Cancer is the number two killer worldwide, yet most people have no idea that cancer cells have a fatal weakness that can be exploited through nutrition. In this eye-opening episode, Mark Simon, founder and director of the Nutritional Oncology Research Institute (NORI), joins Dr. Jason Bradley and James Chester to reveal over 20 years of research into what he calls the “Achilles heel” of cancer.
After losing his wife to stage 3 breast cancer following conventional treatment, Mark dedicated his life to understanding the intersection between plant-based nutrition and cancer therapy. What he discovered is revolutionary: cancer cells operate at dangerously high levels of oxidative stress due to damaged mitochondria, making them vulnerable to targeted nutritional interventions that leave healthy cells unharmed.
In this conversation, Mark breaks down the science behind methionine restriction, explains why fruit actually helps fight cancer rather than feeding it, and reveals shocking research linking antibiotic use to cancer development. He also shares his 99% success rate with papillary thyroid cancer using sodium selenite alone.
Whether you’re looking for prevention strategies or exploring options beyond conventional treatment, this episode delivers actionable information that could change how you think about cancer forever.
Work directly with Dr. J and his team to reclaim radiant health ➝ radiantlife-radianthealth.com
The content of this podcast and any related materials is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition and it should not be used as a substitute for advice from a qualified healthcare provider. Always consult a licensed Medical Professional before making decisions about your health. By listening to this podcast, you agree to use the information at your own risk. The host, guests, and producers disclaim any liability for actions taken based on the content presented.
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The Achilles Heel Of Cancer: How Nutrition Exploits Cancer’s Fatal Weakness
We want to welcome you to another exciting episode of the show. We are joined by a man who has spent over twenty years researching the vulnerabilities of cancer cells and has developed what he calls a targeted, natural, and non-toxic approach to cancer prevention and therapy. Mark Simon is the founder and director of the Nutritional Oncology Research Institute, NORI for short, and CEO of NORI Nutraceuticals.
His background spans neuroscience, biomedical engineering, and clinical nutrition. He has been training doctors worldwide on his revolutionary NORI protocols. What makes Mark’s work so compelling for the GBF nation is his focus on the Achilles heel of cancer, harnessing the power of nutrition to exploit cancer’s primary weaknesses. I am totally stoked for this episode since cancer is the number two killer nationwide and might be completely preventable without further ado, Mark. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Mark, I had a chance to have a quick chat with you in the green room before the show started, and you said you could talk for probably an entire day. I am excited to at least have the next hour and a half with you so we can discuss some of the topics that are in your wheelhouse. I love origin stories. I love to understand how people get involved with the work that they do. As Dr. Jason mentions, cancer is a top two killer, I think globally.
When it comes to this topic, it was one of the things that was a cornerstone for why I wanted to start this podcast with Dr. Jason, because I was like, look, we’ve got to tackle the big three. Got to tackle heart disease, heart attacks, cancer, and diabetes. We had to find people who are experts and subject matter experts on these topics. Can you take us back to that moment and tell us when you first realized that there was a different path and a way that you could help people get better faster through nutrition and help them through oncology with the holistic approach?
The Discovery Of Sodium Selenite And Plant-Based Nutrition
It really started about 44 years ago. That is when I changed my own diet to a plant-based one. I have been strictly plant-based for this amount of time for 44 years. It was a little over twenty years ago that my wife was diagnosed at age 43 with stage three breast cancer. I was very personally involved in this, and she went the traditional path with the surgery and radiation, and it did not serve her well.
I did a lot of research during that period of time when she was alive, and I came across some really interesting information about selenium and cancer. I already had the understanding that plant-based nutrition is quite powerful in preventing cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. It really forced me to dig deep and understand this relationship, this intersection between plant-based nutrition and cancer, as far as prevention and treatment.
What I uncovered is that there is a form of selenium, which is a trace mineral, that is in supplements. You can buy it as a supplement. It is called sodium selenite, which is a selenium salt. There is research going way back, many decades, and it is showing that this form of selenium can selectively kill cancer cells, all different types of cancer, but at fairly low dosages that are safe.
I thought, “This is just incredible. It is super cheap and inexpensive.” There is still a lot of ongoing research on sodium selenite. There is research at Stanford University, and there is research in Europe. It has been proven to be totally safe, and it is quite effective. It is an oxidative therapy that generates oxidative stress in the cancer cell, and it kills it. That is where it started. I wanted to bring in the nutrition part and how to leverage nutrition to support what sodium selenite is capable of doing.
I discovered some research by Dr. Daniel Epner, and it is about restricting methionine in the diet. Methionine is a sulfur-containing amino acid. There is a lot of research on this, and it is actually two amino acids because they are involved with each other. It is methionine and cysteine. When you lower the intake of these amino acids, it does several things. The main thing that happens is that the cancer cell cannot synthesize glutathione as well. That is its master antioxidant.
Here is what is really cool. This is the Achilles heel of cancer cells that differentiates them from normal cells. The cancer cell is known to be functioning at a red level of oxidative stress. It is on high alert. Its oxidative stress is very high compared to a normal cell. Why is that oxidative stress so high? It is because of damaged mitochondria. A faulty metabolism.
The cancer cells are functioning on the edge of survival. It is really struggling to regulate oxidative stress. The normal cell can be ten to a hundred times lower. There is a huge difference in oxidative stress. It does not take a lot to push that cancer cell over the edge. All we need to do is generate additional oxidative stress, interfere with its antioxidant systems, glutathione, and thioredoxin. Sodium selenite comes into the picture, and it does a few things.
It does not take much to push a cancer cell over the edge. We only need to generate additional oxidative stress and interfere with its antioxidant systems, including glutathione and thioredoxin. Share on XIt knocks out one of the antioxidant systems, the thioredoxin system, and also generates some oxidative stress. When you couple that with the low methionine and cysteine diet, then you are knocking out the glutathione antioxidant system. It is a dual knockout of the main antioxidant systems, or I call them antioxidant defense systems, in the cancer cells, and they die.\
There are different forms of cell death. It may be apoptosis, might be ferroptosis, or other types of cell death. It is very simple. It is very targeted. There are a few other things involved to make it work better. There are other pro-oxidants. It is like a cocktail of several pro-oxidants. Another factor that helps a lot is neutralizing the acidity in the tumor.
Tumors are very highly acidic. That is because of the faulty metabolism. They are pumping out a lot of lactate. Using bicarbonates, we can try to neutralize the tumor acidity, which is very helpful. It also helps immunotherapy work better. A plant-based diet has a lot of other advantages in that it can lower IGF-1, it can help stabilize blood glucose, and lower inflammation. You get a lot of bang for the buck on a plant-based diet when you are trying to treat cancer. What gets really confusing is that, on the subject of antioxidants, antioxidants are important for cancer prevention.
The most important thing for cancer prevention is obtaining enough selenium in the diet. Selenium is important because it is incorporated into a bunch of different antioxidant enzymes. We know selenium is very powerful in cancer prevention, but it turns out it is one of the top agents in cancer treatment. How do you administer selenium? You can do it intravenously. I have trained doctors on that. It can be taken orally. You have to be careful how you do it.
I want to jump in real fast because you mentioned the word, Mark. Thank you for sharing all that, by the way. Sorry to hear about your wife and her experience going through it. It sounded like the conventional system failed her, and we hear that story all the time. It is impossible to understand the grief around that. That is why I am so glad that you are here sharing this. I am fascinated. There are a few things. You actually just shared a ton of very, very valuable information. It is actually very actionable with our audiences.
Defining Pro-Oxidants And Reactive Oxygen Species
I want to go back to a few points if it is okay. You use a term that was pro-oxidant, and we hear about antioxidants, as you mentioned, for cancer prevention all day long. Can you talk a little bit about pro-oxidants and what the heck they are? For our audiences that maybe do not have a background in biochemistry and oncology, can you share with them what a pro-oxidant is and how it comes into either cancer development or cancer treatment? Let us talk about pro-oxidants for a minute.
You have heard the term free radical. The most common radicals are oxygen radicals, which can exist in different forms. It can be hydrogen peroxide, H2O2. It can be the hydroxyl radical, OH minus, or O2 minus. They are called reactive oxygen species. In all the scientific literature, it is called ROS, reactive oxygen species. ROS can damage proteins, it can damage DNA, and it can be very damaging to different parts of the cell.
Maybe we should talk a little bit about what cancer is and what it is not. Cancer has nothing to do with the nucleus of the cell, the nuclear genome. We have two genomes in our cells. We have the mitochondrial genome. Mitochondria have their own DNA. Science is telling us that cancer is related to DNA damage and mitochondrial DNA damage. It does not look like it has much to do with the damage to the nuclear DNA. That may happen later on in the development, but it is a mitochondrial dysfunction.
The science supports this very strongly. That is one of the reasons why cancer cells upregulate glycolysis. They consume more sugar or glucose because the mitochondria are not functioning well. There are issues in the electron transport chain. Glucose comes into the cell, it goes through like six steps, and then it is converted to pyruvate.
Pyruvate goes into the TCA cycle, and the mitochondria, and then at the very end is the real high-energy output process called oxidative phosphorylation, and it is called the electron transport chain, and that produces all this ATP. That machinery is not working properly in the cancer cell. It has to compensate for it, and it upregulates glycolysis, or the anaerobic glycolysis, the fermentation of sugar. There is a lot of interest now in the ketogenic diet and hitting all these metabolic pathways and everything. That is an approach to support cancer treatment.
I do not buy into that at all. I do something different. In fact, the dietary protocol involves eating lots of carbohydrates, mostly fruits, vegetables, and potatoes. We stay totally away from animal products because that is where all the methionine and the cysteine are in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. It is much lower in plant-based foods, and very low in fruits. So some patients go totally fruitarian. That works really, really well because it brings down those amino acids to really low levels. We see patients get better just doing that alone.
The Impact Of Eliminating Ultra-Processed Foods
I have a question to insert here, too. Sorry to cut you off. I wrote a book in 2023. I was blessed to have it be an international bestseller. I like to give myself a shout-out for that. The Epic Five Plan. If anybody wants to check that out, it is on Amazon. If you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, it is free for Kindle Unlimited. Otherwise, paperback, very affordable. The way I wrote that book, Mark, was basically, here are the five pillars.
I would have six pillars if I rewrote it today. Here are the five pillars that I shared with thousands of clients over a couple of decades of work to help them lay down a healthy foundation to be as healthy as possible, as long as possible. Drink water and eat the right foods. I will come back to that in a minute. Movement, nervous system regulation, stress management, and sleep patterning.
I would add a sixth pillar in communities around yourself with people who are supportive, loving, and health-oriented. This is the crux of getting healthy. I wrote this book, and the diet that I came up with is, I do not want to say dissimilar, but I would say it was plant-leaning. I would not say it was plant-based completely, but it was plant-leaning.
I focused on healthy protein sources, healthy fat sources, kind of from an omnivore point of view, but we could adapt that if somebody was vegan or vegetarian, certainly low glycemic vegetables, high fiber content. Let us see the fruits. I really centered on berries, although I think there was room for other fruits in there as well. I mean, green bananas and slower starches and things like that.
Some acids, like apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, and lime juice, for digestion and whatnot. It was a simple diet as far as it goes. I got a lot of success with it in a lot of areas, from chronic disease, autoimmunity, and also cancer, and not just cancer prevention, but we saw cancers turning around dramatically on this diet. I have had thousands of patients. I have lost some to cancer, only one during active treatment, and that person actually just did not want to do anything.
She was resolved to die. I feel really horrible saying that, but she literally was not following anybody’s advice. She was just waiting to die. Everyone else who was under our care while they were under our care, they did not die. They lived, they outlived their expectations. We had some Hail Mary passes coming to us of lung cancers and stomach cancers, and a whole host of things, and got really good results.
I am proud of that. That book is not written for oncology at all. It is meant as just a general wellness guide for anybody struggling with chronic illnesses or who just wants to make their personal health better. Now that said, here I am getting to my question finally. I wonder sometimes when people come in to us now, I do things a little bit differently now with my clients, but because they call it practice for a reason, because we are always refining our art. All of that with our outcomes and what works best, and this and that and the other thing.
I started to wonder recently if, when people come to us, and I am wondering if you wonder about this too, whether it is fruit or it is just eat broccoli all day, and I am teasing, or if it is just eat nothing but chicken rice and pears. I am making up diets here, it does not matter what it is, but when people come to us, eating a lot of people are eating ultra-processed foods that are packaged in boxes.
Those foods, as we know, are very destructive to the system. They are endocrine disruptors. They disrupt hormones, insulin, and other sex hormones, protective hormones. They certainly disrupt our blood sugar stability, which can lead to insulin dumping and insulin resistance. We know that that can lead to other cancers. The reason I am bringing all of this up is I wonder how much of the diet book that I wrote in 2023, which I got great reviews on, as an International Seller, has I know helped people transform their health worldwide.
I wonder how much of it was just because they stopped eating crap. I mean that genuinely out of it, it is a question I have for myself. I am wondering for you, you say people have turned into fruitarians, I understand the antioxidant loads from that, which is why I chose berries, fairly low glycemic load, higher in fiber. There is antioxidant load, resveratrol, and other things too. I just wonder how much you think it is the actual dietary choice as opposed to just not eat the ultra-processed foods? I wonder myself, I do not have data on it. I am wondering if you know.
It is both. Remove all the, not even ultra-processed foods, but just processed foods in general, and eat more raw food. Cooking food is a form of food processing. The raw food diet is the ultimate raw vegan diet. People do really well if you do it right. What happens sometimes is that people go vegan. They eat a lot of fat, eat a lot of avocado, nuts, and seeds, which are healthy fats, but it is too much fat, which causes insulin resistance, and then blood sugar goes out of whack. The key is low fat.
Cancer Patient Motivation And Cancer As Environmental Injury
I am just curious, listening to both of you go back and forth about what to eat, what not to eat, and how to eat. I think the average person just struggles mightily with accountability. How do you get somebody to say, “I have just got to adopt a new plan, and it is just got to be like 0 to 60, and I have got to quit everything I have done for the past 30 years of my life and find this new pathway.” Obviously, they are sick because they are experiencing some type of symptom.
If you take it down to the brass tacks, you are talking about humans here. You are asking humans to stop and to go and adopt a whole other way of thinking, doing, and eating. Eating is probably what most people consume most of their time in their day, thinking about and doing. They wake up, they want breakfast, they finish doing their daily activities, they want lunch, they want a snack, they want more snacks, they want dinner, and they want a midnight snack. How do you reprogram people for accountability to get them on the fast track to better money?
I do not have to. They are self-motivated. What is the alternative? Is the alternative being on high-dose chemotherapy? I share all scientific information on this. I show them charts showing how much of these amino acids are in different foods. They clearly understand it. Dietary protocol, if you are motivated, you want to stay alive for your family, or for whatever reason. It is hell of a motivator, cancer is a deadly disease.
A dietary protocol, if you are motivated—whether to stay alive for your family or for any other reason—is a powerful motivator. Cancer is a deadly disease. Share on XI hate to laugh, but it is a hell of a motivator to stay alive.
Mark’s totally right. Same thing. James and Mark, when we are. I have been doing functional medicine, or whatever precision medicine. I do not know the word anymore. Twenty-six years, and I have had the luxury, the pleasure of seeing everything from fatigue to cancer. Ultimately, there is a different level. Mark’s right.
There is a different level of motivation from someone who is like, “I am tired, and I do not want to be tired anymore. I have been diagnosed with a terminal condition, and I do not want to die.” That level of motivation. I made a joke one time, and it is, I am not trying to make a joke, but with an oncology client, that if I had proof, like Mark said, scientific evidence.
If I had proof that having them stand on their head and reciting the alphabet backwards three times in the corner of the room five times a day, they would do it. They would absolutely just do it because what is the alternative, as Mark said, and I think that is an important piece of the puzzle for this. It is just different than weight loss or more energy, or I want my hair to grow back, or I do not want to have diarrhea every day. It is just a different level of motivation.
For me, what I see is that a lot of people are being told not to eat fruit, to take away a really healthy, nutritious food out of their diet, because of this belief that eating fruit is like consuming sugar and it is going to feed the cancer, which is nonsense. Most of these people are really happy that they can eat fruit again, and all they want. We naturally love fruit as humans. We evolved that way.
These are the healthiest and most natural foods one can eat. It tastes great. They provide a lot of energy. There is nothing better than that. Once they start doing it, they start seeing how they feel. They move forward. Most cancer patients are not sick. They do not feel sick. They have no idea they have cancer. You would not know it. It is because cancer is not a disease.
It is not a systemic disease. It is not an illness or sickness. I always tell a cancer patient what it really is. It is an environmental injury. Early-stage cancers are at a very low level, and they are confined to where the primary tumor is, to an organ, whether it is in the prostate, the breast, or the lungs, whatever. It does not affect the rest of the body at all.
Just because somebody has cancer does not mean they are sick until they take all these toxic drugs used to treat radiation and other things. Most of the patients I deal with come to me. They are not sick, they are normal. They feel normal and healthy. Generally, a lot of them are healthy. They have perfect immune systems, they have perfect everything, yet there is a tumor growing in an organ. Dealing with sickness or illness or anything.
That tees it up perfectly for my next question, which is, you talk about them being healthy. You talk about them being normal people. They just have an invasion of an organ tissue. I guess we all have live cancer cells in our bodies. Yes or no?
That is not really known. There is no evidence for that. We all have cancer floating around here and there, and the immune system clears it out. No, there is no evidence for it.
I just heard that that was like a thing.
No.
I was going through my medical programs. That is interesting. I have learned in the last half-decade to question everything that we have been taught. I will put that on the table.
It gets me back to the main part of the question I wanted to ask, because I am glad you cleared that up, and you gave some insight, because it is obviously one of those old wives’ tales, if somebody says it long enough, it just becomes a truth. That is one of the things that I have heard over and over, that we all have cancer cells floating around.
Some just become more dominant and turn into some type of tumor or something. Keys for people to stay healthy. I know you do a Zoom call every Saturday, which I want to let everybody know too, before we get too far into the episode, because that is really the sweet spot for you is getting people more education. That is a big part of doing this interview with you. To get more people educated on topics that they need clarity on.
Bringing you on to talk about something as a subject matter expert gives people personal clarity, and it gives them resources and pathways to help themselves and help their loved ones because everybody deals with somebody. I just lost my aunt, she had pancreatic cancer, and I wish I had interviewed you four months ago, knowing some of these protocols four months ago, so that I might have been able to help her.
She took chemo one time, and a week later, she was dead. I do not think there is anybody out there that is tuned in to this that does not hit home on that. They have lost somebody to this terrible number two killer. What do people do just on a protocol basis? I know you said to become a fruit of Tarian, which sounds funny to me.
I do not plan on not eating meat, and it is a part of my lifestyle. What about somebody like me who likes my life and eats the way that I do? What are some guidelines that could keep me healthy long-term so that I do not fall into this pit of needing some medical intervention to say that you need chemo or radiation, or we need to cut some shit out of you?
Antibiotics And Damage To Mitochondrial DNA
One of the best preventative measures for cancer is not to take antibiotics. I have a whole website on this. Finding an incredible amount of patients, in breast cancer, like 30%, 40 % of breast cancer patients, we can pin down the actual trigger or direct cause of the breast cancer, which is antibiotic treatment. There is a study.
No, I was told my note there, but I will insert it since you gave me a minute. It follows exactly what Kiran Krishnan was telling us on his interview on the show, previously in the year, basically saying that a healthy microbiome is key to systemic health. Obviously, we know that when taking antibiotics, it decimates the microbiome. Best case scenario, it is napalm and kills everything, but the more probable case scenario is it kills our good bacteria and allows space for bad bacteria that might be related to cancer development, immune system dysregulation to proliferate.
It does a lot more than that.
I have also heard that it spins people into depression when they use antibiotics.
The damage to the gut microbiome is one level. There is a whole other level. Think about mitochondria. What are they? They are bacteria. They evolved from bacteria. Four and a half billion years ago, whatever it was, there was a fusion between a prokaryotic cell and bacteria. Our cells are hybrids. They are really cells within cells.
You have a couple of thousand mitochondria per cell, and they have their own DNA. They are essentially bacteria in nature. The collateral damage from antibiotics, beyond damaging the gut microbiome, is damage to mitochondrial DNA. We know that antibiotics can cause mutations and direct damage to mitochondrial DNA. That is cancer, but it happens in stem cells. Mitochondrial DNA damage in stem cells. That is the origin of cancer right there.
Antibiotics do more than disrupt the gut microbiome—they may also damage mitochondrial DNA. Evidence shows they can cause mutations and direct mitochondrial damage, including in stem cells, and this damage may be an origin point for cancer. Share on XCan I jump in quickly? I was once told it is not what you eat, it is what you eat eats. That is what makes you sick. It may be back to your original fruititarian comment. It is not what you take antibiotics for. It is what you eat that takes antibiotics, which has a disruption in the mitochondria inside our gut.
Possibly. There are a lot of chemicals. There are a lot of things that can damage mitochondria beyond antibiotics. But antibiotics are a big one. The worst one out there is tetracycline. Tetracycline has been associated with a 120% increase risk of breast cancer. Typically, it is like 25 years. Here is the pattern. A teenage girl with acne was given tetracycline 25 years later and developed breast cancer.
I took tetracycline in my teenage years. It also can turn your teeth gray, which is a lot of fun. It is interesting because these antibiotics affect me. I am blown away by this mark. You are pulling some pieces together, and I appreciate it. One of my gifts from God is pattern analysis. You are giving me a lot of patterns to consider right now. I really greatly appreciate it.
Bringing back what we were talking about earlier, that damage done to the mitochondria from the antibiotics and to the mitochondrial DNA is through reactive oxygen species or ROSs that we were just talking about. It just pulled that all together there. That is a massive layer. Also, just for our audience, this is the way I described mitochondria. They are the powerhouses of the cells.
There is a lot of work that is getting done in your cell, but it is really powered by the battery of it, which is the mitochondria. If we have mitochondrial dysfunction, certainly mitochondrial death or cancer-type dysfunction from reactive oxygen species, from things like antibiotics, and as Mark mentioned, there are other things, we are not going to produce energy. We are going to feel tired. When our cells are not producing energy, and by the time we are feeling tired, our cells are not working.
If our cells are not working, we are cascading into dis-ease. That can domino right into disease. Mark, thank you for putting that all together with me. I have a lot to think about on this. I am a little blown away by it. If I could wax poetic a little bit on what James was talking about with what we eat eats, and then going back to what you mentioned with the fritarians and other types of plant-based, vegan-based diet approaches.
I got a flash of a remembrance of something that I have not thought about for years, but I have a couple of his books right over here in my library. I do not know if you are familiar with the work of Dr. Howard Loomis. Loomis was a pioneer in enzyme therapies, trying to isolate different types of enzymes, primarily from plants, to be utilized in a therapeutic methodology.
Loomis had, as I said, a couple of books over there. It is deep, fun biochemical stuff. Ultimately, the diet that he recommended, James, that I was remembering now, was a raw foods diet. He was highly advocating for a raw foods plant-based diet to get us those unadulterated enzymes, those unprocessed, like Mark said, when we cook food, it adulterates the food.
It is processing the food, even though it is not adding Franken-chemicals to it. It is still denaturing those proteins, like the enzymes. Mark, I would love to hear your thoughts on a raw foods diet. I know we brought it up, but let us dive in a little bit deeper. Is that what people should be doing? Should we all be fruitarians and eat raw fruit?
Therapeutic Use Of Enzymes In Raw Foods Like Pineapple
One of the best foods for a cancer patient is pineapple, and papaya is too tropical for its loaded with enzymes, proteolytic enzymes, and fibrinolytic enzymes. The enzyme in pineapple is bromelain, which is very powerful, and it has been studied for its anti-cancer activity. I actually recommend lots of pineapple very strongly and eat the core in the middle because that has all the bromelain in it. I also have a powder, a really high-potency bromelain supplement, which is very helpful. It helps lower inflammation. Potentially, it may help break down the protective coat that cancer cells produce around them. It is composed of fibrin. It can help prevent blood clots. Pineapple is a great food.
Being in Iowa, we have all the fresh pineapple that you can get. I am teasing. That was a joke. I love the proteolytic enzymes, the fiberlytic enzymes. I love bromo-main. I love the idea of pineapple. That said, going back to what James said, it is what we eat. We are what we eat eats. Obviously, pineapples are not eating anything, but we are spraying the crap out of everything. We are putting organophosphates on a lot of foods.
Those organophosphates, and the biggest one that comes to mind is something like glyphosate, previously produced by Monsanto and then purchased by Bayer. The largest single-person lawsuit ever run by an individual against a company is over a billion dollars. Unfortunately, he passed away from lymphoma, but not, and you think it would have been a precedent to get rid of glyphosate, but we spray it on everything. My question is, do we need to be careful about, like, should not only be raw food, not only be fruit, some whole-glazed vegetables, but what about organic? Tell me about that.
Ideally, yes. Organic, but it is not a game changer during treatment, but I advise people to look at the dirty dozen lists, the Environmental Working Group produces the dirty dozen, stay away from those foods unless you can get them organic. You have published another list. It is called the Clean 15. There are a lot of things. Pineapple has very low, if any, pesticide residues.
Pineapple is a safe food, whether it is organic or conventional. It is not heavily sprayed or sprayed at all. There are a lot of foods like that. They vary. Conventional spinach, conventional potatoes, conventional peaches, cherries, and strawberries are on that dirty dozen list. They have very high detectable pesticide residues.
I got a new marketing campaign for the pineapple industry. There is your pineapple. They will keep the cancer away.
There you go. Potentially. Let us go back to meat and cancer.
I just want to say we’ll drop in the show notes, GetBetterFasterPodcast.com. We’ll put in links to the environmental working group EWG.org food news, and you can literally enter your zip code, and they can give you the dirty dozen in the Clean 15. They update it every year. It’s very similar every year. Mark brought up a really good resource that’s available for all of us. What that resource does with the EWG, it literally tells us, like this dirty dozen, like strawberries are on there.
You should only eat organic if you’re going to eat off that dirty dozen. Stay away from anything else. The clean 15 doesn’t matter as much. It’s for various reasons. It can be organic or not organic, and you’re probably going to be better off eating food anyway. I appreciate that. Mark, right back to you on it was meat and protein.
Meat and cancer. Consumption of red meat and processed meats is highly associated with colorectal cancer. Why is that? The reason is that we do not totally digest meat and animal products in general very well. You get a lot of undigested chunks of protein that enter the colon. The digestion in the stomach is not complete. The absorption and digestion are incomplete in the small intestine, but then the residue of undigested protein enters the colon.
What does that do? That feeds some highly pathogenic bacteria of all different sorts of strains of E. coli and other bacteria that produce toxins like colibactin, which has been associated with colorectal cancer. If you are eating a diet strongly meat-oriented, animal protein-oriented, and not a lot of fruits and vegetables, not enough fiber, whole grains, and everything else. That stuff sits there and accumulates over time, sitting against the colon wall.
These pathogenic bacteria are pumping out all these toxic metabolites continuously, which damage the stem cells in the colon wall, which then you get polyps, and then you get a tumor, and then you get colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is occurring at much, much higher rates now in younger people in their 30s and 40s. Why is that? Look at what people are eating.
A lot of fast food, garbage, not enough fresh fruits and vegetables, not enough fiber to just keep things sweeping through. We have to remember, meat has no fiber. It is very difficult for the intestinal tract to push all this through. It is like pushing toothpaste through the tube of toothpaste. It is gummy.
Mark’s Perspective On Fasting For Cancer Patients
A couple of things here. I am really interested in you walking us through a day in your life, from how you wake up and how you feed yourself, to how you finish your day and go to sleep. If you would share that with us. I am just really curious as to how you make it sound so easy to just not eat meat and to clear out the colon. A second-level thing is I like fasting. Fasting does a great deal to help clear out some of this gunk, as you call it, the toothpaste and the tube type scenario. What is your take on fasting first? Then can you walk us through a day, a day in the life of how you feed yourself?
Fasting does not physically clear out anything better than fasting is eating, just going off route that way you get things constantly moving through you, fruit is like the body’s best detoxifier and cleanser. You keep the fruit going and keep things moving through you. This is the best thing. It is better than fasting. It is better to eat. Especially for a cancer patient, a lot of patients come to me, and they are underweight for various reasons. Do not fast at all. You’ve got to eat at least three meals a day. Keep the energy coming in. We do not want you losing any more weight. The overweight patients will naturally drop their weight on this type of diet.
Fruit is one of the body’s best natural cleansers. Keeping fruit in your diet helps keep things moving through the system—supporting overall detoxification. In many cases, it may be even better than fasting. Share on XI am not a big proponent of fasting. This business about timed eating, where you eat just 6 or 8 hours during the day, makes some sense. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and stop eating after 6:00 PM. That is reasonable. There is no real big magic in fasting, and fasting will not cure cancer. Better than fasting is changing your diet to a diet that is very healthful, cleansing, and detoxifying. You eat fruit, you physically clear out your digestive tract, you will clear out the liver, you will clear out the kidneys, you will clear out the whole circulatory system, every organ in your body.
I find that really interesting as well. I have seen interesting success. This is just my clinical experience. I always say I am not a researcher. I am an armchair researcher. I read a lot of books. I read a lot of articles, but I do not publish my research. It is a meta-analysis at best and just trying to understand patterns, as I said. I find something curious. I do not know, maybe it is just, it could just be a complete coincidence.
I have an in-factor here of maybe a couple of dozen people that found me in our clinic with my brilliant partner, Dr. Rachel Bradley, our executive producer. We have people who come to us diagnosed with cancer. A lot of times, those people are Hail Mary passes. We have a couple of Hail Mary passes on us, where it is, “I have not been given long to live, and I do not want to do conventional treatment at all.” We have those people.
We have other people who are, “I have not been given very long to live, and I am going to go ahead and do the chemotherapy and then maybe the radiation,” just depends on the person. I always like to honor where our clients, where our patients are coming from, and where they are, and try to help them understand the process. I do not want to be the guy who is like, “Absolutely do not do conventional therapy,” because I do not want to tell people that.
If they have made that choice on their own, I will greatly and happily support them to leverage everything that I know to help them through the process, the way they want to go through it. Coming back to the story, I remember we had a client many years ago, back when we had a brick and mortar, and he had flown in, he was seeing us, he had not been given very long to live. It was lung cancer, pretty rapidly spreading.
He went, and he wanted to undergo chemotherapy. He was willing to do anything, and so this was what I told him, and I want you to tell me what you think about this because I did employ fasting. I have used this subsequently, and I have always had the same outcome, but it could be coincidental. I do not have research on this. I just have experience, anecdotal evidence. I want to be very clear for people tuning in.
They chose to do the chemotherapy and I said, “Cancer likes to cancer cells like to eat sugar.” This is what I was told. Cancer cells like sugar, and they’re smart with the chemotherapy drugs. They add sugar or sugar-like substances to those drugs so that the cancer cells are attracted to it. That’s how they target the cancer cells.
My theory was given at the time, and I thought that was true. I am like, what might help is if we starve the body and put it into a fasting state. I fasted these people for sometimes up to a week before their chemotherapy treatment. The idea is that other cells will go into a more, call it what you want, but a keto-adaptive state using ketones for fuel, as opposed to just sugars.
The cancer cells do not have the ability to go into a keto-adaptive state. They are going to gobble up that chemotherapy, and it is going to be much more effective. Whether or not that is true, I will say this first gentleman that I am speaking of, he was given three weeks to live, and he ended up actually going for years. He lived for years. I lost touch with him just because he was doing so well.
He did not need our care anymore. I said, “It seems like we are out of the blue.” Knock on wood. “Just keep following this low glycemic load diet and eating real foods and everything we had structured around.” His cancer went dormant. We bumped into his wife, Debbie, many years later at a grocery store, actually. She is like, “We got to get back in to see you. The cancer has come back. To be really honest, we got a little lazy and drifted off this low glycemic load diet that you gave us,” which eventually became the Epic Five Plan diet. It was before the book was published.
Long story short, he did not make it. They did not even make it back in to see us. He ended up passing away, and it is a sad ending to that story. I have had a lot of cases where we have had these cancers of various types, whether it is lung, liver, prostate, ovarian, or breast, or fill in the blank. We have seen a lot of brain cancer. My father died a couple of years ago in February, but he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, had diabetes, and had the whole thing.
I did the same thing with him. To come back to what James asked earlier, dying is a pretty big motivator. He fasted, he reduced, he ate low glycemic load, he did all of the stuff, and he literally outlived a terminal brain cancer that had something like a point zero whatever percentage of survival. I just wonder when I hear fasting is really not all chalked up to be. What am I noticing anecdotally? I seem to see a pattern there, but I am open that my noticing on this is flawed or skewed, or biased. Tell me what I am noticing and how I should be looking, what lens should I be looking at? Thank you.
Methionine And Cysteine Restriction As Chemo Synergy
Look at the underlying science. Fasting is zeroing out the intake of these amino acids, methionine, and cysteine. We know from Dr. Hoffman’s research that I have this whole website that I built for Dr. Hoffman, who has studied methionine dependence of cancer since way back in the 70s. He is working. He is doing clinical research now with an enzyme, an orally administered enzyme that one takes, and it breaks down methionine in the gut before it is absorbed.
He is working with patients who are doing chemo, and he has published these pretty extraordinary results, showing the patients are not fasting, they are eating a normal, low-methionine diet, which is mostly fruits and vegetables, but also taking this enzyme to bring methionine down further. He sees this synergy with chemotherapy.
It was patients with pancreatic cancer, two markers came way down very quickly, and they have stayed down for a very long period of time. After the chemo, by doing this enzyme and alumathionine diet together. There is good, strong research there supporting that. Fasting will bring down the methionine and cysteine levels to a certain extent.
I have seen a lot of studies where you fast the day before and the day during chemo, and it seems to be protective to normal cells and makes the chemo more effective. It is probably due to lower intake of the sulfur-containing amino acids, which are tied into the antioxidant systems and glutathione. That is my explanation for what you have observed, but you would see the same results without fasting, just eating fruit.
That is really fascinating.
Maybe. It is very, very complex. There are two intersecting cycles developed. The methionine cycle and the folate cycle. They are intersecting with each other and involve B12, folate, and vitamin B6. It is really complicated and difficult to sort all that out. It is a regulatory system. What I have noticed is that if there is a cancer patient with an MTHFR mutation, it is best not to try to fix it. The patient will do better if you leave it alone because you started supplementing with methylfolate, B12, and other B vitamins. You may actually do more harm than good. You actually may create some promotion of the cancer growth. Best just leave that aside.
That is super interesting.
It is actually an advantage to have that mutation because the whole methionine cycle is not working normally, and it is not feeding the cancer cells as efficiently.
I am a double allele with MTHFR. I have the double polymorph. I have both of them. I am like the worst of the worst, but maybe that is good for me. Maybe I will not get cancer. Mostly, I have what I have found the longer I do the work that I do, I wind up with maybe a lot. I wind up with a lot of maybes. I have another question, and I am just spitballing here, and I still have to, I have not even talked about selenite yet.
I want to go back to that. That was way at the beginning of our conversation. I am curious about Inuit populations on a traditional indigenous type of diet. Inuit populations eat a lot of fat, eat a lot of protein, do not have a lot of fruit available to them, but they have extremely low levels of cancer rates compared to before we modernized, westernized, and processed their foods. Prior to that, they had very low cancer rates. I would be curious. I already have the answer, which I am going to say is they were not exposed to a bunch of ultra-processed crap that was causing problems in their body. Beyond all that, I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Their lifespans are very short, though. It is not a blue zone or anything close to them. They do have very short lifespans. They do consume the entire animal, and they consume most of it raw, and they do eat the stomach contents and organ meats and everything else. They have adapted to what they have had to adapt to as far as food availability. Is it an ideal diet? No or close. They have not been exposed to chemicals and pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and all kinds of other stuff. They do not smoke, and they do not drink alcohol. You will see low cancer rates.
As you guys have been going back and forth, talking scientific stuff, I am the non-doctor here on the show. Mark, you are not a doctor either, it is great to hear Dr. Jason be able to talk about different types of protocols that he works on with actual clients or patients, however you want to frame them. I am just really curious. There are going to be hundreds of thousands of people who will watch this. I am just really curious about them, the NORI protocol, which you are the founder of. Why has it not been adopted and gone mainstream yet?
Reasons For Non-Adoption Of Natural Oncology Protocols
They probably never will. Oncologists are bound by their medical board to do only what they are licensed to do, which is to prescribe FDA-approved drugs. They go anywhere outside, and they are going to lose their license.
Oncologists are bound by their medical boards to do only what they are licensed to do, which is prescribe FDA-approved drugs. If they go outside that scope, they risk losing their license. Share on XI call that the cut it out, drag it out, burn it out method.
Oncologists know nothing about nutrition. They have no training in that area. They tell cancer patients 99% of the time, they will just tell their patients, “Eat whatever you want. It makes no difference. Eat ice cream, eat a steak, whatever. There is no bearing on anything. We are just going to poison you with chemo and burn you with radiation.”
Even when my dad was going through his cancer treatment. Again, he did go through chemotherapy along with what we chatted about earlier. We would go there and check in, and they had a big bowl of candy. “Help yourself. How much do you want?” They had ice cream. They had soda. It was like whatever you wanted your hearts to light up and just go get your chemo and then hope for the best.
I hear you on that. In fact, I will take it a step further, because I will say this. Not only do they not have training, but because it is not in the standard of care, I think this is what the general populace misses. I believe this is a key point that it is not just that the doctors are not trained in it, which they are not. If they are, it is poorly trained. That goes for all doctors, not just oncologists. But if they start to talk about diet having a factor or taking selenite or whatever it happens to be from a nutritional supplement point of view, they are now breaking the standard of care, the SOC.
When you are a derelict away from the standard of care, the SOC, your license is in jeopardy. It is not just like I know we casually said, “They are trained in this, and they have to follow this and do this.” Even if they were the most trained biochemists, nutritional oncologists in the world, if they start deviating from the standard of care, which is cut poison burn, and that is it.
They are in jeopardy with their medical board. They are in jeopardy of their livelihood. There is zero chance. Marcia Angell, past editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said, again, New England Journal of Medicine, just past editor. “When you walk into your traditional doctor’s office, you are being ambushed by the pharmaceutical agencies. There is no hope of survival.”
That is the editor of the New England Journal saying that. I do not know that the general public has this concept down. They keep asking our clients, “We do not accept insurance.” I am like, “Why would we want to accept insurance?” You know how you are handcuffed to what you can do if you are accepting insurance? You are handcuffed to what you could do if you are working within a hospital system or a clinic system.
When you cut those chains free, and you say, “I work directly for my client, and my job is to help my client in any way possible, that is safe, that does no harm, and that is a partnership,” it is a different level of care. It is a different level of partnership than cut poison burn. I just wanted to clarify that point for our audiences, that it is not just a matter of poor training.
Even with the best training, they still cannot do it. Their entire livelihood is in jeopardy, and they will not. What do they do? They literally will poo-poo it and tell you that there is no substance to it, but it might harm. It is not taught in the medical schools, and if it worked, we would have learned about it. I am like, do you know the Flexner report?
There is no money in the clinical trial. Who is going to fund the clinical trial? If you eat raw fruit, you might be able to prevent and treat cancer. There is no big fruit. Big Florida orange juice is going to come in and save the day here. It is not going to happen. James, go ahead. I know you are chomping at the bit.
Suppression Of Knowledge And The Lack Of Profit In Healthy People
I am hearing what you are saying there, Dr. Jason and Mark. I know what we talked about, a suppression, suppression of knowledge, oppression of things that actually get people better faster. That is a big thing about this, we are not so much a mainstream media here. We are not on TV, but I believe we are a cult classic. I believe what we are doing is we are telling people solutions and bringing people together to learn from people like yourself, Mark, who have expertise out there.
Decades of expertise, by the way. Being able to give that type of knowledge to people is the suppression. Jason, you have heard me say this time and time again, there is no money in healthy people. My aunt, for instance, is blessed in her heart. She is over 70 now, but she asked me, she is like, “Jimmy, if you got sick, would you go to the hospital?”
I go, “Hell no. That is where people go to die. Why would I go there?” I was like, “I got access to the smartest people on planet earth. I got natural paths on my side. I have got chiropractors on my side. I have got people that are funk med docs on my side.” I am like, “If I were sick, I would go to Mexico. I go south of the border and get real health care because there is no money in healthy people. There is only money in customers like this case.”
Jamie Reighard sat over here. “If they had a cure, they would hide it because there is no profit in the care. Look at Iowa. The year is changing how we farm, but why would they do that? It is the money.” One thing even deeper is I think so much about the people that are like today, there is going to be somebody today that gets a diagnosis or message from their hospital that says, “You have cancer.” I cannot even put a timer on it. I bet if we put a timer on the wall right now, we could say, “This is how many people have a cancer diagnosis every moment.” What would you tell them to do? “I am not going to go to the hospital.” What would you tell them to do?
Advice To Newly Diagnosed Patients: Due Diligence And Not Rushing Into Treatment
I have published a cancer survival guide, which people can download from the website.
Let us do it. That is great.
The first thing is not to rush into anything. Do your diligence, do your research, and do not be railroaded into making any quick decisions. Even be careful with biopsies. Look at your nutrition and lifestyle. It will take a really good heart to look at it. Think about what may have gotten you here to where you are. Do not rush into surgery. That is a whole other big topic. Removing the primary tumor can cause more problems than it solves.
Do not poke into it. As you said, no biopsy.
A biopsy is sometimes necessary. As with breast cancer, you need to know subtypes. With prostate cancer, there are no subtypes, really. There are Gleason scores and stuff, but that is not that important. It is better not to drive a dozen needles into the prostate gland.
I fully agree with that on so many levels. Also, just for our audiences again, Mark, what was that book called, the Cancer Survival Guide?
It is just a little pamphlet.
We will have a link to that on the GetBetterFasterPodcast.com. We will make sure that everybody tuning in has links to all of this. Our production team is fantastic at linking all of this and backlinking all of it. I think that is wonderful. The other thing I just wanted to mention, because James mentioned, I shortened it to cut poison burn, cut it out, drag it out, or burn it out, right? There is a fantastic documentary from 2010 called Cut Poison Burn, if you can find it.
It has been censored like crazy. It comes and goes, whether it is on the market or not on the market. All of the big streaming agencies, from which I will not name them all, but we stream on some of these as well. Thank you for letting us stream. We do not want to be censored. We want to get the word out. Cut Poison Burn, a 2010 documentary, did a very sharp look at America’s war on cancer.
It is exactly what we are talking about, that the standards of care are so defined by the traditional medical establishments, pharmaceutical agencies, profitable medicine, profitable hospitals, that there is no room to even talk about diet, fasting, supplementation, fasting mimicking diets, if it is fruititarian or whatever happens to be. There is not even room to talk about it because it is against the rules. Check out cut poison burn. If our team can find a link to that, they will put that on GetBetterFasterPodcast.com. Thank you.
Can I interject? Please. Mark, I do not know if you know this, but do you know that Dr. Jason Bradley is a chiropractor?
Yes.
The Impact Of Chiropractic Adjustments On The Nervous System And Tumors
What is your take on the nervous system when somebody gets cancer and actually gets chiropractic adjustments? I am really curious about that because my show is called Chiro Hustle, and I have done so many interviews with chiropractors, talking to them, but I have never been able to ask somebody about oncology and chiropractic and relating to the nervous system being adjusted and how that has an impact on the way you see the world.
There are a lot of things involved, and just stress, emotional stress, or psychological stress has a huge impact on cancer growth and progression. If you can tame that down, through adjustments, I can see where that could be very helpful. Tumors have nerves running through them, and there is a lot more learning about that currently.
Stress—whether emotional or psychological—can have a significant impact on cancer growth and progression. Reducing it through lifestyle adjustments may be very beneficial. Share on XThe nervous energy can have an effect on tumor growth both ways. The body is not separate parts. It is a fully integrated system. Cancer is affected by everything that is going on in the body. It is affected by your emotions, your thoughts, and definitely the balance of your nervous system, sympathetic, parasympathetic. It is affected by your gut microbiome, pretty much everything in the system. I could see where chiropractic can be helpful. If there are areas of inflammation and pain that could be brought down, that is going to be helpful.
As me being a subject matter expert, I just want to inject one thing. We call it an adjustment, not manipulation. Just for everybody out there watching, if you ever go to a chiropractor, do not let them manipulate you. Ask for an adjustment. I am glad that you brought that up, that it is a full-body system. The thing I love about chiropractic is that it puts nothing extra in the body, and it takes nothing out. It just removes that nerve interference.
If you are telling me that the neurological patterns are telling you that there is a neurological component to the tumor, and somebody was to get adjusted, it actually probably, in my opinion, would have a greater outcome on that person’s nervous system and their gut biome or wherever it is happening in their body if they did not have nerve interference going through their spine I just think that what you said really correlates with my belief system I have always had is that once you remove the subluxation from somebody’s spine, the body gets a chance to actually heal naturally. It needs nothing extra in it. Simply no interference. Jason, over to you.
I just want to comment too about chiropractic. Obviously, my first doctoral degree is in chiropractic. I have also gone through naturopathic medicine training. I also have a doctor of health sciences and then a few board certifications, and I could give my whole accolades here. The reason I bring that up is that I just want to say this about chiropractic and just extol it a little bit.
People think that naturopaths get a better education in diet and nutrition than any other doctors that are out there. I am going to say this point-blank. It is going to make a lot of friends around the naturopathic community. Naturopaths want to be medical doctors so badly. They want to prescribe, they want to do minor procedures. In seventeen states, they are practicing as watered-down NPs, PAs, or medical doctors.
They are not the doctors of the natural path. They want so desperately to be part of the inside club that they get better training in diet and nutrition than their medical counterparts. The very best nutritional and diet training that I had in my standardized curriculum was in chiropractic school. I went to the fountainhead of Palmer’s. I went like 30 years ago or something like that.
I do not know if it has changed since then, but I just want to say for the general listening public, when we say the doctors of the future are chiropractors, doctors of chiropractic, it is very true. I would say the future is now. Our local doctor of chiropractic probably knows more about endocrinology, oncology, and gastroenterology. I mean all of the ologies.
Honestly, then possibly their medical counterparts, it is just that those doctors have been relegated to being your pain doctor, and that is what people who are chiropractors do. I just want people to ask their doctor of chiropractic about these things. Probably have a wealth of knowledge that they are just salivating to share. Nobody asks them about it. Everybody just wants, “My neck hurts, my back hurts, I have got a migraine.”
Talk to your chiropractic doctor about this stuff. It is interesting stuff. I want to go back a little bit, if it is okay, Mark, because I know we are getting about ten minutes left for our show. This is a really important topic for me. You mentioned sodium selenite, a selenium salt. I have never thought about it from an oncology point of view.
During my little armchair analysis for 32 seconds, I looked up its effect on cancer cells, and it is pretty awesome. It is amazing, as a matter of fact. I cannot believe that even in all of my deep dive research, I have not come across this. I applaud you for finding this and hooking into it and helping your clients through NORI Nutraceuticals.
You have some products on there. It is interesting because I use Selenium all day, every day, but for a totally different reason. I use selenium in autoimmunities and specifically in thyroid autoimmunities, such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and Graves disease, and it does wonders at helping my clients get into remission. What I mean by remission is that on a blood laboratory analysis, they do not have active antibodies.
They are literally in remission. If they did not know that they had been diagnosed with one of these autoimmune conditions prior, and then somebody ran some blood work and looked at it, any doctor on the planet would say, “You do not have that, because there is no indication on their blood work that they have it anymore.” It is a targeted, structured, and systematic approach. It is not just, “Take some selenium, you are going to get into remission.”
It is a lot more complex than that. I know that you know that too. I just wanted to say that for our audiences. I am floored, and this is the way I understand Selenium. The sodium selenium salts. This is the way I explain it. It helps regulate the immune system and the inflammatory cascade. By doing that, it is basically dampening or down-regulating the hyper response or the over response from a hypervigilant overactive immune system.
I am wondering, though, now that I am chatting with you, because you said somewhere in here, cancer is not an illness or sickness, it is an environmental injury, low-level and confined until it is not. I am wondering how sodium selenite works from a cancer point of view? Not only from treatment prevention, but also walk me through the biochemistry for our audiences that are not biochemists, that are not providers, practitioners. Tell me about how selenium works?
One of the forms of cancer that is really easy to treat, for which I have had over a 99% success rate, is papillary thyroid cancer. It is horrifying for me to see so many patients have their thyroid removed, undergo surgeries, radioactive iodine, and everything else when it is not necessary. I found that just sodium selenite alone can treat thyroid, papillary thyroid cancer, and other forms of thyroid cancer very easily, even without major dietary changes.
It is alarming to see so many patients undergo thyroid removal, surgery, radioactive iodine, and other interventions when they may not be necessary. Sodium selenite alone can effectively treat papillary and other forms of thyroid cancer, even without… Share on XIt is better, of course, if you do the diet along with it. There are studies that show that sodium selenite can kill thyroid cancer cells, but it works so efficiently because there is a naturally high uptake of selenium into thyroid tissue. Thyroid tissue uptakes selenium and iodine. For the thyroid to be healthy and functioning properly, it needs a good amount of iodine and selenium to operate properly.
It is not really related so much to it being selenium. It is related to its outer shell of electrons, as to its oxidation state, because there are two forms of sodium selenite, and there is sodium selenate. The only difference is one oxygen atom. Sodium selenite is Na2SeO3. Selenate is Na2SeO4. Selenate does not have much anti-cancer activity, very little, if any. Selenite is a major. It has more to do with the configuration of the selenium atom.
The way it works, the way it appears to work according to all the scientific literature, it disables one of the antioxidant systems called thioredoxin. In our cells, we have two major antioxidant defense systems, glutathione and thioredoxin. The main thing that sodium selenite looks like it is doing is inhibiting an enzyme called thioredoxin reductase, which basically recirculates the thioredoxin. It is an oxidation-reduction thing.
It reduces the thioredoxin reductase, which is an enzyme. It can work as an antioxidant again. Antioxidant systems have oxidation and reduction feedback systems that keep it active and keep the levels up where they need to be, all automatically regulated by enzymes, which knock out this antioxidant system. Without this antioxidant system, the cancer cell goes into oxidative overload. The oxidation builds up to the point where it is going to have all kinds of downstream effects, and it is going to trigger apoptosis or ferroptosis. That is the simplest explanation I can give you
Thanks for sharing that, Mark. I think that there is a lot there from a scientific brain standpoint for people to take in and to go back and rewatch and rewatch again. The average person like me does not think about the optosis or whatever you said. I am just sharing my ignorance here because I am not the most educated man when it comes to clinical research, diagnosis, or getting people better.
My big question before we wrap is, I have a couple of poignant things to say. I did want to let the audience know that if you do have any questions, post them in the comments now before we wrap up, because Mark is a subject matter expert. He can help answer some questions. We have a little bit of time if you guys do have some extended ideas that you would like to share and post in the comments. Why aren’t more people educated on natural approaches? Why does it take a couple of journalistic mob freaks like Jason and me to put on a show to educate people on natural approaches to getting themselves better faster?
How about white coat syndrome? I do not know. It is the system. It is the media that is much owned by the pharmaceutical industry. Medicine is owned by the pharmaceutical industry and run by them. Doctors are basically just licensed drug pushers. Medical doctors for the most part.
I make friends this way by saying they are glorified Pez dispensers in a white coat. That does not make me friends very easily.
I know on the edge of our time, but I do have one question for you. You talk about eating a lot of fruit. Do you believe that we should clean our fruit?
I buy mostly organic stuff, or I get it from the local farmers’ market, where it is organically or sustainably grown. I am not eating commercial stuff.
I go to the grocery store. I like to buy blueberries. What should I clean my blueberries in?
Baking soda, sometimes hydrogen peroxide. That takes care of what is on the outside. It does not take care of what is on the inside. When it comes to strawberries, do not eat them. Just get organic. Blueberries can have high pesticide residues. You might want to go organic there. A really good source for organic food, and it is inexpensive, is to go to Costco, the plug for Costco. They have such a wide variety and selection of organic food. It is a third of the price of some of the other stores. You get a big bag of frozen blueberries, like 3 or 4 pounds, for around $10. Probably coming from Mexico. No, it does not. It is grown like in Washington or Oregon. It is not from Mexico.
My last statement here, Mark, is what if there were money and healthy people? What if we flip this paradigm around and we taught doctors to make people healthy?
I take it disease by disease. Let us say take diabetes. That is totally fixable through a nutritionist who understands it or a chiropractor who understands nutrition. Cardiovascular disease. These are chronic degenerative diseases, and they are caused by diet and lifestyle. Doctors are the wrong people because they are just putting a Band-Aid on it with a drug.
You want to fix these conditions. You go to people who are trained and experienced in nutrition and lifestyle. There are doctors out there like Dr. Michael Greger, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and a bunch of others, who have training in this area and plant-based nutrition. They have an American College of Lifestyle Medicine Fellowship, board-certified, in that area. Those are good guys to go to if you have one available to you. Some will do telemedicine. They are going to have to travel across the country. That is one route. Find a good nutritionist. That should really be your primary healthcare provider.
I had a patient once, and again, James is over in Colorado, and we are trying desperately to get out of Iowa. Iowa has some of the highest cancer rates in the country. It is because of the way we farm here. I had an organic farmer who was here named Josh, and he and his wife subsequently moved to Hawaii. Good for them. Maybe someday I will join them. He had a really good quote where he said I believe in the future we are going to choose our farmers the way we choose our doctors.
I really like this idea of being highly scrutinizing. Where does my food come from? Josh said this 25 years ago. At the time, I am like, “That is cute.” Now I am like, “He was totally right.” Rachel and I are like, we are buying our food, I like to know the actual farmer, where it is coming from. I like to go to farms. I know James goes to farms and salt mines, and all kinds of stuff around on his travels, too.
It is important what we are talking about. We put a lot of stock into the system, and the system has had approximately a hundred years now to prove to us that pharmaceuticals and traditional medical care, as we are now used to in the United States, work. We are 5% of the population of the world, but we take upwards of 75%, 80% of all the pharmaceuticals created on the planet right here in our tiny little country, per world population. Yet we are the sickest modern country on the planet.
If drugs and traditional care were the solution, we would be the healthiest. It would be like, “How many more drugs can I take? Give me more pharmaceuticals.” It is not the way it is. I know we are running out of time. I do not want to pass it back over to James. I just want to say, Mark, thank you so much for coming. I know James has some closing remarks as well.
Thank you so much for coming. This is an important conversation. I feel like, like you said, we could have gone on for days and days on this. Cancer treatment, cancer prevention, real cancer treatment, and real cancer prevention from a non-medicalized viewpoint, from an open discussion viewpoint, need to be discussed more.
Just to put some numbers on it, we talked about it being the number two killer in the United States and also worldwide. In the United States alone, four people are diagnosed with cancer every single minute. Four people a minute. We have been on this show for 90 minutes now. That means 180 people have newly been diagnosed with cancer since we have been on this call.
Cut poison burn is their only solution within the system. I say all the time, the system that has allowed you to stay so sick for so long will not be the system that you find your solution for health. Mark, thank you so much for coming. I love to have you on for part two down the road. We will coordinate that, James. I am going to pass it right over to you, sir.
Thank you. Before I have any closing remarks, I just want to say a big thank you to our podcast team. I sometimes overlook who is actually the engine behind what we do. Podetize, thank you so much for getting us the rankings that we are getting and the position that we are in. I also want to say thank you to Jason Bradley for doing such hard work behind the scenes to make this dream a reality.
I also want to say thank you to Rachel Bradley for her diligence in getting us together to make sure that the shows go off and everything is scheduled, and everything is launched and ready to go when I step behind this microphone. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Tom, of Podetize.
If you guys want to launch a podcast, reach out to the Podetize team. I am sure that they would love to hear from you. Mark, it has been absolutely eye-opening. So much information I did not know. I am sure our viewers who are still on the line watching did not know this stuff either. I am sure they all have somebody out there that is sick or suffering that they can give this as a recording to as a resource, so they can start educating themselves on understanding the ways to get better faster.
For our audiences, Mark has shown us that cancer is fundamentally vulnerable and that we can target it through strategic nutrition and targeted nutraceuticals. I did not even get a chance to ask him what a nutraceutical was because I was curious, and I did not get a chance to ask that, but in part two, we will touch on that. If somebody you love is navigating a cancer diagnosis and looking for options beyond the conventional cut, burn, poison approach, the NORI protocol offers a natural, non-toxic path worth exploring.
Here is the incredible part for you guys who are still with me right now. Mark hosts a free Zoom workshop every Saturday where you can learn more about this approach and bring your family on to talk to him about what is going on in their personal lives. Visit GetBetterFasterPodcast.com to get the link and join the community. Remember, nobody has come to save you, but solutions like this can prove that you can save yourself. Mark Simon, thank you again. All of you are getting better faster, nation. Thank you for tuning in and for your continued support. The best way to show your support is to share this episode with someone who needs to hear the message.
I would say right now, if you are still watching this, please hit share right now to your audience so they can watch this, and do not forget to subscribe so you never miss another episode and get all the behind-the-scenes hijinks we have got coming your way. We have got more incredible guests lined up who are going to blow your mind with real solutions for reclaiming your health, your happiness, and your life until next time. Keep questioning everything and keep getting better faster. Love and appreciate you guys. Thanks for being with us.
Thanks, Mark. Thanks, James. Thanks, GBF Nation. Love you all.
Bye for now.
Important Links
- Mark Simon on LinkedIn
- Nutritional Oncology Research Institute
- NORI Nutraceuticals
- Chiro Hustle
- Podetize
- Work directly with Dr. J and his team to reclaim radiant health
- Get Dr. Bradley’s book, The EPIC Five Plan
About Mark Simon, CN, CHCC, CPBN
Mark Simon’s focus on cancer research began in 2004. Mark’s studies in plant-based nutrition, holistic health and natural medicine began in 1982. Mark’s strong belief is that there alternatives to surgery, radiation and chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer involving nutritional intervention and natural agents. NORI was established in 2011 to offer cancer patients a set of powerful tools to support recovery and management of their condition.