LA TIMES: It's getting clearer — the diet-cancer connection points to sugar and carbs

The New England Journal of Medicine published a report in August 2016 linking thirteen separate cancers to being overweight or obese and some of them are among the most common and deadly of all: colon, thyroid, ovarian, uterine, pancreatic and (in postmenopausal women) breast cancer.

But, earlier this month, a report from the CDC added even more detail to the report finding that in 2014, around 631,000 Americans were diagnosed with a body fat-related cancer. So, not only does cancer continue to be a problem we can’t get on top of but so does obesity. (However, it’s not for lack of trying- sites like ours and others have been talking about diet FOR YEARS.)

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“A cancer typically arises over years, or decades, making the type of study that might definitively establish cause and effect — an experiment in which people are randomly assigned to different diets — nearly impossible to carry out. The next-best option — observational studies that track what a specific group of individuals eats and which members of the group are later diagnosed with cancer — tends to generate as much confusion as knowledge. One day we read that a study has linked eating meat to cancer; a month later, a new headline declares the exact opposite.
And yet researchers have made progress in understanding the diet-cancer connection. The advances have emerged in the somewhat esoteric field of cancer metabolism, which investigates how cancer cells turn the nutrients we consume into fuel and building blocks for new cancer cells.”¹

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Lewis Cantley, the director of the cancer center at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been at the forefront of the cancer metabolism revival and believes the best explanation for the obesity-cancer connection is that both conditions are also linked to elevated levels of the hormone insulin. ¹

But the problem isn’t just the presence of insulin in our blood (we need insulin to live). Rather, it’s the insulin that remains at elevated (insulin resistance) levels which can promote the growth of tumors directly and indirectly. (And because elevated insulin directs our bodies to store fat, it can also be linked to the various ways the fat tissue itself is thought to contribute to cancer.¹)

So, it seems the problem isn’t just eating too much but WHAT we are eating. Easily digestible carbohydrates in general, and sugar, in particular, can cause insulin levels to rise to abnormally high levels and remain elevated and THAT can promote the growth of tumors directly and indirectly.

While this doesn’t mean that all cancers are caused by too much insulin or that we should never eat sugar again, consuming FAR LESS than we do is certainly a good idea. And honestly, we don’t need sugar. There are plenty of people who eat none and not only survive, but thrive.

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