Cancer. Likely one of the most feared diseases in the modern world. And with good reason as many die from the disease every year. So, what is the best way to fight/prevent cancer? And is there an answer to how to fight cancer naturally and effectively (either in prevention, or as a treatment, with or without conventional treatments)?
In this podcast, I speak with Chris Wark, a cancer survivor, speaker, health coach, and author of the book “Chris Beat Cancer, A Comprehensive Plan For Healing Naturally”. Chris will share his amazing story about how he overcame stage 3C colon cancer. He will uncover some of the science on cancer treatment. So listen in as Chris shares his story about how (as his brand says ) “Chris beat cancer” and his take on how to best prevent and fight cancer naturally and effectively.
(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this podcast are based on Chris’ experiences and Chris’s personal views on the best approach to cancer treatment. This podcast is NOT intended to communicate any sort of blanket recommendation of natural anti-cancer therapies or any sort of shunning of conventional therapies. Please be aware that your choice of therapy for cancer treatment can be a life vs. death decision. If you have cancer, you should ALWAYS do a thorough analysis of the views of experts on this topic, and consult your physician (ideally multiple physicians, and ideally at least one Integrative physician with strong expertise in nutrition and lifestyle factors) BEFORE making any decisions on which way to go. This podcast is NOT intended to encourage people to shun conventional anti-cancer therapies (which can be life-saving and a very effective in some types of cancer). Please also be aware that even if you go a conventional route, there are natural/holistic strategies with science-backed nad proven efficacy to enhance conventional treatment (e.g. chemotherapy) efficacy. So even if you go a conventional therapy route, I strongly encourage working with a physician with expertise in nutrition and lifestyle strategies that enhance the effectiveness of the conventional cancer treatments. With all of that said, please enjoy Chris’ perspective on fighting cancer. There is much wisdom to be gleaned from his experiences and perspective.
Also please note that I intend to have two cancer researchers — with differeing perspectives — on the podcast in the near future, to provide you all with a comprehensive picture of the views of the best anti-cancer therapies from the experts.)
In this podcast, we’ll cover
- The wild (and emotionally intense) story of how Chris beat cancer
- The best anti-cancer foods
- Chris’ take on what science says about chemotherapy for different cancer types
- Keto vs. vegan diets. Why Chris favors a plant-based approach ot anti-cancer therapy rather than keto
- Why most cancer treatment protocols don’t include nutrition and lifestyle
- Chris’s top 3 tips for anyone with cancer who wants to know what to do
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How To Prevent and Fight Cancer Naturally And Effectively with Chris Wark (Chris Beat Cancer) – Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey there, this is Ari Whitten with the Energy Blueprint Podcast and welcome back. Today, I have with me Chris Wark, who is an author, speaker and health coach. He was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer in 2003 at 26 years old. He had surgery, but instead of chemotherapy, he used nutrition and natural therapies to heal himself. Chris has made appearances on radio and television and was featured in the award winning documentary, ”the C word”. He inspires countless people to take control of their health and reverse disease with a radical transformation of diet and lifestyle. And he is the new author of the book, ”Chris Beat Cancer, A Comprehensive Plan For Healing Naturally”. So also I want to mention that, I’ve promoted his program square 1. It’s called square one a couple times before and I’m a big fan of his work. So with that said, Chris, welcome to the show
Chris Wark: Ari. What’s up, man? Thanks for having me.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, my pleasure. It’s great to have you here. Finally.
Chris Wark: Yeah. Dude, good. I spent a long time coming.
How Chris beat Cancer
Ari Whitten: Yeah, definitely. So, I would love to get started by digging more into your story. So you were diagnosed with stage three colon cancer at age 26, this was all the way back in 2003. So take our listeners through that. What, what was that like being, you know, kind of receiving that diagnosis of cancer at such a young age and your mid twenties and then what, what was that whole process like as far as the decision making and the emotional state and all that?
Chris Wark: Yeah. So man, when I was 26 years old I was having abdominal pain and I thought it had an ulcer and I ignored it for the better part of the year because I just thought, you know, I don’t know, maybe it’ll go away or whatever. And unfortunately the pain just got worse and worse. So, my wife talked me into going to see the doctor and they kind of referred me around to a few different doctors and they prescribed me some medicine for ulcers, didn’t help. And then eventually the pain just got so bad that it was balled up on the couch every night after dinner I was just like, man, like, something is wrong.
So I went to a gastroenterologist, he did a colonoscopy and uh, when I woke up after that procedure… You know, my wife and I are in this little, this little room or whatever. And he comes in, he said, look, you’ve got a golf ball sized tumor in your colon and you know, I was still on some pretty heavy medication, propophol or whatever they used to put you out. And, I just just like, like what? Like, this doesn’t even, I just doesn’t even make sense. Like what, what, what are we talking about right now?
So he said, look, we got to, you’ve got this tumor and might be cancerous. We took a biopsy, we were gonna send it to the lab and see if it’s cancer or not. So a day or so later I got a call and they said, listen, it is in fact colon cancer. We need to get you into surgery right away and get this thing out to do before it spreads and kills you.
And at that time in my life, I was, again, 26, pretty young. I’ve been married less than two years. I was in real estate, building a real estate business and I had never had any friends or family members go through cancer. So I’d never really seen it up close and personal. And I’m like most cancer patients, I was pretty clueless about treatment, about the disease, about the industry. I didn’t know anything. And so when they said you’ve got to have surgery, uh, and we’ve got to take this thing out of you right away. I said, I was like, okay, right. I got it if you say so, I, you know, I cancers seems pretty scary, so I guess I should do this.
And this was just a couple of days before Christmas. And so I was like, man, you know, is there any way we can. We can postpone the surgery until after Christmas. Like I’m already kind of depressed enough and I’d rather not be in the hospital on Christmas. And they were like, yeah, that’s fine.
So I went in on December 30th and they took out a third of my large intestine was supposed to be laparoscopic, but when he put the scope in and started looking around, the surgeon was like, uhoh, like this doesn’t look good and he could see that the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes and there’s a lot of inflammation around the, around the tumor site and stuff.
So he opted to just cut me open old school, uh, took out a third of my colon. The ascending colon, which is on the right side of your body, took out my appendix while he was in there, uh, I took out the tumor and a bunch of lymph nodes in an attempt to get clear margins. Right?
So I woke up and they said, well, you’ve got more bad news for you. We thought it was, we’re hoping it was going to be staged to a but it stage three c and because it’s stage three, that’s it’s metastasized to your lymph nodes. It was spreading, um, you’re going to need nine to 12 months of chemotherapy in order to prevent a recurrence.
And so I’m like, oh, like I hadn’t even thought about chemo, like you’d never, we’d never even talked about it because they thought they could do the surgery and just go back to my normal life.
So now, you know, on some heavy drugs, laying in the hospital trying to recover from the surgery and I’m just like, thinking about my life and what was gonna happen to me.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, wow.
Chris Wark: And I initially had accepted the fact that I was going to be a, just a very typical cancer patient, right. Just a chemo patient and I can lose my hair and I don’t know what…
Ari Whitten: And at this time you weren’t particularly health conscious, this health consciousness was not on your radar, that you were not, you know, like me, kind of like a health geek from the time you were 12 years old?
Chris Wark: Nope. I’ve gone through phases in my life where I had gone to the gym and I grew up playing sports and things like that. But at that time in my life I was eating just a very, very, very western diet. I was eating tons of meat and dairy, tons of processed food, junk food, fast food, anything I wanted because I’ve always been thin.
So like I was a junk food connoisseur man and tons of barbecue because I live in Memphis, you know, it’s like the barbecue capital of the world. So yeah, I was not taking care of myself at all and I was under a lot of stress in my life. I was like, you know, trying to build this business as an entrepreneur and real estate is really tough and you deal with a lot of difficult people, a from contractors to tenants and whatever.
And so yeah, I just had just all, just all kinds of things in my life that were contributing to my, to my disease, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But so two things happened in the hospital that started me thinking differently and I did have a background, like I worked at a wild oats when I was in college. So like I knew about health food, right? Like I knew what it was. I was very aware that there was health, food, junk food.
Ari Whitten: Like you knew that there was such a thing as you were shoving Mcdonald’s in your face.
Chris Wark: Yeah, yeah, I was aware. I was aware. The thing about the health food industry in general and the natural living and health industry is a lot of people that are drawn to it are drawn to it because they have disease, right? Because they’re trying to heal.
And I’d never had any problems so I wasn’t drawn to it. My mom’s another story, which I’ll tell in a minute. So these two things happen in the hospital, the first thing they, that, that happened was the very first meal that they served me after taking out a third of my large intestine. Do you know that? You know what it was,
Ari Whitten: I’m guessing some terrible hospital food.
Chris Wark: It was terrible. Hospital food. Yes. It was a sloppy Joe.
Ari Whitten: Oh Jeez.
Chris Wark: Sloppy Joe, which, you know, the sloppy joe is it really kind of interesting food item in and of itself because I’m, they don’t serve Sloppy Joes in restaurants. Right? Because nobody likes him. The only way, the only place you can get a Sloppy Joe is summer camp, you know, maybe if you’re in the army or prison, and apparently at the hospital if you have cancer.
Ari Whitten: I’m just curious, I’m wondering if, I don’t know the answer to this, but I’m wondering if Sloppy Joes is an American thing only. It probably is. And so maybe to all my non American listeners, maybe you just want to explain what that is.
Chris Wark: Sloppy Joe. Yeah. It’s basically ground beef, some kind of ground up mystery meat ground beef, that they do in sort of like a tomato sauce. Right. And then they get a burger bun and they just kind of slop it on there. Yeah, right.
Ari Whitten: Like a burger not formed into a patty with certain kinds of seasoning and it’s like falling all over the place out of the bun. So hence the sloppiness.
Chris Wark: Yeah. Yeah. Kinda like meatloaf. But it’s almost just like a soup they just laid onto your bun. almost if you, if you little chilly onto a burger bun, it’s kind of like that.
Ari Whitten: That’s a good way of explaining it. So anyway, I mean, you know, red meat is a group two carcinogen, specifically known to cause colon cancer. Right? And they’re like, here you go, buddy, you go colon cancer patient would just cut out a third of your large intestine, enjoy this Sloppy Joe.
So that, so strange to me. And I was just looking at it going, I don’t understand. Like I didn’t know that it was… it caused cancer, but I just knew it was like such terrible food and I didn’t want to eat it, but I was really hungry. So I did. Then the second thing that happened in the hospital was a, the, the day I was, they told me I could go home.
The surgeon came in to check on me and we were having a conversation and I said, is there any food I need to avoid? Because instinctively I wanted to take care of myself. Like, I already had the mindset that I want to help myself get well, right. I don’t want to screw up the surgery or the stitches, eat the wrong thing, or are there rules like, you know, I’ve never had my guts cut out and sewn back together. So I’m like, yeah, you know, is there any food I need to eat or avoid? And he says, no, no, just don’t lift anything heavier than a beer.
Ari Whitten: That’s great.
Chris Wark: Yeah.
Ari Whitten: Don’t lift anything heavier than a beer candy bar or.
Chris Wark: Yeah. So I’m like, uh, okay. All right.And that was it. I mean that’s all the nutritional advice I got from my surgeon. So I’m thinking, you know, the wheels are turning right. And I’m thinking why is there such a disconnect between health and health care? Like nobody seems to care like about healthy eating. And it was weird to me. So I go home, I’m recovering from surgery, I’m on trying to get off pain medication because that, it just didn’t like feeling doped up and, you know, just after a few days of being home I was just really thinking a lot about my life and my future and you know, how many birthdays I had left and uh, what, what going through chemotherapy was going to be like, what is going to do to me and I just started develop this, starting to develop this increasing resistance to chemotherapy.
I mean to the idea that I needed to poison my way back to health. Like that didn’t make sense to me like we’re going to give you, this stuff is going to make you really sick, right? But it’s supposed to help cure your cancer.
And like I said before, I had never had anybody go through this in my life, so I really didn’t know. I just was operating on instincts and I, my wife and are Christians and I was just like, I don’t know what to do. And so we, we prayed about it and I just said, God, if there’s another way besides chemo, just show me because I don’t know what to do. This doesn’t feel right, feels wrong for me. It’s not that it’s wrong for everybody, but it felt wrong for me. Like deep down on something was saying like don’t do this. And I felt like really it was just, just, just, it would destroy me.
I was very physically vulnerable at that time. I was skinny, underweight already had lost a ton of weight over the previous year from not eating because when you have the digestive disease like you don’t want to eat because it causes pain.
So I was eating a lot less, lost a lot of weight. Then I had the surgery, lost more weight because that it need for, you know, days. And I just felt like I don’t know if I’ll even survive that. Two days after I prayed about it, I got a book that was sent to me from a man in Alaska who knew my dad. And this guy was a business client of my dad’s. I’m in Tennessee.
And so this book shows up on my doorstep, open the package and start reading this book. And the guy who wrote it, we had had discovered he had colon cancer back in the 19 seventies and he had watched his mother suffer and die through cancer treatment and other church members and things. And he just was like, well, you know, I’m not doing that. And he happened to have a friend who’s like a health nut who told him, man, you just need to go back to the garden of Eden eat raw fruits and vegetables only and you should probably start juicing carrots too.
You need to drink a lot of characters. So this guy does this, and a year later his tumor is gone. The body’s body healed, right? It wasn’t like a Miracle Cure. It’s just his body healed, right? Whatever he was doing that contributed to his disease, it might have been multiple things he stopped doing and you started doing things that contributed to health.
And I’m reading this guy’s story and I’m like, oh my gosh, this is it. This is exactly what I needed to do. I asked for something. This showed up. This is what I’m doing, like no doubt whatsoever. Right. And it was, again, I didn’t have a bunch of studies or science or proof or anything. I had one guy’s testimonial, one guy’s story and he was still alive, you know, 30 years later or whatever. And I just knew, right? I knew this was it. I called my wife and I was really excited about it. I’m trying to explain like I got this book and a like, this guy is talking about like a raw food diet. I’d never heard of it.
I mean, nobody was talking about raw foods in 2004, right? There was no youtube, there was no instagram. Facebook, raw food wasn’t like hot, sexy singles, you know, it wasn’t like the supermodel diet or whatever. And so it was just a diet for fringy kind of hippyish weirdos.
And uh, but anyway, I’m trying to explain that to her. I’m like, we got to get a juicer and all like, you know, she’s at work or on the phone. And she’s like, well, what are you talking about? Like you’re still doing chemo. And I’m like, no, I don’t really want to do it, you know, I feel like I don’t know, I don’t want to do it.
And so we get off the phone. It didn’t really end. The conversation didn’t go very well. Get off the phone. And then, you know, almost immediately other family members are calling me saying, we heard you’re thinking about not doing chemotherapy…
Ari Whitten: Jeez…
Chris Wark: This is really serious. You need to do exactly what the doctor says. I’m don’t you think if there was something better, they’d know about it and you know, I knew somebody that tried alternative therapies and they died.
And I’m like, oh my gosh, what is happening? You know, I went from like all this like excitement and elation and like answered prayer kind of bliss and excited about radically changing my life and embarking on this healing journey to everybody around me saying, no, it’s a mistake. Don’t do that. Like, that’s wrong. And so like you can imagine just like the swirling emotions of like fear and doubt and anxiety and stress. Like all of that, and I’m trying to figure out like what, like what do I do? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do now.
Ari Whitten: It’s almost, you know, it’s like if you’re alone and you’re just, you know, let’s say a 26 year old guy and you’re single and you don’t even really have that closer relationship to your family or they don’t really have such strong opinions on this. It’s almost easier to make the kind of decision that you were trying to make and now you have all these people like thinking you’re crazy and stressing you out and trying to talk you out of it.
And you know, now they’re adding this other layer of psychological stress, which I would imagine is pretty intense psychological stress when your life is at stake.
Chris Wark: Super intense.
Ari Whitten: Yeah…
Chris Wark: Super intense. But I had a couple of things going for me. One, um, I’m an only child and I’m pretty stubborn. And so, I, despite all of that, I was, I just knew like, this is what I gotta do I have to do this and I have to survive. And, and you know, there was sort of a deep regulatory apifany that I had and the big revelation was the way you’re living is killing you. Right?
And if that’s true, then you need to change your whole life. This is the same thing I tell every cancer patient, right, not to blame or shame anybody, but it’s like, look, this is a wakeup call here.
Uh, I know so much more about cancer now than I did back then. But uh, if, if I contributed to this disease in some way, and by the way, the first book I read was making the case that the reason we have, you know, cancer is such a big problem. So because of our diet, like it’s so much of, it’s driven by diet and lifestyle and eating way too much meat and dairy from fast food, processed food, junk food. And I’m like, yeah, that’s me. And so, you know, it’s the first I’ve ever heard anyone talk about that. Like the lot of cancers are caused by our diet. In fact, what’s, this is crazy.
The number two cause of cancer is obesity number two, cause number one. Cause most people can guess it’s smoking. Number two is obesity and obesity accounts for over 600,000 diagnosis of cancer every year.
Forty percent of all cancers are caused by obesity. It’s like what? Like, no one’s talking about this, but this isn’t just. Chris is weird statistical analysis. This is like National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, like look at any of the major governing bodies that cancer research. They agree.
And so that’s kind of a mindblower right now. I wasn’t obese. Okay. So skinny people can get cancer too, but it was a, I mean, it’s a testament to the fact that our diet which is contributing to contributing to obesity, right? Is the leading cause of cancer aside from cigarettes.
So, I realized I’ve got to change my whole life and I love the, the holistic approach to wellness, which was in a nutshell, enabling your body to heal, right? Instead of treating a symptom, right? Or targeting a symptom or targeting a disease, right? You are trying to restore health rebuilds your body and create an environment, an environment where cancer cannot thrive, right?
Because if you have cancer, the tumor is not the problem, it’s a problem, right? But it’s not the problem. It’s a symptom of a systemic metabolic disease, head to toe disease, and it essentially means your body is hospitable to cancer. Your immune system is overloaded or suppressed and you have multiple, multiple, just, we’ll just say system wide dysfunction.
So, those are big ideas, right? But when you look at cancer that way you realize, man, you know, cutting it out, poisoning it, radiating it. That doesn’t solve the body problem, right? That doesn’t fix my terrain where cancer is thriving.
Ari Whitten: I’ll mention a quick story, personal story in my family, , that is relevant to this highly relevant and I, I didn’t grow up in, in, in a family that was mainstream in they’re thinking and that like, I, if, if I was you at 26 and I had the same diagnosis and I said I don’t want to do chemo, I want to treat this naturally. My family, my parents would have had no problem with it whatsoever. And there’s the reason why is that my, my grandma, my dad’s mom actually was diagnosed. I’m actually forgetting what specific type of cancer it was. I was, I was very young at the time. I was, maybe not even born yet actually when this was happening or maybe just a few years old when she was diagnosed with a very severe, I think it was stage four of some kind of cancer.
I’m forgetting what specific kind, but she was given about six to eight weeks to live and she decided that she, you know, she wasn’t really given any options. She was just told you have probably six to eight weeks to live and she decided to go down to, to Mexico, to the Gerson Clinic and do an alternative approach to cancer. Which at that time, this was back in the early nineties or maybe the late eighties, uh, and at that time it was not common or popular at all like it is today. It was a pretty wacky idea. Everybody thought she was crazy for doing that.
And, she lived another six years after that and then actually died from something totally unrelated. She died from getting bitten by a brown recluse spider. But, um, but she lived six years after, given been given that diagnosis of living six to eight weeks and she was all about green juices and coffee enemas and you know, the whole, the whole Gerson Protocol, I think they also do liver or something like raw liver..
Chris Wark: They used to. They used to raw liver juice. Yeah. Yeah.
Ari Whitten: I grew up in that and in an environment that was very friendly to those sorts of things because we all saw what it did for, for my grandma.
Chris Wark: That’s amazing. And I hear stories like that all the time, which I just like are so great. And it’s amazing that anybody even found out about this clinic’s back then because it was all word of mouth right now you can find them online, but back then literally like somebody had to tell you about it basically, you know.
So get this. My mom was a, had always been into health and even though we’re in Memphis, Tennessee, it’s not a healthy place, right? It’s not like California. And she’d always been into health and, you know, love to go to the health food store and buy some little supplement she read about in Prevention magazine or you know, our, our pantry always had like the, you know, peanut butter, you had to stir up.
Right. And we always had like sprouts in the fridge and Kiefer and stuff like that. So my mom was not near the level of today’s hardcore, like crunchy mamas, but she was like, you know, healthier than the average mom. And she would buy whole grain bread instead of white bread.
She wouldn’t let me buy lucky charms. It was like, you know, I dunno, whatever granola or something. So, but my first birthday was at a Mcdonald’s. So like, just, just so I understand, like I, I lots of fast food and junk food growing up too. But my mom had amassed this library of books on nutrition, on alternative cancer therapies, raw food. Like, she had all these books about it and she had read them all.
She was just like an avid lifelong learner. Just loved to learn, loved to read, loved to read, loved to research, loved information on health and healing, natural therapies, stuff like that.
So when I told her, well, you know what I want her to do, she was all for it. So she was the only person in the beginning that really supported me. Now my dad supported me, but he, he was just kind of, this just kind of didn’t oppose me. Wasn’t enthusiastic either way. Yeah, he just was there just for whatever you decide, I’ll support. Right.
My wife’s side of the family, it was a little bit more, you know, they love me. They wanted me to survive, but they didn’t understand and they were much more conventionally minded. Right. So they’re really pushing me to do that. But having said all that, you know, like I said earlier, I was stubborn so… I was like, I don’t care. I’m doing this work. And I went out and bought a juicer immediately loaded up fruits and vegetables, like bought a bunch of carrots.
I went to whole foods and it was like, Oh man, they sell like 25 pound bags of juicing carrots. Like, oh, okay, this is a, this is a thing, you know, like, this is for people who are serious about juicing I guess. And that’s me now. Like, yeah. So for me, I didn’t spend really any time researching beyond this first book. Like it was like I got a book, learn something, I’m doing it, I could take action, we’ll figure it out as we go, like there’s no time to waste.
How many oncologists use a fear-based approach to get people to sign up for chemotherapy
So converted to a raw food diet overnight. Just raw fruits and vegetables and juicing and um, and then kept reading and researching and learning about other books and like trying to figure out like, okay, what else can I do, what else can I do? And, but also in order to appease, you know, family pressure, I reluctantly agreed to go see the oncologist, you know, because people are saying like, you know, we just go here what he has to say.
And maybe there’s some alternative therapies available. I mean you just never know unless you go see. And I’m like, okay, alright. So we go the, we go to the clinic, the parking lot’s full, the waiting rooms packed, you know, I walk in there and I’m looking around and you know. It’s weird because you’re like, okay, I’m a cancer patient, I have cancer, I’m in a Mike in the cancer club now. Who else is in the club? Right? Like the first day of school, you know, like who else is in my class? And you’re looking around and I’m looking around. Everybody has gray hair. I’m 26, handlebar mustache, long shaggy hair. Like I was a musician too.
I was playing in rock bands and like I don’t, what am I doing here? I just don’t eat, I don’t belong here. Everyone is here. Everyone here is twice my age or several of these people are three times my age and we sit down on the couch were, you know, to check in.
We’re watching the TV. Like you know how waiting rooms are here than there for like an hour no matter what. And out comes, Jack Elaine on the TV on one of the morning shows and he starts going off and the guys like 78, 80, somewhere around there and he’s just going off about nutrition and he’s like, look, the reason we’re all so sick is because running on is manmade food and processed food and junk food. If man made it, don’t eat it. And I’m like, Whoa, what is happening?
I can’t believe this is on right now in the cancer clinic on the TV. And I turned to my wife and I was like, she was like, yeah, it’s pretty weird.
And so we go back to see the oncologist and he gives me the, just the boiler plate pitch, right? He’s like, got my file open. And he’s like, look, you know, for 26 years old you have stage three c colon cancer. It’s very aggressive in young adults you’re going to need chemotherapy, five fee plus Leucovorin. And you’ve got about a 60 percent chance of living five years with treatment. Now, I didn’t know anything, back then.
And had I known things, I would have asked a lot more questions. By the way, there’s a free guide on my website now. It’s called 20 questions for your oncologist that I created that like is something I wished existed when I was going through this, but anyway, so he basically just telling me how it’s going to be.
But I asked a couple of questions and that really shifted the tone of the conversation in it ended up going in a direction that I did not expect at all. So the first thing I said was, well, you know, what about the raw food diet because I’ve been on it for one week. And he said, no, you can’t do that. It’ll fight the chemo.
I didn’t ask him why. I learned later that I’m there. They were afraid that raw food is dangerous when you’re taking chemotherapy because chemotherapy decimates your immune system. Right? So you become very vulnerable to otherwise harmless bacteria on an apple. Right.
Ari Whitten: Was the concern that concern of micro organisms or concern of the phytonutrient content?
Chris Wark: Maybe a little bit of both, but the neutropenic diet is sort of an old concept that originated around cancer cancer therapy where they, they think patients need to eat cooked food, microorganisms, which has since been proven to not be an issue. But he said, it’ll fight the chemo. The other thing about raw food and, and chemotherapy is a raw food diet is a very aggressive detoxification diet. So when they, when they give you chemotherapy to a patient eating raw foods, you know, your body is so in tune with like whole foods, right?
When you put something foreign in there, it’s like, Whoa, like what is this? Like get it out. So it detoxifies a lot, lot faster and the chemo is typically less damaging. It doesn’t do as much harm as they want it to do.
Ari Whitten: Harm to the cancer cells?
Chris Wark: Right. So, uh, the other thing he said, no, he didn’t explain any of that. I learned that later. Um, the other thing he said to me that I thought was really weird, uh, well, that really changed the conversation actually, is I said, well, are there any alternative therapies available? And he said, no, there are none, if you don’t do chemotherapy, you’re insane.
And from there, the conversation just turned into him just like braiding me with reasons I had to do chemo. And the main one was basically, if you don’t do it, you’re going to die. Right. And I, I went into this sort of deer in the headlights state, right? Because stress and anxiety affect your brain function. Like everything just kind of goes haywire when fear and stress takeover. And he’s talking down to me, he’s telling me all these things, they got to do chemo and, you know, just and I wasn’t even really hearing what he was saying. I just wanted to run out of there really. But one thing he said that, that jumped out was he said, he said, look, I’m not telling you this because I need your business. Which was like, wait, what? Like I was in sales and they taught me a technique in sales called the ”push away” and this guy just did the ”push away” on me and I’m like, wait, what? And like, what does business have to do with it? Like I didn’t even think about business. I thought this just like health care. Like I wasn’t thinking about it like a business.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. It’s one of those things where like, yeah, I didn’t even realize it was a business. I thought you were just genuinely trying to look after me in the best way that you know, what you think is in my best interest and, but now that you’re talking about business makes me think that maybe business is a big part of this conversation.
Chris Wark: It’s a huge part. And most of us view the medical industry as this sort of altruistic, you know, a profession of like selfless angels or whatever. And there’s a lot of wonderful people, wonderful people in there. But, it’s such a screwed up industry that… it’s a screwed up industry that screws up people in it, right? And it and it turns enthusiastic, well-meaning Med students who want to help make a difference in the world into a sort of like, you know, like the old star trek thing where like you will be assimilated into Klingons or whatever. Like it just turns them into or not are the Borg the Borg.
Ari Whitten: I actually was never into Star Trek so you can say anything right now. I just nod my head point
Chris Wark: It was like, yeah, everyone is conformed like going into the military, like you have to conform and become this thing that we make you into. Right. And they jam people… medical students and doctors like into this box of conformity. And so I’m, I’m getting off track a little bit…
But the interesting and kind of crazy thing is that the medical profession has the highest rate of suicide of any profession because it’s so just mentally, emotionally and physically difficult to be a doctor. And because of the system, right? Because of this money driven a machinery system like institutionalized medicine system. So my appointment with the oncologist concluded and I got up and walked straight out of that office into the lobby to the desk like a robot and made an appointment to get a port put in to start chemo in a few weeks.
Like I had, I just been programmed, like manipulated with fear and uh, my wife and I walked out to her car and sat in her car and just held hands and cried and I choked out a prayer, you know, and was just, my faith was shattered. My confidence was gone. Like I was just terrified. And the reality is that cancer clinics, many of them are really fear factories. They use… So there’s so much fear in there and they use fear to manipulate people to say yes to treatment and cancer patients more often than not are making fear based decisions, not fact based decisions. And definitely not faith based decisions. They’re just making a decision out of fear, which is I just don’t want to die. I’ll do whatever you say. And I have sort of a two part mission in one of them is to help educate patients so they understand the risks and benefits of treatment before they say yes. That’s at that 20 questions guide is all about like ask the right questions so you understand what you’re getting into so you can make an informed decisions, you can make the best decision for you.
I don’t tell people don’t do chemo or don’t do treatment, like I don’t tell people those things, but I do talk about it with a great deal of scrutiny and criticism. The perils and pitfalls of conventional cancer treatment.
So anyway, I went home and I was fortunate and just thank God that I had several weeks before I was supposed to start chemo because a lot of patients, I mean they get them in chemo the next day, like a lot of cancer patients, they are diagnosed, they have got them in chemo within a day or two, right? Because they’ve kind of flip flopped now. They like to do chemo before surgery. And so like, well we need to do chemo first to shrink your tumor before surgery. So patients are just rushed in man, they don’t know what’s happening to them. No idea.
And so I am, I am recovering again, still recovering from surgery. I, but I am. And I was thinking like I don’t know what I was gonna do, like everybody wanted me to do chemo. I was afraid not to do chemo and but I had enough time to, to really do more reading and researching and praying and thinking about what I was going to do. And it’s kind of like this, I have to paths before me. I had like the wide paved, brightly lit road that everybody’s going down. That’s the road that leads to the chemo train and Chemo train is this beautiful modern express train. Right? And everybody’s cheering you on. Like, oh, we support you, we love you. We bake some cookies. Like we made some tee shirts that say, go Chris, you know, and we’re going to run a race for you, Right?
Because you get on the chemo train and it’s beautiful and everybody’s so nice to you. And the chairs are so comfortable, right? And they bring you a little cookies and treats and all your needs are met. Everybody loves you and supports you. And then there’s the other path where you’re just walking into the jungle alone in the dark, right? And there’s barely a path, right? There’s a few people have been through it, but that’s, you got nothing. You’ve got no guides, no support…
Ari Whitten: Might just be a cow trail. You’re not sure yet.
Chris Wark: Been a badger, maybe a hedgehog. Yeah, nothing. Right? And both. And I and I should’ve mentioned that, you know, as nice and wonderful and loving and supportive as the conventional treatment chemo train is. Once that thing starts, it’s very hard to get off right? And the suffering begins immediately and you just don’t know what’s going to happen at the end of the line and you’re going to get off better or worse, they’re going to tell you, we’ve done all we can do. You know where, sorry.
And then the, the jungle path. Who knows, not going to get lost in there and die alone. So both options were, were scary and I wished more than anything that some option could give me. There was an option that I gave me confidence, right? And there I didn’t have one.
Ari Whitten: So what ultimately made you decide and we already know the, the, the ending of this story, which is that you decided not to do chemo…
Chris Wark: The ending of the story is right here in the back. You’ve got to buy my book to find out if I lived or died.
Ari Whitten: Is that another one of your sales techniques?
Chris Wark: Yeah, exactly. We’re going to buy the book. Did he live or die? It’s out now. Find, find out what happened to Chris?
How Chris beat cancer – The best nutrition to cure cancer naturally and effectively
Yes. So, you know, when it came time, the day of when the day finally came that I was supposed to go get that port put in, I just woke up that morning and I was like, I’m not going. I’m not doing it, you know. I had been in, by the way, even though I was discouraged and afraid, and confused, and struggling mentally, emotionally about what to do a man. I went, I fired up the juicer. Dude, you know, I just was like, I’m doing this. I know I’m definitely doing this. I don’t know if I’m doing that, but I’m doing this.
Ari Whitten: [inaudible]
Chris Wark: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, in those weeks, I guess about three weeks, you know, I was just raw foods and juicing, man, I was just doing it, doing it, doing it, and I was feeling so good and so confident. And in that, in the meantime I had found a naturopathic doctor and I’d found an integrative oncologist who also supported me and had come out of retirement because he didn’t like being retired. And in his new season of practice, he was in his seventies in, is this new season of his practice. He was, he was actually integrating natural nontoxic therapies that were not FDA approved, but they were nontoxic, right?
Because he really was trying to find something that would help his patients. And his main concern was how can I help their immune system? Again, he’d spent his whole life as an oncologist. So he had seen how ineffective most cancer treatments are, especially when they’re caught in later stages.
And he just wanted to help people. And so he was doing IV vitamin C and other things. And so, so I, so I started to assemble a little bit of, of, of a team to support me on my mom, at the nutritionist and an oncologist. So that’s what I had in the beginning. And so that did help my confidence. Right.
And then so when the day came to to, to get the port put in, I was just like, I’m not doing it. I’m not going right. I, I’ve, I can always do chemo, right? If I just looked at it, sort of like a little, a bit of a last resort. And the idea of radically changing my life, overdosing on nutrition, giving my body more than it’s ever had before nutritionally. And changing my whole life. I loved that idea. I loved that. Was excited about it.
Like what, what will happen if I do this? And I also wasn’t just like, let’s see what happened, what will happen. It was like, I believed it would help me. Right. I just believed so deeply that this was good, this was good for me. And when I looked at chemotherapy, I thought this is bad for me. Right? Again, not saying it’s bad for everybody, everybody’s going to make their own choice on their treatment.
By the way, you can do both, right? You can overdose on nutrition, you can take care of yourself, you can change your whole life and support your body’s ability to heal while you’re doing conventional treatments. So it’s not, it’s not either or.
Ari Whitten: And actually, you know, I’ve seen so research more recently in the last few years showing how certain phytochemicals can actually enhance the effects of Chemo, for example. So…
Chris Wark: Curcumin and Boswellia or two of them and black seed oil in the Jealous Sativa.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, I think I’ve seen some on sulfuraphane as well.
Chris Wark: Yeah, from Broccoli. Right? So in cruciferous vegetables. So which I’ll talk about. So anyway, I, I’m. So there I was, right. I’m like, I’m doing this, I’m going into the jungle. Like, and it was, it was really me stepping out in faith because it’s like, okay God, if you showed this to me, you opened this door, I’m going through it and you better, you better see me through. Right? You better get me through the jungle man. Because I don’t, it’s just me and Jesus, I don’t have anybody else really.
And it really forced me to step out in faith, right in a big way and step out into the unknown. And really that’s when miracles happen in your life, right when you step out into the unknown. And so that was scary and exciting and part of me, I had this sense that, you know, it wasn’t planning to be a blogger or you know, being interviewed by Ari Whitten, right?
I was just wanting to survive and, but I had this sense that if I could get through this, I could help other people get through. If I could get through the jungle, like I could show people the way. But again, it wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to write a book or whatever. It’s just like I just want to survive. I don’t care about anything else right now. All I care about survival.
And so I gradually just kept reading and researching. And the cool thing about that time that was different, there was, there was, there’s pros and cons, about 2004. Holistic cancer healing in 2004. Um, I’ll start with the cons. The cons is there was very little information, there was nothing on the Internet that was helpful unlike today. No Youtube, no facebook, right? There was no social media like you couldn’t find anything. I tried and I was like, all the websites were super sketch and there was no videos online in 2004 really.
And so that was frustrating. I couldn’t, I couldn’t really. It’s hard to find other cancer survivors who had healed with nutrition and natural nontoxic therapies. So that was the con.
But the pro was that the information I did find all pointed back to the same strategies. So like from book to book to book, they were all saying raw foods, juicing, detoxification, stress, forgiveness, right. Key supplementation and uh, you know, some advanced therapies like IV vitamin C and things like that and, and far infrared saunas. So it was very confirmatory even though I was, had had a shortage, but like a shortage, a shortage of information. It was enough for me, like it was just enough to keep to keep me on track and to keep my confidence at a level that I was able to maintain what I was doing. And so nutritionally I’ll take exactly what I did.
So every morning I juiced 64 ounces of juice. So it’s about five pounds of carrots at a champion juicer. I still do. But it was about five pounds of carrots and beets, celery, ginger root. That was the basic everyday juice formula. And some days it was all carrot juice. I started out with all carrot juice and then as I started to learn more, I was like, oh, I want to incorporate some more stuff in here, you know, just amp it up. And then I would start adding like Greens, Greens, powder to it, wheat grass, barley grass, like spirulina, chlorella, like all that good stuff. And just trying to add as much nutrition as I could to the juice have made a big batch in the morning, 64 ounces, drank it throughout the day. So it’s about eight ounces every hour, you know, eight, eight ounce servings. Roughly.
The goal with juice is to keep adding nutrition to your body, into your blood, and to keep your blood levels high, right? To keep high levels of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and all these wonderful phytonutrients, phytochemicals from plant food in your blood, right? Just circulating, right? Your dosing every hour. So that’s the point of juicing.
I, there were several periods where I did extended juice fasts, five days, 10 days. There. But on the days when I was eating, I would often just use through breakfast, I might have some fruit midmorning a grapefruit or green apple or something if I was feeling a little bit hungry. And then for lunch I had a giant salad, not like a salad you get at a restaurant or a Mcdonald’s a. This was a giant bowl of vegetables, right?
And mainly cruciferous vegetables. So, um, one of my favorite studies on nutrition and cancer is, is one where they actually dripped the extracts of many different vegetables on cancer cells on eight different cancer cell lines. You’re probably familiar with this study and just to see like, hey, if we just juice some vegetables and drip them on cancer cells, will anything happen? And surprisingly yes, they found that the number one anticancer vegetable, which just decimated cancer cells stop their growth, killed cancer cells like super powerful is garlic.
The garlic was the clear winner against all eight cell lines, Leeks and onions were basically number two and three against almost all of the cell lines. And then the remaining top 10 anticancer vegetables where all the cruciferous vegetables, like Broccoli, cauliflower, Kale, cabbage, even spinach, which isn’t cruciferous technically. And my salad was Broccoli, cauliflower, Kale, cabbage, onions, mushrooms, which are immune boosters, spices, anticancer, spices, Cayenne pepper, tumeric, a curry powder, which is a mixture of tumeric and a lot of other stuff, Oregano and I love Brag sprinkled two, which has 24 different herbs in it and garlic powder.
And then I would top it with apple cider vinegar, which is a great fermented food, um, sauerkraut and a little bit of olive oil and peppers and sprouted garbanzo beans or lentils or mung beans or all three and was just as monstrous, right salad and avocado like, uh, ended up, did I say Zucchini and squash also, like, so dude, I’m just like, just pile in it on right.
And that meal, which I call the giant cancer fighting salad was this was my staple meal for lunch and dinner every single day, every day with no variety. And I loved it. It was just because as I was thinking through, I was trying to be methodical and I knew I had to do something that was simple and sustainable where else I just couldn’t keep it up.
I even got some raw food cookbooks and I was like, flipping through them. And I remember flipping through and being like, I don’t know so many ingredients and like all this prep time and yet I need to get a dehydrator for, to make these raw crackers, you know? And I was like, no, this isn’t, I can’t do it. Right. I just, I’m just getting the same thing every day. Right. And then also looking at raw food recipes, I’m like, well, there’s only five ingredients in this recipe and my salad has like 15, you know, or more.
So like every time I compared some recipe with the salad, I’m like, that sounds more nutritious than in any other recipe, but just, just because of the sheer variety, right? That was in it.
So it just became very clear to me like juicing giant salads, this is what I need to do. And then I started incorporating fruit smoothies. Berries are the most potent anticancer fruits, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, throw a banana in there, throw a fresh coconut, you know, scoop out the meat. But the juice in there, blend it up. And then I’ve got this amazing delicious fruit smoothie that I would drink for a snack or have for breakfast. So I just created something that was simple, sustainable and super potent, in. It was just trying to hit every single angle of anticancer nutrition, uh, to give my body would, it could use to heal.
Ari Whitten: Nice. And what’s the, the end of the story? Did you live?
Chris Wark: I died and came back to life. So the end of the story is a lot, uh, to, to, to summarize the journey for me was the first two years were really difficult, right? Mentally, emotionally, right? Just staying, just staying the course, giving my fear to God and just doing the same thing over and over every day. Right. So I got this system in place and I just worked it right.
I had blood work done every month, uh, had every six months for the first couple of years because the oncologist I was working with was very concerned about my immune system, very concerned about the cancer coming back and we were just keeping a very close eye on things. And it took a couple of years before, you know, we both felt like my blood work. I didn’t have any obvious tumor markers, but there were just things in my blood that were weird, you know, my immune system was very low.
It seemed like it was a, there was immunosuppression going on, very low white count, you know, we just couldn’t figure that out. But after just a few years of just doing it, doing it, doing it, and just like building a new body, right? Just rebuilding every tissue in my body with whole plant foods basically. And I will say after 90 days I started adding cooked food back in because just I needed more calories.
So I added sweet potatoes and keenwah and some organic brown rice and other cooked veggies like that just to give me more calories. And My nutritionist, uh, at the time recommended, he said, well, you know, you’re, you’re really underweight or you probably need a little bit of animal protein. Why don’t we add a serving of wild caught salmon or maybe some organic lamb a few times a week. And at that time I thought, well, no, I didn’t become a Vegan for animal rights.
I became a Vegan for survival. And so I was just kinda like, well, if you really think it’ll help, I just want to live like I don’t care about anything else, I just want to live. So if you think this will help me, I’m willing to add a little bit of animal protein back into my diet. So I did. Obviously, it wasn’t enough to hurt me. In hindsight. I don’t know if it really helped and I think it might’ve been a little bit risky at the time.
But anyway, after the two year mark I started to feel really good. I mean, just as far as mentally, I’m more confident, right? That it wasn’t going to come back because the first two years of the most critical and then I just kept, stayed the course, kept doing it and then, you know, and then I woke up and it was like almost five years had another scan totally clean.
And then my oncologist at the time, the one I was working with retired and I was kind of handed to a new guy and he said, man, I think you’re, I think you’re out of the woods. You know, I think need to then come back now I don’t think it’s going to come back. And so that was like celebration time for me and that’s when I started thinking about sharing my story. Right.
Ari Whitten: And, and this was what year?
Chris Wark: So that was around 2009. Um, and I started the blog in 2010. Nice. And so that’s what I was like, okay, well, you know, I should just at least, because people kept sort of asking, you know, word started to get around just locally and people would ask why aren’t you? Didn’t he had cancer and you didn’t do chemo, what’d you do? And you know, I’m like, well how much time do you have?
You know? And so I’m thinking, well maybe I’ll put, I’ll put it on like a blog or something and then I can just send people there and like, oh just go here. And so I’ve got it all on this blog and you can see what I did and I have to tell my story over and over again.
Ari Whitten: Nice.
Chris Wark: See how that turned out. But what happened? And I didn’t realize what was going to happen, I had no idea, but there so many people out there looking for this information on Google. And as soon as I stepped out and started talking about it and blogging about nutrition and anticancer therapies, natural therapies, nontoxic therapies, people just started coming out of the woodwork, right? They found me, they found my blog. They started following, subscribing to my email newsletter, sending me messages like, can we talk?
And I’m coaching people. Like in my spare time I try to help them navigate their healing journeys. And then, uh, things just kind of grew and grew, you know, you understand. And then after five years it was just, my audience got so big, I was like, wow, this is kind of like my profession now. Stop doing real estate and just focus on this and this is all I want to do anyway. It’s help people with this.
And so the big pitch, I did write a book and it’s a, comes out September 25th, published by Hay House.
So yeah, the book tells my story, which, you know, you guys have kind of heard in the podcast, but it also has a very pretty lengthy section on, on the cancer industry, like the things that really no one knows about the cancer industry and in and in cancer treatment. So there’s a, there’s a section in there that sort of critical for anyone who wants to be informed and either if they’re, if they have cancer or know someone with cancer or just want to have that knowledge to carry forward into life about the way the industry works so you can make smart decisions and navigate it.
And then the prescriptive stuff is the third section of the book where I, you know, just kind of break down the daily routine, my diet, lifestyle, stress reduction habits, like everything I did to change my life to transform and restoring my health is in there. I’m pretty much…
Ari Whitten: If you, if you don’t mind, I have a few questions for you if you have 15 minutes,
Chris Wark: Yeah, yeah.
Chris beat cancer – How alternative medicine is viewed and the studies that have been done on cancer
Ari Whitten: So one thing I want to mention, we talked a bit about kind of doctors oftentimes, well, well meaning people, and I’m going to use your, your perspective on this so well meaning people but kind of tend to often get sort of corrupted by the industry and influenced in negative ways. One thing I’ll mention here is there’s often a genuine desire to be evidenced based and to follow the evidence, but when it comes to cancer, especially, there’s a huge limitation in the evidence, which is that.
Actually, let me back up one point. There’s often this saying amongst skeptics, right, that if, if you know any, any type of medicine that was alternative that actually worked. It’s now called conventional medicine, right? It’s just called medicine.
Chris Wark: What do you call it? Alternative medicine that works medicine, right?
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So you know, there’s this idea that right look like everything’s been tested and if something’s in the domain of alternative medicine, therefore it’s by definition according to that view, it’s by definition, quackery and pseudoscience. So one limitation here, especially in cancer is that there haven’t been like randomized controlled trials, let’s say comparing the type of diet that you did or really any other nutrition and lifestyle intervention versus let’s say chemotherapy or let’s say versus radiation for any really any particular type of cancer like that evidence pretty much doesn’t exist.
And, and there are certain ethical concerns around why that type of research hasn’t even been done for the most part. But if let’s say in that environment, in that context where somebody’s trying to be evidenced based and that’s their commitment and their genuine value system and they genuinely think being evidenced based is the best strategy to help people.
Well if evidence doesn’t even exist on nutritional interventions for cancer for the most part, then like you know, there’s, there’s a clear limitation in the advice that a physician can give you on that subject. Add in the fact that, you know, they never, for the most part, 99 plus percent of physicians never even received a single nutrition course in medical school and you just have some, some limitations there as far as this, all of this type of stuff that you’re talking about. But do you want to elaborate a bit more on maybe why, why the types of therapies that you’re talking about, natural nutrition and lifestyle therapies are not kind of within the domain of evidence based, conventional medicine?
Chris Wark: Yeah. I love talking about this actually. So, um, yeah, the, the, the skeptics and the critics of people like me, I’m a, I like to call what I talk about quackery, but nutrition is the foundation of health, right? Nutrition is not alternative therapy, right? Food is medicine, right? But they’ll never call food medicine. And we, the current medical system as it exists today is one that’s controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. So in order for something to be a medicine, it has to be a patented drug, right? So by definition, nutrition is not medicine to them.
And so, ’ that’s sort of point number one. Point number two is they don’t, there’s no money in nutrition and when you’re, when you’re looking at an industry that is driven by dollars, right? Everybody’s got to make a living. I get it right? Pharmaceutical companies are in business to make as much money as possible for shareholders.
They’re not funding research studies to test nutritional interventions against cancer. They don’t care about nutritional interventions against cancer. If they’re funding anything on a natural compound, it’s to try to create a synthetic patentable extract of that compound, like Tumeric, for example, that they can develop into a drug, right? So, yes, they studied plant compounds all the time, but they want to make them into a patentable drug. So the big deception of the term science based medicine or evidence based medicine is that it’s, that it is based on all of the evidence. But it’s not. Ot’s only based on science and evidence that lead to patented billion dollar drugs. Okay. That is how the industry is built, has been built. So. And you’re right, you can’t do a placebo controlled double blind crossover study with diet, right? You can’t tell patients they’re eating a carrot when they’re not eating a carrot, you know what I mean?
So that can’t be done now. It could be done where and, and by the way, we’re, I’m working with an MD and we’re in early, early process of doing a pilot study on nutritional intervention for cancer. Now, you can take patients radically changed their diet and lifestyles and measure their outcomes. And there’s one very famous study where they did this.
There’s a couple actually, but Dr. Dean Ornish took early stage prostate cancer patients that had no treatment, uh, and put them on an inner, a diet and lifestyle intervention. They put them on a plant based Diet and added exercise and stress reduction classes every week. And what they found was every patient who followed this program had reversal in their PSA reversal of prostate cancer from following a plant based Diet evidence, exercise and stress reduction. So that’s where he’s amazing. Then there was a followup study where they did it with late stage prostate cancer patients and they found the same thing, the patients that followed this advice, right, that follow the program closely.
Because, you know, compliance is an issue when you have diet and lifestyle intervention, right? People have to stop eating twinkies, like some people like don’t do it. They like to eat a little healthy and then they need more cheeseburgers. But the patients that complied had reversal in their PSA numbers. So that’s an amazing one. That one happened.
Anybody can Google ”Ornish, prostate cancer” and the study will pop right up. You can read it. It’s fantastic. But the only reason he got permission to do that was because it was early stage prostate cancer and you know, it’s slow growing and so they felt like it wasn’t unethical.
So the way the, because the pharmaceutical industry has infiltrated every aspect of medicine, they have written the rules. And so one of the rules is it’s unethical to treat a person with nutrition if there’s already an approved treatment called Chemo.
Ari Whitten: This standard of care…
Chris Wark: Standard of care…
Ari Whitten: Established as this. And that sort of, that’s what’s viewed as evidenced based then to subject people to anything like in lieu of that, that is kind of in the domain of alternative medicine as a substitute for the standard of care becomes unethical by definition.
Chris Wark: Yup. Yup. And the crazy thing, I don’t like the term alternative medicine or alternative therapies because it can, it can mean anything, right? You drink your own urine. Okay. Eating tree bark, living off bugs like anything is alternative. Right? So I, I shy away from those that term because it really does. Some of it is total quackery. Yeah. Right. There are people in, in my space, in the holistic health and wellness world that, unfortunately, to my dismay, tend to have the idea that everything alternative is somehow good.
Ari Whitten: Oh, thank you for mentioning this drives me crazy.
Chris Wark: Yeah. And better than conventional or whatever. And I am not one of those people. Right? I’m very cautious. I love evidence. I love and, and let’s talk about evidence too.
So here’s the evidencewe do have. We have hundreds of thousands of nutritional science studies, right? Published peer reviewed evidence based studies on nutrition and a large chunk of those are on the anticancer compounds in fruits and vegetables. In food. And the cancer promoters in certain foods like meat and dairy, uh, and the anticancer compounds and other foods like cruciferous vegetables and berries. Okay. So we have all this amazing nutritional science evidence that people who are critics of what I talk about call somehow try to convince their audiences that that’s quackery, that nutritional sciences somehow quackery [inaudible], but they never quite call nutritional science quackery, but they call me a quack. Right?
So, uh, but so we have all that which I get really excited about because in the beginning I didn’t have access to any of these studies. Like I’ve only found them once. I started blogging and started like, wait a minute, okay, I did these things. I got, well, I’ve met a bunch of other people who also did these things and also healed and other types and stages of cancer.
There’s gotta be something to it, what, what evidence exists. So then I started on the quest like you, like what do we have? And as I started to research, I found all this was amazing stuff, right? Like, oh, that explains it. Buries ellagic acid, garlic, alison, right? Broccoli, cruciferous vegetables have sulforaphane and isothiocyanates indole three carbinol. So, uh, like my brain is exploding, right? Like learning all this wonderful stuff. And I’m connecting all these dots, right?
Oh, obesity contributes to cancer because it raises estrogen, promotes inflammation, right? Secretes a hormone called fgf two, which can convert healthy cells into cancer cells, especially from belly fat. So like, right? So learning all this stuff and like, wow, there’s all this evidence, nobody’s talking about it.
Ari Whitten: There’s also another huge layer of evidence which is around prevention and the relationship of that with nutritional science. We have lots and lots of, of, of longterm epidemiological studies. And granted, you can’t necessarily draw a causation from this, but what we know of course, if you connect the dots and it’s really not hard to connect the dots, all the pieces of the puzzle are there. We know that healthier lifestyle factors, including certain nutrition habits, dramatically reduces your risk of dozens of different types of cancer.
And we also know, as you mentioned now kind of on a smaller, more mechanistic level, we have research showing that specific nutrients from specific phytochemicals and specific plans, whether garlic or cruciferous vegetables, et Cetera, et Cetera, um, act on specific mechanisms to help encourage to help either limit cancer cell growth or cause a pop ptosis program, cell death of cancers and so on. So, um, you know, that, that evidence exists, but you know, and, and even skeptics I think don’t necessarily deny that even, you know, a lot of it is just ignorance in a lot of cases that they just are unaware of that all of that science exists and they think talking about nutrition and relationship to cancer is nonsense. But even those who I think recognize that that evidence exists, there’s still kind of this hard line that they’re unwilling to cross between prevention and treatment.
And yeah, okay. Maybe all that stuff is helpful and wonderfully effective in prevention of cancer. But to talk about it in the context of, of treating, treating or curing cancer is ben becomes quackery and pseudoscience.
Chris Wark: Yeah. Well, and there’s the third layer of evidence. Okay, so we’ve got the broad population studies epidemiological, which aren’t perfect, but hey, when you got hundreds of thousands, millions of people with much lower rates of cancer than the US, right? When there’s dozens of nations with rates of cancer that are half as long, half as much as the US a third, right? The rate of colon cancer in rural Africa is 50 times lower. You know, like when you look at these studies like hello, like outcomes razor, let’s just, let’s see what they’re doing. How is it different? Probably is the way their diet and lifestyles probably are the reason. Right?
And we know in some cases their diet and lifestyle is definitely of reason. So you’ve got that level, then you’ve got, like you said, the sort of biological level, all the nutritional science studies on anticancer compounds in food. But then the third layer is all the anecdotal evidence, which people hate anecdotal evidence, right? They hate it. They can’t stand it. They can’t stand the fact that people are healing cancer.
They’re sharing their stories. Right? And, but I love anecdotal evidence, I mean, we learned from the experience of others and every major scientific discovery pretty much started with an anecdote. But the problem is we don’t have clinical trial evidence, right? That’s the one thing missing.
We’ve got four, three of the four major evidence pieces, right? And, hopefully in my lifetime, in our lifetime, some benevolent billionaires will fund some really well designed, diet and lifestyle intervention trials, more of them, right?
The Ornish studies are amazing, uh, just, uh, just an amazing clues and like indications that, hey, this is the jet, this works, your body can heal. And what I say often is like the body creates cancer. The body can heal it if given the proper nutrients and care. Right? So it does take. It’s not about a magic bullet, it’s not about a Miracle Cure.
It’s not about an alternative cure, right? It’s about radical diet and lifestyle transformation, like massive action. That’s, this is what I encourage people to do to take massive action.
It’s not this lotion or potion or job or supplement or weird concoction, right? It’s, you’ve got to change your whole life, you’ve got to eliminate everything in your life that may be contributing to your disease and replace those things with evidence based diet and lifestyle strategies that can only help you. And that’s the great thing about the holistic health world, at least my little little corner of it is that I’m only interested in promoting things with great enthusiasm that can only help, right? That can only help. I’m not encouraging people to do like risking wacky, you know, IV therapies or whatever, right? Like snake venom or something. Yeah. So a couple specific questions I have for you.
How To Fight And Prevent Cancer Naturally And Effectively – The truth about treatment plans
Ari Whitten: A couple of areas that are controversial. One is, you know, some people might listen to you talking and say, Hey, this guy’s advising me to avoid conventional medicine, to treat my cancer and avoid chemo. Avoid radiation. You know, as just a blanket rule. I want to inject, first of all the fact that you’ve already mentioned a couple times, you’ve, you’ve said, hey, this is, these are my decisions, these are not necessarily right for everyone, but I’ll add to this that every type of cancer and the treatments that are available are often radically different from one type of cancer to the next as far as the actual evidence on conventional treatments like Chemo for that specific type of cancer. And in some cases, the evidence is very poor that, that chemo is effective in helping that particular type of cancer. And in some cases it’s quite good.
So, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of degrees of nuance there around the specific types of cancer and the specific treatments that are available. Um, my first question is I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.
And then, my second question is, you’ve also said I think some controversial stuff around kind of veganism and meat and dairy and things like that that I know some people would disagree with. And there are even some people now you know, promoting the Keto Diet, which has become very popular for weight loss. A lot of people are, are promoting that sort of the metabolic theory of cancer cancer feeds on carbs and sugars and so by starving enough carbs and sugars and, and, and eating a kito diet, high fat, and that’s very much inclusive of animal proteins which you’re saying are, are bad for cancer. People are saying that that can be very effective for cancer.
So I’ll just present those, those two things and I’ll let you take it where you want to take it.
Chris Wark: This is good. Good questions. Good questions. Ari. So yeah, first of all, I am, have been accused by my just say call them opponents. Okay. But um, intellectual theory or theoretical opponents of telling people not to do treatment, which I don’t do. I don’t tell people not to do treatment. I do highlight, like I said earlier, the perils and pitfalls of treatment and I created a guide called 20 questions for your oncologist. So a patient can ask the right questions and figure out if treatment makes sense for them because like you said, there’s a lot of different types of cancer. Some cancers respond very well to treatment and some don’t respond at all. So a couple of easy examples.
Childhood leukemia has a very high cure rate. Ten year survivals over 90 percent, uh, testicular cancer. It’s about the same and even lymphomas, highly responsive to chemotherapy, a very high ten year survival. Okay. Now, the most solid tumor cancers though, do not respond well. And respond is a weird word. It’s an industry word, right? Respond, just means, oh, did it shrink a little? Oh it responded, right? But we’re talking about survival. The most important statistic that everyone should know surrounding cancer and the cancer industry and the progress they’ve made is that in the last 60 years, the death rate, which is the purest measure of winning or losing the war on cancer, the death rate has only improved by five percent since the introduction of chemotherapy in the 19 fifties. Five percent reduction in the overall death rate from cancer. Now again, for a small percentage of cancers, they’ve really made huge progress in its may basically leukemia, it’s blood based cancers, leukemia and Lymphomas, and then testicular and like some really rare ones like Burkitt’s lymphoma is another lymphoma.
But the solid tumor, breast, brain, colon, lung, liver, ovarian, cervical, pancreatic, or major cancer killers, they’ve made very little progress if any, in some cases, zero progress in improving the death rate in the last 60 years.
So that’s, you know, that’s a pretty powerful indictment against the cancer industries progress despite the hundreds of billions spent on research. Okay. So, so there’s that. But again, every person needs to be informed. Like if you download my free guide, if you ask those questions, then you will get answers. Is the treatment you’re being given Palliative or curative, right? Is the treatment. What is the success rate of that drug therapy for your cancer type and stage, sex, and age group, right? Most patients aren’t asking those kinds of questions. How about, hey, can I speak with three to five people who are long term survivors with my type of cancer that you’ve treated?
Right. Great question to ask your doctor, do you have some successes I could meet and talk to that? Did this drug therapy and had my kind of cancer and are alive and thriving five, 10 years out.
So again, I have sort of a two pronged mission. One is to help patients make a very informed decision with all the evidence, right in facts about their cancer and treatment, right? Not Get rushed in, out of fear. So that’s sort of like, that’s one prong. And then the other prong is to empower them with knowledge and information that they can use to transform their health that they can help themselves, like with evidence based nutrition, lifestyle medicine, that will only help them even if they do all the treatments the doctors want them to do.
So, you know, that’s, that’s the way I look at it this way I approach it, and it’s totally fair to say that, yeah, some cancers respond better than others, but again, you can pretty much boil it down to, is this an epithelial cancer or non epithelial cancer? Solid tumor cancers don’t have a great success rate. Blood based cancers have a much better success rate. Then there’s the famous two percent study. So the two percent study came out the year I was the year after I was diagnosed were the university of Sidney, uh, I believe it came out of Australia, but they looked at 22 different types of types of cancer and the study is called the contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to five year survival in adult malignancies. And what they found was, is that of the 22 cancers, they looked at, a chemotherapy only contributed two point one percent to five year survival. Right now, again, it’s an average.
So some of them contributed zero, right? And then some of them contributed better, like up to 30 percent, uh, for one of the lymphomas in the study. So people like to throw that two percent number around, but they usually misquoted and say like, chemotherapy only works two percent of the time, but that’s not, that’s not what the study found. It found, it only contributed to percent five year survival, which still isn’t good. Right? It was a groundbreaker industry shocker. Uh, but it didn’t, nothing changed. Right. And that was 12 years ago, uh, treatments haven’t really gotten any better. And you know, it’s not like the industry was like, oops, well we should stop doing that now because they didn’t.
Since I’m on those lines, immunotherapy people, you know, that’s on everybody’s mind. What about immunotherapy? Immunotherapy is a great idea. It’s a great idea to improve the immune system right to him and to try to empower the body’s innate ability to heal itself. Right? And that the problem with immunotherapy is, um, there were several problems. One only eight percent of cancer patients right now, uh, can have any benefit from it. And that’s just for a certain few number of cancers.
So a very low number of patients can have any benefit and I benefit doesn’t mean cure, it just means, oh, it shrunk the tumor temporarily or whatever. Right? So a very small percentage of patients for a small percentage of cancers have some experience, some benefit in clinical trials. That’s problem number one. It’s been overhyped problem number two is it’s insanely expensive, like some of these immunotherapy drugs or a million dollars a year, right? It’s like what? Like this is absolute insanity.
So that could improve over time. They could come up with some perfect immunotherapy drug tomorrow and, and whatever. That’s great. I hope they do. And believe me, the minute the industry comes out with a treatment or drug that cures cancer, I’ll be like, great, go do that. Just go do that, right? Go do that. Great if it works, do it.
But the myth is that there’s gonna be some kind of, if you donate enough money to cancer research, we’ll find a cure. Right? But there’s hundreds of types of cancer. They’re all different. There will never be one cure it. All they’re really doing is just trying to incrementally create drugs that work a little bit better than the current drug. And if they work a little bit better than the current drug, they can make billions of dollars, I could just takes, you just have to work a little bit better and then you totally replaced the existing drug. So that’s, that’s what cancer drug developments all about. I mean, sure, they’d love to find something that cured cancer. I mean, yes, but the reality is they don’t have to cure it. They just have to improve a little bit for them to make billions. So yeah. Does that answer the question?
How To Fight Cancer Naturally And Effectively – Chris’ view on keto, and veganism
Ari Whitten: It does, yes. The next question is just Keto is becoming quite popular in obviously it’s a huge trend now as far as weight loss diet, but it’s also a popular in certain integrative and holistic anticancer circles. So what’s, what’s your take on Keto, which obviously, you know, a lot of those people would have significant differences of opinion with someone like you who’s coming more from a Vegan perspective and plant based avoiding lot of the animal foods, they’re saying no, avoid carbs, high fat, moderate protein, and we can be totally inclusive of animal proteins because we don’t think that those are harmful.
Chris Wark: Yeah. Okay. So I’ll answer in two parts. One, I’ll talk about animal protein. Then I’ll talk about Keto specifically. There’s, there’s a number of ways that animal protein fuels cancer growth. The first is a hormones, so when you eat animal protein, you raise IGF1 one, which is insulin like growth factor in your body. And insulin like growth factor is IGF1. One is cancer rocket fuel. It tells cancer cells to grow. So if you eat anything from an animal, right? Dairy, meat, fish, eggs, you are sending growth signals to cancer cells via all these hormones that exist in animal food.
Doesn’t matter if it’s pasture raised or farm raised obviously, or a factory farm raised. They all have hormones, whether they’re an added extra hormones in the feed or shots, or they just never have an hormone injected ever. Right? It’s a living being. It’s full of hormones.
So hormones and animal food fuels cancer growth. [inaudible], which is an amino acid that’s very, very high in meat, uh, and it’s very, very low in vegetables and almost nonexistent and fruit and methyanine, nothing, um, is an amino acid that many cancer cells are dependent on to survive. So you, you actually starved certain types of cancer cells by eating a diet that’s naturally very low or restricted in methyanine, the third way is saturated fat. So cancer cells like saturated fat for fuel and saturated fat. There’s multiple studies on saturated fat from animal foods, fueling cancer growth. Uh, the fourth way is when you cook me a, you create heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are cancer causers in meat. When animal flesh or animal fat are cooked at high temperatures. Bacon isn’t as an example that most people don’t know, but processed meat, bacon, sausage, jerky, you know, hot dogs, lunch meats, processed meats are a group one carcinogen.
That’s the highest level of evidence of any substance on earth in terms of the confidence that it causes cancer. So cigarettes, right, arsenic and bacon are all group one carcinogens, they cause cancer. Red Meat as a group to which means it has a lot of evidence, not as much as group one. So, there are a number of reasons why animal food fuels cancer growth and uh, and again, I don’t come at it actually from a Vegan perspective because I’m not a Vegan. I eat a plant based diet, but I do eat a little bit of animal food a few times a month I might have some fish or I might have some eggs or something, but, um, my diet’s about 98 to 99 percent plant based because in my quest for my personal health journey went from healing cancer right to once I was confident that I was healed.
I went down a lot of dietary rabbit trails, Paleo, you know, Weston Price, like I went down all these holes in, experimented with a lot of different diets because I was curious. I, I was really interested in longevity, right? It’s like, okay, I’m, I’m cancer free now. I’m alive, I’m healthy. What do, how do I need to eat and live longterm? Because being a raw foodist is not a good. It’s not a healthy diet long term, right? It’s an amazing healing diet, short term for detoxification and all that. But longterm. Yeah, it’s not, there’s no evidence. There’s no healthy long living populations in the world that are raw foodists or that are Vegan, but there are very healthy long living populations. The longest living that eat a diet that’s about 95 percent plant based, which we know from the blue zones for example.
So it’s kind of a long way of me saying like my, my diet now is one that is really just geared toward longevity in which means eating tons of plant food, tons of fruits and vegetables. Every day. When I was healing cancer, I was eating 15 to 20 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. And now I like 10 to 15 servings because I don’t juice all day like I did then. But, um, but having said that, right? Small amounts of animal food, it’s okay. I’m not a Vegan. I don’t see a huge threat there. There may be some benefit or maybe it isn’t enough to hurt you, if it’s less than five percent of calories. But for healing cancer, I think it’s risky and it should be cut way back to zero or maybe a few times a month tops.
So the keto and by the way, so there’s, there’s all of that. I’ve said all that and then I’ve interviewed, you know, we’re approaching 70 people now that I’ve interviewed on my site and there’s more coming at me like every week who have healed cancer with nutrition and natural therapies and all types and all stages of cancer.
And some of them healed without doing any conventional treatment. Some of them healed after conventional treatment failed. Those are the two types of people I like to interview because those stories are the most compelling, right? If they did all the chemo and all that, and they also did juicing and whatever, it’s like, okay, that’s great. Glad you’re alive. But you know, the cancer industry would look at you and say, oh, well the chemo cured you, right?
So anyway, I gravitate towards the people that had these just amazing, remarkable healing and cancer reversal stories. And I’ve interviewed a ton of them. And guess what? They all did raw foods, juicing, radical life change, like they all basically did the same stuff as me. So this, this is a transition into the keto conversation. So in 2012 I started seeing articles and a little stuff on online popping up about the ketogenic diet for cancer.
Chris Wark: So I’m like, hmm, what’s this about? And went down that rabbit hole. I understand on the surface it’s very compelling, a theory hypothesis really that cancer cells run on glucose and if you deprive the body of glucose, you’re starving cancer cells and you know, you, they can’t use ketones for fuel. And so you starve cancer. It’s the best anticancer diet and it’s so sciency and Thomas Siegfried road, this textbook about it, right? And so I’m like, wow, this is, this is fascinating. I’m, I’m really interested in this.
And so I started talking about it a little bit about my interest in it and had an article, an interview with someone about it on the website, on my blog or whatever. And then, um, but I had this funny feeling about it, like there’s something in my gut that was like, had this uneasiness about it and I couldn’t shake it.
I was like, I don’t know, something is weird about this. And then, so I just kept paying more and more attention. And then I realized, well, wait a minute, there’s all these people saying how great it is, where are the survivors? where are they, where are the people who, who did reverse their cancer with this diet? And I realized there was a couple, right? So like I can count on one hand and one of the, one of the big proponents, there was a chiropractor a few years ago. He was really trying to convince everybody, uh, he had brain cancer. Ketogenic diet was just telling everybody how great it was. Then he died and I’m like, hm, okay. And then somebody else I knew who was the big key to genic diet promoter and was a breast cancer survivor, her cancer came back. And I’m like, okay, wait a second, there’s more to this than meets the eye.
So then I went sort of really going down the rabbit hole. I started to, I talked to a friend of mine who runs a Gerson clinic in Mexico. He was like, it doesn’t work, don’t do it, like don’t tell anyone to do it, doesn’t work. And then Dr. Nick Gonzales, the late Dr Dickens wrote an amazing article, really just kind of dismantling it, a hige lengthy piece about the history of alternative cancer treatments, about the Ketogenic Diet, about how Atkins, actually most people don’t know that Dr Atkins a had a wing in his clinic where he was treating cancer patients with ketogenic diet and it was a colossal failure. So this article like rocked my world pretty hard and then I started really digging into the actual published studies on the Ketogenic Diet and like, okay, well what are these studies? What, what studies are out there.
Okay. Like, what do they actually finding or proving or whatever.
And that’s what it actually got, you know, for lack of a better word. Comical. Okay. So like there’s one study where, uh, you know, there are several rat studies where they find that the rats live longer on a ketogenic diet, but what they did was they implanted Human Glioma, bring human brain cancer into a rat’s body, which would never happen. Okay? Brain cancer doesn’t metastasize into the body, but anyway, they put human brain cancer into a rat a and they put these rats on a ketogenic diet. Again, humans aren’t rats either. And the rats lived, you know, a 55 days longer on a ketogenic diet plus hyperbaric oxygen therapy than the rats that weren’t on it. Okay. So, okay, they live longer, but they’re rats and it’s an unrealistic scenario, right? There’s another rat study where they live longer on a, on a supplement called keto-cow.
Uh, and they lived like a five days longer than the rats that are. No, no, the, the rats were given Quito cowl and treated with radiation. Uh, so they, they achieve remission. I don’t know how long their mission was. They achieve remission. The rats treated with just the ketogenic diet. Only live five days longer than the control rats, and then there’s a pilot study on humans where there were 16 patients were treated, ketogenic diet, all died.
Then there’s another study I found a 2012 study that found that tumors can use ketones for fuel.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. This is, this is an interesting thing and you know, I’ll mention real quick, I’m actually about to interview two cancer researchers. One is actually a proponent of ketogenetic diet and has written a book, her name is Nasha Winters and then the other one is actually highly critical of Kenogenic diets in the context of cancers and talks much like you’re talking now about how, how much the science on it has been misrepresented and how certain types of cancer can even feed preferentially on Ketones over glucose.
Chris Wark: Yeah. And I can even tell you which study. There’s a study that came out in 2017 last year that there is a, uh, there’s, there’s a certain genetic mutation in, in some types of cancer that actually, if that allows them to grow faster with ketones. So basically 50 percent of melanomas will grow faster if you are on a ketogenic diet, 10 percent of colon cancers, a hundred percent of hairy cell leukemia, cancers grow faster on ketones and about five percent of multiple myelomas. And then, you know, there’s a couple other studies, again, like there’s one, uh, you know, there’s several other patients studies where it’s like, you know, they give them a ketogenic diet and they, you know, they do a little bit better for a little while, but no one’s cured, right?
And even though there’s a 2018 study on mice where they found that, like when they combined, p one, three k inhibiting drugs, a ketogenic diet, it worked better than just the drug, but the mice that they just gave the ketogenic diet, uh, they had accelerated cancer growth of acute myeloid leukemia. So anyway, yeah, there’s, there’s all these studies that really don’t.
The evidence is so weak. Even the published. The weirdest thing about it is that there’s all these people running around saying how great this diet is for cancer. And yet when you look at the published studies, it’s terrible. It’s like, doesn’t, you know, just not really proving anything. A mice live a little longer then die. Humans maybe live a few months longer and then die or it works better if you combine it with radiation than not. Okay. Well that’s something. But um, at the end of the day, I, you know, in the absence of good clinical trials on humans, you’ve got to just compare the anecdotal evidence if that’s all we have to look at.
The anecdotal evidence is huge and I mean, we have decades and decades and decades of survivor stories and one of the funniest things I do is finding these people and interviewing them of people who’ve healed and they’re all doing the same thing.
There’s not a restriction on carbohydrates. They’re eating tons of fruits and vegetables. Most of them are juicing and changing their whole lives and all that. And you know, it’s just like, why are we ignoring what’s really working? You know, and it has. It doesn’t mean it works for everybody. You know, I can’t promise everybody a cure or whatever, but why would we ignore that in favor of a FAD diet that has almost no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, and it’s completely an unhealthy, unnatural and unsustainable, and there’s no population in the world that eats a ketogenic diet. There is no ancestral population that eats that way. There are no hunter gatherers that eat that way. Even the inuits and the Eskimos, uh, who eat a lot of fat are not in Ketosis. And so like, it’s just unfortunately, it’s consumed the culture. It’s just the biggest FAD.
I mean, it’s just like Atkins, right? Atkins was everywhere and you know, there were whole grocery store sections devoted. If you remember, there were entire aisles of Atkins products, Atkins friendly, like the Atkins label was on like everything back in the, I guess nineties or whatever. And it’s just, you know, history repeats itself. And so now it’s just every time I turn around something is keto this, keto that, you know, and, uh, I, you know, it’ll, the fad will pass. I think I’m ready for it to pass so we can get back to the stuff that’s really helping people.
Ari Whitten: So I want to be sensitive of your time here. We’ve gone way over. I really appreciate you taking the time to do that.
Chris Wark: Of course.
How To Fight Cancer Naturally And Effectively – Chris’ top three tips to beating cancer
Ari Whitten: I would love it if you could just wrap up with your top three real quick tips that people should, should it be aware of if they are looking to either prevent or treat cancer?
Chris Wark: Yep. Absolutely. I’m really, there’s, there’s three pillars of health, diet and lifestyle, environment, and stress. Okay. So your diet and lifestyle are, are huge contributors. The, I believe the two best things any person can do for themselves. Dietarily and lifestyle is one. Eat a plant based diet. Don’t have to be pure vegan again, but eat tons of fruits and vegetables, tons of fruits and vegetables and limit your process, food and animal products to less than five percent of your diet. Really one to two percent. That’s, that’s where I’m at.
the lifestyle stuff is eight. Alcohol and tobacco, you know, promote cancer. So if you smoke, you should probably stop. If you’re taking pharmaceuticals, you should work with your doctor to get off them. Beautiful thing about a plant based diet is you can reverse a lot of chronic health conditions with a plant based diet, you know, especially if you’re overweight, because when you lose weight, you can reverse type two diabetes, you can reverse arthritis, autoimmune disease, inflammatory diseases, all kinds of stuff just by getting back to a normal, healthy way.
So, and then, you know, using pharmaceuticals are taking pharmaceuticals, can increase your risk of cancer and alcohol abuse increases. I mean, now the latest is even one drink a day increases your cancer risk. So you want to be very cautious about that. So that’s the Diet component, the light. And the other piece of the lifestyle thing is, is exercise. Like you’ve got to move, like being sedentary increases your risk of cancer, increases your risk of obesity, obesity increases the risk of cancer. So like making it at the minimum, walking 30 minutes a day, just make that a minimum. Like this is a non negotiable thing. Way that you take care of yourself every day, it’s just going for a walk 30 minutes every day or twice a day for 15 minutes, three times a day for 10 minutes or 30 minutes of brisk walking.
Of course you can do more. I love to go to the gym. I love crossfit kind of stuff and all that, but running, hiking, rock climbing, Jujitsu, Yoga, like anything you do to move your body to sweat and get huffing and puffing and get your heart pumping. Hopefully getting the fresh air and sunshine as well. It’s just amazing for you. So good. So that’s the physical component. And then diet and lifestyle.
The second thing is environment. And so we have to be aware that there are environmental pollutants that cause cancer, right? So where you live really matters. If you live around a lot of pollution, industrial area or in a big city, then you will have an elevated cancer risks.
I do believe you need to filter it, a really good filtration system for your water. You need to filter your shower water and you need an air filter, really good air purifier in your home because indoor air is five times six times more polluted than outdoor air because of all the [inaudible] off gassing from furniture and stuff like that, so got to be aware of environmental factors and do your best to clean up your environment, remove toxic stuff from your home, get rid of air fresheners and candles and toxic cleaning products and all that kind of stuff.
Even clean up your body care products. I mean, it’s a big process right, to to sort of clean up your life, but I think it’s necessary if you’re serious about healing and prevention.
All of this stuff I talk about in my shamelessly promoted new book, ”Chris beat cancer and comprehensive plan for healing naturally”.
And then the third thing is stress and stress is like the secret killer, right? The silent killer, and it really is the underlying cause of most disease. You can trace back to stress because stress leads people to destructive behavior. When you have resentment, bitterness, unforgiveness, jealousy, anger, prejudice like negativity. When your critical, judgemental, insecure, when you’re carrying around guilt and shame, all of those negative emotions produce stress in your, in your mind, in your heart, and your body and lead to an unhealthy physical state. One, stress produce a elevate stress hormones which increased inflammation and suppress your immune system and to stress leads us to medicate, right?
And so many of us engage in unhealthy behaviors to medicate ourselves when we self medicate with drugs and alcohol, with cigarettes, tobacco and with food, even with promiscuous sex, with workoholism, with excessive binge watching, a media entertainment, and so that the root cause of all the stress, right?
Most people are overweight or obese because they overeat and most people overeat because it’s a coping mechanism, right? They use food as medication and food really should be used as medicine, right? It’s a big difference. And so, so addressing that, and again, that is also a big component in, in my book is identifying and eliminating the sources of stress in your life. Because I really truly believe that, and I’ve seen this experientially, that if you don’t address stress in your life, you can do everything else right and still not get well, right, and it can outweigh everything else.
And so your spirit, mind, body, right, they’re all connected. And if you’re spiritually, mentally, emotionally sick, eventually you will be physically sick as well. So that’s the big thing.
And forgiveness, I can’t, I cannot overstate how powerful forgiveness as it is, just the one of the best things you can do for yourself is to forgive the people who’ve hurt you in life is when you forgive them and you let it go. Give it to God and just say, Hey, they’re all yours. Like you can deal with them. I’m letting it go. And you just release that burden, man. And it’s so freeing. It’s so healing and uh, it’s just an amazing thing you can do and you’re not doing it for them. You’re not, you know, letting them off the hook. They’re going to get what they deserve eventually, right? You’re just deciding it’s not going to be for me, right?
Like I’m not responsible for the payback. They’re going to get it right. We all understand Karma. We all understand. You reap what you sow. What goes around comes around, right? People that hurt you in life. We’ll get what’s coming to them, but you just need. Just let them go and give it to God and let them deal with them. It’s powerful stuff, man. Telling you if, if, if a person can only do one thing from this whole interview, there’s only one takeaway from the whole thing. It’s forgive it. Forgive everyone who has ever hurt you. Just just do that.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Well said, man. I think that that’s a great way to end. So Chris, thank you so much for taking almost two hours out of your day to do this. I really appreciate all the…
Chris Wark: Only for you, Ari.
Ari Whitten: It’d better be only for me. No, seriously. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this and very excited to get this out to my audience and share your new book a so people can get that on Amazon.com and it’s Chris beat cancer.
Chris Wark: That’s the book right there, man. And again, thank you for taking the time to let me share my story and talk about my talk about my passion and just share it with your audience. It really means a lot.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. My pleasure man. Well, enjoy the rest of your day and thanks so much and everyone makes sure to go grab his new book on Amazon and I’ll talk to you again next week.
How To Fight And Prevent Cancer Naturally And Effectively with Chris Wark (Chris Beat Cancer)– Show Notes
How Chris beat Cancer (1:29)
How many oncologists use a fear based approach to get people to sign up for chemotherapy (26:28)
How Chris beat cancer – The best nutrition to cure cancer naturally and effectively (40:15)
Chris beat cancer – How alternative medicine is viewed and the studies that have been done on cancer (58:09)
How To Fight Cancer Naturally And Effectively – The truth about treatment plans (1:13:05)
How To Fight Cancer Naturally And Effectively – The truth about keto, and veganism (1:23:45)
How To Fight Cancer Naturally And Effectively – Chris’ top three tips to beating cancer (1:39:32)
Links
You can preorder your own copy of Chris’ new book here
