Anti-Malignancy Factors Apparently Present in Organically Grown Foods

By Dr. Donald C. Collins

Summary: A California physician records in a professional medical journal five separate cases in which patients with various forms of cancer recovered after adopting a diet of only organically grown foods. Though some of the patients had multiple malignancies at different times in their life, all of them remained cancer free—living twenty to thirty years beyond their last surgery and showing no signs of ever having a malignancy at all upon autopsy—after switching to organic foods. While such facts may seem unsurprising today, back in 1961, when this article was published, the act of a medical doctor officially suggesting such a powerful effect of food on health was tantamount to heresy within the medical community, explaining perhaps why the author claims to have written his submission “with considerable hesitancy.” From the American Journal of Proctology, 1961. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.

The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.

Anti-Malignancy Factors Apparently Present in Organically Grown Foods[spacer height=”20px”]

This clinical note is written with considerable hesitancy, and yet on five different occasions during the past thirty-six years of practice, I have seen a marvelous phenomenon occur.

Five patients have been observed with extensive malignancies—proven by biopsies—of either the gastrointestinal tract or blood (leukemias) or sarcomas. Strangely, these five individuals all died many years later from diseases unrelated to these former malignant processes. It was shown in all five instances, following most thorough and painstaking autopsies performed by highly competent pathologists, that no discernible pathologic evidence could be found that such patients had ever previously had the various malignant diseases proven by adequate biopsies to have been present in the past.

The only constant factor in the lives of these five persons was the fact that they all ate home-raised, organically grown foods that were free from various chemical preservatives and insect repellent sprays. Unfortunately, here in Los Angeles we have learned to our dismay that smog apparently destroys these beneficial factors in organically grown foodstuffs. Possibly, such optimum foods possess unidentified antibiotic factors that are antagonistic to malignant growths in some humans. Some recent evidence attributes such beneficial actions to certain antibiotics studied so far.

[Chart showing specific cancer histories of the patients mentioned; for clarity, chart has been slightly modified relative to original:]

Note: These were all my own personal patients.

This brief clinical note is written with the hope that it may prove of possible benefit to other coloproctologists dealing with apparently hopeless malignant disease in their own patients. Surely, this recommended adjuvant therapy is innocuous and might prove life-prolonging or even arrest the further progress of the malignant disease. This is certainly worth trying and remembering for possible future use.

By Donald C. Collins, MD, FIAP, 7046 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, California. Reprinted from The American Journal of Proctology (Clinical Note), Vol. 12, No. 1, February, 1961, by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.