Hi Chris Beat Cancer fans! My name is Jodi Ledley. For many years, I struggled with migraines and chronic pain. After 19 doctors failed to help me, I discovered my problems were caused by food additives called excitotoxins, which overstimulate the nervous system and can cause a variety of chronic conditions in the body. My doctors recommended I have a spinal cord implant to control the pain, but I changed my diet and stopped eating processed food and restaurant food and all my pain went away!

About five years later, my husband Casey was diagnosed with Stage 3 rectal cancer. This was a shock as we were already eating a much healthier diet than most folks. We only ate whole foods and the animal products we ate were grass-fed and of high quality…

And high quantity.

An unprocessed whole foods diet solved my problem, but it wasn’t enough to prevent my husband’s cancer.

I had been following Chris Wark for a while and the day of Casey’s diagnosis, I bought Chris’s SQUARE ONE Healing Cancer Coaching Program. We eliminated all animal products from our diet and decided to “overdose on fruits and vegetables,” as Chris says.

Check out the difference in my husband’s colonoscopy photos after just two weeks of eating the anticancer diet that Chris recommends in SQUARE ONE.

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Casey didn’t do any other therapies during those two weeks. This is just from eating only raw fruits and vegetables, and juicing. His intestines went from bloody, blistered, and rotting, to pink and much healthier. This looks like healing happening to me!

We were highly pressured to do conventional treatment, which would involve 5 weeks of chemo and radiation treatments (at a cost of over $200,000) before surgery, followed by four more months of chemotherapy.

Cancer clinics don’t normally tell patients how much treatments are going to cost, but we told them that we would not schedule surgery until they gave us an estimate.

Get this… They were ready to start treatment the next day, but it took them over 5 weeks to tell us how much it was going to cost!

During this time we did a ton of research and we couldn’t find any evidence that stage 3 rectal cancer could be cured with conventional treatment. So my husband declined chemo and radiation, and only had surgery.

After the scary first colonoscopy at Cleveland Clinic, we were told there were three cancerous lymph nodes based on an MRI, but after surgery only two lymph nodes were cancerous…

We continued with the SQUARE ONE Program and 21 months later, he’s doing well! His scans are clean!

I’ve been sharing some things I’ve discovered in the SQUARE ONE private support group and Chris asked me to summarize it for you here on the blog. :)

In July of 2018, I found a study done by the University of Florida, examining 52,519 people under the age of 50 with rectal cancer. The study found that the current recommended treatment of rectal cancer (chemo and radiation) provides ZERO survival benefits. More confirmation we made the right decision.

One key finding of that study is that rectal cancer is biologically different in young people, possibly due to microbiome changes, which got me interested in research concerning the connection between colorectal cancer and the microbiome.

My investigation turned up some fascinating clues as to what’s happening. Here are the highlights…

Colorectal cancer patients have been found to have low levels of a protective bacteria called Lachnospiraceae, and high levels of a cancer-promoting bacteria called Fusobacterium. Fusobacterium is known to elicit an inflammatory immune response, and can invade epithelial cells and change DNA pathways, in a bad way.

Lachnospiraceae, the good bacteria, is a type of clostridia that feeds on plant matter (fiber) and produces a short-chain fatty acid called butyrate. Butyrate is known to have substantial anti-tumorigenic properties, including the ability to inhibit tumor cell proliferation.

What feeds the good bacteria? Starch and fiber from plant foods, and eugenol, a compound found in cinnamon, basil, and cloves. Some studies indicate that eugenol is the key to thickening the mucosal lining in your gut, so that bad bacteria like Fusobacterium can’t penetrate it.

Another study indicates that periodontal disease-causing bacteria (including Fusobacterium) may be connected to CRC, and are found at high levels in tumors.

CRC patients with elevated levels of Fusobacterium have especially poor survival rates.

So, how do we get rid of cancer-promoting Fusobacterium?

Starve it!

A diet high in animal products (even the grass-fed, organic kind), and low in starch and fiber, feeds Fusobacterium. Simply eliminating animal foods from your diet and replacing them with plant foods (fruits and vegetables, and especially starches like legumes, tubers, and whole grains), can lead to dramatic decreases in Fusobacterium within days!

I also found a study about a single plant food that can KILL Fusobacterium – wild blueberries. Yes!

A 2015 study found that there are many plant phytochemicals which have inhibiting effects on different types of periodontal pathogens including Fusobacterium. Curcumin and quercetin were the most potent.

Studies are finding that microbiome testing can predict CRC with oral swabs and stool tests at a 95% accuracy rate.

When I was researching how diet affects the microbiome, I also came across Jeff Leach, founder of the Human Food Project and author of Rewild. Leach tested his poop for 365 days on all sorts of diets like paleo, raw vegan, vegetarian, Jenny Craig, high fat/low carb, and more. He even lived with the Hadza tribe and got a fecal transplant from one of them!

One thing that stood out was how easily and dramatically he could shift his microbiome with fiber. Leach found that the average paleo dieter eats a measly 19-25 grams of fiber per day. He also found that vegans eat about 43 grams of fiber per day, and an Africans eat up to 130!

Leach also found that low carb diets do not include enough fiber to ferment in the gut and produce butyrate and feed the protective gut bacteria Lachnospiraceae. It’s no wonder that Africans have 50 times less colon cancer than Americans!

Jodi Ledley and her husband Casey have two kids and an organic farm. You can follow Jodi on her facebook page, Adventures with Jodi.