Heinerman on Beet Root and Recipe for Beet Kvass

From Heinerman's Encyclopedia of Healing Herbs and Spices

Food Chemotherapy for Cancer

For several years now I've served as editor of an annual publication, Folk Medicine Journal. It covers all manner of alternative medicine topics, but from a strictly "hands-on, do-it-yourself" approach. In the first volume was an English translation of an original article representing the research of an Hungarian physician, Dr. Alexander Ferenczi, which he conducted on hundreds of patients between 1955 and 1959.

What was so remarkable about his work was that he used an ordinary food for the remission of many different types of cancer. This "beet root chemotherapy" has been used with amazing results since then by other qualified doctors. I've excerpted some of the more important points from the original research report.

"Since October 1950, we tested in our department [for Internal Diseases at the District Hospital in Csoma, Hungary] the tumor-inhibiting action of beetroot . . . We gave this to [cancer] patients raw, finely grated 200 grams [7-8.5 ounces] spread over the day after meals....If the patient could not take it in this way, the grated beetroot was pressed by means of a handpress ... 1 kilogram [2 1/4 lbs] beetroot yielded approximately 300 milliliters [about 1/2 pint] juice, which the patient also took, spread over the day after meals.

"...I tried the above mentioned treatment also on other patients. Naturally, all the patients were inoperable...and other forms of treatment were ruled out. Up to now, I had 22 patients of this kind: ten with tumor of the lung, four with cancer of the stomach, two with cancer of the breast, with metastasis after an operated cancer of the lip, one with cancer of the prostate, one with cancer of the uterus, one with cancer of the skin . . . .The treatment with beetroot was started on many more patients; however, only a few were able to continue the treatment over a longer period. Those suffering from cancer of the liver or stomach in particular were not able to tolerate continued consumption of the [fresh] beetroot.

"The result was that out of 22 patients, 21 showed an improvement, manifesting itself by a shrinking of the tumor, a gain in weight of 3-11 kilograms [6.5-24 1/4 lbs.]...and also an improvement in appetite and general state of health. Unfortunately, after three to four months, the patients stopped taking the beetroot whereupon after two to three further months, their condition started to deteriorate.

"Experience gained up to now points to the fact that beetroot contains a tumor-inhibiting (anti-cancerous) active ingredient. However, for the present, no clue has been found as to the nature of this active substance. One thing is certain: beetroot is fairly stable because it acts when taken orally; therefore, digestion does not harm it. The very apparent red color may suggest that the active substance is the coloring matter. Treatment with beetroot presents several advantages over the rest of the medication used in the treatment of cancer. Firstly, because it is non-toxic and one can administer red beetroot in unlimited quantities. Also, there are unlimited supplies of beetroot at our disposal. We have therefore endeavored to administer to the patient this active substance in the most concentrated form and in the largest quantitites possible ...."

There is only one source in the United States for the concentrated form that Dr. Ferenczi employed in his many successful cancer treatments. It is organic beet root juice powder available in bulk from the following company: Pines International, P.O. Box 1107, Lawrence, KS 66044 (1-800-642-PINE). One level tablespoonful in 8 fluid ounces of water or juice of some kind (liquid chlorophyll is the best) every morning before breakfast will dramatically increase a person's resistance to cancer. However, in the event that some kind of cancer is already present, then this amount should be doubled or even tripled each day, but always taken with meals and never on an empty stomach. Due to the increased intake, the stomach or liver may reject some of it unless accompanied by other solid food.

***************************

Beets are quite potent buggers. You may have noticed that they go in red and come out red too. They're the only food that does that, I think. Here's some information and a recipe from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions cookbook for Beet Kvass:

From the interlineal margin notes:

Professor Zabel observed that sick people always lack digestive juices, not only during the acutye phase of their illness but also for a long time afterwards. In addition, he never saw a cancer victim that had a healthy intestinal flora . . . . Thus, the different lacto-fermented foods are a valuable aid to the cancer patient. They are rich in vitamins and minerals and contain as well enzymes that cancer patients lack. Of particular value are lacto-fermented beets, which have a very favorable effect on disturbed cellular function. Many scientific studies have demonstrated that beets have a regenerating effect on the body. Annelies Schoneck, Des Crudities Toute L'Annee.

No Ukrainian home was ever without its "beet kvass." The kvass was always handy and ready when a pleasing, sour flavor had to be added to soups and vinaigrettes. Lubow A. Kyivska, Ukranian Dishes

Truly the vegetable kingdom contains our best medicines . . . . [The vegetables] are not only beautiful to look at but filled with healthful properties, chief of which are their natural vitamins and trace elements. But only if they are used. Did you know that a stalk of celery or a serving of fresh salad greens has more vitamins and minerals than a box of synthetic vitamin tablets? Henry Bieler, MD, Food is Our Best Medicine

BEET KVASS

Makes 2 quarts

3 medium or 2 large organic beets, peeled and chopped up coarsely

1/4 cup whey

1 tablespoon sea salt

filtered water

This drink is valuable for its medicinal qualities and as a digestive aid. Beets are just loaded with nutrients. One 4-oz glass, morning and night, in an excellent blood tonic, promotes regularity, aids digestion, alkalizes the blood, cleanses the liver and is a good treatment for kidney stones and other ailments. Beet kvass may also be used in place of vinegar in salad ressings and an addition to soups.

Place beets, whey and salt in a 2 quart glass container. Add filtered water to fill the container. Shake well and cover securely. Keep it at room temperature for 2 days before transferring to refrigerator.

When most of the liquid has been drunk, you may fill up the container with water and keep at room temperature for another 2 days. The resulting brew will be slightly less strong than the first. After the second brew, discard the beets and start again. You may, however, reserve some of the liquid and use that as your inoculant instead of the whey.

Note: do not use grated beets in the preparation of this beet tonic. When grated, beets exude too much juice, resulting in a too rapid fermentation that favors the production of alcohol rather than lactic acid.

Eat yer beets, kids. They're good for you. Or, drink your beet juice. I make the beet kvass using Fallon's recipe and I love the stuff. It's tangy and sour and invigorating. I haven't made it in a while, so I'm due. Remember, the beets should be organic!

HM

Home Remedies from Amish Country

Home Remedies from Amish Country
Revised 5th Edition
Published by Abana Books, Ltd.
6523 Township Rd 346
Millersburg OH 44654


I purchased my copy from the Amish bulk store. It is available used from Amazon for a couple of bucks (+shipping at $3.99). It is a very interesting book, heavy on the use of apple cider vinegar, which is all around great stuff. Garlic is big in the book as well. And there's lots and lots of home remedies, all submitted by Amish folks.

The copyright info does say that no part of "this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form ... except for brief excerpts in reviews." I'm including these short paragraphs in my review here as it is a very good synopsis of how disease, toxemia, germs and and unhealthy body work. This section is called Body Cleanser I:

Cleansing the soul if just as important for good health as cleansing the body. Man has been held in the bondage of misery and suffering with negative, destructive influences from licensed and unlicensed witchcraft. [Wonder if the author of the quote is talking about mainstream medicine here?? HM]

Cleansing the body is basic for the elimination and correction of every kind of disease. When we become sick of being sick, then we will learn the truth and it will teach us that we can be free from any disease. Deficiencies in the raw materials our bodies assimilate and use for cell building produce deteriorated cells which in turn will produce toxins. Disease, aging and death are the result of accumulated toxins and congestions throughout the entire body. Germs and virses exist in excess only when we provide a breeding ground in which they can survive and multiply. They are in the body to help break down acculmulated toxins and congestions. Do you think that a microscopic microbe which will make you sick when you are well and strong, that you will ever become strong enough thereafter to throw it off? Infection and fever are not caught; they were created to burn off the excess wastes and toxins our bodies have accumulated. With this understanding, all diseases are varied expressions of the one disease called toxemia. This is briefly defined as a saturation of toxins and congestions in the body. As a person reaches of limit of what the body can tolerate, a good house cleaning is started, and one of nature's most effective methods is to start loosening and eliminating these toxins and congestions with bacterial or viral action. As this action progresses, we become sick and feverish, and the body's other resources kick into action to clean us out as fast as possible. As disease-producing toxins are expelled from our bodies, deficiencies must be restored. Thus a cleansing diet must also incude the proper material for building healthy cells.

.....

Lemons and limes are the richest source of vitamins and minerals of any food known to man. This lemon juice diet has been in use by many thousands of people since 1940 and may be used with complete safety for every known type of sickness. Other reasons to use this diet are for resting the digestive system, losing excess weight, and better assimilation of nutrients from food. Using this diet 3 or 4 times per year will do wonders for your health. Follow the diet for a minimum of 10 days and up to 40 days for extremely serious conditions. All the nutrition needed during the cleansing period is supplied in the diet. This diet does not have any dangerous side effects. Do not substitute any ingredients and make it exactly as shown.
2 Tablespoon lemon or lime juice from fresh fruit only (about 1/2 lemon)
2 T pure maple syrup (less if more weight loss is desired)
1/10 tsp cayenne powder (may start with a dash and increase amount)
Combine the above ingredients and add enough medium hot or cold water to fill a 10 oz glass. Pure sorghum may be used as a lesser substitute when maple syrup isn't available. About 6-12 glasses per day are sufficient. Extra water or mint tea may be taken if desired. When you get hungry just have another glass of lemonade. No other food, vitamins or supplements should be taken during the full period of the diet. If you do, you may defeat your efforts at cleansing the body.

End quote. Also recommended is a herbal tea laxative every morning, aiming at 2-3 bowel movements a day. To come off the diet, drink a glass of orange or grape juice for the first 2-6 meals, adding raw and cooked veggies in small portions after that.

I can vouch for this fast (I call it a fast, they call it a diet) as being very beneficial. Your body will rid itself of toxins, which will make you feel pretty sickly: headaches, dizziness, weakness, vomiting might occur. This is a sign that the fast is working--as your body dumps toxins into the bloodstream on route to elimination, you feel sick--that's the toxins being kicked out and released. Be patient, pray, and let your body do what it knows will work and rid you of excess rotten crap in your system.

The book carries the all important disclaimer that this information is presented only for historical and educational purposes: it is NOT medical advice. Readers should always consult with their physician before trying any home remedies, and etc. That disclaimer applies to this blog as well.

The book is divided into Baby Care, Health Care, Weight Loss, Salves, and an Index. A majority of the remedies include one or more of the following: apple cider vinegar, lemons, onions, garlic, cayenne pepper, honey, and baking soda. The herbs include: ginger, feverfew (for migraine), plantain, boneset, red clover blossoms, goldenseal, echinacea, aloe vera, and more.

Here's a typical remedy that is repeated by many Amish in the book:

The way to stay healthy and alert, well into old age, is to combine one teaspoon of cider vinegar, one teaspoon of honey, and a full glass of water. Take this tonic three times a day, 1/2 hour before meals. Sylvia Shetler

Here's another one, also repeated many times:

1 tablespoon [baking] soda in a glass of water for 3 day, never more than 3 days, the body would become too alkaline. The body is in an acid state when flu strikes. Simon S. Schwartz

The body's acid/alkaline balance is very important. Disease strikes when your system becomes too acidic. Assisting your system to become more alkaline is important.

Here's another remedy for kidney stones:

Wash six ordinary size red beets. Do not slice them. In 3 quarts of water, boil them slowly so as not to boil the water away. After an hour, strain the water and bottle it, placing it in the ice box to prevent souring. Drink 3 glasses of this a day. The drink simply dissolves the stones, and you don't even pass them. Mrs. Lloyd Kuepfer

In our household, we use a lot of home remedies. We do not have health insurance and tend not to use the mainstream medical system much. For one, it has priced itself out of our range. For another, we don't agree with allopathic methods or theory. It is not enough to supress symptoms. Far more important is to get to the root cause of the problem. So Home Remedies from Amish Country is a natural for us, and we have used and will use many of the suggested remedies.

This is an excellent little book, full of interesting ideas. For about $5, used from Amazon, it can't be beat. Then all you have to do is follow the educational and historical non-advice. :)
HM

Lacto-Fermenting and Other Projects

Here’s what happening in the Handmaiden’s Kitchen

My Amish friends, kind purveyors of terrific raw milk, butter, cream, eggs and produce, also have a yard for their chickens that is mostly a haven for lambs quarters in prodigious quantities. They don’t eat lambs quarter themselves, so they allow me to go and harvest as much as I like while we’re there. I’ve been freezing it for wintertime eating. When I bring home the bags of these nutritious greens, I take all the leaves off the stems (composting the stems, natch). The leaves get blanched in boiling water for three to five minutes, then poured into a collander (save the water you boil it in--it’ll have lots of vitamins and use it as part of a soup stock or drink it). I run cool water over the lambs quarter and when it is cool, put in it ziplock bags, marking the date and toss it in the freezer. Prodigal Gardens explains it well, and has some terrific recipes too. Actually, I’m feeling a bit guilty about this--I should tell Joaz and Lydia why I harvest and eat the lambs quarters--I don’t think they realize how nutritious it is. As it is though, they have so many vegetables in their gardens that I doubt they have time for this “weed.”

The tomatoes have come in and are doing their best to keep me very busy. I haven’t canned them so far, though I will probably end up doing a batch or three. I’ve been making tomato sauce and freezing that. A basic tomato sauce is super easy to make, mostly because I don’t bother peeling and seeding them. Saute up some garlic and onions, add a bunch of cut up ripe tomatos, some chopped up basil, oregano and parsley (dried if you don’t have it fresh), some wine or water and salt/pepper and cook it til it tastes mama mia good. I have one of those handheld blender things--and what a great tool for the kitchen that thing is!--and so I blend it well when it has cooked enough. Yum. Tomato sauce is one of those universally useful foods to have around. If you’re as poor as we are all probably going to be, some fried corn mush topped with tomato sauce and cheese can make an excellent dinner.

Mostly what I’ve been doing, however, involves lacto fermentation, which is something you should know about. You can read about it here, here and here.

Lacto fermentation is a method of preserving food with the added bonus of making that food extra delicious and healthy for you. Here’s what Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions has to say:

"It may seem strange to us that, in earlier times, people knew how to preserve vegetables for long periods without the use of freezers or canning machines. This was done through the process of lacto-fermentation. Lactic acid is a natural preservative that inhibits putrefying bacteria. Starches and sugars in vegetables and fruits are converted into lactic acid by the many species of lactic-acid-producing bacteria. These lactobacilli are ubiquitous, present on the surface of all living things and especially numerous on leaves and roots of plants growing in or near the ground. Man needs only to learn the techniques for controlling and encouraging their proliferation to put them to his own use, just as he has learned to put certain yeasts to use in converting the sugars in grape juice to alcohol in wine."

Lacto-fermentation is ancient, preserves food, and makes the vegetables, fruits and beverages easier to digest while increasing vitamin content and adding probiotics to your diet. If you have a root cellar or other cool place where you can store foods long term, then you should learn how to ferment your own vegetables. If you have a love for pickles and other sour-tart foods, you’ll love fermented vegetables. As Fallon points out, this is a worldwide custom, every culture knew how to ferment vegetables and fruits to preserve them and to make them even more nutritious.

The basic process is this: Pick the best vegetables or fruits available to you--organic if possible. Clean and cut up the vegetable, usually diced or shredded. Put the vegetable in a bowl and pound it to get some of its juices going. Put it in a clean glass jar, then add some sea salt, whey and water. Leave an inch of head space in the jar, then put the lid on tightly. Leave at room temperature (about 70 degrees) for a few days. This gives the lactobacillus time to ferment. When it tastes sour/tangy to you, then you can store it in the fridge or in the root cellar or another cool place. Sally Fallon explains this in her article and her cookbook. It is very simple and cheap and will preserve your vegetables for months. There are recipes available on the web, just google lacto-fermented recipes and you’ll find them. I’ve talked about vegetables here because I haven’t tried fruit yet. I keep my fermented veggies in the fridge for now, but will put them in the root cellar or cold room when we get that going.

Where you get whey: If you can get raw milk, you can make your own curds and whey. Raw milk left at room temperature will sour, but it doesn’t go bad, at least not in the few days you leave it out. Pasturized milk will definitely go bad left at room temp. I leave a quart or two of raw milk at room temp for two to four days (the time varies because “room temperature” can vary). When the milk has separated, you pour the milk through cheesecloth, allowing the liquid (whey) to collect in a pot, and keeping the curds in the cheesecloth. I use a collander lined with cheesecloth, and when most of the whey has gone into the pot underneath the collander, I gently tie up the cheesecloth onto a wooden spoon placed on top of the collander. I allow the when to drip off the curds for 8 to 10 hours or so (overnight) and in the morning, I have a quart of whey, and some cream cheese in the cheesecloth. I store the whey in a quart jar in the fridge, and use up the cream cheese in recipes. The whey will keep for months. You can add a tablespoon of whey to a cup of soup or water for extra nutritional value, but mostly I use the whey in fermenting. In the 19th century, there were lots of whey houses (think coffee houses or oxygen bars) and it was renowned for its health-giving properties.

“Whey is such a good helper in your kitchen. It has a lot of minerals. One tablespoon of whey in a little water will help digestion. It is a remedy that will keep your muscles young. It will keep your joints movable and ligaments elastic. When age wants to bend your back, take whey . . . With stomach ailments, take one tablespoon whey three times daily, this will feed the stomach glands and they will work well again.” Hanna Kroeger, Ageless Remedies from Mother’s Kitchen (p. 87 in Nourishing Traditions)

If you can’t get whey, you can make piima milk by purchasing some good non homogenized whole milk and adding piima culture. I haven’t looked but I’m sure you can find piima culture to buy through google or check your local health food store. Once you have piima milk, you can then make your whey and cream cheese curds--just leave at room temp for a few days until it separates. Note I am not talking about whey powder here--this is the liquid stuff.

Using lacto-fermentation, I’ve made beet kvass, a very healthy tonic drink. Tart and pleasingly sour, it will strengthen your liver and alkalize and clean your blood. This couldn’t be easier: peel two to three raw beets, dice them up, put in a quart jar and add one tablespoon sea salt and four tablespoons whey. Fill the jar with filtered or clean water and let sit at 70 degrees for a few days, then refrigerate. Leave the beets right in the jar. Once you’ve drank all the liquid, you can refill the jar with water, leave out for two days, then in the fridge again. I’ve been reading that you can also ferment herb teas, which sounds very interesting. More on that later.

Another thing I’ve fermented is gundru. This is a survival food from Nepal, “poor people” food. Gundru can be made from spinach or any other green. And it doesn’t require any salt or whey! All you do is clean the greens, cut them up into small slices, then use a rolling pin to crush the greens more and get their juices working. Cram as much as possible into a clean jar and put on a tight lid. Leave out at room temp. Next day, pound on the greens in the jar again using a wooden spoon. Then you leave it out for 10 days. At the end of 10 days, the greens will smell tart and fermented, like they’ve been cured. The lactobacilli on the surface of the greens will have done their job. If there is any excess water, drain it, and then put the cured leaves out in the sun to dry. It took the batch I did one day to sun dry (it was hot as hell that day). I then put the greens into a small jar and I’ll add them to soups and stews. The gundru taste interesting--it is a good addition to the Greens Jar for adding to wintertime food.

Then there’s purlane stems fermenting and watermelon rind, using the basic salt, whey, water method. As well as some Amish cider that is fermenting in a slightly more alcoholic mode.

There’s other projects going on as well, freezing and drying foods, but this has gotten too long. With life and times about to get harder for most of us, I’m trying to learn ways to harvest free, healthy food, and preserve them for my family. Anything we can do to heighten our nutrition will lessen our need for doctors. And if we’re eating a lot of basic rice and beans, it will help that our vegetables are preserved in ways that make them tasty, interesting and good for us. Give fermentation a try--all our ancestors did.