This Popular Alternative Cancer Treatment Contains Deadly Poison

Vitamin B17 (amygdalin & laetrile) releases cyanide. Here’s what it does to your liver—not cancer.

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Episode Description:

“Vitamin B17” sounds harmless — even helpful.

But, sadly, it isn’t a vitamin at all.

In fact, vitamin B17 (also called amygdalin or laetrile) breaks down into cyanide inside the body. And during cancer treatment, that poison goes to your liver — not your tumor.

In our newest blog post & video, Dr. Chaplin explains why vitamin B17 is one of the most persistent and dangerous cancer myths still promoted in alternative and integrative medicine.

You’ll learn:

• What vitamin B17 actually is
• Why it causes liver damage during chemotherapy
• Why pills can be more toxic than IV infusions
• Why decades of research show no cancer benefit

This is not an attack on integrative care. It’s about protecting your body and making sure “supportive” treatments don’t quietly undermine your cancer therapy.

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Inquiries: 

info@elevatingcancertreatment.com

https://elevatingcancertreatment.com

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Disclaimer:
The information provided in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and does not constitute medical advice. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard or read in this podcast or on this channel.
Reliance on any information provided by Dr. Jay Chaplin or Elevating Cancer Treatment is solely at your own risk. Dr. Jay Chaplin is a scientist and drug developer, not a medical doctor providing patient care. The content presented here reflects general scientific understanding and research, and may not be applicable to your individual health circumstances. Individual medical conditions and treatments vary, and no two situations are exactly alike.
Always consult with your personal healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment plan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if a natural cancer treatment was actually delivering poison straight to your liver instead of your tumor? It sounds dramatic, but that's exactly what's happening with this vitamin. When I'm reviewing clients' records or looking over treatment plans from integrative clinics, I frequently come across something that leaves me utterly appalled. It's something labeled vitamin B17. And if you've ever thought, well, it's a vitamin, how bad could it be? That's exactly why we need to talk. Since that's marketing and not remotely true. Because if this has ever been recommended to you, you need to understand what it's doing to your cancer and to your body. So please don't click away. This one really matters, not just for your cancer, but for your liver and for your life. Hello, and welcome to Elevating Cancer Treatment, where we explain the science and debunk myths to help you navigate your health journey. My background is a little different. Beyond educating about cancer, I'm actually designing new drugs that are defining the future of oncology. This direct hands-on experience offers me a very different perspective of how these cancer treatments work on the body, interact with the cancer cells, and cause side effects. And these are insights that I'm excited to share with you. If that sounds interesting, make sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and hit that notification bell so you never miss an update. And please share it if you find it useful. I'm Dr. Jay Chaplin. An important reminder, I'm a PhD, not an MD. The information in this video is education and it's not medical advice. Every cancer is unique and no general information applies to everyone. Please remember that. Always consult with your healthcare provider for guidance on your specific situation. And two quick things. First, as a thank you for being here, I've created a free resource, 10 things to elevate your chemo journey, which you can download from the link below. And second, by signing up, you'll also get updates on that innovative cancer treatment I'm working on. I'm confident it represents a significant advancement in immunotherapy. So please take a moment, download your free guide, and join us in shaping the future of cancer treatment. Every so often, when I'm reviewing patient records or looking over treatment plans from integrative clinics, I come across vitamin B17 infusions. Usually infusions, usually not pills. Now, this is one of those cases where the name sounds comforting because it's a vitamin, right? However, the biology is very, very different. So this video is for you if you're considering or already working with an integrative clinic, you've seen B17, Am McDonald, or Laatrill on a treatment plan or a menu, you're trying to support your body, not make things harder, or you just want the actual biology, not the marketing version. And as we go through this, I want you to keep one question in mind, one big overarching question. Is this helping my body fight, or is it weakening the systems I need most right now? Section one, why the name B17 itself is a problem. So let's start with the term itself, vitamin B17. It's not a vitamin, it has no essential function, no deficiency state, no biological necessity. Calling it a vitamin is completely false. Very false. In order for something to be a vitamin, it has to be required for life. That's what the term means. If you don't have it, your metabolism fails and disease follows. Usually rapidly, death. Your body does not need amygdollin. Not a gram, not a milligram, not a microgram, not even a nanogram. There is no amount at which amygdollin becomes necessary or even helpful. It is just a poison. Nobody gets sick from not eating concentrated bitter almond pits. People worldwide do just fine without it. You might be wondering, how the heck did this get called vitamin B17 then? Bare question. M. McDonald was first claimed to be a cancer cure back in the 1920s. Then, when that was completely proven false, it was rebranded as a preventative for cancer, that somehow all cancer was due to a deficiency in this vitamin, and supplementing with it prevented all cancer. That claim was made by the primary person who made and sold it, a guy by the name of Ernst Krebs, who had no evidence to back that claim up, never even tried, just kept repeating it as if it were true. Why would he do something like that? It couldn't be sold as a drug because it had been disproven. So how do you continue to sell it? He just said it as a way to continue marketing it, not as a drug, but as a nutritional supplement. This has less validity than me saying men have more heart attacks than women because they don't wear high heels. Heart attacks must be from a high heel deficiency. That actually has more truth to it because men do have more heart attacks than women. But amygdallin has nothing to do with cancer. So, if this stuff is not a vitamin, and it isn't, what are we really talking about here? Other than the name vitamin B17, which is a marketing name, it goes by amygdollin, you'll see the image, this is the natural compound, or layotril, the synthetic version, there's the compound. Chemically, all of these boil down to the same thing. You've got a sugar molecule attached to a compound, Mendela nitrile, that spontaneously releases free cyanide, yes, you heard that right, cyanide, after that sugar is clipped off. That's not my opinion. That's just the molecular structures that you saw a moment ago. That's basic organic chemistry. It doesn't change because you believe something different. And cyanide, just to be clear, is not some misunderstood nutrient. It's not a vitamin. It's just a poison. End of story. That's why it's used to kill people. Nobody calls cyanide a vitamin. So, question for you, please comment below if you've ever had vitamin B17 recommended to you or someone you know. And if it was recommended, did they mention to you that it releases cyanide? I'd like to know. Now let's talk metabolism. If you were to take amagdolin, whether by mouth or by IV, it eventually passes through your liver. The liver removes the sugar, it's very good at that. When that sugar is removed, congratulations! You've just released cyanide into your liver. If it saturates your liver, some of it will get into your bloodstream. Now, yes, there are enzymes in some tumor cells that can do that same reaction too. But here's the part that actually matters. Tumors have poor blood supply. They really don't get much amygdalin. You can flood your body with amygdalain. Not much of it's going to get to the tumor. But your liver has great blood supply. It receives an enormous amount of your total blood supply. So it gets most of the amygdollin. What ends up happening is that over 95% of the exposure from amygdollin and cyanide goes straight to your liver, not the cancer. Let me repeat that. The cyanide goes to your liver, not the cancer. You're weakening your body to probably not, maybe, slightly irritate the tumor. And it's all really especially silly as many tumors can actually survive for a significant amount of time when cultured in cyanide solutions. They don't require oxygen the way that other cells do, and they bypass cyanide toxicity unless it's at a very high dose. So if you're taking vitamin B17, you are poisoning your liver to do nothing to your cancer. I am so sorry that people think that this is a good idea and recommend it. That is a really bad trade. So unfortunately, there are things that make this treatment even worse. So let me ask you something. If you're in chemotherapy, if you're in radiation, if you're trying to recover between cycles, do you really want to be poisoning your primary metabolic hub? Your liver is really important. Your liver processes drugs, balances sugars, converts amino acids back and forth, it manages fats for you, it keeps your entire metabolic system running. If you don't have enough fat, sugar, or protein, your liver makes it. Very few tissues can do that. Damaging your liver at any point is a bad idea. Doing it during cancer treatment, when your body is under strain, trying to repair itself, is impressively unhelpful. So this is one of the ways we help our clients by reviewing everything they've done and are planning on doing to make sure that they're supporting their cancer treatment. And we can assist you in making sure that whatever you're doing is of the utmost benefit for you. Because you might not have known that a vitamin could actually be a poison. And this part surprises a lot of people, M.Dolin is actually more toxic when taken orally as a pill. Does that sound counterintuitive to you? That something could be worse as a pill than as an IV? Here's why. Your gut bacteria and intestinal enzymes also remove that sugar immediately. So cyanide is released in the intestines and then carried straight to the liver by the hepatic portal vein. Your body has a special mechanism for taking blood from the intestines straight to the liver, all concentrated. This is called first pass metabolism. Even if the total blood amounts of cyanide from an IV treatment are higher, they're diluted in the total volume of blood, five liters, a little more than a gallon. Oral blood levels of cyanide are lower in total, but the concentration hitting your liver is much higher and it hits faster because it's been taken as a pill. So yes, the pill form does more liver damage than an IV. That's been shown in multiple clinical trials. As usual, supporting documentation like that is linked down below. So taking a pill is worse than an IV. Biology is rude like that. What's ruder? Many other complementary therapies also enhance the toxicity of amygdollin or laotril. For instance, taking vitamin C at the same time significantly speeds up the release of free cyanide and increases your risk of permanent damage or death. You might be wondering, hasn't this been studied? Don't people know this? Yeah, it's been studied extensively. Amycdolin has been studied for over 100 years, since before the 1920s. It was popular in the 1920s, and it's been very heavily studied in the 70s and 80s. The results have been completely consistent. There is no survival benefit, there is no meaningful anti-cancer effect, there is clear, repeated, consistent liver toxicity. Thousands of patients, many case studies, and two formal clinical trials, one led by the Mayo Clinic. I've linked a few of the best down below. Just a few, because if I linked all of them, the description would be unpleasantly long. But honestly, you don't even need the studies. Again, the molecular structures from before say it all. This is time-released cyanide. Why would you take time released cyanide? Now, you might be wondering why your complimentary clinic is offering this to you, and that's a fair question. The answer is uncomfortable. Many integrative clinics rely on old ideas. Some complementary therapies are new, and some do have solid evidence behind them. Some of them are very helpful in specific contexts. However, most complementary therapies are either really old ideas or recently repurposed drugs, and in that second case, some of those drugs are used the way that they actually work and provide benefit, and many are just used broadly on everything, even though they don't work that way. So, McDonald is not one of the ones that work. This is just ancient bad news. It was debunked before you were born. You might as well go back to for humors medicine and bloodletting. If you want to laugh, go see Saturday Night Life Skit with Steve Martin. If you see B17, a McDonald's, or Laotrel, on a treatment plan, on an a la carte menu, or recommended to you directly, please understand this is not something that could possibly help you. It is only going to add harm, especially to your poor liver. And if you've already had it, honestly, I'm really sorry. And it's not your fault. I seriously doubt anyone was honest enough to tell you this was just a fancy cyanide infusion. You were trying to do the right thing for your body. You were trying to help. And the folks who gave it to you think they're doing the best thing for your body. However, as I mentioned, many of those types of clinics are running on very old data and unverified stories and not looking at what we now know. So the real work is not in just wholesale rejecting integrative care entirely. It's sorting out what does have evidence and what might help your specific case and sorting what is clearly harmful away from those other things. So when clients decide to work with the cancer care facility, we really like to review their treatment plan and their biomarkers. We did an episode on that. That way we can look at your unique cancer, match it to the plan, and make sure that you're actually getting the best possible things from their menu of options and not taking things that could hurt you. It doesn't mean all of their suggestions are detrimental, but we definitely want to make sure that they are giving you treatments that actually support the best possible outcome and not ones that will weaken you at a critical time. We do this because the details matter. They matter for your health. Context matters, and the biology always wins. If this video helped clarify something you've been unsure about, please like the video, subscribe if you want more science-first breakdowns like this one, share this with somebody navigating integrative treatment decisions, and comment below, has vitamin B17 ever been recommended to you or someone you know? If you want to understand some things that do help in the right biological context, please watch these next videos right here, where I walk through evidence based options like curcumin and apigenin, and I explain when they make sense and when they don't, because everything has a time and a place. My goal here is really simple to help you protect your body while you're doing the hard work of treatment. And that starts with understanding what actually helps and what absolutely does not.