Few diagnoses are more terrifying than cancer. The type and stage of cancer make a significant difference in the prognosis. And the treatment options are almost always highly unpleasant without being guaranteed to work. Many people who receive a cancer diagnosis immediately resolve to do whatever they can to fight the insidious disease, including submitting to harsh treatments like radiation and chemotherapy. Often, such treatments are necessary to eradicate the cancer. But if you’re going to endure them, you want to be sure you’re doing all that you can to make them as effective as possible. Fortunately, I have a suggestion about a way you can do just that.

The secret is in a canning ingredient that you may have used to preserve jams. It’s simple pectin. When most people think of “pectin,” they think of the thickening agent used in canning. But whether you enjoy making jam or not, you’ve probably never given much thought to what pectin actually is or where it comes from. Pectin is a type of carbohydrate that can be found in the inner cell walls of most plants. It’s essentially abundant in the peel and pulp of citrus fruits. However, the pectin found there is hard for us to absorb (there’s a reason we peel these fruits). So scientists have found a way to make it easier for our bodies to break the pectin down and absorb it. These shorter, more soluble fibers are known as modified citrus pectin, or MCP.

Beyond being a good source of fiber, MCP doesn’t offer much in the way of nutrition. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good for us. In fact, MCP can be enormously helpful in a cancer fight, for two main reasons. Let me explain how it works.

You may or may not have heard of a cell signaling protein called galectin-3. Galectins are sticky, so they can cause cells to group together. And these proteins, which are commonly found in epithelial and immune cells, are linked to cancer growth and metastasis. In fact, a study from the Karmanos Cancer Institute at Wayne State University linked galectin-3 to a number of negative cancer characteristics, including aggressiveness, growth, dissemination of cancer cells through the bloodstream, and tumor growth. The study also found that galectin-3 may help cancer cells live longer. Researchers at Canada’s University of Alberta linked high levels of galectins in the bloodstream to increased rates of breast and prostate cancer as well as melanoma. Galectin-3 is also heavily linked to chronic and acute inflammation and pro-inflammatory diseases, including kidney fibrosis, liver failure, allergies, autoimmune disease, atherosclerosis, and arthritis.

The good news is that MCP can help break up galectin-3’s party. When galectin-3 attaches to a cancer cell, MCP can recognize it and stick to it. This makes it hard for the galectin to clump up and contribute to cancer growth. In essence, this inactivates the protein and can halt disease progression in its tracks.

Galectin isn’t the only cell signaling protein that plays a role in cancer progression, and it’s also not the only cell signaling process that MCP is able to interrupt. A number of studies have found that MCP can jam cancer cell signaling processes while allowing healthy cells to continue to communicate with one another. Rendering these cancer-promoting cells inert also makes them easier targets for the immune system.

Another contributor to cancer risk are heavy metals lurking throughout the body. We can accumulate these toxins in very small doses by breathing in polluted air, drinking unfiltered water, using harsh cleaning products, eating some types of seafood, and even being exposed to dental materials. Various products like antiperspirants may also contain trace amounts of heavy metals. Once these metals, like lead or cadmium, get into the body, they’re very hard to get out, so even if you are only absorbing trace amounts at a time, after decades of such exposure, you could have quite the burden.

As these toxic heavy metals take up residence in your body, they can cause a number of problems. These metals can suppress your immune system and contribute to genetic mutations, which can in turn drive cancer growth. So you want to get them out of your system as quickly as possible (in addition, of course, to minimizing your exposure to them in the first place by avoiding pollution and consumer products made with dangerous ingredients).

As I said, it’s hard for the body to remove these toxic metals on its own. But MCP can help. MCP acts as a chelating agent, meaning that it binds to heavy metals. The body recognizes this substance as something it needs to flush out. As the body flushes the MCP, the heavy metals go with it.

A study conducted at California’s Amitabha Medical Clinic and Healing Center reveals the efficacy of MCP as a chelating agent. The researchers gave 15 healthy participants 15 grams of MCP for five days and 20 grams on day six. They took urine samples and tested them for heavy metals at the end of day one and the end of day six.

After just 24 hours, the participants’ arsenic excretion had increased by 130%. By day six, cadmium excretion had increased 150% over day one, and lead excretion increased by a huge 560%. The researchers also tested the patients’ levels of essential minerals like zinc, magnesium, and calcium, and found that the chelation process did not affect them. It seems that MCP is able to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. And these results were in healthy people – imagine what MCP chelation could do for people whose heavy metal burden has started to make them unwell!

The benefits of MCP don’t end there. Other research had found that MCP can help the immune system ramp up to fight leukemia cells. It can induce apoptosis (cell death) in cancer cells and inhibit proliferation and metastasis. It also works synergistically with chemotherapy and radiation treatments, helping them work more effectively. In fact, a study conducted at Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel found that MCP could make aggressive androgen-independent prostate cancer cells more vulnerable to radiation treatments. I know my female readers don’t have prostates to worry about. But most of you have loved ones who do. And this study provides a great example of how powerful MCP can be.

When cancer cells become radio-resistant, radiation therapy becomes much less effective. This study found that MCP can increase the radio-sensitivity of these cells. And that’s not all. The researchers first tested the effects of MCP on prostate cancer cell lines. With just the MCP, cell viability decreased quite a bit. That’s impressive on its own. But the magic really happened when MCP was combined with the radiation treatment. This reduced cell migration by 20% and cell invasion by 40%. This is great news for patients whose cancer isn’t responding well to radiation treatments. No one wants to undergo such an intense therapy only for it to be minimally effective.

Clearly, MCP has numerous benefits for cancer patients. I frequently recommend it, and if you or a loved one is fighting cancer, I strongly recommend talking to your doctor about adding it to your arsenal. The form I prefer is PectaSol Detox Formula, which you can order by calling 800-791-3395 (don’t forget to give the special offer code WH2318). You can take it daily even if you aren’t fighting cancer to support your body’s natural detoxification processes. It’s always better to be moving heavy metals out before they can accumulate, so if you live in a polluted area or just suspect your heavy metal load is high, I recommend giving it a try. Cancer patients can use the same formula, just at a higher dose. Many experts recommend a minimum of 1 teaspoon (5 g) three times a day. To get 5 grams of MCP, you’d have to take 20 capsules of our PectaSol Detox Formula. If you prefer to buy the powder in bulk, you can do so from www.EcoNugenics.com. It comes with a 5 gram scoop.

Many factors allow cancer to grow and spread throughout the body. MCP can help fight some of these and is a well-tolerated, naturally based ally if you find yourself in this war.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/modified-citrus-pectin-enhances-radiation-therapy-in-prostate-cancer-treatment-300070001.html.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-research-modified-citrus-pectin---a-potent-anti-cancer-therapy-210050381.html.

https://thetruthaboutcancer.com/modified-citrus-pectin-mcp/.

http://www.pfeifer-protocol.com/2015/04/oral-mcp-enhances-anti-cancer/.

Struggling With Depression, Fatigue, and Insomnia? This Little-Known Hormone Could Be Deficient

Women hear about their hormones a lot. They’re an easy scapegoat for a number of issues, and they certainly play a major role in our health. But the hormone that’s having the biggest impact on your well-being might be one you’ve never even heard of.

That was the case for Audrey, a 61-year-old patient of mine who came to see me two years after her husband of 35 years had passed away. She was frustrated because she hadn’t been able to regain a sense of emotional stability after losing him. She’d recently given up taking an antidepressant because it was her third attempt with psychiatric drugs, and none of them had helped. Still, she felt depressed and, in her words, “bone tired.” Moreover, she had trouble sleeping and couldn’t tolerate the statin her cardiologist had recommended. With all of these conventional treatment options failing her, Audrey wanted help getting to the root cause of her issues. I had a feeling I knew what it was: a hormonal deficit.

The hormone I suspected Audrey was lacking is called pregnenolone. It’s sometimes referred to as a prohormone and can be considered the “mother” of all the steroid hormones. In fact, DHEA, testosterone, aldosterone, cortisol, progesterone, and estrogen all rely on pregnenolone for their creation. If you’re in good health, you’ll likely find that having the right amount of pregnenolone boosts your energy, mental acuity, and mood. It can also reduce inflammation, enhance wound healing, and even improve sleep.

Based on her symptoms, I suspected low pregnenolone might be at the root of Audrey's complaints. So I had her start taking pregnenolone capsules every night. After three weeks, she called to reschedule her follow-up appointment. She felt so good that she didn’t think she needed to bother coming in. I agreed to let her continue the capsules for three months and then check in.

When Audrey stepped into my office three months later, I almost didn’t recognize her. She stood up straight and seemed bright and lit from within. She reported that she was sleeping “wonderfully,” her mood had reached a 9 on a 1-10 scale, and she was even thinking about going back to work. Audrey proved to be one of my more remarkable pregnenolone cases, but she just goes to show how powerful having the right levels of vital hormones can be.

A study published in the journal Psychiatry Research helps confirm the benefits of pregnenolone for people suffering from depression. In this study, researchers randomly divided 70 participants with bipolar disorder or recurrent major depressive disorder and a history of substance abuse or dependence into two groups. One group received a placebo for eight weeks, while the other group received 100 mg of pregnenolone per day. The researchers used a variety of tests to evaluate the participants, measuring their cognition at baseline, week four, and week eight, and their mood bi-weekly. The pregnenolone group showed greater improvements than the placebo group on both the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression and the Young Mania Rating Scale. The pregnenolone also appeared to be safe for and well-tolerated by all of the participants. The researchers believe that pregnenolone may be useful for treating patients with manic and depressive symptoms.

I agree, but it’s important to use pregnenolone only for patients who have depression alone, not depression accompanied by anxiety. Pregnenolone can increase your cortisol levels, which can in turn increase anxiety and affect sleep, particularly if you’re already over-producing cortisol. It’s also important that you exercise early in the day when you’re taking pregnenolone, as the exercise combined with the cortisol increase can make sleep difficult. However, if you’re waking up with low cortisol levels, the pregnenolone and exercise combination can be extremely beneficial. People with chronic inflammation often benefit greatly from pregnenolone supplementation as well.

One more note: If you have serious adrenal fatigue (which I’ve written about extensively in previous issues, which are available on my website), you should not take pregnenolone supplements without the guidance of a physician knowledgeable about bio-identical hormones. If your adrenal system is exhausted from pumping out hormones, adding additional pregnenolone can easily make the problem worse, particularly if it further heightens your cortisol production.

Many people find that pregnenolone boosts everything from energy to vision to memory to clarity to libido. Women have also reported that it eases hot flashes and other premenstrual and postmenopausal symptoms. However, because this hormone is so powerful, it’s best to start with small doses and to take it under a doctor’s supervision. If you find that you tolerate it well and are having great results like Audrey, you can certainly continue it. In Audrey’s case, adjusting her pregnenolone levels was all it took to help her begin to get her life back. Your improvements may not be quite that dramatic – but they could be. If you’re not feeling like yourself, you’ll never know if the issue truly is hormonal unless you investigate.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178109003473

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4200497/

https://www.grc.com/health/research/Pregnenolone/Pregnenolone_Review.pdf

Green Tea for Patients With Knee Osteoarthritis

You don't have to be a reader of Women's Health Letter for long to learn what one of the most healthful beverages is: green tea. Just when you think the news about this potent drink can't get any better, new research comes out telling us even more. The latest news about green tea shows how it can help alleviate knee pain.
For this study, researchers recruited participants between the ages of 40 and 75 who had experienced moderate knee osteoarthritis for at least six months. Patients whose arthritis had become severe, who had experienced heart problems or gastrointestinal bleeding, were pregnant, or were hypersensitive to caffeine or alkaline drugs were not allowed to participate in the study. The researchers were able to identify 50 patients who met their criteria and divided them into two groups. All of the participants took 100 mg of diclofenac, an NSAID used to treat pain and inflammation related to arthritis. But half of the participants also took 1,500 mg of green tea extract per day.

The researchers assessed the knee pain the participants experienced throughout the study as well as their physical function and joint stiffness. While both groups experienced improvements in their pain, only the green tea group had better physical function. This group also experienced more significant improvements in total pain levels. None of the green tea recipients experienced any unpleasant side effects either.

Green tea has powerful anti-inflammatory properties, so it's not surprising that it helped significantly. In fact, I'd love to see researchers conduct a study using green tea and a natural proteolytic enzyme (such as Reduloxin or Wobenzyme — available at Amazon.com) and leave the NSAID out of it.

If you have osteoarthritis, you might be able to test this out for yourself. You can get the same amount of green tea used in the study by taking Green Tea Extract (800-791-3395). And, in fact, the product used in the study contained just 33.973% epigallocatechin gallate, the bioactive compound that helps make green tea so powerful. This product actually contains a minimum of 40% epigallocatechin gallate, making it even better suited to provide pain relief.

Of course, you can add a cup or two of green tea to your routine as well, whether or not you have arthritis. There are plenty of benefits to the beverage, especially if you can drink it in place of a sugary soda or syrupy coffee. But the extract is the easiest way to get a high dose of epigallocatechin gallate at once. Even if you don't have knee pain, there's probably some aspect of your health that can benefit from more green tea.

Hashempur MH, Sadrneshin S, Mosavat SH, Ashraf A. Green tea (Camellia sinensis) for patients with knee osteoarthritis: A randomized open-label active-controlled clinical trial. Clin Nutr. December 18, 2016; [epub ahead of print]. doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2016.12.004.

Nutrition Detective

How to Keep Salt From Raising Your Blood Pressure

You have probably heard that eating a high-salt diet contributes to high blood pressure. But it doesn’t have to. That’s because there’s a way to prevent salt from causing your blood pressure to go up.

You might be surprised to learn that a major reason this mineral affects your blood pressure is the effect it’s having in your gut.

Yes, your gut bacteria is involved again. In recent years, study after study has linked gut bacteria to nearly every aspect of our health imaginable. And this research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has yet another contribution to make. The researchers started off working with mice and then moved on to humans for a study they published in the journal Nature. They found that in both mice and humans, eating too much salt lowers levels of a certain type of friendly bacteria. So why does this matter? It turns out that these bacteria help keep pro-inflammatory immune cells called Th-17 cells in check. And Th-17 cells contribute to hypertension. So it seems that excess salt kick-starts a process that ultimately causes our immune systems to work against us.
In the study, the researchers bumped the mice’s diets from 0.5% sodium chloride to 4%, leading to a drop in beneficial bacteria and a corresponding increase in Th-17 cells. They tried the experiment again in 12 human participants, adding 6,000 mg of salt to their diets every day for two weeks. Sure enough, friendly bacteria went down and Th-17 cells went up.

The good news is that for both the mice and the human subjects, taking a probiotic helped restore levels of beneficial bacteria, reduce Th-17 cells, and limit hypertension increases. While you shouldn’t use a probiotic as an excuse to consume a high-salt diet, taking a probiotic is a great tool for good health, including helping protect you from high blood pressure. Advanced Probiotic Formula (800-791-3395) is one of my favorite options and will help keep both your digestive and your immune systems running smoothly.

Nicola Wilck, Mariana G. Matus, Sean M. Kearney, Scott W. Olesen, Kristoffer Forslund, Hendrik Bartolomaeus, Stefanie Haase, Anja Mähler, András Balogh, Lajos Markó, Olga Vvedenskaya, Friedrich H. Kleiner, Dmitry Tsvetkov, Lars Klug, Paul I. Costea, Shinichi Sunagawa, Lisa Maier, Natalia Rakova, Valentin Schatz, Patrick Neubert, Christian Frätzer, Alexander Krannich, Maik Gollasch, Diana A. Grohme, Beatriz F. Côrte-Real, Roman G. Gerlach, Marijana Basic, Athanasios Typas, Chuan Wu, Jens M. Titze, Jonathan Jantsch, Michael Boschmann, Ralf Dechend, Markus Kleinewietfeld, Stefan Kempa, Peer Bork, Ralf A. Linker, Eric J. Alm, Dominik N. Müller. Salt-responsive gut commensal modulates TH17 axis and disease. Nature, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nature24628.

LETTERS

Q: I just had my annual check-up with my regular physician. She wants me to start taking Lisinopril because my blood pressure has been running a little high. It was 130/92 in her office. I have been taking the Advanced Blood Pressure supplement for about nine months now, but it doesn't seem to keep it down on a consistent basis. This morning it was 129/73. I don't want to start the medication because I read it is one of the worst for side effects. Do you have any other recommendations? – Dottie I., via email

Dear Dottie,

Oftentimes at the doctor's office, called “white coat syndrome,” our blood pressure can be a bit higher than it usually is. It would be a good idea to take your blood pressure in the course of the day three times throughout the day, record this over 3-5 days and see if indeed your blood pressure remains high. If it does, there are a number of strategies you can look into — these include:

Diet – Look into the DASH and Mediterranean diets and consider getting your diet closer to one of these. DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. It was developed to lower blood pressure without medication. The first study done on the diet showed that it could lower blood pressure as well as the first-line blood pressure medications, even with a sodium intake of 3300 mg/day!

Magnesium – If you don't use magnesium please look into it. Magnesium deficiency oftentimes makes a greater tendency for high blood pressure. I recommend 500 mg magnesium citrate at bedtime to many of my patients.
Fish Oil – A good fish oil supplement is a natural anti-inflammatory. Fish oil oftentimes trumps salt restriction, for example. Using one dose (1000 mg) twice daily in the morning and at bedtime will give you better coverage than once daily.

Ubiquinol CoQ10 – This is another supplement that has been shown to help lower blood pressure naturally.
CircO2 – This is a great product that often works when nothing else does. Low levels of nitric oxide often result in high blood pressure. CircO2 raises NO levels and reduces blood pressure. You can order many of these products by calling 800-791-3395.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8339414

Q. I am a 68-year-old female just diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension. Do you know of any treatment/product that could help me with my condition? – Linda S., Lansing, MI

Dear Linda,

Please ask your doctors to see if you have sleep apnea. Oftentimes if you have been diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and you also suffer with sleep apnea and you use the CPAP machine or treat the sleep apnea, you begin to see some improvement in the pulmonary hypertension. In addition please consider the following:

Try to be as active as you’re comfortable. Not hard exercise, but walking and breathing deeply while you take your walk.

Learn and practice a relaxation technique such as gentle yoga, meditation, biofeedback or breathing exercises.
Staying active can help your condition. Just make sure you don’t overdo it.