Do Mushrooms Help Your Body Fight Cancer? The Science Behind Medicinal Mushrooms | Dr. Catalina Fernández | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10So many people have been diagnosed with cancer. 18 million people were diagnosed around the world with cancer and obviously now, five years later, that's only growing more and more. I think the fact that you're connecting so much of these medicinal mushrooms into cancer treatment, which I really want to delve into, and even autism, that's super interesting for me. But I have to talk about the cancer treatment. You're an oncologist by background. We've just heard about all the incredible ways that different types of mushrooms can help support the body and the whole system, the body, the mind, the immune system, everything, the endocrine system.

0:48But, you know, we've touched a little bit here through the show on cancer. And you started by saying at the beginning of this podcast that you're looking at breast cancer treatment at the moment with certain mushrooms. It's a mix of eight different medicinal mushrooms. Yes. So I was looking kind of before this podcast, obviously, at all the different clinical trials that you're doing. And I also looked at a recent review that found that 92 mushroom species have been found with anti-cancerous effects in the lab, but only 11 have reached clinical trials. And so I thought, well, what a better time to start this with you, who is pioneering this sector in cancer treatment.

1:27Two very different camps, bringing it together. How does mushrooms help support cancer treatment? And is there any type of cancer which has shown the kind of best outcome with mushrooms? So it's going to work in what's called the different hallmarks of cancer, which what takes a healthy cell in a healthy environment to a tumorigenic environment where it's not healthy anymore, it's not clean anymore. So the cell is going to go through different steps, different hallmarks, where it's going to become carcinogens. and then it's going to invade other bases and it's going to invade other terrains of the body.

2:14How the mushrooms work from a very, very high level would be on the immune system, being biological response modifiers, so changing the response of the immune system versus recognizing the cancer cell and understanding that that is a cancer cell and attacking it. Wow. So it can directly... It's not going to be as direct as that, but there are mechanisms of action. They're going to be helping through various mechanisms. But the most important is the immune system. And then we're seeing a lot on microbiota. And the gut microbiome. So the gut microbiome, it's going to definitely be something that we see From scratch, when we see a patient that has a cancer, that has a diagnosis, their gut microbiome is different from a healthy person.

3:16Yes, I've heard about this. We know there's a difference there. And when we start working with the medicinal mushrooms in a person who has this dysbiosis, has a system in the gut microbiota that is not in equilibrium, in balance, then with the mushrooms, what we see is that they start changing, reshaping their composition of their gut microbiota. microbiota microbiome into the healthier one yeah it's a long process as we always say it doesn't happen overnight but what we do see is that you can change the composition of your microbiome only in five days one billion people worldwide are deficient in this nutrient that so many of you guys might not be aware of and women if you're listening you are more risk of being deficient in this nutrient.

4:16So I'm going to first of all explain what the physical symptoms are. If you have cold hands and feet, pale skin, extreme lack of energy or fatigue, then you might be suffering with iron deficiency or anemia. Now first off, please go to your GP to get your iron levels checked. Secondly, please explore a good iron supplement. Many people that come to me are worried about taking iron supplementation because it can cause constipation or GI distress. That's why I'm so incredibly proud to be partnering for this episode with Spartone, the number one iron-rich water supplement. Now, I've personally been using these for years.

4:56The reason why is because they are naturally sourced, highly absorbable iron. That means it's much more gentle on your stomach. There's no harsh tablets. It's just one naturally sourced ingredient that works very well. You can pick it up in boots or buy online at Amazon, but please do not ignore this. It is really critical to make sure your iron levels are in check. It blows my mind and I love that I'm having so many different types of conversations coming to my mind right now because Dr. William Lee has come on here quite a few times and he talks a lot about food and cancer treatments and he speaks a lot about the gut microbiome needing to be targeted during cancer treatment as well and I think just getting people to hear that conversation you know I think every single person listening to this has had somebody in their life that has been touched by cancer and sometimes that diagnosis can feel very heavy and also there's only one route and I think knowing that there is also evidence out there of other things that aren't dangerous because again sometimes there are things that are dangerous that's mentioned that are that do come with safety is important in this and thinking about the gut microbiome when going through cancer care and treatment is really important to be considered.

6:16Yes, what we are always doing is bringing in the concept of integration. It's integrative medicine. It's integrative oncology, never alternative. We're always talking of side by side with the medical oncological treatment of the hospital treatment. So people are taking the treatment, But what we are doing, bringing the medicinal mushrooms in, is helping them to cope better with that treatment, to have a better quality of life while getting the treatment. And overall, for the oncologists, is to get that patient supported out of all the treatment so we can get the completion of the whole window of treatment that we have to work in.

7:06because it's very intense. So we need to work. And for that, we work with serums, creams for radiotherapy with mushrooms, with cordyceps and reishi. We also work with these liquid forms, which are very specific. Now, one thing that is very important, and more than anything, when we're talking about an illness or when we're talking about cancer, more than anything. It's very important that not everything can be taken. For example, the forms that have alcohol shouldn't be taken. So you see that a lot in tinctures, don't you? Yes. Okay, that's really good. Tinctures shouldn't be taken. Okay. Because always, when we study the evidence to work in cancer, it's always with extracts.

7:59Because if we bring alcohol into a body that is, you know, trying to detoxify all of the chemotherapy. We're bringing more problems to that liver, those drugs. So it is hugely important that if we trust a treatment of medicinal mushrooms while we are undergoing a cancer treatment, it has to be a validated model with clinical trials, with going through a clinical committee, ethical committees of the hospitals, that there's evidence, solid evidence. The rates of cancer incidents are mind-blowing right now. When I presented my thesis three years ago now, I was presenting. So this is something we need to be very aware about.

8:54Where do we live? What do we breathe? every day? What do we drink? What do we eat? And then that being the basis of our health and the health span that we are going to have depends on this, on what we do every day. And then we can throw really good things into that nutrition, which is lion's men for being one, can be something that on a daily basis can work at a cellular level, bringing a little bit of of that extract or powder of the mushroom. And it's going to work in different ways, in different equilibriums, balancing the cells and the cycles of the cells. So they're going to be fed on these molecules and these ingredients, and they're going to be building a new system that's going to help.

9:48But it's not going to happen overnight. This is something that we have to be taking it minimum three months, I would say, in order to find the difference in my analytics. We can see that before. We can see a difference in analytics in 17 days, even in the microbiome in five days, as fast as fast days. But if we put it in and then we take it off because we feel better and we don't keep it for three months, the ameliorations will come and go. As fast as they came, they will go. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.