| GEO Health | Cancer cells love sugar! | Updated at: 1008 PST, Wednesday, August 11, 2010
 LONDON: Here is one more reason to stop indulging your sweet tooth. Our love for sweets adds to the calorific value of our diet, it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease and now new studies have shown further proof of the damage caused by sugars. Some sweets contain fructose and some others contain glucose.
Now, it seems, that cancerous cells feed off fructose! In fact, they slurp it up and relish it no end.
When cancer cells that are found in the pancreas come across fructose, then these cancer cells divide and proliferate quickly. A team of researchers at the UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) conducted a study in which they fed both, glucose and fructose to tumour cells. They discovered that cancer cells gobbled up the fructose and multiplied faster.
They published the results of their study in the journal "Cancer Research". In it, Dr. Anthony Heaney and his team from Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Centre at UCLA wrote, "These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation...
They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth." |  | | | |
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