Rethinking Cancer Risk: Nutrition, Screening, and What’s Changing

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

[00:00:34] JENNA: Hey, Dr. Cara. Welcome to the Eat to Love Podcast. I think you're going to be on here a lot more often, which I'm so excited about. So as my sister, as a naturopathic oncologist, as the founder of Longevity Rx, your new medical practice that you opened with Dad, I'm so excited to have this episode of the Eat Live podcast where we are talking about revolutionizing breast health.

[00:00:55] JENNA: So a big part of your career is treating patients – cancer patients at your center, LongevityRx, and we're going to get into that. And we actually have QT imaging, a radiation free breast scan. So I definitely want to talk about that. But to kick us off, let's talk about going back to our childhood. I feel like Dad spoke a lot about cancer.

[00:01:16] JENNA: Can you tell me about how he shaped your views on cancer from a young age?

[00:01:21] DR. CARA: Yeah, so thanks for having me. First of all, I should say, so many people come up to me and say: You're on your sister's podcast. How cool? And I'm like, yeah, I think she'll, maybe she'll initiate me one day to being our podcast.

[00:01:32] JENNA: I think like this is the start of something beautiful. I think it is our podcast.

DR. CARA: My initiation might be over. This was a trial period and now we're back. But you asked how Dad shaped my view on cancer – and I just think that he showed me with my own two eyes, he didn't even really explain to me that cancer is something that doesn't have to happen to you, and it's something that if it does happen to you, you can change it.

[00:01:56] You can take matters into your own hands [00:02:00] and it's not luck of the draw. That's what he taught me is the number I would say, if anything I could take away from what he taught us is that you can control your outcomes when it comes to cancer.

[00:02:11] JENNA: Wow, that's really powerful. And I feel like Dad also framed it in the sense of: You can eat cancer-fighting foods, and you don't have to be fearful that you're going to get cancer.

[00:02:20] Be proactive about it and eat a cancer-fighting diet. So that was always something that I feel like he drilled into our head since we were kids.

[00:02:26] DR. CARA   : Well, also, the cancer-fighting diet is good for everything. Else. So if you want to feel good, if you want to look good, if you want to have energy without stimulants, eat this diet and you won't get cancer too.

[00:02:38] It's kind of like a perk to not get cancer when you're feeling good throughout your whole life, and you can really focus on enjoying life with not feeling poorly. Because there's a quote that I absolutely love and it says: Someone without health concerns has a thousand dreams. Someone with health concerns has one dream, one goal, and that's to get healthy.

[00:02:58] JENNA: Yeah.

DR. CARA: And he [00:03:00] taught us that we can have those thousand dreams.

[00:03:02] JENNA: Yeah. And I feel like growing up too, we witnessed, we had so many people enter our lives as Dad's patients, like whether they were living at our house and Dad was fasting them in our basement, which happened. True story. Or we were just at his medical practice and like dealing with the patient and interacting with them just as his kids.

[00:03:18] I feel like we've had how many people come up to us say like, your father changed my life.

[00:03:22] DR. CARA: Well, that's actually the reason I wanted to specialize in cancer. Because so many of his patients I've seen get better from cancer. And we were even at a conference together. I've been traveling with Dad now going to conferences, speaking to people.

[00:03:33] JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: And really hearing – like, actually seeing with my own two eyes how many people he's helped and saved their lives. And someone came up to me and said, I had stage four cancer, four year – no “I had stage four cancer 14 years ago.” And she said, “Your Dad changed my life. I didn't do any conventional treatment.”

[00:03:53] DR. CARA: “I became a full blown Nutritarian. I did everything that he said to do. And I'm 14 years [00:04:00] later with no recurrence.

JENNA: Wow.

DR. CARA: And that's amazing. It's very common for people to go through conventional care, get rid of their cancer, and have it come back five or six years later. And so for people who have been through the horror of cancer, to not have to worry about recurrence 14 years later is absolutely amazing.

[00:04:20] And so I see all of these people that Dad's helping with cancer specifically, he helps so many, so many diseases. But I just felt like cancer is something that's so detrimental to someone. It hurts their whole entire body. You know, their whole immune system is down, but it has a terrible quality of life when you're going through treatment.

[00:04:37] And I saw that and said that is something that he is so successful at treating and now the research is out there to even have natural supplements that don't cause any harm, they just kill cancer. There's so many more things now. So I was like, this is something that I can make such a difference in.

[00:04:56] JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: And make people's lives just so much better. I was like, [00:05:00] I'm going to specialize in that.

[00:05:01] JENNA: Yeah. And hearing, I mean, Dad has really notable cases that have stayed with him, that he's always sharing with us, about people who have had stage four cancer and 15 years later with zero recurrence.

[00:05:10] So just being able to empower them to live stress-free after they've had a diagnosis is so important. And also I just want to comment on like, our family isn't invincible from health diseases. Like, we have extended family who have had cancer that are super close to us, and we've seen how going through that firsthand, and Dad being able to empower them and say,: “I know you thought my diet was just for sick people.”

[00:05:32] And now that you feel like you need to do it – and without a trace of cancer left in their body – is so, so impactful.

DR. CARA: Mm-hmm.

JENNA: Grandpa, who doesn't have heart issues, but had a heart attack 25 years ago. Like, it's really, really important. And I love Dad's work.

[00:05:45] DR. CARA: And we're also Ashkenazi Jews, and I feel like they have a lot of history of diseases.

[00:05:51] Like something like the BRCA gene is very common in our ancestry and where we come from.

JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: So we aren't these people who don't have any genetic [00:06:00] predisposition to disease. We actually do have a lot of genetic predisposition and we're going to. Answer all our prayers with eating the Nutritarian diet.

[00:06:08] JENNA: A hundred percent. Okay. So this actually – when I was thinking about this podcast – I really did want to ask you about this because I feel like we talk about this a lot. If someone does have the BRCA gene or cancer-causing gene or cancer causing, I don't even know if that's right, but one of the genes…

[00:06:22] DR. CARA: Increasing your risk for cancer, yeah. It doesn't cause cancer, but it can increase your risk.

JENNA: Yeah. So what is your recommendation? Because I know we've known people that have gotten their ovaries removed, breasts removed to fight this cancer. But I feel like there's a more non-invasive way.

[00:06:39] DR. CARA: Diet and lifestyle will prevent the BRCA gene from showing more than any other thing will.

[00:06:45] JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: You can still, you can get a mastectomy, that you're getting your breast removed, taken off, yes. But it's not going to be as effective as diet and lifestyle will. So diet and lifestyle is less invasive and more effective. It's the genetics [00:07:00] that load the gun, but it's what you do with diet and lifestyle that pull the trigger.

[00:07:04] JENNA: Wow.

DR. CARA: And just because you have a BRCA gene doesn't mean that you're going to get a cancer. And how many people do you know that don't have a BRCA gene and have gotten cancer? Because I know a lot of people that have gotten cancer and I don't know, not one of them has the BRCA gene.

[00:07:19] JENNA: Is it true that we're seeing cancer rates increase in young people as well?

[00:07:23] DR. CARA: Absolutely. There's a statistic now is that one in eight individuals is diagnosed with breast cancer and the rates of people in their twenties and thirties is skyrocketing. It's increasing by over 2% every single year, which is a is. That's a lot.

JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: And it wasn't really a thing for people to get breast cancer in their twenties and thirties before, but now it's happening all the time.

[00:07:43] And that's because, you know, people are eating foods that are worse for their health, so they're going to have worse health outcomes. There's a lot of beauty products that people are using. People are starting to use beauty products at 10 years old now. Who was using hormone disruptors in their [00:08:00] skincare at 10 years old, 50 years ago? It just wasn't a thing.

[00:08:03] JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: All these TikTok, Sephora shops with the 10 year olds, it's like really popular. People are getting their periods earlier than ever before, which is a pretty good indicator that they have to work on their hormone health and that they could potentially have a hormone-sensitive cancer like breast cancer – for men, prostate cancer.

[00:08:20] And there's, people are carrying more body fat and body fat triggers inflammation, which causes an enzyme called aromatase to convert, to create estrogen. So it's producing a lot more estrogen. Body fat is one of the largest contributors to how much estrogen you have in the body. So that's also the reason why people are getting more breast cancers.

[00:08:45] All of these things coupled together, you know, all the packaged foods and everything. It's just making it rise – and it's really sad, because it's so preventable.

[00:08:55] JENNA: With the right diet, at least everyone from a young age should learn that there are [00:09:00] cancer-fighting foods like the G bombs.

[00:09:02] And Dad always says, instead of people wearing their p ink ribbons, we should raise our spears of broccoli – because it really is a war on cancer and we don't want to lose it. Like no more than the person going through the diagnosis. It's like the whole family feels it. The whole, you know, world feels it.

[00:09:16] So it's a super serious problem that we want to fight.

DR. CARA: Right.

JENNA: And not fight with more things. We'll get into this later, but with more screening tools that cause harm, or anything that causes harm and adds to that stress, like we're trying to do the opposite of that. So I think that's, yeah, really important.

[00:09:32] I love what you do.

[00:09:33] DR. CARA: Thank you. Yeah, it's really amazing to see patients get better and we're just so successful with that.

[00:09:38] JENNA: Yeah, totally. You have to do it. It's your calling. So for people that have cancer, do you feel like nutrition and supplements really do impact it? Like, I know we talked about prevention, but theose that have cancer

[00:09:52] DR. CARA: Oh, for people that have cancer? Absolutely.

[00:09:52] So there's studies that show that EGCG, for instance, in green tea, can kill cancer within the body. [00:10:00] And when you are going through treatment for someone that is doing chemotherapy or someone that is getting a lumpectomy or a mastectomy to get their cancer removed, the diet and lifestyle really shines to kill any senescent cells that remain.

[00:10:12] So when you get a lumpectomy or a mastectomy, there's always going to be some cancer tumor cells leftover, it can't kill everything. Same with chemotherapy. And where the diet and lifestyle really shines is that can kill those leftover cells so that the cancer has no chance of recurrence. The reason that people have so much recurrence is because of those little leftover cells.

[00:10:31] And it takes tumors a long time to grow. Like if you have a mass a breast cancer. It didn't just grow overnight, it started 10 years ago.

[00:10:39] JENNA: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:40] DR. CARA: So the diet and the supplement's really good at making sure it can't grow back. And we also use a supplement that has the EGCG from green tea. It has curcumin from turmeric.

[00:10:49] And what we do is we. Uh, give it to someone with spaced dosing, so every four to five hours so that it's circulating the blood 24 7 and the cancer does not have a [00:11:00] chance to grow because these compounds are so effective at killing cancer cells.

[00:11:04] JENNA: And more than the supplements, when you're coupling it with the nutrient-dense diet and, you know, minimizing animal products and doing all these things that cause your – increase your risk of cancer.

[00:11:11] When you're doing all of those things together, this is why we've witnessed so many health miracles.

DR. CARA: Mm-hmm.

JENNA: And that's what people will call them is health Miracles.

[00:11:19] DR. CARA: Mm-hmm. Which is so amazing. And there's also herbs alongside with the EGCG and the curcumin that I'll give to a patient that are really good at killing cancer cells and they leave healthy cells unharmed.

[00:11:29] So chemotherapy will kill the cancer cells and the healthy cells, whereas these herbs that are now on the market are killing the cancer cells, but they're not killing the healthy cells. It's amazing.

[00:11:42] JENNA: So we call this your anti-cancer protocol, right? And this anti-cancer protocol is good with or without conventional cancer treatment? Is that right?

[00:11:49] DR. CARA: Absolutely. And it looks a little bit different for people that are going through chemotherapy. – I'll do something a little bit different with diet. We'll do more of like a fasting-mimicking diet around the chemotherapy [00:12:00] and then we won't give the supplements when they're doing the chemotherapy and then we move on from there to kill everything with the supplements.

[00:12:06] Because usually people will do chemo like once every two weeks.

JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: And then we also do the diet so that the chemo can actually become more effective and that there's actually less side effects of chemo when you're eating a Nutritarian diet and doing the supplements at the same time.

And then for people who aren't going under conventional treatment, I've seen miraculous recoveries.

[00:12:28] JENNA: Wow.

DR. CARA: They'll get the lump removed and the cancer won't come back ever again. Even for people – yeah. Yeah, I was going to get into something that I was like, I'm not going to talk about that. Too deep.[…] Reel it back.

[00:12:41] JENNA: But you do have amazing cases in your patients.

[00:12:44] JENNA: I know some of the cases you share with me about that are insane – that people that have been over-diagnosed or maybe treated for cancer where you, you necessarily wouldn't recommend. But we'll get into all that. So. I want, my why about eating G-BOMBS and the way I do is [00:13:00] to avoid cancer entirely.

But maybe someone hasn’t eaten in this whole, you know, this diet, or maybe they're just wanting to be proactive with their breast health when we're doing breast cancer screening or trying to have a proactive approach to breast health.

[00:13:11] And you know, it's, you hear it all the time: Get your yearly mammogram. Do you agree or disagree?

[00:13:18] DR. CARA: Well, we're here today, so you know, I disagree. I don't understand why we're preventing breast cancer with a screening tool that can increase your risk of breast cancer. Because mammograms come with ionizing radiation. And the breast tissue is tissue in the body that's very radiation sensitive.

[00:13:38] It's not the same as holding a cell phone that has diffuse radiation all over the whole body. And so we're getting this screening with radiation when we're preventing a cancer that could be caused by, partly by radiation [that] increases your risk, right? I'm not going to eat candy because it increases my risk of breast cancer and all these other diseases.

[00:13:58] So why am I radiating my [00:14:00] breast to prevent cancer? It just doesn't make sense. Why are we putting ourselves at any harm for any screening? Everything in medicine is weighing the pros and the cons, and I think the cons outweigh the pros.

[00:14:12] JENNA: For screening, like for proactive approach. Like if someone has cancer and because mammograms are required, like you would say not as bad, but the annual, the compounding annual over,

[00:14:23] DR. CARA: I still wouldn't even get a mammogram if I had cancer, because there's other screening tech tools that you can use that are even more accurate.

[00:14:30] And maybe if there wasn't something else out there, you could do a handheld ultrasound, which is has some issues too, because it's operator dependent and it has some issues with dense breasts. But we have better tools.

So I don't know what my viewpoints would be if we didn't have better tools, but because we do have better tools, I say: Nah.

[00:14:48] JENNA Yeah. I will say that's where, I mean, Dad's talked about mammograms, I feel like for some time, because like even the Cochrane Review came out with their study saying – I think it said one in 10 could be helped [00:15:00] by, their life can be saved by a mammogram. But we're also over diagnosing 30, 30 to 40% of cases, 40% in the US.

[00:15:07] Therefore, we're overtreating people with very invasive treatments who didn't actually need cancer. And we'll talk more about overdiagnosis and overtreatment, but – these better tools. I know 'cause you have one at Longevity rx. Can you tell us what they are? And I'm so grateful for them, because there's not a question anymore of like what to do – Do I get a mammogram or I don't. There's a better option. So what is it?

[00:15:28] DR. CARA: Yeah. QT imaging is amazing. It's called QT imaging. And what you do is you lay on a table and you put your breast in a bath of warm water. It's body temperature, so it's not uncomfortable at all, and it uses ultrasound technology, but it's very different than handheld ultrasound.

[00:15:45] So I don't want people to be confused by that. And the image is taken 360 around the breast, so it's going all the way around the breast to look at every single angle and make sure that we're not missing anything. And it takes an image that's even more [00:16:00] clear than a mammogram and an MRI. It's like mammogram and MRI had a baby that's even smarter than the parents.

[00:16:06] They just birthed Einstein.

JENNA: I love when that happens.

DR. CARA: And the great thing is, is that it can minimize the amount of overdiagnosis, and that's where QT imaging really, really shines because there's no harm. There's no radiation, there's no compression. It's very comfortable. We put on spa music, we put on a podcast, it looks very nice in the room.

[00:16:28] We're trying to reduce the anxiety and we're teaching people about what they're doing. They're not just coming in, getting their scan and leaving. We're talking to them about what it means to get a scan, what it means to have what we call over-diagnosis, how we prevent those things. And I think that education piece is also really important when someone is coming in to be screened.

[00:16:47] JENNA: It's so opposite from a mammogram too, where like – did they even share that it's radiation?

DR. CARA: And I always think this way – I'm kind of going off topic here, but with antibiotics, which also increase your risk of breast cancer because when you go [00:17:00] in for a cold and the doctor says, okay, I'm going to give you antibiotics to fight this.

[00:17:05] Did they tell you the risks of taking antibiotics? They don't tell you that it can increase your risk of cancer. They don't tell you that it can destroy your gut. They just say, here's antibiotics and you’re going to feel better.

JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: It's like so many things in medicine. Why are we not telling people what's going on and the side effects and the risks to what they're doing?

[00:17:19] Like mammograms have radiation, for one. They aren't good for people who have dense breasts or implants, which – dense breasts just means that the breast tissue has more granular tissue, which is the tissue that produces milk. It's very common. About 50% of females have dense breasts, and we know what implants are.

[00:17:38] They show up white on mammography, and so does a tumor. So it's like finding snowfall in a snow field.

JENNA: A storm. Like a snow storm.

DR. CARA: Yeah, exactly. And it's just really hard to see. So they don't tell you that, either. Some people might know that about dense breast and implants, but they don't tell you about the radiation.

[00:17:57] They don't tell you that. And then [00:18:00] MRIs come with gadolinium. So it's a contrast heavy metal that you're putting in your body, which is toxic to get the MRI. And they won't do a breast MRS – like, some MRIs you can do without the contrast heavy metal, but not breast MRIs. And they also don't produce the most accurate results.

[00:18:17] They have the same downfall with the dense breast and the implants. And they also lead to over-diagnosis. Like one thing that I love to share with people and find very interesting is –  I'm going to read for you off of the CDC ‘s website, is that – I actually, don't want to take the time of pulling it up, but it even says on the CDC’s website that people who are at average risk for breast cancer, meaning any Joe Schmo that's walking down the street, doesn't have the BRCA gene, that doesn't have a family member that's had breast cancer, should get a mammogram from ages 40 to 74 every one to two years.

JENNA: 34 years.

[00:18:48] DR. CARA: Yeah. Then it says: for people who are at high risk, like if you do have a relative who's had breast cancer, or if you have the BRCA gene, you should get an MRI and you should alternate [00:19:00] between mammogram and MRI. And then it goes on to say that MRIs are not recommended for people who are at average risk because they result in abnormal results.

[00:19:12] And they, things can appear abnormal.

JENNA: Even on the CDCs website: they can appear abnormal when they're not, right? Is that right?

[00:19:19] DR. CARA: Yes.

JENNA: So that's where we get into overtreatment.

DR. CARA: Yes.

JENNA: And how it's so funny, Jacob always asks me this, when I always share, you know, my husband always asks me: How do you know that? How do they know it's being overtreated? Can you answer that?

[00:19:33] DR. CARA: Yes, of course. So one thing I want to share that I found really interesting when I started researching is that about 50% of females on autopsy who die of other causes, like cardiovascular disease, like old age, never knew they had breast cancer. [They] will, on autopsy, 50% of people have breast cancer that would've never harmed them in their whole entire life.

[00:19:58] JENNA: It is benign. It would've [00:20:00] never caused their death. Is that because it's so slow growing?

DR. CARA: It's so slow growing, and masses in the breast that can be abnormal, quote unquote, that will never harm you – they're benign. There's a lot of things that pop up in the breast, like I'm sure people have felt a cysts or they feel a density in the breast.

[00:20:14] That doesn't mean they have cancer and it doesn't mean that it increases their risk of cancer. And what happens in conventional screening is you go for a mammogram, you go for an MRI, they see something abnormal, but they don't know what it is, and then they send you for a biopsy. And the thing about the biopsy is the pathologist also cannot determine if something abnormal is harmless, benign, and never going to kill you, or aggressive, harmful, and going to harm you.

[00:20:45] So they tell both cases that it's cancer, regardless of which category you fall in. And that's what we call over-diagnosis because we're treating people who don't need to be treated.

[00:20:59] JENNA: I just wanted to [00:21:00] chime in about the biopsy component. because this was so interesting to me – is that when you think about it, you think, oh, they biopsied it so they can know.

[00:21:06] JENNA: Because they have the cells in under their microscope, but they're dead. They're cut out of the living organism. Therefore, you're only getting a one photo view of if it's cancer or not. So you can't tell if it's slow growing or fast growing and aggressive. So just one snapshot, it's not the full story, which is really important to know,

[00:21:23] DR. CARA: And that's where QT imaging shines because QT imaging takes 200,000 more data points than a con conventional imaging. And it's 40 times more clear of an image. Right. And it actually measures thing to anatomical size, meaning that the size that they, that the, um, abnormality or the breast is on the screen is the size in the body.

And the only way to determine, distinguish if something is harmless, benign, never going to kill you, or harmful, aggressive, and going to kill you is something called lesion doubling time.

So you're [00:22:00] looking at how fast the mass is doubling in size. Cancers have an average doubling time of 120 days. Benign masses do not double. They do not change in size.

[00:22:12] DR. CARA: They sometimes even go away. So with QT imaging, because you can measure to anatomical size, you can take the exact measurement of a lesion, and then you can repeat the scan in three to six months – three to four months being the sweet spot – compare it to your last scan and know for sure – with accuracy – if it's something that's aggressive over time.

[00:22:37] JENNA: Wow, it's crazy.

DR. CARA: And you can actually calculate the doubling time, the exact amount of days that it took to double in size with the technology behind QT imaging. Because it couples the sound waves with the ultrasound waves with AI and a lot of other technology. I actually think this is really fun.

So I thought that I could potentially read scans for people immediately so that they could get a [00:23:00] quicker response when they came into LongevityRx. So I went to a radiology training thinking that I could do that, and I learned that I cannot.

I had a great time. I was able to read a lot of scans, but I just didn't want to make a mistake and cause too much anxiety for people. So I think it's better that someone who actually specializes in breast radiology and also went through the extensive training, reads the scans.

[00:23:24] But that experience was so cool because I got to see where they manufacture the QT scans, and I met this Einstein behind QT – he was this mastermind guy who's coding all day, working on AI. What other medical technology – like medical equipment – has that kind of technology? It was just so cool.

[00:23:46] JENNA: And they say medicine takes – or inventions take – 17 years to catch up to conventional medical care. And it's like we're bridging that gap with LongevityRx and I – what I love about you having a medical practice, and even [me] being a part of it – is that [00:24:00] Dad was always so dubious about conventional medical care.

[00:24:02] He decided to go into the industry to change it. And I just think it's so cool that we're carrying on that legacy. I know you're doing the medicine, but just –

DR. CARA: You know, you too helping you get the message out.

JENNA: Thanks. But just carrying on that legacy of these state-of-the-art inventions where you don't have to sacrifice anything for clear pictures and like prevention and diagnostic tools. Like we're not into invasive procedures, but if you are trying to be proactive and like want these screening tools as a motivator, like: Oh, I have something benign going on. I'm going to eat and get rid of it, or I'm going to look at my body fat percent or my carotenoid score and like, do something about these numbers.

[00:24:35] They're coming out with these testing and these technologies that are not invasive and can help us prolong our health, which I feel like has never been done before in medicine.

[00:24:48] DR. CARA: Mm-hmm. One of the reasons I love doing it advanced blood panel with people at LongevityRx is because – not necessarily because I think they need it to prevent anything, but it's just the best motivator. Like people don't want to [00:25:00] change their diet, they don't want to use supplements. [But if] they see that they need to, on a physical lab – on a test, they're going to do it.

[00:25:08] JENNA: Yeah, a hundred percent.

[00:25:09] DR. CARA: And I find it just so helpful to get patients on that path.

[00:25:13] JENNA: Yeah, it is. You’re the best. Okay. So talking about over-diagnosis and over-treatment, I just want to say one thing that I feel like really resonated with me and why, you know, there's a problem in the cancer industry because, –  love how I said industry [because] it’s an industry –

[00:25:27] – It’s because there's more treatments and diagnoses than ever, but the same amount of deaths.

DR. CARA: Mm-hmm.

JENNA: So because of those statistics, you could tell that it's killing the same amount of people, so therefore we're over-treating and over-diagnosing.

And what comes with that overtreatment of needing, having a lumpectomy or chemo or radiation, or total invasive procedures is it causes anxiety, stress. S much like your peace is taken, from you without, with just a little bit of lack of knowledge.

[00:25:57] DR. CARA: Not only does it cause anxiety and stress, but [00:26:00] since cancer's being diagnosed with people that are so much younger, their treatment also puts them in early menopause.

[00:26:05] So then they have low libido. They don't want to have sexual intercourse with their partners. They have vaginal dryness, they have hot flashes that someone in their sixties or fifties should have. And it also, cancer treatment increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, which is a leading cause of death in females already.

[00:26:22] So it just comes with all of these issues and this patient who didn't even need to be treated becomes a patient of medical care forever. Which what I do is so heartwarming and amazing to me because I'm teaching people how not to see me.

JENNA: Mm-hmm.

DR. CARA: I'm teaching people that they can do this on their own.

[00:26:40] I'm here to coach them through it. I'm here to help them with anything they need supplement-wise, like any drugs they are concerned about, talking to 'them about the education.

JENNA: Getting off drugs.

DR. CARA: Yeah, exactly. I'm teaching them how to do this on their own. Not to stay in conventional medical care for the rest of their lives.

[00:26:57] JENNA: Mm-hmm. Totally.

DR. CARA: “If you don't eat green [00:27:00] vegetables, you better live close to a hospital,” as Dad would always say.

JENNA: So funny.

[00:27:05] DR. CARA: Okay. It's funny, the jokes we used to cringe at we're like now using, yeah. “The whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead.”

[00:27:12] JENNA: Love it. He's always there. It's because he talked about this stuff so constantly.

DR. CARA: He’s in our ears…

JENNA: It's terrible – what your parents would do and say really matters. We gotta remember that.

DR. CARA: Love him!

JENNA: Can you explain what multi – Wait I need to make sure I get this right: What's a multi cancer detection blood test?

[00:27:29] DR. CARA: It's really cool. So there's a few different types. I, when starting LongevityRx, I interviewed a few different companies – actually, only two – that do this.

[00:27:40] And I ended up going with one that had a little bit more cancers on the blood test for a little bit less cost. And it is so cool. So you take two tubes of blood, and they look for, in the blood, cancer proteins. And they can see if there's any sort of cancer circulating in the blood. So it's an early detection marker [00:28:00] for cancer that's circulating in the blood.

[00:28:01] And you can find this before cancer forms into a mass even. And the company ends up, if someone has a positive result, it just says cancer detected or cancer not detected. And they actually give people money to find out what kind of cancer they have, if they have a positive result.

JENNA: Wow.

DR. CARA: But I love the test because I can couple it with things like QT imaging and see  hitting things from multiple angles is really helpful, because in medicine you want to have more confidence in everything you're doing.

[00:28:28] So the more tests we do, the more confidence we can have.

[00:28:31] JENNA: Yeah, because what I feel like people also don't get told that much is like: there's errors and there's potential for over-diagnosis, overtreatment. So you're layering multiple detection tests. Mm-hmm. To be like, if I'm going to tell this person it's cancer, I want to be positive that it's cancer.

[00:28:47] DR. CARA: Totally. And I know so many people who went for their yearly screenings with things like mammograms. We talked a lot about people who are being overtreated, but we didn't talk about the people that cancers are just missed. And I have a friend whose [00:29:00] mom has stage four breast cancer and that takes a long time to develop.

[00:29:04] She went and got her mammograms every single year. About maybe like 10 years ago, she felt a lump in her breast and she went for a mammogram and they said it was nothing.

[00:29:13] JENNA: No way. Wow.

[00:29:14] DR. CARA:. And then eventually it gets all over her body. She has in her bones now. And that's how they found out it was breast cancer, right? Stage four.

[00:29:20] JENNA: And it's not medicine's fault, like everything was designed with the intention of really helping people. It's just that like sometimes technologies aren't perfect.

DR. CARA: Mm-hmm.

JENNA: And like even with QT imaging, we're so excited with this technology, but it hasn't been around that long.

[00:29:32] That's probably the biggest con. It's just that the number of studies right now are done by QT and people are just studying it. But like you're layering tests too, because there are errors in these systems.

DR. CARA: Mm-hmm.

JENNA: Like medicine still is an evolving thing. And just like any business or industry, it's not perfect and it's still growing.

[00:29:48] DR. CARA: But what I love about QT imaging though, I will say is the lesion doubling time. Because that's something that's very well known – that cancers double in size within a certain amount of time. So you can't really like fight that one.

JENNA: No.

DR. CARA: You know if you can measure the [00:30:00] lesion, you can see how fast it's doubling in size. Like that's just been around

[00:30:02] JENNA: Aggressive or not. You're finding out those details.

[00:30:06] DR. CARA: Yeah, totally. And the thing that I agree with [is that] mammograms weren't invented to harm people. They were invented to help people. And that's something that's very important to point out because when they were invented, what they had thought was that cancers start small and then they grow bigger.

[00:30:21] And as they grow bigger, they're more harmful, right? So that's true for some types of cancers, but it's not actually true for breast cancer. You can have a mass that starts out big and is harmless. You can have a mass that starts out small and is aggressive. It's just not so black and white, and it's not a linear process like they initially thought.

[00:30:40] And that's why I also think that it's not as successful at preventing cancer.

[00:30:45] JENNA: Right. Whoa. So just talking about like the patients that you have that do have cancer: If someone does have cancer, what are the next steps or something that you recommend for anyone who's facing a cancer diagnosis?

[00:30:56] DR. CARA: Well, the Nutritarian diet, we do some things very [00:31:00] specifically.

[00:31:00] There's four parameters of healthy aging and longevity, and I use these parameters in cancer as well. It's nutrient density in the tissues, so we're doing everything we can to increase nutrient density in the tissues. We'll do the berry bowl in the morning, the salad, the greens for dinner. We also do a green juice with no fruit in it to increase that nutrient density a lot.

[00:31:21]: The next parameter – number two – is toxicity in the tissues. So we talk about all the toxins that are in their life, whether they're using toxic pots and pans, whether it's their skincare, you know, whether it's drugs that they're taking or foods that they're eating. We remove those.

JENNA: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:36] DR. CARA: The next one is body fat percent. So we talk, you know, you want to be for a woman below 25% body fat, and for a male below 15% body fat. So we talk about getting to there because as you shed body fat, you shed toxins because toxins are stored. In body fat.

The next one is your omega-3 index being between six and nine, which we will test them for their omegas to be higher, to also allow your body to detox properly.

So we [00:32:00] always start with the foundation, which is that those four principles and the diet, and those are just the top four principles of longevity. They're not all the principles of longevity. Of course, we talk about more than that. I do a lot of psychology counseling. I help them with mindset a lot.

[00:32:16] That's a big portion of what we do. And then we go into the full supplement regime and we use all of these supplements to help fight the cancer even more. It's all about layering. You know, we're not just going to say, you're going to eat broccoli, the cancer's going to go away. We're going to layer the broccoli, the kale, the bok choy, the beans, the nuts and seeds, the supplements, and we layer everything on top of one another so that cancer doesn't stand a chance.

JENNA: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:40] DR. CARA: And one thing I find so amazing is that these studies that show things like green vegetables are really good for cancer, or that mushrooms is really good for cancer, [and] onions are really good for cancer – They're not changing a lot. They're only just adding mushrooms. They're only adding onions.

JENNA: They’re adding flax seeds!

[00:32:56] They're only adding greens. They're only adding the curcumin [00:33:00] from turmeric. They're not adding everything. So what we're doing is we're coupling all of those things together and layering them one by one, all on top of each other. So that cancer doesn't stand a chance. I keep saying that, but it really doesn't stand a chance.

[00:33:12] JENNA: You're like, we're fighting you till the death, buddy. Yeah,

[00:33:14] DR. CARA: So that's what we do.

JENNA: Yeah. And that's, it's so impactful. I always am so grateful for everyone who walks through the doors of Longevity RX, because it's medicine designed with your longevity in mind. And so you never have to question: Is what my doctor telling me what I want to do, or is that the direction I want to go?

[00:33:32] Because so many people don't know what to do. They feel like the diagnosis their doctor gives them isn't right. Like, we just get all types of stories that walk through our doors and I'm just so excited to change lives with you.

[00:33:44] DR. CARA: Me too. It's, it's just honestly amazing. Like, even if I could be having a bad day and then I could go to Longevity RX and it'll immediately turn my day around.

[00:33:51] Like for instance, today I had a patient that was leaving and started crying because she said she's no longer in pain and I've helped her so much. And she [00:34:00] said: “I'm so sorry for crying in front of you, but they're happy tears.” And I wanted to cry because I was so happy for her.

[00:34:09] And just having these tools to be able to teach people to cry, happy tears. Like I love emotion. And it's like – I have the chills right now. How cool is it?

JENNA: So cool!

DR. CARA: To just help people man.

JENNA: And connect with them? We're so lucky.

DR. CARA: Community! Yeah. I love the community. I keep, we've been open two weeks now at Longevity RX, and I was working for months online and doing a lot of virtual visits to see patients as well as all of the business aspect of things, construction, banks, all of these things.

JENNA: Yeah.

[00:34:34] DR. CARA: And ever since we opened, I can't help just being so grateful that I decided to do this because going in person is so much better for me than being at home doing these things. Like I love being able to see my patients, being able to give them hugs.

JENNA: I knew you were going to say you love hugging them. I just knew you were,

DR. CARA: I love hugging them.

[00:34:51] JENNA: I knew you were going there. You're such a physical touch girl.

DR. CARA: I am. It's my love language and I love my patients.

[00:34:59] JENNA: Yeah. All right, Cara, that [00:35:00] was really, really fun. I mean, Dr. Cara, as I'm, I've been saying lately, will you be on the podcast regularly with me?

Dr. CARA: Will you have me?

JENNA: I wanted to propose to you. Do I have to propose to you? [Laughter]

DR. CARA: I accept.

JENNA: Don't make me get on one knee. You know, I’d do it for you in a second.

DR. CARA: I’ve gotten on one knee for her before

JENNA: When?

[00:35:16] DR. CARA: Remember when we were in the living room in Altamont and I gave, I gave you flowers on your birthday on one day. I said, “Will you marry me?”

JENNA: Yeah.

DR. CARA: We've been husband and wife for a long time, but I think it's now fair to tell everyone.

I think this is my, you know, maybe fifth episode on the podcast that I'm the husband, Jenna's the wife.

JENNA: Let's make it official.

DR. CARA: I'm the driver. She's the passenger princess.

JENNA: That's right! Where there's Cara, there's Jenna. [Laughter]

All right. Well thanks for joining me. That was – like, more on a serious note – that like, you know so much. It's so eye-opening, and I really see you transforming medicine just like Dad did,

[00:35:50] DR. CARA: That's so sweet!

[00:35:50] JENNA: Yeah. Thanks for coming.

DR. CARA: Thank you. I love my patients!

JENNA: I love you!