Fasting as a Powerful Ally Against Cancer – with Brad & Maggie Jones

Dr. Mindy  

On this episode of The resetter podcast, I bring you, Maggie and Brad Jones. And the discussion you’re about to hear is the lifestyle tools you need to not only prevent cancer, but as you will hear, you can actually use much of the information that we discussed, to really turn a cancer diagnosis around. Now, let me give you a little bit of background on Maggie and Brad, you’re gonna, you’ll hear Maggie’s story, she had stage four cancer, and use some really interesting lifestyle tools that helped her overcome that you’ll hear that journey continues today. And they became so passionate about what’s not being shared in the world about the control we have in turning cancer diagnoses around and the control we have in preventing cancer. And they wanted to bring it to the world. So they actually launched the first virtual conference on cancer that is dedicated to metabolic lifestyle and nutritional therapies that we can all use to prevent and treat cancer. And Maggie and I had met last fall, and she had invited me on to this summit to talk about fasting. And we just struck up a mutual friendship and respect for each other’s work. And as many of you have probably heard me talk about I have had the honor of sitting at the deathbed of for patients who are transitioning out of this world due to cancer overturning their bodies. And that that experience really left a deep place in my heart, for helping us all understand what control we have in making sure we don’t get a diagnosis of cancer. And also what control do we have if we do get a diagnosis of cancer, because there’s so much that’s not been set. And that is what you’re about to hear. You’re about to hear all the tools you have in a toolbox to be able to prevent, and treat cancer, and I can’t think of anyone better to deliver this to you, then Maggie and Brad. So if you resonate with any of the information that we discussed, please send this out into the world. We are powerful self healing creatures. And when it comes to cancer, there is absolutely a rhythm that you can find with your lifestyle to make sure that you don’t keep making more cancer cells. Regardless of a diagnosis. Regardless of where you are in prevention. There is a toolbox for you, and Maggie and Brad will deliver that to you in this conversation. So as always enjoy.

Dr. Mindy  

Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to season four of the resetter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself. Again, if you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy. Let me just start off by saying Welcome to the resetter podcast. I just am really excited for this conversation.

Brad Jones  

And then we’re just excited to talk to you. Thanks for having us, Mindy.

Maggie Jones  

Thank you. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, agreed, agreed. Here’s where I want to start off this conversation. And I and I don’t know if you actually know this about me. But I have sat at gone through the cancer journey intensively with four of my patients and actually sat at their bedside days before they died. And it really moved me. I learned a lot. One woman in particular, her name is Lanie. My first book was completely dedicated to her. And she taught me so much because she was given a cancer diagnosis where or a prognosis where they gave her three months to live. And she turned it into 11 years. And I learned so much walking that journey with her. So I want to start off with a couple of like, really interesting thoughts that I gained from that experience. And one is, is cancer preventable? Can we actually prevent it from happening? Yeah, that’s it. That’s a big question. I’m just gonna let you all take that. Because it’s one I asked that whole 11 years I just really wanted to grab my head around that concept. can we prevent it?

Maggie Jones  

I think that’s so important to ask and honestly, more research needs to be done. But the one thing that I’ve been convinced of the

Maggie Jones  

Horse of our production and my personal studying is that your DNA is not your destiny. So regardless of what your cancer genes say, maybe you have a bracha mutation or p 152. mutation, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get cancer, you’re epigenetics, your lifestyle, that’s what really makes a difference.

Maggie Jones  

As far as there are certain genetic mutations, very, very small percentage of people have them that do lead to cancer. Usually not terminal. But I think that you sum up what we need to focus on in the future is can it be completely prevented, once we understand the cause fully, that’s gonna lead to those interventions

Brad Jones  

of cancers. 5% about are hereditary. And if you have, like one of the most, the bracha gene, that’s one of the most commonly commonly Yeah, common common genes that cause cancer, you have about a 5050 chance, and that’s the other that that gene, you know, going back,

Maggie Jones  

I want to emphasize on brockagh, though, it used to be a 40% chance, you know, 70 years ago with the different diet, different lifestyle, and now it’s up to 70% of people. And it’s not because the route changes, but it has a lot to do with the environment that we live in.

Brad Jones  

Yeah. So yeah, your genes. Yeah, basically, only 5% of people have this, you know, of cancers, even so that’s 2.5% of people have a chance of heredity, you know, inheriting a cancer. So yeah, as cancer preventable, the lead if the 95% of cancers come from diet and lifestyle, I would think so.

Brad Jones  

So So here’s what’s really interesting now, in this journey that I took with Lani, she actually came into my office of like, you know, a lot of women asking for help for her child, which I think is always so interesting. And she was sitting in my waiting room, she had just gone through radiation and chemo, she had no hair, you can tell that she was she was going through cancer treatment. And at when I dove into chatting with her about what education she got. Now, this was, you know, 20 years ago, that’s a long time ago, or maybe a little like maybe about 15 years ago, I said, what did they teach you about how you got cancer? And she looked at me and she said, What do you mean, how I got cancer, I, they just told me I had it, it was genetic. And here was my treatment. And so I started going down a path with her, the very first thing I taught her was how to eat. And we I actually took her to a supermarket. We went into the supermarket, and I taught her how to read a label. And here she was at the time, like in her early 40s, learning how to read a label for the first time. And at one point, she turned to me and she said, Wait a second, we were in a store called Safeway. That was literally the grocery stores name. And she’s like, are you telling me that there are foods that are in this store that are not safe? Even though stores called Safeway? Yeah. And I was like, yep, yep. I that’s what I’m telling you. So do you think that food is the first place we can start when we look at what’s building cancer and how we can prevent it?

Maggie Jones  

For some people, that is the easiest, most successful way to start. I think what you consume and what you don’t consume, and when you consume it are all really important. But from the beginning, especially in today’s society, yeah, just having a little more control and mindfulness about what’s going into your body and making sure that it’s something that’s going to be healing to you, and not detrimental.

Dr. Mindy  

Right. I mean, where do we start with that? So I know that you’ve gotten really into fasting, which is amazing. I had a beautiful conversation yesterday with Dr. Dale Bredesen about the importance of metabolic switching for preventing Alzheimer’s. I’m starting to feel like fasting metabolic switching glucose management is the IS is are the keys to preventing everything? Would you agree on that when it comes to cancer? Yeah,

Maggie Jones  

I think there’s more even that can be involved. But definitely your diet is so important. And for me personally, when I was diagnosed with my terminal stage four lung cancer, non smokers lung cancer, which all the doctors are like, Oh, you’re one of the unlucky ones. I had to take a long hard look at how I was treating my body with what I put into it. And I wasn’t just unlucky, like I have a metabolic genetic mutation. But this is something that I developed over time because I feel that I wasn’t treating my body well. I thought I had the healthiest standard American diet with whole grains and long more fat dairy and lean meats, things like that. That I just wasn’t looking deep enough and I had a lot of stress and I had quite the alcohol enthusiasm drinking a bottle of wine a night to deal with that. So I finally put my health first and saying like, let’s my body is screaming out it’s decided it doesn’t even want to be alive anymore. I had six to eight months to live. Let’s make till six to eight months exactly what my body needs to start paying attention to it. And these days, it’s not about like, oh, trying to live as long as possible, but trying to have the best life that I possibly can. And I cannot do that without paying attention to my body, and other healing factors like fasting, stress reduction, mindfulness medication, breathwork. All these things for me personally, work so important in conjunction, but it all started with diet.

Dr. Mindy  

You know, what’s so interesting to me is that there is there are like, foundational behaviors that we should be doing through lifestyle, like Dale yesterday was talking a lot about seven things we need to do to prevent Alzheimer’s. And I bet if we look, you just reminded me of this, I bet if we look at those seven things, they’re the same things you do to prevent cancer to prevent heart problems, prevent menopause symptoms, you know, it’s it’s some point, we’re going to have to diabetes, bad COVID outcomes, like at some point, we’re going to have to start taking responsibility for our health and understand that lifestyle is the key to everything. So where do you go when you hit that moment where you’re been given this horrific diagnosis? What how do you go from the fear of that moment into empowerment and seeing that there’s so many aspects of your lifestyle that need to change?

Maggie Jones  

Oh, man, do you hit it on the head, that fear and that urgency and learning, you know, I just turned 40, I thought I was healthy. It was non smokers, lung cancer, so something I never would have expected. And the first place that I went, which I’m embarrassed to admit is, I’m going to die. Well, I’m going to listen to my doctors, when they say I’m terminal, I will be terminal. And my one goal was to make broad proud of me, my doctors proud of me by dying well. And then God that only lasted for about five days. I was diagnosed on a Monday, that weekend, we went off, I started reading all my cancer books, you know what’s out there. And I realized some people do survive. And I think that if anybody could survive, I could do it. And I’m, I have a little too much self esteem that way, maybe that I decided I know my body better than any of my doctors do. I know how I feel better than any scan, and I’m just going to focus on that. Try to live a good life through however much time I have left, I could be hit by a car tomorrow. And that became my goal, my quality of life. I wasn’t trying, maybe deep down, I was hoping for a little cancer outcome. But really what I was hoping for was a good quality life. And I’ve had that and that’s the most important thing. But those books that I was reading is what brought up how a dietary change is very often the first thing that happens in people with radical remissions or unexpected improvements. Dr. Kate, Kelly Turner talks about this in her book radical remission. So I was like, okay, yeah, from now, on that weekend, the first weekend after my diagnosis, I decided not to put anything into my body that wasn’t actively healing. And that’s why we had just moved from Hong Kong, which had very different access to food, definitely no access to the clean meats. And we still found a way to deal with that even if dealing with that was my first 24 hour fast after I made that decision. And then the following week, sending Brad out running around Hong Kong looking for all the organic produce anything that he could find that I could find a study on in PubMed actually shown it either hears cancer in the petri dish, or increases your immune system, or anything that was documented. This is healing.

Brad Jones  

I was just gonna say, you know, usually you go on a ketogenic diet, you gotta kind of like, ease into it. I mean, like, she just 2020 she just stopped eating. Like, she was just like, hey, this is important. I’m gonna do this. So she’s just like, yeah, like, no force.

Maggie Jones  

One of the reasons that I’m so grateful to the severity of my cancer, because I would never have gone to such lengths to change my lifestyle, if it weren’t life and death, and it wasn’t immediate. And I know for some people, it can be tinkering. And it’s never a comment on or judgment that you’re responsible for your cancer. We live in a world that sets that up. And it’s not any individuals fault. But it also provides the hope if you’re interested that it can be within your control, but certainly no judgment to anybody who chooses not to go that path.

Dr. Mindy  

And you bring up an interesting point because as I’ve helped coach people over the years, from a variety of chronic conditions, I have found that the more severe the condition, the more willing the person is to make a change. And there will be came a moment in my clinical practice where I only would take the severe cases because if people were just kind of wanting to dip their toe in I’m like, there’s there’s the world will send you too many mixed messages. You’re gonna find too many reasons why you can’t do the difficult but when You have a death date that is facing you, you know, staring you in the face, you will do anything. And one of the things, one of the things I learned in walking this journey with this patient of mine, Lani was that I was going to live every day as if I did have a cancer diagnosis. Like why don’t I ask myself every single day? What would you do tomorrow? If you were given that diagnosis? And I have to tell you at this particular moment, my life I wouldn’t change anything. I, I feel like I’m very much living every day as if I was so serious about my health, that I could overturn a cancer diagnosis. And I feel like it is a gift that you got on one level that ever all of us could learn from.

Maggie Jones  

Oh, yeah. That’s a beautiful sentiment.

Brad Jones  

Yeah. And honestly, I just, it’s one of the things that we just started talking about privately all the time. It’s just this normalization of what we’re eating. Right? It’s like, right, well, how come? I mean, I know fast food is convenient, but it’s like, how did we ever get to this place? How deadly our bodies with like garbage? Right? It’s, it’s so sad.

Maggie Jones  

And so acceptable is is, is like that. Now you have an eating disorder. If you’re only eating healthful. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy  

Right. And like, we’re gonna actually give it a name. They have like a new name orthorexia.

Maggie Jones  

Yeah, proud Orthorexic.

Dr. Mindy  

Me too. Me too. Yeah. And I, you know, when I travel around the country, I always when I’m in airports, and I’m watching the stress, people are under and watching the foods they’re eating. i It breaks my heart. And I think like, why don’t more and more people have cancer? Why don’t more people realize that? If they changed the way they ate? They would they would think different, they would sleep different, they would feel different? Like, where to your point, Brad, when did we get off that path? I think we just assume food is food. And we don’t know that it either is going to build disease or build health. I have no idea how we got where the awareness on food got so bad.

Maggie Jones  

You can see it though, over the last 70 years because it tracks with all these chronic diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or type three diabetes, cancer, they’re all going up as our truth production system is going way down. Yeah,

Brad Jones  

yeah, absolutely. So this, again, is one of the reasons I got so excited about fasting. And the fun part of this story that I get to tell and I don’t think I’ve actually no, I told it and fast like a girl I put it in the end notes. It was a really important story for me to put out there. And that was that a month before Lani passed maybe a month or two before this patient that I walked this journey with before she passed. She actually asked me about fasting. And she said what do you know about fasting and it was about that time that Dr. Assamese work that was coming out on on a toffee G and we were learning that in a fasted state, the cells repaired themselves. And I remember turning to her and saying, I don’t know anything about fasting, but I’m gonna find out for you. And then worked in storing. Yeah, right. And then two months later, she passed and it propelled me to figure this part of the of the puzzle out because she had done everything. She had changed the way she ate, she had changed the the beauty products, she had totally handled her stress. Like she had done everything she had gone to every alternative doctor, she literally turned like three months into 11 years. But one thing that we didn’t do was fasting. So talk a little bit about where fasting fits in to the cancer journey, because it’s something I’ve never been completely able to answer for myself.

Maggie Jones  

So I had no idea on this at the beginning until I ran across Dr. Walter Longo. It’s research out of USC, and he focused originally on longevity but the cancer science has become incredible that if you fast three days before you start your chemo, it’s more effective before radiation. And that’s what I’ve really discovered the power of it because I had two rounds of Rick brandstory Certain radiations. So grounds caused some aphasia for my brain injury, but you’re here, but two rounds for two tumors each in Hong Kong, same hospital, same radiologist, the first round I was just beginning my cancer journey. And as I was still eating healthy, I went in and it was devastating. It was three weeks on the couch, sweating, crying, vomiting, couldn’t work, obviously. The next session six months later, less than six months. I went in again, walked home from the hospital on a Friday went back to work on a Monday felt amazing and the only difference is the second time I fasted water fasted three days before and about a day after. And it was profound. See, and sometimes I worry that it was made my radiation so effective that that’s why I had this brain injury now the brain radiation necrosis.

Dr. Mindy  

And honestly, they did, they didn’t need as much.

Maggie Jones  

Exactly. And really most people don’t live as long as I do after having this radio surgery. People just didn’t know enough about it. But now more and more people are living long enough to get it. And so the science is coming out. And candidly, the fact that I am as functional as I am, my neuro oncologist told me this in my last session, that if he showed my MRIs to 10, different doctors, all 10 would say, I’m a vegetable, I shouldn’t build a walk or talk. And this was right after I come back from a solo trip to Indonesia to get my yoga teacher training. Yeah, so I do have size function, but it just shows that your scans your doctors, they don’t know everything. And I believe that my fasting and my stress reduction techniques are what causes this on neuroplasticity where my mind can still function, even if it looks like mush in the scans.

Brad Jones  

Yeah, because it’s just like a good time to throw in, like your viewers are all familiar probably with the ketogenic diet, and fasting and that basically, the reason that this works for cancer patients is the idea that cancers more than other cells want glucose. So the higher your blood glucose is, I mean, you’re basically feeding your cancer cells. So obviously, you can’t completely cut the glucose out of your system. But if you can go on a ketogenic diet or fast especially, you’re basically taking away a lot of fuel sources for cancer. And that that’s the background was the science behind it,

Maggie Jones  

and your listeners know that ketosis the state of ketosis is not the same as the ketogenic diet, eating bacon, be it it can be fasting, it can be reached so many different ways. And if that ketosis, that slow healing,

Dr. Mindy  

yeah, I actually think the best door into ketosis is fasting, I think that’s the like, and then use food to that food window to actually fuel yourself and use your fasting window to tap into the ketogenic energy system, and then you’re getting the best of both worlds. So that’s the way I like it. And maybe your eating window is only an hour long, so you’re getting more ketones, you’re allowing yourself to get more ketones. But what I’ve noticed that a lot of people did in the ketogenic movement is that they wanted to up like to your point like up the the bacon up all the all the the harmful fats, which is not great, all and lower all the carbs, we still need some carbs. And that particular diet wasn’t the end all be all they need it if we just use the fasting window to get ketones, and then use the eating window to fuel ourselves. Now we could marry two beautiful healing strategies together. So that’s I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that for cancer, but I have found that that’s the best way just in general, for humans,

Maggie Jones  

it’s been the best way for me and Brad, fast with me it did we do 44 hours water fasting every week, much more once a month. And it’s the best thing to get us into ketosis. I also, and I don’t advocate this was plant based during my year of healing just because of the foods I could get in Hong Kong. So a lot of those good carbs, I was able to keep my ketones up. And the real reason that fasting or sorry, a state of ketosis works so well. Brad, you can explain how the fasting works that it actually strengthens or healthy cells. Oh,

Brad Jones  

yeah. This? Yeah, basically, what happened to Maggie when she got to radiation is this. The when you when you fast, your normal cells sort of go into like a sort of slightly protective state, like a little bit of a hybrid net hibernating type. They’re just like, hey, there’s no fuel out here, I got to kind of like locked down and just sort of protect myself. Cancer cells doesn’t appear have the ability to do that. They’re still trying to take up as much glucose as possible. They’re out there scavenging of everything. So if you’re fasting, and then you introduce a drug, or radiation, your cancer cells are basically leaving the door wide open to this therapy, and your healthy cells have kind of closed themselves off. So the therapies become much more effective. That’s basically I think that what you’re after

Dr. Mindy  

I’ve never heard that that’s yeah. I never heard it explained that. Yeah. Love that.

Maggie Jones  

Yeah. And then to your point, I think there are so many different ways of eating that depends on a person’s genetics, epigenetics, lifestyle, disease, state, all of that, that can be healing, but one thing that is almost a universally unless you have a very strong reason against it is fasting. It’s because it doesn’t matter how you get there, you still have that healing state.

Brad Jones  

A question I get a lot is, is fasting appropriate for all cancers? And I know, Dr. Nation, I’ve talked a little bit about this, but how do we know if your cancer is the one that fasting will work for?

Maggie Jones  

So and this is still being studied? So I want to say that what we’re talking about isn’t completely determined, but 70 to 90% of late stage cancers are glycolytic in nature they need glucose, and so they’re going to be benefited by not having the glucose available. And there are other things that we know cancer can eat, notably glutamine, which would also be reduced by fasting on things that really would not help with fasting as if you’re pregnant. If you maybe have been anorexic in the past, your doctors can let you know whether it’s appropriate up for you or not. But the myth I think that happens so often is that doctors still don’t understand that checks. Yeah, the state of muscle loss that is responsible for so many cancer deaths is not a reason not to fast, because fasting has been coming to show that it can actually reverse the effects. Yeah, well definitely prevent impossibly reverses what the latest studies say, Wow,

Brad Jones  

because it keeps you hold on to your fat stores or, you know, keeps your fat. And that’s the that’s what you’re actually losing when you have kexi You’re just shedding all your fat. No, shut your mouth. Oh, sorry. Yes, sorry, another way you can

Dr. Mindy  

preserve your muscle. So this actually ties into a really beautiful thought that I’ve had in in just teaching the world too fast, I get so much pushback, that fasting breaks muscle down. And one of the things that I really try to emphasize to people is that maybe in the fasted moment you it is breaking muscle down. But what that means let’s dive a little deeper into what that means it means that it is getting rid of the stored sugar that is inside that muscle so it can clean the muscle up. So it can be a stronger, more efficient muscle. And then when you bring food back into the equation, especially protein, you now could stimulate mTOR in a positive way. And you could actually build that muscle stronger. And this is what we’re seeing with all these menopausal women in our in my community is that yes, we put them in fasted states, yes, the body gets rid of stored sugar, it improves itself. And then we put the right foods back into the equation, it builds itself stronger. So it ties into something that you said, Maggie, that’s really interesting to me is that you’re no longer on a plant based diet. To me, in order to build muscle, we got to have protein, and I can’t get the protein that I need on a plant based diet. But from a cancer standpoint, why why animal not plant based?

Maggie Jones  

Absolutely. And again, this is different for everyone and anybody out there who’s affected by cancer needs to talk to their metabolically informed physician. But there’s been a lot of research, especially five Valter Longo as

Dr. Mindy  

well said, Well, I don’t want it I don’t want anybody to miss that. You got to make sure they

Maggie Jones  

don’t take it from me. I’m no one.

Brad Jones  

Yeah, yeah, we’re just your general oncologist. Right? They’re gonna not know what you’re talking about.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, what’s a metabolic? Just before we go any further, what’s a metabolically informed oncologist? How do we know if we have one

Maggie Jones  

they’re hard to find. But if you mentioned the metabolic theory of cancer, they should understand if they know that PET scans work to diagnose your cancer because of your cancer is eating more sugar, and therefore sugar maybe isn’t something you should eat. If they’re not offering you orange juice and ensure before your chemo, that would be a clue. But there are places out there to find them. I have a list on my site, Dr. Nisha has them on her terrain dot network sites, care oncology making metabolic care, they’re out there and they’re becoming more and more of them. Not to mention, the Charlie Foundation has a great resource for dieticians, who practice this and understand that keto and fasting are both safe and effective for a lot of different stages. Yeah,

Brad Jones  

that’s what I was going to add is, if you can just find an oncologist that will work with a nutritionist, that is usually you know, if you find that, if your oncologist is just like add nutrition, yeah, that’s doesn’t mean anything you’re gonna have, you’re probably going to have some trouble. But if you have an oncologist that can work with the nutritionist, a lot of times they’re sort of bound by their standard of care as to what they can prescribe. But they can actually shuttle you to a nutritionist that will work with you at the same time. That that can be really helpful. So see, it could be sometimes a Yeah, could sometimes not even be the oncologist themselves, but just sort of this sort of team of people

Maggie Jones  

asked to your point about protein and cancers. It was Dr. Valter. Longo has done a lot of research on that. And partly because glutamine is a fuel for cancer recommends a lower protein diet. Now obviously, if you’re on chemo, if you’ve had surgery, you need that protein to be able to repair your body, good clean protein, but it’s an individual choice also based on genetics, epigenetics, and for me, plant base was what worked for me at the time. And since then, we moved to the US where we have access to non factory ways meats, and it’s great to feel to get back into that. But for me, I found that the factory to me that I had access to in Hong Kong was so much more dangerous. Unless healing to my body, and I just wanted to get the things that I knew were going to help me. One thing, especially for people with a disease of unregulated growth, like cancer, is we have to be careful about the hormones in animals, and especially in dairy as they’re to braid. You know, these giant animals, but even bigger, we don’t necessarily need that for our cancer.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah. So I just want to make sure we don’t lose what you just said, because you bring up a brilliant point, which is commercial meat with hormones and toxins and antibiotics pumped into it is not a health food. So what I heard you say is you made a choice that you didn’t have access to clean meat. So plant based was a better option, so you could avoid all those toxins. But then once you had you had access to clean meats is what I call them. You started to bring some of them back in is that Did I hear that right?

Maggie Jones  

And when I talk plant based, it’s never like full vegan, I was eating organic pasture raised eggs, wild caught fish, it just meant that about 90 to 95% of my calories came from plants, which is the traditional definition is not a vegan diet. And again, it can differ for so many people, but you have to find what resonates for you and what you feel is healing because that’s what’s gonna work ultimately, I mean, that SIBO effect reigned supreme in all of this.

Dr. Mindy  

Definitely, were the toxins fit into this because I know again, with Lani, she went home and like scan she, she found an app on her phone, like scan dollar products, like literally went crazy in one weekend and got rid of all the toxins. It sounds like that was a familiar story.

Maggie Jones  

almost as important as diet, that diet was the first thing I cleaned up my water was the next thing and then I had to get rid of all my cosmetics. We chose different detergents. We have air purifier, water purifier, I stopped using the cleaner on my yoga mat. Ingredients.

Brad Jones  

I didn’t say there’s this one day that Maggie came home. And did this was like, she just like, did you know that the skin is the biggest organ in your body?

Brad Jones  

And then we had like a week of just like, this is gone, this is gone. This is gone. This was just like, Yeah, I’ve you know, like me. And I was like, I was like, Can I even use my two old toothpaste. And yeah, I was just like everything in our house just like in our bathroom was just like gone and replaced. So now our philosophy is if you’re not going to put it in your mouth, don’t put it on your skin. I taught my daughter that I you know my 23 year old daughter that when I started to realize beauty products were so toxic. I’m like just just easiest thing, look at it and say what I eat it, if I’m not going to eat it, put it back. You know everything with a natural ingredient you should be able to eat, you’ll have no problem. The other thing about this skin, I don’t know if you all know this is that there is a connection from the microbiome of the skin to the microbiome of the gut. And one of the things that really concerned me during the pandemic was all the hand sanitizers, we were putting on our hands. Yeah. And people weren’t realizing that it was actually leading to leaky gut syndrome and imbalances, gut dysbiosis situations. Because those two organs, the skin and the gut are constantly talking to each other.

Brad Jones  

So tell me a little bit about like, gut wise, did you have to do any changes to your gut? Because the microbiome is a big part of our immunity? How did you dive into that?

Maggie Jones  

This has been a challenge for me recently, just because of my survivorship issues with the chemo I went through and the radiation and all of that, where I developed SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And that really did wake me up into the importance of your get for detoxifying, obviously, for just keeping things moving. And just being a part of your beautiful body like these little microbes are they’re part of your ecosystem. And I want to support that. And so it’s been a work in progress for me about three years now continually focusing on that, but I do think that the foods that I eating now, no grains, no dairy, all of that is definitely in support. And again, the fact that I am as functional and happy as I am right now, with all these issues, I think there’s a lot of what would you say? That comes from your gut that can influence your mood? Oh, oh,

Dr. Mindy  

oh, 1,000% 1,000% Definitely. So okay, and then what about sleep? That’s the other one that I as I you know, as I’ve been journeying through my menopause years, I just am starting to prioritize sleep so much more. You know, I used to wear it as a badge of honor that I could get away with less sleep and now I’m like, everybody needs to go home at eight o’clock so I can go to sleep. Where was sleep on the healing journey for you?

Maggie Jones  

You’re my person. So I’m very blessed that I never had a problem sleeping. Maybe a little insomnia. But our culture like you say, it’s like, oh my gosh, not being able to sleep is a badge of honor. I get back to work and all that. So for me, now that I have the brain injury, sleep is more critical than ever, like nothing kills my brain more than fasting and sleep. But it’s still hard because of the cultural way that we were raised that like, I feel lazy if I get more than 10 hours and just thank God for Brad, who’s always supportive, who knows that if I don’t sleep enough, then I’m not going to talk or I’m not going to be as functional. And that’s just my brain injury that doesn’t even represent what other people are experiencing. Because when you sleep is when your cells are turning over, they’re getting healthier, your immune system is at work. So critical. But just like food and trying to push away the societal ideas like eating crap, we have to present the idea that staying awake is is a good thing. We need to prioritize our health. Yeah. Do you find

Dr. Mindy  

people give you more grace? Because they know you had a diagnosis? Are they like, oh, yeah, of course, you need to go home and sleep? Of course, you’re eating that way? Like, do you get a free pass social pass?

Maggie Jones  

Definitely was for the eating. Like when I was in Hong Kong. During my healing. We went through, you know, the Chinese New Year with the mooncakes. Everybody office wanting to really comfort me and to give me something and we’re just used to giving food for comfort. And it was very easy for me to say, oh, no, I can’t do this because of my cancer treatment. And I know it’s much, much harder for people to be able to turn down in a loving way foods that are really poisonous, without hurting somebody’s feelings. So I use it as an excuse as much as I could. And bad. I don’t know how you get away with it now continue to the same way I do without the diagnosis.

Brad Jones  

Oh, yeah. Just to have like, maybe a nibble and just thank you so much, or just haven’t later, right? Just said, like,

Brad Jones  

yeah, here’s what happens with food. And I think it’s so interesting as a couples like being able to see that she gets the free pass. And you might not because when we put some some bad food out there are there drinks out there, when somebody makes a stand for not eating in that way, because they want to be healthy. It’s like, it’s like a mirror back to the person who served you the food that what they’re eating is unhealthy. Yeah. So in order to make themselves feel better, they need you to eat, they need you to stay up late. They need you to participate in these behaviors. Because otherwise, it there’s this internal reflection that happens that makes people feel bad when you’re making a stance for your health. That’s got to change.

Maggie Jones  

Yeah, true. And like we try to be as non judgmental as possible. But it’s really hard for people not to take it as a judgement that I just want to have this lifestyle. You can have your lifestyle, no judgement. Yeah, it’s hard.

Brad Jones  

Yeah, I know. We have family members that have seen what Maggie’s gone through the nicer of doing the keto diet. They’ve seen me and my lifestyle changes. I’ve lost like 50 pounds, you know, and it’s like, I still can’t get these people that are close to me to adopt this lifestyle. It’s just like, so frustrating. It’s also

Maggie Jones  

okay, like, we have to accept them. Yeah, of course.

Brad Jones  

Yeah, they’re my family. But yeah, it’s an example of streaming because you’re like I can I can help you. Right? Or I can you in touch with someone that can help you, right? Yeah.

Maggie Jones  

Yeah, hard thing is we just sadly do not go out. Period. Yes. And so we’ll cook for our friends and family when they’re at home. And then they get to eat delicious foods that we eat. And we don’t give gifts of food or candy or anything like that. Because these are people that we love, and we don’t want to poison them. And you know, if they want to eat themselves, that’s fine, but not for us.

Brad Jones  

I drag us to a seafood restaurant every once in a while. That’s about it. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

I would always talk about not eating out because I’ll tell you that I had a really interesting experience with a patient who ate out all the time. And we ran her Dutch test and her toxic estrogen was so high. And I tried to break down where it might be coming from. And then she explained to me that she and her husband ate out like five days a week. It was a part of their social behavior, and it was going to be very difficult for her to not eat out. And my response to her was if you don’t get this under control, your husband is not going to have a wife to go eat out with. So I do and my husband I do the same thing. We don’t eat out as much so just so people understand why don’t you eat out? What do you what is it that you can’t get in a restaurant that you get at home?

Maggie Jones  

Anything killing for me like it’s somebody else’s preparing it, it’s going to be prepared with seed oils. And for those who don’t listen to enough Mindy, listen to more bendy and you’ll understand that. You don’t know exactly what’s in it with organic. So yeah, we just make it ourselves and then we feel safe. It’s good. It comes from a source that we believe.

Brad Jones  

I mean, you’ve heard Ben talk and, you know, Ben Ben Azadi our obviously, Miriam, Colombian, we’ve talked with her a lot and it’s like, if you are extremely vigilant and you go out to eat and you tell your waiter that I’m allergic to like these 10 things or I mean they’re, you’re like, just give me you know, the lettuce. You can make it happen. You can make it work, but at some point For us, it became a lot of work. And then you also brought this up earlier, it’s like you’re kind of sitting there in the restaurant watching other people eat things that aren’t healthy for them. That’s kind of like a, you know, kind of brings you down a little bit. And it’s so it’s like, what we have done is actually tried to search out restaurants that have organic base, or you know, that are just very proud of, you know, like, where they’ve sourced their food from. And then you can sit down in the restaurant and actually know that you’re getting something healthy and that the people around you are also eating something healthy. So you don’t have that drag. So that’s one of the ways that and when you’re on the road, that’s kind of what you have to do, right? It’s like, yeah,

Maggie Jones  

we go grocery shopping and make a salad at home. I remember the first time in Hong Kong, I went out and I ordered a Caesar salad with no croutons, no cop Parmesan, no sauce, no dressing. Right Romaine and I was like, I’m not going out any any fun.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah. And then they bring the the bread basket and they bring you the dessert menu and like your there’s a lot of willpower that’s got to happen when people are bringing you all the possible dangerous foods. So yeah, that’s that’s absolutely why we just unless it’s a farm to table organic restaurant, we would prefer to make food at home. Yeah, taco talk a little bit about, I feel like this is the elephant in the women health room. And it’s that our bodies from a nervous system standpoint, from a hormone standpoint, need a lot more rest than a male body. And the more we push through and have what we call what Libby Weaver coined the term rushing woman syndrome, the more that we are rushing and stressing out, the weaker our immune system, the worse our health becomes. And we are completely different than men. And that when you look at us, hormonally. So did you have to reorganize and prioritize downtime, learn to say no good. I mean, how do you? How do you take the rushing woman out of a diagnosis, a diagnosis like that, it’s so hard

Maggie Jones  

because we do feel responsible for everything. And you know, in a way that were blessed that I didn’t have children to be looked after. But I still felt like I had to look after Brad after my coworkers, everybody. I found that I do have support. Right? And Brad is there and I need his constant encouragement to say like, no, take a minute, don’t do this. Prioritize yourself. But it would have been very, very difficult for me if I didn’t have somebody from the outside, giving me perspective on that. And I know a lot of cancer sufferers do not have that. And I just, I constantly try to share what I have seen prioritize yourself, if you have this diagnosis, your body is saying you’ve got to pay more attention to me got to put me first. And hopefully somebody doesn’t need a stage four terminal diagnosis to get that message. But it’s hard.

Brad Jones  

Yeah. And I’m just from a caregiver perspective, I would just add, it’s, it’s easy to kind of sort of wrap yourself up and what’s going on and just try to remember to focus on what are the needs of like, your significant other or whoever you’re helping, right? It’s just, you know, it’s like, as soon as she started having these brain issues, and it was like, we were like, the best thing for her sleep. That’s where you know, dead tissues get flushed out of your brain, you you pretty much have to be asleep for this kind of, you know, that’s the most efficient way. And I was just like you have a free pass to sleep as much as you possibly can. So it’s just prioritizing these. And that can be hard. Obviously, if you have to, you know, have other responsibilities kids or road job. I mean, you’re juggling? Yeah. But you have to do the best you can.

Dr. Mindy  

What would you tell somebody who gets a diagnosis of cancer? Where’s the first place? They go? How do you? Because that’s got it, that moment has to be really scary? And how do you go from that ties into a motivated place where you can actually start to unwind it,

Maggie Jones  

the very first thing I think somebody needs is to let go of the urgency. When you first find out you have cancer inside of you. I did all I wanted with get it out, burn it. You know, I’m luckily I wasn’t operable, but do whatever you can do to get it out. And then I have to realize now that cancer has been inside me for years, years, it’s been filming. And so I don’t need a doctor to tell me like, do it. Now. I need to take a minute, take a breath and figure out what’s right for me use your doctors for their wonderful knowledge to help inform you, but ultimately, you know, your body best and what resonates for you back to the placebo effect is going to be what’s most helpful. And so if people can just feel empowered, get that sense of agency and know that the statistics may not apply to them. I think that’s number one. And then that’s going to lead them to the diet to the exercise to taking care of their body and all of that.

Brad Jones  

And where do you feel like you know we have we have traditional cancer treatment and we have them For natural cancer treatment, you know, I see that there tends to be this division, where it’s like some people are like, Well, I’m gonna go the more traditional, so I won’t do the natural and the other people with the natural say, Well, I’m gonna do the natural, I want to the traditional, is there a way where we can integrate both because there are benefits to at all?

Maggie Jones  

Exactly. And there is this divide, just like there is in diet where people consider it’s one or the other. And when I was first diagnosed, I was deeply adherent to allopathic medicine, super Western. And I was living in Hong Kong, where TCM, traditional Chinese medicine is medicine, fortunately. And I slowly realized that what’s been healing to people for the last 3000 years, maybe can have something relevant to this allopathic medicine we’ve had for the last 70 years. And so there’s a little bit that you can take from both, and I hate the idea that you have to go the traditional route or alternative. So many of the metabolic treatments that we talked about, are complementary, they are integrative, right? People can choose from this wonderful palette that we have of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, mistletoe, you know, stress reduction, diet, all of this, figuring out what’s going to work for them work with the doctor who supports that. And I think that’s the quickest, easiest path to healing.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, I like I’d like to think of it as it’s an A, there’s so many things you can do in addition to what your doctor may have given you. And yet, I feel like what I’ve seen so much with cancer patients who have had cancer is that the options are given are very limited. And it’s sort of you have this choice, and this is the only choice. But what I hear you saying is yes, that is a choice. Plus, here are all the other choices that you can be embarking upon.

Maggie Jones  

Yes, and these metabolic therapy is like fasting, diet, rescue size, age, but these are not going to hurt you, the adjuvant therapies, so why not take advantage of them to accelerate your conventional healing. And in our documentary, we do talk to a lot of people who, for stage four terminal like me chose not to take the palliative treatment, which is they knew wouldn’t cure them, I knew that mine wouldn’t cure me. And these are people who are documented in medical journals as case studies. So they were some of the first that we talked to, and their stories of healing have been incredible. But it doesn’t mean that we’re promoting that as the only way to go, really, I feel that traditional plus, metabolic. The combination is stronger than both of them individually.

Dr. Mindy  

So well said, and are there any tests that you would say, hey, everybody needs to run these tests every year to make sure that cancer isn’t brewing.

Maggie Jones  

Yeah, Dr. Naisha, who you’ve spoken to before, has a wonderful list of lab tests. I loved using those. Some people like me are lucky enough to have cancer tumor markers that track their cancer and cancer progression. So I rely on those, I still get my scans several times a year. But for me very, very personally, I don’t rely on my scans at all. Because again, with my MRI, you would look at me to come a vegetable and I’m right, fine. I’m not great. Yeah, pretty much fine. And if I believed the scans more than I believe myself, I don’t think I’d be doing as well.

Brad Jones  

Is that was that hard to overcome? When I mean, we have such a society where when the doctor sits up here, and tells you how it’s going to go down. You in order for you to believe in yourself, especially if you’ve been given a bad prognosis you have to go against a culture. Yeah, I mean, like, I have so much admiration, I think of everything potentially that you did. It’s overcoming that that patriarchal authority telling you this is the way it’s gonna go down. That might be the hardest.

Brad Jones  

Yes, yeah. But yeah, so actually, while you’re talking there just reminded us of the story that when Maggie was in Hong Kong, and she basically had this radiation done for the, for the tumors that were in her brain, her next couple of scans started to look like there might be more activity, more cancer in her brain. But we were very lucky to have run across a, a presentation by Dr. Thomas Seyfried, where he talked about the fact that if you have radiation to your brain, it will very often kill so many cells, and what you get end up with is actually brain radiation necrosis, but on a skin, it’s almost undetectable from cancer. Yeah, on a on a regular MRI, it’s undetectable from cancer. So we’re just really lucky that we ran across this presentation from him. And then so when we went in, and we heard this from her doctor, he was like, hey, it looks like you got more cancer, like we gotta go in and do more radiation. And then the other thing is that if you do more radiation on top of that, it’s actually worse. So we were very luckily just sort of prepared to push back and it was much harder. Then I thought it was going to be actually

Maggie Jones  

but you know, with all these various men telling me all the sides of research, I’m very lucky that I have this deep seated arrogance. I love it. I love I’m I know better. And it’s not always been a good character traits. You in trouble? Yeah, really did and to this day I love I love matching wits with my doctors.

Brad Jones  

I was gonna say it’s just like finish it that story. So we he finally referred us to another specialist who did like a brain scan of hers. This specialist confirmed that it was not more cancer that it was this brain radiation necrosis, we went back to him because we’re like, Hey, he’s got more cancer patients. He wants to know this right? Killed me if I followed more radiation, most most likely, yeah. And so we go to him, and we’re just like, you know, just like, hey, you might want to know this. We saw this, you know, and he’s just sort of like,

Maggie Jones  

oh, he says, Oh, I usually work with a bigger team at my old hospital. And that was it like no, nothing said,

Brad Jones  

yeah, just you. You just want the doctor to be like, oh, man, like, this is great. This is good information. I can help other people right, or anything like that. Right. Or Thank you.

Maggie Jones  

Thank you. I tried to kill you.

Brad Jones  

Yeah, nothing. Yeah, right.

Dr. Mindy  

Right. Well, they’re I mean, unfortunately, they’re not trained to show what they don’t know. They’re trained to be the most certain person in the world in the room. So you know that I understand that. Yeah. Let’s, let’s finish up on this. You guys are doing something really cool with your Summit. I had a lovely conversation with you, Maggie. And was really excited to bring what I know about metabolic flexibility and fasting to it. And I can’t tell you how excited I am for the panel that I get to sit on with all those fasting, pioneers. So talk a little bit about what it is and why you’re doing it. Because education is I think so important. And I don’t know about you all, but I feel like when the pandemic hit, all of a sudden, we forgot about cancer. Like we stopped talking about cancer, we started talking about like immune system and COVID. And like, I keep wondering, like, Hey, are we going to come back to this conversation that cancer is our growing

Maggie Jones  

cause of still, so we write this documentary cancer evolution with incredible scientist practitioners. And it explains the why of the metabolic theory of cancer and why your genes aren’t your destiny and your lifestyle choices can make such a big difference. But it’s just about the why the science of the treatments the how is advancing so quickly. And we’re not calling we’re hoarders for we’re not here to tell you how to treat your cancer. But we wanted to bring together the wonderful healers who are there for that people like you, Mindy and your presentation is incredible. And so we do have a panel on fasting including folks like Valter, Longo, Jason Fung, you a couple others in New Zealand, which will be wonderful talking about other nutritional ways of treating cancer or adjunct therapies like keto or just nutritional dense diet, off label drugs, supplements is something that I use. And while we have to be extremely evidence based in the documentary, I’m going a little bit wider, which is the cancer emotional support in this I met also. So this will be in a number 21 to 26. And everyone who joins will get access to the world premiere. And we’d love for your community to take advantage of a coupon code Pels, 20, to get 20% off the summit. And we do have to charge for the summit for the platform costs and all of that, but anybody can sign up to get access to the documentary itself for just a donation basis, because that costs us a little bit less money.

Dr. Mindy  

So what would would you watch it if you have cancer? Or would you watch it if you want to prevent cancer, or both?

Maggie Jones  

Both anybody who has any, you know, fear of cancer or someone in their life who has been affected if they’re affected themselves, but we also have a really large percentage of practitioners, doctors, oncologist who are joining to learn more, because this information just isn’t out there. And it’s so easy for me to joke about these doctors who don’t know about it and try to act confident. Nobody goes into medicine not wanting to help people, their answers get tied by the system. Right. So frustrating. So we’re here to like, help empower the practitioners and clinicians themselves, but mostly the cancer patients, because you might know my philosophy on that. It’s the patient. That takes precedence.

Brad Jones  

Yeah. Yeah, both the Summit and the documentary itself are geared for patients. So and just to give you a little bit more idea that the documentary itself is about the metabolic theory of cancer, which, as we mentioned, a lot of people don’t know that, you know, the genetic theory of cancer is just a theory. So it’s, it’s, we haven’t really gotten as far as we would have liked using it as the basis for the theory of cancer. Here’s some pretty weak theory.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, I was just gonna say, you know, we’ve, I feel like actually we probably should have started this whole conversation with the theory has changed. It is not it cancer is not a disease of your genes, it’s a metabolic dysfunction. Can you just, you know, just I don’t want to lose that because I think if you’re listening to this, and you’ve never heard that, that is ginormous reframe. So talk a little bit about why it’s a metabolic disease. you’ve alluded a bit to it.

Brad Jones  

Yeah. The main, the main thing that starts we talk about this, the scientific history of how this, you know, back in the early 1900s, before we really even knew about much about genes or DNA for sure. You know, we’re just studying cancer from a very, sort of more top down approach. And with this guy, Otto Warburg, the scientist found that cancer cells were consuming more glucose. And using fermentation, instead of respiration. It’s like when you’re using your, your mitochondria normally use oxygen, when you’re making energy, and they only turn to fermentation when you run out of oxygen. That’s pretty much the only time you use it. And so this metabolic idea of cancer is just that, since cancer is using so much more glucose, maybe that that had something to do with the way cancer formed.

Maggie Jones  

Well, yeah, and we find that definitely genetic alterations play a role in cancer, you look at a lot of cancers, they have these alterations. But the difference between the metabolic theory is that it starts with damage to your mitochondria in your metabolism, and that was as a DNA changes as a downstream effect. It does not mean that your DNA is what’s going to cause you to have cancer. It goes the other way around is what we’re finding. And again, metabolic theory is just a theory. And there’s wonderful other theories involving like the atavistic model, things like that. So we’re just opening this up saying we need to do more research. And we can’t assume that we’ve finished cancer will 600,000 People are dying a day of it, we have to continue to research because cancer is evolving and cancer science should evolve. Thank you.

Dr. Mindy  

Right. And actually, you have me thinking that I don’t for those of us that have been in the biohacking world for some time, that mitochondria has become the target, right? Everybody wants to get at the mitochondria. And I actually think where that obsession with the mitochondria came from is from Thomas Seyfried. And and the this idea that cancer starts in the mitochondria, not in the nucleus, where the DNA is that and once people started to open up that conversation, we started to see oh, my gosh, we got to heal these mitochondria to to heal from everything, not just cancer. The whole biohacking world emerged at that moment. And yet, I think we lost sight that it started in the cancer movement. And that, you know, is a gift we all got from exploring Thomas Seyfried ‘s work.

Brad Jones  

Yeah, one like just sort of interesting fact on that in that thought, is that there’s a couple of cells in your body that almost exclusively use respiration, they almost never turn to fermentation. And that’s the muscles in your heart and the neurons in your brain. Those cells almost never get cancer, it’s extremely rare. If you get heart cancer, or brain cancer, it’s not those cells, it’s the supporting cells around those cells. So just very interesting that the cells that are just constantly using respiration almost never get cancer.

Maggie Jones  

Yeah. And I think it just shows that the root of all these chronic diseases like I believe cancer can be a chronic disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, they all suffering from this metabolism issues that have become endemic in our current society.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, a great a great, well, thank you. I hope this is going to help millions. You know, I again, I wanted to really come at this conversation from two angles, how do we help the person who got the diagnosis? And how do we all wake up and start to prevent the diagnosis? So I’m just I’m really grateful for your work. And of course, I have to finish with my quiet last question since Maggie are already ready for it. Tell me what your self love practices and what’s your superpower? I’ve I think I know your superpower. But I’ve

Maggie Jones  

already talked about it. It’s just the fact that I believe in myself so deeply. Nobody else matters when it comes to

Dr. Mindy  

amazing

Maggie Jones  

and yeah, myself. Practice is stress reduction is huge for me yoga, meditation, my healing foods and fasting I could not function without

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, amen to that. Okay, Brad, you get to answer that to

Brad Jones  

my little secret is I like to take a little bit of me time in the morning, just maybe that first hour of the day or for 30 minutes, whatever I can get. And sometimes I meditate sometimes just have a cup of coffee, but just having that, you know, extra half hour hour before I have to take on the world that really helps me out. superpower I think I’ll just go with support. I just feel like is my real superpower just probably just because I Yeah, Maggie says it to me all the time. But I just, you know, just it took a team I think to kind of get through what she what she’s been through. So I think that that’s probably it. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy  

Oh my gosh, I got chills on that one. Well thank you to both of you. I’m so excited for the summit. I can’t wait to get on this panel with Dr. Fung and Dr. Longo. So I appreciate the opportunity. And just just keep shouting it from the rooftops. We are all more powerful together when we bring this message. So I really, really appreciate what you’re up to.

Maggie Jones  

Thank you for your participation in this but for everything you do, you’ve taught me so much and the community so much. Thank you.

Brad Jones  

Yeah, thanks, Mandy.

Dr. Mindy  

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode, I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.