Chris Wark, a cancer survivor and an advocate for fighting cancer with nutrition and natural therapies, sat down with Dr. Limor Goren, founder of Kyoord to discuss her amazing lab discoveries and the significance of oleocanthal molecule in her PHD research in molecular biology.
Click on the link to watch the full interview and learn about the cancer fighting oleocanthal, how the olive oil process matters, how you can benefit from cancer-fighting olive oil in your daily intake, and in which country doctors are prescribing vegetables.
Wark shares his amazing story in his blog Chris Beat Cancer, he is a 19-year cancer survivor and a great advocate for healthy diet, nutrition and natural, holistic therapies for cancer. His popular channel Chris Beat Cancer provides many resources you can check out here.
Watch the full interview on youtube. The interview is also available on the Chris Beat Cancer Podcast, on Spotify or Itunes.
A short snippet from the interview:
Chris Wark:
- They sent you this oleocanthal molecule to do some benchwork with, and what was discovered?
Dr. Limor Goren:
- So, first of all the most interesting thing was that, initially we tested it on cells in a dish and what we noticed was that it causes really rapid cell death that I have not seen with any other compound, there are bleach and cancer cells, that would kill them, that would kill anything, but as far as organic, natural compounds, it causes very rapid cell death, you could see it with your eyes in a microscope. You didn’t have to do any kind of fancy essays. And that was interesting because mostly when we work with cancer cells, we always think about apoptosis as a mode of death. and apoptosis takes some time to achieve, it’s actually a pathway that involves several reactions that have to happen a certain timeline. But this was much faster, something was happening to those cells that made them almost die from the inside out.
And that was interesting, that was one of the first thing I set to figure out what’s happening there, what’s killing the cell, how does oleocanthal kills the cells. And again I’m not saying it happens with every cell, not even with every cancer cell. But what we found is that it affects a very important organelle inside the cells, we all have, every cell in the body has lysosomes and lysosomes often are referred to as the recycling center of the cells but there are much more than that. Basically for cells that are in the environment where they are very poorly vascularized as the case with many tumors especially in the early stage before they get blood vessels feeding them. The cells need a way of getting nutrients. And they don’t have that way of getting nutrients so what happens is they recycle each and every components that are not necessary anymore of the cell in the lysosomes in a process called autophagy.
And very often autophagy is a survival signal for cells, for cancer cells so often with chemotherapy where some tumors becomes resistant to chemotherapy, the reason for that is because they activate their autophagic pathways and are able to survive, able to exclude those toxins from the cellar environment because lysosomes can shutter some materials out of the cell, and they are able to use only nutrients that already exist in the cell for survival. So when we target lysosomes as we found that oleocanthal does, it really targets lysosomes and pokes holes in them, it makes them not very effective anymore. It affects cancer cells much more than normal cells because normal cells, they still need the lysosomes but not as much as some cancer cells do.
Chris Wark:
- And so even in the lab putting this directly on cell cultures or whatever, what was the effect on healthy cells? Did it kill healthy cells at all?
Dr. Limor Goren:
- Not in the same concentrations, you need a concentration maybe 15-20 times higher in order to start affecting healthy cells, which is what you want when you look at compounds that you can use to fight cancer. You’re looking for that differential. Only to double the amount to grow healthy cells that wouldn’t be very interesting, but there is a really big differential between the dose that kills cancer cells and the dose that kills healthy cells.
