If somebody goes on keto diet, we should expect that epilepsy will get better at least.

Absolutely.

Especially for children.

Now, the funny thing about we have a group of Johns Hopkins colleagues that want keto to be used as a first and foremost treatment for epilepsy.

And then you can bring in low doses of anti-epileptic drugs to work with the diet.

I was a representative of the American Epilepsy Society for the pharmaceutical institutions, and they don't want any part of that.

They want drugs first.

many of the things that we know today we never knew actually 10 years ago until the human genome project and the sequencing that we did and we looked at the you know we had now do next-generation sequencing thing so the technology has shifted that allows us today to detect certain things that weren't able to detect long time ago but I don't think you buy into that

fermenter.

So now that organelle still has in the matrix the old machinery of fermentation.

So when the cristae are damaged and the structure and proteins are damaged, they still can get energy.

And that energy, why do they call most cancers glutamine-addicted? because that organelle is not, and let me point out, and you mentioned this about Sydney Winehouse, they take in oxygen and throw out ATP, but the ATP is coming from a fermentation, not from oxidative phosphorylation in the most part.

This is the mystery.

So you're getting, you say, oh, mitochondria are really effective and powerful in cancer.

Yes, but they're fermenting the energy, not respiring the energy.

education itself.

And that's, to me, I don't want to have you run with it on that one because can you describe to us what that means, this whole metabolic dysfunction in relation to cancer?

Well, I think you have to first look at what the National Cancer Institute, NCI, calls cancer.

And essentially, all cancer centers throughout the United States and the world, for that matter, they refer to cancer as a genetic disease.

It's right on their website.

And what does that mean? It means that mutations in the nucleus lead to cells dividing out of control, which is essentially what cancer is.

So, and on the National Cancer Institute website, they say cancer is a hundred different diseases, all differing in genetic properties.

Background mutations and all these kinds of things, making it an extremely complicated disorder.

What's happening? What's going on? Why? Why is this happening?

Tell me a little about how we even know that something is cancer or not, and what, what potential harms that could have.

Well, I think, you know, it's been well pu- so there's dozens of papers in the, in the scientific literature showing that needle biopsy can increase risk for spreading cancer around the body.

Um, but you, you know, why do you, why are we doing that? Um, and a lot of it is doing for histological, uh, diagnosis, looking at the number of proliferating cells, and then of course they take the tissue and they do gene expression profiles to tell you what kind of, you know, uh, uh, uh, what kind of gene mutations you might have in the tissue.

Which is, which is largely irrelevant anyway.

We don't care.

If you can kill the tumor cell without knowing what's, what the gene mutations are, what difference does it make what the gene mutations are? Largely irrelevant.

Um, so i- if we look at it, it, so you stick the tumor with a needle and you create an inflammation in and around the tumor, which then brings in cells of our immune system called macrophages.

Second part is, is fasting beneficial only because it puts most people in a very ketogenic state?

Mm

... of, of, of, of, of, of women, and yet our genetics are almost identical to the chimpanzee.

Uh, because the chimp is eating and living in a, in a diet and lifestyle, uh, uh, compatible, uh, with how they evolved originally fro- uh, as, as a species.

So I, I was, I tell people I was at the, um, the San Diego Zoo a couple of months ago, which is one of the famous zoos in the United States.

Yeah.

And they, and they had these bonobos and gorillas and all these kinds of things.

And I asked the vet, I, I said, "Do you guys feed these things like they, in the wild?" "Oh, yeah, we're un- constantly under surveillance." I says, "What if you go down to Dunkin' Donuts and get a whole bunch of jelly-filleds, uh, would you, would these guys eat these?" "Oh," he said, "they'd pound them down.

They'd eat pizza.

I, you know, I, I think when the l- the last two discussions we've had have been so, uh, overwhelmingly amazing, but I think one thing that I missed in my, uh, lack of journalist experience, 'cause I have none and I'm not one, but was just asking you the simple, uh, idea, which is when your body gets into ketosis, why is the ketone so important, and what specifically does it do?

Yeah, well, that's why, uh, my late friend and colleague, Dr. Richard Veech, um, who was the leader of the n- uh, NIH metabolic branch of the, uh, of, of the federal government, called it a super fuel, h- he and George Cahill, who ran the Joslin Diabetes Center.

Key, uh, the, the ketone body is made in our liver.

Uh, as you said, when you fast, you don't eat for several days, you use up the glycogen in the, in the liver and some in the kidney, and then now you have to turn to an alternative energy.

Your brain needs...

Your brain has to, has to have function.

And, uh, we evolved as a species, uh, to store energy in the form of fat and, and, and that fat, when we stop eating, gets mobilized.

I'll Google this right in the moment.

Give us a bit longer explanation.

Listen, what we're doing is we're evaluating metabolic therapies for cancer.

You have to realize that our work and the work of others has clearly shown that cancer is not a genetic disease.

It's a mitochondrial metabolic disease.

That changes the whole dynamics of how you view the disease and how you treat it.

So what we did in our 40 years of research on cancer is we went back and we realized that the German scientist Otto Warburg was essentially correct on the origin of cancer as a mitochondrial metabolic problem.

The problem at that time is he had no electron microscopic analysis of mitochondria structure.

What other ways you can get it except water only fasting?

Why is that?

It's because of our, um, technology.

Uh, we are still paleolithic man and, uh, our biology has allowed us to store energy efficiently, uh, because of times of famine.

We are now in a new environment where we have massive amounts of highly processed carbohydrates, inactivity, emotional stress.

We have poor sleep habits.

You, you pile all those together with availabili-- uh, the exposure to carcinogens and whatever, and you chronically damage this organelle.

And, uh, uh, in some organs, uh, you can get breast cancer.

Meditation.