hi I'm Jonathan Landsman with natural health 365.com
and I'm here today with dr. Nicholas Gonzalez dr. Gonzalez thanks so much for
joining us it's always great to be with you Jonathan thanks so much for having
me you know today we're going to talk about the ketogenic diet because in
talking to dr. Gonzalez you know it's obviously a big concern for a lot of
people a lot of people are very excited about it they're hearing a lot of news about it especially those people
concerned about cancer so dr. Gonzales before we talk about more the details of
the ketogenic diet maybe just a quick overview what exactly is it and why are
people so excited about it ketogenic diet is basically a high fat
diet moderate protein diet that basically eliminates virtually all
carbohydrates except a small amount that you might get some vegetables actually
it's kind of a retooling of the old Atkins diet Atkins was famous as the
proponent of the ketogenic diet for weight loss diabetes heart disease and
he would have all those pages on a high-fat diet and they would be using
ketone strips to check their ketones in the urine
now ketones for those out there basically just break down products from
fat that the cells of the body can use for energy the body can use of sugar for
energy or it can use ketone bodies and when you put people on a high-fat diet
the body will start using ketone body bodies which are the breakdown products
of fat and that's the genesis the essence of the ketone ketogenic diet
whether it's the new version under Thomas Seyfried or the old Atkins
version both of these are ketogenic diets high fat diets with virtually no
carbohydrates involved there's a book here by Thomas C Frank who wrote a book cancer as a metabolic disease which is
right here and also there's journals as well the well-being journal has just recently done an article as well about
how exciting the ketogenic diet could be right potentially for cancer patients
based on what you just said I mean it sounds like this diet will starve cancer
cells to death one of the basis of the ketogenic diet for cancer actually goes
back to otto warburg the very famous German scientist won the Nobel Prize in
1931 for his work with cancer he proposed that cancer cells use sugar preferentially in fact can only
their metabolism that they can't use ketone bodies they can't use fat to make energy so the thesis of dr. Seif reads
book is if you put people on a high-fat non carbohydrate diet you basically
starve the cancer cells which require carbohydrates and sugar in order to survive you put them on a high fat diet
heat claims you're starving the cancer cells so that's the genesis of the keep
of the ketone based diet the ketogenic diet as its called so this sounds very exciting obviously
but there are some concerns aren't there dr. gonzalez well the first concern I have is there's really no data with
clinical patients to support its use wait a minute let me just be clear about
this dr. Gonzalez so in his book cancer as a metabolic disease talking about the
ketogenic diet as like sort of in a sense the way to go
Thomas C furring hasn't actually used it on a lot of cancer patients to say that this is the way to go well first of all
he's a PhD so he can't treat patients but what astonished me when I read the
book and I read it carefully I mean good new ideas are good I'm always willing to learn
you know I practice down tomorrow if someone else is doing better work than I
am with cancer and I'll go retire and live on a beach somewhere but what
surprised me about this book is this all this enthusiasm from see freedom self it
basically talks as if he has found the answer to cancer which is kind of a
common nursing way to approach it there are basically two cases in the
book one is a brain cancer well there are several brain cancer patients and
groups together and talks about one patient who is also getting chemotherapy
and as I recall radiation at the same time and had a thirty to forty percent
reduction in the tumor after several months and he's talking about how
extraordinary this is the other case was a physician with multiple myeloma who
two years out was doing well well my lung was a funny disease it can
be extremely aggressive you know I treat it all the time it's a very aggressive
myeloma or couldn't be smoldering in fact there's a syndrome called
smoldering myeloma where smoldering means exactly what we think it means
it's slow growing it's indolent patients can live five or six years before they
even need treatment so a two year survivor of myeloma who's feeling pretty
good and doing pretty well means absolutely nothing in fact if those were
the two best cases I had I wouldn't have written the book or I would have written it as a book of theory that way Warburg
wrote his papers as book as books and papers of theory but not as a cancer
cure the no evidence for that there's laboratory
there's animal there's cell culture but there's no human evidence the world is
littered with great theories for the treatment of cancer that didn't work
when they were used in clinical trials with real patients in my own professional lifetime they've been a
whole series of such treatments that were such theories and such treatments
that were promoted as the answer to cancer without any documentation when
they finally were put into practice they didn't work
now the ketogenic died actually as I mentioned earlier is not new Bob Atkins
rose to fame using the ketogenic diet to treat weight loss that's how he was
primarily known but he also treated heart disease and high blood pressure
and diabetes with the ketogenic diet with virtually no one knows today is Bob
Atkins also tried the ketogenic diet on cancer in fact he probably was the
world's expert of the ketogenic diet treatment in cancer and this is on something you read in a book or a
newspaper or something dr. Gonzalez you knew dr. Atkins right he was a good
friend of mine I mean I don't want to be presumptuous but I met him when I was a
journalist in 1970s and actually wrote a band very positively when he was being
attacked about his ketogenic diet after I finished mine went to medical school
after being a journalist as you know and did cancer research at my fellowship in
cancer immunology when I came back to New York he actually offered me a job in
his clinic he wanted to set up a cancer clinic and he wanted me to head his
cancer unit you offered me a huge amount of money and he said it would be nine to
five work and he wanted me in his unit I was very grateful it was very gracious
of him to do that because I was untried I just finished my training but I turned him down because I don't want to work
for anybody I want to set up my own practice do my treatment my way and just
to be clear he was very excited at that point about something like the ketogenic diet for cancer patients correct
yeah Bobby was a multi-millionaire when he died he left in a state of 350
million dollars based on his diet work so millions and tens of millions of
copies of his books but that wasn't enough he was a very smart man and Bob
really wanted to take on the next challenge into him the biggest challenge
in medicine was cancer and after I turned around he was going to show me
that his ketogenic diet would be effective for cancer and what virtually
no one knows today because he never talks talked about it afterwards and never wrote a book about it is that he
treated thousands of cancer patients putting them primarily on the ketogenic
diet and it really wasn't working too well in fact midway through that experiment in
the mid-1990s his IV nurse actually took me out to lunch and told me that he was
so discouraged that he wanted to come join me and become part of my practice in about 1999 I had dinner with Bob and
he told me he was going to close down if he may have already done at that point
closed down his cancer unit I was stunned he said I'm going back to being
a diet doctor he said I'm going to leave the cancer patients to you said they're
not responding I've treated thousands of patients we have hundreds of patients
that we use different diets as you know but we have hundreds of patients with
advanced cancer including metastatic breast cancer metastatic colon cancer
metastatic pancreatic cancer were alive 10 15 20 25 years later with total
regression of disease on a diet that involved large amounts of carbohydrates
in fact the other day we talked about an old dr. Kelly pacer that I follow now she was diagnosed in 1982 with Stage
four pancreatic cancer with metastasis to the liver the liver was Bobbsey
proven to be at no carcinoma the most aggressive type the slides were read at
the Mayo Clinic the disease was confirmed 31 years later she's alive and
well and for five years Kelly had her on four to six glasses of carrot juice a
day and characters as vitamins minerals and trace elements and guess what lots
of sugar if sugar fed cancer of cancer cells thrived on sugar sugar were like
gasoline on the cancer flower she would have been dead in six to eight weeks
like most stage 4 pancreatic cancer patients in that date 31 years later she is alive and well and I challenge
anybody including dr. safer to pull out of his own file the 31 shift beer
survivor of stage 4 pancreatic cancer treated with the ketogenic diet who did
well and is alive and well there is no such patient I have a patient with stage 4 breast cancer who develop metastasis
in the bone while getting chemotherapy 1987 one of my first patients she's been
drinking four to five glasses of characters for twenty five and a half
years and she's alive and well with all of her bone metastases gone those cases
disprove his theory done one thing about a theory when you make an absolute
statement that cancer cells thrive on sugar sugar will be suicide
for a cancer patient okay all cancer patients um all of them need to be on a
ketogenic diet if you have two patients that are eating large amounts of sugar
in natural foods like characters not white sugar of course but natural sugar
and get well it basically contradicts his theory these are the exceptions that disprove the theory
what would you say that I was Rosabelle what they should be thinking
about before they put something like this into play in their medical practice
be critical thinkers that's what being a scientist is all about it's about
critical thinking that doesn't mean he he's wrong with though I think he's
wrong based on Atkins experience with the ketogenic diet this has already been
done that's the irony of people don't realize it though look for case reports
of appropriately diagnosed cancer patients who are live 5 10 15 years
later with poor prognosis cancer that you can't explain their survival except
their nutritional program or whatever therapy they're doing then you might be
on to something and remember the ketogenic diet is nothing new it's
already been tried you know Blake Donaldson use the
ketogenic diet back in the 1920s Atkins use its you know 70s 80s and 90s and he
tried to cure cancer with it unsuccessfully there's not a new thing
it's a new thing that's being rehashed be very cautious in dr. Gonzalez thank
you very much for sending time thank