#145 Fasting and The Metabolic Approach to Cancer with Dr Nasha Winters

Nasha Winters (0:00)

Think of us as like a bucket, a mitochondrial bucket. And there have been sort of 10 major contributors to the health or disease of that mitochondrial bucket. So these drops add to this bucket, and each of us have our own threshold of what we can handle before the mitochondria basically break, basically stop functioning. But ultimately, the accumulated effect of those 10 drops in the bucket are what make or break your mitochondrial health, which is what makes or breaks your genomic health, which is what makes or breaks your contracting a chronic illness such as cancer.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:38)

Body Mind Empowerment.

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Siim Land (0:46)

Everything the body needs.

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Siim Land (0:51)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast, I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Nasha Winters.

Dr. Nasha is a licensed naturopathic doctor and a fellow of the American Board of Naturopathic Oncology. She's also an author of the book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. Dr. Nasha, welcome to the show.

Nasha Winters (1:08)

Thank you so much. It's great to be here with you. I've loved your work and it's wonderful to be sharing today with all of your listeners.

Siim Land (1:16)

Yeah, yeah, I'm glad to have you here. And unfortunately, I haven't heard you speak in live because when we were at the London Health Optimization Summit, then both of our speeches were at the same time, so we couldn't make it.

Nasha Winters (1:28)

It strategically separated us, I tell you. I heard you did great though, so that makes me very happy.

Siim Land (1:35)

Well, thanks. I'm sure you did fine as well.

So how did you like the London Health Optimization Summit?

Nasha Winters (1:41)

Yeah, you know, I tell you, they knocked it out of the ballpark on their first go. I think they were nervous about how their first big gathering of like-minded biohacking community from all over the world would come together in London and it was incredible. I have to say, I go to a lot of these conferences all over and I was pretty intrigued. I didn't get a stay for the whole shebang because I had to hop back on a plane and head back to the US for another conference. But from the moments I had there and the vibe of the people there was just incredible. I would love to hear your take as well.

Siim Land (2:19)

Yeah, it was the same feelings as you that the people were really into it and I didn't hear any negative comments about the organization, not about the speakers, not about the exhibitors either. So, yeah, definitely a really good job for the first year and definitely looking forward to the next one.

Nasha Winters (2:38)

Exactly. And I will definitely make myself available to be there the entire time next time.

Siim Land (2:45)

So let's talk about you now. So if I'm not mistaken, then I realized that you were a cancer survivor.

So maybe can you tell us a little bit about when did you get diagnosed and how did you survive?

Nasha Winters (2:58)

Sure. So I'm still on that journey. I will be 28 years out October 21st of 2019 from a stage four ovarian cancer diagnosis that was missed for well over a year prior to them finally figuring out what the heck was going on with me. So I was 19, just shy of my 20th birthday. And actually by the time the official diagnosis and all the data came together, I was just a couple weeks into my 20th year on this planet and given less than three months to live. I was too far gone. My organs were in failure, extremely malnourished, extremely cacactics, so metabolic wasted.

And it had been sort of ignored as sort of a histrionic teenage girl, you know, depressed, anxious. They just kept throwing me on more and more medications. I kept getting these crazy infections, they kept putting me on more antibiotics. And you know, I think I was just the zebra. They weren't looking for cancer in 1991 in a 19 year old woman.

Unfortunately today in the work I do, I see a growing number of young people diagnosed with this unfortunate condition. And it's so much related to the work you and I are both passionate about. It's all about the mitochondria.

And you asked how I managed to survive this.

For me, I was going to school in a small liberal arts school that did not have a lot of resources and our library was a bit dated, thankfully, because it was in that library. I was a pre-med student. And it was in that library that I stumbled across the book, the work by some of the research by Otto Warburg, and that made way more sense to me compared to the other things I was learning in my physiology and biochemistry courses of why this could be taking place in my body. And I started to basically apply a metabolic approach to my own physiology at that time. Unbeknownst to me, well before folks like Dr. Seyfried had his great work kind of resurrecting these concepts and all these incredible researchers who have been mentors and colleagues of mine in the last decade. So it was a very lonely path there for a while. And I knew one of the things to do at that time was to basically remove sugar from my diet and start to change the stress patterns and start to understand where the toxicities in my life were coming from on all levels. Not just at the treatment of the tumor, but understanding this concept of what I call the terrain and what our colleagues might call the extracellular matrix or the cytoplasm. But basically the swimming pool in which our mitochondria are frolicking about in is more important to the cancer process than the tumor DNA or genetics itself.