Articles - Defending Against Cancer

-- a self-help article about important dietary changes for preventing and overcoming cancer --

It is often said that we all get cancer from time to time, but that the body cures it and allows us to go on living normal lives. What mechanism does the body use to cure cancer in the course of our daily lives? That question was asked roughly 100 years ago by a renowned Scottish embryologist named Dr. John Beard.

Dr. Beard’s work has long been ignored by conventional medicine, although in recent years his important findings are being re-discovered. His research is documented in “The Enzyme Treatment of Cancer and Its Scientific Basis”,copyrighted in 1911. It explains that the body cures cancer with protein digesting enzymes supplied by the pancreas. Research shows that protein digesting enzymes can dissolve the protein coating from around cancer cells, and this enables white blood cells (which are part of the immune system) to destroy the cancer cells. Cancer cells are actually trophoblasts cells that are misbehaving-- that is, they are trying to do the wrong thing at the wrong time and place. Trophoblasts cells are basic to the development of every newly conceived baby. But if out of control trophoblast activity begins to occur in later life then cancer is the result. Thanks to Dr. Beard's research he proved that if there are enough enzymes, especially enzymes designed to digest protein, then cancer cannot gain a foothold.

Food Enzymes, the First Line of Defense --

There is a problem: Dr. Edward Howell, M.D. notes in his seminal work Enzyme Nutrition, that the pancreas (which was just mentioned) has a limited capability to produce enzymes. Add to that the fact that the pancreas is almost always over-worked trying to produce enough digestive enzymes to digest the cooked food that we eat. Cooked, refined and processed foods have no enzymes. The body is at greatest risk of cancer when the pancreas can no longer produce an adequate supply of protein digesting enzymes.

But there is good news! Through diet, we can do something about a scarcity of protein digesting enzymes. It is possible to make it so the pancreas does not have to work so hard. That can be done by significantly decreasing the consumption of animal protein (because animal protein requires lots of protein digesting enzymes), and by eating more raw fruits, vegetables, and nuts, since they are rich in enzymes. And note this: the tropical fruits papaya (and their seeds) along with pineapple are especially important, because their enzymes closely mimic the protein digesting enzymes produced by the pancreas. (That’s why meat tenderizers contain papaya). Our first line of defense against cancer is therefore protein digesting enzymes (and other food enzymes) all of which can be gotten from raw whole foods.

Nitriloside, a Little Known Food Factor --

We are fortunate to have available to us a second line of defense against cancer. It involves eating foods that contain a little known food factor called nitriloside. Dr. Ernst Krebs, M.D. is a pioneer in cancer research who in the 1920s discovered that nitriloside suppresses cancer cells. He demonstrated that this food factor was essential for maintaining good health, and he called it vitamin B-17. It has shown to be a kind of natural ‘chemotherapy’ because it kills cancer cells while enhancing healthy cells, and produces no negative side effects. Unfortunately, conventional medicine ignores the importance of Dr. Krebs’ findings.

Where can the food factor, nitriloside, be found? It occurs naturally in foods, and is found in greatest abundance in apricot kernels. (Although apricot kernels are hard to find, one can go online and locate companies in California that sell them). Nitriloside also occurs in lesser concentrations in a host of other whole foods, including lima beans, lentil, millet, sprouts, ginger root, turmeric, black eye peas, walnuts, avocados, blackberries, cranberries, papaya, barley, cassava, to mention a few. Unfortunately, our Western diet no longer includes very many foods like the ones just mentioned. The typical American diet is high in processed food, simple carbohydrates, refined grains, and meat and pasteurized dairy from grain fed animals. These foods are essentially devoid of nitriloside.

Cancer arises because the first or second line of defense in the body has been broken. To fix them, one must initiate an aggressive and fundamental change in diet to largely raw fruits and vegetables, especially including foods rich in nitriloside (or vitamin B-17). This is the natural route to true cancer recovery. On the other hand, the broken cancer defense problem is not addressed by orthodox cancer treatment because it focuses only on eliminating the cancerous tumor and not on what caused it.

Cancer is a chronic metabolic disease, and no chronic metabolic disease has ever been cured without involving certain food factors found in whole natural foods.

Finally, to make the body a place where cancer cannot survive, it is vital to eat foods each day that defend the body -- foods rich in enzymes and in nitriloside capable of disrupting the cancer PROCESS.

What a blessing to know that there is something we all can do (on our own) about preventing and overcoming what is arguably the most devastating illness of our time!

Mauris Emeka is the author of Cancer’s Best Medicine, copyright 2004, and also of the book Fear Cancer No More, copyright 2002. Apollo Publishing. P. O. Box 1937. Port Orchard, WA 98366. Refer to: emekam@silverlink.net and to www.cancernomore.com.