The Best Diet for Cancer — What Oncologists Don’t Tell You About Food

If you've been told you just eat whatever you want during cancer treatment, you've been given false advice. Food is not just fuel, it's treatment. It helps your immune system fight cancer. The right plates and the right nutrition, the right methylation, the right detoxification can directly engage your body's five natural defenses and healing to cut the tumor's blood supply, boost your body's immune system, repair your DNA and help other treatments work effectively and importantly, help your body recover and get muscle repair and cell repair. Today, we're changing the conversation from passive eating to what I like to call gourmet immunity and lifestyle changes. This is so important. My name is Dr. Dino Prado, founder of InVita Medical Centers. My team and I have helped countless patients over the last 25 years who have failed the top cancer hospitals across the country. I'd like to show you what key nutrition is based on real clinical experience and not some published papers, but seeing thousands of patients over the last 25 years. So we hear about starving the cancer. First, this is so important. At least partially, this is correct. Reducing sugar and refined carbohydrates. This helps starve cancer cells who love sugar. Healthy cells prefer oxygen. Their metabolism for energy comes from oxygen. So let's keep it simple. Cut the sugar and refined carbohydrates out of the diet. Choose organic whole foods, clean foods whenever possible. And this makes all the difference to lowering your toxic load. Now a lot of the studies you're going to read and see out there is because people have removed the refined carbohydrates and sugars and have gotten away from the fast food and the garbage diet to a clean farm to table diet. And when they've done that, they always do better. Gut microbiome, immunity, protein. We'll get into that here in a minute. This is especially important when patients are taking chemotherapy or doing treatment for cancer because the chemotherapy suppresses their immune system. It wipes it out. It's aggressive. The other thing that feeds tumors you'll hear is glutamine, the amino acid, but we can't get rid of this. We need it for immunity to kill cancer cells. And by the way, this diet is good for everyone. It helps with heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, pretty much across the board because it's healthy eating, but we want to reduce sugar. Get rid of these refined carbohydrates that are dangerous. We want to choose nutrient dense foods. Think of it this way. When patients do a PET scan, which is the imaging to see where the cancer is spread, they use dyes that are substances like sugars, FDG. And what these do, they light up like a Christmas tree wherever the tumors are. So sugar is one of the fuels to cancer. So we're going to remove it. Start giving our mitochondria good health. These are the cells in our body that give us energy for sweetness. We can move to stevia and monk fruit. A little bit of organic honey may be fine, but we don't overdo it. Also, we're going to consider intermittent fasting. The 16 eight, you can look that up. It's everywhere. We want to be in a fasting state when receiving chemotherapy when possible, unless we're hypoglycemic. And in that point we want to use proteins and other nutrient dense foods to help us, but it makes the cancer cells more vulnerable during treatment. And I prefer using targeted chemotherapy, not this high dose, this high dose standard chemotherapy just wipes the immune system out, makes our bodies weak. And we need massive nutrients, minerals, enzymes to repair. So we need to remove the sugar, improve the oxygenation, support the detoxification. One problem every cancer patient has is a difficulty taking out the trash. Their glutathione and SNPs and genetic pathways are always weak. So we want to use things like glutathione to help all these cytochrome pathways of the liver that are hard to detoxify. We want to use glutathione to help detoxify. We want to push methylation, glycine, five tetra methyl folate, B12, all these things, folate that is really good. That helps us with our methylation, support the immune system first and foremost, because it's going to be the key to everything we do short term and long term. And so one way to do that is remove the food allergens, gluten, peanut, corn, soy, you name it. Foods you eat that increase your mucus, make you tired, affect your digestive system, fatigue. You don't think clearly, get rid of those foods. Those are food allergens, but you can also test for these and they're pretty easy to find. They're usually going to be refined carbohydrates. We're talking about eating real organic, whole foods, farm to table. It makes all the difference in the world. All these studies you'll hear keto versus vegetarian. The bottom line is clean eating. And I'll show you what's most effective with real clinical experience. That thing helps during chemotherapy, but after chemotherapy, we need to recover the bodies. Most of the half-life of chemotherapy. That means when it leaves your body is about 48 to 72 hours. You can check for your specific chemotherapy regimens. It could take up to a week, but as soon as that half-life is over, now we want to push antioxidants. We want to get glutathione in strong supplements. Some of these liquid nutrient vitamins that are very powerful. See when oncologists tell you not to do antioxidants, they're partially right, but after the half-life you need them, you can't just rely on your body to recover. You need that high level of antioxidants and support to help. But the reason I don't like standard chemotherapy is because in our data, 90% of the patients we see are on the wrong treatments, wrong drugs, wrong chemotherapy. They're taking a maximum therapeutic dose, wipes out their immune system and it causes further mutations and other problems. And it doesn't keep the immune system intact. I prefer targeted low dose chemotherapy. Once we've run DNA, NGS, transcriptomics, immune profiling, spatial biology, select the right chemotherapy at a 10% dose. This is beautiful. We pulse it along with that fasting and the intermittent window recovery. And we see a beautiful response rate with patients. Let me move to the next part of nutrition. Hydration. Electrolytes are key. So you can get trace minerals. You can get these nice electrolytes. There's a ton of these good products out there that are sugar-free. You can use trace minerals, plant-based minerals, all these combinations because you want these electrons to move in your mitochondria and you're going to be dehydrated. That happens with cancer treatment. And so the way we rehydrate the body is to stay on those electrolytes. Do not overdo the potassium and make sure you're hydrated. And that's another important piece. When we look at precision treatments for cancer patients, we try to avoid all these heavy, toxic chemotherapy loads. We go very targeted, very micro dose, and we work to stimulate the immune system. I bring this back in because the immune system is always the key. We like to kill the cancer and push out those damps, those damage associated molecular patterns that are stress signals. These stress signals trigger the immune system to do the work and go after the cancer. Let's go into the next category. Protein is key. I like to think of cancer diets as a protein centric diet. It's needed for healing and repair. It's so important. Your goal should be the target of one gram of protein per your goal weight, not your current weight, but your goal weight. So if you weighed 20 or 30 pounds more, then you need to add that and you just have one gram of protein for every pound. This is important. And I'll give you a simple hack on how to get there. So if somebody weighs 150 or 170 or 190 pounds, that's a lot of protein, but there's a secret. You can find high quality protein shakes that work for you to be way grass fed, organic, make sure everything's high quality, beef isolate, really quality, or there's a number of vegan proteins. If your body can digest that, make sure that you take some enzymes when you take these proteins, but you can put two scoops and already there, you're going to have 40 to 50 grams. And then you can add another scoop of collagen and you're at 50 grams in one drink. Do two of those a day. We're almost at a hundred grams of protein. Now, whenever we eat, and we'll talk about this in a minute, healthy proteins, it's easy to get to these higher numbers while you're at it, add a little bit of matcha green tea into that shake. So you have the antioxidant support and some of the anti-cancer properties. It's really powerful. You could add blueberries. You're going to get some resveratrol. All this is going to help with the kexia and sarcopenia, which is fancy words for muscle loss that we are avoiding. And we want to rebuild muscle as we age. That's something we fight anyways. We need to keep good muscle on and especially with cancer. Now let's go into real food proteins, grass fed, beef, bison, wild caught, salmon, organic chicken, pasture raised eggs, lamb, elk, venison. You got it strong, high quality proteins that are clean. A lot of these grass fed or organic proteins have better conjugated linoleic acids, which show in the literature to be beneficial to cancer patients. It's cleaner. We don't want any of this stuff that is grain fed, antibiotic hormone meats. We need to stay away from those. We don't want that in the body. If you're a vegetarian for religious reasons, you're going to look at things like tofu, tempeh and some of these protein powders I mentioned that are vegan powders. There's a number of them to pick from, and you can still reach these high quality protein numbers, which are going to help you choose organic, choose things that you digest the best. Even with these protein shakes, prevent kexia and sarcopenia support repair. Some of the most important amino acids are like leucine. They're essential. These are critical for signaling growth recovery, and you can use the digestive enzymes, which will help you digest and improve the absorption of these key proteins to help you repair, restore the damaged tissue. Now let's move right on to gut immunity. Really important here. We want to bring in foods that help our gut microbiome, which are the headquarters for our immune system and our brain chemistry. Build a diverse ecosystem using colorful fruits and vegetables and add probiotics such as acromantia, which has been published to help with immunotherapy. Add fermented foods, yogurt, unsweetened, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut. You've got it. These foods make a big difference. Increase sprouted broccoli. You can take these jars, sprout them overnight over three to five days. Follow the directions. You can get them on Amazon. Use organic broccoli, salad mixes, legume mixes, lentils, and as soon as they sprout, now you have a cancer fighting foods that are loaded with enzymes, better nutrient dense than just buying some salad somewhere. Add pomegranates, cranberry, pistachios. These help your gut microbiome and immunity to fight cancer. Colorful vegetables. Give your body that diversity. It's going to help so much. It decreases the inflammation. And now I'm going to go into the next section. Healthy fats that support the gut. Omega rich fats. We can see this in sardines, mackerel. We can see these in the wild Atlantic salmon. These are good for the gut, but we also see these in flax seeds, which can be really helpful and we can add to our salads and our shakes to give us these really nice omega threes from a plant source. These are fat soluble nutrients and they're important for the body. Healthy fats, lower inflammation, and they feed the mitochondria with better fuel. Let's fuel the mitochondria with the nutrients it needs. Anti-inflammatory foods that are critically important. And I went into the seafoods, wild caught salmon, sardines, mackerel, make sure it's wild caught, not farm raised because they're loaded with toxins. The plant sources we can use flax seeds, walnuts are fantastic. They also have glutathione as an antioxidant and healthy fats like ALA. The other key here is extra virgin olive oil. Now these are hard to find in good quality and they're expensive when they're good, but extra virgin olive oil is loaded with polyphenols for the gut. Very powerful coconut oil, grass fed butter. This is all you're using and or tallow to cook. No other garbage. This is it. No seed oils, no fried seed oils. We're only using these healthy fats because they lower inflammation and they help us in the signaling. We're after energy recovery, restoring the body and healing. It's helping to stabilize the energy. And this is why I always prefer wild caught fish and always prefer fresh ingredients and less toxins in everything we eat. Let's go into phytotherapeutics. These are important. These are concentrated nutrients that we can add here. Now they're best to give intravenously, but I understand that's not always easy. That is the way to get the bioavailability. Oftentimes these nutrients are not very high bioavailable, but they will help on the gut level. Resveratrol, curcumin, really good. They modulate inflammation. Cachexia, the wasting of muscle, sarcopenia, they support muscle and tissue. And as I said, they're best in their IV form. You can also try to use them liposomal or in methods that are highly absorbed better than the typical oral. This will help use organic sprouted powders. These are fantastic. Sometimes you can't sprout things. So they're already freeze dried and organic, and you can just add them to your shakes. They're fast on the go and they help us get our polyphenol content up, which is great for the gut. When we want to make a nice drink, here's an example of one. You can do anything you want, but use a little warm water, heat up the water, use an unsweetened almond milk or coconut milk that is unsweetened, good quality. It doesn't have any fillers. One teaspoon maybe of cacao, which is unsweetened loaded with phytochemicals and a theobromine, a teaspoon of matcha green tea. You could add a tiny bit of cayenne pepper for circulation, gut health, a little bit of ashwagandha for energy. And see now you're starting to get things in the diet that are going to help you. You can sweeten with stevia or monk fruit and froth that up in the blender. And now you got to like a warm chocolate drink that you can do twice a day with no sugar loaded with antioxidants. You can take these tips, put them into AI and build a custom program just for you. It's really easy. Put in these rules I've given you and they're going to help you tremendously. They're going to help you recover. They're going to give you the minerals, nutrients, vitamins, you're eating nutrient dense food. We want to get our vitamin D levels up. So when you run a vitamin D test, you want to be at the highest levels of vitamin D, not in the middle, not down. And so you need to take vitamin D in an absorbable format. That's going to help you make sure your zinc is there because you need this for your nutrition. Now let's talk about detoxification. And I'm going to tell you about glutathione. Glutathione is one of the best antioxidants and reverses chemotherapy damage immediately. Best to be used intravenously, but you want to use that glutathione after the half-life of the chemo. Otherwise you're going to block the benefit of the chemo. That's why oncologists do not want you taking antioxidants. They don't want to block their treatment. But if you know when the half-lives are, you can start recovering and glutathione is a great way. If you can't do IV, look for liposomal ones you can absorb orally. Remember oncology patients and really almost most of the world has a hard time detoxifying. And so they build up these toxins in the liver and in their tissue. They have SNPs, genetic SNPs that are off. This will help you eliminate and detoxify better. You can do things like Brazil nuts, selenium, maybe do two of them a day. Get your selenium, which help all of the pathways for glutathione. They help all the detox pathways, vitamin B's and then acetyl cysteine. So I like using liquid nutrients. You want to take them when you're recovering. It's important because as you're building your immune system and detoxifying, you're also addressing your body's ability to fight toxins, infections, and strengthen immunity and methylation. This is the key because cancer patients have typically weaker immunity and the first and last defense to winning cancer is your immune system. Now let me move into mind body. This is important because spiritual healing and releasing trauma plays a big role in reducing stress and helping us absorb our nutrients. So here's where we want to ask the Lord to bless us and pray and hand everything over to the Lord. Trust in the Lord, pray, ask the Lord to take on any person or anything you haven't forgiven and let it go. Now you want to include breath work, use oxygen to help calm you. You have so many opportunities for breath work. There's so many things online, YouTube, you can look them up, apps for your phone. One of the tools I love to biohack the parasympathetic, which is to keep you calm away from being stressed is a device called Avacen. A V A C E N. Avacen is used typically for help people get out of pain away from using medications if they have like rheumatoid arthritis, but it works really well for microcirculation and it works really well to make you relaxed. You can put your hand in it while watching TV or praying, do a half an hour on each hand, two to three times a day, even up to three hours a day. It'll relax you. Breathe helps oxygenate your tissue and remove the stress. It's so hard sometimes to break our stress patterns because there's a cortisol pathways that are really hard to interrupt. And that's why sometimes devices like this make a big difference. Another tool I like in exercise because I'm moving right on is rebounding and I would get a good rebounder. There's a number of them out there, and this is a great place to do 20 minutes of movement of exercise every day. Breathe in through the nose, lift your hands up high and breathe and move. Using the rebounder to move the lymphatic system and move the immune system and detoxify. I also like using exercise with oxygen therapy. These have gotten more affordable and breathe in oxygen for about 12 to 15 minutes while exercising during the day. This will increase your natural killer cells, especially if you're moving your arms with it and it helps steer your mitochondria away from getting its energy from sugar and towards oxygen because you're super oxygenating the body. Now these don't replace things like ozone therapy and hyperbaric oxygen. I would say those are much more aggressive in this manner, but these are great home care things that you can do after cancer, during cancer, other family members should be doing in the prevention of disease. In the same breath, when we're talking about stress, we want to talk about those adaptogens, ashwagandha and rhodiola. They'll help calm the nervous system and help you relax. The other important thing is mushrooms. These are the mushrooms that are beta glucans. We can find these like reishi mitaki. They have all the different mushrooms. I won't name them all. Lion's mane. And they're all there for you to take and those are great for gut immunity and for systemic immunity. They're going to help your natural killer cells. I could always tell the people who were on mushrooms because they had more natural killer cells and dendritic cells that were more active. Get outside, go for walks, get sunlight, prayer, give gratitude to the Lord for your healing. Use these powerful organic foods, farm to table. Remember when we do studies in the blue zones where people live over a hundred, my family comes from a blue zone in Sicily. Now, not the way they eat today, but the way they used to eat back in the day, along with the way places like Sardinia and Okinawa and why they're so healthy. And I believe their mitochondria is healthy and their sleep is good because they have community. They pull together, they work together, they live together. They're not alone. And that is an important piece is to have community that's supportive and loving. That's critical part of healing. And then, you know, they'd go out, be together, go for a walk, get something to eat, prepare their meals, farm to table, healthy foods, not processed foods. So I want you to pull all this together. We're increasing nutrition. We're detoxifying the body. We're eating organic foods. We're eating nutrient dense foods, those proteins that are high quality and yes, clean foods, non-refined carbohydrates. We have things like exercise with oxygen. We have ways to break stress with breathing and prayer. And we're taking in all the color of the rainbow and nutrients, creating that diverse gut microbiome, fermented foods. And we're taking this to a new level to feel healthy and strong. All you have to do is take what I've given you here, put this in any AI engine you like, Chachi, PT, Gemini, Grok, you pick it and put it in there and say, build me a custom program. You can even put your genre in. I like Mediterranean food, Japanese food, whatever that is. Tell your AI assistant exactly the grams of protein you want, the types of fruits and vegetables you want sprouting, the type of nutrients you want to take, and it'll build you a regimen. You can even say you don't want to be taking the antioxidants during the half life of the drugs and put the drugs in, find the half lives and take your antioxidants afterwards. Ideally you can do them intravenously. The next best thing are these orals. This is the key building the plan that's right for you, not just for cancer, but for the rest of your life. I know you're going to hear a lot of stuff out there to go vegetarian or to go ketogenic. My experience has been over 25 years with our doctors, a clean, healthy diet that puts protein in the center, has these proper nutrients, removes all the refined carbohydrates, and has these components that I've just mentioned here. Along with precision treatment, targeted care, not random care, but targeted care has made a major difference for our patients. I hope this was helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.