Obamacare. It’s changing the way people receive, buy and approach their health care. Cost isn’t the only thing people need to think about in buying health care. And more and more people need to be creative in the types of treatments they choose and doctors, realizing this changes in health care trends, are also thinking outside previous traditional medicine boxes to provide proactive and preventive care.
Probably the biggest health fear of most people is cancer. It’s a huge part of the medical industry and can be devastating to your health if not deadly. Nutrition now plays a big part in modern day heath care and modern, western medicine is more aware than ever of the role of nutrition and eliminating toxins plays in keeping cancer away, but what you may not know is now doctors and nutritionists are warning of the role sugar plays in eliminating cancer.
TheTruthAboutCancer.com calls sugar the white death from cancer. Here’s why!
Truth be told, regular consumption of sugary foods is one of the worst things that you can do for your health. Modern scientific research has shown us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that sugar in your food (in all its myriad forms) is taking a devastating toll on your health.
Here’s how it starts the snowball rolling to attack all the systems of your body to create a playground for cancer to grow:
The “sugar rush” has been targeted at our children. American children are consuming about 10 times as much sugar as they were in 1900, especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is the average American’s greatest source of calories! Highly addictive HFCS contains fructose and glucose, but they are NOT bound together (as they are in table sugar) so the body doesn’t need to break it down. Therefore, the fructose is absorbed immediately, going straight to the liver, which turns it into fat (VLDL and triglycerides).
According to Dr. Joseph Mercola:
“Fructose also tricks the body into gaining weight by fooling your metabolism (it turns off the 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.” This process also suppresses the immune system.
But just because you avoid HFCS doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. Excess intake of ALL processed sugars results in compromised immune function (decreasing the white blood cells’ ability to destroy bacteria), obesity, and diabetes.
Read more at TheTruthAboutCancer.com.
Dr. Mercola reinforces the sugar, cancer connection.
During the last 10 years I have worked with more than 500 cancer patients as director of nutrition for Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Tulsa, Okla. It puzzles me why the simple concept “sugar feeds cancer” can be so dramatically overlooked as part of a comprehensive cancer treatment plan.
Of the 4 million cancer patients being treated in America today, hardly any are offered any scientifically guided nutrition therapy beyond being told to “just eat good foods.” Most patients I work with arrive with a complete lack of nutritional advice. I believe many cancer patients would have a major improvement in their outcome if they controlled the supply of cancer’s preferred fuel, glucose. By slowing the cancer’s growth, patients allow their immune systems and medical debulking therapies — chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to reduce the bulk of the tumor mass — to catch up to the disease. Controlling one’s blood-glucose levels through diet, supplements, exercise, meditation and prescription drugs when necessary can be one of the most crucial components to a cancer recovery program. The sound bite — sugar feeds cancer — is simple. The explanation is a little more complex.
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. The crux of his Nobel thesis was that malignant tumors frequently exhibit an increase in anaerobic glycolysis — a process whereby glucose is used as a fuel by cancer cells with lactic acid as an anaerobic byproduct — compared to normal tissues.1 The large amount of lactic acid produced by this fermentation of glucose from cancer cells is then transported to the liver. This conversion of glucose to lactate generates a lower, more acidic pH in cancerous tissues as well as overall physical fatigue from lactic acid buildup.2,3 Thus, larger tumors tend to exhibit a more acidic pH.4
This inefficient pathway for energy metabolism yields only 2 moles of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) energy per mole of glucose, compared to 38 moles of ATP in the complete aerobic oxidation of glucose. By extracting only about 5 percent (2 vs. 38 moles of ATP) of the available energy in the food supply and the body’s calorie stores, the cancer is “wasting” energy, and the patient becomes tired and undernourished. This vicious cycle increases body wasting.5 It is one reason why 40 percent of cancer patients die from malnutrition, or cachexia.6
Hence, cancer therapies should encompass regulating blood-glucose levels via diet, supplements, non-oral solutions for cachectic patients who lose their appetite, medication, exercise, gradual weight loss and stress reduction. Professional guidance and patient self-discipline are crucial at this point in the cancer process. The quest is not to eliminate sugars or carbohydrates from the diet but rather to control blood glucose within a narrow range to help starve the cancer and bolster immune function.
More at Mercola.com
The Academy Of Nutrition and Dietetics practices says this about sugar and cancer:
Much research shows that it is sugar’s relationship to higher insulin levels and related growth factors that may influence cancer cell growth the most, and increase risk of other chronic diseases. Many types of cancer cells have plenty of insulin receptors, making them respond more than normal cells to insulin’s ability to promote growth.
More at OncologyNutrition.org.
Since at least 2000 people have been buzzing about the cancer, sugar connection. So why haven’t we heard more about it since then? BeatCancer.org has a simple but well cited article on the subject.
Patrick Quillin, PHD, RD, CNS, former director of nutrition for Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Tulsa, OK, wrote: “It puzzles me why the simple concept ‘sugar feeds cancer’ can be so dramatically overlooked as part of a comprehensive cancer treatment plan” (Nutrition Science News, April 2000). I agree. Sugar is cancer’s favorite food. There are at least five reasons that cancer and sugar are best friends.
So, if you still think this simple yet important dietary consideration can’t go a long way in preventing, if not fight cancer, do some more research and consider, modern medicine, especially with the onset of Obamacare, is more of an industry instead of a service focused on your well being. Consider the words of Dr. Gary G. Kohls and his observations of the decline of modern medicine.
In Part I of this essay entitled Big Pharma Dangerous Drugs and “Drug-Injured Patients, I wrote about some of the ethical concerns that I have had with the modern medical profession. Over my 40 years of practicing medicine I have experienced increasing frustration with its direction, mainly because the business of medicine has been increasingly distorting the ethics I was taught in medical school. The profession has become increasingly difficult to recognize over the 40 year span.
Big Pharma Dangerous Drugs and “Drug-Injured Patients”By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, October 29, 2015
Like many other physicians who have tried to take the Hippocratic Oath seriously (“first do no harm”), I also tried to resist the increasing corporate influences that eventually made the once-honorable practice of medicine into a crass profit-making industry. I makes me sad to report that outside forces have gradually made us physicians into computer bound high class technicians that are largely prescribers/providers of Big Pharma’s often toxic and always unaffordable drugs. In the current profit-above-all-else era, it is not even remotely possible for us physicians to be the compassionate healers of the long-gone era that I knew.
Way too often, the money-making Big Business of medicine is being controlled by institutional shareholders (who demand increasing dividends or increasing shareholder value) whose CEOs are often amoral Masters of Business Administration graduates who are equally at home leading Wall Street banks, tobacco companies, weapons manufacturers or brothels – or big clinics or hospitals. In this era the term “business ethics” (just like “military justice”) is an oxymoron.
People are definitely going to have to take control of their own healthcare decisions and be advocates for their own healthcare protocols. Limiting, or eliminating sugar is an easy fix.