0:07

Yeah, I was, Travis.

I was just saying earlier on, like my mum was visiting and she was like, you’ve got hair still, why don’t you grow it?

I was like, if I grow this little bit of hair, I’ll look like Gollum.

Like, what the hell?

No, I’m trimming it all off.

Yeah, there’s a time.

You just have to commit to it.

0:25

Hell yeah, man.

I’m not having a comb over.

Jeez Louise.

No way.

Umm, yeah.

That was a style.

Back 50s and 60s when guys lost their hair.

You had no choice, right?

You You had to wear the clown hair.

0:41

I’m glad that.

I’m glad the shaved hand came in the style.

Oh man, so true.

You know, I remember I remembered the the uncles when I used to go to the mosque and these Asian men would dye their hair orange.

And then they would put oil on these tiny strands of hair and wrap it over their head.

1:01

And it’s probably the most disgusting thing you could do.

And it was like, why?

Why?

Why are you doing this?

That was.

An awful time period for bald men.

Yeah.

You were just branded the bald guy.

1:18

Yeah, I’m just looking at my head now.

I’ve actually got a red mark across the four across my forehead.

You know who that’s actually my wife.

So I was doing Jiu jitsu today and I I go on a Friday normally with my wife, it’s it’s actually really good for the marriage to to get your wife beating you up and choking.

1:35

Yeah, but yeah, I’ve got a Gee burn.

It’s got a Gee burn on my forehead.

How often do jiu jitsu?

Once a week, yeah, I was doing it three times a week and then I was bloody knackered and hurting everywhere because at the age of 48, I’ve realized I just don’t have that physiological reserve.

1:55

I don’t heal as quick.

And half the kids like like sorry and most of the people are half my age.

I mean, they’re like they’re 20 year old kids, they’re like 6 foot 5 and I’m like 5 foot 748 year old guy.

It’s like no, no.

2:11

So I get beat up and I ache for the rest of the week and I’ve realized I can’t do that level of intensity.

So now I’m doing like once, sometimes twice a week, and that’s enough because I like running and I like doing strength training as well.

So I like to mix it up.

How about you?

Yeah, you know I jiu jitsu is interesting to me.

2:31

I I but the joints that’s where I would have trouble you know low back.

It’s just I feel strong you know struggling.

It’s just it’s just the wear and tear and the joints that I can’t so that that’s kind of scares me throwing yourself and and you know just all those compromising.

2:49

Positions where you could strain a shoulder or whatever it is.

I got to be really careful.

I got to exercise.

Like, you know, it’s got to be like a controlled study almost.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I I was in a car accident and I was left in a really bad way.

3:07

I had to have emergency surgery.

I was incontinent and impotent.

I couldn’t feel my legs.

It was called codaquina.

I actually had it twice.

Bizarre.

Very rare.

So that was several years back.

So now I’ve got arthritis in my lower spine, but 9090% of the time I have no pain.

3:25

I if I sleep too long, if I sleep more than 8 hours, I have morning stiffness.

But it’s actually not bad.

And I was worried about jujitsu.

But the reality is it’s actually fantastic for that.

It’s really good for body position sense.

It’s and it’s all about technique and control and as long as you’re just careful with who you spar with and you don’t go too full on mental.

3:48

And you know what?

Just it teaches humility.

You know, I I don’t have a problem tapping at you know, if you’ve got me tap, tap.

Yeah.

I’m not going to kill myself to get out of a position or just struggle for an extra 10 minutes and not get anywhere.

And it’s a it’s a great leveler.

4:04

It teaches you humility.

You know what?

It’s all right.

You’re lost.

Just tap out.

I don’t have a problem with that.

I grew up, yeah, I grew up with him.

My dad was actually a the five state wrestling champion in college.

4:21

He’s a he’s a farm kid and so he he would just giggle and wrestle us as kids you know and just tie us in the knot.

So I grew up learning like rudimentary sort of wrestling skills just because you know we were we just wrestled all the time.

4:37

But yeah, he he there was a time I.

My dad could probably still be competitive with me wrestling in his 70s, whereas my son, I’d wrestle him and then when he turned 14, I just realized that was it.

I could not.

He just turned into a beast when he was young and so I had to just draw that line at that point.

4:57

But it’s good, you know the father, son.

Wrestling is a good, a good way to grow up, a good good skill set to have mate 100%.

The more I learn about wrestling, the more I realized one absolutely brutal sport is how difficult it is.

5:15

The problem with me is right, Travis, I’ll be honest with you.

I, you know, kid in in Scotland watching American TV’s and programs and and wrestling is very big, you know, and collegiate level and all that kind of stuff.

I just thought, Oh my God, these guys don’t look cool.

They wear the stupid freaking leotard, They wear knee high socks.

5:31

They’ve got these ear defenders.

They look like special kids.

And then they’re they’re just like, hugging each other and rolling around so that it just did not look cool.

So I kind of got put off by that and I didn’t, I didn’t understand or appreciate it.

I just like, I was like, what the hell is this?

They’re just like, what the what’s the fact now that I actually understand proper wrestling?

5:52

I’m like, Oh my God, this is insane.

This is an insane sport.

Yeah, it’s brutal.

It’s it’s it’s just got that gritty.

It’s never comfortable, you know that.

Just the feeling you get when you’re doing it is not a pleasant thing, but it’s I got to teach us grit, you know, and perseverance and education.

6:14

It’s a good base.

You know, my dad’s got that spade to being a farm kid and just that that what we always call work ethic.

You know, I think wrestling is kind of the epitome of that.

No, absolutely.

I’m.

I think every child should learn some kind of physical, hard sport and get used to being in difficult and uncomfortable positions because it teaches you resilience, it toughens you up and it prepares you for life.

6:38

My little son who’s four, also does kickboxing and it and it’s it’s not great because he he has a tendency to punch me right in the gonads.

He just thinks it’s funny.

They don’t.

Get it?

He thinks.

Yeah, my son.

6:54

He actually dislocated my trachea.

I have no idea how.

Yeah, it was some weird.

Something happened.

He, he, I got hit on the side and all of a sudden I couldn’t talk and I started to panic.

I was like, I can’t.

And my wife just grabbed it and kind of snapped it back into place.

7:12

It’s like, Oh my God, it was a weird.

Yeah, yeah, don’t.

I don’t recommend that.

No, that sounds freaking terrifying.

You could have.

You could have died.

Oh my God.

Felt that way.

It’s just something was way, way off.

7:28

But apparently there’s some flexibility.

Just got caught and it just, you know, without any harm.

It just kind of snapped back into its normal location.

But that was terrible amazing for a.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it’s made out of cartilage, so, you know, you can move it and, you know, it’s not like a piece of bone.

7:48

So I can.

Wow.

That’s terrifying.

But anyway, I I didn’t organize this podcast to talk about our haircuts.

Although you’ve got a great haircut or or to talk about collegiate wrestling and you know, and men and leotards and whatnot, you’re a very prolific writer.

8:06

You know, you wrote about the origin of the ketogenic diet and you’ve written about ketones. 2020.

The Four Few talked about curable tripping over the truth.

Me.

This is one of those podcasts.

If you don’t, if you don’t mind, I actually don’t want to say anything.

8:24

I just want to just sit back and listen to you.

Can you just, can you educate me?

Because I am a dumb orthopod and you’re 1 smart cookie.

And oh by the way, I need to thank Thomas Seyfried.

I I had this great conversation with him and he was like, Ahmed, you need to speak to Travis.

8:40

He is amazing.

And I was like, all right.

And then you kindly said, Yep, I’ll speak to you buddy.

So thank you so much.

So yeah, tell me about your books.

Tell me what got you into it and what you’ve discovered.

Yeah, Tom was the inspiration for the writing.

8:56

You know, I I.

The writing came really from a, you know, a de facto midlife crisis.

I was sitting there unhappy in my career.

I had just a few.

I had three credits left to finish my master’s degree that I put on hold for about three or four years and.

9:16

You know I my first love was biochemistry.

I fell in love with biochemistry in college.

My first teacher was a guy that was on the cover of Time magazine.

He he sent was part of the project he’s from Yale that sent the first monkey into space and he started our class with with supernova explosions and the creation of heavy elements and prebiotic chemistry and and how life you know formed out of this universe attend towards disorder and I was just.

9:45

Instantly fascinated coming from high school, where I, you know, had zero interest in school and I barely graduated with a 1.9 GPAI think it was, but but I was.

And so I was always wanted to go back to that.

And I was sitting there in the throes of midlife crisis, deeply unhappy.

10:04

I was scrolling through Kindle and I ran into this book, the book, Tom Seyfried’s book, Cancer is a metabolic disease.

And you know, it was a $75 book and I almost didn’t.

By it, but I did and read it and was just absolutely blown away by the amount of data that supported this non standard theory of cancer about how cancer precipitates and is driven in the body.

10:31

And you know this data goes back 100 years.

There was so much of it and he put it into this sort of comprehensive package where you you could really, you know, under understand.

What he was, what he was arguing, which was the cancer, is not based solely on genetic mutations, which we’d always been taught, the somatic mutation theory of cancer, that it possibly could be derived from mitochondrial damage and the cellular shift towards this kind of cancerous phenotype.

10:58

So that sparked this interest again.

And I’d always loved writing.

I I was in an honors program at Montana State where we just we’d read books and write about them, you know, and I absolutely loved writing.

So the challenge to me was I had just read the book The Emperor of All Maladies.

11:16

Have you read that?

No, no.

By Siddharth Mukherjee.

It’s an absolutely brilliant book on really it’s, you know, he calls it the biography of cancer.

Wonderful book, but he didn’t, you know it really it it didn’t mention the name Otto Warburg once, which was he’s the original sort of godfather of Tom Seyfried’s theory, this metabolic theory of cancer.

11:38

And the challenge to me was.

Was Tom’s book was a textbook, but it had this beautiful story within it, this story of this German biochemist Donna Warburg in the early 20s coming up with this theory and he was a brilliant biochemist.

11:54

He won he he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times.

He won it once and then being discarded in the 70s when he died in the somatic mutation theory, really just becoming dogmatic and entrenched and then sort of making this revival.

So it’s this kind of scientific redemption story.

12:11

That can be told not as a textbook but as a story of, you know, these scientists as real people, the sort of sweep of history and how things, how how we become to understand them and accept them as truths.

But you know, science is never, it’s always a moving target because you have no idea what future evidence is going to refute what you think is true today, especially in the room of cancer, so.

12:35

Just with all these, you know, swirling, you know, life is so much about context and situational and just all these things happened at the right time.

And so that led to the book and that led to just interesting, you know, interesting people that you get to talk to, you get to meet after, you know, you write books and things like that.

12:52

So it’s really kind of sparked a lot of interesting things in my life.

That’s amazing.

I love that.

And I love the fact that you’re you made Thomas Seyfried’s book more accessible to a larger population because I can see what you mean.

13:09

He’s quite scientific.

It’s quite medical.

And then you’re making it just a little bit more relatable on a story.

You’re telling a story.

So let’s talk about metabolic origins of cancer because there’ll be a lot of people listening who are like, what are you talking about?

13:27

You know, we do, we donate money to Cancer Research.

All these people with their with their buckets shaking coins and saying come on, donate to us.

And it’s all very complicated and there’s genetic mutations and we’re all susceptible.

And now it seems to be the, the the message is that we need mRNA technology to to fix the genetic code.

13:48

We’re we’re faulty.

What is the reality?

What’s going on here?

You know, it’s one of the last sort of battlegrounds and scientific theory, I think.

Yet besides physics, where you know the, the grand unified theories, cancer, biology is really unsettled.

14:07

And if someone tells you it’s settled, don’t listen to them, they’re wrong.

So we thought it was settled in 1976 right there.

There was throughout most of the 20th century, there was these sort of three competing theories to describe what cancer was.

14:23

There was this idea that Otto Warburg put forth that what he noticed when he looked at the cancer cell was it had shifted the way it generated energy.

A a normal healthy cell will burn oxygen in the mitochondria to generate ATP, which is a cellular form of energy, and it’s a very efficient way to do it.

14:43

What the cancer cell had done is shifted to this sort of antiquated, very inefficient way of generating energy where it doesn’t use as much oxygen.

And it takes blood sugar, glucose and burns it and generates lactic acid.

So if if if you’re looking at miles per gallon, a healthy cell would get about 3534 miles per gallon per per, you know per unit of oxygen used in a cancer cell which generate about it would get about two miles per gallon.

15:14

So it it switches to this strange inefficient form of metabolism.

And the question was why?

And out of Warburg contended that.

Well, there was injury to what he called the respiratory apparatus.

Mitochondria had not been isolated at that time yet, and he contended that this was the prime cause of cancer.

15:33

And then this guy named Peyton Rouse came along, an American scientist, and found a correlation between viruses and cancer, that that viruses were at the, you know, a heart at the heart of some cancer.

And then this guy, a German Hanselman and an Italian scientist, noticed that.

15:51

The chromosomes were damaged and disordered in cancer cells.

So they contended that the the chromosomes are the heart of cancer.

So he had these three computing theories and no one knew who was right.

Then DNA was discovered in 1954, the structure of DNA and that really shifted a generation of biologists to focus on the genome because it was so damn interesting, right?

16:14

Here’s our here’s our genetic code.

This is the library of everything in our bodies and and health and disease.

And so then with everybody looking at the genome, in 1975 there was a series of experiments by Harold Varmus and Michael Bishop that looked at the one of these viruses that cause cancer and they asked why.

16:35

And this virus only had four genes.

And when they isolated the cancer causing gene, what they found was it was a gene we already had in our bodies, but the viral version was slightly mutated.

So the on switch was stuck on.

And this this gene product in instructed the cell to divide.

16:55

So in one sweep this these experiments took the viral theory and it incorporated it into this somatic mutation theory, the idea that DNA is behind genetic mutations are behind cancer.

And no one looked back.

They won the Nobel Prize and everybody thought, OK, now we know what cancer is.

17:13

It is caused by genetic mutations to the genes that tell the cell to divide.

Or tumor suppressor genes, the genes that tell the cell to to not divide.

Right.

And and in the background you know, scientists were sort of looking at where we’re really only one or two in in the US We’re looking at what Otto Warburg left off about this idea that metabolism was behind it and they built slowly behind the scenes in the 80s.

17:41

You know, they built this kind of increasing body of evidence to go, wait a minute.

This needs to be taken seriously.

And then in 2006 the Cancer Genome Atlas project.

This was a huge project on the heels of the of the human Genome project, where technology had evolved enough to where now we could sequence the genomes of of cancer cells and finally find out exactly what these mutations are for each type of cancer.

18:08

And this would draw, you know, a tight line between cause and effect.

We would know what cancer was in its entirety.

And what what happened with that was it it left an incredible amount of confusion.

And the main, the main confusion was was this, this concept of what we call intertumoral heterogeneity.

18:28

And all that is, is simply the difference in the mutations from one person’s tumor to the next.

So if we take a hundred women with breast cancer, right, and we we sample their tumors and we sequence the DNA in those tumors, what you find?

Is an incredible amount of inconsistency between the genes that are mutated.

18:45

You’ll find some commonly mutated genes, but then as you go down the list, it becomes less and less and you’ll find some with one mutation, which doesn’t make sense in the in the the theory, the somatic theory of mutation.

And you’ll find some with 0, right?

So when you looked at that data and then you look at these guys like Tom Seyfried that are, you know, espousing these new theories, the question marks just became huge.

19:12

And and that’s opened the door for, you know, a a lot of people are questioning the relevance of of mutation of of colon cancer, a disease of genetic mutations now.

So it’s shifted a lot, you know, and these things don’t change overnight that their textbooks are still written.

19:30

There’s a lot of money, you know, people’s publications and reputations.

So it’s it’s in science, it’s always, it’s not like there’s a line where we go, OK, we are wrong about that.

This is what’s right.

It’s just an incredibly frustrating, slow moving process.

Yeah, I I like you can get into conspiracy theories, and a lot of conspiracy theories are realities, but I think sometimes it’s really just simple.

19:57

It’s human nature.

People don’t like to be told they’re wrong.

People get invested into certain things, their jobs, research grants, everything.

There’s also the haired mentality.

You never want to stand out from the crowd because of fear of.

Criticism and Oh my God, look at you.

20:14

What are you challenging?

I mean, you just need to look back.

You know, for millennia people thought the world was flat and it was normal.

And when the first people came along and said this planet is round, everybody laughed at them, you know, And now the opposite way around, you know, I think it, you know, now it’s the complete opposite.

20:32

Things just sometimes take time to to to settle down and, you know, get accepted.

I mean what what population of the scientific community do you think now are thinking metabolic disorder is the root cause of cancer?

20:49

I mean, it’s like 5%.

Is it more?

What is it like do you think?

You know, it’s a generational thing too.

What I think is a lot of the old scientists or clinicians, you know, oncologists especially oncologists probably stopped, you know, they once they read the textbook.

21:10

That’s what cancer was and and and a lot of the pharmaceutical you know is driven by that mutation or by that the somatic mutation theory they are looking for trying to target cancer through those mutations.

So I think those got that generation, it’s much, much more difficult to not convince but to have them look objectively at at new data.

21:32

Right.

The next generation and you see this now like when I, when I wrote the book 2014 and I think Tom’s book came out in 2012, not many people took this seriously at all.

And now you Fast forward to the day almost, you know, 10 years later, there’s conferences around the metabolism of cancer.

21:51

So you have seen a a depreciable amount of change in 10 years and I think you know the younger generation.

People just coming coming into Med school, scientists just looking at this are are I would say you know I think they’re, I think that most of them don’t care would say it this way.

22:11

They’d say cancer mutations or the genetic theory, whatever you want to call it, mutations and cancer are certainly part of the part of the, you know, they they provide.

Some of the explanation, but they don’t provide a comprehensive theory on cancer.

22:30

So I I think there’s just less of a definitive saying yes, cancer is a genetic disease.

I think you know this next generation is just very much more open minded and and doesn’t label it that way.

That’s not a good answer.

22:46

But I used.

Yeah, yeah, that’s a good answer.

You ever heard of the The Coup curve?

No.

So I was in a management course once and there’s this musician drummer talking about the cool curve and it’s a moving curve on a timeline.

23:09

And if you imagine like a normal bell shaped curve on the far right, the leading, leading, you know, time and on the left everything is passed right at the front of that leading bell shaped curve where it’s almost flat.

It’s not cool.

23:25

So imagine people for example in the 60s having tattoos, not cool, and then people having tattoos in the 70s were a bit edgy and people in the 80s were getting a bit cool.

23:41

And then in the 90s and 2000s, everybody’s got tattoos and now is it.

It’s like it’s a bit sad if you get a tattoo.

I mean, I mean what I’m basically what I’m trying to say is it says moving trend and things constantly move along that pathway.

23:56

And so take cancer, you know, if you mentioned metabolic cancer, metabolic disorder being root of cancer way back, it was not cool.

You’re a bit of a weirdo bit too far out there.

I think we’re now in the cool curve.

I think now it’s cool to be talking about metabolic origin of cancer and I think in about 1020 years time it’ll just be normal.

24:18

It’ll be like, yeah, you know, that’s that’s where I’m kind of getting it.

I think you’re absolutely right.

That’s a good way to describe it.

Yeah.

Because it used to.

You know and what happens in medicine is you get, they label you a quack that’s the, you know you’re not cool.

24:36

You’re and and so there was a time when you call it the quack or maybe it was the quacks that looked at it that way and now.

I think you’re you’re you’re rapidly approaching being a quack if you don’t consider it in cancer, right.

24:53

You just draw a line and say it’s still irrelevant and and it used to be that way or like eat doughnuts.

You know oncologist offices had doughnuts and it doesn’t matter.

Your diet doesn’t matter.

Cancer metabolism is irrelevant And so that that’s probably rapidly approaching to the quack line as we speak.

25:13

Amen.

So.

So when my dad was diagnosed with cancer oh God, I know it’s 2016 or something 2015, two 1016 that that time frame you know we went to see the oncologist and God, she was a quack absolute quack.

25:30

I said, I said to her is there anything we can do?

No.

Is there any diet that we can adopt.

She just started laughing at us diet of.

Course, yeah.

And I would love to meet her again and say you’re a quack.

You honestly don’t think your diet can influence cancer.

25:50

Your diet, that’s that’s medicine.

Food is medicine.

What you take is medicine or it’s harmful.

And but that was that was not very long ago and unfortunately there still are people like that.

So listen talking to Thomas Seyfried, right.

Remember I’m a dumb orthopod.

26:06

But the the message that I got from him was basically if you eat a very rich carbohydrate diet, you know, high in ultra processed food, you develop very high levels of insulin, which in turn lead to insulin resistance because of the feedback mechanisms.

26:22

Your body goes, ah, you’re high, you’re always high.

I’m not taking notice of you.

That then impairs glucose metabolism, which then kind of impairs mitochondrial health.

It creates extra free radicals.

They knock out bits of bits of gene and they also the high insulin level drives multiplication.

26:43

You know, cells, divisions of cells.

You know, if you think about obesity, your fat cells are multiplying and getting bigger.

The insulin drives growth factor and different growth factors and it’s all of these things that lead to cancer.

Am I right or am I just totally?

26:59

Bumped up.

No, you you you’re absolutely right.

And when you look at.

Like just back to this idea just talking.

Yeah.

Yeah of of that oncologist that said diet doesn’t matter.

OK.

So OK if you want to put it like in the context of a cancer patient but we’ll step we’ll step back from that.

27:22

First, this idea of diet doesn’t matter when when we look you know we we are, I would say we’re probably still in the throes of.

An experiment with humanity where we’re the only animal in the animal Kingdom that really doesn’t know what to eat.

27:40

You know, every other animal’s got their biological niche where they just eat within that niche.

A tiger is out hunting, you know, it knows what to hunt, it knows what to scavenge, and that’s what it eats.

Where we all of a sudden, you know, 12,000 years ago after the agricultural revolution, we all of a sudden had.

27:58

New foods that we probably never were never exposed to en masse that all of a sudden were ready and plentiful and and what happened after that it it seems like humanity became sort of curiously sickly.

You know, when you look at the diabetes rates, they’re absolutely shocking, the obesity rates and and so you look at what happens and it’s very defined.

28:20

You know it metabolically.

It’s easy to see what happens is.

When you when you don’t exercise as much as you should or in the past when we evolved what we had to And when you eat a really heavy carbohydrate diet, you develop what just what you said, insulin resistance and the body does not able to respond to the signal of insulin as well as you used to.

28:44

And So what?

What is insulin?

Well, when you eat a bolus of carbohydrates, your pancreas releases insulin, which tells.

The cells to suck it up out of the bloodstream because it rapidly rises in the bloodstream and it has to be, you know, it has to be taken out because it’s somewhat toxic when it’s at high levels like that.

29:03

So the cells take it up and what do they do?

They convert it to fat because they’re they’re, it’s kind of an energy crisis.

They can’t burn it.

So their only choice is to really convert it to FAT.

And as you get more and more fat cells that this perpetuates the problem it it makes insulin resistance get ratcheted up more and more.

29:22

And so in that scenario you’re right you you and we know this is very clear in the data that obesity is a is a risk factor for cancer in every chronic disease and and cancer cells by themselves are have about 10 times the number of insulin receptors as normal cells.

29:41

So in that sort of metabolic catastrophe state, you can see why it’s just fertile ground for cancer to develop.

There’s a, there’s a fascinating sort of control experiment with this group of people that live in in the mountains in in Ecuador.

29:57

And so they have something called Lorenz syndrome, which is a they have a mutation in the receptor for insulin like growth factor 1.

And I think you’ve mentioned that before, Insulin, like growth factor is a close cousin of insulin.

It’s a very anabolic protein that’s released when you release human growth hormone.

30:16

It causes us to grow.

It’s, it’s there for repair and regeneration, right.

But you don’t need a lot of it, just like insulin.

So in the past, before we had all these carbohydrates, we were probably running around scavenging, hunting.

30:32

We were burning tons of calories.

And we just didn’t have access to a lot of carbohydrates.

So we’re probably in the state of ketosis either most of the time or or for certain part of the time.

And that’s a dramatic shift away from carbohydrate and metabolism.

30:48

You don’t need as much insulin, you need heart, you probably don’t need any insulin.

So your insulin levels are extraordinarily low.

Your mitochondria are extremely well functioning and efficient, and you really don’t release much IGF one.

Right.

So anyway, back to these people in Ecuador.

31:05

They have this mutation, so they can’t respond to IGF one, and they they have dwarfism, so they don’t grow to a normal stature.

But when researchers went and looked at this community, what they found was they’re immune to cancer and diabetes despite a terrible lifestyle.

31:22

They have a terrible diet, they high rates of alcoholism and smoking, but they just do not get cancer.

So that’s an incredibly powerful real world clue, right?

That a population could be immune to this disease based on a hormonal metabolic acting mutation.

31:40

So that that’s an extraordinarily powerful clue.

And when we extrapolate that to the normal population of people, right, we see why our cancer rates are just are continuing to go up, the rate of the people are getting cancer, the rates of chronic disease are going up and back to this dietary, you know question, it’s all interwoven with metabolism.

32:04

Back-to-back to the the acute situation, right, with a cancer patient.

So they have these cells that are dividing uncontrollably, and what do these cells want to eat?

They want to eat glucose.

They’re they’re voracious for glucose.

And so if you take that away, if you take away carbohydrates in the diet, you’ll force somebody’s body to switch to ketone metabolism.

32:26

And ketones replace glucose as a circulating fuel for your brain.

Your muscles, your heart and all of a sudden this cancer, the cancer cells are put in this sort of energetic crisis, right.

They have less glucose, they have this fuel that they can’t burn well because their mitochondria don’t function really well.

32:44

And so that’s a very, that’s what we why we’re so excited about metabolism in oncology now is we proposed perhaps you know maybe a fourth branch of oncology what we call metabolic oncology.

Because in this very unique way, by just putting someone on a diet you can make them so much more susceptible to other therapies.

33:04

Now probably you can get by with much lower doses of chemotherapy, much fewer side effects and and much greater efficacy because the cancer cells are put into this extremely stressed state where if you hit them with a little, you know, something toxic or you know something else, they just die much quicker.

33:25

So yeah, it’s it’s it’s related in people with cancer.

It’s related in people that are concerned about getting cancer.

It’s, it’s important, absolutely.

And and I think this message is really important Travis, because like from a personal point of view and also from listening to patients and friends and family, everyone is touched by cancer.

33:49

Everyone knows someone they love who gets cancer and dies from cancer.

And the common theme is when you get cancer, there ain’t much you can do.

And sooner or later it’s going to get you or you’re going to have to go through horrible chemo and horrible surgery.

34:08

And you know what?

It’s just a ticking time bomb and it’s a sense of really deep helplessness and that’s why people are quite scared by and it’s just, you know, it’s just not a nice disease.

Everybody knows someone who’s wasted away and whittled away.

And it’s just, you know, you just literally it’s a prolonged horrible death.

34:29

And I think understanding that actually what drives it and that there are things that you can do such as diet to change and modulate and actually fight back is so important.

34:45

And I think it’s really also important to realize that it’s not just a case of, oh look, go on a keto diet and you’ll cure your cancer.

Like you just said, it can be complementary.

So you know, you know, you can do it with surgery and you might want to take a mass out, you know, and debulk for example.

35:03

And if it’s pressing on a vital structure, nerve or artery, if it’s you know, if it’s if you’re going to have some other form of treatment.

So it’s not we’re not just throwing all the other treatments although some of them I, I do question, I think you know but it’s it’s finding then the specialists, oncologists who will incorporate this metabolic approach with the the other treatments and not just rely on conventional drug treatments.

35:30

I think that’s the challenge, just educating the doctors.

Yeah, it is.

It’s, it’s, you know, and a lot of doctors will draw a line at at, at.

You have to show me the phase three randomized controlled trial data, right?

35:49

And and if it’s not there they just won’t consider it and you know a lot of for a lot of medicine that’s not there oncology I think it’s got the highest rate of off label drug use just because there’s so few good good solutions.

36:04

But, but that, you know, we’re trying to change that we’re trying.

We’re funding the foundation I started is funding what will be the largest trial to date on the ketogenic diet as an adjunctive therapy for.

Glioblastoma and and adjunctive meaning that like you just said it’s complementary to standard of care and and there’s every reason in the world so much data that shows that this is probably its strong suit you know and that the therapies you have for glioblastoma have been around for a long time.

36:37

That’s one of the the few one of the probably worst diagnosis you can get and one that has not evolved in treatment options for so long.

There’s radiation surgery.

And there’s temozolomide, but little beyond that.

So but it but it’s shown pretty clinically so many times to be complementary with radiation for for beautiful reasons, right.

36:58

There’s very few therapies that you can target that differentiate between healthy cells and cancer cells.

You know radiation is going to burn healthy cells equally well as cancer cells.

Chemotherapy is toxic to normal cells and cancer cells.

37:14

But the ketogenic diet, what it does, Is it it?

That ketones, your healthy cells love to burn ketones and they they get more robust when they’re burning ketones.

Cancer cells do not like to burn ketones.

And so you create this differential to where healthy cells are able to withstand these toxic therapies better.

37:36

And that’s been very clear from clinical work that’s been done where you know the quickest way to get somebody in ketosis is have them fast.

So the experiment was they had.

Cancer patients do fasts before chemotherapy and what they found was every side effect was diminished by by a huge amount.

37:57

And the objective side effects that you can count for the NUM, you know, the number of times someone vomits during the day on chemotherapy was taken from like 8 a day to 0.

Mouth sores, hair loss, all these things were, you know, incredibly diminished.

So you get this, this golden therapeutic effect where you’re able to withstand those therapies, the toxic side effects, but you’re also you’re putting these cancer cells in a stressful state, so you get more efficacy from the output of these toxic therapies.

38:28

So that’s rare to find you know in cancer therapies where you’re able to have a therapy that targets differentiates in its target between healthy and normal cells.

So yeah, it’s it’s exciting and and and.

This trial we’re trying to do will be, I think it’s about 100 cancer patients and the hope it’s done at we’re doing at Cedar Sinai and we have a wonderful neuro oncologist.

38:51

He’s young, it’s an incredibly credible institution.

So if we can show that data and it’s as powerful as I think it’s going to be, then you know what else can you ask for?

It’s right there in front of you.

And now then, then clinicians are making the implicit decision to ignore it at that point if if they do.

39:11

And that’s that’s, you know, that’s medicine if you’re deciding not to treat somebody with data that’s out there.

So that’s my hope is we can put the burden that we can lay to lay to bed this burden of proof and and put it out in front of everybody we need to plug in.

39:27

What’s the name of your foundation?

It’s called the Foundation for Metabolic Cancer therapies, of course, of course.

Yeah, pretty, pretty obvious in the time.

I love it.

I love it.

39:43

Oh man, What was I going to say?

Yeah, the, the randomized perspective studies.

You know, it’s really funny.

A lot of the science we now know is actually corrupted.

A lot of very famous, prominent medical journals and editors have come forward and professors and have said, you know, half of the stuff is just baloney.

40:04

Conflicts of interest.

The numbers have been fudged.

We can’t trust the data.

A lot of the the studies are funded by the big pharma companies and they have the raw data and they don’t show it to the site doctors for peer review.

They just get the results and there’s the doctors have nothing but the results to go by.

40:22

So no one’s actually looking at the raw data and verifying things.

And you know evidence based medicine.

The term I believe was coined by Professor David Sackett in Canada.

And as a triangle it was 3 limbs to this triangle were, you know, peer reviewed literature, OK.

40:40

But equally important was clinical experience.

You know from the experience of a clinician what they do and what they treat, Why have they seen the results being in front of their eyes over like 1020 years.

And also patients, patients experience and values, you know what what does the patient think works and what what’s the patient’s description of things.

40:59

And actually you need to combine all three for it to be evidence based medicine.

But what we’ve seen now is that the evidence based medicine, they’ve taken away the patient, they’ve taken away the doctor and they say it’s all peer reviewed literature, randomized perspective.

41:15

And and that’s actually not true because one that also can open up things to corruption and you’re taking away the most important people, the doctor and the patient from this whole equation.

So I don’t really go by people saying oh there’s no, you know, randomized perspective studies.

41:34

So it’s all it can’t be true and it doesn’t work.

Most of the things we know in this world have not gone through randomized perspective, double-blind, placebo goddamn studies.

So it’s it’s something they they kind of hide behind, I’m afraid.

And I don’t.

I don’t buy it.

41:50

It’s all kind of baloney.

Anyway.

Can I just quickly ask you a joke?

Sorry.

No, no, you have to.

I was just going to say there’s there’s a joke where a doctor’s on skydiving and and he’s it’s his turn to go and he says I’m not going.

42:07

And ask him why.

And he goes.

Because no one has done a randomized, placebo-controlled, blinded study to see if this parachute is actually going to work.

I love it.

We all just know from common sense that the parachute works.

But yeah, it gets to the point of absurdity sometimes.

42:24

It is.

And it’s they’re just hiding behind it and it’s kind of nonsense.

And it’s also weaponized the opposite way around, where they go, oh, this has gone for, you know, robust study.

And actually it’s so flawed.

And you just need to look at, for example, the, the mRNA, COVID shots and the Pfizer and all the study.

42:43

The original study was just so flawed, it wasn’t scientific at all.

And you know, there’s a bias, there’s an agenda and they will make the results fit what they want.

Anyway, that I digress.

That’s a bit controversial.

Sorry about that.

You know, talking about cancer, metabolic, ketones and whatnot.

43:02

So, so the way I look at there’s two approaches to try and prevent the cancer.

One is too fast and then get in a keto state or the other one is to go on a keto diet.

43:18

Or the third option is both.

What do you advocate?

Yeah, I wish I knew the answer to that.

We we don’t know the answer.

We don’t know because.

You know, I, I we haven’t done a couple blinded randomized perspective study, OK.

43:39

We just don’t have enough, right, because and we don’t know if a continuous ketogenic diet is best or if it’s best to do it kind of seasonally, you know, for example, like chimpanzees who eat fruit who you are in, are still in ketosis about seven months out of the year.

43:57

So I think probably we have evolved to.

Probably be in it periodically you know when if you were a good approach may be to you know eat more Whole Foods in the with carbs in the summer berries Things you would find naturally you know carrots things with carbs and maybe you do more more lean towards more ketosis in the in the winter time something like that but the we just don’t know the answer and and eating windows where you.

44:31

Just simply don’t eat for you.

Skip a meal for example, or you fast for three days.

You know, I think every one of those things is going to be shown and has shown you know to be beneficial, but we just don’t know the perfect solution to to that.

But what what we do know is when you do those things right, when you eat a low carb diet and when you fast and eat within eating windows.

44:55

You lower all the markers that are extremely validated to cancer risk.

So in your home, IR, which is a measure of your insulin sensitivity gets better, your insulin goes down.

All of these things, your inflammatory cytokines you can measure in the blood go down.

45:14

Every one of those is strongly correlated to cancer risk.

So you you it, you would be.

I think you’d be crazy if you said you were not reducing the.

The risk because we just don’t know.

We haven’t done that kind of trial.

But but you know the evidence is, is very clear that that kind of lifestyle is, is is most likely going to reduce your risk substantially for getting cancer.

45:39

OK, so recap when it comes to preventing cancer, don’t be obese, don’t be overweight, don’t have any belly fat.

You know, not good.

Having fat around your waist is a sign of metabolic syndrome in some respects.

Minimize carbohydrate intake, especially processed food and ultra processed food.

45:59

Try and restrict your eating window, Skip a meal, don’t graze all day long and try and incorporate some form of fasting if you can.

And have a you know, keto kind of diet high in animal fat and protein and just natural foods.

46:15

So I think, is that a reasonable summary?

That’s 100%, yeah.

And and you know there’s.

There’s really interesting other variables in that equation too.

And one of the most recent one that’s come out is social connectivity.

46:32

And when you look at people, one of the worst things you can do to someone’s health is, is if they are lonely.

I mean, everything goes bad.

They’re insulin resistance.

They’re inflammatory cytokines.

I mean we as human beings, we are physiologically designed.

46:50

To be part of a group, to be you know integrated into a a collective that has meaning and so that that’s a big factor and you can look at the the data on that.

When when epidemiologists look at this study was done I think on 6 million people, there’s a really good study.

47:07

They looked at the number one health risk factors and the first two were number one was your your tight connection, so the people.

That you would call family.

That you would call in a crisis, right?

Or very, very close friends, #2 is your social connectivity.

47:23

So the number of times that you interact with people throughout the day.

This can be your job.

This can be a book club, this can be going to the gym, going to do jiu jitsu with people.

Those were the two biggest factors in your health, in your in your health and your your disease risk moving forward, and even more than smoking a pack a day.

47:45

Shockingly more than diet.

So it’s a package we we we’re a biological action package where we really under appreciated that input from the external world coming into us and what that does to our Physiology you know and and obviously diet and exercise are huge components of that but it’s you know it’s really what is is instructing us is to live a good life.

48:10

To do all the things that your grandma told you to do, to get outside, to play with people, to be involved, you know.

And and when you do those things, it’s it’s absolutely remarkable what it does to your health.

I love it.

I learned something new today that was beautiful, beautiful right.

48:25

Now I want to ask you about patients who’ve got cancer.

So for example I know someone who’s got cancer and they’re losing weight and they’re being told eat as much as possible to put on weight and they’re like, should I fast?

And there’s a lot of people saying you should do five day fast just a water fast and they’re like, I’m already sticks and bones.

48:47

You know I’m nothing there’s nothing on me skin and bones, that’s it.

And you want me to fast for five days that’s that seems so crazy.

I need to eat What?

What should someone who’s got cancer be doing?

And if you if it’s if you don’t want to answer it, I get it, but I think it’d be really useful to to go here.

49:06

Yeah.

That that that question of cachexia, right, which you’re which you when you get that uncontrollable weight loss.

What what’s a lot of the researchers and scientists I talked to is, is your whole body has changed at that point even your healthy cells are turning into the sort of cancerous state that’s a big problem.

49:27

And we don’t know the answers to that.

We we just don’t know if fasting at that point has utility or.

Could make the condition worse.

And I, you know, for people in that situation, it’s awful.

What what I hope to get to is to get to where we avoid that situation.

49:45

And you know what we’re If you can get people at stage zero, Stage one and be able to cure that, which is a much different problem than somebody with stage 4, the best way to cure Stage 4 cancer is to cure them at those stages of stage zero, stage 1.

50:03

And and I think if we’re going to solve the cancer problem, that’s what we’re going to have to do because and it’s not saying it’s hopeless.

We we certainly need to keep trying to find solutions for Stage 4.

But it’s just a different problem.

And with cachexia, I don’t know, I don’t know the answer.

50:18

I don’t have enough to say if you should fast or or what you should do at that point now thanks.

Thanks for your honesty.

It’s the same with me that what I’ve looked into.

I’ve really struggled to find a clear answer.

And you know, it comes back to what a lot of people say to me, oh, doc, you know, what happens if I leave it or, you know, can I leave this right now and I go, of course you can leave this right now.

50:39

And I don’t want to scare you, but the reality is the worse the problem gets, the harder is to fix, the more complications there are.

You know, just take for example, a car, right?

If you’re if your tire is low in air, you know you want to put some air in it.

50:56

And if it keeps going flat, change the tire.

And if you don’t and and you ignore it, then guess what your tire is going to blow.

And if at that stage you still ignore it and drive in the rims because you theoretically can sparks flying everywhere And then your rims are going to crack and your suspension is going to go and then soon your engines going to fail and you’re going to have smoke coming up.

51:18

And if you somehow manage to limp into the garage and say, oh, can you put some air in my tires, it’s kind of a bit late for that.

And and now you’re going to have to do I have a lot of work, you might even have to trade in a different car.

51:34

So I get, I get this is the reason why we’re doing this podcast is to inform as many people as possible to, to make the lifestyle choices where they don’t get to that point where, God forbid during Stage 4 cancer.

And, you know, unfortunately, it takes discipline.

51:50

And it means going against all the medical advice that the TV is telling them, the government’s telling them, the doctors are telling them.

But you know that that advice that we’ve been bombarded with since the 80s hasn’t LED anywhere except, you know, exploding levels of cancer.

52:09

You know, just going back, I mean, sorry for talking.

I really want to hear from you.

But just going back to the 80s, and I remember as a young kid, I was five when it was 1980, and my parents were these young immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.

They’re really slim.

And they were eating like, you know, egg omelets for, you know, breakfast.

52:29

They were using ghee, they were eating meat curries and they’re, they’re look great, right?

And then they started watching the TV like everybody else.

They bought microwaves, They bought microwave food.

They got rid of the ghee because it’s bad.

They got, they got the vegetable oil in, they got rid of eggs, eggs were bad and they got cereals in.

52:50

And then they they they got big and so did we.

And you know, it just goes to show you like when you start moving away from a normal diet, what effect it can have.

And the reality is my dad got diabetes and my dad got diabetes and he had it for 10 years and it was not very well controlled and to give him all the bad dietary advice.

53:09

And here I am a doctor and I still didn’t know the right advice.

I was brainwashed into all the crap and and then he gets cancer.

And now when I look back it was so obvious.

It was so obvious and I wish I now I knew then what I know now and that’s what I want to educate everyone else, everyone who’s listening to this and you know, all the people out there, you know, please just take heed anyway, Travis, if we can move on.

53:37

If there’s anything else you want to talk about cancer, by all means talk about it.

But I was going to ask you, what about ketones?

Why is it the for fuel?

What are the fuels are there?

Yeah.

Well, ketones were under really unknown.

53:54

I mean they were so.

So there’s there’s four, right, what we consider macromolecules, there’s, there’s fats, lipids, there’s carbohydrates, there’s protein and and those were really the three that were considered for most of you know that most of the time we were looking at metabolism, biochemists were and ketones were considered kind of metabolic garbage.

54:17

They were actually considered pathological.

And and I graduated with my degree in 95 and I look back in my biochem textbook and it said the exact same thing, that it’s a dangerous state right to be to to be avoided.

54:33

And So what What ketones are, are when you stop eating carbohydrates or eat low carbohydrates, your body’s faced with this energetic crisis because it’s used to burning carbohydrates.

Now what does it do?

It doesn’t know what to do.

So it can actually breakdown muscle tissue and.

54:50

And and get the the individual amino acids out of muscle and create use those to generate energy.

But obviously it can do that for the very long you would die.

So what it does is it mobilizes fat from your fat tissue and in the liver the fats are converted.

55:08

Some of the energy from the fats is extracted and converted into ketone bodies which are very small molecules.

It’s a four carbon chain.

Beta hydroxybutyrate is one of them.

And these small molecules replace circulating glucose as if you will not totally.

55:24

Your body has to maintain some degree of blood glucose because there’s certain cells that have to burn blood glucose, like your red blood cells, your some eye cells, and even really small neurons.

But it’s this dramatic shift that was completely, it was known, but it was just not appreciated.

55:42

It was considered to be, you know, this this dangerous state to be in.

And but then in the 60s something interesting happened that the the D know that the sort of you know, dejour way of treating obesity was these really long fast.

56:00

So.

So doctors would have obese patients fast for months on end, and the longest fast ever recorded was actually over a year where he didn’t eat anything but I think black some tea and he had just took a few electrolyte supplements, but that was it and he was fine.

56:18

But the doctors or the physiologist?

The biochemist couldn’t explain how these people could fast like that.

Because it was thought that we store enough carbohydrate in our body for about 24 hours when you stop eating them in your liver and your muscle tissue.

56:34

And once after that happens, we couldn’t, they couldn’t figure out how the brain got fuelled because the brain can’t import fatty acids to burn.

It can only import glucose.

And so it it didn’t we didn’t realize or they didn’t realize how this in the brain by the way is a huge metabolic sink.

56:54

It uses about 25% of our basal energy production.

It’s a huge huge energy cost to the brain.

So the experiment was they actually you never get by with this experiment today, but they actually inserted catheters in the jugular veins of.

57:11

Of people, of people that were fasting and in into their arteries and veins.

Of every organ to see what fuels were coming in and what fuels were coming out.

And what they found then was the brain.

Yeah, the brain was perfectly happy to import these ketones to, to take up the energy balance so you could survive.

57:30

So now we knew.

Now we knew that these ketones were this really elegant metabolic shift, this compensation way to get by when we didn’t have food.

And then, you know, the researchers doing this got really interested in ketones at that time.

And what they found was they, they’re just extraordinary in what they do #1.

57:52

They’re thermodynamically superior to glucose.

So per carbon unit there’s more energy in beta hydroxybutyrate.

And what that does to the cell, is it up regulates all of these, what we call coenzyme couples like ATP.

There’s four of them.

58:08

So they get more charged, there’s more energy in that system and this shifts everything.

So, so for example, you make serotonin and dopamine from a molecule called NADPH.

So when you have more more energy in NADPH, you make more serotonin, you make more dopamine.

58:26

So it really changes our Physiology.

And it begs this question, what is the natural state for a human being to exist in, right?

Are we better off being in this state of ketosis?

And then when you look at this molecule, not only is it a better of of superior fuel, but it’s doing all other all these other things that we didn’t realize like it’s binding to these inflammatory complexes in a way that inhibits them from forming.

58:54

So your inflammation drops and you can see this clinically, you know, most people when they go on a diet like this, they’re they’re inflammatory markers or C reactive protein, things like that drop.

Their lipid profiles, like their triglycerides, tend to get better.

So to me it it raises this just fascinating question of what how are human beings?

59:14

What metabolic state are we designed to be in?

Are we better off being in?

And in that research, you know, around 2000, you know, Gary Taubes started kind of pushing this, this idea of the Atkins diet and perhaps ketosis is a very, you know, a superior.

59:34

Metabolism to be in and so that’s still ongoing, but but what you see clinically is that you know like there’s a study on Parkinson’s patients where they put, I think it was 46 of them, they put them on a ketogenic diet compared to a control group and they saw about a 45% reduction in symptoms.

59:54

You see the simple results from Alzheimer’s patients.

They tend to get better and it makes sense because Alzheimer’s.

It shows up very beautifully in a PET scan.

What it looks like is diabetes of the brain.

Your your brain has developed insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance and you just can’t process sugar anymore.

1:00:13

So there’s this energetic gap in the in the brain and the neurons where they just are not getting enough energy to do their their housekeeping duties like clear plaques, clear beta amyloid and things like that.

And when you push ketones in there, that gap closes and they’re able to to start functioning normally again.

1:00:33

So it it seems, you know it seems very strange that this myriad of chronic diseases from neurodegeneration to diabetes to cancer, all of these things look like they get better when people are in a state of ketosis.

1:00:50

So it’s, yeah, it it it just opens the door to a very interesting question about about human diet and Physiology.

Incredible.

I mean, it’s absolutely incredible.

Is this, is this what they mean by brain fuel?

Ketones is brain fuels is optimal brain fuel.

1:01:09

Yeah, yeah, this this, this idea like what your dad went through, right.

It’s very measurable.

This idea what we what?

Stephen Coohane.

He’s a Canadian researcher.

He calls the the brain energetic gap.

1:01:25

In this gap, when we’re young and we’re all tuned up and you know we’re healthy, there’s no gap.

Your brain has got enough fuel.

But because it is so metabolically hungry, as we get older, a typical 40 year old has developed about a 15% gap.

1:01:42

And if they’re in bad health, that gap gets bigger.

Alzheimer’s patients have a huge gap that you can measure.

They’re just not getting enough energy.

And so ketones seem to fill that gap beautifully.

In the experiments that they’re done.

They did Mris where you can see that, you know, the connecting regions of the brain, they’re constantly cross talking, and that cross talking becomes diminished when you don’t have enough energy.

1:02:08

So when you give people ketones right before you put them in that MRI, suddenly that crosstalk opens up again and the brain begins functioning the way it’s supposed to function.

So yeah, the research to date is really, really, really compelling, especially with the brain.

1:02:24

Travis, what do you do nowadays?

Well, nowadays we do a lot of work with the foundation.

We do.

We still do.

You know, I’m still involved with some doctors.

We’re very interested in starting.

1:02:43

We’re very interested in where the technology has brought cancer with regard to to early biopsies, to blood biopsies and what you can do now, you know, before people would have to wait till they had symptoms.

Most of the time before they get diagnosed with cancer.

If you’re lucky, it shows up in a mammogram or a colonoscopy.

1:03:03

But there’s only four really good screening tools for cancer, right.

We just don’t have that early stage screening.

So these blood biopsies, the technology, you know, kind of behind the scenes is just exploding and getting really, really interesting.

So now there’s some companies that have validation testing to where they can detect stage 0, meaning it doesn’t show up on scan, but but cancer is there to stage one cancer about 88% of the time.

1:03:32

And this is a A20 mil blood draw and it’s not expensive.

It’s about $900 right now and it’s going to get cheaper.

So that that tool you know is going to be fascinating in the future if we can mass screen it’d just probably be an annual blood draw and you can tell somebody with with very close, you know, good accuracy that yes there’s cancer here.

1:03:56

Now, now the question becomes what do you do at that point, right.

And that’s where these non-toxic therapies like ketogenic diets, repurposed drugs, that’s where they come in at a level like that because certainly you don’t want to give somebody chemotherapy with with what you think is a stage zero cancer, right.

1:04:13

It’s it’s a disproportionate response.

So I think with with these technologies and the potential you know solutions we have to stage zero and stage one cancer, you could see a a a real meaningful step change in this disease in the near future.

1:04:32

Amazing.

Travis what’s your what’s your diet like what do you what do you eat at home You know I I I just kind of follow just the basic rules.

I always I skip breakfast.

1:04:47

I have a cup of coffee in the morning with some heavy cream.

I usually don’t get hungry till around 1:00 and then I I usually have just like a like a I’ll have like today I had a a salad with just iceberg lettuce and carrots and and some what is it It’s called primal kitchen ranch dressing which is avocado oil and some egg yolks And then dinner is usually you know like some grass fed steak or just Whole Foods.

1:05:16

I stick to Whole Foods and I don’t feel good.

When I eat a lot of carbohydrates I get bloated and I just don’t feel as good.

So I I eat a low carb diet you know and movement.

I play with my dogs my wife and I walk.

I lift some weights.

1:05:33

I I feel much better just when I’m active and walking around most of the day.

So pretty simple diet, you know the simple rules are are don’t be afraid to skip a meal.

I feel better skipping breakfast and then just eat real food.

Just eat Whole Foods.

It’s not complicated.

1:05:49

Once you get in that habit, you know, as I’m sure as you know Ahmed, it’s it’s really easy to maintain it.

Do you ever have like a cheeky cookie or craving for pizza?

You know, I don’t.

I don’t.

I I I have a problem with gluten.

1:06:06

If I eat a pizza, I’ll I’ll regret it.

So I’ve learned enough that it’s there’s enough pain involved that even if I want to eat a piece, I just don’t do it.

But, you know, we were on a road trip a few weeks ago and I we stopped at a gas station.

1:06:23

I got a a a pack of peanut M&M.

So I’m not I I don’t like to be absolutely like if feel horribly guilty if you cheat once in a while then then you know I I think the extreme the the the main thing is to pay attention to your body and just don’t ignore when you feel good you know what are you doing to feel good and if you are eating M&M’s all day every day you know I’m gonna feel like craps and I know that so I don’t try to be too stringent to where it’s not maintainable but but you know it’s easy to follow once you’re going to happen like that.

1:07:02

And yeah, I agree.

I think habits are easy.

Changing them is what’s difficult.

And I used to have a really stupid I used to have a really sweet tooth and I just don’t have it anymore.

I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for four years, and I fast, on average about 2021 hours a day.

1:07:21

And I have a very high meat protein animal fat diet.

And, you know, but I still have, like my homemade sourdough bread.

I still have, you know, a little bit of little bit of fruit.

Not very much, but I still have some.

1:07:37

But take for example, my wife.

You know, I’d closed my window, but a few hours later my wife decided to cook some home cooked chocolate chip cookies and, you know, fraction of the sugar that the recipe says.

And she said you want one.

And it smelled amazing.

And I was like, do you know what?

1:07:53

No, I’m OK.

And she was like, wow, OK.

Because a few years back, I would have guzzled down five of them with a glass of milk.

But now I’m like, no, I’m all right.

I’m good.

I might have 1:00 tomorrow, but no, I’m all right right now.

So you you can change it.

1:08:09

Really.

You really can change things around.

So all those people listening and thinking, oh, my God, I couldn’t do any of that.

Listen, if Ahmed Malik could do it, and if you saw me, you know, six years ago, have you ever watched that Austin Powers ever.

Did you know Austin Powers?

1:08:25

Ever watch that movie?

Austin Parish?

There’s a character called Fat Bastard.

I was a fat bastard from Scotland.

You know, that was me.

Fat Bastard.

Oh, yeah.

So you know, I was eating guzzling soft drinks, chips, burgers, pizzas, you name it.

1:08:41

Chocolate.

Bring it all to me.

Aye, but I’ve changed.

So.

I think all those people are listening, thinking, Oh my God, skipping breakfast?

You must be joking.

No, no, actually, just make small incremental changes.

1:08:59

Just just do it slowly.

Little baby steps.

I didn’t.

I didn’t fast 21 hours.

Straight away.

I was doing 16 hours for a couple of months.

Then I was doing 18 hours for a couple of months.

And then it got to the point where my wife and I were like, actually know what?

I spent the five cooking two meals.

Let’s just cook one meal a day.

1:09:16

So it became a lot easier.

And.

Yeah.

Just little changes, little changes.

You know it becomes yeah, it it it’s interesting with kids, like with my kids you had to fight that battle with you know kids have a natural sweet tooth.

My mind did they want pizza.

1:09:32

You know they want cookies and and and So what we did is we we didn’t necessarily fight them because the way I was raised, my mom, she read diet books in the 70s and we did not have, we didn’t have sugar in the house.

We had nothing like I I could have Grape Nuts, Shredded Wheat.

1:09:51

And then when I when I would go to a friend’s house or when I was able to get it on my own, I would just gorge on it.

Right.

So I didn’t think that was the best approach.

So we didn’t we didn’t take it away.

But I’d slowly like look at you walk through the grocery store and you know you see a really put together couple or you know a guy that’s in shape and I go look at their cart and and the cart would be just as you describe you know Whole Foods and good food and no crap.

1:10:20

And so I just they made that connection on their own.

And then as they turned into teenagers they did it on their own.

They started working out regularly eating great.

And it I just you know it wasn’t me forcing it upon them was that their natural progression of just observing the world and living life and you know I I so I depending on your childhood all those things come into play.

1:10:44

But you’re right, you do those incremental changes that become easier and easier and and it just, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing and I think that’s where people fall in a trend.

I I think that’s really good advice.

Is there anything you want to talk about that we haven’t discussed?

1:11:05

That was a lot?

No, I can’t think of anything else that that is.

That’s a lot of advice for one one hour.

Yeah.

Well, I’ve got a question for you, Travis.

Yeah, you, you are now 180 years old, right?

1:11:23

You’ve lived a long life, a good life.

But your maker has told you that’s it.

Time to go.

So you’re on your deathbed.

You’re still very comfortable, but you’ve got a few hours left, and you’ve got your family all around your your children, your great grandchildren, the whole Shabam before you pass away, right?

1:11:41

What advice would you give to your family?

Health or otherwise, that’s a that’s a brutal question.

You know the the the truth is, is I hope that I’ve imparted any shred of wisdom I already have to my kids.

1:12:04

And I wouldn’t think there’s anything profound that I’m going to have to add to that at that moment in time, which is a terrible answer to give you because A1 liner would be great.

But you know, I with my family, my wife and my kids, you know, we, we, we’ve always enjoyed learning together and talking.

1:12:24

And one of the things I’m most proud of my kids are adults now.

But we we, we still just have wonderful conversations about what they’ve learned today and what I’ve learned.

And so I don’t think I have anything else to give them that’s profound on my deathbed that I, you know and maybe that’s good advice is you God, you know, just mate with especially with close family, you should have that relationship throughout your entire life.

1:12:50

Dude, can I just say something?

That’s a cracking answer.

Why wait until your deathbed to give the the advice, mate.

Well done you.

I’ll give you 10 out of 10 for that one.

Listen, everyone who’s listening.

Everyone listening.

I just want to say I’m really touched.

1:13:07

All, all of you.

You know, I’m reaching out directly to all of you people listening, all those those I keep, I keep getting told by guys their wives love listening to my podcast.

So thank you so much to all those wives out there.

I appreciate that.

Thank you to all those people in New Zealand and Australia and Canada, States and and the United Kingdom and Europe.

1:13:30

I mean, I’m actually touched.

How many people around the world are listening to me and sending me lovely messages?

Especially thank you to all the people who’ve recently upgraded to my paid sub stack.

As you know, I got suspended from my hospital for three months ago and it’s now three weeks ago and it’s come to my knowledge now.

1:13:48

It’s all based on my views, my podcast, my social media.

So censorship is alive and kicking.

So now this is, this is my only way of making an income, a very meager income.

So to all those people who are actually supporting me, I honestly, from the bottom of my heart say thank you so much.

1:14:07

It’s not just me and my family you’re supporting.

You’re helping this podcast and I am on a mission, and if it means giving up orthopaedic surgery, I don’t care.

I I need to.

This is my calling.

I need to help humanity and this is my way of fighting back against the bullshit and the clan world that we’re in.

1:14:25

So to everyone of you running right now, driving, commuting, listening to me, whatever it might be, standing in the kitchen, having breakfast or a coffee, I just want to say I love you all.

Travis, brother, I love you too, man.

Great way to end the show.

1:14:44

I love you too, Ahmed.

All right, folks.

Bye, bye.