Was Hippocrates correct? Can we cure diseases simply by eating the right foods? More importantly, can we reverse some of the most serious diseases of our time using diet? To many doctors, this idea seems preposterous.
But the answer is unequivocal: it can be done and it has been done, time and time again. In fact, this is the most common strategy used by survivors. Food really can act like a medicine, and sometimes it can make the difference between life and death.
The best place to start looking for answers is with cancer, for this is where most research has been done.
Perhaps the best known of doctors to discover that serious diseases could be cured by nothing more than a return to healthy food was Dr Max Gerson. He developed the Gerson Therapy, a diet-based alternative cancer treatment featuring fresh organic juices and extremely low protein, fat and sodium. As a young man, he had suffered from severe migraines and had been unable to obtain relief with medication. He changed his diet to fruit and vegetables and noticed that his migraines went away.
He began experimenting, treating people with this diet free of charge. Many migraine patients did equally well. However, to his surprise, a friend of a patient, using Gerson’s methods, cured himself of lupus vulgaris. This is TB of the skin and was considered incurable at the time.
Gerson later successfully treated the wife of the writer and philosopher Albert Schweitzer, who had severe TB, and Albert Schweitzer himself, who suffered from diabetes.
In spite of his successes, Gerson was wary of taking on a woman who asked for help with cancer. She had cancer of the bile duct, which was already too advanced for surgery. He told her he did not want to treat her because other doctors were already opposed to him and his unorthodox methods.
However, this lady was not one for giving up, and Gerson wrote a disclaimer stating he was not responsible for the results of his treatment. After six months on the treatment, she recovered.
Gerson went on to treat many other cancer cases with a success rate of about 50 percent.
Half a century later, a scientist, Professor Colin Campbell, shed further light on Gerson’s careful observations. He was researching the links between diet and liver cancer in children from the Philippines. At the time it was thought that protein malnutrition might be a contributory factor to this deadly disease. However, his research turned this theory on its head.
Campbell set out to investigate this link between protein and cancer. Firstly he fed rats with aflatoxin, a potent carcinogen that caused liver cancer. He then divided the rats into two groups: those on a high animal protein diet (20 percent) and those on a low animal protein diet (5 percent). The results were unequivocal.
All those on the high protein diet developed cancer; none of those on the low protein diet did. He repeated the experiment and found that however much carcinogen he gave, the rats on the low protein diet remained resistant to cancer.
The fact that a low animal protein diet continued to protect, even as carcinogens were increased, surprised me, and I think it is an observation of immense importance. The animal protein he used was casein, found in milk.
This promoted all stages of cancer, while vegetable protein did not, just as Gerson had observed.
Jane Plant, a professor of geochemistry, developed breast cancer in 1987, and by 1993, after five recurrences, it had become terminal and she had metastatic nodules in her neck. She had tried conventional treatment—surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy—but this had failed to halt the progression of her disease.
For some time she had been puzzling over why she had developed breast cancer while living a healthy lifestyle with none of the traditional risk factors. At some point she had a light-bulb moment, reasoning that, as breast cancer was very rare in China, perhaps milk products, which were hardly eaten there at that time, were the underlying cause.
She removed all milk products from her diet. Because she had cancer nodules, she found herself in a unique position to be able to observe her cancer in a very direct manner.
As she changed her diet, the tumors melted away and the cancer went into remission.1 Although this wasn’t her last relapse, she lived until 2016, when she died from a blood clot.
Jane Plant found milk products were especially dangerous largely, she reasoned, because they were high in hormones, especially insulin growth factor 1 (IGF-1), known to promote tumor growth.
In fact, the higher the level of IGF-1 in the bloodstream, the higher the risk of cancer, notably prostate cancer.2 Colin Campbell used a milk protein, casein, for his experiments but noted that similar results had been achieved with other animal proteins. The facts fit with Gerson’s observations.
William Kelley, a successful American dentist, was unlucky enough to develop pancreatic cancer in his 30s, a cancer that kills over 90 percent of victims within a year.
His cancer had already spread. His situation was dire, but he had one small point in his favor: he was able to feel his tumors. He started to note what made them grow and what made them shrink.3 This was the same method used by Jane Plant several decades later.
Kelley was a methodical observer. He found that his tumors grew when he ate sugar, white flour, red meat and chicken, but shrank when he ate fruit, vegetables and nuts. Carrot juice was especially helpful. He also noted that certain vitamins and minerals helped and some made his tumors worse.
What Kelley, Gerson and Plant had independently discovered was that cancer grows or recedes each time we eat, and this in turn depends on which foods we choose.
Rather than thinking of cancer as an uncontrollable illness, we can think of it as a disease that we influence, positively or negatively, with every mouthful of food we eat. Recent work on the anti-carcinogenic properties of certain foods has made the reasons this happens much clearer.
Kelley’s observations produced dramatic results. He was an avid reader and rediscovered the work of John Beard, published in The Lancet at the turn of the 20th century (1905). Beard, from his studies of the human embryo, deduced that some stem cells did not differentiate into normal cells and became cancer cells. (A similar theory was outlined by Professor Wang of Columbia University 100 years later.)
Beard noted that in the embryo, stem cells stayed in the “trophoblastic” state, and in this state, unlike other cells (apart from cancer cells), they did not die.
However, the embryo produces pancreatic enzymes at around two months and just at the same time the trophoblastic cells differentiate into normal cells. He proposed that enzymes (substances that act as catalysts and speed up biochemical reactions in the body) could be used to successfully treat cancer in humans and animals by reversing this process.
It didn’t take Kelley long to test this out. He was in for a surprise. When he took the enzymes, the tumors broke down so rapidly, he developed a severe toxic reaction only sorted by a coffee enema, the mainstay of treatment for toxic crises, which increases levels of glutathione-S-transferase, a critically important enzyme in detoxification. He continued with his diet, enzymes and coffee enemas and went on to live for another 40 years.
His doctor friends, amazed by his success, sent him other cancer patients to treat. He found the regime worked equally well for these patients and for many other diseases.
Over a period of 20 years he went on to treat 455 cancer patients with an overall success rate of 50 percent. By the standards of the time, these results were exceptional as many of these cancers had been unresponsive to then-conventional medical treatment.
The late Dr Nicholas Gonzales, a New York cancer specialist, started using Kelley’s methods with great success and had many long-term survivors of pancreatic cancer and various metastatic cancers who have vouched for his methods.4
Unfortunately, Kelley found, like many before and after him, the medical profession did not appreciate his discoveries. Instead, they took him to court and banned a book he had written about his findings (One Answer to Cancer).
As it turned out, the banning of his book proved to be for the best. Kelley had underestimated the complexity of cancers. Some types of cancer, notably some leukemias and lymphomas, did not respond to his regime, and he failed with some other diseases.
Here Kelley, ever the great scientist, set aside his own prejudices and continued to experiment, looking for answers. He went on to find dietary regimes that were effective for cancers that didn’t respond. He found different conditions needed different dietary regimes and worked out that there were 12 metabolic types.
Kelley had found not only that food could cure cancer but that no one diet was satisfactory for everyone. Nevertheless, there was one diet that, far and away, stood out as the best.
This was his original diet, the one he had used to cure himself—almost the same diet that Gerson had independently discovered. It was highly beneficial in most cases of cancer, especially if combined with enzymes and detoxification.
The following are foods that prevent cancer, roughly in order of importance:
So what is the optimum diet? The clues are everywhere: in survivors, in healthy populations and in long–lived races. It is a completely natural diet very high in vegetables and, to a lesser extent, fruit.
It contains little meat and dairy (except the highest quality meat, such as organic, grass-fed meat and organ meat), good quality fish, little or no sugar, little or no refined carbohydrates, and little or no processed food. I suspect the pure plant diets may be the most effective in cancer and the modified Paleolithic (“paleo”) diet preferable in autoimmune diseases.
We now have a fairly solid body of data on what constitutes the best healing diet for cancer, and in addition have strong pointers to the diet most likely to heal an autoimmune disease. More and more research verifies the powerful healing effects, including anti-cancer properties, of many foods.
There are over 200 epidemiological studies on the link between fruit and vegetables and cancer. The majority (70 percent) show that the more fruit and vegetables eaten, the less cancer of virtually every type (see box, page xx). These include 20 “cohort studies,” which are generally the more reliable, showing that the higher the fruit and vegetable consumption, the lower the risk of cancer.
A case-control study found those who had 28 or more servings of vegetables per week reduced their risk of prostate cancer by 65 percent (compared with those having fewer than 14 servings per week).5
The Nurse’s Health Study, following 88,410 women for 14 years, found that those who ate over six servings of fruit and vegetables daily had a lower risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma compared with those who ate fewer than three.6
A study by Terry et al. found women with the lowest intake of fruit and vegetables had the highest risk of colorectal cancer.7
A remarkable study by Boivin et al. tested extracts of a variety of vegetables against different cancer cell cultures.8 Although different cultures responded differently to different vegetables, a definite pattern emerged.
Two families of vegetables had the most powerful anti-cancer effects. The first was the cruciferous vegetables. These include (in a rough order starting with those with the strongest anti-cancer effects): Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower and collard greens.
The second group with powerful anti-cancer properties was the allium family. This includes (again in rough order of anti-cancer potency) garlic, leeks, spring onions, onions, chives and scallions. Other vegetables not in these two groups but with strong anticancer properties are celery and beetroot.
However, this study looked only at vegetables. Probably the foods with the most powerful anti-cancer properties of all are mushrooms, which were not tested and are not, strictly speaking, vegetables. Another strong contender is flaxseed.
Many fruits, nuts, herbs and spices (notably turmeric) also have strong anti-cancer effects. Most of these foods work synergistically, acting against cancer at multiple points along the cancer pathway and blocking its development.
Why do fruits and vegetables protect against cancer? It is probably because of the nutrients within them, including isothiocyanates, indoles, phenols, carotenoids and limonene.
Here are some of the known benefits and ways that foods and nutrients affect different stages of cancer. Note these foods come in a variety of colors, sometimes called the “rainbow diet,” and they all act at different stages of the cancer pathway. What strikes me about this research is the wide range of actions plant compounds take against cancer.
Over 50 studies have been done on these cruciferous vegetables, and the
vast majority of them have found a reduced risk of a variety of cancers, including those of the breast, bladder, stomach, colon or rectum, and prostate.
For instance, a Chinese study found that women who ate the most cruciferous vegetables had half the rate of breast cancer compared with those who ate the least.9
A multi-ethnic study found an inverse relationship between the intake of cruciferous vegetables, legumes and yellow-orange vegetables and prostate cancer risk.10
Yet another study found that those who had three or more servings per week of cruciferous vegetables, compared to those who had less than one serving a week, reduced their risk of prostate cancer by 59 percent.5
Research comparing myeloma patients with controls found those who ate cruciferous vegetables most frequently reduced their risk of myeloma by 30 percent.11
Eating cruciferous vegetables releases powerful compounds, including sulforaphanes. These cause cancer-cell death and aid the removal of carcinogens from the body.
Other important compounds in these vegetables include indole-3-carbinol and phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC). These protect laboratory animals from cancer. Glucosinolates present in cruciferous vegetables switch on genes that reduce toxicity. There may well be other cancer-fighting compounds yet to be discovered within this small group of vegetables.
Dr Lilian Thompson at the University of Toronto demonstrated that 25 grams of flaxseeds daily reduced the growth of breast tumors. Breast cancer patients with high or moderate concentrations of carotenoids in their blood plasma have been found to have lower risk of breast cancer recurrence than those with low concentrations.12
So what is the message of all these studies? There is an unmistakable pattern to be found: the more nutrients you have on board, the less likely you are to get cancer, and the higher the levels, the greater the protection.
The way to achieve this is mainly through eating fruit and vegetables. Science is showing us exactly why these nutrients in fruit and vegetables protect us.
There are an astonishing 5,000–10,000 phytochemicals within food, including 4,000 polyphenols. Many of these have disease-fighting properties, but it is safe to assume that many of the benefits have yet to be discovered by science.
None of this was known 10 to 20 years ago, and we can be sure there will be many more discoveries in this field in coming decades.
Most of these compounds are unstable and break down rapidly. This means they are difficult to produce as supplements or medicines but work perfectly within food. Ideally, we need to eat some of them with each meal.
Crucially, the effects are reversible: if we stop eating them, then we lose the protection. We also know that they work synergistically, so the more, the better. For instance, neither EGCG (in green tea) nor curcumin (in turmeric) on its own can kill cancer cells in cultures, but when combined, they do so.
Similarly, curcumin is poorly absorbed, but once piperine (from black pepper) is added, absorption is increased 1,000-fold. (Note spices have some of the highest concentrations of antioxidants of any foods).
There are some undoubted stars in the plant world. Perhaps the most powerful are mushrooms (notably oyster mushrooms). These can stop cancer in animals and shrink tumors.
Medicinal mushrooms are widely used in cancer treatments in Japan and Asia. Dr Kunno from the New York Medical Center found maitake mushrooms combined with vitamin C were highly effective in killing cancer cells and could reduce cancer cell growth by 90 percent in cancer cell cultures, while a study using a maitake extract in patients with advanced cancer showed a significant improvement in 74 percent with breast cancer, 67 percent with lung cancer and 47 percent with liver cancer.13
Numerous other bioactive compounds from a variety of mushrooms have been shown to kill cancer cells in cultures.14 Other research has found that lentinan extracts from shiitake mushrooms can increase survival, enhance cancer cell death and reduce recurrences in hepatocellular carcinoma.15
Active hexose correlated compound (AHCC), a mushroom-based product used in over 700 hospitals in Japan, has been subjected to multiple clinical studies and has shown dramatic increases in survival in many cancer patients, doubling survival time in advanced liver cancer.
A similar mushroom-based product called BioBran has remarkable properties. It is known to increase natural killer (NK) cells, and there are dozens of anecdotal accounts of recovery from cancer, including metastatic cancer, after using this product.16
The data are strong on all of these. I anticipate that they will be beneficial in many other chronic illnesses also. With cancer, what is needed is protection at multiple stages of the cancer pathway and compounds that act synergistically.
We now know for certain that fruit and vegetables prevent cancer, we have identified many of the nutrients within them that act against cancer and we understand how they block various stages of the cancer pathway.
All this powerfully validates those cancer therapies such as the Gerson regime, that have advocated using these foods as medicine, and attests to the inherent logic behind their methodology.
It is surely time to look again at the potential of food both to prevent and to cure disease. The methods used by Gerson and Kelley are inexpensive compared with today’s cancer treatments and would not be hard to put into practice. Just think about how much more progress could have been made in the fight against cancer if the medical profession had been open to these methods from the beginning.
For breast cancer specifically, a range of fruits and vegetables reduce risk. These have included:
These foods most promote cancer, roughly in order of importance:
Excerpted from Curing the Incurable: Beyond the Limits of Medicine by Dr Jerry Thompson (Hammersmith Health Books, 2023)
Our regular columnist Dr Leigh Erin Connealy joined us for a discussion about cancer—its origins, the best anti-cancer diet, other ways to prevent it, and strategies to support any treatment you’re having.
Since Erin joined the WDDTY team, we’ve been constantly amazed at her breadth of knowledge about the disease that afflicts so many of us.
Not surprisingly, she is one of the most sought-after cancer specialists in the US, and so we were especially privileged that she is finding time in her busy schedule to talk with us.
What do you think? Start a conversation over on the... WDDTY Community
References
1. Jane Plant, Your Life in Your Hands: Understand, Prevent and Overcome Breast Cancer and Ovarian Cancer (Virgin Books Ltd, 2003)
2. Int J Cancer, 2009; 124(10): 2416–29
3. Nicholas Gonzalez, “The Enzyme Therapy of Cancer,” Conference at the
Royal Society of Medicine, April 18, 2009
4. Suzanne Somers, Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer—and How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place (Harmony Books, 2009), chapter 8
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16. Spencer Bright, Biobran and the Fight to Empower the Immune System: Imunomodulation and Its Benefits for Cancer Patients (JAFRA, 2006)
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18. Am J Nutr, 2015; 101(6): 1197–1205
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25. Family Practice News 2000; 8: 34619
26. Cancer Drug Resist 2018; 1: 126–38; J Clin Invest 2013; 123: 3678–84
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