Showing posts with label Sugar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sugar. Show all posts

Friday, February 28, 2014

11 Charts That Show Everything Wrong with Our Modern Diet

This image shows various dry fruits.
This image shows various dry fruits. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Three decades ago, the food available was mostly fresh and grown locally. Today, the majority of foods served, whether at home, in school or in restaurants, are highly processed foods, filled with sugars, harmful processed fats, and chemical additives.
During that same time, obesity rates have skyrocketed, and one in five American deaths are now associated with obesity. Obesity-related deaths include those from type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, liver disease, cancer, dementia, and depression, as nearly all have metabolic dysfunction as a common underlying factor.
The featured1 article contains 11 telling charts and graphs, illustrating how the modern diet has led to an avalanche of chronic disease. As its author, Kris Gunnars says:
"The modern diet is the main reason why people all over the world are fatter and sicker than ever before. Everywhere modern processed foods go, chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease soon follow."

Sugar Consumption, Especially Soda and Juices, Drives Disease Rates

Of all the dietary culprits out there, refined sugar in general, and processed fructose in particular, win top billing as the greatest destroyers of health. The amount of refined sugar in the modern diet has ballooned, with the average American now getting about 350 calories a day (equivalent to about 22 teaspoons of sugar and 25 percent of their daily calories) from added sugar.
This level of sugar consumption has definitive health consequences. One recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine,2 which examined the associations between added sugar consumption and cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths, found that:
  • Among American adults, the mean percentage of daily calories from added sugar was 14.9 percent in 2005-2010
  • Most adults (just over 71 percent) get 10 percent or more of their daily calories from added sugar
  • Approximately 10 percent of American adults got 25 percent or more of their daily calories from added sugar in 2005-2010
  • The most common sources of added sugar are sugar-sweetened beverages, grain-based desserts, fruit drinks, dairy desserts, and candy
According to this study, those who consume 21 percent or more of their daily calories in the form of sugar are TWICE as likely to die from heart disease compared to those who get seven percent or less or their daily calories from added sugar.
Needless to say, with all this added sugar in the diet, average calorie consumption has skyrocketed as well, having increased by about 20 percent since 1970.
A primary source of all this added sugar is soda, fruit juices, and other sweetened drinks. Multiple studies have confirmed that these kinds of beverages dramatically increase your risk of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and mortality. Diet sodas or artificially sweetened foods and beverages are no better, as research reveals they appear to do even MORE harm than refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), including causing greater weight gain.

Abandoning Traditional Fats for Processed Vegetable Oils Has Led to Declining Health

Fats help your body absorb important vitamins, including vitamins A, D, and E, and fats are especially important for infants and toddlers for proper growth and development. Moreover, when your body burns non-vegetable carbohydrates like grains and sugars, powerful adverse hormonal changes typically occur. These detrimental changes do not occur when you consume healthy fats or fibrous vegetables.
As explained by Dr. Robert Lustig, fructose in particular is "isocaloric but not isometabolic," which means you can have the same amount of calories from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, but the metabolic effect will be entirely different despite the identical calorie count. Furthermore, saturated fats, although supplying more calories, will NOT actually cause you to get fat, nor will it promote heart disease.
Unfortunately, the healthiest fats, including animal fats and coconut oil, both of which are saturated, have been long portrayed as a heart attack waiting to happen. Meanwhile, harmful hydrogenated vegetable oils such as corn and canola oil have been touted as "healthful" alternatives. Ditto for margarine.
Boy, did they get this wrong. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The hydrogenation process creates incredibly harmfultrans fats, which the US Food and Drug Administration is now finally considering banning altogether. (I'll review the health hazards of trans fats in further detail below.) Clearly, switching from lard and grass-fed butter—which contains heart-protective nutrients—to margarine and other trans-fat rich hydrogenated oils was a public health experiment that has not ended well.

Low-Fat Fad Has Done Unfathomable Harm

Conventional recommendations have also called for dramatically decreasing the overall amount of fat in your diet, and this fat aversion is yet another driving factor of metabolic disease and chronic ill health. As I and other nutritional experts have warned, most people (especially if you're insulin or leptin resistant, which encompasses about 80 percent of Americans) probably need upwards of 50-85 percent of daily calories from healthful fats. This is a FAR cry from the less than 10 percent of calories from saturated fats recommended by the US Department of Agriculture.3 As stated in the featured article:
"The first dietary guidelines for Americans were published in the year 1977, almost at the exact same time the obesity epidemic started. Of course, this doesn't prove anything (correlation does not equal causation), but it makes sense that this could be more than just a mere coincidence.
The anti-fat message essentially put the blame on saturated fat and cholesterol (harmless), while giving sugar and refined carbs (very unhealthy) a free pass. Since the guidelines were published, many massive studies have been conducted on the low-fat diet. It is no better at preventing heart disease, obesity or cancer than the standard Western diet, which is as unhealthy as a diet can get."
There's no telling how many have been prematurely killed by following these flawed low-fat guidelines, yet despite mounting research refuting the value of cutting out fats, such recommendations are still being pushed.

Increased Vegetable Oil Consumption Has Altered Americans' Fatty Acid Composition

The increased consumption of processed vegetable oils has also led to a severely lopsided fatty acid composition, as these oils provide high amounts of omega-6 fats. The ideal ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats is 1:1, but the typical Western diet is between 1:20 and 1:50. Eating too much damaged omega-6 fat and too little omega-3 sets the stage for the very health problems you seek to avoid, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression and Alzheimer's, rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes, just to name a few. To correct this imbalance, you typically need to do two things:
  1. Significantly decrease omega-6 by avoiding processed foods and foods cooked at high temperatures using vegetable oils
  2. Increase your intake of heart-healthy animal-based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil

The Dangers of Hydrogenated Soybean Oil

About 95 percent of soy is genetically engineered to have resistance to glyphosate and is loaded with this highly toxic herbicide. But even if you have organic soy, most of it is hydrogenated. Hydrogenated soybean oil has, like sugar, become a major source of calories in the US diet. Americans consume more than 28 billion pounds of edible oils annually, and soybean oil accounts for about 65 percent of it. About half of it is hydrogenated, as soybean oil is too unstable otherwise to be used in food manufacturing. In 1999, soybean oil accounted for seven percent of consumed daily calories in the US.  
Part of the problem with partially hydrogenated soybean oil is the trans fat it contains. The other part relates to the health hazards of soy itself. An added hazard factor is the fact that the majority of soybeans are genetically engineered. The completely unnatural fats created through the partial hydrogenation process cause dysfunction and chaos in your body on a cellular level, and studies have linked trans-fats to:
Cancer, by interfering with enzymes your body uses to fight cancerChronic health problems such as obesity, asthma, auto-immune disease, cancer, and bone degeneration
Diabetes, by interfering with the insulin receptors in your cell membranesHeart disease, by clogging your arteries (Among women with underlying coronary heart disease, eating trans-fats increased the risk of sudden cardiac arrest three-fold!)
Decreased immune function, by reducing your immune responseIncrease blood levels of low density lipoprotein (LDL), or "bad" cholesterol, while lowering levels of high density lipoprotein (HDL), or "good" cholesterol
Reproductive problems, by interfering with enzymes needed to produce sex hormonesInterfering with your body's use of beneficial omega-3 fats

Besides the health hazards related to the trans fats, soybean oil is, in and of itself, NOT a healthy oil. Add to that the fact that the majority of soybeans grown in the US are genetically engineered, which may have additional health consequences. When taken together, partially hydrogenated GE soybean oil becomes one of the absolute worst types of oils you can consume. Unfortunately, as stated in the featured article:4
"[M]ost people don't have a clue they're eating this much soybean oil. They're actually getting most of it from processed foods, which often have soybean oil added to them because it is cheap. The best way to avoid soybean oil (and other nasty ingredients) is to avoid processed foods."

Wheat - A Bane of the Modern Diet

Modern wheat is not the same kind of wheat your grandparents ate. The nutritional content of this staple grain has been dramatically altered over the years and is now far less nutritious than the varieties of generations past. As Gunnars states:5
"Modern dwarf wheat was introduced around the year 1960, which contains 19-28 percent less of important minerals like Magnesium, Iron, Zinc, and Copper. There is also evidence that modern wheat is much more harmful to celiac patients and people with gluten sensitivity, compared to older breeds like Einkorn wheat. Whereas wheat may have been relatively healthy back in the day, the same is not true of modern dwarf wheat."
Wheat lectin, or "wheat germ agglutinin" (WGA), is largely responsible for many of wheat's pervasive ill effects. WGA is highest in whole wheat, especially sprouted whole wheat, but wheat isn't the only grain with significant lectin. All seeds of the grass family (rice, wheat, spelt, rye, etc.) are high in lectins. WGA has the potential to damage your health by the following mechanisms (list is not all-inclusive):
Pro-Inflammatory: WGA lectin stimulates the synthesis of pro-inflammatory chemical messengers, even at very small concentrationsNeurotoxic: WGA lectin can pass through your blood-brain barrier and attach to the protective coating on your nerves, known as the myelin sheath. It is also capable of inhibiting nerve growth factor, which is important for the growth, maintenance, and survival of certain neurons
Immunotoxic: WGA lectin may bind to and activate white blood cellsCardiotoxic: WGA lectin induces platelet aggregation and has a potent disruptive effect on tissue regeneration and removal of neutrophils from your blood vessels
Cytotoxic (toxic to cells): WGA lectin may induce programmed cell death (apoptosis)Research also shows that WGA maydisrupt endocrine and gastrointestinal function, interfere with genetic expression, and share similarities with certain viruses

Flawed Assumptions About Eggs Have Worsened Health

According to USDA data, Americans ate more than 375 eggs per person per year, on average, in 1950. Egg consumption dipped to just over 225 eggs per capita between 1995 and 2000, and as of 2007, it was just over 250 eggs per capita per year—a 33 percent decline since 1950.
Like saturated fats, many naturally cholesterol-rich foods have also been wrongfully vilified. Eggs, which are actually among the most nutritious foods you can eat (provided they come from organically raised, pastured hens) have long been accused of causing heart disease simply because they're high in cholesterol. But dietary cholesterol has little to do with the cholesterol level in your body, and numerous studies have confirmed that eating eggs does NOT raise potentially adverse LDL cholesterol in your blood. Studies have also failed to find any evidence that eggs contribute to heart disease.
Testing6 has confirmed that true free-range eggs are far more nutritious than commercially raised eggs. The dramatically superior nutrient levels are most likely the result of the differences in diet between free-ranging, pastured hens and commercially farmed hens. In a 2007 egg-testing project, Mother Earth News compared the official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient data for commercial eggs with eggs from hens raised on pasture, and found that the latter typically contains:
  • 2/3 more vitamin A
  • Two times more omega-3 fatty acids
  • Three times more vitamin E
  • Seven times more beta-carotene
Barring organic certification, which is cost-prohibitive for many small farmers, you could just make sure the farmer raises his chickens according to organic, free-range standards, allowing his flock to forage freely for their natural diet, and aren't fed antibiotics, corn, and soy.
You can tell the eggs are free range or pastured by the color of the egg yolk. Foraged hens produce eggs with bright orange yolks. Dull, pale yellow yolks are a sure sign you're getting eggs from caged hens that are not allowed to forage for their natural diet. Cornucopia.org offers a helpful organic egg scorecard that rates egg manufacturers based on 22 criteria that are important for organic consumers. According to Cornucopia, their report "showcases ethical family farms, and their brands, and exposes factory farm producers and brands in grocery store coolers that threaten to take over organic livestock agriculture."

People Eat More Processed Food Than Ever Before

Overall, about 90 percent of the money Americans spend on food is spent on processed foods.7 This includes restaurant foods (i.e. food away from home) and processed grocery foods that require little or no preparation time before consuming at home.
When looking at the ratio of money spent on store-bought groceries only, Americans spend nearly a fourth of their grocery money on processed foods and sweets—twice as much as they did in 1982—according to Department of Labor statistics.8 Pricing of meats, sugar, and flour has had a great influence our spending habits. These items have actually seen a decrease in price per pound, which has had an inverse effect on Americans' spending habits, in that cheaper prices encourage people to buy more.
The result is obvious. Compared with shoppers 30 years ago, American adults today are twice as likely to be obese, and children and adolescent three times as likely to be overweight. Pediatric type 2 diabetes—which used to be very rare—has markedly increased along with the rise in early childhood obesity. According to previous research, early onset type 2 diabetes appears to be a more aggressive disease from a cardiovascular standpoint.9

Take Control of Your Health

Research coming out of some of America's most respected institutions now confirms that sugar is a primary dietary factor driving chronic disease development. Sugar, and fructose in particular, has been implicated as a culprit in the development of both heart disease and cancer, and having this information puts you in the driver's seat when it comes to prevention. A diet that promotes health is high in healthful fats and very, very low in sugar and non-vegetable carbohydrates.
Understand that excessive sugar/fructose consumption leads to insulin resistance, and insulin resistance appears to be the root of many if not most chronic disease. So far, scientific studies have linked excessive fructose consumption to about 78 different diseases and health problems,10 including heart disease and cancer.  
Many also eat far too little healthy fat, and the combination of too much sugar and too little fat is driving disease rates through the roof. If you're still unsure about what constitutes a healthy diet, please review my free optimized nutrition plan, which starts at the beginner level and goes all the way up to advanced.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Friday, January 3, 2014

How Sugar Can Become Toxic

Venezuelan sugar cane (Saccharum) harvested fo...
Venezuelan sugar cane (Saccharum) harvested for processing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Dr. Mercola
Mice fed a diet containing 25 percent sugar – the equivalent of three cans of soda daily – were twice as likely to die as mice fed a similar diet without sugar. 1
Such was the finding of a new 58-week University of Utah study, which once again highlights the early death sentence many Americans may receive for indulging far too often in this sweet treat.
While the mice did not display obvious signs of metabolic diseases, such as obesity, they were nonetheless significantly affected by the sugar. Male mice fed sugar were 26 percent less territorial and produced 25 percent fewer offspring, for example.
Said study author James Ruff in Time:2
“The [mice] are having fewer offspring because they are having a hard time competing, they’re less effective at foraging and raising young. That is due to lots of perturbations across their physiology.
Since most substances that are toxic in mice are also toxic in people, it’s likely that those underlying physical problems that cause those mice to have increased mortality are at play in people.”

19-Fold Increase in Sugar Consumption in Just Three Centuries

In Sugar Love: A Not so Sweet Story,3 author Rich Cohen chronicles the, often bloody, history of sugar and humans’ love affair with this sweet poison. One of the most noteworthy statistics is this: in 1700, the average Englishman ate four pounds of sugar a year.
This has increased steadily to reach 77 pounds of sugar annually for the average American today, which amounts to more than 22 teaspoons of added sugar daily.
And therein lies the problem. Consuming small amounts of sugar may not be a problem, but consuming sugar by the pound certainly is. As Dr. Richard Johnson, who was interviewed for the article, said:
It seems like every time I study an illness and trace a path to the first cause, I find my way back to sugar. Why is it that one-third of adults [worldwide] have high blood pressure, when in 1900 only 5 percent had high blood pressure?
Why did 153 million people have diabetes in 1980, and now we’re up to 347 million? Why are more and more Americans obese? Sugar, we believe, is one of the culprits, if not the major culprit.”
This isn’t simply a matter of consuming ‘empty calories,’ either, as the American Heart Association would have you believe.
“It has nothing to do with its calories,” endocrinologist Robert Lustig stated.“Sugar is a poison by itself when consumed at high doses.”4

Why Calories from Sugar and Fructose May Increase Your Risk of Serious Disease

According to Dr. Lustig, fructose is "isocaloric but not isometabolic." This means you can have the same amount of calories from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, but the metabolic effect will be entirely different despite the identical calorie count.
This is largely because different nutrients provoke different hormonal responses, and those hormonal responses determine, among other things, how much fat you accumulate.
Half of the sugar the average American consumes in a day is fructose, which is 300 percent more than the amount that will trigger biochemical havoc. And many Americans consume more than twice that amount! Thanks to the excellent work of researchers like Dr. Robert Lustig, as well as Dr. Richard Johnson, we now know that fructose:
  • Is metabolized differently from glucose, with the majority being turned directly into fat.
  • Tricks your body into gaining weight by fooling your metabolism, as it turns off your body's appetite-control system. Fructose does not appropriately stimulate insulin, which in turn does not suppress ghrelin (the "hunger hormone") and doesn't stimulate leptin (the "satiety hormone"), which together result in your eating more and developing insulin resistance.
  • Rapidly leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity ("beer belly"), decreased HDL, increased LDL, elevated triglycerides, elevated blood sugar, and high blood pressure—i.e., classic metabolic syndrome.
  • Over time leads to insulin resistance, which is not only an underlying factor of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, but also many cancers.
This is why the general rule that you can lose weight only by counting calories simply doesn't work. After fructose, other sugars and grains are likely the most excessively consumed foods that promote weight gain and chronic disease.

This also includes food items that are typically viewed as healthy, such as fruit juice or even large amounts of high-fructose fruits. What needs to be understood is that when consumed in large amounts, these items will also adversely affect your insulin, which is a crucially potent fat regulator.
So even drinking large amounts of fruit juice on a daily basis can contribute to weight gain... In short, you do not get fat because you eat too many calories and don't exercise enough. You get fat because you eat the wrong kind of calories. As long as you keep eating fructose and grains, you're programming your body to create and store fat.

The Fat Switch: Unveiling the Five Basic Truths That Can Help You Lose Weight

Dr. Johnson discovered the method that animals use to gain fat prior to times of food scarcity, which turned out to be a powerful adaptive benefit. His research showed that fructose activates a key enzyme, fructokinase, which in turn activates another enzyme that causes cells to accumulate fat. When this enzyme is blocked, fat cannot be stored in the cell.
Interestingly, this is the exact same "switch" animals use to fatten up in the fall and to burn fat during the winter. Fructose is the dietary ingredient that turns on this "switch," causing cells to accumulate fat, both in animals and in humans. His latest book, The Fat Switch, dispels many of the most pervasive myths relating to diet and obesity. There are five basic truths that Dr. Johnson explains in detail in the book that overturn current concepts:
  1. Large portions of food and too little exercise are NOT solely responsible for why you are gaining weight
  2. Metabolic Syndrome is actually a healthy adaptive condition that animals undergo to store fat to help them survive periods of famine. The problem is most all of us are always feasting and never undergo fasting. Our bodies have not adapted to this yet and as a result, this beneficial switch actually causes damage to contemporary man
  3. Uric acid is increased by specific foods and causally contributes to obesity and insulin resistance
  4. Fructose-containing sugars cause obesity not by calories but by turning on the ‘fat switch’
  5. Effective treatment of obesity requires turning off your fat switch and improving the function of your cells' mitochondria
I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book, which is a useful tool for those struggling with their weight. Dietary sugar, and fructose in particular, is a significant "tripper of your fat switch," so understanding how sugars of all kinds affect your weight and health is imperative.
Is Any Amount of Sugar Safe?
Excess sugar consumption has been clearly linked to health problems like diabetes,5 heart attack6 and much more, so it’s likely that the less sugar you eat, the better, and this is particularly true when it comes to fructose. As a standard recommendation, I advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per dayFor most people, it would also be wise to limit your fructose from fruit to 15 grams or less, as you're virtually guaranteed to consume "hidden" sources of fructose if you drink beverages other than water and eat processed food.
Fifteen grams of fructose is not much -- it represents two bananas, one-third cup of raisins, or two Medjool dates. Remember, the average 12-ounce can of soda contains 40 grams of sugar, at least half of which is fructose, so one can of soda alone would exceed your daily allotment.  
I realize that there is a controversy over fructose from fruits. I believe that the average American will benefit from following these fructose restrictions, as many are seriously overweight. But for those who are fit and normal body weight, I suspect you could increase those levels significantly if the fructose is from WHOLE fruit, not juice, and not suffer any complications. More than likely you would receive health benefits from the phytonutrients in the fruit as long as you were fit and not overweight.
In his book, The Sugar Fix, Dr. Johnson includes detailed tables showing the content of fructose in different foods -- an information base that isn't readily available when you're trying to find out exactly how much fructose is in various foods. I encourage you to pick up a copy of this excellent resource. You can find an abbreviated listing of the fructose content of common fruits in this previous article.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Sugar Promotes Heart Disease and Cancer

Sugar
Sugar (Photo credit: oskay)
By Dr. Mercola
More than 1,660,290 new cancer cases are projected to be diagnosed in the US this year, and an estimated 580,350 Americans will die from the disease.1Another 600,000 Americans die of heart disease each year.2 At present, heart disease is the leading cause of death among both sexes.
Despite massive technological advances over the past half-century, Western medicine is still at a loss for how to rein in the prevalence of these top two killers.
It’s become increasingly clear that many of the conventional strategies, from diagnosis to treatment, are riddled with flawed assumptions and approaches that, in many cases, do more harm than good.
What’s worse, virtually none of the conventional strategies actually address the root cause of the problem, a flawed diet high in sugars and processed foods.
In fact, conventional dietary recommendations for the prevention of heart diseaseare diametrically opposed to what you actually need for optimal heart health! For over 60 years, saturated fats have been blamed for heart disease, resulting in the promulgation of a dangerous low-fat, high-sugar diet.
In reality, a diet that promotes health is high in healthful fats and very, very low in sugar and non-vegetable carbohydrates... Research coming out of some of America’s most respected institutions now confirms that sugar is a primary dietary factor driving chronic disease development.
Sugar, and fructose in particular, has been implicated as a culprit in the development of both heart disease and cancer, and having this information putsyou in the driver’s seat when it comes to prevention.

How Much Sugar Is in Your Diet?

Ever since I started this Web site back in 1997, I’ve been warning about the dangers of high sugar consumption. It’s important to realize that even if you don’tadd sugar to your foods, hidden sugar, typically in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), is in virtually all processed foods, from yogurts and sauces to breads and sodas.
Many favorite staples are also grain-based, such as bagels, pancakes, and breakfast cereals. All those grains are also quickly turned into sugar in your body, adding to your sugar burden.
Clinical trials have shown that those who consume HFCS tend to develop higher risk factors for cardiovascular disease within as little as two weeks, so if I had to pick out the worst culprit among sugars, it would be fructose.
Other studies indicate that if you limit your sugar, no matter what form you get it in, you effectively decrease your chances of developing cancer—including breast and colon cancers.

Soda Drinkers Have Increased Cancer Risk

According to recent research,3, 4 older women who drink a lot of soda or other sugary beverages may be at significantly increased risk for endometrial cancer—an estrogen-dependent type of cancer that affects the lining of a woman’s uterus.
The study included data for more than 23,000 postmenopausal women who were followed for 14 years.
Women who had the highest intake of sugary beverages had a whopping 78 percent higher risk for endometrial cancer, and the risk appeared to be dose dependent; rising right along with consumption. Study author Maki Inoue-Choi was not surprised by the results, and neither am I.
“Other studies have shown increasing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has paralleled the increase in obesity. Obese women tend to have higher levels of estrogens and insulin than women of normal weight, [and] increased levels of estrogens and insulin are established risk factors for endometrial cancer,” she said.5
Previous research has also shown that dietary fructose can promote cancergrowth in a number of different ways, including:
  • Altered cellular metabolism
  • Increased reactive oxygen species (free radicals)
  • DNA damage
  • Inflammation

Fructose Promotes Cancer Cell Proliferation

Studies have shown that different sugars are metabolized using different metabolic pathways, and this is of MAJOR consequence when it comes to feeding cancer and making it proliferate. Three years ago, researchers published findings showing that fructose is readily used by cancer cells to increase their proliferation.6 Cancer cells did not respond to glucose in the same manner.
In this case, the cancer cells used were pancreatic cancer, which is typically regarded as the most deadly and universally rapid-killing form of cancer. According to the authors:
“Traditionally, glucose and fructose have been considered as interchangeable monosaccharide substrates that are similarly metabolized, and little attention has been given to sugars other than glucose. However, fructose intake has increased dramatically in recent decades and cellular uptake of glucose and fructose uses distinct transporters.
Here, we report that fructose provides an alternative substrate to induce pancreatic cancer cell proliferation. Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different; in comparison with glucose, fructose... is preferentially metabolized via the nonoxidative pentose phosphate pathway to synthesize nucleic acids and increase uric acid production.
These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation. They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth.” [Emphasis mine]
The study confirms the old adage that sugar feeds cancer because they found that tumor cells do thrive on sugar (glucose). However, the cells used fructose for cell division, speeding up the growth and spread of the cancer. This difference is clearly of major consequence, and should be carefully considered by anyone who is currently undergoing cancer treatment or seeking to prevent cancer.

This does not mean you should avoid fruits, the benefits of most fruits outweigh any concerns to fructose.   I would suggest to not juice your fruits and to eat them whole, and also realize we have bred many of these fruits to a very high level of fructose.   Fruits today are many times sweeter than they were historically, and should be consumed in moderation.

The real problem is the high fructose corn syrup that is added to practically every processed food and drink you see.

Remember: Exercise Is Another Potent Ally Against Cancer and Heart Disease

Controlling your blood-glucose and insulin levels—through diet, along with a comprehensive exercise program—can be one of the most crucial components to a cancer recovery program. These factors are also crucial in order to prevent cancer in the first place. Diet and exercise—particularly high intensity interval training—are also the dynamic duo that will help you stave off heart disease.
In fact, a recent meta-analysis that reviewed 305 randomized controlled trials found no statistically detectable differences between exercise and medications for heart disease, including statins and beta blockers. (Previous research has also shown that exercise alone can reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease by a factor of three,7 which isn’t too shabby.) Exercise is in fact so potent, the researchers suggested that drug companies ought to be required to include it for comparison when conducting clinical trials for new drugs. As reported by Bloomberg:8
“The analysis adds to evidence showing the benefit of non-medical approaches to disease through behavior and lifestyle changes... ‘In cases where drug options provide only modest benefit, patients deserve to understand the relative impact that physical activity might have on their condition,’ Naci and Ioannidis said in the published paper. In the meantime, 'exercise interventions should therefore be considered as a viable alternative to, or, alongside, drug therapy.'”
In a nutshell, being a healthy weight and exercising regularly creates a healthy feedback loop that optimizes and helps maintain insulin and leptin receptor sensitivity. And, as I’ve mentioned before, insulin and leptin resistance—primarily driven by excessive consumption of refined sugar and grains along with lack of exercise—are the underlying factors of nearly all chronic disease.

Connecting the Dots: Fructose—Uric Acid—Cancer and Chronic Disease Risk

The theory that sugar feeds cancer was actually born nearly 80 years ago. Shockingly, most conventional cancer programs STILL do not adequately address diet and the need to avoid sugars. The 1931 Nobel laureate in medicine, German Otto Warburg, Ph.D., first discovered that cancer cells have a fundamentally different energy metabolism compared to healthy cells. Malignant tumors tend to use a process where glucose is used as a fuel by the cancer cells, creating lactic acid as a byproduct.9
The large amount of lactic acid produced by this fermentation of glucose from cancer cells is then transported to your liver. This conversion of glucose to lactic acid generates a lower, more acidic pH in cancerous tissues as well as overall physical fatigue from lactic acid buildup.10, 11
This is a very inefficient pathway for energy metabolism, which extracts only about five percent of the available energy in your food supply. In simplistic terms, the cancer is "wasting" energy, which leads you to become both tired and undernourished, and as the vicious cycle continues, will lead to the body wasting so many cancer patients experience. Additionally, carbohydrates from glucose and sucrose significantly decrease the capacity of neutrophils to do their job. Neutrophils are a type of white blood cell that helps cells to envelop and destroy invaders, such as cancer.
While all forms of sugar are detrimental to health in general and promote cancer, but in slightly different ways and to a different extent, fructose clearly seems to be one of the overall most harmful. As mentioned above, fructose metabolism leads to increased uric acid production along with cancer cell proliferation.12 Again, ONLY fructose (not glucose) drives up your uric acidlevels.
Now, the connection between fructose, uric acid, and insulin resistance is so clear that your uric acid level can actually be used as a marker for toxicity from fructose. What this means is that if your uric acid levels are high, you’re at increased risk of all the health hazards associated with fructose consumption—including both heart disease and cancer. Subsequently, you’d be well advised to reduce your fructose intake. For more information about this, please see my previous interview with Dr. Richard Johnson, who is an expert on this topic. Two key recommendations however are:
  • Keep your uric acid level below 4 mg/dl for men and 3.5 mg/dl for women, and
  • As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day

Reeling in Your Fructose Consumption May Be the Most Important Lifestyle Change You Can Make

Dr. Johnson has written one of the best books on the market on the health dangers of fructose, called The Sugar Fix, which explains how fructose causes high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and kidney disease. It’s also safe to say that many cancers are also on the list of diseases that are directly linked to excessive fructose consumption. In addition to the studies already mentioned, fructose has also been found to promote metastasis in breast cancer,13 and shows genotoxic effects on the colon in animal research.14
Fructose also promotes a condition called intracranial atherosclerosis15—a narrowing and hardening of the arteries in your skull—and contrary to popular belief, it is the sugar/fructose in your diet that increases your risk for heart disease, NOT saturated animal fats.
At the basic dietary level, the prevention strategies for heart disease and cancer are identical. First and foremost, you need to address your insulin and leptin resistance, which is the result of eating a diet too high in sugars and grains—again, not fat, with the exception of trans fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which have been linked to increased heart disease risk, even in small amounts. To safely and effectively reverse insulin and leptin resistance, you need to:
  • Avoid sugar, processed fructose, grains if you are insulin and leptin resistant, and processed foods
  • Eat a healthful diet of whole foods, ideally organic, and replace the grain carbs with:
    • Large amounts of vegetables
    • Low-to-moderate amount of high-quality protein (think organically raised, pastured animals)
    • As much high-quality healthful fat as you want (saturated and monosaturated from animal and tropical oil sources). Most people actually need upwards of 50-85 percent fats in their diet for optimal health—a far cry from the 10 percent currently recommended.

Restricting Fructose Consumption Is Crucial Part of a Healthy Lifestyle

Whether we’re talking about heart disease or cancer, reducing (or preferably eliminating) fructose and other added sugars, as well as limiting grain carbohydrates from your diet is a primary strategy on my list if you have insulin and leptin resistance. This dietary modification should also be part of your comprehensive treatment plan if you’ve been diagnosed with either cancer or heart disease.
Understand that excessive fructose consumption leads to insulin resistance, and insulin resistance appears to be the root of many if not most chronic disease, including heart disease and cancer. So far, scientific studies have linked excessive fructose consumption to about 78 different diseases and health problems.16
By severely reducing your intake of fructose and carbs in your diet, you help stave off any potential cancer growth, and “starve” any tumors you currently have. It also bolsters your overall immune function, because sugar decreases the function of your immune system almost immediately.
Enhanced by Zemanta