The vine often grows to a length of ten to twenty feet, while the fruit, depending on the species, ranges in size from a few inches to 2 feet in diameter. The pumpkin flesh is occasionally used as a substitute for pumpkin seeds in expelling tapeworm. Fresh pumpkin can be cooked down to concentrate the vitamins and minerals into a smaller quantity of food. Pumpkin seed is traditionally valued as a prostate cancer preventing agent. Where pumpkin seed is consumed in abundance throughout life, and where the secret of pumpkin seeds has been handed down from father to son for countless generations there is practically no incidence of prostate disorders.
Pumpkin seed preserves the prostate gland, and thereby, also male potency.
Even today, and not limited to non-urban regions within Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Turkey and Ukraine, the people eat pumpkin seed the way they eat sunflower seeds in Russia, as an inexhaustible source of natural vigor. In some of these aforementioned regions, pumpkin seeds have been known for centuries as a healing agent. The pumpkin seed has scientifically determined effects on intermediary metabolism and urination, but these latter are of secondary importance in relation to its regenerative, invigorative and vitalizing influences. There is involved herein a native plant hormone which affects our own hormone production in part by substitution, in part by direct proliferation. Anyone who has studied this influence among traditional peoples has been again and again astonished over the effect of pumpkin seed in putting off the advent of old age.