As most reading this know, my mom passed away from pancreatic cancer this past spring. It was caught late in stage IV and there was likely nothing that could have been done to reverse it. Since her diagnosis I have spent more time researching cancer, first to try to help in her treatment, and after she passed, to help myself and others avoid cancer.
If more of our loved ones are to be spared from cancer, we need to focus on its causes. Activism by the major cancer societies treats causes as a secret realm that only doctors can explore, and a diagnosis a random lightning bolt that can strike any of us. Sending them money and raising ‘awareness’ are all that they tell us an ordinary person can do. A diagnosis, particularly among people not near the end of their expected lifespan, is perversely treated as a rite of passage, or even badge of honor, rather than an abnormal event whose causes need to be investigated. While they are made with good intentions at the individual level, these efforts are not the most productive ways to approach cancer. Granted, there is genetic suspectibility or unwitting exposure to carcinogens, but on the whole cancer is not a mystery. (Though in my mom’s case, it seemed to be one, since there is no known history of either of her cancer types in our family. I believe some of the factors below helped cause both illnesses.)
Magazines such as Time, the New York Times, or other establishment media continuously warn with certainty of ever-increasing cancer rates through 2040, 2050, etc., sometimes calling for a doubling or tripling (e.g. 1, 2 ) Why should rates increase at all? Shouldn’t they be going down with medical advancements? What do they know that we do not? Such warnings imply there are dangerous carcinogens among us now and exposure to them is expected to increase, yet all we hear from the cancer establishment is ‘watch your weight, exercise, and eat your vegetables and whole grains,’ the same advice we’ve gotten for the last century as cancer incidence has soared.
The most likely drivers of cancer must be things that are missing from or added to the pre-epidemic lifestyle. What did those people do differently than us? They lived in the same kind of neighborhoods, smoked more, and generally were subjected to more [fossil fuel] pollution. They had virtually no knowledge of cancer or its treatment. Their cancer rate should have been higher than ours, yet was many times lower.
Here are a few additions to our lives that are strongly linked to cancer:
1) Plastic additives such as BPA, among other similar compounds, that mimic estrogen, which raise estrogen levels and therby cause cancer, all types of cancer in men and breast, cervical, and uterine cancer in women, along with common cleaning products such as certain hand soaps that contain or promote estrogen. Not that I trust such organizations, but the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences classified estrogen as a carcinogen in 2003.
2) GMO foods, particularly GM soy and corn, which have been shown in multiple studies to cause aggressive cancer (plus mass sterility, DNA damage, severe anxiety, and birth defects) in animals. See studies 1, 2, 3, 4.
3) Omnipresent electromagnetic radiation from wifi, cell phones, smart meters, and other wireless devices*. Link here and here (see below)
4) Pesticides and herbicides that are sprayed on foods, particularly glyphosate aka Roundup, which are most heavily sprayed on ‘Roundup Ready’ GM crops. Glyphosate has been repeatedly shown to cause cancer. Nearly all pro-Roundup studies have been conducted by Monsanto, who produces the product.
5) Sharp increase of trypsin-inhibiting foods in the diet, namely soy . Thanks to a lobbying campaign in the 1970s, (unfermented) soy went from relative obscurity in the West to being the #1 vegetable oil in America. Fermented soy, the form in most Asian cuisine, does not inhibit trypsin. Rapeseed aka canola, another unpopular oil until only recently, is also a trypsin inhibitor. Trypsin is a digestive enzyme that can ‘digest’ the outer layer of cancer cells, allowing white blood cells to penetrate and kill them.
6) Sharp increase in exposure to other cancer agents such as processed meats, pharmaceutical drug side effects (e.g., statins, which have been linked to pancreatic cancer and kidney dysfunction), and aflatoxin from peanuts, wheat and other grains, nuts, and legumes that are shipped over long distances and develop the carcinogenic mold.
7) Toxic chemotherapy and radiation from a first case of cancer, which, if survived, can contribute to a more serious second case later. After treatment is over, patients are often subjected to more high-radiation follow-up scans. While surgical intervention undoubtedly works, radiation and chemotherapy lack evidence of efficacy for many cancer types and often seem to do as much as or more harm than good.
8) Radiation from cancer screening and now-routine medical procedures, such as CAT scans a.k.a. CT scans, which subject the patient to extremely large doses of radiation comparable to exposure for atomic bomb victims about 1.5 miles from a blast. The radiation dose of a chest x-ray is about 0.1 mSv, while that of a CT scan ranges from 6 to 16 mSv. CAT scans were widely adopted in the 1970s, coinciding with the explosion in cancer rates. Another major sources of radiation is flying, but it pales in comparison to medical testing. A 7-hr flight in daylight can subject passengers to 0.02 mSv. Accounting for nighttime hours, a single CT scan is the equivalent of spending 6 entire months at cruising altitude (35,000 feet)! Mammograms also provide a significant dose of radiation (0.5 mSv). Some will defend the testing by arguing that background (i.e. solar) radiation already subjects humans to approximately 3.1/mSv per year. But these are predictable levels that the human body is designed to tolerate. Increasing exposure by just a few percentage points, let alone hundreds, could wreak havoc on human health. If you ascribe skyrocketing cancer incidence to things like lack of whole wheat bread rather than repeated radiation dose-years of 500% or more above baseline, you are doing so at your own risk.
Now some things that have gone by the wayside:
1) Gradual reduction and now virtual absence of amygdalin-containing foods from the diet, namely millet, buckwheat, alfalfa, and cassava, once staple foods. Amygdalin is a compound found in over 1,500 foods, with highest concentrations in fruit seeds, particularly peaches, nectarines, apples, and apricots. Berries are also high in amygdalin (from the tiny seeds inside) and from less than a century ago played a much bigger part in the average diet than they do now. In the northern US and most of Europe for example, large varieties of berries, many no longer consumed, were plentiful and one of the only forms of native fruit. See bottom for more on dosage and contraindications.
2) Lower consumption of probiotic foods which ease digestion and reduce the workload of the pancreas , preventing diabetes and cancer, along with increasing consumption of gut-damaging, pancreas-exhausting gluten grains.
3) Lower consumption of higher-enzyme, non-processed foods, raw foods, and fresh foods, which contain higher levels of digestive enzymes than processed or old foods.
4) Lower- and now virtually non-consumption of high-nutrient-value, more easily digestible organ and offal meats, including liver, heart, kidney, pancreas aka sweetbread, bone marrow, and tripe from the diet. While it may sounds strange, organ meats were once preferred over and even eaten exclusively in favor of muscle meat, and eating an organ of an animal has long been used to heal the corresponding organ in humans. For example, animal heart is the best dietary source of CoQ10, eating liver has been shown to improve liver function, pancreas contains enzymes which reduce workload on and improve function of one’s own pancreas, and brain tissue contains compounds that improve brain function such as phosphatidylserine. Though it has not yet been established by science, it is my personal belief that in addition to the effect of these nutritional compounds there is also a stem cell-like effect, where the consumed animal organ cells can be directly used by the body to rebuild and repair human organs of the same kind.
So what is the best program to maximize your cancer prevention potential?
1) Introduce a variety of high-amygdalin foods into your diet, or eat 4-6 apricot seeds or equivalent amount per day (either eaten whole, crushed into powder and put in capsules or mixed in a shake, or ideally, cracked from a fresh apricot pit). Extracts in pill form are also available (see below).
2) Improve your digestive ability in order to avoid exhausting your body’s enzyme supply and pancreas. Eat sauerkraut and other pickled and fermented foods, and if you eat dairy, kefir and certain yogurts. Take digestive enzymes: vegetable source (in capsules, or just eat enzyme-rich foods like pineapple or papaya), synthetic, or actual pancreatin from animal pancreas, especially if you eat a lot of meat. If possible, avoid gut-damaging foods such as wheat (and other gluten grains) and soy. Even chewing food thoroughly can make a difference. These steps will also lower your likelihood of stomach, bowel, and colon cancer specifically. You may even consider the squatty potty (haha; seriously though).
3) Eat large amounts of other foods and spices known to be anti-cancer. Among many others these include berries, dark green leafy vegetables, cruciferous vegetables (e.g. broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage), natural beta carotene sources (synthetic may be carcinogenic) like green vegetables, carrots and sweet potatoes, garlic, turmeric, and CBD and THC-containing products if possible/desired.
4) Minimize your chances of diabetes by avoiding white sugar, corn syrup, excessive fruit juice, and high-glycemic index foods (esp eaten alone), such as white processed grains that are not combined with low-glycemic foods in order to moderate the meal’s net glycemic load. Diabetes is the exhaustion and reduction in responsiveness of the pancreas, the body’s enzyme producer and main ‘defense center’ against cancer (explained in detail in the next post). This explains why diabetics have a much higher chance of getting cancer and why being diabetic is one of the biggest single risk factors for cancer, and why pancreatic cancer is the most aggressive and among the most lethal forms of cancer. The National Institutes of Health and American Cancer Society, which do not acknowledge the role of enzymes and the pancreas in preventing cancer, state the link [between diabetes and cancer] has not been defined and have offered no speculation or explanation for these correlations.
5) Minimize exposure to carcinogens such as tobacco smoke, radiation, GMO foods, processed meats especially those with nitrates, acrylamides, estrogen promoters such as soy, certain soaps and cleaning products, BPA, excessive wifi and cell phone exposure, aflatoxin (found in peanuts and peanut butters, and non-fresh grains). Any damage, overwork, and even minor irritation of organs and tissue can eventually cause cancer. This can come in the form of excessive sunburn (skin), excessive smoke of any kind (lung), hard-to-digest foods (stomach, bowel, and colon), excessive alcohol (liver), irritation of mouth or throat tissue from smoke, alcohol, excessive hot liquids, and other sources (oral and esophagal).
The role of excess estrogen, which causes breast, cervical, and uterine cancers and can contribute to all male cancers, will be discussed in a future post explaining the trophoblastic/enzyme theory of cancer, which maintains that cancer is a natural healing process [of damaged tissue that can be triggered by excess estrogen] that has gone out of control in the absence of regulating factors: sufficient trypsin, which is produced as trypsin and converted from other enzymes, and/or anti-cancer nutrients, not only amygdalin but also the hundreds of other anti-cancer nutritional compounds.
As long as cancer is not too advanced or conventional treatments have not irreparably damaged the body, a cure for cancer already exists- at least as well as cures might be expected to exist for our mortal species- in the form of a complex group of natural factors, some of which are described here. Let’s take control of our cancer risk by including some of them in our own lives. In a coming post I will outline the basic theory behind using enzymes and amygdalin to prevent and treat cancer.
Addressing common objections to the argument that cancer is truly on the rise:
1) ‘People died of cancer earlier and it was misdiagnosed.’ This is possible but is speculation. There are few indications in death reports and autopsies from the past of cancer being present but unacknowledged (such as descriptions of tumors).
2) ‘People did not live long enough in the past to get cancer.’ It is true that one is more susceptible to cancer in old age, but youth and younger-adult cancer rates have increased at an even greater rate than for those in old age. This fact alone rebuts any objections that have been put forth. A bigger problem with this argument is that the idea that people live longer today than they used to, while in small part true, is largely a myth. ‘Most people in Jesus’s day didn’t live past 35’ or ‘Most people in the 1800s didn’t make it past age 50.’ This is not true; lower life expectancy rates were due mostly to high infant and youth mortality. If children made it past age 12 or so, they would likely live into their 60s or 70s, and living into one’s 80s or 90s was not uncommon.
*A note on EMF radiation: the most common objection to warnings about wifi and other wireless signal is that everyday solar radiation is already high. This is true, but artificial sources increase radiation load significantly. All organisms are designed and have evolved to tolerate precise levels of natural radiation, not to sustain several-fold increases in radiation from manmade sources. Also, these artificial sources generally affect one’s body 24/7, while solar radiation rises and falls with daylight, cloud conditions, seasons, etc. Every year we see more ‘peekaboo’ evidence that radiation from cell phones causes brain cancer and can harm fertility.
Recommended supplementation:
Amygdalin: You can find apricot kernels online and at most independent health food shops (i.e., not Vitamin Shoppe or GNC). There are also companies that sell extracts such as CytoPharma. You want the kernels to be bitter not sweet, which indicates high levels of amygdalin are present. Remember that apricot kernels are not meant to be eaten in large quantities, only 1-3 kernels twice a day. By eating them you are raising the amount of amygdalin in your diet to an optimal level and getting it from a whole food source, without having to overhaul your diet to include the large number of amygdalin-containing foods people used to eat daily and in greater amounts. These foods contained amygdalin in much lower concentration than apricot seeds, where bitterness was barely, if at all, detectable. Do not use amygdalin if you are pregnant since it could interfere with placenta development due to the similar nature of placental trophoblast cells and cancer cells.
Enzymes: I have taken Now Foods Super Enzymes complex, which are a good value. CytoPharma makes another enzyme complex. Companies such as Dr. Ron’s make what seems like good quality pork pancreas (the best animal source for pancreas) in capsule form, but are expensive. For a tiny fraction of the price, you can buy fresh pork pancreas, dehydrate it (like you would jerky), grind it into powder with a high-powered blender, and either mix it into a recipe or cap it yourself. Beef or veal pancreas is not recommended as it is more expensive and contains trypsin-inhibiting compounds, although not nearly enough to neutralize all enzyme activity. You can also take a single enzyme such as bromelain (as actual pineapple, or as a supplement extract in pill form) or papain (as papaya, or in supplement form).
