Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability, how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness.
Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode.
Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV. Check us out at optimalhrv.com Please enjoy the show.
Welcome friends to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I am Matt Bennett here with friend of the show, a friend of mine, someone who I don't know. Dr. Pepper, if you teach me more than entertain me or entertain me more than you teach me, but every time I get to have a conversation with you. Last time when we were at AAPB I totally changed up my morning biofeedback practice due to a short conversation we had. So is always a joy to talk to you my friend, and especially a joy I just finished didn't realize how big your book was that you published. So as I was telling you on my hikes in the mountain here, you've been in my ears for the last four or five days. With the second edition of Cancer Reconsidered, I've already sent the Amazon link to two or three people in my life as we were talking before we hit record that they need to get the book. And I'm excited to have this conversation with you because I'm sure more than just me have folks in their life who have struggled with or are struggling or may have been new newly diagnosed with cancer and are looking for some hope and answers that maybe our traditional medical system, especially here in the US doesn't really offer. So Dr. Pepper, welcome back to the show.
Just in case folks haven't listened to our past episodes and if you haven't, they are must listens. So please go back. But Dr. Pepper, just let's do a quick introduction before we nerd out about your most recent work.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Well, I am Eric Pepper and I also am the director of the Biofeedback Health in Berkeley. I was a professor at San Francisco State. I just turned to be emeritus. Right now I continue to do research and I'm intrigued really in my long history of strategies by which you can mobilize your own health.
Especially that I think is even more today than ever before because from my sense of the political climate is it's more and more difficult to get government support or information and even the epa, Environment Protection Agencies, our guidelines are loosened up so we get more pollution. So I think the task becomes more what can I do for myself? What can I do for my family, for my friends? Where can I have control? The key always is focus on the areas where you have control. And then, yes, do implement political actions, et cetera.
But the book, it's so interesting for your introduction, the book we wrote, Cancer Reconsidered, and it's really called why Environment, Lifestyle and Immunity Matter More than we thought really could be used for anyone. It isn't just for cancer. Yes, it focuses on cancer, but the major lifestyle, behavioral suggestions focus on how to optimize your health and immune system.
You know, and what happens so often now is when we get our medical interviews or we fill out all these forms, they look at all our histories, you fill it all out. Did your grandparents have heart disease, hypertension, or. Or your parents died of cancer? And it looks like the focus is on genetics.
And the way I now think about that, and I think that is really the way I think about is genetics is just a risk factor or the other way to say it in a kind of graphic way. Genetics loads the gun, but our lifestyle and behavior pulls the trigger. That is true with many things. You can look at it in diabetes. You know, I may have a genetic predisposition for diabetes, possibly because my previous generations went through many famines and therefore my body learned to store fats quickly and all this stuff. And however, that would not have been a problem except in our over, you know, too much food, too much sweets, etc. Which then triggers the diabetes. And they can argue that very well. I see the same in cancer. It's so interesting that we think of cancer. Ah, it must be the genes that cause it. It's a risk factor. So let's look at the actual data. If I ask any of you if you had twins, remember, they have the same genetics.
So far we know there may be slight differences intrauterinely, you know, that might get a little more blood flow or whatever, how the positions were. But overall they're identical.
The question is, what is the probability that one twin who gets cancer that the other twin will also get a similar cancer? And when I ask many of my students, they would quickly say, gosh, probably 50% or more, because identical, the data really is only about 10%.
It's shocking.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. I was going to say 50% and I thought, oh, I'll be smart and go lower. But yeah, yeah, it's only, you know,
[00:05:24] Speaker B: varies a bit on the type of cancer, maybe 17% or 18%, but. But basically says that the other 80% is not just genetics. It is only genetics and epigenetics that it allows the risk factors to be expressed or not. And I think that's. And now we look at one that's even worse, which we know the genetics are very high Predictor, and that's BRAC1 and BRAC2. Angie Jolie had a preventative mastectomy. Because of that, our actors, because we know that people who have that gene have an 82 to 84% chance of developing cancer in their livestock. That is high.
However, if you go back to their grandmothers or great grandmothers in the 1940s, those grandmothers had only a 24% chance of getting their cancer.
Now, you could say, yes, they died maybe earlier. Therefore, the date isn't very good. I'm even willing to say the data may not be perfect, but that's a big difference. 24 versus 82%.
That's too big. Yeah. So the question you then ask, what is going on? And those are where lifestyle, environment have a big interaction. And that same argument can be applied whether you have hypertension, whether you have diabetes or many other illnesses. And I think that is the focus how we think. And we can control our diet. Partly controls the wrong word. You really want to shift our diet.
And that may explain. Or at least people now think this is one of the major reasons why we now have all of a sudden this massive, almost epidemic, you could say, of. Of the occurrence of younger people getting colon cancer, younger women getting breast cancer. You know, those are diseases that were associated with old age when the whole system was breaking down.
And now we see people in the 40s. You saw these people in their 20s getting breast cancer. And then you say, what is wrong?
You know, and there are many. The book covers, some of these lists, many of those risk factors. And what you can do, for example, you could think of fertility right now, which is, as we all have heard, or most of us know, the male female sperm count has gone down by 50% in the last 10 to 15 years. That's a lot.
And the reason we talk about male sperm counts, because that's something we can count.
It's easily measurable.
Women have equally become much less fertile or the ability to carry the baby or get pregnant. So it is both. But for women, it's harder to identify because the marker is a little more challenging.
The data is fairly supportive that this may be due to our massive exposure to plastics, which are really all endocrine dysregulators and the endocrine disregulators. You know, they eventually end up changing testosterone, changing estrogens, and all these, all these factors affect our hormonal system and our health. And that seems to contribute to this massive decrease in fertility. And if you look at that curve of fertility going down and down and down, you predict another 70 years we'll be totally infertile. It's so shocking.
And yet there's some suggestive data that when you remove your total exposure to plastics, it's almost impossible. Every can you buy is lined in plastic. Every, every time you eat fast food in this paper cardboard with a plastic lining you put into your microwave, you're getting some. And if you have any doubt about that, do a little experiment.
Put a bottle of water in a plastic bottle, put it out in the sun for a couple of days, and then drink the water and you'll notice a funny taste. If you did it in a glass bottle, there would be no funny taste. That funny taste is the absorption of the different phthalates or other chemicals of plastics. We have identified a few, the biphenols, the phthalates.
It doesn't mean that they're not other ones. And the other component is the food we eat. If you think of the food we eat, it's so totally different than even 100 years ago, you know, in the 16th, 17th century, we only had about five pounds maybe or less of sugar a year, you know, because all we got is honey.
And then slowly till the 19th century really, till we eventually industrialized sugar cane and all this, or sugar beets. We could now have sugar all the time. And we are wired from evolution to look to eat sugar and fats because those are necessary for our survival. We need calories. And in the past, anything that was sweet usually was good.
It provide energy.
And that's also by babies. Little children chew the walls with lead paint, because lead paint has that or the chips from that is called picas.
Tastes sweet.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Never do that.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: So the easy make, you still have old buildings with lead paint on. Just put a bitter, paint it with a bitter flavor and the kids won't chew it. The cheapest way to solve it, in fact, you know, there are many of these. But why you have to eat that? Because eat sugars.
Because in the past there was no mechanism to say you shouldn't eat it.
The more you ate, the more you could reproduce almost in natural food.
And now, however, we have all these ultra processed foods and with all these, who knows what they all are. And they are to stabilize the food. They're there to preserve the Food. But think about what happens when you preserve food. You're doing something by which the biochemical process stops.
Bacteria can't eat and now think. So that probably has some indirect effect on ourselves. And the same thing would be true of all the herbicides and pesticides in the food.
You know, I know in the US we have guidelines for, you know, Roundup or glyphosate as cold or many of the atrazine.
However, in the EU those guidelines are either saying 10, they're only tenfold less. So some of the US allows much higher levels and right now the levels are even allowed to get higher, which is criminal.
What we forget is that even if you eat food at this very low level, eating at once probably won't do anything for you. Let's be honest.
However, we are more likely accumulators. It's just like when we eat fish and we look at mercury levels. If you eat these very big fish, the tuna or others, they'll be eating other fish and other fish.
And so they accumulate the poisons. And when we finally eat it, then it's potentially harmful. The same thing is in our body. So we keep eating these, quote, healthy veggies all sprayed with herbicides or pesticides.
We don't always wash them completely. There's some that's totally intrinsic in the food itself.
And we eat that.
And then you accumulate it.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: And ask the question, what is really a pesticide do? And it's to stop the metabolic process, the living process of an insect or something like that of an organism.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Now, you know, we are very similar to fruit flies. We're basically even to a banana genetically, surprisingly, you know. And so the processes of life are very similar. So when we develop chemicals to kill something like atrazine or others, which can very useful for the plant, for farming, to get great crops. However, they may totally inhibit our sperm counts or they may have do endocrine dysregulation.
And so that is some of the concepts in the book. That's the environment, its diet, lifestyle. And although they specifically focused on cancer, really it isn't. But look at it differently.
Just look at your hand for a moment. It's just most interesting. You know, you can see the nice lines in it. Maybe if you. You may think it could tell you the future or whatever, but I'm not dealing with that. But look at the tissue.
And then remember this tissue, your hand, your head, your body is totally made up of all the foods you ate.
Now you think of your body like a house, which it Isn't.
But if you build a house, then you need plants. That's the architectural plants, that's your genetics and possibly epigenetics. Then you need your building material, which are the studs, the roofing and all that stuff, the plumbing.
If you use inferior materials, the house can still be built.
And then you have the whole repair system, which we have as well our immune system, etc. And if you don't repair a house, well it then when a stressor occurs, a windstorm or it quickly can crash, our bodies aren't that different. What makes our bodies different, unlike building the house, is that we have a remarkable process that we can regenerate. Remember, literally every cell in your body can.
Every organ in your body in about seven years will be totally regenerated. So if you do take time to, to change the way you act, your lifestyle, do exercise, all of a sudden in a few years your body will be different. We even notice with smoking, people who, 80% of people who get lung cancer have previously smoked, at least in the U.S. yeah, 20% of people never smoked. So it isn't just genetics.
But what is interesting, if you smoked in your early twenties and stop in your mid twenties or a little bit later, you can gain about six years of your life. Your risk really goes down because you're repairing yourself. Maybe not all repairs are possible. I happen to believe you can do much more of that.
And that is where interaction occurs with our lifestyle. So in the book then it's really lifestyle. It gives many how to avoid some of the toxins, what to do, what kind of food should probably don't want to eat as much of and prefer much less. Because cancer cells, in this case, you know, love sugar. They needed this was already Warbach at the Nobel Prize in 1931 for this pointing out on the metabolic difference of the mitochondria in cancer cells.
And so if you really cut out your sugars, and it doesn't mean just white sugar, it means your white rice, your white bread, all these things which the simple carbohydrates or the complex carbohydrates can be broken down very quickly. Because when I eat a muffin, which may be a complex carbohydrate, it comes into my mouth, the amylase breaks it down and by the time it goes down, it's pure sugar.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: And that, and we know that that excessive glucose exposure or sugar exposure is a risk factor we know distinctly for diabetes, obesity and even for Alzheimer's.
It's sometimes called Alzheimer's. It's something called type 3 diabetes in that sense. And equally it's a significant risk for increasing cancer risk. If you look at all the complementary techniques, I know where people recommend diet changes, and many of them are either automatically organic foods, sometimes it's organic meats as well, organ meats, which we forget about. But I recommend highly. The commonality among many of them is the absence of any simple carbohydrates. Yeah.
And so there must be some wisdom in that. And we notice this is true. People with anxiety as well. If you're doing heart rate variability for people with anxiety, then we know there's an interaction between your glucose level and breathing. If your glucose level goes way down, we always experience that. That's the, you know, the quality of hangriness.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Angriness. Right.
Anger.
Hungry and anger. Why are. When you're. Hunger, you have hunger, most likely your blood sugar level is low.
Then you get agitated, irritable because your body is trying to react.
And then if you breathe even more quickly with that, because now we start breathing quickly, then our carbon dioxide goes down, which makes the EEG drop in frequency and gets you much more in whisk.
And by simply for having breakfast of some fats and protein that modulate your glucose level has a steady level.
That will be the first step for anxiety. But the same thing is true for. For cancer patients or anybody else. It's the key if you think about it in cancer specifically, you want to think in the cancer in two parts. One are the cancer cells you already have. And congratulate you as you're listening to this podcast. All of you have already generated hundreds of cancer cells this whole time.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: One of the scarier things I learned in the book.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: But in fact, that's true.
The key that your body is smart. It recognizes if your immune system is competent. Notice the word competent. If it's really competent, then it recognizes these abnormal cells. The killer T cells will identify.
The dendritic cells will identify the abnormal cells. They'll go to the killer T cells, they go out and they will identify those abnormal cells and kill them.
Or at worst, they'll encapsulate. And that sometimes happens if it gets bigger, but then the cancer basically disappears.
That is an ongoing process. But listen to that process. It's really a dynamic balance between the cancer production, which can be done because you already have a tumor. It can be done because you're exposed to carcinogenic agents, radiation, toxins or whatever, or viruses that trigger the cancer generation, and the competence of your immune system.
If your immune System is very competent. The risk of cancer is much lower because it can deal with the cancer load.
If the load is too high, then it gets overwhelmed.
And the modeling cancer isn't that different. For hypertension or many other illnesses that usually treatment is then to treat the symptoms. And so if you have hypertension, okay, let me give you some antihypertensive medication there. The blood pressure goes down, hopefully okay, in cancer, let me do radiation, chemotherapy or whatever needs to be done. And I am not saying don't do that. I'm going to be very clear because they can be very beneficial and helpful. However, what is forgotten often, especially in our medical care system, which doesn't have enough time to teach people skills, it's easy to just prescribe and do a procedure. It's also better billable set versus the time you need to listen to somebody to hear their story and see how you can change it. That takes a lot of time.
However, that is not billable.
And so we don't look at the site. How can we build up the immune system?
What is going on? No different than if you have hypertension. What is your lifestyle patterns, your anger patterns, your frustrations or your lack of skill of doing heart rate variability or other things you may be doing. And that takes training. And we underestimate how much time that takes.
Any of you who have tried to change your diet knows it's remarkably challenging. You know, my breakfast is always some cereal, Kellogg cereal, right?
Or whatever, or some. Then what do I eat instead?
You know, it's hard, you know. Yes. I mean, I've now developed a ritual personally where one morning I have an omelette and next morning I have a kind of bowl of. I also have fruits and veg, fruits for breakfast as well.
Next morning I have nuts, a bowl of nuts and you know, all the varieties of fruit and yogurt, you know, So I try to alternate and therefore hopefully get the benefit of all.
Now that reminds me again on food in the US where most of us eat a very, including me, eat a very limited variety of foods.
And many of these foods today are no longer the same as your great grandparents eat. We know, for example, that our processed foods, our industrialized agriculture is great, that supplies these great calories, these unbelievably lovely looking colorful fruits and veggies. You just want them. Their taste is sort of abysmal sometimes. I shouldn't say that. But they less because we need to pick them before ripe. They're chemically ripened in the transit. They are grown on fields which are barren in many ways because they make chemically fertilized and the life inside the soil is less and the soil is almost more fatigued. And all the micronutrients that were presence of are now gone. So the food is great, that it contains nitrogen, it contains the cell boundaries, looks great, but it misses all the micronutrients. Yeah, you know, it's lower in iron, lower in many others. And most recently came across this. I thought this was the most interesting thing recently about Alzheimer's.
It works out on a side note that Alzheimer patients who were manic depressive or patients who are manic depressive and have gotten lithium for treatment have a much lower risk or a lower risk for Alzheimer's compared to the patients who don't.
And patients who live in areas where the soil and the food has slight amount of lithium in it have lower Alzheimer rates than areas where the soil does not have that. So Alzheimer patients as a group have low lithium. I am not saying I want to be very clear, that is the only factor.
But it is suggestive that maybe in our modern agriculture, chemical farming, we have forgotten that our bodies need multiple micro minerals or substances, some which we don't even measure as a measure of health because they're so minimal.
And only in these crazy studies almost where you finally say, huh?
And then if I look at food again, I don't know why I'm on food, but I tell this to my students all the time, is what is the meats you eat? The biggest American meat. If I go to normal, Safeway or any other food, Kroger's or whatever, I go to the meat counter, what do I see? I see muscle, I see chicken breasts, I see the whole chicken, possibly. I see steaks, all variations of muscles.
If you go to third world countries, what do you see? You see some of that, then you see heart, you see liver, you see the intestines, you see the organ meat, all the organ meats. And it works out that it's the organ meats that contain the important levels of vitamins and minerals. And the muscles are really, you know, they're myosin and a few collagens and stuff like. But that's about it. They miss the micronutrients, which are critical. And we know this. Even if you look, if looking at carnivorous animals, if you look at a lion taking down a herbivore, and then what do they want to eat first?
They eat the internal liver and stuff like this. If you look at the diet of the Inuits before they shifted to the American diet or the Western world diet, highly controlled by Akro business indirectly and lobbying that when the early Inuits, they ate the liver, they ate the organ meats and fish and they had almost no cancer rates. They had almost none of the diseases of civilization. It's most impressive then in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, as they were starting to watch television, they saw all these foods, they shifted into the potent alcohol that the American diet. For a moment you see all these chronic diseases increasing.
Again, I'm not saying it's the only thing, because they shifted from city, from moving around to just sitting. So there are many other factors. They lost some of the social meaning.
All factors which contribute.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: Yeah. I would love to ask a question about your journey because this is the second edition of the book. So there's been a journey there where I know in Dr. Pepper's head there are probably 20 books floating around that you could write at any given time. So curious about your journey to the second edition.
In a field where we were talking about vitamin C, like I thought, oh, taking a ton of vitamin C was good at one point. Then, you know, a study came out where you shouldn't take vitamin C and now maybe we need more vitamin C. So it's a, it's a tricky world that always seems to be correcting itself and there's a whole bunch of capitalism, as you mentioned a couple times in there as well. But I want to talk about your journey of as the science has advanced to the second edition. And also one of the things I loved about the book is I felt I got to know you a lot better than and your co authors as well and the stories of other people. So I would love to and I feel okay asking this question because you're so, you know, honest about it in the book. Just sort of your own life journey since some of your struggles with cancer and what how you've integrated this personally into your daily habits and routines as well.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Well, I think my daily habit and let me start daily habits. My daily habits overall have changed. I'm not perfect. I still have a sweet. I still love, you know, European pastry. But however, as I told my students.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Good, you're a snob, Dr. Pepper. You know, not American pastries, only European pastries.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: No, I know that is true. I love Hungarian pastry. The solid ones, they real and versus it's the difference between bread and bread. If you think the American sponge bread, you know, has nothing. Sorry for my bias. I love the. The bread made in our local bakery here, which is, you Know, which is sourdough. But it's. What happens is instead of using yeast that rises an hour quick, it uses, it takes 24 hours, which in fact will change the structure of the, of the flour or the, the, the car. The carbohydrates and in fact is healthier. Yeah. And so some of the reasons possibly why so many people have quote gluten intolerance in this culture is the US and not always in Europe, maybe that we allow too much glyphosate in the, in our products and we have really shifted the processing of how we process breads. I mean. But the question about my own journey, keep. Remember I'm Dutch, I was born in Netherlands. So it gives me a cross cultural perspective. Even though, and I do in the last 20 years I would go back to Europe about once a year to teach.
In terms of the cancer, specifically in about 1980, you know, I was going to a healing camp where we would do energy healing with Dora Coons. And one of the nurses there looked at my back and said, I didn't notice.
She saw like a mole or something like that. Said, Eric, you should have a doctor look up. Do I listen to anybody? Forget it. In September she sent me another note, a letter in fact, saying, Eric, have you ever heard somebody look at that, know I'm a night, you know, 28 year old kid or whatever age I was.
Do I look at that? Forget it. Anyway, but that December was most interesting. I was teaching at San Francisco State. I woke up one morning and in my back I felt just like a crab. Like the image of a crab going like this, like a spider sucking.
That morning, I remember those, that letter. I went to university, you know, to the doctor for a moment at the health center, he said, oh, you better see a physician. You know, I went to ucsf. They said, ah, okay, we need to cut that out. So they. I came, you know, one day before class. I had to quickly excise. They excised and they said I have molecular melanoma.
And so then they cut out another section. And that's all was ever done for me. But it gave me a perspective and I, for me personally, I felt that it was tied to the activation loss of my relationships because it was just behind my heart. So I make emotional linkages or frustrations in life. The other part of cancer in interest is that my mother is an identical twin.
And you know, and, and her twin, my aunt, they were really identical. I mean, you know, when I would see her, I would literally almost not know if it was My mother or her. But I would look at the teeth out of the ear. And I remember not having seen her for more than 20 years because we emigrate to the United States. And eventually I went to Greece for a vacation. I came back to Holland and there my aunt gave me a hug. You know how your mother hugs you in a unique way. My aunt did it in the same way. It was just like mind boggling, you know, it's like, you know, and. And she has the same, much of the same characteristics. However, in her 80s, she developed breast cancer and died of it. Which for my mother was just like half of her died. Yeah. The mother lived till 95 and never developed cancer. My niece, my aunts, my mother's twins, daughter in her 50s developed breast cancer and died. Yet my mother, I have two sisters, they never developed breast cancer. So all of a sudden that sense, which I really believed in many ways that genetics is almost destiny, in fact, that day didn't fit anymore.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: But because if it's truly destiny in a certain way, then how come my mother has the same genes and her twin didn't? That they had such different outcomes.
And that was one of the things I shifted my worldview as well. And then the exposure that I teach at San Francisco State and I work with students and often we have many students have different illnesses and we see self regulations, patterns and it's remarkable how often people can optimize their health and these disease factors or the disease can fade out. So they gave me optimism. And then the other piece, which is not in the book, that in 1971, I think I got a grant from Barbara Brown, who was one of the founders initially of biofeedback. And her fame was also that she had used alpha train, alpha EEG to drive a train around for control.
And she said at the first bio, she was instrumental setting up the first meeting of the Biofeedback Research Society, that she had a grant, which she gave me a grant indirectly to look at the emission of cancer, spontaneous emission of cancer. And so this was.
I did that because I had access to some computer searching when I was connected to mit, I could do that. So then I searched the literature for case in remission, spontaneous remission. And it's clear and that almost all cancers there are cases, what you call spontaneous remission, that patients who recover with or in spite of treatment, and there's some classical cases where someone, the surgeon in that era opens a person up, there's total metastasis everywhere. They close the person down, the person goes home Everybody expect the person to die in a couple of months. The person dies eight years later of heart attack because the patient thought, I have a new.
Something new. So I was familiar with that, and I have been impressed with that in the literature that, yes, they're rare. And often people say, well, it was misdiagnosis, but it's not all misdiagnosis. That if you look at all cancer, it's a normal curve.
You know, that means some people die soon when they have it, and some people die very long. And I'm intrigued. In the extremes, what makes you different, that you can survive longer? What factors is that? And much of our literature does not look at that. We report all our data in significance. That means at one mean compared to the other mean. Are they significantly different? Then obviously the treatment works. I totally agree with that. It's useful.
However, what is forgotten is to say, let's look at the people who either did not benefit from your treatment or really benefited way beyond expectancy.
And I think we want to study all those and try to learn from. So I've continually been looking or thinking about that part. And then the final piece in this whole journey, I think, is my biofeedback journey, or using biofeedback as a, you can say, treatment, educational pattern. Working with clients and others are teaching, but especially in clients that I realized after a while that sometimes I worked with somebody and the biofeedback monitor would say, you should be successful. You know, the person has learned slow breathing, or the person has learned to warm their hands and their symptoms didn't go away. Yeah. And so all of a sudden I realized it was. I learned not from the successes as much, because who knows why they're really successful at times. Although we have made the delusion. We know. But I learned more from the people who were failures because then they pointed out certain things. And I've been very humbled in that. Even in 1971, 72, we worked with a woman in New York who had severe migraines. And that was this model of teaching people how to warm their hands. And this woman was very successful. She really could warm her hands. She could really warm her feet. She did all the right things. She even did all the homework. You know, many times she was totally unsuccessful. Her headaches just stayed and stayed and stayed. You know, it was really discouraging.
And then she moved. Two years later, she moved to Colorado. She saw. And they diagnosed a nasal tumor. They took the tumor rate. Her headache totally disappeared.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: So that. That taught me that if your Physiology is now been balanced and the person is not getting better. Other things are going on.
And the same thing is true with breathing. It's like we worked recently, you know, we worked a while ago. Now if you have a therapist, a very well known therapist and she had phobias going over the bridge.
Okay. I mean it started at one time we taught her to breathe, but then breathing needed to be done together with the diet because the breathing wasn't sufficient. If you looked at the etiology of hers, the first time she ever had the panic attack is that she was in a rush, she didn't eat breakfast, drank some coffee, then rushed over the bridge. And so her glucose level was really low. She then anticipated hyperventilated. I would say that then triggered the shift in the eeg, that shift that triggered that sense of panic, the very low glucose level, augmenting the emotional.
And so that led me then to really become much more aware the importance how diet interacts. So now when I work with people like Doc, I automatically check for diet, automatically have them encouraged to eat breakfast, which is not the simple carbohydrates, but having some eggs. I don't care what you eat. You know, if you go to Japan, you have fish for breakfast, smoke fish. I mean, do you eat your cultural diet? So those are the pieces that led me to do this and then the book itself. I have a colleague who I met Robert gorder in about 1986 or so, during the peak of the AIDS crisis.
And I was very fortunate that being involved in the healing process in camps in the summer with Dora Koons, that one of the patients there was a young, was a young man who had AIDS at that point that you know, HIV, AIDS and then there's no cure. Remember in 86 that meant you had death sentence.
He really had a different perspective in the world and he continued to live. These one, these were very rare survivors without any of the medications.
And so that again you look at that and there was, there's data by others to show that the, how you dealt with the hiv, it was a CO factor that shows that our mind, our emotions and our social perspective impacts our immune system, our health. I mean that's one you could all say maybe he had a slightly different variation, maybe had a different genetics, you know, all those. But I've been impressed with that. And so in that process we were doing asthma studies and I met my colleague now Robert Gorder. I got very impressed and then he wanted to do.
He was in, he. His background is anthroposophical medicine. So he was a GCSF as a.
Well, statistics and all this and doing the work on aids.
But he. And then he want to apply this approach in the US and then you can't do that easily because in the US if you do something that is not socially accept, that is not standard treatment, then if the patient dies, she could be sued simply. So then he moved back to Europe and in Germany where he then set up his clinic, he could develop it because in Germany the physician has to control in that sense. So he set this large clinic and a number of patients who were stage four showed remarkable improvement. And there's a series of links to their interviews. If BIFA and the model to me made sense, it didn't mean don't do surgery, don't do chemo. I'm not saying any of that. I'm really clear. Because if the cancer load is too high, you need to remove it.
I think at the same time the focus was not in his case, the model is how do you support the immune system and how do you enhance that.
And we know, for example, at least in minor research he did looking at core temperature, for example, which I would recommend anyone to do for yourself.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: That if you look at your core temperature, that we should use a rectal thermometer, you know, 24 hours a day for a moment or every so often enjoyed. And then you see that in the evening time the temperature drops and early morning it goes up. That's a temperature.
And many. And what happens is that what is common among many of his patients is that they did not have that rhythm anymore lower. And I think. And you know, I think that that is.
Could be a co factor because it's a measure how much resilience you could have in the system possibly. And there are many reasons why our. We lose our dineural rhythms but it's clear when they are out of whack, we are more at risk for illness, whatever the illness is.
And so those were the pieces. And then out of that I thought I had the part that I would say is self care and he had this immune system. So we end up writing our first book that's called Fighting Cancer and that was published about 12 years ago.
And then, you know, I happen to really be happy with the book because I think it is correct. And then the book came out of print a few years ago or so. And then I decided, you know, we should have it reprinted.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Make it available because every sort of time want to recommend it. The behavioral strategies. It's Half the book, which looks at exercise, diet, emotions, how stress management, all these things, breathing, how to deal with it, how to cope differently in your brain, how to reframe it differently.
Dutch was no longer easily available.
And so I. I decided that we should do a second edition. We should publish it, we should republish it. And I make the mistake. Not really. Okay, I should update it and I write a new. You know. And so I decided at that point to say I should write a new introduction. And it ended up being about 100 pages and another, a number of appendices. And then they were put together and that's the new book. And I think in that sense the concepts apply not just to cancer. They're really general concepts with a specificity in cancer. But if you have acne, if you have diabetes, the rules basically are similar. It's how do you optimize your own health system? And you all know that in a way different.
Remember, if you wake up in the morning and you're looking for and you know, going to have a friend come to visit who you really like and you are excited about, then you wake up, even if you're sick or don't feel well, you feel a surge of energy inside you that is a kind of metaphor for your immune system.
In the other hand, when you are dreading the day, your immune system is slowly suppressed. And I'm always shocked now with my students, when they ask on the first day of class, how many of you woke up this morning feeling energized? You know, the kind of feeling, you know, you're like in love. I'm looking forward to the day, you know, really great.
And how many already feel exhausted and tired and all of a sudden, oh, it's another day, you know, it's almost 50% of the students will say on the first day of class that they're already exhausted.
It is shocking because really, you want to look forward today. You know, it's like, I'm looking forward to today.
That's a. Stephen Jobs said something. You know, when you're doing something, you keep waking up and after a number of days you feel you don't want to do that, then take stock of your life. And I think we have miscommunicated to ourselves or that maybe finances, money is the most important. It is important.
If you're poor, you're going to be unhappy. I mean, I'm simplistic.
However, it may be critical. Say, am I going to work and I'm looking forward to it, or do I dread it and this is kind of in between place obviously. And if you get too many days where you dread it, then I really would recommend to renegotiate your life. And I know it's very difficult in our economic world.
We're stuck so many boundaries. However, it's critical. Yeah. And the other part is just we have lost our, we're, you know, we have lost our social connections.
You know, we now look at cell phones versus actually talking to somebody. We are no longer, you know, so we're isolated. And we know that for our immune system, social isolation is one of the most dominant punishments you can give somebody. You know, solitary confinement makes people go crazy and sick. You know, and so we need to all these is what, where we have made mistakes and our culture, I would say that we have broken away our social connections.
We have at times pushed profits over health. If I think of foods, for example, I. It's great that we have this food revolution that there's so many calories so people don't have to starve.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: However, you know, the key is, is it healthy for you? And the choice is not because of health but because of financial profits. And I look at this, I mean, I was just pissed off at the healthcare system. Yesterday I went to the ophthalmologist at UCSF and here I, you know, I need to order on Monday. I need to check whether I do. I may have cataracts or not. So they first scheduled me last week to have some simple eye tests done.
And that took me the whole morning, three hours. I have to get there, sit for an hour, get back and then the next week I see the ophthalmologist. It's another three or four hours to be there.
And I realized that the same test I did on that the previous week could have been on five minutes before and I would only have made one visit. So either our healthcare system is not organized for patient wellness, it's organized for the corporate world profits at times.
And that's maybe why people go partially go to biofeedback or self regulation strategies or or complementary medicine because we want that personal and we need that personal connection. We need to be listened to in depth to tell our story. We need to be taught the skills not just to say do the following.
You know, most of our doctors are totally correct. It's not their fault. It's the system of reimbursement.
But when a healthcare provider recognizes the patient needs stress management, you can say go meditate or you can say do relaxation or eat healthy foods.
It takes massive training And I think the best one, the better protocols of that has been the ones developed by Dean Ornish.
He's taking groups of people. He literally puts meats in a group. He teaches them how to shop, he teaches them how to cook. He teaches intense mastery. And look at health.
Not like a pill, but look at it like learning a sport or a piece of music. If you learn to play the violin the first time you play. My sisters played the violin. My God, the screeching is of the first couple of times or years were not always the best.
However they practiced and in practice they became phenomenal.
And we do. And that is the same thing for health.
It's just. And then the question is, how do you support and motivate yourself so. And it doesn't feel like it's sure, I supposed to go swimming today. I need to do this versus saying I'm looking forward to that. And that is where for some people they do it because they love doing it by themselves. Some people love it because how they feel afterwards. And many people would do it in social connections. And in fact, even I do this every Sunday now.
I go hiking. I send out an email blast to friends of mine and we then. And I set up a course when we go hiking in the hills in Berkeley or whatever. And then always wanted to show up. And therefore I am doing it. It's really my way to get my own commitment going. But I love the social connections in that. I think health incorporates all of those.
And, you know, so I think that's the major part. I don't know if I told you my story, but at least that's a beginning.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that is great. The other question I gotta ask before we start to wrap up is the relationship between cancer and autonomic health.
You mentioned heart rate variability in the book. I almost let out a cheer when I heard it.
I know it's not a HRV specific book, though. If you changed a few titles and a few words, it could be how to improve your heart rate variability. Because all the strategies, you know, translate into what our listeners know about hrv. But I. I was just kind of dying to ask you about, like, well, as an expert on, you know, cancer and health and wellness and as an expert on autonomic health. I just love if you put those two things together, how does cancer interact with.
With the autonomic nervous system? I'm assuming we'll see drops in heart rate variability, but it's not one of those things. I see studied a lot. There's a lot of cardiac Disease, you know, heart disease, diabetes study. But I mean as I was thinking in my brain, listen to the book, it's a lot more rare to see an HRV and cancer study.
I don't think there's research.
[00:49:07] Speaker B: You're totally right. I don't think there are any. I don't know of any really HRV and cancer studies.
[00:49:13] Speaker A: It's just kind of shocking with all the research coming out every day.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: The better way to think about is there are lots of studies that show that stress management is helpful.
[00:49:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:23] Speaker B: And so me HRV is a one of the tools to optimize stress management or how to get the system back where the other way is the f think about it is how do you feel safe.
And if you feel safe, that allows the body to heal. If you don't feel safe, then you're vigilant. And in a very old way by which Sampolsky said this about this concept of stress.
If you see a saber toothed tiger, then your body gets mobilized. There's sympathetic arousal to fight flight. And at that moment of fight flight light, why should your body waste its energy to restore itself, to heal itself or digest food? And so when you think of when you get a diagnosis of cancer or even other many illnesses, you trigger a kind of either feeling hopeless, which then is highly associated with worsening of the disease of any diseases long term you. You start thinking negative, oh my God, what will happen. All those are sympathetic, arousing. If you can teach the person to get centered and interrupt that process and maybe folk using imagery techniques or reframing of it of language, it makes an optimistic internal sense. It is not a pollyanish way of thinking. It's acknowledging what is and then seeing the new opportunities this may get. I've seen a number of patients for whom cancer was that just like.
Well, for whom cancer in some sense was the. I was going to say the best thing that happened to them, but that's the long way where the disease was a marker to really shift their lives, to really stop in the track saying I don't know how many more days I have to live, but I want to live those fully and meaningfully. And maybe I need to do less about the money. But for some people money is such a big issue because they, they lose their whole house and all their belongings on medical bills, which is criminal in the United States. It's about the only country in the world I know of that does that.
But we want to really provide safety. And if I feel safe, then I can ask what Do I really want to do.
And if I can pause and do that, then when I have directionality, our body works together again. It's interesting to think of a totally different way about cancer. This is a book I read about 10 years ago about cancer cells. If you think about it, cancer is probably the oldest disease we have because really if you think about it for a cell, then we became single celled organisms. Initially the only purpose of a single cell was to divide and multiply. To reproduce.
[00:52:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: Somehow in the contract when cells became multi cellular organism in that contract, it's a metaphor, obviously the single cell gave up its drive to reproduce for the whole, for the whole system and therefore would allow the, the reproductive system to do that job for them. So the genes would still continue. It's like the selfish gene almost.
And now you could think of cancer that's own different ways to say somehow a cell phone breaks the contract to the whole and now becomes selfish again.
It's a funny way of thinking, you know, but if life, if you live under life stress and you start saying I don't want to look forward to this, then maybe that can occur partially. But I'm also really clear that cancer and hell is not in our hands.
We can contribute to both, to the healing process, just like it can contribute to, to, you know, to optimizing our immune system. But remember, if you think of having cancer, the first thing people often ask is why me? How come? What did I do wrong? In fact, it may not be you at all. And it's the wrong question to ask. The question is, what can I do now to optimize my focus on where you have control? If you keep focusing on the guilt in the past, my God, I did this. That doesn't get you anywhere except more guilt and depression. And so focus where you want to go and what you need to do to do that. And how can you allow your immune system to be supported? And step one of that is to learn to feel safe inside and therefore learn a skill to get totally centered and quiet and then apply that not 24 hours a day, because then you get sick just as much, I think. But the question how can I do it when I feel myself getting too excited, too responsive to then say, oops, I need time out to restore. And so often we in our modern world, we do not allow or we cannot appear not to have the opportunity to take time and restore. It's like if at 2 o' clock in the afternoon I feel tired.
You know, if you lived in Spain or other place you would take a siesta.
[00:54:23] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:54:23] Speaker B: You know, especially the warm weather right now. However, in the US that's not a model that is allowable. But maybe we should take the siesta for two hours or an hour, and then we have more energy again. So listening to your.
So the key underneath all of this for stress management, heart rate variability, is to listen to yourself and recognize when you're reacting and how you can go. And the final piece, and that's the most recent research we're doing, is on bleeding.
Is not all diaphragmatic breathing or belly breathing is the same.
Because, you know, we just did a little pilot study where we had people just simply asking, take a big breath.
And most people then lift their chest, right?
[00:55:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:08] Speaker B: And then you can ask the simple question, did you, as you did that, did you pull your stomach in?
That's what. And. And the second one is when you now take a big abdominal breath so your stomach gets bigger.
And when that happens, did your anus go up or down? Did you tighten your anus or not? And when you then exhaled from the abdominal, did you tighten your anus or did it relax?
And it's a predictor quite well, those 2 of whether people have much higher levels of anxiety.
So those who, when they inhale in their chest and pull their stomach in, they're in trouble.
Those who inhale into their stomach and they tighten the anus at the same time, which they often do, they're doing incorrectly also. So it looks like if the strain gauges are breathing correctly, the heart rate variability is doing it correctly. But the real key is in the vertical sense of breathing. When you, after you exhale, you allow the whole pelvic floor to relax, and that feels safe. In order to do that, you have to feel safe. So the question is not just to relax. The question how do you optimize your safety? And that is partially conditioned by our experience of our past, et cetera. I love that.
[00:56:22] Speaker A: And I've incorporated that into my.
Because I always do a little bit of muscle contractions. Pelvic floor in the evening, more aggressive kind of muscle relaxion, Tai chi kind of stuff in the morning. And you having this conversation with you at aapb, I started the contraction on the exhale, which to me what did not make logical sense at first, but I've seen good improvement. I do, I think we owe the woman who we started this conversation with, which I don't think either of us knew, who had a poster there. Dr. Pepper and I went off on a 20 minute conversation about anal contractions.
So I think she was a nerd enough to, you know, not get too creeped out by us, my friend. But I look back on that and how hilarious that we just started all into anal contraction and relaxation right there in front of a stranger. And hopefully she learned a little with us because I remember but to go
[00:57:23] Speaker B: back into breathing in the end, I think in autogenic training it's phrased well, it breathes me breathing.
Ideally you should be unaware. It should just go by itself effortlessly and that is where you're aiming for. It's not with will.
Yes, you use will in the initial parts of training, like skill training. But just like in sports, you know, when you're, whether that is soccer or football in, in the world, rest of the world or any sport, when you're performing, if you use will, it isn't going to work. It is allowing the flow and breathing. We are aiming in the end to shift that to a flow, an effortless flow where breathing just goes effortlessly and it really only works I think when you feel safe.
[00:58:08] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah, well, that is a great way to end, my friend. I we will put the links to the book and we'll get, we'll get some other information from Dr. Pepper with other links and stuff because I know this is one of many resources you offer, my friend. I just as someone who's, who's read the book, you know, I was sharing with Dr. Pepper a little bit as I had a brother in law who has had some struggle with cancer. You know, I sent the link to the book to my sister, you know, as they look at integrating some of this so it doesn't come back sort of mentality. And I really believe that, you know, if you've got a diagnosis or you're facing this Dr. Pepper that your, your book really wraps up up a lot of stuff that I know in a very practical way while adding some new things that I've never heard of before which the more I read the harder that gets. And so to get some new stuff to say, hey, have you heard of this? And starting conversations with other people, it's a really, if you think somebody's open to, you know, this conversation that we've had.
The book just goes into step by step strategies from everything from mindset to nutrition, movement. And it's I think will offer so many people hope that the medical system probably isn't designed to necessarily give them as they're handed a treatment protocol. This is really what's missing. And so if you know somebody I couldn't suggest, you know, your, your book More So thank you for this great gift, my friend.
[00:59:52] Speaker B: Well, Matt, thank you so much for the endorsement. And from my perspective, the concepts are optical, not just for cancer, but for most people, it's really how to optimize your health. Yeah. And your immune system.
And, and that's a very broad field. And in complementary to the medical treatments you do.
[01:00:12] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:00:13] Speaker B: Thank you so much for the interview.
[01:00:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Dr. Pepper, thank you so much. And thanks so much for joining us. As always. You can find show notes, we'll put load those with a bunch of links and you can find that optimalhrv.com thank you, everybody, and we'll see you soon.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: Thanks so much.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: Beautiful, my friend.
Yes. Yeah.
You're back.
