Researchers find the smoking gun behind cancer’s deadly spread

If it seems like cancer is hitting more and more people than ever before, it is.

So what is causing this huge uptick in America’s scariest disease?

Believe it or not, common foods we eat every day could be causing an epidemic of cancer.

And even scarier, that soft drink, granola bar, slice of bread — even something as benign as ketchup — could contain a trigger that causes a tumor to metastasize.

That’s what has researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center issuing one of the most important health alarms sounded in a long time.

But by taking four simple steps, you’ll be able to boot the worst form of this cancer-promoting additive out of your diet for good.

The ‘sweet’ new tobaccoNo doubt scientists and doctors of the future will look back at how much fructose Americans of our era were consuming every day and shake their heads.

And I’m not just talking about soda and candy addicts, either. Fructose, in a variety of dangerous forms, is added to more processed foods and drinks than ever. And that’s because it’s as addictive as cocaine.

Last year I told you how a neuroscience professor from a Canadian university got his lab rats to behave like drug addicts. It was simple. He added high fructose corn syrup in three different amounts to their water. And the bigger the dose they got the more they worked harder and harder to get their fructose “fix.”

And when people get that jolt of fructose, they act almost the same way. Only it works on us by shutting off the part of our brain that tells us when to stop eating.

That was bad enough. But what the MD Anderson cancer researchers found is 100 times worse.

They determined that “it was specifically fructose” that is “responsible” for causing both an increase in breast cancer and its deadly metastasis.

“A lot of patients are told it doesn’t matter what you eat after you are diagnosed with cancer,” said Professor Lorenzo Cohen, co-author of the study. This research, he said, shows that “it does.”

While this study focused on breast cancer and how fructose can accelerate its spread throughout the body, it’s a wake-up call for all kinds of cancer. Two years ago researchers found that fructose was the perfect fuel to speed the growth and spread of pancreatic cancer cells. And as this new study shows, the same applies to breast cancer.

Now, we’re not talking about some crazy amount of this deadly sweetener equal to 1000 Cokes, either. The researchers called the amounts they used “comparable to levels of Western diets.”

In fact, the lowest dose given to the mice in Cohen’s study was the maximum amount of “sugars” that the USDA says we should be consuming — just 10 percent of our daily calories.

Yet even at the lowball amount, the mice were still developing tumors that were being fueled along by the fructose.

And those MD Anderson cancer doctors found something else about fructose than may explain the “why” behind their findings.

Fructose helps speed along and make more active a metabolic pathway that is believed to be a big factor behind how cancers spread. Fructose is also thought to increase inflammation, another thing that gives cancer a chance to develop and metastasize.

But it’s no longer a case of just avoiding soda. At this point, HFCS can be found in foods ranging from pizza to pierogis. And the corn refiners are making sure that some versions of this test-tube sweetener contain even more fructose than ever before.

So along with reading labels to dodge HFCS, here are four ways to keep this cancer-promoter out of your diet:

• Watch out for foods and beverages with added fructose, and even “fruit sugar.” (When you eat fruit, however, you’re getting fructose “packaged” with fiber, something that slows the its absorption and allows you to digest it in a different and healthier way.)
• Avoid crystalline fructose — which is around 99 percent fructose!
• Steer clear of agave syrup, even if it’s organic. Agave will give you a giant jolt as it’s practically 100 percent fructose.
• Check all processed foods for the presence of HFCS, even ones that you would never imagine could contain it.

Sources:
“Here’s how sugar might fuel the growth of cancer” Maggie Fox, January 1, 2016, Today Health
& Wellness, today.com