Healing Cancer with Astaxanthin

 

Today we speak with Samuel Shepard, who is a biochemical engineer, about how he took his own disease diagnosis and developed a therapy from it using Astaxanthin, a carotenoid that he has a patented formulation for that increases its bio-availability and its ability to get through the gut membrane as an oral supplement. I know a lot of people are going to want to take this supplement by ordering from his web site ValAsta.net after they read this wonderful information that follows. (If you order from Sam, use the code POI5 (as in Pod of Inquiry 5) for 5% off of your purchases.)

In this episode, we discuss reactive oxidative species (ROS)... how inflammation is virtually present in every disease process, and how we are able now to address this with the supplement that Sam has designed. Welcome, Sam, to the Pod of Inquiry.

Thanks Stephen for having me. It's a great opportunity to at least inform people and let them know that they have options, other than what's out there in the standard health care community. My journey started in 2003... actually prior to that a couple years I was having problems with very high blood pressure and they thought for the longest time that I had some form of coronary artery disease, but when tested they found that my arteries appeared to be clear. I had no indications of coronary artery disease, so they did more blood work. Then on a Sunday night, a nurse called me and said the doctor wanted to see me at 7:30 on Monday morning. If you ever get that phone call, it's never good.

I knew something was up because every time I laid down, I'd feel my blood pressure really take off. It wasn't uncommon for me to spike a blood pressure reading of 280 over 160. I thought my eyes were going to come out of their sockets, but when I went in Monday morning, the doctor came in, put his hands on my knees, looked up to me and said, “I got some bad news. You've got a rare form of blood cancer called polycythemia vera (PV)”. And I asked what in the world was that, and he explained it to me. It's a case of over-active stem cells in my bone marrow.

Turned out I had a JAK2 STAT3 mutation. Typically, you produce 3 to 5 million red blood cells every day. I was making 35 to 60 million red blood cells every day. My blood was like ketchup and my heart enlarged. I had a problem just trying to pump this viscous blood through my body. My spiked hemoglobin was at 27, a hematocrit in the low 80's, and I knew I was in trouble. So from that visit I immediately was transferred to a hospital where they phlebotomized me and removed blood to try to fix me through dilution. I had to be phlebotomized every month thereafter to manage my red blood cells.

I did that for four years and I knew at the end of that four-year period I had a 3% chance of surviving for another 10 years. I asked my doctor if there was any chemo or radiation treatments and he said no. My blood pressure was getting higher and higher and it was getting to be more and more difficult through the phlebotomies to keep it lower and I just knew that at any moment I was going to throw a clot to my brain and my family was going to have to take care of me.

There are a whole bunch of weird thoughts that go through your head, especially at four in the morning. This one particular morning I had the realization that all this is going to end soon... and at that point, God and I got really close.

I began spending a lot of time talking to God and waiting for an answer. And one day it sort of came to me in the form of a weird question that there's got to be some animals on this planet that don't get cancer. Not everybody gets cancer, right? There's got to be a reason for it.

My entire life as an inquiring scientist was based on understanding the fundamentals. I had all the tools to figure this out from a physics point of view, and chemistry, thermodynamics, kinetics, mathematics. If anybody could figure this out, I felt I was in a pretty good position to do just that.

At one time I worked for the Department of Defense on other projects and had access to a database called ProQuest, so I queried that computer database and wanted to know of all the animals on the planet, which ones had no recorded cases of cancer reported ever... and it came back that there were five: salmon, pink flamingos, sharks, elephants, and naked mole rats.

Since then, we have also found that shrimp and lobsters don't get cancer, but at that time, I only had those five. So, I went to Scripps. I was working on a project in San Diego and asked if they had any information with regard to those animals in particular. I wanted to know all the molecules that shouldn't be in any of those animals, across all five species, but is found in all of them. Scripps came back about four months later and said they found one exceptional molecule. Astaxanthin. 

It showed up in all five of those animals. I learned that Astaxanthin is a carotenoid produced by an red algae called Haematococcus pluvialis. So I went to the University of Texas, got that algae species and bought a hot tub and got very good at home-growing Haematococcus pluvialis. I knew how to trick it to make it think that it was dying. The algae would produce these xenophiles and carotenoids to absorb ultraviolet light from the sun so it wouldn't kill them and they would change color. The Haematococcus algae would turn deep purple red. I just added salt to my reactor and within 48 hours it went from a green algae to a bright purple red algae. It was pretty remarkable to watch. I figured out how to float the algae to the surface and then I could manually skim it off as a red algae and put it into a dehydrator.

All my experience with red things is that they're usually toxic. So, I didn't want to kill my liver or my kidneys or do anything really bizarre, so I started my personal experiment by eating just four milligrams per day. I knew it was 3.8% Astaxanthin, so, I could figure out how many grams of dried algae I had to eat. I would sprinkle it on my eggs or on my salads or put it into a cookie or smoothie and eat it that way.

I did four milligrams daily for about four months. I noticed from my blood work, my A1C, that I was probably pre-diabetic. My A1C had been 62, which indicated hypoglycemia (dangerously low blood sugar), but after about three months, my A1C got down to about 54 and my blood work became almost normal, so my phlebotomies got pushed out to once every two months instead of every month.

Statistically it wasn't significant, but the algae wasn't killing me either. That was the upside, right? So I thought, okay, it seems to be safe and it is sort of moving in the right direction... so I tripled the dose to 12 milligrams of Astaxanthin per day by eating more algae, and when I did that, after about two months my phlebotomies got pushed out to once every four months. Okay, so instead of 12 times a year, now it was down to just three times a year.

I projected the curve out and asked myself just how much I needed to take in to completely stop the phlebotomies and it turned out to be 96 milligrams... quite a bit more than I was taking. So I started taking the equivalent of 100 milligrams of Astaxanthin from algae per day... and my phlebotomies ended completely within two months.

The only side effect I got, which was a little concerning at the time, was that my stool was red. I wondered at first if I was bleeding, then it dawned on me that it was in fact the red dye from the Astaxanthin algae. I guess beets do the same thing. There's some colorful carotenoids that'll end up coming through like that.

I also noticed my energy level changed. My sugar levels dropped too. There were some very positive things that happened when I was doing that. I didn't focus on it all that much, but man, my blood work straightened right out. And from that point I knew that I had something that was working.

But I didn't know why it was working, and as a biochemist, especially an engineer, you have to know why these things are working. So I spent eight years and a lot of money trying to figure out biochemically what was it about this Astaxanthin that was working.

I went back through a lot of the literature on free radical chemistry in polymer manufacturing, which I had a background in, and we initiated polymerization reactions with free radicals. I headed down that path because I understood free radical chemistry. When I got into the metabolic side of it I found four reactive oxygen species (ROS)... super oxide, singlet oxygen, the peroxyl non-radical, and the hydroxyl free radical. There's also a nitril, but I'm not going to talk about the nitril right now. But it turns out the hydroxyl free radical is the one that was stealing these electrons from DNA at the lowest oxidative potential we have in our DNA.

So mutations happen at those lowest oxidation potential locations. I deciphered the chemistry as to how that hydroxyl changed the guanine into another organic molecule. It's a pretty serious mutation, especially if the RNA messenger picks it up and starts translating into proteins. That's a problem and I finally convinced myself what was causing these genetic mutations... it was caused by the excess hydroxyl free radical.

There was a blood test (hs-CRP) that they ran for years called a high sensitivity C reactive protein and it was a measure of your inflammatory disease state. What it was picking up was the C reactive protein. Your liver, if you're systemically inflamed, will produce that protein. So I began to track that in my own blood work. And sure enough, it correlated when I began taking Astaxanthin. My hs-CRP (High-sensitivity C-reactive protein) went from about 12 down to under 2... and that was the only thing that I could lock into that actually changed from this.

I was actually having trouble with stiffness in my fingers when I would wake up in the morning. My ankles sometimes would hurt. After taking 100 mg I didn't have any of that anymore. I'm 73. I don't have any arthritis. I don't have anything anymore. My arthritis went away in about seven days, and that was shocking to me. All of a sudden, I'm not eating as much. I don't have any sort of cravings.

I felt that I had a real good understanding of the biochemistry as to how these reactive oxygen species (ROS) were accumulated. So then we did a study on blood from 5-year-olds up to 105-year-olds and I measured the glutathione levels of their red blood cells (RBC) and their hs-CRP.

In young people, their hs-CRP's are really low. Disease doesn't happen in young people, but their glutathione levels and their RBC's were very high. So, you had glutathione levels very high and you had hs-CRP's very very low. When I got to people in their 40's and 50's, all of a sudden I saw a tremendous up-tick in their hs-CRP. And when I measured the glutathione levels, there was almost a 60% decrease over someone who was 20 years old.

It all began to make sense as to why we get these age-onset diseases... because our intracellular antioxidants like glutathione or catalase or super-oxide dismutase are breaking down as we age. We don't have as much protection as we should. So I thought, okay, how do you increase the glutathione?

I looked at taking glutathione orally, but it doesn't make it past the HCl in the stomach. And then I looked at intravenous injections of glutathione, but it's still not getting into the cells. And then I realized that glutathione is made intra-cellularly. It's made inside the cell from lysine, leucine, and tryptophan. So those basic amino acids and the pathway along which glutathione is made has to be intact.

There's 11 steps for these amino acids to get to the glutathione level. If any one of those steps is missing, we don't get glutathione. It turns out that as we age, we become very inefficient in that particular pathway. So, our ability to cellularly produce these antioxidants rapidly declines after age 50, which is when we see heart disease, we see cancers form, we see arthritis begin to creep in.

So, it all began to sort of gel that maybe we were on the right track. Now, if I could simply figure out how to donate an electron to a free radical, I would neutralize that free radical into water.

Neutralizing free radicals was the key. Metabolically, these reactive oxygen species are made in the mitochondria. And typically, sugar, carbohydrates, anything that has a lot of oxygen molecules hanging off of it, like glucose and fructose, will become free radicals. The other way is what's called the fenton reaction, a reaction between peroxide and iron or peroxide and copper, to produce huge amounts of free radicals.

So, I'm going to step back out of the chemistry now and get more into a clinical discussion. In 2013 I met a very gaunt-looking woman with stage four inflammatory breast cancer. She said, "I have two tumors in my brain, seven in my colon, and a pretty nasty lesion under my left armpit." And I said, "Are you in chemo?" And she said, "No. They've sent me home with hospice. I've got two to four months and I'm already in month two." She had learned what I was doing and said she'd be willing to take it. And I said, "I don't know what dose to give you." She reached up and grabbed me by my cheeks and said, "I have two months left. How much can you spare?" I said, “I do 3,000 milligrams a day.” She said, 'Well, I'll do that for 60 days.” That was her two months.

All I had was my data for 100 milligrams a day, and now I was going up to 3,000. That's a big jump. High risk. And I told her, "If we do this, you really can't say anything to anybody."

So 42 days later, a little longer than a month, she called me on the phone and said, "I'm feeling much better." She said, "I'm gaining weight and hospice notified MD Anderson that I wasn't progressing." And I thought, "I know what that means." Progressing is the wrong term for that. I think they meant regressing... or progressing towards death, I guess.

Anyway she said they'd contacted MD Anderson and hospice was leaving. She said that when she went in for an examination, her doctor palpated her colon area and her abdomen trying to find the tumors... but couldn't find any tumors... and he said, "I don't know what's going on here." So he set her up for a PET scan which came back with absolutely no traces of cancer in her body. And it sort of freaked him out... did they misdiagnose her? What was going on here? And he started quizzing her as to what she had changed in her diet? She told him nothing.

She was elated to tell me "I'm cancer free. They can't find any cancer in me." She said, "You need to tell them what this is." I said, "No. I'm not telling them because I don't understand it well enough yet." She said, "No, you need to do this."

And then it dawned on me. I said, "Did they take any blood samples?" She said, "Oh, yeah. They about drained me of blood." And I thought, they're going to find the carotenoid in her bloodstream. I didn't tell her that, but that's what I thought. So, I said, "Just don't say anything to anybody and let's just thank God for the blessing that you have and let's just go on."

So she went home and called me again about three days later and said the pathologist called her and wanted to know what she changed in her diet. He said we have found this marker in your blood that's not in any of your other blood samples. Can you tell me what this is?

When she conveyed this exchange to me I told her, "If he wants to talk to me, give him my telephone number and I'll explain it to him... because it's a natural product, like eating algae... it doesn't get into any sort of pharmacological issues.

Several days later I got a phone call from this doctor in which I clarified that I was a researcher and not a prescribing doctor. After this, I began producing it and giving it to family and friends and their cancers began to go away anywhere from 30 to 60 days, depending on the type of cancer and the severity of it. 

But the one that got me was glioblastoma. It's pretty tough, devastating. We had four cases of glioblastoma that we gave it to and within 30 days they had no progression of their cancers. It stopped. They had, however, some secondary issues with fluid retention inside the cranium. When cancer dies, it creates an inflammatory response trying to clean up the mess, so you end up pumping fluid in to try to dilute it. In two of those cases, they put a shunt in to drain the fluid off... but their cancer was gone. They couldn't find any live cancer cells in the fluid. The scans came back negative. They didn't light up under a PET.

So right now we have had 18 glioblastomas... all 18 have been cured... and I mean cured. Pancreatic cancer is the one that's really posing the biggest problem for us right now. Late stage pancreatic cancer builds an extracellular matrix around the cancer and it is very hard to get chemo in.

I spoke in Washington to a bunch of senators and representatives. Ben Carson's team was there. The five major hospitals... Johns Hopkins, Sloan, MD Anderson, Mayo, and the Cleveland Clinic... were all represented and it went on for two hours. It was like an oral thesis... pretty intense. After it was over, the Director of Oncology for Johns Hopkins came up to me and said he wanted to apologize. He's the gatekeeper for money that moves from Congress to the NIH. He said, "You have this figured out." And I said, "Yeah. I know why we get disease. I know what's causing it." And he said, "We're going to allocate money to this. You may be on to something." And I volunteered, "You know, I'll do it free of charge." And he smiled, looked at me, and said, "No, you just need to go away." I just smiled.

So lo and behold, they put about 80 million bucks into the NIH to prove me wrong, which is okay. That's the scientific way of doing it. But they have ended up proving me right. You can Google the NIH... they've made all this public... and Astaxanthin and whatever disease you're looking at... cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, irritable bowel, Hashimoto's... and the research on that showing the cause of those diseases and the ROS component that causes those diseases.

What separates my company ValAsta from the other Astaxanthin products out there is that ValAsta is the only patented natural supplement. The way the Astaxanthin molecule is found in the algae cell is that it's in the form of a glycosidic or a liposomal, which means that the glucose sugar molecule is chemically attached to the Astaxanthin. When we extracted the Astaxanthin from the algae, the super-critical CO2 extraction process breaks the glucose off, so you end up with pure Astaxanthin... but pure Astaxanthin has only 1/8 the absorption rate of the glycosidic form of it. So the glucose attachment allows it to get through the gut.

You'll hear of glycosides used in the pharmaceutical world to get certain organic medicines into the body a lot quicker. So when I chemically reattached the glucose to the Astaxanthin through a patented process we end with an absorbable variation of Astaxanthin at ValAsta.

I attached the sugar to the Astaxanthin. It not only gets it through the small bowel, but also gets it into the bloodstream. A cancer cell, because of the hydroxyl free radical generation from its massive metabolic consumption of sugar, consumes 16 times more sugar than a normal cell to get the same ATP, generating free radicals which are pushed outside the cancer cell, making the pH drop to about 5.2.

Cancer thrives in an acid environment. The acidity destroys adjacent tissue. The surrounding cells become acidified and they die, making room for the cancer cell tumor to further grow. That's how it gets space. That's how organs are eventually destroyed by cancer... because of the acidic pH they are exposed to.

So now you have all these free radicals hovering inside and around the outer membrane of the cancer cell. When the cancer cell sees that glucose attached to Astaxanthin... it will take any form of sugar it can... it pulls it in. Enzymes inside the cancer cell crack the sugar off and use it for its metabolism.

But Astaxanthin is intracellular. Once inside after it has donated its glucose it neutralizes the cancer with a pH of 11... killing any cancer cell in just four seconds. Cancer cells cannot tolerate it. The cell membrane on the cancer cell just opens up and dissolves and all the guts of the cancer cell come flooding out.

In figuring a dosing protocol, the first thing everybody should do is get their hs-CRP measured.

The hs-CRP test (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein) is a blood test that measures low levels of C-reactive protein to assess cardiovascular disease risk and detect low-grade inflammation. Unlike standard CRP tests used for infections, hs-CRP specifically identifies small increments in protein produced by the liver, which serve as an early indicator of atherosclerosis and risk for heart attack or stroke.

Interpretation and Risk Levels

• Lower Risk: hs-CRP level < 2 mg/L indicates a lower chance of cardiovascular events.

• Higher Risk: Level ≥ 2 mg/L suggests an increased risk of heart disease or a repeat heart attack.

• Highest Risk: Level > 3 mg/L denotes the highest risk category for cardiovascular incidents.

Clinical Context and Preparation The test is most useful for individuals at intermediate risk (10–20% chance of heart attack in 10 years) and is often combined with cholesterol checks. Results should ideally be averaged from two tests taken two weeks apart; a level > 10 mg/L suggests acute inflammation from infection or injury, requiring retesting. Factors like intense exercise, recent injury, or illness can temporarily elevate levels, so patients may be advised to avoid heavy training before the test.

It is an inexpensive test, but doctors don't like running it because they can't treat to it. It's a pre-marker to a disease. So, it doesn't dictate what kind of disease you're going to get. Doctors treat symptoms, so the doctor doesn't know how to treat. When we measure the hs-CRP, and say that number is over 3 mg per liter, you are given warning that you better make some changes.

Astaxanthin has significantly more antioxidant power than glutathione, which we think of as the mother of all antioxidants. The rate at which you introduce free radicals into your body minus the rate at which you take them out equals the accumulation or inventory of those in the body. What Astaxanthin does is it increases the out and allows the accumulation to drop even though you are still introducing new free radicals.

So the question ultimately becomes how much Astaxanthin should a person take daily to get their hs-CRP down?

Hypothetically, if your hs-CRP is 2.5 (we deal with people that have hs-CRP's as high as 80) and you show some risk of disease you're going to want to do about 0.1 milligrams of Astaxanthin per kilogram of body weight. So a 150-pound person would be doing maybe 7 to 10 mg of Astaxanthin a day. If you have under 2 mg for a hs-CRP reading, I couldn't recommend that you take Astaxanthin. So get the test first before using it.

ValAsta now has offices in 26 countries and is all over the world thanks to social media... we haven't done any sales or marketing. When people take it and find out that their cancer is no longer there, they tell everybody. Visit the web site ValAsta.net if Astaxanthin sounds like a solution for you. (If you order, use the code POI5 (as in Pod of Inquiry 5) for 5% off of your purchases.) They have a telephone number also: 803-470-1913 with nurses that will walk you through it. No charge. There's no consulting fee. The whole push is to make this available to people who have the need. So there's no reason not to do this.

This podcast is designed for informational purposes only and does not constitute any medical or surgical consulting advice or imply development of any physician patient relationship. The opinions of guests who are featured on the show are not necessarily the opinions of Dr. Barrett or the production team. This podcast is owned solely by Barrett Medical and Surgical Media LLC. While the show is highly oriented for physicians and healthcare providers, anyone interested in the improvement of human performance and understanding will find this a welcome goblet to sip from or guzzle. However, no representation or warranties are made in any way whatsoever on this podcast for any products, techniques, [music] or other things discussed. Invited guests are not vetted by the Pod of Inquiry for their qualifications and may have a direct or indirect financial [music] interest in what they present and discuss on the show. The Pod of Inquiry disclaims any responsibility from anything taken from the show and used personally or professionally. It is a responsibility of the listener to perform their own due diligence prior to the implementation of any ideas, products, techniques, or anything talked about on the show.

two-part interview by Dr. Stephen L. Barrett at YouTube @podofinquiry on January 12, 2026

LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW IN TWO PARTS