Fructose Feeds Cancer

"Cancer cells slurp up fructose, US study finds"

On August 2, 2010, Reuters released a story with that title.  The first few paragraphs:

Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.

Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types.

"These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation," Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.

"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."

 I actually felt amazed to find the following statement in the article:

Tumor cells thrive on sugar but they used the fructose to proliferate. "Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different," Heaney's team wrote.

Finally a mainstream article admits that "tumor cells thrive on sugar"!  And how amazing also that a mainstream article discusses cancer and nutrition with nary a mention of the dreaded saturated fat or how meat supposedly promotes cancer!

Now we know that it is the fructose portion of sugar that promotes proliferation.  This data of course helps explain why cancer occurred rarely or not at all among hunter-gatherers. 

And I think of those who say "moderation in everything."  Do you really want "moderate" amounts of a substance which so efficiently promotes cancer? 

"I think this paper has a lot of public health implications. Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diets," Heaney said in a statement.

I wonder what he has in mind...some form of regulation?  Or does he know that cheap corn syrup is a product of taxation (essentially without representation) and agricultural subsidies, i.e. socialized farming (we support the corn farmers)?   Did you, my dear reader, know that the processed food industry has the goons in Washington using their brute force (guns pointing at your head) to steal money from you and turn it over to their supply chain so that they can have cheap raw materials?  Did you realize the extent to which we already live in a fascist nation?  

Of course I favor ending those subsidies and retaining my hard earned dollars for my own use.  In our current system, I am subsidizing corn, which I rarely eat, and thus have less money available for the foods I do eat, like grass fed meat and vegetables.   This is NOT what I would call a free nation!


According to the article, "Now the team hopes to develop a drug that might stop tumor cells from making use of fructose."

I find this tragico-comic.  Fructose is a dietary component, not produced by human cells nor essential in the diet.  Thus, it is simple to stop tumor cells from making use of fructose....simply eliminate fructose from the diet, or limit it to the point where all coming in will get efficiently metabolized by the liver so that none extra will remain available for cancer cells! 


But the corn syrup industry wouldn't find that palatable.  As noted in the article:

U.S. consumption of high fructose corn syrup went up 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990, researchers reported in 2004 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

 I fear this research will suffer a crushing fate at the hands of the Sugar Industry.  I doubt that  those leaches will let their subsidies go easily.  So maybe they will finance the quest for a drug to "stop tumor cells from making use of fructose"?  And maybe they will put that drug right into their sodas and other corn syrup-laden products?  A "value-added" product for you, eh?