Page 43An interesting point to note is that when an Eskimo leaves his traditional way of
life and begins to rely on a western/modern diet he becomes even more cancer
prone than the average American.
The Indians of North America are another people who are remarkably free
from cancer. The AMA went as far as conducting a special study in an effort to
discover why there was little to no cancer amongst the Hopi and Navajo Indians.
The February 5, 1949 issue of the journal of the American Medical Association
declared that they found 36 cases of malignant cancer from a population of
30,000. In the same population of white persons there would have been about
1,800 current cases.
In 1843, a French surgeon, Stanislas Tanchou, MD, formulated a doctrine that
the incidence of cancer increases in direct proportion to the “civilization” of a
nation and its people.
This theory was embraced by John Le Conte, MD (1818-1891), first president of
the University of California, and his enthusiasm led medical missionaries, ship
surgeons, anthropologists and others to undertake an avid search for cancer
among the Alaskan Eskimo (Inuit), northern Athapaskans of Canada and the
native peoples of Labrador.
The result was always the same: for 75 years, not a single case of cancer
was documented among the tens of thousands of such people studied
by competent medical examiners. The Harvard-trained anthropologist,
Vilhjalmur Stefannson, for instance, lived for 11 years among the Eskimo and
never saw a case. In later life, he wrote a book on the topic, Cancer: A Disease
of Civilization?
Similar stories are told about the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia. Albert
Schweitzer, MD, the famous Nobel laureate, testified: “On my arrival in Gabon, in
1913, I was astonished to encounter no case of cancer....The absence of cancer
seemed to me due to the difference in nutrition....”
Is this beginning to add up to a pattern for you?
Indigenous people of regions across the globe seem protected so long as they
eat the diet that their ancestors ate for millennia. But once they adopt Western
dietary habits, cancer appears and then rapidly grows to being a major killer, if
not the number one.