In September 2019 Alex visited the lovely folks at The LifeCo in Phuket. A health and wellness retreat that helps reverse chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer. Whilst there Alex interviewed Dr. Thomas Lodi, the famous US physician who now practices holistic and integrative oncology at The LifeCo. 100 years ago, 0.5% of the population got cancer. Today in Singapore almost 30% of the population die from cancer1. So what are the causes of chronic disease like cancer and what's going wrong? How can we take back control of our health? There are so many pearls of wisdom in this video that we strongly suggest you set aside 15 mins and get stuck in to devour it all. With knowledge comes awareness, empowerment and peace of mind - enjoy.
“It’s stupid to think we would have a gene for cancer.”
Dr. Thomas Lodi
Here are the highlights:
- 00:00 why you have to detox
- 00:32 why we get sick and old
- 01:51 the origins of human health
- 04:00 is cancer our fate, is it in our genes? [EDIT: this was amazing]
- 05:00 the real cause of cancer
- 08:09 why it’s more dangerous to eat fried foods than to smoke cigarettes [EDIT: shock!]
- 10:11 what should we be doing to prevent cancer
- 14:06 what treatments does The LifeCo use to reverse chronic diseases and cancer
- 15:00 how effective are The LifeCo’s treatments vs surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy
- 17:00 find out how long it takes to 100% reverse diabetes at The LifeCo [EDIT: it’s not long]
“Everything we’ve ever learned is the opposite of the truth.”
Dr. Thomas Lodi
It was really a pleasure to visit to see all the great work they’re doing at The LifeCo. Medically supervised fasting protocols, organic food from their own garden, an infrared sauna the size of a small house, lymphatic drainage techniques, mind work, my favourite 'the Angel of Water' and many more detox and wellness techniques that are all combined to provide a multifaceted solution to reverse chronic disease. Indeed towards the end of the video Dr. Lodi explains that if the clients follow their protocol to a T, they can reverse diabetes in only 2 weeks! If you want to read a transcript of what we have discussed, please check that out below.
“People live in an artificial environment, they live in boxes, drive around in machines and have relationships with their computers.”
Dr. Thomas Lodi
Cancer is a complex disease and it's wishful thinking that we can just pop off to a retreat for a week long detox and be cured immediately. There are several root causes that often need to be looked at and worked on simultaneously in order to create permanent and lasting success. Some of these we have discussed in this blog before such as minimising toxicity from the diet by going organic, addressing hormonal imbalances such as estrogen dominance, working on physical strength, avoiding 'stinking thinking' or the nocebo effect, removing environmental toxins and addressing repressed emotional issues and current lifestyle stressors. It may sound like a lot of things to consider and sometimes it's more comforting to just "pooh pooh" them all and put it down to genes and fate. However for those that are willing to engage in a little outside the box research there's a huge amount of comfort in the knowledge that actually we are in control and we don't have to fear bad news from our next doctor's visit. A great place to start is to read the awesome Tripping Over The Truth by Travis Christofferson and the equally splendid When The Body Says No by Gabor Mate. And of course spending a week at The LifeCo, learning from the wonderful staff there and sampling their treatments is not a bad way to start your journey either!
To your health, happiness and longevity,
The Levitise Team
P.S. If you love this blog post then do check out our fortnightly newsletter where you'll get the freshest content delivered straight to your inbox. Don't miss out and sign up here with only your name and email.
Video transcript
Alex: Thanks for agreeing to meet me today. It's really a pleasure to meet you. I'm really excited to hear what you have to say. Maybe you can start off by letting us know a little bit more about what you do at the LifeCo and some of the common conditions you treat.
Dr Lodi: Well… LifeCo originally started in Turkey and it's basically a place for detoxification and it became very well-known for that. And why would we want to detox? We want to detox, because the reason we get old and the reason we get sick is because we accumulate toxins over a lifetime, that's how it works. As those toxins are accumulating in our endocrine organs, the glands that produce hormones, they become less efficient and then, they start to decline. And as hormones decline, aging sets in for sure. So basically, disease is simply the accumulation of waste. So if you want to prevent disease then, the only thing that you must do, no matter what else you do, is get rid of that waste, to detoxify. So what conditions do we detoxify? Every condition. You have to understand that all conditions are deviations from health.
Health is our birth right. Health is what we were fitted for by nature. We were designed to be healthy, and what is health? Health can be defined as optimal functioning of the organism. The organism can only function optimally in and out of the niche out of which it arose. So you can't take a tuna fish and put it in a lake. You can't put a polar bear on the equator. So in other words, humans must first of all figure out where are we from? Where do humans arise out of? Any serious look into that you'll come to the conclusion that humans are equatorial or subequatorial organisms, around the equator, just the same as all other primates, monkeys, chimps, gorillas. You don't find primates in Germany, naturally. You could find them in zoos, but you don't naturally find them in the forests. So that would be our natural habitat. And what would we eat in our natural habitat? We would eat all of the things that are growing and blossoming (e.g. fruits). There's abundant vegetation, air, oxygen and sun - all those things that we need to survive. Furthermore, it would require no more than an hour a day, to take care of our survival needs. That's in our natural habitat. Where all of our needs are met and we would function optimally. But we live in artificial environments even though we're on the equator. Take a look at Bangkok, take a look at Singapore, look at all these places, they're completely artificial, people live in boxes, they drive around in machines, they interact with and have relationships from their computers - all artificial. Even our food's artificial, it comes in packages. All these things accumulate, and then our body begins to decline.
And that's basically it. So you have to detox. So you see high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, depression, cancer and heart disease, all these things are the same thing really. They're different apples on the tree. Our approach is to cleanse, first of all but then, we have very specific, natural medical interventions as well.
Alex: Yeah, that's beautifully put because we look at everything from an ancestral point of view as well. We look at the blue zones where people would live over 100, look at their natural environment like the Okinawans, Hunza from Northern Pakistan, Sardinians, Cretians and people like that. So I'm really excited that you mentioned that. 'Cause we would agree like totally and we're kind of in an environment where it is not natural to us so you may have to do something that's natural, to kind of, get us back. So since we've only got 20 minutes together, I'm just thinking about the most relevant questions to ask you.
Dr Lodi: Well, the genetic question is important.
Alex: Okay, that's a good one. So..a lot of people, I think, feel that particular diseases, like diabetes, are diet and lifestyle-related. However things like cancer, most people believe in fate or genes, what would you say to that?
Dr Lodi: First of all...I don't know how to say it nicely, it's stupid to think that we would have a gene for cancer. That we would have a gene for diabetes. Why would evolution allow that? Natural selection weeds out those that can't survive. So by now we would not have these genes. And then if you look at it from the point of view of the creator, how would the creator give us a
a cancer gene? For entertainment? I mean, there's no 'why', it doesn't make sense on any level. And then, of course, that's not true. Why do we know that? 100 years ago 0.5% of population got cancer. Today in America 1 out of 2 men, 1 out of 3 women, 1 out of 4 worldwide. It's becoming a leading cause of death worldwide. It's growing exponentially. So if it were true, that it's genetic then, our grandparents should've had it. They all should've had it. And that's not the case. Okay, so we now know that cancer is not genetic. It's not due to mutations on the genome. What happens is our little organellas inside the cell that make energy, are called mitochondria. When enough of them become damaged, the cell, to survive, starts to produce energy through fermentation which a very primitive way of making energy. So now the cell starts to ferment and in order to support the fermentation, it changes its genetic expression so it turns on genes, it turns off genes. The genes, that turned on are what are called oncogenes. Oncogenes are simply to support fermentation. That's what they are. So the genome, or the genetic expression is what is known now as the downstream epiphenomenon. It's not something that causes it, it's in the backseat, driving. There's another driver, the driver is called the epigenome, the environment around the cell, to which the cell responds. The DNA is just a library of potential responses and it will only respond to what it needs to respond. Too much sugar? It down regulates insulin receptors. So, the genetic expression is always a response to the environment. That's great news, we can change that. We can't change the genes, but we can change the environment. Therefore we can really determine, what genes are gonna be expressed. And this is not just a nice theory. It's been well-researched and published in peer review journals. So basically, that's it. So cancer, diabetes, all of these things, again are the same thing. They're the body's response, the adaptive homeostatic response to an unfavourable situation, always.
Alex: I agree totally, that's fantastic. I, myself am interested in cancer. I was a heavy smoker for 25 years and it was interesting to me after I gave up that people still died from smoking-related diseases, or got cancer 20 or 30 years after they've given up. So that's what could take me down, how do we reverse this process?
Dr Lodi: But what does that tell you? That it wasn't the smoking! Listen, if you smoke a cigarette..Yes, it's a poison that takes 30-40 years to kill you. Arsenic is a little bit faster.
Alex: It is a toxicity load, right?
Dr Lodi: Yeah. So now, if you quit smoking, but you don't change your lifestyle, you don't detoxify, you don't get rid of that and you continue to eat food. Now, I don't know if you know this, but it is more dangerous to eat a french fry than to smoke a cigarette. Fried foods instead of producing free radicals produce reactive aldehydes, which stay active for several minutes whereas free radicals are there for a nanosecond.
Alex: I have industrial vegetable seed oils right at the top of my hate list. Actually, above white refined sugar.
Dr Lodi: Yeah, right. Exactly!
Alex: I remember reading about this when I was reading about cholesterol and exploring that myth. As you know cholesterol is an essential component of our cell membranes. If we're eating wrong kind of fats, like deep fried fats, we're making our membranes out of that. Out of that bad fat! Which is causing the stress on the cell, it's not allowing the nutrients in and it's not allowing the waste out. And so I agree with you totally, yeah.
Dr Lodi: So yeah, cholesterol is essential. And basically, if you want to just have a broad understanding, it's that everything we've ever learned is the opposite of the truth. You can't.. there's not even a little bit of truth there. If you understand that then you can proceed.
Alex: For me, the education is so empowering! It provides you such a great peace of mind, that you are in control, you don't have to outsource that out to "specialists" who don't seem to have very efficacious rate of healing.
Dr Lodi: Doctors, they know nothing about health - they are disease managers. So, they can't restore you the health cause they don't know what it is.
Alex: I'm not sure if everyone knows this but you're actually an oncologist...
Dr Lodi: I didn't finish an oncology fellowship, because I didn't have what it takes to kill people. So I did it on my own and now I've been practicing integrative oncology for over 20 years.
Alex: So what are people doing wrong, and what should they be doing for preventative care? The second part of that question is if it's really serious, what can they do then?
Dr Lodi: Well, again, keeping things simple. We're living artificial lives. So what do you do? Live a natural one. What does that mean? That means you go to bed when the sun goes down. That means you eat only when you're hungry. And then you have to learn, to determine, distinguish between hunger and appetite. Those are two different things. They're not at all, not even of the same universe. Appetite is something that comes from the mind. Hunger comes from the body. And hunger, like all bodily functions is not brought to our attention through pain. It's brought to our attention as a longing, as a desire. It's not a pain. If you're feeling pain, it's because your body is finally getting rid of it, rebalancing after eating improperly before. So basically, you need to get back to nature, you need to get back to living an authentic life. And that starts with cleansing the body. But of course, going to sleep early, you know.. Exercise has become an actual phenomenon that we need to do, you know. And when we lived the natural life, we moved our bodies just to live. Just to be alive, so we didn't need to. I was down in Vanuat hiking with a lot of natives. And these were young kids, 18-19, with what we would call ripped, perfect bodies, and they never went to the gym, they don't even know what the gym is. That's just from living. You know, that's our natural state, that's health, right? They also didn't chatter. They only talked about things that were necessary and appropriate. I can't imagine them gossiping about what somebody was wearing.
Alex: Really comfortable with silence, right? Really comfortable in their own heads.
Dr Lodi: Right, 'cause they're part of it all. And you eat human food. But the big question is however, "what is human food?". And that's a whole discussion, but basically, in case people don't know, human food is plants, fruits, nuts and seeds. We probably eat a few insects too. Maybe some eggs, you know, in a natural setting we're gonna probably do that. But...it violates everything in us, to grab an animal and start eating it alive. Neither do we get excited and start salivating when we see a corpse on the road. And say, "Hmmm, let me take that home!" In other words to eat that stuff, you have to have been trained from an early age. Like people in certain parts of China up from an early age eat a live monkey brain and they can't imagine living life without it. Okay, so… "Oh, I can't eat monkey brain once a month, huh!" "Who wants to be alive?" So we have to understand, that our appetites, which are in the mind, within certain perspectives and contexts, are cultural. They come from our cultural experiences. So, eating a natural human diet. What is that? I mean...put an apple and a bunny in front of a baby, a little one-year-old, what's he gonna do? He's gonna eat the apple and he is gonna play with the rabbit. That's not what a baby lion would do. You see, so we have to go back to that, we don't understand that.
So eating human food and eating it only when hungry. Getting proper sleep, moving your body around. Having authentic relationships, stop lying. We all lie. We've got to stop lying.
Alex: That's important, yeah, destroying a little piece of your soul every time.
Dr Lodi: It is emotional puss.
Alex: Emotions then get repressed and that can be one of the leading causes, which is probably a topic for another day.
Dr Lodi: It's a big deal. But anyway, so it's not genetic. And we're turning to a natural lifestyle. Now, what we have to do here, though, because people are already far long the way of pathology, is use various plant-based bio-identical hormones. We get intravenous vitamin C and also intravenous curcumin, which comes from turmeric. This is important to not only fight cancer, but also to eliminate and quell inflammation, which is the underlying pathology in all conditions. So we do a variety of things, intravenously and lifestyle related. You have to clean the colon. Gotta get the lymphatics working. And you have to meditate! You have to turn the madman, madwoman off cause in our minds, we're all crazy.
Alex: One of the hardest thing for me to do as a holistic lifestyle coach is to get my clients who are generally you know, busy executives, busy moms and dads to meditate. The more they need it, the harder they fight.
Dr Lodi: You just tell, "It's five minutes, twice a day. Anybody can do that.
Alex: Yeah, that's tough.
Dr Lodi: You gotta inspire them.
Alex: So when people come here, what kind of success ratio do you have versus conventional treatment for things chemotherapy? How effective are your treatments?
Dr Lodi: Well, with stage 4 cancer, you've got a less than 5% chance of being alive in five years if you go the conventional route. We get up close to 60% with what we do.
Alex: 60% versus 5%, that is amazing! Why are they not queuing up out the door?
Dr Lodi: They don't know. People don't know about it. And out of fear! You know, the cancer market, the marketing, the PR, started by the American Cancer Society back in the 30s by John D. Rockefeller. They're in some big business, trillion dollar industry and so they're not gonna do anything to diminish the number of potential clients. Yeah, so most people out of fear, run to the hospital, get things taken off, get radiated. Finally, when the oncologist says, "There's nothing else we can do." Then they go looking for alternatives. What we wanna do, the reason I moved to Southeast Asia is, because we have very successful center in the US. But I want to bring that here and I want people to know. Before they get that they don't have to do the other. In fact, I was talking to an Indian man the other day, and he reminded me, that in his culture, what we call conventional medicine, to him it's the alternative. He grew up with that Ayurveda. He grew up in Chinese traditions. So that's a perspective.
Alex: And that's getting forgotten now. You know, I wanted to learn qigong in Singapore and I couldn't find any teachers. I had to go to Malaysia to do that and 85% of population is Chinese in Singapore and in China they're losing it as well. It's a shame. And the Western influence of medical drugs is permeating our cultures.
Dr Lodi: But diabetes, you have type 2 diabetes. 100% will no longer have diabetes,
if they do exactly what we say within two weeks.
Alex: Wow
Dr Lodi: Check that out!
Alex: That’s amazing. Thanks so much for your time.
Dr Lodi: You're welcome.
Alex: It's been a pleasure to meet you and I hope we can do this again.
Dr Lodi: Thanks for coming.
To your health, happiness and longevity,
The Levitise Team
P.S. If you love this blog post then do check out our fortnightly newsletter where you'll get the freshest content on health, nutrition and fitness delivered straight to your inbox. Don't miss out and sign up here with just your name and email.
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