[World Without Cancer by G. Edward Griffin. pp. 63 - 70 & p. 95. Copyright 1997 and 1974.]

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A look at the many cultures around the world that are, or have been, free from cancer; and an analysis of their native foods.

The best way to prove or disprove the vitamin theory of cancer would be to take a large group of people numbering in the thousands and, over a period of many years, expose them to a consistent diet of rich nitriloside foods, and then check the results. This, surely, would be the ultimate test. Fortunately, it already has been done.

In the remote recesses of the Himalaya Mountains, between West Pakistan, India, and China, there is a tiny kingdom called Hunza. These people are known world over for their amazing longevity and good health. It is not uncommon for Hunzakuts to live beyond a hundred years, and some even to a hundred and twenty or more. Visiting medical teams from the outside world have reported that they found no cancer in Hunza.

Although presently accepted science is unable to explain why these people should have been free of cancer, it is interesting to note that the traditional Hunza diet contains over two-hundred times more nitriloside than the average American diet. In fact, in that land where there was no such thing as money, a man's wealth was measured by the number of apricot trees he owned. And the most prized of all foods was considered to be the apricot seed.

One of the first medical teams to gain access to the remote kingdom of Hunza was headed by the world-renowned British surgeon and physician Dr. Robert McCarrison. Writing in the January 7, 1922, issue of the Journal of The American Medical Association, Dr. McCarrison reported:

The Hunza has no known incidence of cancer. They have an abundant crop of apricots. These they dry in the sun and use very largely in their food.

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Visitors to Hunza, when offered a fresh apricot or peach to eat, usually drop the hard pit to the ground when they are through. Invariably; this brings looks of dismay and disbelief to the faces of their guides. To them, the seed inside is the delicacy of the fruit.

Dr. Allen E. Banik, an optometrist from Kearney, Nebraska, was one such visitor. In his book, Hunza Land, he describes what happened:

My first experience with Hunza apricots, fresh from the tree, came when my guide picked several, washed them in a mountain stream, and handed them to me. I ate the luscious fruit and casually tossed the seeds to the ground. After an incredulous glance at me, one of the older men stooped and picked up the seeds. He cracked them between two stones, and handed them to me. The guide said with a smile: "Eat them. It is the best part of the fruit."

My curiosity aroused, I asked, "What do you do with the seeds you do not eat?"

The guide informed me that many are stored, but most of them are ground very fine and then squeezed under pressure to produce a very rich oil. "This oil," my guide claimed, "looks much like olive oil. Sometimes we swallow a spoonful of it when we need it. On special days, we deep-fry our chappatis [bread] in it. On festival nights, our women use the oil to shine their hair. It makes a good rubbing compound for body bruises."¹

In 1973, Prince Mohammed Ameen Khan, son of the Mir of Hunza, told Charles Hillinger of the Los Angeles Times that the average life expectancy of his people is about eighty-five years. He added: "Many members of the Council of Elders who help my father govern the state have been over one hundred."²

With a scientific distrust for both hearsay and the printed word, Dr. Ernst T. Krebs, Jr. met Prince Khan for dinner where he queried him on the accuracy of the L.A. Times report. The prince happily confirmed it and then described how it was not uncommon to eat thirty to fifty apricot seeds as an after-lunch snack. All of this is in addition to a diet of fresh and dried apricots. These often account for an excess of 75,000 International Units of vitamin A per day as well as for over 150 mg. of vitamin B17. Despite all of this, or possibly because of it, the life expectancy in Hunza, the Prince affirmed, is about eighty-five years.

1. Allen E. Banik and Renee Taylor, Hunza Land (Long Beach, Calif.: Whitehorn, 1960), pp. 123-24.

2. Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1973, Part I-A.

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This is in puzzling contrast to the United States where, at that time, life expectancy was about seventy-one years. Even now, more than two decades later, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is only about seventy-six.

That number may sound pretty good, but remember that it includes millions of old people who are alive but not really living. The length of their lives may have been extended by surgery or medication, but the quality of their lives has been devastated in the process. They are the ones who stare blankly into space with impaired mental capacity, or who are dependent on life-support mechanisms, or who are confined to bed requiring round-the-clock care. There are no such cases buried in the statistics from Hunza. Most of those people are healthy, vigorous, and vital right up to within a few days of the end. The quality of life is more important than the quantity. The Hunzakuts have both.

It will be noted that the Hunzakut intake of vitamin A may run seven-and-a-half times the maximum amount the FDA allows to be used in a tablet or capsule, while that agency has tried to outlaw entirely the eating of apricot seeds.

The women of Hunza are renowned for their strikingly smooth skin even into advanced age. Generally, their faces appear fifteen to twenty years younger than their counterparts in other areas of the world. They claim that their secret is merely the apricot oil which they apply to their skins almost daily.

In 1974 Senator Charles Percy, a member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, visited Hunza. When he returned to the United States he wrote:

We began curiously to observe the life style of the Hunzakuts. Could their eating habits be a source of longevity? ...

Some Hunzakuts believe their long lives are due in part to the apricot. Eaten fresh in the summer, dried in the sun for the long winter, the apricot is a staple in Hunza, much as rice is in other parts of the world. Apricot seeds are ground fine and squeezed for their rich oil, used for both frying and lighting.¹

And so, the Hunzakuts use the apricot, its seed, and the oil from its seed for practically everything. They share with most western scientists an ignorance of the chemistry and physiology of the nitriloside content of this fruit, but they have learned empirically that their life is enhanced by its generous use.

1. "You Live To Be 100 in Hunza," Parade, Feb. 17, 1974, p. 11.

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Five or six excellent volumes similar to Dr. Banik's have been written by those who have risked their lives over the treacherous Himalaya Mountain passes to gain entrance to Hunza. Also, there have been scores of magazine and newspaper articles published over the years. They all present the identical picture of the average Hunza diet. In addition to the ever-present apricot, the Hunzakuts eat mainly grain and fresh vegetables. These include buckwheat, millet, alfalfa, peas, broad beans, turnips, lettuce, sprouting pulse or gram, and berries of various sorts. All of these, with the exception of lettuce and turnips, contain nitriloside or vitamin B17.

It is sad to note that, in recent years, a narrow road was finally carved through the mountains, and food supplies from the "modern world" have at last arrived in Hunza. So have the first few cases of cancer.

In 1927 Dr. McCarrison was appointed Director of Nutrition Research in India. Part of his work consisted of experiments on albino rats to see what effect the Hunza diet had on them compared to the diets of other countries. Over a thousand rats were involved in the experiment and carefully observed from birth to twenty-seven months, which corresponds to about fifty years of age in man. At this point the Hunza-fed rats were killed and autopsied. Here is what McCarrison reported:

During the past two and a quarter years there has been no case of illness in the "universe" of albino rats, no death from natural causes in the adult stock, and, but for a few accidental deaths, no infantile mortality. Both clinically and at post-mortem, examination of this stock has been shown to be remarkably free from disease. It may be that some of them have cryptic disease of one kind or another, but if so, I have failed to find either clinical or microscopic evidence of it.¹

By comparison, over two thousand rats fed on typical Indian and Pakistani diets soon developed eye ailments, ulcers, boils, bad teeth, crooked spines, loss of hair, anemia, skin disorders, heart, kidney and glandular weaknesses, and a wide variety of gastrointestinal disorders.

In follow-up experiments, McCarrison gave a group of rats the diet of the lower classes of England. It consisted of white bread, margarine, sweetened tea, boiled vegetables, canned meat,

1. Quoted by Renee Taylor, Hunza Health Secrets (New York: Award Books, 1964), pp. 96-7.

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and inexpensive jams and jellies--a diet not too far removed from that of many Americans. Not only did the rats develop all kinds of chronic metabolic diseases, but they also became nervous wrecks. McCarrison wrote:

They were nervous and apt to bite their attendants; they lived unhappily together, and by the sixteenth day of the experiment they began to kill and eat the weaker ones amongst them.¹

It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that westernized man is victimized by the chronic metabolic disease of cancer while his counterpart in Hunza is not. And lest anyone suspect that this difference is due to hereditary factors, it is important to know that when the Hunzakuts leave their secluded land and adopt the menus of other countries, they soon succumb to the same diseases and infirmities--including cancer--as the rest of mankind.

The Eskimos are another people that have been observed by medical teams for many decades and found to be totally free of cancer. In VilhJalmur Stefanson's book Cancer: Disease of Civilization? An Anthropological and Historical Study,² it is revealed that the traditional Eskimo diet is amazingly rich in nitrilosides that come from the residue of the meat of caribou and other grazing animals, and also from the salmon berry which grows abundantly in the Arctic areas. Another Eskimo delicacy is a green salad made out of the stomach contents of caribou and reindeer which are full of fresh tundra grasses. Among these grasses, Arrow grass (Triglochin Maritima) is very common. Studies made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture have shown that Arrow grass is probably richer in nitriloside content than any other grass.

What happens when the Eskimo abandons his traditional way of life and begins to rely on westernized foods? He becomes even more cancer-prone than the average American.

Dr. Otto Schaefer, M.D., who has studied the diets and health patterns of the Eskimos, reports that these people have undergone a drastic change in their eating habits, caused indirectly by the construction of military and civilian airports across the Canadian Arctic in the mid-50's. These attracted the Eskimos to new jobs, new homes, new schools--and new menus. Just a little over one generation previously, their diet consisted almost entirely of game and fish, along with seasonal berries, roots, leafy

1. Ibid. p. 97.

2. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.

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greens and seaweed. Carbohydrates were almost completely lacking.

Suddenly, all of that changed. Dr. Schaefer reports:

When the Eskimo gives up his nomadic life and moves into the settlement, he and his family undergo remarkable changes. His children grow faster and taller, and reach puberty sooner. Their teeth rot, his wife comes down with gallbladder disease and, likely as not, a member of his family will suffer one of the degenerative diseases for which the white man is well known.¹

There are many other peoples in the world that could be cited with the same characteristics. The Abkhazians deep in the Caucasus Mountains on the Northeast side of the Black Sea are a people with almost exactly the same record of health and longevity as the Hunzakuts. The parallels between the two are striking. First, Abkhazia is a hard land which does not yield up a harvest easily. The inhabitants are accustomed to daily hard work throughout their lives. Consequently, their bodies and minds are strong right up until death, which comes swiftly with little or no preliminary illness. Like the Hunzakuts, the Abkhazians expect to live well beyond eighty years of age. Many are over a hundred. One of the oldest persons in the world was Mrs. Shirali Mislimov of Abkhazia who, in 1972, was estimated to be 165 years old.²

The other common factor, of course, is the food, which, typically; is low in carbohydrates, high in vegetable proteins, and rich in minerals and vitamins, especially vitamin B17.

The Indians of North America, while they remained true to their native customs and foods, also were remarkably free from cancer. At one time, the American Medical Association urged the federal government to conduct a study in an effort to discover why there was so little cancer among the Hopi and Navajo Indians. The February 5, 1949, issue of the Journal of the AMA declared:

The Indian's diet seems to be low in quality and quantity and wanting in variety, and the doctors wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that only 36 cases of malignant cancer were found out of 30,000 admissions to the Ganado Arizona Mission Hospital.

In the same population of white persons, the doctors said there would have been about 1,800.

1. Nutrition Today, Nov./Dec., 1971, as quoted in "Modern Refined Foods Finally Reach The Eskimos," Kaysers Health Research, May, 1972, pp. 11, 46, 48.

2. "The Secret of Long Life" by Sula Benet, (N.Y. Times News Service), L.A. Herald Examiner, Jan. 2, 1972, p. A-12. Also "Soviet Study Finds Recipe for Long Life," National Enquirer, Aug. 27, 1972, p. 13.

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Thirty-six cases compared to eighteen hundred represents only two percent of the expected number. Obviously, something is responsible.

Dr. Krebs, who has done exhaustive research on this subject, has written:

I have analyzed from historical and anthropological records the nitrilosidic content of the diets of these various North American tribes. The evidence should put to rest forever the notion of toxicity in nitrilosidic foods. Some of these tribes would ingest over 8,000 milligrams of vitamin B17 (nitriloside) a day. My data on the Modoc Indians are particularly complete.¹

A quick glance at the cancer-free native populations in tropical areas, such as South America and Africa, reveals a great abundance and variety of nitriloside-rich foods. In fact, over one-third of all plants native to these areas contain vitamin B17. One of the most common is cassava, sometimes described as "the bread of the tropic." But this is not the same as the sweet cassava preferred in the cities of western civilization. The native fruit is more bitter, but it is rich in nitriloside. The sweet cassava has much less of this vital substance, and even that is so processed as to eliminate practically all nitrile ions.²

As far back as 1913, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the world-famous medical missionary to Africa, had put his finger on the basic cause of cancer. He had not isolated the specific substance, but he was convinced from his observations that a difference in food was the key. In his preface to Alexander Berglas' Cancer: Cause and Cure (Paris: Pasteur Institute, 1957), he wrote:

On my arrival in Gabon in 1913, I was astonished to encounter no cases of cancer. I saw none among the natives two hundred miles from the coast .... I can not, of course, say positively that there was no cancer at all, but, like other frontier doctors, I can only say that, if any cases existed, they must have been quite rare. This absence of cancer seemed to be due to the difference in nutrition of the natives compared to the Europeans ....

1. Letter from Dr. E.T. Krebs, Jr. to Dr. Dean Burk of the National Cancer Institute, dated March 14, 1972, Griffin; Private Papers, op. cit.

2. The LaetriIes/Nitrilosides, op. cit., pp. 9, 10.

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The missionary and medical journals have recorded many such cancer-free populations all over the world. Some are in tropic regions, some in the Arctic. Some are hunters who eat great quantities of meat, some are vegetarians who eat almost no meat at all. From all continents and all races, the one thing they have in common is that the degree to which they are free from cancer is in direct proportion to the amount of nitriloside or vitamin B17 found in their natural diet.

* * * * *

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On September 1, 1972, the California State Health Department released its Monthly Morbidity Report to the medical profession and to the press. It contained an entry about a Los Angeles couple who were treated for "cyanide poisoning" after eating thirty apricot kernels. On September 4, the Los Angeles Examiner ran a UPI dispatch under the heading: FRUIT PITS CAN CAUSE CYANIDE. And six days later, the New York Times ran a similar story: APRICOT KERNELS LINKED TO POISONINGS ON COAST.

All Americans had been warned--and scared--to stay away from those seeds! For those who were only vaguely familiar with the story of Laetrile, it was a near knock-out blow to the use of vitamin B17. And, as shall be demonstrated in a following chapter, it is likely that it was intended to be just that.

In response to this news story, Mr. Jay Huchinson, a former cancer patient who attributes his recovery to Laetrile, dashed off the following whimsical letter, sent airmail special delivery, to Mohammed Jamel Khan, Mir of Hunza:

Dear Mir and Rhani of Hunza:

I am rushing this extremely urgent warning to you so that you can take immediate steps to notify your government and your people of the health hazard reported by the California State Department of Public Health during the week of September 3, 1972. I enclose articles from San Francisco newspapers ....

Mir, you must get your people to stop eating those pits! Stop making flour out of them! Stop feeding your new-born infants the oil, and, for Mohammed's sake, stop anointing them with it!...

Please write soon, and when you do, would you mind telling us why your people are among the healthiest in the world, and why your men and women live vigorous lives well into their 90's, and why you and your beautiful people never get cancer?¹