that can fight cancer specifically

five of them. Here on the Exam Room podcast brought to you

by the Physicians Committee. Hi.

I am the weight loss champion Chuck Carroll.

And helping us learn about cancer

fighting foods today is a woman who is quite remarkable

because she is not only a plant based chef

and a recipe developer, a fantastic one at that,

but she also happens to be a cancer survivor herself.

So there is no better person on planet Earth to help us learn

today, Raise our health IQ's, then chef Lauren Kretzer.

Lauren, thank you so very much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

That was quite the introduction and I'm flattered.

Well, it's true. It's so good to see you again.

I feel like

it has been an eternity since you've been on the Exam Room.

It has been a few years, so a lot has happened since then.

Globally. Personally, so.

I know let's let's dive into what you have been up

to, before we unveil those five foods.

I know that since you have last been on the show,

you, as you just said, have been through a lot.

And that includes a cancer scare of your own.

So kind of bring the audience up to date with

what's been going on with you.

Yes. So I have talked a little bit about this

on my channels, but basically a few years ago,

I had what I thought was a cold, a bad cold.

And at the time, my daughter was an infant.

So I was up all night with her

just basically whenever she would wake up needing to eat.

And so I was pretty run down and just kind of feeling like

my exhaustion was due to having a young baby

and a toddler and that's why

I wasn't kind of getting over this cold that I had.

But the cold persisted for weeks, and sometimes

the symptoms were fairly severe.

So at the urging of my family,

I finally got myself over to Urgent Care on a Saturday,

just kind of expecting them to send me home

with a prescription for something

and then I'd be on my way to feeling better.

But after the physician there saw me,

she said she suspected pneumonia and she wanted to take a chest

X-ray and, just kind of trying to avoid X-rays

unless absolutely necessary, I kind of asked if I could just

bypass it, and she said that, no,

we really need the X-ray because the type of meds

we will give you will depend on that.

So I submitted to the X-ray, and when they came back

in the room, she kind of sat me down

and she said,

I don't want you to be frightened,

but we found a very large mass in your chest

and we need you to get to a hospital today

to have a CAT scan done and get that checked out.

So from then on, it was a whirlwind few months of testing.

Basically, all I heard from November of 2019

until basically pathology came back from my surgery

was that this thing was huge.

It was 12 centimeters.

So about the size of a grapefruit,

it was abutting my heart.

So in my chest cavity and no one really knew what it was.

So they said

that it had some characteristics that could be benign,

but it also had some suspicious

characteristics that were showing up in PET

scans and MRI's and things like that.

So they recommended surgical resection.

So in March of 2020 just a few days before

COVID kind of went wild and shut down the world, I had

surgery to remove it.

I was not a candidate for a minimally invasive surgery,

so they had to do a full, open thoracotomy and remove the cyst.

So it did turn out to be a benign thymic cyst.

But my surgeon in his wisdom took out my thymus gland,

which is something

that you don't really need once you're an adult.

So he took it out just in case something was up

and when I first met with him in my post-surgical appointment,

he told me that they couldn't figure out

what was wrong with it, but something was up.

So it had been sent over

to Memorial Sloan-Kettering for further evaluation.

At that point,

I kind of knew that there was a possibility of cancer,

but since I didn't feel sick I never felt sick

other than the pneumonia.

You know, I tried to stay optimistic.

And then in early April of 2020, I got a call saying that

I had a very rare aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

So it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks.

And, you know, ever since then I've been kind of

dealing with it on and off.

And so, yeah, that's, that's the long, winding story.

That's the Reader's Digest version.

That's the Reader's Digest version.

I mean, I'm not sure that I could

handle the full blown text.

So, I mean, when you get that that phone call in April

and they're telling you like, oh, we have ourselves a problem

here, what runs through your head?

Because

as long as I've known you

and as much as I know about you, you have always been

an exceptionally healthy human being.

And yet you're getting this news.

How did that sit with you?

Yeah, it was really hard.

I mean, there was a lot of disbelief.

I'm going to be honest.

And the beginning and anger,

you know, kind of feeling like I had done so many things right.

And so, you know, why was this happening?

And a certain amount of shame, if I'm being honest,

because, again, you know, you eat a certain way

and you kind of preach the benefits of a certain lifestyle.

And then, whoops, I have cancer.

But, you know,

obviously since then, I've done

a lot of reflection and also a lot of research and,

you know, many things can cause cancer,

some of which are not in our control.

There's strong environmental links to the kind of cancer

that I was diagnosed with you know, use of Roundup

and things like that.

So for all I know, I was breathing that for years.

And who knows, maybe that's what caused it.

Things like stress, you know, it kind of

forced me to reexamine my life from every angle,

which was one of the huge benefits.

You know, they say every cloud has a silver lining.

And that was certainly

the one for me that I kind of just got to examine everything

that went on in my life and determine

what could have caused this and work on that.

I love the way that you put that.

I think that it's so important to you

know, stress that in particular, when it comes to diet,

you always hear our experts on the show use the term

lower your risk by whatever the percentage may be.

There is unfortunately and sadly really no magic

cure for things or no silver bullet

that would prevent something 100%.

All we can do is severely or severely

like really fantastically lower our risk for so many of

these chronic diseases.

But there are external factors, like you were just

mentioning that have literally nothing to do with nutrition.

That can still play a huge part in that.

And I am sorry that you felt that shame.

And I imagine that you felt it

especially hard because of the circles that you run in.

You know what you do for a living.

You are in the whole food plant- based community.

You are a prominent, prominent figure in it.

And so I completely understand why you would feel that shame.

But here we are now two years later as we record this.

And, you know,

I hope that you're at a point now where you realize that

there is no shame to be had here. Right?

This was not your fault.

This was just you got dealt a raw hand.

Right? Right.

Yeah.

And I mean, that's basically

what I've come to realize, that things happen to people.

And the statistics that you mentioned about lowering risk,

you know, they're certainly true,

but they're not a promise.

As I've said before, you know, in my channels

when I've talked about this, they're not a guarantee.

And so we just have to do our best,

you know, with our diet, with our lifestyle,

with everything that we can control to lower that risk.

And I think that's really empowering.

You know, like you can do things and you have a lot more power

than you think.

And that just became clearer and clearer to me

and empowered me even more in my recovery from everything.

It just kind of made me believe even more and the whole food

plant-based way of living rather than deter me from it,

because when I started reading stories of other people

who were diagnosed and recovered and, you know, using certain

tools and dietary changes, it really got me excited.

I'm like, oh, my God, this isn't a done deal.

I can still make changes because, you know,

my diet was not perfect. No one's diets perfect.

But my diet did have things going on that

I could have improved.

And that's what I've been working on the last few years.

I love your optimistic outlook on this.

That's fantastic.

So we do have those cancer fighting foods

we're going

to talk about here in just a moment,

but I feel like I want a little bit more to that readers

digest story here.

So when last we left off, it was April of 2020.

You had just gotten that news.

So what happens after that report comes back?

So my surgeon

and I had a conversation and he was very optimistic.

Thankfully, even though the cancer that

I was diagnosed with

is rare, and aggressive, it thankfully has a high cure rate.

So he told me that in all likelihood I would be okay,

but that, you know, I needed to see an oncologist right away.

So I met with an oncologist at the hospital

where I had received my surgery.

It's a, you know, the number one hospital in my state.

So I felt comfortable and spoke with him.

But my surgeon had told me, you know, seek outside opinions

just to be safe.

You know, you just want to cover all your bases.

So since I trust my surgeon so much, I decided to do just that.

So I followed up with more oncologists

at a renowned, like a, globally renowned cancer hospital. And

they immediately told me that, you know,

I had to start a pretty intensive chemotherapy regimen.

And I was kind of

shocked to hear that just because there there was

they had to removed the organ or the glands

that had the cancer on it.

And based on other testing, there was no visible cancer

in my body.

And so I was kind of, you know, thinking

why am I going to go through treatment?

There was no there was no cancer in my body right now.

And they explained, you know, microscopic cancer can exist.

And since it's aggressive, it can form a tumor fairly quickly.

And we want to kind of nip it in the bud.

And so they did more testing on me.

And I went through another PET scan and like still no sign

of cancer.

And so I was like

basically pleading with them