Starving Cancer: The Hidden Power of Food, Fasting, and the Body’s Inner Terrain

25 snips

Nov 10, 2025

Guest

Thomas Seyfried

Guest

Jason Fung

Join Dr. Jason Fung, a physician and fasting expert, alongside Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a renowned professor focused on metabolic therapies for cancer. They delve into how modern diets loaded with sugar and processed foods create an unhealthy 'soil' for cancer. Discover the role of fasting, ketogenic diets, and nutrient signals like insulin in promoting or preventing cancer growth. They also discuss how chronic inflammation and an imbalanced gut microbiome contribute to disease. Learn practical steps to nourish your body and potentially starve cancer.

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INSIGHT

Soil Over Seed For Cancer Risk

Cancer risk depends more on the body's environment than on genetics.
Populations who keep traditional diets and lifestyles have dramatically lower cancer rates.

ANECDOTE

Dinner With A Pesticide Rep

Mark Hyman recounts dinner with a pesticide-maker to illustrate industrial agriculture's approach.
He contrasts that with regenerative medicine focusing on soil health.

ADVICE

Cut Insulin Signals To Starve Growth

Reduce insulin-driving foods and constant eating to lower growth signals.
Remove hyper-processed foods and stop frequent snacking to blunt insulin spikes.

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Cancer can be seen as a seed that only sprouts in the right soil—the body’s inner landscape. Today, that soil is changing fast, and cancer rates are climbing, especially among young people. Our modern diet—packed with sugar, processed foods, and nonstop snacking—keeps the body flooded with signals to grow, not heal. But there’s good news: by eating real, colorful foods and giving the body time to rest between meals, we can calm inflammation, balance our gut, and make our inner soil far less welcoming to disease. The power to shift the story lies in every bite and every pause we take.

In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Jason Fung and Dr. Thomas Seyfried, how modern diets and constant eating create a fertile soil for disease.

Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, author, and researcher. His groundbreaking science-based books about diabetes and obesity, The Diabetes Code, The Obesity Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting have sold over one million copies and challenged the conventional wisdom that diabetics should be treated with insulin. Dr. Fung is also the co-founder of The Fasting Method, a program to help people lose weight and reverse Type 2 Diabetes naturally with fasting. His work on fasting has been cited by CNN, Time, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Toronto Star, and many other media outlets. His latest book is The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery.

Dr. Thomas Seyfried is an American professor of biology, genetics, and biochemistry at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Seyfried has over 150 peer-reviewed publications, and his research focuses primarily on the mechanisms driving cancer, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative diseases and calorie-restricted ketogenic diets in their prevention and treatment. He is the author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer and presently serves on the Nutrition & Metabolism, Neurochemical Research, Journal of Lipid Research, and ASN Neuro editorial boards.

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Full-length episodes can be found here:
Is Cancer Caused By Sugar?

How Can My Diet Help Prevent Cancer?

A Radical New Dietary Approach To Cancer Treatment