Here in the northern hemisphere, it’s been paw paw season and these huge yellow fruits have been stacked up in the local organic grocery, ready to help cure everyone’s cancer. There are large pawpaws (Latin name Carica papaya) and small ones called papayas (Latin name Asimina trebola). As a small child in Australia, I was familiar with paw paws and with the song on the radio about “Picking up paw paws, put ’em in your pocket, Way down yonder in the paw paw patch.” I used to think, What big pockets you must have, funny man, to fit paw paws in them! It was sung in a strange way that I hadn’t yet identified as American.
In 2013, when I lived in Thailand, my house had a tall paw paw tree. This was a housing development and quite luxurious for Thailand. But the houses were close together and the tree was crowded. There were six more paw paws above those two orange ones that were still green and hidden in the leaves. Although the paw paw and papaya trees look different, I believe the two kinds of fruit offer the same health benefits.
Carotenoids
Like carrots, the orange color of pawpaw/papaya indicates it has carotenoids, which become Vitamin A in the body. One of them is lycopene (also in tomatoes and watermelon), a very strong anti-oxidant. In cancer research, lycopene has been linked to reduction of many cancers such as breast, prostate, ovary, lung and bladder.
Fibrin
This compound improves the quality of blood cells, promoting good blood flow and reducing risk of clots. Good blood flow is essential for cancer recovery, to bring enough oxygen to all the body cells so none of them convert to being anaerobic (i.e. become cancerous).
Papain, a Proteolytic Enzyme
Papain is in papaya/pawpaw fruit and leaves, both. Enzymes are little proteins that make things happen and we have trillions of them in the body. Each one is responsible for a specific function. Lysis and its adjectival form lytic mean cell breakdown. So papain is proteolytic; it breaks down dietary protein cells into their component amino acids. The body has other enzymes that do this but as we age, we produce fewer of them and therefore digest protein less effectively. If you eat paw paw before a meal, you’re adding more enzymes for the job.
If you leave undigested protein in the intestines, it ferments, enabling bacteria to multiply and gas to form. Over time, layers of bacteria grow, covering the interior intestinal surfaces and, with the undigested food, clogging the passageway. This can lead to malnourishment because (a) when food is not broken down enough, its nutrients can’t pass into the tiny intestinal capillaries; and (b) when intestinal blood vessels are blocked by the layers of bacteria from contact with any food that is broken down enough, nutrients cannot be fully absorbed.
“Papaya” Leaf Tea
This is actually pawpaw leaf tea. It is an old Australian Aboriginal remedy, passed on to some cancer patients in Australia’s Gold Coast (in Queensland), where the instructions for making it were published in 1978. I’ve read that the name Paw Paw comes from Africa but personally, I’m inclined to believe it’s an Aussie Aborigine name because many Aboriginal names have that double form. Some examples are the town, Wagga Wagga; the Sydney beach Curl Curl; the coastal holiday area, Woy Woy; and the huge eroded shapes in N.W. Australia called the Bungle Bungles.
Papaya (pawpaw) leaf tea has been effective for Dengue Fever and for some cancers. A woman in Thailand recommended it to me and I bought a bottle of it at a health food store. She said it increases red blood cells, which was important for my cancer (chronic myeloid leukemia, CML) because untreated, it repeatedly lowers the red cells, causing anemia, and clumps them together, reducing the oxygen they can deliver to body tissues. See How Free is Your Blood? for more on this.
I drank some but reading online about it, found that it also increases the platelets. I promptly threw the bottle out! CML increases platelets, putting you in danger of having a blood clot, so I certainly didn’t need any further platelet increase. So papaya leaf tea may be excellent for tumorous cancers but not for leukemia.
- BTW, my leukemia is now cured and there is a free download that describes how it happaned. It’s available from this site, an eBook called How I Nabbed That Cancer.
How to Reach Those Paw Paws?
In the above photo, my house is the one on the right. You might think, Well, just reach out a second floor window and pick them. No; all those houses, like most in Thailand, had fixed iron grillwork on all windows and doors. The gaps in the window grillwork were too small for paw paws. Each crop (two per year) is higher up the tree, and the tree grows quickly. The first crop was just barely reachable by my wonderful neighbor, Hahn, from a ladder. The second one, in the photo, is too high for that.
So Hahn got inventive. He firmly attached a bucket to one end of a long stick. I reached through the grillwork and dislodged pawpaws with a wooden spoon and he stood on his ladder, reached up, and caught them in the bucket. Nice bit of teamwork. There were always four or five ripe ones at a time. Then I cut one up in a bowlful of pieces for him to eat as kitchen work was not to his taste but paw paws were. If our mutual cleaning lady was there that day, she received one or two also, for her small children who loved them.
Paw Paw Sweetness
Papayas and pawpaws are excellent fruits for cancer patients. They do contain fructose, fruit sugar, and if you have cancer you might feel you shouldn’t eat much fruit because fructose is a type of sugar. There’s actually controversy about how harmful fructose is to cancer patients but I’ll leave that for a future blog. For comfort in the meantime, keep in mind that paw paws and papayas have less sugar than other tropical fruits such as mangos and pineapples.
Stevia is a safe sweetener but to me, has an unpleasant taste and after-taste. Please see How to Sweeten Life? for information on Xylitol, the best sweetener IMO, whether you have cancer or not. Far from rotting your teeth, it strengthens them and besides not feeding cancer, it doesn’t attract ants. You can read more about cancer, sugar, Hahn, and my adventures in Costa Rica, Thailand and Germany in My Cancer Survival Saga And How You Could Star in Yours, available on this site at a 10% discount compared to regular online booksellers.