

Aug 03, 2010


Although it's widely known that cancers use glucose, a simple sugar, to fuel their growth, this is the first time a link has been shown between and cancer proliferation, said Dr. Anthony Heaney, an associate professor of medicine and neurosurgery, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and senior author of the study.





In his study, Heaney and his team took pancreatic tumors from patients and cultured and grew the in Petri dishes. They then added glucose to one set of cells and fructose to another. Using mass spectrometry, they were able to follow the carbon-labeled sugars in the cells to determine what exactly they were being used for and how.







Explore further: Death rates from lung cancer will overtake those for breast cancer in 2015 among EU women

Provided by University of California - Los Angeles

5 /5 (17 votes)

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User comments : 15

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4.4 / 5 (7) Aug 03, 2010
"As in anti-smoking campaigns..." WTF??? This crap causes cancer and diabetes. It isn't advertised like cigarettes, it's an ingredient put anonymously into half the food Americans eat, including pop, spaghetti sauce, BBQ sauce, salad dressing, cereal and ketchup!

4 / 5 (5) Aug 03, 2010
The only effective way to avoid HFCS is to stay away from nearly all processed foods. This stuff is in everything!
4.2 / 5 (6) Aug 03, 2010
The mantra from the food industry for so long was the fructose is just another form of sugar and no different in terms of metabolism. Clearly we all need to cut all refined sugars from our diets where we can. But HFCS more and more seems to be one bad actor.

And children get exposed to it everywhere.

This makes me crazy!
3 / 5 (2) Aug 03, 2010

And children get exposed to it everywhere.

This makes me crazy!
5 / 5 (3) Aug 03, 2010
@ sstrit: It's possible, albeit difficult, to avoid it almost entirely. Then again, between all my food allergies and sugar sensitivity I'm avoiding most processed food anyway...

This needs to be spread everywhere. HFCS is bad for you, worse than pure cane sugar, and yet the corn industry, which gets tens of millions in federal subsidies, is spending money on ad campaigns which outright lie to the American people. It's sickening.
3.7 / 5 (6) Aug 03, 2010
@fionn: The same corn industry which demonized coconut oil as being an unhealthy saturated fat- causing a major switch to omega-6 laden corn oil and hydrogenated fats!
2.3 / 5 (6) Aug 03, 2010
As is so often the case (unfortunately), the title of this article and the substance of the text present two different messages. I read the title thinking researchers had found a "smoking gun" as to the cause of pancreatic cancer. But they only say that pancreatic cancer cells can use fructose just like they use glucose. There doesn't seem to be any indication that such an ability causes pancreatic cancer to be more prevalent, or more agressive. If we all removed HFCS from our diets, the cancer cells could just use glucose to grow. I think previous commenters have made an inferential leap in determining this study implicates HFCS as causing pancreatic cancer, or making it worse.
2.6 / 5 (5) Aug 03, 2010
To add to my previous comment, who's to say people haven't merely substituted HFCS for refined sucrose over the past several decades? If that is the case, and HFCS was removed from the market, people would likely switch back to sucrose as a sweetener, thereby providing cancer cells with plenty of glucose, instead of fructose, to fuel their growth. Pancreatic cancer rates would be unaffected.
4 / 5 (2) Aug 03, 2010
The anti-smoking campaigns haven't been all that effective. In the states, smoking rates have basically been stable for the last six to seven years. As a pay-as-you-go methodology I'm not opposed to taxing proven health damaging food or consumer items to compensate for medical care and research - if only the politicians would leave it alone. Once they see money they can't help but seal it for unintended purposes.

I consider consumption taxes on unhealthy lifestyles to be the most fair way to compensate for private choices that adversely effect the public.
4.7 / 5 (3) Aug 03, 2010
I am wondering if there is any danger from eating a lot of fruit. The main natural sweetener in fruit is fructose, and it worries me that eating something which I had always considered very healthy may have adverse side effects. Anyone care to comment on the relative quantities of fructose from fruit vs HFCS? Is there a danger here?
5 / 5 (5) Aug 03, 2010
Parsec, this article only states that fructose helps the cancer cells multiply does not cause cancer. Fruits are very important to your health. If you ever develop cancer, you should obviously talk to your doctor about this study in determining a diet for yourself. As long as you're healthy though, you should definitely continue eating fruit, some of which are high in antioxidants which help prevent cancer.
5 / 5 (1) Aug 04, 2010
In answer to your question, my comment isn't based on expert knowledge, but I would assume that deriving fructose from whole foods, ie fruit, would not be a problem in a 'normal' diet as it would be bound to natural fiber found in fruits and would thus be released more slowly into the blood stream. Also, the concentrations would be far lower compared to additives in processed foods.
3 / 5 (2) Aug 04, 2010
Half of fruit sugar and half of table sugar is fructose. Less than half of HFCS is fructose. In fruit, only about one half of the fructose is free fructose, the rest is in sucrose. Honey and maple syrup have a lot of free fructose. The disgestion rate of sucrose is limited by the supply of the sucrase enzyme, but the fructose is eventually digested nonetheless. The difference with fruit is that there are benefits, so it is a trade-off between the damage caused by fructose (elevation of triglycerides, fatty liver, elevation of blood pressure, increase in ectopic fat storage, interference with leptin appetite suppressing hormone, increase in small dense LDL particles, accelerated cancer growth) and the anti-oxidants and other phytochemicals shown to benefit the health.
not rated yet Aug 05, 2010
Legislative incentives built the huge corporate corn production system, and only legislation can change the focus of the incentive to development of a smarter, healthier food culture. Corn didn't get to be what it is purely through "free market" processes.
3 / 5 (2) Aug 08, 2010
You can't legislate behavior, that is a time tested axiom as far as I'm concerned. Education however has an amazing effect.

An absolutely terrific diet plan has evolved to modern forms and is available on any government website. Unfortunately almost no one reads things at random so it's luck to even know about this.

Why food education and personal health are not taught in schools I will never know. Except for a few feeble attempts in my early school days I have never seen it involved in any school system anywhere in the world.

Outside the school system I've seen nice attempts by NGOs to reach villagers but it's a slow process and does not necessarily transfer to the children since it's directed at the parents.

I think it's time this enter formally through education at an early age.


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