1 Absolute Best Way To Prevent Colon Cancer

Colon cancer used to be considered an old person's disease but not anymore. Rates are rising in younger adults and a lot of people are walking around with the exact conditions that help it grow. The good news is that it's one of the most preventable cancers out there. The key is creating conditions where healing thrives and cancer struggles. Hello Health Champions! Today I'm going to show you exactly how to create those conditions that are good for you and bad for cancer. But why is it increasing and why is it more common than ever in young people today? Well each generation that comes eats more sugar and more processed foods and we have a sedentary lifestyle. We don't move like we used to and there's more antibiotics being used and this results in metabolic disease. We have insulin resistance which is affecting the majority of the world's population and it's affecting younger and younger people. It's also causing inflammation, these lifestyle changes, as well as gut microbiome disruption. Obviously if we have a healthy gut that's going to be a good thing for the colon because that's where these bacteria live. And it's also very common with chronic constipation that the fecal material, the stool, is having a very slow transit and now it sits around and irritates the lining for longer. But the main thing to understand is that colon cancer, like other cancers, is not something that just shows up one day. It doesn't attack you. It doesn't jump on you. It is something that develops. It's your own body cells that with the wrong sort of conditions that favor the cancer cells, now that cancer develops in that environment that's favorable to cancer cells and unfavorable to you. So we're going to talk about several different things that we want to fix to create a better environment. And the first one and one of the biggest is insulin resistance because it affects us at so many different levels. We hear a lot about insulin but most people don't realize that insulin is what's called mitogenic and anabolic. And what does that mean? Well, mitosis, that is cell division. That's what cancer cells do to grow faster. And insulin is mitogenic, meaning it drives that process of cell division forward. It makes it happen faster. Also, the other aspect of that growth is that insulin promotes growth. It's an anabolic hormone. But then what happens also is that when we're insulin resistant is that we're going to have higher blood glucose levels on average. And high blood glucose selectively feeds cancer cells. When they do imaging of cancers, they feed people a solution of glucose, but they also trace it with radioactive material that they can show up on a scan. And now what happens is all that glucose is favorably selectively absorbed by the cancer cells so that we can visualize it. That's how important sugar is for cancer cells. They suck it up like a sponge. So, the more sugar we have, the more we're going to feed cancer cells. By cutting down on sugar, we're starving them. Also, insulin resistance is associated with belly fat. And belly fat tends to release inflammatory chemicals that promote body-wide inflammation. And for all these reasons, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and belly fat are strongly linked to cancer. It increases the rate of cancer. And when we are insulin resistant, now we are in storage mode and we have higher levels of inflammation and elevated insulin. And in a nutshell, that is very dangerous terrain. Those are bad circumstances for your cells and the good circumstances for cancer cells. That's why it's so important to make reversing insulin resistance priority. And just how do we do that? Well, I've done tons of videos, but a quick walk through here is A, you stop sugar, stop soda, stop liquid sugar, high fructose corn syrup. You stop processed foods, especially ultra processed foods. And you also want to cut back on refined flour or eliminate refined flour. And you want to stop snacking. And in addition to cutting back on snacks, you want to take it a little further and do something called intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating. Most people eat the first thing that they do in the morning and then they eat throughout the day and they eat the very last thing that they do before bed. So with that sort of food schedule, you're always promoting blood sugar. You're always giving your body more things to convert into blood sugar and more insulin spikes. So if you cut that back and instead you wait, you don't eat the first thing in the morning. Maybe you wait till noon or you could eat first thing in the morning, but you don't have any meals after four o'clock. Let's say that's a time-restricted window. You eat all your meals within eight hours or so. And what this does of course is you're not spiking insulin. So overall that's going to help lower insulin, but also you improve your repair pathways. The repair and cleanup works better when you don't put stuff into the body all the time. And as far as the gut goes, it gives the gut better opportunity to rest and repair. So you have better gut rest cycles. And then as far as your diet and your meals, you want to build an anti-cancer plate. So you eat non-starchy vegetables, you eat lots of leafy greens, and you eat cruciferous vegetables. They specifically contain some compounds that have been shown to be cancer-fighting. And you want to eat a wide variety of these and you want to get fiber from real food. Vegetables are a great source, but you can also get them from nuts and seeds and berries. And the reason I put real foods here is not that I'm opposed to supplements with fiber or eating ground-up chia or flax or psyllium husks, but you want to eat a variety of foods so you get a variety of fiber. Because different types of fiber feed different gut bacteria and it's the variety of gut bacteria that keeps your gut healthy. And then you also want to get the foundation of your foods in terms of calories from healthy fats and quality proteins. So eggs and meat and butter and olive oil and things like that should provide most of your calories. And you want to hold off on the starches like we talked about, the sugar and the white flour and starchy things in general. And then you also want to do daily movement. And this helps on so many different levels. Every system in your body works better with movement, including your gut. So you want to walk after meals is a good idea. Don't go like exhaust yourself, but movement just kind of gets some circulation going. And also a resistance training is great to build up some muscle tone and some muscle mass. And the movement also helps reduce insulin because working muscles will absorb, they will suck the glucose out of the bloodstream like a sponge without the need of insulin. So if you walk after a meal, you will have a lesser insulin spike than you would otherwise. And also the movement improves peristalsis improves the movement of your gut. And to prevent colon cancer, we obviously want to focus on gut health. And if we have a healthy microbiome, healthy bacteria, the right kind of bacteria in the gut, they're going to make something called butyrate, which is a short chain fatty acid. And that short chain fatty acid is the main fuel for the cells that line the gut. So they're called enterocytes. And if we give them the right type of fuel called butyrate, now we're assisting them in staying healthy and repairing properly. And like I mentioned, to support your gut, you want to eat a variety of greens, leafy greens, and vegetables. They have mostly fiber and water in them. And if you eat a variety, you get a variety of different types of fiber that's going to serve as food for different types of bacteria. So you're promoting variety. You want to cut out the sugar and the processed foods. Because like we said, first of all, they feed the cancer cells with the glucose, but also they feed the pathogenic bacteria. A lot of the bacteria you don't want get selectively fed by sugar and processed starches. Then you can also support your gut with probiotic supplements. But one of the easiest ways to do that is with fermented foods. So you could ferment any kind of vegetable really. But one of the most popular obviously is sauerkraut, cabbage, and kimchi in Asia. But you can also ferment dairy as long as you tolerate dairy fairly well. And kefir and yogurt are some very popular ways to do that. And like I mentioned before, to support your gut, you want to move. Because movement stimulates the peristalsis. It assists the peristalsis. You may have noticed that you tend to get more constipated if you sit all day or if you sit for several days. Then it's very easy to stop things up. And one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest killers of gut health, of healthy gut bacteria is antibiotics. Because when you take an antibiotic, it's going to kill off some of the pathogens that we want to get rid of. But it's also going to kill off equally or more of the good gut bacteria. So I would say I understand that there's a place for antibiotics. But I would say use antibiotics only when absolutely necessary. And to me personally, that would mean if there's something life-threatening. If it's just something, if I get a bacterial infection and I can fight it off in a few days and it would just take me a few days extra compared to taking an antibiotic, that would not be a choice for me to take an antibiotic. I would rather suffer a few days unless, like I said, if it's so serious that it threatens my health, then I would rather suffer a few days and keep my gut bacteria intact. And while prevention is the best way, we also want to be on the lookout for early warning signs. And some of these signs could be as simple as constipation or bloating. And a lot of people have this and it may not mean anything, but still it means something isn't working quite right down there. So it might be heading in the wrong direction. It might be contributing to some irritation. Also, if you find blood in the stool, and this could be either red. If you get red in the toilet, that means that there's something bleeding close to the exit. But it could also be very dark stools. If you have a bleed higher up that coagulates and turns dark before it gets out. Another sign is pencil-thin stool. If you have a growth inside the colon, which is a tube, then that growth might take up some space and the stool might have to come and be squeezed through in a very thin fashion. So if you get pencil-thin stool, that could be it. But also be on the lookout for sudden bowel changes. If something comes on quickly and it doesn't go away in a few days, then that could be something to check up on. And then of course there is screening. And for some people, a colonoscopy might be a good idea. If you have certain signs, if it runs in your family, if you're past a certain age, etc. But we also have to realize that early detection is not prevention. It's early detection. It means to find something that's already there. However, early detection is much much better than late detection. But for a lot of people today, with the advances in technology and with the gradual worsening of gut health, they've developed biome tests. You can test your microbiome, which is completely non-invasive. It's not like colonoscopy that can be rather invasive. A biome test, you're just collecting a very small sample and sending it into the lab. And then when you get the results from that biome test, they're going to tell you what you have too much of or not enough of. They're going to tell you how many different species you have and what you need to work on. And for some people, there's going to be a relatively straightforward way that you can start working on it. Maybe eat some better foods and take some supplements and probiotics and start restoring the biome. For other people though, they're going to be a little bit more imbalanced and they might need to talk to someone and get some guidance in the process of restoring the biome. And if you can restore the biome and adopt a healthy lifestyle, this is really the best prevention which consists of creating good conditions for healing and harmony. Good conditions for your cells to thrive and repair and self-regulate and all the things your body is designed for. And at the same time, create bad conditions for cancer cells. Because again, they love inflammation. They love sugar. But we really want to keep in mind that the colon does not operate independently of the rest of the body. So in mainstream health care or mainstream sick care, because that's what they do. They treat symptoms. They try to intervene in emergencies. The mainstream or allopathic system, they have a bunch of different specialists. There's a specialist for the eyes and one for the skin and one for the brain and one for the joints and so forth and one for the colon, one for the intestines. And that way, they treat each body system separately. They think of it as operating independently. And this can work in a sick care system where we deal with emergencies. When we have crises and we need to go in and fix something or repair something physically, we need to do surgery, then it's great that we have specialists. But in reality though, all your body systems work together. Your neurologic system, your cardiovascular system, your GI system, they all work together. So when we're talking about these solutions, which everything I've talked about basically falls into three categories, better food, sleep, and reduced stress and good sleep is one aspect, and then movement. So we're talking about structural, emotional, and chemical. Those are different aspects that affect the body. And if you ask people, the standard understanding would be that the things we want to improve like reduced insulin or improving the biome or improving immunity, those are things that would help us prevent colon cancer. Then people think that, well, if we eat better, then we can reduce insulin. We can reverse insulin resistance. And then they think, well, if you sleep well, and if we work on reducing stress, then they think that, yes, we can help immunity. They may have heard that. And they heard that maybe movement will also assist in reducing insulin resistance. And that's not wrong, but we need to understand that all of them do all of it. So better food is going to help insulin, biome, and immunity. And better sleep, reducing stress is going to help all of them. And movement is going to help all of them. And then some people are going to say, oh, well, you know, I already eat well, but my gut is still messed up. And I already exercise a little bit. Well, if you don't sleep, and if you're working 80 hours, then you're not doing all of them. So that's the thing. It's like three legs on a table. It's like three sides to a triangle. You want to do all of them at the same time for a period of time. And when you do, now you're creating good conditions for healing and harmony, and you're creating bad conditions for cancer cells. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.