Natural Ginger is Up to 10,000 Times More Effective Than Chemo...

(NaturalNews) Ginger naturally contains a compound that is up to 10,000 times more effective than chemotherapy drugs at killing the cancer stem cells that make malignant tumors so dangerous, according to a study published in the journal PLoS.

The chemical, known as 6-shogaol, is produced when ginger roots are dried or cooked. The researchers found that 6-shogaol is active against cancer stem cells at concentrations that are harmless to healthy cells. This is dramatically different from conventional chemotherapy, which has serious side effects largely because it kills healthy as well as cancerous cells.

Cells responsible for 90 percent of cancer death?

Like other stem cells, cancer stem cells possess the ability to differentiate into various different cell types. In the case of cancer, stem cells differentiate into the various malignant cells that make up a tumor colony. Although they make up less than 1 percent of the cells in any given tumor, stem cells are impervious to nearly all known or experimental chemotherapy agents. These cells are also able to replicate indefinitely, and they are capable of splitting off from their originating colony to start new tumors elsewhere. They are key players in the process of metastasis, which is responsible for 90 percent of cancer-related deaths.

The persistence of cancer stem cells also explains why cancers can recur even after seemingly successful tumor eradication via chemotherapy, radiation or surgery.

"Cancer stem cells pose serious obstacle to cancer therapy as they can be responsible for poor prognosis and tumour relapse," the researchers wrote. "To add into the misery, very few chemotherapeutic compounds show promise to kill these cells."

Kills cancer cells on many fronts

The researchers found that 6-shogaol targets breast cancer stem cells along several different pathways, including reducing the expression of surface markers, altering the cell cycle to increase the rate of cell death, inhibiting tumor formation, directly inducing programmed cell death, and flat-out poisoning cancer stem cells (cytotoxicity).

The researchers then compared the cytotoxicity of 6-shogaol against human breast cancer stem cells with that of the widely used chemotherapy drug taxol. They found that while taxol did show cytotoxicity in a one-dimensional laboratory model of cancer ("monolayer"), it showed almost no effect in the three-dimensional ("spheroid") model that is now believed to be a more accurate model of real-world cancer tumors. 6-shogaol, however, was effective in both the monolayer and spheroid models.

The researchers then increased the taxol concentration by 10,000 times, but it still showed no effectiveness in spheroid model.

"[T]axol, even though was highly active in monolayer cells, did not show activity against the spheroids even at 10,000 fold higher concentration compared to 6-shogaol," the researchers wrote.

To read further and learn more:   http://www.naturalnews.com/052009_ginger_chemotherapy_cancer_treatment.html#ixzz3ryTPuUoT

Kill cancer cells without destroying your immune system

Chemotherapy is one of the most well known ways to treat cancer. Unfortunately, chemotherapy drugs by nature are extremely toxic and usually work against your body's natural mechanisms to fight cancer. It destroys your host immunity instead of supporting it. Along with inhibiting your immunity, it destroys healthy cells in your body as well and can lead to more severe health problems going forward. The other side effect chemotherapy has is the fact that it can actually support the growth of more cancer cells by destroying the immune system.

An alternative to chemotherapy can be found in natural compounds that can kill cancer cells without destroying the healthy cells that are essential for recovery. It is an effect called "selective cytotoxicity." The result is a targeted, intelligent cancer treatment that doesn't hinder the body's ability to fight cancer.

One particular compound is found in pineapple stems, called bromelain. A study published in the Journal Planta Medica discovered that bromelain treated cancer in an animal study better than the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorauracil. The effect of bromelian was superior to that of 5-fluorouracil by approximately 263 percent, compared to the untreated control.

The impressive part of this study was that the bromelain worked in a way that didn't cause additional harm to the animals, whereas the drug 5-fluorauracil was relatively unsuccessful.

Written by GreenMedInfo:

"As a highly toxic, fluoride-bound form of the nucleic acid uracil, a normal component of RNA, the drug is supposed to work by tricking more rapidly dividing cells -- which include both cancer and healthy intestinal, hair follicle, and immune cells -- into taking it up, thereby inhibiting (read: poisoning) RNA replication enzymes and RNA synthesis..."

"When a person dies following conventional cancer treatment it is all too easy to "blame the victim" and simply write that patient's cancer off as "chemo-resistant," or "exceptionally aggressive," when in fact the non-selective nature of the chemotoxic agent is what ultimately lead to their death."

There is no chemotherapy drug that has been proven to produce effects like selective cytotoxicity. Apart from bromelain, there are a number of other natural compounds that have been known to produce the same results:

Vitamin C - A study done by Dr. Ronald Hunninghake found Vitamin C to be selectively cytotoxic against cancer cells over the course of a 15-year research project.

Eggplant Extract - Dr. Bill E. Cham is a leading researcher in the area of treating skin cancer and says:

"The mode of action of SRGs [glycoalkaloids solasodine rhamnosy glycosides (BEC)] is unlike any current antineoplastic [anti-tumor] agent. Specific receptors for the SRGs present only on cancer cells but not normal cells are the first step of events that lead to apoptosis in cancer cells only, and this may explain why, during treatment, the cancer cells were being eliminated and normal cells were replacing the killed cancer cells with no scar tissue being formed."

In particular, the extracts from plants in the Solanaceae family such as eggplant, tomato, potato, bell peppers and tobacco are the compounds that have the ability of killing cancer cells without harming the healthy tissue.

Turmeric (Curcumin Extract) - In the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, a study conducted discovered that rats who were administered curcumin noted a decrease in experimentally-induced brain tumors in 9 out of 11 treated. This spice has been intensely researched and is suggested that it targets transformed cells.

There are a number of resources to find alternative treatments to chemotherapy, including the methods mentioned above, found in the below sources for this article.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.foodconsumer.org

http://www.dr-gonzalez.com/index.htm

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4924076_bromelain-work.html