I have been passionate about learning about health for the last 50 years. I hope my story will prevent you from making some of the same painful and foolish mistakes I have made along my journey toward optimal health. It is my experience that it is far easier and less painful to learn from others’ mistakes.
My commitment to a fitness routine started in 1968. Dr. Ken Cooper’s book Aerobics catalyzed my interest in health, which eventually led me to enter medical school 10 years later. Sadly, like most health enthusiasts during the late ’60s and early ’70s, I fell in line with the low-fat, high-carb diet that has been popularized by the mass media for decades. This type of diet is the polar opposite of what I now understand as necessary to prevent chronic disease, manage cancer, and optimize health.
Seven years of medical school and family practice residency solidified my brainwashing into the conventional drug-based medical model that exists primarily to treat the symptoms of disease. Virtually none of my seven years of training ever addressed the root cause of common chronic illness. Rather, it focused on managing symptoms through the use of pharmaceutical products and medical procedures.
In 1995, my understanding made a radical leap in evolution. I met Dr. Ron Rosedale in a room with a few dozen other physicians at a meeting of the Great Lakes Academy of Medicine. Little did I realize then how fortunate I was to be one of the first physicians inspired by Dr. Rosedale’s wisdom on clinical metabolic biochemistry.
Dr. Rosedale lectured for over three hours on the critical need to control high insulin levels in order to prevent nearly every chronic degenerative disease that is rampant in our modern culture, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and neurodegenerative diseases.
You may have had a similar epiphany in your life when you knew you were encountering a foundational truth. In this case I knew it could impact the health of hundreds of millions of people who desperately needed help.
For the next ten years I used the principles Dr. Rosedale taught me along with other information I had gained from attending many dozens of postgraduate courses on nutrition—a subject, suffice to say, never taught in medical school—to continually refine my understanding and use of food as medicine. (Even today most medical schools fail to provide even the most rudimentary basics of nutrition.1)
I was fortunate to have the privilege of using these principles to care for more than 25,000 patients in my clinical career. It was enormously rewarding to be able to provide solutions for most of my patients, many of whom had been seen but not successfully treated by some of the leading physicians at some of the finest institutions in the country.
It wasn’t that I was any smarter than these other physicians—far from it. The difference was that I stayed disciplined, open-minded, and diligent in pursuing the truth about the underpinnings of health. My unfair advantage was elemental: I had a better understanding of how the body healed itself because I had made a decision to stay at arm’s length from pharmaceutical interests. That perspective helped me focus on looking for and remedying the cause of disease rather than mitigating the symptoms.
Although I was aware of the importance of limiting refined carbs and processed foods and replacing them with healthier choices, I was relatively clueless about the importance of eating plenty of high-quality fats and activating the body’s natural ability to burn fat for its primary fuel instead of glucose. I didn’t realize that I still had to look further.
WE’RE LOSING THE WAR ON CANCER BECAUSE WE’VE BEEN FIGHTING THE WRONG ENEMY
Twenty years after I learned of the importance of insulin, I read Travis Christofferson’s Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine’s Most Entrenched Paradigms. I was struck by an epiphany similar to when I first heard Dr. Rosedale’s lecture—here was something that had the potential to radically improve the health of millions.
The argument Christofferson so eloquently laid out—and that builds on what Dr. Rosedale taught me in 1995—is that cancer and nearly all other chronic diseases are caused by defective metabolic processes in your mitochondria. This is typically a result of insulin and leptin receptor resistance from too many net carbs and activation of the mTOR metabolic signaling pathway by excessive protein. We will go into great detail on these topics later on, but for now it’s enough to know that this is the root of the problem for most.
This is in direct opposition to the conventional views of the roots of disease; for over a century, the widely accepted scientific dogma has been that cancer is a genetic disease that develops as a result of chromosomal damage in the nucleus of the cell. The discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in the mid-20th century along with DNA sequencing in the 21st century has served to greatly reinforce this viewpoint.
Tragically, President Nixon’s War on Cancer, which started with the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971, has been a miserable failure. And in 2016, President Obama’s moonshot to cure cancer is doomed to this same fate, despite its billion-dollar price tag. Today, in the United States alone, over 1,600 people will die from cancer.2 If you look at global statistics, that number jumps to an astonishing 21,000 who pass each day from this mostly preventable disease.3 The odds are astronomically high that at some point in your life you will develop cancer or know someone who has cancer. Shockingly, the latest data from 2011 to 2013 show that nearly 40 percent of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during our lifetime.4 I have come to see that we are losing the war against cancer because scientists are chasing a flawed paradigm: most adult cancers are not a disease of damaged DNA, but rather one of defective metabolism.
THE MIGHTY MITOCHONDRIA
Mitochondria—tiny energy factories within your cells that use a metabolic process to convert the food you eat and the air you breathe into energy—are at the core of what is causing your biological systems to go haywire in the first place, making you vulnerable to cancer and most other chronic diseases. When large numbers of mitochondria in your body stop functioning properly, it is simply impossible to stay healthy. This is an enormously empowering shift in how we approach cancer and all chronic diseases: if disease starts as a result of metabolic dysfunction, we can heal that dysfunction. How? That’s what this book will show you—how to carefully choose nutrients and employ other strategies that turn on your body’s innate ability to prevent and heal from disease.
In its most distilled form, the theory that drives this book is that the food choices you make every day directly impact your mitochondria. And if you make food choices that boost the health of your mitochondria, you also make it much less likely that the genetic material that’s housed in your mitochondria will become damaged and trigger a chain reaction that is more likely than not to result in disease.
Another major impetus for me to write this book was seeing so many friends and colleagues, including Jerry Burnetti, die from cancer. It is no exaggeration to say that Jerry was a genius. He was one of the world’s leading experts on regenerative farming, and I had the privilege of interviewing him for my website a few years ago.
Seeing the movie The Fault in Our Stars, a devastating romantic tragedy about two teens with cancer who find each other and fall in love despite their imminent mortality, was another catalyst for me. Though incredibly sad, it is one of my favorite movies. If you haven’t already seen it or read the book, I strongly encourage you to do so.
I believe—as do many of the experts I interviewed for this book—that tragic scenarios like Jerry’s early death and the story depicted in this tearjerker film are unnecessary because more than 90 percent of cancer cases are either preventable or treatable. I had to do something to help staunch the loss of so many talented and loving people to cancer.
Since viewing the movie and reading Travis’s book, I have scoured the National Library of Medicine for the latest research, which has led me to hundreds of review articles on the critical role of mitochondria and what factors play into how best to optimize their function. I have gained insights via personal interviews of many of the most respected authorities in this area.
One of these is Miriam Kalamian, Ed.M., M.S., C.N.S., a nutrition consultant, educator, and author specializing in the implementation of ketogenic therapies for people with cancer. Miriam is the go-to nutrition consultant for Dr. Thomas Seyfried, who is widely recognized as one of the leading pioneers in the metabolic theory of cancer. She has worked with hundreds of clients to adopt the food changes I outline in this book, and she has contributed invaluable insight and information that you will read in the pages to come. She played a vital role in helping me use what I’ve learned to put the puzzle pieces together for you.
THE EATING PROGRAM THAT CAN HEAL YOUR METABOLISM
My goal in writing this book is to present you with a clear, simple, and rational explanation based on science that will help you understand how your body works at a biological and molecular level. I will also tell you what foods to eat, practical strategies to follow, and ways to monitor your progress to help your mitochondria thrive—a program I call Mitochondrial Metabolic Therapy (MMT).
Simply put, MMT is a system of eating that will help shift your metabolism from burning glucose as your primary fuel to burning fat to fuel your body. When you make this shift, you optimize your mitochondrial function and protect your mitochondrial DNA from potential damage that could lead to disease.
At its most basic level, MMT is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carb diet that is built on eating the highest-quality foods available. It is quite a shift from the typical American diet—which is notorious for its excessive refined grains, sugars, and low-quality fats. As you will see, the foods that make up MMT are delicious. Luscious, even. They are satisfying, satiating, and absolutely energizing. And once you make the change to MMT, you will finally be free of hunger, cravings, and any feelings of deprivation that accompany the vast majority of eating plans, aka “diets,” out there.
MMT is about so much more than the foods you eat—it factors in when you eat as well, as regular periods of fasting improve mitochondrial function and accelerate the transition from burning sugar to burning fat. (I cover fasting extensively in Chapter 10, but at this point, you can rest assured that MMT does not require you to go even a whole day without eating; most of your fasting hours are spent sleeping.)
MMT is for you if you are facing one or more serious health conditions—such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative disease including Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, or obesity—or you are passionate about optimizing your health while also slowing down the aging process.
MMT, in whole or part, is optional. And options are wonderful things to have. Perhaps you don’t fit into either the chronically ill or the passionate-about-health category right now. But should you find yourself at that point later, or desire to prevent a health crisis, you’ll know that there is a powerful healing protocol available, one that puts you in control. That is no small thing.
THIS IS EMERGING SCIENCE—BUT YOU CAN REAP THE BENEFITS NOW
Please understand that mitochondrial and metabolic health is an emerging discipline and only a handful of researchers and even fewer practicing physicians are actively involved in its study. But I firmly believe that at some point in the future, metabolic therapy will be accepted as the standard of care not only for cancer but for most chronic diseases.
Thankfully you and your family don’t have to wait 10 or 20 years to reap those benefits. You can begin to improve your health, prevent needless pain and suffering, and help lower your risk of developing serious diseases like cancer by applying what we already know about mitochondrial dysfunction today.
I fully realize that much of the information in this book is not widely accepted yet by the mainstream and many will criticize it. I and others pioneering the way forward toward a more inclusive and holistic view of health and healing are very accustomed to this type of reaction when we provide evidence that there is a more rational and safer way to stay healthy.
The first time I experienced this was as a medical student in the early 1980s when I recommended improving gut microflora as a way to treat ulcers rather than using prescription drugs. I was widely criticized by all of my supervising physicians for promoting this new idea. Years later, I was vindicated when it eventually became the standard of care. Dr. Barry Marshall was the courageous family physician who had pointed me in this direction, and 25 years later in 2005, he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Similarly, I was the first to publicly warn of the dangers of the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx. One year before the drug was approved for sale in the U.S., I told my newsletter readers that this was a dangerous drug that could cause heart disease and stroke. Sure enough, four years after Vioxx was released Merck voluntarily withdrew it from the market—but not before it killed an estimated 60,000 people.5
There are many examples in the history of medicine where routine use of pharmaceutical products and other medical interventions is accepted as “standard of care” for a period of time before they are found to be flat-out wrong and toxic to human health.
I believe it is time to challenge widely accepted assumptions about the causes and cures for cancer. We must open our minds and reexamine the evidence by first acknowledging that science is never settled and that our current understanding of biology is rapidly evolving as more objective, impartial, and unbiased research is performed and published.
I was initially reluctant to write a book about mitochondria dysfunction and cancer because of the very real potential for the information to rapidly become outdated. I thought it was far more efficient and effective to give away the information in real time on the Internet on my website, which I started in 1997 in my off hours as a medical practitioner and which has grown into one of the most visited health sites in the world, with over 15 million unique visitors and 40 million page views a month. But my team convinced me about 10 years ago that books serve a very valuable purpose. They require the author to consolidate thoughts into a comprehensive printed resource where all the material is carefully integrated into an easy-to-follow format.
I am still concerned that the information in this book will need to be revised in the not too distant future, but it will likely be several years before I can carve out the time to fully update it. That is why I strongly encourage you to stay on top of the emerging science by subscribing to my free newsletter or doing your own searches at mercola.com, and, of course, reading from many other sources to help educate and empower yourself and your family on health care and health-related issues.
I continue to network with the leading researchers studying metabolic disease, and I actively review new studies as they are published. I will regularly post updates in my free newsletter at mercola.com, so you will be one of the first to know about new scientific developments and revised recommendations. It has been so rewarding to see what an impact this information has already had in helping people gain awareness, empower themselves, and recapture their health without the use of potentially toxic and dangerous pharmaceutical products. I hope that this book will help millions more do the same.