Starving Cancer: The Hidden Power of Food, Fasting, and the Body’s Inner Terrain

The Dr. Hyman Show

Dr. Mark Hyman

Health & Fitness, Nutrition, Medicine

4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Cancer can be seen as a seed that only sprouts in the right soil—the body’s inner landscape. Today, that soil is changing fast, and cancer rates are climbing, especially among young people. Our modern diet—packed with sugar, processed foods, and nonstop snacking—keeps the body flooded with signals to grow, not heal. But there’s good news: by eating real, colorful foods and giving the body time to rest between meals, we can calm inflammation, balance our gut, and make our inner soil far less welcoming to disease. The power to shift the story lies in every bite and every pause we take. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Jason Fung and Dr. Thomas Seyfried, how modern diets and constant eating create a fertile soil for disease. Dr. Jason Fung is a physician, author, and researcher. His groundbreaking science-based books about diabetes and obesity, The Diabetes Code, The Obesity Code, and The Complete Guide to Fasting have sold over one million copies and challenged the conventional wisdom that diabetics should be treated with insulin. Dr. Fung is also the co-founder of The Fasting Method, a program to help people lose weight and reverse Type 2 Diabetes naturally with fasting. His work on fasting has been cited by CNN, Time, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Toronto Star, and many other media outlets. His latest book is The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery. Dr. Thomas Seyfried is an American professor of biology, genetics, and biochemistry at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Seyfried has over 150 peer-reviewed publications, and his research focuses primarily on the mechanisms driving cancer, epilepsy, and neurodegenerative diseases and calorie-restricted ketogenic diets in their prevention and treatment. He is the author of Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer and presently serves on the Nutrition & Metabolism, Neurochemical Research, Journal of Lipid Research, and ASN Neuro editorial boards. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here:Is Cancer Caused By Sugar? How Can My Diet Help Prevent Cancer? A Radical New Dietary Approach To Cancer Treatment

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
0:02.7	The most important thing we need to focus on is not the genetics of the problem.
0:08.6	It's the soil problem.
0:12.7	Modern life makes it surprisingly easy to run low on magnesium.
0:16.0	Stress, screens, sugar, they all deplete this essential mineral.
0:19.5	Magnesium supports over 300 functions in your body, from stress and sleep to recovery and
0:24.0	energy. That's why I take magnesium breakthrough. The only supplement with all seven forms
0:28.3	your body needs. Most formulas, just one or two. Bioptimizers has increased their discount
0:33.0	for my audience. Go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code Hyman to get 15% off your order today. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I've built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership,
0:54.9	the Hyman Hive for live Q&A's exclusive content and direct connection. For real-time lab testing
1:00.2	and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated
1:04.8	doctor-trusted supplements and health products at Dr.hyman.com. And if you prefer to listen
1:09.8	without any breaks, don't forget, you can enjoy every episode of this podcast, Add Free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial. When you think about functional medicine and the approach you're taking, it's a very different model of thinking about cancer. So yes, if you have a tumor or something, you might need to get it cut out, you might need
1:30.4	radiation, or you might need some chemo at some point.
1:33.1	But the question that never really gets asked is one, why do the cancer develop in the first
1:37.3	place and how do I change those conditions?
1:39.3	And two, how do I actually create a healthy immune system and a healthy soil and to actually make sure
1:48.8	that the cancer can't grow?
1:50.8	And I, and as a functional medicine doctor often say, we're very much like regenerative
1:54.7	farmers where we focus on soil health, as opposed to industrial farmers, which use a lot of chemicals, pesticides,
2:02.6	basically antibiotics and glyphosate and herbicides to make the plant healthy. And I remember
2:09.0	being at this conference on nutrition. I don't know why they invited me. It was all the big
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 8 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr. Mark Hyman, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Dr. Mark Hyman and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.