In this episode, Leah Chischilly talks to Dr. Ron about the Anti-Cancer benefits of compounds called Salvestrols. They discuss how Salvestrols are found in larger quantities in organic produce and how you can get more of them into your diet.
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Episode Transcripts
Intro: This is the Real Health Podcast brought to you by Riordan Clinic. Our mission is to bring you the latest information and top experts in Functional and Integrative Medicine to help you make informed decisions on your path to real health.
Leah Chischilly: Welcome everybody to the Real Health Podcast. I’m your host today Leah Chischilly, and joining me is Dr. Ron. Hi, Dr. Ron,
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Thank you.
Leah Chischilly: It’s always nice to see you. And today we’re going to have a conversation about why organic foods and fruits and vegetables are so important especially for their anti-cancer properties, which they’re now discovering. So I think this is a really fascinating topic.
So first I want to start out differentiating for our listeners. What is the difference between an organic fruit and vegetable and a non-organic? And what does that look like when they go to the grocery store?
Dr. Ron: So organic fruits and vegetables literally have more phytonutrients in them. They have actually done studies, looking at organically growing fruits and vegetables and the phytonutrients are the plant-based chemicals that the plant uses to defend itself against predators, such as a fungi or a bacteria or something that would otherwise inhibit its growth. And so where this comes into the whole cancer arena and, and where it relates to organic foods is that organic foods have not been sprayed. Fruits and vegetables have not been sprayed. I mean, if they’re properly growing in an organic way, that means if that particular plant is attacked by especially a fungus, it will have to within its own, genetic heritage, be able to manufacture some kind of biochemical defense against whatever it is. Maybe it could be an insect.
Maybe it could be a bacteria, but I’m especially thinking of fungi. Fungi are ubiquitous. And when things die, fungi basically are what basically break them back down again. Fungi, literally live on dead things, so to speak. And so, it’s interesting that when a fungus attacks, let’s say a blueberry plant, that plant has to mount a biochemical defense. So what’s really interesting is that cancer has many characteristics of a fungus in the body. It is, yeah, most people don’t know, but cancer lives almost completely on sugar. It reverts from burning sugar in a more, uh, mitochondrial way to a very simple way called glycolysis. And so this is one of the reasons why we encourage people not to overeat sugar if they’ve got cancer. By the way, they use a radioactive tagged sugar in the PET scan to determine if you have metastasis throughout the body, so that sugar is attracted to the growth of tumors. And so, so anyway, what it comes down to is that there are specialized chemicals in organic plants that you do not find in non-organic plants that can help protect you from the growth of cancer.
Leah Chischilly: I find that so interesting. And let me know if I’m not understanding this correctly, but it’s kind of interesting because it sounds like the plant, the vegetable, the fruit almost has to have a stronger immune system towards these things, which is very similar to a person fighting cancer. They have to have a very strong immune system in order to be able to fight that off. So it makes sense that we would have to ingest the things that are stronger in order to make us stronger. Does that sound accurate?
Dr. Ron: Now these chemicals, these phytonutrients, actually help the plant to ward off the fungus. And, there’s a real fancy term called hormesis that it’s, and see, the non-organic plants get the aid of the farmer. The farmer wants to have a really good crop. It’s a monoculture crop. And so, he wants to protect his plants from fungi or other predators on the plants. And so he sprays them, but that does not allow the plant to evoke its own immune system, as you say. And so the chemicals that we’re going to be talking about here, which are called Salvestrols, they tend to be absent in the non-organic plants now, or their amounts are much smaller than what you get in organic fruits and vegetables.
Leah Chischilly: So tell me a little bit about Salvestrols. What are they exactly?
Dr. Ron: They were discovered at the turn of the century. It came about because scientists were looking for something that was unique to cancer cells. And it turned out that they found an enzyme called the CYP 1B1 enzyme that was present in all cancer cells and they thought, Hmm, this’ll be a good way to maybe help doctors to detect cancer. Then they started asking, what does this enzyme do? And it turns out that, that enzyme, you know, all enzymes can take one molecule and transform it into another molecule. So the CYP 1B1 can convert a Salvestrol, there’s about 20 different types of Salvestrols that you find, especially in fruits and vegetables and some herbs as well. It will convert the Salvestrol molecule into a cancer-killing molecule, an apoptosis molecule, which sounds like unreal.
But why did our ancestors seem to fare better than we are? You know, there’s so many people getting cancer in our modern age. And of course there are a lot of modern stressors and chemicals and whatnot, but what was it about our ancestors that protected them from cancer? And part of it was, is that all food was organic until the last, maybe 60, 50, 60, 70 years, all food was organic. And so it was inherently there to help the body control cancer. But in the modern times, where want to have these large farms, these what’s called monoculture farms. They don’t have the diversity there. And so consequently, the farmers have to use an abundance of, uh, insecticides and pesticides in order to protect their crop
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Dr. Ron: So not only with non-organic foods, not only are we having the harmful effects of the pesticides themselves, but the plants themselves are not as rich in the beneficial nutrients. That’s right
Salve is Latin for to save. And so they call this cluster of phytonutrients this salvestrols because they can literally save you from cancer. The good news is, I mean, even if you eat a perfect organic diet, you will only ingest about what they have determined to be about 300 points. But for the average person who’s healthy, that’s probably enough. But if someone has cancer or has a strong family history of cancer, they’re finding that maybe you need as many as a thousand, 2000 or more of the Salvestrol points. And so, uh, they have basically learned how to extract the salvage straws from organic fruits and vegetables and herbs, and to put them into capsules. So I’m not necessarily saying everyone should run out and buy Sylvester, all capsules, but for people who have been diagnosed with cancer and are looking for options, of course, we do a lot with intravenous vitamin C, but even Dr. Riordan said that IV vitamin C alone is not enough. Here’s another very simple way to augment your organic foods diet is to find extracts of organic fruits that will increase the ability of your cancer cells. It’s not the, actually the it’s kind of, it’s not, it’s it’s what’s happening is that the cancer cells are contributing to their own demise because they contain the, the one enzyme is not contained in healthy cells. It’s only in cancer cells. It is a tumor marker, but it’s also an opportunity for us to utilize our knowledge of whole foods, organic foods, and to extract out the, the, the part of that, that is converse converted into the, uh, metabolite that kills the cancer.
Leah Chischilly: That’s so interesting. Now what about with juicing? Would that be a way to get more of them in a higher concentration?
Dr. Ron: Yep. And I, I encourage juicing. I usually tell people I would prefer them to do what I call whole juice, juicing. Some of the juicers extract out the pulp and you have a very concentrated, really good tasting juice, but you’re missing a lot of the fiber that’s necessary. And the reason that’s a problem is that cancer loves sugar. And so if you just have a really just no pulp juice, it can cause a pretty high spike in your blood sugar. Even though it’s got a lot of phytonutrients in it, we still don’t want to give any help to the cancer cells. We want to support our good bacteria in our gut. That’s another important part of our immune defense against cancer. And so we need those indigestible fibers, because that’s what the good bacteria live on
Leah Chischilly: Are there certain fruits and vegetables that are better sources of Salvestrols?
Dr. Ron: So it, it turns out that green vegetables like artichoke, asparagus, cabbage, avocado, celery. You know, there’s a big thing on celery juicing these days, cucumbers, these are all really good sources of Salvestrols. The berries are very good, grapes, blueberries, um, olives, you don’t think of all it as a berry, but it’s a very good source. It’s kind of the bitter part of the food, the fruit that kind of contains the Salvestrols. And that’s why some people don’t get enough. They shy away from bitter tasting foods, but bitter is better for you. So these are just some examples, but just in general, if you’re eating more organic plant-based foods, you’re going to be getting more Salvestrols.
Leah Chischilly: Yeah, that’s great. So if our listeners, if you needed another reason to go organic, I think this is a really good one. Anything else you can tell us about Salvestrols that you think might be interesting for the listeners to know?
Dr. Ron: If you do go on to a Salvestrol diet, there are certain things that inhibit it such as cannabis or certain. Uh, you know, some people, uh, really will go big into things like, ginseng and resveratrol. So not every phytonutrient is beneficial to every other phytonutrient. And so I encourage people who either have cancer or who have a strong family history of cancer to go online and, and type in the word, Salvestrol. S A L V E S T R O L. And then you can add an S because there’s over 20 different Salvestrols and just read about how effective this has been for a number of people. There’s actually a whole book on Amazon on case studies on Salvestrols and people who have used them very effectively to get over their advanced cancers.
Leah Chischilly: Wow. That’s such great information, Dr. Ron, thank you so much for sharing that with us today. I hope this has been beneficial for all of our listeners, and we will talk to you next time.
Dr. Ron: Thank you, Leah.
Outro
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Thank you for the info.