How Junk Food Leads to Cancer & Other Serious Health Issues: Part 1 (video)

Video Transcript: How Junk Food Leads to Cancer (Part 1)

Ty Bollinger: Liana was raised on a healthy, nutritious diet. But when she became an adult and she moved out of her childhood home, she left a healthy diet and good nutrition behind. Eventually, she was diagnosed with cancer.

Charlene Bollinger: Nearly 10 years after her diagnosis, she has accomplished so much including two published books that are wonderful. Listen to Liana’s inspiring story about nutrition and cancer for a wake-up call on the dangers of junk food.

Liana Werner-Gray: So, at my school there was half white people and half aboriginal people, which I thought was really cool, and I naturally just gravitated towards the indigenous people. And from a young age we were taken out on school excursions and we were taught how to survive in the bush, and how to survive in nature without anything. So, we were taught how to collect our own food and how to find water.

I found it so fascinating and I just loved that the indigenous people would take from the earth to feed themselves but then they would also give back to the earth as well. So, they weren’t doing anything in excess and they had very lean, healthy bodies.

And guess what the cancer rate was for aboriginal people? Zero percent, which makes sense because they didn’t have environmental stresses, they didn’t have mental stresses and they weren’t polluting their body with a lot of toxins. So, that was my upbringing.

And then there was my grandfather. My grandfather was Canadian, and he unfortunately passed away of cancer when I was 12 years old, which as you guys know, I’m sure everyone here has lost someone to cancer, it is extremely devastating to the entire family. And unfortunately, my grandfather just liked junk food way too much. And bless his heart he was the one who introduced me to junk food.

So, he taught me about popcorn and milkshakes and McDonald’s, but I remember when I was kid, I remember comparing my grandfather to the indigenous people. That’s when it clicked for me the difference of what we ate and the consequences that it had on our body and our health.

Okay, so… I was brought up very natural. My parents raised us on very simple, natural foods. We didn’t eat a lot of junk foods. Thanks mom. Then when I was 18, I moved to Brisbane City and I didn’t have parents around and that’s when I started to indulge in junk foods. I thought it was so cool because I had no one around to tell me that I couldn’t eat it.

So, I started indulging in every type of junk food that you can think of. I did KFC, fried chicken, McDonald’s, pizza, I did cookie dough, chocolate cake, burgers, ice cream, gummy bears. I mean, I was in junk food heaven. And it gave me a rush for about 10 minutes. It just felt so good just to eat all of these junk foods.

And I would feel really, really high and really great for about 5-10 minutes and then it would come crashing down. That feeling when I came crashing down did not feel good at all. So, to avoid that feeling of feeling really bad and drained, I went out and bought more junk food to try and keep me up.

So, obviously this is very unsustainable, and it didn’t last long because within a month of eating this way I started to feel the health effects. I started to feel bloated. My skin was getting bad, I was gaining weight. And I felt really disempowered and depressed because I didn’t feel like I was eating what I should because I knew from my upbringing that I should have been eating foods that gave me nutrition.

And so, I told myself, “Okay. You know what? I’m going to start tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m going to be healthy and I’m never going to eat junk foods ever again.” So, I was like, “Today I am just going to eat whatever I want.” So, I went out and I just bought huge amounts of junk food and I would eat huge amounts just in one sitting. Not just like a gummy bear here in there but I mean like a whole package of gummy bears and a whole packet of Tim Tams and McDonald’s and then I would have pizza and ice cream for dinner. I mean, it was a lot of junk food.

So, I ate all this junk food until I felt really, really sick and I was like, “I’m really starting tomorrow.” And then tomorrow comes and I wake up and I’m like, “Uh oh. I’m craving gummy bears.” But then I said, “Okay, I’m just going to ignore it and go about my day.” But I had this persistent thought in my head, “Gummy bears. Gummy bears. Gummy bears.” And I was like, “No, I can’t eat gummy bears. It’s not going to be helpful.”

So, this went on for hours and hours and hours and eventually I’d be like, “Fine…I’m just going to give in. I’m just going to go out and eat gummy bears. I’ll start again tomorrow.” So, I went out and I just ate as much junk food as I wanted again. And then, tomorrow came and you can guess what happened. I woke up and had a craving for cookie dough.

So, this cycle continued every single day for five years. Yeah. I can’t believe how five years went by. Crazy. It was like, one month and then it was two months and then it was a year. Then, wow. Five years. So, you can imagine how much pollution and toxins and poisons I was putting into my body. And not a single soul knew that I was doing this.

Nobody knew. I didn’t tell my mom. I didn’t tell any of my friends. No one in my family knew. To them I was healthy because when I was around them I would just eat healthy food and then when I was by myself, that was when I was eating all the junk food. So, nobody knew. So, it was a huge secret which makes it even worse.

Then I had the wakeup call of my life. So, I was 21 at the time and something just popped in my neck one day. It just popped instantly and I didn’t even know that cancer could just pop and there it was. Obviously, it was in my body before that but it just popped and so, I had a lump in my throat. It was the size of a golf ball.

So, I went to the hospital and they stuck a needle in and they pulled a piece of it out, which I knew wasn’t ideal from my upbringing because the indigenous people avoid surgery. And they took a piece of it out and I felt the lump harden. And the result came back a week later and I was diagnosed with Stage 1 cancer in my lymphatic system in the form of a golf ball-sized tumor.

So, I had Stage 1 and at the time they were saying that Stage 1 was precancerous. So, it wasn’t that serious. Now they’ve added another stage. So, now there is Stage 0, I heard about that a few years ago and I thought, “Okay. Obviously, they are wanting to hit people earlier so if you get diagnosed with Stage 0, they can still say, “You can still do chemo and surgery.” So, they get more business out of it.

So, I had Stage 1 and I also had Epstein-Barr virus. My blood work was on the verge of leukemia. My immune system was so low. They were like, “Look, your blood count is showing us that you’re borderline leukemia.” And I was heavier than I am now. I had skin issues. My skin was slightly yellow because my liver wasn’t processing properly and my digestive system was just not working at all from all the years of eating junk foods. Plus, I was also taking laxatives because sometimes I felt so bad that I was eating so much junk food that I would take copious amounts of laxatives to try and just get the food out of my system. So, my digestive system was a wreck.

So, I’m 21. I’m in a hospital and I’m like, “Oh boy. What have I done to myself?” And this is a live blood test that I had done. You can see that those in the red ring are parasites basically invading my blood. Which when I saw that it just completely grossed me out. Just to know that there were parasites in my body at that time invading my blood, like taking over my body, taking over my life.

So, that was a good shock value. I recommend you trying that. If you want to see what’s going on with your blood because it might give you that shock value that you need to say, “Wow. I really need to do some things to help take those parasites out.” Which we can do with juicing and foods and bentonite clay which I’ll get to.

So, I was in the hospital and of course my options were surgery and chemo and radiation but because of the confidence that I had from my upbringing I knew that there was a better way to treat cancer then cutting, burning, and poisoning. So, I left the hospital. I was like, “No, thank you. I need to actually address this properly.”

Because I knew that just cutting it out wouldn’t address the root cause, the deeper issue of why I was just binge eating on this junk food. I knew that I had to restore proper love back into my body and nutrition. And so, I thought, “This is my wake-up call. This is my opportunity to be able to do that.”

Charlene Bollinger: We hope you learned a lot from this video. If you learned something new, please take a few seconds to let us know in the comments section below.