What Are Saccharides, Part 2

Sugars That Heal: The New Healing Science of Glyconutrients
by Emil I. Mondoa, M.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

Recreational radium finally lost its luster soon after forty-seven-year-old Pittsburgh playboy, steel tycoon and former amateur golf champion Eben M. Byers, on his doctor's advice, began imbibing Radithor daily to nurse an arm injury. Invigorated, he tripled his dose but gradually began feeling tired and losing weight. By the time he figured out why, it was too late. The toothless Food and Drug Administration(FDA) at the time could only issue warnings. Not so for the Federal Trade Commission(FTC). In a surreal twist, the FTC at first took action against those radium elixirs that failed to meet their advertised levels of radium.

As for Byers, the radium had dissolved much of his upper and lower jaws in short order and bored holes in his skull, causing pain and disfigurement. "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off" proclaimed the blunt Wall Street Journal headline, curtly summing up Eben Byers's disastrous experience with Radithor.18 The once rakish, robust industrialist was a timeworn, shrunken 92 pounds fading into the starched white sheets at Doctors' Hospital in New York City, where he died at age fifty-one on March 31, 1932, and made front-page news. A few months before, the FTC had stepped in and put a stop to Radithor, and before long the FDA was regulating the chemical element.

Astonishingly, Byers's death didn't taint the use of high-dose radiation - perhaps because with Coley's toxins passé, there were no other cancer-treatment options at the time besides surgery. After Coley's death in 1936, his immunotherapy plunged from outré to oblivion.

Then, in 1943, a scientist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) discovered that a lipopolysaccharide - a fat bonded to a saccharide, the scientific word for sugar - was the biologically active substance in the toxins of Serratia marcescens, one of the components of Coley's vaccine. In this case, the lipopolysaccharides resided in the cell walls of the Serratia marcescens bacteria. The fat in the lipopolysaccharide could cause toxicity problems, however; scientists eventually pared the fat from the sugar, leaving a nontoxic compound with salutary immune-system effects. These compounds incite the body to stimulate the immune cells and produce proteins called cytokines, which make you feel achy and fluish as they do battle with pathogens loitering in their path.

Unfortunately, the NCI discovery did nothing to resurrect the popularity of Coley's therapy. In fact, in 1965, in a mind-boggling move, the American Cancer Society added Coley's toxins to its list of "unproven" cancer drugs, in essence pronouncing his invention quackery, along with the likes of coffee enemas and laetrile. Although the pronouncement was lifted ten years later, the bad publicity had sealed the fate of this undervalued treatment in the United States.

Vaccine therapy, however, remained popular in other countries. German scientists continued with their research, as did the Chinese. Bacterial vaccines have been most effective for sarcomas, lymphomas, and melanomas. Coley's vaccine has yielded impressive results, but thanks to one hundred years of scientific inertia, politics, and greed propagated by an unwitting confederacy of dunces, it's still not an established treatment for cancer. In all probability Coley's vaccine never will be because you can't patent a century-old drug.

Many discoveries of the first rank are for a time ignored or ridiculed. (Conversely, many discoveries, like radiation therapy, are for a time overrated.) What happened to the discovery of William Coley, who died largely forgotten and broke, having lost his money in the stock market crash of 1929, was, sadly, nothing new. What was new, though Coley didn't know it at the time, was that he made the first scientific association between the immune system and saccharides, the sugars that heal.

As an early indication of saccharides' worth, Coley's toxins are just the tip of the iceberg. In the past twenty years, the amount of information garnered about these sugars has increased dramatically. Of the more than two hundred sugars, eight are essential to optimal body functioning. Far more than just a ready source of fuel for the cells, these eight essential sugars have potent antiviral, antibacterial, antiparasitic, and of course antitumor effects.

Essential saccharides have also been shown in clinical trials to reduce allergies and to allay symptoms in such chronic diseases as arthritis, diabetes, lupus, and kidney disease. They accelerate the healing of burns and wounds and help heal skin conditions - from poison ivy to psoriasis. They increase the body's resistance to viruses, including those that cause the common cold, influenza, herpes, and hepatitis. They quell the recurrent bacterial ear infections that plague toddlers and children. Some people with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, and HIV have reported improvement in their symptoms when they supplement their diet with these simple sugars.

The Eight Essential Saccharides

When most of us think of sugar, we think only of table sugar from sugarcane, which consists of two saccharides, glucose and fructose. The eight essential saccharides our bodies need are mannose, glucose, galactose, xylose, fucose (not to be confused with fructose), N-acetylglucosamine, N-acetylgalactosamine, and N-acetylneuraminic acid. These eight essential saccharides compose the main focus of Sugars That Heal. Only two of these essential sugars, glucose (found in plants and table sugar) and galactose (found in milk products and certain pectins), are common in our diets. Although fructose, found in fruits and table sugar, is also a part of most diets, it's not an essential saccharide.

Copyright © 2001 by Emil I. Mondoa, M.D.

About the Author

Emil I. Mondoa, M.D., is a practicing, board-certified pediatrician affiliated with Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, New Jersey; South Jersey Medical Center in Vineland, New Jersey; and the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware. He also holds an MBA from the Wharton School, with a focus on health-care management. He is founder of the Glyconutrients Research Foundation.