It’s not breaking news that too much sugar in your diet can lead to serious health concerns such as diabetes and obesity. In fact, there have been lots of questions regarding sugar’s relationship to cancer.  We know that sugar consumption can impact our insulin levels which, in turn, can lead to chronic disease but… does too much sugar directly cause cancer?
While researchers are continuing to try to understand and investigate the connection between sugar and cancer, we do know that the power of a healthy, low sugar diet has powerful health benefits.
So let’s learn some important facts to understand how sugar can affect cancer cells!
How Does Cancer Grow?
Our healthy cells are programmed by their DNA to follow the body’s rules so-to-speak. This means that they follow a healthy pattern of growth and replication as the body sees fit. A cancer cell is first created when a gene mutation happens to a healthy cell or a small group of cells.
Once a cell has mutated its original healthy programming or signals become faulty, leading the cell to start to grow and multiply too much and form a lump called a tumor.
As tumors grow and their cancer cells multiply, they need an increasingly larger blood supply.  In order to do this, they send out special signals to recruit the formation of new blood vessels (angiogenesis) to continue to help them grow. Once a cancerous mass can stimulate blood vessel growth, it can grow bigger and grow more quickly.
Cancer cells, just like our healthy cells, need oxygen and nutrients to grow and survive. Glucose is the sugar our bodies use most and is used as energy to feed every cell in the body, healthy or cancerous. Â Having a glucose supply to feed our cells is so important that even without any carbohydrates in your diet, your body can make glucose from other sources like protein and fat.
So Does Sugar Actually Feed Cancer Cells?
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