Bombshell: Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging (46 page)

NG:
Sure. I told you to eat organically, which you were already doing. Everyone should eat organically. Everyone should strive to eat
whole foods, in as close to natural form as possible—fresh, locally grown produce, eggs from barnyard chickens, beef from grass-fed animals. Everyone should minimize their exposure to toxic chemicals in our food, water, air. I read an article recently that stated we in America are exposed to seventy-nine thousand synthetic chemicals, most of which have not been tested for safety. We can’t completely eliminate our exposure—we all have to breathe, and when I walk down the streets of New York, I am taking in heavy metals that can be aerosolized, even pesticides that waft in on the wind currents to New York. But by eating organically, for example, we immediately reduce our exposure to many toxic chemicals. Pesticides, remember, are for the most part nerve toxins that kill insects by poisoning their nervous system. How is that a good thing, to add that to the food supply?

SS:
I’m a big proponent of organic foods. It just makes sense.

NG:
Organic is always best. Organic foods also tend to have higher levels of many nutrients than conventionally grown produce, as Sir Albert Howard, the great English scientist, proved eighty years ago. Fresh organic is better than canned or frozen, though I realize in a pinch sometimes we have to go with food that isn’t right off the farm. But the metal of cans does leach into the food, not a good thing, and even frozen organic food is blanched to facilitate the freezing process—and with blanching comes the loss of some nutritional value. Food should also always be as untampered with as possible: no refining, no processing, no added synthetic chemicals, all of which invariably reduce the nutritional content.

SS:
What else can we do?

NG:
Both my office and my apartment are “green” spaces. When we had our office built in 1993, we sourced out all nontoxic materials, and instead used woods that hadn’t been treated with formaldehyde and paints that had no toxic by-products or odors. We even had our office furniture built by a group of craftsmen (and craftswomen) up in Vermont, with natural woods, and natural oils for stains. In those days it was tough to find such products, but nineteen years later, the situation has changed dramatically for the better as people increasingly demand nontoxic building materials.

My apartment is the same, nontoxic—we had it painted not too long ago and purchased only low-VOC paints. There was no chemical odor, only a fresh scent, and even the painters commented how much better they liked our paints, and how much better they felt.

SS:
What about water? I see it as a key to healthy cells.

NG:
In my home and office, we have very state-of-the-art water filters. I know, there are all kinds of arguments about which filter is best, but we are sticking with reverse osmosis. There is no such thing as a perfect water filter, but RO comes close. People criticize reverse osmosis because it removes minerals, but it also removes the tiniest of pollutants, even viruses, and I just add a little good-quality sea salt, like Celtic Salt, to each glass of water to replenish the lost minerals. The upside of filtered water is enormous: chlorine is a carcinogen, very toxic; fluoride, which is still in many water systems, is a toxic chemical that poisons enzymes—not good. Fluoride is essentially a waste product from aluminum manufacturing that industry has convinced our politicians is a good thing, not the poison it really is.

Though we may not be able to control what’s in the air outside, we certainly can control what we put on our bodies. Many preservatives and additives added to personal care products like shampoos are toxic—parabens, for example, added to many of these body care products for their antibacterial effect, are absorbed systemically and behave like estrogens in the body—not a good thing for a man, or for anyone. We recommend all our patients use natural body products, from shampoos to toenail polish—fortunately, organically based and nontoxic products are increasingly available, like your wonderful line.

SS:
Thank you. I am extremely proud of Suzanne Organics, my line of certified toxic-free cosmetics. Your wife, Mary Beth, is my best customer.

NG:
Yes, she is … So again, live as clean as possible. Eat clean. Eat whole fresh organic foods as much as possible. Avoid chemicals in the food and water, and live in a clean house. And, oh yes, exercise, good old exercise! A recent study confirmed that cancer patients receiving conventional treatment for their disease who exercised vigorously on a regular basis did better than those who didn’t exercise. Traditionally, oncologists encouraged their patients not to exercise, in order to conserve their energy, but it turns out to be far better if they are active. Having said that, I do see a lot of patients who are very sick and simply can’t exercise. It happens. Yet most everyone can walk every day, and twenty to thirty minutes of walking stimulates circulation—and with improved circulation, healing speeds up whatever the underlying problem. Walking also stimulates lymphatic flow, which assists the removal of toxic materials from our tissues
and organs. So, exercise vigorously, regularly, and at least walk on a daily basis.

SS:
What about supplementation? How important is it?

NG:
Of course with supplements, you know we individualize our regimens for each patient, so it’s difficult to offer general rules. However, we use pancreatic enzymes derived from a pig source to treat cancer, and in my opinion we believe that not only do these enzymes kill active cancer, but they also prevent cancer cells from forming and growing. The best supplements for cancer prevention, in my opinion, are pancreatic enzymes. For someone without cancer who wants a preventive program, like yourself, I would suggest maybe three to four capsules with meals, three times a day. With active cancer, of course, we get much more aggressive.

In terms of other supplements, we use many products, from A to zinc. Many alleged experts claim, even some of the organic raw-foods fanatics, that we should be able to get all the nutrition we need for good health from food. I’ve been hearing that for some forty years, and it is nonsense … if you want to enjoy good great health. It’s simply impossible in this day and age to get sufficient nutrition from food alone—first of all, most of the soils, even those on organic farms, have been depleted of many nutrients so the food has less value than it did fifty years ago. Then, the ambient pollution in the air depletes nutrients—air pollution, for example, destroys both vitamin C and vitamin E. Our bodies are exposed to an assault of toxic chemicals we weren’t designed to handle, which increases the demand for many nutrients. We all live with stress, and stress burns nutrients—I once read an article claiming that an animal exposed to extreme stress in a laboratory situation can burn up all its vitamin C in fifteen minutes. For these reasons, we need supplementation in addition to a wholesome organic diet, to help overcome the ravages of the toxic, stress-filled world in which we live.

SS:
Why are enzymes so important?

NG:
Dr. John Beard, the brilliant English scientist, first proposed in 1902 that pancreatic enzymes represent the body’s main defense against cancer and would be useful as a cancer treatment. At the time, physiologists had already identified the many classes of pancreatic enzymes, which they acknowledged served a major digestive function, breaking down complex proteins, fats, and carbohydrates into simpler, easily absorbable molecules. But Beard claimed that above and beyond this digestive activity, the protein-digestive enzymes
kill cancer cells. Subsequently, in both laboratory and human tests, he proved his point, reporting the successes of his treatment in the mainstream medical literature. He published his wonderful book
The Enzyme Treatment of Cancer
in 1911, but by the time he died in 1924, his work was forgotten. Fortunately, my mentor, Dr. Kelley, revived Beard’s thesis in the 1960s with great success in his practice treating patients with advanced cancer. We’ve been employing high-dose enzyme therapy since we opened our practice in 1987, again with gratifying success.

SS:
Are there other enzymes that are important?

NG:
Of course, pancreatic enzymes represent only one class of enzymes in the body. Enzymes are a catalyst, which means they allow complex chemical reactions to occur quickly and efficiently, without much heat being produced. With enzymes, for example, reactions in our cells that might require a thousand degrees of heat—and make life impossible—occur rapidly at normal temperature. Every cell in our many tissues uses hundreds and thousands of enzymes as part of its normal metabolic machinery.

We don’t tend to think of these many metabolic enzymes as nutrients, but Dr. Edward Howell was the great American researcher who spent more than fifty years of his life studying these “food enzymes” as he called them. These molecules, he claimed, could be absorbed like a vitamin or mineral and be used in the body to enhance metabolism and repair damage from injury or disease. However, these enzymes are very heat sensitive, being rendered inactive generally when the temperature hits 117 degrees Fahrenheit. So Howell proposed we should all eat, if not a completely raw-foods diet, at least some raw food to get the complement of these naturally occurring enzymes. We agree that most of us should consume some raw, but we vary the percentage of raw food in each patient’s diet depending on their underlying metabolism. We prescribe diets, for example, that are largely raw but also diets that are largely cooked—cooking does destroy enzymes and some vitamins like vitamin C and folate, but it also breaks down the cells and essentially converts the food into a more or less predigested mix that doesn’t require as much effort in the digestive system. Some of our patients are so inefficient from the effects of their disease or prior treatment, they initially can’t tolerate too much raw food, but they do fine with cooked food. As they improve, we often increase the percentage of raw food.

SS:
But this goes against the belief of some that all “raw” foods are best for you, doesn’t it?

NG:
For most of us, some raw food is beneficial—juicing particularly is a good way to get concentrated raw nutrition, including the food enzymes in a very enjoyable form. Fortunately, with the increased interest in juicing in the United States, there’s been a host of books on the subject published.

SS:
For those who haven’t read
Knockout
as well as your critics, what is the benefit of coffee enemas?

NG:
No part of our therapeutic regimen elicits more derisive comments from our conventional colleagues than our use of coffee enemas with our patients. Ironically, coffee enemas come right out of the mainstream academic literature, a point that seems lost on the critics. For example, many twentieth-century nursing texts recommended the enemas, as did the esteemed
Merck Manual
, a compendium of conventional orthodox wisdom. According to my conversations with a former editor of the manual, the text editors included the enemas right up until 1977 or so, when they were removed more for space considerations than anything else.

SS:
That’s a Bombshell.
Merck
! Any others?

NG:
We have put together a nice collection of articles from the peer-reviewed medical literature discussing the positive effects of coffee enemas. One article I particularly enjoy appeared in 1922 in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, our most prominent of medical journals, discussing reversal of what today we call bipolar illness with the use of “rectal instillations,” that is, enemas. A wonderful article I dug up in the Latin American medical literature dates from the early 1940s, in which a team of doctors in Uruguay reversed septic shock—almost invariably fatal in those days, and pretty fatal even today—with coffee enemas.

SS:
Why do you think orthodox medicine turned away from their use?

NG:
When the famed and brilliant Max Gerson started treating cancer patients with his whole-foods, raw-foods-type plant-based diet in the 1930s or so, he lost patients, not because the diet wasn’t working but because it was working too fast—tumors were breaking down so quickly the patients’ bodies were overloaded with dead tissue wastes, which can be deadly. Cancer cells are very abnormal and produce all kinds of proteins and enzymes that are foreign and toxic to normal tissue, so while breaking down a tumor is certainly a good
thing, breaking down a tumor too fast can be overly toxic and deadly. Gerson began incorporating coffee enemas into his routine and saved his patients when they went through this toxic healing crisis. Gerson proposed that the enemas must be helping the liver, the body’s main organ of detoxification, to work better.

SS:
How does it work? What does it do?

NG:
In terms of its physiological action, oddly enough when you drink coffee it stimulates the sympathetic or stress nervous system, so we get an energetic lift but also suppression of liver function. When you do the coffee as an enema rectally, it stimulates a completely different collection of nerves located in the lower pelvis called the
sacral parasympathetics
, and these nerves, when turned on, work through a reflex to stimulate the liver to release its toxic load. We believe that the coffee enemas enhance what scientists now refer to as
Phase I and Phase II detoxification systems
, which are responsible for neutralizing toxins whatever the source—from our diet, the environment, or our own metabolism. Coffee enemas in my experience help both these pathways work more effectively.

SS:
Do you do them?

NG:
Though I’ve never had cancer, I’ve done coffee enemas since I learned about them from Dr. Kelley in the summer of 1981, more than thirty years ago, and I have no intention of ever giving them up. The day I die I’m going to do my enema first, then go off and die. Patients often initially approach the enemas with some trepidation, as did I thirty years ago, but the great majority of patients report the enemas are one of the best, if not the best, part of the program because they feel so much better, whether the problem is toenail fungus or brain cancer. Coffee enemas help the liver work better, and when the liver works better, everything else in the body works better. Kelley, and Gerson before him, came to believe that an efficient liver was the key to healing, and I suspect they were both right.