In this episode of the Real Health Podcast, Riordan Clinic’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ron Hunninghake, MD, is joined by Fred Evrard. They discuss how Fred used extended fasting, a strict ketogenic diet, and other techniques to heal himself from advanced colon cancer.
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Links
Riordan Clinic: https://riordanclinic.org/
Fred Evrard:
Instagram: @fredevrard.academy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Fredevrard.academy1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FredEvrardAcademy
Transcript
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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.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, welcome everyone. We’re back here again at the Real Health Podcast. I’m Dr. Ron Hunninghake here at the Riordan Clinic. Today, we have the distinct pleasure of interviewing Mr. Fred Evrard. Did I pronounce it right, Fred?
Fred Evrard: Perfect, that French accent.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Okay. Fred has done what many of our patients want to do. We’re seeing more and more cancer patients these days. Fred was diagnosed with cancer here, a while back. He did use some conventional therapy, but he made a very strong push on natural therapies, and he wrote a book about his experience. The book is called “How My Immune System Beat Cancer.” Fred, thank you so very much for coming on our show.
Fred Evrard: Hi, Dr. Ron. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. I know our audience, they’re going to be very curious not only about what you did, but also the fact that you did do an integrated approach. Evidently, you had a type of… Why don’t you tell us. What type of cancer did you have? And how did you find out about this? And what were some of the initial things that you did?
Fred Evrard: Well, we have a colon cancer history in my family, on my father’s side of the family, and pretty much all men on that side died of colon cancer.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Wow.
Fred Evrard: So I knew there was a history. There was a trend here. But I’m a martial artist. It’s my profession. I’ve been practicing martial arts for 45 years. Had a quite a healthy lifestyle, probably not perfect, but I’ve been eating organic food for the past, I don’t know, 30, 35 years, always tried to eat as healthy as possible. I never drank alcohol in my life, never smoked, never had soda, never had coffee. I had a pretty much healthy martial artist lifestyle we could say. Maybe that was a little too naive, but I thought that my lifestyle would protect me from the family disease.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: This is something that we get all the time is my patients will say, “Doctor, I was healthy, and I got cancer. It’s just not fair,” but usually there’s something else that’s going on that sets you up for it. But go ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but you’re telling the story that I hear a lot.
Fred Evrard: Yeah, I’m sure. That’s where I try to make the difference. I always say I was trying to be as healthy as possible with the knowledge that I had at the time, which now, with everything that I’ve learned, was not perfect, of course. Who can be? And there was also a lot of other factors. We both know that cancer is multifactorial.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Right.
Fred Evrard: I also thought in my healing process that healing would, by necessity, be multifactorial.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Good point.
Fred Evrard: So yes, I had a trend. I had a genetic disposition to colon cancer. It started with some blood in my stool. I first thought it was an hemorrhoid or something like that. I went back in France. I live in South Carolina. I went back to France to be tested, and that’s where they told me it’s a stage 3, borderline stage 4 colon cancer.
Fred Evrard: It’s because of the size of the tumor. The tumor was 10 centimeters, very close to the anus and the sphincter muscle. So because of all those, plus my family history, they told me it’s urgent.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: I mean, you’re in danger. We have to start chemo and radiation and surgery right away.
Fred Evrard: The protocol that they gave me was one to two round of chemo, so 12 to 24 sessions, then radiation, and only then a surgery that was very risky. Of course, that didn’t make me feel very safe and very good, so that that’s where I start thinking and start searching and try to look for something else.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. You were basically pushed against the wall. You really didn’t have much choice, and so you did go into a conventional cancer treatment program. Isn’t that right?
Fred Evrard: Not right away. What happened is, quick, going back to the origin of the story, I thought I was as healthy as possible, but I didn’t take into consideration stress, fatigue. I have an international business of martial arts schools around the world, and I was on the plane six months out of the year. I was in South Carolina, then I was in Paris, then I was in Singapore, then I was in Japan, then I was in Europe, then back to the US. I mean, I was traveling all the time, and I think my organism was just exhausted. That was also a big part of it. Not the only part, but I think that was part of it.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, the pandemic was going on during that time as well, or at least the early stages of it.
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. I was diagnosed in September 2020. Of course, the pandemic really hurt my international business. All my martial arts studios closed around the world, so I had very, if not zero finance. It was very stressful. Plus I was at the end of a very long and very stressful green card process to move from Singapore to the US. All that really was probably a lot for my body. And as much as the trend, the genetic was there, I think the stress and the fatigue was the trigger.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: So we could kind of think of this as a scale. And even though you were doing many good things for your body stress, you were eating well, you’re in top physical condition, it’s almost as though the stress load tipped the scale farther than what your body could accommodate.
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. That’s exactly the way I see it. Yes.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Okay. What happened then?
Fred Evrard: I’m in France, and they tell me the diagnosis. And then they offer me this treatment, and they tell me, “You have to start right away.” And my answer was, “No. I mean, my wife is in the US. My life is in the US. I’m going back home.” And the oncologist look at me like if I was crazy and said, “No, you got to start. We’re going to put you a plug, and you’re starting tomorrow.” I say, “No, it’s not possible. Give me a few weeks, and I’m going back home.”
Fred Evrard: So I went back to the US. Of course, I had to redo all the tests again, the PET scan, the MRI, the blood test, the colonoscopy, and the diagnosis in the US is exactly the same. The prognosis is exactly the same, and the protocol is exactly the same. And then I look at my US oncologist, and I tell him, “No. I mean, I’m not satisfied with the odds, so that’s not what I’m going to do. I’m going to start with a 21-day fast.”
Fred Evrard: I’ve been into fasting for quite a while. I do intermittent fasting, and I did few prolonged fasting in my life. And I’ve read the research of Professor Valter Longo, in California-
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: … on fasting and the benefits of fasting for cancer patient, whether they do or do not use chemo. I wanted to try that first, and that’s what I did.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Fred, could…
Fred Evrard: I started a 21-day water fast.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Can I just make a good point for our listeners? Is the other thing is that when people get diagnosed with cancer, especially in advanced cancer like you had, they’re like the deer in the headlights. It’s such a huge, huge shock to people’s immune systems and to their nervous system, and it puts them in a really bad hyper-sympathetic fight or flight mode, which is not a very good mode to heal in, A because it causes a lot of inflammation.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: B, I think people have not come to grips with the fact that they’ve been diagnosed with a life threatening disease. Consequently, they go into the therapy in a kind of fog. They’re not present to what the therapy’s doing and what else they may need to do to compensate for the negative effects of the therapy. These therapies are very toxic.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: So I think this is a very important point of what you’re making. You did this fast as a way for you to step back and take a look at what the situation was and look at what resources you had in terms of meeting the challenge of this disease. That sounds like that was that fast. And plus all the benefits of the fasting, there’s tremendous amounts of… There’s something called apoptosis. When you fast, your body will clean out the toxins. The dead cells or the cells that are dying, it’ll take those out. So I think this was a very good step that you made.
Fred Evrard: Yeah. And like you said, the first… It depends the person. The first few days for me, some people is the first few weeks or month, but you freeze. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t fast at the beginning because I wanted to, but I couldn’t eat. I was so upset on that.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: I really felt that… There was nobody at home. There was nobody there. And when I was facing the oncologist, I felt like a puppet. Not that he was trying to manipulate me or anything, it’s not what I’m saying, but that’s how I was feeling, that if the guy tell me, “Turn left,” I would turn left. If the guy tell me, “Turn right,” I would turn right. If he tells me to jump, I would jump. I mean you’re in a fog. Your brain is frozen, basically.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: You feel helpless. You feel helpless.
Fred Evrard: Yeah.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah, that’s not a good state.
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. For me, that lasted three day. For three days, I was miserable. I couldn’t do anything. And after three days, I slapped myself in the face and kicked myself in the butt. And I told myself, “Look,” this exactly what you said, “this fight or flight situation, that’s what you have been training your entire life, doing martial arts for 45 years.”
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: I’m 50 now. I started when I was five because I was born in a martial arts family. I should have been ready for that. That’s what I told myself. And after three days, I woke up. I get out of this fog and told myself three things. Number one, this cancer is not going to kill me. I never used the word my cancer. It was always this cancer.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: Number two, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And number three, may food be thy medicine. And I lived by that for, well, ever since, basically.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. No, I agree. I tell patients… A lot of them talk about my cancer, and I say, “No, this is an illness, and certainly, but you’re making the cancer bigger than you are. That’s going to perpetuate your sense of helplessness. You’ve got to get bigger than the cancer and start making decisions that’s going to help you find a way to overcome the illness.” It sounds like this is how you had to psych yourself down and get calm and get grounded in order to develop a plan that would fit how you feel about the whole situation.
Fred Evrard: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s exactly the way I felt. And during the fast, of course, 21 day on water, and I had one little shot of wheat grass juice once a week, so it was basically almost 100% water.
Fred Evrard: During that time, I was, of course, exhausted. I started losing weight. I didn’t lose that much weight during the fast, but still a little bit. And I start reading. I start reading all the scientific literature that I could find. I was on the NCBI, and I was on Nature, and I was on PubMed, I mean night and day-
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: … reading all the scientific literature on fasting and what diet could be best for helping me. And I jumped, right after my fast, on a strict, very strict ketogenic diet, but that was the beginning of my research and my mental process.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. Here, at the Riordan Clinic, we’ve all taken the metabolic approach to cancer under Nasha Winters. And she is, again, a big advocate of ketogenic because, basically, you start to starve the cancer. Instead of you being the victim, now you’re turning the table on the cancer, and you’re beginning to starve it because cancers thrive on sugar. So going on this, the fast and then going on the ketogenic diet, you are depriving the cancer cells of sugar.
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. And Dr. Nasha’s research are some of the top research that I came through and that I used to cure myself, along with Professor Thomas Seyfried’s research. And I really approached cancer as a metabolic disease, something that was in my hand and not something that happens just by accident or bad luck. And that was really my state of mind when I was trying to cure and to heal myself.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Fabulous. What was the next step then?
Fred Evrard: I started the fast early October, and I fasted for 21 days. After that, I jumped into a very strict 100% organic ketogenic diet. Of course, I research all the potentially anti-cancer food that I could include in my diet, and that’s all I ate.
Fred Evrard: That sounds weird for some people. But I basically eat nothing but red meat, organic, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished red meat, tons of vegetable juice. I was juicing because the fibers were hurting me because of my colon inflammation.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: And a lot of good fats, olive oil, avocado, coconut oil, grass-fed, grass-finish ghee, stuff like that. That’s all I ate. I had zero cheat days, zero falling out of the wagon for four month.
Fred Evrard: In addition to that, I was talking about multifactorial and multifactorial healing. In addition to that, I did a lot of cryotherapy. I was going into freezing cold water at least three, four times a week. I did some rebounding on a mini trampoline to boost my… Ah, I’m losing the word in English.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: The-
Fred Evrard: That the immune system, the elimination of toxin.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: The lymphatic system.
Fred Evrard: The lymphatic, thank you, lymphatic system. My goal, and that’s why I have the title of the book, How My Immune System Beat Cancer, my goal was to reinforce my immune system and my lymphatic system from every possible angle, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I was doing deep breathing, positive thinking, meditation, Tai chi, everything that I could to really beat that cancer and reduce that tumor.
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Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, and keep in mind for the listening audience, our immune system is what protects us from cancer. Normally, all the people who don’t have cancer, why don’t they have it? Well, it’s because we have an immune surveillance system. But all the various things that Fred is talking about, like environmental toxins, stress, poor diet, lack of sleep… There’s a long list of metabolic factors that weaken the immune system, so basically, what you were doing was doing everything you could to strengthen your immune response.
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. Absolutely. So back to October, at the end of my 21-day fast, the tumor shrunk about 50%. It went from 10 centimeters to 5.5.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: This is before any chemotherapy.
Fred Evrard: I didn’t do anything.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Amazing.
Fred Evrard: Didn’t even take a painkiller-
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: … nothing.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yep.
Fred Evrard: So 50% reduction in the tumor after a 21-day fast. I was very excited with the results, and it was pushing me even more, helping me to really believe in what I was doing even more. Because when I tell the story here, it sounds very positive and very warrior-like, and I’m going up all the time, but that’s not the case.
Fred Evrard: I mean, my state of mind and my emotions were a rollercoaster. I mean, one day I was, “Okay, I’m going to do this naturally,” and the next day, “No, I’m going to do chemo. If not, I’m going to die,” and the next day, “No, I don’t want to do chemo,” and the day after, “Yeah, I’m going to do chemo.” It’s really, it’s crazy what’s going on in your head when you have a life threatening disease, and that was the case for me. But really, I was going up, but like this.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. I think a lot of our patients who are dealing with cancer would definitely identify with that state of mind. It’s a very, very turbulent time in a person’s life. So anyway, I think I remember from your book that even though the tumor did shrink, you were still having quite a bit of pain and issues.
Fred Evrard: Yeah. Yeah. The tumor, they discovered that, after doing an MRI, the tumor was on a nerve, so the pain was excruciating. It was horrible. Even when the tumor was shrinking, the pain didn’t go away, and I didn’t know what to do.
Fred Evrard: So now we’re in November, and I’m better, but in my head because of the result that I saw after the fat, but my body’s telling me something else. The cancer is eating me from inside. I went from 70 kilos to 49 kilos, so now I’m nothing but bones and skin. There’s no more muscle. There’s no energy. There’s nothing, nothing left.
Fred Evrard: And the pain, I was in tear night and day. At some point when people ask me how much pain I was in, I tell them, if zero you don’t have any pain and 10 you kill yourself because you can’t take it anymore. I was at 9.9, 24/7.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Wow.
Fred Evrard: It was absolutely horrible. Even when I talk about it today, I’m still emotional because it’s like engraved in my body. But so I went back to see my oncologist. He was nice enough to follow me, even though I was not doing anything he was telling me to do, but he kept doing blood work every two months, MRI every three to four months. He was a nice guy. He really followed me and helped me through that.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Which highlights the idea that, with the integrative oncology, we encourage our patients to develop a strong relationship with our oncologist and help them understand that we’re not trying to sidestep them. We’re trying to promote the innate healing processes of the body. But in your situation, and in so many cancer patients’ situation, we need the oncologist, so this is the importance of the integrative approach.
Fred Evrard: Yeah, absolutely. So I went back to him and I let him know about my pain, and he told me, “Look, I know what you’re doing. I know what you’re trying to do, but I can only encourage you to do chemo. I know what you want, but I can almost guarantee you that after five, six sessions of chemo, we will have a good control of the pain.” So I accepted the deal of six session of chemotherapy.
Fred Evrard: Of course, being a followers of Dr. Longo’s research, I fasted before the first chemo. I fasted the day before, the day during. Then there were three days at home with the portable chemo, one day at… No, one day at the hospital, and two days at home, three days altogether. So I fasted the day before the three days of chemo and the day after, so five days of fasting, wrapping around the chemotherapy session.
Fred Evrard: First session was great. I mean, I didn’t have any side effect. I was not tired, or at least not more than before. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t throw up. I was not constipated. All of the symptoms they told me I would have, I didn’t lose one single hair, I didn’t have them.
Fred Evrard: Then comes the next session, my second session, a few weeks later. And I thought to myself… Quick, I like to experiment on myself and know what’s going on inside the human body. So I told myself, is it the fast, or is it that kind of chemo, or is it my immune system that is maybe stronger than most people because of the martial arts? Let’s try not too fast and see what happen.
Fred Evrard: So I didn’t fast before, during, and after the second session of chemo. Dr. Ron, I was sick like a dog.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Oh, man.
Fred Evrard: I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t go to the bathroom. I was on the floor in pain. I was throwing up every two minutes. It was horrible. Then finally, I get a little better. The third session come, and I’m going to fast.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Now you’re going to fast again. Yes.
Fred Evrard: And I promise you, I did that. So I fasted, and again, zero side effect.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Wow.
Fred Evrard: Nothing.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Now there, that’s a controlled experiment.
Fred Evrard: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: A N of one, you’re the only participant in that case, but there’s a lot of other research that verifies your experience.
Fred Evrard: Yeah, that was my experience, and it was night and day between fasting or not fasting during chemo. And at the end of the third session, I didn’t have any pain anymore. I still felt a little inflammation, but it was not horrible like it was, and I felt that I could live my life again finally.
Fred Evrard: So I went back to my doctor and I cancel the session number four, five, and six. At first, they didn’t want take the plug out of my body because it had… They told me, “You’ll be back next week. I promise you.” And I didn’t because the pain didn’t come back. And they finally took the plug off, and that was it. That was my three sessions of chemo, and I felt much better.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: But during this time, you were using all the other modalities of in integrative type care that would help you. And you might just talk a little bit for our audience, in a little bit more depth, about… You did the fasting, but you were also doing other things. What were those?
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. I was doing fasting. After my 21-day fast, I was doing long 24 hours, 36-hour fasting every week. I didn’t eat at all on from Saturday night until Monday noon, okay, so basically didn’t eat at all for the whole Sunday. Then I was on intermittent fasting in one meal a day every single day.
Fred Evrard: I broke my fast. At the beginning, I couldn’t do any sports, any activity, anything physical, but as I get better, end of November, December, I started training and working out and doing my martial lots again. So I was breaking my fast after my training, basically having a early dinner. Strict ketogenic diet, zero sugar, zero carbs, not even fruit, nothing that has carbs in it, except the very little that you find in vegetable juice.
Fred Evrard: Of course, cold exposure was a very big thing on me, of mine, so now we are in December. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina, so now it’s 27, 26 degrees outside. And every morning I get out in my underwear and I walk my dog in the snow, no shoes, no clothes, nothing. That’s my first cold exposure of the day. And then a few hours later, I drive to the waterfall and go with my dog into the waterfalls to boost my immune system, to reduce inflammation and all the good stuff that we know that happens when you do cryotherapy.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: And most people don’t understand that therapy, but it’s a type of what we call hormesis, where you’re purposefully stressing your body in a controlled way, that when the stress wears off, you’re stronger because of it. Now, so that has to be done in an appropriate way, which it sounds like you’re an expert at, and you made full use of it.
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. An expert, I don’t know, but I used it tremendously, and I was really counting on hormesis. Whatever doesn’t kill us, makes us strongest.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Stronger.
Fred Evrard: That’s exactly what it is. In addition to that, I also had some food supplement from Dr. Maurice Israel in France, which he calls the metabolic cancer healing process. And that consists of high doses of vitamin C, high doses of vitamin D3 and K2. What else? Garcinia cambogia and high doses of melatonin. I use melatonin a lot.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yes.
Fred Evrard: Every night. And that’s about it.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Great. Yeah. There’s a number of strategies along that line. Dr. Linus Pauling, in his famous research in Scotland, he did IV vitamin C for 10 days, but he followed it with 12 grams of vitamin C daily on all of his patients. These were stage 3 and stage 4 cancer patients, and they increased their longevity by five to ninefold in his patients. And that has to be worked out between you and someone who’s an expert in using nutritional supplements.
Fred Evrard: Yes, absolutely. So a friend of mine back in France is a doctor, and he was the one who was giving me the supplements and the dosage and everything that I use.
Fred Evrard: And in addition to that, more little things, I could say the things that I was using before in my martial arts life, so to speak, briefing, debriefing, going out in the sun every single day, playing with my dog, having fun, watching comedies, nothing that stressed me. Another friend of mine is another doctor in France. He’s a psychotherapist. So I was also working on the psychology aspect of cancer. Like I said, everything I could do, everything that I read that could help heal cancer or control cancer, I tried it.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: And your wife…
Fred Evrard: And the result, it… Yeah, go ahead.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Your wife, Lila, what wrote the second forward of your book, having that kind of intimate support is crucial, as well.
Fred Evrard: Yeah. Yeah. I talk about it in my book. I said that I am completely aware that I was in the perfect environment to do that. But if I didn’t have the finance, if I didn’t have the support from my family and friends and doctors, if I was in a very noisy, very polluted environment, maybe things would have been different. I don’t know. I cannot say. But I was in a peaceful, positive, supportive environment. That really, really, really helped.
Fred Evrard: At no point in time, a member of my family, or my wife, or my parents told me, “You’re crazy. You got to do your chemo. You got to do your radiation. It’s not going to work. You’re going to die.” They never did that. I was always supported in my decision.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, it’s necessary for people who have an advanced cancer, like you did, to really pull out all the stops. Because people ask me, “Well, what am I going to do?” Well, it’s not a quick fix. It’s not an easy fix. But basically you’re going to have to reinvent your life and change all the various aspects of your life that we’re promoting the cancer, and then shift everything in a direction that promotes your health, your wellbeing, everything that helps you strengthen your immune system because I think the title of your book says it all, How My Immune System Beat Cancer.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, the immune system didn’t do it alone. You had to take control of your life and make some very profound decisions in favor of staying alive and beating the cancer. And by golly, you’re a good example of how it can be done if people really put their mind and heart to it.
Fred Evrard: Oh, yeah. Yeah, but like you said, you have to go in it 100%. It was hard, in a way. Not so hard because when you know you’re going to die, I mean, what choice do you have? Some people ask me, “How did you fast for 21 days?” Yeah, well, I didn’t want to die. That’s how. If I had to fast 21 day today would be much harder.
Fred Evrard: But all that for an amazing result because now we are at the end of December, and it’s going to be the holidays, so we’re between Christmas and New Year. And my mom, who’s a pastry chef in France, comes and visit us in South Carolina. And for a week, between Christmas and New Year, I completely fall off the wagon. I had cakes and pies and everything that she did for me, and I asked for it.
Fred Evrard: I was feeling so good. The pain was gone. My weight was coming back. I could exercise again. So I was feeling really good, and I just did it not for one day, but for seven days. And at the end of that, I look at my calendar. I feel good, I look at my calendar and I realize that in a month from now is my next MRI. And I start freaking out and, “Oh, my god. I’m sure I reversed everything and the tumor is back, or at least grew back.” I was really scared that what I did during that week was going to have an impact on my health.
Fred Evrard: So I did another… I tried to do another 21-day fast, and I failed. But let me explain you why and how. I fasted from Monday to Friday, and then I ate on the weekends. And I did that for another week and another week. So out of 21 days, I fasted for 15 days.
Fred Evrard: And then was my next MRI, And I didn’t know it was going to be my last as a cancer patient. So I go for my MRI, and I wait three or four days to see the oncologist. And a friend of mine is a nurse at this cancer hospital where I go. She took a peek at my file and called me and said, “Look, I don’t know what it means. You have to see your oncologist. I just let you know that they don’t mention the tumor in the MRI report. I don’t know why. Did they forget? I don’t know. But that’s what I see.”
Fred Evrard: I start to get my hopes high. And I’m like, “Really? What does it mean? Does it mean that I’m cured?” And then a few days later I go see my oncologist, and he’s got a big smile on his face. He looks at me and tells me, “Mr. Evrard, you are disease-free.”
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Wow. Fred…
Fred Evrard: Four months exactly after I was diagnosed. I was diagnosed in September, September 20, and on… no, sorry, September 10, and January 9, the doctor tell me I’m cancer-free.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: How long have you been cancer free now, then?
Fred Evrard: Two years.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Three years. Okay.
Fred Evrard: Two, two.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Two years. What level of severity, I guess you’re going to say, or how tight are you following your schedule these days to stay cancer free?
Fred Evrard: Almost the same. The difference is once a week, I allow myself some low-glycemic index fruits, like blueberries for example. So once a week, I would have blueberries and khefir that I’ve made out of raw milk. That’s my dessert of the week. That’s my sweet thing of the week.
Fred Evrard: Once in a while, I have a little bit of carbs. My wife is Chinese, and she’s an amazing cook, so once in a while I’ll have a rice with her Chinese cooking, but that’s about it. Most of the time, 90% of the time I stay on a very strict clean ketogenic diet, as low sugar, low carbs as I can.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Fred, thank you so very much for being on the Real Health Podcast. I hope everyone who has cancer, dealing with cancer, or knows someone who’s dealing with cancer pick up Fred’s book because it’s a blueprint. There’s not a whole lot of words in it. It’s very, very simple in its explanation of what he did to move from a pretty dangerous cancer state to a remission state right now.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Which, as you just heard, he’s working very hard to maintain his remission, as well, but it’s not like total misery. It sounds like you’re back living again and enjoying life. And you have a great prospect of staying well, at this point, now that your stress is down, and you’re using all these wonderful metabolic approaches.
Fred Evrard: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Thank you, Fred.
Fred Evrard: Thank you.
Outro: Thank you for listening to the Real Health Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. You can also find all of the episodes and show notes over at realhealthpodcast.org. Also, be sure to visit riordanclinic.org where you will find hundreds of videos and articles to help you create your own version of Real Health.
