Juicing is now pretty mainstream and carrots are a popular ingredient for their copious juice and pleasant sweetness. Sweetness. What if you have cancer: should they be included? At the cancer clinic I went to in Arizona, carrots were never included in the daily vegetable juice because of their high sugar content. However, the Gerson protocol for cancer treatment features up to 13 glass of carrot juice per day.
I puzzled over this contradiction for a while. Fructose is the sugar in fruits and vegetables and many cancer doctors say:
- Fructose is sugar! No different from sucrose, table sugar, so keep it to a minimum in your anti-cancer diet.
Others, such as Dr. Jimenez of Hope4Cancer, an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico, say:
- Fruit fructose is safe! High fructose corn syrup and other fructoses do feed cancer but the fructose in fruit, carrots and beets does not. That’s because those fructose molecules have left-spinning electrons around their nucleus and cancer cells ignore them as food.
I love fruit so for two weeks in 2015 I followed that theory, eating red grapes, berries, and green apples. Red grapes contain the anti-cancer Resveratrol in their skins and seeds; berries are widely thought to be anti-cancer; and green apples are less sweet than red ones. However, after two weeks, my chronic leukemia tried to go acute. The dysfunctional white cells rose high, cluttering the blood and partially blocking the capillaries in the brain. This gave me a woozy feeling and the fast and erratic heart rate alarmed me so for three days I took the Leukemia pills called Sprycel and rested a lot. Then I was OK again and I thought, Fructose is not safe! Back to the fructose contradiction.
A Possible Answer: Falcarinol
Googling around, I stumbled upon a British site, the World Carrot Museum. Carrots have a phytonutrient called falcarinol which is a natural pesticide and fungicide that protects them as they grow. Some research studies have found that lab rats with carrots included in their diet were one third less likely to develop cancer than the rats fed a carrotless diet. It is thought that the falcarinol stimulated a body mechanism that fights cancer. By itself or in large amounts, falcarinol is toxic to the body but in the carrot, it is somehow toxic only to cancer. More research is needed.
Carrots and IPT
Insulin Potentiated Therapy (IPT) is a form of low-dose chemo and is offered in some alternative cancer clinics. The patient arrives for treatment having eaten no breakfast and is given a dose of insulin to further lower the blood sugar level. The cancer cells are now extra hungry for sugar and therefore have their membrane’s sugar receptors open but instead of sugar, they receive chemo drugs administered in quick succession. (You can read more about IPT in My Cancer Survival Saga And How You Could Star in Yours.)
Perhaps carrot juice works in a similar fashion to reduce cancer. The cancer cells open up to receive the fructose and they do receive it but along with it they receive falcarinol, then weaken and die.
Carrots are Good Guys
When we boil whole carrots, falcarinol does not die. The Carrot Museum reports that it actually gains strength because the cooked carrot cells lose their water content along with water-soluble vitamins and minerals and this increases the concentration of falcarinol within the carrot. This is true only of boiled whole carrots. The carrot enzymes would also be lost as all food enzymes die at temperatures above 118 degrees.
But it appears that we can confidently add lots of carrots to our veggie juice, along with the celery, asparagus, peppers, ginger, lemon, leafies, or whatever your favorite recipe is. Carrots have persisted in sharing this planet with us for at least 5,000 years – seeds of that age have been found in Europe. They would have been yellow, white or purple as our orange carrots (color from carotenoids) give no evidence of their existence until the 15th century. Today I bought a bag of carrots for juicing and they were each a different color: yellow, purple and orange.
Carrots also presumably contain a great many other phytonutrients as yet unidentified by research but of course we don’t have to wait for official permission. Full speed ahead with carrots.