Hillary Wright of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has a brief podcast on the connection between sugar and cancer.
Play Podcast on Cancer and Sugar
Transcript
We now now realize that there is a lot about diet and lifestyle that can influence the chemical hormonal environment of your body that may potentially be more favorable for the growth and development of abnormal cells.
Chronic excessive intake of simple sugar leads to excess production of hormones like insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF) that may encourage the growth of cancer cells.
So when you eat any kind of a carbohydrate, within an hour it’s in your blood as glucose (which is blood sugar).
So if you’re just eating food and your blood sugar goes up, and then it goes down, and then it goes up, and then it goes down…that’s what’s going on with your insulin levels. They are just rolling…
This is the way human beings were designed. Again, we’re hunter gatherers. We got food, we digested it, hopefully we got some more…
But there’s nothing in nature that represents a 20oz coke, a gigantic serving of whatever kind of junk food you’re going to get at a fast food place that has sugar in it that you never even dreamed would be there. We’re just eating way too much sugar.
So the issue is more that nowadays we have people eating a lot of sugar that causes these big spikes in their blood sugar and their insulin response. We also have a lot of people who are overweight and sedentary, so they are more likely to be resistant to this hormone insulin. So when the pancreas secretes it to clear the sugar out, it gets in the habit of oversecreting it.
So it’s the excess circulating growth hormones, like insulin and insulin-like growth factor and others, that if you have chronic exposure to those things, that’s what we’re worried about having a connection to cancer cell growth.
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