we all have questions about cancer you know are there particular ways of eating or living that might prevent cancer are there types of diets that might help in the treatment of cancer these are all very important questions they're valid questions and I've got a wonderful guest today the author of Bio diet Dr David Harper a PhD researcher who's been doing a lot of cancer research and I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation if you know anyone who has a family history of cancer or who's worried about cancer who has cancer please consider sharing this video with them it could absolutely affect the trajectory of their life so let's bring on Dr Harper doc welcome it's so glad to have you great wonderful to be here Ken finally we uh we've been talking since April so I'm glad to be here we've been trying to make this happen for you guys since April and uh part mostly my fault partly Harper's fault but mainly also I'll tell you it's my Grievous fault okay so I forgive you uh thanks so much for doing this I know that you've been active in cancer research for years and so many people have so many questions is this diet gonna cause cancer is this diet going to prevent cancer and so I'd really like to dig into all of that and more wherever this conversation leads us I'm happy to go uh first tell us who you are just a brief little snippet about yourself why why should we care about your opinion on this topic this very important topic uh sure well I'm uh um as you mentioned I'm a university Professor a lifelong teacher 40 years now teaching uh Health uh at University level so Anatomy physiology pathology nutrition uh contemporary health issues uh I've also been working for several years now uh in collaboration with the BC Cancer Research Center which is one of the leading cancer research centers in the world uh with one of my colleagues there uh Dr uh Terry Crystal who's uh one of the world leaders on low carb diets and the effects on cancer and then we've collaborated for the last few years with a fellow I'm sure you know Dr Jeff volack at the Ohio State University uh on a three-year study to investigate the therapeutic benefits of ketogenic diets specifically for women with metastatic breast cancer so very late stage breast cancer so and I have to say you know I'm really just the communicator of the amazing work that these teams are doing uh yes I would say I'm a cancer researcher but I'm really a health educator so I'm more involved with the good work that you're doing is getting this information through to the general public because when it goes through those filters uh you know of Academia and journals and and the media and so on it often gets filtered out and and there are competing interests there which we both know about I know you've talked about on your show many times yes so I'm just trying to talk directly to individuals and try and teach them that yes the most important lifestyle decision you make every day uh Dr Berry is what goes into your mouth what's on the end of your fork uh there's a study that came out I think it was 2017 in in um the uh it was a global study of the burden of chronic disease so what causes chronic disease so they looked at uh you know lack of exercise sedentary Behavior smoking alcohol and it turns out that diet is more important than all of those combined in terms of whether or not you're going to experience chronic disease and I'm sure your listeners no chronic disease or things like cancer cardiovascular disease diabetes uh so on not acute diseases like covid or you know trauma like injuries so these are the things that haunt us later on in life and I would say if there's one message I want to get through to people again the most important decision you're making is what's on the end of year four oh I totally agree I couldn't agree more I think other Lifestyle Changes matter and but I I really consider them to be being the 10 percent right if you want to if you want to fix 90 of the problem it's the food you're putting in your face that that's going to fix 90 of the problem now I want to ask you a question about something you mentioned in another lecture but first of all I want to ask everybody watching this uh we got 864 watch and that's not nearly enough everybody right now please click the share button and share this on your favorite social media because millions of people around the world are suffering with cancer directly but they're also there are hundreds of millions who have family members who they're worried about who need this information to know that no guess what there's hope there's hope this is not a completely lost cause you can make changes in your diet starting today [Music] that will absolutely affect the trajectory of your future health your future cancer risk and if you've already been diagnosed with cancer your future life with or without cancer so please share this video there's there's way more people out there who need to hear this message doc I heard you talk about some research that was done on the The First Nations people and and the diet that they ate and how often they contracted cancer could you briefly just go over that and and tell people about this yeah well uh it wasn't work done by by me but colleagues that I I know Dr Richard Matthias uh who actually introduced me to the this notion many years ago more than 10 years ago uh spent his career looking at this uh there have been many investigations of Inuit living in the far north I'm in Canada here in Vancouver we're talking about way far north um and of course on their diet you know there's no there's no pizzas and muffins up in the north especially on their traditional diet they're eating 90 70 to 90 percent closer 90 saturated fat which according to you know the sad or the sad the standard American diet that's recommended by dietitians that's supposed to kill you give you heart disease and so on well it turns out on their traditional diet no cardiovascular disease no diabetes uh a single case of cancer would be worth writing a paper on because on their traditional diet uh and this includes the first nations in in my area on the west coast of BC where they eat a lot of salmon and so on but it's mostly Animal product high in saturated fat very low in carbohydrate therefore very likely ketogenic and on that diet they experience almost no chronic disease and and they do live uh you know if they can avoid injuries or accidents uh very long lives typically into their 90s and so on uh and I love the way you talk about a proper human diet Dr Berry because I I would call it a natural human diet um you know when we were hunting and Gathering again there's no pizzas and corn flakes out there we were eating fish uh whatever animals we could catch we'd eat the organ Meats first um and on that diet uh you see a very low incidence of chronic disease in populations that eat that sort of a diet and and I should mention you know you we're talking about cancer today the same I view all those things as the same thing when you have cancer you have diabetes or you have cardiovascular disease you have metabolic disease yes and absolutely you have metabolic disease that's right at the mitochondrial level so when we talk about metabolism people often think of you know calories in calories out and when we talk about metabolism and you and I are both of a background as animal physiologists so we we have that understanding of the cellular molecular biology metabolism is the sum total of all the chemical reactions in your body so you can through lifestyle push those towards very uh positive outcomes in other words Health promoting chemical reactions or if you adopt poor strategies you know you eat a poor diet in particular you're going to push that metabolism towards chronic disease so I view cancer cardiovascular disease diabetes even Alzheimer's as different manifestations of the same root cause metabolic disorder and and the easiest way to fix that is through diet and the first thing you should do I'm sure you'd agree Dr Berry is get sugar out of your diet absolutely and what uh what Dr Harper was alluding to I threw up a graphic here to help you guys see this if there's nothing really magic in a ketogenic diet in a very very low carbohydrate diet and so a lot of people get confused by this they're like well how can keto because there's definitive research now showing that for diabetes for cardiovascular risk for weight reduction for epilepsy it is the diet of choice there's this is not even a debatable any longer in science there's so much research that backs that up but even for other diseases like acne neurological diseases PCOS and cancer and we're going to talk about the cancer research coming up there's more and more research not only being done currently there's hundreds of studies but there's already cancer research on the books showing very clearly that a ketogenic diet almost certainly prevents cancer but absolutely can be used as an adjunct therapy for cancer when someone's already been diagnosed now I want everybody watching this we got over a thousand now tell me where you're watching from what city what state what country where are you watching this from I want to see it in the comments uh so any comments on this graphic doctor you already pretty much laid it out well I'd say it's already 10 years old so we've moved on from there again the black areas the strong evidence where there are therapeutic benefits for ketogenic diet on the right side um somebody in the comments mentioned PCOS absolutely that's Paul uh um polycystic ovarian syndrome the leading cause of infertility in women is due to insulin resistance and a ketogenic diet will help to reverse that maybe later we can talk about my Axis of illness which are the three things that contribute to these chronic diseases um so in terms of cancer one thing I want to get through to folks is uh very politely refer to be a doctor that's a that's a PhD not an MD I'm not a physician and I'm not trying to say that a ketogenic diet will cure cancer we actually can't say that I'm not even saying that ketogenic diet uh can prevent cancer because in order to say that as a scientist we'd have to get tens of thousands of people lock them away feed them one diet or the other wait 30 years and see what happens you know we don't have enough money on the planet to do that our study is very small just a dozen or so women in the experimental side over 12 weeks and then six months and a year and that's an almost a million dollars so we we're not going to do that so what we do look at is can a ketogenic diet be used as you mentioned as an adjunct therapy will it help improve cancer outcomes and that's the work we're doing on uh doing at the Ohio State University it should be published this year uh I don't want to you know uh give the end story away but the results are very positive and there are other studies that have shown quite clearly that there is a therapeutic benefit to a ketogenic diet as an adjunct therapy so then the theory is if we can use a ketogenic diet to treat diabetes which we've done very effectively if we can use ketogenic diets to treat cancer or to treat PCOS then it's also follows logically that it would be helpful in preventing it if you adopted it before you're sick um yeah and as you and I would agree we don't really have a Health Care system in the west we have a disease management system absolutely we wait till it's broken and then we throw all kinds of very expensive technology at it to try and fix it and we're very good at that but it's way cheaper and way better to prevent it from happening in the first place right so that's what we really need to focus on is how can we prevent it so I again scientifically we can't conclude it I don't have 30 years to wait the people that watch my videos they they're well aware of the strength of different types of research and they realize that observational studies don't really prove anything at all and that in order to do a randomized control trial in humans it would take 30 years just like you said we'd have to block you know a thousand people in a room and give them junk and another thousand people in a room and give them keto and then wait 30 years and that's just not a doable diet but you alluded earlier to sugar as the first thing to get out of your diet so let me let me pull up this graphic from from a talk you did recently so I made a video about for I guess five years ago God I'm getting old five years ago and the title was cancer love sugar and I went into detail how this is pretty commonly known in in biology and medicine and I even talked about the Pet Scan and how we use pet scans and how pet scans actually find cancer so tell us about this and then I got some questions for you sure well this is a slide actually from my colleague at University Alberta Dave wiesenhunt who loaned it to me and it shows how they use cancer uh sorry how they use something called floridioxyglucose which is a radioactive form of glucose to image tumors uh so they they inject this and you can see in the armpit in in this woman uh that little black spot that's where they inject it and then the the glucose goes and it concentrates where cells are absorbing it them at the highest rate and cancer cells can't now I shouldn't say this so broadly most cancer cells cannot absorb and use glucose aerobically like the rest of our muscle cells and heart cells and so on can but uh they will in order to produce energy to continue to divide as as cancer cells do they need an energy source and and and so they use glucose exclusively and in order to provide that much energy because it's an inefficient way when they burn it anaerobically uh and it's called the vorberg effect and Otto vorberg won the uh Nobel Prize for this discovery um it concentrates 100 or 200 times in cancer cells so we actually use it for Imaging so when you think about that if we're using cancer cells for Imaging and it's the glucose that those cancer cells are taking up why would we want a cancer patient to be eating a high carbohydrate diet which is the recommended you know standard American diet if that's what the cancer cells are looking to eat right so uh the other thing that happens of course when you have when you eat a high carbohydrate diet you release a lot of that carbohydrate as glucose in your blood how does the body respond by releasing insulin and we know insulin helps gets that glucose out of the blood but insulin is one of the most powerful growth promoters in your body it's a very powerful hormone so when you have too much sugar in your blood and then too much insulin to try and take that sugar level down you're giving the cancer cells all of the fuel and all of the fertilizer it needs for optimal growth so that's why when we're talking about diet uh eating a standard American diet uh when you have cancer to me just seems to be completely counterproductive what you should do is reduce that glucose load as close to zero as you can get it let your body create its own glucose as needed as libidum as you say in medicine and and then that will moderate the insulin levels and that gives your immune system a chance to identify and destroy those cancer cells absolutely and now I get a lot of Kickback mainly on Twitter about the concept that cancer loves sugar you say very clearly you know it it it it uses a hundred times the 200 times more glucose than just normal somatic cells sales in the human body then I get people saying well there are some cancers that that love fatty acids or love ketones or love oxalates or love fats to your knowledge uh looking over the the cancer literature like you do have has anybody found a cancer cell line that can Thrive and metastasize on fat or uh ketones or oxalates in the absence of glucose uh I'm no expert on this but my short answer is yes there are um they're about about 60 to 70 percent of cancers that we know we're talking only about solid tumors here not like blood cancers and and lymphomas and so on uh and um there are some types of cancer where those cells can use other metabolites other than glucose that's true um and there are almost surely uh through their rapid adaptation and ability for cancer cells if deprived from glucose to modify to use those things to a limited degree but it's always a it's a balancing act it's when you have a drug therapy or even radiation to destroy cancer cells it's still up to your immune system to to set you back on the right path your immune system has to be able to identify and destroy those cancer cells at the cell by cell by cell level and so what we're doing with the ketogenic diet is we're tipping that balance in favor of your immune system by reducing the load and and the and the growth promoting effects of that high carbohydrate diet so as I say it's not by itself a cure for cancer but we have shown I think inclusively in a number of different cancers that it's a very good adjunct therapy and it's being used I think at about 30 or 40 different cancer research centers in the U.S and this is just in the last five ten years many people are catching on to how effective it is so if you're if you're if you're an oncologist and you have a patient and you realize that uh being on a ketogenic diet is going to prove the outcome of your patient you're going to recommend that yeah and that's actually that's a section of medicine where I'm seeing rapid adoption of a ketogenic diet is oncologist and once they realize oh holy crap there's there's research to support this uh there's research to show that the high sugar diet the orange juice the cookies the treats that we give people literally after their chemo and radiation therapy that's probably not helping anything but that's one of the areas of medicine I see very rapid adopt adoption uh H Cooper said sister-in-law and remission from stage four terminal breast cancer third time getting cancer she went low carb uh low sugar per her doctor's order so well here's an oncologist saying that we got Carol my husband was diagnosed in 19 with b-cell lymphoma when we asked his oncologist at the get-go it's sugar-fed cancer cells he literally laughed at us and said no he lost some of my respect at that moment and rightfully so what would you say to Carol uh well it's a lymphoma again so that's not a solid tumor that's right but to even imply that that cancer doesn't in some way utilize sugar to thrive and to metastasize well that's arrogant at best and ignorant at worst and I I have to say Dr Barry this way your show is so important because um when you went through Medical School how much nutrition education did you get in your med what did you go to medical school I can't remember where the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis Yeah and uh I got one half of one semester of nutrition training in my second year of medical school so I think we went maybe Tuesday and Thursday each week for a half a semester and then the other half of the semester was Behavioral Science you can tell uh that my medical school really thought nutrition and Behavioral Science to psychology Psychiatry was super super important we got a half a semester of training my second year of med school uh but it's the vast majority of that nutrition training was how do you feed someone who's have has third degree burns and they're in the Burn Unit or they're in the intensive care and unconscious how do you start an IV and feed that person that was probably 80 percent of our nutrition training just the care and feeding of the an average human in the wild very little training on that whatsoever and that was the only training in the second year of med school after that nobody ever talked about nutrition again it was just which drug to use yeah and I I think that's pretty typical probably even pretty good um and I think uh the average in North America is about five to seven hours in medical school of nutrition it's basically these are carbohydrates you know fats you know carbohydrates uh proteins and so on uh so to answer uh your your call-in question um Physicians are not experts in nutrition and and and this this particular physician doesn't sound like they uh have the same understanding I do of how cancer cells metabolize um so making any any blanket statement about a cell or an organism is near impossible in biology you know it just it there are always exceptions to the rule so we have to look at generalities and uh and then we have to focus in on particular groups of people uh and and and test these hypotheses so the diff difference I can say if we compare our approach which is a high fat High saturated fat low carbohydrate diet to what's now recommended by our policy makers which is a high carbohydrate extremely low fat extremely low saturated fat diet I I will ask your 800 or so viewers you know somebody out there tell me what it is about a saturated fat at the cellular molecular level that causes problems because nobody in 10 years has ever said what it is it's all epidemiological correlational studies right however if you look at what a low carb diet does at the cellular molecular level in diabetes cancer cardiovascular disease we can tell you at the cellular molecular level what that diet is doing to improve your outcomes so if we want to get a bit geeky for a while you know the Ketone that's produced the main it's actually a ketone body the beta hydroxybutyrate which is something of a super molecule actually does at least three or four different things on its own this is a great slide that uh that that I have in my presentation um Ryan Parkinson did this uh at the Ohio State University um and and uh it shows some of the things that the uh beta hydroxybutyrate does these are the ketones in the bottom left there so it reduces inflammation it increases those uh natural killer cells those cd8 cells uh it also um uh uh up regulates something called ampk amp kinase which is the molecule that probably delivers most of the benefits from exercise uh perhaps really important is it down regulates something called mtor the mammalian Target of rapamycin which is this whole black box of growth promoters so it it lowers the growth rate uh and about 200 different Pathways and it does something else called hdac inhibition which is histone D acetylase which allows the uh the the the genes to be activated that correct and shut down the oncogenes that get turned on in cancer cells so we know at least four or five absolutely conclusive Pathways by which the Ketone itself should help in addition to lowering the glucose in addition to lowering the insulin levels and in addition to reducing the burden of what we call ages or Advanced glycated entities which happen when you have too much sugar in your diet and they start glomming onto chromosomes and proteins and yes and gooping up your arteries and causing the inflammation at least to cardiovascular disease so again we're talking about this in terms of cancer um reducing uh fatty tissue we know that that uh you know obesity is one of the biggest uh comorbidities associated with cancer um the increase in fatty acid acid oxidation we talked about so you're burning fats which also helps of course to reduce adiposity or obesity you're decreasing the glucose levels and there's a list of about eight different things that you benefit from by there and then you're increasing the the level of these beneficial Ketone bodies in your system so somebody show me something like that that tells me how saturated fats cause heart disease it all start to listen because I've looked for it for more than 10 years and I'll tell you I'll save you the time it doesn't exist because there is no direct cellular molecular relationship between saturated fats and cardiovascular disease absolutely and so in this one chart alone you show multiple mechanistic ways that a ketogenic diet is either going to prevent cancer or is going to decrease the the growth of cancer these are mechanistically known things that we have researched to back this up so let's compare uh beta hydroxybutyrate which is one of the ketones your body produces when you eat a ketogenic diet let's compare that to fiber because the average doctor will say oh if you want to prevent cancer you need to increase the fiber in your diet do we know the mechanism by which eating fiber decreases the risk of cancer like we know about uh ketones uh well there might be two moderate ways in which it would help um I don't think fiber is necessarily a bad thing I mean I know there's people out there that you know I I it's fine um you know they're soluble and insoluble fiber the insoluble provides bulk in your feces um it doesn't really do anything metabolically uh the soluble fiber is interesting because it may have some benefits one is it it slows the rate at which glucose is absorbed from your digestive system which means you're gonna not Peak at the same high levels and you're not going to release as much insulin so that would have a benefit secondly um soluble fiber when it gets into your colon uh it's digested by bacteria there but it's not turned into glucose it's turned into short chain fatty acids and when those short chain fatty acids get into the uh the colonocytes the colon cells they convert those into what ketones you know I'm not here for my reading what if those ketones if those fatty acids are actually used systemically or if they're just used by the cuboidal epithelial cells in the the colon lining I'm not sure you may know the answer to that but I'm not sure another thing that when I'm always watching videos I'm always reading articles I'm always looking for new research and and something you hear just constantly is eat the following five fruits to prevent cancer avoid you know obviously bacon in eggs to prevent cancer but have you seen any mechanistic studies showing that that fruit or this particular fruit or this particular Berry do we have mechanistic research like we're showing on the screen right now for ketones is there any mechanistic research showing that some magic molecule in some fruit or some Berry can prevent cancer or slow down the growth of cancer do it have you seen anything thing like that in your studies uh short answer is no there are some beneficial chemicals in you know plants and you know you can absorb it and and and and use those uh they're also phytochemicals which are found only in Plants um some of which seem to have you know lycopene and so on have have some benefits um so they're not certainly not bad things when we talk about fruit um you know and they usually say eat your fruits and vegetables so I would say um you know Dr Eric Westman says you know I don't eat fruit uh I I eat berries and and berries have a high concentration of some phytochemicals and I'll eat you know a very small handful of berries uh in the morning something like that in the morning you're a little more insulin sensitive and uh um but there's nothing that you need in there um but is there some benefit yeah is that benefit been shown to reduce the incidence or treat cancer not that I've seen no I agree Simon says uh should glioblastoma patient be eating high sugar carb diet and will eating a keto carnivore diet help uh glioblastoma multiform or GBM uh these are very serious brain tumors in the brain stem uh generally fatal almost 100 percent of the time uh and it's really interesting you know that when they occur it'll move up the brain stem so um you know if you're very young it tends to be very low in the in the medulla oblongata and then it moves up in the midbrain enough the end of the cerebral hemispheres but tends to be in the brain stem area they're generally untreatable because they're in the brain so you can't use surgery radiation is the only really effective treatment now there have been some studies uh and Dom diagostino is the person to talk to about this uh where they've used a combination of hyperbaric oxygen therapy as well as a ketogenic diet to reduce the tumors and and there are some amazing examples of people that have been tumor free for five or ten years and that you know almost 100 percent of people with gbms uh it's fatal within a year it's a very serious form yes absolutely so this is actually one of the most exciting areas of uh using ketogenic diets that therapeutic it seems to be very effective but it has to be really quite extreme you know you really have to get those carbs down in near zero almost like a ketogenic diet for a seizure disorder it has to be super super high fat oh it's close to zero carb as you can possibly get yeah uh s Jillian this this tugs at my heart right here but it also shows you that hope my dad my mom my brother all died from chemo or from cancer I asked oncologists what diet changes we should make he said none and pushed insure uh which is basically a sugar-filled melted milkshake that's what that is and many doctors recommend ensure I think that's malpractice when a doctor recommends ensure we'll see how the courts decide on that later but s Jillian's lost 90 pounds on keto with a goal of avoiding cancer I want everybody watching this if you've lost a family member to cancer tell me who in the comments Mom Dad Granddad grandmother uh brother sister put it in the comments I know I know doc you lost somebody tell us about that and then speak to Jillian well my mother I grew up with a mother who had breast cancer back in the 1960s and you know that was when the treatments were pretty horrific she was actually one of the first people to be involved with the Cobalt bomb treatment which was the first radiation treatments at Montreal general hospital uh struggled with it for five years and finally passed away uh in her early 40s so it was probably I don't know if we knew how to diagnose those days a triple negative you know very aggressive early stage breast cancer so that gives me um you know some some incentive to try and figure this out I certainly wouldn't um do this if I didn't think there was you know a pretty darn sure it was going to be helpful and I have to say you know working with Dr volik's team at the Ohio State University they just they're throwing everything at this they have the best Imaging people in the world they're using a digital pet scan and a clinical study for the first time ever they have a commercial kitchen where we produce and weigh all of the foods that they the the patients eat so we know exactly what they're eating to a tenth of a gram we're measure we're doing blood draws we're doing ketones every day but blood draws every few weeks so that we know exactly what's happening we get samples at the BC cancer research center and we do the immunohistochemistry so we know exactly what cells are activated or upregulated as we say are down regulated and we can relate that to what we know about how those cells behave as anti-cancer cells so we're throwing everything we can at all the technology we can it is really a pretty small study it's a pilot study so you know we can't draw broad conclusions and the women that we can recruit that we're allowed to recruit due to the research ethics are very very sick women they're going to you know they they have a life expectancy of six months to a year typically so they're very brave women that are volunteering to do this and I have to say you know the outcome I can't talk about the full results yet until it's published sure but uh certainly very positive indications that as an adjunct therapy it has a fact for these women with breast cancer uh we have seen the kinds of cellular molecular changes that we expected to see the other thing that perhaps you know first Do no harm is a physician uh yourself is no bad outcomes there was no women dropped out of the trials because of any problems with the diet so what we saw was even though these women were very sick and effectively dying they responded the same way normal healthy people would respond to a ketogenic diet they lost the body fat they had improvements in blood sugar and blood lipids and so on just like anybody else would so so we know it's not going to cause any harm and what we're trying to do is estimate the the benefit now that's treating a cancer that's very very progressed if we're looking at again you know people ask me because I work in cancer research what's the best treatment the best treatment is don't get it in the first place 100 and do you think Jillian's strategy of losing 90 pounds and eating a ketogenic diet is that a rational strategy to decrease her risk of cancer absolutely no it's not just rational it's yeah I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't I congratulate her more first for losing 90 pounds that's a challenge I mean uh there are a lot of people they're very plus-sized people that are struggling with this and I can tell you ketogenic diet is the best way you know full stop to naturally lose that weight um you know without surgeries and without drugs or anything like that and and um uh so so that's great and and if you're reducing that that adiposity burden the the the cellular molecular activities that are causing you to lose that weight are also very positive in terms of preventing you from getting cancer and absolutely you know someone whose parent died of cancer yeah I don't want to get it either so far you know touch wood so good so far so good um and so I think yeah she's absolutely doing the right thing yep and based on the the chart that we showed earlier uh let's talk about hyperinsulinemia now because I've heard you talk about that before and I think you you and I agree on this completely of course when you eat a diet that's high in in sugar in starches in in any kind of carbohydrates it's going to spike your blood sugar but then your pancreas is immediately going to try to pull the blood sugar back down to normal buying spiking your insulin and so if people are eating a high carb diet every day with snacks in between they're going to have something that I've started calling hyperinsulinemia and some people speak about this as insulin resistance which I think may be a kind of an upside down and backwards way of thinking about it because you can actually measure serum insulin yep oh yeah but you can't really measure insulin resistant directly and so all everything on this chart is affected by by not only hyper high blood sugar but also by hyperinsulinemia chronically elevated levels of insulin so until it kind of make this a global statement of how changing your diet is going to decrease your risk of having all these things yeah I don't know if you have it available but I have this model it's on one of my slides called the axis of illness yeah I may have linked you to the wrong slide deck but that's okay um it you picture a triangle and on that triangle you have insulin resistance at the top you have obesity on one of the bottom sides and you have uh inflammation on the other and I think you talk to any clinician or any physician and they'll tell you boy if you can do something for those three things reduce obesity which is a disease reduce insulin resistance uh reduce inflammation each of those independently is responsible for about 70 percent of chronic disease so collectively there's a tremendous power if you can find one way to treat all those things at the same time and this is what a ketogenic diet does because it reduces all of those things you reduce so when you talked about hyperinsulinemia which is the correct term which means you're chronically excessive levels of insulin in the blood what causes that it's caused by chronically ingesting too much carbohydrate and stimulating the release of that insulin so um so that's caused absolutely by a high carb diet a high carb diet will also lead to obesity it just will it's your body's way of getting rid of that excess glucose and storing it and and uh you know if your insulin levels are even slightly elevated it really biases that towards storing as fat rather than burning in the cells so you put inflammation in there as well cardiovascular disease is not caused by cholesterol or you know high fat diet it's caused by inflammation in the blood vessels and all of those three elements I call them the axis of illness so we have insulin resistance we have obesity we have inflammation they all make each other worse and so once you get it doesn't matter which comes first once you get one started the other two will keep going and it'll just keep getting worse until you change your lifestyle and eventually it wears your body down so you can't just keep secreting too much insulin forever those beta cells in your pancreas that release them get tired and all of a sudden they well like we don't have any insulin left you know so then what do you have to do you have to start taking units of insulin every day just to get your blood sugar down what's that going to do it's going to make the disease even worse right because you're adding insulin to people who have glucose tolerance issues so those three things are all related and as we talked about earlier they're all manifestations of metabolic disorder yes so your cells are not metabolizing the way they want to because you're giving them the wrong fuel it's like putting crappy gasoline into your car if you want to switch to the high octane stuff that's kind of what ketones are and your one of the interesting things we've shown in our studies is uh when we do the Imaging of the women before and after being on a ketogenic diet initially their heart glows not because they have cancer because that heart cells love Fuel and they'll just because it keeps going all the time it's a very anaerobic organ and it'll just suck up all the glucose it can but when we put them on a ketogenic diet the heart disappears why well it's the glucose doesn't need it anymore right why is that well because it prefers ketones and fatty acids because they have less stress burden at the cellular level what we call reactive oxygen species and oxidative stress so that's that inflammation side of it too right so I think that's so important that people understand that everybody listen to this carefully the muscle cells that make up your heart actually prefer to run on ketones and we see this in in the before and after pictures if you go and watch uh some of Dr Harper's other videos he actually has motion videos of the pet scans before and after and you can see the heart in the initial study went into glucose burners brought lights up very dark but then at the end of the study now that they're keto adapted right that heart's burning ketones it would rather have ketones rather than glucose but if you're eating a high carb diet you're not giving it giving it that option so this goes directly to Ted Rose's question uh you said earlier that if you eat too many carbs you're going to get fat and that's very true for some subsets of the population uh whose genetics are like mining like yours 100 we'll get fat but there are many people in the world uh people in Ethiopia in India in the Asian countries who it's very hard for them to become obese or severely obese but they can become disastrously hyper insulinemic and so for somebody like Ted Rose's mom tedro's probably what's happening is when your mother goes to the doctor your doctor's checking a basic metabolic panel which checks a fasting blood sugar your doctor's probably not checking in A1C now hemoglobin A1c and therefore if your mom fast for 12 hours before blood work her blood sugar can be normal her fasting glucose can be normal and she might be severely pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic and without an A1C your doctor's blind to that and she doesn't fatten easily because of her genetic predisposition therefore she looks healthy now even an additional layer to that is most doctors never check a fasting insulin level or a c-peptide and so your mother could have a normal blood sugar and a normal A1C but be Dangerously hyperinsulinemic and if your doctor doesn't check a c-peptide and or a fasting insulin then your doctor's blind to that and so she gets sent home saying oh you're healthy as a horse you're looking you're doing good keep doing what you're doing all the while she's suffering from severe metabolic disease and I see this all the time and in many countries it's almost impossible to get a doctor to order a fasting insulin test and that's a personal pet peeve of mine is a health care provider and practitioner well let's talk about what's wrong with doctors Dr Harper what the hell is wrong with the average Doctor Who's who's recommending Ensure to their their obese patients or to their their patients who've been diagnosed with cancer who are saying here you've had your chemo treatment now here's some orange juice and some cookies what the hell is going on in these doctors Minds do they magically believe that the human diet somehow is just magically does not matter or do they just not give a damn or are they so nutritionally ignorant that they don't even realize that the [ __ ] that they're promoting to their patients is actually promoting metabolic disease time to bring it Dr Harper let's hear what's your opinion well you know I have good friends there are Physicians uh yourself included I don't want to paint them all at the same brush I think it's our system again it's a disease management system so it's easy to provide a pill you know so I think there's a lot of uh you know Americans a lot of people in the west Canadians whatever uh that are obese and they just want to keep eating what they're eating and they want the pharmacy industry to come up with a pill that's going to prevent them from getting obese or getting sick that's not the right way to go about it um I think that um they don't get any nutrition education in the first place secondly is I don't think they are necessarily up to speed on the research because you know there's a thousand there's a million Publications a year three thousand a day in health science is hard to keep up with all that stuff um so you know why aren't they listening to what's happening it takes about 17 years for a scientific discovery to get into basic clinical practice in a physician's office again ask yourself do I have 17 years to wait for this to happen right what I'm finding is just what you are finding too is now the Physicians are sort of getting that information from their patients they're going hey wow you've lost a lot of weight that's great look your your blood sugar is great your blood lipids are great what have you been doing while I went on this keto diet and they go oh okay because what you what you probably Learned was ketoacidosis right High ketones is from uh you know late late stage diabetes and it can kill you so they heard the word keto and they think it's dangerous well it's not uh it's natural and and you have that proper human diet I have that natural human diet babies are in ketosis in the womb they're born in ketosis and they stay in ketosis as long as they're breastfeeding this is the natural proper human state is a state of nutritional ketosis and so when you put your body into that state it prevents you from having a metabolic disorder that will manifest as a disease so you don't even end up in the physician's office in the first place that's the best thing now can we re-educate them that's what we really have to do that's why your show and others like it are so important because you know you have a part of an organization called the Canadian clinicians for therapeutic nutrition I think there's 8 000 now mostly Physicians that are saying hey wait a minute we never really learned any nutrition now that we looked at it maybe we have this whole thing wrong and the other part of that wrong thing uh Dr Barry is getting someone to admit they were wrong especially if they've been telling people to do something for 20 or 30 years and get you know what all that low-fat stuff I told you you know I got to apologize so those who read my book bio diet that's one of the first things I do I said I taught the wrong stuff for 30 years before I realized what I didn't do as a scientist I didn't go back and look for the primary research that tied high fat diets to disease and when I did I didn't find it because it doesn't exist right there was one guy in his gang Ansel keys that tried to drive that hypothesis forward and they drove it into the American Cardiology society and they drove it into the dietitians and they we have this this model which is really just a hypothesis that a low-fat high carb diet is a healthy diet and as I say in my book we didn't experiment on the western world for about 30 years telling him to eat that and look at the data yourself what happened since the first guidelines for nutrition came out in 1980 skyrocketing rates of diabetes skyrocketing rates of obesity skyrocketing rates of inflammatory related diseases which is why you measure that C-reactive protein so that's Association sure it is but we can also tell you on the cellular molecular level that eating all those high sugar high processed foods is going to make you sick and if you're eating those you have to stop and you have to learn to eat and enjoy a proper human diet a natural human diet which is high fat you know High omega-3 grass-fed butter eat your meat eat the skin eat the fat you have to start doing that and when you do I can tell you two things it will do no harm but there is a transition period so you should discuss it with physician because as you know Dr Brady there's often a need for concomitant reduction in anti-hypertensive and antihyperglycemic drugs you need to talk to your physician before you start but once you do it do it for 12 weeks and see what happens and I would be shocked if you didn't go oh my God you know I've been rejuvenated that's why I call one of the stages Rejuvenation right you just do this for 12 weeks and go I don't hurt anymore I've lost all this body fat my brain is cleared up I seem to be more cognitively functional um and if it doesn't work which happens you know for about one out of eight people it doesn't work then carry on with whatever you were doing before but don't eat the crappy food that they're trying to sell you that taste good and you can't stop eating it and then hope that the medical system is going to be able to fix you what you need to do is get that stuff out of your diet eat a proper human diet and and then you can move on into a happy healthy life absolutely absolutely we've got a ton of comments and questions we got 1700 watching now thank you guys for sharing this video and helping reach more people uh let me see if I can find a question here uh what was the question earlier Dr Barry about you know Asians and and higher carbohydrates yes absolutely so two of the things I would I would I would encourage you to look at is what's the average life expectancy in those countries most chronic diseases don't really start to affect you until you're 50s and later and often that's the average lifespan so when in North America before World War II the average lifespan was only in the 50s uh and it was only you know since then that we've been able to live long enough to experience those chronic diseases uh the other thing if you look at you know Asians if you look at South Asians uh in India huge rates of obesity and and heart disease in in male males in in India for sure uh and and then a lot of them yes it's a high carb diet but it's also your malnourished it's really really hard to get full nutrition which is what we call a balanced diet it's really hard to do that if you're not going to eat uh meat and and and a you know a lot more fat you need about 40 percent of your calories from fat just just for your brain to be happy so so yeah I think there's a bit of a misnomer that you know they eat rice at the end of the meal if they're still hungry right yeah uh and it's only a small amount and and uh you know they are there I guess the other question was can people adapt uh to be sort of more resistant to carbs well you can actually test for that genetically and some people do metabolize carbs better than others and they probably are more resistant to type 2 diabetes but if you look at let's look at America 78 of American adults over 18 are now overweight or obese that is the definition or one of the definitions or one of the key elements of metabolic disease so yeah you have two third three quarters of Americans have metabolic disease yeah and so I'm working more and more with doctors from India now and it's very common there because the average Indian eats a very high carbohydrate diet but they're almost uniformly slender they might have a little belly pooch but they're not obese like uh people in America get and so the argument is this guy's slender he's healthy he doesn't have any markers of disease and then when I talk to the Indian doctors they're like yeah no doctor here checks fasting insulin yeah right and many of them don't even check an A1C and so they see the normal blood sugar because the person fasted for 12 14 16 hours and they're like there there you go you don't have diabetes but if they first of all check the hemoglobin A1c they would see that they have absolutely verifiable pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes in many cases severe type 2 diabetes and and if they do we call it toffee thin outside fat inside so just because you're lean outside doesn't mean it's we're talking about the visceral fat that impacts on the organs and so on that you can't see inside that's the fact that's important not the little roll of your belly or your bum or whatever it's it's the internal stuff and you can be very thin but still fat inside and those people that are thin outside and and uh and and but have type 2 diabetes they have very poor outcomes because I actually think that obesity is your body's way of trying not to raise your blood it's it's getting that Sugar out of your blood and putting it somewhere has to go somewhere so it goes into fat those that can't do that to address the you know the adaptability of the metabolic differences people those who can't do that that blood sugar just stays High the insulin stays high so they often have worse outcomes absolutely I totally agree with that we actually talk about it as a as a protective mechanism people who are able to fatten very often will will be very very fat I used to be 297 pounds at my fattest uh and I was only pre-diabetic whereas other people with different genetic diversity perhaps different gut microbiomes they wouldn't have got very fat but they would have been severely type 2 diabetes and so now looking back now I'm I'm very glad that I got I was a fat ass because that probably protected me from developing severe uncontrolled type 2 diabetes well and it has a lot to do with your genetic diversity uh doc if somebody's just joining us right now and they're like okay I want you to tell me Dr David Harper PhD who teaches medical students and teaches residents I want you to tell me if you had to just say okay here's three steps to to fix your diet here's the stuff you should eat here's the stuff shouldn't eat here this is it go uh don't eat sugar don't eat uh anything processed so up and down those aisles don't eat the stuff in the middle of the grocery store that's in a package if it's in a package don't eat it if it says natural or or healthy probably not don't eat that don't eat any uh high glycemic index stuff sugar bread pasta rice don't eat that um do eat saturated fats somebody talk about eggs in here earlier I ate probably my wife and I maybe three four dozen eggs a week eggs are that's why there's a that's why there's an egg on the cover of my book uh it's Nature's perfect food and I want to ask you about that a little bit too so yeah that's why we have chickens now in the backyard for that very reason because eggs are especially properly raised hens eggs unbelievable superfoods when you think about it the the egg has almost no carbohydrate in it that's right it's almost no it's almost zero yet somehow without eating anything that produces the same 200 tissue types substitute feathers and hair as we have so somehow all the cells know what to do in the complete absence of carbohydrate and and and there are no essential carbohydrates you don't have to eat any at all your body can make its own through a process called uh neoglucogenesis or making new glucose glio nuclear gluconeogenesis right yes um and um so that's that's the main thing is don't worry about saturated fats eat eat your eat what you like eat a eat a diet that you enjoy that includes uh meat and fish and beef and bacon and uh uh you know and just avoid processed foods and avoid sugar and carbohydrate just that and drink more water be fine um I would like to ask you because it's something that I've been I've been meaning to ask you though Dr Berry is uh there's a lot of people when I talk they talk about what about fasting so I'd like to hear what your thoughts are on on fasting I have some which I'm on going to share but I'd like to hear your thoughts first yeah the the research that I have uh reviewed and the anecdotal evidence that I've gotten from literally tens of thousands of people who who comment on our videos and are part of our private Community uh fasting absolutely speeds up uh the the metabolizing fat sword fats and so it helps people lose weight faster uh for many people it helps break what I consider to be a real entity some doctors don't think it's real but sugar addiction I think it helps with that uh I it absolutely increases your rate of both autophagy which is your body's recycling of old and damaged cells and breaking breaking them down and building new healthy vibrant cells out of them not only my uh or autopsy but also my autophagy doing the same thing with mitochondria mitochondria are the PowerHouse of the cell right and so if you've got an old crippled damage image mitochondria your body's going to tag that when you fast for longer periods of time and it's going to break that mitochondria down and it's going to use those constituent parts to build a new healthy vibrant mitochondria now there's always some degree of autophagy in mitophagy going on in your body at all times every day if you're eating just a completely [ __ ] diet you're still you still have some known rate of that but the rate of autophagy and mitophagy increased dramatically the longer that you fast and so many many benefits we've had we've had followers of ours for five years now who lost over 200 pounds and you would expect them to look like Sharpay puppies right but but they made intermittent fasting a big part of their weight loss Journey whether it was an 18 or a 20 hour daily intermittent fast or whether they fasted for three days once a week or five days once a month they may they just made that part of their lifestyle and now to look at them you know how some people lose weight and you can look at them be like well they're they've obviously lost weight but if you can tell they used to be really large just by looking at them these people look like they were never fats and this doesn't happen for everybody but and I think it's because of that normal distribution curve that every single thing in human physiology is plotted upon I think there are some people that that fasting like that is just borderline magical in the body recomposition that it can have other people it doesn't seem to have as much effect of course these are not controlled studies so we're not peeking into their living rooms and seeing if they're actually fasting or not we're just going from self-reported data I'd love to hear your thoughts on fasting as well and then I want to ask you about vegetable seed oils well no oh okay so let's do the vegetable seed oils just go Google vegetable seed oil processing and look at the pictures and they look like oil refineries because that's what they are that's the most processed food and it's horrible highly highly inflammatory and you know not oils like avocado oil or you know avocado or olive oil fine um I like grass-fed butter that's my favorite fat yeah but but seed oils absolutely no they're just they're and especially the really cheap ones like linseed oil and cotton seed oil that they use at those fast food places to fry french fries yeah you know they used to change the grease doctor you know I I used to my dad actually used to be a regional distributor for Kentucky Fried Chicken he would repair their cookers and he would take them supplies and stuff dude I when I was probably 12 13 I would go in the back of the KFC store and it literally smells so bad that I would have to go sit out on the stoop in less than uh safe neighborhoods and my dad would have to come look out the back door every 10 seconds because he didn't want me to get abducted but it was awful the everything was slippery and greasy but those he would say you guys are not changing your oil often enough and you can understand as a franchise owner every time you change that oil it's probably 30 gallons that's four hundred dollars yeah every and so they ideally they're supposed to change it very very regularly but any any franchise owners can be like well change and we'll go another day it's not too dark it's not too rancid we'll go another day and really in truth the only time they change the oil is when customers start to come bring the chicken back and say this don't taste right that's when they change the oil and so not only are you getting vegetable seed oil that's super high in omega-6 fatty acids but it in a in a fast food restaurant if you buy anything fried like that bet me that that oil is not being changed according to schedule because my money's tight in this economy they're not going to change that oil until somebody complains about the taste of the chicken or whatever the fried food is I personally don't find as much research showing the mechanistic things that we showed for for GHB and for uh hyperglycemia and Hyper insulinemia uh I absolutely one of my my three first things to stop all sugar both added and natural stop all grains all grains and then number three stuff all vegetable seed oils that's been my first three recommendations for everybody since 2017 but I have to be honest I don't find as much research supporting the stop all vegetable seed oils as I find with the first two and I always like to ask people about that uh now eggs yeah well eggs Nature's perfect food you know as we said you get all the you know there were vertebrates like chickens are and you you don't need any so it just tells you you don't need carbohydrates for starters uh the cholesterol in the eggs does not relate very strongly to the cholesterol in your blood if you have cholesterol issues I mean we we don't want to start an hour into an interview talking about whether uh LDL is worth measuring or not and what the meaning is but let's just suffice it let's just sum it up like this the American Heart Association a few years back came out and said eating cholesterol in your diet is no longer of anything okay they just very recently came out with a new statement that said that saturated fat in your diet is unrelated and these risk and the diabetes associations are now recognizing low carbon ketogenic diets as you know they're saying it you know that's another option for you so they are coming around and the reason they're coming around these are very conservative very risk-averse organizations is that the evidence and support of low carb ketogenic diets is overwhelmingly positive and there is the first you know harm the any negative effects are short-term transitional and Mild so there are some and I list them in the book in the first part of the second half there's about you know 30 or 40 really rare rare genetic disorders where you can't metabolize ketones and for those right the diet would be contraindicated and you need to discuss that with your physician it's not something you would know unless you tested for it exactly yeah I actually did a YouTube video about that it's probably 20 000 people in the entire United States yeah we have a genetic defect where they they probably shouldn't do keto or ketovor or carnivore it's a minuscule amount of people the vast majority 99.99 of people around the world can enjoy all the benefits of a ketogenic diet doc where is the hour uh any final thoughts any final advice to anybody out there uh any any uh someone's like okay I get it I hear you guys but my doctor said I should eat a plant-based diet lots of whole grains lots of fruit juice smoothies talk to that person Dr Harper tell them what you think well I I have to sort of you know empathize with the physician because they have decision trees and you've probably talked about this is when you have certain systems they go through their decision trees if the patient says yes then this is what you prescribe if they say no then you go down this and so they're um you know if they recommend what the American uh dietitians organization say is the record or what the government says they reduce their liability to zero because they're recommending what's being told so Physicians like yourself who have more courage in reality are saying actually we should question that you actually assume some liability if you get it wrong and if you if you had got that wrong you've been doing this a long time you'd be in jail right now and you know you know I think it's going to go to jail that process food people because I think they know that this food this high sugar processed high carb food is killing people absolutely if you look at diabetes alone and the burden of of treating just type 2 diabetes which is 90 of diabetes in the United States uh and you you take the rate of increase of diabetes uh to where they project it for 20 30. the United States alone people will be spending 660 billion dollars a year just to treat type 2 diabetes and if you compare that to put in context right now the U.S defense budget is about 660 billion dollars a year so that's what we're spending to treat a disease which is largely preventable and can be reversed with think of the savings for the governments that could then go into schools and hospitals and maybe better nutrition educating for physicians in medical school so so I guess the news is there is good news do discuss it with your physician it's not a cure for cancer if we want to talk about that but I think it's the most important lifestyle decision that will help prevent you from getting one of these chronic diseases we didn't even get into Alzheimer's disease because the brain loves ketones too but that we'll do that another hour another day yeah Dr David Harper author of the bio diet I have a copy of this it's available on Amazon and in all bookstores I've got a link down in the show notes right if you want to get a copy there is an audible version like yeah Audible and we read it ourselves my wife and I as a co-author uh I would always I always tell people you know it's not an expensive book is and they should buy your book too lies my doctor told me I'm sure they already have yours but but I would say buy two one for you and one to give to your physician when they started 100 absolutely and you know many of my patients are uh followers have done that and I just I thought back in 2017 when I was contemplating doing this I initially wanted to work at the upper level I wanted to try to change government guidelines change the Ada change the AHA but very similar to you at some point I realized that's a Fool's errand yep that's going to take 17 years 20 years 25 years how many grandmothers are going to die between now and then how many children are we going to lose to metabolic disease to cancer and others during that time and I said you know no I'm going to go to the people I'm just going to go to the people I'm gonna tell them what I've learned both from my personal experience from the research from the Common Sense from the archeology from the Paleo anthropology I'm going to put it all together and just present it to the people and let them say huh that's cool I think I'll try that or no I'm just going to follow my doctor's advice but either way at least they had a choice and they didn't have to wait 20 damn years to have the choice and so I applaud you Dr David Harper for also going to the people I know you speak at conferences all the time I think you're doing uh tremendous work I love your book I hope there's a second one on the way uh thank you so much for joining us any final words my friend well we'll have to write that second book together then terrible literary partner okay you I I have terrible ADHD and you will have to goad me and prod me constantly but when you do get me in gear I turn out fairly decent work yeah we'll we'll go and talk about that next time we're speaking together like we did back in in April in in Salt Lake City it was a pleasure to meet you in person and a pleasure to meet you online and to have an opportunity to talk to the good folks that tune into your show and for those folks uh I absolutely applaud Dr Barry for what he's doing it is the right way we're not going to convince policy makers and and uh large bodies uh advisory bodies uh quickly enough to affect your individual health so make sure you get good sources there's all kinds of crap out there on the internet as well uh that's what I that's why I wrote the book that's why trying to get the right information so that you and it's it's I think a pretty engageable easily to understand it's not like deep science stuff absolutely so you'll have the you'll have the information that that will form you and when you make those informed decisions you'll realize not only is this the right thing to do but after about 12 you're actually going to go that's the best decision I ever made in my life maybe post getting married or having children absolutely Dr Harper thank you so much for this it was a pleasure I'll see you next time great all right bye-bye