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Top Takeaways
- Kirtsin Nussgruber is a two-time cancer survivor who created an integrative and functional medicine approach for ones health to facilitate true healing.
- Kirstin offers individualized one on one mentoring, can be hired for inspirational speaking, and offers training and support programs.
- Specific foods can positively effect various organs to aid in detoxification.
- Phase one and phase two mechanisms of detoxification in the liver are essential.
- Dandelion greens and beats are great foods to support the detoxification of the liver.
- Loose-leaf green Tea is one of Kirstin’s favorite detoxing ingredients.
- Kidneys gather up and dispel the toxins through urine so keeping yourself hydrated is extremely important.
- Broccoli has phytonutrience and sulforophane, which are both anti cancer compounds and great detoxifiers.
- Sprout ingredients have the most concentrated and potentnutrients, offering the most detoxifying benefits.
- The lymphatic system is composed of lymph nodes, and lymphatic vessels which sprout of out and carry waste products through to organs which eliminate toxins.
- Lymphatic fluids rely on muscle contractions to carry toxins, which is why it is very important to keep moving and exercise.
- Numeric, ginger rout, lemons, and limes are potent lymphatic supporters.
- It is important to distinguish between supporting protocol and regiments,and cancer treatment protocols.
- It is necessary to create variety in your juicing detoxprotocal
- Knowing where the cancer is, and whether your treatment is curative or palliative can help you devise your best treatment plan.
- Putting together the right team of oncologists,nutritionalists, and mental health practitioners will greatly help your overall treatment.
- Learn more about Kirstin and her work at kirstincancercare.com
- Make sure to check out Kirstin’s free gift to all of Live to 110 listeners Click here!
Wendy Myers: Hello, everyone. My name is Wendy Myers. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. You can check my website out at myersdetox.com. I’ve got hundreds of podcasts and hundreds of articles about how to detox your body of heavy metals and more. Today, we have my friend, Kirstin Nussgruber on the show. She’s going to be talking about the top five foods to aid detox. She’s a cancer expert too. She’s going to be weaving in why these type five foods are helpful when you have cancer, going through cancer treatments or post cancer treatment and even to prevent cancer. These five foods are really key in helping to facilitate detox in your body and prevent cancer and help you if you have a cancer diagnosis as well.
Wendy Myers: It’s a really interesting show, but we actually haven’t talked about this before on the show. We’ve been at hundreds of podcasts, over 250 podcasts and just haven’t talked about top foods to beat cancer that aid detox. I’m really excited about this show. It’s really, really great information, a lot of simple, practical tips on how to incorporate these foods into your diet as well.
Wendy Myers: I had a great weekend. I just moved to Huntington Beach, and I just am so happy. It’s just really, really peaceful down here. I was living up in Los Angeles before, near Downtown, Los Angeles where it’s extra toxic. There’s so much EMF. I don’t know what I was thinking, so I decided to make a change and come down here to Huntington Beach. It’s just so relaxing. There’s a lot less EMF here because there’s just more concentrated population in Los Angeles. I’m enjoying it so much. I live five minutes from the beach. I’ve been going on bike rides a few times a week, and my daughter’s going to a really wonderful public school now. She was in private school before, but here, the public school system was so good that I felt comfortable putting her in the public school system here and she’s just really enjoying life. It’s sunny here every day, and I planted an herb garden this weekend. I’ve been wanting that for years. For whatever reason, it just was a super busy year, just didn’t take the time to do that for myself. I’m really excited.
Wendy Myers: I finally decided that I wanted to have all different types of fresh herbs that I could use in cooking. I have this rule now where I have to have fresh herbs in every single meal that I make for myself and for my daughter, and so I also use sprouts as well. That’s my rule. Sprouts and fresh herbs for every single meal, and whether I’m buying them in the grocery store and having them cut, having been cut that morning or cut a few days ago, and I’m having them sit in the fridge and losing nutrients that whole time. Now, I can cut them totally fresh. It’s almost still alive and quivering while I’m eating it, so I’m really, really excited about that. I encourage you to do the same and incorporate fresh herbs into your diet every single day and grow some herbs yourself in some pots. It’s really, really simple and easy to do from scratch and not very expensive.
Wendy Myers: For any of you guys that are curious about your metal levels in your body, I created this amazing quiz, very, very simple quiz that you can take at metalsquiz.com to assess the metal levels that you may have in your body. It’s a 14-question quiz. It takes two minutes to go there and answer all of the questions. I encourage you to go there if you’ve been curious about it. Maybe some of your habits, dietary habits are maybe contributing to the toxic metal load in your body. Simply go to metalsquiz.com and find out for yourself.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Kirstin Nussgruber. She is an empathetic cancer mentor, author and speaker who is passionate about helping people get out of cancer overwhelm by teaching them how to reclaim their lives. A two-time cancer survivor herself, she learnt firsthand the importance of an integrative and functional medicine approach to one’s health to facilitate true healing. Kirstin is a graduate of The Munich Base, Zentrum für Naturheilkunde as board-certified Nutritional Consultant, a professional member of the National Association of Nutrition Professions, board-certified by the American Association of Nutritional Professionals and certified health coach by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners. Kirstin offers individualized, one-on-one mentoring, can be hired for inspirational speaking engagements and offers training and support programs such as her First Steps To Take Charge of Your Cancer Care Program.
Wendy Myers: She’s also the best-selling author of Confessions of a Cancer Conqueror: My five-step process to transform your relationship with cancer. She’s also co-host of the #All Things Cancer Podcast, a monthly guest blogger for the anti-cancer club and heads a cancer support program at Valley Integrative Pharmacy in Bedminster, New Jersey. She has featured frequently in a variety of holistic internet radio shows and online podcasts and was a monthly contributing author for the online Civil Magazine for the Spirit and Soul of Woman. You can find her website at kirstinscancercare.com.
Wendy Myers: Kirstin, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Kirstin: Thanks for having me, Wendy. I’m honored to be here.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about your story of surviving cancer and why you dedicated your life to helping cancer patients?
Kirstin: Sure. Well, I was diagnosed with my first breast cancer. I was just 39 at the time, and I actually was in the middle of my nutrition studies. We were living in Germany at the time, and I went to school there. That made it all clear to me that, that was the direction that I wanted to go in because at the same time, as we’re trying to fight cancer, we also need to move beyond that and realize that we need to do things differently. How can we also become proactively involved in creating an environment that will not allow cancer to happen again or will strengthen it, that it can just deal with the onslaught of the treatments that we may be doing. Being in my nutrition studies at that point in time, it was easy for me to really focus on that pathway, on that niche and finding out which foods are super, super important to deal with that, because that’s something we could do proactively every single day. We have to eat, don’t we? We might as well make that count.
Kirstin: To me personally, it was always important to find out why. Why am I supposed to eat a certain food? Why are they saying that eating this particular food will do that for me? To me, it was always why, why, why, so that’s my personal passion. I was trying to find out the reason for something rather than just following suit and saying, “Okay. You tell me to eat that. I will do that,” because I want to explain it to you as well. I want to give you the reasons why so that you can use that information to keep yourself motivated. That’s just how I work. I’m assuming that many out there work in a similar fashion because once you know the background to something, it’s easier for you to keep on that bandwagon of, “I’m doing this because. I’m doing this because these foods are giving me not just the vital nutrients and antioxidants that I need,” because we hear a lot about that. “Eat this because it gives you this and this and these nutrients.”
Kirstin: Well, of course that is the case, but there is a whole other side to certain foods. What else can they do? How else can they influence this delicate biochemistry inside your body, which is absolutely fascinating to me and plays a role in detoxification because when we have cancer, one role that is failing in our body is our body’s ability to detoxify properly. Something went wrong there. Something got tweaked there, and again, in biochemistry, we need to focus on that as well. By focusing on certain foods, incorporating them into a very regular way of eating, we’re doing this every single day. We don’t always have to think we need to do this big thing, and it’s going to disrupt my life. I hope it’s going to end soon.
Kirstin: Very often, we associate this mentality around certain changes that we need to make, but when it’s just focusing on food and understanding why certain foods play a big role, and then of course, checking it one step further, which is then what I do personally when I coach my clients is, how do you implement that? Now you have the knowledge. Now you know what you need to do. How do you actually make it work so that it’s fun, that it tastes good, that you’re enjoying it, and that you could keep it going? It’s the sustainability of the long haul, which is very important here too.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and once someone has a cancer diagnosis, it’s a wake-up call that they need to change their diet. They need to be focused more on healthy, fresh foods, juicing and things like that, but why wait until you or a loved one has a cancer diagnosis? You can start today, helping your body, nourishing your body and giving it foods that help it detoxify. Let’s talk about some of the top foods in your opinion that help to aid detoxification and gently cleansing of the body.
Kirstin: Sure. Well, the way I approach this with my clients is I go walk them through the main organs of elimination in the body, so to just give it a mental picture of what bodily systems are we actually trying to support, so of course, the liver plays a very important role in detoxification, kidneys, the lymphatic system, your lungs as well, your colon, of course, your whole digestive tract and then your skin. Each of those categories have some specific foods that can really support them, but I know we have limited time, although we could talk about this all-day long, but let’s just focus on the liver a little bit and the kidneys and the lymph. Would that be okay?
Wendy Myers: Yes, let’s do it.
Kirstin: Yeah, so for the liver, of course, the liver is your main organ that really breaks down the toxins. It does so in different stages, phase one and phase two, and these are very acute stages of detoxification that need to work in synergy. It’s very important to, again, understand that, that we need to support both phases of detoxification. Otherwise, we can actually become a lot more toxic. We can actually even fort the process of detoxification in the body, so it’s actually very important to understand this, that there are phase one and phase two mechanisms in the liver, for trying to just keep it plain and simple here, that we need to support.
Kirstin: Really, really awesome foods for the liver in the greens category are dandelion greens. You might think, “What? That weed out there?” Yes, that weed out there. It’s the leaves, in particular. The root too, but in particular, leaves, dandelion leaves are super, super, super potent liver detoxifiers. How do we use them? We can use them very easily in smoothies, right? That’s how I do it on a very regular basis. We can also turn them into salads. Now, I’m seeing more and more of dandelion greens actually being grown for consumption, so you find them in your local supermarkets, usually in the organic sections, but in the general fresh produce section, that’s where you see bunches of dandelion greens. I mean people sometimes think it’s just another form of spinach, but it’s dandelion greens.
Kirstin: Depending on the season, they obviously are either spring or fall, that their leaves will be a little bit sturdier. For example, the fall ones now are a little bit sturdier than the spring ones. Our spring is generally associated with this real cleansing of the liver after the long winter, but for me, being a cancer survivor myself, it’s just important to support the liver throughout. When I see fresh bunches of dandelion greens, that’s just what I do. I take it throughout the year. You can also drink dandelion tea. That also has an effect, but people generally need to adapt to that. When you have real, true herbal teas, they can be quite bitter and then more of a medicinal drink. I’ll be honest. That’s not your, “Let’s sit down and enjoy this,” cup-of-tea moment. That’s not what dandelion tea will do for you, and that’s okay. That’s okay, so why not eat it? Why not eat the actual leaf? Again, that’s one favorite of mine, the dandelion greens.
Kirstin: The other super potent liver food that I really love, and I only got to love when I was older, certainly not as a kid, not as a teenager, not even as a young adult, maybe to my detriment. That’s beets, right, beets. Now, most of them are red. You can get orange beets as well, but beets, the real bright red beets are, again, super, super potent lover detoxifiers. I have a trick with beets. When I tell my clients this trick, they usually love that, is roast them. Roast them in their skin. Then, peel them and the peel comes off like butter, although you do still need to wear gloves because they do stain. You can actually use it as a natural food coloring, by the way, that red pigment, but roasting any form of root vegetable brings out their natural sweetness.
Kirstin: It turns into this more bitter root vegetable into an allowed sweet treat, because it’s a natural food. What I do on a regular basis, I take bunches of whole red beets. I wrap them first in unbleached white … Not white, but unbleached parchment paper. Then, I wrap the aluminum foil around it. I don’t the actual root to touch the aluminum. Not good.
Wendy Myers:Yes.
Kirstin: I know you’ll thicken …
Wendy Myers: That’s a good tip. That’s a really good tip to avoid the-
Kirstin: Yeah, yeah, you don’t want that.
Wendy Myers: Aluminum toxicity that could be had from the aluminum foil.
Kirstin: It’s natural. It can rub off, and you just want to eliminate any possible chance of adding to your toxic burden, and that’s just one way of doing it.
Wendy Myers: Yes.
Kirstin: If you wrap it, if you just use the parchment paper, it won’t stay closed. The whole thing will just flop open, so I use the aluminum foil to make it into a package, but they never touch.
Wendy Myers: Yes.
Kirstin: Then, you do need to roast them usually for over an hour for it to get nice and soft. Then, you just let it cool, and you can easily peel it. I store it in glass containers in the fridge, and I usually do batches, so I usually do six roots at the same time. Then, you can use it throughout the week. You can cut it up into salads. You can cut it up and slice it just as a side condiment, but you basically can have a little bit of red beet every single day. Drizzle it with a little bit of olive oil, maybe a little bit of herbal salt. That’s enough, and sometimes, I just eat it just like that with nothing else with it just because it’s so delicious. You do want to add a little bit of … Some form of healthy fat with it thought because fat helps to absorb the fat soluble vitamins, so that’s important too. At least drizzle a little bit of olive oil if that’s the minimum that you do.
Kirstin: You can also grate beets. You can just take the raw beet, and again, you have to wear gloves. That’s when you have to peel it first with a peeler, and then you grate it using a grater and create almost like a coleslaw. Just understand that whatever else you’re mixing to that salad will turn to color red, so if you grate a carrot into it or kohlrabi or cabbage, white cabbage, it will turn red, so just understand that. That, even more, is an incredible detoxifying food for you, or you use it for juicing. You mentioned juicing, so let’s just digress the difference between a smoothie or a shake and juicing.
Kirstin: If I make a smoothie, I use a blender, and then, I blend the entire contents, make it creamy, make it thick, right? In other words, I’m pureeing the contents whereas if I use a juicer, I’m extracting the juice only, and the remaining fiber gets discarded. It’s a different beverage that you end up with. The one has fiber and is filling, and the other one has just real, raw, very, very bio-available nutrients there, and then, it does not have fiber. It does have an effect on your blood sugar levels. That’s why people can sometimes use that. For example, if you have an afternoon slump, and sometimes, people will then go and grab, “I need my cup of coffee in the late afternoon,” you can actually go and grab a juice, make yourself a fresh juice. That will have the same effect. It will kick you back up into action again because you get a raise in your blood sugar levels, and I …
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and juicing, I love juicing too because it’s really concentrated minerals.
Kirstin: Very.
Wendy Myers: Minerals are so deficient in the soil. If you’re, say, doing a carrot beet juice and you’re using two pounds of carrots to make that juice and some beets, you’re going to get all those minerals and nutrients in all those carrots. You couldn’t eat that at one sitting by yourself, and so it just really, really concentrates the nutrients.
Kirstin: Yeah. Beets, you can use in the same way they are. Again, it will turn everything red, but that’s a really good food. I did that a lot when I was going through chemo therapy. I actually was blessed to have a juice bar near the Kansas Center where I had to go, so that was always a treat for me. When you go somewhere, they actually juice for you rather than you having to do it yourself. That was always one of the things I did. I wanted to have a liver support, because especially when you’re getting something like chemo therapy, you really, really have to support that liver even more so and juice that included beets. That’s the thing for e. The dandelion greens, the beats, green team is another really great food for the liver. Real … When I say real green tea, I mean get into the habit of buying loose green tea so you can really develop a taste for the actual flavors of green tea. When you buy them in the ordinary teabags, it’s almost like powder. You’re not getting the full flavor of the green tea.
Kirstin: Now, so you get some teabags that will include tea leaves. In other words, when you steep it, they open up. They are there, volume, their bulk increases. Then you know you’re having more of the real leaves. That’s what I use. I use the loose leaves. I have a serve that is the size of my mug, so when I put a teaspoon of the leaves in there, they really expand almost three-quarters full of that actual little sieve because then, the leaves uncurl and unfurl, but it did a lot of really great, not just nutrients but phytonutrients from the green tea. If you include that in your daily diet, you are really not only adding cancer-fighting nutrients to it, but you’re actually supporting your liver and the process as well.
Kirstin: You can develop a taste for green tea. I started off too with green tea, and I needed to sweeten it a little bit. That’s how I started, and I slowly went myself off there because if we want the taste buds to really change and enjoy a beverage that isn’t sweetened anymore, we need to give it time so that we grow into that. Then, you’ll be absolutely amazed. It works every single time. If you give it enough time and your taste buds adjust, you go back to what you used to eat or drink. You won’t be able to tolerate this weakness anymore. It will too sweet for you because you’ve allowed the time it takes to adapt your taste buds. It’s awesome. It’s really awesome. I drink my green tea a lot, and I don’t need it to be sweetened, so there goes that sugar addition. I could eliminate that very easily.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love a jasmine dragon pearl green tea. That’s my absolute favorite green tea. It’s been prepared the same way for thousands of years, and you have these very fragrant jasmine flowers they use to scent the … They are in balls, the green tea leaves.
Kirstin: Yeah, they come in these balls.
Wendy Myers: They make them by hand.
Kirstin: Yeah. I mean you see them like pearls, yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Kirstin: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: It’s just a wonderful way to experience green tea.
Kirstin: I agree with you. I have … I don’t want to brag, but to me, that’s my passion. I like green tea. I have about 15 different flavors, and it’s just green tea. There’s nothing else with it. I’m not the type of person that needs other things added to it. I just want the actual green tea leaf but from all over. I go to China, to Japan, even from Rwanda, from Nepal. There are many areas. They all have a distinct taste to them, so there are a couple of favorites that I have. That’s really … They come as just little daily detox ritual that you’re doing right there, and you think of it as such, but you are detoxing at the same time every single day with every cup of green tea that you have.
Wendy Myers: Are there any other food do you like for the liver, or do you want to move on to the kidneys?
Kirstin: Just one quick mention. The seaweed chlorella because that’s also … It’s less common and that you don’t eat it. It comes more as a supplement form or as a powder form, but it has alginic acid in it, which is super, super important to absorb toxins and especially when you are going through an activated detoxification process like you’re doing heavy metal detox with chelators and so on, then this can be a very good supporting supplement to help absorb the toxins that are stirred up in your system, and you don’t want them to settle back in again. You want them to be drawn out. The chlorella supplements are a good choice to support the liver there too, but the kidney. We can move on to the kidneys, of course, the urine filters, the urine.
Kirstin: The kidneys, what they do is, they basically help to gather up and finish the toxins inside the urine and clear it all out through the urine, so first of all, with obviously drinking, keep yourself hydrated with simple liquids, clear liquids. The green tea will help with that but also obviously, simple water. Just keep yourself hydrated because you’re really, really supporting the liver. Oh, the kidneys, I’m sorry. When I went through chemo therapy, I drank like crazy. The two days before my chemo regimen would, I would start. I would, in the end, basically triple the amount that I was drinking every day, but it helped to flush through the toxicity, so the side effects weren’t that severe, and it really, really made a difference. Everyone would used to laugh because I’d arrive from my chemo therapy session with my bags, and I had six big water bottles with me. They would laugh.
Kirstin: I mean obviously, with my little pile load, I’d have to use the bathroom a couple of times, but I didn’t experience the same level of side effects and toxicity that many of the others did. It really makes a difference to stay hydrated, but foods too. We go into the herbs tea a little bit. Parsley and cilantro are two very, very powerful kidney supporters, so they’re not just condiments. They should really be parts of your foods, so parsley, for example. You can very easily include in your smoothies or even in your juicing as well. Cilantro has a bit of a more pungent taste to it, so unless you’re a hardcore juicer, it dominates everything that you do, but just include it a lot. Sprinkle it on your food. Whatever food you cook, you can sprinkle fresh herbs onto it, if you think about it, not just salads. That way, you actually get the benefit of that herb as well.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I do. Every meal that I have, I put fresh sprouts, broccoli sprouts, onion sprouts, radish sprouts. I put tons of herbs. I just planted an herb garden over the weekend. I’m super excited about that. Parsley and cilantro and all different types of herbs. It’s so important because they’re so nutrient-dense.
Kirstin: They are, they are. You mentioned the broccoli seeds, so the vegetable broccoli itself, of course, is a great vegetable to have, period. Not only does it have the phytonutrients that we find in broccoli. The very important ones and the ones that we know so far, I find, are really, really great have anti-cancer compounds in them, but it’s also great as a detoxifier. Again, supports liver and kidneys, but the broccoli seeds and the sprouts from that are so much more potent. Any sprout, really, has very concentrated nutrients because it’s the seed developing into the plant needing to grow, so it has the benefit of being super, super potent. We get the benefits of that. If we consume those sprouts, we’re getting a hefty dose of nutrients right there and then, so that’s definitely a good thing to include as well. Again, you can throw it into anything that you eat, and it’s very easy to sprout them yourself. Again, most supermarkets will actually have them now. The word is getting out.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah. I just want to buy a little machine so I can plant a bunch of different types. Not plant but just sprout a lot of different types of sprouts like mung beans and broccoli seeds, onion, radish. I just love sprouts so much. They’re so nutrient-dense. The broccoli sprouts can be 400 times more nutrient-dense than the actual broccoli.
Kirstin: The actual broccoli plant, absolutely.
Wendy Myers: It’s unbelievable how nutrient-dense they are.
Kirstin: Yeah. You don’t need to eat a lot. People often say to me, “I’m not hungry, and I just don’t have an appetite,” which for various reasons, that can be. Then, you say, “Well, at least get some sprouts into you because you don’t need to eat a lot. You can have just little handful. That might be okay for you, but you’re getting very nutrient-dense food that way.” Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Kirstin: Then, if we look at the lymphatic system that I wanted to focus on too, now, I … That’s often overlooked. People go, “What is that?” We don’t understand it very well. We don’t talk about it a lot, but think of it this way, and I’ll never forget. I don’t know if you recall. There’s these bodies, exhibits of all these bodies that basically show every part of the body exhibited. These were bodies that were donated. They’re all Asian bodies, but they give you a very detailed insight into the human body. We went to one of those years ago. The kids were still little. There was the exhibit of the lymphatic system. It basically, it was fascinating to see even how they extracted that. I don’t want to go into too much detail.
Wendy Myers: I don’t want to imagine that.
Kirstin: Visually, if you think about it, so the entire shape of the body has lots of little spider-like veins going through it. Some are actually our blood vessels, but these are lymphatic vessels. Every certain spots, there are little modules. Those are your so-called lymph nodes. Then, these lymphatic vessels sprout out of them. They carry waste products from your body, even natural waste products from your body. They collect them in the lymph nodes. They carry them throughout your body to your organs of elimination, and they are not attached to a pump like our blood vessels are attached to our heart. Our heart pumps our blood through the body. It happens automatically. Lymphatic fluids relies on muscle contraction. That’s why it’s so important to keep moving and to do some form of exercise because only with muscle contraction, we’re actually moving the lymph tissue around our body. The lymphatic system is incredibly powerful. It really is systemic. It affects the entire system, so we can really support that with … There’s a manual process called skin brushing.
Kirstin: I’m sure you talk about that where we just brush in circular motions, starting at the bottom. We don’t have to even rub very hard, but we just activate the skin. That’s a manual procedure we can do, but then, from a nutrition point of view, again, we go back to the herbs and the spices, but the ginger and turmeric are the two key roots, little root that we can include. Everyone knows the ginger root, and the cousin to it is the turmeric root, which looks similar to ginger. It’s just bright, bright orange. The active ingredient in that is curcumin. That is what gives it the bright orange color. That’s really what is the potent medicinal food in this turmeric root. Those two, which we can, by the way, also include in our juicing, in little bits though because they’re pretty pungent or even in our smoothies. Throw them in there. A little bit of ginger, a little bit of turmeric, and those are very potent lymphatic system supporters, really, that we can do, include in a regular basis.
Kirstin: Then, of course, the lemons and the limes fall into that category as well. One thing that I do is, I start my morning with … I squeeze half a lemon in a little bit of water, and I add a little bit cold water, a little bit hot water, but that’s what I drink before I have anything else. Basically on an empty stomach. Now, sometimes, I add fresh slices of ginger to that. Sometimes, some turmeric, depending on what I have. If I’m sick, if I feel a cold coming, I’ll dose up on, especially the ginger. Sometimes, I let that steep overnight. You just slice those roots, and you pour water, hot water over it and let it steep overnight. Then, in the morning, you take those roots out. You add our lemon juice, and there’s your instant tonic remedy. If you have your honey, you can add honey to that too. That is really that boosts your immune system as well.
Kirstin: Yeah, there’s a little, couple of tips there for you that you can easily do. Think about it. You do that every single day. You can use every single day to help your body do its normal detoxification process. Whether it is compromised or not, whether you have a large heavy metal load or not, in this instance, this is something you need to eat every single day, so why not make it count?
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I make that a rule. Every single meal, I have to have sprouts. I have to have fresh herbs, and every single day, I have a fresh vegetable juice. That’s my little rules, and I have to make sure I get them in because it’s easy to forget about it and forget to buy the sprouts at the store or just get lazy and not have vegetables with the meal. You just have to really focus on getting those foods in every single day. Let’s talk about juicing. Juicing, definitely part of the Gerson therapy protocol to … They might require too much juicing. They require, I think, 13 cups of vegetable juice a day. What is your position on juicing for cancer? What kinds of juice do you like to why do you have cancer and to prevent cancer? How much should we be drinking?
Kirstin: A very good question, and people ask me that all the time. First of all, the Gerson protocol, let’s put it this way. It is a therapeutic protocol. You really, in order to make it be the most effective, you really need to do that almost in their clinic because you don’t just drink the juice. You have other procedures that you need to follow at the same time because you’re wanting to help your body detoxify. You do coffee enemas a couple of times a day, so there are other parts of that protocol than just juicing. People think it’s just drinking a lot of juice every day. No. It’s a whole therapeutic protocol that you do onsite, right? If you go back home or if you want to just try this on your own, same thing again. Realize that you can’t perform the full Gerson protocol on yourself without all the other supporting parts to it, number one. Number two, understand that if you are juicing, juicing, juicing all the time, you are constantly also raising your blood sugar levels that has that effect.
Kirstin: If you say, “I’m going to include one or three juices every day,” and you’re still eating normally and you still have enough, a lot of fiber in your diet, because remember with juices, you’re taking out the fiber. Then, that can be seen as just a supporter regimen to add extra nutrients to the body and make them quickly bioavailable. That’s something that you can do if you have the stamina to juice that much. It does cost a bit because you need lots, large quantities of juice even if, say, you just want to be able to enjoy three juices every single day. That’s a lot of produce that you have to-
Wendy Myers: It’s very expensive.
Kirstin: Push through that juicer, so just bear that in mind. That is not a treatment protocol because we need to distinguish between a supporting protocol or regimen, and a cancer treatment protocol or regimen. The Gerson protocol falls into the alternative treatment regimens. You need to treat it as such, and at least kickstart it in a professional way, but if you’re doing it as a supporting regimen, one juice a day, that’s great. Variety, okay, so think variety. You can juice all kinds of vegetables. If we, as with everything, if we zone in on only juicing these four vegetables every single day, well, you could be overdoing it. Kale, for example, and I can speak from personal experience here.
Kirstin: I was juicing kale every single day. I had gone back to my integrative doctor. We did just a regular heavy metal check-in, and my thallium heavy metal was suddenly sky-high, and it had never been before. We could compare it before. We were all … he was flabbergasted saying, “That’s a heavy metal.” If you’re exposed to an industrial site, that’s how you would absorb that heavy metal, and I wasn’t, nor did I have that in my past. Of course, in my past, it was even six months ago, my thallium levels were negligible. All of a sudden, they’re very high. Then, I did some research, and kale is high in thallium as a normal … This has nothing to do with its organic or conventional kale. Kale just has that, so me, by focusing on juicing with kale every single day and not varying this, I was actually adding to my heavy metal load, so I just stopped.
Kirstin: I stopped using kale, because I know I wanted to experiment and see if that really was it. My integrative MD said, “Well, let’s give it a try,” because I don’t have any other answer for you either. Stopped and boom, it came all the way down again. It just goes to show. We can’t overdo it either. Everything in moderation. We want to support the body, not actually introduce an additional burden to it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I had one comment about thallium. It’s a naturally occurring metal in petroleum deposits, so we get that breathing from breathing in smog and car exhaust. People who live in urban areas are definitely more affected by that.
Kirstin: Correct, correct, and I’m not out here, so that wasn’t … We could rule out those things. That was the interesting thing. I couldn’t say I live there now or I visited there. I couldn’t say any of those things, so that’s where you prick up your ears and go, “Well, what’s going on here? What else could” … This was like a direct causal relationship where I can definitely say my habit, my nutritional habit, which I thought was a great habit, I needed to spread that out. It doesn’t mean I don’t eat kale. Absolutely not. Kale has really great benefits for you but not exclusively like that. That was just not a wise thing to do. When it comes to juicing, go through the colors.
Kirstin: The favorites for juicing are, obviously, there’s some green celery stalks, a cucumber, ginger or turmeric, carrots, beets, cabbages. Those are generally your staples that I use. I don’t know, green apple maybe for some if you want a little bit of sweetness. What about you? What’s your favorite juice like?
Wendy Myers: Yes, I’m glad you asked that. My very, very favorite juice is using celery, lime juice, cilantro, a little bit of ginger and a little bit of lemon. It just has the most wonderful flavor because I just love this cilantro-lime combo. The celery gives you lots and lots of concentrated minerals. It’s a great liver detoxifier, but I really like that you mentioned that you still eat kale even though you’re aware that it has some thallium in it, because I think what people need to really be aware of is that most of our food supply has metals and chemicals in it even if it’s organic. The soils have lead, the soils have metals. The water it’s irrigated with has metals. The air has metals that land on the vegetables and meats and things like that. Maybe have some awareness of what foods have the most metals in them and maybe avoid those, but everything in moderation, like you said. We can’t just single out any foods and completely avoid them because all the food is contaminated today. It’s really more about thinking about a sensible life-long detox strategy and thinking about detox as a lifestyle.
Kirstin: Exactly, and that’s my point, is moderation. Let’s not go crazy because we hear this is good for you, but let’s space it out. Let’s offer variety, introduce variety because we have variety. There’s a reason. For example, if we also think about that, when we have seasonal vegetables, there’s a reason for that. It’s actually pretty healthy to … You have a certain concentrated time up here in which certain fruits and vegetables are in season, so that’s what you eat. Then, you move on to the next, and you don’t have access to this. I mean in modern day and time do we have access to that which is not necessarily locally seasonal. Now, having said that, I mean we would never have access to bananas, for example, out here in the northeast. I mean there’s a benefit to it too, but overall, understand that this fluctuation and this variety in moving, it has a point.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes, and so let’s talk about some of the worst foods too that promote cancer, because my father passed away from his cancer treatment. He developed esophageal cancer. He had quit smoking for seven years prior, but he smoked for 40 years. Unfortunately, that was the price he paid, but he passed from his cancer treatments, but I was blown away that his doctor had this list of foods for him to eat. I was horrified that he was told to eat crackers and just processed foods, horrible foods and reduce his salt intake. We need sea salt for our body to function and minerals. Let’s talk about some of the worst foods that people can eat when they have cancer or getting cancer treatments and maybe that cause cancer outright.
Kirstin: Funny you mention that as an example because when I was going through my chemo therapy treatments and the snacks that were offered in the chemo therapy room was … Let’s start with that. Packaged food is not real food. Now, I do understand that in today’s day and age, we can’t quite go without. We do need to include some, but at least include that which we know is not tainted. All the snacky foods, and so we need to snack with real food. We need to understand that, that is what gives us nourishment. We don’t want to introduce anything else to it, but what we can do is rid of all the packaged foods, which are high in the wrong types of fat, high in the different types of sugar.
Kirstin: A lot of the products out there theses days, sugar is antibacterial too, right? When our previous dog cut his paw, and it wouldn’t heal properly. They tried stitching it, and it kept on popping up, and then, she said to me, “You know what we need to do? It needs to heal by itself from inside-out. It’s going to take about three months. He need to have a bandaged paw, and all you got to do every single day is, when you change the dressing, is you put sugar on it.” I said, “What?” She said, “Sugar.” First of all, I had to go out and buy white table sugar because I didn’t have that in my house anymore, and it’s true. It’s true. It’s antibacterial. All right, so sugar is used a lot in processed foods in all different shapes and forms.
Kirstin: We’ve gotten used to all the sugar consumption. It’s just … When you start analyzing how much sugar you get because, “I’ll just stop eating the cakes and the pastries,” but then you continue buying packaged foods. Start reading labels and figure out, see where, how much sugar there is in each product and understand that the impact that, that has in particular for cancer growth. For influencing our blood sugar regulation mechanism in the body, that’s really the key here. Many of us are not aware that we are doing that, so the processed foods, packaged foods, let’s keep that to a bare minimum, and let’s make sure that we understand all the ingredients that are listed. We don’t want this whole laundry list of ingredients. What the hell is that? That’s not food. That’s then, of course, the incredibly sugary treats. Things in the United States are very, very high on sugar.
Kirstin: Walking down a stand at the bread aisle in any supermarket, we have the packaged breads ready in the aisles. Just smell. Just smell. All your smell is sugar. You won’t notice it unless you actually do that, but just smell, sniff. We were in Europe now over summer, and we have family there. I indulged in one or two pieces of cake over there. You know why? Because it’s not sweet. They look like they are sugar bombs, but they are not. That’s the whole key, is we don’t have to have that level of sweetness in our products, but we do, here in the United States, unfortunately. We’re used to that level of sweetness, and when we moved here 17 years ago, we got used to it, which was scary in itself. Again, your taste buds adjust to that level of sweetness.
Kirstin: We have to start training ourselves to wanting less sweets and loop back to what I was saying at the beginning of our interview. It takes time. Give it time, but you will succeed at that if you stick with it and you make sure that you nourish yourself and you keep yourself full and satisfied with proteins and with healthy doses of fats. If you keep that in balance, then you can actually work on slowly but surely breaking down that need for the sugary taste. You will start eating things and realize, “I can’t eat this. It’s just too sweet.” I’m even now at that point where I can’t even eat a full banana. That’s a real whole food, but it is too sweet for me. My body just doesn’t like that anymore. Now, I took a while to get to that point. I really want that point to really hone in. It doesn’t happen overnight. It can’t be forced on your system.
Kirstin: You have to get your system used to that, but that’s the one big, big area where we can really make a big difference, is reducing our dependence on the sweet taste. That starts by reading labels and making sure that we just make other choices and start making things ourselves. Bake your own goods. Reduce the sugar content slowly but surely, and especially your children. Don’t get them used to those because that’s where it all starts. That’s why there’s this indulgence in just giving kids what they want and not allowing them to eat any because they’re used to that high, high level of sweetness through all the snacks and packaged foods. It’s just … Sugar used to be a treat like with maple syrup. In winter, if you think about it, they would use maple syrup and freeze that. That was the treat of the year when the maple trees were releasing the maple syrup, but that was a one-self thing. We enjoy sweet. We’re supposed to enjoy sweet but as occasional treats and in moderation and not to that same degree that, that is now total standard.
Wendy Myers: I know so many people today at our age, they are just set up to be sugar addicts, growing up with the advent in the ’70s with the processed foods, packaged foods, cereals and things like that. So many people just grew up eating only sugar, and so you have to really protect your child’s health by trying not to repeat that same powder in the modern convenience and feeding them the packaged foods. I’ve almost completely cut out going to restaurants because the sugar content in the sauces gets me or in the salad dressings. The regular salt that’s typically used just makes me feel really sick, so I’m just really focusing on eating only at home in as much as possible. Let’s talk a little bit about for those who have been diagnosed with cancer or know a loved one who is suffering from cancer, what do you recommend as a first step in pursuing self-help to aid in their healing process?
Kirstin: It sounds like an intro to my program. I created a program called First Steps To Take Control Of Your Cancer Care for exactly that moment because it’s so … People generally go onto the internet, and apart from the fact, first of all, that you’re pretty overwhelmed, so either you have the mental capacity to do it yourself, or you have your everyone around you doing and going and hopping onto the internet and coming up with all kinds of recommendations. There is so much information out there. A lot of it is conflicting. It can be incredibly overwhelming, but you need to know where to start. I think, where do you start? You need to understand what type of cancer you have. We just tune out … I was there myself, and I get it. You tune out. You have cancer, but cancer is not cancer. We need to understand what type of cancer do I have? That will determine also what treatment options I have because we, there are different treatment options out there.
Kirstin: The conventional treatment options, to a degree, have their place and, to a degree, are … You have to be a bit mindful of them. You always have to understand, “Is my cancer curative or not? Is the treatment offered considered to be palliative,” meaning that we actually can’t cure you. We can just try and reduce the time that you’re probably going to die. I mean I’m sounding really brutal here, but that’s really what palliative is all about. Understand where you are on this particular spectrum and then know that you have options. This is not a quick question to answer, but once you get a grips on that and understand that there can be many complimentary options that work with your conventional team, and find yourself a team.
Kirstin: You will need a team. You will need an oncologist. Actually, more than one. You probably will need a standard oncologist because you need to keep yourself monitored. You need to have access to the diagnostic tools that are out there to look at things. You do need to know where is this cancer? Is it growing? Is it big? Where else is it in the body? You need to have that information, and we have diagnostic tools available these days to tell us that. That can only be accessed through a standard oncologist, but choose them wisely because they need to understand that you are assembling a team. Even though they might not directly work with that team, you are as a patient, empowering yourself. You are not just going to refer to that particular oncologist. You’re going to also listen to what the other team members are saying.
Kirstin: Other team members will include, often, there are naturopathic oncologists that can often work hand-in-hand with your traditional oncologist. Again, depending on where you are in the cancer spectrum, sometimes, they can offer certain treatments too. It really depends. What chances do you really have? Then, absolutely have a cancer nutrition expert on your team because we can do so much to help you through treatments, to help you post-cancer and to also focus. Once, say, you’re going through active treatment. What happens afterwards? How do you strengthen this body again? What do you do to this? How do you observe yourself? What are the body functions that you need to focus on now so that you can actually absorb the nutrients? It’s not just about what you eat afterwards. It’s also can you actually digest it? Can you absorb the nutrients? A qualified nutritionist can help you through that and take you step-by-step through that plus implementing it and making it work.
Kirstin: Then, of course, there are the other, the mind side of it. You need to have someone on your team there too because cancer isn’t just a physical … It doesn’t just have a physicality. Yes, you have the physical tumor or tumors, but there’s a mental side and an energetic side to it too. You need to have people on that side on your team too. You need to start amassing a team, and that can morph, but you need to have a team to help you through this health journey.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, because when you go to your conventional oncologist, you’re typically only given chemo in radiation as options. Why is that? Why is that the case in the United States?
Kirstin: It isn’t just a case in the United States. Chemo and radiation are just two of a whole list of options. Surgery falls into that too. It’s also a form of cancer treatment. You can get vaccinations as well even in the conventional oncology treatment. You get immunotherapy. They’re making great strides there. There was just a Nobel Prize for, I think it was medicine, right, was just awarded for … I think it was a Japanese and American scientists or researchers who worked on the whole concept of immunotherapy, which is how do we stimulate the immune system to start fighting a cancer, which is a huge inroad into the cancer treatments, because it makes sense to do that.
Kirstin: When you take traditional medicine, it needs to be scientifically evidence-based. You need to go through the research and the clinical trials. All of that takes time to administer that because you want it to be repeatable. You want to find something that you can apply in certain scenarios. Again, look at the options. Look at what they’re offering, but demand that they are open to you receiving support elsewhere and because you want to collaborate. You want to work together. If you find a traditional oncologist that really still thinks that the cancer patient should only listen to them, and they don’t want to communicate or even listen to what the patient has to say when they bring certain information to the table, then choose another one.
Kirstin: I always come from a point of view of, you need to understand where these doctors come from as well, because I get that too. Clients that approach me and say, “I’ve started with doing,” and I’ll call them a little bit of this and a little bit of that therapies. “I don’t want chemo. I don’t want radiation. I’m doing a little bit of that.” I say, “Please don’t because in that time period, you need to understand, cancer can be very aggressive, can be very sneaky. It constantly adapts. It’s smart, so we have to apply that same aggression that we find in conventional treatments to any natural approaches that we do. You can’t just … You have to monitor yourself carefully all the time,” so going the only natural root is very, very costly. Understand that. People don’t. You really have to be at it totally disciplined and all the time. Every single day, you’ll spend a couple of hours in trying to do some protocol, whether it be with nutritional support, whether it be protocols and things that you need to do at home.
Kirstin: When you’ve done the Gerson therapy, for example, and you do that in the clinic for a specific period of time, and then you come home, what do you think you’re doing at home every single day? Dedicating a couple of hours to the after-case. Understand that you need to put that time in, that dedication in and that investment in. That’s only how you could tackle cancer if you’re only doing it the natural way if you have a chance, if the cancer isn’t progressed too far. It really, really depends, but there are just different modalities in which we fight in cancer. We need to be open to all of them. I want to see more communication and more collaboration. That’s the key here.
Wendy Myers: My question is really more about how, in United States, people go to an oncologist, and they’re typically only given chemo and radiation as an option where in Europe, they might be given all kinds of nutrition, natural modalities and many other options, but in the US, because it’s licensing restrictions, medical doctors can only offer those options than the immunotherapy that you talked about, but it’s really dependent on the patient to educate themselves about alternative treatments, because they’re not going to get that information from their medical doctor typically.
Kirstin: Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head with the licensing thing. It’s not part of the standard of care, and there’s no education. There’s no green light given from the industry to be able to include that. They have their hands tied very often. Unless you break out of that and you really become an integrative oncologist, and there is that, the Society for Integrative Oncology is a group like that. They’re composed of traditional oncologists from all over the world. I attended the annual conference last year. I’m a member of them because it was just fascinating to me to understand what they are all about. They are the ones who are stepping outside the box. They are still working within their traditional cancer centers, and some of the big leagues were there, Memorial Sloan Kettering or MD Anderson were there, as well as smaller cancer centers were there, but they’re communicating. They’re collaborating. They’re including traditional Chinese medicine. They’re looking at all what Asia does in their centers where they offer conventional treatments such as chemo, radiation, immunotherapy, but they also always have some eastern medicine aspect to it.
Kirstin: There is a group that talks about this, but when you get back to reality, you take Memorial Sloan Kettering here in New York, huge facility. They have four integrative oncologists only. If you are newly diagnosed and you say, “I want to have an appointment,” you can wait three to four months. Okay, so that’s this dark reality. They don’t like that either. They’d like to see this movement expand, but even they have a tough time often explaining it to their colleagues because there’s still the mindset. There hasn’t been a complete shift in the mindset yet to accept that we need to combine to find different approaches and that the body is an incredible, incredible bio-dynamic system and that we may be able to include other forms of treatment modalities that have an effect on how effective certain treatments are.
Kirstin: When I was diagnosed for the first time, we were actually living in Munich, in Germany, and that was a traditional cancer center too. Now, right next to it was a naturopathic clinic. Right next to it, there was a passage that linked the two buildings. I thought, “Cool. I’ll go next door and see how they’ll help me through the treatments.” You know what they told me? They said, “Come back afterwards. Come back when your treatments are done. They,” pointing back to the hospital, “Don’t want to work with us while you’re going through treatment.”
Wendy Myers: Oh, wow.
Kirstin: You have the same block there. I mean there are other cancer centers, smaller cancer centers that combine everything. Same as what you find here, so you just really have to do your homework and then figure out, “Who do I have access to in my immediate environment? If I don’t have such an integrative cancer center close to me that makes it possible for me to go,” then find people in your community and create a team. That’s another option that you have if you’re newly diagnosed.
Wendy Myers: Well, Kirstin, thank you so much. That was so interesting. I know the listeners have really been craving this type of podcast talking about the top foods that help to detox the body. It’s something we actually haven’t talked about before for some reason I don’t know what. Thank you so much for coming on the show-
Kirstin: You’re welcome.
Wendy Myers: And sharing with us. Tell the listeners where they can find you and learn more about you and work with you.
Kirstin: I have a website, so my first name is Kirstin. Let me spell that for you. It’s K-I-R-S-T-I-N, so it’s not Kristine, no. It’s Kirstin, K-I-R-S-T-I-N. Website is kirstinscancercare.com, so you take my first name, K-I-R-S-T-I-N, you add an S for Sam and then you put cancercare at the end of that, kirstinscancercare.com. I am the best-selling author of my book called Confessions of a Cancer Conqueror: My five-step process to transform your relationship with cancer because that’s what we need to do. We need to transform the relationship we have with it, not see it as the enemy. That book, you access that actually through my website. I have a free chapter opt-in there for you. I have a Facebook page. I’m on LinkedIn. Twitter, you can find me.
Kirstin: Also, I host a regular Facebook Lives too on my business page, Kirstin’s Cancer Care, same name. I do have a program, an online program for those of you that don’t necessarily want to start coaching with me because that’s always a longer period of time. It’s called First Steps To Take Care of Your … Sorry, First Steps To Take Control of Your Cancer Care. You can find that on my website as well.
Wendy Myers: Fantastic. Well, Kirstin, thank you so much for coming on the show, and everyone, thanks for listening. You can learn more about me, Wendy Myers at myersdetox.com. I have hundreds of articles, hundreds of podcasts focused on detoxification where you can learn more. Thanks so much for joining us, and you can join me on Facebook at Myers Detox, and we will talk to you next week.
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