the scene for cancer actually, and this to destroy our communication network inside our bodies between our gut flora and our cell,

Dawn Waldron
our mitochondria, our cell bacteria. And I think increasingly that is far more important than we understand or have understood.

Robin Daly
So you’re talking about the ways in which you think the ground has been set for this epidemic of cancer that we’re in the midst of now. Other mistakes that we maybe have made there that are also playing into that same tsunami of cancer, I think that you have some other things to add to that apart from our bad relationship with bugs.

Dawn Waldron
So I think just generally speaking, I would say that we’ve got problems with the food supply, haven’t we? With the food chain. And we tend to eat foods that don’t feed us. And that’s increasingly important.

Dawn Waldron
I’m reading a paper today about mitochondria as big mill transducers. Now I had to look that all up. It was like, well, what do we mean by transducing? And it’s not juicing. It’s about turning a signal, turning something but something else, transforming it in a way.

Dawn Waldron
And we’re starting to understand that our mitochondria have a sensory as they’re not just batteries. So we can no longer call mitochondria our powerhouses or our energy producers. They are so much more than that.

Dawn Waldron
We’re starting to see that they are actually our cell processors and that they do indeed give instructions to our genes, to our DNA. So they’re much more important than we’ve ever realized. And they rely on…

Dawn Waldron
So as well as relying on signals from the gut, they also rely on signals from hormones and from metabolism to manage the flow of energy in and energy out, or fuel in and energy out if you like. And they are not surprisingly extremely sensitive to what they’re fed.

Dawn Waldron
So eating the wrong things is a bit like putting pension in a diesel car in many ways. And we’ve been so fixated for totally understandable reasons. We’ve been very fixated for about a decade since the Varberg theory resurfaced about whether cells should have carbs or fats or proteins or this, that and the other.

Dawn Waldron
And perhaps missed the point a little bit about, well, what signals are we giving to our mitochondria? And here, I just want to mention Dr. Stephen Gundry, who is part of my learning phase. I went back to reading some of his published work, one of his books in particular called Unlocking the Keto Code, actually because I find I don’t always agree with him.

Dawn Waldron
And I think it’s very important to read stuff that we don’t agree with as well as stuff that we do agree with. And I was going back because I wanted to understand something I’d learned was feeding back and I thought, oh, actually maybe he does.

Dawn Waldron
Maybe I do agree with him after all. So I was going back in reading his book about ketones and there was just this sentence where he said, you know, we’re getting it all wrong. We’re seeing ketones as fuels, but actually, they are mitochondrial signalers.

Dawn Waldron
And for me, I think I studied in a blog post recently, that was a bit like finding that dodgy bulb in a string of Christmas tree lights. Everything sort of lit up for me. I thought, oh my goodness. For me, that was one of those moments where I thought that’s what we’re missing at this understanding of the signals to mitochondria, not just the fuel supply, so that perhaps we can change the way our mitochondria behave when we understand them better.

Dawn Waldron
And that got me thinking, Stephen Gundry started to list the number of things that also send signals to the mitochondria. I then brought into that equation some work I’ve been doing with Emma Besick on the uncoupling genes in the mitochondria.

Dawn Waldron
We’ve actually got five uncoupling proteins. Now I’ve used a word, I’m going to come back to that word actually, because that’s one of those words, isn’t it? And so I started to realize that uncoupling might be key here.

Dawn Waldron
And so actually, before I jump ahead, let’s talk about what uncoupling is, shall we?

Dawn Waldron
So I’ve already talked about the mitochondria that we’re not allowed to call our energy processing machines anymore, but just for this example, I’m going to talk about the way they process energy. So we have fuel in, so that might be carbohydrates and fats, we’re familiar with that idea.

Dawn Waldron
Sometimes it might be proteins that the sort of exoskeletons of proteins might be pushed into the mitochondria that make energy. And then what comes out the other side is something called ATP, which is the sort of like energy currency, it’s our energy catch for the body.

Dawn Waldron
And at times, as you can well imagine, the fuel supply that arrives at our mitochondria is not steady. So we all know that it’s not a good idea to overeat, we know that maybe having a can of energy drink that’s got 20 teaspoons of sugar in it is perhaps a bit too much energy.

Dawn Waldron
And there are all sorts of ways that we can actually, that the energy turns up at the mitochondria, and there’s a bit too much of it. The body’s got a number of ways of dealing with it, I don’t want to oversimplify this.

Dawn Waldron
But one of the problems is when there’s too much energy, the Krebs cycle and the respiratory chain, you end up with a sort of a highly charged rhodont excess inside the mitochondria that is dangerous, it can lead to mitochondrial damage.

Dawn Waldron
It’s a bit like an electrical charge, too much of an electrical charge. And the body’s got various ways of dealing with this, you can do some fat storage. If you’re apable of doing fat storage, not everybody is lucky enough to be able to make fat.

Dawn Waldron
Some people are too lean for that. But the point being, the body needs some ways to deal with this excess charge. And one of the ways it can do this is by uncoupling. We call it thermogenic uncoupling, that instead of pushing those protons through to make energy, the body pushes them through to make heat instead.

Dawn Waldron
Now, obviously, heat is a form of energy, but it’s not the form that we can use to run ourselves. So we do thermogenic uncoupling. And in that process, we release the pressure from the mitochondria, and they get to fight another day.

Dawn Waldron
More than that, the premise of releasing that thermogenic energy, the uncoupling process, sends a message to the cell that actually we need more mitochondria. We actually, we’ve got some energy overload here, let’s make more mitochondria.

Dawn Waldron
And that’s a healthy thing. We need an athlete that their cells are full of mitochondria. We need to have cells that are absolutely as full of mitochondria as possible, but quite simply, if you don’t uncouple, if uncoupling goes wrong, the mitochondria can, I’m just going to say, explode.

Dawn Waldron
So instead of ending up with more mitochondria, you end up with fewer. You might actually be eating a big meal, but the upshot of the big meal is less energy, not more energy. And that’s a sort of dynamic that we don’t understand terribly well.

Dawn Waldron
And yet, of course, we do totally understand it’s not a good idea to overeat, it’s a good idea to fast, it’s a good idea to take exercise. All of that really is about this uncoupling mechanism that we need to, or it’s about taking the pressure off the mitochondria and trying to manage the energy flow through them so that they don’t explode.

Robin Daly
Hmm, very interesting. Well, of course, this is your string into territory, which lots of people have physical experience, obviously, managing their food and their energy. It’s very interesting. It put me in my by heating system, interestingly enough.

Robin Daly
I have a heating system where I had a back boiler on the stove. If I crank up the stove too much, and it gets too hot, the plumber very clever is put in a kind of valve upstairs, which says, oh, this is too much.

Robin Daly
And it lets it out with a very girdly noise into the heating system so as it doesn’t overheat. And that sounds very likely just described as thermogenic and coupling.

Dawn Waldron
Yeah. Absolutely. I’m sure I’ve probably mentioned this before, but my husband and I eat the same thing. We’re a bit like Jack Spratt and his wife, and my husband is very slim, and I’m definitely not quite so slim.

Dawn Waldron
I think he’s much better at thermogenic uncoupling than I am, so he can. For me, if I overeat, then I think I’m lucky enough that I store fat, ironically. I’m good at fat storage, which means that probably my mitochondria don’t explode as soon as some people’s fat.

Dawn Waldron
But then also, people who are good at thermogenic uncoupling will actually be able to overeat a bit without storing fat. And those are the people that we really envy, the people that we get. How do we- Yeah, those people.

Dawn Waldron
Well, there’s your answer. It’s not because they bid you or run around like, or not just because, not just because. But then, the thing that fascinated me was once I started to look into the uncoupling mechanism, and the molecules that promote uncoupling, I started to see just all of the anti-cancer molecules that we talk about.

Dawn Waldron
Deep tones, butyrate, turmeric, berberine, resveratrol, and I have a habit now of every time I read a study that says Phycetin is helpful for cancer, or sesquipatines, or you know, all these crazy names that you hear, I just go on to PubMed and I think they’re any good at uncoupling, and I’m just busy blowing my own mind at the moment, and I did cross-reference actually because I find this really fascinating,

Dawn Waldron
obviously, as you will hear, and I’m very interested in the microbial aspect of this and also, you know, Mark Linton’s excellent book, Looking at Cancer Through the Eyes of Fungal Infection, and he’s found a very similar thing.

Dawn Waldron
He’s done an extremely exhaustive study of the antifungal properties of so many molecules that we consider to be active against cancer, and he’s found again for his theory that they often have antifungal properties, and I think what we’re talking about is possibly two sides of the same coin here, sort of microbial regulation, cellular regulation, that these molecules are managing us at a bacterial level.

Dawn Waldron
They are all about, you know, if we’re talking mitochondrial replication, if we’re saying, well, you know, it’s healthy to make more mitochondria, and they’re helping us to do that, they are sort of involved in the balance of the microbiome in the body in some way.

Dawn Waldron
Again, really oversimplifying that, but I’m just fascinated in the symmetries and understanding where the rubber hits the road here. Is uncoupling actually really important for cancer? Is it our sort of little mitochondrial safety valve that protects them and helps them to keep functioning?

Dawn Waldron
And then, of course, circling back round, if we need ketones, if we need the products of microbial metabolism, which are increasingly called postbiotics, and we need these activated polyphenols, which are also activated by the microbiome, if that’s what we need to keep our mitochondria healthy, it’s not difficult to see that the modern diet doesn’t facilitate that, you know, that we’re not making ketones.

Dawn Waldron
When we don’t have a healthy microbiome, we often eradicate the microbiome, particularly, I guess I’d say during treatment, when we perhaps are learning that we might need it more, there is evidence to show that having a healthy microbiome can help some of the drugs, like pyschophosphamide, for example, patients do better if they have a better microbiome.

Dawn Waldron
So yes, gosh, it’s huge, and I’m aware that I’m sort of opening up this massive can of worms.

Robin Daly
you are kind of bugged. So I just want to come back to this very important, if you like, it was your light bulb moment. Okay, so you’ve written, okay, food is not fuel, it’s information. When we eat the wrong things, we send the wrong messages.

Robin Daly
And that’s a very different way of looking at food. And basically, that’s not how people are looking at it. Can you just say a bit more about that, just to sort of let it sink in.

Dawn Waldron
Yes. Yeah. Thanks for picking up on that because that’s such an important point. You know, I love cooking. I love having people around for dinner. I totally understand the joy of sitting around the table with friends and loved ones and sharing food.

Dawn Waldron
And we’re in a culture where that’s a very important part of what we do. I think a lot of cultures are based around that, aren’t they? But we’re also in a culture where it’s increasingly difficult for that food to be real food, for it to be food that’s as close to nature as possible.

Dawn Waldron
It’s hard. It can be hard to get enough vegetables. We’re busier and busier. It’s easier and easier to pick food off the shelf that has been highly processed. I mean, there’s a lot of buzz around ultra-processed foods at the moment and things like that.

Dawn Waldron
So ultra-processed foods are not the information that your mitochondria are expecting to get. We didn’t evolve alongside them. We haven’t had time to adapt to them. I mean, it’s fascinating in some ways.

Dawn Waldron
If human life survives on the planet at all, we might well say that the humans of the future are likely to be the ones that do thrive on ultra-processed foods and lots of sugar. That could be an evolutionary message in itself.

Dawn Waldron
But right now, what I’m interested in, I think we’re interested in, is trying to improve the health of the humans that are on the planet now. And we haven’t evolved to deal with ultra-processed food.

Dawn Waldron
Our mitochondria and our genes just don’t know what to do with that. And it sends them in to disarray. It also, very importantly, either destroys the gut wall or in some ways when the particle size is too small, it can actually go directly across the gut wall.

Dawn Waldron
Bypassing our first line of immune defense, setting up immune signals in the immune layer that’s directly behind the gut wall and sending us into inflammation, immune problems, and that sort of thing, so that cell signaling goes wild.

Dawn Waldron
And of course, you know, dysregulated cell signaling and chronic inflammation is a hallmark of cancer. So it’s understanding that when you, you know, take your plastic packet, you tear it open and you consume the contents, your body is nearly always saying, what’s this now?

Dawn Waldron
What’s this now? And if you can just understand how you feel sometimes when you run at your computer and you see there are 43 email messages that need attention and your local neighborhood, what’s that group is kicking off?

Dawn Waldron
And your mother’s texted you to say, can you this, that, and the other? And your child is as, you know, stuck at Amsterdam airport or something like that. And your brain is going, why don’t I start with all this?

Dawn Waldron
And I think that’s exactly what’s happening in our cells. I sometimes think of mitochondria as mini me, that they’re always, they’re also sitting there going, oh, I can’t do this, you know, feed me properly.

Dawn Waldron
And I’ll give you the right outcomes. So I feel a bit sorry for them really, that we’re asking them to deal with. And I think maybe are we just doing a bit blah say, do we think it doesn’t really matter?

Dawn Waldron
You know, we’ve got so many examples of humans who are, they do all right, don’t they? You know, human beings wander around, they’re all right. You know, we all survive, except that we don’t, and a lot of us are vertically ill, and a lot of us are really tired.

Dawn Waldron
And a lot of us don’t understand why we’re so tired when we’re doing all the right things. And I think, I think also one of the things that I learned from clinic is that so many people who came to see me were doing all the right things, according to what we know, but perhaps not always focusing on, you know, I think, I think we can learn a lot from focusing on feeding the microbiome, keeping the gut wall healthy,

Dawn Waldron
and making sure our mitochondria are not overloaded.

Robin Daly
Well, yeah, right. Which brings us, I’m just going to read out this sentence that you wrote here. Together, the microbiome and the mitochondria hold the key to recovery and they rely heavily on a healthy gut wall to transmit the correct messages and keep the immune system in check.

Robin Daly
So just stick your neck out there and make a bold claim in a territory where few dare to trade, really, than cancer. But you’re pretty confident about this, it sounds, that you found something here about really an area that we ignore as our peril if we want to recover from cancer. Would that be fair?

Dawn Waldron
I think that would be fair and I almost shiver as I say it because I’m sort of used to… I like to sort of approach all these subjects with beginner’s mind. I like to think I know nothing and actually that’s really true.

Dawn Waldron
I know nothing. I know a lot. I know nothing. I have lots of knowledge and of course that could be entirely wrong but for me there’s this wonderful symmetry where we are sort of energetic beings and what’s going wrong here?

Dawn Waldron
I’m used to thinking about the hallmarks of cancer. Well, we’ve got a bit of this going on, we’ve got some information going on there, we’ve got some genomic instability going on here, we’ve got some reprogrammed metabolism here and then all the resisting cell death over here and it’s all these little pockets of stuff that we can’t pull together and actually when you look at this as a sort of communication network,

Dawn Waldron
when this communication network fails you can pretty much expect to see all the hallmarks of cancer happening. And I find that fascinating and so while I would not in any way say that people who are diagnosed who are facing stage 4 and all that sort of thing can just do this and everything will be okay, I’m not in any way saying that, I am pretty sure that if we take care of our gut flora, if we feed our gut flora properly,

Dawn Waldron
if we respect our gut wall and we are careful with what we ask our mitochondria to deal with, that some of the incidence of cancer, our ability to avoid it and recover from it, make a good recovery will be reduced and while that sounds like a wild claim, it’s also a very natural, it’s a very natural thing to say, it’s that sort of comms network in the body where basically our gut flora are communicating with the mitochondria in our cell,

Dawn Waldron
they speak the same language and I think we can understand it as the way we communicate with the world. I’ve said it before but our cells are blind, they don’t interface with the world, they need to get information somehow about how to behave and I think that’s the information highway for our cells and our mitochondria touch inside ourselves.

Robin Daly
So you’re calling from an exclusive attention that a lot of people give to fuel supplies. You’re calling for a move to include in that communications as being an important element of it that currently is not being taken into account. And it gives a different slant of the picture.

Dawn Waldron
I do think so. I think, you know, I wrote a book about the ketogenic diet some years ago. I’d been a proponent of the ketogenic diet in as much as, and I need to qualify this by saying, a diet that ensures that you generate ketones for some part of the day.

Dawn Waldron
I am not talking about the steak meat and cream and cheese and, you know, I’m not talking about that ketogenic diet. I’m talking about the importance that we cycle during the day between fed state and fasting state metabolism in some way or another.

Dawn Waldron
And that has already been shown to be quite effective for some people. And there are some great stories around the ketogenic diet. And obviously, you know, Thomas Seafree did a great proponent and lots of other therapies.

Dawn Waldron
But it’s not always the answer. And, you know, 20 years of clinical practice and the last 10 using ketogenic diet has shown that it suited some people and not others. And so you have to then say, well, what might the missing link be, you know?

Robin Daly
Exactly, right.

Dawn Waldron
And for me, it’s symmetrical. The idea that, well, we need a good microbiome as well, seems entirely sensible.

Robin Daly
Hmm, very interesting. You’re right. So, well, it happens so often in cancer, we come up with something which looks like it’s good for everyone. In the end, it turns out to be good for some, some other time.

Robin Daly
So, but which keeps telling us that you haven’t got the whole picture. So, well, look, it’s been really interesting to talk to them. I haven’t got anywhere near asking you everything I want to ask you.

Robin Daly
So, I’m going to invite you back again, and we’re going to have another chat about this, but I hope people have been interested in that. They’ve been able to travel this journey with us and find out a bit more about what your thinking is on this.

Robin Daly
It is a news learned on things, and I think it could prove very valuable to people. So, it’s based in your real world experience and trying to help people with cancer. It’s not abstract at all. So, you know, I think it’s great that you’re doing this kind of out of the box thinking.

Robin Daly
So, great. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Dawn Waldron
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s lovely always to talk to you, Robin. And yes, I’d be delighted to come back and put some other pieces of the jigsaw together with you.

Robin Daly
Take care, bye. Bye-bye. Well, fascinating stuff. I found it particularly interesting knowing about the uncoupling mechanism as it does seem that this could have significant implications when it comes to understanding the multi-faceted health epidemic we’re deep in.

Robin Daly
As I said, I feel that Dorn’s ideas are worthy of further exploration, so watch out in the coming weeks for part two of this investigation. If you’re not already booked for the YestoLife online conference on June 22nd, be sure to visit yes2lifeannualconference.org to check it out.

Robin Daly
We have some really heavy hisses in the line-up of presenters. We’ve got Patricia Peat, Dr. Nasha Winters, Michael Lerner, Dr. Heidi Kussman, Dr. Olivia Lessler, Dr. Sean Devlin, and Dr. Michael Castro.

Robin Daly
It’s ridiculously accessibly priced, so anyone can afford it, and it will be sharing information that you cannot afford to miss. While you’re there, check out our awesome in-person conference in London in September, and maybe pick up a bargain by booking both at the same time.

Robin Daly
So that’s yestolifeannualconference.org, and the two conferences go under the title, Pushing the Banderies. Thanks for joining me today. I’ll be back at the same time next week for another Yes2Life show here on UK Health Radio.

Robin Daly
Goodbye. Thank you. Bye.