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2011-04-26 Olivier C. Wenker MD Obesity’s Effect on Cancer and How the American Lifestyle Fuels Both Epidemics

April 26, 2011, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
© copyright 2011, Prescription 2000, Inc.
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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 "Obesity's Effect on Cancer and How the American Lifestyle Fuels Both Epidemics." Our guest today is Dr. Olivier Wenker, Professor of Anesthesiology, Director of Technology, Discovery, Office of Translational Research in the Division of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Welcome Dr. Wenker. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: You're welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know, I really, really, really enjoyed your talk at the A4M meeting in Las Vegas, and I believe it was in December (2010). And one of the reasons is you go to that conference and there's a lot of different theories and approaches thrown around, but I'm kind of a basic lifestyle guy. And so when you came on and talked, really started your talk about - well, you blatantly said, you just said "Obesity causes cancer." And you really got into the nuts and bolts of lifestyle, I really enjoyed that. So thank you so much for doing that talk.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: You're welcome. I mean it is such an important topic. And you know we have so many, many patients who are unfortunately touched with cancer. And today the guess would be anywhere between 30 and 70% of cancers probably could be avoided in the first place. And certainly once you get them and you go to the traditional means of medicine with you know the chemo, the radiation, the surgery, you know people just forget that they're still in control of their destiny and that it all has to do with lifestyle.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's - first of all you have a very interesting background. You're an anesthesiologist, critical care specialist, emergency/disaster medicine specialist. So how did those specialties eventually lead you to getting involved with cancer in general, and then being part of one of the largest cancer centers in the world?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Well, okay, I mean many, many cancer patients have to undergo surgery so if you're an anesthesiologist in a critical specialist, of course you know MD Anderson has the largest cancer center in the world, it's gonna need anesthesiologists and critical care specialists. And this is how I've been hired here at MD Anderson. Now, doing anesthesia for cancer patients is a little special. Same thing for intensive care for cancer patients, but I mean these are specialties that are needed. That was not the fact that brought me to the lifestyle changes. The lifestyle changes and looking into the research and the literature and what goes on out there with food, nutrition, lifestyle, supplements, all these kinds of things. Integrative oncology, alternative medicine, all these things. That just came about through my own private experience.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well tell me. Let's stay with MD Anderson Cancer Center because you make a point of the enormity of that institution, and what it signifies to me is the enormity of the cancer problem. And when people say we beat cancer, frequency is leveling out a little bit, you shared that this place is growing by leaps and bounds. So can you put MD Anderson Cancer Center kind of in the center of what's happening with cancer?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Oh, yeah. I mean you come to the Texas Medical Center. You know, I have become a Texan so I can say the Texas Medical Center is the largest medical center in the world. But it is true, you know, you come here, I mean dozens of hospitals everything together, and you look at where the cranes are, where new buildings are being built. The metastasis of MD Anderson Cancer Center is in full, you know, go. We are just growing, we are just kind of - have not enough space for all our patients. This just tells you what's going out in the population. People are just getting cancers in an increasing rate. Now what we have seen in the newspapers basically, death rates are going down a little bit and some of the cancers we may get a little bit better handle. A very good example is the colon cancer. If you do your colonoscopy it is not just a diagnostic treatment or a diagnostic procedure. You treat the problem right there and then. This is why this is so important that you do these preventive things. However, the way we go with our lifestyles in the U.S. and abroad now, cancer is not something that's gonna go away. And in fact when you go to the schools, and you look at our children and you look at what they eat, and you look at their body weight, and you look at how heavier they are getting, and you know more obese compared to 10, 20, 30 years ago. I bet you we're gonna see a large increase in cancers in the next 10 or 20 years.

KIRK HAMILTON: So it's fair to say that we're not winning the war on cancer?
DR. OLIVIER WENKER: No, not by any means at this point.

KIRK HAMILTON: And so there's this huge industry of cancer treatment. And you make a comment you created the two views. One is that we have kind of a stealth bomber approach going in with radiation or chemo and blasting the cancer. And the cost effectiveness of that, and maybe how long it may prolong life versus lifestyle change and prevention. Can you just talk about those two concepts for a second?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Yeah. Let's go to the easy one kind of - you know. So here we are, a big hospital, traditional medicine, you're a cancer patient, you expect to come in and to be treated with the latest of the latest. We spend millions and hundreds of millions of dollars getting these little stealth bombers. What they do, they go into your body typically now and attack one single gene or something that causes the cancer. So you really go in there and you really like what one of these very good missiles that we're launching all around the world unfortunately. You're really able to go in there and take out one single part of the cancer. The problem with that is it's enormously expensive. Um, it typically prolongs life anywhere between three months and maybe years. And the cancer, because, people you know always say okay I have one cancer, and then they say well we know there are different stages of cancers, 1, 2, 3, 4, something like that. But a cancer mass, when you take a cancer out of the body this cancer has all kind of different stages. There are very young cancer cells, there are very old ones, there are dying ones, there are growing ones, there are ones that even mutate into something different. So when you go in there with the bomb you can kill that but the chance that one or two of those little ones are not being killed and then come back and develop resistance to the same treatment is very, very high. Now we see this with some of the very famous drugs. We thought we eliminated certain type of cancers and yet two or three years later suddenly these patients come back with reoccurrence of cancer and now you cannot use that drug anymore. So that's one of the approaches. And the conventional chemo approach was really to kill basically many, many cells including healthy cells, and then let your body recover. But that has problems because you're killing the immune system and blood cells and all kind of stuff that shouldn't be killed. The other way to look at that today is - I heard once by a very good researcher, very, very famous researcher here in-house, at MD Anderson, the example of the Christmas tree. So the modern chemotherapy is basically you're squishing one of the lights that is controlling many other lights and the whole light chain goes out until you fix that again or the cancer becomes resistant. The other way to treat the cancer is go to the dimmer at the wall and just dim down the whole tree. And in that is kind of an old but new concept. It's living with your disease. It's managing your disease. It's not dying from your disease. It's just kind of keeping your disease, you know diabetes or things like that, in check and make sure that you not die from that disease and you have a good life quality. And we're not even talking prevention in the first place. But there are many things you can do to dim down the lights in your body so that cancer cells cannot just go ahead and do what they do.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let's talk about prevention and the economics of that versus letting the disease happen. You talk about if there was a drug that came up and could prevent anywhere from what I think you said 30 to 70% of cancers, correct me if I'm wrong. There would be a blockbuster -

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: No, no, you're absolutely right. That's what I said. And we, you know even our president here in the hospital, he mentions up to 70%, I mean we believe that.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well tell me then how does - let's get to one of the heart of the topics today - is how does being fat cause cancer?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Okay. Many, many direct and indirect ways. I mean body weight is really - we always relate it to diabetes and heart attacks and strokes and all these things. But it is directly related to cancers. And that goes back - I mean we - high body weight kills anywhere between, directly 15 and 20% of the cancer patients are just related to their body weight. And there is many different things how that works. And I always say, okay let's put that into maybe four or five categories you know. One is just the mechanical things. Like let's image you have a huge belly, you eat, you sit down, and so all that fat is now pushing back into your belly and it causes you to regurgitate. I mean you stuff that's in your stomach doesn't have enough space, the belly pushes it up, and now suddenly you get acid reflux. You know you get your GERD symptoms you know, syndromes and all how they are called. But in other words you're just basically getting acid back into your esophagus, causes inflammation, causes esophageal cancer. If you're very, very heavy then you have your gallbladder constantly working on all these fats that are being eliminated. More stones are being formed in the gallbladder, you're gonna get more cancers in the gallbladder area of that part. And then you know if you - if you're heavy weight you typically have constipation because stuff doesn't work that well anymore in your body. And you move less because you're too heavy because now we have joint pain and all these other things. So now suddenly you have constipation. And all these toxins have a lot of time to be in contact with your bowel wall and cause colon cancers and bowel cancer and anal cancer and all these kind of things. So there's some very simple mechanics - mechanistic problems that happen when you're overweight. The other really, really big groups are the hormones in your body. When you talk about being obese that means you just have many, many fat cells, that the storage cell - you know the storage room, the warehouse's full, full of fat. And people think okay so now it's fat, it's just sitting there. No! The fat cell is an absolute factory of bad stuff. It's active tissue. It's a hormonally active tissue. So many things do happen in these fat cells. They create inflammation in your body. Inflammation, you know, causes cancer by itself. It destroys the immune system. It destroys your DNA. It causes mutations, all these things, all these cascades that will start going on in your body besides the joint pain and all the other things. You're starting directly creating cancer just by the inflammation alone. The fat cell will produce estrogen. Many, many cancers, especially in women, but as well in men are completely dependent on estrogen. Estrogen you know is a hormone. It's a female hormone. But in men most of the estrogen is formed in the fat cell. So if a man is obese he's gonna have more and more estrogen in the body and so now what estrogen does, like sugar, like insulin, it goes to what we call a receptor. It's like the key in the key hole. These hormones function like a key. They go into the key hole, unlock the door, open the door, and a lot of bad stuff can now go into the cell or happens in the cell when that happens. And so the two main players here when we're talk about hormones are the estrogens and are the sugar, insulins. And both are very, very high when you're obese. I mean you have heard obesity, diabetes very close links. Obesity and breast cancer, uterine cancers and other cancers very, very high correlation. And you know it's way more complicated than I've just told you but there's an absolute direct link. And the good news is when you start losing weight and you start managing your lifestyle you can reverse some of that stuff. And that's why I'm saying even if you did all the bad stuff and you got diagnosed with your cancer and you got treated with your cancer, let's say a breast cancer. The moment you get out of the hospital you need to start working on your lifestyle because there's a huge difference on how you're gonna survive, how the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years will be. Whether you're gonna be cancer-free or not; whether your cancer is gonna reoccur or not; whether you're gonna get metastases or not; and whether you're gonna you know tolerate treatments or not. It's all related to your body weight.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well let me interject here because you drove me in three different directions and I had three questions and I wanted to let you go. So, let's talk about insulin and sugar. How do they promote cancer? Aside from making you fat, okay, how does insulin and sugar promote cancer?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Right. So here you have sugar goes up when you eat sugary stuff and unfortunately we eat way too much sugar. So you eat a lot of sugar, your body needs to get that sugar in some way into the cell, right. So why do we need sugar? We need to produce energy. Okay so the sugar goes into the cell and produces energy. Whoa, you just ate too much sugar. There is not that much energy you can produce. What are we doing with the extra sugar? It's being diverted and being stored into fat, into fat cells. Whenever your sugar goes up in the blood the body produces a hormone called insulin. Insulin goes up, insulin goes to insulin receptors. Insulin is now the key. The insulin receptor is the key hole. It opens that key hole, it opens that door, and immediately the cancer cells can start growing. There's many mechanisms. Cancers do feed on sugars. Sugars are cancer feeders. Okay. There's a direct link between high sugar levels, high insulin levels and cancers. Not just that you get more cancer when you always have high sugars, the cancer grows faster, better, is very, very happy when you eat a lot of sugar.

KIRK HAMILTON: So let me ask you another question that was derived off that part of the discussion was. I know we were at A4M, and A4M uses bioidentical hormones, one of their, you know in many of the practitioners there. And you just said there are hormone related cancers. So how do you marry those two together and what is your opinion of giving, let's say even a bioidentical estrogen to females and you know bioidentical testosterone, etc. Where do you fall in this discussion?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: It depends on the dose. There's an optimal dose for everything. Even for supplements. You can take a little, you can take just the right amount, you can take too much. Okay. So when you talk about obese people, overweight people, morbidly obese people, they're just producing like crazy typically and have extremely high levels. I mean, and you know and then what the body does. It then responds, like with diabetes. Now you're constantly getting high sugars and then high insulin and suddenly the body says, oh, now I'm getting resistance to that insulin, you know and so you need even more insulin, or you need to add some other things and it destroys itself. So it's a question of the dose and it's a question of the formulation. And you mentioned one thing, you know even if it's bioidentical, you know unfortunately most of the hormones that people take today are synthetic. And that may cause more damage than it does good. And again it's the question of the dose and I think there's still a lot of research quite honestly to be done, long-term research with these bioidentical hormones, even with that.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well would it be more reasonable then, let me put it this way. Since fat is a hormone factory and some adverse things come out of that. Wouldn't it be better for the individual to be lean and then adjust the hormone dose than a fat person adjust the hormone dose?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Yeah. I mean the lean person is always better than a fat person. I don't mean -

KIRK HAMILTON: No, I got it.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: You know, a fat person might be more humorous, more loving, and all that, I mean, I'm just talking medically. Overweight is medically a huge, huge, huge problem in many ways.

KIRK HAMILTON: I know you're in the heart of the - I want to say the beast kindly so to speak, in this big institution. And you talked about an underground integrative group. And one of the things that comes up constantly to our clinic - I work in an integrative medicine practice and we do supportive care. And what I mean by that is we don't say we're gonna treat your cancer, but if you come to us we'll be glad to change your diet, give you supportive supplements, and maybe give you some IV vitamin C, along with your traditional therapies. And the 24/7 challenge comes up from the oncologists, don't give antioxidants during chemotherapy, radiation therapy, because it's gonna negate the effectiveness of the chemotherapy. And I know you addressed that and if you could address it to me. I give articles out, but it doesn't seem to matter much. Can you address that question?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Okay, how many hours do we have?

KIRK HAMILTON: You got 30 seconds. No, I'm just kidding.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Because it's not that simple. You see, it's not that simple. I mean first of all we are the largest cancer center in the world and I'm saying there's an underground going on - no, it's not underground anymore. It's above ground. We are - have formed an integrative oncology group. We are very active for years. We have the wellness center, we already integrate music therapy, yoga, tai chi, I mean all kind of therapies, acupuncture into our patient care. However, what we have not done yet, and we're very active in prevention, we're putting out the message to the outside with diet and lifestyle. But we have not achieved yet is to really have every single patient go through that integrative oncology care. Where we not only look at you know what's the latest chemo, what's the latest surgery, what's the latest radiation, but would as well personalize the integrative oncology care or alternative medicine that goes with it. I mean just looking at the old and the new. And we have a department that has formed. It has physicians in there, it has scientists in there, nursing, and MD Anderson's goal over the next five to ten years is to have every single patient seen by that group that we'll have to expand naturally. The problem with that is the government and the way medicine is reimbursed. I mean we can run bankrupt even as a big hospital like that, within a year, if we do all these services and they're not reimbursed for. Um, so really the question is how to deal with that and we have entire workgroups that are working on that problem. So that's just to say, you know, we're big, big ship. It takes a little while to turn around the big ship. It's much faster in a little practice. You read something, you can turn overnight. You cannot do this with a big institution like that. However it is well recognized that something needs to happen. So that was kind of that part of your question. I need to go back to the other part of the question. What was that?

KIRK HAMILTON: I don't know!

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Okay, good.

KIRK HAMILTON: But that's alright. We're talking to Dr. Olivier Wenker, who's from MD Anderson Cancer Center. And I wanted to ask you. Give me specifics of your cancer preventive diet, and then is it any different from the diet that you would utilize during a cancer therapy.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: I would say what prevents and is given during even sometimes treatment, is certainly valid after the treatment. I mean that's again - there should be no cancer patient that is just continuing in lifestyle, bad lifestyle like before. I mean the nutrition plan needs to be part, not just nutrition plan because it's not just nutrition, it's lifestyle. How you walk and all these things. So I'm gonna make it easy. You know, I mean if I need to boil it down to maybe five words, what you need to do to prevent cancer, to treat cancer and then later on to make sure it doesn't come back? Bring down your sugar consumption, bring down your calorie consumption, eat the colors, start exercising, and do something like meditation, prayer, just some relaxation, spa, sleep, you know, you need seven hours sleep. So it's sugars down, calories down, colors up, exercise up, and then relaxation up. If you do that, you have a secret formula.

KIRK HAMILTON: Right. And that's probably your approach to changing the obesity epidemic in the United States?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Exactly the same thing.

KIRK HAMILTON: You gave an analogy of you know 9/11, 3000 lives were lost, and we had this tremendous outpouring of dollars to prevent it from ever happening it again. An energy. And I have given kind of a similar kind of concept that you know 7 out of 10 deaths in the United States relate to chronic diseases and 75% of our healthcare budget is related to chronic disease treatment. And yet, if there was - if that was a biological warfare agent we'd be all up in arms, but it's the Standard American Diet (SAD). So being the health czar of the United States, how would you approach healthcare reform?

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: (Laughter)

KIRK HAMILTON: I thought I'd put you on the spot.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but you know it just - as you can hear from my slick Texan accent, you know, I came from somewhere else. I came from the European coast, you know. So having said that, America's strength is America's weakness. It is recognizing personal rights and everybody can do what they want to do, the freedom of doing things, which you don't get in other parts of the world or many other parts of the world. So if someone decides that they want to go and eat every day you know at the fast foods and just eat the wrong stuff and load themselves with sugar and then get completely obese and then having all these diseases, you know, you have that freedom unfortunately to do so. And it is a great thing in the United States that you can do that, but it's the downfall as well because we're not going to be able to pay for that anymore. So in my mind you know, I mean again I'm not a politician, whatever, I would say every fast food needs to be taxed to the wazoo, like a cigarette and alcohol will be and the fuel needs to be on the fuel station. You need to make sure that those people who want to do the healthy stuff that they can afford it. So if you want to go and buy your broccoli, and the broccoli costs 10 cents, you know, you're gonna probably buy it. If it's 5 dollars, you're not gonna buy it. You know, your fresh vegetable. But around the corner you have fast food that offers you two burgers for one dollar. So I mean you would - I would sell those burgers for 20 bucks, whatever, 15 bucks, they're good. I would spend the money every once in a while because it's really good. But I would not spend it every day because it's too expensive. And take all that money and subsidize all the healthy stuff. All the colors, all the berries, all the fruits, all that stuff, that's one way to start addressing. Then the other way is you know, you can tell the person, "Hey you had all the freedoms to do to your body whatever you wanted, but not everybody will pay for you." "You know the moment will come when you smoke, I mean it's already here, then you're not gonna get certain health benefits because you're a smoker. Well, guess what, if you're obese you may not get them." The obesity is like smoking. It's not that easy, you know, it's an addiction. There are at least 40 to 50 hormones that are playing in your body so it's a little more difficult than just telling a person, well stop eating and start exercising. It's not that easy. Right? And it's - and so healthcare clearly, you're gonna have to make people responsible for their lifestyle. You're gonna have - and you're gonna to have to award those people that do the right thing. I mean otherwise it's not going over a long time.

KIRK HAMILTON: I've had this discussion, because, inspiring people and giving them incentives, um, you can do it by punishment per se, like the threat of "you're gonna die"
or giving them economic incentives or whatever. But there's a part of me that says if we never paid for chronic diseases, heart disease and diabetes and obesity, that people would either have to sink or swim because if we keep paying for it. For example, your institution lives because we pay handsomely for disease care and cancer treatment. That model, I mean, in other words if you - if your vision came true, your institution would not be the biggest thing in the world. It would -

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: I wouldn't - hey, the mission of our institution. I mean listen very well, is to destruct ourselves basically. Our mission is to make cancer history. Alright, and if one day there's this issue, this institution has to disappear because we did such a good job we fulfilled our mission. I do not know of any business that has a mission basically to eliminate itself.

KIRK HAMILTON: Do you really think that, that's - I mean I understand the verbiage, but that - but you're saying reimbursement is hard for preventive care, and yet you're getting reimbursed for treatment of the disease which propagates the whole institution. You know, it's - that's the problem. I mean I hope -

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: We are spending - we are spending enormous amounts of money to try to eliminate cancer. I mean, I'm just telling you.

KIRK HAMILTON: Good.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: You're going to down scale the institution. I mean it's - it is a business like everything else. We have to survive like everybody else out there. But the mission really, the goal is really to decrease cancer and we spend a lot of money on decreasing cancers. I mean I'm just telling you this is the way this hospital has grown out of you know - and it's the spirit here. When you work in a hospital like that I mean you have to see - I mean I deal with patients every day, they're dying. I mean it's a misery. If you could do something for that misery, we'll do it.

KIRK HAMILTON: Uh-hum.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: I mean we're physicians here. We're researchers here. We're not just here to bring home a decent salary. We're here to make a difference.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well I'm glad to hear that. I mean I believe you. I mean you - but that's the way the world has to be. I mean, my daughter's an ICU nurse in critical care cardiac ICU and my job is to help put her out of business. I mean, in a sense, you know.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: And this is right. And we need to act that way. I mean we all need to pull on the same string. We need to get these hospitals out of the business because it's - we cannot pay for it any more. They're gonna go out of business by themselves because it's gonna bankrupt. You cannot pay for what's going on right now.

KIRK HAMILTON: Yeah. I've always thought that there's a new term, and I'm finish up a book, but "being healthy is patriotic" in my opinion you know. Because it helps save government dollars and it helps the work force and it helps all kinds of things. I think we need to change our thinking a little bit. Before we get off, I wanted to ask you about - I heard - you know Dr. Rosenberg spoke before you at the conference. And just an overview of alkalinity of the diet and I know - can you make a comment on that? You know how do you make a good cancer preventive diet and what's an alkaline diet, if that's that important at all.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Again, how many hours do we have? But having said that if you go with the ‘colors' as I told you to eat, you're gonna automatically more or less do an alkaline diet. You know, the acid diet would more, be the red meat diets kind of thing, a lot of acids. The alkalines you're gonna find in the fruits and vegetables. Having said that, the body was created in a just wonderful and miraculous way and the body has many means to deal with alkaline and acids, and all these things. And as long as the lung or your kidneys are functioning to a certain extent, you're gonna immediately equalize whatever you do wrong in the nutrition. The problem is we do it wrong chronically and then the bone has to come in and give some calcium and some other things out of the bone to stabilize and then you get osteoporosis and many other things do happen. So it's a little more complicated than that. So my opinion, when - a lot of people ask me about alkaline water and things like that. The difference is so small. At the end of the day the cancer cell is very acidic. We don't know yet how to deal with that. And Dr. Rosenberg's theory and his plans on what he does with his cancer cell I think is right on. He floods them with what they love, the sugars you know. I mean he deprives them first and he floods them and he makes them very, very acidic at that point because sugar is turning to lactic acid. And at that point it becomes so acidic that the cancer cell might kill itself right there. And he uses a few tricks to do that. So having - maybe that's a mid to long short answer to your very, very complicated question. You didn't realize how complicated that question was.

KIRK HAMILTON: I did. I did.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Yeah, you probably do.

KIRK HAMILTON: I was - you just give a teaspoon of sodium bicarb and a couple of times a day.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Yeah, yeah. And let me do just one more word on the antioxidants.

KIRK HAMILTON: Sure.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Okay, because there's - that's a huge discussion out there and every cancer patient always asks me about antioxidants. History has shown - all the literature that is out shown in the vast majority, I would say oven 90% that antioxidants are crucial for cancer patients. In fact, if you have cancer, your antioxidants go down and so really the question becomes, should you take antioxidants before for prevention of the cancer, should you take them during treatment, or should you take them after treatments. So the before is a clear yes. Eat your colors, your berries, your, all the colorful fruits and vegetables. It's full of antioxidants. Okay. It becomes very tricky during the treatment because there are very few examples where you can show that those that took antioxidants during treatment interfered with the chemotherapy and maybe with the radiation, although I don't believe that because all the research shows that you should take it during radiation. Okay. But there are some examples on the chemo. And you can basically count them on one or two hands. I mean less than 10 examples. Everything else you should go ahead and do it. So what do you tell now the population? Go ahead and do it? Well you're gonna find those that gonna have a problem if they do so. And because many oncologists do not understand in detail the problem and do not - have not read all the literature, they will just go the easy way and say don't do it. So my approach to that is very simple. I look at what the patient will get and will do. But I cannot do this for 100,000 people, so a very easy solution will be take it (antioxidants) until about a week before your treatment, be a little hesitant during your treatment, immediately after three or four days after the treatment start again. That's a very good, you know rule of the thumb. And again, different antioxidant different half-times (lives), I mean they're broken down differently. So it's not that easy either. But it may be a very good, you know kind of thing in the win thing.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well Dr. Olivier, Dr. Ollie, thank you so much for being on the show today. Any parting words you'd like to say or how to contact -

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Yeah. Parting words. One important thing. Everybody thinks cancer's in the genes, right? And they're right. We find more and more and more that the genes will determine whether you can get a cancer or not, and if you're genes don't determine that the mutations of your DNA will create those genes or so. You are, everybody, is in absolute control on - of their destiny when it comes to the genes. You're not the victims of your genes. Even if you have the worse genes in the world, you go, you do the right lifestyle, you eat the colors, you do the exercise, you are changing the genes every single time you make a good healthy meal. You are changing the genes to the worst every time you eat bad, okay. Every time you exercise, whether it's walking or on the treadmill, whatever you do, you're influencing your genes right there and then. You are in control of your destiny and it's not true that the genes will control your cancers. I mean, they will, but you can control your genes.

KIRK HAMILTON: Dr. Wenker, that's a perfect, perfect ending. And thank you so much for taking time coming on the show today. And we'll talk again soon I hope.

DR. OLIVIER WENKER: Okay. It was pleasure.

KIRK HAMILTON: And I want to thank you, the audience, for listening to this edition of Staying Health Today Radio. And until next time, Be and Stay Well.

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