What if the secret to a longer, healthier life has been right in front of us all along? Today, we explore the Riker Regimen — a science-backed lifestyle created by surgical oncologist Dr. Adam Riker to prevent disease and boost vitality. Covering five key pillars — nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, and purpose — Dr. Riker shares practical strategies to improve your health span well before surgery is ever needed. Whether you’re managing illness or simply want more energy, this episode offers evidence-based tools to help you take control of your wellness.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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The Riker Regimen: Five Pillars To Prevent Disease & Extend Your Healthspan With Dr. Adam Riker
Welcome to the show, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. I’m excited to bring you our episode. Our guest is someone who has stood on the front lines of medicine for decades, treating thousands of patients as a surgical oncologist. He’s now helping people take charge of their health long before they ever reach an operating room.
Dr. Adam Riker is not only a renowned cancer surgeon but also the creator of the Riker Regimen, a science-backed, lifestyle-focused approach to optimizing health, preventing disease, and extending both lifespan and healthspan. In his book and in his work, Dr. Riker outlines five foundational pillars of long-term well-being, nutrition, movement, sleep, stress reduction, and purpose.
He brings a rare blend of deep clinical expertise and personal conviction to this space, and he’s passionate about empowering others to take charge of their own health. Whether you or someone you know or love is battling chronic illness, seeking to prevent disease, or just hungry to live with more vitality and energy, then this conversation is for you. Grab a cup of green tea, as Dr. Riker will recommend, or lace up your walking shoes, or whatever you do while reading, and let’s dive into this fascinating and practical conversation with Dr. Adam Riker.
Dr. Riker, thank you so much for being on the show with us here. We’re really privileged and lucky to have you, and I’m excited for our readers to hear from you.
I’m happy to be here. I can say this is my first official podcast, so this is great.
We get the exclusive then.
That’s right.
Cancer Care, Academic Medicine, & A Typical Monday Saving Lives
You were telling me a little bit about your day, but maybe you can just share for our readers. What does a typical Monday look like?
A typical Monday for me is that I go to the office. I get up at 5:01. I’m usually at the office by about 6:00. First patient scene at 7:30. In my practice, for instance, I saw about 3 or 4 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients. I saw probably 4, maybe 5 newly diagnosed melanoma cases. I saw one soft tissue sarcoma. All in one day.
A lot of lives that you’re impacting in one day.
I see my post-op patients and go over their final pathology, and then figure out what else they need, whether it be medical oncology, radiation oncology. It’s a full day, probably start 20, 25 patients today. It’s a typical Monday.
You’ve been practicing surgical oncology for 25 years?
Right around 25 years now. Now, 25 years means after all of my training and residency, and fellowship. You become board-certified. Once you’re board certified, which was 2002 for me. That’s when your practice officially starts.
You’ve seen all kinds of advances and changes in this space.
I have, and I’m an academic guy. I come from a bunch of different places, hospital systems, and I really come from academics. Publishing papers and teaching medical students and residents and fellows, and the whole spectrum of education for the next generation of surgeons, of course, and then a lot of clinical research, translational research.
The Riker Regimen & Its Pillars
I’m sure you have a lot of wisdom and knowledge, and experience to share with us. I’m excited to unpack that a bit. I’d love to just dive in a little bit into this regimen that you created, that you call the Riker Regimen. You have your book that you’ve written about this regimen. Maybe break it down for us a little bit. I’d love to dive into all the pillars of the regimen itself, but how did you come up? What led to it? What was the backstory or the journey that led you to that?
It’s a long story, but I’ll shorten it. It began in about 2011. This is the honest truth. I was up in Chicago practicing, and I was training and completed the Chicago Marathon. My time was 4 hours and 2 minutes.
Probably run just two minutes faster.
Exactly. Here I am at the end of the marathon. I’m all tired and annoyed by those two minutes. It was my epiphany when I’m like, “Something just wasn’t quite right.” I train, I put all the miles in, and by basically elimination, I figured out it was my diet and my lifestyle. Here we are in 2011, I’m not even in mid-career or early career. I’ve got a busy practice, of course, very clinically busy. My diet and lifestyle were horrible.
I give you an example of, like, one of my dinners, three times a week. It would be a big bowl of Captain Crunch cereal with milk, two big bagels with either cream cheese or peanut butter on it, and a big glass of either orange juice or milk. That would be like three times a week. I had bad GE reflux. I was taking Protonics. I was taking Zantac. I had to sleep on like three pillows. I’m in my late 30s, early 40s now. That’s what started all of this. I had to really take a critical look at my diet and lifestyle, only to figure out it was just like every other American. It wasn’t very good.
That’s what started me on this pathway. I went down, I ended up in New Orleans. I got a job at Oxner and then at LSU. This really hit me when I started working actively on the book, as I’d see a newly diagnosed cancer patient, whether it be breast cancer or skin cancer, and it’s in New Orleans. The food’s very good down there. It’s Southern food and cupcakes. Almost everybody I saw was a smoker and a drinker, and they were obese. They had a BMI of 25 to 35. They were on 3 to 5 different medications, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome.
That was 9 out of 10 of my patients. I’m sitting there, I’m like, “Look, the cancer is not going to kill you. It’s all of these other chronic diseases that you have that are really going to kill you.” I started having that conversation with my patients, and it started with like just a simple bullet point sheet of things that I would give out to the patients to say, “Look, you’ve got to start doing some of these things. Like getting rid of processed foods, lowering how much sugar you eat and added sugar, start reading labels, simple stuff.
If you’re drinking, don’t drink so much. If you’re smoking, quit smoking.” Just some basic bullet points that I could give out and provide patients to really help them with the chronic diseases, which are killing people, killing my patients. It wasn’t the cancer that they came for them to see me about, or the surgery. I could take care of them, cure their cancer with an operation, but I wasn’t going to cure their chronic diseases unless I had that conversation with. That’s what’s wrong with all that.
How did you actually develop and come up with the five different pillars? Maybe walk us through what exactly the Riker Regimen is for those of us who are readers who haven’t read your book yet.
It’s not about perfection at all. It’s about just some basic lifestyle and nutritional changes. I point out that throughout my entire career, we weren’t taught this. In residency and fellowship, we didn’t learn this as doctors. We are not the experts, the doctors, the healthcare professionals that everybody thinks we know all about everything. We just don’t.
I can tell you, one of our big deficiencies in the medical profession is about what constitutes a healthy lifestyle and nutrition. Trust me, we are not the experts on this. Neither are your dietitians, neither are your nutritionists, because they just are not thinking anything other than the dogma that has been taught for decades upon decades.
Again, going back 50 years or so, based on the food pyramid and what we think at the foundation ought to be 5 to 11 servings of wheat grains, pasta and rice, and bread, which we know nowadays is really unhealthy for the American population. There’s a lot of history behind this. I had to go back and really do my own research to develop the guidelines or the bullet points, or the pillars of what constitutes the Riker Regimen.
A couple of things. That’s a big statement to say we are not the expert because most people, because you’re a doctor. It’s like, of course, they know.
One of the major deficiencies in the medical profession is a lack of understanding about what constitutes a healthy lifestyle and proper nutrition. Share on X
Go get ten doctors and ask them about what’s the healthiest nutrition out there, the healthiest diet, and you’ll get ten different answers. Usually, 9 out of 10 of them are not helpful to the patient. Remember, we’re doctors, so we treat stuff. I can write a prescription much faster than I can have a 30-minute conversation with a patient about what constitutes healthy human nutrition.
I can talk to them about carbs and fats and proteins and what you should be getting of each and why it is dangerous to eat processed and ultra-processed foods, this is junk food. Why is it important to filter your drinking water? Basic stuff like this, patients are not expected to know all this stuff. I’m telling you, your mainstream primary care physician has no idea about what constitutes a healthy lifestyle and nutrition. Zero. They’re not your expert.
They’re just not trained in that.
They’re not trained. It’s not their fault. I’m not throwing them under the bus. It’s just that they didn’t learn any of the stuff, as none of us did. My point is, I had to go learn this. I can go on and find, go on to PubMed, which is a great resource. Read books. You can go see the books that I have here about nutrition and lifestyle, and longevity. There’s a whole book here on longevity. There is a book out there for pretty much everything, and some of them are absolutely excellent. That’s how I really did my research and coming up with what would constitute, in quotes, the Riker Regimen, which is basically just a healthy lifestyle of living.
Can you break it down for us a little bit? What are the main pillars or points?
I can provide it to maybe, for your readers. It’s got a bullet point sheet. I don’t have it in front of me, but there are some 3 or 4. I’ll just do 3 to 5 of the most really important things on the Riker Regimen. Number one is there’s no such thing as a healthy whole grain period. No healthy whole grains. Whole grains, wheat, flour, anything that comes from wheat, oats, all of that stuff. If it’s a grain, it is not healthy for you, and you ought not be eating it.
No grains of any kind. See on cereal boxes, healthy whole grains. Heart-healthy, you see that a lot. Approved by the American Heart Association. The only reason it’s approved because a lobbyist gave them money to put that on there. There’s nothing healthy about a grain. It needs to be eliminated from your diet. There’s an excellent book. One of the first books that I read was by a guy named William Davis, he is a cardiologist from, I believe, Wisconsin.
He wrote a book called Wheat Belly. It was on the New York Times bestseller, came out about the same year that I ran that marathon, by the way, and started my journey through all this was reading that book. A second book called Grain Brain by a guy named Perlmutter, who is also a physician down who is practicing down where I am now in Naples. Those are the two books, and it’s all about wheat, gluten, flour, and all the dangers of the wheat and flour and processed foods that we eat today that have gluten in them.
Number one, got to go gluten-free. You’ve got to eliminate, you can’t just have a little, you’ve got to eliminate it completely. You want to know why? It’s because all of these grains, processed foods are causing havoc to our GI tract, they’re causing gut inflammation, and there’s this syndrome called chronic leaky gut.
What happens is that this gluten is not processed. It basically creates holes in our intestinal lining and our gut. We develop an immune reaction to the gluten and the other byproducts of the wheat that we’re consuming. You get this chronic low-grade inflammation in the body. You know what happens when you get chronic low-grade inflammation over an extended period of time, you get cancer. The common root cause of almost all the cancers in humans is chronic low-grade inflammation.
That is a fact. If we want to avoid getting cancer, avoid things that are going to cause chronic low-grade inflammation. Let’s go through that list. What do we eat and drink that causes chronic low-grade inflammation? We just touched on one. Wheat and flour, and gluten. Give me two more things that cause very bad, chronic, low-grade inflammation in our bodies.
It’s a pop quiz on this.
There are two more, two easy ones.
I’m assuming alcohol?
Alcohol, perfect. Perfect example. If you’re drinking too much, stop drinking. Now I’m not talking about a glass of wine at dinner. Fine. I’m not arguing with that. I’m talking about a lot of alcohol. You like either you’re drinking every day after work, or you’re drinking a ton on the weekends. That’s the type of alcohol you’ve got to eliminate. Yes, it causes inflammation. No question. I’ll give you another easy one. There’s more, but tobacco. Of course. chronic inflammation. 90% of newly diagnosed lung cancer patients are smokers. By that definition, if you quit smoking, we would almost eliminate lung cancer in the United States. Easy one. Those are two, alcohol and tobacco, of course. Another one, which we have a really big addiction to, is what?
Red meat?
No. It’s way more common. It’s in every food out there.
Let’s see, sugar?
Sugar, you hit it. Correct. Sugar is the new crack cocaine of this decade. In many ways, it’s worse than crack cocaine. I know that’s a strong hyperbolic statement.
I’ve heard that before.
It’s true. Sugar is one of the most potent substances that we eat and consume on a daily basis, more than any other country in the world, by the way, sugar or add any type of added sugar compared to any other country. What it does is the same thing. It causes a chronic gut inflammation and basically a whole-body inflammation. It’s like an atomic bomb going off in your body every single day. That’s another easy one.
It’s hard to get out of it.
Just cut back on the amount of sugar that you’re consuming on a regular basis.
You mean added sugars like fruit are okay, right?
Fruit is not okay. Fruit is fructose and sugar, but it’s fructose. It’s not table sugar, but it is sugar. You can have one piece of whole fruit per day. One piece of whole fruit per day is perfectly healthy, not going to cause any harm. I make that statement because we tend Americans tend to have too much fruit in their diet. We were taught for decades that fruit is healthy for you. Too much fruit is not healthy for you. That’s too much sugar.
For decades, we were taught that fruit is healthy. But too much fruit isn't—it's too much sugar. Share on X
It’s too much fructose. Fructose gets metabolized by the body differently than sucrose or table sugar, or some of the other sugars. Fructose goes directly into the liver, and it gets metabolized in a different way. Again, though, it’s sugar, and it’s still causing inflammation if you eat too much of it. We have to be careful. The other is the availability of fruit in America.
It can be December, and you can get a Pitch Perfect Orange at Costco in December. That’s not normal. We should not be eating fruit in the wintertime. Why? It’s because our Paleolithic ancestors didn’t eat fruit in the wintertime because fruit was not available. Having 24/7 access to all of these different nutrients that we have. It’s easy to overconsume. It’s easy to eat too much sugar. It’s easy to eat junk food. It’s easy to sit down and eat ten Oreo cookies.
It’s too easy. Some of this is personal responsibility to self-limit these things, but others, we are inundated as a society from the commercials, from the food companies, from every which source of telling us, compelling us almost to eat these things. Fast food, junk food, diet, Coke. You name it, the list is endless. That’s the process of re-educating, not just my patients, but society that we are really going down a bad path here in terms of our diet and lifestyle.
That’s one of the key pillars of the Riker Regimen is cutting out.
You’ve got to eliminate sugar from the diet. Two is the gluten, wheat, and flour products. There’s a third big one. Nobody’s going to like this one. They’re not going to like the sugar one, but they’re really not going to like this one. Cow’s milk and cheese, and ice cream.
Dairy.
Dairy, it’s a potent human carcinogen. You don’t want a carcinogen, as it causes cancer in humans. Don’t shoot the messenger. The data is very clear on this in the literature. Cow’s milk and cheese derived from a cow mainly is a potent initiator for the development of nine different types of cancers. I’m not making this stuff up. It’s all out there, published in the literature.
What if you have like grass-fed cows, or I mean, there are A1Cs, there are different types.
It’s still milk from a cow, still has the casein milk protein as the agent that causes this initiation of cancer, so it’s casein within cow’s milk. Casein is in all forms of different cow’s milk. You can’t eliminate it. It’s in there. Whey protein is the other part. Casein milk protein is 87% of the cow’s milk. The other 15% to 20 % is whey protein, which they use to make the protein powders out of.
That’s actually okay.
That appears to be fairly safe. It’s whey protein from the cow, but the casein milk protein seems to be the key link and feature of cow’s milk that is causing a lot of cancers in humans. There’s compelling data that’s published on this, and don’t take my word for it. There’s an amazing series by a guy named Campbell, is a PhD, called the China study. It’s a book. It’s a seminal work about this, and he talks all about that, about the casein milk protein and how it is a potent initiator of cancers in humans. That’s where I got a lot of this information from the China study from T. Colin Campbell.
I’ve heard of that. I’ve not read that.
It’s an amazing book.
The China study before. The pillars, then, are cutting those things out of our diet.
Yes, that is three ones right there.
Eliminating a lot of the things that are going to cause cancer.
Yes. That’s really one of the underlying causes why I came up with this list, because I treat and see cancer patients every day. I know that this would have a lot more impact if they implemented some of these changes to help them, in turn helping activate their own immune systems by eliminating those types of foods from their body.
Another thing that I learned along the way was that I used to get asked this a lot from my patients, “Does sugar feed cancer?” I didn’t have a good answer for it. I said, “No, that’s just fake news.” I don’t, I’d always say that to my patients without really having gone back and looked at the data. I can tell you today, 2025, that there is a wealth of published literature showing a direct link between cancer progression and sugar intake.
I often will tell my patients who have can’t active cancers, even after I’ve operated on them to eliminate their sugar intake. Why? It’s because it’s feeding cancer cells. There’s no question in my mind. The data is clear that sugar feeds cancer cells. By that premise, we have a way nowadays, if you eliminate sugar from your diet, of actually preventing cancers. We’re basically taking a step back, we’re not feeding any cancer cells that might arise with sugar, and so forth.
We can prevent cancer if someone already has cancer and they eliminate sugar, then it’s going to help obviously their treatment.
It will help with their treatment. It definitely will help with their treatment. Again, there’s this thing called the Warburg effect, where cancer cells specifically utilize sugar in the presence of oxygen. They use this as a mechanism of survival, cancer cells. By eliminating that sugar for them to survive, you’re really impacting overall outcomes with many different types of cancers. This is well documented.
Thanks for sharing that. It sounds simple.
I learned all this stuff by the way. I didn’t know any of this stuff.
Have you been able to eliminate those things from your own diet? I’m assuming you’re not eating Captain Crunch for dinner any longer.
I’m not anymore. Again, go back to that point. It’s not about perfection. When I’m hanging out with my kids, my two daughters, and we have like a little mini vacation or whatever, I don’t sweat the small stuff. I’ll have dinner. I’ll have a piece of cheesecake. I’m not like crazy strict on this. However, it’s few and far between when I do that. I have this 80, 20, 90, ten rule. 90% of the time, I’m good.
I’m very strict on what I eat. You don’t even want to know what my diet and lifestyle are, but it’s a 90, 10 thing. I go on vacations. I spend quality time with my kids, and I’m going to dinner with them, and I’m not going to sweat the small stuff. I’ll have some wine. I’ll have a dessert. I wake up the next day, and I move on. That’s how I would approach with the Riker Regimen. It’s not about perfection. It’s about being consistent.
Most of the time, making good quality choices 80% of the time. It’s sustainable. It doesn’t feel like you’re too restrictive on yourself. Everybody knows if you’re on a restrictive diet, it’s never going to last. Now, it’s going to last a few months, and then you’re done. You’re going back to your old ways. That’s the problem with being too restrictive on any diet or any lifestyle. There has to be this somewhat of balance. You want to call it a cheat day. Fine. Have a cheat day on a Saturday. It doesn’t matter because six days out of a week, you’re doing fine. No big deal.
You’re significantly cutting back on those things.
It makes a big difference. Just as an example, I am to the point now of having tried ketogenic diets. I was a vegan for six months. Didn’t like that very much at all. I did ketogenic. I’ve done paleo and I’m experimenting a little bit more of the experiment. I’ve been doing a purely paleo, a paleolithic diet. It’s called the carnivore. You’re basically doing all carnivores. The difference between carnivore and paleo.
Paleo, you can still eat nuts and fruits and things of that nature. True carnivore is red meat, game meat like venison. Any red meat, fish of any kind, grass-fed butter, bacon, and eggs. That’s a true paleo. I do that 9 out of 10, say 6 out of 7 days of the week. I may have a cheat day here and there, but that’s what I do. The other thing is that I eat one meal a day.
You just have time-restricted eating. Just one meal.
That’s the last really big pillar in all of this is not from the start, but eventually work your way towards one meal a day.
You get the autophagy.
It’s amazing.
That has a big effect on cancer.
It’s not only a preventative for cancer development, it also gets rid of all the dead cells in our body as you go through that autophagy stage when you’re into 12 or 16 hours of fasting. What I do pretty much every day now, which I’ve done for years now is one meal a day. Here’s my typical day.
Tell us.
I wake up at 5:01.
I’m curious, why 5:01?
I don’t like even numbers. I don’t like 5:00.
You get that extra minute.
I just have a thing against even numbers. The 00. I have to get up a 5:01. I could get up a 4:59 if I wanted. It’s odd. I get up a 5:01 and then I have I have water. I drink a big glass of water. I take some supplements. I got another whole separate list of supplements that I take, really focused on longevity. That’s a whole other talk. We can talk about that maybe another time. I take my supplements in the morning, and then I have coffee. Coffee, add cacao butter and MCT oil powder.
It’s like a bulletproof coffee, almost.
It’s just like a bulletproof coffee, but better. He uses grass-fed butter. I use cacao butter, which is a much tastier butter, and it’s got great flavor to it, and it’s pure fat. Love it.
That gives your brain energy for the bones.
By drinking that coffee with the fat, you’re still doing fasting. You’re not having any food. Coffee in the morning. It’s a must. I go to work. Like today at 12:00 noon, I had a cup of hot green tea, Chinese green tea.
I’ve heard that there are a lot of really amazing benefits from green tea as well.
By far the best thing you can do is just have hot green tea, good Chinese green tea, or Japanese matcha green tea. They’re both excellent. Filled with great stuff from antioxidants to cancer prevention compounds. It’s absolutely amazing. That’s a green tea. That’s 12:00 noon. I got home from work around about 5:00. This is a special occasion. I had Japanese Wagyu, great grade A5 beef. Just a steak. No sides, no vegetables, no potatoes. I have Japanese Wagyu beef. Tomorrow I’m going to have hamburgers. Last day I’m going to have chicken. The next day after that, I’m going to have a ribeye. The next day after that, I’m going to have a New York strip.
You’re doing the full carnivore.
Time-restricted eating—moving toward just one meal a day—triggers autophagy, the body’s natural way of clearing out dead cells, which not only helps prevent cancer but also supports healing and renewal. Share on X
The thing about carnivores when you eat the protein or the meat for dinner, even if it’s one meal a day, I can’t even eat a whole a whole steak. Now your body is a very filling food. If you realize that you’re eating steak. It fills you up very quickly, and it sets that switch off, and your stomach sends it to your brain. It says, “I’m full.” You only need half a steak.
If you’re hungry, you might get down a whole steak, maybe two hamburgers, but I could rarely eat three. I’m not a big guy. If there’s a guy who’s 200 pounds, they’re going to be eating a lot more than I am. I’m small and I don’t weigh that much. I struggle with getting the amount of protein probably that I should need, but I don’t worry about it. I just eat until I’m full. I don’t count any calories. I just don’t worry about it because I’m eating one meal a day.
You’re on a somewhat calorie calorie deficiency each day.
I’m almost certain I’m on a calorie-restricted daily diet.
You’re going to maintain a lean.
I maintain a very lean, very stable weight. Again, those cheat days, honestly, they don’t matter.
That makes it easy to eliminate gluten and grains, and because you have your diet.
It’s like, don’t go crazy on a cheat day, and I might have some pizza. I like pizza. I’ll eat some gluten-free pizza. It’s not a big deal, but for the most part, Monday through Friday, sometimes the whole weekend, I stick to it, and it’s not difficult to stick to that.
Out of the pillars of the Riker Regimen, then that allows you to do all of those things. You have that fasting period. You’re getting the autophagy. Your cells can clean themselves and clean the body out.
I would add one thing. Every two months, every three months, I’ll do a three-day fast. It’s just a little longer than just your daily 18, 6. I’ll do a three-day fast. I found that when I started on a Monday, not a Friday, it was better to start it on a Monday. Do you have your normal weekend, and then you go to work on Monday, and you’re not going to eat until Wednesday night. It’s Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night. That’s a three-day water fast, water, coffee, and tea.
You also have your MCT oil and butter, and coffee?
I put that in the coffee. Normal coffee with MCT oil powder, cacao butter, tea, and then a lot of water.
That allows your body to clean. We’re getting cancers all the time.
Our immune systems take care of that.
Most of the time, right?
Yeah.
That fast allows your body to do that cleansing work.
From head to toe. I strongly recommend that. I tell that to my patients as well. They’re like, “No way I can’t do three days.” “Yes, you can.” You’re not going to die. You’re going to be fine.
That’s great. I’m sure our audience is wondering too. After you changed your diet and lifestyle, did you go back and run another marathon, and did you make it under four hours?
I have. Probably one of my better marathons was Chicago. I ran Chicago again, and I ran about a 350, 348, well under four. I’m always just happy to finish, of course, but the second goal is under four hours. I’ve done it with very on a very low-carb, almost at that time ketogenic type of lifestyle. I’m basically burning fat the whole time. I have become a fat burner. I encourage my patients to become, go from a sugar burner to transition and become a fat burner. Once you start burning your own fat through intermittent fasting or whatever the case may be, and you become a fat burner, it’s night and day how your whole body feels and how well you feel when you’re burning fat as your primary energy source.
You’re eliminating all the inflammation.
Correct. Take advantage of it. Remember, fat is not stupid in our bodies. These adipose cells it’s a complex microenvironment in the fatty tissues that we all the adipose cells. They secrete all kinds of cytokines and things that stimulate the growth of potentially of cancer cells. Fat is not our friend. You see all these, we’re in an epidemic of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. They’re all intermixed within this vicious cycle of all of those things. Again, the root cause of all of that contributes to chronic low-grade inflammation, which is transitioning our normal human cells into cancer cells.
Why Simple Movement & Muscle Maintenance Matter Most
Speaking of exercise, what role do you see exercise playing? Obviously, everybody talks about the importance of exercise and movement. What do you recommend for your patients or for those of us who want to prevent ourselves from getting cancer?
I’ve gone back and forth on this issue of exercise a bit. Most recently, my thought process on exercise is that to maintain your muscle mass, not to get huge and get gigantic muscles, especially when we get older, like I am, you want to just maintain muscle mass. The best way to maintain muscle mass is to do some core weights in the gym. Normal stuff, pushups, sit-ups, leg raises, just simple stuff. You don’t need any weights to do these things.
Just go to the gym and do an hour of that, 2 or 3 times a week. I really try to do that. Get your walk in. I have now come to realize the importance of getting your steps in. I didn’t think so much about it, but I’m telling you it’s probably one of the more important things to get 10,000 plus somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 steps per day. From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. Now that means because you’re not walking around much at work.
You burn more fat walking on a treadmill than doing high-intensity or HIIT training. Share on X
You’re in your work. You’re at a desk. You got to go for a walk when you get home. You got to get on a treadmill. Everybody can go for a walk. You don’t got to go fast. Just go for a walk. A three-mile walk. I figured this out is about 6,000 steps. A three-mile walk is around 6,000 steps. If you’re at work and say you’re going around the hospital or wherever it is, you’re getting probably 4,000 to 6,000 steps, depending on what you do. This is, you’re not at a desk job. You’re doing stuff. If you get that, say 5,000, and then you go for a three-mile walk when you get home, that’s 11,000 steps per day. That’s good.
That would be good.
If you’re not too much, you’re sitting behind a desk, you’ve got to maybe go for a longer walk.
I’m a fan of the standing desks and adding a treadmill Pad under. I think we’re some folks in the team are looking at doing that.
That’s a great way to do it. You’re just sitting there, doing nothing, you might as well be walking.
10,000 to 14,000 steps a day, strength training, resistance training, and maintain that muscle mass. That’s really a key. I hear that from most experts I talk to now. It’s muscle mass and strength training.
Muscle mass for the core. When you’re on a treadmill, say you’re at the gym, you do half an hour on the treadmill, you’re walking. You do not need to run. Just get in. It’s a fat-burning zone. It’s low intensity. It’s 3.2 miles on the treadmill, flat, maybe a little bit of an incline, you’re golden. Just do that for half an hour, 40 minutes. Anybody can do it. Just walking. You will burn, by the way, more fat walking on a treadmill than doing high-intensity or HIIT training.
Really?
Yeah. Burn more fat.
That makes it easy for us, then, right?
Yep.
The Science Behind Living Longer
We’re in 2025, there’s AI. AI is enabling all kinds of things. This convergence of technology and new breakthroughs that are coming through. When you think about the future or the next 5 to 10 years, what are some of the most exciting breakthroughs that you’re following in the world of cancer prevention and longevity?
That’s two parts. Let me take the first part. Breakthroughs in quotes, breakthroughs say, and all the stuff we’re talking about, chronic diseases. How can we not talk about a GLP-1 agonist like Ozempic? Let’s just spend a couple of minutes on that. My feelings on Ozempic is for the very overweight person it’s helpful because definitely you will drop pounds, taking Ozempic every week.
That’s a great feeling if you’re overweight, got a high BMI, and you need to drop 20, 30 pounds, 40 pounds right off the bat. It’s great for self-esteem. It’s great for the overall body. It’s great for everything. You’re dropping weight quickly. The problem is with Ozempic and any of the other GLP-1 agonists, not just Ozempic, but all of them. My problem is that it’s not changing behavior.
That’s the problem. I can give a patient a shot of Ozempic. They come back, you need to get it every week, and they drop weight. They feel great. You’ve got to take it forever. If I stop it and we haven’t addressed the elephant in the room is their dietary patterns and what they’re eating and drinking, they’re going to put all the weight back on and probably more.
This has been published already, showing that they usually gain all that weight back. That’s my problem with Ozempic. Does it help patients? Yes, in the short term, but it has to go along with lifestyle and dietary modification in the long term. I think a lot of our concierge practices nowadays are using it as a selling point and a way to make money by keeping these patients coming back week after week after week for these shots. I have an issue with that.
That makes sense.
That’s the probably the biggest breakthrough in weights and obesity management these days. The longevity, I’m a big fan of longevity, whatever I could do to live longer. A lot of these ideas, concepts, studies published or otherwise come from people we all know. Peter Attia, I got a book right here. It’s from David Sinclair called Lifespan. Wonderful book.
He’s a Harvard researcher about how do we live longer. What can we do to live longer? That part, there’s some really great data on ways to extend our lives. There are supplements that you can take that I imagine are going to extend our human lives by anywhere from 7 to 15 years. That’s impressive. Some of these supplements, most of them are natural. One is called resveratrol. You can’t drink enough wine to get enough resveratrol. You’ve got to take a supplement. Resveratrol. It’s a prescription drug used for type 2 diabetes called metformin.
Metformin is one of probably the most potent prescription medications that you can take to increase longevity in humans, and it’s also a potent anti-tumor immunity drug. I published I actually published a review article on the utilities of metformin and preventing cancers. Metformin, resveratrol, great combo with a nut, with a third drug called NMN. NMN is a precursor to NAD plus. That all creates a synergy on similar cellular pathways that increase our overall longevity. For instance, I take those things, I take those and a few others every single morning.
You have your own version. You’ve actually created your own.
I made my own supplement. It’s called longevity.
You made it for yourself, essentially, you’re going to sell it, right?
Yes. I’ve got six supplements. They’re all unique proprietary blends, and they do six different things. I got one for inflammation to decrease inflammation in our bodies, because I know how important that is. One is for the immune system to create a robust immune system. One is to increase cellular metabolism. It’s like a fat blaster. It increases the taste, a really strong one. Fat, it’s called organoline. One is called Brain Active for increased cognitive function. It’s got mushrooms in there. It’s all natural compounds. One for cognitive function. Another one is for longevity. I’ve got one which is popular for improved sleep. It’s called REM state.
You take all those yourself, I’m assuming.
Metformin, resveratrol, and NMN—a precursor to NAD+—create a powerful synergy, activating similar cellular pathways that can boost longevity and support healthy aging. Share on X
I take them. I take some of them, some every day, some every other day. My nurses love them. They’re on the market now, just got a website. I found that a lot of my patients are taking these supplements, and they’re very helpful. I get a lot of feedback from them. Especially at how somebody with a lot of chronic inflammatory issues, how well these things are working for them.
That’s great. As we conclude our time together, maybe do you have a story or two about a patient or anyone that you’ve seen go through the Riker Regimen and have some life transformation or life changes?
I got several.
I’m sure you have a lot, yeah.
She’s a colleague up in Charlotte County. This was when I first got into town several years ago. I hadn’t even had the first book out yet. I just had my bullet point sheet, and I gave it to her. She’s in healthcare. She was just asking me a lot of questions about it, because she just thought I was crazy. I was doing all this crazy stuff about you know, one meal a day.
She asked me all these questions about one meal a day. She was eating three meals a day. Finally, she read the book. I finally published it, I gave her a book, she read it, and she got down to one meal a day. She was probably 20 or 30 pounds maybe overweight. She lost 30 or 35 pounds. She is now a strict one-meal-a-day person, and she is just couldn’t be happier.
It was all just from me talking to her, telling her the importance of autophagy and the benefits of intermittent fasting. It is so beneficial to the human body. I wish more people would do it. I’ve got other patients in my practice that have literally lost 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds. I have not just reversed their diabetes, I’ve eliminated their diabetes.
Patients who were on metformin, taking a lot of insulin, very insulin resistant, metabolic, just a host of other related chronic diseases related to their diabetes, peripheral neuropathies, all of these things, kidney problems, early-stage renal failure from just having bad diabetes, eye problems, neuropathies, completely reversed. Their diabetes is gone because of them implementing changes in the Riker Regimen. I have some very big, very gratifying success stories.
That’s amazing. I love it when you say you’re healing or curing cancer one case at a time.
That’s right.
Close
Dr. Riker, thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. Where can people find the Riker Regimen, and how can they get your book and your supplements? Can you tell us about that?
The book is on Amazon. I always get my book on Amazon. I have a website called TheRikerRegimen.com. It’s one word, TheRikerRegimen.com. It’s not on Amazon. They’re not on Amazon because I couldn’t get them on there. They’re on a Shopify website, but it’s a nice website. My supplements are there, you can buy the book there, too. I’m working on my second edition of the Riker Regimen book, right here.
It’s going to be an updated, modified, expanded version of the Riker Regimen. I’ve got twenty chapters and I’m going to talk more about, for instance, I got one on a pure carnivore lifestyle. I’m still going to talk about cow’s milk, cheese, and dairy. I’ve got a whole chapter on sugar, diabetes, insulin resistance, chronic disease, and cancer risk, obesity, chronic disease and cancer risk, inflammation. This is an updated version of the first book that goes into more detail on all these things that we just talked about. My goal is to have it done by the end of the year. We’ll see.
We’ll be on the lookout for Riker Regimen 2.0 then.
We’ve got a lot of stuff that we could talk about. If you wanted to do some more podcasts, I’d be happy to do that.
I would love to have you back another time. Maybe we can dive into some of the longevity-focused.
We could do some more on longevity. We could talk about all kinds of stuff. In the back of my house, I got a sauna and a cold plunge. We could talk about that.
Yes, we could definitely get into that as well. That’ll be fun. I’ll definitely have you back on then. Like you said, there are a lot more topics to cover. Thank you so much for your time, and really would encourage our readers to check out your book and your website, and thanks for putting those supplements together. I know a lot of people in this space follow the work of people like David Sinclair, and sometimes it’s hard to find the rest of their fall.
It is.
You’re buying it all separately. It sounds like you put it all together.
That’s exactly why I did it, because I was doing the same thing. I was saying like 8, 9, 10 supplements. I’m like, “I want them all in one capsule.”
Make it easy. Thank you so much for the amazing work you’re doing, the way you’re curing cancer and saving lives. I’m sure that your message will make a big impact, and I’m definitely going to reconsider some of the things that I’m taking in my diet currently. I’ve been like you, I’ve tried different things. I’ve been a vegan for a couple of years at one point, and I like meat.
Me too. Thanks for having me on, too. I’ve enjoyed having this conversation. I’m passionate about this.
Absolutely.
What a fascinating conversation with Dr. Riker, and very practical. If we just recap a few things that we talked about here, if we want to prevent cancer, if we or someone we know or love is struggling with cancer, then here are a few practical things we can do. We can eliminate sugar. He said, it’s like an atomic bomb going off in your body. I know that’s hard to do. If you look at labels, there’s sugar in almost everything, but even limiting our quantity of fruits, one whole piece of fruit a day.
I know I eat way more fruit than that. I always think, “This is good for me,” but maybe it’s too much sugar, too much fructose for my body. Eliminating dairy, which is also in so many things, and eliminating all grains. Dairy, gluten, and sugar. Those are the three bombs that are really carcinogenic in our bodies. How do we eliminate those things? Maybe then we also talked about limiting our time of eating.
That intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating, and as Dr. Riker only eats one meal a day, is working down towards that. Having that time for autophagy for ourselves to cleanse themselves and to clean out all those cancer-causing issues at the cellular level. Limiting our time and then getting all those steps in, finding ways to get our steps in, and even just walking, is good exercise.
The last thing that he mentioned, too, was having a three-day fast or a longer fast once every few months. That really allows our body to clean out those cancers that we’re all getting, these cancer cells all the time. Our body naturally eliminates them. If we can really reduce that low-grade inflammation that we discussed, then we’ll have a much better chance of fighting those things off and staying healthy for longer.
I hope that this episode was as fascinating for you as it was for me. I know there are some things that I need to go and evaluate in my own diet and share with those that I love, and so I hope that you’ll do the same. You can find Dr. Riker once again at TheRikerRegimen.com and his book there as well and as well as his supplements. He has a few supplements. I’m sure we’ll have him back another time to talk about some of those other longevity-focused topics as well. Have a great day. Thank you for tuning in to the show where we’re unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. We’ll see you next time.
