Because the sun causes Free Radical damage, we also put OPC in our skin and hair care range.

Why Capsulate when so many supplements are in hard pill form?

Noni Juice concentrate.

NONI: A PRELIMINARY REPORT
Copyright 1997 by Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.


What is noni juice and why are so many people taking it?

Noni is Hawaiian for a plant known scientifically as Morinda citrifolia. It is also known as Indian mulberry and is virtually ubiquitous in tropical climes.

Noni grows as a small evergreen tree at elevations of up to 1,300 feet. It has large oblong leaves, white flowers, and a very distinctive grenade shaped fruit.

This fruit turns a characteristic yellow upon ripening. Noni has been used extensively in both Polynesian and Hawaiian folk medicine as a general health tonic, and especially for diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure. It is also rubbed on wounds, cuts and abrasions of all sorts. One Maori has written that traditional Polynesians use noni for just about every illness.

"Noni is part of our lives," he said. Noni is also said to have been used as a traditional remedy for malignancies by Polynesians (Proc Annu Meet Am Assoc Cancer Res; 33:A3078 1992).

Since the 1980s some scientists and native healers in Hawaii have been experimenting with the properties and uses of this plant.
There are even a number of books on this topic, such as those by W. Arthur Whistler.

CRAZY ABOUT THAT PLANT

Noni has now developed into something of a craze. In 1992, Isabella Abbott, the G.P. Wilder Professor of Botany at the University of Hawaii, reported that in her state "people are crazy about this plant. They use it for diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer," as well as many other illnesses (Sunday Star-Bulletin & Advertiser, 2/9/92). She herself reported getting ten phones call a week on the topic.

The main obstacle to marketing noni as a food supplement was esthetic. Again, according to Prof. Abbott:"It smells like something the dog dragged in." The Maori writer says "the traditional juice stinks and tastes terribly bitter—it's almost unbearable."

According to another scientist, "If one is dying and all other remedies have failed, then and only then will the average person drink noni juice. The flavor of juice made from ripe Hawaiian noni is terrible. None of my colleagues would touch the untreated juice...."

So here was a marketing challenge. Abundant Health Ltd, New Zealand added a potent natural Raspberry flavour and now even children will drink it, they also produce Noni capsules with no taste at all. Most alternative clinicians and many cancer patients have heard about it, and many are on the juice, with or without an attendant diet. So, the question naturally arises, is there anything to it?

SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE?

There is a small amount of experimental evidence to support the use of noni juice against cancer.
Morinda Citrifolia appears to contain some interesting compounds, not just the usual nutrients but exotic compounds such as damnacanthal (Cancer Lett,73: 2-3, 1993 Sep 30, 161-6). In 1993, scientists at the University of Metz found that a freeze-dried extract of noni roots had a "significant, dose-related, central analgesic activity...," one of its traditional uses. The French scientists concluded that "these results are suggestive of sedative properties."

This could be important in cancer, certainly. However, these experiments were conducted with roots, and nobody is selling noni roots. Only the fruit.

MAIN EXPERIMENT

If you surf the Net, you will find numerous claims of noni's "proven" anticancer activity in the laboratory. But this is based on a single set of studies. Most of these were carried out by Dr. Annie Hirazumi and colleagues at the Department of Pharmacology, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

She administered pure noni juice to a pet dog when it was dying. The dog recovered miraculously, and she set out to find out more about this fruit.

In 1992, her group reported at an AACR (American Assoc for Cancer Research) meeting that when they injected a relatively large amount (750 mg/kg solid)of noni juice into animals with cancer, every other day, the mean survival time was 33.5 days. This was compared to 14.8 days in the controls.

While there were no survivors out of 23 control mice, 9 out of 22 of the treated animals were still alive at the end of the experiment.

They also reported that the juice was not toxic to cancer cells or to many strains of normal cells, even at high concentration (Proc Annu Meet Am Assoc Cancer Res; 33:A3078 1992).This was promising.

At a Federation meeting in 1995 [FASEB9(3):A93; 1995], they reported in more detail on the use of noni against transplanted tumors. An alcohol precipitation of the fruit juice was shown to give protection against cancer when it was injected into the peritoneal cavity of the mice. Thirty-four C57BL/6 mice were first implanted with Lewis lung carcinoma cells. Treated mice were given a total of five injections. Again, the mean survival was 32.7 days compared to 14.7 days in the controls.

Concurrent treatment with immuno-suppressive drugs destroyed the anticancer effects of noni, "suggesting the antitumor activity acts via activation of host immune system," they wrote.

They reported that noni demonstrated a protective effect against an experimental leukemia caused by the inoculation of tumor-causing viruses. It prevented the enlargement of the spleen by 51 percent.

Again, they concluded that noni juice "...seems to act indirectly by enhancing host immune system involving macrophages and/or lymphocytes" (The Proceedings of the Western Pharmacological Society (1994;37:145-146).

This is encouraging, even exciting. But several caveats need to be emphatically stated. First, most of these studies were conducted with alcohol extracts of noni. I do not think this is how commercial noni juice is prepared. More to the point, the compound was injected into the peritoneal cavities of the animals whereas obviously human cancer patients are taking it as a drink.
The dosage was multiples of what human patients are taking. So, while suggestive, these studies on transplantable tumors in animals (from a single lab) cannot be considered definitive for human anti-cancer effects.

XERONINE?

Much of the theoretical interest in noni has been stimulated by articles on the value of the fruit by Ralph Heinicke, PhD.

Dr. Heinicke is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Minnesota. He lived in Hawaii from 1950 to 1986, and worked for the Dole Pineapple Company, the Pineapple Research Institute, and the University of Hawaii.

Dr. Heinicke has discovered and patented an alkaloid he named "xeronine." Xeronine is an enigmatic molecule which rapidly comes and goes in the body. It is formed from "pro-xeronine," which Dr. Heinicke first isolated from pineapples and then from noni. (He states that it is no longer present in pineapple because of depleted soil.)

Heinicke writes that "identifying the pharmacologically active ingredient of noni has been difficult —for an understandably good reason. The active ingredient is not present in the plant or fruit!
Only after the potion has been drunk does the active ingredient form. Some-times!" he adds, with some humor.

Heinicke calls xeronine a "relatively small alkaloid...which is physiologically active in the picogram range." A picogram, mind you, is a trillionth of a gram.


While it is well known that alkaloids are highly bioactive substances, they are often present in much larger quantities in plants. Take for instance one of the best known of all alkaloids, nicotine.
This can constitute up to 9.0 percent by weight of tobacco leaves! (Robbers, James, et al. Pharmacognosy and Pharmacobiotechnol-ogy, Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1996, p. 149)

This is an astronomical amount compared to Dr. Heinicke's picogram-range xeronine. Some further explanation of xeronine's mechanism of action was clearly needed and it is now known that xeronine is a pre-cursor to seratonin.

TESTIMONIALS

Noni would just be another health food wanabee if it were not for the intense promotion going on in its behalf. Once again, it demonstrates the power of the Internet as an amplification mechanism for reputed "cancer cures."

Quite a few testimonials are being put forward about nearly miraculous effects from taking the juice.

Once contacted on the Net, a distributor then sent me a four-page tabloid called "Health News."
This bore headlines such as "An Ancient Cure from Paradise," "Healing From Across the Seas," and "No More Wheelchair!" On the front page it clearly states that noni is "a healing fruit" that "helps cancer."


You will not find a single cloud in the blue Polynesian skies of Noni-dom. Noni, it appears, cures bowel obstruction, chronic fatigue, severe back pain, menstrual problems, sinus congestion, knee blow-out and water on the knee, and severe arthritis. It can also be useful in incurable cancer, they say.

"In Polynesia," a Utah man just returned from the tropics is quoted as saying, "anytime someone has an `untreatable' or terminal illness—when it seems that everything else has been tried but nothing has worked— they reach for noni." Who are we to contradict him?



PULLOUT BOX: STRANGE FRUIT?

Noni juice appears to be non-toxic. All of the animal and cell-line experiments I have seen so far have found no evidence of toxicity. I have been repeatedly assured that noni is on the FDA's Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) list. I am assured that noni was listed as an acceptable food for US troops in the Pacific during World War Two. I haven't seen either list, but am ready to believe that they do in fact exist.

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