Transcript:

Episode 20: Childhood Cancer

Dr. Pompa:

All right. Yeah. Welcome to Health Hunters, and I’ll tell you, this topic today should grab you, especially if you have children, but I think, even if you don’t, this topic should really grab you. Today’s topic is cancer in children. I have to say, this is relatively a new phenomenon, when you look at the statistics on childhood cancers, and I think our guest can share some of those with us today, because we do, in fact, have a guest. You know my story is from pain to purpose, and Dr. Ryan—and I asked him how to pronounce it at the beginning, and he gave me some German pronunciation that threw me off—Sternagel, and I’ll let him pronounce it, Dr. Ryan, but mixing the German and the English. Listen, this topic is near and dear to your heart, because you lived this story, obviously, with your own son, but it is a pain to purpose story.

When we look at this topic of children with cancer today, I think people don’t understand what’s happening, because it’s become so common that it almost becomes normal, and I can tell you, just because something’s common doesn’t mean it’s normal. It’s not normal, especially when you look at statistics in other countries, even third-world countries, and you look at their cancer statistics in children. The difference is striking, so with that said, let me introduce my guest.

Dr. Ryan, I don’t want to butcher your name again, because the Sternagel, Sternagel—how do you pronounce it, Dr. Ryan? Give me the German pronunciation.

Ryan:

Two corrections. The German pronunciation is Sternagel. I think, Sternagel—you’ve got to do a little S-H at the beginning there. American pronunciation [00:02:54] my family.

Dr. Pompa:

Sternagel?

Ryan:

Sternagel. Sternagel.

Dr. Pompa:

Sternagel.

Ryan:

Second correction, there’s no doctor as of yet, Dr. Pompa. That’s still on the roadmap on the purpose side of things, I suppose, but yeah, just a guy who’s been hitting the books pretty hard for the past year or two.

Dr. Pompa:

You’ve been interviewed on a lot of podcasts. You’ve got your name out there, and I can tell you, none of my education on what I teach on came out of my schooling. It really was in my pain that I discovered everything that I teach today. Now, granted, my degree helped me be able to read the literature, helped me understand it all, but that was pretty much it. I guess the biochemistry, the chemistry helped me in certain aspects, no doubt. You probably had those in your undergrad anyway, but the bottom line, though, is that really from pain to purpose. With that said, Ryan, tell your story, because childhood cancers—matter of fact, share some statistics with you, and then you can get into your story.

Ryan:

Yeah, statistics anywhere—it’s hard to tell worldwide. You find different numbers, but it’s somewhere between 250 and 300,000 kids per year are diagnosed with cancer all across the world at this point, which is just—yeah, it’s an astounding number, and when I—I’ll tell my story in a second, but when I started looking into this, it’s been known for quite some time that the adult cancer rate is going up. I don’t think anyone would dispute that at this point, but yeah, what doesn’t get talked about as much is that the childhood cancer rate has been going up right along with it, and I don’t know, I guess around the time that everything started industrializing, but it went from practically zero. Doctors had to fly across the country if they wanted to see an up close and personal case of childhood cancer, and now, I don’t know, you go to the mall, and I’m sure you’ll see a kid losing his hair and with a feeding tube and whatnot, so it’s—yeah, it’s—

Dr. Pompa:

A statistic in my mind pops out, because it was in one of my Power Points from when I spoke at Bulletproof a couple of weeks ago, and it was 67.1 percent rise in childhood cancer since the 1950s. That’s almost a 70 percent increase. In your mind, what has changed since the 50s until now?

Ryan:

I think it’s the same conversations that we have with adults. I think it’s amplified in children, just the toxic storm of all the personal care products that parents are—or that maybe expectant mothers are slathering on themselves and just breathing in the air and the pesticides and glyphosate, the GMOs. EMS, I think, is huge. I’ve been reading a lot of studies on EMS and how they’re bad for everyone but especially for children, and I don’t know. Combine all that with poor nutrition, and you throw all that into a child during their very formation, then I don’t know, I guess it’s not all that surprising that the rate’s on the rise when you just kind of think about it that way. Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:

You’re right, and I want to talk about some of those things in the next segment, because if we don’t talk about those things and understand where it’s coming from, then how do we avoid this? I think avoidance is key, but go ahead and tell your story, because that’s obviously what got you here.

Ryan:

Yeah, so my wife, Teddy, and I were—I don’t know. We were just starting to get into natural health stuff for the past couple of years before we found out our son had cancer, but we were messing around with different diets and starting to eat organic, and we really cleaned up before Teddy had gotten pregnant, because that was important to us. Yeah, so our son, Ryder, was almost a year old, about a month before his first birthday, and Teddy was nursing him. She felt a lump in his back, and it wasn’t just bulging out or anything. He had to be bent over the right way to feel it, and she had me feel it. It took a second, but yeah, it was definitely something there, and so I don’t know. We took him to his pediatrician, who was a holistic, naturopathic pediatrician and was already of the mindset that we were, but she did not really think anything of it and actually sent us home, just feeling kind of silly for even, I don’t know, being concerned about a lump sticking out of our kid’s back.

About that time, we had also just started thinking, and there was other stuff that everything was starting to add up to be something really concerning. He was born in the 90th percentile for height and weight, and he just stopped growing at about six months, and he was down around, I think, the 25th by the time he was almost one. He was not crawling, again a month before his first birthday when most of his peers were either crawling around quite handily or some of them walking at that point. He was stationary. He had a hard time even pulling himself up, and also, we started to notice that there wasn’t a whole lot of feeling in his right leg, so yeah, all of that had us pretty concerned, but we got sent home, and actually I think they tried to send us to physical therapy to teach him how to crawl and occupational therapy to teach him how to eat. It actually got blamed—I think the percentile thing got blamed on the fact that he was breastfeeding, which didn’t really go too far with us.

Dr. Pompa:

Gosh. Is that absurd? That’s crazy. We’re already at a segment already. We’re going to finish the story when we come back, but just ending on that note, that they blamed breastfeeding. I want to drive and strangle that doctor. All right, we’ll do that when we come back. We’ll come back on Health Hunters Radio in a moment.

All right. Welcome back, and Ryan, thanks for being here. I know I’ve told my story plenty of times, but when I hear someone else’s story like this, I just thought to myself, as we were breaking there, I can’t imagine. I just can’t imagine. It’s one thing, me getting sick, but it’s another thing, watching one of your children. I think it’s worse. I know it is. It’s just like the death of a child. I think there’s nothing worse than that, and so watching your child go through this, I can’t imagine. Telling this story—I guess you’ve told it enough times where it’s like, okay, it just becomes a story. That’s the way it is with me, but I tell you, it’s emotional, man, so finish out what happened.

Ryan:

Yeah, and it was. You’re absolutely right. Once we got the diagnosis, I begged God every day to take it from him and give it to him, but that’s obviously not how it works. Yeah, we kept pressing. We knew something was up, especially my wife. All credit goes to the mother’s instincts, because it was my instinct to try to be reassuring and assure her everything’s fine and that sort of thing, even though I had a bad feeling myself, but it was really Teddy that was really driving the thing to get the—ended up getting us the diagnosis as quickly as possible, which actually probably—not probably. It did save Ryder’s life, so anyway, we went home but then didn’t feel good about that. We pressed to get referred to a hospital and got referred to what we thought was a doctor, but then it turned out to be a physician’s assistant.

The physician’s assistant told us—he took an x-ray and thought everything was fine. Actually, he saw Ryder was constipated, which was also something really new. He’d been super regular his whole life, and then, right at that point, he hadn’t gone in the last couple of weeks, and that was also something freak and strange, but no, he took an x-ray and sent us home, and again, Teddy didn’t feel—or we both didn’t feel good about that. We demanded to see an actual doctor and then pretty much had to talk our way into getting an ultrasound and an MRI, and the ultrasound, sure enough, revealed that there was something in there. Now, they needed to rule out—

Dr. Pompa:

Ryan, what was on the back that you originally saw? Was it changing, growing, or staying the same?

Ryan:

This was all in the span of a couple of weeks.

Dr. Pompa:

Oh, okay. All right.

Ryan:

Yeah, it was—literally, they sent us home, and we called back the next day, like, now let us back in there to see someone else.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, got it. Yeah.

Ryan:

Yeah, but the physician’s assistant did tell us to come back in six weeks, which, yeah, is just mind-blowing with all of those red flags I just mentioned and the fact that the kid’s got a lump sticking out of his back and all that, but anyway, we finally pressed for an ultrasound. We got the ultrasound, and in the meantime, Teddy had actually been playing Dr. Google and had come across neuroblastoma, which is a childhood cancer of the nervous system, and she basically had Ryder diagnosed in her mind and to any medical professional that would listen, neuroblastoma—I think of neuroblastoma, and every one of us tried to talk her out of that, but after the ultrasound came, they said, okay, well, now we need an MRI to rule out neuroblastoma. We got the MRI, and the MRI took—they said it was supposed to take 45 minutes, and we were in there for—we were waiting for close to two hours, and by the end of it, we knew something was up. We could see the nurses and the doctors kind of walking by our little waiting room with more concerned looks on their faces and that sort of thing, and the doctor—

Dr. Pompa:

That must have been the worst two hours of your life, right there, just—

Ryan:

Yeah, it was.

Dr. Pompa:

You know, fear is at its greatest point when you don’t know, right? It’s the unknown. The uncertainty creates the greatest fear, and there you are in that moment.

Ryan:

Yeah, and I’m already—like I said, we kind of already knew at that point without actually having heard it, so I’m starting to run through everything I’ve heard on natural cancer treatments or integrative cancer treatments and documentaries I’d seen and just trying to scrape all my knowledge together, getting ready, and sure enough, the nurse and the doctor came back, and they were both female. They were actually both crying, and they said, the lump you felt on your son’s back was just the tip of the iceberg. Those were their exact words, and turned out, yeah, he had a tumor inside of and growing out of his spine that was larger than his kidneys and a couple secondary tumors growing off of that, and they had all metastasized into his hip bones, so yeah, it was stage 4 neuroblastoma, which, yeah, that was—we went from just wondering what this little lump next to our son’s spine was to—so it was actually a miracle that we did get the diagnosis when we did, because every medical professional that sees those scans now say they’re amazed that—fast forward to today, Ryder’s running around, and he’s a normal, little 4-year-old, but he should’ve been—

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, with that said, what the prognosis at that time?

Ryan:

The prognosis at that—at that exact time, they weren’t sure whether—so there’s risk groups within neuroblastoma. Even if you’re stage 4, there’s high-risk, intermediate-risk, and low-risk. If you get diagnosed sometime after one year old, you’re a candidate for high-risk, and those odds are 50/50. Intermediate-risk is more around 85, 90 percent, I believe, and this was like 11 days before—it was exactly 11 days before his first birthday, so it’s kind of funny—funny’s not the right word, but if he had gotten diagnosed 11 days later, he potentially could’ve been in the high-risk group, and that would’ve been—his protocol, the standard of care was eight rounds of chemotherapy. For the high-risk kids, it’s chemotherapy plus radiation plus immunotherapy. They really just throw the kitchen sink at those kids, so yeah—

Dr. Pompa:

By the way, as a parent, of course, they’re saying, here’s the therapy, and of course, your mind’s going, well, is this the right therapy? Of course, you hear statistics, and of course, I’m sure you and your wife did a lot of research. Now, with kids, you have to understand out there listening, you pretty much have to do this. Otherwise, CYS comes in, Child Youth Services, and they’ll take your child. Did you go through any of that emotional thought, like what if—is this the right therapy? Tell me that process that you went through.

Ryan:

Oh, it was really hard. It was really hard, because like I said, I had already seen—I didn’t know as much as I know today, but I knew enough that there’s quite a few ways to skin that cat, and I didn’t necessarily want to start with the most toxic option, but yeah, no, it was made pretty clear to us pretty early on that we did not have a choice, and we clearly wanted to—I don’t know. We talked to a lot of the alternative health people that you see featured in documentaries and such, and of course, they’d just say, well, if it was my kid, I’d be in jail, or I’d be on the way to Mexico or something. It’s like, well, if you’re in jail, then [00:18:14] treatment.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, I know. Right. Yeah, none of us can say what we would’ve done, but the law pretty much can determine that. That’s for sure. More of this when we come back, man. I can’t wait to hear the rest of the story, so thank you, Ryan, again.

All right, welcome back. Wow. What a story, and you know, I don’t think any of us put in that situation, when your baby has cancer, stage 4—what would we do? My background is, I don’t trust them. I don’t trust the medical field. I know the statistics all too well. I know the outcomes. I’ve been down that road with family members, and so therefore my history, my knowledge makes me question, but put in that situation, where I would have to question, and I’m digging, and I’m searching. Man, what do you do? There you are. You’re faced pretty much—like you said, they give—you have no choice. Yeah, you will go to jail or take your child. Any of that is not worth it. Run where? Go where? There you are. You’re faced with that decision. You make the decision. Tell us the rest.

Ryan:

Yeah, and so the choice we realized that we did have, and this is what I tell the parents who I talk to every day now, going through these same types of decisions, is it doesn’t have to be one or the other, and we did, right from the start, just start throwing our own kitchen sink at him. You walk through the oncology ward of the hospital, and you see all these kids running around with the feeding tubes sticking out of their nose, and at first, my wife and I were both, that’s not going to be our kid. He’s not going to need a feeding tube, but then we started researching. Just everything we were finding, all the supplements, all the juices, all this stuff, and then, how are we going to get all of this into a 1-year-old who has never even taken a bite of food? It became obvious that that was really the best way, so we actually insisted on him getting a feeding tube upfront before he ever even received any conventional treatment, and that was actually—they’d already [00:20:37], and they didn’t understand why we would want to put a feeding tube in our kid before he was emaciated and going through all that stuff, but we ended up getting the feeding tube in, and we just started pumping him full of just everything.

We brought a juicer into the hospital. We were making him all sorts of green juices, and we were researching the Gerson protocol and trying to copy that the best that we could within the confines of our hospital room and just overnighting supplements from Amazon, just pushing them in. Green tea extract and everything we could really just—yeah, I was Googling chemotherapy protective supplements and trying to educate myself best I could on all that stuff, and we just started pumping him full of as much stuff as we could, knowing that we didn’t have all the answers, and that’s what I’ll also tell everyone is, don’t think you have to have it all figured out day one.

I’ve been researching this stuff three and a half years, and I know there’s a whole lot I still don’t know, but just taking action is better than not taking action, so we dove in, and Ryder was the best—I like to say he was the best-looking kid in the oncology ward, because he did—Teddy and I looked more like cancer patients than he did early on, because we were certainly not taking too great of care of ourselves, which is something I would go back and change if I could, but yeah, so he got—kind of fast forward. He received a few rounds of chemotherapy, and at that point, it was—we were just trying to figure out how much is going to be enough, and when could we stop, and how do we minimize this, and that sort of thing, and we never really got straight answers as far as what the stopping point was and how much was going to be enough.

We ended up moving over the whole thing. We moved states. We’re here in Utah now, and not like anywhere is perfect or anything like that. There’s CPS and these sorts of laws everywhere, but we just happened—Ryder already made so much progress. Just a couple months later, and the tumors had shrunk. The secondary ones were gone. The primary one was—I think, at the time of his scan after the fourth round, it had shrunk about 85 percent or so, and it was just kind of blowing all expectations out of the water, and I like to think we had something to do with that. Yeah, by the time we got to Utah, the team here was okay with taking a wait and see approach, and this was halfway through the protocol that he was supposed to receive for an intermediate-risk stage 4 neuroblastoma diagnosis and a tiny fraction of what it would have been if he had been diagnosed a little later and he had got put in the high-risk group.

Yeah, that was the last drop of conventional treatment he received, and we just—it was funny. Once we actually had the decision, it wasn’t exactly easy to make. It did kind of take us back when he actually asked, well, okay, do you want to stop early? Do you really want to do this? The team here was still trying to talk us into doing more. They just weren’t making us. It was a tough decision, but yeah, we kind of stuck with it and just, like I said, we’ve been just learning and implementing as we go. We got the—I’m looking at our infrared sauna right now that Ryder loves. We play games in the infrared, and yeah, so that’s—lots more twists and turns to the story, but that’s basically it. We’re three and a half years out now from diagnosis, and the primary is—it continued to shrink for a little longer after we got out, and we kept doing all the alternative, natural stuff, and at some point, it leveled off. It’s still there but a tiny fraction of what it was, and it’s basically just been flatlined for the last year or so, year and a half, I’d say, and yeah.

Dr. Pompa:

What do they say about that, as far as what are the chances of it growing again? Will he live his life like that? Will it all of a sudden, at a certain age, start to resolve again? What are they saying?

Ryan:

Yeah, they’re basically saying that they would be—it lists the size of the tumor as big as it was to start. They’d actually be surprised if there was not any residual tissue, any residual mass, just because it was so big, and there was so much of that tumor tissue surrounding it that the kids, more often than not, if they have a tumor that big, they are left with just a little residual mass that—it’s something we keep an eye on. We’ve gone back for MRIs. It was every three months, and then it was every six months, and this last time, they told us they didn’t want to see us for a year, so it’s just been a day-by-day thing, but you feel a little better every day out you go, so yeah.

Dr. Pompa:

Looking back, I’m a person of cause, right? We look at the literature, and I’ve interviewed Thomas Seyfried. He wrote a book called Cancer As a Metabolic Disease, and we look back at all of the research, Warburg at the turn of the century in the 1900s. We know there’s a causative factor for cancer. The modern-day theory, if you will, at least dogma at this point, is that, hey, you’re just unlucky. You got the gene, but really, the science shows otherwise. It’s not about gene of cancer, and yet we have billions of dollars going into that. It’s more about what’s happening at the cell, so looking back, what do you think? You know your wife’s history, health history. What are your biggest theories, looking back, of causation here?

Ryan:

Yeah, I’ve looked back, and it certainly—my wife and I, throughout growing up and college, were living the pretty typical, standard American lifestyle, standard American diet, all that stuff, so that certainly was probably part of it, but there’s obviously plenty of people living the standard American lifestyle whose children don’t get diagnosed with cancer, so I don’t know if there was some sort of predisposition that—

Dr. Pompa:

Triggered?

Ryan:

—pushed him over the line. I guess the part of the story I left out was, along the way, right when he was getting his first initial scan, somebody came into the room and said, by the way, your son has a double aorta.

Dr. Pompa:

Hold that thought. Hold that thought for when we get back. Double aorta, and we’re going to talk about solutions when we get back as well.

All right. Double aorta. Okay, you dropped that bomb on us right before we were coming into solutions. Okay, so a person walks into the room and says, guess what? He has a double aorta. Talk about that.

Ryan:

Yeah, and so that actually explained why he wasn’t eating. When he was, there was—so we all have one aortic arch coming off of our heart, the main valve. He had two, and they were wrapped around his esophagus and his trachea and compressing it, so every time he’d go to swallow any sort of solid food, he’d gag it back up, so that was another explanation, so it was just illustrative of the fact that something clearly went wrong with the kid, but we ended up actually—after we moved and got the cancer under control, we had to fly across the country to the top heart surgeon in the country, pediatric heart surgeon in the country, and get that taken care of. Yeah, predisposition.

The other—I know you’ve also had Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, epigenetics, emotions, thoughts, all that. I don’t know. I guess one other thing that I do think back to is my wife was under an immense amount of stress during her pregnancy. She actually had a really rough work situation, one of those classic they’re trying to make her quit, so she wanted, I don’t know, to get the maternity leave or whatever, and it really got to her. We ended up pulling her out early, so I don’t know if you want to—epigenetics, or just straight a bunch of cortisol dumping in during the formation is probably not a good thing, either, so yeah.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, but see, it’s a perfect storm. When we look at why an adult gets sick, I hear the same stories. It’s always physical, emotional, and chemical stressors. The body doesn’t know the difference, right? It doesn’t. Elevated cortisol is a stress, and it’s a stress reaction. All of it. Chemical toxins. When I spoke at Bulletproof, I mentioned at the beginning—I spoke on generational toxicity, how in utero the baby is inheriting Mom’s toxic load, right? Again, genes are turned on. We all have them. We all have genes that are turned on, so the old dogma, as I said before, was, oh, you just got cancer, because your mom had that cancer. We know it’s not true. We know those genes can be triggered, turned on. They’re susceptible.

However, the good news is, number one, we can turn them off. Number two, it’s a susceptibility. It doesn’t mean it has to be turned on, but stressors, physical, chemical, and emotional, do trigger them. They turn them on, so something happened in utero that turned on this gene, and the good news is, it can be turned off. Okay, let’s talk about some of the things that you did that were extra and on top of the treatments that they were doing that you felt were really important, and what did you learn? What did you learn, what other treatments? If someone’s listening to this that is battling cancer, childhood or adult, what recommendations would you have for them as well?

Ryan:

For childhood specifically, one thing that I gravitated to was just the research, and you can—if you’re going through cancer right now, and you’re interested in integrative stuff and that sort of thing, you can find plenty of alternative cancer blogs and people writing about these sorts of things, but nothing really in the terms of children, until now, I guess. Now we have our own website, “My Kid Cures Cancer,” which maybe we can talk about the website.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, your website. Give your website, Ryan.

Ryan:

The website’s mykidcurescancer.com. We started writing articles just about everything we were finding, and that led to making videos of us doing all this stuff. That led to a podcast, interviewing health experts and naturopathic oncologists and just talking about all things cancer healing, so that’s [00:32:10].

Dr. Pompa:

[00:32:10].

Ryan:

Yeah, childhood cancer specifically, there wasn’t really anything out there, but I was already of the mind that I knew that there was research on natural treatments and whatnot, and I just dove into PubMed. I started searching all of these compounds that I was finding, just the curcumin, the green tea, the genistein, the resveratrol, just going down the list. You just Google anti-cancer supplement or something like that, and then I was literally just searching those compounds in combination with neuroblastoma on PubMed, and sure enough, there was a whole bunch of stuff on there. Beta carotene kills neuroblastoma stem cells, and vitamin C or ascorbate. There were a lot of studies on neuroblastoma and ascorbate, so we were doing—we actually found a naturopathic oncologist early on that was—and that’s actually a differentiation from someone—for anyone listening as well, there is naturopaths, and then there’s naturopathic oncologists, which is an actual naturopath that specializes in cancer.

We found one that was willing to work on a child, which is not all of them, unfortunately, just due to the political climate, but we did find one, so we were doing intravenous vitamin C and BMSO, alongside the conventional treatment. I tried to get him in a hyperbaric chamber, but it was a soft shell and one of those ones that you’re in a little cocoon, and with everything else going on, he never really took to that, but we tried in earnest.

What else? Like I said, we had the infrared sauna for detoxification, trying to stimulate hyperthermia and stimulate the immune system, that sort of thing, and really a covered bowl of various supplements, and like I said, just trying to flood his body with nutrition in general. The easiest way to do that was juicing, so we’d just make crazy, green juices or the Gerson carrot apple juice, lots of stuff like that, and just mix the supplements in with it. It went right down the tube. Yeah. You name it, we’ve tried it. Essential oils, those are easy for kids. We’d rub in essential oils just right on the tumor location many, many times per day, and yeah, we just tried to create a perfect storm, and it seemed to work out.

Dr. Pompa:

I look at situations like this now, because of my life, and every bit of hard stuff that I’ve had in my life has really turned out to be what God had for me as far as, this is your purpose. Now, when I have hard things, I look in the pain for the purpose. That’s something I teach the doctors I train as well. Look for your purpose in your pain, but when I look at a kid like this, I immediately now say, man, what an advantage he has. For him, knowing where he’s come from. For you all, knowing where he was. This child is being fed a diet, supplements, nutrition—even a parent who knows this stuff would never be as driven to give their child—I fear being sick again, so therefore I live an extraordinary, healthy life, and I do extraordinary things, because I fear going back. My gosh, if my son, if any of my children got cancer, I know this, I’d have been more driven to put the perfect nutrients in them. I’d have been more driven to do all of the crazy biohacks that I do into them. This child’s been blessed. That’s the way I look at it. How is he now? What is he, four and a half, right? He’s four and a half years old.

Ryan:

Yeah, he’s four and a half, and he’s – yeah, he’s the healthiest of his peers, that’s for sure.

Dr. Pompa:

Yeah, no doubt about it, right? How does he—what does he eat on a daily basis now, and how does he tolerate the—does he swallow pills? How do you get it in him? Tell us some things like that.

Ryan:

Yeah, no, it’s been a progression from doing everything in the feeding tube to trying to mix everything into juices that actually tasted good and that sort of thing to now, he’s actually just taking capsules and supplements, so that’s—he just takes whatever we want to give him now. It works out, and he’s used to it, and that’s fine. Diet? We’re not crazy about really avoiding any one thing. It’s more just making sure everything is as it should be. Organic, fermented, grass-fed, pasture-raised, not pasturized, but yeah, super, super, super clean is kind of the motto and lots of plants.

Dr. Pompa:

I hear you are really avoiding something huge, and it’s the chemical, glyphosate, being sprayed on all of our food, because he’s eating a hundred percent organic diet, which parents listening, I think that is the first huge step. Studies are showing that this chemical, glyphosate, it disrupts our immune system and our cells multiple, multiple ways. Of course, it disrupts the microbiome. That’s our gut bacteria that are literally responsible for 70 percent of our immune system. We know that it opens up the gut and allows these things to cross into our body, causing hyperimmunity, so avoiding glyphosate, eating all organic. Ryan, I think that’s the number one takeaway for people, because we know these chemicals are driving cancer, turning on genes, so avoiding them is step one. If you heard one thing from this show, hear that. Hey, Ryan, thank you. I almost called you doctor again, because you’ve got a degree in pain to purpose. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you.