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Introduction to Dr. Brandy and his Cancer Story with Matt Feret [1:09]

Matt Feret:

Hello everyone. This is Matt Feret, author of Prepare for Medicare and Prepare for Social Security Insider's, guidebooks, and online course training series. Welcome to another episode of The Matt Feret Show, where I interview insiders and experts to help light a path to successful living in midlife retirement and beyond. Dr. Brandy, welcome to the show.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Hey, it's great being here.

Matt Feret:

Tell everybody what you do, how long you've been doing it, and how you help people.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Well, I had a plastic-surgery-slash-anti-aging-center-slash-med-spa for 40 years. We were one of the highest ranked med spas in the country. We’re actually ranked number six in the country by Allergan. We had over a hundred employees, and back about three and a half years ago, we had a venture capital group come in and they offered us some money to sell it. So, there's some other people now with all those headaches. But my story, how I got into cancer lifestyle coaching, it really started in 2017 when I got diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is an incurable blood cancer. And the whole story actually started two months before that. My wife and I were on a Viking cruise, went across the Atlantic, and because I have an anti-aging center, I've always been interested in health and nutrition. I've read well over 300 books on topic, and I pulled up my Kindle the first day we were on vacation and a book popped up called How Not to Die by Michael Gregor. I don't know if you've ever read it before, but if anybody's ever seen the hardback, it's literally about two inches thick and about half of it, an inch of it, are scientific references. And being a medical doctor, that was the thing that really intrigued me about this book. I started reading it, and what the science was showing over and over again was that cultures and research cohort groups that ate more plant-based had much lower incidence of cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes- all cause mortality. So, two days into this cruise, I told my wife, I said, Trina, I'm going to start eating whole food. And she thought I was totally out of my mind. Yeah, cruise, you have all this meat and dairy and these desserts, but I made that decision on a cruise.

Matt Feret:

That's the worst time to pick.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

I know. So, from that day on, that was mid-September 2017, I've been eating whole food. So, I got home, and I remember the first week that I got back, it was the last week of September, I was in surgery and I felt a little pop in my right shoulder, and I didn't think a whole lot of it, but it just kept getting worse and worse. And then, I remember it was the end of October, my wife and I went on a little trip in Portland, and it was starting to keep me up at night and it was really concerning me. And I even mentioned to my wife, I said, Trina, I think I had bone cancer.

Matt Feret:

So, you got the pain in your shoulder, you felt it pop when you were working.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

It was in my clavicle, and it was there when I was just sleeping, which really concerned me and my wife kind of poo-pooed it off. She goes, oh, you're one of the healthiest people I know. So that kind of made me feel good, but it kept getting worse. And then one evening, it was November 10th, 2017, I remember the exact date, we are watching television. I accidentally knocked over a container of water. I lunged for it, and my clavicle just cracked right in half, and it was painful as heck. And I can't even tell you how surprised I was in shock by the pain. But anyway, my wife went down and she got a shoulders sling, and I went into work the next day, and I always am a fanatic about how I keep my hair. I always combed, but I couldn't even comb my hair because I couldn't raise my right hand. So I walk into my surgery department the next day and I'm supposed to see reviews, and my staff is shocked. I'm coming in, I'm all disheveled, I'm in a sling. And they said, man, you need to get an x-ray. So, I got an x-ray at the urgent care center, and it was completely displaced. I went to a friend of mine who is an orthopedic surgeon. He ordered an MRI; Friday night he calls me. So that happened on a Sunday, Friday night, he gives me a call and he says, hey Nick, that's my nickname. He said, you know what? You have a tumor in there. He said, it's either multiple myeloma or you have a metastasis from some kind of cancer. And it was devastating. I mean, my brother came over, my family, I mean, they're all crying. I'm devastated. I mean, all of a sudden, your life is totally rocked. And then thankfully, a really good friend of mine who's a plastic surgeon, he came in and he took over my cases from that point forward, and he still is working there at the skin center. But what happened at that point was that obviously I had to see an oncologist and they did all these tests, CAT scans and blood tests, biopsies, and they came up with this diagnosis of multiple myeloma. And it's a type-IGA, and if you go on the internet, you'll see that there's three basic types of multiple myeloma. There's IGA, I, GM, and IGG. IGA is the most aggressive, and that's the kind that I had. So, my oncologist wanted to put me on a triple regimen of three different medications. Two were oral, and then one, I would have to go in every week and get a shot into my abdomen. It's called Velcade proteasome inhibitor. And the more I read about it, it was almost everybody that got this injection got a severe peripheral neuropathy to the point where it could affect my hand coordination.

Matt Feret:

Oh, that's kind of important for a surgeon.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Yeah, surgeon, something I was concerned with. The other thing, remember I had already been eating whole food for two months at this point, and I was a hundred percent sure that that was going to help me. So, I told the doctor, I said, listen, I'll do the two oral medications. I'm not doing the Velcade. And he was super upset with me. I mean, he just did not think I was going to be able to get into a complete remission just on these two oral medications. So, at that point, I went into a deep dive into the scientific literature. I was studying like three to four hours every day. I just wanted to find out every lifestyle change I could do, every supplement I could possibly take. And I was really gaining a lot of knowledge. And as I was doing that, I was getting monthly blood work and my numbers just kept coming down and down and down. And then by six months I was in a complete remission. And to say the least, my oncologist was shocked because he didn't even think I was going to get into it. And then he in a complete remission in six months, I mean, he was flabbergasted, and he was very happy that I got to that point. But I continued to study. And then a year after I was diagnosed, I decided I was going to give a lecture at one of the hotels in Pittsburgh because I really wanted to share all this knowledge. So, I rented a hotel room. Fortunately, a woman that I know, she did a lot of interviews with me from one of the local TV stations. She called me and said it was right around new. And she said, hey, could you do a story about your whole situation? And I said, hey, it's kind of worked out pretty well because I have this lecture coming up. You can maybe promote it at the same time. So, we talked a lot about diet and all the things that I was doing, and I had 125 people show up for this lecture. I was figuring maybe 50 would show up, and we were bringing chairs from the restaurant and everywhere we could find them. And so, I gave this lecture. I thought it was going to go an hour. It ended up going two hours because a lot of the people that were in the audience were cancer patients and they were just interrupting me and asking me questions because they were interested in what I was talking about. And then at the end of the lecture, I had a standing ovation, and I've never had a standing ovation for anything in my life.

Matt Feret:

Fifth grade Star Spangled Banner? Nothing?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

I think they felt sorry for me what it was, but it was either they felt sorry for me or I personally think it was because the people in the audience thought that they were at the mercy of the chemo drugs, the surgery, the radiation, and there wasn't anything they could do to enhance their chances of having a long life and a high quality of life. In fact, after the lecture, I had quite a few people come up to me ask me questions, and I remember this one lady very clearly. She has what I have, multiple myeloma. She was definitely overweight, I would say she's obese. And she told me that she asked her oncologist if she should change her diet. And he said, oh, no, just keep eating what you're eating. You'll be fine. She looked me in the eye, and she said, doctor, she goes, I just knew that wasn't, couldn't be right, that I should just keep doing what I'm doing. And I had other people, it was the same kind of a theme that was occurring over and over again that most oncologists, including mine, I mean they know very, very little about health and nutrition. In fact, in medical school, I don't know if you know this, but at most, I remember I went to Hanaman at Drexel now back in the seventies, but we literally had about two weeks of health class, and it was like a junior high school health class.

Matt Feret:

Food pyramids and vitamin C and all that.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Scurvy. It's like, who in the hell gets scurvy nowadays? So, I mean, it was really, honestly, most medical doctors really are very deficient in nutritional education. So, I think because they don't know anything about it, they just kind of stay away from it because they don't even know what the heck to even recommend a patient. But from that point, I had such an interest in what I was doing. I started to have monthly meetings at one of my med spas, and I used to cram a hundred people into this. I used to invite speakers coming in, and it was really quite a neat thing that was happening. And then Covid hit, and then we had to kind of end all that. But as that was going on, people started asking me, hey, when are you going to write a book? You have all this knowledge. And that's when I decided to write a book. I started it. In fact, I hired a writing coach, and I had written a book before. It's going to be two years to write. And the idea of it, it was just something that I just didn't want to go through another two years of doing that. But this writing coach told me that if you wake up every morning and you write for one hour, you can write a short book in one month. You can write a medium book in two months, and you can write a long book in three months.

Matt Feret:

Oh, wow.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

So, I started on Memorial Day, and it was Memorial Day of 2018. I woke up every morning and I wrote for an hour, and obviously I have to do research and so forth in between scientific articles and so forth. On Labor Day, I was done.

Matt Feret:

Oh wow.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

The first week of November, I had it on Amazon, and the second week of November I had a book launch. So, it just shows you that if you want to write a book, if you just put your head to it and you just wake up every morning and you're consistent, you can really get through a book pretty quickly as long as you have the knowledge in the back of your head.

Matt Feret:

On that point, I remember going on long walks and typing passages. When an idea hit me, I would type to myself over and over and over and then come back. And so, it's kind of not just sitting down necessarily in writing, but it was definitely punching out text and emails to myself and then going back. So, I get what you're saying, an hour a day.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

I would just throw stuff on the computer. It wasn't like it perfect. And then I would go back the next day, and I would just kind of clean it up and then go to the next part and so forth. But a lot of it, getting the stuff on the paper. And then at that point, I had developed a website and that thing's gotten really pretty prolific. I have a shopping cart and all kinds of things on, and I do a lot of virtual consultations for patients and 24/7 coaching. And most of these people have, they're either actively in cancer or they are in remission. I have people stage four, I have people stage three, two. Some people work in a stage three now they're in a remission, and I'm just trying to help them stay in a remission. So, I do a lot of that. I mean, that takes up a lot of my time is really doing a lot of this lifestyle coaching. And then I have some lab monitoring and so forth that I do on my website. I have one test that's really interesting. It's called a gallery test. This would be something that a lot of your audience would be interested in. It's mainly for people over 50. It's called a liquid biopsy, and it actually detects 50 cancers that your other routine testing can't pick up. For instance, we have breast cancer monitor, we have colon screening, things of that nature. You can do x-rays for lung, for cervix, you can do pap smears. So we have screening for six different cancers, but we really don't have screening for rectal cancer. Pancreatic, you can actually pick up a stage one pancreatic cancer with this gall test where in normal situations when somebody has pancreatic cancer, they almost always pick them up at a stage three or four.

Matt Feret:

I've read that.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

So, it really doesn't press on anything until it gets pretty advanced. That's why most people don't really have any symptoms until they're into a stage three or four. So that's one of the beauties of that test. That's something that I offer on my website.

Matt Feret:

When you were doing all this and you were, I mean, you're a doc, right? You've been in the community for a long time, and then you had a, I mean, you didn't even know what was going on, but you knew it wasn't good. And then you had the background of the knowledge at your fingertips, and you went on a, not only, that's kind of a discovery tour for yourself, but also sounds like because you're just interested in it, I mean not only to save your own life, but okay, so what else? Other than just getting nasty chemo multiple times and just sitting there grinning and bear it, what were the overall themes? You mentioned plant-based, how you started. What are some of the overall themes that you've found that are in your mind, true that everyone can take? I mean, are we talking things like you must take the ground up horn of a rhinoceros specifically from the Western Sahara, or is it know what avoid this and you should eat this many. What did you find in general that every human being that you've run across that science backed should do?

 ‘Blue Zone’ Diets and the Science Behind Cancer with Dr. Dominic Brandy [17:45]

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Well, one thing that I always refer to, because if you go on social media, there's always these battles, vegan versus carnivore. I mean, it really starts getting totally bizarre, but I always kind of go back to the blue zones.

Matt Feret:

I was going to ask you about those.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

If you look at the people that live the longest, and he's really dedicated about 20 years of his life to this, there's like Sardinia, Greece, Koya, and Costa Rica, Okinawa. And then I always like to use Loma Linda because it's in the United States, it's in California, and that's where a lot of the Seven Day Adventists live. But if you just look at Loma Linda, women live about 10 years longer than their American counterparts. And men actually live 14 years longer on average, but they primarily eat plant-based. And in the Adventist religion, you'll find some people that are totally plant-based, then you'll see some that are pescatarian. So that's where a lot of the good studies come because they have really excellent records of all of these people. And they can kind of compare vegans to vegetarians, the pescatarians, and then kind of see what the health outcomes are. And what they find consistently is that those that eat more plant-based have much lower incidences of cancer. Cardiovascular disease, dementia, really all cause mortality. So, some of the really good studies come out of that, the Adventist studies that are performed in Loma Linda. But I always ask people that are into all of these arguments and so forth, I said, are there any countries in the world that have long lived people that eat meat all day? I mean, it just doesn't happen. And the people in the blue zones, it's about 90-95% plant-based. On average, they eat meat about the size of a deck of cards. Usually, a piece of fish might be once or twice a week. It's kind of a condiment rather than in the United States, you put a big steak on there and you throw maybe some corn on the side or something. But for my cancer patients, I do strongly recommend a totally whole food, plant-based diet. I mean, when you're battling cancer, I really try to get them to at least eat plant-strong. But if they can go more whole food, and it's really not hard today if you go on the internet or Instagram, there are so many talented cooks that have these incredible recipes. In fact, my wife become an amazing vegan cook. And our diet, it's more delicious and more varied than ever. We just have a ball even with our meals every morning. My wife actually makes sourdough bread. That's like her hobby nowadays. But I do think whole food plant-based is important. And the reason that it is, is that plant foods have these chemicals called phytonutrients, and we know there's over a hundred thousand of them in plant foods. I heard a podcast by Jed Fahe, he's one of the premier experts on phytonutrients, and he actually feels there's over 5 million in edible plants. We've only studied about 150 of them. But when we study them, they consistently have very powerful anti-cancer activity, anti-inflammatory activity. And they have this amazing ability to affect your epigenetics. So, you have your genes, but the way that you eat can definitely affect the way that your genes are expressed. For example, Dean Ornish did a landmark study on prostate cancer. It was really interesting study. It was back in 2005. It was in the Journal of Urology. And he took 93 men, and he broke them into two different groups. One group ate a whole food plant-based diet. The other group was a standard American diet, and they looked at their PSA level, which is the biomarker for prostate cancer. So, after a year, the people that were eating whole food plant-based, their PSAs came down 4%. And the group that was eating the standard American diet actually went up 6%. And then they looked at the epigenetic expression, and Elizabeth Blackburn, who is a Nobel Prize winner, was part of that study. And they found that there were 48 good genes that were upregulated, and there were 453 bad genes that were downregulated. So that means the bad genes were made to act better and the good genes were actually made to act even better than they were before. So, it has this amazing ability, these phytonutrients to not only fight cancer and they fight cancer in many ways. I have them all documented in my book, Beat Back Cancer Naturally. I mean, they fragment DNA, they can affect cell signaling, they can disrupt the DNA synthesis of the cancer cell at various stages of cell division. They can help tumor suppressor genes. So, there's a lot of different ways that they actually fight cancer. And one of the things that I really promote in my book, and I actually have a supplement that I developed mainly for my convenience and for my patient's convenience, but there's 16 different freeze-dried powders that I put in my morning coffee every morning, and I have them all documented in my book. But freeze-dried powders, for example, if you get a blueberry freeze dried powder, you can get them on Amazon for a bag. If it's like 25 bucks or something, it'll last for three months. A bag of freeze-dried blueberry powder. If you eat one gram, it's like eating 50 grams of blueberries because most people don't realize fruit and vegetables, like 90% of it is water. So once you get all the water out of it, all the phytonutrients are super packed into there. And these powders are amazing. In fact, there's one video I just did on my Instagram on these freeze-dried powders. There was a study they did in China that was really pretty incredible. They took people that had early esophageal cancer and esophageal cancer, for your audience if they don't know this, that is the second most deadly cancer next to pancreatic cancer. And they put them on strawberry freeze-dried powder, a quarter cup every day for six months. And before they did it, they went down with endoscopy and they took photos of the cancer, and then they took photos of where the area was six months later. Well, 50% of them had complete elimination of the esophageal cancer.

Matt Feret:

Because of strawberries or were they doing other things?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Strawberries, yeah. And the quarter cup’s a lot. And they didn't change their diet or anything, it was just the freeze-dried power. And then 86 at least had the cancer get smaller. And on the video that I have on Instagram, I show the photographs. I mean, it is pretty mind blowing, but it just shows you the power of these phytonutrients. And the other thing that I have a good lecture on my website about the synergy of phytonutrients. So, for instance, there's one study where they had breast cancer cells and they applied onion extract to it, and they killed about 25% of the cancer cells. And then they did grape extract that killed about 50%. Then they did a half and half solution. So, you would figure it would kill maybe 33% because it's like half of each. No, it killed like 75%. So, there was this synergistic effect, and there's tons of studies that I go, there's ones on keratinoid with prostate cancer and so forth that when you combine  teas together or you eat different foods. And that's why I'm a big proponent of people eating at least 30 different plant foods per week. And that doesn't mean servings. That means you could have a salad with 20 different plant foods in it, and then you're up to like 20 there and you could have a soup with 10, you're up to 30 right there. That's probably the easiest way to get up to 30 plant foods per week. But when you eat a variety, it helps your microbiome. In fact, the American Gut Project that's directed by Dr. Robert Knight in Colorado, it's one of the largest studies on the gut microbiome. He's analyzed over 15,000 stool samples, and they found people that ate over 30 different plant foods in a week had by far the healthiest microbiomes compared to people that were eating 10 or less. So, the ones that were eating 10 or less had a lot of antibiotic resistant bacteria. They had a lot of pathogenic bacteria, and they had the less diverse and less healthy microbiome. And those got bacteria controlled 70% of your immune function. I mean, it is one of the most amazing, it's actually kind of where most of my study is right now. It is just a fascinating topic. The gut biome. 15 years ago, I used to go to anti-aging meetings. If somebody talked about gut bacteria, everybody would roll their eyes. They thought they were like nutcases. I mean, it's crazy how the science has just really proliferated on that.

Matt Feret:

So are you saying, and again, I haven't done anywhere near the research you did. Is it that the meat-based diet is actively harmful to you from a cancer standpoint? Or is it because you're not eating more plants and you're eating more meat that you're not getting the stuff from plants that you should and could to prevent it or change it? Which one is it?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Well, there's a couple things with meat. First off, if you're not getting grass fed meat, you're really getting into a really, really bad situation. But what people don't realize is that when you're eating meat products, there's long branched amino acids in there. So, plants have plant protein, but they don't have long branched amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, valine. They're long branched amino acids. When you ingest those, they send a signal to the liver to start manufacturing IGF one insulin growth factor one. And we know through many, many studies that when you have elevated IGF one as an adult, you have much higher incidence of cancer. So, my cancer patients, I check their IGF one. I try to keep it between one 20 and one 60, and studies show that when you go on a plant-based diet in two weeks, you can actually lower your IGF one by 20%. There's a group of Laron Dwarfs in Peru. They can't make IGF one, they have a mutation. There has never been a single case of ever getting cancer. So IGF one is something that definitely jacks up when you are an adult. And the reason you don't want high, high growth factors as an adult is that as you age every day you are getting more and more DNA mutations. For instance, KY wrote a really good article in Nature, which is one of the premier journals, and he said, by the time you are diagnosed with cancer, you have about 5,000 DNA mutations in that cancer cell, and by the time you relapse, you're up to about 12,000 and a lot of the mutations after you get cancer, it's all these drugs that people are taking. I mean, they're carcinogenic in themselves and they’re causing mutations. That's why when I have cancer patients, the reason I really try to get them on a whole food plant-based diet is plants have 63 times the antioxidant power compared to meat. Give you an example. If you eat one sweet potato and you put a little tablespoon of cinnamon and it'll pinch a clove on it, that's 263 ORAC units. So ORAC units are the way that we measure the way that food can neutralize what are called free radicals. So free radical molecules with an unaired impaired electron that really cause a lot of these DNA mutations. A typical standard of breakfast let's say an egg McMuffin, then for lunch like a Big Mac, and then for dinner, a steak, and I'll put some parsley on it for some extra antioxidants. The whole day you have 44 ORAC units, and that sweet potato had 263 ORAC units, just the one potato. And then I show, I have kind of a graphic that shows five different American breakfast and the highest one has 33 ORAC units. And then this one smoothie has 1,500 ORAC units. Just to show you. So especially when you're a cancer patient, but even if you're not, you don't want to get cancer, you want to have as many AAC units fighting free radical damage in your body because that's what creates the DNA mutations that eventually screw up your what are called your proto-oncogenes. They become oncogenes and then they kind of make these cancers get more aggressive spread metastasize, and that's really what ends up killing you. So that is why I really try. And the other thing that meat does is it jacks up your mTOR. mTOR is another growth factor. It's a protein kinase, and many, many studies show that when you jack up your mTOR, you increase your cancer activity.

Matt Feret:

It’s called the M-Tor? Like the letter M?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

It's little ‘m’, capital ‘O’, capital ‘R’. But they've actually done really interesting studies with rodents that had colon cancer. And a normal feeding for a rodent is about 21% protein. The colon cancer just keeps rolling along at 21%, they jack them down to 4%. All of a sudden, the cancer goes into remission, they jack them back up to 21%. The cancer starts going crazy, they take them down to 4%. Just

Matt Feret:

Just that protein alone.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Just the protein alone. Yeah. So, protein is, and most Americans are protein overload. I mean, they're eating way more protein than they need, and that's why these carnivore diets are really super, super dangerous. I mean, there was a study that was done by David Lawrence and his group in Nature, that really prodigious journal, and they did a study where it was a five day study crossover study where they put one group on a plant-based diet and they analyzed their microbiome, their gut bacteria before they started the diet, and then they put the other group on a carnivore diet. And even within 24 hours, the gut microbiome started to change dramatically on the plant-based diet. The good beneficial bacteria started to proliferate, and they create these short chain fatty acids that have these incredible anti-inflammatory effects. The people on the carnivore diet started to proliferate these pathogenic bacteria and it was very, very dramatic. At the end of five days, the gut microbiomes look completely different, and these pathogenic bacteria do not make short chain fatty acids. They secrete endotoxins, they secrete secondary bile acids that are very carcinogenic, and they have been correlated with, for instance, colitis, colon cancer and so forth. So, in fact, I was listening to a podcast the other day, it was another podcast I did. So, I was listening to some of the podcasts. There was a trainer, and he was carnivore and he was bragging like he said, I never fart, and he goes, my stools are really, really nice and skinny. And I'm thinking, man, your gut microbiome is totally keyed up because when you have a healthy gut microbiome, you are definitely passing gas a lot. You're moving your, I hate to be gross, but I move my bowels like four times a day. And when you're reading plant-based, your stools are huge. Most people don't realize that a stool is 60% bacteria. So, if you have this little skinny stool coming out, you really don't have any healthy bacteria in there that are creating a good healthy stool. But these gut bacteria are really, really quite amazing. And the other thing that they do is they, most people don't know this, but serotonin is your happy hormone or when you take antidepressant, it's a serotonin uptake inhibitor. 90% of your serotonin actually is secreted by your gut bacteria and 50% of your dopamine comes from your gut bacteria and then there's like 30 other neurotransmitters that are released by your gut bacteria, and they control 70% of your immune function by sending signals across the colon cells to your immune system. So, they tell your T cells, your B cells, where to go, how hard to fight, when to back off. If the inflammation's getting out of control, they tell the T regulatory cells, hey, you guys need to back off a little bit. So, when you have a healthy microbiome, you have a much healthier immune system. And the best way to do that is when you eat plant-based, you're going to be getting probably, I'd probably eat like 60, 70 grams of fiber every day. The average American's getting about 15 grams. I mean you need at least 30 grams of fiber to be healthy. Only 3% of the population's even hitting 15. Men, 30 to 50% even eat 15 grams of fiber per day. I mean, it's pathetic and that's why we have a lot of the sickness that we do.

Nutritional Fact vs. Fiction with Dr. Dominic Brandy [36:49]

Matt Feret:

I've read, and I'm sure a lot of people do and listen to podcasts about people and all sorts of diets. In fact, I had one person, I was like, don't use the word diet. Diet's a bad word, but eating in different ways. But there are a lot of people out there that will say, stop cancer or get cancer, and it's all it's food, it’s medicine. The food is medicine unit, but your actual doctor saying that you went through this experience and then what your diet was doing was helping you beat this thing. So how do consumers listen to someone like you with a medical background and filter out what's real and fact-based, like you've said is in your book, in the papers that you've written versus some of the other things on the internet that are people are trying to sell whatever, a white paper, a training course, is it necessarily the MD behind the name or is it just the fact-based research based stuff?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

There's an MD out there, carnivore MD, and he's big into carnivore. And here's what you can do. There are so many articles out there today. For instance, in 2001, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, they did an article comparing whole grains and cancer. What effect did it have? They went through the whole entire scientific literature. There were 45 articles at that point. 43 out of the 45 proved that it had a positive effect on cancer. In other words, it fought cancer. Now, two of them didn't show that. So, somebody like the Carnivore MD, he'll pick out those two articles and put them on his social media. Oh, look at whole grains have a negative effect on cancer. Where if you looked at each of the individual cancers, like six out of six showed it had a positive effect against breast cancer, 10 out of 10 against. I mean, there was no question that when you looked at this meta-analysis, that whole grains had a positive effect on cancer. So, the problem is there's so many articles out there and if you study any topic, if there's 30 articles out there, you're going to have maybe five that show one thing and then 25 you have to look at the preponderance of evidence. That's basically what I try to do. I look at the preponderance of what the science is showing, and I study this stuff like two hours every day. I'm in PubMed constantly, and if you look at my videos, I mean every one of them, I have a lot of articles in there, a lot of evidence based because you really need to show people the evidence of what you're talking about and why it's true. The other thing about this whole diet thing, when people start getting arguments about that, I just go to the fiber. I just say, that's not talking about diet. Let's just talk about fiber. Fiber start talking about that. These carnivores start mumbling and they don't know what to say because there's no fiber and they're deficient at fiber. These keto diets are deficient in fiber, these carnivore diets, paleo diets, they tell people not to eat whole grains, not to eat legumes. That's the healthiest, the longest-lived people in the world, legumes are their staple and they tell people not to eat legumes and whole grains and you can only eat so many fruits and you can only eat so many different kind of vegetables. Like I told you, you need to eat as many different types of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, not seeds and spices as you can. The more variety, the healthier your microbiome and healthier you're going to be. And if you want to eat some meat here and there, it's not a problem, but it shouldn't be the basis of your diet. It should be a condiment and not the priority.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, I don't know that I could do a hundred percent. I don't know that if there's a nice business meeting or something and someone says, let's go to a nice steakhouse and get a four-ounce filet, not sure I'm going to be able to just being on stock.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

I don't really think that's a problem. And like I said, the people in the blue zones, they'll have a piece of meat, usually it's fit once or twice a week. It's about the size of a deck of cards, but it's not like something they're eating every day. I think most Americans, there's meat on the plate on every meal, and I don't think that's a good idea.

Matt Feret:

For athletes. Do you find or have you done anything specifically for people who are being told if they're lifting weights and as you age or you lose bone mass, you lose body mass and people are out there lifting weights and doing cardio, and part of that is, I guess common knowledge is you need to increase your protein intake to make sure that it's creating and you're keeping muscle tone and foundation. How do you balance or A, is that correct? And B, how do you balance that with the don't eat so much protein unless it's a whole can of beans, which is, it's hard to get the type of protein that people talk about and keeping high muscle as an overall percentage of body weight.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Question, how do gorillas have all that, they’re vegans, how do they get all that muscle? How about the steak that you, there's a grass-fed cow, always eating is grass. How does he get all that muscle?

Matt Feret:

That's a good point.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

There was a study, it was a recent study in the Royal Proceedings and it was one of the most amazing studies I've ever read, and it gets back to the gut microbiome, they fed, it was a rodent study, but firm acuities was the bacteria that was doing this conversion. They fed them sugar and cornmeal, that's all they fed them and put a carbon radio isotope on the carbon so they could kind of trace where it was going. So, it went all the way down to the colon. The firm acuities bacteria actually converted the sugar and the corn mill into all of the essential amino acids and then they followed it up through the bloodstream and then incorporated itself into the muscle. So, your microbiome can make all those essential fatty, I always would wonder, how can a gorilla get all that muscle? How can that cow get all that muscle? How does that rhinoceros get all that muscle? So, I will tell you, if you are like heavy body building, you need to up your protein a little bit because you, you're trying to build muscle. But I will tell you the average, I don't know if you know this, the average lifespan of a bodybuilder is 47 years of age.

Matt Feret:

I've never heard that.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Yeah, well, it's true. And what they're doing is they're basically, they're aging. They're getting DNA mutations; they're taking all these growth stimulators and that is the worst combination. DNA mutations in the environment of growth stimulators like IGF one or mTOR, and these guys jack up like whey protein for example, that's loaded with leucine, which is a long branch amino acid.

Matt Feret:

Don't use whey protein, is that what you're telling me?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

No, I don't recommend any whey protein. I have my patients do plant, if they want to do plant proteins like protein, I have them do a plant protein powder and there's a ton of them out there. One I usually recommend, it's called So Clean, So Lean. It's a really good protein powder, but if you want to do it, that's what I would use. But I think most people are definitely protein overloaded. I think they're eating way too much protein.

Matt Feret:

By the way, I just looked this up on Google. I mean, did you think I used Bing? I didn't use Bing. I used Google. Conclusions mortality rates of bodybuilders within the cohort were 34% higher than those in age matched general US male population. Cause of this increased mortality is currently unclear but supports the possibility of the use of performance enhancing drugs and the unique competitive training. Extreme weight changes may contribute to deaths.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

I think a lot of it is it's the gross stimulation in the environment of DNA mutations.

Matt Feret:

Yep, possible liver damage, hyperlipidemia, cardiovascular effects.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Oh yeah. Like the Carnivore MD, he was on Joe Rogan, he was bragging that his LDL cholesterol, it was like 535, he was bragging about it. My LDL was 64. When you're under 70, you are actually reversing atherosclerosis. I try to get all my patients' LDLs under 70. The problem with the way that our LDLs are normalized is it's based on the population. So, the average person has an LDL of like one 20 in the United States. If you have one 20, you are definitely having progressive atherosclerosis. In fact, I don’t know if you've ever heard these studies, but they did studies on the American soldiers in the Korean War and the Vietnamese war, and on average when they did autopsies on these men, 45-55% of them already had advanced atherosclerosis.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, I think I read something newer than that too about the Iraq war veterans as well.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Yeah, and teenagers in auto accidents, I mean, they've done autopsies on them and about 30% already have fairly advanced atherosclerosis. So, it's something that if you have an LDL of one 20, it's definitely progressive. You got to get that thing under 70. And I will tell you, most people that go plant-based, they will get their LDLs under 70 even without any kind of statin or anything like that. So, it's something like myself, mine gets down just with before I started my LDL was like 124, now it's 64. I mean it came down that far, just eating.

Improving Health and Preventing Cancer through Diet with Dr. Dominic Brandy [47:13]

Matt Feret:

Wow. How long does this take? So, if I'm sitting here thinking I don't want cancer or I'm currently in cancer treatment and I know it's not a cure, right? You can't just have cancer and then try to, cancer is different. You have three different types that you mentioned just in one particular type of cancer. What's the perspective here? It says not only a prevention piece you're talking about in terms of being plant-based, but during cancer treatment or before it. What's the right perspective for folks to have?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Well, what I do, a lot of the patients that I have are in remission and you and I tell them, I go, hey, you know what, if you had another chance to change any of your habits, what would you change? And my basic precepts are plant-based diet. There are certain supplements that I recommend daily exercise, stress management, trying to get at least seven to eight hours of sleep everyday, detoxing. I get into an infrared sauna almost every night with my wife and I have one of those ones where your head sticks out. I think it's important to really sweat every day, make sure you're drinking a lot of clear filtered water, get a reverse osmosis. You would not believe what is in your tap water. I mean there's even chemo. I mean, I've had my water checked before I had a filter on it. There's like three columns of heavy metals, hormones, chemotherapy, and you can't believe what's in the tap water. So, you have to get rid of that stuff. And I tell people to maybe run an air filter in their bedroom because there's a lot of stuff that we breathe even through the whole day, but it's basically following the precepts I have in my book. I mean, there's the five that I just mentioned. The whole food, plant-based diet exercise is really important. There are certain supplements that I recommend and getting good stress management, getting good sleep detoxing, and then gut microbiome enhancement. I mean, that's kind of like my program.

Matt Feret:

It’s good work. Tell me about the people you've taken through the program before. Have you seen in terms of incident rates of cancer coming again or not? And I don't mean you've written a journal that's been double blind tested, but what do you see as some of the outcome that keeps you going, that keeps you out there trying to spread this word and try to help more people?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Well, I will tell you, because I was asked this on a podcast before, and I've really never really kind of worked the numbers out, but people that got into remission, I can't think of one person that's come out of remission that I have coached. Now I have people right now, I have some people on stage four pancreatic. I mean, all I'm trying to do with those people is if I can help them live another six months a year with a higher quality of life, I have a couple people to stage two, stage three, so I'm going to treat them differently. If somebody stage four, I typically am looking for someone near them, maybe for IV vitamin C, for ozone treatments, hypothermia treatments. I mean, there's other things you can do once you get to that point. I personally, I do everything through telemedicine, so I find somebody in their area that I think is highly qualified if they get to that point. So, when you get to stage four, you need to start pulling out all the stops. And one thing I want your audience to know, I am not one of these people that tell them that you can kill cancer just with food. I think people that promote that on the internet, I just think it's horrific. I have one woman, for example, just passed away 33 years old. She was diagnosed with breast cancer at 29. She did the Geron therapy for a year where you do six coffee enemas every day and you drink like 13 juice drinks and you're not allowed to eat soy and all these different restrictions, and it kept getting worse. Then she went to another clinic in Austin, and they were doing methylene blue with ozone missile toe, and it kept getting worse. And by the time she came to me, she was like stage four, this thing was going out of control. And I told her, listen, you need to do some conventional medicine. You need some chemotherapy to get this. The cure rates are high with conventional medicine, with breast cancer. You need to do both. And her husband just texted me about a month ago. He said she was dead. So, a lot of these people think they can get away with just doing it with food and supplements and that just anybody that promotes that is a quack in my view. You really should not do that because you need to take the best of both. Take the best of conventional medicine, take the best of alternative, and that's how you're going to get the best outcome.

Matt Feret:

Well said. Any other questions about this topic that I didn't ask or that we didn't cover that I should have?

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Not really. I would say if somebody wants to start introducing more plants into their diet, a good way to do it is maybe the first week, maybe just do a couple plant-based breakfasts, for example, and maybe the second week, and then be learning some recipes. There's all, when I do consults, I send people like 10 different recipe people. There are amazing recipes out there nowadays, and maybe the second week you add maybe a couple lunches and you just kind of gradually work your way into it until you're maybe plant strong. I like to use that word, plant strong kind of freaks people out. So, it's like, hey, if you can just try to make your diet plant predominant, try to get at least 30 grams of fiber per day, then you're going to be a much healthier person. So that's the way that I really try to introduce it to people so that it doesn't blow their mind. So, they do it. And the other thing is, we were talking about passing gas. When you start eating more beans and so forth, there's an adjustment there too because,

Matt Feret:

So, if you've got a partner or a spouse, you got to give them a little heads up of how you're changing your diet.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Yeah, so you will initially, but as you go along, it's less and less so it's more manageable, but it's something you need to kind of gradually break into.

Matt Feret:

Got it. Break into, I heard what you did there. I picked up on that.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Well, it looks like my battery's ready to go out here.

Conclusion and Episode End with Dr. Dominic Brandy [53:52]

Matt Feret:

Dr. Brandy, no, that was a perfect timing for your battery and perfect timing for this. Thank you so much for being on the show. This was great. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

Yeah, I just wanted let people know about my website. It's https://www.naturalinsightsintocancer.com/. My Instagram site is Cancer Veggie Doc. I do a post every single day, and my book is Beat Back Cancer Naturally. You can get it on my website or on Amazon, so make sure you check out.

Matt Feret:

I'll put it all on the homepage and the show page as well on all the notes. And Dr. Brandy, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Dr. Dominic Brandy:

It was great. Thanks.

Matt Feret:

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