Cancer Cells Seem to Love Your Sodas
By Naturopath Suzann Wang
We’ve spoken about how high fructose corn syrup has been found to be loaded with mercury, a toxic heavy metal, in a previous post. In that article, we talked about how mercury can damage the brain. Now, new research is even more damning of products with high fructose corn syrup, a highly refined by-product of corn. It seems that a recent study published by the Journal of Cancer Research have found that pancreatic cancer, the most deadly form of cancer, cells not only like to use fructose as food but also use it to divide and grow. This study is particularly impactful because before this it was thought that all sugars were preceived as equal by the body. This, however, does not seem to be true since pancreatic cancer cells seem to prefer fructose to glucose in helping it to divide and proliferate.
American’s greatest intake of fructose is from high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Concerns with HFCS were poo poo’d by the corn refining industry who held the stance that a sugar is a sugar. But as intake of HFCS has increased over 1000 percent between 1970 and 1990 we are seeing the effects on our health in the increasing of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and now cancer. As it turns out, fructose is absorbed by cancer cells totally differently than glucose is and now we see that fructose is used by cancer cells in ways that glucose is not being used, particularly that it is assisting the cancerous cell to continue to divide and grow. Cancer has supplanted heart disease as the number one killer of Americans. Pancreatic cancer cells, on which the research has been done, is a particularly nasty cancer that kills 95% of people who have contracted it within 5 years.
Do yourselves and your kids a favor and read ingredients. Particularly, look for high fructose corn syrup and choose products that contain none. Even if you loved your Coca-Cola, just by switching from HFCS to the cane sugar version, you are taking a step in the right direction. Not that I’m recommending you drink Coca-Cola but if you did and couldn’t give it up easily, cutting out the HFCS of your diet is a good start. Best to drink water or unsweetened tea. Weaning yourself off sugar of any kind is that first step toward health. And for goodness sake, if you know anyone with cancer, recommend them get off as many sugar or refined foods as possible but especially cut the HFCS out of the diet.
