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2009-10-29 Nicholas Gonzalez MD Alternative Cancer Treatment

An Interview with Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D.

October 29, 2009, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
© copyright 2009, Prescription 2000, Inc.
www.prescription2000.com

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KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today, and our mission is simple: To provide you credible usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is "What Is New And Old In Alternative Treatment With An Emphasis On Enzyme Therapy." Our guest today is Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, a graduate of Cornell University Medical College in 1983. After his internship he completed a fellowship residency in immunology under Dr. Robert A. Good, M.D., PhD., considered by many to be the ‘Father' of modern immunology. Dr. Gonzalez began researching nutritional approaches to cancer treatment while a medical student and completed an investigation of enzyme therapy of cancer while an immunology fellow. Dr. Gonzalez also completed a pilot study from 1994 to 1996 of 11 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer showing very promising results in this very difficult to treat condition. I first interviewed Dr. Gonzalez on his work on the successful treatment of pancreatic cancer in 1999 now posted at Vitasearch.com.

So welcome Dr. Gonzalez and thank you so much for coming on the show today.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well it's great to be here. It's nice to talk to you again after all this time.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know, ten years. I went back and pulled up the interview and I'm going, "Gosh that's ten years since the interview and it's fifteen I guess since you did that study!"

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Since we started it. Yeah, we began in 1994. And you know that interview was a good interview. I mean we still have it linked to our website so it's - you know we got a lot of information in that. I remember it very well.

KIRK HAMILTON: Tell me. Suzanne Sommer's book just came out, "Knockout." How does it feel to be in that book as far as how is this going to help get your work known, and what did you think about that whole book process that she did?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well, Suzanne is a meticulous researcher. She is you know really dedicated to the cause. She has been following nutritional approaches herself for ten years. She is not my patient. She has her own doctors which she discusses in the book. She has her own organic garden. I mean this woman lives the walk and she's actually legitimately devoted to alternative medicine and finding out what's the best and she was determined that our work should get some recognition that's been denied today. And it's kind of ironic. I mean I come out of a very orthodox research training background. I mean my goal in life was to spend the rest of my research career at Sloan-Kettering doing basic science research. I never thought I would be into alternative medicine or anything like that. And I always thought that the way you do science is you do the right thing. You do clinical studies, you get papers published. That good work rises to the surface, bad work falls by the wayside as it should. But that wasn't going to be. It took an actress really to get our work the recognition it deserves and took an actress actually to evaluate our work properly and honestly and effectively. And I think that's kind of ironic. And it's kind of a sad statement on the state of affairs in the conventional medical world that you know they can't do it but you know outsiders without scientific training will do a better job.

KIRK HAMILTON: Why do you think she picked - there's only four cancer specialists for treatment in that book. Why do you think she picked your work?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: She's been a believer in that we're doing good work. Now she called me out of the blue in February (2009) and announced that she was doing this book and it was very quiet at that point. We didn't want to create any stir so none of us were talking about it as she began her work. She really got it done pretty quickly. She said she had had a file on me for years and said that she had a history of breast cancer which she discusses in the book. She was diagnosed 10 years ago and started doing the alternative stuff, had surgery, some radiation, but declined chemo and then went alternative and never looked back. Again she never was my patient but said she had a file on me and that if her disease ever came back she would come see me. She knew more about me that I knew about myself. She had really investigated me pretty thoroughly. And she said she really wanted to provide good information to her readership which is quite large. You know she has had number one best selling books before. And she really wanted to do a good job and pick the best and she thought that my work belonged you know in the book. And I was flattered and you know she did a great job and really nailed it. So she really did her research and her homework very well and picked what she thought were the best approaches in the alternative world toward cancer.

KIRK HAMILTON: Why don't you start off and go back a little bit to where your pancreatic study was done and how you even decided to do that pilot study and a little bit of preliminary work with you know Dr. Beard and Kelley. Their histories.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Sure. In July of 1993 the National Cancer Institute had me down to Washington where I presented it, actually their Bethesda, Maryland offices, as part of their initial attempt to evaluate nontraditional unconventional alternative type approaches to cancer. And I was one of the first people they invited down there and I presented 25 cases from my own practice experience. At that point I hadn't been in practice that long. It was basically late 1987, early 1988. We were sort of gearing up. And I presented cases. Based on that they suggested that I do a pilot study which is basically a technically phase 2 study which you don't have a control group, but you take a cancer for which there is no known successful conventional therapy, and because it involves a cancer that has a terrible prognosis like pancreatic cancer you don't need a large number of patients. You can make a statistical point they said with ten patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. They suggested I take on pancreatic cancer because it's the worst cancer there is, and if we got some success with that it would make a point and people would have to listen. And I was quite willing to do that because Kelley, my previous mentor, had a lot of successful with pancreatic cancer and we already had seen success in our own practice over the five years I had been in practice at that time. At that time Nestle was interested in funding a clinical trial of our work because they had done a review of my cases. It's kind of odd, you know, a mainstream food company, but they got interested in my work and they were willing to put up the money. So the NCI kind of supervised it. Nestle paid for it. We had a very eminent group of people supervising the study so there could be no accusations that the patient didn't have pancreatic cancer. I didn't choose the patients. They had to be approved by an oncologist, Ernst Wynder who is one of the preeminent cancer epidemiologists in the 20th century. He is now deceased. Pierre Guesry, head of the Pasteur Institute who was from Nestle, he was vice president of Nestle at the time, he supervised it as well. So we had a really good group of people ensuring that the study would be done right. We did the study and we got the best results in the history of medicine. You know we had patients that were living for four, up to five years with inoperative pancreatic cancer which in the Gemzar® studies from 1997and 1998 no one out of 126 patients - no one lived longer than 19 months and that was considered an advance over previous studies. So in our little pilot study of 10, 11 patients - one dropped out so we added an11th, we had patients living four and five years which the Gemzar® with 126 patients couldn't meet that, match that.

KIRK HAMILTON: The core of your treatment then was the diet and pancreatic enzyme therapy. Can you go back a little bit and talk about Dr. Beard, the original researcher that got enzyme therapy going.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Yeah. Our therapy really involves three basic components. Individualized diet, and we don't have one magical diet. We have ten basic diets that range from pure vegetarian, nuts and seeds to red meat three times a day, 90 variations and we use our own way of assessing what diet each patient needs and we individualize it for each patient. Secondly, large doses of supplements. We use the vitamins, minerals, trace elements, antioxidants. Again the supplement protocols are very individualized. We don't believe those supplements are as valuable, as they are really aren't going to have much effect on reversing advanced cancer. The main anticancer element in terms of supplements are large doses of proteolytic pancreatic enzymes. Now in conventional physiology and medicine pancreatic enzymes have one function. They are necessary for digestion. They've known that since 1858 when Kühne, the European researcher first isolated trypsin, the main proteolytic protein digesting enzyme. And it was known at that time and it's known today that they digest food. Pancreatic enzymes are required to digest proteins, fats, carbohydrates. Well Dr. John Beard was an English scientist who was working at the University of Edinburg. He was a full professor there and very eminent in embryology. He wasn't a medical doctor, he was a Ph.D. in embryology, but he got interested in the cancer work and he was the first person to suggest that pancreatic proteolytic enzymes above and beyond their digestive function have a pronounced anticancer effect. In fact he went as far as to say they're the body's main defense against cancer and would be useful as a cancer therapy, and he actually tested it in animal models that were available in 1902 and 1903 with great success. And they were used on patients at the time who clearly had advanced cancer with total regression of disease as reported in the orthodox conventional medical literature. Beard's work never took hold because at the time Madame Curie and her friends were suggesting radiation was a simple easy cure for cancer and she was very well known and loved by the press and Beard was an esoteric ivory tower kind of research scientist that no one listened to or took seriously. So Beard died in obscurity, Madame Curie rose to fame, and ultimately won two Nobel prizes, but of course it eventually turned out that radiation isn't a simple cure for all cancers and most cancers are resistant even when it regresses. It eventually comes back and it's a very toxic approach. In fact Madame Curie herself died of radiation induced aplastic anemia. A whole generation of researchers died as a result of overexposure to radiation.

KIRK HAMILTON: Do you have a mechanism of how the pancreatic enzymes actually destroy cancer or how does that work?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well, of course in Beard's day you know going back a hundred years, molecular biology was in its infancy and he didn't really know how it worked. He had some idea that cancer cells have proteins in them that are kind of the mirror image of normal proteins and pancreatic enzymes won't affect normal living proteins but will attack cancer proteins which are their mirror image. There's some evidence to support that cancer proteins are kind of quite different from normal proteins in terms of the way they reflect light which is their polarity. I can't say that's been documented to be the case. Beard really didn't know but that was one of his suggestions. We've done animal studies with Dr. Pour at the University of Nebraska who's one of the preeminent molecular biologists in terms of pancreatic cancer and he started looking into that. We don't have the funding to really support in depth molecular biological studies of how the enzymes work. We do know they work. Beard knew they worked. We don't know the actual mechanism but interestingly enough they tend to leave normal cells alone and normal tissues really aren't affected by them but cancer cells are very vulnerable to pancreatic proteolytic enzymes.

KIRK HAMILTON: Do my own pancreatic enzymes deal with the cancer cells that come into my body and come and go, or is this just strictly treatment?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: No. We think they are the main defense against cancer. Even though I was trained as a cancer immunologist Beard believed, and I believe now, that it isn't the immune system which is what's so popular in the alternative world as well as the conventional world that it's necessary to evoke an anticancer effect. We think it's the pancreatic enzymes. The immune system's very secondary, even tertiary. That the main defense against cancer in all of us as we produce cancer cells every day are the pancreatic enzymes, not the immune system.

KIRK HAMILTON: When then - when you give your dosing of the high dose pancreatic enzymes are those between meals or as I would secrete - do I secrete pancreatic enzymes away from meals or is it only with meals?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: We all secrete them 24 hours a day. But secretion really gears up when we eat because there are neurological as well as hormonal signals through the autonomic nervous system through hormones like secretin and cholecystokinin that in the presence of food will stimulate the pancreas to really start pouring out enzymes. So clearly there's an increase in secretion with food. But we are producing enzymes all the time. For example, any laboratory has normal values for trypsin and amylase and lipase which are the three main pancreatic enzymes in the blood and they're 24 hours a day. If you draw blood on anybody even if their fasting you will have levels of trypsin, amylase and lipase and that's how physicians monitor pancreatitis. The blood levels. And during pancreatitis when the pancreas breaks down the blood levels go real high. When people get better the blood levels return to normal. But the fact is, they never go to zero. We all have levels of pancreatic enzymes in our blood 24 hours a day and any lab will have normal values.

KIRK HAMILTON: This may sound like a simplistic question but then is there a preventive level of enzymes that you could look at, like a lipid profile or whatever that you might say is preventive of cancer?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Yes. I mean we've looked - we have our own way of assessing enzymes, but blood is useful. I mean 24-hour urine collections are useful also. In fact during the 1940s and 1950s when there was a lot of interest in orally ingested pancreatic enzymes as a therapeutic tool. They used to use 24-hour urine collections and that could tell you whether someone was deficient or had sufficient amounts because they are secreted in the urine kind of tonically on a regular basis. And they actually developed normal levels so you could determine whether someone was deficient or not and we think pancreatic enzymes are always deficient in cancer. Either they're deficient or they're not being used efficiently which is there are enzyme blockers in the blood, that even if you have adequate blood levels they can be prevented from doing what they're supposed to do.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. Let's talk about how you went from Dr. Beard's work and then you met Dr. Kelley and this is where the genesis of actually the dietary program came together. Was that correct?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: I learned about - actually I learned about Beard from Kelley when I was a second year medical student and had the opportunity to meet Dr. Kelley who at that time was very controversial. It was 1981. He'd just come off that Steve McQueen fiasco - you know as if Kelley was responsible for his death when McQueen had advanced mesothelioma and had failed radiation, immunotherapy before he even got to Kelley, and Kelley wasn't really directly in charge of treating him anyway. And you know oncologists just lose patients every day and they don't get blamed for it and Kelley was blamed and it was a big scandal. I had the opportunity to meet him through a journalist friend of mine and Kelley said he didn't really want to do a kind of a pot-boiler type book. He wanted his work investigated by an academic research group and I happened to be working in Dr. Good's group at the time. And Good at the time was head of Sloan-Kettering as the president of Sloan-Kettering. And he supported an initial evaluation of Kelley's work. Now Kelley had taken Beard's work and basically saved it from obscurity. But he also added a dietary component. It was Kelley who added on the individual dietary approach, the individualized supplement programs and also the third component which I hadn't mentioned before is the detoxification routines like the infamous coffee enemas. So Kelley had developed the enzyme therapy into a very sophisticated combination nutritional enzyme approach with individualized diet, individualized supplement protocols, and the detoxification routines, as well as large doses of orally ingested pancreatic enzymes.

KIRK HAMILTON: Kelley was a dentist, correct?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: He was an orthodontist. Yeah, he was a dentist orthodontist and the way the story goes during the early 60s he got very sick and was diagnosed clinically with pancreatic cancer. Of course this is before CAT scans and needle aspiration of tumors and all that, but I spoke to some of his doctors and he clearly was sick. He had tumors in his bone. They could see them on x-rays. Again, they didn't have CAT scans and they could see tumors in his lung. He had a tumor in his heart, a tumor in his hip. Very sick. They give him six to eight weeks to live and he had four kids and he was afraid if died they'd end up in a orphanage so he started treating himself. He was already interested in nutrition and began using large doses of enzymes and got well. He was his first patient, his first test case. And after that people started coming to him from the local Texas town to be treated with a cancer, and you know by the mid to late 60s basically his practice consisted of not orthodonture anymore but of cancer patients coming to him to get nutritional programs.

KIRK HAMILTON: Where do you get these enzymes or what specific types? They have to be animal-based or they're a specific type of porcine? Where do you get these?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Our enzymes are made especially for us by a process we developed. A lot of the currently available commercial brands rely on a patent from 1951 that we think is long outdated and produces a less than optimal type enzyme product. We had actually to develop our own method of making it and we had funding from Procter and Gamble to help us do that. And we had funding from Nestle as well as Procter and Gamble and that gave us the opportunity to really perfect the manufacturing process. They're made for us in New Zealand. New Zealand has the strictest laws for raising animals. They've never had mad cow, trichinosis, hoof and mouth and scrapie, any of those diseases which are really worrisome. Their regular animals are raised what we would consider virtually organic grass-fed organic standards. So we get all our animal products and enzymes from them. We use a porcine base because the pig pancreas is most like the human pancreas. For years diabetologists used pig insulin to treat diabetics because in terms of amino acids sequence it was most homologous to human insulin. Pancreatic enzymes are the same. I mean the beef pancreatic enzymes are quite different in terms of amino acid sequence than human enzymes. The pig is the most similar so we use pig, and they seem to work best and the pig pancreas is very similar to ours and they produce a lot of enzymes. Beef cattle, for example, have two stomachs and they don't really have a very strong pancreas because they rely on bacterial fermentation of food. So their pancreas is kind of weak and they don't have a lot of enzymes in their pancreas where the pig pancreas is just like ours. It works best. Plant enzymes we don't believe have any effect against cancer. They're very useful for a lot of reasons like bromelain and papain help with inflammation. They can be synergistic with pancreatic enzymes and we do use them regularly because they seem to help the pancreatic enzymes, but plant based enzymes whether it's from a fungus, or from as is commonly manufactured and sold from pineapple or from papaya, they don't work against cancer directly. You need the animal based enzymes. They just aren't similar enough. They don't have the same mechanism of action as the animal based enzymes.

KIRK HAMILTON: When are these enzymes given? I got a little confused. With meals or away from meals?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: I think I went off on a tangent. We give some with meals to help digestion but when you're looking for an anticancer effect to treat cancer you've got to give them away from meals. Otherwise they'll be used up in the digestive process to some extent although a lot of the enzymes that you give with food can be reabsorbed. But when we're treating cancer patients, we give the six, seven doses a day spread through the day even a dose in the middle of the night but they have been at least an hour away from food to get maximum effect. When you give them on an empty stomach they'll be absorbed to a large degree, and then circulating, and they work most effectively in terms of the cancer treatment. When you give them with food a lot of them will be used up just in the digestive process.

KIRK HAMILTON: How many pills or pancreatic enzymes are given daily?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well they range quite a bit but generally in the range of about 100 to 110 capsules. Our capsules are 425 mg so we're talking, you know, 40 to 50 grams a day of pancreatic enzymes.

KIRK HAMILTON: So this is a committed patient then obviously?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Oh yeah. You know this is not for the passive, or someone who doesn't believe in it, or someone who wants a way out, or doesn't want to change their life. If they want to continue smoking, drinking, eating ice cream and white flour pizza, this is not the program for you. And I understand that . This is not for everybody. This requires a dedicated motivated patient first. Unlike chemo which is passive, you just show up, eat ice cream, watch TV and they give you the drug. The patient has to take charge and do the program every day and take the pills every day. And we're the first people to say this isn't for everybody. It's for people that really want to take charge of their own health.

KIRK HAMILTON: How does your regimen now take off from Kelley's? What is - the Gonzales version so to speak?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well Kelley had 10 different metabolic types. You know the concept of metabolic types is getting quite popular in the alternative field. Kelley was the first one to use that term and it just means that different people need different types of diets and different supplements and they're meat eaters and vegetarians and balanced people that do well with both plant and animal type foods. We still use that system. We use 10 basic diets. We have about 90 variations. Kelley had a big questionnaire that he used to use to help determine metabolic types. We do it from hair testing and blood work. We have a simple more objective rather than subjective questionnaire type.

KIRK HAMILTON: Can you hold on that a second and backtrack and kind of explain how you tell the difference in types because I'm a little confused. You use hair, you use a few other things?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well we look at blood work and hair completely different than anyone else. We've - the lab we use that does it for us has adjusted the testing to give us the metabolic type just from the biochemical profile. You can do it from blood or hair. In fact, Kelley was actually - when Kelley kind of went off the deep end and shut down his office he was working on assessing metabolic type from blood work. And you can do it because vegetarians have a different - slightly different blood chemistry profile than a meat eater, you know in terms of sodium, potassium, chloride. It gets very complicated but you can tell, and there are patterns that you can see. You know the calcium tends to run high in parasympathetics and tends to run low in sympathetics.

KIRK HAMILTON: Is most of this based off this autonomic parasympathetic and sympathetic determination?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Yes, it's completely based on that. I mean Kelley was the great master of metabolic typing based on autonomic physiology you know for your listeners out there. You know the autonomic nervous system is a nervous system that basically controls all metabolism - cardiovascular function, respiration, secretion of hormones, digestion, peristalsis, secretion of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, pancreatic enzymes, liver function. All that's under the control of the autonomic nervous system and there are two branches the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. Traditionally in physiology they teach that the sympathetic system is more active in times of stress when you have to convert energy to useable blood sugar. It tends to shunt blood to the brain so you can think quickly in a time of stress, and to the muscles and tends to shut down digestion because in a time of stress you don't have to digest your food. What you gotta do is think fast and move fast if there's a dangerous threat. The parasympathetic is more the workhorse of the body that is involved with digestion, breakdown of food, absorption of nutrients, utilization of nutrients. The parasympathetic system is active at night when the body repairs the day's damage. The sympathetic is active during the day when I have to be active and alert and functioning and leading meetings and you know running governments and running military platoons or whatever we're doing. That's the sympathetic system. Parasympathetic system repairs from the damage of all that activity. So they kind of work in opposition. You know the sympathetic system shuts down digestion, parasympathetic turns it all on.

KIRK HAMILTON: So from that assessment, you've come up with the ten metabolic types and you have the 90 different diets.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Yes.

KIRK HAMILTON: So I'd like to go into some of the extra treatments and explain - and give your wrap on coffee enemas, that a traditional physician if they were listening wouldn't jump out of the -

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well it's really quite ironic coming out of a very conventional medical research - I mean the first thing when I met Kelley and started doing my research we talked about coffee enemas. In fact, he wanted me to start doing them and I was a very conventional medical student. I had an open mind or I wouldn't have given him the time of day. So I have to credit myself at least I would listen to him. He started about coffee enemas and I thought this is just silly. And he said it comes right out of the medical literature. Kelley said he learned about them not from the alternative world but he actually learned about them from the Merck Manual when he was trying to find a way to help himself get through his cancer. And indeed I - being a good investigator - I contacted the Merck Manual and indeed they (coffee enemas) were in old editions right up to 1997. Coffee enemas come out of the orthodox conventional medical literature. Actually there's a history of them going back to the Egyptians. The first documented mention of coffee enemas are in the Egyptian medical papyruses going back, you know, three and four thousand years and they were used by the Greeks and the Romans. There's nothing odd about them and sometimes these therapies when they've been kept alive for a few thousand years there's a reason because they're actually quite effective. The Merck Manual recommended them, and the only reason they took them out, and I spoke to the editor about this - not because they thought they were dangerous or didn't work, because they were kind of focusing and ran out of space and they were getting into all the high tech things. They were in most nursing texts right though the 1960s and I got copies of these old nursing texts from medical libraries and sure enough they would recommend coffee enemas. They made people feel well. No one was quite sure why. Kelley thought they helped the liver work better and there's some evidence to support that. To my astonishment when I started going through the old literature in 1920s, 30s into the 40s there were dozens of papers in the conventional medical literature like the Journal of the American Medical Association discussing the therapeutic effectiveness of rectal instillations of a variety of material, even milk, like milk enemas and they were in the literature. And there was one study I saw where they actually helped with schizophrenia. It was in the conventional peer-reviewed medical literature. I think it was 1920s.

KIRK HAMILTON: So what does the coffee enema do for the cancer patient?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well what coffee enemas do is they help the liver work better. You know when you're treating cancer patients with enzymes those enzymes are very powerful and very effective and they start breaking down tumors the first dose. Now the tumor is a very abnormal collection of cells and they produce all kinds of abnormal proteins, and are really toxic to the normal tissue. And you have this tumor sitting in your body, then the enzymes attack it and you‘ve got all this dead tissue. It's like having gangrene in your body. It's dead tissue. It's going to make you sick. A lot of the dead tumor waste will be processed through the kidney and the liver but those enzymes break down cancer so fast the kidney and the liver will get overloaded. People get sick. In fact we have to cycle people off the enzymes just to slow the process down. What coffee enemas do is through a parasympathetic reflex stimulate the liver to work more efficiently and dump its waste. What enemas do basically is they help the liver work better. Now when you drink coffee it turns on the sympathetic system. That's why you feel alert but it shuts the liver down. When you take it rectally it has a complete opposite neurophysiological activity. It turns on the parasympathetic system which causes the liver to work more efficaciously and helps it, you know get rid of all these extra toxins that are being produced by the tumor.

KIRK HAMILTON: I just had a funny thought of you know coffee clinics and rectal suppositories.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well that's been - actually people have tried caffeine suppositories. You know - look - asthma specialists will use rectal instillations of asthma drugs which are methylxanthines. Caffeine is a methylxanthine. It's in the same class of medications that are used to treat asthma and there are suppositories of theophylline which is a methylxanthine and even suppositories of caffeine and one reason they give them rectally is because they are so well absorbed. And very often asthmatics can't swallow when you're in an asthmatic episode and it can threaten your life. You instill theophylline, this methylxanthine rectally, it's quickly absorbed. Well there's no difference than taking a coffee enema. Caffeine is a methylxanthine just like theophylline.

KIRK HAMILTON: How about - I'd like to go - are there any favorite nutrients that you use? And then do you use any IV therapy like IV vitamin C or anything like that?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: I never use IV therapy. I know it's very - I knew Linus Pauling and I actually spoke with Fred Klenner a few times. Fred Klenner was the regional North Carolina specialist who first developed intravenous forms of vitamin C going back to 1948 and he treated everything from encephalitis and polio to cancer with high dose vitamin C. And Cathcart, of course in California, is one of the world's experts. And I know it's done widely. I think it's very limited in its efficacy having talked to many doctors who use it. And I think it also interferes with my program. When you take - vitamin C is very powerful. I don't question that for a second. It's so powerful that it can neutralize drugs and it can neutralize my enzymes. So if a patient wants to do my program and they've been on intravenous vitamin C we say make a choice. You know we're not cult leaders. If they want to intravenous vitamin C they should do that but not try and combine it with my program because vitamin C is so powerful it's going to neutralize my enzymes.

KIRK HAMILTON: Do you use any oral supplements then?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Our average patient is taking in addition to the 100 capsules of enzymes probably 100 capsules of other supplements as well. And it's all individualized and it depends on the metabolic type. Like the sympathetic dominants do really well with large doses of ascorbic acid. By large dose I mean you know 6 to 9 grams. Not huge, huge doses. Parasympathetics do much worse at those kinds of doses. They do better with lower doses, you know modest doses. You know 1.5 grams, 2 grams a day of vitamin C.

KIRK HAMILTON: So the nutritional supplementation is related to the metabolic typing and not necessary a nutritional assessment?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Totally. You know I don't even care what the nutritional assessment is. I care what their autonomic status is. If they're parasympathetic dominant they need calcium. I don't care what the hair test or the blood test says about their calcium blood level. They need calcium. If they're sympathetic, they need magnesium and they don't need calcium and their metabolic type will determine what nutrients they need regardless of what the nutritional profile might show. And what we find is when you get the autonomic system to work in balance, you get rid of these extreme effects that a lot of the deficiencies just self-correct. If the body's more efficient it can absorb food better so you know we use supplements specifically to manipulate autonomic physiology. And that's irrespective of what any nutritional profile might show.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. And let me ask you. I think I heard somewhere and I don't - you're not a soy advocate at all, correct?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: No. I mean I'm not. You know my friend Kaayla Daniel (PhD, CCN) wrote the book "The Whole Soy Story" of 480 pages or so on the dangers of soy. And the problem with soy. I think you actually do like soy as I remember. The problems with soy are two-fold. First, soy is the most powerful trypsin blocker of any food on earth. Trypsin is the main anti-cancer proteolytic enzyme in the pancreas. It completely neutralizes trypsin. It's a disaster on my program and I don't think anyone should have their trypsin neutralized. You know the Department of Agriculture some years ago did a study with calves where they were going to raise them on 40% soy thinking it would be a cheap way of raising a cow. They all died in infancy and they did autopsies and their pancreases had atrophied and they published it in an esoteric agricultural journal but it blew my mind when I read it. And Kelley was always against soy going back 35 years because of the effect on trypsin which was even documented in the 1960s. Secondly, soy as you know can affect thyroid and even if it's fermented we still find that it blocks enzymes and can still have an antithyroid effect. And anything that can interfere with my enzymes I get nervous about understandably. I mean that's the whole essence of our program.

KIRK HAMILTON: So I can see in treatment. Okay, I can see that affecting a treatment. But how do you take a culture - like I read the centenarian study, the 25 year centenarian study of the Okinawan people, and that's (soy) part of their diet, and it's not all fermented. There's tofu chunks, there's miso, there's tempeh, and that's a good part of their diet. So how in that light can it be - I can see as a therapy what you're talking about, but I don't understand as a lifestyle incorporated in whole foods. (Recommended Reading: "The Okinawa Program: How the World's Longest-Lived People Achieve Everlasting Health - And How You Can Too", Bradley J. Willcox, M.D, D. Craig Willcox, Ph.D. , Makoto Suzuki, M.D., Ph.D., 2001, 484 pages, "The Okinawa Diet Plan: The Only Diet With 100 Years of Living Proof," Bradley J. Willcox, M.D, D. Craig Willcox, Ph.D. , Makoto Suzuki, M.D., Ph.D., 2004, 419 pages; What About Soy? by John Robbins).

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well first of all - you know a lot of the studies in the Orient when you actually look at them as Kaayla Daniels has, my friend Sally Fallon will say soy for generations was only used as a condiment. For example soy milk was introduced into Asia by the 7th Day Adventists. This is not a food they were using during the 1930s. They had never used soy milk before in Japan or China or anywhere else in the Orient. It was actually an American invention and brought over to Asia. This idea that they used this stuff for thousands of years. They used soy primarily as a condiment. They use soy sauce. I mean, in fact I'm working with Kikkoman which makes soy sauce. They've made it for 12 generations, the same family. They're a billion dollar company and they make soy sauce which as a condiment. They weren't using it as a primary food and nor did Kikkoman even intend that and they're very successful. They make the best soy sauce around. And they have a different approach. I mean they look at it as a condiment, not as a main food. The idea that they were living on miso soup and living on soy burgers, that's just - a lot of those things are American inventions that were brought over to the East in the 1930s and 1940s. And as for the Okinawans, I mean I would have to really look - I mean Kaayla Daniels is the expert on the Orientals and their soy intake. It not my area - I don't claim to be an expert on that at all as they block enzymes.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. I got that they block enzymes. I got your opinion on that because I want to get to a couple more before we round up. Thank you for that.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Sure.

KIRK HAMILTON: Because it's a constant question. How about milk products? Do you encourage any? Or are there certain metabolic types that need milk according to you or what...?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: It depends on the type. I mean as Weston Price found you know the Masai was studied by George Mann at Vanderbilt University during the 1960s and 70s. I mean the traditional Massi lived on milk and blood. Raw milk and blood. And they would drink a gallon a day of raw milk and blood and these are among the healthiest people on earth and they were studied by Weston Price as well as by George Mann more recently. They had no cancer, arthritis, heart disease, depression, mental illness. They would walk 30 miles a day tending their cattle and all they ate was raw milk and blood and their diet was 70% saturated fat and they were among the healthiest people on earth. You know when Weston Price went up to the high Swiss Valley these people lived on dairy products. They had their cattle up and they were extraordinarily healthy. They had no dental decay, no arthritis. The whole essence of Weston Price - certain people you know, then the Polynesians didn't have milk at all. It depends again on the lo-cal and culture that you're looking at. So the Masai did very well, thank you very much, on large doses of milk products. Of course, there's a difference between raw milk from grass fed animals and pasteurized homogenized milk from a dairy, you know, from an industrial dairy farm where the animals never go outside and are raised on grains. I mean you're not dealing with the same product.

KIRK HAMILTON: In your treatment protocols if you had to kind of give a picture of your patients with all the different metabolic types, how many are on raw milk products? I guess that's what you would recommend.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well raw milk products are tough to get because only 13 states allow them legally. You can get them. Like New York state does allow them. I get raw milk and New York state will allow it. Their attitude is if you're stupid enough to own a cow and you want to drink raw milk, you can do it. So I own part of a cow in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and every few weeks the Amish farmer drives into New York City with his raw milk and sells it to us where there's a buyers club. You know we're allowed to do that. We're stupid enough to want to do it. Doing it for years. I don't do it regularly because you know I like it. It's great but it tends to put on weight because it's so good you want drink a lot of it. And that's great. Now the difference between raw - I can't tolerate homogenized pasteurized - ultra pasteurized milk that's heated to 230 degrees Fahrenheit. They blast every living nutrient out. It's all dead food. Raw milk isn't, and you know there are groups that have lived on raw milk like the Masai and done very well so the idea that humans shouldn't be eating dairy products - so it is true that no other mammal species lives on dairy products beyond infancy, I'm well aware of that and actually use that in my lectures. But there are also human groups that have thrived on dairy products like the Swiss which Weston Price documented or the Masai which he documented and had been studied extensively by modern scientists and are extraordinarily healthy with no atherosclerosis or heart disease or anything.

KIRK HAMILTON: In your program, do you do other lifestyle things like do you encourage exercise and strength training or any mind-body stuff?

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: You know with advanced cancer patients a lot of them are so sick all they can do is make their carrot juice. As they get better, yes exercise helps. I mean there's studies recently that show exercise actually cuts down cancer rates and there's no question that it's helpful and the Masai walk 30 miles a day. The Eskimos up in - the traditional Eskimos they go 50 miles a day easily. Yeah, so exercise is the normal inheritance of the human body. We should be active. We shouldn't be sitting on our duffs of course but a lot of advanced - a lot of my chronic fatigue patients they can barely get out of bed. So you have to let them get better before you can start pushing exercise on them. We start gently. Kelley said, and I agree, that walking is the best exercise. We encourage them to walk as a start and it's something that most anyone can do.

KIRK HAMILTON: I would like to finish up by - can you kind of give me an overview of like the best cancers - that you think you have had the best success with and those that are really troublesome.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: The best cancers are the cancers where the patients comply. The worst cancers are when they don't comply. It doesn't really - in terms of the cancer type, it really is - and I wasn't trying to be a wiseguy with that. I mean that's the way it is. I mean we have pancreatic cancer patients that have been with us 20 years. We have people with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma biopsy-proven at fancy places like the Mayo Clinic alive 15 years later where their tumors completely went away. And we have other patients with simple cancers that got worse and we usually, not always, usually it's compliance issue. And it's not that I'm crediting myself. I didn't invent the enzyme therapy. Kelley and Beard before me did and they were right. They (pancreatic enzymes) kill cancer if you get them down they kill - I mean sometimes if the patient has so much cancer that you just can't break it down fast enough. You know a lot of times they come to us at the end of the line not at the beginning. Yeah we can't break it down fast enough. They get too toxic, but usually if they can get the enzymes down, do their program, do their enemas, and follow a diet and are willing to do that they have a really good chance of getting well whatever the cancer is.

KIRK HAMILTON: How are you going to get your work out? I know there's a little ‘snafu' with the politics of the last study.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well we got this big grant from the NCI and they sabotaged it and we've you know we've gone on the attack and the Government itself had to investigate and found that the study was completely mismanaged by the fancy Columbia NCI teams assigned to supervise it. So it was a disaster. Oddly enough when we began this conversation it's kind of gone full circle. It took Suzanne Sommers coming out of nowhere. I mean I didn't know her. Just called me one day in February, this past February (2009), and said she wanted to do a book and she wanted me in it. You know God works in his own way. You know...kind of funny to evoke divine inspiration. It wasn't as I thought it would be. The NCI and NIH all working together. They could care less. They hate alternative, they hated me. They wish I would get hit by a truck. All I do is cause them -

KIRK HAMILTON: (Laughter)

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: They wanted it - look they gave me the grant because they had to and then they wanted to sabotage it and finally get rid of me. We wouldn't let them do it easily. They thought I was so stupid I wouldn't see that they're committing mismanagement, and even fraud in changing data. Well I caught them and we went to the appropriate investigative groups who would rather not investigate their - you know one of their own, and you know blame the alternative. They couldn't. It was conventional orthodox physicians who screwed up and it was the alterative doctors, my colleague Isaacs and myself, who insisted the study be run by the appropriate tenants of clinical trial management. And they couldn't do it. And we insisted they do it and there is an Inspector General investigation right now at the request of Congressman Burton to investigate the conventional doctors who mismanaged the study, and there's already been one report from the Office of Human Research Protection showing it was completely mismanaged. So I think ultimately we've been vindicated and we've also written a book about it which will be a lot of fun. We hope to get that out in the next month or two.

KIRK HAMILTON: So tell me about your two books before we wrap up and how do we contact you.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Well the first book is, we just got it back from the printer. It's called "The Trophoblast and the Origins of Cancer" where we really discuss now modern molecular biology confirms Dr. Beard's work from 100 years ago using his early research documents to show what he did 100 years ago really has been confirmed now, and among other things Beard first discovered stem cells, although no one knew what he was talking about so when he died they forgot what he was talking about and now they've been rediscovered of course and it's a hot research topic. He deserved the Nobel Prize for that alone and we discuss that in our book. We talk about the evolution of enzyme therapy through Kelley. And the second book is actually my original investigation of Dr. Kelley, the monograph that I completed in 1986 under Dr. Good's direction which was the summation of my five year investigation of Kelley's therapy and his records including 50 case reports with the actual medical records in the book. Well we couldn't get it published in the mid 1980s even though my mentor was Robert Good, the most published author in the history of medicine, because no one believed that nutritional therapy could be valuable and they thought I must have made these records up, or the patients weren't real or something like that. So now it's 20 years later - 23 years later and a different attitude. We're well known so we're going to publish it. We're going to get it out. The third book is "The Investigation of Clinical Study." If people are interested in getting any of these books, they can contact our office or our website, www.Dr-Gonzalez.com.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay, Dr. Gonzalez, you know - I obviously could go on forever. I really appreciate your work and it's been a fast decade since the last time I interviewed you.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: Yeah, it sure has.

KIRK HAMILTON: I just go wow! I pulled that up and I just go whew 1999! So I wish you the best of luck and thank you so much for coming on and taking time out of your busy day. And we will do our best to get your work out there.

DR. NICHOLAS GONZALEZ: I appreciate it so much. It was nice talking to you again.

KIRK HAMILTON: Nice talking to you. And for the listening audience out there, just remember until next time, Stay and Be Well.

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