It has been just revealed that there is a strong connection between sugar and cancer. Check out the latest reports about the matter below.
Sugar and cancer connection
For cancer patients, “sugar intake can indeed nourish cancer cells,” says Mingyang Song, an associate professor of clinical epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
This is supported by strong epidemiological evidence, he said.
In a study published in PLoS One, researchers followed 1,011 colon cancer patients for over seven years. They found that patients who consumed two or more servings of sugar-sweetened beverages per day had a 67 percent increased risk of colon cancer recurrence or mortality compared to those consuming less than two servings per month.
Another study published in Clinical Nutrition, including more than 7,000 participants, showed that for every additional 5 grams of sugar consumed in liquid form per day, cancer incidence increased by 8 percent. High intake of sugar resulted in a 46 percent increase in cancer incidence.
It is noteworthy that a can of soda usually contains 30 to 45 grams of sugar.
A change in the amount of sugar consumed by a population can have a significant impact on cancer rates. Lewis Cantley, a renowned biologist and professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, used Taiwan as an example to illustrate this point in an email to The Epoch Times.
He explained that before World War II, Taiwan had relatively low rates of various cancers including colon, endometrial, and breast. This was attributed to the scarcity of sugar-sweetened beverages in their diet. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, with the introduction of Western diets, particularly sugary drinks, cancer rates in Taiwan began to increase gradually.
Currently, cancer rates in Taiwan have reached a level comparable to that of the United States.
Cancer cells require a significant amount of glucose to survive. In the 1930s, Otto Warburg, a German biochemist, discovered that both cancer cells and normal cells need sugar but they use different metabolic pathways.
Normal cells primarily convert glucose into energy through aerobic respiration, while cancer cells obtain energy through glycolysis instead of using oxygen.
Cancer cells produce very little and inefficient energy due to their unique method of metabolizing sugar. That’s why they consume sugar voraciously – at a rate 200 times faster than normal cells do. This appetite can have various effects.
