Don't Hope! Refined Sugar Helps Fight Cancer

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Video: Don't Hope! Refined Sugar Helps Fight Cancer

Video: Don't Hope! Refined Sugar Helps Fight Cancer
Video: Does Sugar Feed Cancer Cells? 2024, December
Don't Hope! Refined Sugar Helps Fight Cancer
Don't Hope! Refined Sugar Helps Fight Cancer
Anonim

The prevailing myth of harm from sugar it is often recreated with funny cartoons. We can see in some of them how a bouncing cancer cell eagerly bites a lump of sugar. The sweet spice is accused of stimulating the growth of cancer cells when consumed regularly. And now imagine that left to starve for another serving of glucose, the cancer dies. All our cells need glucose (blood sugar) to produce energy and follow the regular life cycle of growth, division and death.

Like the leaves of a tree, old cells die and are replaced by an equal number of new and healthy ones. Cancer develops when old cells refuse to die but continue to grow, divide and progress in a specific place. This is how they create a tumor.

The well-known saying Cancer loves sugar began to make its way in 1924 after a controversial interpretation by Dr. Otto Warburg, derived from his publication On the metabolism of tumors. The famous Nobel Prize-winning scientist states in his writings:… In a nutshell, the main cause of cancer is the replacement of oxygen uptake in normal cells by the fermentation of sugar. Many people who write scientific papers on the same subject in the coming years misquote Warburg's statement, spreading the expression cancer loves sugar.

Warburg's hypothesis states that the development of cancer is caused when cancer cells convert glucose into energy without using oxygen. Healthy cells obtain it using pyruvate and oxygen. Pyruvate is oxidized in the mitochondria of healthy cells, and the German biochemist believes that because cancer cells do not oxidize pyruvate, cancer should be considered a mitochondrial dysfunction.

Crab
Crab

Now that we know more about the genetics of cancer, we know that cancer is not a mitochondrial dysfunction, but is caused by genetic mutations that occur in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. It is true that healthy cells and cancer cells convert food into energy by different mechanisms, but this difference is comparative and distinguishing from each other, not a cause leading to cancer.

It has been said many times that cancer cells are immortal, or rather that they do not die the way healthy people do. Scientists have studied this phenomenon and may be on the verge of finding out what tumors can do to avoid cell death. Laboratory research at Duke University has found that cancer cells appear to use a combination of sugar and specific proteins to keep growing when they should be dying.

Most likely, they use and absorb sugar at high speed to ignore the cellular instruction to die. In this sense, can you sugar from an accomplice to cancer becoming his Achilles heel?

At Johns Hopkins University, a group of researchers are looking for ways to outwit cancer cells by forcing them to divide more slowly and eventually commit suicide. They studied the process of abnormal glycosylation - how cancer cells combine and make proteins and sugar work together to keep them alive. When these cells are given N-butyrate (salt) with carbohydrates (containing sugar), cell proliferation is slowed down. In order to make cancer cells "feed" on the drug that kills them, the scientists produced a hybrid molecule made from ordinary sugar and N-butyrate. Because cancer is happy and easily absorbs sugar, diseased cells absorb this new molecule, which shatters their ability to continue to divide, and they eventually die.

Refined sugar
Refined sugar

Another team of scientists is also working on creating drugs that aim to take advantage of the cancer's weakness for sugar. Some of these new drugs can be given in conjunction with chemotherapy to help tumor cells get better and be more effectively exposed to chemotherapy. In Switzerland, scientists are developing a sugar coating that envelops quantum dots, or nanocrystals of drugs that will be able to travel only to the liver, avoiding other organs. Sugar in these small doses is the ingredient that helps the drugs to target a specific part of the body, thus reducing side effects and increasing the effect of the drug.

Be sensible in your healthy diet

Sugar provides energy, but does not give you any of the nutrients you need to reduce your risk of cancer. Natural sugars are found in fruits and vegetables, as well as in honey and molasses. These natural products should be part of your healthy diet. Processed sugars such as white or brown sugar should be avoided or limited. Consuming too many calories from sugar can lead to obesity and high levels of [insulin], which could also increase the risk of cancer.

Sweet stuff
Sweet stuff

Turn your back on sugary foods such as candy and biscuits, pasta and fatty foods, and sweetened carbonated beverages to reduce your risk of cancer. Balance your diet with plant and whole grains, fish and fruit sugar.

Use white refined sugar scarce and let its positive role in health be played by the research drive of scientists. In any case, do not deprive yourself of its natural substitute. Sugar does not cause cancer to develop. If you make all your cells starve for lack of glucose, you will deprive the healthy of energy and will not reduce the risk of increasing the sick.

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