CHAPTER 16
Cancer
More than fifteen hundred Americans will die of cancer in the next twenty-four hours—more than one death every minute. One out of two American men and one out of three American women will contract cancer. No wonder Susan Sontag called it “an evil, invincible predator,” and most people consider a diagnosis predictive of disability and death.
Surprisingly, old-fashioned broth can play a role in preventing and even curing this disease. And that’s not just because broth keeps people well-nourished and in optimal health. Broth contains components with known anticarcinogenic activities, the most notable of which is cartilage.
Cartilage for Cancer
Dr. John F. Prudden discovered the power of bovine tracheal cartilage on cancer back in 1972. Treating a woman with a malignant, bleeding, pustulating ulceration that infested her entire chest, he not only healed the wound but shrank the tumor. This led him to wonder what it was in cartilage that could cause such a potent effect.
A study conducted by Brian G. M. Durie, MD, published in 1985 in the Journal of Biological Response Modifiers, provided some of his answer. Dr. Durie, then with the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center in Tucson and now world renowned for his work with myeloma, performed in vitro laboratory experiments that showed the direct antimitotic effect of bovine tracheal cartilage on human ovarian, testicular, pancreatic, and colon cancers. Antimitotic means it inhibits cell division. Cell division, of course, is the key to the spread of cancer, which is a catchall name for a number of diseases that are marked by a wild, unruly, runaway growth of cells. In contrast, normal cell growth takes place in an orderly fashion with no population explosions. Because cancer cells divide at high rates but also die at high rates, a cancer will die off on its own if the reproduction rate can be slowed.
Stopping Cell Division
What is it in cartilage that stops cell division? Dr. Prudden thought it was the large sugar and protein molecules known as glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). These adhere to the cell membrane of cancerous cells and interfere with cell division but don’t harm normal cells. In contrast, chemotherapy interferes with the multiplication of cancer cells but poisons normal tissues as well, particularly the rapidly dividing cells of the bone marrow, intestinal wall, and hair follicles. The result is a depressed immune system, profound digestive disturbances, and hair loss.
How Cartilage Fights Cancer
Arthur G. Johnson, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anatomy, Microbiology and Pathology at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine in Duluth, discovered that cartilage can activate and increase the numbers of macrophages, the “big eater” white blood cells whose mission in life is to hungrily devour foreign cells. The macrophages also secrete a substance called necrosis factor alpha, which, as its name implies, causes the necrosis (death) of solid tumors.
Dr. Johnson also found that cartilage activates cytotoxic (killer) T-cells and stimulates B-cells. The increase in the number of B-cells, in turn, produces a rise in the number of antibodies known as immunoglobulins A, G, and M (IgA, IgG, and IgM). IgA combines with a protein in the mucosa to defend body surfaces against invading microorganisms and triggers antigen-antibody reaction. IgG is a specialized protein synthesized by the body in response to invasions by bacteria, fungi, and viruses. And IgM, which is found in all circulating fluids, is the first immunoglobulin the body produces when challenged by antigens.
Dr. Johnson found as well that the numbers of natural killer (NK) cells usually—but not always—increase thanks to cartilage. NK cells are part of the body’s first line of defense. Unlike the killer T-cells, they can destroy tumor cells nonspecifically, that is, without having had prior exposure to the tumor antigens. Clearly, all these players have key roles in cancer prevention and cures.
Dr. Durie’s studies on cartilage were done in a laboratory, not in a human host. But because the lab dish obviously had no immune system to contribute to the cancer cells’ demise, Dr. Durie’s studies established the fact that cartilage can prevent tumor growth without any assistance from the host’s immune system. That is good news indeed for cancer patients, who might not have cancer at all if they had immune systems able to recognize cancer cells as foreign and dispatch them before they divide, conquer, and multiply to point of a cancer diagnosis.
For the tens of thousands of cancer patients whose immune systems have been wasted by radiation and chemotherapy, their best hope lies in finding a therapy that does not depend for its effectiveness on enlisting the immune response. That is one reason that almost all cancer research is done on “nude” mice, which have been genetically stripped of their natural immune capabilities. The power of bovine cartilage lies in the fact that it not only slows cell division and normalizes the aberrant and malignant cells but simultaneously nourishes the immune system.
Some Possible Causes of Cancer
For decades, scientists have theorized that cancer is caused by a “somatic mutation,” in which a gene unaccountably develops a flaw that disorganizes cellular function. Known causes of such flaws are X-rays, nuclear radiation, industrial chemicals, pesticides, pollution, and other environmental toxins, many of which are prevalent in our air, water, and food supply. Bruce Ames, PhD, of the University of California at Berkeley, has estimated that each of the sixty trillion cells in our body undergoes from one thousand to ten thousand “hits” each day. Normally DNA repair mechanisms and immune system surveillance keep the genetic damage under control. A nourishing diet, including broth, can help maintain that control, allowing genes to express their full, intended potential.
Another possible cause of cancer is viruses capable of invading cells, corrupting the DNA and causing the cells’ progeny to become outlaws. This theory dates back to 1910 when Peyton Rous, MD (1879–1970), a medical researcher at the Rockefeller Institute, found a cancer-causing agent in fowl. His claim that this mysterious infectious agent could pass through the smallest filter known to science made him the laughingstock of his colleagues. However, the discovery of viruses and the unraveling of the genetic code led to new respect for Rous’s iconoclastic theory, and in 1966 he won the Nobel Prize. Though proponents of the virus theory of cancer have high hopes of finding a cancer vaccine, they have so far failed to do so. After more than fifty years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on research, the role of viruses is known in only a few human cancers, namely Burkitt’s lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
Theories of pleomorphic bacteria also exist despite dismissal by cancer experts for more than sixty years. These particular bacteria are capable of shifting shape, form, and size as they pass through various stages. Indeed, the Rous “virus” itself may be just such a bacterium. Though their existence is not accepted by orthodox microbiologists, pleomorphic bacteria have been spied in live blood samples viewed under dark field microscopes by some of the most controversial and persecuted men and women ever to work at curing cancer. Royal R. Rife; Gaston Naessens (who named the pleomorphic bacteria somatids); Gunther Enderlein (who called them endobionts); and others all followed Antoine Beauchamp, the nineteenth-century bacteriologist and rival of Louis Pasteur who contended that bacteria could not only change forms but could also devolve into smaller, unseen forms, which he called microzymia.
From 1946 until her death in 1990, Virginia Livingston, MD, was a forceful exponent of that theory. “Instead of a bacillus being a bacillus ad infinitum,” she wrote, “it can and does change into numerous other forms dictated by its need to survive or stimulated to greater productivity by an unusually favorable environment.”
Dr. Livingston—who also used the last names Wuerthele-Caspe and Livingston-Wheeler at various points in her career—named the cancer-causing bacillus Progenitor cryptocides (PC), and claimed that it was closely related to the bacteria known to cause tuberculosis and leprosy. In 1972, she found these bacteria were capable of producing human choriogonadotropin (hCG), a hormone once thought to be exclusively human. The presence of hCG establishes the existence of choriocarcinoma (a rare form of cancer associated with an ill-fated pregnancy) and is a marker for other types of cancer as well.
Cartilage as an Anticancer Agent
Any of these possible cancer causes—alone or in combination—would suggest why cartilage has proven such a successful anticancer agent. Because cartilage stimulates the immune system, it prompts surveillance against aberrant cells. If cancer itself is caused by microbial infection, then cartilage’s antibacterial and antiviral powers come into play.
Instead, the medical establishment attempts to induce, enhance, or suppress the immune system with stratospherically priced chemicals that are developed and announced with great fanfare. These agents have included alpha and gamma interferon; monoclonal antibodies; interleukin-2 and interleukin-7; tumor necrosis factor (TNF); and genetically engineered T-cells, among others. Although chemical immunotherapy is an acceptable established treatment blessed by the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and other major cancer centers, even its proponents acknowledge that the results have been disappointing. The problem is that rather than help the cancer patient’s already beleaguered immune system kick in, these artificially isolated immunostimulants unbalance and further disrupt it. The results are so toxic that some patients have died as a direct result of such therapy.
Because cancer cells are generally larger-than-normal cells, the impact of any therapy on them shows up with the help of a scanning electron microscope. Biopsies taken from patients treated with bovine cartilage show a progressive decrease in size of the malignant cells until they achieve the dimensions of healthy cells. Dr. Prudden repeatedly demonstrated “a progressive normalization in the appearance of the cancer cells in sequential biopsies obtained during treatment.”
“ Colon Health
My grandfather died of colon cancer, my mom has an enlarged colon, my brother has colitis, and my problems started in childhood. After going to university, I started having bloody diarrhea. It became a very aggressive form of colitis, and I had as many as fifty bowel movements a day. If I had to go somewhere, I had to make sure there was always a bathroom nearby. My life was about that. At five feet eight inches I was below one hundred pounds and dropping.
None of the medicines helped, so the doctors said I was a candidate for surgery. My dad, a retired doctor, then took me home to his farm and put me on a diet similar to the Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) diet. I drank at least a quart of broth a day. The diarrhea stopped. After a year, I had a colonoscopy and there were no more signs of Crohn’s. I had also had severe polyps, and they were gone too. It’s now been twelve years. I no longer take medications, have lots of energy, and weigh a healthy 165 pounds. I’m still careful to have plenty of broth. Other than that, I eat heartily and have no digestive problems. I’ve become a dietitian and now help many people with the same problems.
—Shantih Coro, Miami, Florida ”
Given that the cancer cells also start acting like normal cells, we might say that cartilage therapy declines to kill the aberrant cells in favor of rehabilitating them. In contrast, chemotherapy and radiation kill cancer cells directly. Though the death penalty might seem to be in order, the price is steep: death or damage to many of the noncancerous cells in the body as well as destruction of the immune system. Why not, as Dr. Prudden suggested, choose a therapy that is totally benign, with no untoward side effects and that “burns no immunological or hematological bridges”?
The therapy Dr. Prudden proposed was bovine tracheal cartilage, a component of beef broth, but chicken, shark, and other cartilages have similar effect. Proof of its efficacy came out in 1985 when Dr. Prudden published “The Treatment of Human Cancer with Agents Prepared from Bovine Cartilage” in the December 1985 issue of the Journal of Biological Response Modifiers. The article documents an eleven-year study begun in 1972, in which Dr. Prudden tracked the progress of thirty-one patients treated with cartilage who had suffered from a wide variety of cancers.
Every one of his thirty-one patients was considered morbidly ill and “beyond hope.” The standard slash, poison, and burn techniques had proved worthless—or had been refused by the patients—and the patients had been sent home to die. “With few exceptions, only those for whom standard therapy had failed or was conceded to be of no value were accepted for the studies,” said Dr. Prudden. Prior to starting the therapy with his patients, Dr. Prudden ordered extensive laboratory blood work, the details of which can be found in his article in the Journal of Biological Response Modifiers.
Each treatment began with a “loading phase” in which patients were injected with bovine tracheal cartilage in their thighs, flanks, abdomen, back, and chest, and occasionally in other locations (such as the nose for a patient afflicted with nasal cancer). Treatments varied somewhat depending on the patient’s condition, but the typical dose was 100 ml per session for a total of 2000 ml over a period of several weeks. A few patients got more. These amounts are much more than we would find in broth or soup, of course, but do suggest that these delicious foods have the potential for prevention.
“ Recovery from Cancer Treatments
While recovering from chemotherapy and radiation treatment for throat cancer last year, I took all of my nourishment from a feeding tube in my stomach. The first homemade formula we used was a vegetable broth with ground salmon. Then a friend made me aware of how beef bone broth could be of great benefit during recovery from an illness such as mine. I was fortunate to find a supply of the broth available from a local source. The addition of the bone broth nutrients to my diet contributed greatly to my successful recovery. I now take all my nourishment by mouth and still use the bone broth as part of my diet.
—Edward C., Lancaster, Pennsylvania ”
Dr. Prudden found no limit to the amount of cartilage that could be given safely, whether orally, topically, or by injection. On one occasion he gave a whopping 900 ml injection to an anesthetized patient without “discernible problems of any kind.” A few other patients received 6000 ml over a number of weeks. Though these are obviously very large amounts, laboratory tests run on the patients turned up no new abnormalities, and there was no other indication of toxicity. Only one negative side effect was ever observed—local redness, swelling, and itching at the injection sites. And that was soon remedied.
Once the initial “loading phase” was complete, Dr. Prudden advised most of the patients to swallow 3 grams of bovine cartilage, three times a day, for a total of 9 grams per day.
During the course of the study, Dr. Prudden also completed toxicity testing as mandated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A two-year carcinogenesis study—designed to determine whether cartilage was capable of causing cancer—and a sixteen-month teratogenicity study—to judge whether or not cartilage could cause birth defects—both proved negative. Cartilage was found to be totally benign. “This is a most important feature of this therapy,” said Dr. Prudden, “because of the extraordinary contrast with the debility regularly induced by chemotherapy.”
Dr. Prudden emphasized the fact that cartilage is not an instant miracle cure. A definite response might not be observed for four months, and users should be prepared to see the cancer worsen for a time before the action of the cartilage kicks in. Once remission is achieved, he said, it is important to continue the cartilage therapy. Though many stayed well after quitting the capsules, others saw their cancer return. In general, Dr. Prudden recommended that his patients take the pills in a maintenance dose for life. Strictly speaking, this makes the therapy not a cure but a control.
Summing up his results in his forty-four-page paper, Dr. Prudden reported that bovine tracheal cartilage had a “major inhibitory effect upon a wide-spectrum of cancers.” Of the thirty-one patients, eleven had a “complete response” with a probable cure. Eight cases had a complete response with a relapse. Of those who had a partial response (meaning a 50 percent decrease in the size of the lesions or of another measure of the cancer), six had a partial response and three had a partial response and relapse. One person had an improved response, one showed no change, and one saw the cancer progress.
If this sounds like a considerably less-than-perfect score, remember that all thirty-one of these patients had been evaluated as “hopeless” by doctors and oncologists other than Dr. Prudden. Medical opinion held that 100 percent would be pushing up daisies within a year. Many of the patients were already extremely debilitated by orthodox treatments. Some had persisted in bad habits including smoking and drinking, and one actually died of pentobarbital abuse. In those cases where the treatment was successful but the patient died, the deaths most often came from heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, or urinary tract infections. Not one can be attributed—either directly or indirectly—to a side effect of cartilage therapy. (All thirty-one cases, warts and all, including details from the 1985 article and updates on the patients up to 1997 are posted at our website for this book, www.nourishingbroth.com.) Many of the failures can be laid at the feet of patients who got overconfident and chose to quit taking their maintenance dose of cartilage, against Dr. Prudden’s advice. That turned out to be a big mistake, for their cancer generally returned.
At the time of his death in 1998, Dr. Prudden had carried out long-term follow-up on all of the 31 pilot cases and accumulated extensive data on 140 other cases. The latter group contained more cancers of the brain, lung, pharynx, and ovary—cases that are generally considered incurable. As of 1997, Dr. Prudden reported the patients were “doing considerably better than anyone else would have anticipated and the results are even more impressive than the original thirty-one.” The only real change in treatment was that Dr. Prudden stopped the “loading phase” with injectable cartilage to work with the cartilage pills alone. Sadly, this paper has yet to be published, and Dr. Prudden’s dream of seeing bovine cartilage accepted in the orthodox medical community has failed to materialize.
During his lifetime, many people in the scientific community asked Dr. Prudden why he did not do blind randomized studies. He cited ethical reasons: “It is not necessary when one is dealing with malignancies whose deadly outcome is inexorable. Double-blind studies are important for osteoarthritics because there can be much day-to-day variation in the course of the illness. With pancreatic cancer, renal cell carcinoma, brain cancer, there is no such variation. They are never cured or very seldom cured by standard therapies. To insist on double-blind studies in these cases guarantees the patients will be blind—blind because they are dead! It’s nonsense to say anything other than double-blind study is an anecdotal report. Death, of course, can be reported.”
Dr. Prudden also used rigorous statistical analysis to compare his results with standard cancer therapies. This was to ensure that what appears to be an outstanding advantage was not due to a fortuitous selection of cases. When statistician Jack Silverston compared the thirty-one cases to those reported to the cancer epidemiological section of the Connecticut Health Department during the same period of time and subjected them to a Wilcoxon Rank Analysis, he claimed that the difference was “highly significant,” with a “p” value of less than .002. Such a remarkable series of successes could not have been assembled through the use of any other mode of cancer treatment. The analysis was accepted after careful review by the U.S. Patent Office.
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Prudden switched from the injectable form of cartilage to pills. As he perceived it, the injectable form had both pluses and minuses. On the plus side, the shots bypassed the digestive system—often a weak point in morbidly ill patients—so the cartilage could be absorbed directly into the blood. This means more of the cartilage could be absorbed and used. But quantity is not the only criterion here. “More” also refers to more of the components of the cartilage itself. Taken orally, the protein components of cartilage are denatured, dismantled, and digested in the human gut.
Although this would seem to be a major strike against cartilage pills—and against cartilage-rich broth as well—Dr. Prudden saw it differently. Though he demonstrated outstanding results on the cancer patients who were injected with cartilage, he was concerned about the fact that whole cartilage contains “growth factors”—hormones that stimulate cell growth and cell division.
While growth factors would seem to be the last thing cancer patients need, the scenario is not quite so simple. Cartilage contains “bio-directors” that know instinctively when to turn cell division off and turn it on. This would explain why Dr. Durie discovered an antimitotic effect on cancer cells in the laboratory and why Dr. Prudden had succeeded in annihilating cancer when working with patients clinically. Even so, he thought it wise to be cautious about giving cancer patients growth factors in any form. Accordingly, his future plans had included testing an injectable form of cartilage from which the growth factors had been removed.
Anti-Angiogenesis
On the plus side, the injectable form of cartilage contains an anti-angiogenesis protein that Dr. Prudden considered highly valuable for cancer treatment. Angio-genesis comes from the Greek words angio, meaning “blood,” and genesis, meaning “formation of.” The term was coined back in 1935 to describe the new blood vessels forming in the placenta during pregnancy. It now commonly refers to the formation of new blood vessels during any bodily growth spurt, from the replacement of blood vessels after an injury to the ability of malignant tissues to rapidly form the network of blood vessels that they need for runaway growth.
Normal cartilage has no blood vessels and so contains an anti-angiogenesis factor that specifically inhibits the incursion of blood vessels. When blood vessels do enter cartilage, it is a preliminary to bone formation.
Dr. Prudden’s interest in anti-angiogenesis followed the pioneering work of Judah Folkman, MD (1933–2008), of Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Beginning in 1971, Dr. Folkman hypothesized in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and other medical journals that tumor growth could be stopped if angiogenesis was first stopped. Without a network of blood vessels to supply nutrients and remove waste, a tumor has no choice but to shrivel up and die. Later, Robert Langer, ScD, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered that cartilage taken from the shoulders of calves could inhibit the vascularization of solid tumors.
Both Drs. Folkman and Langer asserted, however, that the large and fragile protein molecules that give cartilage its anti-angiogenic properties could not survive the digestive processes of the human gut. If the oral forms of cartilage cure cancer, they said, it must be from factors other than anti-angiogenesis. “If you give large molecules orally, you find they get destroyed,” said Dr. Langer. “Insulin is a classic example of this.” Injected, however, the proteins would enter the bloodstream intact, a fact that potentiates the cancer-curing powers of cartilage. One of Dr. Prudden’s dreams was to obtain the funds to perfect an injectable form of cartilage in which growth factors were removed but the anti-angiogenesis factors retained.
Neither the Harvard nor the MIT researchers were happy about I. William Lane’s book Sharks Don’t Get Cancer and his trumped-up claim that shark cartilage pills possessed the magic bullet of anti-angiogenesis factors. Drs. Folkman, Langer, and Prudden all tried to dissuade Lane from making his claims, to no avail. Dr. Langer also spoke out against Lane’s totally unwarranted claim that shark cartilage was “one thousand times more potent” than bovine cartilage based on the ratio of raw material needed to produce a product of a known dose. What is relevant is the amount of each type of cartilage that must be taken each day to have a therapeutic effect. Here bovine cartilage shines, for the recommended daily dose is 9 grams a day, versus 70 grams a day for shark cartilage. On average that means about eight times more shark cartilage to be swallowed. This is not a minor point because, as Dr. Lane himself acknowledged, the huge amounts of shark cartilage prescribed frequently led to nausea and noncompliance.
As found in the human diet, we could all conceivably eat 9 grams (less than 2 teaspoons) a day of bovine or chicken cartilage through broth, soups, and stews and by chewing on chicken wings and drumsticks. But even the most avid eater of shark fin soup could never down 70 grams’ worth of cartilage a day.
Why is so much less bovine cartilage needed? Dr. Prudden pointed to the fact that cows are mammals and so are more similar to human beings than sharks. “The potency of shark cartilage is from ten to twenty times less than bovine, depending on the test system employed,” he said. “This is not surprising when one considers that sharks separated from our hominoid ancestors on the Tree of Life more than twenty-five million years ago.”
Dr. Prudden was intrigued by anti-angiogenesis but believed the active cancer-curing agents in cartilage might not be proteins at all, but the sugars, known variously as mucopolysaccharides, proteoglycans, and glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). “The fact is, all studies show that a positive ‘cartilage effect’ in any pathological situation is not due to one specific agent, but to an interaction of a complex array of molecular entities capable of stimulating immunological resistance to cancer,” he said. He added that Dr. Lane’s entrancement with anti-angiogenesis also missed the point that both angiogenesis and anti-angiogenesis are needed if the body is to stay in balance. Dr. Prudden found that all types of cartilage contain biological directors that prevent angiogenesis in cases of cancer and arthritis but promote angiogenesis in wound healing.
The fall of Lane’s anti-angiogenesis theory does not make shark cartilage useless, and some clinicians have reported good results from using it for cancer therapy. The late Robert Atkins, MD, of the Atkins Center in New York City, incorporated both shark and bovine cartilages into comprehensive programs, making it hard to tease out the results of either form of cartilage alone. Alan Gaby, MD, past president of the American Holistic Medical Association, wrote in the April 1994 issue of the Townsend Letter for Doctors, “As far as clinical results are concerned, I have not met any physicians who are excited about their results with shark cartilage.” Lane, however, cites scores of studies in his book Sharks Don’t Get Cancer and its sequel, Sharks Still Don’t Get Cancer, including much early research that was actually performed with bovine cartilage. As for the studies done with shark cartilage in Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Chile, and Belgium, good results have been reported, but without long-term follow-up. None was strict enough in its protocol to warrant publication in major medical or scientific journals. Particularly bad news for shark cartilage came from a study by the Cancer Treatment Research Foundation in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and published in the November 1998 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. As tested on sixty terminally ill cancer patients, shark cartilage did nothing to slow their disease or improve their quality of life. However, the problem may not have been the shark cartilage but the short duration of the study, which lasted only three months. Dr. Prudden insisted it took a minimum of four months to see results with bovine cartilage, and, despite Lane’s claims, there’s no reason to think shark cartilage would be speedier.
“ Preparing for a Colonoscopy
I am almost sixty years old, and for the last five years, my doctor had been telling me I needed to have a colonoscopy. The problem is when I miss even one meal, I get awful headaches, which bring on migraines, usually with nausea and vomiting. I could only imagine the shape I would be in after not eating anything substantial for a whole day to prepare for a colonoscopy. However, three months previously, my mother died of colon cancer, and that was the impetus I needed to get myself in gear.
So I called the endoscopy center and bravely scheduled my appointment. I made sure I had plenty of migraine meds and antinausea meds for extra insurance and peace of mind. I made bone broth from vegetables and chickens, including the heads and the feet so I would have plenty of gel and good nutrition. I made sure to strain it extra well through a towel, so there would be no large particles. I even removed the layer of fat off the top (which I usually drink) because I wasn’t sure whether that fat would remain in the colon. On the day before the procedure, I drank lots of water as directed. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I drank a large mug of hot chicken broth. In the midafternoon slump, I drank some kombucha. And guess what?
Yep. No headache. I could not believe what was happening. Sure, I was hungry, but I did not feel weak and I never got a headache. Even the next morning, before the procedure, I felt amazingly well. And I know it was due in large part to the bone broth. It gave my body what it needed (pretty much all by itself) to make it through the preparation day with flying colors. I had three benign growths that were removed, and I don’t have to fret the next colonoscopy because I know how to make it through. And now you do too!
—Kathy Mellin, Littleton, Colorado ”
Non-Cartilage Components of Broth for Cancer
As of yet, very little cancer research exists on the non-cartilage components of broth. In 2009, the Health Research Center of Aichi-Gakuin University in Aichi, Japan, reported in Experimental Oncology that injections of porcine skin gelatin prolonged the survival of mice morbidly ill from liver or colon cancers. A year earlier the same Japanese team had reported in Experimental Oncology on antitumor activity in vitro from porcine skin gelatin. In 2009, the Journal of Dermatological Science reported success with bovine collagen hydrolysate against melanoma cell proliferation, also in vitro.
Three recent studies on glucosamine and cancer are of interest. In 2013, Molecular Medicine Reports published results from China Medical University in Shenyang, Liaoning, China, on glucosamine inhibition of lung cell proliferation in vitro.
In 2013, a team from the Public Health Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle published the results of an “exploratory analysis conducted within the VITamins And Lifestyle (VITAL) study.” The team wanted to know whether the use of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate could be associated with reduced risk of colorectal cancer. The study involved over 75,000 western Washington State residents, ages fifty to seventy-six, who completed a mailed VITAL questionnaire between 2000 and 2002. The conclusion, published in Cancer Causes and Control, was that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements “merit further attention as a potential chemopreventive agent.”
While these studies are of interest, they mostly suggest fertile areas for further research, highlight the stellar quality of Dr. Prudden’s work, and remind us of the fact that this work has languished since his death in 1998. Sadly, the reputation of bovine tracheal cartilage has been smudged by investigators who were less than strict with protocol. A good example is a company that developed a bovine cartilage product and received an Investigational New Drug (IND) grant from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the mid-1980s. It began trials with twenty-five patients in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Newark, New Jersey. Of the twenty-five patients, only one survived.
The failure, said Dr. Prudden, should not have been blamed on cartilage, but on the selection of patients, who, without exception, had only a few days left to live at the start of the study. “Look,” he said. “I have never promised resurrection. Those patients were essentially dead and did not fail to perish, except for one brilliant triumph. That triumph was a person with renal cell carcinoma, who was still alive nine years later. A presumptive cure. That itself is a blazing star in the sky.”
Dr. Prudden, of course, worked exclusively with terminally ill patients in his own pilot studies. The difference, he said, was that the Hershey and Newark patients were “already breathing their last and died, on average, thirty days from the start of treatment.”
Glutamine and Cancer
Broth and gelatin have helped people recover from cancer and other illnesses for many years, yet recent research has cast doubt on the value of their glutamine component. Broth and gelatin, as we discussed in chapter 6, are naturally high in glutamine, a conditionally essential amino acid that improves strength, muscle mass, gut healing, immunity, and liver detoxification. Numerous studies show that glutamine enhances recovery from stress, trauma, injury, and illness, as well as damage to the body from radiation and chemotherapy.
The dark side of glutamine is the fact that it plays an important role in cancer cell adaptation, survival, and progression, and has even been called “ambrosia for cancer cells.” Accordingly, some doctors are warning cancer patients to steer clear of glutamine. By extension, that warning would include broth.
What to think? Consider this: Cancer cells are wily survivors that can get all the glutamine they need from the glutamine produced naturally in the body. If we cut back on broth, meats, and other good sources of glutamine, it is our healthy cells that lose out. And with low glutamine, we get low glutathione, lower immune function, loss of muscle mass, and other unwanted conditions caused by glutamine depletion.
What to do? Eat plenty of nourishing traditional foods that are naturally rich in glutamine, but avoid artificially high supplemental doses.
As Dr. Prudden found, it normally takes four months to see whether cartilage is working. “I’m a clinician, and I know when the jig is up,” he said. “There can be a large load of cancer and it can have spread, but it must not have shut down body systems that are needed to survive.” Sloan Kettering, Columbia-Presbyterian, and other cancer centers have protocols by which they test the bio-efficacy of new drugs only on people who still have some life in them. They also routinely eliminate from their studies anyone who is seriously ill from another disease.
Though the Journal of Biological Response Modifiers is one of the world’s leading medical journals, little attention was paid to Dr. Prudden’s 1985 article, even at the time. “I’d thought I’d go to my apotheosis trailing clouds of glory, but there was nothing but silence. It produced nothing. That was, I must confess, a great astonishment to me.” Though discouraged, Dr. Prudden felt it may have been beneficial in the long run. Had he attained celebrity status as a cancer curer, he said, it would have been more difficult to achieve “responsible development of the findings.”
Dr. Prudden’s article concluded with a plea that the scientific and medical communities examine the work thoroughly and speed it on its way, but this has not happened. Although Dr. Prudden felt massive research was needed to reveal cartilage’s full potential, he thought oncologists should use cartilage in the meantime. “There is absolutely no reason to delay except the dead weight of habit and its handmaiden, the regulatory apparatus,” he said. “I find it interesting but very sad that sub-lethal amounts of toxic drugs are approved for use with a minimum quantity of preliminary evidence, but nutritional therapies such as cartilage are expected to wait for some sort of ‘final proof of effectiveness’ before they can join the mainstream of modern medicine.”
That attitude has led to the deaths of more than twenty million Americans from cancer since Dr. Prudden published his groundbreaking cancer article in 1985. Many of these people might have benefited from taking cartilage or even consuming cartilage-rich broth, but neither they nor their doctors had ever heard of it.