Latest / Two Girls and a Cup of Wellness / Breast Health: Knowledge Is Power with Dr. Jenn Simmons | Ep 26
Transcript
- Crissy and Marie: Hey everyone, welcome back for another Two Girls in a Couple Wellness Chat. This is Chrissy. And I'm Marie. And as you already know, we have the beautiful, the inspirational, the super brilliant Dr. Jen Simmons with us today. Welcome, gorgeous. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Well, thank you so much. I have chills. What a lovely introduction. I'm actually a little embarrassed. Crissy and Marie: Well, I think I'm going to start with kind of giving you a little bit more chills. have a feeling. I just want to say as a breast cancer thriver, probably a couple of years after I was diagnosed is when I first heard about you. And I think I came across either your podcast or you were on somebody else else's podcast. And I just. need you to know how much I felt seen and validated because in my own breast cancer journey and story, I said no to quite a few things that my doctors were like, wait, what? And they did not understand. They did not agree. And I felt very alone in a lot of different ways. And then when I heard one of your podcasts and have been listening to you over the years, it just it just ignites that fire in me and again, makes me feel like, okay, I was really listening to what felt good to me, living in my alignment, living my truth and with my intuition. And I know there's probably so many women that you are continuing to help move from a fear-based diagnosis into their own power. So I just want to... start off with that because I know this conversation is going to go in so many different ways. We have so many topics to talk about, but I just wanted to say that the work that you are doing is really, really powerful. And I am just honored for you to be on our show and, and Maria and I both are. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Thank you. Probably my biggest role is validation, right? That's what you felt. You felt validated. what is so broken about our system, and there's a lot, right? There's a a lot that's broken in our system. But I think one of the most egregious things is that we treat everyone like they're the same. Once they get that diagnosis, everyone's the same, right? And no one ever thinks about why they got there. Crissy and Marie: Yeah, yeah, I did. Yes. Dr. Jenn Simmons: What brought them there, what's going on, what their individual physiology is, how the their environment has affected their genetic composition, has challenged their own innate ability to handle environmental insults. And so when we just say you have this diagnosis, or there this is how we screen for it, and Once you get this diagnosis, this is what we do to everyone. It's so inappropriate. And women know that. Women feel that. At every end of that spectrum, women feel it with how we screen, women feel it with how we treat, and they for sure feel it with how we survive. And I think that that is the most vacant part of. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Medical education is how we are leaving these women after treatment. And they check the box, they got you through whatever interval they have deemed appropriate. Is it five years? Is it 10 years? Whatever it is, what they what they do is they just check that box that they got you through that interval, and they don't even think for a moment how you are doing. Crissy and Marie: Yeah, Dr. Jenn Simmons: Throughout that interval and beyond, right? Like they say you're alive, but Crissy and Marie: the aftermath. Yeah, the aftermath for sure. Dr. Jenn Simmons: you don't feel alive. You feel awful. Right? But that doesn't matter. All they are interested in are the absolutes. And it's a problem. And it's a problem at multiple points along the way. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. we'll kind of, I would like to get to the aftermath in a few, let's kind of start with breast screenings. There are so many different types of screenings and scans. And we know the number one go-to are mammography or is mammography, right? And- It's the standard of care. Yeah. To drill it in our brains. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Yeah. Standard of care, but you know what's so interesting is that if mammography were to go through the FDA today, it would never be approved. It would never be approved for wh how we're using it today. we we mostly hear from the societies, right? We mostly hear from the American College of Radiologists, we hear from the Society of Breast Imagers. But there was a position paper put out in April of 2026. So, you know, we're just talking a couple of months ago. And it was put out by the American College of Physicians and it was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. So we're not talking about a fringe organization. And we're not talking about a fringe publication. And essentially what the paper said was that at all ages, there is no survival benefit to screening with mammogram. None. Crissy and Marie: Which is crazy because that's, again, like you said, the standard care. everybody's like, Chrissy, guess what? I went and got a mammogram today. And I'm like, I want to say great job, but I can't. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Crazy. Crazy. So Yeah. With with the with the belief that mammograms save lives. And what we never what we never have explained to women, and this is actually Michael Baum, profession Professor Michael Baum's like life story. do you know who he is? Have you ever heard of him? So, you know, in the UK, if you're a surgeon, you're called a professor, right? Crissy and Marie: I have not. Got it. Dr. Jenn Simmons: So he is a professor of surgery. And he was involved. I forget how old he is now, but he he he's as we as we say long in the tooth. He is he is not a young man. He was involved in the original clinical trials for mammography in the nineteen sixties. And it was based on this sentinel trial in the nineteen sixties. It was an invitation to treat study. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. I also say this in the 60s. Dr. Jenn Simmons: So what that meant was if you're in the UK and you're invited to get a mammogram, that means you're pretty tied into the system, right? Because the people that aren't tied into the system, that aren't going to see doctors, that aren't probably aren't taking care of themselves, they're not invited to screen. So they compared the population of women that were invited to screen to the popul. T to the population of women that weren't. And what they found after they screened a thousand women over 10 years is that in the group that was invited to screen, four out of a thousand died of breast cancer. And in the group that five that weren't invited to screen, five out of a thousand women died of breast cancer. Four is twenty percent less than five. And we came away from that study saying that screening with mammography leads to a 20% reduction in breast cancer deaths. And we rolled out the program all throughout the world. Okay. Now, what we didn't hear about that study, obviously the two groups are not the same. So we're comparing a healthier group to a less healthy group. So of course, more women are going to die of breast cancer in a less healthy group because Crissy and Marie: Wow. Wow. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Breast cancer is a metabolic disease, an environmental disease. When you look at the two groups, 13 women died of cancer in each group. The survival statistics are exactly the same in both groups. The only difference is that there was one more breast cancer death in the group that was not invited to screen. So there was a committee formed, and Professor Michael Baum remained on that committee. And it became exceedingly clear that mammogram in fact was not leading to increased survival and in fact was leading to overdiagnosis. So they were diagnosing women with cancer that would never have known about it in their lifetime but for the mammogram. So it was Crissy and Marie: Right, and ones that could possibly never even express into cancer, right? Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Right, right. They were picking up subclinical disease. And somewhere between 20 and 50% of the time, that would have never gone on to become what we know as breast cancer, developing a lump, spreading, becoming life-threatening. And so he went to the committee and he said, Listen, mammogram is not doing what we're saying it's doing. It's not, it's not saving lives. And in fact, We are putting more women through treatment than should be put through treatment, and we're actually hurting them in the long run. And the committee said, Yeah, we know. And he said, Well, we should tell women this. And the committee said, Well, if we tell women this, they won't screen with mammogram. And he said, Yes, I know. And that was it. He resigned from the committee because they were unwilling. And it's still going on today. Women still believe today that mammograms save lives. Crissy and Marie: Mm Yeah, yes, they do. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And they assume, and you know what happens when you assume, right? They assume that finding a cancer on mammogram equals a life saved. But we've had massive, enormous studies that show quite the contrary. That when you look at the population that screens compared to the population that doesn't screen, and they just re Revisited this data again in 2024. So we're not talking about old outdated data. When you look at the population of women that screen compared to the population that don't screen, and when you have controls for everything else, universal health care, everyone has the same access to treatment, everyone has the same kind of treatment. When you control for all of that, the same exact number of women die of breast cancer in each group. Crissy and Marie: Bye. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And the only difference between the groups are that you are going to diagnose 20 to 30 percent more women with breast cancer without saving their lives. You're just diagnosing them with breast cancer and putting them through treatment 20 to 30 percent more in the group that screens with mammogram. And ultimately, what we are doing is hurting exponentially more women than we're helping. Because when you screen a thousand women over 10 years, you will potentially elongate one woman's life. You will cause 10 women to be diagnosed with and treated for a breast cancer that they would have never known about in their lives. You will cause 200 women to undergo additional studies and biopsies that they did not need for benign changes. And we are hurting exponentially more women than we're hoping. Mammogram is not saving lives. It's not. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. And not to mention that no, no, no. And honestly, even before my diagnosis, I had two mammograms that were completely fine. The mammogram didn't even show the tumor. The ultrasound showed the tumor. Mammogram showed calcifications, but it did not show the actual tumor. even, mean, that mine was very large. So I can only imagine that it had to have been there two years prior to. Right? it's like it just missed it. And I hear that story time and time again. So people listening, our listeners listening right now, this isn't to scare you. This is to empower you. And there are other types of scans and tools and tests and screenings that you can do. So let's talk about that. What are some other ways around this? Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have essentially revolutionized how we screen for breast cancer because how we were doing it before, and this is not for the purposes to look back and blame or shame anyone, right? I always think we do the best we can with the information that we have at the time. And as the information changes, so too must our minds. So I take a systemic approach. Breast cancer screening because breast cancer is not about a bad breast, right? It is a normal response to an abnormal environment, and we have to be looking at the environment, especially if we're going to prevent breast cancer diagnoses, because we want to look at dysfunction and reverse it before it becomes disease. So we start with something called the breast test, it's a tears test, and By taking a tear sample, by putting a tiny litmus paper inside of your eyelid, you don't have to touch your eyeball or anything like that for all the people that are weirded out by eye stuff. Crissy and Marie: Myself included on that one. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. We take a tiny litmus paper, we put it inside of your lid, close your eye for five minutes, and we are looking for two proteins, the S100A8 and S100A9 proteins, that when they are both elevated to critical levels, this is highly predictive of the early stages of breast cancer. It is very good at picking up early, early findings. Crissy and Marie: Just saying. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Not so good at picking up late findings. There must be something that happens with these proteins, they must go away over time. So this is for an asymptomatic woman. This is for screening, right? And we either get a negative result, in which case we know that that woman is not at risk right now. And this has nothing to do with genetics, and it's for Every woman of every breast density of every size and shape and implants, it doesn't matter. This is what I think the primary baseline screening tool needs to be for everyone. So, and you do it every year because things change, right? So that's the first thing we do. The second thing we do is we're doing a metabolic screen. Only 10% of Americans. Are metabolically healthy. And when you start to lose your metabolic health, this is the inflammatory cascade that eventually leads to heart disease, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, dementia, Alzheimer's, breast cancer. Like everyone has a different manifestation of this metabolic dysfunction. But breast cancer is definitely up there. So we are doing a body composition analysis. We are analyzing your lipids, your glucose sensitivity, all of that to determine where you are in terms of your metabolic health. And if you have metabolic dysfunction, we're helping you correct that. The same way that if you have a clinically significant tears test, we are helping you to correct that dysfunction. Now we're imaging everyone, but we're imaging everyone in a way that does not and cannot compromise their health. Because every mammogram that you have is more radiation exposure. The more mammograms you have in your life, the higher your likelihood is of being diagnosed with breast cancer. With every mammogram, you are increasing your risk, right? And MRI isn't really better. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: MRI, in order for it to be a useful exam, needs gadolinium. Galolinium is a heavy metal. And incidentally, in case people are not aware, MR was never cleared to screen the breast for breast cancer. Never cleared. Never. And it wouldn't be if they had to go to the FDA today and say, Crissy and Marie: interesting. Wow. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Should we be using gadolinium every single year to screen women for breast cancer? The FDA would say absolutely not. Absolutely not. We should not be giving gadolinium every year. It builds up in your brain, it builds up in your kidneys, it has very serious long-term ramifications, and it's not indicated. It's not appropriate. And the recommendations for yearly MRI. They come out of the societies. They are not FDA recommendations because it's not appropriate and it's not safe. But the thing is, when you listen to the society, the society isn't thinking about your long-term health. They're thinking about right now and money. Crissy and Marie: Wow. They're thinking about money and money. Like mammography is a billion, multi-billion dollar industry. Okay, four billion. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Four billion dollar industry, four billion dollar industry for screening, four billion dollars for screening, right? They are not going to be giving up on that anytime soon. Anytime soon. And even when you trickle down to the level of the providers, right? These the breast radiologists, they have the best of intentions in mind. And they're not sitting there thinking like cha changing. Crissy and Marie: no, they like that money. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Right? But they're guided by their societies, who are right? And so the societies are telling a story that the breast imagers are all too happy to embrace because it goes along with the narrative that they've been trained on their entire career. So they can't even see it. They literally cannot see it. They are blind to it. If you ask, Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Anyone, any physician, any medical personnel, does radiation cause cancer? And the answer is a resounding yes. It's undeniable. We know that it is a known carcinogen. It is classified as a known carcinogen. Ask the same people if mammograms cause cancer. And they are a resounding no. Right? Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You have to do it. Dr. Jenn Simmons: It's like total Crissy and Marie: That's sick. Dr. Jenn Simmons: cognitive dissonance. They just can't it, they just have separated it entirely. They gave it a nice name, mammogram, picture of the breast, right? What we should be calling it is what it is. It's a breast x-ray. And if we called it a breast x-ray, we would have to say, Yes, x-rays cause cancer. It must cause cancer. But they've been able Crissy and Marie: Yes. I think they can't even. Mm-hmm. It's such a shame. It's Dr. Jenn Simmons: If they've been able to make that separation. Crissy and Marie: such a shame. Dr. Jenn Simmons: So in any event, I do not screen with any, I don't believe in putting healthy women in harm's way. And that's what the screening population is. The screening population are women who we have no reason to believe that they have breast cancer because otherwise they wouldn't be screening. They would be diagnostic. So for screening, what I do and what I recommend is the QT scan. So the QT scan uses circumferential sound waves. It's transmitted through a warm water bath. It creates a true 3D reconstruction of the breast without pain, without compression, without radiation, without gadolinium. And literally, it's like a spa visit. You feel like you went to the spa for the day. You feel like you were nurtured. You feel like you were cared for. You feel seen. You feel human. respected, revered, because that's what this technology is about. And I am so proud of the fact that I have completely removed the trauma from breast cancer screening. Completely. Crissy and Marie: That's a cool way to put it, the trauma from breast cancer screening. mean, just that squeezing in this and turn here and turn here. And then you get somebody who is doing it, who is so mean. Dr. Jenn Simmons: It's horrible. Crissy and Marie: I've never had a mammogram because I read an article 10 years ago for my nursing license about the amount of radiation and the risk of cancer. And they were arguing between genetic variations and those with inherited disposition to get breast cancer. And I said, well, what about the people that don't like I don't even want it. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Yeah. Crissy and Marie: But I appreciate how you talk about bullying because I play games now when I go for my ultrasounds. They don't know I have medical background and they're so mean about why haven't you had a mammogram. So now I just make up the stories. say, I was traveling to my parents last summer and I had one in Boston. And they say, well, we need that record. Sure. Yeah. I'll email it to you after. Well, the bullying is a big thing. It's like if you go against. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Isn't it crazy? That's good. I mean, I never like to tell people to lie, but the thing is, it's it's well, it's not worth telling them the truth, right? Because they're they're very mean and they they know they get away with it a lot of the time. Like there are a lot of women who won't stand up for themselves, who give into that, and they know that. They know that they are successful at converting people that amount of the time. Crissy and Marie: It's not because they're Dr. Jenn Simmons: Right. So though they're just gonna take a chance and try to bully you and convert you. I've heard crazy stories. Like I have a friend whose mother was barricaded into the imaging center. They wouldn't let her leave. They told her she couldn't leave until she had a mammogram. I was like, that's assault. Crissy and Marie: Yeah, right. That's crazy. That's insane. And what I think the whole medical system is just no, they're just trying to pull us away from our own innate intuition and inner power and that making decisions for ourselves and it's our bodies and knowing our bodies instead of looking outside of ourselves to ask everybody all the questions. When I was kind of forced into taking tamoxifen or guided, I wasn't forced because I said no. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Like you can't you can't do that. Yes. Yes. Crissy and Marie: but it took quite a few conversations with my oncologist for her to get it. I said, listen, I am not going to just sit back and go back to my old self. I'm gonna change my diet. I'm working with a naturopathic doctor. I'm gonna change a lot of different things, right? Start changing out some of my products and in the home and on my skin. And eventually I think she got it. Also seeing how well I went through chemotherapy and stuff like that, but. not before some tears left my body and almost second guessing myself and then waking up the next morning to my own powers again saying, no, this is not for you between tamoxifen and radiation. That was an interesting time. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. But the thing that's so interesting about let's take radiation, there's no survival impact. There's no increase in survival with radiation. None. Why are we doing it? Why are we doing it? Crissy and Marie: Why are we doing it? I know some people want to do that over chemotherapy, but again, it's like the worst of the two evils. Dr. Jenn Simmons: But that's not even a choice, right? Like we separate breast cancer treatments into local and systemic. So the local treatments are surgery and radiation. The systemic treatments are chemotherapy and all the anti hormonal therapies. And it's not this is probably not politically correct, but I'm just gonna use it anyway because I haven't found a good substitute. It's not a Chinese menu. You don't get to choose one from column one and one from column two. Like they're not interchangeable with one another. So what you have to think about, and I really tried to lay this out in my book, The Smart Woman's Guide to Breast Cancer. I really try you have your copy. I really tried to lay this out for women in a way that they could really understand it and have confidence in their ability to participate in their decision making in a really educated and informed way. Crissy and Marie: We have it here. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Because that is one of the things that is really, really missing is we talk about informed consent all the time. We talk a good game, but you have to have the information in order to make an informed decision. And women are not given that information. They're not. They're given a lot of scare task tactics. And well, you know, I had an I had a cousin a Crissy and Marie: Mm-mm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: who who knew someone who had a neighbor across the street and she didn't take her tamoxifen and she died and it's like, wait, that's not data. That's scare tactics. Yeah. Crissy and Marie: Right. Yeah, that's hearsay. No, and I think you do. The book is phenomenal. The book is phenomenal. And for anybody who was just recently diagnosed or know somebody that was diagnosed, you really do lay out a lot of phenomenal information in there for people to take it and then take it for what it's worth for them. Right. Take this information and then what can you do with it? And it's really, really good. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Thank you. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I want people to know that, you know, the reason I got sick is not the reason you got sick, is not the reason your neighbor got sick and your teacher got sick and your cousin got sick. And it it's just not the same. So we all need to think about what happened to us? What do we have that we don't need? What do we need that we don't have? And put together a plan that works for us. But I think the thing that is most important to me and the message that I really wanted to share in the book is that everyone who gets a breast cancer diagnosis gets a treatment plan, right? They're everyone. But what everyone needs is a health plan. And unless you go outside of the system, you have no access to one. Because as doctors, we're not trained to teach people how to be healthy. We're not trained to help people be healthy. We're just not. We don't even know what to look for. All we're trained for is failure. We are trained to recognize failure, recognize the symptoms of failure, and suppress them. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. My happiest time before I left and went on on my own was when I would educate patients in primary care. I'd teach them how make a smoothie. And I remember that my boss at the time said, there's no money in that. There's no ICD code. You don't have time for that. On to the next patient. They're not wrong. They're not wrong. It's... Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Well it and they're not wrong, right? Like I think I think a lot of my functional medicine colleagues are frustrated in that it's really hard to make a living doing the right thing because all that our society values in in that all of our all our society pays for is sick care. And we're not Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Accustomed to paying for wellness. We're not accustomed to paying for health care. And it is a little bit of a disconnect. And people think, well, it costs too much money to be healthy. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna wait and be sick. Right? Yeah. Crissy and Marie: Keep on going. until, yeah. Just hope for the best. But I do. I do think people are turning around. I do. Slowly. Yeah. Yep. Dr. Jenn Simmons: I agree. I agree. It's changing. it's way better now than it was five years ago, and 10 years ago it barely existed, right? so it is changing, but our medical system is very, very slow to adopt anything. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Well, it's for sure, it's a reactive system, right? They react. They're not proactive about our health. Dr. Jenn Simmons: It's a reactive system. And until we start to pay for welfare, it's not going to change because we're not going to educate our providers. So if we keep turning out providers that have no idea how to create health, have no idea how to help people maintain health, it's just not going to happen. Crissy and Marie: It's not gonna change. I think this is where it comes back to being our own advocate. And it always starts with us and just listening to what feels good to us and not always needing something outside of us. You guys have to make the changes yourself if you want to live a long and healthy life. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yes. Yes. Well that that's the bottom line is that no one can make you healthy but you. Right? Even working with someone like me, it doesn't help. You know, I I can't exercise for you. I can't deep breathe for you. I can't sleep for you. I can't meditate for you. I yeah, I can't do these things. I would love to. I can't. You know? Crissy and Marie: cook for you. I'll take it on for everybody. It's like the Matrix maybe. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Like if I could if I could give it to you through through the Zoom waves, I would happily do it. But I can't. I can't. And and the other thing is I was talking to a wonderful, wonderful provider who had a journey very similar to mine in that she was a medical oncologist, had her own experience as a patient, and Crissy and Marie: Yes. Right. Patient empowerment, education. Dr. Jenn Simmons: learned about functional medicine and was like, wait a minute, what is going on here? And why? and what she said was that Crissy and Marie: I have a feeling I might know who you're talking about. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And I I have spoken to, do you know Liz Boham? She works at the Ultra Wellness Center with Mark Hyman. We have talked about this a number of times. Red hair. Yep. Yeah. And she's a breast cancer survivor. She's amazing. I love her. but we all feel the same way in that when you're on this side of it and you're really helping people with root cause medicine. Crissy and Marie: Is she red hair as well? Yes, I saw her speak in London at IFM. She's really good. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And you're spending a lot of time with them and really taking on a lot from them, you you can't work five days a week doing this. You can't. Crissy and Marie: No, no, no, no, no, no. That's what we talk about with her a lot. like reading. Like, I'll have these wild cards and I get into it I love it because I can spend hours reading and trying to figure out what's going on. I could never do that all the time. I'd be exhausted. I enjoy it and I'm happy, much happier. Well, you're feeling like you're really making a difference. Dr. Jenn Simmons: No. Yeah, I I I totally agree with you. And at the same time, if I see more than three patients a day, because you know, I spend like an hour and a half or two hours with them. If I see more than three patients in a day, I'm I'm like burnt. Right? And you can't pour from an empty cup. So Crissy and Marie: Yeah, it's draining. Mm-hmm. No. And that's why coming back to, guess, everybody having their own daily routines and things that can help fill them back up when they are depleted. And it doesn't matter what position you are in. You could be the president of the United States or you can be, you know, working in a janitor's cafeteria or something like that. Right. It doesn't matter. We're all humans. And as a human body, we need to reset. We need to slow down. We need to fill our cups up. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes? Crissy and Marie: It's so important. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Agreed. Sorry, my dog is taking my seat. Crissy and Marie: Aw, look how sweet. Lucy was just barking at it. So I have a question for you. So you talked about metabolic health, which I love. We all know that there's a big awakening in the food, but our breast cancer rates are still continuing to rise. And I feel like I've been in medicine for 20 years. I can't believe the young girls getting breast cancer. It's shocking to me because it always used to be like the old ladies disease, right? Yeah. I know. And I thought I was young. I was 42 when I was diagnosed. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Say my baby. I know. Yes. So so but l so let's unpack that a little bit. First of all, we're not living on our grandmother's earth. We're not even living on our mother's earth. And the earth that we are living on now is infinitely more toxic than ever before, right? We have also done a lot of things to manipulate the system. So Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Our bodies are supposed to bleed every month. But we decided that that was inconvenient. So we put implants in to stop bleeding every month, and we do things to decrease our bleeding every month. Well, that is just making us more and more toxic because that's a major way that we get rid of our toxins, which is why breast cancer is so much more. Crissy and Marie: speaking my language right there. Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: common after menopause than it is before, because before, first of all, you have a monthly release of toxins, so you don't get as much buildup. And as it turns out, hormones are protective, right? Breast cancer is not a disease of hormone excess, it's a disease of hormone deficiency. Now, the other part of that, like looking at that aspect, a disease of hormone deficiency. Crissy and Marie: Mm-mm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: The more inflamed we are, the less hormones we're making. The more inflamed we are, the less progesterone we make. Progesterone is very, very protective. Right. But now we have these girls. You you used to like have progesterone drop off in your forties. Now we have these girls with in their 30s and in their twenties. Right? So it is. Crissy and Marie: Just sounds awesome. I think it's the endocrine disrupting chemicals. It's crazy. Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: It is. It is. Right? So we are and we're not getting outside. We're not getting sunlight. We have sunblock on our skin. We're all vitamin D deficient. I mean, I could go on and on and on about about the why. But you know, once you once you see all of this, you're like, of course, of course. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm, this kills me. Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And then that little thing that happened in twenty twenty one didn't help at all. Crissy and Marie: No, it definitely did not. was diagnosed in 2020, September of 2020, I was diagnosed. And I was like, oh, great, this year's getting better. Yeah, stress, right? The stress that these people or everybody is under. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Yeah. But Stress, the biological weapon that was injected into everyone. You know, that didn't help. That didn't help. And we are we are seeing those effects. But what's interesting, and of course, you know, the data will will bear this out, and I'm very curious to see the numbers for twenty twenty five and and again in twenty twenty six. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-mm. No. Dr. Jenn Simmons: The same number of women die of breast cancer every year. So are we just diagnosing more? But the aggressive variant remains the same because that's what it appears. But again, I think it's early. It's early to say we need to see the numbers from 2025 and 2026. But right now we know that. Around 42,000 women die of breast cancer in this country every year. And that has been the same for two decades. Which is why I know that mammogram does not increase survival. Because no matter how many mammograms we do every year, the same exact number of women die of breast cancer. So even though the incidence of breast cancer is more, we're just diagnosing. Crissy and Marie: Bye. Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: women that didn't need to be diagnosed. Because the only population that matters is the population with aggressive disease. Because the rest of the people are gonna be fine no matter what. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. It's mind-blowing. Really, it just is, right? Because more more people are being diagnosed, but the same amount of people are dying. And it's not like just because they're being diagnosed, they're catching it early so they're not going to die. No, it's just literally they're just diagnosing people that it may never even express and forcing them to go through treatment like mastectomies and lumpectomies and radiation and chemotherapy. And Dr. Jenn Simmons: It is mind blowing. Yeah, yeah. Crissy and Marie: That is no fun, my friends. For those of you, hopefully you never have to go through it, but none of that is fun. Yeah, it really, really is. Dr. Jenn Simmons: No. No, it's awful. It's awful. And there are some brilliant books about this, but we don't it it's not exclusive to breast cancer in that I don't know if you ever read Gilbert Welch's book Overdiagnosed. and I think he might have been let go from his position at Dartmouth because of it. I'm not 100% sure though, don't quote me on that. It's happening in prostate cancer. It's happening with hypertension. It's happening with lipids. It's happening with thyroid. It's happening with breast. We are lowering the bar for what we call the disease, right? Where we went from doing maybe four prostate biopsies to six prostate biopsies to eight prostate biopsies. Now we're up to like 12 prostate biopsies. The harder you look, The more likely it is that you're gonna find something. The question is, is that meaningful? Is that meaningful? Hypertension, we used to call normal hypertension like 150 over 90. Now they wanna treat you if you're 130 over 80, right? But the problem is when you start to treat these people when they don't have the disease, you're taking away their body's ability to. To compensate. Because if your blood pressure is going up, that is because you have some source of inflammation and your body is trying to maintain perfusion. So then if you drop that person's blood pressure with medicine, they're just gonna have more dysfunction because you're not allowing them to maintain the pressure to their brain. So they'll get dementia. You're not allowing them to maintain the perfusion to their heart. So they're gonna have cardiac issues and ischemia. And Crissy and Marie: Yeah, it's the you're taking away the body's innate ability to heal and you're just adding a bandaid to it. Right. Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yes. To compensate. To compensate. What we should be doing in situations like that is asking why. Why is the blood pressure going up? What's going on? Why is there inflammation? Why is there endothelial dysfunction? And if you look at why and correct that, the blood pressure will normalize. But We're not in the business of doing that. We're in the business of let me just write you a prescription. Here you go. Right? Crissy and Marie: I'm And then you'll come back for another one because you're going to have a side effect from that one. Dr. Jenn Simmons: That's exactly right. And so we are very well trained to, by the end of someone's life, have them on five, six, seven, eight, nine pharmaceuticals. I mean, that's what the women's health initiative was all about. That was the entire purpose for the women's health initiative. It's time this is a direct quote, I forget whose it was. It's time for the runaway train of hormone replacement therapy to end. Because if you take away women's hormones. Then they can't sleep, so you give them sleep meds. They're anxious, so you give them anxiolytics. They're depressed, so you give them antidepressants. they've gained weight, you can give them weight loss drugs. They have pain, give them nine steroidal anti-inflammatories. They have reflux, great, we'll give them proton pump inhibitors. They have osteoporosis. We have bisphosphonates for that. And they I can go on and on and on. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Fantastic. Dr. Jenn Simmons: I can easily come up with a scenario where women are on three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine drugs, all for what hormone replacement therapy was doing for them. Now, I'm not here to advocate for HRT for everyone, but I think it needs to be part of the conversation. And I don't think there are any absolutes. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: We would tell women with a strong family history of breast cancer that they can't have hormone replacement. Why? Make it make sense. We would tell women with a BROCA mutation that they can't have hormone replacement. Why? Where's the data? Because actually, when you look at the data, hormone replacement is protective. It's protective in these populations. But what you don't want to do is put hormone replacement on top of A foundation that sucks, right? So it's the bow on top of the box. And the box is filled with all of those foundational things that we know drive health, right? Eating a whole food, plant-based, low glycemic diet, whatever that is for you. Like I'm not here to preach about where you should get your protein from. Right? You want to be vegan and it's okay with your physiology, fine. If you want to be, well, carnivore is not good for anyone. But if you want to do like meat-based, fine, right? As long as you're careful about the sources and everyone should be on a low glycemic diet. That's just the bottom line. You have to have fasting practice. Our bodies were meant to have a rest from food. They just were. And if you can't fast, there's bigger issues. You have serious, serious dependence on carbohydrates if you can't fast. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And that is metabolic inflexibility. What we want is metabolic flexibility, right? I I can go days without food. I don't love it, but I I can easily go days without food and do all the things I normally do. Because think about it, we were meant to function optimally in a fasted state. It's not like we could come out of the cave in the morning and say to that saber tooth tiger, Crissy and Marie: Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Can you just hold on for a minute because I haven't had my breakfast, right? No, you just run. You just run like hell. And we had to hunt when we were hungry. It's not like we had a stockpile of food and we didn't have to hunt. We had to hunt when we were hungry. We had to gather when we were hungry. We are meant to function optimally in a fasted state. Crissy and Marie: I need to go to get a cup of coffee. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And as it turns out, that's when our cells heal. So, you know, that whole three squares, three square meals a day, that was created to make us sick, to make us dependent on food, to get rid of our metabolic flexibility, to create disease states, and to make us dependent on pharmaceuticals. That's where three squares came from. It was never part of our physiology. And as much as we are modern beings living in a modern environment, our genes haven't changed. We are living on a very old gene code that is not accustomed to being fed all the time. And a lot of dysfunction. I mean, I my son this morning, he's like, My stomach is bothering me. I'm gonna eat something. I'm like, no. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Your stomach is bothering you because it's telling you, I don't want food right now. Fast. He's like, Well, I don't like to fast. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. How often do you fast? Dr. Jenn Simmons: So every day I do time restricted eating. So I have a window that is seasonal. So my fasts are shorter during the summer than they are during the winter. During the winter, my fasts are much longer. I try to keep my eating to when the sun is out and fast when the sun is down. But I'm I'm just naturally not hungry in the morning. So my first meal is usually around noontime. So I have a meal around noontime, a meal at six o'clock, and then I'm done. during the winter, it's usually a little earlier. I eat my meal at five o'clock. Now I'm not rigid about this. My husband and I go out to dinner one night a week, and you know, we don't eat at 4 30. We, you know, it I I but at the same time I do have a a day a week where I do a 24 hour fast. So I finish my Crissy and Marie: early bird special. Dr. Jenn Simmons: meal one day and then I don't eat until that time the next day. And then quarterly I'm doing 72 hour fasts. Now I am not if you are cakectic, if you are, you know, not doing well, if you are underweight, if you are sarcopenic, meaning that you don't have enough muscle mass, I'm not telling you to fast. I'm not trying to create, create or worsen anyone's anorexia. We have to think about it in the context of what should we do to optimize our health. If your health is already compromised in the area of malnutrition, you y you shouldn't be fasting. But we're not we're not dying of of starvation in this country. We're we're dying of indigestion. Right. We our problem is well on the other side. And most of the metabolic dysfunction that we have is because we've been taught to feed ourselves constantly. And this is very bad for your physiology because if you're busy digesting, your cells don't have the time to heal, your cells don't have the time to repair. And what we what we need to know is that. Crissy and Marie: Mm-hmm. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Roughly 70% of our immune system is housed in our gut. And it is charged with checking out every single thing that you eat and you drink and determining if it is food or if it's faux. And if you are constantly eating and drinking, that doesn't get any time off. It doesn't have any chance to repair. And what it really can't do is Be over here checking out all the food and drink you're taking, and be over here guarding against cancer. And so much of our immunity and the capability of our immune system is used up in our digestive system. So if you want to be healthy, you have to take breaks from food. Have to. I'm not suggesting anyone take breaks from water because we can live without food for weeks. Again, not telling anyone to fast for weeks. There there are times when that's appropriate, but it needs to be medically supervised. But You can live for weeks without food. You can live for three days without water. That's it. So I'm very, very now. I also don't think that anyone should be flooding themselves with water. I'm not a drink three gallons of water a day. I'm a if you are peeing and your pee is light yellow, you're you're good. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. That's a way to test it for sure. If it's dark and just like milkier. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Yeah. If it's dark, n no bueno. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. And the quality of water. Right. Dr. Jenn Simmons: You j definitely don't want concentrated urine. It means you're not drinking enough. Speaking of which, I don't have my water in front of me. Crissy and Marie: We have water in our coffee mugs today or tea mugs today. Oh, goodness. So what are your other tips for the listeners? This is great. Like one of the questions we had asked, if you could like talk to every 25 year old American female or world female, I don't know why I said American, but my husband's British. So he's like, it's not just all about America, Marie. So anyways, what would you tell them prevention wise? On top of what you've already said. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah, yeah Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. So Crissy and Marie: the fasting and food and... Dr. Jenn Simmons: The thing is, breast healthy is health. And the same exact things that you're going to do to give you healthy breasts are also going to give you a healthy brain, healthy bones, healthy joints, healthy gut, healthy skin, healthy mood, healthy libido, all of that. And that is just built on the foundations, what you eat, what you drink, prioritizing sleep. I know that young people love to burn their candle. But that's one of the things, like you just can't compromise on sleep. and you know how you feel after an abbreviated or an awful night's sleep. Like you're hungry the next day, you're cranky, you're tired. We we need sleep. Sleep is where the healing happens. So if you're not sleeping, you're not healing. movement. Our bodies were meant to move. If you don't move your body, you lose your body. And being sedentary, sitting is the new smoking, and it's really true. and all of you know, one of the best things that I ever did, because I work a lot of hours, and one of the best things that I ever did was I got a standing desk with a treadmill underneath it. And this whole generation, so many of them are working from home. Don't work from home at your kitchen table. Work from home at a standing desk on a treadmill and incidentally get outside. Crissy and Marie: Mm. Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Because we don't have enough sun exposure. Do not start a sunblock habit. That is toxic. And we have only seen an increase in cancer with the judicious use of sunblock. So I don't care what the dermatologists say, sunblock is not good for you, not good for anyone. And if you're gonna be out in the sun for a long time, first of all, the best thing to do, no sunglasses, as beautiful as they are. If you have sunglasses on and you're out in the bright sun, your brain doesn't know you're out in the bright sun. It doesn't know to send the antioxidants to your skin. So that's a habit that needs to start early. Do not get into the sunglass habit. I know they're beautiful. Believe me, I know they're beautiful. They're not good for you. Because you want your brain to know that you're outside so it can send all the antioxidants to your skin and protect you. Crissy and Marie: Thank you for the reminder because I always have my sunglasses with me. Sometimes I've been testing myself more and more of taking them off and, OK, can my eyes adjust to the sun? And it's so funny. My daughter is 21 years old. And she never wears sunglasses. And for the longest time, I was like, Tony, you got to get sunglasses. You're going to hurt your eyes. You're going to hurt your eyes. Where do we hear that from? Our parents? I don't know. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Well, listen, my father-in-law, God rest his soul, was born in nineteen seventeen. He was an eye doctor, and he used to say that all the time. You have to wear sunglasses when you're outside or you're gonna get cataracts. And I think of him all the time. I mean, he would be one of those people that I couldn't convince, right? Because it was so Crissy and Marie: Right. Set in those ways. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Ingrained in him in throughout his education, the same way that we can't teach breast radiologists that mammograms don't save lives. I could never convince him that sunglasses are not good for you. but they're they're not good for you. They're not. And think about like all the tennis players. I don't know if you follow tennis, but we just finished Wimbledon, right? Those people are looking up into the sun to serve their ball. And none of them are wearing sunglasses ever. You never see a tennis player wearing sunglasses, right? They're all ha and you also don't see them sunburned. Right? And they're in the sun constantly, constantly. So I I I know that we Crissy and Marie: So true, I never even picked up on that. Dr. Jenn Simmons: develop these habits when we're young, but so many of them are so bad. Like all of the perfume and the fragrance and the the things that that young kids do and and the makeup and if you can start now in your non-toxic lifestyle, it will serve you so well going forward. Crissy and Marie: Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: And that's another thing that I love about what I put out in the Smart Woman's Guide to Breast Cancer is that it's yes, of course, it's very useful for a woman who got a breast cancer diagnosis, but it's also meant to help prevent a breast cancer diagnosis because these are the foundations that everyone needs to be healthy. Crissy and Marie: Yeah, and knowledge is power. And the more we know, the better we get to choose what we want to bring forth into our lives. you know, starting young, I think there is a revolution of teaching our children to be more conscious in what they choose. I know my daughter in particular is very conscious about what she eats. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. It is. Crissy and Marie: what she puts on her body. She's all cotton. She's not wearing all of the polyester stuff. Very mindful about fragrance. And a lot of her friends are as well. So there is, it's out there. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. So this generation was hard to raise because everything is why, why, why, why, why, right? Like my generation, when my parents told me to do something and I would say why, what was the response? Because because I told you so. Right? Like there was no there was no there was no debate. I told you so. That's the reason, right? Crissy and Marie: just do it. Right. my dog is Italian. He got whacked. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: This generation coming up, that's not an acceptable answer. They're like, nope, I want to know why. And they question everything, and they should. And so, you know, I have a 20-year-old who barely wants to eat outside of the house because he knows that there'll be seed oils and there'll be ingredients and there'll be quality of food that is not acceptable to him. Right? And he's looking at labels and he's asking all the questions and he's not doing anything because I said so. And he he questions me every day and I'm like, hang on, where did you get your degree from again? Crissy and Marie: These kids, tell ya. Dr. Jenn Simmons: But but at the same time, it's great because they will they will be healthier than we are, but they have bigger obstacles than we do because our choices were better than theirs. And the things that if if you are unknowing in this day and age, you're going to consume a lot of toxins that we we just didn't have. Crissy and Marie: That's great. hates. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: You know, it when you when you look at some people post those the differences between the products then and now, and not that I'm advocating anyone eat Wonderbread, right? But that that's always one of the one of the items that they have on there. But Wonder Bread used to have five ingredients. Now it has 25, and I can't pronounce half of them. And I have 11, 12, 15 years of higher education. You know? So Crissy and Marie: Right. I love. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah, the food is not the same. Even the fast food, right? The ingredients, what was in a McDonald's or a Burger King before is so different than now. Yeah, even Chick-fil-A, right? Yeah. Dr. Jenn Simmons: All of it. All of it. Yeah. So my husband says that when he used to take the kids to McDonald's or whatever, and I used to freak out on him. And he used to say, Well, I I grew up eating it and I'm fine. And I said, What you grew up eating is not what is in this food now. It's not. It's it doesn't even compare. So they are. Better, more educated consumers, the ones that are in the know. but their choices suck because we have really lowered the bar for what we consider food and for the products that we put out there on the shelves and on the market, and you know, our clothing and it virtually everything is really tainted. And Crissy and Marie: Yeah, it's unfortunate. Dr. Jenn Simmons: It is. It is. You have to be such a savvy consumer these days. But I think the bottom line is I would just tell everyone to do less. Just do less. Use less. Because the less you use, the less likely you are going to be putting those things in you. Crissy and Marie: Yeah, yeah, and have good detoxification and how, know, know, consume less, be around less EMFs and those electronic magnetic fields, right? And try to limit processed foods, obviously, but move your body more. Like you said, get outside and just kind of come, go back to the way that our bodies were designed to live, the simplicity of it and let it's, Dr. Jenn Simmons: All of it. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Crissy and Marie: let it do its job. Dr. Jenn Simmons: So that's another big difference between the world when we grew up and the world that they grew up in, in that I would come home from school and my best friends lived within a three block radius. So you would come back from school, drop off your book bag and go play with your friends until it was dinner time. So, you know, we had three or four hours after school where we were Just outside. Right? There was no, we weren't watching TV. We weren't, we were just outside. And I mean, maybe when it rained, but outside of that, like we were outside, we were riding our bikes, we were do whatever we were doing. And Crissy and Marie: literally playing and being kids and Yeah. But even when it did rain or something like that, I remember going in to my playroom and having a chalkboard up there and I would play school or I would play, friends come over and play Barbies. Right? We were still playing and not just on the screens. Now they get together and hang out on the screens together. Right. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. I know. It's terrible. So that part is not great. and I think It remains to be seen what that effect is going to be. But the social isolation is a problem. And the lack of human contact, the lack of human connection, because that is one of the major drivers of our health. And we all need to be purposeful. And we all need to be connected to our community. When you look at the blue zones around the world, that is one of the reasons why these people live as long as they do. Yes, they have better food, and yes, they they are very active because they tend to drive less and you know they they they walk a lot and plant and garden and that kind of thing. Crissy and Marie: walking or. Dr. Jenn Simmons: But they're also very connected to one another, emotionally connected to one another. And that goes a long way. And we know that for people that when we look at survival, the number one predictor of how long you live is how long you think you'll live. And the more connected you are, the the more longevity you have. Crissy and Marie: really does. makes laughs at me because I always tell him I'm living to 102. And he's like, really 102? I'm not living that long. I'm like, well, that's my number babe and I'll have friends around me. Dr. Jenn Simmons: In the Jewish religion we talk about living to a hundred and twenty because that's how long Moses lived. Yeah. Crissy and Marie: I love that. I know in your book, I saw a bubblah that your mom used to call you bubblah. I love that. A grandmother, right. I love that. I love that. well, this was fantastic. I think we covered a whole heck of a lot of amazing information. And I just want to remind everybody that that's all that this is. It's information and you get to choose what you're going to take into your daily routine. Dr. Jenn Simmons: Bobola, my grandmother, Bobola. Crissy and Marie: and your life and you know, we're not here ever to scare or force or do anything. It's just knowledge is power and we want you all to know everything that you can and thank you so much for joining us and being a part of our community. Dr. Jenn Simmons: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Crissy and Marie: Right, until next time guys, thank you.