Dr. William Donald Kelley's
Research Nutritional Diet for Cancer
By Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez
http://educate-yourself.org/cancer/gonzalexlectureondrkelly1990.shtml
1990
[The following is the transcript from Dr. Gonzalez's lecture
in 1990 to the World Research Foundation.]
Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez lecture of Dr. William Donald Kelley's
Research Nutritional Diet for Cancer
For Dr. Kelley cancer began with eye problems. He was riding
down the road and noticed that he was having trouble reading street signs.
At 35 years old he had always had 20/20 vision. Over the subsequent months
his eyesight got progressively worse and he called his ophthalmologists.
The ophthalmologist told him that at 35 he was just getting older and prescribed
glasses for Dr. Kelley.
A few months later while he was with his patients (Dr. Kelley
was an orthodontist) he noticed that he was having trouble seeing the patient's
teeth clearly. He went back to his ophthalmologist who said "this is
interesting, you need bifocals". That didn't sit well on Kelley's soul
because he was only 35 years old he thought that was much too young to wear
bifocals, but he wore the glasses anyway and they seemed to help.
After three months, he noticed that he could see far distances
pretty well and he could read and work on his patients but the intermediate
distances were getting fuzzy. This was unusual and he went back to his ophthalmologist
who discovered that Kelley needed trifocals. The ophthalmologist was amazed,
he had never had a patient who needed trifocals before. It was around this
time that Kelley began having muscle cramps in his arms.
Initially, it wasn't too bad and he figured that it was because
he was spending so much time working, some days up to 12 hours. The cramps
progressed to where they were like severe charlie horses and moved to his
legs as well. Shortly afterwards he developed chest pains. These pains became
so severe that he was taken to the hospital a total of three times thinking
it was a heart attack but the EKGs were normal.
He went to his local doctor who told him that he was just
working too hard and needed to take some time off. Kelley did take some
time off, but the pains didn't get any better. Just about the time he began
having problems with the muscle pains he also noticed that his hair was
falling out. He had a thick head of hair and thinning hair didn't run in
his family. At 35, he considered this pretty serious.
He went to his doctor again and his doctor said that it was
just a symptom of stress and aging and there was nothing he could do about
it. About the time his hair started falling out, he developed crippling
depression. Dr. Kelley had never been depressed a day in his life. He worked
12 to 14 hours a day - loved his job, had 4 beautiful children (all adopted)
that he adored, had a good wife who was active in community affairs that
he loved.
Suddenly he was waking up with crying spells, was losing interest
in his family, losing interest in his work and thinking of leaving it all
and moving to the mountains of Colorado. He went to his doctor and begged
for some anti-depressant drugs, but his doctor refused and told him to just
take some more time off. Kelley took more time off but the depression got
worst. Just when he was getting suicidal, his stomach expanded suddenly
overnight.
His doctor put him in the hospital immediately. Being a well
known orthodontist in the Texas community where he lived, all the local
surgeons and gastrointestinal doctors were called in. The surgeon took one
look at him said "this man has terminal cancer". This was in 1964
and they didn't have CT scans or sophisticated ultra-sound equipment. They
just had x-ray machines and simple ultra-sound machines.
They did a series of x-rays that showed that he had lesions
in his lungs, a huge tumor in his right hip, his liver was swollen to three
times it's normal size and it appeared that he had a pancreatic tumor that
had metastasized very quickly. The surgeon said Kelley was too sick to operate
and told Mrs. Kelley that he had 4 to 8 weeks to live. The news got worse.
His wife handled this sudden occurrence by leaving Dr. Kelley
with 4 young children to raise and dying of cancer. Kelley did what any
normal man would do in this situation, he called his mother. Kelley's mother
was an unusual character. You have to meet her to fully appreciate her.
She raised three sons on a dirt poor Kansas farm, 80 acres, during the Depression.
Her husband had died of a heart attack.
She got all three sons through college and graduate school.
Kelley talked to his mother, told her that he was dying of cancer, his wife
left him and he had 4 young children to raise and asked her what he should
do. His mother got very angry with him and told him that he was just going
to have to get over his cancer. He told her that was impossible, the finest
doctors in Texas had examined him and told him that there was no hope.
Mrs. Kelley said "nonsense" and flew down to Texas
to help him get better. The first thing she did was to walk into his kitchen
and throw all his food away. Dr. Kelley was the preeminent connoisseur of
junk food. He knew all the contents of every chocolate bar in the US He
basically lived on chocolate bars and Fritos for years. It's not very surprising
that at 35 he was dying from terminal cancer.
After his mother threw out all the junk food in the house,
she went out and bought fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, seeds -
no animal protein. From that day on she put her son a strict vegetarian
diet of nothing but raw foods. Absolutely no animal protein, no fish, chicken,
red meat of any kind.
This was a hard diet for Kelley to follow. He loved Big Macs
and chocolate bars, but his mother wouldn't allow any of those things in
the house and he had no choice but to follow her diet. Then to his absolute
astonishment he began to feel better - 4 weeks past, 6 weeks past, 8 weeks
past and he was still alive. After three months had passed his mother walked
into his bedroom and told him three months had passed it was time to go
back to work.
He reminded her that he had terminal pancreatic cancer. She
said "you have 4 kids to raise, your wife emptied out the bank account,
you're going to work whether you want to or not." The next day he went
back to work. He had to nap between patients but he was working. The miracle
was first that he wasn't dead and second that he was getting better. Kelley
was a scientist. Scientists aren't like the rest of us.
They ask questions that the rest of us are too lazy to research.
Kelley couldn't believe that his mother was the first person to figure out
that a diet of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains and seeds can stabilize
cancer. So, he went to his local library and luckily his local library had
a copy of Max Gerson's 1959 book called "50 Cases". Gerson is
an interesting character in medical history.
He was a very prominent physician from Germany who in the
1920s and 30s developed his own nutritional approach to degenerative diseases
with a diet of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains and seeds and lots of
fresh vegetable juices - 8 to 10 glasses a day. With this diet Gerson had
very good success with a whole range of degenerative diseases ranging from
arthritis to cancer.
During the 30s with the advent of Nazism, Gerson being Jewish,
left the country and settled in New York City where he set up his own clinic.
Over a 20 year period, he continued to have success with this diet. Gerson
had hypothesized that meat was toxic body, toxic to the liver. Raw foods
helped the body to clean out, stimulated the liver and enabled the immune
system to work better.
He wasn't sure of the science but he knew it worked. He published
this in 1959. Kelley was excited about this because it confirmed that this
diet had the possibility to work. He got progressively stronger for the
next three to six months but he stabilized. Kelley was lucky in a very unlucky
way.
He was lucky in that his cancer was such that it protruded
through his liver and he could actually feel the tumors in his liver. He
could monitor the progress of the diet. He knew that if he went off the
diet, which would occasionally happen, that the tumors would start to grow
within days and when he stuck to the diet religiously his tumors would regress.
About the six or seventh month the tumors stopped regressing
and Kelley developed severe digestive problems. Of course, one of the problems
with pancreatic cancer is that it destroys the pancreas which produces insulin
and digestive enzymes. Without digestive enzymes you can't digest your food.
One of the major problems with pancreatic disease, be it pancreatic
cancer or pancreatisis, is severe digestive problems. Bloating, gas, nausea,
vomiting, diarrhea - they just can't digest their food correctly. Kelley
thought that there had to be some simple solution to this, so he went to
his local pharmacy. The pharmacist was a friend of his.
Since this was 1964, the pharmacist handed Kelley a large
bottle of pancreative enzymes and told him that this would take care of
the bloating etc. Kelley, being a man of excess, bought about 10 cases of
the enzymes. He began taking 3 with meals, then 4 with meals - after about
3 days he was taking 50 capsules of enzymes with each meal.
He noticed that when he took a dose of enzymes something would
happen. Every time he took a dose of enzymes there would be a twinge of
pain in the areas of the tumor in the liver. The tumors began to feel different,
they felt like they were getting softer. He could actually begin to feel
them shrinking and dissolving after the stabilization on the diet. Kelley
couldn't figure out why this was happening.
He couldn't figure out why pancreatic enzymes would cause
his tumors to dissolve. Being a doctor and needing to find answers to his
questions, he went back to his local library to research. He was fortunate
enough to find the name of John Beard in his research. John Beard was an
eminent embryologist working out of the University of Edinborough in Scotland
during the 1890s.
Beard started out with no interest in cancer, he was an embryologist
and his work concentrated on the placenta. After fertilization in a mammal
the embryo produces the placenta which literally eats into the mother's
uterus. It serves as an anchor for the fetus and also serves as the connection
to the blood supply of the mother which feeds the baby and is how the baby
gets rid of it's waste material.
Beard noticed that in every mammal there was one particular
day in the gestation period that the placenta stops growing. In mice it
was 10 days, humans it was 56 days. In virtually every human embryo, on
the 56th day the placenta stops growing. Beard was particularly interested
in this because he thought of the placenta as a type of tumor. It invades
the uterus in much the same way a tumor would invade the uterus.
Usually, the placenta reaches a certain phase and stops, but
in the women where the placenta doesn't stop growing they develop a very
serious cancer called cariocarcinoma which was once the most aggressive
cancer around. Now we have a chemotherapeutic agent that knocks it out and
today 80 to 90% of these women are cured. There is a tradition of the placenta
acting as a tumor.
Beard thought that if he could find the reason why the placenta
would stop growing, he might could find out how to stop cancerous tumors
from growing. This lead to 10 years of research. Beard did a variety of
animal studies where he would investigate the growth of every organ system,
every tissue, every organ. Trying to find a connection to the cessation
of the growth of the placenta. It took him 10 years before he hit on it.
The only connection that existed was that in every mammal
the placenta stopped growing the day the embryonic pancreas began to work.
This is interesting because the embryo doesn't need the pancreas. It gets
all the nutrients it needs from the mother's blood supply, it doesn't need
digestive enzymes.
Beard deduced that the only reason the embryo needed digestive
enzymes was to stop the growth of the placenta. If they indeed stopped the
placenta from growing maybe they could stop tumors from growing. In 1904
Beard presented his hypothesis that pancreatic enzymes represent the main
defense against cancer and not the immune system or any other system to
the Edinborough Scientific Society.
He was nearly universally laughed at. Nearly because there
was one bright army surgeon in the audience who was a cancer specialist
and in 1904 there was no known cancer therapy except for surgery. This man
had seen too many of his patients die and he was willing to try anything.
After the lecture, his army captain went up to Beard and said that he'd
like to try this therapy.
Over the next few months, the surgeon and Beard developed
an injunctive form of pancreatic enzymes. The first case documented in medical
history was a man with a huge tumor sitting in his throat. The army captain
injected this man, with Beard's assistance, over the next two weeks with
pancreatic enzymes. After two weeks, this tumor was thrown up by this patient.
The tumor was there on the table in front of them. They analyzed
the tumor and found that it was completely dead. This was the first case
of a patient apparently being cured of cancer by pancreatic enzymes. It
was published in the British Medical Journal and cause a lot of controversy.
The usual controversy: the patient didn't really have cancer, the results
were faked, that wasn't really a tumor, the same thing we hear today. A
number of doctors did get interested in Beard's work and over the years
about 40 to 50 papers were published in various medical journals in the
US and Europe documenting the regression of tumors and in fact some cures
using injectable pancreatic enzymes. You may wonder why Beard's work never
took hold if it was so good. In fact, in 1911 Beard published a book called
"The Enzyme Therapy of Cancer" and about 15 people ever bothered
to read it.
The reason is that about the time Beard published his book
Madame Curie announced that radiation was a safe, non-toxic cure for virtually
all cancers. Madame Curie has a fabulous reputation. She was that brilliant
Polish immigrant to Paris who had done wonderful work with radiation. She
proposed that radiation was perfectly safe and it took a generation of radiation
oncologists to die of leukemia before it was realized that it wasn't safe.
She was also mistaken thinking that it was good for all cancers.
There are very few cancers that are radiation sensitive for a prolonged
period of time. However, Madame Curie was so well loved by the world's press
that this was presented as the answer to cancer. Beard's work was ignored
and by the time he died in 1920, he died in obscurity and enzyme therapy
was forgotten until Dr. Kelley began to suspect that the enzymes given to
him by his pharmacist was dissolving his tumors.
There was one problem - Beard said that pancreatic enzymes
had to be injected or they would be destroyed in the gut. Every dental and
medical school student is taught that orally ingested pancreatic enzymes
are wonderful digestive aids but they are destroyed in the gut and they
are not absorbed active and intact in the gut. That doesn't happen.
Kelley was taking the enzymes orally and he knew something
was happening, so he went back to the medical literature. In the 1930s and
1940s there are a whole series of documented experiments that orally ingested
pancreatic enzymes in both animals and humans studies are absorbed active
and intact in the gut and serve a variety physiological functions. The easiest
way to document this is with a 24 hour check of the urine.
If you feed a patient a large amount of pancreatic enzymes
and check their urine for 24 hours, you can see how much of the enzymes
are excreted in the urine. Virtually 100% of what you take orally is found
in the urine, not in the intestinal tract, which means that they have to
be absorbed. With that problems resolved, Kelley began to focus on the diet
itself. Remember Kelley's therapy began with his mother's diet.
Raw fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds and nuts - all raw and
lot of juices. He began to wonder why the food had to be raw. Being intrigued
by Beard's theory of enzymes, he began to try and connect the enzymes with
raw foods. He knew that raw foods were packed with vitamins and nutrients
and when you cook food you don't really destroy a lot of the vitamins and
minerals and trace elements.
Heat doesn't effect those, but heat does destroy enzymes.
Raw food is packed with enzymes. When you cook food you get no enzymes at
all. That's a pretty important concept when you think about it. We're the
only species of animal that cooks it's food. Every other animal eats raw
food. Kelley was thinking about this and he couldn't believe that he was
the first person to make this connection.
He went back to the library and he found the work of Edward
Howell. Howell was a doctor who graduated from the University of Illinois
Medical School in 1920. Howell was a brilliant doctor with a great career
except for one thing. He was sick as a dog. Today he would be diagnosed
with chronic fatigue syndrome. He was 24 years old and couldn't get out
of bed in the morning.
No interest in his work, he was depressed with fevers, chills
and sweats. When a doctor gets sick it's pretty scary and he goes to the
best doctors to find the best answers for what is troubling him. He went
everywhere, from the Columbia Presbyterian to the Mayo Clinic. No one could
diagnose him. They told him that nothing was wrong with him, just stress
and he should probably see a psychiatrist.
Howell didn't like that prognosis, he knew there was something
wrong. He was 24 years old and he couldn't function. Out of desperation
(no one goes to a natural therapy as the first choice) he went to a spa
run by a naturopath in Illinois. The naturopath took one look at Howell
and told him that he was going to put him on a raw foods diet. Raw fruits,
vegetables, nuts, grains and seeds - the Mama Kelley diet and the Gerson
diet.
Howell was too sick to argue, too sick to think clearly, so
he went on the diet and within 3 months he was a new man. He was virtually
completely well. He asked the naturopath what it was about the raw foods
that could cause such a dramatic effect and the naturopath said one word
"enzymes". In 1920 there wasn't much known about enzyme but they
knew some.
Enzymes are a catalyst they enable reactions to occur in both
biological and non-biological systems with a minimum input of energy. There
are reactions that occur in the normal human cells that if not for enzymes
it would take 1,000 to 2,000 degrees centigrade - we would disappear in
a puff of smoke. Enzymes allow reactions to occur with a minimum amount
of heat and energy input.
They increase the efficiency of both biological and non-biological
chemical reactions. When you cook food, this naturopath said, you don't
destroy the vitamins, the minerals and the trace elements. You don't destroy
the fats, the proteins. There is as much fat in a cooked McDonald's Big
Mac as in raw beef but you do destroy enzymes. He told Howell - even back
then it was known - that all biological enzymes are inactivated above 118
degrees.
That struck Howell as a profound concept because he made the
same connection that Kelley made 40 years later. We're the only species
of animal that cooks it's food and we're the only species of animal that
are eating enzyme free food. The naturopath, Howell and Kelley realized
that the enzymes in food may be the single most important nutrient in food,
the nutrient required to repair and prevent damage in tissues, the nutrient
for preventing disease.
Howell spent 50 years of his life documenting the effect of
raw foods on human health. Since he was unorthodox, outside the norm, he
was largely ignored. Kelley was doing well now. He had his diet down. He
was getting his enzymes and feeling good. He was nine months into his therapy,
working 8 hours a day seeing his patients, everything was going well. Then
he got sick.
He woke up one day feeling tired, he canceled his patients
and stayed in bed. The next day he felt worse. He thought he was getting
the flu. The third he was sicker, he developed nausea and began vomiting.
This was a bit scary because he would take the enzymes and would throw them
up immediately. Kelley was a tough character, he'd take more enzymes and
again throw them up.
By the end of the day, he gave up. He stayed off the pills
for a few days and he felt better so he went back on the pills and did OK
for the first two or three days. Then he got sick again, following the same
pattern. Kelley looked at the enzymes as his life line so he would go off
the enzymes for a few days and go back on when he felt better until he got
sick again. He noticed by feeling the tumors in his stomach that when he
went off the enzymes that his tumors would start to grow and when he went
back on they would regress.
It seemed that it should have been the other way around. He
should have felt better on the enzymes when the tumors were breaking up
and worse when the tumors were growing. Kelley stayed up day after day trying
to figure out why this was occurring. One night he suddenly came up with
the answer. He was breaking down the tumors and the tumor material was making
him sick - the tumor material was toxic. Kelley also realized that this
was why people would get sick on chemotherapy.
The chemo was breaking up the tumors and the tumor material
was making them sick. He had severe symptoms when he was sick on the pills
- high fever, chills, sweats, like a severe case of flu. That lead to another
investigation. He was looking for some way to alleviate this symptom to
allow the program to work more efficiently. He went through a number of
medical journals and a number of medical textbooks and the one thing that
kept coming back to him was coffee enemas.
Nothing causes more controversy of Kelley's program than coffee
enemas. Kelley learned of coffee enemas, not from some alternative medical
manual but from the Merck manual. The Merck manual included coffee enemas
as a therapeutic tools from 1889 to 1977. It was documented during the 1920s
and 30s that when you take coffee rectally the caffeine stimulates the liver
to release toxins.
Caffeine is a metholzantin, it causes smooth muscle relaxation
in the gut. Kelley wasn't too thrilled by this prospect. He figured that
he really didn't have much choice - his life depended on it. He went to
his local grocery store, bought the normal brand of coffee and went to his
pharmacy for an enema bag. He went on the enzymes for about 4 or 5 days
until he was feeling really sick.
He had a fever of 104, he had muscle aches, he was vomiting.
He did this so he could see if the coffee enema really worked. After taking
his first enema, within 30 minutes his fever went from 104 to 99, his muscle
aches and pains resolved. From that day on he did coffee enemas daily and
is still doing them today. That was the third element in the Kelley program.
Diet, pancreatic enzymes and coffee enemas.
When he went back to work, word had spread about crazy Dr.
Kelley who had cured himself of terminal cancer. People started coming to
him for his cancer program and not for their teeth. He not only got calls
from people with cancer but also people with MS and asthma from the local
outlying towns. He developed such an international reputation that the local
medical society had him thrown in jail in 1969.
Nothing offends the AMA like a dentist that cures cancer.
Kelley was doing well with his program. He added some vitamins to make the
enzymes work better and he was getting a good success rate, but not good
enough. Kelley always said that you don't learn from your successes. Successes
make you feel all arrogant and wonderful, but you learn from your failures.
By 1970, Kelley was getting about 50% of his patients well, but he was losing
about 50%.
He couldn't figure out any he was losing the 50%. He changed
parts of the diet. He would increase the amounts of fruits, then decrease
the fruits and increase the vegetables, change the ratio of beans to rice,
give more juices, give less juices. There were some patients that no matter
what he did they didn't get any better. One of these patients was a woman
who would become the second Mrs. Kelley.
Susie was a remarkable woman. She had the worse case of allergies
in the history of medicine. She was so sensitive to iodine that she could
not walk within 10 miles of the ocean or she would have an anaphylactic
reaction. She had to carry Adeline around with her continually. Repeatedly
about twice a week she would have anaphylactic reactions. Some bright allergist
had treated her with dirty needles and she developed hepatitis.
So not only had severe allergies but she had chronic active
hepatitis which in and of itself was a fatal disease in many cases. She
was 24 and she was dying. There were about 4 things that she could eat.
She figured that when she got down to distilled water it was over. She knew
Kelley was a cancer doctor but she thought that if Kelley could cure cancer
he could cure her allergies.
She arrived at his office very sick. Kelley put her on his
diet and within 3 or 4 months she was doing very well and at 6 months she
could eat fish. By 9 months she was doing so well that she married Dr. Kelley
and began to run his office. Things were going really well until about 12
months when Susie began to get sick. Kelley thought what he had initially
thought when he got sick, that she had the flu.
He told her to just stay on the program and she would get
over it. She got progressively worse and what alarmed Dr. Kelley, and Susie
too, was that she again developed allergies after about a year free of allergies.
She began to react to any food that she took in. Even the raw fruits and
vegetables. Kelley did a lot of manipulations, he increased the fruits,
increased the vegetables, all the things that had worked before.
Susie got progressively worse and was almost comatose. Kelley
was faced with a problem. If she got any worse he'd have to take her to
the hospital and the papers would have a field day. Crazy, quack cancer
doctor's wife ends up in the hospital in a coma. He thought about this a
lot and he didn't want that to happen. He thought about all he had done
and all he hadn't done and the only thing he hadn't tried was raw meat.
He rejected the idea at first - meat was toxic. Two days later,
he knew that his wife was dying. He said that since the only thing he hadn't
given her was meat, he was going to try meat. He talked it over with her.
She was delirious but she did hear meat and she said "NO, meat is not
apart of the Kelley diet, you're trying to kill me, Donald". Kelley
told her that she had to eat it whether she liked it or not.
He went to the market and bought the biggest prime rib he
could find, ground it up and asked Susie to eat it raw. If it was cooked
it would destroy the enzymes and she needed the enzymes. Within two hours,
she was sitting up in bed, Kelley fed her raw meat for the next 24 hours
and she got stronger and stronger. Within three days she was complete well.
Today Susie Kelley looks 20 years younger than she is, still
eats raw red meat three times a day and is in perfect physical health. It
was exhilarating and humiliating for Kelley to realize that his own wife
was a meat eater because it went against everything that he believed in.
Kelley couldn't believe that he was the first person who found out that
there was a subcategory of human being that not only did well on meats but
had to have it or they would get sick.
Back at the library, Kelley read about the wonderful work
of Stefenson. Stefenson was an American anthropologist who was trained at
the Harvard. He got bored hanging around Cambridge trying to figure out
what to do with his life, so he packed up and moved to one of the most remote
regions of the Arctic Circle to study Eskimos. Up until that point, no white
man had lived with the Eskimos.
Stefenson not only lived among them but took an Eskimo wife.
He studied their way of life, their hunting techniques and particularly
their diet. The Eskimo diet stunned Stefenson. It shouldn't have when you
think about the Eskimo way of life. The Eskimo diet is nothing but meat.
Up in the Arctic Circle there is not much of a summer, only two months.
There's no fruits, no vegetables, there's no soil only tundra.
All there is fatty red meat - seal, polar bear, whale, fish.
Stefenson thought about this and he knew enough about biology to know that
humans weren't suppose to be able to live on meat. Even back then it was
thought that red meat was one of the great evils of man. Stefenson looked
at this very carefully. The Eskimos had no cancer, no diabetes, heart disease,
they didn't even have a word for depression because they didn't know what
it was.
They seemed to be very happy people, they lived a very rigorous
climate and they were very strong. Stefenson discussed this diet with his
biochemist friend at Harvard and it was realized that their diet as 80%
saturated fat. There are executives at the American Heart Association that
would drop dead of a heart attack if you suggested a diet of 80% saturated
fat. The American diet is about 40%, the AHA recommends about 20 to 30%
and here is this society of people thriving on 80% saturated fat.
Stefenson spent 10 years at the Arctic Circle and when he
came back to the US he wrote a series of 10 books documenting his time with
the Eskimos. Several of those books dealt with the Eskimo diet. When those
books were published a controversy erupted. It was thought to be impossible
for someone to live on meat. Meat was unhealthy and caused all kinds of
toxic conditions.
Stefenson was called a fraud. Logically you have to think,
what would they live on, but people didn't realize the conditions of the
Arctic. This controversy raged for five years, there were articles on the
front page of the New York Times. Stefenson was a romantic figure at that
time. Here was this man who disappeared for 10 years in the Arctic Circle
and married an Eskimo. Finally, Stefenson dared the New York City Medical
Society to lock him up in a ward at Bellevue for a year and feed him nothing
but red meat. Professor Tolstoy of Cornell University said let's do it.
So Stefenson and a colleague lived in Bellevue for a year and lived on nothing
but a diet of 80% saturated fat.
At the end of the year, Stefenson's cholesterol level had
dropped 70 points, he was in excellent health, his triglycerides were practically
non-existent and no one could figure out what had happened. When Kelley
read Stefenson's work, he thought, "my wife's not an Eskimo why would
she need red meat". Upon researching at the library he realized that
about 20,000 years ago there was an ice age that came all the way down to
New York City.
There were a lot of Northern Europeans who were living in
Arctic Circle conditions around that time. If you're from Northern Europe,
your ancestors had nothing to eat but large fatty animals because the Arctic
Circle had moved down several thousand miles. Kelley knew that Susie was
of Northern European descent and her ancestors survived because they could
live on 80% saturated fat.
You have to think about geological history when you make dietary
selections. Kelley had his two diets now. The vegetarian diet and the carnivore
and a third category of people who fell in between these two. This third
category does well with some of both categories. Fruits, vegetables, nuts,
grains, seeds and some meats. Eventually he had 10 subtypes, 90 variations
of the subtypes, etc. but he had basically three separate types of people.
The vegetarians who do very well with raw fruits, vegetables
but terrible on meats, the carnivores who do extremely well with fatty meat
and root vegetables but terrible with salad vegetables, and the balanced
metabolizers who are somewhere in between. Kelley noticed while treating
these different types of people that each type was susceptible to specific
types of cancer. He was seeing thousands of patients with all types of cancer.
He noticed that the vegetarians types tended to get the hard
tumors. The carnivores tended to get the blood tumors (leukemia, lymphoma
and melanoma - while not a blood cancer seemed to be found mostly in carnivore
types). Balanced people were in between seeming to be susceptible to both
types of cancer. Kelley thought that this was a particularly important observation
- that certain types of people who do well on certain types of diets get
certain types of cancer and not other types.
He wondered if there was something physiological that could
explain this and if he could figure it out he might understand something
fundamental about cancer. He went through the thousands of records he had
on his patients. It was there he discovered that there were certain qualities
that were universally distinctive.
The vegetarian patients tended to have a fast pulse, they
tended to need little sleep, they tended to be very irritable emotionally,
they tended to do very well in the mornings and less well at night, they
tended to have very lean faces. The carnivores were just the opposite, they
tended to be more lethargic, they needed 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night,
they did terrible in the mornings and didn't start waking up until 1 or
2 in the afternoon, they tended to have a low pulse and good digestion.
Balanced people were in between, a normal pulse, they tended
to need 6 to 8 hours of sleep and did well at any time of day. Kelley thought
that if he could find a something biological that would explain this, he
would be able to understand cancer a bit better. Back at the library, Kelley
found the work of Melvin Page. Page was an eccentric dentist who worked
out of St. Petersburg, Florida. Page, like Kelley, had discovered that different
types of people needed different diets.
His explanation was an autonomic physiology. The nervous system
can be divided up on two basic ways. The easiest way to divide it is the
conscience nervous system and the unconscious nervous system. The conscience
nervous system is what you need when you drive a car, doing a crossword
puzzle or do a math problem.
The unconscious nervous system is the system that controls
physiological processes in which we don't have to think: heart rate, secretion
of enzymes, secretion of hormones, digestion. The unconscious nervous system
is known as the autonomic nervous system. It's kind of automatic and this
is divided into two parts: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The
sympathetic and the parasympathetic tend to work in opposition.
The sympathetic nervous system tends to speed up heart rate
and the parasympathetic nervous system tend to slow down heart rate. The
sympathetic nervous system tends to block secretion of pancreatic enzymes
and the parasympathetic nervous system tends to increase them. These two
systems tend to work in opposition every second of our lives to keep our
physiology exactly where it should be to do the process that is necessary
for that moment. Melvin Page suggested that there were certain people whose
sympathetic nervous system was overly developed and overly active.
In those people the parasympathetic nervous system was correspondingly
weak. In order people the parasympathetic nervous system was strong and
the sympathetic nervous system was correspondingly weak. In the third group
the two systems were equally balanced. Kelley immediately recognized that
there were his vegetarians, carnivores and balanced groups.
Vegetarians had a very strong sympathetic nervous system and
a weak parasympathetic nervous system, carnivores had a strong parasympathetic
nervous system and a weak sympathetic nervous system. Kelley realized the
balance of these systems were related to three important minerals. Calcium,
potassium, and magnesium. The vegetarian diet that his sympathetic system
patients are on were loaded with potassium and magnesium. These are very
alkalizing nutrients.
We now know through orthodox neurophysiology that potassium
tends to stimulate the parasympathetic nerves and magnesium tends to block
sympathetic functions. So, if you're dealing with a vegetarian who has a
very strong sympathetic system but a weak parasympathetic system, a vegetarian
diet will tend to tone down the strong system and build up the weak system
and bring them into balance.
Meat is a very acid forming, it's loaded with phosphates and
sulfates. In the body, phosphates turn into phosphoric acid and sulfates
into sulfuric acid. There is an enormous load of free acid in every pieces
of meat we eat. This has been measured and it's an extraordinary load on
the body. The quickest way to acidify the bloodstream is to eat red meat.
We now know from studies done in emergency rooms that sympathetic
and parasympathetic functions is very keenly tied into pH. The acid base
balance. The traditional medicine for a patient who walks in with a heart
attack is to fill them up with calcium and bicarbonate. Heart attack patients
go into acidosis, we thought to fill them up with bicarbonate to block the
acidosis.
The only problem is that the patients we saw die from a heart
attacks were dying because we were using too much bicarbonate. When you
use too much bicarbonate you're turning off the sympathetic nervous system
and the sympathetic nervous system is the stress nervous system. The one
system you want functioning during the stress of a heart attack is the sympathetic
nervous system.
When you block it's function, patients can go into fatal arrhythmia's
and die within seconds. It took thousands of patients to die from too much
bicarbonate to realize that it isn't an idea therapy. You want the pH slightly
acid, if you get too alkaline the parasympathetic turns off and you lose
your patient.
Carnivores have a strong parasympathetic system and a weak
sympathetic system and if you give them red meat you turn the body acid,
you stimulate sympathetic nervous system and tone down the parasympathetic
nervous system in order to balance. Kelley began to realize after documenting
and studying thousands of patients that when he got that autonomic nervous
system into balance with his diet the tumors would go away. It was that
simply.
When you tone down sympathetic system and build up the parasympathetic
system in a hard tumor patient sometimes the tumor would go away in days.
Similarly a patient with leukemia or lymphoma put on a red meat diet will
acidify the blood stream, stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and tone
down the parasympathetic nervous system and the tumors would go away.
He saw this in his own practice. Very often he'd treat patient
for months and months and get no progress at all and then one day the tumors
would start shrinking like it was melting away like an ice cube on a hot
day. Calcium is probably the key element in all this. Calcium has a lot
of applications to anybody practicing any kind of oncology. Calcium has
a lot of functions.
We know it is the main cement for the bones, but it also is
very metabolically active. It almost acts like a hormone in the body. It's
what's called the second messenger in the cells, it's the one way neurotransmitters
translate their information into the nucleus. Calcium functions as a carrier
of information, as a stimulator of information systems in the cell.
Calcium is also fundamentally the main cement of cellular
membranes. When the sympathetic nervous system is very strong and active
and producing lots of adrenaline which is one of it's main hormones, some
membranes tend to get very tight. If you give adrenaline to somebody their
muscles tend to get very tense, their jaw will tense up. Cell membranes
tighten in every tissue in the body.
What happens is that with sympathetic discharge calcium goes
into the cell membranes and tightens them. With an alkaline environment,
when the sympathetic nervous system is turned off membranes get very weak
and calcium leaches out and membranes leak out all kinds of junk. Kelley
tried to relate this to cancer, and he began to realized that with hard
tumor patients the sympathetic nervous system was too strong and the cell
membrane was too tight.
The membranes of the tumor were too tight and the patient's
own immune system and the patient's pancreatic enzymes couldn't get to the
tumor. On Kelley's diet, the patient would turn a little more alkaline,
the sympathetic system would weaken, calcium would leach out in the membrane,
the membranes would get leaky and then the enzymes could get to the tumor
very easily and the patient's own immune system could get to the tumor easily.
Chemo-therapeutic drugs could get to the tumor easily. One
of the most interesting things in oncology is that you can get two patients
with the same type of tumor in the same location and one will respond to
treatment beautifully while the other won't respond at all. It's pH autonomic
balance - if you believe Kelley's hypothesis.
One patient will have a strong sympathetic system and you
give the chemotherapeutic agent to them and the cell membranes are so tight
that the agents can't get in. Enzymes won't get into the tumors, chemo won't
get into the tumors, the immune system products won't get into the tumors.
Those patients die and the tumors grow. The parasympathetic tumors, the
tumors of the blood, deal with the opposite situation.
These patient tend to be too alkaline and the cell membranes
tend to be too leaky. When cell membranes are too leaky, this tend to stimulate
cell reproduction. The problem with these tumors is that they reproduce
so quickly that with whatever therapeutic agent you are using, you are running
a race - whether you can break them down faster than they are reproducing.
When you use a red meat diet, it stimulates sympathetic function,
tones down parasympathetic function, you get the body acidic, the cell membranes
tighten and reproduction slows. The patients with leukemia have very aggressive
tumors. The white blood cells can go from 10,000 to 1,000,000 in a matter
of weeks. The reason for this is weakened cell membranes. You slow down
the rate of tumor growth by tightening the cell membranes and you give these
patients time to get the therapeutic agents time to work. When you treat
a cancer patient you have to think about autonomic physiology - whether
you are using nutrition or chemotherapy. Gonzalez spent 5 years going through
10,000 of Kelley's records. He found that patients who followed the program
closely and utilizing it properly - about 70% of them were getting well.
It didn't matter what type of cancer or how far advanced they
were. Since this was just a research of Kelley's records and not a "controlled"
study it is not accepted by the orthodox medical community. Kelley decided
to track down all Kelley's patients with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer
being the most aggressive and the hardest to treat. In Kelley's records
from 1974 to 1982 Gonzalez found 23. He did extensive interviews with the
patient's family and the traditional doctors that they used.
He found that out of these 23, 10 went to Kelley once, thought
he was a quack and never came back and the median survival time was 60 days
after seeing Kelley which is normal for this type of cancer. The second
group had 7 patients. This group consisted of those who went on the program
partially, most gave it up due to pressure from traditional doctors. Even
though they only partially completed the program they had significantly
improved survival rates of 300 days on average.
The third group of 6 patients that completed the program had
a median survival of 8 1/2 years and most are alive today. One died of Alzheimer's
and Gonzalez feels that if you have your pancreatic cancer patient's dying
of old age and Alzheimer's you have succeeded as a physician. So, the median
survival rate of pancreatic cancer patients who completed Kelley's program
had a median survival rate of 8 1/2 years and going.
The above text is from a lecture by Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez
in 1990. Dr. Gonzalez treats cancer patients with a modified version of
Dr. William Donald Kelley's program. The text is not word for word. The
transcriber omitted anecdotal sections, but kept all research and pertinent
information.
Web posted at: http://www.thebodytherapycenter.com/drg.htm
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