When being anemic and eating blue corn may prevent cancer - Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Jan, 2003  

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Editor:

I had started a letter on the subject that cancer is a modern plague and had completed a page when I read the Ralph Moss, PhD report on the same subject in the November 2002 issue of the Townsend Letter for Doctors & Patients.

He said that there had been much less cancer 200 years ago but that this could not be attributed to people living longer now and having more cancer as they grow older. He said that 200 years ago there were far more childhood deaths and deaths of women in childbirth but that an adult who lived to age 30, lived about as long as an adult lives now. The only difference was that 200 years ago there were more deaths from infections and fewer deaths from cancer.

Moss told of Albert Schweitzer MD. When Schweitzer established his hospital in Gabon in West Africa in 1913, he was astounded to find no cancer among the natives there. (When World War I started in 1914, Schweitzer was a German national living in a French colony. He was arrested and he and his wife had to live in a concentration camp in the South of France until mid-1918.)

The food of the natives in 1913 was vegetarian and the main item in diet was cassava. Schweitzer, in his book published in 1931, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, had a photo of natives in Gabon holding cassava roots that were three feet long and six inches across.

Schweitzer did not return to his hospital in Gabon again until 1923. During that time, the lumber industry had come to Gabon. The natives had been hired to cut down the great trees there and to run a sawmill. They were then living in company-owned housing and they were being fed European-type food. In this brief period of ten years, many of the natives now had cancer and were dying of it.

Schweitzer was not the only one to report a freedom from cancer among the African natives who lived out of contact with Europeans. In the British Medical Journal in June and July of 1923, then were three letters from English doctors in Africa reporting on the freedom from cancer among the natives there. (1-3)

The diet of these African natives had a very low iron content and they had a hemoglobin of close to 10. In the USA when hemoglobin gets under 13, most often patients are given iron.

Dr. Maria de Sousa for years, was with the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. She is notable for her work on how immunosuppressive are excess body iron stores and hence cancer-causing. I had a report in Medical Hypotheses, 1984 13, pp 119-121 with the title "Do We Get Too Much Iron?" In it is told the de Sousa story. She says in the process of evolution our white cells which can detect cancer cells and kill them and harmful bacteria also, have learned to be attracted to bacteria by the iron in them. The iron content of bacteria is much higher than it is in human cells. So we have the case of our white cells that kill cancer cells being attracted to body iron stores, thinking that body iron stores are bacteria. By this process our cancer-killing white cells are not free to attack and kill cancer cells. This is the basis of the immunosuppression of too much iron.

In the USA we get much iron in red meat but then also we get more iron added to bread and food made from wheat. We also get a lot of iron in vitamin pills.

I think that de Sousa may have wanted to treat cancer patients by maintaining them on a very low iron diet. In any event de Sousa returned to her native Portugal to the University of Oporto. In The New England Journal of Medicine, 1989:320(15) 1012 she had a letter with the title of "Body Iron Stores and Risk of Cancer." In her letter she had reported that children with leukemia have a longer survival when maintained on a low iron diet.

The very low iron in the diet of the vegetarian natives in Gabon in 1913 may have played a part in their freedom from cancer.

It is not altogether nebulous to suggest that the cyanide bearing nitriloside in cassava may have been, in part, responsible for the freedom from cancer, as well, among these African natives.

Let us now examine a report by the late Keith Brewer, PhD. He had established the A. Keith Brewer International Science Library, which has been fostering cesium treatment of cancer.

He has reported on the Hopi and Pueblo Indians of Arizona. These Indians as of 1940, were essentially free from cancer. The basic food in their diet was blue Indian corn, melons from which the seeds were a major part of diet and fruit. They converted the corn to cornmeal, to which they added the ash obtained by burning the green chamisa leaves. The soil where they lived in Arizona is of volcanic origin and is high in cesium, rubidium, calcium and potassium. Their blue corn is high in these four elements but by burning the leaves of the chamisa plant and by adding the ash to their corn meal, the Hopi diet had about 35 times as much of these four elements as is in the diet of the US population.

Brewer has held that the high content of cesium, rubidium and potassium in the Hopi diet was responsible for the near freedom frm cancer among them.