130. Chemo Sugar: Guilty of More than Just Tooth Decay

Sometimes it feels like I have been living under a rock as far as my own health is concerned.  Take sugar for instance.  While I have been aware of the fact that inflammation is at the origin of many health problems and diseases such as diabetes and cancer for quite some time, I did not know  about the sugar-cancer connection...

During my childhood, when relatives would come over for tea on Sunday afternoons and my mother would serve a variety of pastries, I instinctively refused to eat any of it.  I did not like the taste of the gooey stuff.  My mother and aunts however gobbled it up like there was no tomorrow.  After all, they had survived several years of starvation during the war.  They deserved to have a nice treat, right?  And I was labeled as being "weird".  They could not understand how I did not appreciate such bounty.  And that is exactly the point: humans learned to seek out sweetness because sweet foods were generally safe to eat and it helped them survive lean years of deprivation when calories were difficult to obtain.  In our part of the world, starvation is not usually a problem.  Nevertheless we have developed a sweet tooth to the extend that according to "Sugar" in the National Geographic of August 2013 "the average American consumes 77 pounds of added sugar annually, or more than 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day."  The stuff routinely gets snuck into our food in all sorts of ways.  But we, the consumers, are becoming more and more savvy and I for one, have been trying my darndest to rid our pantry of added-sugar-staple-foods.  I am preparing a lot from scratch again, going back as much as possible to using basic ingredients. 

So when I had a conversation with a physiologist at a recent Christmas gathering, and he heard about me having cancer, the first advice he offered was to cut out all sugar, including natural sugar, as much as possible  because it causes inflammation and it feeds cancer.   But with the festive holidays just around the corner, how easy will that be?

If it interests you, please read: "5 Reasons Cancer Cells and Sugar are Best Friends" on www.beatcancer.org    Click on link below.

https://beatcancer.org/?s=5+reasons+cancer+cells+and+sugar+are+best+friends

The above ad dates from 1966.  Back next week.  Happy Holidays!  SanTeh! 😋