I'll get a team. It's it's the new project. Of course it is. It's your favorite podcast. That may not be true. Maybe it's just a podcast, could be your favorite. I hope it is.
Tiffany and Cook's probably probably one of your favorites. If this is one of your favorites, Hi, tiv.
High Harps, it's one of my favorites, that's for sure.
Is it in the top five, It's definitely in the top five. It's just in my top five, and it's my show.
So it's like it comes in at number five, it comes in at number five. That's not true. I don't even listen. I listened a bit. I just had actually two minus before we went live. Andrew May, who's been on the podcast too as his own podcast of course, High Performance Coach.
Man about Tanny Rangmini, just said he was listening to the show and he loves it.
And I'm like, it's nice when other people who have their own shows listen to our show and say nice things.
A little bit of validation.
But I get which you would think, because everyone thinks I've got a big head, maybe that I would like listening to me.
I actually do not like listening to me. At all.
I would rather I reckon out of the twenty twenty or so that we've done, I've maybe listened to two podcasts right through, like Start Finish two, and maybe not even right through. I just I don't like the sound of my own voice. I'm very familiar with it, but I don't like the sound of it. And I, yeah, what about you, gilespo do you You probably don't hear a lot of yourself, or do you.
I used to do a lot of media, and you know, television shows and so on, when various books came out. I can't stand watching or listening to myself. Most people don't like it much, and you know why, because of the way you sound in your head is very, very different to the way you sound when it's recorded, because it's much much deeper and more resonant when you're hearing it, because of the vibrations and so on, of the bonestructures
in your skull. And people always say I feel like I sound a lot tinier in you know, when when I hear myself played back, and I agree with that sounds awful. I wish I sounded the way I sound to me, but very few people do. And they've got jobs in radio, because you will have met many of those people, especially deep voiced people, particularly deep voiced females, are the ones who work best in radio.
That's right, and welcome back to the You Project.
David Glesbie, Tivanty and Cook joining me Craig Harper for another compelling episode of the U Project. That's funny you say that, right, because I mentioned this in my presentations quite often when we're talking about self awareness. And we were briefly talking about my PhD focus before we started recording,
and you know, what's it like being around me? And as way of introduction to the idea of metaperception and kind of this kind of external self awareness concept, I say to people, put up your hand if you've heard your voice, you know, audio recording. And everybody kind of shakes their head and goes ah and puts up their hand.
And then I say, depending on which environment, something like, put your hand back up if you think you sound shit, And everybody puts their hand back up, and I say, well, that's how you sound all the time to the rest of the world, and then they laugh and I go, that's kind of a bit of an analogy here, because we that is what you sound like. And even I mean,
you've seen yourself on TV. I did a bit of tally for a while for a few years on Channel ten, and the same it's like, I didn't watch I watched one. I watched one, the first one I ever did, and I hated it so much. I never watched another one. And even if I would come into whatever, the house or the gym or whatever and it was on, I would not watch it.
Yeah, I don't know what about but anyway.
Yeah, I know I avoided at all costs. I won't watch myself. I won't even to the point, as you've seen here, I don't even turn my camera on here because it's so irritating to see myself.
That is that is that is an unknown now known.
We may have mentioned it once maybe, but everybody David David said, I don't know how many, like a lot, one hundred podcasts with us, maybe more, maybe less, I don't know, but give I'll take a hundred and for every single second of every one of these recordings that we do with him, we've never seen his face.
He could be a fucking you know computer, he could be a side.
Yeah, I'm an AI. Yeah, that's right.
It could be one of those super computer they call it. You could be a quantum computer for all we know, just managing everything and multitasking.
Yeah.
Why do you just not like to see yourself when you're talking? Is it better for focus and concentration or it just that?
Yeah, a brough head.
Well it's that too. It's it's all of those things. It helps me focus if if I'm not looking at myself. But it also yeah, yeah, so I've got a rough head.
Yet you're you're a right ma.
You're handsome to us and your mum. So you wrote an article today about breast cancer, which I have not Sorry, yeah, breast cancer which I have not looked at.
What was that about?
What was I only?
All right?
Throw me under the bus.
You should be you should be hanging off off my every written word. Yeah I am. It's been up there for three or four hours and you haven't even bothered to look at it.
Well, I finally I could see your face, I'd feel more connected.
I mean, I think that's the missing link. What tell us about that article if you would.
Okay, so before we get to the thing it's about, which is a very recent study, let's do a little bit of history. You know, you you'd be familiar, no doubt, Craig, But just for the benefit of some of your listeners, with good old Bernardino Ramezini.
Yeah, I call him, I call him, but go on.
Yet he's generally considered to be the father of occupational medicine, so you know that would ring a bell with you, no doubt. He wrote a paper, well the book really, in seventeen thirteen, and he published it just a year before he died. Coincidentally, but the book was the very first time anyone had bothered to look at what people did as a job and compare it to the diseases they most often died from. So he looked at everything. He had hundreds and hundreds of jobs, and he would compare.
He did all this analysis of what are these people do and what do they die from? And it's all very very interesting if you care to go and read it, and you can read Latin. But for the of today's discussion, he also noticed a really interesting thing, which is that nuns were more likely to die of breast cancer than people who were not nuns.
Can I guess why?
Yeah, go for it.
I can't remember the mechanism. But because having children and breastfeeding is protective in some way from breast cancer. I can't remember the why or the how, but it's got there with them. It's got something to do with not having kids.
I think, well that's what he thought too, So you're on the same page with old br as you like to call him. And yeah, and he didn't quite go to the children, but he just stopped at the sex bit and decided that not having sex was going to give you a breast cancer. He didn't really bother to
explain why that might be. But subsequently, you know, less than one hundred years later, people started to analyze it a bit and came to the conclusion you did, which is, well, obviously it's not really about having sex or not having sex, you know, it's you know, for all we know, nuns were having sex, but they weren't having children, and so maybe it's about the kids. And then people went a little step further and said, well, what the kids do
that might affect the parents' chances of breast cancer? The kids do anything with breasts that might in some way affect their chances, And they thought, oh, there's an obvious connection between having kids and breast cancer is that, you know, that's the mechanism for feeding them. So maybe breastfeeding has something to do with breast cancer. And so they theorized.
After backing up his studies, they did more observations and and even outside nuns concluded that there was a very definite relationship between whether or not you breastfeed and whether or not you've got breast cancer. And they didn't know why. They had a theory which was, oh, look, it's about
the maturity of the breast cells. You know, obviously they're there to become mature and produce milk, and that action means that they become less grown to cancer, whereas the immature version of them is somehow more prone to cancer.
And as a dodgy theory for it, it does sound like a.
Dodgy theory, But for three hundred years, it was all we had until this month. So were you to ask a specialist in this area, what's the thinking on this a month or two ago, that's the ants he would have gotten. Now a massive new paper has come out in Nature, which we were talking before about the levels of journals. This is about as tier one ish as
you can get. And this is looked in more detail at this and they started out sort of what kicked off the study is that they had a cohort of around two hundred and sixty samples from women who had had breast tissue removed either from breast reduction surgery or from preemptive mastectomies and a people. And they had this sample of two hundred and sixty from two hundred and sixty different individuals, and none of the tissue was cancer affected.
But what they were doing was measuring something called the immune T cells in the cancer. This is a sort of an immune system response that helps combat cancer. So these are cells that are part of the immune system that, among other things, can target potential cancer cells in tissue.
And what they found is that a lot, there were a lot more of these cancer protective cells, these T cells in the breast tissue of women who had had children, And even if the tissue had been sampled a long time after their last child, they still had many, many more of these protective cells in their breast tissue than women who had not had children. And this started them down the path of saying, well, maybe it's not about this maturity of breast cells nonsense. That we've been believing
for the last three hundred years. And maybe it's not about being a nun or not on whether or not you have sex or not. Maybe it's about these immune systemselves in the tissues. Okay, good theory, but you have to go a little bit further than that, because that's just correlation, and as you know, that doesn't prove anything. So I said, okay, well, what kind of a study
could we create that might prove something? And they went straight to the porld lab rats and mice it was actually mice in this case, and set up three different cohorts of test mice. They had mice with pups, mice without pups, and a third group that had undergone a
full lactation and winning cycle so had breastfeed essentially. Then they implanted cancer cells into the equivalent of the breast tissue in these animals, and the results really were about as black and white as you could possibly imagine them to be. The cancer cells were much less frequent, so the cells were implanted, so gave them cancer essentially, but it didn't turn into cancer in the group that had
gone through the lactation cycle. In other words, the group that had breastfed, even if they weren't breastfeeding, if you like, at that time they'd gone through that cycle. And when they analyzed, well, there was many, much much higher percentage of these T cells in those animals than in the others. And just to test it out even more, they then suppressed the T cell action in those ones, and the cancer grew just as fast as in the others, So
that pretty much definitively nailed it. Yes, it's the T cells that are doing this, at least in mice, and it kind of looks like it might be in humans as well, because we're seeing a similar effect. But to take it back to the humans, they then looked at two large studies of more than a thousand women who had been diagnosed with a particular type of breast cancer called triple negative breast cancer, which is a particularly aggressive sort of breast cancer people often refer to as the
as the bracker breast cancer. It affects women under forty, much more aggressive than most and much more resistant to treatment. And they looked at studies of those where they had been measuring They collected data on whether or not the women had breast fed, and what they found is that the women who had breastfed were much less risk and much more likely to recover from this particularly aggressive cancer
than those who had not. So that's about as good as you can get without, you know, going the full Monty and dividing women into groups of women who have breastfed and women who are having implanted cancer cells in them, which you know, ethics people will have a problem with, I.
Guess I think so. Yeah, it might have hard getting ethical approval on that.
Always people who worry about these sorts of things. But this gets about as close as you possibly can to doing that. So they've observed it in human tissue, they've replicated it in mice, they've gone back to the humans and seen exactly the same effect in humans when the
humans have breastfed. And then and there's still one remaining thing coming back to your mate from seventeen hundred is what if it's not about the breastfeeding, but what if it's about having the kids in some other way, and it's not the breastfeeding, it's having the kids, Because both
of those things tend to go together. And you know, how can we say we're certainty gets the breastfeeding and not having the kids and The interesting thing is there that they did segment the study a bit and look at some US studies on African American women who have different rates of cancer than Caucasian women, and were able
to by doing some statistical analysis on that. So African American women tend to have a higher rate of triple negative breast cancer and also on average have more children, but they have lower rates of breastfeeding than Caucasian women. And what they found was that it's the breastfeeding part that provides the protection. So if the breadth, if the African American woman had more children but also breastfeed, then
she was more less luckly to have the cancer. Now this kind of backs up some observational studies have been done for quite some time in Australia where they've observed there is something that you can measure here. They've actually managed to put some numbers on this, which is that various studies are shown that a woman's risk of breast cancer decreases by about seven percent for every child she has, and then in addition to that, for every five months
of breastfeeding, the risk further reduces by about two percent. Wow. Wow, So this stuff is measurable now they've got a good explanation as to why. Now, this is all very interesting if you, I guess, into immunotherapy and understanding the immune system and all that sort of thing. But coming back to the sort of thing that I guess people might want to ask, which is, well, sure, but I don't plan to have kids, let alone breastfeed anyone might it
might be something that it's occurring to people. So you know, yes, just raising her hands in the air, So how do you reduce the risk. And the answer would be if you're only looking at this, then there's probably not much you can do other than to find someone to breastfeed.
Yeah, put that on your list, will you. That's Golespo's little bit of health advice for you today. So if you can get some breastfeeding going in the next few months. But I guess that's the most practical piece of advice is given.
May not be, may not be. The interesting thing here is the background of the overall significantly increasing rates of breast cancer. And this is always sort of not looked
at in these sorts of studies. Is they're just looking at the immediate problem and saying, okay, you know, are there things that make you more or less susceptible to this, and yes, all this is very interesting from that perspective, but there's a background picture here, which is breast cancer rates in this country are going through the roof, not deaths from breast cancer, which is the statistic that often gets reported because treatments are very effective. It's being picked
up very early. Survival rates are very high breast cancer, but the incidence is increasing very rapidly. And a more important question to ask when you're talking about all these things about are you more or less likely to have breast cancer if you breastfeed, is what about that background rate that's massively increasing. What's causing that? Before we start getting down to finessing whether or not you're breastfeeding, and we've had this discussion before, it's the same thing that
causes all cancers. It's the same reason that all cancers are growing very very rapidly. It's something called aldehydes. Aldehydes are extremely destructive molecules that when we ingest them, attack our DNA, dismember it, mutate, it make us more likely to get cancer of any kind. And we are very familiar with two aldehyde producing substances, alcohol and cigarette smoke. Which are both great at producing aldehyde and therefore causing cancers,
but both have been declining. So you know, the current generation of teenagers drink less than anyone before in history, but they're having more cancer. There's less smoking going on now than Australia has had at any time since the Second World War. Even if there is a black market trade in the stuff growing up because of all the taxes,
it's still a lot less than it was. But the rates are going up, and that's because we've introduced a massive new source of aldehyde into our diet, which is the granddaddy of them all, the one that produces the worst kind of aldehyde, a little chap called four HNE is seed oils. So the fats that they fry our chips in, the fats in the margarine they put on our sandwich in the deli, the fat in the mayonnaise they spread on our sandwich in the deli, the fat
the fat they put in our bread. All those seed oils are very very high in amiga six fats, which are the only way to produce four HNE, one of the more most dangerous alder hides we can consume. So at the same time as societally we probably have less women who are breastfeeding for all number of reasons, less
women having children. For starters, the Australian birth rate is dropping like a stone, so less women having children and therefore less women breastfeeding, which is a protective mechanism according to this science. At exactly the same time as we're doing that, we're giving those women a source of aldehydes, which that no women in history have ever been exposed to.
So we're massively increasing the things that could cause cancer in the first place, as at a time when societally, for a large number of reasons, we have women who are less likely to have the natural built in protection that this science says comes from breastfeed. Now, what this doesn't say is if you don't breastfeed, you will get breast cancer. It doesn't say that that's nonsense. This is
population level stuff. But what it does say is we have a trend in society where less people are breastfeeding, which is a protective factor, and we have a simultaneous trend where we are giving those same people a much higher exposure to things that are likely to cause cancer.
Yeah, is the decline in breastfeeding primarily about just the decline in number of people that are giving birth, like the dropping birth rate, or is it because there's another reason people are choosing formula or whatever. I'm thinking that the companies that produce formula won't like this research.
Look, there's always been an endless battle ever since the Nesle battles. I think it was in the nineteen sixties where they tried to well, they did get half of Africa basically consume formula rather than breastfeeding, which caused all sorts of much more acute complications than the ones we're talking about here, because they would have to use water to make the formula, and the water wasn't particularly safe,
so it was very, very dangerous. Legislation came in worldwide, including it in Australia where breastfeeding must be promoted first. And if you ever go to one of those websites of a formula manufacturer, the first thing you'll see when you go to a website like that is something to the effect of breastfeeding first. You know, breastfeeding should be
done first, it's highest priority, et cetera, et cetera. They do that because they're required to do that by legislation, not because they want to do it, and they try all kinds of tricky ways to get around it, like, for example, branding toddler formula to be exactly the same as formula formula for baby. So there's formula for babies which has mandated levels of certain things in it because it's a replacement for breast milk, and they'll branded exactly the same as this is stage one or stage two
or stage three, et cetera of the formula. They branded exactly the same for toddler formula, which is just basically chocolate milk. So the companies try all kinds of tricks to have people preferring to use that than breastfeeding. The reality, though, of modern life is almost all mothers have to work and have to work, have to get back to work very very quickly, and we are not a society that
accommodates breastfeeding and work very very well at all. You know, every now and then there's a flare up in social media about someone being attacked for breastfeeding in public, et cetera, et cetera. It's just a reality, is that the society of our grandparents, where the mother didn't have a job and stayed home and breastfeed the kids for a year is not something that most of Australia society can afford now. And and so that combined with a much lower birth
rate at all. And just to put that in perfect, put some numbers on that birth rate just after the Second World War, the so called baby boom three and a half children per mother. Now we're down under replacement at around one I think is one point one one point two. So there are a lot less babies being born, and of those babies, a lot less of them are having access to significant periods of breastfeeding.
Well, I mean, like I know, there are a lot of different variables and it's not one thing. You know, the four HNA is like a big factor of course, and what you shared about the seed oils, but just as a standalone thing, so it appears that breastfeeding is probably definitely better for the kid and better for the mum. But you can't really what do you do with that information though, I mean, you can't really try to compel people to breastfeed. That seems inappropriate.
What you wouldn do is be tough about stopping people convincing mothers not to breastfeed, right, which is what the legislation that requires formula manufacturers to say that sort of thing is about but we're kind of easy oasy about it in that we let them get away with marketing that is quite frankly deceptive about it, and so we
could be tougher around that. But you can't force women to breastfeed other than doing what we're doing right now, Craig, which is explain why it matters, and it's not just
this the act of breastfeeding. There's a whole section of one of my books I kin't of remember which one, where I went into this in some detail, looking at the immune system effects of breastfeeding, which is part of the reason of breastfeeding is very effective from an immune perspective, is that effectively the mother is transferring her exposure to everything she's ever encountered her in her entire life to her child, so that the child comes with a pre
set set of Hey, you've already seen all these diseases even though you haven't, because your mum has, and her mum has and her mom has.
So the more like a natural vaccination. Yeah, it's like the world's best, most natural vaccination from mum to kid.
And there's a reason it works that way, which is there's a way to transmit this information. It's very effective, and it's through breast milk, and you know, explaining that to people, helping them understand why it matters can help. It doesn't change if they can't do it at all, which some women can't, or if their circumstances don't permit them to do it. But if you know it, then it's something you can you can aim for even one hundred.
So I was just going to say, what do we ask the one who asked, I'm thinking that there's only one woman on the panel there?
Do you no, you're you're a rock solid seventy percent female. You know that you've done that's the alleged percentage. What do you say about it?
What do you percent that's remotely maternal? Is the thirty percent I don't have?
Right?
Right? What do you think about all this?
That makes my brain hurt? It really does. Sometimes David does make my brain hurt on here. Sometimes I wish I didn't understand some of the things he brings to us.
To understand. What have you got more? Have you got more or less anxiety?
Now than you more?
Now? Oh, that's not the aim. I don't I don't want women to come away from listening to this and think and be in any way guilty about not breastfeeding, or in any way fearful of about the fact they have it. And that's why I said at the start, this does not say that if you don't breastfeed you will have breast cancer. That is not what it says. It just says there is a risk factor that they
have clearly identified. But you've got to take that about the against the background of the things that are inducing more cancer.
To begin with, that idea of the concept of being like a natural vaccination, like that baby grew inside the biology of the mother, So everything that she has ever experienced, had or been has come from herself. So wouldn't she already be passing on the vast majority of.
That seems not it. I mean that that may well have a role to play in it. But the research that I read through for that book, I can't remember which of my books where I talk about this, it really clearly identified the act of breastfeeding as if not the full transference, at least the important end bit to it.
Mm hm wow, Well, T if I think you better start thinking about procreating, I.
Was just going to have a word to me.
Capt and dog and seated.
Or just oils that you just don't oils.
Yeah, so get rid of the margarine and the mayo.
And did someone tell me that margarine is gray before they color it?
Yeah? It is, yeah, before they color it. Yeah, it's great.
Imagine a big slab of gray shit.
They know they use to make them. They used to make them color a pink so that you could tell that it was fake. So only butter was allowed to be yellow. So in the United States when they first released it, they had to call it imitation butter and it had to be pink so you could tell on site. Ah, yeah, no, that's the fake stuff.
Where did those rules go? They're great rules.
Well, imagine if that ship got Imagine if the rule was you can't color it's got it?
That would be the end of margarine. And it's great.
And where can people access that that article data?
All right, Okay, so I've changed the name because Raisin Hell was so terrible and unmemorable. This may not be any better, but you can you can just you can just go to David David Gillespie dot org and you'll see the article there.
Well, that's that's better. I think that's better. Did you have a whole teamwork on that phone?
I did, my entire marketing team. We're up for minutes doing that.
There's even a photo of him, is even a photo of him on that website?
There you go. Now I know what he looks like.
He told me he was six or five with blonde hair and looks like a surfer. Is that true?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah I was sitting down.
Yeah.
Yeah, we'll say goodbye fair but thank you David, thank you, TIV, thanks
Everyone, all right, see you later.