She works very closely with Dr. Nasha Winters, and a big part of their message is that it's really about changing your entire lifestyle to lower your risk of cancer progression. And it's such an interesting topic and we also talk a little bit about evidence because, when you're talking about something like this, you're clearly outside of conventional evidence. And what does that mean?
Well, what does that mean for somebody with no diagnosed disease but just wants to be healthy and prevent cancer versus someone who's been given this life-threatening stage 4 cancer diagnosis? It means two completely different things, so we talk about that a bit and hopefully you'll see that there's a definite difference.
So, when somebody's listening to this, saying "well, how does this apply to me?", well, we all are going to have a friend or family member or loved one diagnosed with cancer and a large percentage of us individually will be diagnosed with cancer. So, whether we're talking about prevention or whether we're talking about treatment, this is going to hit many of us.
So, hopefully you'll appreciate the message and understand the nuances depending on who you are and how this applies to you. So, I hope you enjoy this interview and understand that this is a remarkable story and enjoy the story of Allison Gannett. Alison Gannett, thanks so much for joining me on the Diet Doctor Podcast.
And the other thing is I was a real dorky kind of overweight math geek as a kid, and I think it was just an overcompensation to like go in a whole other direction. And so, now I'm kind of like more in the middle and in probably a better place, little less extreme.
Bret:Nerdy math geeks don't jump off cliffs this high. Unsure where they're going to land. Alison: But it was a really, you know, it might have damaged my health quite a bit, but I think, you know, it was a great way to see the world and get paid for it.
But it wasn't enough at first to be like, "oh, something's really wrong.". There was one day that I was cooking bacon and I was watching the flames like go up the wall and my husband walked in and was like, "what are you doing?"
A lack of caring about things.
So, what I thought was healthy, I clearly was not. And, you know, starting with blood sugar imbalance, that was a big whammy and I had some bad genetics in there, I had a leaky gut, I had immune system disruption, I had a lot of inflammation, I had thyroid problems, I was an over-exerciser, I was an over-stressor, you know... the list goes on and on. So, basically everything I studied in college for nutrition turned out to be wrong. That's the long and the short of it. That's why we're here talking.
And when we ran the genetic test, I basically don't process drugs, like chemo drugs, very well, and nor would I be a very good candidate for radiation due to steroids raising blood sugar and me having a blood sugar problem. So, since the outcomes were not good for standard of care for me and my DNA was not pushing me in that direction, I chose to not do that and just look at the underlying causes instead.
And I, a lot of people, you know, say, well, you know, that's easy. But underlying causes are hard, you know, changing behavior is hard. And I had to change my whole life and diet was just the start.
But, you know, Dr. Nasha's going to look at do you have a thyroid problem, are you... potentially have some virus or do you have an immune system problem or a leaky gut or, you know, she's going to go through all of those things.
So, they create energy as if there's no oxygen available even when there's tons of oxygen, and so, it's a disordered metabolism of the mitochondria and the way the cell functions. And it primarily utilizes glucose and can't use other forms of energy really besides glucose. So, the simplistic model is ketogenic diet, you lower glucose, you use ketones for fuel, and you starve the cancer. And while based in truth, it's not quite so black and white, is it?
And so, a lot of times we see, when we put people on the ketogenic diet, and we can talk about this too, there's no one ketogenic diet, there's no one cancer diet. Every single person should be on a specific diet for their DNA and for their labs and for their history. And there's a lot of misinformation out there between also what I call internet keto and therapeutic keto. They're very, very different things.
And then even bigger problem is how is insulin, fasting insulin, because really, the bigger issue is insulin. And, you know, we also look at, you know, fasting glucose, IGF1, all these different blood sugar markers, you can't just like pick one. What Dr. Nasha has taught me is to look for patterns. You know, a certain pattern of glucose and hormones might indicate like polycystic ovarian disease.
Or a certain pattern, you know, like if we see high thyroid antibodies, it often can mean that you're massively allergic to grains. So, there's all these like little snippets and I feel like Sherlock Holmes when I look at labs and when I look at DNA, it's just a super fun puzzle to put together, and I love that about my life, you know. I am learning more about my body every day and it's been this continual discovery. But it really gives you power because what you feel when you're diagnosed is just complete disempowerment.
Or I can tell when I've exercised too much, I did a ski trip last February and, you know, went and had a ball and everybody said well, if you're doing what you love, it doesn't matter. Well, it did matter. My labs took a huge hit in inflammation after that ski trip, and so, you know, you learn what your body can tolerate and what it can't.
You know, you've got to have all these factors, you know, Dr. Nasha calls them her 10 different things- the 10 different root causes of cancer. You know, if my thyroid goes off, that's not going to give me cancer, but that combined with over exercise and inflammation and high blood sugar and a virus, all those things together are going to cause the perfect storm.
Well, my whole goal with therapeutic keto is how do I get five to nine cups of vegetables into 20 grams of carbs... total carbs a day. And that's a real challenge to do that. And then I use cronometer to track my foods and my clients' foods because it's about getting the right quality of the foods but also the quantity of the macros. For therapeutic keto, we're aiming for 85% fat, 5% carbs, 10% protein.
So, it's very low protein relatively speaking. A lot of people overeat protein, overeat carbs and under eat fat. So, I find a lot of people trying to do therapeutic keto have kind of- their body's burning glucose one moment, and then it's burning fat, and then it's burning glucose; it's not quite sure where to be. it's kind of doing both. And for therapeutic keto to manage disease or insulin resistance, your body needs to be continually in that fat-burning mode. You can't be yo-yoing back and forth.
Then, I'm going to cook my protein in a different keto fat and then put that on top and then maybe I'd put some organic pork rinds on top of that, so that's four different fats. And then for dessert, I'd probably have like one of my homemade life by chocolate brownies, so that's six fats that we're at, I don't know.
So, it's like layer upon layer of fat and really trying to mix up the vegetables. A lot of people eat the same thing every day and I think of food as medicine. So, you know, if I can get 20 different kinds of salad greens in that salads, you know, then I'm getting 50 plus antioxidants and polyphenols, if not more.
And so, we're really trying to have a lot of different types of vegetables, a lot of different types of fats, and a lot of different types of proteins that are really, really high quality, grass-fed, grass-finished, using ewg.org to find fish that's safe to eat, making sure my eggs are pastured.
So it's really important what your food eats and as a farmer, you know, I raise animals and so I know, you know, from an ethical standpoint, I think it's really important to do those things for the animals and for myself and you know, the animal deserves the best. It's...what...I think someone did a study and I can't remember who calculated it. Because the amounts of proteins are fairly low, and the overall... your overall food intake actually goes down even though your amount of calories might even go up. They actually say that you save money on a ketogenic diet even buying the best of the best because of that issue.
So, now my eating window is quite small, I buy the best of the best, you know you're eating very small amounts of proteins, that's like less than the size of a deck of cards. So, like if I bought- when I was at my mom's, she was like isn't that grass-fed steak expensive? Well, we bought one, it was $18,99 a pound but we got two meals for two of us out of that one steak.
Whereas before, you know, the model of America is like you plunk this giant steak on your plate. So, it was only a couple bucks to have that grass-fed steak on our plate and then tons and tons of local vegetables. You know, the local greens especially. You're not paying a lot more for local organic greens than you are for conventional.
And so, I pick a big basket of greens that are for stir fry, for cooking and then I pick another big basket of- for salads. And so, you can ask your farmers that grow in the winter, you know, do you grow chemical free, do you grow all winter long... can you make me a seasonal mix of cooking and a seasonal mix of salad greens?
So, you're benefiting - these farmers don't make any money, you know, we lose money farming. So, you're supporting a local person and you're getting stuff that's so fresh. I think, you know, when you buy those big bags of organic greens at Costco, I mean, they're probably three or four weeks old, they're probably sprayed with some kind of chemical to keep them green, you know.
So, then I'm going to customize the cronometer so that the protein level is a bit higher and we'll retest and see if it works. I see a lot more people on the other end with protein being too high. Because glutamate and glutamine can feed the cancering process, and so if you overeat meat, you can have too many cancer growth factors and we also have the fact of gluconeogenesis of protein being converted to sugar. About 30% of the protein can convert to sugar, so we don't want to overeat protein for two reasons.
A tumor will also create high calcium, it will create high ferritin, it will create high growth factors, it wants to create, you know, think of it like if we're decorating this room, and we're, the cancer cell's decorating its room so it can be the happiest it can be.
And on the one hand that makes sense because if you're treating people who are healthy and there's a potential risk of what you are doing, you want evidence to know that it is successful. If you're treating people who are at a desperate stage, you have no other options, then evidence becomes a little less important.
And so, I want people to understand there's sort of a difference in how we would approach somebody. And if all we did was practice what there's evidence for, it slows the growth of progression. So, there's a little balance there. So, what you're talking about, there's clearly no long-term scientific evidence to support it but there is some clinical experience that is gaining momentum. So, how would you characterize the strength of evidence that a program like this works?
So, a lot of the evidence- for example they might say a ketogenic diet raised inflammation and then I look at it and they used canola oil. Well, canola oil is going to raise inflammation for everybody. So, you have to really dig to see what the studies are that you're looking at. And then, yes, a lot of the information that I get, is anecdotally through myself and my clients, watching someone like myself given a terminal diagnosis. And you know, and if I had to go back and like redo my whole life and say I never had cancer, I actually wouldn't want that because cancer had me find keto.
And keto, being therapeutic diet that I had been put on along with all the other things we talked about, you know, the hormones and the viruses and all that stuff, I have reversed my hashimoto's thyroiditis, I've reversed my breast fibroids, which they considered to be pretty cancerous, my polycystic ovarian disease has gone away, my- I had really bad like yeast infections and urinary tract infections almost annually, practically pneumonia from like lung infections and I had really bad seasonal allergies that went away, and all my arthritis, even with my eight knee surgeries from jumping off of cliffs-
And so, I had like a little like thyroid bump in September and so I was like okay, what's this trying to teach me. And I realized I was working too much, and that there was too much stress in my life and that I had been ignoring that I had a DNA mutation that said I couldn't process lactose. I thought, I'll have a bit of grass-fed cheese, it's local and really, really clean.
Well, that wasn't the case, you now. My DNA, once I finally did get rid of dairy, even though I had no symptoms of having a dairy inability to process. I then had a bite of goat cheese maybe two months after I had gotten rid of it and I literally got so, so sick.
If you're allergic to something, you could also see elevated monocytes if you're allergic to something and you can see an immune system imbalance where your neutrophils and your lymphocytes can be off as well.
That's really different than whether you have like the BRCA gene a lot. And a lot of people confuse the two, because the BRCA gene is going to have some underlying genes like CYP1a1 or 1b1, inability to process estrogen. BRCA genes also...usually- people usually have CYP2d6 or 2c9 inability to process toxins. BRCA people also generally have ESR genes.
So, there's like all these genes underneath that kind of make up our whole body, and then there's like gene tests that are more like tumor tests, I guess is what I would call them. I'm sure there's a better scientific word for it than that.
But you know, often the inability to process dioxins, you know, like unbleached tampons, things like that, unbleached paper - or bleached- sorry, I should say bleached tampons, bleached paper towels. All those are dioxins and BRCA gene has an inability to process dioxins.
And so, if you know those things- and that's the next thing I want to bring up is a lot of people are afraid to get a genetic test like the nutrition genome - and I use nutrition genome because I feel that it tests for more genes than 23andMe. 23andMe is missing a whole bunch of key genes that I really like to look at. So, let's say for example, they call the gene that I have - the APOE 4 - they call it the Alzheimer's gene.
And so, then people are like, I don't want to do that, I don't want to find out if I have that predisposition for Alzheimer's. Well, what they don't know about that gene is one... every single gene I test positive for, there's a workaround. So, I have APOE 4, the "Alzheimer's gene" means that I am much better at fasting than other people, it was preferred in Palaeolithic times and it was probably bred for because we lived through periods of sustained lack of food.
And so, adding fasting in helps clear my triglycerides that accumulate due to the fact that I have APOE 4. I've also switched the types of fats that I eat to help lower my triglycerides because of APOE 4. And then the biggest thing with APOE 4 is that we're very, very sensitive to sugar.
So, you know, here, we call Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes of the brain. So, APOE 4 people, like myself, are going to be really, really sensitive to sugar, which is why like, you know, if I eat cabbage I go out of ketosis. You know, that's probably due in part to that gene.
And my NMR lipid profile is fantastic because of the way I eat. So, all the things that said APOE 4 should be a problem for me- I have now-
I wonder if sometimes measuring the genes is not as important as just measuring the outcomes that you think they may lead to with certain blood tests and markers. So, how do you sort of differentiate for people who want to be as proactive as possible but just don't want to be overwhelmed and go down so many different rabbit holes?
And so, I think of our health as like peeling layers of an onion. And you just got to start with the outside layer. And you have to realize that when you get your lab test back and it says in range, that normal is in range as an average. It doesn't mean that you have the correct amount of protein or that your blood glucose is in the right range, you know. If everybody in your area has diabetes, you're going to come back as in range even if you have diabetes.
Then it's about the quality of the food. So, how can you, you know, really say that like eating really clean, really yummy food is like bad for you? You know, first do no harm. You can put anybody on a lower carb, higher fat diet and unless they have some genetic marker that's like really bizarre- I think one of the hardest ones is APOA 2, because that can only consume less than 22 grams of saturated fat a day with the current science.
And I think that's one of the biggest benefits of the gene analysis right now is before we're guessing. And we're still kind of guessing because no one really knows anything for sure, we learn something new every day. But all I can say is that in general, those gene tests have really helped myself and my clients pick better foods for our genetics.
Bret:And is that a fasting test that you do? Alison: Fasting, glucose, and yes. Well, actually, the glucose ketone ratio I can take any time of day. So all I am is taking my - when I eat a meal, my glucose doesn't go up. Not anymore, you know. I can be like 69 before the meal, if it's a really good keto meal, I can be like 75, you know, so a little there. But that's what our bodies should be.
You know, the glucose can be affected by stress or by hormones or a lot of other things, so we have to figure out why is your glucose still high. Why is your insulin high and then put that together. And then, so, ketones can be- exogenous ketones can be a problem, especially if people have high glucose and they're taking exogenous ketones. It's simulating ketoacidosis.
Like, say someone's going into surgery or they're doing radiation treatments, they need like a little bit of extra. You know, then I think it's a good application. And the other great application I think, is traumatic brain surgery. And so, if you have a TVI or let's say you get hit, let's say your kid gets hit on the football field... popping some exogenous ketones has really been shown to diminish the effects of a brain injury if they're administered within I don't know how much time, but it's like, it's a short window.
Because that's a hot topic and a controversial topic because, I guess you can say, temporary medicine focuses so much on cachexia and calories by any means, that it's okay to eat whatever you want just to keep your weight up versus some evidence and clinical experience that says a prolonged fast is going to potentiate the effects of the radiation or the chemotherapy and help you get through it. How do you... what do you recommend for people in that standpoint?
Even simple things, a lot of people use like Benadryl instead of steroids for chemo. So you know, you can get away with doing it with less toxic effects to your body, keeping your healthier cells healthy, your cancer cells weaker, you know. But in my mind, everything I put in my mouth is either making my cancer cells happier or healthier or not.
This is something a lot of people don't talk about, the healthy human body makes somewhere between 500 and 2000 cancer cells a day. So, you made them today, I made them today, you made them today. What we do is feed them or kill them.
And I think this was a great discussion and really to help differentiate the treatment versus the prevention, what people can be thinking about to maximize their chances to either cure their cancer or knock out their cancer but obviously still work with a provider, don't do this on their own.
And came back like playing with their children. And so a lot of the world - rest of the world... is kind of light years ahead of where we are, because right now in America if a doctor recommends anything other than surgery, chemo, radiation or a clinical trial, they can lose their AMA license. And so we can't even speak about this, you know, mistletoe, you know, these things that are working really well in other countries that are considered standard of care.
Transcript pdf
