Dr Ian Billinghurst – Pointing the Bone at Cancer

Dr Ian Billinghurst joins me to discuss the many parallels between our own health and the health of domesticated animals, our pets. Dr Ian Billinghurst is a nutritionist, agricultural scientist, veterinary surgeon, lecturer, nutritional consult and author. We discuss his newest book, ‘Pointing the Bone at Cancer’, a book that provides a solution for a disease that is striking with increased frequency and severity. We discuss cancer as a metabolic disease and the use of targeted nutritional therapy in treating it, in both humans and pets.

Selected Links from the Episode

Dr. Ian Billinghurst website
Dr. Ian Billinghurst books

Pointing the Bone at Cancer
Give Your Dog a Bone
The BARF Diet
Grow Your Pups with Bones

Dr. Ron blog post on mitochondria
Unstress episode with Prof. Thomas Seyfried on cancer as a metabolic disease
Unstress episode with Prof. Dominic D'Agostino on keto nutrition
Unstress episode with Cliff Harvey on carbohydrate and ketogenic appropriate diets
Unstress episode with Dr. Ross Walker on cholesterol
Unstress episode with Dr. Terry Wahls on food as medicine
Unstress episode with Dr. Bruce Lipton on epigenetics

Download the PDF transcription
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Hello and welcome to “Unstress”, I’m Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Animals are an important part of our lives. They always have been. Whether we're talking about going back in time to the beginning of the human journey and our relationship with animals as a food source or more recently in human history as a domesticated animal and companion. We've got lots to learn about them and from them and in many ways their health is a reflection of our own health.

As a general rule, I think we could say that what is good for an animal's health is generally good for our health and most likely the health of the planet. My guest today is Dr. Ian Billinghurst. He's a nutritionist, an agricultural scientist, a veterinary surgeon an author, a lecturer, a nutritional consultant and a fascinating guy. In fact, his latest book is called “Pointing the bone at cancer”. There are so many interesting parallels here between our own health journey and those of our domesticated animals. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Ian Billingshurst.
Download the PDF transcription
Welcome to the show Ian.

Dr. Ian Billinghurst: Thank you very much. It’s good to be here.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: You've written this book “Pointing the bone at cancer” and it’s something we really want to talk about today obviously, but I wondered if you might share a bit of your own journey professionally, personally that got you to this point.

Dr. Ian Billinghurst: Well, yes, it's a long story, 74 years of age. It hasn't been a rapid journey. I started off at an agricultural high school then I did agricultural science at University where I learned a lot about the nutrition of farm animals and agronomy and there were my major subjects. And then I went and became ironically an agronomist at Orange Agricultural Research Station where we were looking at potatoes, which I now regard just as almost pure sugar when you look at them. But I didn't feel particularly satisfied in that role, so I entered the education sphere and went teaching for approximately four years during which time I did a DipEd. And in that period in the DipEd one of the most important books I read was by Karl Popper and it was the “Philosophy of science” and that was intriguing. That stayed with me for a long time and I won't go into that now because it's rather in-depth stuff.

But I was yearning to be something either a doctor or a veterinary surgeon and the reason I wanted to do that was because ironically again I was out as a young man in my early twenties, newly married actually and we were shooting rabbits and I rather enjoyed cutting them open after they had been shot and pulling their intestines out and dressing and feeding them to the dogs and to the family and all that sor...