Nathan Crane is a best-selling author, speaker, cancer health researcher, and award-winning documentary filmmaker. With more than 15 years of experience in the health and wellness field, Nathan’s research has focused on the link between cancer and the immune system. In this episode, Nathan and I discuss his favorite natural therapies to heal from cancer, how processed foods, toxins, and chemicals can damage DNA, the limitations of conventional cancer treatments, the importance of having a positive attitude to overcome, and other lessons learned from his conversations with more than 500 integrative doctors and cancer survivors.
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*Unedited Transcript*
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Jacqueline: [00:00:00] well, Nathan, first of all, it’s really great to connect with you. I’ve heard your name, uh come up quite a few times. And it was funny. I was talking with my mom, ~the other weekend~ and she always asks who’s on my podcast. And I mentioned your name.
I said, I have someone called Nathan crane coming on. She’s like, Oh, I get his newsletter. Just to kick it off, Nathan, I’m curious, what is your background?
Like, how did you find yourself? In the holistic, cancer coaching space?
Nathan: Yeah, I mean it’s a bit of a long story, but the short version is, you know, I was really Lost as a teenager and very sick, uh, fell into a lot of addiction, homelessness, um, nearly dead by 17, 18 years old. I had a beautiful family take me in, my best friend’s parents, and they were really spiritual people and, um, they ate healthy or vegetarian and, and I just.
I was about 17, I just soaked that up. I loved being with them and [00:01:00] asking questions and having spiritual and philosophical conversations. And my best friend came back from what was like a military boot camp, you know, it was actually, it was called Youth Challenge. And, um, we, he kind of, we kind of got into a lot of the same.
patterns and problems, uh, that sent him there after he got back and he said, I’m moving to San Diego. I got to get away from here. And I’m like, you answered my prayers. Let’s go. And, uh, so at 18, this was 2005, left to San Diego and really started my life over and started meditating and going to the gym and learning about health and writing and, and just.
Trying to transform my life to know what it was like to be a good person. You know, I, I hadn’t really known that. I mean, since I was nine years old, I mean, I was smoking cigarettes and 12 years old drinking alcohol and I in and out of jail and homelessness and. Drug abuse and fights and violence. And that’s all I knew basically from the time, [00:02:00] you know, generally we don’t remember very much before we’re seven or eight years old, you know, the brain is basically in a hypnotic trance state at a whole time, it’s in a theta state as we’re, you know, developing our subconscious as Bruce Lipton and other neuroscientists talk about.
And so from the point of like consciousness to young adulthood, it was like, that’s all I knew. I didn’t know there was another way to live, you know? And so. It was like this, all this weight that was lifted off my shoulders. It was an incredible experience. Um, I was more high being sober for the first time that I had been on all this stuff I’d been using up to that point.
But it wasn’t easy, and it, you know, kind of my health and personal transformation wasn’t overnight. It was, you know, two steps forward, one step back. Two steps forward, one step back. So it was a struggle, but I’d make progress. Struggle, make progress. Along the way, I, you know, through meditation and through finding some great teachers and mentors in my life, Um, [00:03:00] and really getting, you know, serious about health and then I was being asked to teach and speak and I was speaking in front of groups and started finding a new passion, passion in my life.
And then my grandpa was diagnosed with cancer and, um, when I went to visit him in Arizona, uh, and I just saw how much pain and suffering he was going through. I mean, you were talking with me a minute ago about your mom and I’m sure you’ve seen, you know, devastation of treatment. that cancer patients go through when they do chemotherapy and radiation.
It just destroys their immune system and the vomiting and the sickness and the brain fog and the fatigue and you know, all the pain and suffering that comes from that treatment. That’s what I saw what my grandpa was going through and, and I just, I knew there had to be a better way. I just didn’t have the tools at my resource.
I didn’t have those resources and I didn’t have that knowledge then I didn’t know anything about cancer. Like most people, you know, most people don’t know anything about cancer, what causes it, how our bodies [00:04:00] make it, what we can do about it. We’re just not educated. And in fact, most oncologists don’t even know actually anything about cancer.
They don’t know any true understanding of what causes cancer and how to get rid of it. They’re trained in pharmacology and surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, they’re doing the best they can with what they have, but they really are not trained in the underlying causes of cancer. The cellular metabolism that causes cancer to proliferate, and then how we can actually reverse that, because that’s, that’s diet and lifestyle and mindset and nutrition, that’s, that’s holistic medicine that deals with the root cause.
Our current conventional. medical establishment is not trained in root cause medicine, right? So they just don’t know what they don’t know. And then my grandpa passed away and, um, and that sent me, you know, 2012, I did one of the first online summits about cancer, bringing together top cancer, holistic cancer [00:05:00] physicians and doctors and cancer conquerors, people who’ve overcome cancer and started.
learning and spreading that, um, with thousands of people. And that eventually turned into documentaries and summits and conferences and magazines and masterclasses and books. And I’ve been really focused on that since around 2012, really understanding everything I possibly could about cancer, the causes of it, how do we reverse it?
How do we heal it? How do we prevent it using a holistic approach? And if there is good things in our current medical model, you know, what can we use? What, what are the. Low toxic, low side effects, but highly effective conventional methods to help support, but they’ll never cure cancer. Our conventional medicine will, there will never be a cure.
This whole, you know, facade of let’s raise billions and billions and billions of dollars for nonprofits that are really focused on drugs. There’s never going to be a drug that cures cancer because cancer is not caused by lack of drugs, right? We [00:06:00] don’t form cancer in the body because. We have a lack of pharmaceuticals in our body.
We form cancer because of the underlying root causes. And that’s what I have researched and discovered. And so I got certified as a holistic cancer coach and have created, brought on other coaches and they run our cancer coaching program and we’ve, you know, really reached millions of people over the years now and have had incredible case studies of people revert, going through our programs, going through our documentary series, following my masterclass, following our coaching.
Um, reverse stage four cancers, have reversed irreversible cancers, have changed everything about their life and seen their cancer completely go away. So, you know, it’s, it’s incredible to see that. And what I tell people, you know, they tell us that, you know, thank you, Nathan, you saved my life. And I say, well, no, you save your life.
Like, yes, I’m here to, to, understand the research and to share it and inspire you, but you’re the one who has to take [00:07:00] action. And if you didn’t take action, if you didn’t start meditating and press, pressing Qi Gong and yoga and change your diet and eat more plant based and get rid of the toxins and detox and clean your water and clean your, and all these things that you did over the last two years, if you didn’t actually do the hard work, put in the work to do that, Your cancer wouldn’t have gone away and your life wouldn’t have got better.
But the unfortunate thing is it’s such a small percentage of people that actually do all that, you know, that’s like, if everybody did all that, the, the cancer rates, we would see just plummet without a doubt. I have no doubt about that. Cancer rates would plummet if they did all the holistic lifestyle things that we teach.
The problem is, we get busy, we get scared, you know, we rush into treatments we don’t know anything about. We look for that magic blue pill that’s going to save our life, and I’m telling you, it doesn’t exist. There is no magic blue pharmaceutical pill that’s ever going to save your life. Yes, there are some highly targeted drugs that may be [00:08:00] beneficial.
Yes, there are some highly targeted supplements that may be beneficial, and yes, we recommend those. But they’re not the magic bullet. There’s no, you know, the, the magic bullet is God, in my opinion. You know, we see miraculous things where we bring God into our lives, but even then we still have to take action, even in all the scriptures, whether it’s from, you know, Jesus in the Bible to, uh, the Vedas in India, they all teach us, we still have to take care of our body.
We still have to. Be healthy and live simply and live a more natural life close to nature. And if we do that, then our bodies will be healthy. But I was reading something in, um, in the book, uh, Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda recently, and one of the things they said in there that was so simple and so powerful is, you know, we often look at health.
Health as the goal, health as the end point, right? Like trying to be healthy.
Jacqueline: Mm hmm.[00:09:00]
Nathan: But he says health should not be the end, health should be the means to an end. The end should be to be one with God, to be our highest spiritual self possible and to know God and to be one with God. And so health is a means to that end, having a healthy body is our vehicle to help us experience that divinity, that higher.
Purpose in ourselves, that higher connection to God, but very often we get attached to the health, me included, you know, to the physical health and, oh, it’s all about being healthy and strong and vital and, you know, yes, and the diet and nutrition and this and this and, but then. You’re still not happy, you’re still not fulfilled in your life, even you’re healthy and strong and vital, but it’s like you’re unhappy about everything else, right?
Because you haven’t yet, we haven’t yet realized that there’s something even greater beyond physical health. And when we, you know, in my life, as I’ve noticed over the years, like away at [00:10:00] detached, Detaching from, you know, my attachment to my body, detaching from my expectations of this physical world.
And not removing ourselves completely from it, right? But getting to a place of detachment, non expectation. Getting to a place of, of um, care, but without expectation of the ends of the body. And so that’s a challenging place to be. To get to, but I think it’s also very liberating and, and you, and I’ve seen it with cancer patients that we work with, but when they finally, finally fully accept, okay, I’ve got this cancer, it’s spread throughout my body, it’s metastasized in my bones, I could be dead in three months, but I’m going to let it go.
I’m going to give it to God. I’m going to just do what I can, right? I’m going to stop stressing about it. I’m going to stop being attached to it. I’m going to stop expecting my body to be a certain way. And I’m going to focus on what [00:11:00] I can do. I’m going to focus on regulating my nervous system, on deep breathing practices, on meditation, on eating healthy and doing all these things.
And then six months goes by and they’re still alive. Eight months goes by a year, two years go by. They’re still alive. The cancer hasn’t progressed. It maybe hasn’t reversed, but it hasn’t. I’ve gotten any worse, but their quality of life has improved significantly because now they’re happier. And, um, and I’ve, I’ve gone through many of those experiences in my own life and going through many challenges and failures and mistakes and physical problems and injuries and kinds of things.
So it’s like. The more that we can get to that state, uh, you know, the happier we’re going to be. And I think we all agree that happiness, joy, peace in our lives, and the avoidance of suffering, the avoidance of pain, you know, these are things that, that we all need. We all can agree that, uh, are important to us, no matter what your religion, your belief is, your whatever.
It’s like, we all want to be happy [00:12:00] and none of us want to suffer. Um, even someone who says they’re a masochist, I don’t think they really want to suffer, you know, because when you do feel good, when you do have peace, when you’re happy. It’s our, it’s our biological imperative that, you know, we’re, we feel great.
Our brains literally release neurochemicals that make us feel good. We’re designed, we’re wired to be happy and peaceful. And so it’s the things, these things that, um, whether it’s cancer or it’s anything else in our life that if we practice more and more, then we can experience more of that happiness and peace in our lives.
Jacqueline: Yeah, all very true. Wow. So many things came to mind. As you were talking, I think the first is that you and I share similar backgrounds in the sense of we’re kind of self taught. Um, you know, when it comes to holistic and integrative cancer care, so you’re going to laugh. I actually went to a school for business and I majored in economics and finance, completely unrelated to health.
But during my undergraduate years, I was in this honors program where we could [00:13:00] essentially write a thesis on any topic under the sun. So what did I choose, Nathan? I chose integrative oncology. Um, and I wrote, I wrote about a hundred page thesis on exactly that. Um, I explored a whole chapter just dedicated to pharmaceuticals and just how it’s one of the most corrupt, uh, sectors in our healthcare system.
And it just really, really opened my eyes and made me question a lot of things. And I mean, quite honestly, I think my interest in integrative oncology, first started when my mom was diagnosed with stage two, as I mentioned to you back in no eight, but I was 13, you know, didn’t really know much.
And it wasn’t really until her recurrence in 2018 where I kind of questioned everything that she did. You know, she was on a neuromatase inhibitor tamoxifen for about nine years. That was supposed to be the quote unquote, gold standard to prevent recurrence. Um, and her cancer ended up spreading, right?
So then I paused and I said, okay, what. What was her lifestyle like over the past nine years? And then that’s when I got into the importance of sleep, regulating your nervous system, your [00:14:00] diet, right? All things that should be. Relayed to a cancer patient in their oncologist office that are sadly not. Um, it is a bit encouraging though, to see that there are some more oncologists who are kind of incorporating more nutrition guidance, uh, with their patients, but, um, there’s still a long way to go on that front. But yeah, and with regards to resources, Nathan, I’m really curious what some of the first resources. You kind of leveraged were because I at the time had Chris work. Um, I was a big fan of the moss reports I got a subscription and I basically spent hours upon hours just reading through all of the wonderful , literature and research there, but I mean, as you’re very well aware, there are very limited clinical trials on alternative therapies.
Um, we’ve seen, you know, mistletoe past the recent Johns Hopkins phase one clinical trial that he believes and believe big have been spearheading, which has been wonderful for folks who are looking for reputable sources, right. What sources would you recommend them, them [00:15:00] going to?
Thank you.
Nathan: Yeah, there’s a few things that, um, that are important to talk about in that regard. You know, number one is that there, there truly is a clamp down on natural medicine and there has been, you know, for a long time, long time, meaning that there’s a lot of financial interests at play that do not want natural medicine.
Accessible and in the mainstream. That’s just, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just the way it is. We don’t have to get into the history and all of that and the Flexner report and all the things around that, like. None of that really matters. I think most people realize today, seeing what happened with COVID and seeing what, you know, all these forced vaccinations and all this, you know, and then where they came out, say it’s a hundred percent effective.
And anybody who looked at the study was like, okay, they’re already lying completely. And then you see, and then, you know, Oh, it’s 95%. Oh, it’s 90%. Oh, it’s 80. Oh, it’s 70. Oh, it’s 60%, right. Month after month after month, [00:16:00] it kept changing their tune because there’s no way it would have been a hundred percent effective anyway.
And. They didn’t tell us about the people who died from heart complications, right? There was like two, it was like two X people died from other complications to save one life from COVID. Those are the things that like, when people start to wake up to that, they go, okay, yes, there is. You know, a lot of money at play here that prevent natural medicine from getting into the mainstream.
Um, number one is because herbs can’t be patented, right? So you can’t make trillions of dollars on an herb. You can’t patent it, which is great. We don’t want them to be patented. We want them freely accessible and sold to anybody, anywhere at really affordable prices, because. Herbs and herbal medicine had been the medicine of human beings for literally thousands and thousands and thousands of years with very little to no side effects and complications when used properly, right?
Um, and they’re very effective. They’re very effective. They are what I would say, God’s [00:17:00] medicine, you know, their nature’s medicine. And so, um, you, they will not get as much. You know, um, double blind placebo controlled trials because those cost millions of dollars to publish those scientific studies on a single herb that you cannot make billions of dollars from.
So where’s the incentive? There’s no incentive to do, to spend the millions and millions of dollars on those trials, uh, because you can’t make any money from it. So, and our government doesn’t invest in things that they can’t make money from either. You know, our government and the WHO and the CDC, you know, they all in those organizational bodies, they all make money from the patents of the pharmaceuticals.
That’s where a lot of their funding comes from. You know, the FDA gets half of its funding from the pharmaceutical companies and they’re supposed to regulate pharmaceutical companies. So at the end of the day, it’s like those studies, we can’t depend on those studies. That’s, that’s what I’m saying. If you’re going to wait until.
There’s double, [00:18:00] double blind placebo controlled trials that prove the efficacy of every single natural medicine out there. You’ll never benefit from the natural medicine that thousands and thousands and thousands of people benefit from every single day. Look, our ancestors already figured this stuff out.
Go back to ancient China, traditional Chinese medicine through their own scientific approach. They discovered what this herb does for this and how, you know, milk thistle is fantastic for the liver and how, you know, uh, slippery elm is amazing for the gut and how, you know, gonaderma reishi is amazing for the brain.
They already figured all this stuff out. Now go to greenmedinfo. com, which is my friend Sanjayji’s website, and you can go find all the science we have on natural medicine in its, you know, whether it’s, you know, herbs for diabetes, or or red light therapy for cancer, this or that, all the published science that’s there, even if it’s, um, you know, even if it’s not, uh, placebo control, but [00:19:00] there are lots and lots of studies.
I mean, there’s 80, 000 abstracts of natural medicine collected at GreenMedInfo. These are abstracts that are in all the peer reviewed published journals around the world, the top journals. And so, you know, medical, the problem is medical students today in many schools are being told. There’s no science on natural medicine for disease, and they’re being told that it doesn’t exist.
And I say, well, what about these 80, 000 published scientific studies that we have just collected at GreenMedInfo that links right to them, and they’re like, oh, our teachers tell us it doesn’t exist. It’s not true. It’s like, okay, uh, if you, if you believe so, it’s like, hey, do you see the lake in front of you?
Uh, no, my, my teacher told me it’s not true, so I don’t see it. Okay. You’re clearly not using your own eyes and your own reasoning. So. There’s a lot of science on natural medicine, but also, and there are some double blind placebo controlled trials, but [00:20:00] there’s a lot of animal studies, and there’s a lot of, um, you know, mouse studies, and there’s a lot of cell studies, there’s a lot of, um, in vitro studies, and like, I’m on the board of directors for the Beljanski Foundation.
We do scientific research into natural cures for cancer. We have dozens of studies published on our website. We do a lot of in vitro and in vivo. Both in cell petri dish and animal studies showing different plants and how they kill cancer stem cells, how they, uh, stop cancer cells, how they, you know, start to regress cancer.
Like we have those studies published on just a handful of plants. I mean, we’ve studied six, seven plants in multiple forms of cancer. Our next
Jacqueline: Wow.
Nathan: study that’s coming up is for prostate cancer. We’re publishing one right now on breast cancer stem cells, which is, which is amazing because if you know, in the research you’ve done, there’s, there’s, um, chemotherapy and radiation do not kill the cancer stem cells.
Even if [00:21:00] you take out the tumor, then you blast the area with chemotherapy and radiation, which both cause cancer, they’re carcinogenic by the way, but anyway, you blast the cancer with, and you kill the cancer cells as well as the healthy cells. It does not kill cancer stem cells, that’s clearly understood in the literature.
So those cancer stem cells are like the mother cells, they’re going to go out and they’re the ones that can metastasize. And that’s why, like, in your own, uh, mother’s case, unfortunately, in many people’s cases, the cancer often comes back with a vengeance. Three years, five years, eight years, ten years later, because the cancer stem cells were never addressed.
It spread somewhere else in the body, it started to grow and proliferate, and the underlying, uh, Root cause of that cancer, which was stress, or chemicals, or toxins, or lack of nutrition, uh, DNA damage, mitochondrial damage, has caused that cancer, the perfect environment for that cancer to thrive. And so what we’re studying is different plants and their effectiveness at killing cancer stem cells.
And so, like I said, we’re studying a handful of [00:22:00] plants, but there are thousands and thousands and thousands of plants that have been studied for thousands of years, showing their effectiveness against all these ailments that we experience. And what’s cool about modern science is that all it’s really doing is validating and verifying what our ancient ancestors have figured out from India and China for literally thousands of years.
You know, and our Native Americans, uh, here in, in, uh, in North America as well have been using natural herbal medicine for centuries and centuries. And when, whenever there’s a study published, it might be a Petri dish or might be a in vitro study. It’s literally just confirming what they already figured out through really, I believe, a stronger connection with Spirit, a stronger connection with God, a strong connection with God through the plants, speaking to them.
Doug Simons, who I spent a couple of days with in southern New Mexico, he told me he lived for 20 years. In the wild, in the desert, [00:23:00] on nothing but wild plants, on nothing but herbs and plants. And he didn’t go to school, he didn’t study Ayurveda, he didn’t study traditional Chinese medicine. Everything he learned on their medicinal capabilities came from what the plants taught him.
So, how I understand that is, he was so in tune with spirit, with nature, with the plants, that They taught him everything he knew about them and everything that he was teaching others is the same understanding that science has confirmed today about those plants. So there’s an underlying connection here that goes much deeper beyond just this material world.
I think we all know that. I think we all sense that. We might deny it. We might avoid it. You know, we might get too attached to this material to forget that, oh, everything’s energy. Everything’s quantum. Everything is, Universal is God, is, is beyond just the material. And so we can tap into that in, when we’re looking at what solution is [00:24:00] best for me.
And what solution, so the other thing is, into your question, how did I learn? I learned by learning from the experts. So interviewing them, asking them questions, meeting with them, learning from the people who overcame cancer. What’d you do? How’d you do it? What’d you eat? How much do you eat? How often do you eat?
Did you meditate? How long did you meditate? How many times a day did you meditate? Right? Asking them tons and tons of questions, doing interviews like this with hundreds. I’ve done five or six hundred interviews now with the top functional medicine practitioners in the world and dozens and dozens of people who’ve overcome cancer, diabetes, heart disease, you name it.
And just asking all these questions. Eventually you create a blueprint. Eventually you create the commonalities, right? Oh, I ask, I learn number one. Number two, um, then I read the research. I go and look at the studies. Uh, I hear a study, I go and read it. I read about chemotherapy, radiation, its effectiveness in colon cancer.
I’ll actually read the study. I’ll read the studies on diet and lifestyle, nutrition, herbs, and all those things. So I’ve read [00:25:00] probably thousands of studies by this point. So I do like to look into the science and see what’s there and try to understand it. And number three, I experiment. I experiment on myself.
You know, so if I tell someone to go do a raw vegan diet, I’ve already done that for a year, strict, a hundred percent raw vegan for a year. If I tell someone to be on a vegetarian diet, I’ve already done that. If I tell someone, uh, ketogenic, I’ve already done that. If I tell someone to do something, it’s cause I’ve, I’ve heard it from others who’ve had success.
I’ve read the research on it. If we have any, which we usually do have some research and then I’ve experimented with it on myself. And then I share it with others when I’ve had my own experience. I think you said your mom was on my newsletter. There’s 300, 000 people on my newsletter, right? And when I recommend supplements, or I recommend saunas, or I recommend anything. I, I get to know the company first, I try their products, I research their products, I use them for weeks or months, then, and [00:26:00] only then, if I like them and I think they’re high quality and I think they’ll actually help people and, you know, I think they’re good quality, I’ve used them personally, then I recommend them to my community.
A lot of people, they just, they have a following or whatever, and some company reaches out and goes, Hey, we want you to promote this product. We’ll give you some money. And they’re like, great money. Good. They don’t look at the ingredients label. They don’t like these companies that reach outside. These companies reach out to me every single day.
Cause they know I have a very large following. They want me to promote their stuff every single day. I turned down 90 percent of them. And every one of them, they never send you their ingredients label on their website that they want you to promote the ingredients label isn’t even there. I’m like, Send me your product, send me your ingredients label, send me information about your company.
I’ll look into all that. If I like that, then I’ll actually try your product. If I don’t like that, donate, we won’t, I’ll let you know so I won’t waste your time. Right? I want to know what’s in the products. I want to know what’s, what’s it made of. I want to know, you know, the, the effects of it and the quality of it [00:27:00] before I even put it in my own body.
Let alone, if I’m not going to put it in my own body, I’m not going to recommend it to somebody else. And so, I think that’s, you know, I’m going through Yogananda’s lessons right now. And that’s, that’s the essence of what Yogananda teaches and what all great teachers teach is, Yes, study. Yes, learn. But the only way that we truly know something is by experiencing it.
You have to experience it. Right. I could tell you, Hey, drink a glass of lemon water in the morning with a little bit of salt in there to kind of kickstart your digestive system. And you can look at the lemon, you can look at the water, you can look at the salt and you know what I’m talking about. And you can go, yeah, that’s a great idea.
You know what? That, that should give me benefit. That should be great way to start my morning. And you can go tell other people to do that, but you’ll never get the benefit of it yourself or the experience of it yourself until you actually do it and you do it for a period of time. Um, Not a day or two, you know, I’m talking months, [00:28:00] years of experiencing something.
Um, you know, you can usually though experience something for a couple of weeks, two, three, four weeks and start to go like, am I heading the right direction with this or the wrong direction with this? You can usually start to four or five weeks, six weeks, like anybody who’s ever did. started exercise for the first time, or after a long time, right?
The first three or four weeks really suck. It’s like, it’s hard, it’s challenging, you’re sore, you’re tired, you don’t want to do it. But about that third week, end of second week, beginning of third week, fourth week, fifth week, It’s like, Oh man, you’re really looking forward to it. Oh, it gives you more energy.
Now you feel better. You’ve, you know, you’ve got more oxygen going, you’re less sore. It’s like, Oh, I can’t wait to get to the gym now or this, or go for a run or ride my bike or go swimming. But it’s like getting past that first three or four weeks of challenge to recognize that, Oh, the adaptation, Oh, this thing is actually really, really good for me, I should do this very often.
Jacqueline: [00:29:00] Yeah. No, that’s, that’s very, very true. Um, and in fact, that’s something I try to live by as well. To the point about integrity when it comes to products and supplements, I think that’s incredibly important, right? Especially with a large audience. But going back to herbal remedies, Nathan.
So I did a bit of research in this area. Um, again, back in 2018, 2019, I’m sure you’re familiar with SC act. Yeah. Um, contains a very like high amount of sheep’s are all I think in Burdock root. So again, that’s one whole Avenue, but beyond herbal, um, remedies in, in your research, what other actual like alternative or complimentary therapies have you found to be most effective based on your conversations with the over 600, cancer survivors and experts in the space coupled with your own research, because they’re obviously, you know, There are so many, right?
Like, my mom, like, she’s tried high dose IVC. There’s off label drugs, hyperbaric oxygen, like, all these nutritional changes. I had Dr. Naysha on the show not too long ago, and we spoke about, you know, you have [00:30:00] to approach it as a metabolic disease, which I think also has truth. So, it’s just like, for someone who’s so overwhelmed, who doesn’t have years under their belt, where, where do they start?
Um, and again, to my, to my initial question, like, what are the three? Most, I would say, effective alternative therapies, um, that you’ve seen and, and heard over your past, you know, 20 years in this space.
Nathan: Yeah, I used to always start with diet, um, and diet’s important and we could talk about that. But over the years as I have learned from the cancer conquerors, the stage four, you know, conquerors, not just survivors, remember cancer survivor means that if you live with cancer past five years. And so that bar is set really, really low because modern medicine doesn’t really treat the root cause of cancer.
So they say, you know, treatment was a success. You’re a cancer survivor, even if your quality of life went down, even if your immune system’s destroyed, now you got autoimmune disease, now you got chronic joint pain, [00:31:00] right? And you, but you live five years, you’re a cancer survivor. I think that should be changed to if your cancer is completely gone, but that’s why I use the word cancer conqueror, someone who is fully cancer free, no evidence of disease, NED, and, you know, they’ve taught me so much.
They’ve taught me so much about what they’ve done, and I’ll tell you what, the number one thing that has come up again and again in every conversation I’ve ever had, and especially I paid attention when I was talking to people who their second, their recurrence, right? They had a second or third recurrence and they did this one thing more intently.
They put more time in it, more energy into it. And they gave the credit to this one thing more than everything else was meditation. A lot of people might go, Oh, meditation, whatever. And that’s not like a nutrition or therapy or scientific study or whatever. Number one, no, we have actually hundreds and hundreds of studies on meditation and why it is so effective at improving our [00:32:00] health.
The number one is that it puts us into a parasympathetic state. And we know that if you’re in a sympathetic nervous system state, your body cannot heal itself. It has a very hard time because it’s putting all the energy towards your survival mechanisms. Right? It’s increasing your heart rate. It’s increasing blood flow to your extremities.
It’s, you know, even if you’re, we think of fight or flight as like, you know, that life or death situation, but people are in fight or flight or freeze most of the time of their life. Most of the time of their day, except when they’re sleeping. Even when they sleep because they watch some terrible shows at night, some murderous shows and reading murderous books and, you know, all this.
Then they have. Nightmares and terrible dreams that wake them up and put them in a sympathetic state when they should be healing when you sleep, right? So number one is getting yourself into a parasympathetic state as often as possible, because as Bruce Lipton talks about good friend of mine has been in my documentaries, I’ve known him for years and he’s a, he’s a [00:33:00] just incredible, brilliant human being when the sympathetic state or he calls the adrenal state.
Is kicked on, right? We’re in that kind of stress. Just think of any stress in your life. You’re, you’re having stress. Your adrenal system is kicked on, which means your immune system turns off. It’s downregulated and that’s meant to save us in a fight or flight environment, right? You’re out in the woods and you see a bear and it’s like, You’re either going to freeze and try and hide and hope it leaves you alone.
That’s fight or flight or freeze, or you’re going to try and run and probably won’t outrun a bear, but, uh, you know, if it’s, if it’s hungry enough or if it’s angry enough or whatever, not hungry, they don’t really like to eat people, but if, you know, it feels threatened, um, but you’re going to run. And so you want all that blood and energy going to your extremities, right?
You don’t want it focusing on your immune system. You want all your energy to give you all the speed possible to get away. Or to fight, to stand and fight your ground. But people are in that every [00:34:00] day, watching the news, driving in traffic, thinking about their bills, worrying about the past, worrying about the future, every one of those stressful situations.
Sympathetic, sympathetic, sympathetic, sympathetic. Immune system down regulated. As Dr. Thomas Lodi said it best in my, uh, Deintegrative Perspective, my cancer documentary, he said, There is a cure for cancer. It’s called the immune system. When you have a fully functioning immune system, you don’t have to worry about a cancer diagnosis.
And our immune systems are not fully functioning. In fact, autoimmune disease, if you grouped them all together, is the number one disease. actually, because there’s over a hundred autoimmune diseases. And so it’s actually, uh, kills more people than heart disease. So yeah, and if you, because they don’t group them together, they give them as an individual, but they’re all from basically the same root cause.
And a lot of it is stress. It’s a stressed immune system. It’s a stressed inflammatory gut. It’s opening up barriers in the gut and allowing proteins to slip [00:35:00] through. And then our immune system attacks, similar looking proteins, which end up looking like our thyroid or joint tissue or things like that. I mean, that’s basically what autoimmune disease is.
And so immune system downregulated now the op, which means cancer could thrive. Cancer can thrive because you don’t have as many T cells being created. You don’t have as many natural killer cells being created. You don’t have as many natural anti inflammatory responses. Being sent out through the body or B cells all these immune cells.
So the opposite is Parasympathetic we want Parasympathetic to be raised which up regulates our immune system. So it calms our nervous system It activates what I teach in my master class and in my book becoming cancer free what I call the healer within It activates the healer within. Your innate, automatic, autonomic, healing system, God created system.
You don’t even have to think about it. All you have to do is get to a calm [00:36:00] state, meditative state, a relaxed state, and then the immune system wakes up and does its job. It goes around and it’s cleaning up dead cells, and cleaning up cancer cells, and repairing cells, and recycling cells, and doing all the stuff it’s supposed to do.
It does that in sleep. It does it, uh, when we’re fasting, um, and it especially fasting past, you know, 16 hours in general. Um, so if you do like a 24 hour fast once a week, that’s fantastic. You know, if you’re doing a water fast. Once a month, twice a month. There’s incredible stories. Dr. Lodi told me about one of his patients.
He put him on a 30 day or 40 day water fast, stage four cancer completely went away. Um, that kind of stuff needs to be, you know, uh, absurd. Yeah. Monitored by a doctor. It’s like, I would never tell a cancer patient, Oh, go fast for 30 days on water by yourself at home. It’s risky and dangerous, but if you’re at a clinic and there are water fasting clinics with doctors where you can do that and, you know, those kinds of things are, are very powerful.
There’s a doc, there’s [00:37:00] a. A book called, um, the water of life actually started here and J. W. Armstrong used to fast his patients, many cancer patients, all kinds of other chronic disease patients on their own urine. So they would drink all their own urine and, um, and any water they want throughout the day, and then within weeks, very often, their diseases were completely gone, right?
So it’s actually sometimes just giving a break from the body, from all the torrential input that we’re putting in, including the stress we’re exposed to, the toxins, chemicals, those kinds of things. But meditation is key in creating a practice, a daily practice. Ideally, first thing in the morning when you wake up, Do a meditation, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes.
Elaine Gibson told me, you know, she started meditating twice a day, one hour in the morning, one hour at night. And her, that was part of her, part of her strategy that [00:38:00] put stage four cancer in remission. Um, Same thing with Dr. V, Veronique Desanier. She told me the exact same thing. When cancer came back a second time, she knew she was overworked, overstressed.
It just created that environment. She started meditating more in the morning and at night. Right now, I do somewhere between a 30 minute to an hour meditation in the mornings, 30 minutes to an hour at night. You know, if you can, even 15 minutes or beyond, the main thing is creating a practice, starting your day that way, ending your day that way.
You can listen to guided meditations, doesn’t really matter. Just start a practice. Start a practice in meditating. That’s number one. Everything else will come secondary to that, because if your immune system is in fight or flight throughout the day, right, like meditation, what it helps you do is, if you A guy cuts you off in the car, maybe you get pissed off for a second, but then, because you’re learning to control your mind, you’re learning to relax yourself, you’re learning to control your nervous system, you can get out of that fight or flight instantly.
[00:39:00] And over time, that thing never, doesn’t piss you off anymore. Someone can cut in front of me and I’m like, I’m like, you know, uh, I wish you safety. Have a great day. Whereas before my bank, you idiot, you know,
Jacqueline: And I think too, there’s also other practices that help stimulate your vagal nerve to help activate your parasympathetic nervous system aside from meditation too, right? So for folks who are constantly looking at screens, the act of just looking up in the distance is one of the best things someone could do, right?
Chanting, hot, cold therapy. Those are again, all practices that folks can include, um, you know, beyond meditation to help keep their body in that parasympathetic state.
Nathan: anything that activates parasympathetic is going to be beneficial. It’s just, you know, you asked me like, what are my top three? And, and the reason meditation and a daily meditation practice is so essential is because of all the, beyond just the parasympathetic, beyond just the vagal tone, it brings a deeper sense of.
piece into your entire [00:40:00] life, right? So we can be, we can do something that activates parasympathetic and maybe it lasts five minutes, 10 minutes, 15, 20 minutes, which is great. But then what happens the next eight hours, that’s what’s most important. And that’s what meditation gives us. It gives us the skillset and the ability to self regulate during those next eight hours to not be so triggered, to not be so impacted by the stresses around us.
And, and in fact, when something happens, it’s that we can respond so much better. And that’s what we need. We need that ability to self regulate our nervous system during the whole day. You know, not just 15 minutes at a time. It kind of helps us do that through the whole day. And then the more we’re in that state, the more our immune system is kicked on and doing what it needs to do to fight against the cancer.
Jacqueline: absolutely. Yeah. There is a study too. I mean, it wasn’t recent. I think it was about five or so years ago, but it showed that I think it was 10 minutes of daily meditation had such significant impact. [00:41:00] That it was measurable on a brain scan, um, after only eight weeks.
Nathan: Exactly. I mean, there’s studies on Qi Gong, for example. Qi Gong is an ancient Chinese form. of meditation, energy healing, chanting, there’s, they did studies on, uh, specific kind of energy healing, qigong, and petri dishes, and watched the cancer cells completely, uh, be eliminated.
Right? Like, there’s, there’s some really interesting studies like that just on, you know, whether it’s qigong, it’s yoga, it’s meditation, it’s deep breathing, you know, pranayama, all these kinds of things that, uh, help to regulate the body so that it can heal itself. And so There’s, there’s quite a few studies, but again, it’s like, we could talk about these things all day until we actually
do it, actually make a practice of it until we experience it.
That’s all it’s going to be is talk. And so, you know, you have to practice it, you have to experience it, and then you speak from that experience. I, you know, meditation changed my life, it saved my life, you know, so I can speak from that. I know it saved my life. I [00:42:00] know it. Brought me to the place where I am now in my life and the successes that I’ve had.
Had I not been meditating over the years, absolutely would not be doing the work I’m doing. You know, it, it awakens greater intuition, so you make better decisions. You know, when we’re stressed and we’re afraid and how should I do that next treatment? Oh, I don’t know. I feel afraid, but I feel like I need to do it.
And you sit in meditation, you pray to God, you ask for guidance, you get clear, you get calm. Boom.
Jacqueline: Yeah. I’m not doing that. It’s not right for me. You know, and I’ve, I’ve talked to cancer patients who said that it’s not right for me. I need to do something else. And then the next day someone brings them a book on Uh, specific diet and they follow that and their cancer goes away.
Nathan: Like those are the kinds of incredible senior synchronicities and synergies that happen when we get into that space.
Jacqueline: Yeah. Quick note on that, Nathan, before I hear your other, uh, two top therapies, but even with meditation, I think, you know, folks tend to have this image of their, in their mind for those who’ve never, you Attempted it [00:43:00] before of just sitting in silence, um, which not really is that doesn’t necessarily have to be like the way to meditate.
In fact, something I love doing that’s become part of my morning routine is just meditating on scripture. But I like to actually create like a mental image in my head of, you know, being at my favorite place, which is the beach and I’ll just envision.
Um, Literally sitting next to Jesus and just having a conversation with him, but he’s talking right like I my mind is is silenced And to your point, I mean when you have the space for silence You can better hear God in terms of direction on what to do So I love that and I couldn’t agree more
Nathan: Exactly. Well, um, in the Bible, Jesus talked about seek first the kingdom of God, and all else will be given to you, right? Seek first the kingdom of God. And then it goes on in Luke, and it, where is the kingdom of God? Jesus tells us where the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God is within you.
So what does [00:44:00] that mean? You know, what does that really mean? We look deep into the scripture for guidance on where to find the kingdom of God.
Jesus tells us it’s within you. And the only way for us to know that it’s within us is to sit. in that quiet place, in that peaceful place, in that prayer, prayerful place, in that meditative place, in that stillness. And there is where we start to get that glimpse of the kingdom. We start to get that glimpse of peace and happiness.
You know, in, in the Vedas, it talks about how do you know you’re starting to experience God, you know, because Anytime you experience that peace, or you start to experience love, or you start to experience even bliss, they talk about the deeper and deeper you get into your practice, you will start to experience true bliss all throughout your whole mind and body.
That is the essence of God. And we know because it starts to show up more and more in our lives the more we practice. Right? So, you know, scripture is incredible because, um, and I love that you do that in the [00:45:00] mornings. That’s the best way to start today, you know, is to meditate, to pray, to reflect, to read scripture.
And that gets us into that state, that calm, healing state. And so, yes, there’s a million ways to meditate. Um, and that’s, that’s one way, you know, that’s a powerful way. For people who are new to meditation, um, You know, what I recommend is, is getting on YouTube and just listening to a 15 minute or 30 minute guided meditation.
you can find them on, whether it’s physical healing, you can visualize physical healing, you can find them on just peace and serenity. You can find them on God. In the beginning, it’s just a matter of getting a practice going, right? Um, And the sitting in quiet, you know, part of what, what the, uh, what the ancient texts teach us is that first we have to get control of the mind and the incessant chattering, right?
The cheetah is called. It’s like the mind stuff and learn to calm that. [00:46:00] And as we learn to calm that, then we can start to go deeper into. reflecting on God and they teach us concentration. Concentration in meditation means that you single pointedly focus your attention on one thing and that thing should be God or form of God.
And so we connect to God, we focus on God, we put that concentration on God. It could also be, if you have cancer, focus on your healing, right? It’s like I’m bringing in Love and light and healing into my body. My body is healed. God, heal my body. Please God, heal my body. Help me heal this body. I’m healed and strong.
It’s concentration on one core thing. And then we get into a state of what’s called meditation, right? So meditation is then when that single pointed focus of concentration gets. So deep that then we start to experience God, we start to experience that expansive connection to God through the entire universe.
And anybody who’s had that experience, you know, I’ve had, you know, pieces, [00:47:00] glimpses of it over the years. It’s like, it’s just this infinite, expansive experience that you have that we are way more than just this body, you know, we are, we are way more than just this material world that. God truly, as in the Bible says, you know, God is within you.
God is within every single one of you. The kingdom of God is within you. And so the more we start to experience that, it’s like we feel that love, that peace, that infinite expansiveness. And then the teachings teach us to go even deeper, you know, and that’s, that’s called Samadhi, for example, the bliss of God, the oneness with God.
And so anyway, that’s, you know, this is, this is why we have to start somewhere. We have to, and that’s not going to happen overnight, you know, it’s like, we just have to start with a daily practice.
Jacqueline: Yeah. The same power the resurrected Christ from the dead lives in us, right? That’s key and you touched on something too when you said I am healed I think a lot of cancer patients today at least my mom [00:48:00] used to talk like this now she says it the correct way, but she would say, like, I will be healed.
Right. And I just remind her, I say, mom, like, no, you are healed. Like Jesus says, like, you were healed. It’s past. It’s already done. And I think too many times, you know, we go by what we’re feeling, right. Symptom wise. And we let that dictate. Our belief if we are healed or not, right? And my aunt always reminds me.
She’s like, there’s two things. There’s fact and there’s truth She’s like what a doctor presents to you what a scan shows you what blood work shows you those are facts Right, but it’s they’re not truth. The truth is that you were healed So I think when we can really focus on that and the power of that belief despite what?
The doctor is saying despite what our physical bodies are, experiencing symptom wise. It’s so, so powerful. , and that’s certainly an area that I’ve really been diving into, uh, over the past few months,
Nathan: that’s it. It’s beautiful.
Exactly what you said. And I would say that would lead to the second [00:49:00] thing, which is, I know it’s like, I could talk about technologies and I could talk about, you know, or like talk about so many things, but to me, like that’s
10%, 20 percent of it. And a lot of people talk about that all day, every day anyway, right?
The second thing I would say is your mindset. And you were just talking about that is how do you see yourself and how do you see your cancer? And how do you see. Your future. And so there have been stu, there have been studies on this where they l they um, looked at the commonalities among cancer patients, people who thrived without cancer, who, who overcame cancer, and, and people who succumbed, you know, to an early death from cancer.
And the one of the commonalities, which is actually two that they found is. Number one, not accepting your prognosis. So denying the prognosis, what I call the fake expiration date, denying the fake expiration date. So the doctor says you have three months left to live. You have six months, you have a year, maybe you have two or three years.
If you do this, if you don’t do this, maybe [00:50:00] you have a year. Completely denying that. Not accepting it, saying, I do not accept that, that is not part of my life, I don’t care what you say, this is fake, it’s made up, it doesn’t apply to me. It doesn’t, because it’s an average of cancer patients that they know through their clinics, their hospitals, and that’s all they know.
Some people overcame it in that, right, if you took a million people into a single study like that that said, you know, if you do our treatments. You have a 70 percent chance of living past three years, or if you don’t do them, you have 80 percent chance of dying within two years. That’s their average. But what about all the people that overcame that?
What about all the people who live 10 years? What about all the people
who don’t have a chance to live long? You know, they’re, you can’t average those into a single, and then into a single outcome and say, this is you, this is your life. Your life is different. You’re going to end up somewhere else outside of that average.
Right? You could end up in that average, but [00:51:00] you’re going to end up here or here or here or here or way over here and not deal with it and not come and not succumb to that. So number one, deny the prognosis. No, I do not accept that. And that’s what these cancer conquerors had in common. The second mindset that they had in common when study was that they X, they accepted, they accepted their diagnosis.
So we deny the prognosis. We, we do not accept that. Nope, I’m not going to succumb to that. My life is not a life of average. You know, I’m going to overcome this. And we accept the diagnosis, fully accept the diagnosis. I have this cancer. Yes, it is part of me. I accept it. Because very often we go into denial, right?
When something bad happens. It’s like, denial kicks in and then we can’t get to the next stage. of grieving, overcoming grieving. We can’t get to the next stage of healing until we fully accept it. And we fully accept the responsibility for it. [00:52:00] It’s not God’s fault. It’s not someone else’s fault. It’s not even your own fault.
It’s just, this is what I have right now. I have this cancer going on in my body right now, and I’m going to do everything I can. I’m going to, what I teach cancer patients, what I teach all people, actually I’ve been teaching for over a decade, is something I call solution oriented mindset. S O N, Solution Oriented Mindset, and that means that we start to focus our mind, concentrate our mind on solutions and not problems, and we can’t focus on solutions until we fully accept, okay, this is what’s going on, I accept it.
Now what? God, guide me. You know, show me the way. Let me take action forward. I’m not going to deny it any longer. I’m not going to condemn anyone any longer. I’m not going to, you know, blame anyone any longer. I’m not even going to blame myself. It might be my own doing. It might be my own unconscious doing, right?
Eating poorly, stressed [00:53:00] out, lots of toxins, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Okay, forgive yourself, you know, forgive yourself, forgive the others who you hold resentment towards. But it’s another thing Jesus taught us, right? Forgiveness. I mean, even going You know, as, as he was being crucified and stoned and, you know, bleeding and on the cross saying, Father, please forgive them for them to not know what they do.
I mean, that level of forgiveness, think about who’s ever done anything wrong to you or who you hold resentments towards or your own resentments towards yourself, your own blame. We cannot be free in our lives until we forgive,
we forgive ourselves and we forgive others, you know? And so
Jacqueline: Quick note on that, Nathan, I mean, in Kelly Turner’s radical remission, forgiveness, that was one of the main themes, right, in things that she’s witnessed in cases of radical remission from cancer patients, um, so I love that you mentioned that. I know Chris Work talks about that a lot, but it’s, it’s truly so, so [00:54:00] powerful.
Nathan: I mean, in my own life, I mean, I was, my mom kicked me out when I was 15. I was living on the streets and you know, and I, I went to her for help. I said, Hey, I need help. I want to get sober. I want to get out of this life. is so painful. And she said, no, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. And she sent me away and I just like, it destroyed me.
It just destroyed me emotionally. And then I held resentments towards her and I didn’t talk to her for years. And then. You know, then when I moved to California to change my life, it was, and I started getting sober and, and meditating and reading and starting to, you know, open up, uh, kind of a spiritual path.
Then I just had this. Divine guidance. I needed to forgive my mother. I needed to forgive her. And when I did, it was this freedom that happened in my body. I felt it. It was just pure freedom. It was like this huge weight lifted off of me. And had I not, and then our relationship has since healed and been [00:55:00] repaired over the years, you know, and I had to let go of my.
resentments towards her and I just talked to her the other night. I just found this out actually, which was really beautiful to hear. She, and it was around the time not too long before I actually finally got the invitation from my friend and we moved to San Diego to change our lives. She told me that she had to give me up to God.
She said, she said, you know, I was just so, and I was talking with her, I mean, she was so, uh, in so much suffering, you know, mental anguish, emotional anguish. Here’s her kid, you know, living this way and she can’t do anything about it. And she’s trying, she wants to see him do well. And she feels like it’s totally out of her control.
And just, I mean, imagine the pain of a mother that she was going through. Right. And I just told her, I said, I’m so sorry. You know, she’s like, you don’t have to be. I’m like, well, no, I do. It’s obviously I didn’t know what I was doing. And. Um, but I mean, I’m so [00:56:00] sorry I put you through that pain. She said, I just gave you up to God.
I said, I just, I can’t do this anymore. I, I have to just let this go and give you to God. God, please take care of him. And then she said, and then I found out shortly after that you were moving to San Diego. You said, God, really? You did? And I told
her.
I said that was the answer. That was the answer to your prayer because that’s exactly what I needed to do.
That’s exactly what I needed to do and it was the right thing. So thank you, you know, thank you for giving me up to God to allow that to happen. Um, and so the mindset is so important, you know, focusing on solutions, overcoming that attachment to, you know, whatever we’re holding on to and saying, okay. What can I do now?
Who do I need to talk to? What doctor do I need to talk to? What, what herbs and supplements can I take? What do I need to change in my life? Or, you know what, I’m hearing about meditation. I should do that. I should commit to it. I should start [00:57:00] to it. You know, reading scripture, prayer. Okay, let’s do this every day.
Let’s start making these changes. Oh, you know, um, and then that takes me into the third thing, right? So mind, so meditation every day and then mindset, solution oriented mindset in everything that you do. And then I would say is going to be your diet, you know, diet and lifestyle. And so most people put all their attention on that first, to me that’s 20 percent of it.
I mean, I know people who’ve healed diseases without changing their diet at all. Now that’s not, it’s because their mindset was so strong, and their prayer was so strong, and their faith was so strong, and their meditation was so strong, right? They overcame the limitations of the physical body. But, Even the scriptures teach us to take care of our body, right?
Take care of this temple. This body is our temple. So, getting the diet right. And that is, number one, foundational, as organic as much as possible. There’s so many chemicals sprayed on so much of the conventional food. That those chemicals, many of them are endocrine disruptors. They mess up our hormones.
They cause inflammation and [00:58:00] some of them even cause cancer. So reducing those chemicals as much as possible by eating organic as much as possible. Yes, it’s a little more expensive, but when you’re eating real foods, which is principle two of, of diet is. Eat as much real food as possible, then it’s not much more expensive.
If you’re eating bananas and you’re eating real fruits and real berries, you’re eating blue, you know, blueberries can be expensive if they’re out of season, but you’re eating, you know, plenty of vegetables and bok choy and lettuce and kale and all these cruciferous vegetables that are very high in sulforaphane and anti cancer ingredients and fiber that are going to clean up the gut, right?
You’re eating the real foods that are living, that come from the earth, that come from God, that come from nature. That’s where most of your nutrition should come from. And if you’re going down the packaged aisles, packaged food aisles, and you’re buying organic, that’s where it gets really expensive, you know?
And so avoid packaged food because it’s processed. The further we get away, you know, avoid it to a certain degree. It’s like, you don’t have to avoid a hundred percent, but [00:59:00] reduce it, reduce the processed sugar, reduce anything processed and just 80 percent or more whole foods, you’re going to be. In the right direction.
Just those three alone or those two, you know, organic, uh, as much as possible, real whole foods, as much as possible and less processed. sugar as much as possible. We know cancer thrives on sugar and no sugar and fruit is not the same as processed sugar, totally different sugar and fruit actually has fiber and has minerals, has, has water, um, doesn’t create the insulin, uh, response because it’s, it’s actually, um, It slows down the absorption because of the fiber.
It has antioxidants, anti cancer, uh, molecules, right? Vitamins, all these things that the body needs, amino acids. So when people go, Oh, avoid fruit because sugar is in fruit and sugar feeds cancer. It’s totally not true at all. And actually most of the people I’ve interviewed who reverse stage four cancers were eating [01:00:00] berries and fruit and, and a high, uh, Carbohydrate diet.
And so you don’t have to go ketogenic as many people teach. You don’t have to, that’s one approach, but it’s, you don’t have to avoid these healthy foods when you’re eating real whole foods in their real natural form, right?
Jacqueline: Quick note on that too Nathan, I had um, Dr. Thomas Seyfried, he was among I think one of the first people I had on my show and as you well know, I mean, he’s a Proponent of restricting glucose and glutamine, um, as they’re fuels for cancer. But I think, you know, within his research, just as you pointed out, he isolated the compound, you can’t isolate glucose from fruit.
Um, so I think, you know, when we look at contextually, like what is the application of this, it, it kind of changes your approach in determining like, you know, whether to eat the cup of blueberries or not, because we know that blueberries are very rich in antioxidants and which are very high, you know, anti, anti cancer properties.
So. Yeah. Just wanted to point that out.
Nathan: So, and I’ve interviewed him before as well, and I’ve looked at his research and his research is wonderful. So what [01:01:00] professor Seyfried got right, which is what, um, we’ve known for, you know, since. The Nobel Prize in the early 1900s on the mechanism of cancer through metabolic dysfunction, right? Through mitochondrial dysfunction.
That part is, seems absolutely right. That, you know, dysfunction of mitochondria, that damage to mitochondria. is actually what’s at the root of cancer proliferation. But what that leads to is that, okay, glucose is feeding cancer, and because glucose is feeding cancer, then we have to eliminate all glucose and the cancer will go away.
Well, that doesn’t always Okay, so if that were the only case, then why wouldn’t all cancer go away? It doesn’t always happen. And why is that? It’s because, you know, that ketogenic approach, you know, cancer doesn’t live in a vacuum, right? It’s not like, oh, cancer only thrives on glucose. [01:02:00] And isn’t an entire holistic, um, you know, almost dysfunction in the body, but I’d only call it dysfunction because cancer is actually a natural process in the body due to a very specific set of circumstances that we put our body into.
So cancer is actually like keeping us alive. If you think about it, if all those cells died off, maybe our organs would shut down, maybe our body would die if they didn’t actually become cancerous. Because what they’re doing is they’re just trying to stay alive. They’re very inefficient. They switch, you know, about 50 percent of their ATP production.
They switch to, um, you know, glucose aerobic glycolysis. So what they’re doing is they’re just, taking in lots of glucose, but they’re only producing a couple of ATP versus a healthy cell through healthy cellular respiration is basically taking oxygen and it’s turning it into ATP, right? And taking from our food and turning it into ATP and so then we get like 32 ATP for example, you know, so it’s way [01:03:00] more efficient.
Now cells will can become metabolically flexible, and they can switch fuel sources. Cancer cells are highly inefficient, but they’re still just trying to stay alive. That’s all they’re trying to do. They’re trying to stay alive and keep us alive. When you get a tumor, the benefit of a tumor is it’s kind of encapsulated all those cancer cells into one area.
The one thing, uh, I don’t know, I haven’t asked him, I don’t know if Professor Seyfried knows or not, but if you actually look at what, inside a tumor, what is using majority of the glucose, it’s actually not even the cancer cells in that tumor. It’s the, uh, if, if I got it correctly, I believe it’s the macrophages.
in that tumor that are actually using majority of the glucose. So you have to kind of start looking deeper into things. And then anytime we just try to isolate, like you’re just talking about, isolate one mechanism or isolate, and this is what pharmaceuticals do. And that’s why pharmaceuticals don’t cure things because it’s all about [01:04:00] isolation.
If we isolate this one compound that does
this one
mechanism, Right? That, that shuts, that reduces estrogen in your body because estrogen, excess estrogen causes breast cancer, which is not totally true at all. Then the cancer will go away. Oh, but why did the cancer come back? And it came back worse with the vengeance even though you were on tamoxifen and we were reducing the estrogen, estrogen in your body.
That was the cause of cancer, right? Oh no, that’s not the cause of cancer. There’s deeper causes, there’s metabolic dysfunction, there’s damage to the mitochondria, there’s not enough nutrition coming in, there’s too much stress going on.
Jacqueline: Quick question. I’ve always wanted to ask this because it’s always been in the back of my mind, but I mean, you and I are big proponents of integrative medicine and all these alternative therapies and all, you know, healthy practices, which I think everyone should be abiding by.
What about the folks who like Aren’t exposed to any of this who go the conventional route like I have someone in my family for example who had a mastectomy Had full dose chemotherapy and it’s been 20 years and she’s fine And she like has not changed her diet or her [01:05:00] lifestyle or anything and like God willing like she will be fine But how do you explain cases like that?
Yeah,
Nathan: so, there’s a lot of Different explanations for different cases, right? And so in her case, I don’t know, but what I’ve seen, unfortunately, is very often the cancer comes back or something else happens, right? Someone goes, Oh, my grandmother lived for, she smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol and did all this and ate fried food and stuff until she was 80.
And I go, yeah, but what were the last five years of her life? Oh, they were terrible. She was in hospice. She’d had, you know, renal failure, like all this like came and hit with a vengeance. And really, what was their quality of life? Do you know? Do you really know? Did they live in pain all the time? Did they have digestive issues?
I mean, remember, uh, even generations now, even people today aren’t comfortable talking about what they really feel inside. They’ll post on Instagram how great they look, but you find out 10 years later by their story. [01:06:00] Yeah, I was, I look great. I showed the world that I looked amazing. I had abs and I had this, Healthy looking, strong body, but I was dying inside.
I had gut issues and pain and my joints hurt and I was depressed. Right. You hear all these stories of that same thing. So. Is that going on as well? Is that person actually dying inside? You don’t know unless you really, really get to know them and they’re willing to be vulnerable and share with you.
Number one. Number two is, you know, I do think genetics can play a role. Genetics can play a role in, you know, how deeply you get affected by something. Right. How deeply. Some chemical or toxin or food affects you or someone else. Like my body’s had trouble with corn for years. And it took me a long time to figure that out.
Um, and I was getting sick, you know, pretty often with, with these, with these kinds of allergy, uh, symptoms. It took me a long time to figure out. I was like, Oh, when I remove corn from my diet, even organic corn, which I love by the way, [01:07:00] then those symptoms don’t show up anymore. And so it just, it took me a long time to figure that out.
Yeah. Different things affect people differently and we have resilience. You know, some of us have more resilience to some things than others. Um, I can tell you my, my grandpa, he ate fried chicken and smoked cigarettes and drank hard alcohol every day of his life. You know, and he lived to his late seventies, but the last few years of his life, I would not wish upon any human being, nobody should go through that much suffering, you know, the physical suffering that he went through and he still died, you know, lay there in hospice, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and eating fried chicken.
People go, I’ll do what I want because you know, it’s, what’s the point anyway? I might as well have fun. I’ll tell you what, life is way more fun and way more enjoyable when you’re actually feeling good and healthy. You know, and the food that you think. Taste bad, the vegetables and, you know, beans and, and real whole foods that you think taste bad.
Actually, when you cut out the processed food [01:08:00] and the highly palatable foods and the highly processed sugars, all those foods actually start to taste good. A carrot actually tastes really sweet. Celery, you know, has a sweet crispness to it. Like lettuce, like all these kinds of foods that because we have trained our brains, To expect everything to be so sweet because everything has sugar in it now, right?
And even they’re trying to get away from hiding sugar by putting all these processed sugars in it. So they say it’s no sugar, but it’s still super sweet. We’re not, we go and eat some real vegetables from the, from the earth. And we’re like, Oh, it tastes terrible. After a few weeks or a few months of that, all of a sudden your brain’s like, Oh, actually this tastes really good.
And I feel good doing it. You know, so it’s going to be different for everybody in terms of what the outcomes look like. But the majority, what I can tell you, the majority, look at what’s happening, right? Cancer’s at almost 50 percent of Americans. Crazy, right? 33 percent of women, 50 [01:09:00] percent of men, and it’s increasing every year.
We have 10 million people dying around the world with cancer right now. Autoimmune diseases have exploded to the highest it’s ever been. Diabetes exploded to the highest it’s ever been. Heart disease exploded to the highest it’s ever been. More and more people are diagnosed with these diseases that are preventable. Most of them are primarily preventable, right? We could prevent 95 percent or more of these diseases just by mindset, diet, and lifestyle alone, right? Some things, yeah, you come into the world, you got dealt a bad hand of cards, you know, if you believe in, in, in karma as the, as the Indians do and the Buddhists do, then, you know, that explains.
Basically, uh, it’s another explanation to your question, uh, which makes a lot of sense as well. Um, but people go, why, why are kids born with cancer then? We know from the EWG, the study that was done on the placentas, right, on the umbilical cores, that the chemicals and toxins. That the mother’s taking in [01:10:00] through the chemicals that are in the water, in the air, in the food, it passes into the umbilical cord, into the child.
So we know that the child is not shielded from the chemicals that we used to think. Doctors used to think, oh, the baby’s shielded by the umbilical cord from those chemicals entering in the placenta. Not true. Those chemicals go right into the baby. So that’s why children are being, you know, at age three, five, seven, eight, nine, 10.
higher diagnosed with cancer ever before. And then I go, I just go walk around, you know, in Jacksonville and I see six, seven year old kids that are obese, obese. Why? Because they’re eating their whole diet is potato chips and Funyuns and fake food, processed food. They don’t have real food. And all you can do is feel very sad for them, you know, because they don’t know any different and their parents are just.
Giving them all that toxic food leading to diabetes, pre diabetes, cancer, right? Parents don’t really know either, you can’t judge them, but [01:11:00] it’s up to each one of us to awaken to Simple clean diet, simple clean lifestyle, exercise, make sure we’re meditating, praying, reading good, positive, you know, spiritual teachings, um, and then having that solution oriented mindset.
If you do those three things and you get really serious about it and bring it to your everyday life, Cancer’s not going to have a chance.
Jacqueline: yeah. I love that, Nathan. And I mean, bringing it back to our, you know, where we first started our conversations come full circle. It’s about being a steward of your own body. Right. So I think that’s really important. And again, I mean, the mission of Well and Strong is to encourage my followers to be advocates of their own health.
How do you do that? You become educated and I try to you know Encourage folks to become educated without instilling a sense of a fear mongering that I feel like a lot of folks have started to do now Which is kind of sad because I mean, I mean, it’s not kind of sad It’s very sad, but I think they do that with the intent to gain more followers, right?
So I think the way you [01:12:00] convey information is also very, very important. So there are small steps everyone can take to your point about purchasing organic foods. It might be more expensive, but there’s loopholes, right? You can go to your nearby farmer’s market. Um, you could shop at Costco. So I think there’s always a way to do something if you really want to do it right and start looking at the opportunities.
rather than the obstacles. So I love that. Um, I could chat with you for hours, Nathan, but I do want to be conscious of your time. So I will have to have you back on at some point. But with that, where can listeners find you?
Nathan: Yeah. Thank you for that. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for doing this podcast, by the way. It was wonderful talking with you as well and, uh, love, be happy to come back on in the future. Um, and, um. I give my book away. I have a best selling book, Becoming Cancer Free. I just give it away to anybody who wants to download it for free.
They can get that at becomingcancerfree. com if you want to go deeper into the cancer specific topics. [01:13:00] Um, and then people can just go to my website, nathancrane. com You can join my newsletter there, and I, you know, send out Uh, evidence based information, experiential information as we talked about every day and every week, uh, whether it’s supplements, it’s practices, it’s teachings, it’s summits, it’s events, it’s different things I’m a part of.
And, uh, it’s a great place for people to, uh, to connect with me there.
Jacqueline: Awesome. I will be including the links to all of those in the show notes. And my last question for you, Nathan, and this is my favorite one to ask, and that is what does being well and strong mean to you?
Nathan: Oh, I love it. Yeah. I love the name of your podcast, by the way, that’s awesome. Uh, Well and strong. I mean, the first, the first word that comes is enlightened and I’m definitely not enlightened, but you know, that’s a goal striving towards, right? And enlightened meaning a true deep connection and oneness with God, with our higher, our highest purpose in life.
Um, a, a flexible, mobile, strong, vital, physical body. [01:14:00] A. Open heart that’s compassionate, that cares about all living beings, that really tries to show up in the world and be a positive force for others. Um, doing our best, you know, being honest and transparent with ourselves, you know, not perfect and make mistakes.
Uh, but I’m trying to get better every single day. And so that’s what I think that’s a big part of, of that is just honesty with ourselves, the constant focus on being our highest possible self of health in mind, body, and spirit. And to me, that’s, uh, that’s well and strong. Yeah.
Jacqueline: I love that. Beautiful. Well, thank you again for your time. I’m super excited to share this with listeners, and yeah, I hope to have you on again soon.
Nathan: Awesome. Thanks. Appreciate it.
