Dr. Max Gerson CANCER RESEARCH Hearings before a Subcommittee of the COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS UNITED STATES SENATE SEVENTY-NINTH CONGRESS Second Session on S. 1875

While I was a consultant to the Prussian Ministry of Health in Germany during 1930 – 1933, I had occasion to advise Dr. Hirtsiefer State Secretary of Health, about the deplorable condition of the soil around certain large cities, especially Essen, Dortmund, and Dusseldorf. I suggested the use of human manure, mostly wasted by canalization in place of chemical fertilizers. This was carried out along with the planting of vegetable gardens around these big cities. Composts, i.e., a mixture of dried manure from humans and animals plus straw and leaves, were used to cover these gardens in October and November and were allowed to remain through the winter. The soil was then ploughed in the spring; planting was done from four to six weeks later. Depending upon the original condition of the soil, it took several years or more to develop a fertile topsoil by this method. According to Dr. Hirtsiefer, the results were highly satisfactory, in that vegetables were obtained which were greatly superior in both quantity and quality to those previously obtained by the use of chemical fertilizers. It is interesting that no human disease was transmitted by this type of fertilizing, due, most probably, first to compost being exposed to sun, air, freezing, and snow throughout the winter, and second to the fact that most pathogenic bacteria will not survive long in a healthy soil which normally contains much antibiotic material. This is the method of the natural cycle used for over a thousand years by the farmers of the ancient Teutonic or Allemanic Empire, now known as Western Europe.
For more than 30 years Professor Czapek of Prague collected an enormous amount of information about the mineral content of the lowly potato. He found whenever artificial fertilizer was used on potatoes, there generally was a great increase in the potato crop but at the same time there was more sodium chloride and H20 and less starch and K,P, etc.; therefore, there was a greater vulnerability to many diseases in which excess NaCI and H20 play a prominent causative and dangerous part. … On a commercial fox ranch in the Harz Mountains the owner made a striking animal experiment. He used vegetables and fruits raised by organic gardening to cure foxes with lung tuberculosis after reading in a journal of my method of treating lung tuberculosis. He cured six out of seven foxes with the dietetic regime, containing among other things a great deal of K plus living tissue enzymes; he observed that the furs became extraordinarily good. He then advertised to buy sick foxes from other farms for very little, and established a large business as the low cost tuberculosis foxes regained their health and produced high quality fox furs…
We must conclude from these observations that unless the soil is cared for properly, the depleted soil with its abnormal external metabolism will bring about more and more abnormalities of our internal metabolism, resulting in serious degenerative diseases in animals and human beings. The soil needs activity–the natural cycle of growth; it needs rest; it needs protection from erosion; and finally, it needs less and less artificial fertilizer, but more and more of the use of organic waste material in the correct way, to maintain the soil’s productivity and life. Food produced in that way–we have to eat as living substances, partly fresh and partly freshly prepared, for life begets life. Organic gardening food seems to be the answer to the cancer problem.

Dr. Max Gerson Pages 183 – 185

Chapter XIII – Scientists Term Radiation A Peril to Future of Man

Chapter XXIII – Insecticides. “…spraying with modern insecticides is doing more and more damage to our food and to our bodies. I cannot emphasize too often that our nutrition is our external metabolism…. The introduction for uncontrolled general use by the public of the insecticide DDT, or chlorophenothane, and the series of even more deadly substances that followed, has no previous counterpart in history.” page 167

from CANCER RESEARCH
Hearings before a Subcommittee of the COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
SEVENTY-NINTH CONGRESS
Second Session on S. 1875

A Bill to authorize and request the President to undertake to mobilize at some convenient place in the United States an adequate number of the World’s Outstanding Experts, and coordinate and utilize their services in a Supreme Effort to Discover Means of Curing and Preventing Cancer.

July 1, 2, and 3, 1946

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Songbirds Dying From DDT in Michigan Yards Superfund site blamed by Brian Bienkowski

Songbirds Dying From DDT in Michigan Yards

Superfund site blamed

by Brian Bienkowski

ST. LOUIS, Mich. – Jim Hall was mowing the town’s baseball diamond when he felt a little bump underneath him. “And there it was, a dead robin,” he said.

Just last week, he found another one. “Something is going on here,” said Hall, who has lived in this mid-Michigan town of 7,000 for 50 years.

Two dead birds may not seem like much. But for this town, it’s a worrisome legacy left behind by a chemical plant-turned-Superfund site.

After residents complained for years about dead birds in their yards, 22 American robins, six European starlings and one bluebird were collected for testing.

The results, revealed last week: The neighborhood’s songbirds are being poisoned by DDT, a pesticide that was banned in the United States more than 40 years ago. Lethal concentrations were found in the birds’ brains, as well as in the worms they eat.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. When people told me about it I didn’t believe it. And then we ran these tests. These are some of the highest-ever recorded levels in wild birds,” said Matt Zwiernik, a Michigan State University assistant professor of environmental toxicology who led the testing.

The birds’ brains contained concentrations of DDE, a breakdown product of DDT, from 155 to 1,043 parts per million, with an average of 552. “Thirty in the brain is the threshold for acute death,” Zwiernik said. “All the birds exceeded that by at least two- or three-fold, and many by much more than that.” Twelve of the 29 birds had brain lesions or liver abnormalities.

The culprit is a toxic mess left behind by Velsicol Chemical Corp., formerly Michigan Chemical, which manufactured pesticides until 1963, a year after Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring exposed the hazards of DDT, especially for birds. Populations of bald eagles and other birds crashed when DDT thinned their eggs, killing their embryos. The pesticide, known for accumulating in food webs and persisting for decades in soil and river sediment, was banned in the United States in 1972.

The nine-block neighborhood has become a real-life example of Carson’s “Fable for Tomorrow” in Silent Spring. “It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh,” Carson wrote.

Velsicol is infamous for one of the worst chemical disasters in U.S. history: In 1973 a flame retardant compound they manufactured – polybrominated biphenyls, or PBBs – was mixed up with a cattle feed supplement, which led to widespread contamination in Michigan. Thousands of cattle and other livestock were poisoned, about 500 farms were quarantined and people across Michigan were exposed to a chemical linked to cancer, reproduction problems and endocrine disruption.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took control of the site in 1982 and the plant was demolished in the mid-1990s, leaving behind three Superfund sites in the 3.5-square mile town.

EPA officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the poisoned birds and the Superfund cleanup.

Of most concern is the 54-acre site that once contained Velsicol’s main plant, which backs up to the neighborhood where residents have found dead birds on their lawns.

“When he [Zwiernik] tells people about what we have going on here, people say ‘Really? That’s a 1960s problem,’ ” said Ed Lorenz, a professor at nearby Alma College and vice chair of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force, which represents the community. Hall is the chair of the task force.

While there is a long-term health study for residents who had been exposed to PBBs, no one is monitoring their exposure to DDT or looking for possible human health effects. Elsewhere, traces of the pesticide have been linked in some human studies to reproductive problems, including reduced fertility and altered sperm counts.

“There’s definitely concern about the plant, the plant site, health and the environment,” said St. Louis City Manager Robert McConkie. “But we’ve learned to live with it.”

The town’s median household income is 43 percent lower than the state’s. About 22 percent of its families live below the poverty line.

The birds apparently have been poisoned by eating worms living in contaminated soil near the old chemical plant. No studies have been conducted to see whether the DDT has contaminated any vegetables or fruits grown in yards.

Jane Keon, secretary of the task force, said the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality ignored their complaints about dead birds for years.

But Dan Rockafellow, the state agency’s project manager for the site, said it took time to collect enough bird samples to test.

“People would tell us they found dead birds all the time, but birds disappear quickly. Cats, raccoons, other animals get to them,” Rockafellow said. “They weren’t just lying around everywhere.”

Keon said that for two decades the EPA stayed only on the plant site, “as if the chain link fence would hold in the chemicals or something.”

State officials didn’t start testing people’s yards until 2006, when they found several yards highly contaminated with DDT and PBBs.

EPA contractors now are cleaning up 59 yards. (One homeowner refused the cleanup.) Next year the agency plans on adding another 37 yards outside of the nine-block area.

Most of the contamination is in the top six inches of the soil, probably from the chemicals drifting over from the plant, Rockafellow said. However, some yards have DDT and PBBs deeper in the soil, which could be due to Velsicol’s offer of free fill dirt to their neighbors decades ago.

The cleanup is driven by ecological risk, not risk to the homeowners, Rockafellow said. “This is because of the dead robins.”

When asked why it took so long to address the contaminated yards, Rockafellow said it came down to “knowing where the chemicals were. Once we did we fenced those areas off.” Those areas were cleaned up in the fall of 2012, he said, and that spurred “aggressive sampling in the neighborhood.”

Now the neighborhood is buzzing with trucks and workers. Clad in construction helmets and orange vests, workers contracted by the EPA tear up yards, remove dirt, fill it back in and lay new sod.

It isn’t the first time St. Louis wildlife has been contaminated. The Pine River’s contaminated sediment has resulted in a no-consumption advisory for all species of its fish. From 1998 to 2006, most of the Superfund site’s cleanup money – about $100 million – went toward cleaning up the river. After polluted mud was dredged up, preliminary testing has shown that DDT levels are declining in bass and carp downstream of the site, Rockafellow said.

However, DDT and PBBs remain in the river’s sediment and soil, he said. In addition, traces of a chemical that is a byproduct of DDT manufacturing, pCBSA, have been found in the city’s water system, so new water mains will tap into a nearby town’s water supply.

“Our first priority was water and the second priority is now getting the lawns cleaned up,” Rockafellow said.

The bird testing by the Michigan State researcher was largely unfunded, except for a small amount from the community task force. Zwiernik said the EPA and state need to determine if the cleanup actually stops birds from dropping dead.

“They have to have some kind of future monitoring program to test the remediation effort’s success. We’ve had a difficult time to get regulators to listen to that,” he said.

While birds in the rest of the region aren’t at risk, “the robins’ population in the nine-block area is decimated year over year,” he said.

Residents of the neighborhood go about their business of watering flowers and walking their dogs. “It’s sad because a lot of people here are losing some beautiful trees,” Keon said. She pointed to a large Victorian home with new, patchy sod. “The owner of that home said this was going to be his retirement home,” Keon said.

For Hall, leaving St. Louis is not an option. Pollution or not, this is home.

“It’s a nice place to raise your family, great community, people love and take care of each other,” Hall said. “If I ran away, I’d be running away from my responsibility to leave this place better for the next generation.”

By Brian Bienkowski
Staff Writer
Environmental Health News

August 6, 2014

Health experts are questioning the Environmental Protection Agency and Michigan state officials for their decades-long delays in cleanup of a Superfund site that is killing songbirds in yards, possibly leaving people at risk, too.

After years of complaints from residents, researchers recently reported that robins and other birds are dropping dead from DDT poisoning in the mid-Michigan town of St. Louis, which was contaminated by an old chemical plant.

“The more we know about DDT the more dangerous we find out it is for wildlife, yes, but humans, too,” said Dr. David Carpenter, director of the University at Albany – State University of New York’s School of Public Health and an expert in Superfund cleanups.

Velsicol Chemical Corp., formerly Michigan Chemical, manufactured pesticides at the plant until 1963. DDT, known for accumulating in food webs and persisting for decades in soil and river sediment, was banned in the United States in 1972.

The dead robins and other songbirds tested last month at Michigan State University had some of the highest levels of DDT ever recorded in wild birds. They were contaminated by eating worms in the neighborhood’s soil.

The EPA has been in control of the Superfund site since 1982, and the residents and songbirds have been living with the highly-tainted soil in their yards for decades. This summer, EPA contractors are excavating contaminated soil from 59 yards in the town of 7,000 people. Another 37 yards will be cleaned up next year.

EPA and state officials are not conducting any testing to determine how highly exposed the residents are, or whether they are experiencing any health effects.

Carpenter said research elsewhere has linked DDT exposure to effects on fertility, immunity, hormones and brain development. Fetuses are particularly at risk. It also may induce asthma.

“Let’s say your backyard has DDT in it. If wind blows, and kicks up dust, you might [be exposed to] DDT. The sun shines, water evaporates, you might get a little DDT,” Carpenter said. “And who knows what other chemical exposure they’re getting from the site.”

Michele Marcus, an Emory University epidemiologist, said she and her team of health experts heard “shocking stories” when they visited the neighborhood near the dismantled chemical plant last December.

“We heard from several people in the neighborhood that back in the day [decades ago] on several occasions alarms would go off and the neighborhood would be covered in white powder,” Marcus said. “It would take the paint off of people’s cars. Imagine what it was doing to people.”

When asked why it took three decades to address contamination in people’s yards next to the plant, Thomas Alcamo, remedial project manager for the Superfund site, said “hindsight is 20-20.” He said there were some “obvious problems” with the initial cleanup but he maintained it was “not an oversight.”

“This was just a natural progression of the Superfund. It’s just a continual investigation of the plant site itself,” Alcamo said. “Then we looked at the [Pine] river and focused efforts there. Then the state looked at residential areas.”

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality started sampling some yards in a nine-block area near the plant in 2006, after complaints from residents. Orange fences were installed around heavily contaminated areas. The EPA cleaned up those yards in 2012, Alcamo said. Further sampling, however, found that nearly the entire neighborhood needs cleanup so more excavations began this summer.

Jonathan Chevrier, an epidemiologist at McGill University, said research suggests that fetuses and young children are most vulnerable to DDT. The major worry is brain development in the womb, he said. “Research shows those with prenatal exposure scored lower on neurodevelopmental scales,” which can indicate lower IQs, he said.

There also is evidence that DDT is linked to low birth weights. In addition, a study last month found female mice exposed as a fetus were more likely to have diabetes and obesity later in life.

“The way it kills insects is by affecting the nervous system. It induces a rapid firing of neurons, exhausts them, and then the insect is killed,” Chevrier said. “It’s very plausible that it would attack humans’ nervous systems in the same way.” DDT also may disrupt thyroid hormones, which are critical for brain development, he said.

Nevertheless, EPA officials said St. Louis residents are not in danger. Alcamo said the levels in the soil are not high enough to pose an immediate risk to people.

“This [cleanup] is all for long-term risk so there’s no one that needs to leave during cleanup activities,” he said.

The EPA has not issued recommendations on gardening or other activities while the yards are cleaned up, other than keeping people away from the removed dirt. The agency is monitoring air and controlling dust, Alcamo said. “As long as they wash vegetables,” they should be fine because DDT doesn’t uptake into plants, he said.

However studies have found that some plants can take up DDT, including pumpkin and zucchini and some corn.

Health experts disputed Alcamo’s contention that the DDT levels are not high enough to pose a risk to people. There is no such thing as a level of DDT that “we don’t need to worry about,” Carpenter said.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s a clear health threshold,” Chevrier added. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but, if there is, scientists haven’t found it.”

Velsicol is infamous for one of the worst chemical disasters in U.S. history: In 1973 its flame retardant compound – polybrominated biphenyls, or PBBs – was mixed up with a cattle feed supplement, which led to widespread contamination in Michigan.

Marcus and her colleagues are studying people exposed during the PBB mix-up. They also have launched a new study to examine the levels of PBB, DDT and other chemicals in former Velsicol workers and their families.

Some of the chemical workers in Marcus’ study live adjacent to the plant, but the study does not cover the entire contaminated neighborhood.

Alcamo said community health studies are “outside the scope” of what the EPA does.

Most of the contamination is in the top six inches of the soil, probably from the chemicals drifting over from the plant, but some yards have DDT as deep as four feet, according to an EPA report from April.

All 59 houses tested had at least one soil sample that contained more than 4.1 parts per million of DDT that the EPA set as a cleanup standard. Two-thirds of the yards had at least one sample with more than double the 4.1 parts per million guideline.

The EPA uses a DDT cleanup standard of 5 parts per million based on studies to protect wildlife health, Alcamo said.

“We are using an excavation level of 4.1 ppm DDT to ensure that we are 95 percent confident that we are meeting the 5 ppm number,” he said.

Michigan’s cleanup criteria, based on protecting people from exposure, is 57 ppm for DDT. One home had levels more than twice that amount –140 parts per million in the top six inches of soil.

Alcamo said the EPA is now over-excavating many yards to be certain of cleanup. Contractors will remove about 30,000 tons of contaminated soil this summer.

Alcamo said the EPA has made “great progress,” including a Pine River cleanup. There’s been a “98 percent reduction in fish tissue concentrations of DDT,” he said.

In addition, the EPA is providing 90 percent of the funding to overhaul St. Louis’ drinking water supply because low levels of a DDT byproduct, pCBSA, have been found in the city’s water system.

But Gary Smith, a lifelong resident of St. Louis, said the EPA failed St. Louis on the first round of cleanup, and it cannot happen again.

“We just want the doggone neighborhood cleaned up so we can put an end to this,” said Smith, 63, who is treasurer of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force. “We don’t want to be called a toxic town. We want people to say ‘hey, they cleaned it up.’

“Let’s go the extra mile and not have this be an embarrassment for the EPA again,” he said. “’We have no money’ may be true, but it’s a poor excuse.”

Carpenter said it’s unfortunate that people were probably exposed to DDT for many years.

“The EPA is simply overwhelmed with hazardous sites,” Carpenter said.

EHN welcomes republication of our stories, but we require that publications include the author’s name and Environmental Health News at the top of the piece, along with a link back to EHN’s version.

For questions or feedback about this piece, contact Editor in Chief Marla Cone at mcone@ehn.org.

Follow Brian Bienkowski on Twitter.

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2014/aug/michigan-ddt-cleanup

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“Our Stolen Future,” by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers. Hand-Me-Down Poisons Excerpt

“Our Stolen Future,” by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers.
Hand-Me-Down Poisons Excerpt

Gilbertson had given Colborn complete access to his meticulously organized collection of material on each animal species that breeds in the Great Lakes basin–data that he had gathered over the years and arranged in chronological order in three-ring binders. Colborn was awed by the elegance of the effort and by the years of dedication and scholarly consideration that it reflected. With a sense of history, Gilbertson had gone to great lengths to collect papers and studies dating back a half century or more–literature documenting that the problems seen today in the birds and wildlife along the lakes had not been reported before World War II. In the bald eagle file, she found evidence of parallel declines in the postwar period in the bald eagle in North America and in its European cousin, the white-tailed sea eagle, along with a collection of reports detailing the concentrations of synthetic chemical contaminants found in both species. Photocopies from Gilbertson’s archive had greatly enriched Colborn’s files, but their conversations, during which Gilbertson generously shared his broad experience, had proven even more valuable.

Over lunch in the Canadian Wildlife Service cafeteria, Colborn, Gilbertson, and Fox had discussed the wildlife evidence contradicting the frequent claims that the lakes had been cleaned up. The two Canadians shared the conviction the wildlife work had likely implications for human health and constituted a warning humans ought to heed. In her survey of the scientific literature, Colborn had been fascinated by some of Fox’s work, which reported evidence of behavioral changes in wildlife as well as signs of physical damage.

In herring gull colonies, particularly in highly polluted areas of Lakes Ontario and Michigan, Fox and his colleagues had found nests with twice the normal number of eggs–a sign that the birds occupying the nests were two females instead of the expected male-female pair. The phenomenon, which persisted in some areas, had been particularly prevalent in the mid to late 1970s. During this period, Fox had collected and preserved seventeen near-term embryos and newly hatched chicks from the affected colonies in hopes that he might eventually discover what was causing this unusual behavior and other reproduction problems.

A few years later, Fox encountered a scientist who might help him find the answer. Michael Fry, a wildlife toxicologist at the University of California at Davis, had investigated how the pesticide DDT and other synthetic chemicals disrupt the sexual development of birds after hearing reports of nests with female pairs in western gull colonies in southern California. While some looked for an evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon, Fry had suspected contamination. Reports in scientific literature indicated that a number of synthetic chemicals, including the pesticide DDT, could somehow act like the female hormone estrogen.

To test his theory, Fry had injected eggs taken from western gull and California gull colonies in relatively uncontaminated areas with four substances–two forms of DDT; DDE, the breakdown product of DDT; and methoxychlor, another synthetic pesticide that had also been reported to act like the hormone estrogen. The experiment showed that the levels of DDT reported in contaminated areas would disrupt the sexual development of male birds. Fry noted a feminization of the males’ reproductive tracts, evident by the presence of typically female cell types in the testicles or, in cases of higher doses, by the presence of an oviduct, the egg-laying canal normally found in females. Despite all this internal disruption, the chicks had no visible defects and looked completely normal.

As soon as he could make arrangements, Fox shipped the preserved embryos and chicks off to Fry in California. In his examination of the birds’ reproductive tracts, Fry found that five of the seven males were significantly feminized and two had visibly abnormal sex organs. Five of the nine females showed significant signs of disrupted development as well, including the presence of two egg-laying canals instead of the one that is normal in gulls. Such disruption, Fry noted, could indicate that the birds had been exposed to chemicals that acted like the female hormone estrogen.

Earlier experiments by other researchers had shown that exposing male birds to estrogen during development affects the brain as well as the reproductive tract and permanently suppresses sexual behavior. When chicken and Japanese quail eggs received estrogen injections, the males that hatched never crowed, strutted, or exhibited mating behavior as adults.

Taken together, the evidence in the Great Lakes suggested that the females were nesting together because of a shortage of males, which might be absent because they were disinterested in mating or incapable of reproducing. Though most eggs in these same sex nests were infertile, these females sometimes managed to mate with an already paired male and hatch a chick. The female pairs appeared to be an effort to make the best of a bad situation.

Fox and others had noticed other behavioral abnormalities as well, particularly in birds that had high levels of chemical contamination. In Lake Ontario colonies, the birds showed aberrant parental behavior, including less inclination to defend their nests or sit on their eggs. In unsuccessful nests, the incubating eggs were unattended for three times as long as in the nests where birds successfully produced offspring. A study comparing reproduction in Forster’s terns nesting in clean and contaminated areas reported that nest abandonment and egg disappearance, often due to theft by predators, was substantial in the contaminated area on Lake Michigan but virtually nonexistent in the clean colony on a smaller lake in Wisconsin. Parental inattentiveness clearly diminished the chances that the eggs would hatch and the chicks would survive.

What Colborn remembered afterward about the conversation was how cautious they had all been. Despite the shared view that wildlife findings had implications for humans, no one wanted to acknowledge the unspoken question hanging in the air. No one dared ask whether synthetic chemicals might be having similar disrupting effects on human behavior. Those were treacherous waters they all preferred to avoid.

pages 20 – 22

For additional information – http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/

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Retirement Heist by Ellen E. Schultz. Death Benefits: An Insurable Interest

Retirement Heist by Ellen E. Schultz.

Death Benefits: An Insurable Interest

Over time, life insurance began morphing from a tax shelter into a finance tool for executive pay. For decades, if an individual or company wanted to buy life insurance on someone, they had to have an “insurable interest in the person,” that is, the beneficiary of the policy would be directly affected by the insured’s death. This rule existed for obvious reasons: a skydiver, race car driver, or coal miner–and profit from his demise. And if he didn’t die soon enough, the policyholder would have an incentive to push him over a cliff.

Initially, companies bought policies to protect them from the deaths of certain executives, or “key” employees. It made sense for partners in law and accounting firms to buy life insurance on each other. But encouraged by insurance brokers, companies began buying it on broad swaths of their employees, because by insuring thousands of employees, not just “key men,” the companies can place greater sums in life insurance contracts.

Dow Chemical, the Midland, Michigan, company known for its manufacturing of napalm, breast implants, and Agent Orange, was initially skeptical. An internal memo noted that, except for top-paid executives, it was “doubtful that Dow has an insurable interest in any of its employees.” But it overcame its qualms and by 1992 had purchased life insurance policies on more than 20,000 employees.

Congress had no idea how widespread this practice had become until someone ratted on them. In 1995, a brown envelope was left on the desk of Ken Kies, chief of staff at the Joint Tax Committee. The envelope contained a list of companies that had bought life insurance on employees–along with the calculations showing that a company might take in $1.2 billion over ten years by insuring 50,000 of its employees. It also noted that from 1993 to 1995, Wal-Mart had taken out insurance on 350,000 workers.

Lawmakers did the math and were appalled. They weren’t concerned about whether Wal-Mart had an insurable interest in its stock clerks and store greeters, but they did care a lot about the loss of tax revenue. Companies were borrowing money from policies and deducting the interest. The IRS deemed that the leveraged COLI (corporate-owned life insurance) taken out by seven hundred companies were sham transactions with no business purpose other than to score tax breaks. It filed a flurry of tax court cases, and companies subsequently took big charges for the disallowed deductions for interest on policy loans; among them were American Greetings, the Brooklyn, Ohio, maker of Tender Thoughts brand greeting cards and owners of Holly Hobbie and Care Bears licenses, and W.R. Grace, the Columbia, Maryland, manufacturer of building materials, which took out life insurance policies on its workers while defending thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits.

Within minutes of the interest-deduction phase-out, companies found a way around it. Instead of borrowing money from insurance companies, they simply borrowed it elsewhere. This was called “indirect leverage.” The practice was especially appealing to banks, which can borrow money cheaply. Banks bought fresh policies on employees and in 1997 were floating the idea that they could buy life insurance on depositors and credit card holders as well. Fannie May, the giant mortgage buyer, proposed to insure the lives of home-mortgage holders, but the plan didn’t go far. Congress nixed those ideas and tried to plug the indirect-leverage loophole in 1998. The Joint Tax Committee’s Ken Kies, in classic revolving-door fashion, had quit his government job and was now lobbying for the COLI industry, which led a campaign that blanketed Congress with more than 170,000 letters and faxes and ran a radio and newspaper ads targeting lawmakers as anti-business. The effort to close the loophole failed. Former House Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer, who had criticized janitors insurance as a tax shelter in 1995, joined the board of Clark/Bardes, the most influential COLI provider, in 2001.

pages 123

If the investments weren’t wrapped in an insurance policy, the company would have to sell the investments, then pay taxes on the gains, if it wanted to be able to report the income. Bottom line: Even though companies aren’t supposed to get tax breaks for funding executive deferred comp and pensions, they get essentially the same tax breaks—and accounting benefits—by taking out life insurance on workers.

TO DIE FOR

Though the investments are essentially locked up in the insurance policies, companies receive tax-free cash when employees and former employees die whether in car accidents, in plane crashes, or from illness. Even people who are murdered or accidentally killed at work produce death benefits for their employers.

Companies report the death benefits as income, though they usually refer to them by opaque terms. The St. Louis–based Panera Bread Company calls them “mortality dividends” and refers to a death benefit as a “mortality income receivable” in its filings.

Banks have the largest obligations for executive pay and pensions, so it’s not surprising that they are also the biggest buyers of life insurance on workers, which they call “bank-owned life insurance,” or BOLI. Industry consultants estimate that over the coming decades, banks will receive more than $400 billion in death benefits as their retirees and former employees die. Financial filings occasionally disclose income triggered by deaths. Pacific State Bancorp, of Stockton, California, reported $2.6 million in income from a death benefit in 2008. A subsidiary of Conseco, Bankers Life and Casualty, bought life insurance on employees in 2006 and got an almost immediate payout of $2.7 million that year after an employee died.

Most families have no clue that their relatives are covered. Irma Johnson certainly didn’t. Her husband, Daniel, had been a credit-risk manager for Southwest Bank of Texas, which was a predecessor to Amegy Bank. He was diagnosed with two cancerous brain tumors in 1999 and underwent two surgeries and radiation treatment that initially impaired his speech and left him unable to walk. He eventually returned to work, but in 2000 the bank criticized his communication skills and job performance and demoted him.

Despite the demotion, in May 2001, a manager took Daniel aside and told him that the compensation committee of the board of directors had selected him to be eligible for supplemental life insurance of $150,000. All he had to do was sign an agreement to receive the coverage, and a consent form authorizing the bank to purchase an insurance policy on his life. Four months later, the bank fired him. When Daniel died in August 2008, his family received no life insurance death benefits, because the company had terminated the family’s policy when it fired him.

Irma Johnson says her husband didn’t have the “necessary capacity” to make financial decisions when he signed the agreement in 2001, and that the bank should have told him how much it would get when he died. She sued in state court in Houston in February 2009; under Texas law, material omissions can constitute a form of fraud. During the proceedings, Irma learned that the bank, which maintained that it had bought the policies to offset the cost of providing “employee benefits,” had received $4.7 million when her husband died…

DEATH AND TAXES

Initially, insurance agents touted the death benefits as the most appealing feature of their plans, and some employers were disappointed when employees didn’t die quickly enough to generate the anticipated “mortality dividends” for that year. In a confidential memo in 1991, an insurance agent wrote to Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co. that American Electric Power (20,441 employees covered), American Greetings (4,000), R.R. Donnelley (15,624), and Procter & Gamble (14,987) were “acutely aware” that mortality was running at only 50 percent of projected rates.

The Procter & Gamble plan covered only white-collar employees, which might explain its poor death rate (34 percent of projected mortality), the memo noted. But the disappointing death rate at card maker American Greetings was a puzzle, since the plan covered only blue-collar employees, who are expected to have higher mortality rates. (The white-collar employees were covered by a separate policy with Provident.)

Diebold, the agent wrote, had been expecting $675,300 in death benefits since adopting the plan; so far, it was expecting only one “mortality dividend” of $98,000. “Do you think that a mortality dividend of that size relative to their current shortfall will give them comfort?” the memo said.

A company the agent called NCC had a better death rate, he noted: People were dying at 78 percent expected mortality. “However, this includes three suicides within the first year which is highly unusual”—NCC had not had one suicide in twenty-five years until 1990. “Without these suicides, NCC would be running at 33% expected mortality. This fact highly concerns me.”

To keep track of when employees and retirees die, employers regularly check the Social Security Administration’s database of deaths. That’s how CM Holdings monitored its dead former employees. Page after page of a 1990 document called a “Death Run” lays out the names, ages, and Social Security numbers of more than 1,400 who would be worth more dead than alive. Also included was the amount of money the company was to receive when each employee died, even if the death occurred long after he or she left the job. Older workers would bring the company about $120,000 to $200,000 each, while younger workers would generate $400,000 to almost $500,000 each, the document said. (Younger workers yield bigger payouts because, based on actuarial calculations, they are less likely to die soon, so the premium amount buys more coverage for them.)

One of these workers was Felipe M. Tillman. Born in 1963, Tillman was an unlikely source of revenue for CM Holdings. A music lover whose taste ran from opera to jazz and even country music, he played keyboards and drums, sang, and was choral director at his Tulsa, Oklahoma, church. To make ends meet, he took part-time jobs in record stores, including a brief stint at a Camelot Music outlet owned by CM Holdings. As a minimum-wage, part-time employee, he didn’t have health coverage or other benefits. But CM Holdings nonetheless took out a policy on his life. It didn’t have to wait long for a payoff. Tillman died in 1992, of complications from AIDS. He was twenty-nine years old.

CM Holdings used the $168,875 death benefit it received when Tillman died to pay for executive compensation, among other things. Company documents also show that $280 went to Star County Children’s Services to help cover child support payments owed by a nephew of Camelot Music’s founder, who was working at the company at the time.

Another name on the company’s “Death Run” was Margaret Reynolds, of Uniontown, Ohio, born in 1936. Margaret was an administrative assistant and buyer for CM Holdings, making $21,000 a year. In the 1990s, she began deteriorating from the effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. In her final years, her adult children, who took turns caring for her, begged the company to provide $5,000 to pay for a special wheelchair so they could take their mother to church. “They said it wasn’t covered,” her son John Reynolds recalled bitterly. His mother died in 1998 at age sixty-two. Her family received a $21,000 benefit from a life insurance policy provided to employees by the company; CM Holdings received a death benefit payout of $180,000.

 

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Max Gerson, M.D. 1881 – 1959

Max Gerson died in 1959. He was eulogized by one of his long time patients, Albert Schweitzer.

I see in him one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine. Many of his basic ideas have been adapted without having his name connected with them. Yet he has achieved more than seemed possible under adverse conditions. He leaves a legacy which commands attention and which will assure him his due place. Those whom he cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas.

I must confess that I probably never would have bought his book had I not read Albert Schweitzer’s comment. I would like to first present information from his book without declaring its title. I would like you all to discover this man in the same manner in which he was revealed to me. Evidence and information presented in his book is profound especially given its publication was in 1958.

Thomas Edison believed that, “The doctors of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.” This is the story of one such doctor. The following are excerpts of his 1958 book.

Introduction

At this time, of course, it is not possible to replace a century-long pessimism with an overwhelming optimism. We all know that everything in biology is not as precise as in mathematics or physics. I fear that it will not be possible, at least in the near future, to repair all the damage that modern agriculture and civilization have brought to our lives. I believe it is essential that people unite, in the old conservative manner, for the humanitarian purpose of producing nutrition for their families and future generations as natural and unrefined as possible.

The amount of damage done by chemical fertilizers, spraying, and insecticides which lead to a chronic poisoning of the soil can be estimated when we realize how many poisons go into the fruit and vegetables we eat, into the cattle, the eggs and butter we consume and the milk which we and our children drink.

For the future of coming generations, I think it is high time that we change our agricultural and food preservation methods. Otherwise we will have to increase our institutions for mental patients yearly, and we will see the hospitals overcrowded with degenerative diseases even more rapidly and in greater numbers than the hospitals themselves can be enlarged.

Seventy years ago, leukemia was unknown in the United States. Fifty years ago, lung cancer was so seldom observed in clinics and autopsies that every case was worthy of a publication. But today-what a change for the worse. (O quae mutatio rerum.)

The coming years will make it more and more imperative that organically grown fruit and vegetables will be, and must be, used for protection against degenerative diseases, the prevention of cancer, and more so in the treatment of cancer.

I am more than ever convinced that biochemistry and metabolic science will be victorious in healing degenerative diseases, including cancer if the whole body or the whole metabolism will be attacked and not the symptoms.

The family has to give up some of the social life and do this humanitarian work with deep devotion. The decline in our modern life is evident by this lack of devotion for the sick members of the family.
page 3, 142, 143

Scientists Term Radiation A Peril to Future of Man

A Cumulative Effect

Shock and surprise were expressed by the committee on genetics in its finding that the American public was using up about one third of the safety limit in medical and dental X-rays. Its members called on the medical profession to reduce the use of X-rays to the lowest limit consistent with medical necessity.

This committee also urged a national system of personal records whereby every American would know his total amount of exposure. The effect of radiation is cumulative, it is said, no matter how long the period over which it is experienced.

The six committees studied the radiation problem in the fields of genetics, pathology, meteorology, oceanography, and fisheries, agriculture and food supplies, and disposal and dispersal of radioactive wastes….

Pathological effects: Dr. Shields Warren, Chairman — Recommendations will be made in the future. The committee concluded in agreement with geneticists that radiation, no matter how small the dose, shortens life in some degree…

Dr. Weaver’s genetics committee recommended as a general population safety limit that exposure to radiation should be held down to 10 roentgens for the first 30 years of a person’s life. A roentgen is a unit for measuring the harmful gamma ray from medical and dental X-ray equipment, nuclear weapons explosions and from natural causes like cosmic rays and natural radium.

As a result of medical X-rays it is estimated that each person in this country receives on the average a total accumulated dose to the gonads or sex glands about three roentgens in 30 years. “Of course, some persons get none at all; others may get a good deal….” Dr. Weaver declared it was “stupid genetically” to use X-ray for the fitting of shoes. He was referring to the X-ray devices that have become common in shoe stores and into which children often stare in awe, sometimes without regard to time at the shadows of the bones of their feet.

Dr. Weaver also condemned obstetricians who make X-ray pictures of pregnant mothers to show them how “beautifully formed” is the skeleton of their baby without realizing the “hazards” of the dose of three or four roentgens that is being administered.

In addition to six long summary reports of the committees, the scientists also issued “a report to the public” in the simplest language possible. Here the layman may now read how radiation damage inevitably results from exposure, no matter how small the dose.

Radiation causes mutation or harmful changes in the genes or germ lines of the reproductive organs. Damage manifests itself in shortening of the life span, reduces the ability to produce children, and sometimes, but not often, produces deformed children.

Even if the mutations is in one gene, there is some harmful effect that mutation will go on through every generation until the line that bears it becomes extinct.

The report explained how “every cell of a person’s body contains a great collection, passed down from the parents, the parents’ parents, and so on back, of diverse heredity units called genes.”

The layman’s report went on to explain:
“From the point of view of the total and eventual damage to the entire population, every mutation causes roughly the same amount of harm. This is because mutant genes can only disappear when the inheritance line in which they are carried dies out. In cases of severe and obvious damage this may happen in the first generation; in other cases it may require hundreds of generations.

“Thus, for the general population, and in the long run, a little radiation to a lot of people is as harmful as a lot of radiation to a few, since the total number of mutant genes can be the same in the two cases.”

But damage to future generations due to radiation will be difficult to identify. The study of genetics damage has only just begun, with a report due on genetic effects observed in the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese cities destroyed by American atom bombs in World War II …

The following appeared in an article on radiation in the New York Times on July 21, 1957:

Safety Limit Set

As a safety limit, the National Academy of Sciences has recommended, that the average person receive not more than ten roentgens of man-made radiation to the reproductive organs from conception to the age of 30.

The roentgen is a unit of measurement of radiation dose.
The report also lends new support to the repeated warnings of atomic officials and scientists that man faces a far greater danger from medical use of radiation than he does from the radio-active fall-out from atomic testings

A similar warning came last month from Dr. Leroy E. Burney, Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service, who said that in view of the increasing sources of radiation in the nuclear age, the time had come to reassess the safety levels of radiation from medical treatment.

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness in the medical profession of the potential danger of radiation from X-ray treatments, and steps have been instituted to limit the radiation dose.

Insecticides

We have learned in recent years that spraying with modern insecticides is doing more damage to our food and to our bodies. I cannot emphasize too often that our nutrition is our external metabolism. Whoever is interested in this field may read the Hearings Before the House Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products, House of Representatives Eighty-First Congress, Second Session. There is clearly described in the hearing of Dr. Biskind what he observed in this field and what he recommended ought to be done.

The following is a brief survey of this hearing: “The introduction for uncontrolled general use by the public of the insecticide DDT, or chlorophenothane, and the series of even more deadly substances that followed, has no previous counterpart in history. Beyond question, no other substance known to man was ever developed so rapidly and spread so indiscriminately over so large a portion of the earth in so short of time. This is the more surprising as, at the time DDT was released for public use, a large amount of data was already available to the medical literature showing that this agent was extremely toxic for many different species of animals, that it was cumulatively stored in the body fat and that it appeared in the milk. At this time a few cases of DDT poisoning in human beings had also been reported. These observations were almost completely ignored or misinterpreted.

“In the subsequent mass use of DDT and related compounds a vast amount of additional information on the toxicity of these materials, both in animals and in man, has become available. Somehow a fantastic myth of human invulnerability has grown up with reference to the use of these substances. Because their effects are cumulative and may be insidious and because they resemble those of so many other conditions, physicians for the most part are unaware of the danger. Elsewhere, the evidence has been treated with disbelief, ignored, misinterpreted, distorted, suppressed or subjected to some of the fanciest double talk ever perpetrated.

“Early last year I published a series of observations on DDT poisoning in man. Since shortly after the last war a large number of cases had been observed by physicians all over the country in which a group of symptoms occurred, the most prominent feature of which was gastroenteritis, persistently recurrent nervous symptoms, and extreme muscular weakness.

– Dr. Gerson then goes on to site the case studies in great detail.
pages 163 -164

The Significance of the Content of the Soil to Human Disease

The familiar expression “mother earth” is justified. When we take from and rob the earth we disturb the natural equilibrium and harmony, producing sickness of the soil, sickness of the plants and fruits (the common nutrition), and finally sickness of both animals and human beings.

As a physician who has spent much of his life investigating the nutritional aspects of disease, I have often had occasion to observe a definitive connection between dietary deficiencies and a sick or poor quality soil.

The relationship between soil and plants on the one hand and animal and human nutrition on the other is to me a fascinating subject. This relationship is a natural cycle in which one may distinguish two great parts:

I. The first part, which may be called “external metabolism,” is comprised of the following:
(a) Plants and their fruits.
(b) Composition of the soil in which they grow–thus being the real basis of all nutrition.
(c) Transportation, storage, and preparation of these food stuffs.

II. The second part, known as “internal metabolism” consists of all the biochemical transformations that take place when such foodstuffs enter the animal body and support the nutrition and growth of its cells and tissues.

When foodstuffs are ingested, their metabolism is influenced directly by the biochemical changes of the individual body and indirectly by the condition of the soil from which they came. The type of metabolic change thus directly affects nutrition and growth of body tissues. There is an external and internal metabolism upon which all life depends; both are closely and inextricably connected with each other; furthermore, the reserves of both are not inexhaustible. There are, of course, some exceptions, about five to ten percent of the population who have an extraordinarily well-functioning reabsorption and good storage capacity apparatus.

This is to emphasize the great importance of metabolism to human health, i.e., the soil as the basis of life which is generally neglected to a great extent.

There are then numerous soil studies illustrating relationships between soil health and plant and animal health.

We must conclude from these observations that unless the soil is cared for properly, the depleted soil with its abnormal external metabolism will bring about more and more abnormalities of our internal metabolism, resulting in serious degenerative diseases in animals and human beings. The soil needs activity–the natural cycle of growth; it needs rest; it needs protection from erosion; and finally, it needs less and less artificial fertilizer, but more and more of the use of organic waste material in the correct way, to maintain the soil’s productivity and life. Food produced in that way–we have to eat as living substances, partly fresh and partly freshly prepared, for life begets life. Organic gardening food seems to be the answer to the cancer problem.

page 175-176, 185

Paracelsus’ Dietary Regime

The body needs nutrition through which it is bound to nature. However, that which we have to give to the body as nutrition also contains toxins and damaging substances…

The human being has to acquire knowledge of what to eat and drink, and what he has to weave and wear, because nature gave him the instinct of self-preservation. For the things that one does for the prolongation of one’s life are ordained by Great Nature. If someone eats what is useful for his health and avoids other things that may shorten his life then he is a man of wisdom and self-control. All that we do should serve to prolong our life….
page 49

In themselves, the statements of Paracelsus about diet are not uniform but one can notice everywhere in them the thought that combines them; their chemical effect. Everywhere in his writings it can be perceived how he would like to dissect everything into the finest particles (atoms) and find an interpretation; it seems as if he would like a penetrating power to enable him to look into things microscopically. The layman only sees the surface; the physician must be able to visualize the inside and the hidden facts which combine to form the whole, regardless of whether it is a piece of wood or bone. Marvelous are his ideas about the chemical reactions and his passionate love for all chemical occurrences which he applied to the reactions of the body long before his time. Paracelsus seeks to develop everything from its origin. In that he always observes three things: the heaven, the earth, and the microcosm; it is similar with healing. Man can only be comprehended through a microcosm; not through himself alone. Only knowledge about this harmony perfects the physician.

This short condensation does not take a critical stand in the historical sense towards the statements of Paracelsus as measured against the knowledge of his time. It merely seeks to show how stimulating his writings are and the wealth of ideas which shines through everywhere, how intense his urge to find causal connections in accordance with the eternal laws in nature outside of the body and the same laws ruling inside the microcosm.
page 53

The Concept of Totality-Decisive in Cancer and Other Degenerative Diseases.

Cancer is a chronic, degenerative disease, where almost all essential organs are involved in the more advanced cases: The entire metabolism with the intestinal tract and its adnexa, the liver and pancreas, the circulatory apparatus (the cellular exchange supporter), the kidneys and bile system (as main elimination organs), the reticulo-endothelial and lymphatic system (as defense apparatus), the central nervous system and especially the visceral nervous system for most metabolic and motoric purposes.

Dr. Nicholas was probably one of the first in our time who recognized the “concept of totality” as applied to disease. He combined the following clinical appearances: Emotional, nutritional, poisons, infections, accidents and inheritance as underlying causes for diseases: “No wonder we are all sick….and science is no longer science when it attempts to violate God’s natural law.”

Some cancer biologists are of the opinion that “cancer is a phenomenon co-existent with the living processes,” “that the cancer cell is not something living exclusively from the body,” and that the cancer cell is not a special “system isolated from the living organism.” They are united with and part of the whole body.

It has been emphasized before that cancer develops in a body which more or less has lost the normal functions of the metabolism as a consequence of a chronic daily poisoning accumulated especially in the liver.” It is important to realize that in our body all the most innermost processes work together, depend on each other, and will be deranged with each other in diseases. That is the reason why all of them together have to be attacked for healing purposes at the base and in combination. My clinical experiences revealed that this is the surest way to success of a therapy. Most parts of the general metabolism can be found concentrated in the liver. The biological function of the liver itself, however, depends on the proper activity and correct cooperation of many other essential organs….

Medical science has eliminated the totality of the natural biological rules in the human body, mostly by dividing research and practice into many specialties. Doing intensive, masterly specialized work, it was forgotten that every part is still only a piece of the entire body.

In all textbooks, we find that single biological processes have been studied and overestimated statements made about them. The symptoms of a disease have become the main problem for research, clinical work and therapy. The old methods sought to combine all functional parts in a body into a biological entity, have been pushed aside almost involuntarily, in the clinic, and especially in institutions of physiology and pathology. Finally, that idea became very remote in our thinking and therapeutical work. The opinion of the best cancer specialists is, as Jessie Greenstein stated, “Emphasis must be laid on a direct study on the side of malignancy itself,” despite the fact that his book is an excellent collection of physiological changes in the other organs, especially the liver. In my opinion, the application of the concept of totality can help us find the true cause of cancer; it could be best worked out in practical examples, not in animal experiments where every little symptom is observed singly (by itself).

In the nutritional field, observations for centuries have shown that people who live according to natural methods in which plants, animals and human beings are only fragments of the eternal cycle of Nature do not get cancer. On the contrary, people who accept methods of modern nutrition on an increasing scale become involved in degenerative diseases, including cancer, in a relatively short time.

In later medical history, the best known cancer-free people were the Hunzas, who live on the slopes of the Himalaya mountains and who use only food grown in their own country and fertilized with natural manure. Imported food is forbidden. Very similar is the story of the Ethiopians who also have natural agriculture and living habits which seems to prove that this type of agriculture keeps people free of cancer and most degenerative diseases.

The damage that modern agriculture brings into our lives begins with the soil, where artificial fertilization leads to the displacement of mineral contents and changes in the flora of microbes combined with the exodus of the earthworms. Consequently, frequent erosion of arable land takes place. These changes bring about, at the beginning, an irritation of the plants; later they cause their degeneration. Spraying with poisonous substances (insecticides) increases the poisons in the soil, and these poisons are transferred to plants and fruits.

We must conclude from these and many other observations that the soil and all that grows in it is not something distant from us but must be regarded as our external metabolism, which produces the basic substances for our internal metabolism. Therefore, the soil must be cared for properly and must not be depleted or poisoned; otherwise, these changes will result in serious degenerative diseases, rapidly increasing in animals and humans beings. The soil needs activity–the natural cycle in growth and in rest–and natural fertilizer, as we have to give back that which is necessary to replenish the consumed substances. This is the best protection against erosion; it also maintains the soil’s microbic flora, productivity and life. Food planted and grown in this way must be eaten partly as living substances and partly freshly prepared, for “life begets life.” Very significant are reports about Eskimos who get degenerative diseases and cancer in those parts of their country where canned food and unnatural nutrition were introduced and accepted.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who built a hospital in Lambarene, Central Africa, 40 years ago, reported in his letters of October, 1954, the following:

“Many natives, especially those who are living in larger communities, do not live now as the same way as formerly–they used to live almost exclusively on fruits and vegetables, bananas, casava, ignam, taro, sweet potatoes and other fruits. They now live on condensed milk, canned butter, meat-and-fish preserves and bread.” Dr. Schweitzer observed in 1954 the first operation on appendicitis on a native of this region.” …. The date of the appearance of cancer and other diseases of civilization cannot be traced in our region with the same certainty as that of appendicitis, because the microscopic examinations have only been in existence here for a few years…. It is obvious to connect the fact of increase of cancer also with increased use of salt by the natives…. Curiously enough, we did not have any cancer cases in our hospitals before.”

Dr. Salisbury reported, concerning the Navajo Indians, that he had, in 23 years, 35,000 Indian admissions in the hospital, with only 66 cases of cancer. The death rate among these Indians is one out of 1,000, while it is about one out of 500 among Indians who have accepted part of the nutrition of modern civilization.

The Bantu population of South Africa has 20 percent primary liver cancers. Their diet, of a very low standard, consists chiefly of cheap carbohydrates, maize and mealy meals. Seldom do they have fermented cow’s milk. Meat is eaten only at ceremonies. Two physicians, Dr Gilbert and Dr. Gilman, studied their nutrition habits in animal experiments and placed stress on the diet of the Bantus as a cause of cancer…..

To the great complexity of the biological functions of the body belongs also its capacity of adaptation. A healthy body can adapt itself to different types of nutrition. It reabsorbs the necessary minerals, vitamins, and enzymes as we know from experiments to determine the time for the clinical appearance of one type or another of vitamin deficiency. A sick body has lost this capacity. The deficiencies cannot be restored as long as the essential organs are poisoned. That is true in cancer also, as demonstrated by clinical observations.

Cancer, the great killer, will be prevented and can be cured if we learn to understand the eternal laws of totality in nature and in our body. Both are combined and have to be united in a effective treatment for cancer; in that way we can learn to cure cancer in a higher proportion, even in advanced cases. The limitations of the totality of functions of the whole body, however, also come into action here. The totality of functions is lost if one or another vital organ is too far destroyed. I saw, in several patients, tumors of the abdomen absorbed, and in others, hundreds of nodules and nodes on the skin and some as the base of the brain eliminated, but the patients died of cirrhosis of the liver in a period of one to three and a half years afterwards.

A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and The Cure of Advanced Cancer by Diet Therapy

About the Author

Dr. Max Gerson first came to the attention of the medical profession and the public in 1929, when he developed an effective treatment for tuberculosis of the skin (Lupus), which was until then considered incurable. Under the supervision and sponsorship of the internationally famous surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, this new therapy has been tested on 450 patients at the University of Munich. Of these 446 made a complete recovery.

Dr. Gerson studied medicine at several well-known German Universities including Freiburg, Breslau, and Berlin. He was associated with some of the finest hospitals and was assistant to the eminent neurologist, Ottfried Foerster. He has lectured at universities and to medical assemblies in the principal cities of Europe. After D. Gerson came to the United States twenty-two years ago, he devoted himself to the study and treatment of cancer.

In July 1946, a Senate Subcommittee under the chairmanship of Senator Claude Pepper, witnessed a demonstration of cancer patients whose health had been restored by Dr. Gerson’s therapy. This was the first time in the history of the United States Senate that a physician was so honored. This demonstration is in the Congressional Record.

Dr. Gerson has published fifty medical papers and three books.

Preface

My approach is mostly in the field of nutritional changes. Most of the details of the findings and application already have been proved by scientific research. The results obtained in the cases presented here were the result of the application and composition of the demonstrated facts. These findings have been combined in the last years with the idea that intensive and maintained detoxification of the diseased body is required for a longer period than described in previous publications. In recent years the public has been educated and alerted towards the difficult problem of malignancies and the unceasing search for a successful treatment. While this book was written for the medical profession primarily, I endeavored to write it so intelligent laymen could understand the main problems involved. Several chapters were written at different times; therefore the reader will find a number of repetitions.

The history of medicine reveals that reformers who bring new ideas into the general thinking and practice of physicians have a difficult time. Very few physicians like to change their medical approaches. The majority practice what they have learned and apply the treatments of the textbooks more or less automatically. Right from the beginning, the physician wants most of all to help the patient. He hesitates to take risks for his patients by applying a not-recognized treatment. The history of science, art and technology shows that each new idea has been fought bitterly; most of the reformers did not live to see the realization of their ideas.

This is one of the reasons why developments in culture made very slow progress all through the centuries; they were restrained forcefully.

I was in a more favorable position. Ninety to ninety-five percent of my patients were far advanced (terminal) cases without any risk to take; either all recognized treatments had failed or the patients were inoperable from the beginning. It takes some time to acquire enough experience to see progress, results or failures.

page xvi

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge with deep gratitude the cooperation and encouragement received from the Foundation for Cancer Treatment, Inc., a non-profit organization formed many years ago by grateful patients for the purpose of perpetuating the treatment as described in this book. To the following directors of the Foundation, I would like to express my special thanks: Professor Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Professor Henry Schaefer-Simmern, Mr. Carl Groper, Rev. Dr. Erwin Seale, Professor Fulmer Mood, Mr. Louis J. Rosenthal and Mr. Arnold J. Oberlander.

This publication is an exemplification of the work of Max Gerson, M.D., on his treatment of cancer as disclosed to the United States Senate in public hearings held July 1, 2, and 3, 1946. It is designed as a report on his continued work in cancer treatment, and will be filed with the United States Senate when it again resumes hearings on means of curing and preventing cancer. The title page of the U.S. Senate Committee report, containing 227 pages, follows:

Cancer Research
Hearings
before a
Subcommittee of the
Committee on Foreign Relations
United States Senate
Seventy-Ninth Congress
Second Session
on
S. 1875

A bill to authorize and request the President to undertake to mobilize at some convenient place in the United States as adequate number of the World’s Outstanding Experts, and coordinate and utilize their services in a Supreme Effort to Discover Means of Curing and Preventing Cancer.

July 1, 2 and 3, 1946

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations
United States
89471 Government Printing Office
Washington: 1946

A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases

About the Book

The great majority of Dr. Gerson’s patients have been terminal cases, which in most instances had been treated by conventional methods or had been previously diagnosed as inoperable. With fifty years of medical research and clinical experience to guide him in the practical handling of such patients, Dr. Gerson has developed the therapy which this volume describes in detail. Here are its fundamentals, the history of its development and its practical management.

This volume offers a different approach to the problem of cancer based on the concept of totality. Emphasis is placed on the deteriorated metabolism as a whole with the liver as its central organ. Dr. Gerson believes tumors to be only symptoms of cancer since they reappear all too frequently. The real disease affects and weakens the entire body. In order to bring about the healing processes, the liver and other vital organs must be restored and the body functions reactivated to as near normal as possible.

For a more effective prevention of cancer as well as other chronic and degenerative diseases, this book presents a sensible dietary regime–a nutrition that can be followed by the average family in order to maintain health and build the best possible bodily strength for defense purposes.

The fifty case histories selected for this book have been chosen from the many hundreds of cases from Dr. Gerson’s files in the hope that they may be of interest to the members of the medical profession.

Here we find favorable results in far advanced, internal cancer cases.

After more than 25 years of cancer work I can draw the following conclusions:

1) Cancer is not a local but a general disease, caused chiefly by the poisoning of foodstuffs prepared by modern farming and food industry. Medicine must be able to adapt its therapeutic methods to the damages of the processes of our modern civilization.

2) A method is elaborated to detoxify the body, kill the tumor masses and to absorb and eliminate them. (Restoration of the healing power.)

3) A way has been found to restore the liver if not too far destroyed and repair the destruction caused by the tumor masses.

– Dr. Max Gerson

See Abstract of New York Academy of Medicine and reprint of the New York City Cancer Committee in the book, Cancer Alerts, 1957.

I highly recommend reading this fascinating book. I will end this excerpt with his list of necessary foods & forbidden foods and consumer products given to his cancer patients.

Necessary Food

This diet consists mainly of the following organic foods

Fruit
Juices of fruit, vegetables and leaves
Vegetables, salads
Special Soup
Potatoes
Oatmeal, bread, etc.

All Freshly Prepared and Saltless

Forbidden

Nicotine
Salt and all substitutes

Foods

Bottled
Canned
Refined
Salted
Smoked
Sulphured
Frozen
Preserved

Alcohol
Avocados, nuts (too much fatty acid.)
Berries (aromatic acids cause unfavorable reactions)
Fat
Flour (white)
Beverages (commercial)
Bicarbonate of soda in food, toothpaste, gargle
Candy
Cake
Chocolate
Cocoa
Coffee, also instant
Cream
Cucumbers (too much sodium)
Epsom Salts
Ice Cream
Mushrooms
Nuts
Oil
Pineapples (too many aromatic acids)
Spice (Pepper, Paprika)
Soy Beans and Soy Products
Sugar (white)
tea
drinking water (Distilled only)

Temporarily Forbidden until further notice:
Butter
Cheese
Eggs
Fish
Meat
Milk

Fluoride in toothpaste, gargle
Hair dying and Permanents

Utensils

Do not use: Pressure cookers or any aluminum pots or utensils

Use: Stainless Steel, glass, enamel, earthenware, and cast iron.

Utensils for the Preparation of Juices

Use: A separate grinder and a separate press.

Do not use: One-unit machines such as liquifiers, centrifuges, juice mixers or masters, etc.

Fluoridation of the water supply has become very common in many communities. Since fluorides are among the most powerful enzyme inhibitors and since healing requires the reactivation of enzymes, it is obvious that fluorides must be eliminated from all food and water supplies as much as possible. Fluoridated toothpastes or enzyme inhibiting toothpastes must be avoided along with all other toxic substances such as insect sprays, paint sprays..
page 399.

Task of the Saltless Diet in Cancer

The main task of the saltless diet is to eliminate the retained Na, Cl together with toxins and poisons from the tissues all over the body.

All poisons and other substances difficult to eliminate are stimulants for the sick tissues, especially liver and kidneys. That condition seems to be the reason why sodium chloride excretion increases in tuberculosis, cancer and other chronic diseases after two to three days on a saltless diet, and this condition stays at that higher level for about eight to fourteen days, corresponding to a favorable development in the course of the disease. After that is accomplished, it stays near normal level with the saltless diet.
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Liver Functioning & Chemical Synergies – An Excerpt – Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Liver Functioning & Chemical Synergies

An Excerpt from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

One of the most significant facts about the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides is their effect on the liver. Of all the organs in the body the liver is most extraordinary. In its versatility and in the indispensable nature of its functions it has no equal. It presides over so many vital activities that even the slightest damage is fraught with serious consequences. Not only does it provide bile for the digestion of fats, but because of its location and the special circulatory pathways that converge upon it the liver receives blood directly from the digestive tract and is deeply involved in the metabolism of all the principal foodstuffs. It stores sugar in the form of glycogen and releases it as glucose in carefully measured quantities to keep the blood sugar at a normal level. It builds body proteins, including some essential elements of blood plasma concerned with blood-clotting. It maintains cholesterol at its proper level in the blood plasma, and inactivates the male and female hormones when they reach excessive levels. It is a storehouse of many vitamins, some of which in turn contribute to its own proper functioning.

Without a normally functioning liver the body would be disarmed–defenseless against the great variety of poisons that continually invade it. Some of these are normal by-products of metabolism, which the liver swiftly and efficiently makes harmless by withdrawing their nitrogen. But poisons that have no normal place in the body may also be detoxified. The “harmless” insecticides malathion and methoxychlor are less poisonous than their relatives only because a liver enzyme deals with them, altering their molecules in such a way that their capacity for harm is lessened. In similar ways the liver deals with the majority of the toxic materials to which we are exposed.

Our line of defense against invading poisons or poisons from within is now weakened and crumbling. A liver damaged by pesticides is not only incapable of protecting us from poisons, the whole range of its activities may be interfered with. Not only are the consequences far-reaching, but because of their variety and the fact that they may not immediately appear they may not be attributed to their true cause.

In connection with the nearly universal use of insecticides that are liver poisons, it is interesting to note the sharp rise in hepatitis that began during the 1950’s and is continuing a fluctuating climb. Cirrhosis also is said to be increasing. While it is admittedly difficult, in dealing with human beings rather than laboratory animals, to “prove” that cause A produces effect B, plain common sense suggests that the relation between a soaring rate of liver disease and the prevalence of liver poisons in the environment is no coincidence. Whether or not the chlorinated hydrocarbons are the primary cause, it seems hardly sensible under the circumstances to expose ourselves to poisons that have a proven ability to damage the liver and so presumably to make it less resistant to disease.

Both major types of insecticides, the chlorinated hydrocarbons and the organic phosphates, directly affect the nervous system, although in somewhat different ways. This has been made clear by an infinite number of experiments on animals and by observations on human subjects as well. As for DDT, the first of the new organic insecticides to be widely used, its action is primarily on the central nervous system of man; the cerebellum and the higher motor cortex are thought to be the areas chiefly affected. Abnormal sensations as of prickling, burning, or itching, as well as tremors or even convulsions may follow exposure to appreciable amounts, according to a standard textbook of toxicology.

There is interaction even between the two major groups of insecticides usually thought to be completely distinct in their action. The power of the organic phosphates, those poisoners of the nerve-protective enzyme cholinesterase, may become greater if the body has first been exposed to a chlorinated hydrocarbon which injures the liver. This is because, when liver function is disturbed, the cholinesterase level drops below normal. The added depressive effect of the organic phosphate may then be enough to precipitate acute symptoms. And as we have seen, pairs of the organic phosphates themselves may interact in such a way as to increase their toxicity a hundredfold. Or the organic phosphates may interact with various drugs, or with synthetic materials, food additives–who can say what else of the infinite number of man-made substances that now pervade our world.

The effect of a chemical of supposedly innocuous nature can be drastically changed by the action of another; one of the best examples is a close relative of DDT called methoxychlor (Actually, methoxychlor may not be as free from dangerous qualities as it is generally said to be, for recent work on experimental animals shows a direct action on the uterus and a blocking effect on some of the powerful pituitary hormones–reminding us again that these are chemicals with enormous biological effect. Other work shows that methoxychlor has a potential ability to damage the kidneys.) Because it is not stored to any great extent when given alone, we are told that methoxychlor is a safe chemical. But this is not necessarily true. If the liver has been damaged by another agent, methoxychlor is stored in the body at 100 times its normal rate, and will then imitate the effects of DDT with long-lasting effects on the nervous system. Yet the liver damage that brings this about might be so slight as to pass unnoticed. It might have been the result of any number of commonplace situations–using another insecticide, using a cleaning fluid containing carbon tetrachloride, or taking one of the so-called tranquilizing drugs, a number (but not all) of which are chlorinated hydrocarbons and possess power to damage the liver.

Damage to the central nervous system is not confined to acute poisoning; there may also be delayed effects from exposure. Long-lasting damage to brain or nerves has been reported for methoxychlor and others. Dieldrin, besides its immediate consequences, can have long delayed effects ranging from “loss of memory, insomnia, and nightmares to mania.” Lindane, according to medical findings is stored in significant amounts in the brain and functioning liver tissue may induce “profound and long lasting effects on the central nervous system.” Yet this chemical, a form of benzene hexachloride, is much used in vaporizers, devices that pour a stream of volatilized insecticide into homes, offices, restaurants.

The organic phosphates, usually considered only in relation to their more violent manifestations in acute poisoning, also have the power to produce lasting physical damage to nerve tissues and, according to recent findings, to induce mental disorders. Various cases of delayed paralysis have followed use of one or another of these insecticides. A bizarre happening in the United States during the prohibition era about 1930 was an omen of things to come. It was caused not by an insecticide but by a substance belonging chemically to the same group as the organic phosphate insecticides. During that period some medicinal substances were being pressed into service as substitutes for liquor, being exempt from the prohibition law. One of these was Jamaica ginger. But the United States Pharmacopia product was expensive, and bootleggers conceived the idea of making a substitute Jamaica ginger. They succeeded so well that their spurious product responded to the appropriate chemical tests and deceived the government chemists. To give their false ginger the necessary tang they introduced a chemical known as triorthocresyl phosphate. This chemical, like parathion and its relatives, destroys the protective enzyme cholinesterase. As a consequence of drinking the bootleggers’ product some 15,000 people developed a permanently crippling type of paralysis of the leg muscles, a condition now called “ginger paralysis.” The paralysis was accompanied by destruction of nerve sheaths and by degeneration of the cells of the anterior horns of the spinal chord.

About two decades later various other organic phosphates came into use as insecticides, as we have seen, and soon cases reminiscent of the ginger paralysis episode began to occur. One was a greenhouse worker in Germany who became paralyzed several months after experiencing mild symptoms of poisoning on a few occasions after using parathion. Then a group of three chemical plant workers developed acute poisoning from exposure to other insecticides in this group. They recovered under treatment, but ten days later two of them developed muscular weakness in the legs. This persisted for 10 months in one; the other, a young woman chemist, was more severely affected, with paralysis in both legs and some involvement of the hands and arms. Two years later when her case was reported in a medical journal she was still unable to walk.

The insecticide responsible for these cases has been withdrawn from the market, but some of those now in use may be capable of harm. Malathion (beloved by gardeners) has induced severe muscular weakness in experiments on chickens. This was attended (as in ginger paralysis) by destruction of the sheaths of the sciatic and spinal nerves.

All these consequences of organic phosphate poisoning, if survived, may be a prelude to worse. In view of the severe damage they inflict upon the nervous system, it was perhaps inevitable that these insecticides would eventually be linked with mental disease. That link has recently been supplied by investigators at the University of Melbourne and Prince Henry’s Hospital in Melbourne, who reported on 16 cases of mental disease. All had a history of prolonged exposure to organic phosphorus insecticides. Three were scientists checking the efficacy of sprays; 8 worked in greenhouses; 5 were farm workers. Their symptoms ranged from impairment of memory to schizophrenic and depressive reactions. All had normal medical histories before the chemicals they were using boomeranged and struck them down.

Echoes of this sort of thing are to be found, as we have seen, widely scattered throughout medical literature, sometimes involving chlorinated hydrocarbons, sometimes the organic phosphates. Confusion, delusions, loss of memory, mania–a heavy price to pay for the temporary destruction of a few insects, but a price that will continue to be exacted as long as we insist upon using chemicals that strike directly at the nervous system.

Portions taken from pages 191 – 198

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