HS 277 - A World Without Cancer, The Story of Vitamin B17 with G. Edward Griffin

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It's my pleasure to welcome G. Edward Griffin back to the show. He's been on several of our shows. On the Creating wealth show, of course, he is the very famous author of a fantastic book entitled the Creature from Jekyll island, talking about monetary policy in the Federal Reserve and some very fascinating history there. But today we want to talk about some of his other work. We want to talk about a world without the story of vitamin B17. Ed, welcome. How are you?

Well, thanks, Jason. I'm doing fine. I appreciate your invitation.

Yeah, it's good to talk to you again. So tell us, how did you get interested in some of these alternative health pursuits?

Well, that's a good question. I've often asked that of myself. It seems like it's pretty random. I have a lot of interests like most people do and I bounce around a lot. And every once in a while I feel like I'm kind of a roulette ball bouncing around the rim of the wheel. And every once in a while it just sort of sticks in one of those slots. And that's where I choose to work for the next couple of years on some topic. I don't really choose the topics, I don't think as much as they choose me. And in this particular case, I had no interest in health outside of, you know, wanting to have a name of a good doctor to go to if you get sick. That was about my level of self responsibility for my own health, just to know a good doctor. And I had no interest in alternative health. I had no interest in cancer therapy. I just hoped and prayed that I never got cancer. In other words, I was like many people. And the only reason I became involved in this topic is because a very good friend of mine was a medical doctor in the San Francisco area and we had a very close relationship and we like to get away from business and go off and talk about big, important things and all that sort of thing. Well, anyway, one of those occasions we did that, he asked for my help. And I said, how can I help you, John? He said, well, I'm starting to use an alternative cancer therapy in my practice. And he said, I'm having amazing results, very good results, much better than anything that I've ever seen before. And now the profession, the medical profession, is threatening me to take my license away if I don't stop using it. And I said, what? How can that be? I said, who? Who are these people, John? Who are they that would want to do such a stupid thing as that if this is working? He said, well, that's what I need your help for. He said, I'm a doctor. I treat patients. You're a writer and you communicate ideas. And he said, I'd like to ask you to help me write an article that I could publish. And he meant himself that he could publish in some journal or newspaper or magazine and explain how this material is supposed to work or they think it works to explain the results he's getting and get the profession off of his back. That was his idea. So I said, well, sure, I'll be glad to help in any way I can, but you'll have to, you know, feed me the information so I can get up to speed. Well, that's how I got interested in it. I had no idea. I certainly had no idea what I was getting into. I thought that project would probably take about, oh, maybe a couple of weeks and we could get it done and move on to other things. I had no idea that I was going into what turned out to be probably an initial period of 10 years of research and investigation and learning, exploration. And I certainly had no idea how much voltage was in that wire I was about to grab.

Yeah, that's a good metaphor.

Yeah. I mean, the voltage was so high, I was touching one of the most generous income streams ever. You know, the profession, medical profession, has a great income stream, and within that, the cancer industry is huge. And anything.

Well, you already touched the one on the banking and Wall street world, so. And that one's pretty big.

Yeah, at that time, I hadn't touched the banking line yet.

So I had a few more to touch. But, yeah, that's the analogy. And so, you know, whenever there's a great flow money in any industry, if you start to upset the apple cart and ask too many questions, you become very unpopular. So that's how it all started.

Yeah. So what was that treatment? Your doctor. It was a doctor friend who was using it. Right. What was he?

Dr. John Richardson. Well, the treatment is known in the journals, the news as Laetril. And that's a good name for it because it's the name given to it by the person who applied it in the field of cancer for the first time. And his name was Dr. Ernst T. Krebs Jr. But actually it's a therapy. The substance behind leotril is a therapy based on a compound that is found in nature and it's been known for a long, long time. And it's called amygdalin. But it's only when they take amygdalin, which is found widely in plants, edible plants, and they refine it and concentrate it, purify it. Then only then do they call it leotril, because now it's medical grade and it can be used in the treatment of diseases. But amygdalin and leotril essentially are pretty much the same thing.

Talk about vitamin B17. Where does that come into play?

Well, yeah, I always like to make it clear that it's not officially vitamin B17. It hasn't been declared to be that by whoever declares it. I don't know who it is that determines when something is a vitamin, but it certainly involves some kind of a consensus in the medical and science community, and that has not been achieved in this case. It's called vitamin B17 because Dr. Krebs called it that and he acknowledged that it wasn't officially a vitamin, but he said the compound itself and its action is very similar to the other B vitamins. And since there were 16 of them that were already identified, and since in his view this was a life essential substance, it should be called vitamin B17. And so that's how that moniker got tagged onto it.

Hmm, very interesting. Okay, so what should people do with this knowledge, this something that you use as a prevention, as there a preventative tool here, or is there simply a cancer treatment tool?

It's basically a prevention. It's found in nature and you know, nature is capable of curing, but its primary function is to keep everything going well in the first place. And you said, what should the average person do with this? And I think the honest answer is the average person should be skeptical, should ask questions, shouldn't just rush right into it. I certainly didn't. I was quite skeptical, although I did have a great deal of confidence in my friend Dr. Richardson. Still, it had to be proven to me because it didn't make sense to me that a simple substance that's found in nature, you know, you don't need to get a prescription for it. All you need to do is find the foods that include it and you eat it. And that's supposed to. To cure your cancer. That didn't sound right to me. You know, it sounded like quackery, and that's what they were calling it at the time. So the first step is to question it and then dig into the rationale and the scientific evidence that supports why it should work. And then once you have a handle on that, then you can start to deal with how you should react to it. So if you don't mind, I would just like to give you a very short explanation of how this stuff works.

Of course, yeah.

It's a very fascinating study. And bear in mind, I had to learn all of this stuff. I was not prepared when I started into this research, but fortunately, I had a lot of good teachers. Dr. Richardson, Dr. Krebs, I got to know very well. There were about 12 or 13 other practicing physicians that were using this, and they all helped me a lot. And some researchers and even some help from the National Cancer Institute was very beneficial for me. So, anyway, here's what I learned, and it is that this substance called amygdalin is a molecule that contains four components. It has two components of glucose, sugar, basically one part of cyanide. And we'll come back to that word. Yeah, that scares a lot of people. Right. And one part of benzaldehyde. If cyanide scares you, benzaldehyde should too, because it's also very toxic.

It doesn't sound good.

It doesn't sound good, and it's not. And especially when you combine benzaldehyde and cyanide together, it becomes even more toxic than either of them separately. So it's something to be very cautious about. So who in the right mind would want to be taking food which contains benzaldehyde and cyanide? Good question. So the first thing we have to understand is, what is cyanide? Cyanide is a gas. It's very toxic in its nascent form, its gaseous form. And they use it to exterminate people. They use it for executions and so forth. Everybody knows that you don't want that. But in its pure form, it's toxic in a gaseous form. But when it's found in food, it's not a gaseous form. It's not cyanide at all. It's cyano, something else. It's combined with something else. And in the solid form, it is not necessarily toxic at all. For example, vitamin B12 is called cyanocobalamin. It has cyanide in it. Now, if cyanide were deadly in all forms, we'd all be dead because we go out and we buy jars full of vitamin B12 when we're not feeling well. The fact is that cyanide is a life essential element or compound when it is found in combination with other elements and other compounds, as in vitamin B12. And that is exactly how it is in Laatril. It's not free cyanide, it's not gaseous cyanide, it's cyano. And then it's combined with these other elements of glucose and benzaldehyde. So there you go. The idea of being afraid to take amygdalin or any of the foods that it's found in, such as in apricot seeds or apple seeds or any of those things, you find it in there, instead of being worried about it, you should be very joyous because it is not toxic. It is actually life giving. So here's what happens. The only thing you have to worry about with this amygdalin molecule is the release of cyanide and benzaldehyde. You have to be worried about something that might split that component apart and release those toxic elements. And there is only one thing really that is common that does that, and that is an enzyme. It's called beta glucosidase. Took me a long time to remember the word in my book. When I wrote about it, I just called it the unlocking enzyme. A lot easier to remember. But that is the enzyme that unlocks this molecule and releases the cyanide and the benzaldehyde. And you got to look out for that enzyme because that could be a problem. So now the question is, where do you find that enzyme? And I hope all your listeners are sitting down for this because it is found in cancer cells.

Oh, you're not going to say apricots?

Yes, yes. It's found in cancer cells, this enzyme, and only in cancer cells, primarily in the body. I mean, all cells have a trace amount of it, but it's so small it doesn't do anything. The only time it's in any quantity sufficient to be a factor in releasing the cyanide that's found in these foods is in cancer cells. And so what we have is a beautiful mechanism of nature that results in the fact that if you have a cancer cell forming and you also are eating native foods, rich foods that have Trace amounts of amygdalin. The amygdalin goes through your system la di da very happily, actually providing nutrition along the way. But when it comes in contact with a cancer cell, it meets this un unlocking enzyme and releases the cyanide and the benzaldehyde, and the cancer cell commits suicide. Now, that is the very short. It's kind of an oversimplified explanation, but in principle, it is exactly what happens in the lateral therapy. Now, there's nothing mysterious about this mechanism that I just described is found in the textbooks. It's just conveniently ignored. And there's a big debate as to whether or not it really works that way. But you can always prove that it does, because you go to the textbooks and the experiments that were done long before it became controversial, and it is proven that that is how basically it works. So that's pretty exciting. It's a beautiful mechanism of nature. It couldn't have been just accidental. And it reinforces that concept that I had become very appreciative of in later years. And that is we have to have great respect for nature. Nature knows how to do a lot of things that scientists will never figure out.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that a lot of western medicine really wants to overlook that because it's not patentable, it's not profitable.

And as the old saying goes, follow the money.

Yeah, you touched on the nerve cell there. That is what makes the whole thing controversial is the fact that nothing in nature is patentable. And so therefore, the industry, the pharmaceutical industry, which makes billions of dollars off of patented drugs, is not interested in anything that comes from nature unless they can isolate it and find some little fraction of the compound, and then they can replicate that in a test tube, and then now they can patent a part of it. And that's what they always try and do with all of these discoveries that come from nature. They want to examine the herbs and the grasses and the foods and find out what is the component in it that work. And then they can create that in a test tube and patent it. And sometimes it has some effect. But generally, when they break the original complex compound part and just use a part of it and not the whole thing, it backfires in some way, and it's either not as effective at all or actually has some negative side effects to it.

When people look at stuff like this, they're concerned that it's not sort of sanctioned by the American medical Association, obviously. Right. If they were to use these alternatives as their treatment, I mean, they're risking their life, but they're risking their life with chemotherapy and other things. Also, I would say, how does someone know with some degree of certainty which is the best path? Can you do both at once?

Jason, that's why I began this whole thing by saying the first thing a person should do is be skeptical and start to check things out.

I heard you say that, and I appreciate that. And that just shows that you are a balanced, ethical person, that you say that to people. But even after that, what do they do? I mean, how should they be skeptical? What do you rely on? It's great advice, but there's more to it, right?

Well, there's a lot more to it, yes, because it's true that even though you're skeptical and you're willing to do the research, I mean, not everybody has 10 years of their life to spend like I did, to dig into this. I understand that. And so somewhere along the line you have to come up with a few general principles like the one I just mentioned a moment ago. Respect nature. There's another general principle I think you come to after you've been in this kind of a thing for any while, and that is to question authority. Because authority is very easily corrupted, especially when there are huge income flows involved.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Any industry, any profession, any field of politics, I mean, I don't care what it is, even religion, if there is a huge flow of money involved, there is probably, and I use that word advisedly, I want to say there is always. But I'll back off just a hair and say there's probably corruption somewhere along the line. So that's the next thing you have to learn, is to question authority. And after you do that, then I think the next thing is to be willing to look around and see who is physically benefiting, health wise. Where are the cures? Look at the people who are in our books. For example, we publish case histories, we have hundreds of them that we publish of people who were firmly diagnosed with incurable cancer. They were given a few weeks or a month at most to live. They couldn't walk. They were carried into Dr. Richardson's clinic on a stretcher or in wheelchairs. They were expected to conk any day. And now we can demonstrate that 20 years later they're walking around playing golf, you know, playing with their grandchildren. And this is not just one rare exception, this is common. And so you have to look around for things like that. Once you run into people like that, as I have, and even just run into two or three of them, it gets Pretty convincing. I've seen hundreds. No more. Many hundreds of people like that. So that's the next thing you can do. And once you do that, if you respect nature, question authority, and look around for the success stories, I think you don't need to be a rocket scientist. You don't have to understand the chemistry. I think you just then have to say, huh, this looks interesting. I think I'll give it a try.

Right? Yeah, yeah. Can you do things concurrently? Like if someone were to be diagnosed and they're listening to this show and thinking, you know, I want to try this stuff, but I want to go with what the doctor says so my insurance company can spend $300,000 on my treatment.

Yeah.

You know, being snarky, of course, you know, and do chemo at the same time. Like, what do you do? Is there sort of hedge your bets alternative, I guess, is what I'm asking.

Well, there are. And a lot of people do that because they're not sure. I mean, they. They haven't really gotten to that. My second point that I mentioned a moment ago, they don't really question authority.

Right.

They see that stethoscope hanging around a white coat.

Yeah. And they think that's the authority right there.

And they see that diploma on the wall, and that just is overpowering. And I can understand that because, you know, I was there once, too. It's quite logical if you don't understand the possibility of corruption in an industry like that, because I used to think that all doctors, you know, they only had one thing in mind, and that was to cure their patients. I never dreamed that even subconsciously, perhaps, that the object was not to cure a disease, but to maintain it so that you keep coming in for treatment over and over again for the rest of your life. Never dreamed that that was the model in the industry. So people haven't come quite to the point where they're ready to fully question authority, so they want to strad. Spread their bed a little bit. And so now we come to that. Can it be done? And yes, a lot of people do it all the time. But we have to remember that most of the orthodox treatments are highly destructive of nature. And we're back to the first principle again, that does not respect nature. Chemotherapy, radiation in particular, are very destructive of the immune system. And the immune system is one of the frontline defenses against cancer.

That's a great point.

And I believe that most of these people that die of cancer, you look at their death certificate, it says they died of cancer. Really? What? They died of was the cancer treatment because it destroyed their immune system, it made them weak, it killed their digestive system, it gave them anemic condition, probably created more cancer than it burned away or poisoned away all of those things. But nevertheless, it's still. There's nothing in amygdalin therapy or most alternative therapies that I'm aware of. There's nothing in any of them that contraindicates the use of anything else. It's all positive. There's nothing that can interact. There's one element that I should say or mention that might be considered an exception to that, and that is with the apricot seed. This requires a little explanation. I mentioned earlier that there was an enzyme called beta glucosidase that was the unlocking enzyme and could release toxic components from amygdalin. And I said it's found only in one place in any appreciable amount, and that was in cancer cells. Well, another place it's found in unappreciable amounts, very small amounts. But nevertheless, it's still there is in the seeds of some fruits like apricots and peach and plum and that cherry and so forth, apple. In other words, along with the amygdala, there is a little bit a trace amount of unlocking enzyme. Now, it's not enough to cause any serious problem Unless you're taking an ungodly amount of apricot seeds.

Now, for example, if you ate a seed with every apricot that you ate, There'd be some kind of a natural limitation of somewhere probably around 5, 6, 7, maybe 8. There have been cases reported, by the way, never confirmed, but reported, of people who have eaten a whole cup full of apricot seeds, you know, maybe 50, 60 or 70 or something like that, and they get very, very sick. And this I can believe is true because I've seen people eating more than they should.

So just eat five of them or so. Is that what you're saying?

The rule of thumb that I like to use is that if you're eating anything like that, just don't eat any more of the seeds than you would likely eat if you were also consuming the whole fruit. So whatever that is. Well, that's perfectly safe. When I eat them and I eat them quite regularly, I usually eat six. All right, I eat six. I've never had any problem. I probably could eat 12 or 15, but I wouldn't want to go that far.

Right. But that's what concerns me about people who are really into juicing, for example, is that I Don't think our creator meant for us to have the equivalent of five pounds of carrots in an eight ounce glass. When I drink some of these juice drinks, you know, you're drinking a cup of sugar sometimes. I mean, it's not meant to be that way. We were supposed to have one banana, one apple, not, not a whole bunch of it. Right. Do you agree with that? Is there some truth to that?

Remember I said respect nature? Yeah, right, Isn't it? Yeah. I don't think you can, you know, you're not going to kill yourself by eating a pound of carrots. But if you did it every day, every day for a long, long time, I don't know, it might have some adverse effects on it. I agree with that.

All right, good. So what else do you want people to know?

Well, let's see. So that's what I want them to know about. That's what I discovered. And I'm not advocating anything except I'm answering questions about what I discovered. And the reason I wrote this book is because I felt it was a very important discovery and that if more people understood what this mechanism was and how it worked, I think we could all but eliminate cancer in the world today. And back to your earlier question, is this a cure or is it a prevention? In nature, it's meant to be a prevention. I mean, I think that if people ate the whole foods, the wholesome foods that was intended for them, you'd never have cancer to cure in the first place. In other words, if you ate a couple of apricot seeds or a couple of apple seeds every day or a couple of times a week, or you got this in other sources. There are other foods that have this too in trace amount. I don't think cancer would be. In fact, I'm convinced of that. Cancer would not be a problem. And the reason I say that is because one of the things I looked into when I wrote this book, Jason, was those places in the world where cancer is unheard of, they're mythical places, we thought at first. Now we find out they're real. The Hunzas, for example, in a little tiny kingdom between North Pakistan and India. It's up there, hidden in the mountains, actually the real place after which the story Shangri La was written.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it's a real place. It's so remote, or at least it was until recently. Now I think they cut a jeep trail into it somehow. But it used to be you couldn't get to Hunza without crossing these rope bridges across deep ravines. And walking along on the edges of sheer cliffs and things like that. So not many Westerners made it in and out, but some of them did. And they wrote books about it and took pictures and so forth. And I was fortunate enough to get those books and look at those pictures and hear the stories. And Hunza, I'm just using that as an example. Cancer was unheard of there. And it's a primitive society. So primitive that they didn't really have money, as we call it. For money, they used apricots.

How coincidental.

Yeah, man's wealth was measured pretty much by the number of apricots, apricot trees he owned. And they ate the apricot and the seeds. The women crushed the seeds and took the oil out and made cosmetics out of it. And the apricot seed was a delicacy in Hunza. And Hunza never had any cancer. All of them lived to be much older than in Western civilization. I mean, the average age in Hunza at that time, I think, was about 95 years old. And these guys and women were running around in perfect health, and they would drop dead relatively quickly. It wasn't this case of slow decline. They probably just fell off a cliff or something, I don't know. But they were quite active in their 80s and 90s, but they never had any cancer. But, however, when the Hunza cuts left Hunza and went into Pakistan, for example, and started to eat the foods that they eat in Pakistan, they came down with cancer like everybody else. So it was not a genetic thing. And you find that over and over again, like in the Hopi Indians and the Navajo Indians in North America, the aboriginal Eskimos up in Alaska. Interesting case. When the U.S. army and Air Force went up there to install these radar systems, you know, during the Cold War, they call it the dew line. And the military went up there and had all these installations in the Quonset huts and so forth. And they hired the Eskimos to do some of the grunt work, you know, the digging and, you know, whatever the Eskimos could do. And so a lot of the Eskimos came there to get a good job and get a pay. And they left their homes for a while and they left their native diets. And the Eskimos who never had cancer before were dropping with cancer just the same as the servicemen up there. In fact, even a little bit more statistically.

Right.

Where did the Eskimos get amygdalin? Well, we found it. I shouldn't say we. The researchers found it. The Eskimos of course they eat the caribou, they kill the caribou and they eat the caribou. That's one of their favorite meals. And the caribou has what is called a rumen. It's sort of a second stomach. It's a pre digestive stomach. And the caribou eat the grasses and they can, you know, get the grasses from underneath the snow and they find it even where men couldn't find it. Caribou eat the grasses and then when the caribou is butchered by the Eskimo, they take out this sounds gruesome, but they take out this.

Open it up and they extract the pre digested or partially digested grasses that are in the rumen and they eat it like a salad. Wow, it is really rich in amygdalin.

Very interesting. You know, it's amazing how all these cultures discovered this and how we need to definitely be conscious of our roots and all the stuff that's been discovered throughout history. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, really good stuff.

That's the reason I'm convinced that if the world got back to a diet which included natural sources of amygdalin, cancer could become so rare as to be almost an oddity.

Yeah, good stuff. Give out your website Ed and tell people where they can find out more about this and you know, your other work.

Our website is Reality zone so it's realityzone.com we have about 100 different educational things there, books and recordings on this and many other topics and you'll find world without the story of vitamin B17.

As one of those fantastic G. Edward Griffin thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you Jason for inviting me. Hope we can do it again.

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