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Fall is here and it makes consuming sugar a lot easier. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas treats ARE so easily and readily available for us to eat. However, I want you to understand that sugar and cancer are best friends!
Sugar is cancer’s favorite food! It puzzles me why the simple concept of “sugar feeds cancer” can be so dramatically overlooked as part of a comprehensive cancer treatment plan. So here are several important reasons to avoid that sugary snack that may seem good at the time but has negative effects later.
Cancer cells love sugar!
That is why refined carbohydrates like white sugar, white flour, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and soft drinks are extremely dangerous for anyone trying to prevent or reverse cancer. Sugar essentially feeds tumors and encourages cancer growth.
Cancer cells uptake sugar at 10-12 times the rate of healthy cells. In fact, that is the basis of PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans. These scans are one of the most accurate tools for detecting cancer growth. PET scans use radioactively labeled glucose to detect sugar-hungry tumor cells.
When patients drink the sugar water, it gets preferentially taken up into the cancer cells and they light up! The 1931 Nobel laureate in medicine, German Otto Warburg, PhD, discovered that cancer cells have fundamentally different energy metabolism compared to healthy cells. He found that malignant tumors exhibit increased glycolysis – a process whereby glucose is used as a fuel by cancer – as compared with normal cells.
Sugar Suppresses a Key Immune Response
Sugar suppresses a key immune response known as phagocytosis – the Pac-Man effect of the immune system. Consuming 10 teaspoons of sugar can cause about a 50% reduction in phagocytosis. If you consider the sugar in your cereal, the syrup on your waffles and pancakes, the sugar added to your morning coffee or tea, the sugar in cold beverages like iced tea or lemonade, sports drinks, the HFCS in prepared foods, salad dressings and ketchup, and of course sugary snacks and desserts, you can see how easy it is to suppress your immune system significantly.
Not only the amount of sugar, but also the frequency of ingesting sugar is relevant to immune function. In one study, research subjects were found to have nearly a 38% decrease in phagocytosis one hour after ingesting a moderate amount of sugar. Two hours later, the immune system was suppressed 44%; immune function did not recover completely for a full five hours.
In most people, when sugar in any form is consumed, the pancreas releases insulin. Breast tissue, for example, contains insulin receptors, and insulin is a powerful stimulant of cell growth. One group of Australian researchers concluded that high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factors (IGF) may actually be causative of cancers of the breast, prostate, endometrium and pancreas
