UNDERSTAND THE BUDWIG DIET Transcript

Scott: Doctor, you co-authored a book titled A Day in The Budwig Diet.  How did that diet come about and why?  Can you discuss that?

Dr. Gene Wei: Well, the Budwig Diet was created by Johanna Budwig.  She was a German biochemist.  She was an expert in fats and lipids.  She was actually the lead researcher in that topic at the Ministry of Health, kind of like our FDA.  And she was... Germany at that time was a really big hot bed of scientific discovery, especially when it comes to cell biology and cancer in general.  Otto Warberg was a Nobel Prize winning scientist who made some really landmark discoveries in cancer, things that are actually even being discussed today.  There's a resurgence of it.  But being a lipids expert, she was able to see the connection of fats and oils with cancer and the connection between that topic and the work of these other researchers.  She was really a pioneer in the field.  She was one of the first to talk about Omega-3s.  She was one of the first to talk about the benefits of coconut oil.  You know, these things now we know, in research, there's so many benefits to these types of fats.  She was also one of the first to speak out against trans fats.  These are man-made fats, these are hydrogenated oils.  They're very damaging to the body.  And because of her expertise in the field, she was able to understand how they worked in the body.  And even went through some lawsuits with big food companies because of her protests against them.  But she had a really deep understanding, because she was a biochemist and she was trained in physics.  And cancer back then, was a big problem, just like it is today.  And with that understanding in biochemistry, she formulated a diet to address some of these underlying issues in cancer.  Because she was a fats researcher, a lot of her diet is based around the use of healthy fats to optimize cell metabolism.

Scott: Can you talk a little bit more about how that diet treats illness?  When someone's on that diet... and explain a little bit of that and what's going on in the body then?

Dr. Wei: Well, the first thing is I always tell my patients to think of the Budwig Diet, as one component in a large arsenal of things they have available to them.  But that being said, when you look at the Budwig Diet, you look at components of it, and you look at the science, there's actually a lot to it.  She's most well-known for her flax oil and cottage cheese mixture.  That's what everyone knows.  And there's a lot to that too.  I think there's a misunderstanding about that, a lot of people say when you mix the two together, they become water soluble.  That's a loose... that's kind of a loose interpretation of the words.  I mean basically what's happening is you're emulsifying those fats.  And now we have research showing that pre-emulsified fats, especially as it applies to omega-3s, actually allows those oils to be more rapidly absorbed and more completely absorbed in the body.  So when you think about it in that perspective and when you remove a lot of the pro-inflammatory foods and you add high doses of rapidly absorbed omega-3s, and some omega-6s, you can see how you're kind of removing the variable of inflammation in cancer growth.  And that's a very big variable.

Scott: So a big part of it can just be you're just eating better foods and by that token you're not eating bad foods. 

Dr. Wei: Definitely.  That's half of the equation, right?  Everything is a system and that's definitely half of the equation.  The other thing is that she included a lot of vegetable juices and fruit juices, and she was always talking about plant pigments and how they benefit the body.  And she was talking about these things in a little more esoteric kind of way because of her training in physics.  And there are researchers now who are looking, bioresearchers who are looking into a phenomenon called biophotons.  These are little signals of light that occur between cells.  And they think that that could be part of cell communication that precedes biochemistry.  According to these researchers, a lot of this biophoton energy comes from food and sunlight.  But even from a biochemical perspective, when you're talking about these plant pigments, you're talking about bioflavonoids, right?  These are a lot of the plant compounds, the plant pigments that give plants their color.  And these are some of the most well researched substances, in terms of their anti cancer abilities.  In medicine, we look for the magic bullet.  Something that will hit cancer, but will not hit the rest of the body.  Well, when you look at these anticancer compounds, there's things like quercetin, curcumin, EGCG from green tea.  These things are really well researched.  They have a wide variety.  They really hit cancer from a variety of different ways, from blocking glycolysis to down regulating cancer genes and addressing inflammation from various angles.   So when you look at all these things in combination, you really see how they work and how they can benefit people.