I’m always looking for natural substances that throw a “monkey wrench” into the peculiar metabolism of cancer cells. It’s vital these substances kill cancer cells and leave normal cells untouched.
By Dr Robert Rowen
I’ve told you about some of my discoveries in the past. They include resveratrol, green tea, Seanol, and others. But today I’m going to tell you about another plant that safely starves cancer cells as efficiently as a powerful chemo drug. In fact, it even works on pancreatic cancer cells, which are particularly difficult to kill.
This plant is a common vegetable from Asia called “bitter melon.” It is popular among the long-lived population of Okinawa, Japan.
Bitter melon juice diluted to just 5% in water showed remarkable potency in severely damaging all four pancreatic cancer cell lines researchers tested. The bitter melon reduced the viability of two cancer cell lines by 90%, while it knocked off the other two lines by a staggering 98%. And it did so after just 72 hours of treatment!
In the past, I’ve told you about apoptosis. That’s nature’s way of dealing with wayward cells. They simply kill themselves. Bitter melon juice induced this programmed cell death along several different pathways. And even better, it also activated a pathway, which shows that it knocks out the cancer cells’ metabolism of glucose. In other words, it literally starved them of the sugar they need to survive.
Do these lab dish studies apply to living animals? A resounding yes! University of Colorado researchers gave mice bitter melon at doses easily achievable in humans. The animals had a 64% reduction in pancreatic tumor size without side effects! This level of effectiveness beat the most commonly used chemo drugs for this lethal cancer.
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