Dr Andrew Greenland: 0:04

So hello and welcome back to Voices in Health and Wellness. This is the podcast where we uncover the emerging shift shaping the future of wellness clinics and the people leading them. I'm your host, dr Andrew Greenland, and today I'm joined by Katrina Foe, a board certified holistic nutritionist, certified terrain expert in the metabolic approach to cancer and international bestselling author of Nutritional Pilates. She's the founder of CancerFreedomcom, where she empowers individuals navigating cancer to reclaim their health through root cause protocols and personalized movement. Katrina's work lives at the intersection of functional medicine and movement-based healing, and her philosophy is reshaping how both patients and practitioners approach long-term wellness. Katrina, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on this afternoon. Perhaps you could tell us where you're calling from, just for the benefit of our viewers or listeners.

Katrina Foe: 0:53

Yeah, absolutely. I'm over in the US in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, so right up by the Canadian border.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 0:59

Perfect. So let's maybe start with your work. Can you tell us a little bit about your role and how it fits into the bigger picture at cancer freedom? And I'm really curious to know about this intersection between nutrition and pilates. It's a really interesting angle. I'm a big, big advocate of both, but I'm just really, really interested to hear how you kind of combine them and do your thing yeah, well, um, so I, when I was 24, I opened a Pilates studio.

Katrina Foe: 1:24

It's down in Scottsdale, arizona, and we do Pilates teacher training and we really focus more on like post rehab. And then for myself, I ended up having a cancer diagnosis breast cancer in 2015, which brought me to a whole nother level, brought me to a whole nother level. I'd already started working on diet and nutrition and we'd had some other little minor health issues to deal with and seeing food as medicine work. But when I got cancer, it took it to the next level and challenged me. I decided to do everything all natural, using functional testing, and the whole process just fascinated me. And that's when I went back to school to become certified in the integrative oncology and such as you were and getting all the functional medicine training.

Katrina Foe: 2:10

So everything that I do now is looking through the lens of more of the whole body, because with Pilates as well as with functional nutrition, there's a commonality of root cause. Let's look at the body as a whole, it's not individual pieces. So there's that thread of continuity there. Now, with Cancer Freedom, as a practitioner, I am working exclusively with cancer clients and so I'm the practitioner behind Cancer Freedom. It's an online group program, looking at things a little different format, to really dive into why people got cancer. Most of my clients are middle aged women and they're the healthy ones and they're like where did this come from? And that's what we're going to unearth and then address. Naturally, Amazing.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 3:04

So what will be a typical sort of client journey in terms of the kind of people you're saying? I mean, you mentioned middle-aged women. What would it look like from them in terms of what you do with them, working them up and what you offer?

Katrina Foe: 3:17

Yeah. So about a third of my clients are doing things all natural. That's the path they chose. About a third of them are working integratively, where they're doing some part or all of the standard of care in conjunction at the same time with the functional work. And then about a third of them did standard of care and now want to get to the root cause to make sure it doesn't come back. So we start with a full array, a very wide spans of functional testing. That's looking at what the research is showing causes drives is associated with cancer, and then we address those issues. So you know, a ketogenic diet is the base and then whatever shows up on their labs we're going to start to support Wonderful wonderful.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 4:04

So what does a typical day look like for you at the moment, between client work, writing and running the business, because I guess you're doing a bit of all of those things. So what does it kind of look like for you if there is such thing as a typical day in your?

Katrina Foe: 4:14

that's why I'm kind of laughing, because my days look very different. It's not nine to five clients back to back, and I have just found for myself. I thrive on change, on variety. So to keep me fresh, I've got a mixture of live Q&As with my clients, sales calls to discuss different cases and, if this would be appropriate, with potential clients, webinars, podcasts that I record, like this, and then social media content to you know, get the word out there about this.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 4:51

Got it. So, from your vantage point, what are you? What sort of major shifts are you seeing in integrative stroke functional care right now, particularly around how people are choosing to approach cancer, because that's the thing that you're specializing in, but also chronic conditions in general?

Katrina Foe: 5:06

Yeah, this is a loaded question. This is a good one. So, with cancer particularly, I'm seeing a lot of people, especially in the kind of middle age bracket, are more and more open to I don't want to necessarily just do or even do standard of care. I don't want to necessarily just do or even do standard of care. There, if I think through the whole COVID thing, there's a little bit of questioning and evaluating like how do I really want to take an approach to my personal health? And that's coming out where people are looking outside of just what their insurance will cover and being willing to pay for it out of pocket because it's not what they want, which I think is exciting that we have that medical freedom and ability to choose what we want, even if it's, you know, not covered at this point.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 5:55

Interesting. And how about the shift towards personalization and also the terrain therapy? Perhaps you could talk to a little bit about terrain theory and how you apply it to a little bit about terrain theory and how you apply it to delivering care, because I think it's probably something people aren't terribly familiar with, perhaps outside of your circles.

Katrina Foe: 6:12

Yeah, yeah. So the terrain, the theory, the metabolic approach to cancer, you know, we know from the literature. I mean, otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in 1931. So this is this is not new information showing that a cancer cell is defined as a metabolic shift in the actual mitochondria and you know. So addressing that and really working on making sure that they have balanced blood sugar.

Katrina Foe: 6:39

So we're not feeding the cancer, you know, with all this extra abundance of its preferred fuel source, as well as getting into a state of ketosis, because those ketones are super therapeutic. They actually have been shown to shrink tumors, stop their growth and such. So you know, diet is the base with everything. And then from there there's there's 10 areas, terrain, sometimes they're called root cause drivers that are what's going to be, what's showing up in the research as can cause cancer, so to speak.

Katrina Foe: 7:13

Now, the interesting thing here is that in our standard of care, it's not that it's bad, it's just their view is different and there's a time and a place for it. But their focus is make the tumor go away, whereas with functional care we're looking at why is the tumor there? So when we can discover and list out why the tumor is there, based on someone's labs. Then we've got a plan to address those items which can be done. Naturally. We don't need the drugs necessarily, and then the body is unburdened so that it can do what it was designed to do, which is cure that cancer itself.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 7:54

Amazing. Can you give us perhaps a recent case example just to illustrate this for people who are not necessarily familiar with this theory and just kind of see how it will play out for a real person?

Katrina Foe: 8:05

Yeah, I can give you myself as an example, would that be?

Dr Andrew Greenland: 8:07

more fun. Yeah, it would be wonderful if you're happy to share, it would be wonderful.

Katrina Foe: 8:11

Oh yeah, I get personal, no problem. Like I said, I was the healthy one in my friend group. We had already done a lot of like changes in terms of making everything from scratch, cooking wise, making toiletries, cleaning products, like we had even moved to a different state so that we could have land to raise our own meat animals so that they weren't being fed junk and antibiotics and such like kind of extreme. And I still got cancer and I had no idea why and they was just like okay, clearly something I'm doing isn't right. Let's evaluate everything. And I floundered a little bit, including getting kicked out of a cancer clinic for asking too many questions. But I found functional medicine and so we started the practitioner I found started running all these tests and so many things showed up that I found started running all these tests and so many things showed up that I had no idea about. Like I was not having symptoms, I didn't even know some of these were like cancer causing things. So for me I'll just list things off I was.

Katrina Foe: 9:11

I was insulin resistant, which you know we talk about blood sugar issues and people think of hypoglycemia. Where is the low blood sugar, the hangry, shaky before meals and such, but having a lot of blood sugar oh too much actually feels really good. It doesn't feel bad and that's where people usually will fight. I'm like I don't have blood sugar issues. I'm like let's test and see what's really going on, not just assume. So that was a big issue for me.

Katrina Foe: 9:40

I also was very estrogen dominant, so high estrogen, low progesterone, both. I was very sluggish thyroid, my thyroid numbers were super low and I had a lot of genetic issues. So I'm not talking about BRCA stuff, I'm talking about like I don't make fat soluble vitamins well, I have blood sugar regulation issues. I'm terrible at methylating and all those things are known to contribute to cancer. I was in a toxic relationship which emotionally, was a big factor. I had just moved into a house with very high levels of toxic mold, like eight months prior to my diagnosis. I had some parasites, all sorts of fun things like that. So you know, exposing those, you know I wouldn't have known about the mold, I wouldn't have known about the insulin and issues and such if we hadn't done the testing.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 10:40

Sounds like there's a perfect storm with all of those things going on.

Katrina Foe: 10:43

That's actually the phrase I use all the time with my clients. I love that. Yeah, it takes usually out of the 10 terrain areas, it takes seven or eight to usually for people to overwhelm that immune system and create that perfect storm where it can't do what it's supposed to do. And so the biggest myth that I have with clients is that you know they come, they're like oh, I think this one thing did it and like it's not just that one thing. You know, and that's where, as a practitioner, I don't want to miss things. So I make sure we do all the testing up front so we know what we're dealing with got it.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 11:19

So do you see this movement as part of a broader cultural shift, or is it more of a response to gaps in the conventional system?

Katrina Foe: 11:27

I think that this is definitely part of a larger shift because people are wanting to do things that are not just drug-based and they really want to get to know the why. They want to understand their bodies more and take ownership for it. They're maybe a little mistrustful because they're getting shuffled through systems and not being seen or heard. Things are being missed and they are feeling like they want to have more ownership in the process, and that's one thing functional medicine does is it gives them more ownership. A lot of it has to do with education and understanding and then the personalizing. So when you're implementing some of these protocols, the client has to be actively participating. They have to educate themselves and own you know, changing their diet and doing you know the actual implementation. It's not just take a pill.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 12:23

Certainly. I mean, this is all music to my ears because I'm a functional medicine practitioner and this is all my language, so I'm loving this. So what's working well for you and your team right now in the business side of things, what's the trend?

Katrina Foe: 12:37

So I've been doing this work one-on-one for a while now and you know it's expensive, especially when you're talking about not being covered by insurance and there's a lot of nuances of like I'm saying the same thing over and over and over again to everybody. That just felt like from a business perspective it wasn't the most efficient use of my time and I'm super capped at how many clients that I could see. So I did a lot of tech stacking and leveraging and we developed a group program We've had it running for a year now where people get to hear the questions that other people are having and get answered before they even develop the question in their head. A lot of the information that I need to impart. It's not necessarily super personalized, it's explanation on how to do X, y, z or whatever is recorded so they can watch it on their own time as many times as they want and they don't have to pay for my time to do that, so we can drop the cost greatly. So we're really excited about this new program and I've gotten nothing but good feedback from my clients of you know it builds a certain level of community that you don't get as well with.

Katrina Foe: 13:55

You know one-on-ones where you're just one-off. One-off Because with cancer especially, you know it can be very, very alienating, and especially when you start talking to people about doing it natural, it's even more so. And so even just getting together on our weekly calls and seeing faces and hearing that other people are asking the same questions and thinking things on the same line, it's really validating to my clients and that's probably been the thing they like the most.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 14:24

Brilliant. This is really interesting to me because it's one of the challenges we face in this kind of world is being able to scale, and functional medicine takes time one-to-one. I mean, I spend quite a long time with my clients and so I'm very much limited by the number I can see, as you're kind of saying. So how do you structure this? Because cancer is a fairly vast topic and I guess you have patients with all different kinds of cancer. So are you doing them on a breast cancer group or bowel cancer group, or are you just putting them generically together and trying to get some common themes that come out in the group?

Katrina Foe: 14:57

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So it sounds a little blasphemous to say, but honestly I don't really care what kind of cancer it is, because cancer is cancer and there's going to be those same root cause drivers, you know, just to speak generically. So when I run all the same tests on everybody, so we don't miss anything, and those are what they're going to have in common. If they have toxic levels of mold, if they've got auto-immunes flared up and different things to where those need to be addressed, and whether they have colorectal cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, they're going to have those same things that we're talking about as a group. Yeah, so it's one group.

Katrina Foe: 15:39

Right now my group is just women, cause it's it's got a really nice dynamic with that and, just to be super direct, I don't get very many men that want to do this work. I'm not. I'm not sure if you get the same thing, but it's primarily middle-aged women, which is disturbing that they're so young, usually, primarily middle-aged women which is disturbing that they're so young usually, and you know they've got kids at home and such and they really want to understand and so together, you know we're working on that. But primarily I think I get mostly breast cancer. Not only is it a big deal, but you know that was what I had. So I think I tend to draw that in.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 16:15

Sure, and then how do you? Obviously the group sounds like it's very successful, but how do you get the, the personalization and the individual kind of attention into that kind of model?

Katrina Foe: 16:25

Yeah, yeah, this is where tech can really help.

Katrina Foe: 16:28

So I have developed an extensive system on the back end of my website where they enter their labs in and, based on what's showing up on their labs, they're going to get different recommendations for their protocol, down to dosing and brands and everything, and then we can tease that out.

Katrina Foe: 16:47

You know if something's backordered or something's not working for them in the group calls. So it's a very different model, um, that is much less time heavy and but still gets the personalization. Now the other thing that we do is in our educational portal they get information everything from you know anatomy and physiology to what does this marker mean, on all the different tests, to how to implement all the different lifestyle like sauna or enemas or different things. All of that's in there for them to watch, because a lot of times, especially if they're doing chemo or something or they have some mold toxicity, the brain's a little foggy, and so for them not having to remember everything that they talked through in one session, because you're doing one-on-one, you're cramming the information in and they're exploding. They're not going to remember everything, and this way they get to absorb it at their own pace, in their own time, and they can take notes and such if they want brilliant um, so that sounds like it's very successful.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 17:54

But do you have any um friction points in your business, whether it's um scaling, education, operations, anything that you're kind of actively trying to solve?

Katrina Foe: 18:04

Oh, that's a great question.

Katrina Foe: 18:05

Yeah, I think right now our biggest friction point is helping people to shift their idea of what medicine should be.

Katrina Foe: 18:13

So you know, when I'll talk with a potential client they're very much like I have to have one on ones and to have them open their mind that you don't actually need to.

Katrina Foe: 18:24

I mean, it doesn't hurt you if Susie's listening in and learning from it at the same time and then you get to do the same for her. And it just that that paradigm shift because it's super ingrained in us of I need to have a one hour session with the practitioner every three months or whatever. It's really different. And so at this point you know they can, they have the option to upgrade to my one-on-one package, which is, you know, it's the same program, it's just a matter of you get the one-on-one time. I haven't ever had anybody upgrade to that. Once they get in there and they actually feel and experience it, you know if they can take that leap, um to open their mind to it, they, they love it and they find that it's really helpful and in it actually adds more, but that there's a little disconnect there because of what we've been conditioned to expect got it?

Dr Andrew Greenland: 19:16

um, are there any particular metrics or outcomes that you are most focused with on in the business in terms of sort of seeing how things are going, monitoring, monitoring the business, anything that you tend to choose, because obviously there's lots of things we can measure, but I just wonder if there's any that you particularly focus on in your business I mean, obviously there's client metrics of you know how they're improving and such, which I think would be the same for any practitioner.

Katrina Foe: 19:43

In terms of business, I'm really looking at my funnels and the conversion rates and how we're connecting with people. Specifically, we run social ads to a webinar. That, looking at the social ads, are they hitting the right target demographic and people that are actually interested? That's usually what we're looking at the social ads are they hitting the right target demographic and and people that are actually interested?

Dr Andrew Greenland: 20:03

um, that's, that's usually what we're looking at a lot and in terms of the future, or if we just take the next six to twelve months, um where do you want to be, either personally or with um cancer freedom?

Katrina Foe: 20:16

yeah, that's um for me. I were. I really want to promote the group program more and just get it out there more. So I've just hired a salesperson to help me with that, because you only got so many hours in the week, so that's a huge step for me to get to have that taken off my plate. So that transition is what I'm focusing on to be able to then stay exclusively in just the patient realm, if you will.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 20:43

Got it, and if there's one big thing you could solve today that would accelerate everything else, what might that be?

Katrina Foe: 20:51

Oh, that's a great one. I mean, if I could magically reach exactly my person and help them see that group is a unique but valuable asset, like that would be where I'd jump into. I guess that's kind of two things, huh.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 21:09

No, that's fine, we can have two things. Katrina, thank you so much for joining us today for this chat. Really interesting to hear what you're doing around cancer, the way you apply terrain theory and functional medicine, and the fact that you're able to reach more people by scaling your group program. I think it's been a really interesting conversation. I think it will interest a lot of people because I think a lot of us are still working in silos and hearing about how you've managed to make this work for a group. I think is really interesting. So thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. You're welcome.