LowCarbUSA Podcast

Martha Tettenborn is a Registered Dietitian and a Health Coach who was going through life quite 'smug with her health' as she puts it until one day she found an unexpected large lump in her abdomen and was diagnosed with stage 1 ovarian cancer. It had ruptured and so she required surgery and then 6 rounds of chemo to take care of any cancer cells that might be floating around and seed new tumours.

The thought of the side effects of chemotherapy terrified her so she started searching for what she could do and she learned that the use of fasting might help to mitigate the side effects of the treatment. To describe it simply, she says that fasting makes your heathy cells go quiet and the cancer cells can't downregulate and become stressed so the chemo drugs seek them out and leave your healthy cells, which are in 'Stealth Mode', alone for the most part. So the side effects are drastically reduced and the treatment itself may also be more effective.

Martha is not able to function as an RD outside of her home state but she has developed what she calls a Cancer Doula role where she is able to provide support and comfort for anyone going through treatment. She has written a 'Keto Fasting Protocol' which is available for free on her website

She has also just published the book, 'Hacking Chemo' - getting through chemo with a keto diet, targeted therapeutic fasting and a kick ass attitude.

One month after Maggie Jones' 40th birthday, she was diagnosed with terminal, stage 4 lung cancer that had spread to her eye, liver, four tumors in her brain, and more than a dozen lymph nodes throughout her chest, neck and abdomen. Her prognosis of six to eight months with conventional treatment seemed optimistic. Her doctors were focused on making her comfortable. She was dying.

After doing a bunch of research and adopting a whole new lifestyle and a ketogenic diet she found herself cancer free in just one year. We talked with her and husband, Brad Jones, about their incredible journey and how that has led to them taking on a project to make a documentary called 'Cancerevolution' in an attempt to reach as many people as possible that there is hope for people out there who are diagnosed with cancer.

Their driving goal is to raise awareness of marginalized but evidence-based metabolic cancer therapies that can be used in conjunction with conventional treatment and can help save lives. The special deal they are offering LowCarbUSA folks is here. Scroll down a bit and on the right you will see a 'Secret' offer for LowCarbUSA. For just $25 you get the movie the minute it is released and your pre-payment goes to help fund the graphics and editing efforts to get it all finished.

Dr. Philip Ovadia is a cardiothoracic surgeon who found himself becoming morbidly obese and running the risk of ending up on his own operating table. He came across the ketogenic diet and the concept of carbohydrate restriction initially at a conference where Gary Taubes was talking. "What he was saying made a lot of sense", Dr. Ovadia says and so he started researching more and reading Gary's books and in the end adopted the diet and lifestyle changes for himself. Now he has lost more than 100 lbs and has taken his health back.

On top of his surgery practice, he now has a lifestyle consulting business where he helps people to get healthy and stay off his operating table. He has written a book to that effect, "Stay Of My Operating Table", and you can learn more about him and even get in touch with him through his website.

This is such an amazing story! Bethany McKenzie is a mom on a mission to tell the story of how she manages her son's Type 1 Diabetes through diet and lifestyle in spite of the resistance from the doctors and supposed specialists. "I just tell my story in a very common way", she says and in doing so she is reaching so many people with the message that they don't have to accept the suffering and anguish experienced by most Type 1 families following the current Standard of Care.

She bases her management strategy on Dr. Bernstein's book call The Diabetes Solution. She has created a foundation to help other parents to implement this strategy with their children. Her journey led her down a path to where she decided to make a movie. "I felt I needed to get this story out to parents all over the world", she says. She found a director and went and filmed a bunch of families with kids with Type 1 Diabetes who were managing their condition this way. She got permission from Dr. Bernstein to use the title 'The Diabetes Solution' and the movie is streaming on iTunes, AppleTV, Google Play, Vimeo (for international folks) and Youtube. You can learn more about the work she is doing and her foundation here.

At our last in-person event in Boca Raton in January 2020, Tekla did a great presentation on food labels and all the ways she felt they came up short, not only in terms of content but also on what foods had labels on them. For instance, why shouldn't we see labels on apples and bananas. Maybe not on each one but at least at the display in the grocery store. If people saw how much sugar was in these fruits they might reconsider eating them. And that's another thing I didn't know and that is that food labels don't always show the amount of sugar in an item other then the added sugar. So orange juice, for instance, often comes with a label showing zero grams of sugar as there is no added sugar. But we all know how frighteningly high OJ is in naturally occurring sugar and as we also all know, sugar is sugar, naturally occurring or not.

She also feels the labels should highlight the quality of protein. Just showing grams of protein is not enough, we need to know the makeup of the protein and what essential versus non-essential amino acids are in there. That is critical.

If you want to contact here about the project or just learn more about the project and how food labels could be better, you can find her on her website.

Alison Gannett was an organic farmer and professional extreme skier travelling the world competing and one day she was cooking bacon at home and it caught on fire. Her husband walked in to see her admiring the flames and realised they were really in trouble. After a CT scan they found an orange sized tumour in her brain. It was a type of terminal brain cancer and they reckoned she had around 6 months to live. She refused to take this lying down and worked with Dr. Nasha Winters to reverse her insulin resistance via dietary interventions and today the brain tumour is gone and at 56 she says she feels better than when she was 20.

Her main focus these days is on teaching people about how their DNA can have a profound effect on their health. She identifies certain genes that could be causing problems and then how tweaking your diet and lifestyle can negate the effects of these genes. She goes into detail about a few genes like the ones that affect the processing of things like dairy, lactose in particular, coffee, chocolate and the ApoE4 that affects how we processes saturated fats and how people carrying that gene are more inclined to develop Alzheimer's. She also touches on the study of epigenetics where we can learn how to turn certain genes on or off, again, through diet and lifestyle changes.

You can reach her through her website: https://alisongannett.com/

r. Alexandra Sowa is a dual board-certified physician of Internal Medicine and Obesity Medicine, helping thousands of patients through her practice in New York. Seeing a growing need for patients to easily be able to get access to relevant lab tests that can help diagnose as well as track responses to interventions, she has created the concept of at-home testing. Once the kit arrives at your door a simple finger prick is all that is required to collect the samples which can then be mailed off to the lab and the results come back days later. For me, the most exciting test she offers is insulin. Before, it was such a task to find a doctor who would even order an Insulin test for you and then after the doctor visit you had to physically go to the lab to get it done. Now that is a thing of the past. Listen to this awesome chat we had with her about this new concept and if you want to contact her or order a test kit you can find her at:

Website: alexandrasowamd.com

Instagram: @alexandrasowamd

One of the things we have not really addressed before is the role of reduced carbohydrates in wound care and infectious diseases. As a physician trained in these areas as well as obesity medicine, Dr. Ravi Kamepalli is working to improve patient outcomes with keto(genic)-based nutrition. "Insulin Resistance is the core problem," he said, "and I've found that cutting carbs really helps a patient to heal." He says that while clinical trials are important, we also need to do n=1 trials. We need to move from the mass medicine mindset and narrow it down to personal health. That is where healthcare is going, and that is where we have to empower doctors."

You can follow him further by finding his website 'https://nobadbugs.com' and you can find links to his social media accounts at the bottom of the page.

Allen Green weighed in at 403 lbs at age 49 when he discovered the concept of carbohydrate restriction and the ketogenic diet. Now he has regained his health, is off all his medications, of which there were many, and he has lost almost 200 lbs to boot. He discusses how he got to that point in the first place and what it was that made him decide that it was imperative that he correct the situation.

He talks for not being able to go on theme park rides with his kids and not wanting to play basketball with his young son as he was literally afraid of tripping and falling on him and killing him. As with most of us, he is now super motivated to pay it forward and try to help others who are in a similar state to the one that he was in to recover and get their lives back.

The other day, Tim Noakes tweeted the following: "Third truly iconic book in low-carb literature. All written by investigative journalists who've done as much for promoting low-carb science as anyone: 'Good Calories Bad Calories' by Gary Taubes; 'Big Fat Surprise' by Nina Teicholz and now 'Ravenous' by Sam Apple. We're blessed!" Praise doesn't come much higher than that.

This is a fascinating journey where he explores how the life and work of Otto Warburg is intricately woven into the story of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler and how different things might have been had things panned out differently for Warburg.

You can find 'Ravenous' in book stores, and on Kindle and Audible. You can learn more about Sam Apple on his website and catch him on twitter: @sam_apple1