Does Sugar Cause Cancer?
Learn if sugar causes cancer in this healthy food video from Howcast.
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Transcript
So we love our sugar. But be warned: Sugar does have some relationship with cancer. What happens when you eat a lot of sugar over time is that your body produces more insulin. And when you keep producing more insulin than you need over many years, you become insulin resistant and your body produces more insulin. And insulin is actually tied to promoting tumor growth in the body. So the more diabetic you are, if you're pre-diabetic or if you're insulin-resistant, that could lead to exacerbating an underlying cancer condition. If you eat a lot of sugar you're also going to be causing an inflammatory response in your body and inflammation is also linked to cancer. And there are different types of sugars to be aware of. The sugar that we consume from most fruit has a much different effect on the body and on our insulin levels than refined sugar like white sugar, even maple syrup, agave, brown rice syrup. All of the refined carbohydrates from those refined sugars do spike our insulin levels faster than sugar that comes from fruit which also comes with fiber which slows the absorption and doesn't cause your insulin to spike as high. In native cultures around the world when a Western diet is introduced and people start moving away from their traditional way of eating which is an unprocessed, low-sugar diet, we see a huge skyrocketing in cancer rates. So it's been shown over and over again that introducing a Western-style high-sugar diet does lead to cancer.
