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How I Cured Cancer in 30 Days with Samuel Shepherd - E74
29 Plays20 days ago
Being told you have terminal cancer - and that there are no treatments left - is a scenario no one expects to face.
Despite medical progress, chronic inflammation and age-related disease still cut lives short, while most options only manage symptoms. Many of us try things like diet and exercise, yet the core causes of illness often go unchecked, leaving lasting health out of reach.
In this episode, we speak with someone who cured his own cancer in just 30 days, by using his knowledge and experience as a scientist, and by tapping into the body's ability to heal itself from inflammation. You'll learn the links between free radicals and chronic inflammation, and how you can use astaxanthin to help slow down - and possibly even prevent - age-related inflammatory diseases.
Samuel Shepherd is an award-winning physicist, inventor, and engineer. His career has taken him from developing technologies for NASA and the Beijing Olympics to pioneering solutions in alternative energy and environmental remediation. But it was a deeply personal health challenge that led him to his most life-changing discovery. Today, Samuel is on a mission to educate others about how inflammation accelerates disease and diminishes quality of life, and how targeted natural solutions can restore health. Beyond his formidable credentials, his personal story of overcoming terminal illness fuels his passion for helping others age with strength, energy, and resilience.
“And if you're no longer afraid of dying, what other is there to fear?” - Samuel Shepherd
In this episode you will learn:
- How Samuel survived a terminal cancer diagnosis using a compound found in algae.
- The link between free radicals, chronic inflammation, and common diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
- How NASA’s standards for astronaut safety shape space travel, and why Mars missions remain risky for human health.
- What astaxanthin is, how it works to neutralize free radicals, and why it may help prevent age-related and inflammatory diseases.
- Steps Samuel took to dose and measure the effects of astaxanthin, with practical observations and outcomes.
- The ways health role models use science-based tools and routines to tackle sickness and boost long-term wellbeing.
Resources
- Connect with Samuel via ValAsta on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ValastaHome
- Learn all about ValAsta: https://valasta.net/
- Watch ValAsta’s videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ValAsta
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
Recommended
Transcript
Facing Terminal Cancer in 2003
00:00:00
Speaker
In 2003, ended up with bone cancer. There was no chemo, no radiation options available to me. I was terminal. I knew how I was going to die. i knew within a certain time span that I was going to die. That makes it very difficult to come awake at four o'clock in the morning and realize all of this is going to end.
Introduction to Healthspan Podcast
00:00:26
Speaker
This is the Home of Healthspan podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome back to a lively episode of the Homo Health Spam podcast. And this is an episode I am very much looking forward
Inflammation's Role in Health
00:00:48
Speaker
to. i think we all have heard a lot about inflammation and its role in health, and especially inflammation, I think has become a common term. And today we have an absolute expert, both scientifically and personally in the the field.
Guest's Scientific Background
00:01:03
Speaker
But Sam, before we jump in to your story, how you got here, everything that led you here, how would you describe yourself?
00:01:10
Speaker
Well, I guess I'm a i'm a lively, awe-inspired scientist. I've always had this um curiosity as to how the universe works from as far back as I can remember.
00:01:26
Speaker
and And didn't always have the answers. And it motivated me to go and seek out those answers to the questions that I had all during my life.
00:01:39
Speaker
And I think for anyone watching this episode, as opposed to just listening, they will see the photo of Einstein behind you. So you when you say a scientist, I mean, you really came at it from a scientific background. You've worked with NASA. You've worked with ah the Olympics and and other realms. So I don't know if the...
00:02:00
Speaker
The adventure into health is as obvious as someone who just did premed went to med school and learned about the medical side of the field.
Unconventional Scientific Approach
00:02:07
Speaker
I mean, when you say scientist, I think you're what people imagine as the the hard science side of the things. And then really exploring that final human frontier of human health. So can you talk a little bit about that career trajectory? Because, you know...
00:02:23
Speaker
the The scientist, I think of Adam Grant's ah book, Think Again, and he talks about these different roles that you could have of a prosecutor, preacher, he's saying, hey, the best way for us to learn and and keep moving is to be that of a scientist, to keep questioning. And it sounds like that's something that you're naturally inclined to do that led to this journey you've been on.
00:02:44
Speaker
I've done that, Andrew, since, ah like I said, very early on from looking at leaves. Why are leaves green? That was one of the very first things, probably eight years old. I couldn't understand why leaves were were're green. And it turns out later on in life that when I began to look at the colors of the rainbow, Roy G. Biv, and I found out that green is toxic.
00:03:12
Speaker
to all things that appear green. Green is a poison wavelength of light. So when plants pick up the seven colors from the sun, they reject or reflect green light.
00:03:30
Speaker
That's why we see it green. The reds, orange, and yellows are absorbed to heighten the antenna in during the photosynthetic process. We see it with algae also.
00:03:43
Speaker
So began to think a little differently. I thought in the negative of what we were actually observing. I operated from behind the curtain in a lot of these things.
00:03:57
Speaker
When I realized, for example, that leaves hate green light And that's been since proven in even science projects where they try to grow plants under certain wavelengths of light.
00:04:11
Speaker
They all die if they're just exposed to green light. So the basis of my understanding was not exactly what do we observe and ask why, but why don't we ask why not on the on the on the backside of that?
Educational and Career Path in Science
00:04:32
Speaker
So a lot of my success was based on why not this. It's easy for people to design and create things that they observe and live in a derivative type of ah of a world where you're derived by tinkering off of somebody else's invention.
00:04:54
Speaker
But I pushed it on the other side. I did things that no one else thought of. or or things that I imagined could be opposite of of what we're observing.
00:05:05
Speaker
And so that sort of started started my career. And to answer those questions, I ran into roadblocks. I didn't understand chemistry well enough. I didn't understand physics that well.
00:05:20
Speaker
I didn't, ah and and to and to get involved in those sciences, you had to be very proficient in math. So in my background, I started out in chemistry because it was the most fundamental elements.
00:05:35
Speaker
And I recognized very quickly, we only had two things in this entire universe to play with. It was mass or energy. That was it. So chemistry defined mass for me.
00:05:50
Speaker
And then physics, defined the energy component that I was needing in the electricity, the magnetism, ah how does sound vibrate? What is the electromagnetic frequency? How do you ah manage those in your life? How important are they in the movement of mass atoms?
00:06:11
Speaker
And it turns out the chemistry is all electromagnetic with the electron orbitals making all the bonds. So mass and energy was it. So the curriculums, that i A lot of this is in hindsight, but but there was a driving force to figure out all of those components, and they were all found in chemistry or physics.
00:06:33
Speaker
So I went and received undergraduate degrees in chemistry and physics, and then went and got a four-year degree, BS in chemical engineering, which combined the engineering component of those two fundamental basis of scientific study.
00:06:53
Speaker
And ah started out in um chemical engineering. in um I was going to go into nuclear engineering in the 1970s and then Three Mile Island hit and that quickly changed.
00:07:08
Speaker
But I became very proficient in the nuclear engineering side. Went to work for a company called Union Carbide, who was in the nuclear field. They're also in the polymer field. So I went in to learn how to make polystyrene, polysulfone, bakelite, and how polymer kinetics and and reactions happen. And I was very good at designing polymer reactors, mass polymerization reactors, suspension reactors.
00:07:39
Speaker
And I understood the kinetics very well. like i I could understand how the molecules moved in a molecular soup to give us the combined properties of what we needed.
00:07:51
Speaker
So in that part of that, which I didn't know at the time was going to be important, I became proficient in what's called free radical chemistry. Because free radicals are the initiators we use to make a styrene molecule stick to another styrene molecule to stick to another until we finally end up with this long spaghetti chain of um organic materials called polymers or plastics.
00:08:18
Speaker
So I did that for quite a while. Then I went in into um research and development with a company called Air Products out of Allentown, Pennsylvania.
00:08:31
Speaker
worked on polyvinyl chloride oh um operations manufacturing, and then went to the corporate headquarters and became a lobbyist in Washington for the Chemical Manufacturers Association.
00:08:45
Speaker
And that was during the mid-80s. At that time, the hazardous materials regulations under Elizabeth Dole, she was a secretary of transportation at the time under Reagan, And ah I was asked to develop the DOT hazmat regulations, Title 49, Part 173.
00:09:08
Speaker
You've probably seen them going down a highway, the HC placards for hazardous cargo. And and after 9-11, they were placed ah placed everywhere. For example, you couldn't drive a gasoline tanker in downtown Houston anymore. So there was a whole slew of of things that came out of that.
00:09:26
Speaker
Well, during that period in in our company, we had seven individuals who it took for when we developed in research a new product,
00:09:38
Speaker
It took up to a year for it to be identified where we could identify the marking, labeling, placarding, what type of package could it go in? How do we ship it by air? How do we ship it by water?
00:09:49
Speaker
So it would, and each person was a specialist. So the paperwork would all go to them. They would do their little tweaking then it would move on. It was in series. Very inefficient.
00:10:03
Speaker
So I developed probably one of the first artificial intelligence systems in 1987 to interpret the federal regulations. And it was an eye opener for me. I can now do in five minutes what took a year to do.
AI's Impact on Employment and Industry
00:10:20
Speaker
So when the paperwork came down from the business area, then we just plugged in the physical properties of the product.
00:10:28
Speaker
And within five minutes, I had all the marking, labeling, what kind of drums it could go in, what kind of trucks it could be transported in, how do you stow it on board an international shipment by water.
00:10:42
Speaker
So what normally took a year to do and seven people, we could now do with one person in five minutes. From that point,
00:10:54
Speaker
I recognize the importance of being able to model and to understand a lot of these processes from the thought process. Okay. In a nutshell, after it was presented to the board of air Products, when I went back to my office, they had fired those seven people.
00:11:13
Speaker
Oh, OK. I mean, this is really relevant right now as people wonder with AI, what's it going to do for job displacement? It's not necessarily just not hiring. It's really getting rid of people. Yeah.
00:11:26
Speaker
And Andrew, I've been asked that question a lot. And I can tell them that job loss is going to be a huge component for this. Wow. OK, so then that takes us through the eighty s Yeah. And then in 1990, a ah gentleman that I met, um Colonel Tony Wachinski, he and I worked on several projects together.
Lunar and Martian Scientific Projects
00:11:54
Speaker
He introduced me to an organization called the Lunar Outpost Commission. And that was in 1991 to 1994. And when they were looking to ah have people come on board to see how do we build, how do we get to Mars? That's the ultimate objective. so the obvious pathway was Earth to Moon, Moon to Mars.
00:12:21
Speaker
There was a lot of ah health and safety reasons why you do that. You're only three days from the Moon. If something happens, you can get somebody back. But the big component was, and there were several several of us that were working on it, and we really didn't know who was working on it.
00:12:39
Speaker
We were just given specific projects, and I had two. My first one was to develop a way of generating electricity on the moon with no moving parts. o The second one, and I could only use the natural resources of the moon, and there's not much.
00:12:56
Speaker
The second one was how do we install from a construction point of view, ah lab habs, laboratories and habitats on the moon that could be ah protected from the pretty severe radiation levels.
00:13:12
Speaker
ah There were three, Kegers, Leps, and Seps that we had to deal with, cosmic radiation, radiation, ah low mass, high energy particles like helium nuclei coming off of the sun, traveling almost at the speed of light.
00:13:27
Speaker
And then there were SEPs. These are solar event particles. These were heavy nuclear, like ah iron, nickel, okay ah uranium, things that were generated in the sun, but they would come flying off in these plasma bursts,
00:13:45
Speaker
the and would approach very high velocities. These things would go right through you, right through the aluminum spacecraft, and pretty much destroy everything. If it wasn't for our magnetic field around the Earth, we would all be shotgunned to death but by these particles.
00:14:06
Speaker
When I worked on the project on the for the generation of electricity, we found water on the moon in the southernmost crater. Pioneer 10, I think, is the ah spacecraft that found it.
00:14:18
Speaker
So the biggest economic component of going to Mars was the fuel. How do you get that much fuel to the moon launched from the gravity of Earth to the moon?
00:14:30
Speaker
Well, it turns out the fuel is already on the moon in the form of h two o All we had to do was generate electricity to crack the H2O into hydrogen gas and oxygen, and there's our fuel already on the moon.
00:14:46
Speaker
So that was ah something a very that was gonna make, we thought, the Mars mission quite successful. So I developed, knowing what's called, this was in physics, but a process called the Seabek effect.
00:15:01
Speaker
The Seabek effect is two dissimilar metals um If I take two dissimilar metals and twist the twist them together on one end, and it's open on on the other end, and I stick that in a heat source, I get a voltage across these two points.
00:15:22
Speaker
And that's called the Seebeck effect. It's where thermoelectric generators were developed from. and So I knew that, very few people knew that, but I but i knew that and I knew that I had to only use the natural resources of the moon.
00:15:39
Speaker
Well, there aren't many. The soil is called regolith, but there's no real heat source other than the solar radiation striking the surface.
00:15:49
Speaker
But where the sun's rays strike the surface, it's almost 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow. It's hot.
00:16:01
Speaker
But in the shade, it's minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit. So I had a temperature difference between sun and shade of over 700 degrees. That's hotter than a propane flame on your stove.
00:16:18
Speaker
So what I did is I created this this polymer fabric and I stuck a million of these little tips up through it.
00:16:29
Speaker
So it's, it think of it this way, you got copper, then you got aluminum, you got copper, aluminum, copper, aluminum. And I did that all the way down this this big film.
00:16:42
Speaker
So I could roll the film up, but when they got to the moon, they would unroll it. Well, on the sunny side, the the film itself created its own shade.
00:16:53
Speaker
So on the sunny side of that film, it got really hot, 400 degrees. It created its own shade. So in the shade on the bottom junctions, the cold junctions, it was minus 200 degrees.
00:17:08
Speaker
So I would get electricity flowing through there based off of the electronegativities differences in those wires. So at the end, I had very high voltage and high amperage.
00:17:20
Speaker
So I can now put those ends into that water and I would get hydrogen coming off of the positive side, I would have oxygen coming off of the negative side.
00:17:34
Speaker
So that was, the in a nutshell, that was it. And I really thought we were going to Mars. I was very excited about going. In 2004, the medical team gave us some very bad news. ah There's a ah a factor in the evaluation of space travel called REID.
00:17:53
Speaker
It's called the REID factor. And what it stands for is the risk of imminent injury or death. And that number has to be um under 3% for any space launch.
00:18:05
Speaker
And that's why the shuttle program was shut down because they exceeded that with the shuttle losses. So that program ended. Well, when we did the evaluation of the Mars mission with what we knew and how we were gonna get there and the distance and the time,
00:18:24
Speaker
and the radiation exposure that the astronauts would be exposed to, it came in in excess of 6%. So we knew no one could survive the mission to Mars.
00:18:37
Speaker
Well, sorry, when you say 6%, why would no one, I guess I need to understand what that 6% means. So that doesn't mean if you sent 100, 94 would make it, but 6 wouldn't. 6% somehow is going from some to zero.
00:18:51
Speaker
No, it meant that you only had, yeah, yeah you had a 94% chance of survival. But ah NASA's standard was 97%. It's interesting though, because I mean, the people that volunteer for it, because if you put it in context of the explorers to the new world or lewis and Clark or Shackleton with endurance going to Antarctica, you know, that three they had 3% chance of survival. yeah It was, it was an inverse.
00:19:17
Speaker
And so there's a question of if people know what they're getting into, are we being too paternalistic or is it a optics thing? It's a liabilities issue. Yeah. Yeah. okay The lawyers got involved. There wasn't any lawyers on Christopher Columbus's ship. Yeah.
00:19:33
Speaker
And now Magellan sailing around the world wasn't insured by Lloyd's of London. sure So so times have changed a little bit. Yeah. ah Right now, no one will survive the trip to Mars.
00:19:47
Speaker
the The spacecraft is designed improperly. It cannot be a cylinder. It can't be made out of aluminum. um The Kegers, Lips, and Seps will go right through an aluminum. So if you have a particle coming pretty close to the speed of light, hits the the structure, the aluminum structure of the spacecraft.
00:20:05
Speaker
On the backside, it's like a shotgun blast. So all of that energy throws all these tiny little aluminum particles like a mist traveling close to the speed of light.
00:20:19
Speaker
The momentum remains the same. So those aluminum, it's called spatter, but the the aluminum particles will go right through any human being.
00:20:30
Speaker
You have enough of those holes drilled through you at the atomic level, and it creates an inflammatory problem. you You have these internal wounds that now your body has to heal and try to fix.
00:20:43
Speaker
Now, when you're it's gonna take us a year to get to Mars, a year on Mars, and a year to return. So you have three years of exposed exposure to these. And at this point, from what we've seen with the space station, still inside some of the protection of the Van Allen Belt, they're still suffering from these types of problems.
00:21:06
Speaker
um A three-year mission, no one survives. the risk of imminent injury or death is almost 99%.
00:21:17
Speaker
um So I'm not at this point ah convinced that we can even make it to Mars and return. It could be a lot of people are gonna die on the way there because these inflammatory diseases kick in about two to three months after you exit the magnetic field protection protection of the Earth.
Understanding Free Radicals and Disease
00:21:40
Speaker
And these inflammatory diseases, are these similar or the same to ones we experience living on Earth? They're just more accelerated in higher likelihood because of that kind of exposure?
00:21:51
Speaker
What I found was that there's four free radicals that cause 92% of all human disease. There's singlet oxygen, there's superoxide, the peroxyl, and the hydroxyl free radicals.
00:22:09
Speaker
As a group, there's also ah a nitrogen a couple nitrogen-based free radicals, but I'm not gonna talk about those right now, but those four are the are the major ones.
00:22:21
Speaker
And they're categorized in a group called ROS, R-O-S, reactive oxygen species. Those are the precursors to all disease.
00:22:34
Speaker
Now, the best analogy that I have is a very large oak tree. So this oak tree has its roots based down in the ground.
00:22:46
Speaker
That root structure is what initiates the production of these Ross. So that's diet, That's environmental ah pollution, radiation, alcohol, smoking, um epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol, the stress hormones from our adrenal gland.
00:23:08
Speaker
It can be wounds, it can be bacterial, it can be virus in ah causes of of that. So you have this root structure down in the ground and all these things that we live around or in or we take,
00:23:24
Speaker
they generate up the trunk, these four free radicals. So think of the trunk as the Ross. Now, if that Ross builds enough, you end up with these big branches that we call disease.
00:23:41
Speaker
Right. So you got type two diabetes as a result, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, MS. Well, doctors only treat the tips once the symptoms happen. They only treat the tips of those branches.
00:23:55
Speaker
And that's how our health program and industry is based right now. The problem is the trunk of that tree. Somebody needs to cut that trunk down.
00:24:09
Speaker
So ah this is sort of after an explanation of how I actually got into it. But in from a strategic point of view, if I can eliminate the trunk of the tree, all the branches fall away.
00:24:24
Speaker
There's no more disease. So all I had to do was eliminate those four free radicals. And how I got there, now it's like Paul Harvey. I'm going to tell the rest of the story. Yeah.
00:24:37
Speaker
um It wasn't supposed to happen to me, but I i developed electromagnetic pulse weapons, auditory weapons, and bioweapons for a group out of Brooks Air Force Base.
Alternative Cancer Treatment Journey
00:24:49
Speaker
So in 2003, I'd also developed, ah I've got 44 patents um that are pretty applicable throughout the world. I've built wastewater treatment plants in China, in the UK, about 27 facilities here in the United States.
00:25:07
Speaker
And in 2003, may have gotten a little too close to something, but I ended up with bone cancer. And it was incurable. There was no chemo, no radiation options available to me.
00:25:21
Speaker
So it was a little shocking, to put it mildly. And I had a a wonderful career. I had a wonderful life.
00:25:33
Speaker
I thought I was in control of everything that I was doing. And then this hit me and I was terminal.
00:25:44
Speaker
I knew how I was going to die. i knew within a certain time span that I was going to die. and That makes it very difficult to come awake at four o'clock in the morning and realize all of this is gonna end.
00:26:03
Speaker
Nobody's escaping.
00:26:05
Speaker
So once I realized that and at that point had said, well, God, I'm im i'm out, I'm done.
00:26:17
Speaker
and there's There's no other place for me to go. And some people call it a surrender. Some people will say yeah you just gave up. Well, I just my life changed from that point. There was no more fear in my life.
00:26:34
Speaker
It ended. yeah I realized how insecure fear makes somebody. And if you're no longer a fear, afraid of dying, what other is there to fear?
00:26:50
Speaker
and so. One very dark morning, I had gotten up and sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee trying to figure out, because I knew I was going to stroke. I was going to either throw a blood clot to my brain, my heart, or my lung.
00:27:06
Speaker
I was probably going to be disabled. My family was going to have to take care of me if I if i didn't die outright. So I knew I had to think about things that people shouldn't have to think about.
00:27:22
Speaker
And the moment I reached that point of just nothing, i i it was i um a very peaceful but low point of my life, I sort of popped up and said, what's my purpose?
00:27:44
Speaker
What am I doing, still doing here? And why can't this cancer be cured? And I began to ask these questions. And then there was one answer that came back was everything that God gave us, he he put here on this earth.
00:28:02
Speaker
And if that's the case, then there's gotta be some animals that don't get cancer or some plants or something. So i had access to ProQuest, which was a government database at that time.
00:28:15
Speaker
So I queried it and asked for the identification of all the animals known to date that don't apparently get cancer. Well, it listed five, salmon, pink flamingos, sharks, elephants, and naked mole rats.
00:28:33
Speaker
And at that time, um i had asked a ah friend of mine who works at Scripps Oceanographic if he could... um do a mass spec and find those molecules that shouldn't be in any of those animals and yet is found in all five of those species.
00:28:56
Speaker
And he came back and he said, yeah, there's there's one. It's called astaxanthin. I said, what's astaxanthin? He said, well, it's a a carotenoid made by an and an algae called Hematococcus pluvialis.
00:29:12
Speaker
So I went to the University of Texas and I got that Hematococcus pluvialis algal species and went out and bought, I call them hillbilly hot tubs, but those blow up um Intex hot tubs that you can get.
00:29:26
Speaker
So I went and got one of those and I had my family on edge because where I lived in Houston, we had a pool and every every day had to go out and kill the algae in my pool.
00:29:39
Speaker
And yet here I am now, I have an algae reactor where I'm growing algae right beside my pool. And people were saying, what are you doing? You're trying to kill algae in your swimming pool, but you're growing it prolifically in this little tub.
00:29:55
Speaker
said, yeah, yeah. so So I learned how to make the algae produce this astaxanthin very efficiently. And it was ah just a little trick because the algae itself is green.
00:30:11
Speaker
and But I knew if i had if I could stress the algae, make it think that it's dying, it would produce this carotenoid. And the University of Texas helped me with that pathway.
00:30:24
Speaker
But they didn't have a way of really stressing it other than sunlight. So they would do phototoxicity of the algae and the algae would get too much UV and it would turn red.
00:30:36
Speaker
but I didn't want to do that. So what I did is increase the salt concentration. I made the algae think that its pond was drying up. So the way that it would act is if it's ponds drying up, the salt content would increase. And that triggered the algae then to start producing this astaxanthin, thinking that it's going to die when its pond dries out.
00:30:57
Speaker
And that's what happened. Within 48 hours, I could turn the entire green algae biomass into a red, deeply red, slimy algae.
00:31:10
Speaker
okay So I would float it out. and skim it off, put it in dehydrator, and I knew it was 3.8% astaxanthin at its reddest. So if I wanted to dose myself at, my first dose was four milligrams a day, I could calculate how many grams of this biomass do I have to eat to give me four milligrams?
00:31:32
Speaker
And since it was so red in my past history, things that are red are usually poisonous. like red tide and red berries. yeah those Those are things you stay away from.
00:31:45
Speaker
So I figured that this was probably gonna destroy my liver or my kidneys. There was something bad was gonna happen. So I did a low dose, four milligrams a day. I began eating it.
00:31:59
Speaker
And within about a month, of that ah Well, to keep me alive while I had my cancer, i had the cancer in 2003. This didn't start until about 2006, early 2007. So for about four years, I was phlebotomized every month.
00:32:18
Speaker
I would go in and they'd take my blood out. That's the only way they could keep me alive. So my phlebotomies was once a month. So when I started taking four milligrams a day, my phlebotomies got pushed out. the The slope of the climb out of my hemoglobin dipped down.
00:32:36
Speaker
So I was being phlebotomized about once every two months. Statistically, it wasn't significant, but at least it wasn't killing me. My A1C came in line. My blood work began to normalize except for my hemoglobin.
00:32:51
Speaker
And I thought, okay, it i'm my liver enzymes, AST, AALT were fine. My glomerul and renal counts were fine.
00:33:02
Speaker
So I said, okay, at four milligrams, I'm perfectly fine. It's not killing me. And I'm seeing some positive effect. So I bumped it to 12 milligrams a day.
00:33:14
Speaker
And when I did that, my phlebotomies got pushed out to once every four months. So now I had three slopes of the curve. I had the control. Every 30 days, I had to be phlebotomized.
00:33:27
Speaker
Then I had it at four milligrams. Every two months, I had to be phlebotomized. And then at 12 milligrams, every four months, I had to be phlebotomized.
00:33:37
Speaker
So I had the derivative, the slopes of those curves. So now I can calculate how much do I have to take so that I'm never phlebotomized for the next 50 years of my life.
00:33:50
Speaker
And it turned out to be 96 milligrams a day. I started taking 100 and my cancer went away in 30 days. 30 days. No more phlebotomies. Haven't been phlebotomized since 2008. That's ah one amazing. like Congratulations and so happy 22 years after the diagnosis that you're still here. We're having this conversation.
00:34:12
Speaker
Well, yeah. I mean, the the doctor came in when when and told me I had polycythemia vera. I said, well, what's my how much time do I have? He said, in your current condition, you have 10 minutes to 10 years. He said, 97% of the people will perish within 10 years.
00:34:28
Speaker
I said, well, what about the 10 minutes? He said, your blood is so thick that you could throw a blood clot to your brain, your heart, or your lung right now. would take me 10 minutes to declare you dead. So that was my first phlebotomy.
00:34:41
Speaker
You talked about your hemoglobin a one c You said got in line. so you've developed this now for people to be able to take because, you know, it's We've gotten here in different ways. we We talked about the free radicals. Now we're getting into antioxidants and then this high dosage of this one very specific produced from the the algae.
00:35:03
Speaker
What other objective metrics is people take this rate? Do healthy individuals take it and what what impact or benefits do they see?
00:35:14
Speaker
As a biochemist, I had all the tools in the toolbox. If anybody could figure out the exact reason why this worked, I truly believed that I could figure this out.
00:35:26
Speaker
So it took me eight years. It wasn't something that I could figure out right away. But um I had family friends who were dying of cancer and home with hospice.
00:35:37
Speaker
So I began just to produce it and give it to them and their cancers went away. Hospice left and they're still alive today. You'll see some of the testimonies on the website.
00:35:50
Speaker
So what I found was these four free radicals. And there there's a biochemistry course right there that I that i teach.
00:36:03
Speaker
In that book, this is not clinical stuff. This is textbook. In that book, it talks about the importance of these free radicals in the communication between cells and and how they're produced in the mitochondria.
00:36:18
Speaker
So all of a sudden, I now knew the hydroxyl free radical was the one I focused on because it had the longest half-life and seemed to have the greatest um affinity to react with the guanide of the DNA to cause mutation.
00:36:37
Speaker
And it did. So there was a whole bunch of articles that was listed, um research papers published as to how the hydroxyl free radical causes DNA mutation. Well, cancer is a DNA mutation.
00:36:52
Speaker
So, When I began to look at the at the chemical um pathway as to how the astaxanthin donates or reacts from a free radical point of view and donates an electron to an OH, an oxygen hydrogen with a zero charge. Now an oxygen has eight protein protons, hydrogen has one, that's nine.
00:37:21
Speaker
Well, the OH radical has nine electrons to match up with the nine protons. So it's electrically neutral.
00:37:33
Speaker
So up at the top valence, we put a zero, it's neutral. The problem is on all free radicals, all the orbitals, electrons in those orbitals have to be paired.
00:37:45
Speaker
and With a free radical, one isn't paired. So it's highly reactive. It will steal an electron from anything that it bumps into.
00:37:56
Speaker
so it's So it's very electrostatic. It's looking looking for an electron. If it bumps into a ah perfectly folded up protein, steals an electron, the electronic configuration of that protein changes and it'll open up and misfold. It's called misfolding.
00:38:15
Speaker
So I knew that chemistry. So now I had these four free radicals that I knew were being impacted by the astaxanthin by
Astaxanthin's Unique Properties
00:38:24
Speaker
its ability to donate ah electrons without itself becoming a free radical.
00:38:31
Speaker
And that's why astaxanthin is one of the only products that doesn't become a pro-oxidant. ah Vitamin C is great on inflammation.
00:38:45
Speaker
But when it's processed in the liver, it generates all these hydroxyl free radicals again. So a large dose vitamin C, a lot of other things will go ahead and and throw these free radicals back out into your system and can become quite inflammatory.
00:39:02
Speaker
And we see that with high dose vitamin C causing um non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. That's where it's coming from. Alcohol does the same thing. ah Fructose in fruit does the same thing.
00:39:16
Speaker
So when I began to look at the astaxanthin, all of a sudden, all four of these free radicals, as they're produced in the mitochondria during the metabolic pathways, they they immediately would neutralize it.
00:39:30
Speaker
Well, when we're young, we can do a lot of stupid things without generating these free radicals. We can eat a lot of pizza, we can eat carbohydrates, we can eat sugar, we can stay up late, we can drink beer, we drink alcohol, stress ourselves.
00:39:47
Speaker
So why don't young people get these diseases? So I went back in and looked at the glutathione on the red blood cells versus a test called an HSCRP.
00:40:00
Speaker
HSCRP is a high sensitivity C-reactive protein. It's a protein generated by the liver when there's chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is what causes these diseases and the chronic, that measure is a measure of the concentration of these free radicals.
00:40:19
Speaker
So if the free radical concentration is very high and they're not being neutralized, your HSCRP will go out to go out the the roof. So when I took the blood samples from five-year-old all the way up to 105-year-old,
00:40:34
Speaker
and I plotted the glutathione levels versus the HSCRP. Well, young people are producing a lot of glutathione, superoxide dismutase, catalase.
00:40:48
Speaker
These are all cellular antioxidants. So when we're young, we're producing a lot of these. Then in women at age 42 was the average,
00:40:59
Speaker
we begin to see it uptick. The HSCRP began to increase and the glutathione levels were dropping off fast. And now you get these inflammatory disease, these age onset inflammatory diseases.
00:41:15
Speaker
So, Now I had the link to to show the correlation between the HSCRP and the glutathione levels. Nature cuts off glutathione. It can only be produced at ah intracellular, inside the cell.
00:41:31
Speaker
You can't take glutathione orally. um You can't get it into the cell. And it's typically either lysine, leucine, ah tyrosine. Those are all amino acids that have to be present in the cell to produce glutathione.
00:41:47
Speaker
um there's a sulfur-based amino acid also. But when the glutathione levels drop, your inflammatory disease state begins to go out of control.
00:41:59
Speaker
We start getting arthritis in our joints, waking up, our fingers are stiff. For men, it happens at about age 50. So we have about an eight-year jump on on women. But ah Their ankles, they begin to retain water. Their kidneys aren't functioning properly.
00:42:14
Speaker
um And it's all inflammatory related. When that happens, eventually you're going to present with a more serious disease and everybody presents differently.
00:42:28
Speaker
Some people will present with chronic arthritis, osteoarthritis, arthritis. irritable bowel syndrome, diverticulitis, diverticulosis, the coronary artery disease. It's not caused by cholesterol, never has been caused by cholesterol.
00:42:47
Speaker
um What causes it is a free radical. The OH zero charge has an acidic pH, a pH of about 5, 5.2.
00:42:59
Speaker
five two Well, when it is running through your bloodstream, your blood's trying to maintain a pH of 7.35, but it will irritate the endothelial cells that line your artery and it will burn them. It will create a wound.
00:43:16
Speaker
At that point, and that endothelial cell will die. The moment it dies and bursts open, the white blood cells, the basophiles, go there and try to clean up the mess.
00:43:28
Speaker
Well, it forms a scab. So we use cholesterol to form the scab.
00:43:36
Speaker
That's what causes heart disease. So it builds up, but why it builds up is because of,
Rethinking Heart Disease Causes
00:43:43
Speaker
yeah. Okay. So this whole concept of cholesterol is bad for you is hog crap.
00:43:50
Speaker
No, you need the cholesterol to do the healing. The issue is the damage that requires the healing in the first place. Correct. And that's the hydroxyl free radical. If we can eliminate that, no more heart disease.
00:44:03
Speaker
Um, In 2023, February of 2023, Dr. Stefan Keis, and people can can look him up, he's a world-renowned cardiologist.
00:44:15
Speaker
He's a guy who invented and the practical use of the very first stent ever put into a human being to save his life. He's number one cardiologist in Poland, very highly ranked here in the United States. He runs the Heart Institute in San Antonio.
00:44:32
Speaker
I think he even teaches or taught at Baylor for for years. Well, he contacted me. We we have known each other for for a while and he had contacted me and asked if, ah because I had been on Velasta longer than anybody else, probably on the planet.
00:44:50
Speaker
He said, would you come into my cath lab and we want to go in and look in your arteries? and see what kind of inflammation or plaque you have building up. As a 70-year-old, I should have plaque built up if it's a normal distribution of 70-year-olds.
00:45:09
Speaker
And I had no symptoms. you know My wife and I struggled with, you know do we do this? Well, we decided to do it. So we went in first day, fill out paperwork. If they kill us, we don't have any liability to sue them. There's a whole bunch of legal paperwork you have to fill out. Yeah.
00:45:26
Speaker
So day two was stress testing and scanning. And he was extremely thorough. He did Doppler of the arteries. He did CAT scans.
00:45:39
Speaker
He knew exactly what what to do. And that went on all day for both of us. And then the next day, um i went in at six o'clock in the morning and i'm I'm laying there and I'm wide awake. And he stuck the the catheter in, went up through my wrist.
00:46:01
Speaker
And I'm watching it on a screen. I'm seeing the catheter in there and he injects the the the radionucleotide, lights up my heart. Now, he told me before he went in, if he found anything, he would fix it.
00:46:15
Speaker
And I said, OK, well, It lit up. There's all my arteries beating around my heart. I mean, it was something to watch.
00:46:27
Speaker
Sort of exciting. i I didn't have any feelings or anything. No pain, nothing like that. And he looked in my heart heart area, and I believe he may have even gone up into the carotids and looked to see if there's anything there was there.
00:46:41
Speaker
So I come out of that and I go back into the recovery room and he comes in, he throws the curtain back and in his Eastern European twang, he says, ah you know, I don't believe this.
00:46:55
Speaker
i said I said, what's going on? He said, you want the good news or the bad news first? I said, give me the good news first. He says, the good news is you have no atherosclerosis at your age.
00:47:07
Speaker
Your arteries ah are as clean as a 20 year old. He said, I have no patients. I have 56,000 patients. I have no patients at your age that have clean arteries like this.
00:47:20
Speaker
And I thought, well, that's pretty good news. I said, what's the bad news? And he comes over with his little video and he said, I want you to look at this. Tell me if there's something strange here. So I began to watch it and I could just see my you know my arteries flexing with every heartbeat.
00:47:37
Speaker
He said, yep, he said, but I want you to look right here. And here is my lad, the widow maker artery that goes around your heart. Every heartbeat, it would kink and cut the blood supply off to my heart.
00:47:54
Speaker
In essence, giving me a heart heart attack with every heartbeat. And I said, oh, i said, that looks like a worm. He said, every time your heart beats, it did that.
00:48:07
Speaker
And I said, well, what what is that? He said, that's a congenital heart defect. You've had that since you were born. well And I said, well well, can you fix it?
00:48:19
Speaker
He said, oh, no, no, no, no. He said, we're not good there's nothing to fix. He said, I just want you to know that if you'd had a blood clot, that's called a widowmaker. If you'd had a blood clot hit at that kink, you're dead.
00:48:31
Speaker
Your whole life you've been playing on this edge, if you'd had any plaque formation, which is where it forms is in that kink, that's where it would have hung up and you would have died within minutes.
00:48:46
Speaker
And I said, oh my golly, I said, i said can you can you fix that? He said, no, no, no. He said, we're not gonna fix that. I said, well, how long can i live with that? He says, how old are you? I said, I'm 71. And he sort of looks up like this and he goes, well,
00:49:02
Speaker
He says, I'll give you another 30, 35 years. Okay. said I get it. I understand. And he sort of smiled and walked out of the room.
00:49:13
Speaker
And then um my wife, she volunteered also. And her cholesterol runs about 260 for the last 20 years, untreated. Never had any treatment for it.
00:49:26
Speaker
And he came in and he said, now we'll probably find something on her. um you it That's difficult with current understanding to have a cholesterol that high without having some atherosclerosis or blockage or plaque formation.
00:49:41
Speaker
So she went through the same thing. She went in. She came in and he come running in again and threw that curtain back and he said, and used a an expletive.
00:49:54
Speaker
And he said, i don't believe this. And he said, you have no plaque formation anywhere in your body.
00:50:06
Speaker
And i I was sort of shocked too, because I thought they'd find something. And he said um he said, this is highly unusual. He said, i I could explain it being genetic if you two were related.
00:50:21
Speaker
And I said, well, no, we're not from West Virginia or Arkansas. No, I don't think we're related. yeah And he he he said, well, he said, you have no atherosclerosis either.
00:50:34
Speaker
And um he called his entire staff over. and told every one of them to get on Velasta tomorrow morning. He now prescribes it to his patients.
Astaxanthin's Global Impact and Applications
00:50:45
Speaker
And what is the dosing? So you were taking 100 when you were trying to treat yeah a terminal cancer. I still do 100. Okay. And is that is that the recommended for a healthy... No, we have to we have to play a little bit of economics in this too.
00:51:01
Speaker
So... if you If you are treating for a disease, we wanna get every cell in your body um saturated as quickly as possible. Because that's where these ROS are generated is in the mitochondria in every cell.
00:51:16
Speaker
So we look at your body weight. That translates to the number of cells you have in your body. So we're able, to look at your body weight, and we've been able to figure out that if you have a disease, we want one milligram for every pound of body weight.
00:51:38
Speaker
So that's what we start people with as the baseline dose. And then we measure their HSCRP before they start the dosage, and then we monitor it.
00:51:50
Speaker
So if someone's in a disease state, if it's inflammatory, their HSCRP will be extremely elevated, greater than 10. And so so we'll we'll measure that.
00:52:06
Speaker
Then we put them on the Velasta and for the next, and anywhere from two weeks to four weeks, we'll test the HSCRP again and it should be trending down. If it's not trending ten trending down, then we'll increase the dose until we break over. Because what we found is that there's two things. There's a rate of generation of ROS that's not being neutralized, but there's also an inventory, a big tank full of ROS.
00:52:35
Speaker
You have to clean it out. Depending on on how we have to drain that tank dictates the time and and what our dose is. So we we start the baseline. if If the HSCRP moves down, then we can monitor it and possibly start reducing the dose.
00:52:53
Speaker
If the HSCRP remains the same or elevates, that means that we gotta increase the dose, that that person in their lifestyle is generating a huge concentration of ROS.
00:53:07
Speaker
And is this prescribed or is this? It's all natural. It's the only natural product that's ever been allowed to be patented. So we have two patents on it.
00:53:20
Speaker
The first one is that the title, which really surprised me that it was even allowed to go through the government agency, but it's a method for the process of using astaxanthin for the treatment of inflammatory disease, particularly for the treatment of cancer.
00:53:40
Speaker
Now, the FDA usually doesn't allow those types, that type of verbiage, a press to be used, but they did in this case. The second patent is for the mitigation of radiation for space travel.
00:53:55
Speaker
So astronauts are going to be taking it. We have special forces operators who are taking it. um We have now going into horses for the removal of lactic acid for racehorses.
00:54:08
Speaker
wow. And that last furlong in a horse race dictates what horse is going to win, depending on how fast they generate lactic acid in their muscle tissue.
00:54:19
Speaker
So if I can stop that from forming, these horses are going to go start winning races. Interesting. And for listeners that want to learn more about estaxanthin and everything, what's the best way for them to do so?
00:54:37
Speaker
Velasta.net. All the testimonials are on there. The and NIH has over a thousand peer reviewed articles on Astaxanta now on that website. um It was I testified in Washington, D.C.,
00:54:52
Speaker
In April of 2019, there were a bunch of senators, representatives that were there. The five major hospitals, John Hopkins, Sloan, MD Anderson, Mayo, and the Cleveland Clinic were all present.
00:55:03
Speaker
They were shocked that we had found what actually causes human disease. And I was approached and was um and told that they were going to allocate funds through the and NIH, I think, to prove me wrong, which is okay from a scientific point of view.
00:55:21
Speaker
In some cases, that's the best way to do it. It's called the null hypothesis. um But I volunteered to help. They didn't have to pay me or anything. And they basically told me that, no, I just need to go away.
00:55:35
Speaker
So it's an unbiased ah research program. Well, since then, you can now go on and Google and NIH and astaxanthin and a multitude of diseases, cancer, heart disease, arthritis, type 2 diabetes.
00:55:53
Speaker
It doesn't work on type 1. um Irritable bowel, Alzheimer's, dementia. And all these research papers are now available for people to review and for their doctors to to look at as they ah the positive aspects of this.
00:56:08
Speaker
On the website, there's two approaches we make ah specifically for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and dementia. The first one is people who have the disease already have amyloid beta plaque that's sort of plated out in their brains around the neurons.
00:56:26
Speaker
And for that, we developed a electromagnetic pulse, a light pulse I can send through the eye. And it came out of electromagnetic pulse weapons development, but it sends a very specific light into the eye. The that the eye is very good at converting photons of light into electricity.
00:56:47
Speaker
That's what the rods and cones do. So it sends the electric pulse back the optic nerve into the occipital lobe of the brain and it dissipates and it activates a a um a little or organelle called microglia.
00:57:03
Speaker
And microglia have no DNA in them. They live forever. They're like an an immortal cancer cell. It lives in our brain, swings through the neuronal forest looking for debris that it can eat.
00:57:16
Speaker
So it cleans up bacteria, viruses, dead cell, dead bodies on the battlefield, you know, cells that have died and it cleans up the mess. Well, as we age, the microglia goes into hibernation and gets lazy.
00:57:30
Speaker
And that plaque will will start to accumulate around the neurons in our brain. And they don't get removed. And that's what causes Alzheimer's. MIT figured it out.
00:57:42
Speaker
So we activate the microglia to clean up the mess that's there. And then you take Velasta that stops the misfolding of the amyloid beta protein so you don't get the reaccumulation okay of it.
00:57:59
Speaker
Interesting technologies. Yeah, it's a it's incredibly exciting space to be. And hopefully this is the first of many conversations. It just seems like it keeps expanding what it can do or what it is doing. and we're learning that it's doing, I guess, is is a more accurate way to say it.
00:58:18
Speaker
Well, keep in mind, Andrew, that when we started this, when I started this in 2008, I didn't tell anybody what the what I was doing because nobody was going to believe it. So I gave it just to those in need. So those who had two to four months, three to six months to live, we we gave it to them. And sure enough, within 30 days, the doctors were shocked. They couldn't find cancer in these people.
00:58:43
Speaker
So if you're cured of cancer, you tell 100 Well, those hundred people, all they're all in the same group. right And it went completely around the world.
00:58:53
Speaker
We now have offices in Dubai, Singapore, in Poland, in Denmark, UK. It went completely around the world with no sales or marketing, just by word of mouth and the social media.
00:59:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's amazing. i I'm excited to to learn more and I'm grateful that what seemed like a winding path, it to me, it's very much like a a prayer for Owen Meany or something where they say, you know, life only makes sense when looked in the rear view mirror, but you live it going forward. So you don't know each of these pieces as you go, how perfectly they'll fit together for your purpose and then what that compounds to be in the impact.
00:59:38
Speaker
But, ah you know, we're seeing it and that's only going to amplify it from here. So Sam, thank you so much. Thank you, Andrew, for having me and giving at least the opportunity for people to have hope.
00:59:53
Speaker
Because current medicine isn't giving it to them. No, and this is the difference, right? To get to the trunk, it's not about sick care. Health is too often associated with sickness, and this is about getting to health.
01:00:05
Speaker
And maintaining your health. Yeah. Yeah. i i have I have nothing. I'm 70, 73 years old. have no arthritis. i have no arthritis I lift weights. i I walk two or three miles a day.
01:00:20
Speaker
I'm now developing ultracapacitors to replace lithium iron phosphate batteries. That could be another podcast we want to do. um We're currently building drones.
01:00:32
Speaker
We get one chance to live this life.
01:00:37
Speaker
And and it's it's for living. It's for living and it's for exploring. I mean, the the scientific mindset, that curiosity, i think we're all the beneficiaries of people like you that that lead the way, not asking what necessarily has been, but what could be and why not.
01:00:57
Speaker
And so thank you for all your work and your time today. Thanks, Andrew. To all our listeners, enjoy a lively day. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast.
01:01:09
Speaker
And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other Healthspan role models on Alively.com. Enjoy a lively day.