THE DISEASE OF CIVILIZATION - BY TOM COWAN
Let’s
begin with a definition of cancer. Cancer is the situation that occurs
when a certain type of cell out of the many different types of cells in
our body—such as blood cells, pancreas cells, brain cells, liver cells,
connective tissue cells—decides to grow in an uncontrolled way, in an
excessive way, and at the expense of all the other types of cells in the
body.
If you had one word or brief phrase to answer the
question, “What causes cancer?” what might it be? You might respond with
“emotions,” “toxins,” “fungus,” “stress,” or “bad terrain of the body.”
Those are all great answers.
But they are not my answer. In my
twenty-five years of being a doctor and thinking about food and cancer
and health issues for pretty much every day of those twenty-five years, I
can say—and I don’t wish to say this in an arrogant way—that I have no
doubt in my mind that I know what causes cancer. I have come to the
conclusion that I have this one right.
My answer in one word is “civilization.”
THE BANE OF CIVILIZATION
I’m
not the first person to think this way. That is actually the title of
one of my favorite books, a book by Vilhjalmur Stefansson called Cancer:
Disease of Civilization? (1960).
The
idea started some time before Stefansson in a lecture given at a Paris
medical society in 1842 by Stanislas Tanchou, a physician and one of
Napoleon’s surgeons.
At that time France was a primary center of
science and medicine in the world. You have to remember where we were
in the world at that time: it was the era of scientific discovery and
manifest destiny; white people were going to conquer and civilize the
world and make it safe for Christianity.
Against this political
backdrop Tanchou in his lecture claimed he could predict the exact
incidence of cancer in all the major European cities over the next fifty
years, and it was all dependent on the percentage of grain in their
diets.
Tanchou’s numbers were all recorded and in time they came
exactly true—a certain cancer percentage for Berlin, a certain
percentage for Munich, and so on.
The cancer incidence all
depended on the amount of cereal grains in the diet. This set off a huge
furor around the world since the great mission of the age was to
civilize every inch of the globe.
Here was somebody in a center
of civilization who declared that these people who don’t eat grains, who
have the more indigenous hunter-gatherer diet, never get cancer.
This
provocative idea motivated many thinkers between 1842 to about 1950, as
archaeologists, anthropologists, medical doctors, missionaries and
explorers took up the challenge of answering the question.
Whether
he knew it or not, Weston Price’s research came as a result of
Tanchou’s fundamental question. Price focused on dental health as a kind
of proxy to the question, “Is it true that cancer is a disease of
civilization?”
Another thinker who took up this challenge was
George Caitlin, a mid-nineteenth century American lawyer and
portraitist. Caitlin spent twenty years of his life living and studying
with Native Americans in indigenous hunter-gatherer populations all over
the western part of the United States.
About the people with
whom he lived, Caitlin noted: “I love a people who have always made me
feel welcome to the best they had, who were honest without laws, who had
no jails, no poor houses, who keep the commandments without ever having
read them or heard them preached from the pulpit, never swear, never
take the name of God in vain, love their neighbor as themselves, free of
religious animosity.
I love a people who have never raised a
hand against me, or stole my property, when there was no law to punish
them for either. I love a people who have never fought a battle with
white men except on their own ground. I love a people who live and keep
what is their own without locks and keys. And oh, how I love a people
who don’t live for the love of money.”
UNCONTROLLED GROWTH
The
premise that we are examining is whether cancer is a disease of
civilization, but I say that civilization is the cause of cancer.
But
first we need to define civilization. We know what cancer is:
uncontrolled growth of one of the members of a community; that is, one
cell type deciding to grow at an excessive rate compared to the rest of
the community of cells.
This civilization project, if you want
to call it that, which started about ten thousand years ago, probably in
the Tigris and Euphrates delta, is the process wherein humans decided
to co-opt the natural resources of the land base and set off to grow
themselves at the expense of the rest of the community.
That is
the definition of civilization, this co-opting of the resources of the
land base, this mining of the resources which is essentially mining the
soil. If you go on long enough, you turn productive soil into a desert,
and the region of the Garden of Eden in the Tigris and Euphrates delta
is now a desert. It took ten thousand years, which is the blink of an
eye in the overall picture of humanity.
Civilization can also be
seen as the process of extracting the resources from the earth in order
to grow one particular species of the landed community, namely humans.
When
I give that definition it might remind you of the cancer process. We
believe deeply in growth. In order to grow we co-opt the resources from
the rest of the earth’s community.
Given enough time, the rest
of the community withers and dies and this one particular species of the
community grows more and more until it kills the land base or the
person. That is the definition of civilization.
Think of the
Great Plains—this once fertile region extending from Minnesota to Texas.
According to early white explorers, the top soil on the Great Plains
was twelve feet deep.
Interestingly, by the 1930s, before
chemical agriculture, before GMOs, before Monsanto, barely a hundred
years of growing grains—and growing them organically—turned those twelve
feet into a mere twelve inches, which in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s
blew away to the Gulf of Mexico.
That is what happened because
of organic agriculture. For those of us who say the solution is to
simply to go back to organic agriculture, remember that the Tigris and
Euphrates Delta became the desert of Iraq solely through organic
agriculture, and maybe some over-grazing.
But the point is that
the hunter-gatherer indigenous populations that were dependent upon
animals feeding on perennial grass-based environments lived free of
cancer for literally thousands and thousands of years.
Organic
agriculture turned the soil into nearly a desert, and brought cancer to a
people who had no cancer. Weston Price got in at the tail end of this
inquiry in the 1930s and documented the health of these people from the
standpoint of their teeth.
But again whenever we look at the
health of nonindustrialized peoples we see the same thing: these are
people without cancer, and also without heart disease.
Any
anthropologist can tell you this bone was from a hunter-gatherer, a
pre-grain eating person, and this bone, by contrast, from a grain-eating
person, because the latter has holes in it and looks like it has
arthritis and it not as thick and strong.
You can see physical
degeneration almost every place where people have switched from
indigenous diets to primarily grain-based diets.
HUNTER-GATHERER DIET
So
the next step is to discover what these healthy people ate. As you
know, Weston Price found healthy isolated peoples who were eating small
amounts grains, usually prepared through a fermentation process.
But the basic diet of these people was about 65 percent animal foods with a definite predominance of fats over protein.
It
was not a low-protein diet but a diet that included adequate protein,
and then about thirty-five percent fermented grains, low-starch seeds,
nuts and vegetables and perhaps a natural sweetener, such as honey.
Does
that type of diet square with the human anatomy? I’m not against
changing certain patterns of the diet based on what a person can
tolerate.
But when someone says this person because of their
blood type needs to be an herbivore, a vegan, I think to myself well,
yes, that would be fine if they had a rumen.
Let me tell you,
the first cancer patient who comes in with a rumen, I’m putting them on a
vegetarian diet, I don’t care what blood type they are. If they have
very long intestines and a rumen with bacteria to ferment cellulose, I’d
put them on a vegetarian diet.
THE GORILLA SYNDROME
Interestingly,
the primate that has the largest amount of plant food in the diet, the
gorilla, has a very long digestive tract and the smallest brain of any
primate.
If you were in the jungle and had only leaves to eat,
you would starve in the midst of abundance because you cannot digest
leaves, at least most leaves.
But the gorilla is so constructed that he can eat high-cellulose plant foods like leaves.
Remember that the herbivorous animals literally must eat all day to extract nutrients from grass, leaves and seeds.
You,
as the predator human, can get concentrated fats and protein from the
herbivores, and you need only a short digestive system to get all you
need to develop a healthy body and a healthier more robust brain to
talk, think and create.
You don’t have to eat all day long. When
you revert to a more “gorilla-ish” way of life, you increase the number
of times you have to eat, increase the size of your digestive
apparatus, and shrink your brain, which is exactly what has happened to
us over the last ten thousand years.
I’m not so sure that this is the way we want to go.
I
wish I had a dollar for every patient who walked into my office—usually
a female patient— who has said, “My belly is bloated and I’m full of
gas; I have digestive disturbance and a foggy brain.”
Usually
they end up with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism. When you ask them what
they eat, they tell me, “I’m mostly vegetarian.” They have gorilla
syndrome.
The human anatomy is precisely designed for a
hunter-gatherer diet of about 70 percent animal food, predominantly fat
(as much as they could tolerate and digest) including organ meats and
bones (usually in the form of broth), but not so much protein—something
like two to four ounces of protein, two to three times a day was about
the average of what people ate.
The remaining 30-35 percent
plant foods provides variety and additional amounts of vitamins and
minerals. The protein and fat part is what builds a healthy body
structure, the endocrine and immune systems, and, most importantly, the
brain and nervous systems.
People ate plants for balancing their
pH, for accessing different minerals and phytochemicals. Because these
plant foods were often fermented, they served as food for bacteria,
which greatly increased their vitamin content for the benefit of humans.
This
is the framework to the hypothesis that cancer is a disease of
civilization. Taking these ideas as a basis, my cancer therapy is based
on the GAPS diet, low-dose naltroxone (LDN), Iscador (mistletoe extract)
and cardiotonics in order to create a “pre-civilization” milieu for the
cancer patient.
GAPS DIET
The
diet I use for treating cancer patients is the Gut and Psychology
Syndrome (GAPS) diet, formulated by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride in her
book of the same name. Let
me give a brief description of how the GAPS diet works. The healthy
intestine contains millions of tiny absorptive villi. It also contains a
layer of good bacteria, a diverse colony.
We have, or should
have, more microorganisms in our gut—five to seven pounds of them—than
we have human cells in our body. These bacteria represent our immune
system.
Children with autism have holes in their intestinal
walls that allow toxic proteins and other chemicals to leak through
their porous guts into their blood stream.
The two most serious are casomorphin and gluteomorphin. These leak into the blood stream and cause neurological symptoms.
Think
of your intestines as soil and grass: the villi are like the soil, and
the layer of good bacteria is like the grass covering the soil.
If
you go to a meadow or a perennial grass field and you overgraze or do
something to strip the grass, the soil will become eroded. If this
condition continues, you get further erosion of soil, you get cracks in
the soil, and surface material starts seeping into the ground water.
That
is exactly the same process that happens in the human gut. People
“strip their grass” with antibiotics, with vaccines, with processed
foods, with not getting the right flora via the birth canal due either
to a C-section or gut dysbiosis in the mother.
Lastly,
“civilized” people today are no longer eating probiotic foods. All these
factors create an unhealthy gut ecology, a flattening of the villi, and
actual holes in the gut wall.
The villi are a source of the
enzyme disaccharidase, which digests disaccharides, just as lipase
digests lipids and protease digests protein.
As you lose the
integrity of the villi you lose the ability to digest disaccharides
because you lose the ability to produce the enzymes solely responsible
for this function.
If you continue to eat disaccharides, they
cannot be digested, and instead feed fungus, yeasts, and toxic
microorganisms that are present in the gut.
These are like crab
grass growing on the soil. Crab grass doesn’t protect the soil, it
doesn’t make the good micronutrients, it doesn’t make the B vitamins,
and it doesn’t protect the lining.
Instead, it results in
bloating and gas and all the other things that people with sickness
experience. As the condition of the villi worsens, even less
disaccharidase is produced, and we have a vicious cycle.
Eventually
you get ulcerative colitis—an erosion through the mucosa into the
muscle layer, and that is like a bad crater in the soil.
As a
result of this leakiness of the gut you end up with these two
predominant chemicals, gluteomorphin and casomorphin, getting absorbed
into the blood stream.
These substances are opiates, and opiates essentially paralyze your immune response.
So
in the GAPS diet we eliminate all disaccharides including sugar,
potatoes, sweet potatoes and grains; lactose is also a disaccharide so
fluid milk, even raw milk, needs to be avoided.
The diet
emphasizes lots of healthy fats like butter, ghee and coconut oil,
grass-fed meats and organ meats, wild seafood, fermented raw dairy
products, low-starch vegetables, some fruit, bone broths and cod liver
oil.
I should add that I also prescribe pancreatic enzymes, based
on the work of Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez. I use lyophilized pancreatic
enzymes from Allergy Research extracted from New Zealand pork, lamb and
beef, all at one time.
The dose is 10-15 capsules, three times per day, on an empty stomach.
LOW DOSE NALTREXONE
Now
let’s introduce low dose naltrexone (LDN) into this picture, and see
what it has to do with the GAPS diet. We’ll also discuss what it has to
do with cancer and civilization.
Naltrexone is a drug that was
developed in the late 1960s to treat heroin overdose. It is an opiate
receptor blocking agent. Three hundred milligrams of intravenous
naltrexone would block the receptors of someone who had overdosed on
heroin and save him from respiratory arrest and death.
Oral naltrexone in a fifty-milligram dose was next tried as a strategy to stop heroin addiction.
Two
interesting things happened. First, the fifty milligrams would block
the opiate receptors all day and the heroin would have no effect.
Addicts
would stop using heroin because it wouldn’t make them high. But
unfortunately, the people who took the fifty-milligram dose of
naltrexone felt so lousy they said they’d rather be dead than take this
stuff.
The therapy completely failed as an addiction drug, but
Bernard Bihari, a neurologist in New York City, had a lot of AIDS
patients who were also heroin addicts.
Bihari knew the story of naltrexone and this led to an attempt to discover why people taking naltrexone felt so lousy.
The answer is that heroin and morphine are identical to chemicals we make in our bodies called endorphins.
These
are the chemicals that make you feel good. If you block the body’s
production of natural endorphins—which is an inadvertent effect of
blocking the exogenous opiates, heroin and morphine—then this complete
embargo on endorphins makes you feel worse than worse.
The
result is a lifeless life with no feelings of joy, since this is what
endorphins are intimately associated with. If you feel miserable all the
time, you probably suffer from a deficiency of endorphins.
The
feeling of well-being is connected with your immune response. Endorphins
are literally the fuel for the activity of your T cells; they have to
do with your natural killer cells and the synthesis of tumor necrosis
factor. All of this is clearly delineated in the medical literature.
The
next step for Bihari was to test the heroin addicts who had AIDS and MS
and other immune system problems to see whether they were actually low
in endorphins.
Bihari was the first to hypothesize that we can
trick the body into making more endorphins by giving a very low dose of
naltrexone. If fifty milligrams blocks the opiate receptors for a day,
he reasoned, then three or four milligrams will block the receptors for
about an hour.
We give the dose at bedtime and the body says,
“Hey, somebody blocked my endorphin sites! I need to make more
endorphins.” Sometimes there is a ten-fold increase in the number of
endorphins produced.
The next thing you know you find a normal
or even heightened response in endorphin production leading to improved
immune function. In one survey, forty out of forty-two MS patients went
into remission using LDN.
Their autoimmune disease had been
based on toxic opiates replacing healthy endorphins in their immune
response. There are many classes of diseases that have been helped with
this therapy.
How does the use of LDN fit into our theory that cancer is a disease of civilization?
First,
the foods of civilization, especially the current lowfat (or wrong-fat)
and low-cholesterol diets, impede the body’s production of natural
endorphins;
Second, civilized peoples are addicted to substances
that stress the adrenal glands, such as coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar
and stronger drugs—you might say that the process of becoming civilized
takes us from the slow lane to the fast lane—and as the adrenals are
involved in endorphin production, with so much stress and over-use, our
innate feel-good mechanism breaks down.
Finally, civilization
puts millions of people into jobs they can’t stand, relationships that
are stressful, activities they don’t enjoy. Civilization is interesting
and challenging, but it is also stressful.
We often hear of a
person diagnosed with cancer who says to himself, “Well, if I have only a
few months to live, I’m going to do what I always wanted to do.”
So
he quits his work and plays the cello, or takes up oil painting. And lo
and behold, his cancer goes into remission. Why? Because his body is
finally producing and benefiting from endorphins, his immune system can
finally work again, and he gets well.
It is interesting to
compare this therapy to the GAPS diet, which eliminates the
disaccharides found in grains, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweet milk and a
few other foods.
The diet also avoids the exogenous opiates: casomorphins and gluteomorphins found in grains and unfermented dairy products.
The
GAPS diet mirrors the pre-civilized diet of 60-70 percent animal foods,
with fruits, vegetables, seeds and nuts as sort of “vitamin pill”
supplement.
The strategy is to get rid of toxic opiates, heal
the gut, stimulate the production of healthy endorphins, and normalize
the immune response.
A significant number of people with autoimmune disease and cancer have a positive response to this combination.
ISCADOR
The next modality in my approach to cancer treatment is mistletoe therapy, otherwise known as Iscador.
This
is the backbone of anthroposophical medical therapy and I’m a trained
anthroposophical physician. This philosophy is associated with Waldorf
schools and biodynamic farming, started by Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s.
The
mistletoe plant is made into a number of different cancer preparations,
but the original one formulated by Rudolf Steiner is called Iscador.
The
formulation involves an extremely complicated pharmaceutical process
using winter and summer sap from the Viscum album plant and mixing it in
a gold-plated centrifuge rotated at the exact speed of the earth. It is
an amazing process.
You may be surprised to learn that Iscador
is the most prescribed cancer medicine in the world. At a conference I
attended a few years ago, a German oncologist quoted 400,000 registered
cancer patients in Germany, 310,000 of whom take some kind of mistletoe
preparation. (Unfortunately, European doctors usually prescribe it in
conjunction with conventional therapy.)
You may have heard that
the celebrity Suzanne Somers is an ardent proponent of Iscador, which
has played a big part in her successful treatment of her breast cancer,
along with a low-carbohydrate diet and hormones.
I’ve been
treating cancer patients with Iscador for twenty-five years or so, and
almost every patient I see is prescribed the diet that I have described,
along with Iscador and LDN.
That is the mainstay of my
therapeutic protocol. How does it fit in with our “cancer is a disease
of civilization” hypothesis? Rudolf Steiner was the first to describe
Iscador, but he was by no means the first to describe the theory of
Iscador.
Twenty-five hundred years ago Hippocrates said, “Give me a medicine that can produce a fever and I can cure any disease.”
The
way that I explain this to my patients is to note that the job of the
doctor is to distinguish between the therapy and the illness.
What
I mean by that is if you get a splinter in your finger, and then your
body makes pus to get the splinter out, is the pus the therapy or the
disease? We know that pus indicates infection and the presence of
microorganisms, and we learned in medical school that doctors should
kill the pus.
But I don’t think it is that far of a stretch to
see that if you have a splinter in your finger, the pus is the therapy
for the splinter. If you don’t take the splinter out, the pus will do it
for you. If you mistakenly think that the pus is the disease and you
destroy the pus, the splinter will stay and your body will attempt this
process again.
If you destroy the pus again, your body might
repeat this process three or four more times. Then you have a chronic
infection as the body keeps trying to remove the splinter.
Eventually
it will either succeed, or it will encapsulate the splinter, which is a
tumor, a new growth. It is not a cancerous tumor but a benign cystic
tumor of the splinter. The understanding that the pus is the therapy
allows you to predict what is going to happen in the future.
Now
think of this example. Joe Bloke is a smoker. In other words, he puts a
bunch of splinters in his lungs every day. Twice a year Joe gets cough,
fever, mucus—all to get the splinters out of his lungs.
I prefer
to say “cough, fever, mucus” rather than “bronchitis” because the word
“bronchitis” separates you from the reality of the situation. His body
is producing an inflammatory response—it is making a mucus-pus-fever
response to cleanse his lungs of splinters.
If Joe goes to a
doctor who makes the mistake of thinking that the response is the
problem, he will give drugs to stop the bronchitis—which is actually the
medicine. So Joe will be left with the splinters.
That scenario
will happen twice a year for thirty years and then Joe has a big bag of
splinters in his lungs, and we call that lung cancer.
We know
that epidemiologically every culture that has embarked on aggressive
prevention of infectious disease with vaccines and antibiotic treatment
has seen infectious diseases diminish, but deaths from cancer increase.
Every single one. This paradox is not unknown to the medical profession.
William
Coley was a surgeon in New York City at the end of the nineteenth
century and the inventor of a cancer therapy called Coley’s Toxins,
which was basically just rotting meat.
Coley knew of the
apparent relationship between infection and cancer regression. His
protocol was to inject terminally ill cancer patients with an agent to
make them get really sick and produce a fever.
Somewhere between
20-40 percent of the terminally ill cancer patients who received this
treatment, especially with combinations of Streptococcus and Serratia,
went into remission.
The treatment produced high fevers for a
week, a lot of mucus, and a lot of what we call sickness. It is also
undeniably true that the thing we call sickness is the immune response.
The
bacteria and the viruses don’t actually make us sick. They trigger an
immune response and the symptoms which we deem as unpleasant—fever,
mucus and so on—those are the response to the foreign situation.
With Coley’s Toxins, 20-40 percent of these patients, as written up by the New York Academy of Sciences, went into remission.
Unfortunately, another 20-40 percent died from sepsis; that is, from the therapy, and another 20 percent or so had no response.
It
was a toxic therapy, or you might say a last ditch effort, but the
point remains that the fevers and the pus and the mucus—and the
interleukin-2 and the interferon and all these tumor necrosis factors
and natural killer cells that constitute our immune response—that is the
therapy for cancer.
As Hippocrates said, give me a medicine that produces a fever, that provokes an immune response, and I can cure any disease.
Rudolf Steiner was asked how Iscador works in the body. He replied that it simulates a bacterial infection.
You
get the warmth, the interferon, the interleukin-2 response, the natural
killer cell response; you get everything you would get from an
infection except the bacterial infection and the sepsis, which are the
toxic parts.
So instead of 20-40 percent of patients dying from
Coley’s Toxins from sepsis, you have an activation of the immune
response but no side effects.
This response is demonstrated when
you inject the Iscador, because the body temperature increases, and you
see actual signs of an inflammatory response. This inflammatory
response digests the tumor.
Then you can help the dead material
out of the body with coffee enemas, hot baths and so on. This is one of
the most effective therapies for all solid tumor cancers.
ASSAULT ON THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
If
you look at this process you might wonder how we got into this mess of
so many people with a diminished cell-mediated inflammatory response.
A cell-mediated inflammatory response— the part that we call “being sick”—is the activation of the white blood cells.
Whenever we have a normal infection like chicken pox, two arms of our immune system get activated.
First
is the humoral immune response, or antibody-based response in the B
cells, which make antibodies to remember what happened.
Second
is a cell-mediated activation, where the white blood cells chew up the
invader and spit it out through fever, mucus, rash, achiness and
sweating—all those things we call being sick.
That is what
happens with every naturally occurring infection. Is there something
that we are doing that is somehow turning on the humoral immunity and
deactivating the cell-mediated immunity?
A vaccine is a specific attempt to activate a humoral response—antibodies—and to deactivate the cell-mediated response.
Why
do I say that? If you get sick with fever, rash, mucus, after you had a
vaccine, then that would be a bad vaccine. No one would want that
vaccine.
The whole point of a vaccine is to deactivate the
cell-mediated response so you don’t feel sick, but to activate the
humoral response.
This is exactly the same immune situation that you see with cancer and auto-immune disease.
The
cell-mediated response is the only way your body expels microorganisms
and foreign proteins, and that response gets shut down with
vaccinations.
Everyone who is vaccinated ends up with an
over-stimulated humoral antibody system and an under-stimulated
cell-mediated system.
Add to that the use of fever-suppressing
drugs like aspirin and Tylenol, as well as antibiotics that kill the
bacteria in our guts, and we have a recipe for cancer.
The incidence of cancer has skyrocketed with the introduction of vaccines and with the suppression of the acute sick response.
Unlike
the indigenous man who accepts everything in nature and in the body as a
natural process, the civilized man tries to suppress natural processes;
he is afraid of them, or thinks they serve no purpose, and cancer is
the result.
CARDIOTONICS
A
fourth component of my cancer therapy involves cardiotonics. Cardiac
glycosides are novel therapeutic agents belonging to a family of
substances that come mostly from plants.
They are a source of
proteins (glycosides) that stimulate the metabolism of the heart. The
two main cardiac glycosides are digitalis from the foxglove and a
substance called ouabain—which I prefer to use—from the strophanthus
plant.
This African vine was originally used by tribes for
hunting. They would dip their arrows into a substance taken from the
seeds and it would cause a temporary stoppage of the heart in the animal
they shot.
Researchers understood that this was a cardiac active
substance and when they isolated it they found it was a hormone, which
they called ouabain (through French from Somali waabaayo, “arrow
poison”) or strophanthin.
Until the 1990s, the very similar
digitalis was the main treatment for heart problems. And there have been
a number of studies over the years of women with breast cancer, and men
with prostate cancer who have been put on digitalis for their heart
problems.
These patients have an incidence of cancer ten times
lower than controls and if they already had cancer, digitalis lowers
their recurrence rate seven- to twenty-fold.
Ouabain is an
excellent medicine for the heart. I have a patient from Germany who has a
doctorate in biochemistry. About twenty-eight years ago, he had three
heart attacks, bypass surgery and stents. Nothing worked, and he was
given up for dead.
He had heard about ouabain as a medicine for
heart attacks and angina. He found a source of it, started taking it,
and he is still alive today.
Recently he sent me what he hopes
to be a published paper in the American Journal of Oncology on the
entire world literature pertaining to the use and actions of ouabain
(its trade name is Strodival).
I’ve been using Strodival for
heart patients for five or six years. It’s been a great help for people
with angina, heart disease and congestive heart failure. Many have
better outcomes, less angina and better exercise tolerance.
But
what does ouabain have to do with cancer and civilization? According to
my biochemist patient, ouabain does two things: it flushes lactic acid
from the cells, and it catalyzes the ability of the cells, particularly
the heart cells, to metabolize fats into energy.
He calls it the
“insulin of the heart,” or the “insulin of fat metabolism.” Without the
hormone ouabain you have a difficult time digesting fats, which may be
why you temporarily seem better on a carbohydrate diet.
If you
don’t have enough ouabain, you can’t metabolize fats, and you can’t get
energy from fats. We actually know the specific biochemical fat
metabolism blockade that it overcomes.
But the next question is:
how could this substance from an African vine have anything to do with
helping cancer patients in civilization?
What I have learned from this biochemist and others in studying the history of ouabain is an interesting revelation.
Here is a chemical, a hormone that is found only in this one African vine, strophanthus.
By
an amazing quirk of nature we humans make the exact same chemical in
our adrenal glands. You can radioactively tag precursors of this hormone
and the precursors light up in the adrenal glands; ouabain also lights
up the adrenal glands, proving that you actually make ouabain from this
precursor.
It goes into the blood, into the heart and all the
other cells in the body, allowing you to use fats as fuel while also
flushing out lactic acid from your cells.
The inability to metabolize fats is in some ways exactly the defect we have with cancer.
The
inability to use fat as fuel, and therefore the reliance on sugar,
causes increased levels of insulin. Excess insulin stimulates growth,
and an increase in lactic acid builds up because of the deficiency of
ouabain.
This leads to a state of acidosis which is essentially necrosis—it poisons the cells.
Cancer
cells are cells in a state of acidosis. This is why people came up with
alkalinizing diets for cancer patients; but these diets rarely work in
the long run because your body doesn’t actually need more alkaline
foods; what it needs is more fat.
What you need to do is change
your metabolism so that lactic acid doesn’t build up in your cells, and
the adrenal hormone ouabain helps you do that.
By the way, ouabain is made out of cholesterol; or to put it another way, ouabain is made from animal fats.
And
since the widely used statin drugs inhibit the production of
cholesterol, they also inhibit the production of ouabain. Here is yet
another example of fear about one of nature’s vital processes—the use of
cholesterol in the human body—that is so characteristic of civilized
man.
Fear of cholesterol and saturated fat has led to a vicious
cycle. Ouabain catalyzes the metabolism of fats, allowing you to eat
them, so you eat more.
If you don’t eat cholesterol and fats, or
if you try to lower your cholesterol, you can’t make oaubain and then
you can’t eat fats, and so you think you are doing better if you
decrease the amount of fats in your diet.
The next thing you know you have more insulin from increased carbohydrate consumption, and then you are in big trouble.
DON’T WORK FOR MONEY!
Steiner
once said that for mankind to make progress, men and women would need
to learn not to work for money. Of course you want to be paid for what
you do, but you should not work simply for money.
If you work
every day in a job you don’t love, then you are going to put enormous
stress on your adrenal glands. Eventually they will not be able to
produce the cardiotonics and endorphins that you need to stay well,
happy and cancer free.
In fact, everything we do should be
enjoyable—our work, our leisure time, our family life, our food—yet even
eating has become stressful today as we are hounded to stick to a
soulless lowfat diet.
The threat of cancer should challenge us
to humanize our existence, to inject the stress-free attitude of
indigenous peoples into our stressful, goal-oriented civilized lives.
This
is really our only choice because we can’t go back. Very few of us
would want to go back to indigenous tribal life, a life without
electricity, without gadgets, without books and computers, a life, in
fact, without the opportunity for personal choice that we have become
used to.
What we can do is choose to bring the village life back
to civilization, by choosing not to work for money, by choosing to
enjoy our food, by choosing to do the things we love to do, by reducing
the pace, by socializing with friends, by taking naps, by doing as much
for ourselves as we do for others, by supporting old-fashioned and
sustainable agriculture, and above all by eating lots and lots of animal
fats.
RUNNING SHOES, MONKEYS AND CANCER
I
sometimes say that having access to the Weston Price philosophy is a
bit like taking a test and knowing the answer beforehand.
When
you wonder how to proceed with any subset of human endeavor, you can
look backward to find (or remember) the right answer. Along with this,
I’m sure you’ve heard about the “hundredth-monkey” effect.
This
phenomenon refers to the instantaneous, paranormal spreading of an idea
or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of
that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability.
When
the hundredth monkey learned to wash sweet potatoes, then every monkey
in the world was supposedly washing sweet potatoes as well via this
process.
There are certain things that bubble up out of the
culture at certain times. The thing that is bubbling up right now, for
the obvious reason that we are poisoning and killing ourselves
environmentally and in a lot of other ways, is this big question of how
we should live.
This question affects even very small, specific matters in our lives.
I
read a book recently called Born to Run. The theory of this book is
that human beings evolved running and walking barefoot. As soon as you
run and walk with shoes on you will have injuries to your legs and
back.
In fact they point out a study from the American College
of Orthopedic Medicine that seventy percent of all runners have a
significant injury within a year, and the number one thing that
correlates with the likelihood of having an injury is the price of your
running shoes.
The higher the price of your shoes the more
likely you are to injure yourself. Because the foot craves to find a
hard place to impact the ground, and the more expensive running shoes
have more cushion in the heel and now even springs, you really have to
grind your leg in order to find that hard place.
That puts
stress on your ankle and knee and then hip and then back. We even know
the physiological mechanism of how that works. But as I said, you
already know the answer to the question of what to put on your feet,
because the healthiest people, the ones who didn’t have leg and back
problems were these “uncivilized” people who walked and ran barefoot all
the time.
You already knew the answer to that conundrum; we just had to fill in the science.
This thinking process can be applied to shoes; it can also be applied to electromagnetic fields, to cell phones.
If
you look at the life of these “uncivilized” people, they didn’t have
cell phones, they didn’t have electromagnetic fields. If you ask me when
to go to bed at night, ask instead when did they do it?
They went to bed when it got dark and woke up when it got light.
If
you have a serious illness like cancer and you know these people never
had cancer, then you might want to consider emulating their lifestyle
strategy not only in their diet but in every possible way: walk barefoot
on the beach; when you wear shoes, wear shoes with flat soles; throw
away your cell phone; live as far away from a cell tower as you can; go
to bed when the sun goes down and don’t sleep near any electric
appliances like alarm clocks, and certainly not under an electric
blanket.
WHY CANCER PATIENTS NEED MORE FAT
If
you have cancer of your colon or liver, breast or prostate, and we want
to know if the cancer has spread to any other part of the body, we can
use a nuclear medicine imaging technique called PET (positron emission
topography).
This technique highlights any other nests of cancer
cells and is the conventional approach for checking on the spread of
cancer. The process involves radioactively tagged glucose that is
injected into the body and then that glucose is selectively picked up by
various cells in the body.
We know that cancer cells love to
eat glucose, so they actively pick up the tagged glucose. The
highlighted nests of radioactive glucose therefore indicate areas of the
strongest growth of cancer cells.
In other words, cancer cells
thrive on sugar. Cancer cells use an anaerobic respiration of sugar to
form acids. That is the metabolism of cancer cells.
The reason
the cancer patient starves while the cancer cells grow is because they
are much better at taking up the sugar than are normal cells.
If
we understand this selective metabolism of cancer well enough to
diagnose its growth, then the next step is to withhold sugar and see
what happens. The trouble is we need a backup fuel source.
And
there is a back up fuel source: ketones from fats. Cancer cells cannot
metobolize ketones. Normal cells do fine on ketones; we know this from
fifty years of successfully utilizing a therapeutic very high-fat
ketogenic diet.
Cancer patients on a ketogenic diet will often
have their tumors shrink and will halt their cachexia—their physical
wasting and weight loss. The cancer cells starve on a ketogenic diet,
but normal cells thrive.
Now take a moment to think of these
pre-civilized people 10,000 years ago before the cultivation of grains. I
hope by now you are convinced they did not suffer from cancer.
These people ate a ketogenic diet. Think about pre-grain, pre-potatoes, pre-milk—where were the carbohydrates?
They
ate seventy percent animal foods, a little bit of seeds and nuts, a few
vegetables that they could find, honey when they could chase off the
bees.
And we know that they favored the animal fats rather than
the proteins. Their main fuel was ketones. Our whole notion of the right
diet for cancer patients today is backwards.
The knee-jerk
dietary prescription for cancer patients is a lowfat, high-carbohydrate
diet. But the primary fuel for many human groups is ketones, and the
backup fuel is glucose.
Glucose as a fuel source would have been
used in an emergency—to sprint away from a dangerous situation, for
example. It is essentially an anaerobic backup system that produces
lactic acid and acidosis and is only meant to be used for a brief period
of time.
It is also important to note that with the ketogenic
diet protein intake is kept low to moderate, with fat as the main fuel
source.
Protein consumption in excess of your actual needs will be metabolized like sugars, by the way.
Insulin
has long been implicated as the growth hormone, stimulating growth in
cancer cells as well. We want to lower the insulin levels in the blood
and by far the most reliable way to do that is to get rid of the sugar.
A DIET FULL OF FAT
How
does one achieve a diet that is 80 percent fat? It’s not as hard as you
think, because by 80 percent, we mean 80 percent of calories, not 80
percent of weight or volume.
Since there are twice as many
calories in a gram of fat compared to a gram of carbohydrate or protein,
and since fat contains no water but carbohydrate and protein foods can
be up to 90 percent water, that means that if your diet is about 10
percent of fat by volume or weight, you will probably be eating 80
percent of your calories as fat.
Here are some ways to increase your fat intake:
• Take 1-2 tablespoons coconut oil in hot water before a meal.
• Add an extra yolk to scrambled eggs.
• Cook some fruit along with your bacon so you soak up some bacon fat into the fruit.
•
Use plenty of butter in your oatmeal or on your bread—you should put
enough butter on your bread to show teeth marks when you bite into it.
• Put lots of melted butter on your vegetables or even on your meat and fish.
• Use cream in sauces.
• Make gravy with pan drippings.
• Always consume whole dairy products—whole milk, whole yoghurt, full-fat cheese.
• Cook in generous amounts of lard, ghee, butter, goose fat or duck fat.
• Spreads like paté are a good way to consume extra fat.
If you are not used to eating a lot of fat, you will need to build up slowly.
Start
with 1/4 teaspoon coconut oil in hot water, small amounts of butter on
your bread or vegetables, small servings of whole dairy products.
Swedish
bitters taken morning and evening (1 teaspoon in water) will help your
liver produce bile for fat digestion. If you still have trouble with all
that fat, you can take an ox bile tablet with your meal, or lipase
enzymes.
Eventually you will be able to tolerate and enjoy a
diet full of healthy fats. You may also find that any cravings for
carbohydrates subside once your body gets the fat it needs.
SOME RECENT STUDIES INVOLVING MISTLETOE EXTRACT
This
study showed that complementary treatment with sME [a mistletoe
extract] can beneficially reduce the side-effects of chemotherapy in
cancer patients and thus improve quality of life (Anticancer Res 2004
Jan-Feb;24(1):303-9).
The results of this study show that
sensitivity to IscadorQu [a mistletoe extract] treatment varies strongly
between different cell lines. In sensitive cell lines, including tumor
and endothelial cell cultures, IscadorQu caused early cell cycle
inhibition followed by apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner (Int J Oncol
2004 Dec;25(6):1521-9).
Complementary treatment of breast cancer
patients with lectin-standardized mistletoe extract (sME) proved to be a
well tolerated optimization of standard tumor-destructive therapies,
mainly improving quality of life and relapse-free intervals in defined
UICC stages (Anticancer Res 2003 Nov-Dec;23(6D):5081-7).
Mistletoe
extracts have immunomodulatory activity. We show that nontoxic
concentrations of Viscum album [mistletoe] extracts increase natural
killer (NK) cell-mediated killing of tumor cells but spare nontarget
cells from NK lysis (Eur J Biochem 2002 May;269(10):2591-600).
Results
from the present study suggest that VA [an extract of mistletoe]
extract-induced endothelial apoptosis may explain the tumor regression
associated with the therapeutic use of VA preparations and support
further investigations to develop novel anti-angiogenic compounds based
on mistletoe compounds (Mol Med 2002 Oct;8(10):600-6).
These
results demonstrate the presence of insulin-releasing natural product(s)
in Viscum album [mistletoe] which may contribute to the reported
antidiabetic property of the plant (J Endocrinol 1999
Mar;160(3):409-14).
Selective apoptotic effects of VAA-I [a
mistletoe extract] may represent a novel approach for pharmacological
manipulation of the balance between cell growth and programmed cell
death. Appropriate combination of immunomodulatory and cytotoxic doses
may open new clinical perspectives in the mistletoe therapy (Forsch
Komplementarmed 1999 Aug;6(4):186-94).
GRAINS AND CIVILIZATION
Although
I have pointed out the destructive nature of grain production—and, I
should also add, of feeding grains to ruminant animals—and of the
“civilized” attitudes that lead to cancer, please don’t think that I am
against grains and against civilization.
In every mythology,
grains are said to be a gift of the gods. Steiner taught that grains
were the gift of a great wise man named Zarathustra, and that along with
grains he gave us one other gift: the knowledge of our mortality.
With
the knowledge of our mortality, we become individuals and can no longer
participate in the group soul of the tribe or village. Instead we must
build a civilization as individuals, and grains make civilization
possible.
All this is as it should be: we need to make our way in the world and learn to understand the world as an individual.
Along with this comes the scientific method and a rejection of anything that smacks of “intuition” or “superstition.”
All
this has created a feeling of alienation and loneliness in “civilized”
men and women, but again, this is part of our spiritual evolution.
Grains have played a role in moving us forward.
The challenge for
any individual is to go forward on this great adventure of spiritual
evolution without causing too much suffering to ourselves or to others.
In
the case of grains, this means raising them in a way that does not
deplete the earth (which means cultivating grains in rotation with
animal agriculture), eating them in moderation, preparing them properly
so that they don’t cause health problems, and then consuming them
properly, which means with plenty of fat.
In fact, if you think
of it, it would be hard to eat four tablespoons of butter alone, but
very easy to eat four tablespoons of butter on a piece of sourdough
bread—the bread makes the butter go down well and the butter makes the
bread go down well.
When we are very sick with a disease of
civilization—such as cancer, heart disease or arthritis—then we need to
step back to a more hunter-gatherer diet, perhaps even avoid grains
altogether for a time.
But the goal should be to incorporate
them into our diet, because we need grains to make spiritual progress,
that is, to be healthy on all levels.
I had a patient who had
many health problems and the GAPS diet helped her recover from them. But
after recovery she continued on the GAPS diet and she started to go
downhill—not with the old symptoms, but she just got more and more
tired.
I advised her to add more grains to her diet—soaked
oatmeal and sourdough bread—and she immediately snapped out of it. So
there is a time to go off grains and a time to reintroduce them!Tom Cowan
This
content is an edited copy of an article by Tom Cowan which appeared in
Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly
magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation.
Tom Cowan's own entire massive and incredibly well researched website is HERE
