We all know that if we want to improve our health, the first thing we need to do is change our diet! Even though everyone has heard of this, the fast-food lovers and sugary-treat fanatics are yet to be convinced. They might have heard of the consequences their favorite foods cause to their bodies, but they continue diving in their high-fat, high-sugar foods, without giving it a second thought.
Nature Medicine recently confirmed that foods containing processed sugar are the main reason behind the growth and spread of cancer tumors. In fact, the results were so conclusive, that future cancer screening may rely on scanning the body for accumulated sugar for signs of the disease.
This discovery was made after the University College London (UCL) in the U.K. experimented with a new cancer detection method that involves utilizing a unique form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The scientists sensitized a MRI scanner to look specifically for glucose in the body, and it revealed that cancer tumors – which have been proven to feed off sugar – light up brightly as they contain high amounts of sugar.
Explained by a recent UCL announcement, “The new technique, called ‘glucose chemical exchange saturation transfer’ (glucoCEST), is based on the fact that tumors consume much more glucose (a type of sugar) than normal, healthy tissues in order to sustain their growth.” The university gave an update saying that the tumors appear as “bright images” on the scanner.
When traditionally scanning for cancer, the presence of tumors is identified by using low-dose radiation injections because radiation is another known cause of cancer. But such an injection is not the best choice due to its potential side effects. However, this method is effective because the things that activate and encourage cancer cells to expand and multiply can also be used by doctors to detect it inside the body. And now, sugar can be officially added to that list.
“The method uses an injection of normal sugar and could offer a cheap, safe alternative to existing methods for detecting tumors, which require the injection of radioactive material,” says Dr. Simon Walker-Samuel, lead researcher of the study from the UCL Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI).
The study’s senior author reported that it was shocking to discover that the glucoCEST method could effectively identify the presence of tumors only by using the amount of sugar that can be found in “half a standard sized chocolate bar.” This finding is astonishing, as it suggests that even moderately low amounts of sugar have the potential to promote cancer proliferation.
UCL is not the first source to link processed sugar with diseases like cancer. Dr. Robert H. Lustig, M.D. and Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), cites that sugar consumption causes most of the chronic illnesses prevalent today. Lustig is a famed author of “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”, and he describes his findings in many videos.
The main culprits of deadening sugar include: white sugar and flour, sweetened and processed foods, and fast food. When these foods break down in the body (when compared to natural sources of fructose from fruit), they cause an increase of hormones to be released (specifically insulin), and in effect, signal for cancer cells to feed and continue to grow in size.
Dr. Lewis Cantley, head of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) at Harvard University, shared the sugar-cancer link in a CBS interview: “What we’re beginning to learn is that insulin can cause adverse effects in various tissues, and a particular concern is cancer.”
He continued, “If you happen to have a tumor that has insulin receptors on it, then it will get stimulated to take up the glucose that’s in the bloodstream. So rather than going to the fat or to the muscle, the glucose now goes into the tumor, and the tumor uses it to grow.”
These sources came to the conclusion that the only way to have a healthy body, and a nourished mind, is to choose wholesome, unprocessed, and predominantly plant-based foods. You should consume more greens, vegetables and plant-based proteins, and decrease the amount of processed foods in your diet. Our bodies can be capable of healing themselves, and it is becoming increasingly evident that we must make the necessary changes for that to happen.