John Whyte, MD, MHA, Chief Medical Officer of WebMD, Author of "Taking Control of Your Cancer Risk"

It is often stated that the average American fears spiders more than death. We can probably add sharks to that list too (did you know that the risk of being attacked, not dying, is 1 in 5 million?). After Jaws came out many Americans canceled their beach vacations. But what are Americans doing about the fact that 1 in 7 of us ultimately die of cancer? The popular narrative is that it runs in your family, and you get it or you don't. It turns out, however, that 70% of cancers are based on lifestyle choices. Last week I spoke with Dr. John Whyte, the CMO of WebMD and the author of Take Control of Your Cancer, now a bestseller on Amazon.

Dr. Whyte and I spoke about some of the tangible things you can do to lower your risk of getting cancer, like sleeping more, and eating more fish. We started our discussion with a topic that is the focus of most of Dr. Whyte's day job - misinformation. In an age where opinions dress up like facts, it is comforting to know that every piece of content on WebMD is reviewed by a medical expert, and has a source, a link to the credentials of the reviewer, and a date.

Dr. Whyte started a daily Coronavirus news show as a means of getting people information, which has changed so rapidly over the past 2 years. We spoke of the importance of staying relevant, and distilling what the public needs to know into manageable clips. John believes that if we give people better information, they will have better health. Fake news is a problem, but fake medical news is quite literally Dr. Whyte's problem, and it is killing people.

Recently, Dr. Malone was a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast, which created an upheaval in the medical community. I wanted to dive into some of the controversial content with Dr. Whyte, so we touched on natural immunity versus vaccine-induced-immunity, and which the data says is more effective.

As Dr. Whyte appropriately noted, nobody who is hospitalized with Covid thought they were the one that was going to have a bad outcome, and so it behooves us to do everything we can to protect ourselves. We still need more studies, and better instruments to detect various measures of immunity, until which it is not possible to definitively state if natural immunity is as strong as passive immunity.

While there has been a lot of buzz about the low mortality rate of Omicron, John was quick to point out that it isn't just like the flu. Particularly for those people with underlying conditions, Omicron can push them over into acute states, and so while it may not be Omicron that kills them, their underlying condition might well.

We ended with the discussion on cancer I alluded to at the start of the notes. 1 in 7 Americans die of cancer, and many more are diagnosed in their lifetime. Millions of cases are diagnosed each year, and 600K people die each year in this country of cancer. John noted that while we speak to patients often about how to reduce their risk of diabetes, and other chronic diseases, we don't often talk to people about how to prevent cancer.

We know sleep is one of the most important factors in determining cancer risk, and that shift workers have significantly increased instances in hormone based cancer (i.e. Prostate, and Breast Cancer). Some governments have even started to reimburse those workers who have developed cancer at an earlier age.

Dr. Whyte noted that what we eat is as powerful as a prescription drug (and my next guess will be Jon Hix, CEO of Season, who has created a platform for food as medicine). Data has increasingly shown that red meat causes an increased risk in rectal cancer. The biggest change folks could make, according to Dr. Whyte, is to consume more fish.  Stay tuned for more on food as medicine next week!