Do Mushrooms Help Your Body Fight Cancer? The Science Behind Medicinal Mushrooms | Dr. Catalina Fernández | Be Well Moments

Can medicinal mushrooms really support cancer treatment? Dr. Catalina Fernández explains how mushrooms may help strengthen the immune system, reshape the gut microbiome, and improve quality of life during conventional cancer care.Dr. Catalina Fernández

Listen to the full episode⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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If you enjoyed this episode you might also like:

Can These Mushrooms Heal Your Gut, Stop Alzheimer’s, & Fight Cancer? | Dr Catalina Fernándezhttps://youtu.be/FM44DD_Cc78

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#CancerTreatment #MedicinalMushrooms #IntegrativeOncology

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers
improve their health and well-being.
So many people have been diagnosed with cancer, 18
million people were diagnosed around the world with cancer.
And obviously now five years later, that's only growing more
and more. I think the fact that you've

(00:23):
you're connecting so much of these medicinal mushrooms into
cancer treatment, which I reallywant to delve into, and even
autism, that's super interestingfor me.
But I have to talk about the cancer treatment.
You're an oncologist by background.
We've just heard about all the incredible ways that different
types of mushrooms can help support the body and the whole

(00:43):
system, the body, the mind, the immune system, everything, the
endocrine system. But you know, we've touched a
little bit here through the showon cancer, and you started by
saying at the beginning of this podcast that you're looking at
breast cancer treatment at the moment with certain mushrooms.
It's a mix of eight different 8 medicinal mushrooms, yes.

(01:04):
So I was looking kind of before this podcast, obviously at all
the different clinical trials that you're doing.
And I also looked at a recent review that found that 92
mushroom species have been foundwith anti cancerous effects in
the lab, but only 11 have reached clinical trials.
And so I thought, well, what a better time to start this with
you who is pioneering this sector in cancer treatment?

(01:27):
2 very different camps bringing it together.
How does mushrooms help support cancer treatment?
And is there any type of cancer which has shown the kind of best
outcome with mushrooms? So it's going to work in what's
called the different hallmarks of cancer, which what takes
healthy cell in a healthy environment to a tumorigenic

(01:53):
environment where it's not healthy anymore, it's not clean
anymore. So the cell is going to go
through different steps, different hallmarks where it's
going to become carcinogens, andthen it's going to invade other
bases and it's going to invade other terrains of the body.

(02:14):
How the mushrooms work from a very, very high level would be
on the immune system been biological respond modifiers.
So changing the response of the immune system versus recognizing
the cancer cell and understanding that that is a

(02:34):
cancer cell and attacking it. Wow, so it can directly.
It's not going to be as you knowdirect as that, but there are
mechanisms of action. They're going to be helping
through various mechanism, but the most important is the immune
system. And then we're seeing a lot on
microbiota and. The gut microbiome.

(02:56):
So the gut microbiome, it's going to definitely be something
that we see from from scratch when we see a patient that has a
cancer that has a diagnose, their gut microbiome is
different from a healthy person,yes.

(03:17):
So we know there's a difference there.
And when we start working with the medicinal mushrooms in a
person who has this dysbiosis, has a system in the gut
microbiota that is not in equilibrium, in balance, then

(03:38):
with the mushrooms, what we see is that they start changing,
reshaping their composition of their gut microbiota microbiome
into the healthier one. It's a long process, as we
always say, it doesn't happen overnight.
But what we do see is that you can change the composition of

(04:02):
your microbiome only in five days. 1 billion people worldwide
are deficient in this nutrient that so.
Many of you guys might not be aware of.
And women, if you're listening, you are more at risk of being
deficient in this nutrient. So I'm going to first of all
explain what the. Physical symptoms are.
If you have cold hands and feet,pale skin, extreme lack of

(04:23):
energy or fatigue then you mightbe suffering with iron
deficiency or anemia. Now First off, please go to your
GP to get your iron levels checked.
Secondly, please explore a good iron supplement.
Many people that come to me are worried about taking iron
supplementation because it can cause Constipation or GI

(04:44):
distress. That's why I'm so incredibly
proud to be partnering for this episode with Spartan, the number
one iron rich water supplement. Now I've personally been using
these for years. The reason why is because they
are naturally sourced, highly absorbable iron.
That means it's much more gentleon your stomach.

(05:05):
There's no harsh tablets, it's just one naturally sourced
ingredient that works very well.You can pick it up in Boots or
buy online at Amazon. But please do not ignore this.
It is really critical to make sure your iron levels are in
check. It blows my mind.
And I'm, I love that I'm having so many different types of

(05:25):
conversations coming to my mind right now because Doctor William
Lee has come on here quite a fewtimes and he talks a lot about
food and cancer treatments. And he speaks a lot about the
gut microbiome needing to be targeted during cancer treatment
as well. And I think just getting people
to hear that conversation, you know, I think every single
person listening to this has hadsomebody in their life that has

(05:48):
been touched by cancer. And sometimes that diagnosis can
feel very heavy. And also there's only one route
and I think knowing that there is also evidence out there of
other things that aren't dangerous because again,
sometimes there are things that are dangerous that's mentioned
that are that do come with safety is important in this.

(06:09):
And thinking about the gut microbiome when going through
cancer care and treatment is is really important to be
considered. Yes.
What we are always doing is bringing in the concept of
integration. It's integrative medicine, it's
integrative oncology, never alternative.
We're always talking of side by side with the medical

(06:31):
oncological treatment of the hospital treatment.
So people are taking the treatment, but what we are
doing, bringing the medicinal mushrooms in is helping them to
cope better with that treatment,to have to have a better quality
of life while getting the treatment.
And overall for the oncologists is to get that patient supported

(06:57):
through or out of all the treatment.
So we can get the competition ofthe the whole window of
treatment that we have to work in because it's very intense.
So we need to work. And for that we work with
serums, creams for radiotherapy,with mushrooms, with Cordyceps
and reishi. We also work with this liquid

(07:22):
forms which are very specific. Now what?
One thing that it's very important and more than
anything, when we're talking about an illness or when we're
talking about cancer, more than anything, it's very important
that not everything it's can be taken.
For example, the forms that havealcohol shouldn't be taken.

(07:47):
So that you see that a lot in tinches, don't you?
Yes, OK. That's really.
Good tinches shouldn't be taken because always when we studied
the evidence to work in cancer, it's always with extracts
because if we bring alcohol intoa body that is, you know, trying
to detoxify all of the chemotherapy, we're bringing

(08:10):
more problems to that liver, those drugs.
So it is hugely important that if we trust a treatment of
medicinal mushrooms while we areundergoing a cancer treatment,
it has to be a validated model with clinical trials, with going

(08:31):
through a clinical committee, ethical committees of the.
Hospitals. That there's evidence, solid
evidence. The rates of cancer incidents
are mind blowing right now. When I presented my thesis 3
years ago now the they I was presenting.

(08:52):
So this is something we need to be very aware about.
Where do we live? What do we breathe everyday?
What do we drink, what do we eat?
And then that being the basis ofour health and the health span
that we're going to have dependson this, on what we do every
day. And then we can throw really

(09:14):
good things into that. Nutrition, which is Lion's win
for being 1, can be something that on a daily basis can work
at a cellular level, bringing a little bit of of that extract or
powder of the mushroom in. It's going to work in different
ways in different equilibriums, balancing the cells and the

(09:38):
cycles of the cells. So they're going to be fed on on
this molecules and this ingredients and they're going to
be building a new system that's going to help.
But it's not going to happen overnight.
This is something that we have to be taking it minimum three
months I would say in order to find the difference in my

(09:58):
analytics. We can see that before we can
see a difference in analytics in17 days, even in the microbiome
in five days, as fast as fast days.
But if we put it in and then we take it off because we feel
better and we don't keep it for three months, the ameliorations
will come and go as fast as theycame, they will go.

(10:22):
Thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode.
There's a link in the description.