By Sayer Ji

Contributing writer for 

This commonly overlooked superfood protects the body from nuclear fallout, kills a wide range of cancers, and keeps the arteries unclogged — to name but a few experimentally confirmed ways in which the apple awakens your inner physician.

Why Apple is One of the World’s Most Healing Superfoods

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” This age old saying has never rang truer with greater promise and authority than it does today. As in the modern era, doctors bring with them a battery of tests, drugs, and interventions, all of which carry unintended, adverse health risks that often outweigh their purported benefits, and are therefore best avoided whenever possible.

While some might take this opening aphorism as mere folk medicine fantasy, the reality is that the medicinal properties of apple are well-documented within the biomedical literature.

 For instance, apple consumption has been the subject of quite a few studies on colorectal cancer risk reduction. [i] [ii] [iii]  Other cancers that apple constituents have been studied to kill in pre-clinical research include:

• Liver Cancer: apple juice, apple pectin and apple peel has been experimentally confirmed to kill liver cancer,[iv]
• Breast Cancer: apples have been found to both prevent and to suppress mammary cancers in the animal model.[v]
• Multi-Drug Resistant Cancer: carotenoids extracted from apple have been found to inhibit drug resistant cancer cell line proliferation.[vi]
• Esophageal Cancer: An apple-derived procyanidin has been found to suppress esophageal cancer. [vii]
• Stomach Cancer: One of the ways in which apple constituents prevent stomach cancer is through their inhibition of Helicobacter pylori, one of the main infectious agents linked to both ulcer and gastric cancer.[viii]  But apple procyanidin has also been studied for its ability to directly induce programmed cell death within stomach cancer cells.[ix]

It is likely that many of the fundamental processes involved in cancer initiation and promotion are inhibited by apples and their constituents, and therefore apples may protect against far more cancers than referenced above. It appears that no matter what part of apple is studied, it has anti-tumor properties. Apple cider vinegar, for instance, has been found to contain an anti-tumor compound which results from the acetic acid fermentative process known as alpha-glycan.

Another proven way in which apples reduce the risk of cancer is through their ability to remove carcinogenic radioisotopes that have accumulated in our bodies as a result of the fallout from nuclear weapons, depleted uranium munitions, and nuclear energy and disaster-associated pollution, e.g. Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Post-Chernobyl, for instance, apple pectin was used to reduce Cesium-137 levels in exposed children, in some cases by over 60%.[x] From 1996 to 2007, a total of more than 160,000 “Chernobyl” children received pectin food additives. As a result, levels of Cs-137 in children’s organs decreased after each course of pectin additives by an average of 30-40%.[xi] Significant reductions were noted in as short a time period as 16 days.[xii]  Apple pectin has even been found to prevent the most deadly, and entirely man-made radioisotope, Plutonium-239, from absorbing in the gastrointestinal tract of animals fed it.[xiii]

We could, therefore, modernize our apple aphorism by saying “an apple a day keeps the nuclear fallout away.” And truly, there are very few other substances, natural or synthetic, that have ever been found to protect against plutonium exposure. Apples, therefore, are truly super-foods in this respect”

In fact there are many “evidence-based” healing properties of eating apples. And, it doesn’t hurt that apples are delicious to boot. 

For a list of many of the other healing properties of apples, continue reading the post over on wakeup-world.com.