My friend Richard died this year in January. Shortly after his death I submitted a paper he had written for publication in a scientific journal called Bioscience Hypotheses. The editors were interested, but they had questions. As I had contributed somewhat to Richard’s ideas, I was familiar with them and I felt I could refine the article for the editors. This I did and the paper was accepted for publication in late January. The article has finally been officially published at the journal and is available online here: Honey bee colony collapse disorder is possibly caused by a dietary pyrethrum deficiency and also on Richard’s personal website.

This paper presents a hypothesis regarding the possible cause of Bee Colony Collapse Disorder, but the inspiration for it actually came from consideration regarding the controversial cancer treatment laetrile and a general principle of economics known as the Law of Returns.

The Law of Returns was first made explicit for me after studying Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action. Mises discusses the law in relation to economics, but it is in fact a universal law which holds for any goal-oriented action. In essence it states that: if for the realization of goal G, a given system S requires ingredient I, then for I there exists an optimum; i.e., there is a “too much”, a “too little” and a “just right”. Aristotle boiled it down to a simple rule: “everything in moderation, nothing to excess.”

Put that way, it seems a little obvious. But despite most people having an implicit understanding of it, the lack of an explicit one leads people very often to violate it. They seem to say “If a little is good, then a lot will be even better!” The reverse is also popular: “If a lot is bad, none is best!” Hence, one can always find violations in the current news; a woman, for example, who died after drinking too much water, or the off-hand rejection of a treatment for cancer because the molecule includes a cyanide group.

Thankfully, our bodies can handle small deviations one way or the other fairly well, either by filtering out when we take in too much or by breaking down the least necessary of our tissues to reuse what we don’t take in enough of (this second principle is also discussed by Mises in relation to economic science, it’s known as the Law of Marginal Utility.) Still, our explicit understanding of the law can mean the difference between health and disease. After all, just what qualifies as a “toxin” or a “nutrient”? For the woman who drank too much water, the water was clearly toxic. But for the bee that consumes pyrethrum, a natural insecticide, the trade off may be resistance to parasites. The answer is not as easy as we might first think and is affected in no small part by the Law of Returns.

In a previous post I suggested that when you eat an apple you might want to also eat the seeds which contain amygdalin, a substance that inhibits the growth of cancer cells. Recently, I came across an article published this year in the Internet Journal of Alternative Medicine entitled Inaccurate Reporting of the Effects of Laetrile: Mistreatment of Ellison, Byar and Newell. While I’m happy to see someone bringing this topic to the forefront again (it is especially timely in light of the recent court decision to force 13-year-old Daniel Hauser to undergo chemotherapy), I’m concerned about the effect it will have on the writer’s reputation. It seems that no matter how reputable you were before you argue in defense of Laetrile or amygdalin, you become a raving lunatic suitable for committal immediately after you do. (This, of course, is just one of the things that ought to make you suspicious.) Already here and there on the internet are the usual loud and bizarre complaints that “apricot kernels are poison!”, “there’s no evidence they cure cancer!”, and “these people are just trying to earn a profit off sick people!” as IF traditional chemotherapy is harmless, evidently cures cancer, and doesn’t make somebody somewhere a nice fat profit. All this while those who attempt to argue that Laetrile might actually work lose their credibility, their licenses to practice medicine, and sometimes their freedom. As John Stossel would say “Give me a break!”

For those of you who are new to this debate and may be struggling to figure out for yourself who is correct and who is deluded I have a few links for you to check out.

Eating Apricot Kernel in Egypt – This is a fascinating blog by a native Egyptian discussing the plants he likes to grow in his garden and the traditional foods made from them. He is apparently still alive and kicking despite eating these highly poisonous apricot kernels on a regular basis. And he points out that this practice has been going on in Egypt for thousands of years.

Contrast that with this article from 1979 (the height of the Laetrile controversy) published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Clinical Nutrition entitled Laetrile: the cult of cyanide. Promoting poison for profit. Just a few quotes from this obvious hit piece:

“The laetrile empire is a highly organized and lucrative industry using sophisticated computerized technology, levels of funding undreamed of by the “snake oil salesmen” of old, with enormous impact on federal, state, and local levels of government.  It has the ability by push-button to generate avalanches of mail, massive funding for candidates supporting laetrile. It has an interlocking network of direct mail, an interlocking network with other organizations promoting health quackery, exerts unrelenting pressures on elected officials, and is not above smearing and threatening responsible scientists who dare to challenge it.”

Now for those of you unfamiliar with the psychological principle of projection, this is really a bizarrely classic case of it. In truth Laetrile proponents are utterly powerless against the real culprit being described here. Do I really need to say more?

“The process of cyanide release from an apricot kernel is analogous to dropping a sodium or potassium cyanide pellet (these salts of cyanide are highly water soluble solids) in water or acid, the means of “gas chamber” executions in California and genocidal mass killings by the Hitler regime during World War II.  Ironically, various leaders of the Third Reich, including Himmler and Goering, ultimately committed suicide by bitting into, and thereby crushing, cyanide pellets.”

Yes, you heard that right. Now, take THAT you Egyptian farmers!

Despite all of this bad press,and contrary to what you might expect, there are still amygdalin studies being done today, but they are done mainly by Asian scientists. Here are two fairly recent articles from the Biological & Pharmaceutical Bulletin which is published by the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan:

Amygdalin Induces Apoptosis through Regulation of Bax and Bcl-2 Expressions in Human DU145 and LNCaP Prostate Cancer Cells (2006)

Antinociceptive Effect of Amygdalin Isolated from Prunus armeniaca on Formalin-Induced Pain in Rats (2008)

This one is from the Department of Pharmacology at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea and was published in The World Journal of Gastroenterology -Amygdalin inhibits genes related to cell cycle in SNU-C4 human colon cancer cells (2005)

In an interesting discussion on another blog, one skeptic points out that the two cancer studies above were done using in vitro cancer cells – meaning they are in a petri dish, not in a living organism (experiments that use living organisms are called in vivo). This is true and is a good point, however, they are put forward here not so much because they are proof of amygdalin’s efficacy, but because they show that these Asian scientists are in fact still interested in conducting experiments while all such experimentation is dismissed out-of-hand in the west. (The other experiment listed here has to do with controlling pain and it was done with live animals. This effect that was also noted by the original proponents of Laetrile.)

In response to the skeptic (or overly credulous depending on how you look at it) above I would like to mention that evidence of the efficacy of amygdalin was shown in positive animal studies that were done in the 70’s. They were performed by Kanematsu Sugiura at Sloan Kettering but they were never officially published. They were, however, leaked by individuals working at Sloan Kettering at the time. Although I have managed to obtain a copy of them, I unfortunately do not have an electronic version at this time and have not been able to locate one on the web. (Update: See Kanematsu Sugiura’s Sloan Kettering studies here.) There is, however, an article written in 1976 by investigative reporter David M. Rorvik entitled Laetrile: The Goddamned-Contraband-Apricot Connection that is available online and that provides a good overview of the entire controversy.

For me, the apparently desperate attempts from the powers that be to prevent people from learning about the nutritional effects of amygdalin, (reference the insane quotes listed above), the fact that people have been eating foods containing it for thousands of years, Sloan Kettering’s suppressed positive animal studies showing an inhibitory effect on tumors in mice (bred specifically to spontaneously develop cancer), the fact that other scientists from around the world are still interested in studying it, proponents’ intelligent statements regarding the medical establishment’s focus on the size of tumors rather than the number of malignant cells in them, and the fact that it is present in a host of otherwise particularly nutritious foods, (apricot seeds, apple seeds, millet, lingonberries, mulberries, and blackberries to name a few) provide evidence that amygdalin does in fact have anti-cancer properties. You will still need to decide for yourself.

Yes, I know. They are poisonous and you will drop dead if you so much as swallow one. NOT! In fact, I believed this fallacy since the time I was a small child. Many times throughout my life I wondered to myself how in the hell more people didn’t drop dead from cyanide poisoning since apple seeds were so damn ubiquitous. Maybe wondering that is proof I was a smart kid. Either way, it took me some days of trying to overcome my fear enough to take a bite of one. After I did that, I swore up and down that I was having some kind of reaction and wondered if I would fall over dead any minute. I didn’t.

And now, whenever I eat an apple, I also eat the seeds—anywhere from 5 to 12 of them depending on the apple. Apple seeds most definitely taste like “bitter almonds” too. I actually find them quite tasty, but if the flavor is bothersome, eating them at the same time as you eat the flesh of the apple cuts the bitterness. But, why do it, you might ask. One reason is to realize for yourself the lies you’ve been told. The other is because, I believe, they are good for you.

I became interested in this subject after reading G. Edward Griffin’s World Without Cancer: The Story of Vitamin B17. I highly recommend this book. Just click the link to pick up a copy from Amazon. It’s well worth it.

You can find a good overview of this controversy, on both sides, in a number of places on the web. A quick search on laetrile or amygdalin will bring up more than you can possibly read. A quick and easy way to get a taste of what it’s all about, though, is to view G. Edward Griffin’s video on the subject.

After doing a little bit of research on my own, I was able to note that certain areas of the world had less of an incidence of cancer than other areas. Africa for example, has a low incidence of cancer, while all the 1st world countries have a high incidence. Now that seemed backwards to me. Aren’t we supposed to be healthier? But if you take diet into consideration, it starts to make a lot of sense. In fact, at one point, I came upon a researcher with a smart idea. Why not look into different groups of people right here within the US that had lower incidences of cancer? What was different about them? For example, mormons have a lower incidence of cancer than do the non-mormon people living right next to them. Some of that might be attributed to the fact that they do not smoke cigarettes, but certainly not all of it. What’s different? Could it be their diets?

It seems to me that populations of people that consume nuts and seeds, and/or foods high in nitrilosides, (like cassava in Africa for example), have less of an incidence of cancer. Could there be something to this Vitamin B-17 thing?

While US researchers are looking into cases of “poisoning” where individuals clearly ate TOO MUCH of something (even WATER in excess will kill you) Asian scientists have no such problem with it. They are still studying the effects of amygdalin on cancers and finding that indeed it has an effect. You can find one such article here. You can also do your own search on “amygdalin” using Google Scholar. Look for more recent articles. Now these research articles may not seem definitive to you, that’s fine. But note that these researchers are not afraid to consider it, while here in the US it’s practically taboo. On top of this, the nitriloside/amygdalin/laetrile/cyanide scare of the 70’s and 80’s has many people literally AFRAID to eat something that is in fact NOT poisonous at all. That’s damn suspicious.

Now if the thought of eating an apple seed frightens you, I’m not surprised. I think this phenomenon is much worse if you were in fact a child during the 70’s and 80’s. It’s very difficult to overcome those long held beliefs. Nevertheless, they are simply false and it’s worth witnessing it for yourself. It’s kind of like finally putting on those sunglasses that let you read subliminal messages on the road signs, or swallowing the pill that lets you see the matrix.