I wrote this article many years ago, debunking the claim that bananas prevent cancer, and it remains the most popular article I’ve ever written. It probably gets so much traffic because of the ongoing memes about how bananas will cure every cancer known to man.
Too many individuals see these memes on Twitter and Facebook, they accept them as scientific facts. They rarely are. That’s why critical thinking is necessary.
But if a meme is going to make an extraordinary claim, like bananas prevent cancer, then that claim ought to be backed by extraordinary evidence. But this wild belief about bananas is not even supported by ordinary evidence. It is supported by zero evidence.
Bananas prevent cancer memes
Facebook is filled with false memes on just about everything from vaccines to Monsanto. The anti-vaccination crowd fills Facebook with their amusing and highly inaccurate memes, which only leads to people thinking they’ve done their research, and not vaccinating their kids.
For years, there have been dozens of photos of bananas with a few words that usually claim that some Japanese scientists found that ripe bananas have high levels of “tumor necrosis factor”, so eat ripe bananas to boost your immune system, thereby preventing or curing cancer. Facebook is famous for these things, little pictures with few words, no sources of information, and broad conclusions.
Eat bananas. Cure cancer. And people share them with a click of a button and move on to the next cute cat picture. It’s the lazy person’s way of learning. Although who doesn’t enjoy the cute cat pictures?
But what are the facts? What can bananas do or not do? Let’s start at the beginning.
The Japanese “bananas cure cancer” study
The actual study was published here (pdf) (or here, also pdf) in Food Science and Technology Research in 2009. I have several issues with the article concerning the banana meme, especially in trying to make any conclusion that bananas have anything to do with “curing cancer” in humans.
Let me try to explain this Japanese “bananas cure cancer” research paper:
- The authors do not make one single claim (as best as I can tell) that there are tumor necrosis factors (TNF, which we will discuss in some detail below) molecules in a banana. No, the Japanese research team did not say anything about bananas having TNF. Nothing else I write about this article matters because the “Japanese researchers” just don’t make any claim whatsoever about TNF and bananas. That should end the matter, but many of you would like to know why this myth started anyways.
- The study is in a mouse model, and many animal model experiments have no applicability to human clinical results. The percentage of animal studies that is relevant to humans is small, that’s why there’s the old joke that “we’ve cured cancer in mice thousands of times.” So, even if the authors claimed that bananas had TNF (and that would be Nobel Prize-winning research), we have no clue as to whether it has any clinical impact. But let’s not forget that the authors make not a single claim that TNF is in bananas.
- The article is published in a low-impact journal. This journal has an impact factor of less than 1.0, which indicates a very low-quality journal and it’s not even indexed in PubMed, which further indicates its low value. But again, I need to remind everyone, no matter where they published this article, they did not claim that there was TNF in bananas.
- The bananas were not fed to the mice, and without getting into details about the study, they try to stimulate the production of TNF in the mouse model by essentially placing slices of banana in the mouse – of course, there will be an inflammatory response in these mice. Shocking. I am not sure why the authors used bananas, and I am unclear what it is supposed to prove. That it induces TNF activity might be expected since the body would react to any foreign substance (an apple, viruses, bacteria, anything) injected into the peritoneum, and production of TNF might be expected. But the TNF does appear from the banana, it is just the immune system’s reaction to a banana injected into the body. Of course, right at this point, someone will try to claim, “see, bananas prevent cancer.” No.
- There is no evidence presented that consuming bananas would induce the mouse to produce TNF – again, the bananas are used to produce an inflammatory response.
- What is the clinical significance of what was induced? In other words, is there TNF isolated from the bananas in a form that actually can do something? Or is there some other effect just because there’s a blob of intraperitoneal banana extract which induces some other immune response? Again, and I’m going to keep repeating it, the TNF did not come from the bananas.
- No one has repeated this experiment, and certainly, no one has shown this effect in humans. There is not a single double-blind clinical trial to show that bananas induce a TNF-alpha response in humans. And I can’t stress this point enough – bananas do not produce TNF. It is simply an evolutionary impossibility unless, through some amazing instance of evolutionary convergence, the banana plant evolved the ability to produce the TNF molecule for a completely different purpose for the banana plant. This would violate several principles of evolution since there are reasons why the TNF molecule evolved in mammals and not in plants.
- Another point that needs to be made is that cancer is not one disease. It is, in fact, over 200 different diseases, all with different etiologies, pathophysiologies, treatments, and prognoses. It is ludicrous to believe that there would be one treatment to “cure” all cancers. And it’s on some other level of ridiculousness to think that a banana has any effect whatsoever in any of those 200 (or a lot more) different cancers.
Just for review–I dug up the original “Japanese scientific paper”, and what I found was essentially simple – the authors did not claim bananas produce TNF, but that wasn’t even the point of the article. The article didn’t show much, but it did not provide any convincing evidence that in humans, bananas had any effect on the immune system. Again, unless that human is chronically malnourished.
A critical review of these banana claims
We need to examine this pseudoscience even more carefully, so we will look at these claims, point by point.
I hate to keep repeating this, but the “Japanese scientists” did not claim that there’s TNF in a banana. Unfortunately, the junk medicine pushers continue to make the claim, facts are damned.
The problem is that anyone with a basic comprehension of biochemistry would understand that tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is a fairly complex protein, with a highly specific role in the human immune system (something notably lacking in a plant), so the chances that a banana would have evolved some protein that exactly mimics or copies TNF is so tiny as to be close to impossible.
A banana does not need TNF since it lacks an immune system of a vertebrate, so evolving a complex protein like TNF would be crazy; if it did, we’d have to rewrite our understanding of evolution. Let’s make this clear – we don’t have to rewrite evolution, because there is no TNF in bananas. This whole notion defies biological plausibility.
Even if we could assume that a banana makes TNF, the digestive tract would break down the complex proteins and substances, such as TNF, into its constituent components, such as amino acids, simple sugars, and fats, before being absorbed into the bloodstream. The TNF almost certainly would not survive intact within the digestive tract.
The true scientific skeptic would, even if they thought that maybe a banana evolved a TNF molecule by some strange mechanism, know that it could not enter the body. It is just not physiologically possible.
Bananas produce small amounts of serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine) and dopamine, depending on their stage of ripeness. These can have a stimulatory effect on neutrophils and macrophages in a living organism, and these can, in turn, produce the touted TNF-a, Interleukin-12 (IL-12), and other cytokines (signal molecules for part of the immune system reaction to antigens).
In this role, serotonin and dopamine are said to serve as a “biological response modifier” (BRM). In plain English, the stuff in ripe bananas may (but not necessarily will because we have zero evidence of this) stimulate a subset of white blood cells to produce chemical signals to deal with a variety of threats.
However, this would be a small effect, and it will not help you fight off cancer. And remember, this won’t happen unless you directly inject the banana into the gut – it won’t happen if you consume bananas, because all of the components of the banana will be broken down in the digestive tract.
Unless you, for some odd reason, inject bananas into your peritoneal cavity, they, by themselves, cannot stimulate or boost the immune system unless there’s some chronic malnutrition or disorder where you need to get more nutrition than bananas are adequate in providing. But, in healthy individuals, only vaccines can boost your immune system.
But let’s pretend that TNF is produced in bananas (it doesn’t) and it can pass intact into the bloodstream from the digestive tract (it can’t), it would require eating hundreds of bananas to get a blood level of TNF that would have a biological effect.
And even if TNF killed cancer cells (it doesn’t), how would your body “know” how to move the TNF to the cancer site (it can’t)? And which one of the 200 or so cancers would it affect? Moreover, the body would start down-regulating TNF in response to excess TNF in the blood, because TNF doesn’t do what you think it does.
The name, tumor necrosis factor, seems to imply that it kills cancers (it doesn’t). I would have to write a 20-page paper just to describe how TNF is up- and down-regulated within the immune system both locally and generally in response to a wide variety of immune challenges, including cancers.
It is incredibly complex, and the name is simply one given without consideration to future alternative medicine pushers who jump on it as the “cure” to all cancers. It isn’t.
Of course, all of this leads us to what TNF does. It’s part of the inflammatory response, so TNF is associated with autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, hidradenitis suppurativa, and refractory asthma. Seriously, you don’t want more TNF, and you certainly wouldn’t want to consume something that would cause an increase in TNF. If bananas could do all that was claimed here, they would be banned by the FDA.
And one more thing about this annoying “boost the immune system” myth. The immune system is incredibly complex, with an almost infinite number of interactions between various proteins, compounds, organs, factors, immunoglobulins, receptors, and cells. As long as you’re healthy, so is your immune system, there is nothing you can do to make it stronger, better, or “boosted.” As I’ve said, vaccinations do boost the immune system, and they rely upon an appropriate immune response.
So here we go again. Someone reads that some scientists discovered bananas cure cancer. They didn’t dig up the actual paper to find out that the scientists didn’t say that it did. They didn’t think through the problem that bananas wouldn’t actually contain tumor necrosis factor or that the digestive tract wouldn’t absorb it. Or that you couldn’t possibly eat enough bananas to get enough TNF to do any good. Or that if you could that it would have some very bad effects.
But bananas do have some benefits
I hope I have completely debunked the myth that bananas can prevent or treat cancer. They can’t.
Just to make sure you don’t think I’m an anti-banana shill for the apple industry, the fruit does have some nutritional benefits:
- Bananas contain vitamin B6, along with moderate amounts of vitamin C, manganese, and dietary fiber.
- They are a great source of carbohydrates and are an important starch staple for many countries.
- Despite a lot of claims, bananas are not a great source of potassium, an average serving only provides about 8% of the recommended daily amount.
- They are delicious. Except when made into banana bread.
But once again, it does not prevent cancer.
Bananas do not prevent cancer
- The bananas prevent cancer meme relies upon a misinterpretation of an unimportant “Japanese scientist study.”
- The “Japanese scientists” did not claim, nor show, that there is a protein called tumor necrosis factor in bananas.
- These scientists did not show that eating bananas could induce the production of TNF.
- Even if bananas contained TNF, your digestive tract would destroy the TNF, breaking it into constituent molecules. It would have no effect.
- But even if it could pass through the digestive tract and enter the bloodstream, you couldn’t consume enough bananas to raise your blood level of TNF to actually have a biological effect.
- And even you could raise your blood level of TNF, its name is a misnomer since TNF doesn’t cause tumors to die. TNF causes an inflammatory response and numerous autoimmune disorders. You really don’t want to increase TNF.
- And if you consumed that much TNF that you think is in bananas, you’d die. So sure, the cancer is dead. But so are you.
- There are a few ways to prevent cancer, like not smoking. Consuming bananas is not one of those ways.
- Finally, there isn’t a single published epidemiological or clinical study that shows that consuming bananas has any effect on any of the 200 or more cancers.
If you want to eat a banana, go ahead. It does have some benefits I’m sure. But rest assured that as much as you want to believe that bananas prevent cancer, the evidence does not support it. It’s not ever going to cure cancer. It’s not going to make you live longer. It’s just going to provide nutrition.
Key citations
- Iwasawa, Haruyo, and Masatoshi Yamazaki. Differences in biological response modifier-like activities according to the strain and maturity of bananas. Food science and technology research 15.3 (2009): 275-282. doi:10.3136/fstr.15.275. 2020 Impact Factor = 0.553
