Can sugar really give you CANCER?

Over the past 30 years obesity rates have doubled and the rise in diabetes has been just as unstoppable.
The problem doesn't stop with these conditions — people who are obese and diabetic also tend to have high blood pressure and they have a higher risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, even Alzheimer's disease.
So what's happening? Something has changed dramatically in our diets, our lifestyle or our environment to trigger these unprecedented epidemics. But what?
The official explanation is that people eat more calories than they burn off and this imbalance is what makes them obese.
The obesity then causes them to develop diabetes.
As a top nutrition expert at Harvard University once said: 'The only trouble with the American diet is that we eat too damn much.'
And the finger of blame has been pointed, if anything, at dietary fat.
The most likely cause, though, lies elsewhere — sugar.
Not because we eat too much, but because sugar has unique physiological, metabolic and hormonal effects in the human body that are likely to directly trigger disorders such as diabetes, heart disease and even cancer.

It might not surprise you to hear that sugar is a bad guy.
After ignoring or downplaying the role of sugars and sweets for a quarter-century, many health authorities have now woken up to the threat and argue that sugar is, in fact, a major cause of obesity and diabetes and should be taxed heavily or regulated to reduce consumption.
But this isn't because they believe sugar directly causes disease; rather they believe that sugar merely represents 'empty calories' that we eat in excess because they taste so good.
By this logic, sugar either displaces other, more nutritious elements of our diet, or simply adds extra, unneeded calories to make us fatter.
The empty calories argument is particularly convenient for the food industry, which would understandably prefer not to see a key constituent of its products — all too often, the key constituent — damned as toxic.
Meanwhile, health organisations, including the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association, have also found the argument convenient, having spent the past 50 years blaming dietary fat for our ills, while letting sugar off the hook.
So how do we know it's sugar that's the prime suspect for directly making us ill? One clue is that the incidence of diabetes and obesity has risen in parallel with the rise in sugar consumption.
Not just in Western countries, but in those where sugar had never been part of the traditional diet.
For instance, in the Eighties, only one per cent of the Chinese population was diabetic — now that Western-style eating is common it's 11 per cent.
Among the Inuit in Greenland and Canada the result is similar; diabetes was virtually unknown in the Sixties, now it's at nine per cent of the population.
Both increases, as with everywhere else in the world, follow the adoption of a Western-style, sugar-rich diet.
This certainly contains high levels of sugar, but why should that be a major cause of obesity and diabetes? The answer is that it appears to do far more than add to the daily calorie count.
Research dating back to the Sixties, but consistently ignored by dietitians and food regulatory authorities, has directly linked sugar with metabolic syndrome, a cluster of problems which includes putting on weight round the middle and chronic inflammation.
This is how it happens: sugar in the diet, along with other refined carbohydrates, raises blood sugar which then triggers the release of insulin, to move it into cells where it can be burned for fuel.
Everyday table sugar (known as sucrose) is actually made up of two carbohydrates — glucose and fructose — and it's the fructose that makes sugar particularly damaging.
Unlike other carbs, fructose is mostly processed in the liver, where it is turned into fat and seems to trigger a sequence of events that eventually leads to cells becoming resistant to insulin.
As is the case with many drugs, the body needs more insulin to have the same effect.
Insulin resistance is damaging to the body in a number of ways, which results in a cluster of abnormalities known as metabolic syndrome — as well as putting on weight round the middle and chronic inflammation, these include raised blood pressure and an increased amount of fat (triglycerides) in the blood.
Type 2 diabetes is the result of insulin resistance and so are, to some extent, diseases linked with diabetes and obesity such as heart disease, hypertension and Alzheimer's.
Among the most provocative of the implications of this hypothesis is that sugar may cause or exacerbate cancer.
Just as diabetes was rare in traditional societies until they began eating a Western diet, researchers noticed the same was true for cancer.
By the Sixties, public health authorities believed that many cancers were 'potentially preventable' with changes of diet.
About ten years ago scientists discovered that the higher the level of insulin people had in their blood, the greater the chance they would develop cancer.
What's more, giving a diabetes drug that lowered insulin levels was associated with a lower risk of cancer.
But why should cancer, which happens when cells grow out of control, be affected by high levels of insulin?

It's because insulin does many things in the human body, including stimulating cells to multiply and tumours to grow. And it can have another effect that benefits cancer.

Insulin together with a related hormone called insulin growth hormone turns off one of the programmes that normally kicks in to kill off cells that have turned cancerous (technically known as apoptosis, or cell suicide).
If the high levels of the sugars we consume cause insulin resistance, then it's hard to avoid the conclusion that sugar causes or at least promotes cancer, radical as this may seem, and even though this suggestion is rarely if ever voiced publicly.
There is also a strong case for saying that sugar is also directly responsible for high blood pressure.
Usually the blame is placed on excess salt. It's a simple and concise hypothesis — and it's all too likely wrong.
Eating a lot of salt certainly increases blood pressure as our bodies then automatically retain more water.
This makes the salt in the blood less concentrated and raises blood pressure in the process.
But this salt/hypertension theory has resolutely resisted confirmation in clinical trials.
In other words, cutting salt hasn't been shown to make much difference to the risk of developing hypertension, and even when people do lower salt intake significantly — by 50 per cent, say — it only lowers blood pressure, on average, by two to three points.
The connection between high blood pressure and insulin was first suggested back in 1933. Insulin makes your kidneys retain salt, rather than discarding it in urine.
Hence the more insulin in your blood, the more salt, and the greater the blood pressure. It can also raise blood pressure directly by constricting blood vessels.
It's not immediately obvious that there is a direct link between insulin resistance and Alzheimer's.
But as with cancer, there is a connection with diabetes, and people with diabetes have up to twice the risk of Alzheimer's as those without.
Some researchers are even talking about Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes.
Among other things, it is thought insulin resistance might directly increase the rate at which the brain accumulates amyloid plaques and tau tangles — classic signs of the disease.
Science is ultimately about explaining what we observe in nature and doing so in the simplest possible way.
The simple explanation adopted by nutrition researchers and public health authorities for our epidemic of chronic disease has been to blame the victims, those who are overweight and obese.
They are guilty of eating too much and exercising too little.
Since the Seventies the authorities have considered it quackery to suggest sugar is responsible. In fact, sugar is the primary suspect.

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