Sugar: A Leading Promoter of Cancer & Heart Disease

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More than 1.6 million new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in the United States of America this year – and over half a million are expected to die from the disease. Another 600,000 Americans die every single year due to heart disease – it being the number one cause of death among both males and females.

Regardless of the incredible technological advances over the past century, Western medicine still has no idea of how to stop the progression of these two diseases in their tracks.

It’s becoming more and more clear that many of the conventional strategies claiming to properly and effectively treat and prevent cancer and heart disease hold many flawed assumptions that do more harm than they do good.

The sad thing is that these conventional strategies actually fail to address the core of the problem: that a diet high in sugar and processed foods is the culprit.

For many years, saturated fats have been where physicians and nutrition experts were placing the blame. They thought that eating foods high in saturated fat would lead to clogged arteries, which would then lead to the inevitable heart problems. Now, more and more folks are beginning to realize that saturated fats are healthy, and necessary for optimal brain function.

What they have realized is that a diet high in sugar, and fructose in particular, is what leads to serious health problems – heart disease, cancer, and many others. Equipped with this pivotal information puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to the prevention of these pernicious diseases.

So How Much Sugar Is in Your Diet?

So high sugar consumption deleteriously affects one’s health. But hold on a second, cutting out sugars is not the be all end all. Many food ingredients out there do even more damage than sugar, and the bad thing is that there are a few that are in over half of the boxed foods that you find in the grocery store. They all have funky, difficult to pronounce names. The word sugar isn’t appended to them to warn you of how unhealthy they are. Rather, it seems as though there is an attempt to obscure the truth from the general public, so that they do not know what they are eating. If they did, they would be able to make wiser, healthier choices and thus boycott the companies that pump out foods with harmful ingredients.

Hidden sugar, in the form of high fructose corn syrup is in just about every single processed food imaginable. You can even find it in stuff that you would generally consider to be the healthiest foods of all – like yogurt and certain juices. They are in just about every soda you can think of, and now, they are beginning to appear in just about every other bread or sauce that you buy from the store. The majority of the grains have this noxious corn syrup. Grain-based staples, like pancakes, muffins and cereals, have a bunch of sugar in them already (they quickly turn to sugar in your body). Now, adding high fructose corn syrup into the mix is just adding fuel to the fire.

Studies indicate that if you limit your sugar, you dramatically decrease your chances of developing cancer – and that includes breast and colon cancers. Those who want to optimize their health need to think long and hard before they make their next trip to the grocery store. Chances are, they are consuming far too much of both sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

Fructose Increases Cancer Risk

As we mentioned earlier, high fructose corn syrup is in just about every single soda out there. Many companies have attempted to conceal this fact by using a different name for the ingredient instead. Regardless, the body’s reaction to the exposure of such unhealthy stuff is going to be the same. DNA damage, altered cellular metabolism and inflammation are all symptoms that develop as a result of drinking too much soda.

Tumor cells thrive in glucose. This, by itself, confirms the old adage that sugar feeds cancer. Cells have the capacity to use fructose for cell division. A rapid and unmitigated growth of cells is what causes cancer. The tumors you see are a bunch of cells that have reproduced at a rate much faster than normal.

This by no means suggests that one ought to totally avoid fruits just because they are high in sugar as well. The benefits of fruit definitely outweigh any concerns regarding fructose. It is recommended not to juice fruits and to eat them whole. Fruits today are a great deal sweeter than they were in the past, and for that, should be consumed in moderation. The greatest problem, though, is the high fructose corn syrup that is in practically each and every one of the processed foods and drinks you see.

Don’t Forget the Exercise

Exercise actually does more than merely help you look thin and good. Controlling your blood-glucose and insulin levels can be an incredibly effective way of recovering from cancer. Exercise is a fantastic way of doing this. Of course, this is not the be all end all by any stretch of the imagination. But exercise is a big factor, if not in recovering from cancer, at the very least, preventing cancer. Folks who spend a great deal of time getting their heart rate up and running do seem to develop cancer much less than the inert who remain listless on a regular basis.

In short, maintaining a healthy weight and exercising on the regular creates an incredibly healthy feedback loop that makes certain that insulin and leptin levels are at an optimal level. Insulin and leptin resistance – mostly driven by not exercising and by eating a lot of refined sugars – are the underlying factors that result in pretty much the majority of chronic diseases.