Interview of Dr Conners on The Food Heals Podcast

Did you know that since Nixon declared the war on cancer, cancer rates have actually increased from 1/21 people to 1/2.5?

You can’t point to just one thing and say “this caused my cancer.” You can’t even just point to genetics, because only around 5% of cancers can be attributed to genetics. Cancer comes from a combination of issues: diet, nutrition, environment, emotions, etc. There are epigenetic factors involved – these are the things that change the expression of your genes, and will then either trigger or protect you from cancer and other diseases.

This is why there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Everyone is different, and therefore a cancer diagnosis needs to be treated as such.

In reality, one person might do great on a raw food diet, while another may not have the proper gut health to cope with that. Instead of applying a standard treatment, Dr. Conners treats every single patient as an individual.

That’s where functional testing comes in, which helps you work out exactly what’s hindering your immune system, determine food allergies, intolerances, deficiencies, which in turn helps you create the perfect anti-disease diet for you.

Dr. Conners also works with people with autoimmune conditions and Lyme disease. Just like cancer, these are multifactorial. These days it really isn’t a matter of if you will get an autoimmune disease, but rather which autoimmune condition will you get.

We are constantly damaging our gut walls, which makes us vulnerable to these conditions. Even if you eat organic food, we’re exposed to many chemicals that have damaging effects on our digestive system. A major one is vaccinations, which can damage the brain, increase inflammation, and lead to autoimmune disorders.

So what can you do to protect yourself from cancer and autoimmune conditions? Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as drinking green juice – you have to go deeper.

  • Give up sugar, because sugar feeds into cell replication and therefore cancer.
  • Do you have metal mouth? Depending on your health, you can work with a specialized dentist to replace or remove them.
  • Start with healing and sealing the gut to stop undigested particles triggering inflammation.
  • Get functional medicine tests to determine what is triggering your immune response and how your genes are reacting to your lifestyle.
  • Get in touch with Dr. Conners – you can work with Conners Clinic regardless of your location.
  • Check out Dr. Conners’ website for free book/chapter downloads – if you can’t work with Dr. Conners this is the next best thing. You can take this information to your local doctor.
  • Join/Enroll in one of Dr. Conners’ online health courses – choose from multiple courses like Chronic Disease & Autoimmune, reflecting 35+ years of clinical practice experience, created to help educate and empower you

What you’ll learn in this interview:

  • The cause of 4 out of 5 cancer deaths
  • What’s the deal with genetics and cancer?
  • The problem with keto diets and cancer
  • The supplements to avoid when you have cancer
  • The #1 reason autoimmune disease has gone through the roof
  • How the pharmaceutical industry inhibits real healing
  • Are autoimmune diseases and cancer linked?
  • What causes MS?
  • Should you get your fillings removed?
  • How your body naturally fights cancer all the time

Listen to the Full Podcast Interview

Listen to the Full Interview:

Read the Transcript

Dr Kevin Conners
When President Nixon declared the war on cancer, there was 1/21 Americans would have been diagnosed with cancer back in that time. Now it’s at a rate of 1/2.5 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.

Allison Melody
All right, welcome Food Heals Nation. Thanks for joining us. I’m Alison Melody. When Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1971 it was said that 1/21 Americans would be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. Cut to the early 2000’s; this is when my parents were dealing with cancer. It was said that 1/4 people would be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes and according to today’s guest as of 2020 it is now 1/2.5 people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. I’m shocked. I mean this statistic is showing that the current healthcare model when it comes to cancer is not working and that’s why I’m so glad to have today’s guest, Dr Kevin Conners, here on the show to break down what is working. After graduating from Northwestern Health Sciences University with his doctorate, Dr Conners has spent most of his professional life through the Conners Clinic finding an alternative way to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases. So today he will explain how his multifactorial method has turned into the number one natural cancer treatment center in the country. So I’m very excited for this episode. Tell your friends, send it to any of your loved ones who need to hear this. Let’s get right into it. Please welcome today’s guest, Dr Kevin Conners.

Dr Kevin Conners
How are you?

Allison Melody
I am really, really well. I’m very excited to hear about your journey and your story and have you on today. So you have been practicing Functional Medicine since the 80s’s. Can you take us back and tell us how you got into it?

Dr Kevin Conners
Sure. Well, I graduated as a Chiropractor back in 1986, so I am vintage, maybe, but I graduated as a Kinesiologist, Nutritionist type of Chiropractor. So I was basically doing Functional Medicine before that term came out. Seeing a lot of Autoimmune thyroid patients, adrenal fatigue issues, so dealing with that kind of stuff; though Chiropractic as well. Did that for a number of years. Ended up, getting the little feeling, maybe, I wouldn’t say burned out, but feeling like God had something different for me. I just never, I always felt unsettled. So I sold my practice and went into, ended up going into full time ministry. We served as missionaries down in Mexico, my wife and kids and I. And eventually came back in ’97 and went back into practice again. And then that’s when God showed up and showed me what I was really supposed to do, which was work with cancer patients in particular.

Allison Melody
Yes. And that is so close to my heart because you know, I lost both of my parents to cancer by the time I was 25 years old. Yeah. And I just saw how Western medicine had failed them. And so I went on a mission to discover alternative ways to heal and that’s when, you know, I discovered all of the things that we now know and that you now are helping people with. So I would love to go into cancer a little bit and talk about what you found and what are some of the things that we can do to fight and treat the cause instead of just the bandaid approach.

Dr Kevin Conners
Right. Well, it’s amazing how many cancers that, even the standard medical procedure is to look for the cause, but it’s always postmortem. It’s always after a person passed away if there’s a study going on. And that’s unfortunate because standard medicine, standard ocology does not look at the cause at all with cancers. And though I will say in their defense that if you treat the cause of a person’s cancer, if you were able to be as definitive as possible and do so, it’s not necessarily going to kill the cancer cells that are already growing, but it can help decrease metastasis. And that’s really, 4/5 cancer deaths, that’s really what is the cause of the death is a metastasis. So if you could help decrease the rate of metastasis or or the possible metastasis at all, you’re going to help the patient in the long run.

Allison Melody
Absolutely. And so what are some things that you take your patients through to do that?

Dr Kevin Conners
We look at a patient as holistically as we possibly can. So you have to look at what brought the person up to that point. There are certainly nutritional things that we need to change, dietary things that we need to change. And then environmental things because most of the time when we’re testing a person, so there’s multiple causes of cancer, first of all, there’s never just one thing or rarely just one thing. And many of them are environmental. That’s why I believe, at least one of the reasons why our rate of cancer has increased so dramatically over the last 50 years. Goodness, when I think President Nixon declared the war on cancer, there was 1/21 Americans would have been diagnosed with cancer back in that time. Now it’s at a rate of 1/2.5 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. And the argument is, well, people are living longer. Well, no, it’s not that they’re being diagnosed with cancer at 65, we’re getting children diagnosed with cancer. We’re getting so many more younger people in their teens and 20’s and 30’s diagnosed with cancer that was just never seen before.

Allison Melody
Yeah. And I didn’t even realize it was one 1/2.5 the last stat that I had heard, which I thought maybe it was a few years ago, was 1/4. So it sounds like it’s even gotten worse since I was getting into this. And that’s, you know, that’s a scary fact. And you know, the environmental factor, I’m so glad you bring that up because I also believe that cancer is multifactorial because not only are we, you know, sometimes creating cancer on our own bodies with our lifestyle choices, but sometimes the people who are doing everything supposedly right and eating their greens and everything like that are still being affected. And so that’s when it can be the environmental factors that are really coming into play. So I’d love to hear some of the treatments that you help people do to deal with this.

Dr Kevin Conners
I totally agree with you. We’ve had patients come to us say, how could this possibly be me? I’ve been eating organic for 25 years, we never spray our lawn with pesticides. You know, we’re so very careful in our exposure to chemicals. How could this possibly be? Well, we live in a world that is so toxic. If you’re not doing all those things on that list, your chance of not being sick is pretty much zero. So you have to try to prevent it in as many ways as you can, helping your environment, diet, etc. And still, you know, if they moved to a mountain top, maybe that’d be worse because the air is going to be thinner. I don’t know. But it’s hard getting away from that. So getting to the question of what do we do to treat it?

So number one, we have to share our little legal caveat that we can’t treat cancer. We’re not oncologists. But how do we take care of a person that has a diagnosis of cancer? With that we have to be as holistic as possible too. So be careful. I always warn patients, be careful what you see on the internet. I always try to respond to these little partial factoids that people post on Facebook, you know, some supplement kills cancer in 98% of cases. Well, those things just aren’t true. There’s nothing that’s gonna kill cancer in 90% or 60% of patients. Laetrile is gonna help cancer patients in a small percentage of people. Protocel will help cancer patients in a small percentage of people. Mushrooms will help cancer patients in a small percentage of people. Well so will chemotherapy help cure cancer in a small percentage of people.

Everybody is so individual here when you’re trying to find what is going to work best for that person. You have to wait to be able to test that person to see what works for them. And that’s what we try to do. Everybody’s an individual, so we could have a set of twins that have breast cancer in the same breasts, both ER-Positive, HER2-Positive and when we test them it might be a different diet, might be a different nutraceutical approach. It might be a different even cause, even if it was the same cause, it might be a different way to pull that out of their body. So everybody has to be treated asan individual. That’s our one rule in our office. There are, we get patients that call us and say, “What’s your protocol for prostate cancer?” We don’t have a protocol for prostate cancer. We develop a protocol around you as an individual.

Allison Melody
I’m so glad you’re bringing this up because I could not agree more. And we talk about this all the time on the show, especially when it comes to diet because it feels like everyone wants to know the perfect diet and whatever’s trending. It used to be those South Beach diets and there was Slim Fast diet and there’s always something. Right now there’s a lot of gluten free and I’m personally vegan but that’s what works for me. It doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, but it’s finding out what works for you. And that’s really what functional medicine testing is all about. Because you can discover your own food allergies, your own nutritional deficiencies and create the perfect diet for you. So is that the similar approach that you take to figuring out the treatment protocol?

Dr Kevin Conners
The exact same approach we take. When you talk about specific diets for cancer, what you’re really looking for, cancer is rapidly replicating cells. So there needs to be a fuel source for that. So you think, well everybody should be off sugar. Well yes because sugar feeds right into glycolysis, which is where you produce energy. And that’s where you know, energy can be produced for cancer cells. But then when you, we take out sugar, we should, nobody should eat sugar anyhow whether you have cancer or not. Then what’s the best diet? Should I be juicing? Should I be vegan? Should I do a keto diet? That’s a real big thing right now. Several books were written about keto diets and cancer and though it can be very beneficial for some cancers, what bothers me about those books is that when you start slapping that label on every single person that has cancer because then it just falls into, this is just not true again.

So ketogenic diet, you know is high in fat, which can feed some cancers. Unfortunately, a lot of ketogenic diets have animal proteins as a source of their proteins, which can be a major feeder of some people with cancer that are fed through Methionine and Glutamine pathways. They have to be completely or as vegan as possible and ketogenic diets tend to be high in dairy, which you never want to give dairy to a cancer patient. It just raises IGF-1 levels too high and will stimulate growth. So you’ve got to be careful of fad diets. You want to be tested. We do specific testing in our office for what can be feeding the fuel source for that person’s cancer. And everybody’s a little bit different. And we could do genetic testing to look at that too. And then we can also look at things that are maybe stimulating autoimmune responses, and that’s specific food testing as well.

Allison Melody
And so can you take us through some of the, if we’re changing our diets based on our functional medicine testing or genes testing and the things that you’re doing, what are some things that, what are some alternative medicine practices that you’re recommending to people based on when you figure out how to treat them?

Dr Kevin Conners
So we look at diet, what we just discussed, what’s the best diet for that patient based upon what is that cancer seeking for a fuel source. And that can change over time. Number two, we look at what are specific nutraceuticals, supplements, herbs, etc. that will be a “cancer killer” for that person. A natural chemotherapy for that person. There are dozens and dozens of cancer killer type supplements that have each one of them can have a thousand people testimonials that this “cured their cancer” using Essiac tea. But just for every person that has been helped by Essiac tea, there’s probably, you know, five that it didn’t work for. And you could say that with each of the natural cancer killer supplements out there. That’s why it can get a bad name, and alternative cancer treatment can get a bad name.

When you start putting these wrong expectations on specific nutraceuticals. So you want to be specific what’s going to be best for that person for diet, you want to be specific, what’s gonna be best for that person, for their nutritional, their nutraceutical. What supplements you’re going to have them on. And then there’s some supplements that you don’t want cancer patients to be on. You don’t necessarily want to be stimulating mitochondrial function with a cancer patient that’s very fatty right now. Pushing the NRV2 pathway and such. That might not be the best approach for a cancer patient because cancer cells are very highly metabolic and they will suck up that, that nutrition, it’ll actually help them grow. So there’s certain things you don’t want to do with a cancer patients that you would do with a cardio patient or an autoimmune patient or a Lyme patient.

So it’s a little bit some things that you want to know on how to treat a cancer patient a little bit differently. And then there’s different specific therapies that can be extremely beneficial for cancer patients. We use one of them with all of our cancer patients, and that’s the Rife machine R, I, F, E, was started by Royal Rife back in the 30’s. So we use that with all our cancer patients, but there’s other therapies that we use as well. Hyperthermia, PEMF, numerous others that could be extremely beneficial for cancer patients as well.

Allison Melody
Yes, I did an interview with someone and his wife swore by the hypothermia for her and it literally saved her life. And you know what I find interesting, you mentioned the rife machine and that’s something I think you said from the 30’s and then I know in your blog you talk about the 1899 Merck manual and how the remedies are natural and food-based. How did we get here when there was so much good information that has just disappeared? This is what they used to do, right?

Dr Kevin Conners
Well, it’s unfortunate that what they used to do worked but had limitations. Right? Praise God, the invention and discovery of antibiotics, right? That saved millions of people’s lives in war time and epidemic time. But it has limitations. Unfortunately, we threw out all the herbs and the natural approaches for use of modern medications that could be patented by pharmaceutical companies knowing full well that there’s limitations to both. Now, why can’t we just marry both of them together? Well, you and I know the really sad answer to that, greed and money and control. And that’s a very sad thing.

But, we, that’s where podcasts like yours are so important because it empowers people to take control back of their healthcare decisions. So that they can start going, “Oh, maybe I will do some chemotherapy, but I’m going to use the rife and I’m going to change my diet and I’m gonna, I’m going to, you know, use some specific nutrition as well. I going to be wise about this and not just turn over my, all my health care choices to this doctor because I don’t want to take responsibility.” Unfortunately, you know, how many percentage, probably 80% of the people are still in that category. But we’re trying to educate people to take control back on their life. They don’t have to just surrender their brain at the door of the hospital when they walk in and they can marry the two systems. And by getting, by seeking out other help or using multiple doctors.

Allison Melody
I could not agree more. You know, I always tell people that my mission is to inspire people to take their health into their own hands and stop outsourcing their health to doctors. Right? Cause that’s, unfortunately, that’s what my parents did and we didn’t know any better. So, we were in North Carolina, small town, and what the word of the doctor was literally the word of God to my family. We didn’t know of any other way and what they were telling us to do was the only option. And when I brought up things, well I was like a young, with my mom, I was like, you know, 20. So I’m like young and there’s no YouTube videos at this point.

So I had no outlet to discover alternative knowledge or anything like that. And I would bring up things like, does it matter what they eat? And literally the oncologist was like, “It does not matter. It has nothing to do with this.” And I was like, okay, great. And my mom would take a bunch of supplements cause she knew about alternative medicine. She would take all these supplements and he would go, I mean, do what you want, but they’re not going to do anything, you know?

Dr Kevin Conners
Yeah. It’s sad and it continues today. I just going off the phone 30 minutes ago with a patient who, she told me that her oncologist said, “If you want to eat cake every day, just go ahead and eat cake.”

Allison Melody
Oh my God, still to this day? Come on people.

Dr Kevin Conners
Yeah. I just talked to another patient yesterday who he said he was so upset because he asked his oncologist about juicing and the oncologist said, “I don’t know anything about that, so I would recommend it.” So it’s like how can, he was so upset that, how could these people who claim to treat cancer for a living, not know about any other approach? And, uh, it’s hard to answer for that really, because to me there really is no excuse.

You know, I did my training, you know, I graduated as a chiropractor, but when I started seeing cancer patients 21 or so years ago, you know, God just kept sending me these cancer patients. Like, what if I mess this up? You know, I take grave responsibility with taking these patients on, so I went back to school and got a degree in integrative cancer therapy through, it’s an AMA fellowship, and they’re all medical doctors in my training and it was really an eye-opener for me years ago to have them say, “Oh my gosh, you’re a chiropractor? It’s so great. I wish I would have gone that route because you can use all this.” And I’m like, what do you mean? And they said, “Oh, we’re just learning this for our families because we can’t use this in our practice.”

Allison Melody
Oh my gosh. Wow.

Dr Kevin Conners
I just, I guess I was always in private practice so I could, you know, do what I thought was the best interest of the patient all the time. And they said they can’t, they can’t even recommend fish oils to their patients or they’ll get in trouble.

Allison Melody
Oh, it’s so wrong. It’s so backwards. It’s very sad. So if someone is listening right now, Dr Conners, what can they do? You know, I know you have a great book, “Stop Fighting Cancer and Start Treating the Cause,” which was your premier book on cancer care. I know you have many books which we will talk about as well, but they can get your book. How can they work with you? What can they start doing on their own? Can you give us some really practical advice?

Dr Kevin Conners
Sure. You can always work with us. You can call us and set up a case review, we call an initial consultation with me. But I realize that not everybody can work with us, so we try to give away as much information as possible. We have, like you, multiple podcasts. I have probably 400 and so YouTube videos trying to teach people as much as possible so that they can be empowered to do this themselves. We give away our book for free on our website. All our books are free on our website. I’m writing multiple blogs every week. We have at least 400 pages of those and there’s lots of doctors like me and people like you that are giving away this information all the time.

In one sense, there’s no excuse for not knowing how to do some level of self care, but in the same sense, I know a lot of people, they need that handholding. They need to be, you know, get greater testing and get more adept. And that’s what we’re here for. And there’s other clinics like us that are doing the same thing. Trying to help people the best way possible. Maybe first, go to our website, look at our blogs, look at our videos, all the information that we try to provide free of charge for people. And then if you’d like to speak with me, for sure contact our office to do so.

Allison Melody
Okay. So it’s ConnersClinic.com and that’s where they can get in touch with you. And what is your YouTube?

Dr Kevin Conners
Our YouTube is, um, I think it’s just if you just search Dr Kevin Conners, C-O-N-N-E-R-S you’ll find our YouTube channel there as well. You can link to our YouTube through our website as well. So all those links are on there. Our Facebook page too, we’re always putting stuff on Facebook as well. So through our website is probably easiest way to get to all those other venues.

Allison Melody
I know that you have done so much more work and I really wanted to focus on cancer because it’s close to my heart and I know a lot of people, like you said, 1/2.5 are dealing with it. So I’m glad that we covered this, but you’ve also done a lot of work with Lyme Disease and autoimmune conditions. You have a number of books on them. “Beating Chronic Lyme,” articles as well. “Beating Chronic Lyme,” “The Three Phases of Lyme,” “Lyme Brain,” “Help My Body is Killing Me,” which is about Lyme and autoimmune diseases. Can you take us through some of that? Why are people getting these autoimmune conditions? Are they multifactorial? Just like cancer? You know, give us the goods.

Dr Kevin Conners
Well they are multifactorial. Everything is. But the biggest reason why we have such just, it’s almost like you could look at your little kids or grandkids and it’s not, will they get an autoimmune disease, it’s which autoimmune disease will they get? But unfortunately that’s just the truth. The damage that we are doing constantly to our guts, our intestinal wall barrier is probably the number one reason why autoimmune diseases go through the roof. And even if you’re not taking antibiotics or exposed to antibiotics or keeping your kids off of those as much as possible, it’s because of our foods and the GMOs in our foods, the chemicals in our foods that are damaging the gut wall.

Even if you’re trying to eat organic. So you could eat a perfect diet, raise your kids in this perfect environment. The chemicals that they’re exposed to that are damaging that gut border is the number one cause for autoimmune disease. Not to mention, okay, hot topic there, vaccination, that is damaging, you know, in the brain and increasing inflammation for the gut and the brain. And that’s really what’s leading to autoimmune disorders, when you start to develop antibodies to self-tissue.

Allison Melody
But Dr Conners, the internet told me that GMOs and vaccines were safe?

Dr Kevin Conners
Yeah. Yeah. Well, the internet, if there was one at the time, would have told you back in the 1950s that smoking is safe too. There is wisdom in a multitude of counselors and you have to seek those counselors. You know, it’s so funny when you get bashed, like I do, on the internet for speaking up against vaccinations or GMOs, I have zero financial bias to say those things. It onlly hurts me to say those things, from a financial standpoint. I lose patients by taking a strong stance against things like that and you lose credibility because you have these trolls that are bashing you constantly, giving you bad Google reviews and saying nasty things on Facebook about you who know nothing about you, and you know that they’re just trolls. But it’s, it’s, you just have to believe in something and stand for what’s right.

No matter what, even though it might not be popular in this day and age. Now there’s a lot more educated people out there then there was 10 years ago, 20 years ago when you first started saying these kind of things, praise God for that, that people are getting their eyes opened up to the truth with some of this stuff. But still, it’s just, people want to believe that the medical establishment would never do anything to harm you. And in defense of the average general practitioner that’s out there, they’re not trying to harm anybody. But they’re, why learn anything new and cutting edge if you can’t use it, number one. And it could hurt your golden handcuffs that you’re tied to in your position at work. So it’s, they just stay with the status quo. It’s basically produced by the pharmaceutical industry telling them exactly what line to toe the whole time.

Allison Melody
It’s literally the biggest tragedy. And I, I tried for so long to shout it from the rooftops and then I just decided to shut up and talk only positively about health and host this podcast to have people you know, smarter than me, such as yourself to explain it in greater detail and give it to the people who really want to hear what we all have to say, which is why I started Food Heals. But I’m really appreciative of you and what you do. And you know what you said earlier, I had chills as being like, exactly. We don’t have a financial incentive. Everyone else does. So who are you going to listen to? The ones with the financial incentive and that to keep us sick?

Dr Kevin Conners
Right, exactly. That’s exactly it.

Allison Melody
So let’s, take us through autoimmune a little bit. I know you said it is multifactorial, just like you said cancer was. What are some things that we can do? My mom had multiple sclerosis before she had cancer, so I’m very familiar and you know, it was the same thing. There were no natural cures available or offered to her. It was just drug after drug after drug. It was pain killers with side effects and then there’d be another pill for the side effects. And I just watched her wither away until she literally got cancer and you know, passed away very quickly.

Dr Kevin Conners
Well in all honesty, the cause of the autoimmune disease may have actually also been the cause of the cancer. So I talk about the cause of an autoimmune disease and people will go, oh I thought it was genetic. Well that’s just not true. So an autoimmune disease is when your immune system is attacking self tissue. Or a better definition is when one side of your system, your B cells, make antibodies against some cells in your body, maybe your thyroid gland or in the case of multiple sclerosis, it’s starting to make antibodies against your lining of your myelin sheath cells. So that your immune system is attacking it. You have demyelination taking place or sclerotic plaquing on that myelin sheath cells trying to protect itself. So then you go, well why would my immune system do that? Well your immune system isn’t supposed to attack self-tissue.

Well, there had to have been something there for the immune system to recognize as an enemy, either a toxin or a biotoxin like bacteria or virus or fungus or Lyme disease of some kind or some co-infection that your immune system saw as an enemy and launched a T-cell response, a Th1 response against, was not able to kill. It probably went on for months and months and then finally launches a B-cell response or a Th2 response, and creates antibodies against the cell line there. Which is the myelin sheath cells and then you end up with symptoms of MS and then you get a CT scan or MRI and you have sclerotic plaquing and then you get the diagnosis of MS. MS isn’t a disease, it’s just the signs that they see on a CT and MRI that say you have MS. There’s multiple causes of MS, whether it’s that, initially that bacteria, or could be Lyme, could be mercury toxicity from mercury fillings or goodness we say vaccinations that the immune system tried to kill.

Wasn’t able to kill created antibodies to try to destroy that tissue line. You know the thought of, well, it’s better to lose that tissue line then this person to lose their life due to this poison. And now you have antibodies to self-tissue and now every time you fire an immune response for any reason, you will attack that which you have antibodies against first. And if you have antibodies against self-tissue, every time you fire an immune response you’re going to be attacking that self-tissue. So that’s when you have just built up destruction and over time it could lead to all sorts of problems and even death, depending on what type of autoimmune disease you have, what type of antibodies were created because of what was there in the first place.

Allison Melody
Thank you for breaking that down so clearly. I really appreciate it. And going back to one thing you said, this has always stayed with me. Both of my parents had metal mouths. What was leaking into their bodies for 20, 30, 40, I don’t know how long. You know how many years? They both had fillings in the back of their mouth. I remember gold and silver. What was leaking into their gut at all times? What was offgassing into their mouth? You know, and I can’t say it was the cause of MS or the cause of cancer, but we know that these things are multifactorial and I definitely think they were a contributing factor. Yeah. So when I discover this, my dad was actually still alive and just before he died was when I was starting to get all my fillings removed and I haven’t had a filling since or anything like that.

But it’s terrifying because you can be doing everything right. Look, just like we said earlier, eating all the right things, right? Living a healthy holistic life, meditating on a mountain that’s not too high in the bad air, but then you could be every single day being exposed to your own toxins in your mouth. And that’s scary. And so, if you have a second to go into that, what should we do? If we’re like, “Oh my gosh, I have fillings and they’re 10 years old and they’re not using good stuff back then?” I don’t even know if they’re using that stuff now necessarily.

Dr Kevin Conners
Well, and we won’t know for another 10 years, right? So, yeah. Well, you have silver fillings, mercury fillings, probably the worst. What do I do? Should I get them all removed? I’ve looked at people’s mouths that they have a mouth so full of fillings that literally, they’d have to just pull all the teeth because it’s, you know, wound around that molar that it’s, how are you going to get that out? So it becomes a very difficult decision. And my approach as a functional medicine doctor has been, if the person’s healthy, you know, suffering from an autoimmune disease, right now, not diagnosed with cancer, then that’s probably the best time to take out those fillings and have them removed. But you have to factor in if the person isn’t under care for somebody who knows how to help deal with that, meaing, if I’m going to have a mercury filling removed, you’re having to go to a natural dentist who’s going to use a mercury vacuum, who’s going to use a rubber dam, who’s going to do everything possible to prevent the off-gassing.

Allison Melody
You breathe it in, that off-gassing as they’re removing that filling or you swallow any of that mercury. Um, and then also dealing with the gum around there that already absorbed some mercury. Tryingto clean that up and then also going to a functional medicine doctor that’s going to also put you on a chelater to help pull out any, you’re still going to spill it into the blood. You pull out a chelater to get it out, put that person on a binder to make sure that it’s bound in the gut so that they’re not reabsorbing that. So there’s multiple things that you want to do. You don’t want to just go and have your cavities removied, or your fillings removed. You want to do it correctly or you could end up in a much worse situation than before you started. But then the problem exists if the person’s already ill, can they even handle removing those mercury fillings and your bad dental work. So you need to get some wisdom in there and really look at each case separately.

Yes. And thank you for mentioning that. This is what happened to me. Literally. I don’t remember how many years ago it was now, but when I got those fillings removed, I never got tested by functional medicine to see if it was still in the blood, nothing like that. And 10 years later, I go to my first functional medicine test and there’s mercury in my blood. And just because the fillings were gone didn’t mean it wasn’t still in my body. And so I had to do the chelation. Right. So it, this stuff lasts. And I’m not trying to scare anyone, but do exactly what Dr Conners just said. If you are healthy enough to get them removed, then there’s some maintenance you gotta do and make sure it’s out of your system.

Dr Kevin Conners
Yeah. Well, the half-life of mercury is probably about 15 million years, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

Allison Melody
Alright, let’s go into, um, prevention and treatment so we can stop scaring everyone. But I like that we’re, you know, we’re just telling the truth and because I’ve lived this, I know it’s real and I’m trying to make sure everyone understands, you know, what we can all do to avoid some of this. And if we are already suffering, what we can do. So yeah. What’s, what are some good preventative measures for autoimmune and what are some treatments? I know it is multifactorial and we’re going to change the diet and things like that, but what are some things that everyone can do?

Dr Kevin Conners
The way we deal with any autoimmune disease, you have to start with the gut. So you want to heal the gut border. I know there’s a lot of products out there that work on the gut, but you, if you don’t deal with antibodies to food. So if you’ve had an autoimmune disease or you have had a damage gut for any length of time, that loose border, that wide border of the gut wall with damaged cells are going to allow proteins and different foods to cross into the bloodstream that should never have crossed in. It should have been broken down specifically to amino acids and then being able to cross. So when you have those large peptides as portions of proteins that have crossed into the bloodstream, that should never be in the bloodstream, they only cross because of that damaged gut border. You’re going to develop antibodies to those peptides.

That is the negative cycle that is created that keeps a person in an autoimmune state, so they might clean up their diet. Let’s say they’re going to go off gluten and go off dairy and they’re going to eat a vegan diet and they’re going to take a bunch of different really good supplements, gut healing supplements and heal their gut, well even going on a gluten free diet, you know there’s, you’re maybe eating foods with the flours with tapioca starch in it. You know that you weren’t used to before and as that did it get broken down fully still through your damaged gut, you developed antibodies to tapioca starch shell. So even though you’re trying to do a lot of right things every time you eat gluten-free flour with tapioca starch as an example, you’re firing this immune response and this immune response, it’s like a fire in the gut and it’s damaging gut cells again.

And it’s this like, “Why can’t I get better?” Scenario from this person you hear all the time, “I’m doing all these things right! I have been eating gluten free, dairy free for five years. I’ve been vegan for eight years and I’ve been on all these products. How come I can’t get better?” Well, you go to do some more in-depth testing on antibody testing and see, you know, wow, you’re reacting to cooked carrots. A weird thing like that because of, that all started with that damaged gut. Doesn’t mean you can’t eat cooked carrots again in six months, but you’ve got to stay off of them, you gotta decrease that immune response. You got to look for everything that’s firing an immune response, everything that’s doing damage, remove that, heal, and then you can slowly introduce those things back to your diet.

Allison Melody
Yes. Thank you for breaking that down. I really appreciate it. Your primary focus, which we haven’t gotten to yet because I really wanted to cover those, they’re very close to my heart, but it’s really genetics. And I know that you mentioned it earlier, and I know a lot of people who literally go, well, I am bound to get cancer because so-and-so in my family did, or I’m bound to get this or that and that’s simply not true in my opinion. So what’s the deal with genetics?

Dr Kevin Conners
Well, there’s, there are about anywhere between 3-5% of cancers that truly have a genetic tie, or a direct cause, we should say. I think there’s, there can be genetic ties to a lot of people’s cancer. But let me explain because these are all epigenetic ties, meaning that there’s things that you can do to change that from an environmental food choice lifestyle choice perspective. So there are, in your cells, if a cell is, DNA is damaged, somehow usually due to a toxin or a biotoxin that gets in that cell and now that cell goes into a state of rapid replication. That’s what cancer is. So cancer is something affecting the DNA replication cycle of initially, simply, one cell. So let’s go back to our mercury toxicity picture. So, I had all this mercury in my mouth, had it removed, tested myself.

10 years later, my blood test shows my, I’m high in mercury, “What the hey, I had this removed 10 years ago?” Well, mercury has a half-life of 15 million years and it’s still circulating by blood. It stays in my cells so it could, in the cell, it could damage the DNA and cause the cell to go into rapid replication. Now, most of the time it doesn’t, otherwise we’d all have cancer, but it can do that. And that could cause the cell to go into rapid replication, create another cell that’s in rapid replication. That’s the definition of cancer. And truth be told, this happen to all of us, maybe on a weekly basis, but in each cell we have specific genes that are called tumor suppressor genes. So if the cell does erroneously go into rapid replication, these tumor suppressor genes should kick in and cause the cell to die.

We’ll get into the process of that, but it kills the cell. That’s the purpose of a tumor suppressor gene. That happens to us on a regular basis. So if you’ve never been diagnosed with cancer, the truth is you’ve had cancer multiple times. Your body has used its fail safe methods like this. There are others, but this is one of them, and it killed that cell so you never got a diagnosis of cancer. However, we can have genetic defects in tumor suppressor genes. Understand also that tumor suppressor genes are governed by specific metabolic processes and the need for specific nutrients to help stimulate or upregulate tumor suppressor genes helps prevent cancer. And that’s why, okay, we’ll use an example of curcumin, an anti-inflammatory product in turmeric, is a strong tumor suppressor upregulator, in almost every study that’s out there shows. These are all peer-reviewed studies, not done by natural doctors.

Tumeric, curcumin helps upregulate P53, helps upregulate most tumor suppressor systems. So if I do have defects on my tumor suppressor genes, there’s multiple different tumor suppressor genes. But if I had defects like P53 tumor suppressor gene, and I was taking curcumin, then I would have my P53, because of the defects that may not be working as well as if it didn’t have defects. If I was taking a nutrient that would help upregulate it, then it would work better. So knowing your genetics before you have cancer could help, could help you not to get cancer because, “Oh look at these defects you have on this cell line. It’d be really good if, because of the studies that are out there, that if you got on this supplement and you started eating more Indian foods with turmeric in it, that would help prevent that for you.” Or in another person because of these defects you have in your detoxification pathways, you don’t detox large chemicals very well because look at all these defects on your PON1 pathway, that’s another genetic pathway.

So it would behoove to maybe support that pathway because this nutrient, this nutrient, this nutrient has been proven to help upregulate that PON1 pathway. So this would be a good thing for you to be on because you’re a slow detoxer of these chemicals. Also i’d be smart not to use pesticides on your heart. Also, it’d be smart to eat organic. So you could help prevent disease by looking at a person’s genetics. You could take a person that is sick, look at their genetics, and it can give you clues to maybe why and then to make adjustments to help support those pathways. You’re not treating the gene defect, but you’re, you’re using wisdom through looking at that, those gene defects and it can give you clues to some things that you may want to do to change in your lifestyle that can help prevent or help you deal with whatever disease process you have going on.

Allison Melody
So what I’m hearing is essentially just like everything we’ve been talking today, it’s extremely individualized and you won’t know the right protocol for you unless you get these tests done to find out exactly what you need and what you don’t.

Dr Kevin Conners
Yes.

Allison Melody
For myself and for any other listeners. And um, another simplified statement, I know there’s more to it, but would you agree or disagree with the statement that I hear a lot and I’ve said on the show that genetics, when it comes to chronic diseases and things like this, genetics load the gun, but lifestyle is what really pulls the trigger.

Dr Kevin Conners
Oh absolutely. If we really want to get a little deeper, it gets kind of scary because it is the lifestyle exposure to toxins and chemicals and such that can actually cause genetic defects. So the reason why I have the genetic defects that I have most of the time is because I inherited them from my mother and father. But I can have genetic defects because I worked at a paint factory for 10 years and actually was the person mixing the chemicals with my hands and didn’t care about exposure because I got to make a limit and that could have caused genetic defects and then I have babies after that, I’m passing them onto the next generation.

So the really sad thing about what you could say, all the chemicals that we’re exposed to and the pesticides and all the GMOs, that’s not good for us. But the sad thing is we’re actually changing our genetic makeup that even if we could magically make all that stuff disappear tomorrow, we’ve done damage to our genetic makeup that we can’t undo and we’re passing that onto the next generation and we can’t change that for the better. So it would be more important to make these epigenetic changes, these lifestyle changes, now as much as you possibly can.

Allison Melody
And I feel like I just know that half the people listening will be like, how do I work with you right now? Do we have to be in Minnesota to work with you? Or can we work with you online? What kind of program do you have for us?

Dr Kevin Conners
So with our cancer patients, probably 80% of them are not in the five state area around Minnesota. So we see patients from all over the world. Many of them come to us. We have programs where we actually travel to them within the United States. So we have practitioners in our office that will be out sometimes every week in another part of the country. There’s patients that just can’t travel for their health reasons or don’t like to travel. As far as non-cancer patients doing genetic work and doing functional medicine work. Almost all of that is over the internet, over the phone, distant type work, online work, even if the person is local. So it’s just an advantage that we have now with the internet that that we could get on the phone with somebody, do a Zoom call, see them face to face and work through their issues, send the lab kits that we need, do the genetic workup that we need. So no, they don’t have to be local. Everything is online.

Allison Melody
Amazing. I’m so grateful for that. That’s absolutely wonderful. So they just need to go to ConnersClinic.com to start to work with you right away and set up that initial call.

Dr Kevin Conners
Yeah, they could do that. I have trade nutritionists and nutrigenetic practitioners that work for me and know that all your cases go through me as well. So they’re working with somebody and they’re stuck on somebody, they come in my office and we work through it, what’s going to be the best for that patient. So just call the office, contact the office, there’s a contact form all over our website as well. We’ll get back to you and we can set up that initial consultation with either myself or one of our nutritionists. Working with our nutritionists is extremely affordable.

Allison Melody
Amazing. Well thank you. And so if you’re listening right now, you or a loved one you know needs this right now, go to ConnersClinic.com and before we wrap up, Dr Conners, can you tell us a little bit about your books and who they’re for and who should be reading them?

Dr Kevin Conners
So I wrote the books that I did write for people that would never be able to come to me. So I just thought, well I just got to, I feel like, we come from a Christian perspective in our office and we feel like, when you’ve been given much, you have to give back much. So we try to, again, like I said previously, teach as much as possible; besides I like to teach. So the books are for anybody, so you can get them on Amazon if you’d like a hard copy to read. We have them all available as a download, like most are a free download as well. And those are on our website. (ConnersClinic.com/books) If you don’t work with us, you could take some of that information and talk to your local doctor and work through some of those things as well. We just want to be a blessing to people. So that’s ultimately the bottom line.

Allison Melody
What a beautiful goal and mission. And I’m so grateful for what you do and I’m so glad you came on today and really broke these things down and I look forward to talking to you again. I know there’s many more things that we could get into, but I really appreciate you being here today.

Dr Kevin Conners
Well, thanks so much. Thank you for all you do. You’re just a blessing to everybody.

Allison Melody
Oh, thank you. Back at ya.

 

Get your copy of  Stop Fighting Cancer & Start Treating the Cause  or dive in to Dr. Conners’ Stop Fighting Cancer Course to learn more about alternative tools, nutrition and supplements for cancer.

 

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