Revolutionizing Cancer Care: The Metabolic Terrain with Dr. Nasha Winters

This week on The Less Stressed Life, we’re digging into a bold reframe of cancer: it’s not just about the tumor, it’s about the terrain. Dr. Nasha Winters and I explore how nervous system state, mitochondrial health, oxygen, light, and circadian rhythm shape resilience and healing. We talk about why standard treatments often fall flat without nervous system regulation, how modern inputs overload our mitochondria, and the simple daily habits that create measurable shifts in terrain.

If you’ve ever wondered why some therapies don’t stick—or how breathwork, fasting, light, and minerals could matter just as much as labs and scans—this conversation connects the dots.

Find both Dr. Nasha's education courses & books here: https://drnasha.com/books-and-education

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Your nervous system is step zero—nothing works if you’re stuck in fight-or-flight
• Mitochondria are the hub of terrain and energy production
• Oxygen and breathwork are underrated tools in prevention and recovery
• Daily rhythm matters: sunrise/sunset light, post-meal walks, and overnight fasting
• Some “healthy” supplements (iron, calcium, glutathione, methyl donors) can fuel cancer if misused
• Timing is everything—especially with red light therapy

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ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Nasha Winters is a global leader in integrative oncology and the author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. With decades of experience, she bridges conventional care with metabolic and complementary therapies while making complex science feel accessible and empowering. Her passion lies in helping people understand their bodies, build resilience, and embrace new possibilities for healing. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://drnasha.com/ 
Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/drnashawinters/
Practitioner Directory: https://www.mtih.org/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE:
🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
🔄 Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
🤝 You don’t have to figure it out alone
❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

SPONSOR:
Thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode! Looking for a clean, tasty way to stay hydrated this summer? Their Electrolyte Supreme is a go-to for energy, minerals, and daily hydration support. Use code LESSSTRESSED10 at JigsawHealth.com for 10% off—unlimited use!

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Dr. Nasha Winters : I don't care how good your treatment is, I don't care if you've gone to the best of the best oncologist or integrative oncologist or therapist, if you are in a sympathetic, nervous system override.

If your vagal nerve tone is very low, if your heart rate variability is very low. No amount of therapy or treatment or supplement or dietary lifestyle intervention will land. It has nothing to land on.

[00:00:26] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stress life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

Today on The Less Stressed Life, I have Dr. Nasha Winters, who's a Global Authority and integrative oncology author of The Metabolic Approach to Cancer and Mistletoe, and the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology, and the host of the Metabolic Matters podcast. She's the former executive director of the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health and currently serves as CEO of Doc Nasha Inc.

And Medical Director of Terrain Holding Company, which I. Love all these nods to what she loves with decades of experience. She consults with medical professionals worldwide bridging conventional cancer care with metabolic and complementary therapies. Dr. Nasha is advancing her vision of a groundbreaking integrative oncology hospital, and recently launched a nonprofit metabolic research lab in Phoenix.

So cool. We were just talking about, she's in Phoenix, so she also trains practitioners through the integrative Metabolic Oncology Course and Terrain Advocate Program, while raising funds to support patient access to innovative care through her adventures, Mito, Vita and M Omics, she is developing targeted supplements and AI driven tools to transform cancer and metabolic health treatment.

What a fun resume of things that you are working on. Dr. Nasha Welcome. 

[00:02:21] Dr. Nasha Winters : Thanks Christa, and I'm glad that you noticed it. It's like I like lots of things. Just eclectic. Just like you. We had such a fun, some of 

[00:02:26] Christa Biegler, RD: us are meant to be entrepreneurs, so we can do lots of things and try to solve problems at the rate we see them.

Right? 

[00:02:34] Dr. Nasha Winters : Exactly. It's easy to point the finger of what is wrong, but it's not as easy to be part of the solution. 

[00:02:40] Christa Biegler, RD: I agree. I agree. It's like how can we make this better? So I wanna give a little bit of lip service, first of all, to some of what I might call your legacy work, right? How you've said, I really think this is the way we should be approaching oncology, and I'm going to give a little preface as well.

I am maybe unnaturally interested in this topic, but I think I'm interested in it because we're all so affected by it and I feel that if I can do anything to shine a light on opportunities, something, an advanced kind of coaching topic is an advanced decision making. And one of the ones I've been working on is what would I want to do if I was diagnosed with cancer, which

the stats are a lot. So the reason I'm interested is because we're at one and three and we're gonna be one and two, right? So correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure those are the stats of cancer. So I think we should all care. 

[00:03:30] Dr. Nasha Winters : We crossed over. We crossed over to the one and two. Oh, we 

[00:03:32] Christa Biegler, RD: crossed over to the one and two.

Okay. The last five years have been a little rough on cancer, it's been about a year since I did a cancer interview, I think. But I recall Michael Robinson telling me that it has just been crazy, and since 2020 that I used to have older people come in with cancer, and now it's a lot of younger people, actually, maybe we should start there. I think that this is maybe an impossible question, but someone asked me this just yesterday actually. She was interviewing me about skin issues, but I think everything has overlapped. But 

[00:04:02] Dr. Nasha Winters : First of all, just some context. Cancer's always been, it's not like it's a new modern illness, but it's definitely never been at the rates that it is today. And I was trying to remember the stats. I had to do this conversation recently in the basically in World War ii we were looking at, I think about one in 250 cases of cancer.

So to go from one in 250, just, 75, 80 years ago. It's crazy. By the time I graduated medical school, I believe it was one in six or one in eight, that was still a huge jump and we all thought we were all shaking in our boots with that one. And then to your point, when we started this conversation up until about 2022, it was one in three or, and then it moved into one in 2.4.

I don't know how you get to that, but it is now solidly into half of us are expected to experience a cancer diagnosis in our lifetime. And so your question is really loaded in that I think we're always looking for the single cause and the single treatment, and it's more complex than that. Can I go into a little please timer?

Yeah. Let's just go back into time. So up until about 12,000 years ago, we were all hunter gatherers. We all had the same playing field of what we were being exposed to in whatever region or season or geography we were in. We were all on an equal field. Then in about 11, 12,000 years ago, we started to put down some roots, literally in the neolithic farming era, all through the Fertile Crescent, which is basically around the Mediterranean.

And that's when we actually introduced for the very first time, a genetic change because of that big change in humanity, which was the creation of the HLA gene human leukocyte antigen. And why I'm having this conversation is this. Little bugger is a very key player in what we're about to talk about here.

So HLA gene showed up at that time. Many of us, for the last several decades have really gotten to understand the HLA gene and relationship to celiac disease. It's probably where it had been most studied for the last. 30 or so years that people with specifically H-L-A-D-Q have a genetic form of celiac disease.

And so we understood that piece, which makes sense. Neolithic farming, we'd never had farming of grains. Then suddenly we introduced that and our immune systems behave differently. Not all of us. Had a bad expression with gluten, but many of us did. Something new happened. And so that even has changed in the last few years.

We used to have about one in a thousand people with celiac disease and now it's in one in, depending on the studies, 15 to 50. So again, something else has changed. In the last few years. So then fast forward, the next big change happened in the industrial Food revolution, the industrial Revolution of the early to mid 18 hundreds.

And we had a, from thousands of years of kind of here we are, all of us living on Little House on the Prairie, right? Until the Industrial Revolution, when suddenly we had access to the processing and milling of sugar, flour, and salt, something we'd never had in human history. People started screaming from the rooftops at that time, like Dr.

Pottinger and Dr. Price Western, a price started saying, Hey, we are seeing problems here. Sound the alarm, there's a problem. And everyone poo-pooed them and ignored them. And now we look back at their. Work and go, oh, they saw things happening. They saw the tidal wave coming. The next big shift happened after World War ii, after World War ii.

First of all, we bonded as a globe for World Wars, world War I and World War II brought us like to a global community, a global family for the first time in human evolution as well. That we were never so intimately connected because we were fighting wars on many fronts and we were all impacted.

So this story plays into what we're about to talk about as well. But in World War ii, at the end of that, we had a lot of leftover ammunition, a lot. And there were smart business people out there who said we gotta do something with it. Can't just throw it away. Can't just bury it. You can, and they do, and they have.

But they decided to take some of that ammunition and put it into big Ag. The big agricultural way that in the form of fertilizer nitrogen, okay? And we decided to put it into big farm, big pharma. Okay, so pharmaceuticals and farming, so the big farms, pH and F is where we put all that excess ammo, and that has forever changed our medical system.

Even though the A MA was developed in the early 19 hundreds, it really didn't take root until after World War ii. They didn't really get their influence until after World War ii, and really then our medical system has been entirely. Influenced by big corporations that are involved in big Ag and big pharma, and that's been what's been driving the train of medicine ever since.

So fast forward, people like Dr. Don Huber, who's a dear friend and colleague of mine who started sounding the alarm on the dangers of glyphosate back in the late sixties. Mind you, who's now in deep into his nineties started saying, this can't be let outta the lab folks. We're going to disseminate the earth, which will disseminate us.

And unfortunately, he is been right and it's still a battle that we still are fighting all these years later. But it's probably the single biggest change that's happened in humanity that made a big insidious shift in our bodies. So it's destroyed our microbiome because it's an antibiotic. Knowing that we've all evolved from bacteria known as mitochondria.

Just imagine you've now basically ubiquitously poured a giant antibiotic all over the globe. Which means the very longevity of our cellular being is a microorganism that is now being killed off. Insidiously and chronically from this massive, chemical pollution. So that's created a level of lack of resilience and vulnerability in our systems, in our immune system, in our psychological system, that brain access in particular in our neuroendocrine system.

And so I wanted to paint that picture so that folks understand that, the concept of the straw that broke the camel's back. That's basically what COVID did. 

Okay. The injection and the infection, the SARS cov and the spike protein specifically was that straw that broke the vulnerable camel's back.

So I want your listeners to understand this didn't happen overnight, but it's certainly happened when you look at the clock of time of humans on the planet. It happened in just a few seconds. And so it's been so overwhelming to our systems we were yet to adapt. But in that vulnerability with, now that we know that one and two now are facing a diagnosis of cancer the things we are learning about the impact of SARS Cov and the Spike protein in particular is it interfaces with the few important things that we, now, this is not conspiratorial, it's just information. It's just what we now know that we didn't know. We didn't know. We didn't know. Until we know the fact that we now know and we're still doing the stupid shit things drives me nuts. Like it's that's where I get fired up. But we know that it impacts and interfaces with ace receptors of the body.

ACE receptors interface with all of our endothelial linings, so the endothelial linings of our vascular system, our organs, our reproductive system in particular. Very interface. So if people are on an ACE inhibitor drug, they were gonna have a hard time with the injection or the infection. If people had vulnerability in their endocrine system, especially their gonads testicles, ovaries, uterus, they will have problems with the.

COVID infection injection, if they had cardiovascular vulnerabilities, metabolic vulnerabilities, those also interface with the ACE receptor. They were going to have a lot more problems with this particular new addition into our world. And so when you start to think about it. And you start to realize that at least in the West, and this is likely true for the whole globe, that less than 7% of us are considered metabolically healthy.

That means 93% of us were vulnerable to this new invention that landed globally and has now impacted billions of people and likely for generations to come. And so this other piece that we've learned is that it kicks on co-infections. So if you've had a latent Epstein-Barr virus, which by the way, historically pre COVID was known to cause over 250,000 cases of cancer annually, globally.

Now those rates are almost innumerable. We're now talking well over a million documented cases to Epstein Barr virus. Since COVID because it re invoked a a sort of suppressed viral process. The same thing is happening with HPV. The same thing is happening with CMV Cytomegalovirus. And the same thing is happening with HHV Human vari, various human viral variants.

Okay, so we've seen a lot of interesting. Moments of re inoculated rein in awakened infections and viruses in particular have a high propensity to kick off cancering processes. About 20% of cancers have a viral etiology, so that's one reason why we're seeing bigger and weirder and louder of these.

The other one is it kicks off a mechanism called PI three. PI three KCA. Now this little switch, this cell signaling switch is basically an oncogene. That is, it puts things into high gear of expression of cancer and proliferation, and that is involved in 70% of people with cancer. So it's a genetic variant.

An epigenetic variant, meaning that diet and lifestyle, keep it at bay. But you bring in this exogenous spike protein, which turns on the ignition and off and running. You take all those people whose bodies were holding back the flood waters. Of this particular variant, and now it's off and running. So that's really dangerous.

And even standard of care, like all the things I'm saying, you can go into PubMed, like these aren't just thoughts or beliefs or theories. These are well documented. And then the other big one is that. The spike protein lands on something called complex one of our mitochondria, and that you guys is basically the beginning of the ride down a TP production.

And if you stop the movement of that train, you stop life, period. And the amazing thing is if we have other mitochondria that are not affected, they can keep trying to keep the engine moving, but when you destroy the complex, one of the mitochondria, you just d destroy the mitochondria and you create, you create a perfect storm for all chronic illnesses that we are dealing with today, which are all mitochondrial diseases, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, dementia, autism mental illness autoimmune conditions, cancer. These are all well-known, well-documented metabolic mitochondrial diseases.

And so we took a simmering. Pressure cooker that's been simmering for likely millennia, and then it has picked up some pressure 150 or so years ago. Picked up some bigger pressure about 80 years ago. Really picked up some pressure in the last 20 years, but in the last five years, it's like we turned the fire up to as high as it'll go.

And Krista is what we're seeing today. And for clinicians to, if there are any clinicians still out there saying that this doesn't exist. They're either effing delusional. Not actually listening to or paying attention to their patients or reading labs or reading literature. And so the fact that I've trained over 1200 clinicians and allied health professionals in 46 countries, and we collect this data and we have it in a repository and we're chronic, constantly evaluating it.

It's universal. What we're seeing, it is not, it has not been reserved for us here in the West. It is a universal phenomenon and one that many of us lose sleepover. It's been a very stressful few years trying to find, as you and I started this conversation, it's easy to see what the problems are now that we're understanding more and more, but it's harder in this case because it's so new.

To find the solution. And that's what so many like myself and like some of the people you've interviewed on your show are trying to do just that, is to find solutions to a brand new. Like when we introduced the neolithic farming, we brought in the hhl aging. I look at this like that moment, right?

 It is what it is. We can't go back. We can't reverse the clock. So what do we do? How do we adapt to this new addition into humanity? 

[00:16:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I wanna talk about terrain, but I was taking notes and will you repeat the gene mutation on the second one? And then also, it's interesting that 20% of cancers have this viral etiology.

'cause I think about viruses being very secondary to other stressors, right? And so there's like a cascade. That is happening and it's like something happens that allows the virus to take hold and that just lives there forever, quietly, and then that gets reactivated and then triggers, a cancer.

And that has been how I generally have interpreted or understood cancer is that. There can be things going on and then something will activate it, right? Overall pathogen stressor. Something. And you're welcome to comment on any of that. But I do wanna make sure I grab the genetic mutation that you said was related to 70.

Another 70% of cancers. It was a PC something? Yeah. 

[00:17:56] Dr. Nasha Winters : PI three.

[00:17:57] Christa Biegler, RD: PI three.

[00:17:58] Dr. Nasha Winters : And so it is the, this gene, the PI three CA gene. Okay. So I just wanna make sure I'm giving you the right acronym 'cause I'm always messing with this here. But it is the phosphatidyl i OL three kinase protein and it's very involved in the overall cell cycle.

In general, and it is what makes cells grow, develop, and live. And it does it well when it's in balance in our healthy cells. But when it's abberant, meaning when the metabolic pattern has shifted into an abberant state, it makes the cancer cells do the same. It's a interesting, a turn on cell signaling and cell proliferation pathway and you want it in a developing like a little kid who's, born and growing up.

That's a really good thing, but when you're an adult, you don't want things to be grown anymore. 

And so that is the turn on growth signal that will not be silenced. And standard of care recognizes this, and they've tried various therapeutics to target it from a targeted and chemotherapeutic intervention, but it's not very responsive.

In fact, the therapies they have for this particular protein mutation are very toxic and actually create the very terrain, the very environment. Which, what in which created the cancer to begin with? So it puts you into, like these drugs create almost irreversible diabetes, for instance. You will cure cancer if diabetes is still raging.

Like it's just not gonna happen. It's impossible. It's a growth factor on growth factor. 

[00:19:31] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah.

[00:19:32] Dr. Nasha Winters : This is the world we live in today is like we're whack-a-mole, everything. Yeah. Love. Christopher, I just wanna really like second what you said about there's like a collection of things until one trigger is finally the bucket is now full and overflowing.

And I think you described that and what maybe fills your bucket. Overflows would be different in how my bucket fills and overflows. To somebody else's. And so it's not a universal either. And that's where I think standard of care just goes bonkers. 'cause they don't understand that they're always looking for the single treatment.

Single treatment start starting point. But it's unique for all of us. 

[00:20:05] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, and I think the way we interpret even genetic causes can be different. That's something that kind of just blows my mind, which is a separate, I feel like a whole separate conversation around genetic influence of cancer and what's not genetic and how we talk about it and how they test and execute based on that.

But yeah. Anyway, let's talk about. This from a terrain perspective if you don't mind, because this is the meat and potatoes of what you talk about a lot and terrain is a topic. You used the word resilience earlier. I always think resilience and terrain go hand in hand. I think you talked about the importance of mitochondria.

I felt like mitochondria was the river that was running through the conversation. The important part of it, and I was thinking about. Whether you would consider terrain to be an umbrella term where mitochondria fit under it, et cetera. How would you define terrain and how is that different from how we used to look at cancer?

I don't know what the somatic mutation model is, but is this how we normally recognize what cancer is and you are saying, Hey, no, this is terrain and me metabolic instead. So please tell us a little bit about this and how you landed on this overall. 

[00:21:16] Dr. Nasha Winters : Sure. A lot of people, when you hear the word metabolic, they think like weight loss or weight gain, right?

Oh, I have a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism. That's all how our minds are constructed around our understanding of it. And yet, metabolics are around how basically every single thing functions in your body. So it is a an ecosystem. And it is a way that everything interacts with everything else.

That it really breaks down the silos that says, the, literally the knee bones attached to the leg bone and all those things. It's like you can't separate them out, which is what standard of care continues to ,go back to again and again. Then let's go back to somatic mutation or the genetic theory of cancer, which came into be in 1914 with Dr.

Theodore Bovary, coining that term, and it was a very popular concept for a few years until the kind of controversial Dr. Otto Warberg came along and the early 1920s saying, Hey, wait a minute. The genetics that Dr. Bovary is talking about are not the starting point. They're a response. To something else, something higher upstream, which he noted that at the heart and soul of this metabolic communication system were the mitochondria.

They're like the hub and everything else spokes off of them into the terrain. So to me the hub of this is the mitochondria and he noticed that they looked very different and behaved very differently in cancer cells versus healthy cells. And that's what led to his eventual Nobel Prize. And his theory was actually predominant until the mid fifties, until Watson and Crick took credit for a woman for the finding of the DNA helix.

And our energy just pendulum away entirely from the metabolic mitochondrial, which was well on its way to explaining a lot of things, especially as we moved into the post-industrial revolution and moved in into World War ii, that would've been a far better place to hang out in. But instead we went back to the somatic mutation theory and we really were hopeful that after mapping the genome and all the research we did there, that it would pan out.

And yet I tell people that we debunked these somatic mutation theory decades ago is where if it was truly somatic, it was truly genetic. You could remove the hard drive known as the nuclei of a cell that contains all of our genetic material. And you could replace that, the nuclei of a cancer cell and turn that cell back into a healthy cell, or replace the nuclei of a healthy cell with a nuclei of a cancer cell and create cancer that has never been accomplished in thousands and thousands of repeated nuclear cell transfer studies around the globe for decades.

And yet, this is the drum we've been beating to. At least since the 1950s, and it really picked up momentum in 1971 when the NCI was developed and which Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. And we declared it through the lens of genetics. And it has failed us ever since. We've virtually been flatlined with our ability to, change cancer outcomes. That we might be living longer with cancer because we're creating earlier diagnostics, not because we're fighting it better. And so that's the piece that people like Dr. Tom Sifri dusted off the literature and kind of Dr. Resuscitated the metabolic mitochondrial discussions.

But it was people like Dr. Mina Bissell in the 1980s who was doing research on the extracellular matrix, and she was recognizing that in the lab. That you could put tumors, like tumor cells into a Petri dish and then into several different Petri dishes. But the, it depending how those cancer cells grew, depended on the medium and the Petri dish in which they were placed.

Like right there. There you go. And she's guys, we're onto something here. Everybody ignored her and still do. She's probably the most prolific cancer researcher. What was her name? Bissell, Mina Bissell, like the vacuum cleaner has a TED talk, by the way. Excellent. This woman has been a hero.

I've been stalking her for years, but she was sounding the alarm as well, saying this is, here's where the issue is, and suddenly we're understanding the concept of terrain. 

And so 

what we started to recognize is we understand the mitochondria beyond what our sixth grade biology taught us. It's not just about making a TP, which is very important.

We wouldn't be alive without a TP, but what we've learned that the mitochondria truly do, so now, they've evolved. We've, they take up upwards of 20% of our body composition is mitochondria. Which evolved from bacteria, which should tell you that probably universal antibiotics into our food, water sources and healthcare systems is probably not a great idea.

That's probably created some problems. But even more think of the mitochondria as having three major jobs. It's first job is to gather information. It is a collection, it is a receiver of information putting in, being put in, on and around it, including people, places, and things. Okay. So it takes, in that information, its second job is to translate that information, to make sense of it, to understand the patterns, recognize patterns.

And the third job is to communicate or signal out into the surrounding mitochondria, surrounding cytoplasms, surrounding organelles, cells, tissues, organs, container meat suit, and several feet beyond us. 

What it's learned and signaling that out into the ecosystem. Terrain around it. And so you can imagine there's a lot of opportunities for those three things to break down, right?

And the more information you put into the mitochondria, the more overwhelmed it gets. And when you think about what has been new. To our world and to our bodies. That story I told you in the beginning about Hunter gathered it, you know the story to what led us to this moment. We are being exposed now to more input and stimuli than ever before, and it has frankly, overwhelmed the very life-giving organelles that keep this meat suit moving.

[00:27:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, so this is a good point to keep talking about mitochondria, but I wanna go back. You were just talking about auto Warburg, and I have a question from last summer about Warburg's theory. Yeah. So the Warburg effect has to do with. Essentially the presence of oxygen and converting glucose into lactate in the cells.

Yeah. And so you're welcome to unwrap that more. So when I was reading about the Warburg effect of cancer last year, I was asking myself, is there oxygen dysfunction with cancer? Do you see large amounts of people with C paps or sleep apnea getting, if that is true, are we seeing, those who struggle with oxygen dysfunction, have more cancer?

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[00:29:05] Dr. Nasha Winters : Simply put yes. And so even I, gosh, I know if you went and Googled right now, Otto Warburg's quote on lack of oxygen, it's something like if you diminish the body's oxygen levels down to say 74 4%. So 74% at room oxygen, like on a pulse oximetry, doctor Dr. Wada Warberg gave some quote about the amount, like the increased risk or rate of cancer related to that even short term.

Oxygen deprivation. 

And so you start to think about things like, okay, the conditions are of metabolic nature, cardiovascular disease. That's an issue with perfusion and oxygenation to the tissues, right? 

You think about things like COPD, which is, from smokers and whatnot, or chronic respiratory distress or different things where they're not working well. You think about just simple stress response. We breathe slowly. We don't take what we need. You think about living at elevation. So the oxygen there, you think about sleep apnea, which is almost always, it's super, in fact, I can't think of a single case in my whole career that it's not been related to metabolic syndrome.

And so suddenly you start to realize hypoxia is far more reaching than we're led to believe because no one routinely tests for it. And 

so 

if you have like people can invest in a simple a pulse oximetry off Amazon or Walgreens, you should never be below 97% at room, like just basically hanging out.

It should definitely be above 97% if it drops even in standard of care. They say if it drops before below 94%, you have something very wrong going on. 

But when I landed in the ER with my own diagnosis back in 1991, my pulse oximetry was 78 at room. 

[00:30:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, wow. 

[00:30:53] Dr. Nasha Winters : Yeah. God only knows how long I've been walking around with that.

Yeah. And 

the only reason it was tested, 'cause I came in an emergency situation, but I have all my patients invest in a $20 pulse oximetry and they start to learn very quickly that they're all low. 

All of them, they're all below 97. And then what happens is that in reminds them, it's like a little built-in gamification that gets 'em back into breath work and they clean their body.

I'm 

[00:31:19] Christa Biegler, RD: like a lover of breath work. When you read about breath work, I just fall over all of the benefits. So I was like, oh, so we could also use breath work to prevent or support cancer. 

[00:31:30] Dr. Nasha Winters : Yes, you 

[00:31:30] Christa Biegler, RD: can. 

That was my takeaway when I was reading about the Warburg effect 

[00:31:34] Dr. Nasha Winters : and so much of it, it's like where we don't talk about, like Warburg again was way ahead of his time.

We've got a lot more technologies and understanding today, and we've built upon his theory. We're not like saying just this and stop here. We're ongoing building upon it, but it's like we've also understood this intersection of our breath with cancer, with stress response, with organs of elimination all through the vagal nerve.

Living on planet Earth today, you are exposed to a chronic running from a saber tooth tiger, and we never turn it off. The body is incapable of cleanup. Of rest and digest, of rebuilding, of regenerating when we're chronically running from a saber tooth Tiger And I don't care how good your treatment is, I don't care if you've gone to the best of the best oncologist or integrative oncologist or therapist, if you are in a sympathetic, nervous system override.

If your vagal nerve tone is very low, if your heart rate variability is very low. No amount of therapy or treatment or supplement or dietary lifestyle intervention will land. It has nothing to land on. 

It has nothing to interface with. And so when we're talking about terrain, we need to talk about the terrain of trauma as well, and the terrain of stress response and the terrain of self-care and the terrain of, all of these pieces and how they interact and standard of care is very good at focusing on the tumor.

Whereas my expertise is in focusing on the terrain. 

And if we can bring those together, not as alternatives to one another, but as allies, we can make our biggest impact ever. 

[00:33:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Let's talk about how you might measure terrain objectively, because my real question is, do you see measurable differences in terrain with nervous system practices and how long does it take?

[00:33:31] Dr. Nasha Winters : I love this. So what's really beautiful is there is an instant response if you even just sit down for your very first time. Never done breath work before and practice. A little breath work. You can see it measurably on EEGs. You can see it measurably on pulse o symmetries. You can see it measurably on HRV.

Heart rate variability devices. You can see it measurably on continuous glucose monitors. You can see it and feel it subjectively as well, and you can even see it on thermography. Where you are looking for changes of perfusion and changes of temperature on the body. And then you can also see when you've got access.

So those are all like wearables at home. 

But you can also get blood draws, and you can be looking immediately at things like cortisol, IGM, salivary IGA, you can be looking at cytokines, inflammatory markers. All of those things are measurable changes to any change you give to improving the resilience and improving the tone of your nervous system.

[00:34:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Yeah. I love that so 

[00:34:36] Dr. Nasha Winters : much. It's so beautiful and it's so free. 

[00:34:39] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, it's so fun. It's so fun. And on that note, you talk a bit about circadian rhythm as well. So what do you think is the dose of light or how do you maybe tell your clients to implement or to check themselves or to be, or assess how they're doing with their chronobiology or following circadian 

[00:35:01] Dr. Nasha Winters : rhythm?

I love it. Krista, I would use the same tools I just described from doing like breath work or, toning work like humming and, chanting meditation, prayer. You can see that on those devices I just described and tests I described. You can also see the same with chronobiology and you know the best is for folks to get out into real nature.

But some people are very urban urbanite and they may not see that sun come up over their skyscraper. Yeah. For a while. Tough. So for ways. Exactly. So there are ways, like in my household, I'm at an Airbnb, I found a bunch of, you can see I still have my morning light on behind me. So we've replaced all of the bulbs in the house.

So in the morning and the evenings, every house in this, every light bulb in this house is red light. So when we're working from home, we're doing things. We mitigate it as much as possible, but we also get ourselves out walk first thing in morning light last day in morning light is leaving to set that, and we can see that change in our H rv.

We can see that change in our CGMs. We can see that change in just our sleep response. We can see that change in our digestion, things along those lines. And so chronobiology is one of those others that's very, I think, underrated. And the irony is that our beautiful mitochondria the Krebs cycle within the mitochondria, the complexes within the mitochondria are very specific to light.

They, each complex takes in a different frequency of light. And so if you are just only in front of red light or only in front of blue light. You create discourse, in coherence in the system. And so I've got a conference coming up soon and I have two folks, Dr. Petra Dela and Logan Duval.

Logan and I met with his 4-year-old son who was diagnosed with terminal renal cell cancer. treated it through chronobiology because there was no standard of care treatment for this. And basically getting him out there laying, in the sun, belly down on the earth, shirt, off, sun, hitting the, those kidneys and getting on a carb restricted diet and being in nature and getting a routine in his circadian rhythm.

This kiddo is now, gosh, I'm trying to think how many years out. That's so cool in remission, and so this turned Logan, who's a farmer, his entire, a regenerative farmer who's now like practicing what he preaches, and he partnered with my colleague, Dr. Patriot, Dave La, who's really well known in her field of deuterium depletion.

She's a de expert, which depletion of deuterium happens by nature. When you are in rhythm of the world around you the light and dark cycles, the rhythm of the hot and cold cycles, the rhythm of your eating cycles and the types of foods you're eating, you are naturally depleting deuterium.

Which 

means you're naturally upregulating the function of your mitochondria, which means you're naturally upregulating your resilience. But when you're eating a standard American diet and you're in onscreen time, and maybe you're over or under exercising and you're putting all kinds of chemicals on your skin, your largest organ of absorption elimination, you are increasing those levels of deuterium and you're making your mitochondria function more sluggishly.

More and effectively, and therefore making your genome more vulnerable because your mitochondria, the protector of that, making your energy production less optimal and basically setting yourself up for all kinds of mayhem. 

[00:38:22] Christa Biegler, RD: This is great because I, one of my questions that I had listed was about red light, and so something that gets a little bit tricky with cancer and integrative therapies is there are some things that maybe shouldn't, this is what I have been learning just from experts I'm interviewing, is that there are some things we wanna be careful with because they can support growth.

So they're about supporting growth in general. So since we now have cancer growing, we want to avoid growth, and so is one of those glutathione. 

[00:38:50] Dr. Nasha Winters : So really quick on the red light piece. Yeah. There is some interesting evidence that suggests that using red light directly over tumors or in a cancering body, if there's a systemic process going on out of sync with the typical times you would be naturally exposed to red light could actually provoke.

Further proliferation of cancer cells. So I tell people like, please don't go and sit in front of your red light therapy at noon.

[00:39:14] Christa Biegler, RD: That's, yeah, that was what I had is red light is a growth medium of cancer. It's like questionable.

[00:39:18] Dr. Nasha Winters : Exactly. So it's if you're gonna use it at all best to get it from just the sun itself, sunrise sunsets, like that's your best.

You don't think about it, right? We evolve with that, and if you are gonna use those external devices or utility of red light, then use it again at the same time, you would normally be exposed to the natural. Red light in our, ecosystem. So that, moving over into your next question

[00:39:38] Christa Biegler, RD: yeah. So growth, like what are some of the nutrients or supplements that people might take that could be no-nos in a cancer context because there are promoting growth and I think glutathione is one of them. 

[00:39:50] Dr. Nasha Winters : Glutathione is one of them. For sure in, and you, especially it's not in all cancer types, right?

But those that are very glutamine sucking. So most of our brain tumors, for instance, glutathione is, can be problematic because it's made from glutamine and glut, glutamate. It's a bidirectional. Process, right? So we wanna be mindful. 'cause everyone and their dog in the, especially in the integrative world, they're like, everyone get on glutathione or everyone get on this.

It doesn't work that way. It's very one. And you also don't wanna use a therapy like that. It's extremely important for antioxidant. So it's really powerful to use when you're not cancering as a prevention. Once you're cancering, you wanna work with an expert to know when and where and how to use it. 

Yeah.

It's not universal of when and where and how you use it, right? There's very nuanced pieces around it. Like for instance, we never wanna use it in when we're applying an oxidative therapy. So if you're applying high dose IV vitamin C with hyperbaric oxygen, for instance, that's an oxidative therapy.

So as chemotherapy, radiation, certain targeted therapies, even photodynamic therapy, the whole point of those therapies is to create a high level of reactive oxygen species that the cancer cells get overwhelmed by and lice and apoptose. But if you then simultaneously give a quenching agent like glutathione or alpha lipoic acid or acetylcysteine.

Or high doses of vitamin e succinate or something along those lines into the mix. You are blocking that of apoptotic process. So timing really is everything. And also certain cancer types will utilize, will harness glutathione as a way to fuel the cancer cells. So that's one. Another one that folks are, drives me crazy.

I wish we would just outlaw the supplementation of calcium across the board. 

Okay. What do we look for when we're looking for at a mammogram? We're looking for calcium depositions. 

One of the first signs that someone has an oncology process happening is to see a rise in their serum calcium levels.

So I like my serum calcium below 9.5. So if it starts to even E at 9.6, I'm looking around the building going, what's going on here? Usually what I do first is ask them if they're taking vitamin D, if they're taking high doses of vitamin D. Then I say, are you taking it with K two? And if they're not, then that might be the only reason why the calcium went rogue, because the K two basically says calcium.

Come on now. You need to either get outta the building or get into the receptor sites where you belong, but you should not be out here floating around causing mayhem. 

It's an oxidative agent, right? That similar pattern with iron. No bueno. So what do we first do when patients get cancer? A lot of 'em are, they look like they're blood deficient, and everyone assumes that means that their anemia is an iron deficient.

Anemia, let's just say it even was an iron deficient anemia. The last thing you ever wanna give a cancer patient is iron. Period. You will explode. You will absolutely feed like cancer's. Favorite food groups are glutamine. For versus glucose. Then it's iron, then it's glutamine. Don't wanna give it that.

So that's one that I keep out of the mix as well. And then another one we watch for is we watch for homocysteine levels. And homocysteine can be a marker of inflammation. It could be a marker of cardiovascular inflammation, it could be a marker of methylation. And if patients undergoing a cancering process, have me homocysteine levels getting above eight.

We then need to do what we call a homocysteine challenge, where we give them some methyl donors higher dose for a couple of days and then retest their homocysteine, and if the homocysteine is still elevated or even went higher, what that tells me is this patient has a very unique pathway that goes beyond glycolysis and goes beyond glutaminolysis glutamine intake.

It also can sequester, methionine. 

And so that's our marker there. So I don't want people taking a lot of methyl donors, which is what everyone seems to wanna do. Some are hypermethylated, and we can tell easily through running a homocysteine levels we can tell easily from some tissue or blood biopsies.

But we can know very quickly this person needs to methionine, restrict, and different ways to do it, not what's out there and popular because if you methionine restrict too long, the person will die. 

[00:43:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:44:00] Dr. Nasha Winters : they gotta have methionine to live. But there's ways to do this, like a pulse press of methionine restriction, and everyone thinks a methionine restricted diet is a vegan diet.

That's other bullshit. Like first of all, soybeans have as much, methionine in them as a steak. So you know, certain legumes, same thing here. So the reality is it's very specific in working with someone who's had some very specific oncology nutrition. Who we've trained Oncology Nutrition Institute and our organization have trained nutritionists to know exactly what to look for and how to test for this, and what types of diets and programs to put people on.

It's not an in of one it's not an all a diet for everybody. It's an in of one approach to this those are the big ones. I'd be careful with iron. I'd be careful with calcium. I'd be careful with glutathione. I'd be careful with methionine in specific situations. So those are the big ones to I love that.

Find out. I 

[00:44:52] Christa Biegler, RD: don't think anyone's come on and talked about iron and calcium related to that, but it was interesting for me because. This is something I've seen a lot on mineral testing as well. All of the patterns that you described we see on minerals and we usually see that when you can't see it on blood.

Wow. And so we'll see these high calcium levels and that's impairing how thyroid is working as well. Iodine being like a major helper in this space. So just fun when you are familiar with some of the Yeah. Biochemistry of what's happening. Yeah. And on that note. About people wanting to take a lot of methyl donors.

The whole concept that everyone should just be supporting M-T-H-F-R kind of drives me crazy a little bit. I don't know who started this. I just am like, I don't understand. We didn't come outta the womb, needing to be on methylated nutrients. I'm just I'm a big questioner about it, but

I haven't gotten around to tracing it back to its roots or sources or where this comes from. I think we 

[00:45:43] Dr. Nasha Winters : started getting access because I got excited when we could start doing single nucleotide polymorphism testing, but I wanted As a context of the whole terrain Yeah. And the ecosystem in general of what I was working in.

If you are working with someone who's treating your SNPs, you're with the wrong practitioner. 

[00:45:59] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. It doesn't even make any sense. It doesn't even make any sense. You should focus on your epigenetics, what's actually going on in your life. 

[00:46:05] Dr. Nasha Winters : Exactly. If you're treating 

[00:46:06] Christa Biegler, RD: based on genetics, it is so it makes literally no sense by the time I was ever getting to genetics, which I mostly, I will teach on it a little bit more so people understand, at least from the perspective I have, I say to, yeah.

I say to clients, I say, I do not understand conventional genetic testing. I do not understand why it costs $2,000 for someone to get a single couple of mar. I just don't get that. I don't understand how that happened, what's going on over there. I know what I have done historically, but when we eventually got to genetics, which I'm not really doing 'cause I just found them to.

Sometimes it's information overwhelm. Yeah. It, you should really be headed in the right direction. There might be a couple like new pieces of information, or maybe in your context it makes even more sense. My goal in life is to help all of your systems work as optimally as possible. 

[00:46:50] Dr. Nasha Winters : I'm so there with you and that's, it takes, that is a contextual, that is a terrain approach.

That is a approaching the whole not single. Symptoms or snips or labs. You are looking at it all in context and that's where the magic happens. That's when people who come to me who've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on therapies that have failed them because people treated their individual symptoms or their individual diagnoses and not their terrain.

Yeah. And that's what makes all the difference. If we'd started there, we wouldn't have had the problems we had, yeah. 

[00:47:22] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, that's 

[00:47:23] Dr. Nasha Winters : tough. 

[00:47:23] Christa Biegler, RD: So I think you talk about multiple things around terrain, but if people could only work on a couple of them, what are a couple of your favorite needle movers related to terrain?

[00:47:31] Dr. Nasha Winters : I think you actually already covered them. For me, I wanna get the body as regulated as possible to the rhythm of nature in, on and around you. So starting and ending your day the best you can with a sunrise, sunset exposure. Walk, sitting even in front of a window if it's cold or something where you're getting that first light on your body and the last light on your body.

It makes a huge difference. Walking after meals is a very powerful lever that we don't utilize enough. That can really change the way you metabolize your food and how it just manages your blood sugar. Even fasting, and not even big fasting, but like 13 hour a day fasting, finishing dinner, say 7:00 PM and not having anything but water before 8:00 AM.

That alone has shown a 70% reduction in cancer recurrences in a massive breast cancer study. It wasn't even asking what those women were eating. It just said, give a little space. Let the body digest what it's had the day before. Clean up, start all over again. Exactly. Yeah. Those are some of the simplest, cheapest tools and breath.

Yeah. To me it's if people were actually dealing with those things first, I would have less patient population. Yeah, and our therapies would work better in the patients that are dealing with and addressing those fundamentals. 

[00:48:46] Christa Biegler, RD: No, I love that. On that note, you have a couple of books. You have a whole institute.

What if someone picked up, one of your books? What would be, how would someone choose, oh, I would read this book of Dr. Nisha's. If I wanted to know this or if I would read this one. If I wanted to know this, what would be something? Why did you write them in short? Yeah, 

[00:49:05] Dr. Nasha Winters : I wrote the metabolic approach to cancer to help my patients because I was, fi getting frustrated of having to say the same thing over and over again.

And I thought geez, read this first and then we'll talk. So that's like your primer. That's, and it's more of a resource book, not just a sit from start to finish. You could even start with the. Questionnaire in the beginning and kind of focus on the chapters that are your priority and then go back into it.

The second book missile Toe in the Emerging Future of Integrative Oncology is more advanced. It was actually written more as the best practices for clinicians. But it's funny because the patients tend to be savvier than the clinicians sometimes. So a lot of patients stumble across it, read it, and then take it to their clinicians.

But it does talk about. Some of these other like interventions, but it still weaves in some of the terrain context into it. And then just, the training programs, we have a do it yourself program for someone who wants to just like the metabolic approach to life, not necessarily just cancer, so to prevention, we have, if you are someone drawn to doing this as advocacy work, if you are an allied health professional and you wanna get this training, or if you're a clinician who has access to ordering and prescribing.

We have a course for you, like this is important, knowing that half of us are meeting this diagnosis. Frankly, we need a lot more help. Out there and the options that are out there today are very limited. We get about 30,000 hits a month on our directory, and there's no way with the numbers we have, we can serve all those people.

And so unfortunately they end up then in desperation going to people who frankly have no business doing this work, and it causes more harm than good and creates a bad name for integrative oncology, when really this is a very powerful. Powerful tool. And so when it's done in the right place, the right context, the right combination, dose, duration, it is miraculous.

[00:50:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I wanna highlight something that you just said in weaving in there. It sounds like you have a directory of trained professionals if someone's looking for someone. So where can people find that? 

[00:50:56] Dr. Nasha Winters : So they can go to MTI h.org, metabolic terrain institute of health.org. You can find a link to it on dr nayha.com, D-R-N-A-S-H a.com, and you can find it on Metabolic Region which is.com metabolic region, like regen regenerative.

Which our tagline for that is Metabolic Regen University. You educate to regenerate. And so that's where, you can find the directory in all of those environments, and so people stumble across it in a variety of ways. 

[00:51:26] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm only laughing just because I have six or seven websites for you already.

I didn't have mh.org. No, it's so funny. Not a problem. But I'm like this girl, I don't know how she's getting it all done, but 

[00:51:37] Dr. Nasha Winters : proliferating like a cancer cell. A good one. I'm a good one. I'm good. Not evil. Okay. 

[00:51:44] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh funny. Okay. We could have talked about this all day. If people just want to learn more about what you've got, is there one of these places where you would maybe 

[00:51:52] Dr. Nasha Winters : start them?

[email protected] 'cause that's also where you can get to my podcast. You can get to all the different po other podcasts I've been a part of, like yours, that you can listen for hours of free content, free learning, free empowerment read some of my blogs, read what's on my mind, look at the events that we're part of like just, it's a great place to start.

And it will also take you to the links to the directory and to the books and to the other activities that we're up there, up to in the world. 

[00:52:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Thank you so much for the work. You're doing such big, these are big things. I'm so thankful that you're doing all of this. It's a big deal and sometimes you just need more, you need more of that.

Congratulations as well, just because it's very important. Obviously. So thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:52:35] Dr. Nasha Winters : Such my joy. Thank you so much for having me, Christa