There are ways to cut the risk of pancreatic cancer

Before Aretha Franklin passed away last week at 76, fans were asked to pray for the “Queen of Soul” despite knowing only that she was very ill. We now know that she had been battling pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest forms of the disease, with a one-year survival rate of only 20 percent.

While we weren’t told what treatments Franklin underwent, we do know that surgery, chemo, and other drugs don’t offer a lot of hope for people stricken with this illness. Actually, it doesn’t seem to matter which grueling medical treatments they submit to… only 8 percent of them will live five years after being diagnosed.

Of course, if you ask the experts, they’ll likely tell you that they just don’t know what could cause it. Genetics is a popular theory… or exposure to cancer-causing chemicals that cause gene mutations… but that’s about it.

The truth of the matter, however, is that we know considerably more about what might trigger this lethal cancer than you’re being led to believe.

In fact, it’s a threat you might be exposed to every day… unless you know what to look out for.

The fructose connection

It was almost a decade ago that researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, released the results of a frightening new study… results they referred to as being of “major significance.”

Those findings revealed that refined fructose, such as the kind found in high-fructose corn syrup, is practically an accelerant for pancreatic cancer cells!

At the time, lead researcher Dr. Anthony Heaney, a professor of medicine and neurosurgery at the UCLA cancer center, was quoted as saying that he hoped there would be an “effort to step back on the amount of HFCS in our diets” and “at the federal level.”

While it’s certainly no surprise that our federal health regulators didn’t jump in and do something immediately, what IS shocking is that any mention of these findings seemed to disappear faster than a snowball in June.

The UCLA researchers discovered that when they exposed human pancreatic tumor cells to fructose in a lab dish, the cancer cells made a beeline for the sweetener, using it to fuel their rapid reproduction.

And of most interest to these researchers, those cells appeared to “know” the difference between fructose and glucose — both of which HFCS contains in free form (unlike in sugar, where they’re bonded together) — and gravitated to the fructose. Dr. Heaney also noted that these findings don’t just apply to pancreatic cancer, but that fructose can fuel other types of cancer cells the same way.

And as I mentioned, fructose isn’t the only cancer risk we’re being exposed to all the time.

A number of years ago, researchers affiliated with he National Cancer Institute looked at over 80,000 pesticide applicators and their spouses, finding that exposure to several pesticides resulted in a “statistically significant” link to pancreatic cancer. These are toxic substances that very often remain on many of the foods you eat and serve your family every day.

And the chemicals these scientists studied are just a drop in the bucket. It’s estimated that close to a billion tons of pesticides are used by farmers in the U.S. every single year — most of which we actually know very little about.

The bottom line is that you want to do anything you can to tip the odds of avoiding this terrible cancer in your favor. And taking these three simple steps is a good place to start.

#1. Kick added fructose out of your life for good! That means avoiding not only the high-fructose corn syrup that’s still found in so many processed foods and beverages, but ingredients such as fructose, crystalline fructose, agave syrup, and HFCS-90. Any food containing fructose (with the exception of whole fruit, where it’s bound together with fiber) should be left on the shelf.

#2. When buying strawberries, spinach, peaches, nectarines, cherries, and apples, always go organic. Those six are most likely to contain pesticide residues – often more than one.

#3. Stop using bug and weed killers around your home and yard. Look for poison-free approaches to pest control instead.

The estimated 44,000 people in the U.S. who will have died from pancreatic cancer this year alone, including Aretha Franklin, never learned why they developed this deadly disease. But I’m quite sure that every single one of them would have taken simple steps like those above if given a second chance.

“Queen of soul Aretha Franklin has died of pancreatic cancer at age 76” People Magazine, August 19, 2018, people.com