Avoiding Sugar May Prevent Cancer

ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2008) — Researchers at the Duke School of Medicine have found that tumor cells use glucose as a way to avoid programmed cell death.

They make use of a protein called Akt, which promotes glucose metabolism, which in turn regulates a family of proteins critical for cell survival, the researchers shared during an April 15 presentation at the American Association of Cancer Research Annual Meeting in San Diego.

In normal cells, growth factors regulate metabolism and cell survival. Removing these factors leads to loss of glucose uptake and metabolism and cell death. Cancer cells, however, maintain glucose metabolism and resist cell death, even when deprived of growth factors.

To study how Akt might affect these processes, Coloff and colleagues introduced a cancer-causing form of Akt called myrAkt, into cells that depend on growth factor to survive. The mutant form of Akt allowed cells to maintain glucose usage and survive even when no growth factors were present, allowing them to bypass a normal safeguard used by cells to prevent cancer development.
The death of normal cells after growth factors are removed is partly accomplished by two proteins called Mcl-1 and Puma. But the cancer-causing version of Akt prevents these two proteins from accomplishing their tasks, allowing the cell to survive when it shouldn't.
Once glucose was withdrawn from the environment, however, Akt was no longer able to maintain regulation of the key targeted proteins Mcl-1 and Puma, and the cells died.
"Akt's dependence on glucose to provide an anti-cell-death signal could be a sign of metabolic addiction to glucose in cancer cells, and could give us a new avenue for a metabolic treatment of cancer," said Dr. Rathmell.

Dr. Zach's Comments:

• The idea that cancer feeds on sugar is not new, and many natural health care providers have condemned sugar for multiple reasons, this one included. However, now we have a specific mechanism of why sugar is so important to cancer, and if this evidence doesn't encourage you to cut glucose based sugar from your diet, there may be nothing that does.



• If you got lost in the scientific mumbo-jumbo above, here's the short story: Your cells know when things go haywire, and they have an innate program that essentially causes cellular suicide when things go wrong (e.g. cancer). One of the the suicide programs takes away the cells ability to use the fuels we give it (energy in food). However, cancer cells have the ability to continue to use glucose even in this environment.



• Do you get it? If there was no glucose around the cancer cell, it would not have fuel to survive and it would die too... thus no more cancer.



• So, where do we find glucose or glucose sugars in high enough concentrations to be problematic: refined sugar, table sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, grains (especially refined wheat flour), juice, just to name a few.



• It's impossible to completely remove glucose from your body, as every cell requires it to make energy, but if you can remove most of the glucose from your diet, your body will still make energy by converting other forms of energy like fructose and triglycerides (fat) into glucose, and this process is much easier for your body to regulate. Unregulated levels of blood glucose will lead to health problems every time.



• Want to know other ways to promote cancer cell death: exercise, vitamin D, and even caffeine assist the body in regulating cancer.