When Kit Kitatani was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1986, he went through the usual procedure of having the tumor surgically removed and starting chemotherapy treatments. But his white blood-cell count was too low to continue the chemo. His doctor said he had less than six months to live.
A Shizuoka native, Kitatani was living in New York at the time. After hearing the bad news, a friend told him about an unorthodox method she'd used to recover from her own sickness.
"She said she got better from eating brown rice," says Kitatani. "My doctor had given up on me so I didn't have any other choice. It was a question of life or death for me."