Are you a bit of a sugar addict?
It turns out the sweet stuff may be putting you at risk for a lot more than thunder thighs and soaring blood sugars.
It could be a threat to your life.
Sugar sends your cancer risk soaring
According to researchers at the University of Texas a love affair with sugar could send your breast-cancer risk soaring.
Even worse, your incurable sweet tooth may actually be giving cancer a free ride to other parts of your body.
In the animal study mice were given meals laced with a bunch of extra sugar or a bunch of extra starch for six months.
And the results were shocking.
Thirty percent of the starch eaters developed breast cancer. And as if that weren’t stunning enough, the sugar eaters fared even worse.
MUCH worse.
60% of the sugar eaters developed cancer!
Close to 60 percent of the mice on the sugar-laced diet developed breast cancer in those six months!
The link was quite clear, the more sugar they ate the bigger their tumors grew.
In other words, the sugar seemed to be literally FEEDING the tumors.
The U of T researchers said no matter the type of sugar the cancers gobbled them up.
Dodge the cancer bullet by dropping sugar
But it was fructose—the kind of sugar they dump into just about every processed food you can get your hands on these days from ketchup to cola—that the cancers appeared to have a preference for.
And that’s a problem since the average American is sucked down over 35 pounds of fructose a year these days.
Unsurprisingly fructose has already been linked to diabetes, and weight gain.
The sickeningly sweet stuff has even been implicated in heart issues. In fact, one Swiss study found fructose could be the trigger in a deadly chain of events that could lead to heart enlargement and eventually a fatal heart attack.
Turn your breast cancer risk right back around by banning added sugars from your diet starting today. Become a label reader and be on the lookout for hidden fructose.
The low carbohydrate Paleo diet, which is full of health fats and veggies is a great way to slash the sugars from your diet while still feeling satisfied.
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What is about natural honey? I have been reading a lot of positive health benefits from including natural organic honey in your diet. However, honey is full of sugar and as far as our bodies concern, they don’t know the source of sweets. Honey raises insulin hormone as much as any other sugars.
With respect Michael that’s not really true. The manmade fructose comes without all the things that should be in it. It comes without the enzymes and fiber and things that come in nautral sugars. The high fructose stuff is not processed the same way in your body. There’s fructose in other sugars too but it’s not unbound like in high fructose corn syrup. Which means it gets absorbed into your blood faster. Your liver can’t process it right. It’s something like 6 times sweeter than natural cane sugar too. You shouldn’t eat a lot of any kind of sugar but if you want to sweeten something with a little go with the natural like honey.
Isn’t aspartame also a carcinogenic? It’s in all the diet foods and drinks. Why not use Splenda or its generic equivalent as Dr. Atkins suggested years ago?
Hi Terry,
Thanks so much for your question.
We definitely don’t recommend using aspartame.The FDA has received well over 10,000 consumer complaints, so many that a list of 92 symptoms have been compiled that are potentially linked to the sweetener including headaches, memory loss, seizures, and cancer.
At least two studies have linked aspartame to muscle pain. Other associations have been drawn to conditions as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and depression. And products sweetened with the stuff have been linked to weight GAIN.
However were not fans of Splenda either. The sweetener has some potential links to cancer as well and some experts classify the sweetener as an excitotoxin. We’ve written about Splenda before. To learn more you can click on the link below…
Q&A: Is the artificial sweetener Splenda bad for me?
Our preferred sweetener is stevia. Healthier Talk contributor Dr. Group has written about stevia before. To learn more you can click on the link below.
7 reasons why you should replace your refined sugar with stevia
Thanks again for your question!
–The Healthier Talk Team