In the Jungle, the Quiet Jungle
For many years – long before HSI was founded – mainstream media reports often contemplated the bounty of healing botanicals that might lie hidden in the depths of the world’s rainforests. Inevitably, each report wondered if cancer treatments might be right under our noses – or at least under the noses of scientists who ventured into the Amazon and other rainforests.
Today, however, the media is more likely to report on the clearing of rainforests to make way for soy plantations, while herbal supplements are usually portrayed as highly suspect.
So what happened to those optimistic predictions about rainforest cancer cures? Well, at least one of them has proved to be quite promising. And while you may not hear about it in the national mainstream, a report recently surfaced in a local FOX News broadcast in Tampa, Florida. The topic: graviola – the cancer-fighting rainforest herb. And we were pleasantly surprised to find that HSI was referenced in the brief report.
But there’s quite a bit more to tell about the graviola story, and it begins with a risky act by a drug company insider who felt compelled to reveal a secret from the jungle.
Under wraps
“I can truthfully say that had I not begun to use graviola, I most likely would not be alive today.” This testimonial was received from a woman who began supplementing with graviola in early 2006 while also receiving conventional therapy for esophageal cancer. Today, she’s cancer-free, and she’s just one of many patients who have shared their personal triumphs over cancer with HSI Panelist Leslie Taylor, N.D., who has played a central role in the emergence of this powerful botanical.
Graviola is a small evergreen that grows wild in the tropics of North and South America. About 30 years ago, the National Cancer Institute included graviola in a plant-screening program that showed how extracts of the plant effectively attack malignant cells. This information was part of an internal report never released to the public.
Years later, a major pharmaceutical company began extensive research, which confirmed that graviola extracts actually seek out and destroy cancer cells without harming healthy cells. But researchers struggled unsuccessfully to create a synthetic copy of the cancer- fighting components of graviola, so the results remained under wraps.
If you were an insider who had full knowledge of graviola’s remarkable cancer-fighting potential and you knew that this information was deliberately being withheld from the public, what would you do? Would you defy your superiors and secretly find a way to share the information with the world? That’s exactly what one insider-with-a-conscience did. And the person he contacted was Dr. Leslie Taylor.
Vibrancy of life
“The first thing that hits you when you step into the rainforest is the air. It’s so heavy with oxygen and humidity that it is almost a tangible thing which just kind of envelops you. There is a heavy, rich stillness to it The clean oxygen-filled air and the sheer magnitude of living things all around you sort of energizes you somehow. The vibrancy of life you feel flowing around you and through you resonates.”
Clearly, those are the words of someone who feels right at home in the rainforest. They were written by Dr. Taylor and appear on her web site (leslietaylor.net).
More than a decade ago, Dr. Taylor founded Raintree Nutrition, Inc., which today harvests more than 60 medicinal plants in Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, and Columbia. But Dr. Taylor isn’t content to run Raintree from a desk in an air-conditioned office. She makes regular trips to rainforest areas where she uncovers the age-old secrets of botanical healing from tribal shamans and medicine men, as well as conventionally trained chemists and herbalists.
In a report that appeared in the March 2007 HSI Members Alert, Dr. Taylor shared the research she’s collected on a new, more potent species of graviola called mountain graviola, which contains more than two dozen novel acetogenins – the active cancer- fighting compounds of graviola. Laboratory research has produced very promising results, especially on liver and ovarian cancer cell lines, but also on solid breast cancer tumors, as well as prostate, lymphoma, pancreatic, and colon cancers.
So far, no clinical trials have been mounted to test graviola or mountain graviola, but testimonials from those who have used the extracts have been very encouraging. Dr. Taylor’s Raintree Nutrition web site (rain-tree.com) contains exhaustive information about graviola research, as well as a database file that details plant chemical information, traditional preparation, and contraindications for Graviola Max, a product that combines both species of graviola for a very powerful cancer-fighting therapy.
I believe in coming years we’ll see much more graviola coverage from the mainstream media. Until then, please share this information with your friends. Each time you do, you’ll be furthering the effort of that lone pharmaceutical insider who was intent on letting the world know about this extraordinary cancer therapy.
