You know the serious terminal illness of cancer. You know the toll it takes emotionally, mentally, socially, environmentally. It causes a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances. in your own mind, thought and body as well as in your relationships with dear ones and family. Cancer treatments can make it hard to do the things you’ve always done as a human being, a parent, or an employee.
There’s nothing in your daily existence that cancer doesn’t touch. It’s an exhausting villain to fight and it wipes you out in so many ways that are hard to elaborate in daily to people who haven’t felt the impression of this horrific disease in their own lives.
What if I notify you that there is something you could do right now to cut your cancer risk? I mean right away!
Now if you know the protocols or steps to carry out to get rife of cancer would you like to do?
People talk a lot about “antidote” in the health industry but there’s a saying you probably heard from your grandparents that makes a lot more sense…
“prevention is better than cure.”
The Truth About Cancer we discuss on this page and the foods that fight cancer and lower your cancer risk. Now I’m going to talk to you about known, scientifically proven, cancer causing foods that actively increase the chance that you’ll be diagnosed with cancer in your lifetime.
There are cases where it strikes quickly but it is more common when cancerous tumors manifest after years of specific abuse of drugs. Good examples of this are smoking, exposure to radiation (i.e. from cellphones), and overexposure to ultraviolet rays, which result in lung cancer, brain cancer, and skin cancer, respectively.
Remember sugar is a fueling compound of cancer.
Glucose – the fuel of lifeSugar is the “white death” and “cancer’s favourite food”.
But this idea that sugar is responsible for kick-starting or fueling a cancer’s growth is an over-simplification of some complicated biology. Let’s know what sugar actually is.
Sugar comes in many different forms. The simplest form is just as a single molecule, such as glucose and fructose. These molecules of simple sugars can also stick together, either in pairs or as longer chains of molecules. All of these combinations of molecules are carbohydrates, and are our body’s main source of energy.
The most sugar familiarity is table sugar, which is a simple sugar that dissolves in a universal solvent (water) and gives things a sweet taste. Its chemistry name is sucrose, and it’s made up of crystals of glucose and fructose. Table sugar is refined, meaning it’s been processed to extract it from a natural source (usually sugar beet). Unprocessed foods can be high in simple sugars too, for example honey (also made mostly of glucose and fructose) is nearly pure sugar.
As chains of sugar combine together, they lose their sweet taste and won’t dissolve in water anymore. These chains are known polysaccharides and form a large component of starchy foods. Starchy foods such as rice, bread, pasta and vegetables like potatoes might not taste sweet, but they are high in carbohydrate too.
Sugar, in some form, is in many things we eat. And this is good, because our bodies rely need it to work.
Nearly every single part of our body is made of living cells. And it’s these cells that help us see, breathe, feel, think and much more.
While their roles in our body may differ, one thing all these cells have in common is that they need energy to survive.
Cells somehow need to turn nutrients in our diet into a form of energy that they can use, called ATP.
Glucose is the basic fuel that powers every single one of our cells. If we eat or drink things that are high in glucose, such as fizzy drinks, the glucose gets absorbed straight into our blood ready for our cells to use. If a starchy food, such as pasta, is on the menu, the enzymes in our saliva and digestive juices break it down and convert it into glucose. And if for some reason there’s no carbohydrate in our diet, cells can turn fat and protein into glucose as a last resort, because they need glucose to survive.
It’s here that sugar and cancer start to collide, because cancer is a disease of cells.
Sugar and cancer
Cancer cells usually grow quickly, multiplying at a fast rate, which takes a lot of energy. This means they need lots of glucose. Cancer cells also need lots of other nutrients too, such as amino acids and fats; it’s not just sugar they crave.
Here’s where the myth that sugar fuels cancer was born: if cancer cells need lots of glucose, then cutting sugar out of our diet must help stop cancer growing, and could even stop it developing in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. All our healthy cells need glucose too, and there’s no way of telling our bodies to let healthy cells have the glucose they need, but not give it to cancer cells.
There’s no evidence that following a “sugar-free” diet lowers the risk of getting cancer, or boosts the chances of surviving if you are diagnosed.
And following severely restricted diets with very low amounts of carbohydrate could damage health in the long term by eliminating foods that are good sources of fibre and vitamins.
This is particularly important for cancer patients, because some treatments can result in weight loss and put the body under a lot of stress. So poor nutrition from restrictive diets could also hamper recovery, or even be life-threatening.
A sticky end for sugar research?
Although there’s no evidence that cutting carbohydrates from our diet will help treat cancer, important research has shown that understanding the abnormal ways that cancer cells make energy could lead to new treatments.
Back in the 50s, a scientist called Otto Warburg noticed that cancer cells use a different chemical process from normal cells to turn glucose into energy.
Healthy cells use a series of chemical reactions in small cellular ‘batteries’ called mitochondria. The Warburg Effect, as it was dubbed following Otto’s discovery, describes how cancer cells bypass their ‘batteries’ to generate energy more rapidly to meet demand.
This shortcut for making energy might be a weakness for some cancers that gives researchers an advantage for developing new treatments.
Firstly, it opens up the potential for developing drugs that shut down cancer cells’ energy-making processes but don’t stop healthy cells making energy. And researchers are testing drugs that work in this way.
Secondly, the abnormal processes in cancer cells can also leave them less able to adapt when faced with a lack of other nutrients, like amino acids. These potential vulnerabilities could lead to treatments too.
But these approaches are still experimental, and we don’t know yet if treatments that starve cancer cells are safe or if they work.
It’s certainly not grounds for cancer patients to try and do it themselves by restricting their diet during treatment – and going back to our earlier point, it could be dangerous to do so.
If sugar doesn't cause cancer, why worry about it?
Cutting out sugar doesn't help treat cancer, and sugar doesn't directly cause cancer. Why then do we encourage people to cut down on sugary foods in our diet advice?
That’s because there is an indirect link between cancer risk and sugar. Eating lots of sugar over time can cause you to gain weight, and robust scientific evidence shows that being overweight or obese increases the risk of 13 different types of cancer. In fact, obesity is the single biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking.
It’s added sugar we’re mainly concerned with when it comes to weight gain, not sugar that is naturally found in foods like fruits and milk or healthy starchy foods like wholegrain and pulses (which people should be eating more of*).
*Please note that the intake of vegetable, fruits, wholegrain and pulses as these nutritious foods are also high in fiber- this not helps yours body digest the natural sugar more slowly(which helps you keep a healthy weight), it also reduces the risk of bowel cancer.
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