Book review: One Answer to Cancer, by William Donald Kelley

The last few weeks have involved some very interesting reading, culminating in my review of Food is Your Best Medicine, by Henry Bieler, The Metabolic Typing Diet, by William Wolcott, and now One Answer to Cancer, by William Donald Kelley.

All of these books suggest that significant health gains can be made by taking into consideration the right nutrients that our body wants and needs, that eating these nutrients leads to good health but that other some foodstuffs place a heavy burden on the digestive systems and release toxins that lead to poor health.

However, William Donald Kelley has gone further in being more specific in how his nutritional approach is not only best for optimum health but also for preventing and even treating cancer.

Once I had read Kelley’s book, I thought quite hard about whether to publish a book review.  It presents a very different view of a disease that affects most people (either individually or their relatives) at some point in their lives.  And the idea that it might be completely preventable is very unpalatable.

But I decided that my readers are all grown up and can take care of themselves.

Be warned, this is about to get really, really weird.  There are dark waters ahead.

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The cause of cancer, according to William Donald Kelly

After doing his research, Kelley explains that he believes that:

• The cause of cancer – the cause of cancer is the changing of an ectopic germ cell into an ectopic trophoblast cell.
• What are germ cells and trophoblast cells? – there are three basic kinds of cells produced by developing fertilized human eggs: primitive germ cells, normal body cells and trophoblast cells.
• Why do we need trophoblast cells? – when developing fertilised human eggs drop into the uterus, trophoblast cells grow very rapidly and surround the other two types of cells.  The trophoblast cells metastasize (as cancer does) to the wall of the uterus and form the placenta.  This keeps the human embryo in place and well-nourished.
• What stops these cells growing? placental trophoblast tissue continues to grow until about the seventh week when the baby’s pancreas develops.  The baby’s pancreatic enzyme production along with the mother’s pancreatic enzyme production stops the growth of the placental trophoblastic tissue.
• How is this relevant? Well, as the new embryo is being formed from the normal body cells, the primitive germ cells are still multiplying.  In a few days, when the embryo develops to the proper stage, the primitive germ cells stop multiplying and begin to migrate to the gonads (ovaries or testes).  There are about three billion of these primitive germ cells that fatigue and never have the vital force necessary to reach the gonads.  Any one of these germ cells is a potential cancer. That is why cancer can form in any part of the body.
• What causes one of these primitive germ cells to turn cancerous? aside from the basic germ cell, all that is needed to create cancer in our body is a deficiency of pancreatic enzymes and an imbalance of sex hormones.  This state of affairs causes the germ cell to start building a placenta, which we think of as a cancerous tumour.
• You have to be kidding me? when dissecting tumours, pathologists often find partially formed teeth, toenails and other types of tissue, such as lung tissue, within the tumours.  Malignancy, therefore, is not normal tissue gone into wild proliferation, but a normal primitive germ cell growing normally in the wrong place.

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OK, when you said really weird I didn’t think really weird

OK, let us pause for a moment to digest this weirdness.

The first time I read Kelley’s explanation of cancer, I must admit that I reacted against it.  I thought that such a radical explanation was completely unbelievable.  I mean, how could it be the case the mainstream medical community could miss something like this?  Surely, there must be a flaw in the argument somewhere?

Then I considered that simplicity is often overlooked.  As Einstein said, things should be as simple as possible (but no simpler).  While this theory is attractive in its simplicity to laymen, it may have been rejected out of hand by scientists as being too simple (much like Elaine Morgan’s The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, which is rejected by mainstream anthropologists for no obvious reason that I can ascertain other than the fact that she is not a mainstream anthropologist).

Also, perversely, the medical research community seems to prefer not having a believable mechanism for a disease or condition.  As Malcolm Kendrick notes, there is no plausible mechanism by which saturated fat can cause heart disease and yet every scientist working in the field seems to believe in the lipid hypothesis.

Obviously, such points relate to the philosophy of science and not to the actual science itself but they might suggest why this theory has not been given a fair crack of the whip.

So I decided to persevere with Kelley’s theory.  My first question was how he came to formulate it.

Curious?

Well, you might be surprised to learn that Kelley’s logical breakthrough came by from his realisation that cancer was a similar to diabetes.

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How is cancer like diabetes?

Kelley started with the recognition that diabetes it is a set of symptoms that tells us that our carbohydrate metabolism functions are not working properly.   What we think of as diabetes, the inability to deal with blood sugar, is simply the manifestation of a carbohydrate metabolism that has reached breaking point.  Most people who have read Robb Wolf’s book The Paleo Solution will recognise this idea.

Happily, these days, doctors understand that people with diabetes probably shouldn’t eat and drink lots of sugar all day long.  Because of their devotion to the untenable lipid hypothesis, they are reluctant to go all the way and prescribe low-carbohydrate diets, but even so, it is a step in the right direction.

But Kelley noted that this positive attitude towards the role of food in carbohydrate metabolism wasn’t always the case.

According to Kelley (and I haven’t read up on this to check), before the discovery of insulin, doctors couldn’t connect diet and diabetes.  They often therefore gave no dietary recommendations at all.  But despite the lack of knowledge, people figured out that if you reduced the amount of sugar you ate, you survived longer.

Kelley’s radical weirdness (or genius) came when he simply proposed that cancer was analogous to diabetes, but related to protein metabolism and not carbohydrate metabolism.  He suggested that what we perceive as cancerous tumours is merely a symptom of inadequate and deficient protein metabolism.  Kelley believed that surgery, radiation and chemotherapy only treat the symptoms of cancer and not the cause.

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And was Kelley alone in proposing ideas like this?

Not at all.  Hang on, folks, this is where it gets a bit hairy…

• Dr John Beard discovered that the body’s primary mechanism for destroying cancer is contained in pancreatin, a protein-digesting secretion from the pancreas.  He seems to have come up with the whole trophoblast theory of cancer.
• Dr Howard Beard (no relation) worked on the use of pancreatic enzymes in the treatment of cancer.  He and other researchers indicated that where cancer is concerned trypsin and particularly chymotrypsin are the important enzymes in pancreatin.

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So what is Kelley’s approach?

Kelley’s cancer cure program had five main elements, as follows:

• Metabolic supplementation – Kelley noted that the modern diet is quite deficient in certain nutrients that we naturally derive from organ meats, such as kidney, liver, stomach, intestinal tract tripe, and lung.
• Detoxification of the body – Kelley argued that many people do not have an unobstructed flow of bile from the liver and gall bladder in response to food entering the small intestine as a result of eating refined or processed foods or stress.  Formation of solid particles from bile components is therefore now commonplace.  Kelley suggested that these solid particles should be cleansed by way of enemas.
• Adequate, proper, well-balanced diet – Kelley proposed a diet of raw foods, including raw meats (especially organ meats), vegetables and raw milk.  He suggested psyllium husks and flax seed for fibre.
• Neurological stimulation – Kelley believed that the mind was the most important part of the body and needed as much assistance as the physiological systems.
• Spiritual attitude – Kelley identified the need for a calm and happy approach to life, with little stress and a strong sense of community.

What I find fascinating about this is that the key preventative pillars that Kelley discovered are very close to aspects of the Paleo Diet:

• Organ meats
• Raw foods
• Low stress
• Sense of community

Obviously, I can’t see cavemen giving each other enemas, but I guess they wouldn’t have got clogged up in the first place…

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And what about individual differences?

Like William Wolcott and Henry Bieler, Kelley proposed that there are three main metabolic groups as follows:

• Group A – sympathetic dominant
• Group B – parasympathetic dominant
• Group C – balanced

Kelley suggested slightly different diets for each.  However, reading his works, it doesn’t appear that his heart was really in the idea of individual differences, as he puts the section right at the end of his book.  He seems to have included it as something to tweak and not something to start with, which makes his approach very different from Henry Bieler or William Wolcott.

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Conclusion

I have to say that my tolerance for weirdness was definitely tested by this book.  However, it has definitely given me some research projects to consider, including the benefits of organ meats and the benefits of raw foods (and how this relates to Richard Wrangham’s theory of how cooking made us human).  I am also keen to look into the work of John Beard to see what his exact ideas were.

Before I do, however, I need to put some distance between me and all this nutrition reading.  Time for something else for a bit, I think.

Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness.