Sugar - mere carbohydrate calorie or most potent cancer promoter?
Jaydad
Friday, October 2, 2009
Sugar - mere carbohydrate calorie or most potent cancer promoter?
Question:
Ok, I really would like some medical literature that shows sugar feeds the Cancer. Dads Oncologist and PCP told him to eat anything he wants and since sweets is what he wants he eats alot of them. It seems to be what tastes good to him.
My understanding of digestion is that all food breaksdown and enters the bloodstream as glucose, protein, and fatty acids. If you eat a slice of whole wheat bread it still is going to become glucose(sugar) in the blood stream. Is there some study that I can read that proves the theory that sugar feeds cancer? Dad and I need proof. I certainly dont want him to stop something he enjoys if it is not necessary.
Answer:
if cancer awakens and needs energy to grow and expand, it can just break down other parts of the body, say muscle - sounds familiar?
it is not energy supply that matters, it is the SIGNAL feed. The signal carried in your food can tell cancer to hibernate, or to proliferate, or to undergo programmed cell death (apoptosize?), ATP content irrelevant.
next time you read ingradients list - "high fructose corn syrup, corn oil, monosodium glutamate, aspartame, nutrasweet, nitrite", maybe you can try treat them as signal, not just simple nutrition or energy supply?
The invention of refined sugar, and for the same matter, the industrial production of fructose, glucose, sucrose, etc, are among the most evil human inventions. For millenia, humans exist just fine and healthy without these small molecule fuels. Our bodies are capable of producing the monomer glucose from variety of starchy sources. You may wonder, what difference does it make for the body to make its own or to draw it directly from food? This is where the key lies - from polymeric starchy food, digestive enzyme can only clip one glucose molecule at a time, thus the release of ready fuel into blood stream is GRADUAL; whereas the release of glucose from either breaking sucrose (a dimer), or converting fructose (a monomer), results in an immediate SURGE of available fuel. Rate-limiting steps and feed-back controls are the norms of biochemical metabolism and synthesis processes. The implication of a gradual supply of a source molecule can be totally different from a sudden surge of the same molecule, even when overall calorie contents do not differ. Natural history of human kind (i could just use the word evolution, but...) tells us clearly that refine sugar and processed monomeric carbohydrate molecules are unnatural, therefore the potential signal these molecules carry can only be abnormal - at this point of human evolvement, diabete and cancer are still considered anything but normal.
Nationalized healthcare (obamacare?) would be much cheaper & easier to achieve, only if we could reverse human history and ban refined sugar and fructose syrup and the likes.
Everyone should read this circulating testament about sugar -
{
Sugar can suppress your immune system and impair your defenses against infectious disease.1,2
Sugar upsets the mineral relationships in your body: causes chromium and copper deficiencies and interferes with absorption of calcium and magnesium. 3,4,5,6
Sugar can cause can cause a rapid rise of adrenaline, hyperactivity, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and crankiness in children.7,8
Sugar can produce a significant rise in total cholesterol, triglycerides and bad cholesterol and a decrease in good cholesterol.9,10,11,12
Sugar causes a loss of tissue elasticity and function.13
Sugar feeds cancer cells and has been connected with the development of cancer of the breast, ovaries, prostate, rectum, pancreas, biliary tract, lung, gallbladder and stomach.14,15,16,17,18,19,20
Sugar can increase fasting levels of glucose and can cause reactive hypoglycemia.21,22
Sugar can weaken eyesight.23
Sugar can cause many problems with the gastrointestinal tract including: an acidic digestive tract, indigestion, malabsorption in patients with functional bowel disease, increased risk of Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis.24,25,26,27,28
......
}
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光用能量/卡值看食物,单/双糖与粗粮淀粉是没区别的;
终期发疯的癌细胞需要能量,病人的肌肉就很方便的为之分解了,与糖不糖甚至吃不吃都可以无关;
所以提问者对"sugar feeds cancer"的理解是偏面的.
要看到更重要的signal transduction一面,不要/不只要看卡值.
"feed" has two layers of meaning here
1) calorie feed: sugar, whole wheat bread, tofu, butter or even patient's own muscle, can all be converted to calorie, if needed
2) signal feed: it is long known that most cancers are addicted to glucose because of their preference for anaerobic metabolism, which is the basis for FDG-PET scan. This part of the cancer feed by sugar surge is dangerous, because it selects for hypoxic and invasive phenotype of cancer. So, in practical term, sure way for cancer patients to expire quickly is to feed them dunken doughnuts every day.
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some known mechanisms
一个关健调控点是
pyruvate
Cancer cells tend to have
- selective expression of PKM2 (instead of PKM1), causing return to FETAL phenotype.
[step: phosphoenolpyruvate -->pyruvate]
- inactivation of PDC (pyruvate dehydrogenase complex): basis for the controversial canadian DCA cancer therapy in that DCA inhibits PDH kinase by irreversible binding to the pyruvate site, which results in the re-activation of PDC, and eventual restoration of aerobic respiration, proper mitochondrial function hence apoptosis.
[step: pyruvate --> acetyl CoA]
- high expression of transcription factor HIF (hypoxia inducible factor): the expression of enzymes for both above steps, and many other key players, such as Glut-1 (gluocose transporter), VEGF and some MMPs/cathepsin, are regulated by HIF. I am sure you are familiar with avastin
glucose surge => enhanced tumor anaerobic metabolism => hypoxia => HIF => expression of cancer growth, angiogenesis, metastasis related proteins => aggressive cancer
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