Researcher Thomas Seyfried: Cancer is a metabolic dysfunction

Stay Off My Operating Table

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Researcher Thomas Seyfried: Cancer is a metabolic dysfunction

Dr. Philip Ovadia

Nov 08, 2022

The ketogenic diet was developed in the 1920s as a cure for epilepsy, but when epilepsy medications hit the market, the diet was entirely forgotten. Thomas Seyfried remembers that 35 years ago at Yale University, the challenge was to do something about epilepsy. At that time, it was a prime area of research in neurology. From mapping epilepsy genes, he studied ketogenic diets and how lowering blood sugar and elevating ketones could help manage epilepsy and even cancer.

For years, there has been resistance towards metabolic therapy as it's not a standard of care. However, Thomas is optimistic that this will shift soon due to an increasing body of scientific evidence and testimony from patients who have survived the treatment. He goes into great detail about how the ketogenic diet aids in the management of epilepsy, how metabolic therapies function, and why the diet and lifestyle of today are the cause of the prevalence of cancer. It seems like he squeezed a semester's worth of lessons into this jam-packed episode. You might find yourself wanting to sign up for his class as well.

Quick Guide:
00:59 Introduction
02:03 Getting into the study of epilepsy
11:53 What happens when you saturate your body with fats
20:17 The knowledge transfer and moving the field forward
25:02 How metastasis happens
30:33 Metabolic therapies will soon be the standard of care for managing cancer
37:24 The downstream effect of altered metabolism
44:11 The need to keep the mitochondria healthy
49:32 The protocols and the benefits of metabolic therapy

Get to know our guest:
Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D., is a professor at Boston College and has worked on various research on how metabolic therapy can manage epilepsy and cancer.

“If I develop the drug in my lab that can do what metabolic therapy can do, oh, you'd say you cure cancer. Yeah, this is the best thing in the world. They would be just running over each other to get this drug. But it can happen. But it's not happening from a drug. It's happening from an entire physiological change. And the body is a healing machine. The body can heal itself if you give it the opportunity, don't stand in the way of the body's ability to heal.”

Connect with him:
Website: https://tomseyfried.com/
BC profile: https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/biology/people/faculty-directory/thomas-seyfried.html

Episode snippets:
11:13 - 11:48 - Glucose can inactivate a ketogenic diet
14:24 - 15:37 - Ketogenic diet is therapeutic fasting
18:55 - 19:35 - Understand both the mouse and human physiology
31:53 - 32:47 - Metabolic therapy as a standard of care
40:33 - 41:55 - The simple approach that can manage all major cancers
45:25 - 46:28 - The diet and lifestyle problem