In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD, sits down with Dr. Joseph Zundell to explore proactive approaches to cancer prevention.

5-things-you-can-do-today-to-prevent-cancer-ft-dr-joseph-zundell

5 Things You Can Do Today to Prevent Cancer ft. Dr. Joseph Zundell

what are the top five things that someone could do within their power to prevent cancer and we can talk about people if they had an unlimited supply of resources versus those who maybe don't I'll say this from something that everybody can do and of course this comes with educating ourselves too so actually I wrote a newsletter on this so when people sign up for my newsletter it's the first thing they receive is my top five uh cancer risk reduction uh tips the first thing that I would say is consistent and safe exercise you know doing whatever it is that you want to do for the entirety of your life adapting whatever exercise you like to do over time as you get older just being consistent about it doesn't matter what it is do it safely try to reduce prevalence of injury where you can consistent exercise can't can't get any more important than than that in terms of cancer risk reduction but that'll also reduce a a variety of different disease risks let alone cancer that's super important another one is sleep Health there's really strong positive data now to show that disregulated sleep can be carcinogenic uh in a way um by destabilizing a lot of the the metabolism that governs how our organs work together to metabolize foods and and our response to light and those sorts of things and this is circadian biology so if we chronically are are poorly sleeping it can significantly increase our risks for cancer so adopting healthy sleep behaviors is incredibly important so like going to sleep with comfortable bedding uh ensuring that the room is as dark as possible going to bed in an appropriate time frame in accordance to human physiology you know trying to get seven to 8 hours um at actual night and not you know unfortunately like shift workers as an example shift workers don't always have that privilege but you know trying to sleep in accordance to to human physiology those sorts of things just you know ensuring you're comfortable while you sleep another one is practicing sun safety sunlight of of course is is very important from a shadian biology perspective but sunlight is many different spectrums of photons and sometimes radiation so radiation and photons are kind of the same thing people often don't get that difference but um as a part of sunlight you have ultraviolet radiation now while it's not nonionizing and while it can't maybe damage you as much as x-ray radiation or gamma radiation or maybe even like alpha particle Decay if you want to get really fancy you know practicing sun safety from ultraviolet B Rays by wearing sunscreen if I'm somebody who Works outside often uh wearing sunscreen can be incredibly important if you don't want to wear sunscreen you can wear appropriate SPF related clothing but in general sunscreens are pretty safe but it's always you know these context about how to use these things and and not over applying them to you know use them the way that they're intended to be to be safe minimizing smoke and alcohol consumption obviously smoking is a carcinogen uh the same as alcohol consumption is a carcinogen now people get a little bit triggered when I say minimize because I don't I don't believe in the cold turkey approach from a human behavior perspective I would love it in the world if nobody smoked or drank because it would be great for everybody in the long run however as somebody who is a human being on this planet Earth I also enjoy the occasional alcoholic drink and I I'm not going to lie to you I've smoked the occasional cigarette or or marijuana occasionally I don't currently do those things but I still drink the occasional drink now and again but uh are carcinogens so minimizing the exposure to those things as much as possible is going to have positive health effects and if you can not do them at all great but some people like myself like the occasional drink and of course overc consumption of of those things comes with significantly increased risks that is a fact consuming a nutrient rich and diverse profile is what I often tell people as well so this is you know again an accordance to to human physiology consuming a diet um that has a lot of diverse types of vegetables and a lot of diverse types of protein sources um a lot of people get so fixated on oh I need more protein but they assume that you know meat is a really good source of protein and it is a really good source of protein but you can also get protein from Plants instead of fixating on protein in a person's diet both plant and animal sources of protein have so much more than just protein that have really good things for our health and consuming one food group versus the other whether it's meat or plant-based products can come with negative side effects so we really need to consume a diverse and nutrient-rich profile so we can get you know the fiber and the vitamins and the the minerals that come from plants and the different types of fats and different types of proteins and and things that comes from from Meats again diverse types of meats like Omega-3s are are prominent in salmon and those sorts of things beef has good source of iron for our health a lot more than plants uh in many cases and in some cases in many more more bi available those are the things uh that can help a person be healthy regarding their their diet the way that I like to talk about our immune system is that our skeletal muscle is mechanistically linked to how our immune system works so the way that our heart pumps our blood throughout our bodies Our lymphatic system doesn't have a heart to pump the fluid uh throughout our bodies and our lymphatic system contains our immune cells and so our skeletal muscle contractions drive that now even not exercising our skeletal muscles uh contracted will drive lymphatic fluid movement but obviously the more I exercise the more I maintain a healthy exercise program the greater lymphatic fluid movement I'll have and the increased likelihood I'll I'll have for my immune system to function healthy for my body um so that's how the immune system is is intrinsically linked to healthy skeletal muscle function so that's why it's really important for people to exercise just from an immune cell perspective but there's immune independent mechanism Ms about how exercise can secrete these proteins from muscle tissue to enable our organs to work together in harmony so this is called myokines so when we exercise our muscles secrete myokines and they you know they go throughout our blood they interact with you know liver cells and and um you know kidney and they kind of tell everything to to work together uh so that way we respond from an energetics perspective to shuttle glucose G and fats throughout our bodies and they can go to tissues as need be and exercise helps to stimulate that as well from a metabolic perspective great in terms of nutrition I think you mentioned some great points that people often get very nervous about one is like a lot of people are taking on the carnivore diet which means that they are not having any fiber in their diet really at all and so I as a you know physician practicing clinician know that there are strong links with fiber consumption and reduction of Choral cancer and certainly a lot of benefits from cruciferous vegetables from vegetables in general right getting flavonoids and other antioxidants that can be beneficial for a variety of things you know what is the push back against vegetables and fiber I honestly um I don't know I think it's there's this level of extremism that I'll never understand on social media just because and this isn't a jab at anybody in particular but I just I think way too much and I try and bolster my audience to think more critically about these problems because if we live in extremist camps it becomes very easy but with these extreme behavioral Tendencies you can have problems with vegans and vegetarians and and carnivores they they often live in these extremist camps and and try and ignore things like fiber um in their diet from a carnivore perspective and and it's just not in support of the evidence that we have uh at our disposal so it's a real problem because then we see you know people who have overall increased consumption of red meats in their diet relative to plants so like somebody who consumes primarily red meat in their diet and zero plants if if any uh they'll have severe health issues not even just from a fiber perspective but just because they're they're not getting a lot of the vitamins and minerals that come with uh with plant plants and uh those sorts of things I wish I knew why people attached to these camps and I guess I'm kind of happy that I don't but uh I mean again people don't like to uh consider how complex these things are they would just rather be told uh carnivore diets the best veganism is the best vegetarians the best but you know more often than not it's somewhere in the middle and uh it's it's often dependent on a person's lifestyle too there are many cultures um as you might be familiar that are primarily carnivore or primarily vegetarian and there's trade-offs that come with those decisions but you know sometimes there are societal limitations as to to what diets people can do but you know we live in the United States which is you know pretty well-developed country I'd like to think a lot of people have access to you know diverse food sources independent of you know the amount of ultr processed foods in their environment they can still if educated appropriately consume a a nutrient wrench diet even if that means consuming Ultra processed foods so that like you mentioned with my video too it's like people love to live in these camps where they just demonize cereals and dies like red 40 but realistically someone shouldn't be eating so much of those cereals in their diet that it's going to cause them severe health problems um but they can be incorporated and and often enjoyed into a person's diet they just shouldn't be sought after for nutritional reasons absolutely there's a lot of fear around sugar and cancer that Sugar feeds cancer cells and fasting on the converse you know cures cancer cells or starves them of their nutrients to then make them shrink let's talk about that this is one of those those issues in my feel that I'll never be able to escape no matter how much it frustrates me because the truth of the matter is that glucose does fuel cancer cells but so too does it fuel a majority of the other cells in your body and and organs and tissues it's just the way that cancer cells utilize glucose is different metabolically largely so trying to give people the appropriate Nuance as to how they're utilizing glucose differently than normal healthy cells and how that creates problems and in the case of cancer is a very challenging and complex thing to discuss that most do not want to sit down and spend the time to understand understand although I try um and I I do my best to try and keep it simple for people but the truth of the matter is that it's not simple these are complex metabolic and biochemical Pathways within our cells depending on where they are in our body that compete for not only glucose but other sources of fuel like amino acids and we even see cancer cells utilize amino acids as materials to to enter into different biochemical Pathways but that doesn't mean that all cancer cells all the time utilize glucose either so there's a lot of adaptations that happen with within Cancers and especially as they're developing you know if you starve them of glucose they can adopt different ways to use different fuel sources I think people fail to realize often that life is very adaptive and cancer cells at some point had all the materials that a normal healthy cell had but they just kind of became so messed up that now they kind of evolved into something different within you and so it's it's a little bit more of a parasitic relationship than it is you know you fighting you anymore and it's you know like I said it's it's very complicated so there's a lot of ongoing iCal trials to investigate how starving and and various diets like fasting and and ketogenic diets can be helpful for cancer patients but without understanding the consequences and the context of these situations we can't know how to implement these dietary strategies safely uh for cancer patients so while they might help reduce a person's cancer we have to understand all the ways that that it can help somebody uh identifying that it has more Pros than it does cons and right now there just isn't enough information so anyone that wants to claim that ketogenic diets and fasting are Curative for cancer is simply lying do you think there's value in terms of prevention with fasting you hear about people doing 5-day fasting mimicking diets or 5 day prolonged fasts like once a quarter or whatever once a year is there any value to that in the literature A lot of it comes from and and laye Norton uh my friend he he speaks about this quite often regarding caloric intake so if somebody really is trying to lose weight as an ex example um obviously obesity is linked to 13 different cancer types at this point that we know of which you know is obviously too many if if somebody is obese and they're trying to lose weight and they really latch on to these fasting diets and they're able to lose weight through those the pros outweigh the cons but again there there are unhealthy ways to go about doing these fasting and and ketogenic diets and stuff often times they're not easy to maintain so they can be good in the short term for for weight loss but overall in the long term they're not they're not great for good human health outcomes doesn't mean that somebody can't do it and I'm sure somebody will argue with me if you show this clip claiming that I'm an idiot or something I don't know anything about nutrition or whatever but uh these diets they can be helpful but again without understanding the context uh it's just it's just the diet so they can be helpful for people to reduce weight but that's pretty much it but not cancer prevention in doing so that can help reduce someone's cancer risks if it's um you know directly linked to to obesity but intrinsically no they're not they're not going to be directly reducing cancer rates yeah cuz you'll hear people say things like oh I fasted it killed all these precancerous cells in my body because I fasted you know AB yeah I mean the thing the thing here that people need to realize too is that cancer isn't just one disease right so if I do this diet and there's research to so that like fasting diets reduce coloral cancer risks right let's I don't know if that's true so don't quote me on that um because it's again not my full area of research but let's say there's a study that says fasting mimicking diets reduce prevalence of colar rectal cancer but what about all the other cancers right so there could be positive relationships between how fasting uh can be related to other types of cancers and simultaneously reduce coloral cancer risk if you like this clip from the Reena Malik MD podcast with Dr Joseph Sandell make sure you check out the full video right here

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