Dr. Fred Hatfield is an impressive guy: a power-lifting champion, author of dozens of books, a millionaire businessman with a beautiful wife. But he'll tell you his greatest accomplishment is killing his cancer just in the nick of time.
"The doctors gave me three months to live because of widespread metastatic cancer in my skeletal structure," he recalled. "Three months, three different doctors told me that same thing."
His wife Gloria remembers it well.
It's a horrible, horrible feeling to have someone tell you that the person you love only has three months to live and you're not going to be with him any more," she said.
While Hatfield was preparing to die, he heard about an anti-cancer diet, also known as metabolic therapy. With nothing to lose, he gave it a try and was shocked when it actually worked.
"The cancer was gone!" he exclaimed. "Completely. To this day there's no trace of it. And it's been over a year."
Starving Bad Cells
Although it wasn't easy, Hatfield stopped eating carbohydrates, which turn into glucose inside your body. Cancer cells love glucose and need it so badly, that if you stop giving it to them, they die.
"It just absolutely amazes me that medical science is just now finding this out," he said.
When he and his team of scientists at the University of South Florida removed carbohydrates from the diets of lab mice, the mice survived highly aggressive metastatic cancer even better than when they were treated with chemotherapy.
"We have dramatically increased survival with metabolic therapy," he said. "So we think it's important to get this information out."
Hatfield's cancer recovery, however, was not a surprise to Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, who researches metabolic therapy