| Can
Cactus Heal?
continued... Cactus juice By
Mike Touzeau
And just like the tolerant and trusting little Pedro, Natalie McGee, a former social worker and unwavering believer in the benefits of the prickly pear cactus juice she prepares at her Arizona Cactus Ranch operation in Tucson, sees Zou's groundbreaking discoveries as a "gift," that may prove a significant breakthrough in cancer prevention. "If Natalie's people had not delivered the first bottle of cactus nectar to my lab that day, I never would have discovered it," said Zou, an expert with more than 20 years in the field of cancer prevention research (most of it at the University of Texas Health Science Center and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.) She has won several awards from the National Cancer Institute and other cancer research organizations. Her articles have been published in medical journals, and she has been invited to speak at both national and international medical conferences about her research several times. McGee's beliefs, and testimonials from people like Dr. Andrew Weil, and Dr. Marcia Garcia, who has been studying the effects of prickly pear nectar on diabetes and cholesterol at the U of A, led to research that has culminated in further testing of the cactus juice with diabetes problems among local Native American tribes. McGee decided last spring to have an employee deliver a bottle to Zou's lab where she was already studying the effects of some food-derived chemopreventive agents against synthetic ones. Chemoprevention
already uses chemical agents to inhibit, delay, or reverse the production
of cancer producing cells, but they have side effects and are extremely
costly.
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