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

Robin Daly
Hi and welcome to the Yes To Life show. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes To Life. The UK charity has been advocating for the integration of lifestyle and complementary medicine into cancer care for 20 years. The Yes To Life show focuses on integrated medicine for cancer and my guests range from scientists to clinicians and from practitioners to expert patients. For today’s show, I’m delighted that the irrepressible Julia Bradbury of Countryfile fame, who’s also an author, a cancer survivor and the subject of a documentary about cancer, has agreed to be my guest. I’m speaking to Julia over the internet at her home in London.

Robin Daly
Hi Julia, so excited to have you as my guest on the Yes To Life show.

Julia Bradbury
It’s great to be here, Robin.

Robin Daly
So there’s one thing that you’re strikingly memorable for. It’s your unusual passion and enthusiasm for life, which you seem to engage with with a wholeheartedness that few can match. So what do you attribute that to?

Julia Bradbury
I don’t know. I’ve always had what people have described as quite a high energy. I’m quite a positive person. I remember when I was a little girl, when I was about 11 or 12, one of the gifts I wanted for my mum was this set of positive affirmation tapes. It came in this, it looked like a book and then you opened them out and they were cassette tapes. Remember those, everybody? Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, they were those. I used to listen to those and I found them quite inspiring. I’ve always been an avid reader of that ilk of book as well. I don’t know. I guess it’s got to come from my parents who I have to say thank you to Chrissie and Michael because I was taught to use my assets and use your voice and go for whatever it is that you want and be kind along the way. Those are the rules.

Robin Daly
you you produce at least half a dozen popular books over the years in between your many tv appearances pretty much all of them focused around uh walking in some way or another and your latest book Walk Yourself Happy is of course no exception. Uh this book however seems to me to be a kind of less about the destination than the journey sort of book. I was wondering when you set off to write it what were you wanting to say to people.

Julia Bradbury
I would definitely make it clear that Walk Yourself Happy isn’t a book full of gorgeous walking routes. Right. Although we do talk about particular locations and it’s not just a book about walking either. Walk Yourself Happy is really a book about health. Firstly, it was the initial idea was for it to be a book about mental health and how nature and engagement with nature via walking and other means can really help improve mental health. We know that there are all sorts of studies that link walking with improved feelings of well-being and mood and psychological well-being. The initial idea was inspired when I heard a horrifying story of children during lockdown in Manchester who didn’t go out at all. We were all allowed to go out once a day, get our exercise, and there was a doctor who was talking about some children that he was familiar with. I think it was the Manchester region and it was some horrifying statistic that they hadn’t been out in a year or two years, so they hadn’t stepped foot outside their homes, their flats, their apartments, wherever they were living. Really scary. I thought about the downstream effect that that would have on them as they grew up and the mental health impact that it would have on them. That was the initial idea for the book, Walk Self Happy, it was right. How can we use these tools to get ourselves into a better place mentally? Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had discovered a lump a year and a half before that time when I was traveling and filming in Costa Rica and it turned out rather horribly to be a breast cancer diagnosis. I went through all of that and I had a mastectomy and it was a massive wake-up call for me. It really made me revisit my health, look at how I was living, sleeping, eating, everything. What I was consuming visually as well as what I was eating, the content that I was taking in, just how I was living my life. The book came back, the idea of the book continued, but then I added this extra layer which was right, it’s not just mental health, it’s health. It’s going to be a book about the pillars of health and what they are. What was lovely while writing it, I interviewed all sorts of brilliant experts who added great color and scientific fact to a lot of my musings. But what was lovely is that it all came back to nature in the end anyway. So sleep is really important, we can talk about why, but it’s fundamental to our health. It’s a really key part of building our immune system, rebuilding our digestive system, resting, repairing, and good quality sleep would be one of the most important things that we could all try and focus on. And one of the things that can help sleep… is physical activity during the day and getting daylight into your eyeballs at a particular time of the morning. So our eyes are receptors to our brain and they deliver a message to the brain to an area called the SCN, which is the Charismatic nuclei, central nuclei, and then that delivers a stream of messages down to our body and it gets our hormone cascade going and that sets you up for the day, which in turn sets you up for the night that’s coming up and your sleep that’s coming up. We human beings are synced to the daylight cycle, so we need to see it, we need to connect with it, we need to absorb it into our eyeballs, our bodies, and that’s how our circadian rhythms, our biological rhythms, that’s how they operate and that’s how they work and to do that you need to be outside. So that was another thing that was like, right, okay, there’s another link back to nature, that’s the sleep element. Walking, walking improves your memory, it can stave off chronic disease, it pumps things called BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor into your body and into your brain, it’s kind of like fish food for the brain and the more you walk, the more benefits you get. So two minutes of walking will offset you sitting at a desk for 30 minutes, 15 minutes will raise your heart rate and help you decrease your blood pressure and so it goes on. You can go to 60 minutes, 90 minutes, two hours and there are all these benefits which range from fighting off cancer, boosting your immune system, holding off the sugary cravings, managing your weight, all of this stuff. So again, back to the walking, back to being outside and the book just covers all of these things beautifully and it’s as I learned them and of course I innately knew a lot of this stuff, I’ve always been a walker, my dad took me walking in the Peak District from a very, very early age but there are other things like breath work, breathing, again something that we all do, we all take about between 20 and 25,000 breaths a day but most of us do it wrong and that might seem a bit implausible but we tend to overbreathe, we tend to breathe through our mouths and these two things have a profound impact on our health because if you’re overbreathing then you’re probably putting your body into a stressful situation for most of the day and if your body is in that sympathetic nervous system state then that stress is not good, it’s good to have little stresses in our life, it’s good to have peaks and troughs and stresses can be good like cold water swimming could be good, taking a cold shower could be good, exercising is a stressor but being stressed all the time is not good and if you’re breathing quickly and your body thinks that you’re stressed, You’re in this high anxiety state all the time, and that means your cortisol levels will rise. cortisol is a very useful hormone, but it’s not something you want surging through your body all the time because it could be damaging if it’s there all the time. So breath work is something else that we can access for our health. And again, I learned this when I started really looking at my health. And I realized I wasn’t sleeping properly. I was over breathing. I breathe through my mouth. Well, I used to. Now I’m a nasal breather. And the advantages of nasal breathing are you increase nitric oxide to the body, you reduce that stress response, you purify the air, and you actually get more oxygen inside you as well. So there are multiple benefits to breathing properly and breathing through your nose.

Julia Bradbury
there are multiple benefits to having a breath work practice, a daily breath work practice, which is you can calm your system down and get yourself ready for stressful situations or the day ahead, or maybe you’ve had a fight and you need to relax and get yourself back into a steady state. Breath work can do that, as can walking and other forms of exercise as well. So I just learned all these fascinating things during the research of the book. And I was like, right, okay, I’m going to reset my life. I’m going to focus on sleep. I’m going to have a sleep hygiene routine. I’m going to do breath work regularly. I’m going to learn to meditate properly. And one of the biggest changes in my life was from a nutritional point of view, I cut out the sugar and I cut out the alcohol. And I had a lot of alcohol in my body and in my life. And I had a lot of sugar, probably more sugar than alcohol, I would say. I was very, very addicted to sugar. So I revisited my diet and I didn’t snack anymore. I only eat at regular meal times. I eat either two or three times a day. I stop eating before I go to bed, two or three hours before I go to bed. I intermittent fast overnight and I eat good nourishing whole foods. Gone are the chocolate bars. Gone are the crisps and the biscuits and the brownies and the donuts and the popcorn with Maltesers poured into it. All of that has stopped. And my treats now are blueberries and lovely yogurt and dark chocolate has become my new favorite best friend.

Robin Daly
That’s fantastic. Well, that’s a good taster of the sort of goldmine of information that’s in this walking book, there’s a lot in there.

Julia Bradbury
Interestingly, it’s a bestseller, but interestingly, it became a bestseller across many different genres, but including the health and wellbeing section, so that’s how it’s been received as well.

Robin Daly
Okay, great. Anyway, I’m just thinking while you’re talking how interesting it is, the way that, you know, kind of common sense stuff, which you say you inherently sort of knew deep down all along has now got all the science behind it as well. And so you’re talking about actually, we know how these things work. We know that these things, it’s not just made up that old wives’ tales, this stuff does really matter to our health and wellbeing. And we’re likely to suffer if we try and ignore it.

Julia Bradbury
Definitely. And it’s also encouraging that ancestral wisdom has a very significant place at the table. There are a lot of these things, breath work, for example, I explore the history of breath work in Walk Yourself Happy, and it dates back thousands of years through multiple cultures. there are even some tribes that don’t smile when they meet people because they want to keep their mouth closed all the time. they stand over their young babies, their infants at night, they stand over them and they hold their lips closed if they open their mouths at night because they believe it’s so important to breathe through the nose that this is adopted and encouraged at a very, very early age. So there’s a lot of that. I mean, I talk about the Greeks quite a lot because my great grandparents are Greek and they moved over to the UK 120 years ago from an island called Chios. So I love to bring in a Greek tale about a Greek legend or a Greek word that resonates. They’ve been very, the Greeks have given the English language an awful lot in terms of its etymology. the Greeks also had walking schools, the peripatatic school of philosophy. So all of these ancient wisdoms as well, it’s lovely that we can back these up with the science as well, because people go, oh, well, that was thousands of years ago. Why is it relevant in the 21st century? all of these things are relevant in the 21st century because we have made astonishing leaps towards a lifestyle that our bodies simply do not understand and that we have not adapted to yet. Over the course of thousands of years, we’ve lived outdoor lifestyles. We’ve been mobile, we’ve walked, we’ve camped, we’ve lived in tribes, we’ve squatted. now in the last 50 to 100 years, we’re sedentary, we sit at screens, we eat all day, highly processed food, lots of sugar, we drink, and yet we seem to be obsessed with screens and not interaction with each other and social fitness, as it’s called. And that’s all happened almost overnight. If you’re looking in sort of geological, a geological time, it’s not even a pinprick in the timeline of evolution. So of course we haven’t adapted to these lifestyles. And that will be why you see this incredible rise in chronic illnesses, obesity, type two diabetes, cancers. It’s predicted that cancer rates are going to rise by 70% by 2050. That’s the World Health Organization.

Robin Daly
there’s one thing that changes people’s lives is a diagnosis of cancer. And over the years, I’ve met scores of people who claim it’s the best thing that ever happened to them, funnily enough. And I think maybe you’re one of them, but let’s see. In most instances, you could describe the effects that they experienced as waking up, waking up to the beauty and the preciousness of every aspect of their life. As I said at the outset, I reckon most people would think of viewers naturally a lot more awake than most. But nonetheless, do you think that having cancer fundamentally affects your relationship to life? And if so, in what way?

Julia Bradbury
there’s quite a controversial line in the book where I openly admit that cancer saved my life. I genuinely concur with the comments that you’ve said about previous guests you’ve had on the show, that it does, of course, heighten your awareness about the preciousness of life. I’m the mother of young children as well. I have twin girls who are just about to turn nine and I have a son who’s 12. not yet teenagers, so I still count them as and I very, very much want to be here for them. And that’s my driving motivation and my driving force. As I know, it is for almost any parent that is struck with a cancer diagnosis. It’s the first thing that I feared when I was told I had cancer was, I need to see my children grow up. I want to see my children grow up. they are a massive motivation, but I’m also, I’m very excited by all of the new information that I’ve learned and I’m very excited by what’s out there in terms of the science of prevention of chronic diseases and early screening and diagnosis and where we’re at. And that’s an interesting place for me, not just about cancer, but about health and about health span. There’s been an awful lot of science and studies into the beneficial effects of exercise now as well, not just walking, but generally exercise. And there’s a great doctor in America called Dr. Peter Attire, whose podcast I listen to all the time called The Drive. And he deep dives into all sorts of different medical topics, including he’s obsessed with exercise himself. So he includes that a lot. paraphrasing, he basically said the number one thing that we can all do to increase our life span and ensure that we have a healthier old age is to exercise. It’s sort of a no brainer. If there’s one thing that you can do because you know you want to live a longer and healthier life, then you need to be serious about your exercise. that means really looking at who you are, how that works for you, how you can genuinely make it work into your life. And I think adopting good habits is another really interesting topic because it’s hard. It’s hard to get into good habits. You have to build it into your lifestyle. You have to know that in my opinion, that’s why diets don’t work. If losing weight is their goal. I don’t know the statistic off the top of my head, but it’s very common that people lose weight on a particular diet, and then they regain the weight again. And more. And more within a year or within a particular time, let’s say five years to be safe. I think the reason for that is if you’re on an extreme diet that doesn’t work with your life and you’re not fully invested in, if it’s only about losing weight, then I think it’s no surprise that you’ll put the weight back on because it’s got to work with you. And there has to be a certain amount of willpower that you can adopt. so you need to find your motivators and you need to know that this is something that really, really works for you. It’s taken me a good two years and I’m still tinkering and tweaking and I will continue to.

Julia Bradbury
The more that I learn and the more that I learn about myself and the more that I learn about food, the more I will continue to tweak. And I definitely have made mistakes along the way, but I don’t believe that I’ve made a mistake with cutting out alcohol and cutting out sugar because both of those things are incredibly damaging to human beings. Alcohol is ethanol. Whichever way you cut it, it’s a compound that is chemically damaging to human beings. The World Health Organization again describe it as a carcinogen. So it doesn’t matter what flavour, what shape, what cost, whether it’s a good wine or a champagne or a spirit or a vodka, whatever it is, it’s damaging to humans. That unfortunately is the truth. So when you drink alcohol, just know that. It’s a risk factor. Now, for me, it increases my chance of reoccurrence by something like 28%. That’s way too high a risk for me to adopt and it’s a massive motivator for me. Sugar leads to all sorts of complications. It’s not just weight gain that it can do, weight gain in itself and I’m not being fattest. The science is out there. You can go onto any cancer website and it will tell you that unfortunately fatty tissue is linked to an increased risk of all sorts of cancers. It’s the way that the fatty tissue operates and moves, which is why there is always this link between obesity and cancer. And again, please don’t shoot the messenger. Go onto all sorts of other websites to verify this. But sugar causes all sorts of other things as well. One of them being inflammation. It makes your blood sticky. It makes things tougher for your liver, which of course is a main detox organ. So if you’ve got sticky blood and a liver that’s not functioning well, basically you’re going to start to see a long term impact if you are like me and you’re addicted to sugar as I was. it’s something that’s in your life every day and it’s a constant and you’re eating over the recommended daily allowance, which is, I think it’s, is it 10 grams a day? And there are many doctors who would disagree with that and say, that’s way too much. Way too much. Yeah. You know, that it should be under five if that, but if it’s a constant, then you are nudging at inflammation and insulin resistance all the time. And that’s why it’s not uncommon to suddenly, and I’ve got little quotation marks, I had to suddenly get a type two diabetes diagnosis in your fifties and sixties. It’s not sudden. It’s something that has built up over a number of years, unfortunately. I think I caused quite a lot of damage to myself with my, with my sugar addiction. And I’m just grateful that I’ve managed to change my taste buds. And I would say to people as words of encouragement, you can do it. It is possible. I really do find that, that I get that sweet hit that I used to get with all sorts of other sugary things. I get it from my blueberries. I get it from my blackberries. I get it from my dark chocolate. I really do. And changing what I eat in the morning has changed the way you know, my cravings and what I want in the afternoon. You can tinker with your diet and really, really make a difference.

Robin Daly
I saw the documentary you produced, Breast Cancer and Me, about your diagnosis and treatment. And I was thinking people who haven’t been there, they tend to have little idea what an absolutely intense roller coaster ride cancer really is. if they’re unlucky enough to find themselves on that ride, generally, they feel hugely isolated by the lack of understanding that surrounds them. So I found your films really impactful and compelling. I got the impression that you were determined to use your relationship with the wider public to find a new way to cross that gap. Is that true? can you tell us a little bit about the challenges of making the documentary and the feedback that came from it?

Julia Bradbury
first of all, I must give credit to the production company 2.4, who I work with regularly. And although I was co-developed, they were the producers of the of the documentary. And a very good friend of mine called Rachel’s in his Lumsden was the executive producer. And the reason why that’s important to mention is that it was a safe environment for me. when I first when we first discussed doing a documentary, Rachel was brilliant. I said, look, I will be your friend and your executive producer throughout this. And if ever I think that there’s a moment that this is not working for you from a health point of view, and I think it’s it’s going to be damaging, then we’ll pull the plug and that I will be overseeing that. Right. that was really important. Yes, you’re right. I wanted to be able to reach as big an audience as possible with several messages about cancer. I also wasn’t frightened to show how frightened I was by the diagnosis. And for those people who don’t know, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. It was a lump that I had discovered, but was initially dismissed as being benign microcysts. eventually it was accidentally discovered a year and a half later through an ultrasound. It was missed by mammogram because I have something called dense breasts. And I should talk about dense breasts because dense breasts are very common in women. 30 to 40 percent of women have dense breasts. It’s nothing to do with how they look, the size, the shape is to do with the the density of the tissue of your breasts. And the reason why it’s important to know and by the way, you’re not informed when you go from mammogram in this country, which I think is a mistake and I’m trying to change it and campaign for it to for it to be changed. If you’ve got dense breasts and you don’t know about it, when you go for your mammogram, it’s very difficult to see cancer in a dense breast landscape because the cancer shows up as white in the mammogram. The image and your breasts, your dense breasts tissue is very white. So the best way to describe it as it was described to me is it’s like looking for a snowball in a snowstorm. I have dense breasts. So it was missed twice, three times. And eventually it was discovered by ultrasound. It was a tiny little pinprick that my consultant, Mr. Guy found and he discovered it. So I’m very fortunate because it might have continued to go missed. And who knows what that situation could have led to. We probably wouldn’t be sitting here now. Right. So I wanted to be able to talk about these kinds of issues and I also wanted that some you expect whenever you make a television program about anything, you always expect a bit of pushback because that’s what being in the public eye is about. Yeah. So some of the negative comments were, oh, well, why does she think she’s she’s special? You know, she’s just a celebrity and and she’s got breast cancer just like thousands of other women. Why is she special?

Julia Bradbury
Why is it special because she’s got breast cancer. and trust me I don’t think that in any way. But what I do know from the response, the overwhelming response I had as soon as I went public with my diagnosis in the press and subsequently from the documentary. What I do know is the fact that I went on national television and I showed my fear of the diagnosis and I showed how frightened I was to have a mastectomy and I cried openly. And I explained what this whole process was and how it was affecting me and my family genuinely thousands of people got in touch about sharing their feelings to say. Thank you. Thank you for validating my own feelings. Thank you for giving me something. I could show my family and my friends to help them explain how I was feeling because you did it and you showed that. And that’s why I did it. And I also did it to talk about the science that’s out there. So I did something I underwent a test with Professor Gareth Evans in the documentary called a SNPs test, a single nucleotide polymorphism. Yes, a SNP. this test is a sort of a genetic test that looks at fragments of your DNA. And if it’s pre a cancer diagnosis, it can it can give you an indication of your risk of certain cancers that you can do a breast cancer one, you can do a prostate cancer one, you can do various other ones. So I did this SNPs test after my mastectomy, and Professor Garris Evans was overseeing it, and this is part of his life’s work. He’s a prolific cancer campaigner or SNPs campaigner for this test. And what it showed was I, post my operation, I’m at a slightly above-average risk of a reoccurrence. the average woman in my position would stand, her risk of reoccurrence would stand at 10%, and my risk of reoccurrence stands at 13%. So in the one hand, it’s not very much, it’s between 10 and 13. In the other hand, if you’re just looking at the sum of 10%, it’s threefold. So it’s significant, but it doesn’t put me in a high-risk category, so that informed me again about lifestyle choices. I’m at a slightly higher risk, so I would, for me, again, that taught me that I need to be, for me, it was about being more vigilant. So if alcohol’s a risk, alcohol goes. Not exercising regularly is a risk, I exercise regularly. If building muscle mass is important, I build muscle mass. If regular meditation and maintaining my mental health is important in reducing my stress, I will learn how to do that. I will focus on that. So it really helped me and pointed me in the right direction. Now, if this test was available on the NHS, which is not, and we’d like it to be, had I had that test done in my 20s or 30s, then when I had discovered my lump in my 40s and the prognosis came back, oh, they’re benign microcysts, they’re nothing to worry about, I could have fallen back to that information and said, hey, I had this test done, and actually, I’m at a slightly elevated risk of breast cancer. Is there anything else we can do to confirm? Are you absolutely happy? Are we sure that these are benign microcysts?

Julia Bradbury
Is there something else we can do to triple check, double check? So I might have discovered my lump much, much earlier when it was much smaller, and maybe I wouldn’t have had to have had a mastectomy. Maybe I could have had a lumpectomy, or maybe, I don’t know, in the future, there might be some other form of treatment that I could have if it’s such an early detection. One thing that we do know about cancer, and it’s still a very pernicious, clever, impossible, in some ways, disease. It’s very unpredictable, and doctors are still scratching their heads. There is no one silver bullet cure, that’s for certain, I would think. But one thing we do know about it is the earlier the diagnosis, the better the outcome for the patient. So screening and using all of this new technology that’s available for screening, that is going to become the key player in the fight against cancer in the next five to 10 years, undoubtedly.

Robin Daly
it’s a very important element. If you were right, information is king and you would have been looking at it very differently. Obviously, there’s this thing which longs for somebody to tell you, oh, if only, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. But if you’re better informed, then maybe that won’t land so welcomely and you’ll just hold a suspicion that it needs a better check.

Julia Bradbury
Yes, exactly. And it’s something that you hold with you and you know, and it might even impact your lifestyle choices. It could be something that you, so we know that smoking increases your chance of risk cancer. We know that drinking regularly, sorry, a cancer, not just breast cancer. We know that drinking is a risk factor. We know that carrying a lot of extra weight is a risk factor. If you know all of those things and if you knew all of those things and you knew that you were at a higher risk, would you make adaptations? Absolutely. Possibly. Maybe not. And I completely understand some people who just say, you know what, I don’t want to know this. For me, that would be horrifying. I just want to carry on. I kind of get that as well, but it’s more difficult for me with my personality to understand that.

Robin Daly
So I noticed in the documentary that immediately after you come through the surgery, you dived straight into researching what you could do to prevent your occurrence. And top of your bedside reading pile, I spot, it was Dr. Nathan Winters, the metabolic approach to cancer, along with a few other classics, Dr. William Lee, David Servinshrybe, et cetera. So not everybody has this sort of proactive approach, the health. Some of them think, I’ll leave it to the medics, you know, or even to luck, would you believe? But anyway, you clearly looked right outside the box for conventional thinking. You just want to know what’s out there. Yeah. So in a nutshell, what have you found? I obviously found lots of stuff, but just to summarize what you found, what would you say?

Julia Bradbury
Well, I’ve been working a lot with Dr. Nasha Winters and it’s not that I’m a regular personal client of hers, but she has looked at my bloods and she’s looked at some of the DNA tests that I’ve done and she’s examined me, if you like, she’s examined my case and what’s really interesting I think about Nasha’s approach is that it’s not one thing, she looks at everything. She’s looking at you, your emotional health, your body, your terrain, as she calls it, the cancer, the type of cancer, in the case of breast cancer, left side and right side, there’s an implication for that as well. She works a lot with mistletoe, which is an emerging treatment and there’s a doctor in the UK called Dr. Elizabeth Thompson. She’s very much an advocate of mistletoe as well as a form of treatment. But Nasha, as I say, she looked at the DNA, so she looks at what foods work for you, how you metabolise certain things. I can give a couple of examples where, because these just sound like grand sweeping statements, but I have found out, for example, that I’m missing a couple of copies of the genes that protect your stomach lining. you have a stomach lining that protects when you eat something, the food and everything you eat bleaches into your bloodstream and I don’t have that thin, I don’t have that, so I’m missing both copies of the gene. So therefore, eating a clean diet is very important to me, not drinking alcohol is very important to me and always has been, which I didn’t know that before. there’ll be certain foods that might be more disruptive to the gut lining, so maybe things that are very lectin heavy, so beans and pulses and things like that. So that’s given me a real pointer in terms of stuff that I should and can avoid in terms of my diet and how I can lead a clean lifestyle. I detox by exercising regularly, I do lymph massages, I take regular infrared saunas, as well as other regular saunas. So I really work on detoxing myself, because I know that that’s an issue for me. Interestingly, I also don’t metabolize for hydroxy, which is the not so good oestrogen. I’ve been oestrogen dominant all my life and that’s shown itself in the form of endometriosis. I didn’t realise that endometriosis was a sign of being oestrogen positive. And the fact that I had a hormone positive, sorry, oestrogen dominant, and the fact that I had a hormone positive cancer plays into all of this information. So again, what can I do? Are there foods that I can eat? And are there certain lifestyle things that I can adopt that are going to help me? How do I manage that oestrogen load? And there are things that you can do. And that’s the kind of information that nature looks at. And then she looks at your emotional health. How are you? Stress? Have you been stressed? Do you lead a stressful life? Are there any big stresses in your life that could have been part of this diagnosis? I have a friend who’s going through breast cancer right now, and she’s going through treatment, and she has a very conventional doctor, and she’s going through radiation, and she went to see him.

Julia Bradbury
he said to her, he’s not part of the new vanguard, I would say, he said, I want you to avoid stress. Stress is a really big player in cancer. you’ve got to try and manage your stress. So there’s information out there now that stress plays a role. we know that stress plays a role because having cortisol, it goes back to what we were talking about, having cortisol surging through your body all the time, that’s damaging. And if you then weaken your immune system, or you’re damaging your body in some way, that’s when you’re letting chinks in your armour. And then that’s why certain chronic illnesses can take hold, like a cancer.

Robin Daly
in summary, you’ve found a lot outside the box, which is informing you in how you’re going to keep yourself well.

Julia Bradbury
Yes, very much so. And I continue to learn. And I work with a nutritionist called Pauline Cox. She’s brilliant. She’s an integrative nutritionist, highly qualified. She has a master’s, and she’s very, very interested in this topic, in this area of cancer and nutrition as well. I want to talk about a doctor, a UK doctor. Yes, Professor Thomas. So Professor Robert Thomas, listeners might be familiar with him. He wrote the brilliant book, How to Live. He’s a real advocate for cancer patients having a team. So you have a nutritionist, you have a physio, you have an oncologist. You’ve got a squad of people who are looking at all aspects of you as a patient. it’s not just, all right, well, it’s chemo today, chemotherapy, lots of very interesting research and quite convincing data about microbiome, gut health, and effective chemo. In summary, having a healthy gut microbiome can help enormously if you’re having chemotherapy. It can really improve outcomes. Now, a lot of the time, the focus of chemotherapy is just keep the weight on. Have as much sugar as you want. You know, take the drink, the sugary drink, eat stuff, just keep the weight on. Well, I’m going to say it’s not just about keeping the weight on. It’s about being healthy, yes, but there are ways to keep weight on. There are good foods that you can take on that are full of good fats that can help with your weight management. But how’s your microbiome doing? How’s the good bacteria and the bad bacteria doing? And you want that to be as healthy as possible. There are some studies to do with immunotherapy. Immunotherapy, I think, is only successful in about 20% of people, and they’re trying to work out why that is the case. And I know that one study, and this is not to say this is the answer, but it’s interesting that this is out there. In one study, it showed that the people who had a gut bacteria called acromancia in their gut, those people seem to be more susceptible to immunotherapy than those that don’t have acromancia. So that’s one bacteria in the gut microbiome. Is that the full answer? I’m sure it isn’t. As I said before, I don’t think there is this one answer to cancer, but we know that gut health is so important for so much of our own health now, not just in a cancer situation. Having a healthy gut microbiome means better mood. It improves your brain. Serotonin is produced in the gut. That’s your mood hormone. That’s increasing your mood. So, you know, good gut, which then goes back to eating well. So it all circles back to eating well, moving well, sleeping well, protecting your immune system, taking the best possible care of yourself.

Robin Daly
Amazing. So, good lifestyle. Super important. we’re out of time. There’s plenty more I could talk about. I’d love to go into the whole thing with nature most more. But anyway, there we are. It’s been fabulous to have you on the show, and I exhort everybody to get out there and buy your new book, Walk Yourself Happy. It’s full of all sorts of stuff. It’s a tour de force in terms of lifestyle, really. So, you know, you cover pretty much all the bases in there.

Julia Bradbury
Thank you very much. also for people to go to theoutdoorguide.co.uk, which is the outdoor website I run with my sister Gina. we’ve got some Walk Yourself Happy retreats on the horizon as well in very, very lovely locations with many of the experts from the book, including me, where we will be walking and working ourselves happy. there’s just one more thing that I want to mention because I know that some of your listeners are very interested in what’s out there from a cancer perspective in terms of treatment and screening. I’m actually just in the process of undergoing a really fascinating screening process by a company called Datar testing. it’s a blood biopsy that’s incredibly accurate, and it can detect whether or not you still have circulating cancer cells in your blood. And blood biopsies are things to watch in the future, fiendishly expensive right , but they will become mainstream. they will be part of the fight against, well, a part of the prevention arsenal, I think, is how they will be used. But they’re a very avant-garde group and brilliant. it’s been fascinating learning more and working with them as well. So I just wanted to give them a shout out.

Robin Daly
stuff to wise up about if you want to really make the most of your help. Very good, thank you.

Julia Bradbury
very much indeed. Robin thank you very much it’s been great to chat to you thanks for having me on today and say yes to life everyone!

Robin Daly
Julia is a force and I am delighted to say she is weighing in on the movement to make integrated medicine available to all those with cancer. Her book Walk Yourself Happy is an inspiring read and I will provide you with all the reasons you need to give lifestyle the attention it deserves. And do check out theoutdoorguide.co.uk if you fancy engaging directly with some mud on a Walk Yourself Happy retreat. Thanks for listening. Do make a point of joining me again next week if you can for another Yes To Life show. Goodbye.