Sugar doesn;t cause cancer but cancer cells feed on it and it helps them grow and multiply really fast. iflscience pub lished the relationship between these two in details…. Read below:
Scientists have discovered the exact relationship between sugar and cancer by revealing that the way in which cancer cells break down sugar is linked to the stimulation of tumor growth.
Cancer cells tend to produce energy differently from normal cells – they use a process that involves fermentation of glucose into lactate, rather than ordinary respiration.
Every cell in the body needs sugar to survive. But cancer cells seem to require more than healthy cells do. They also seem to break sugar down faster. Cancer’s mechanism of speedily metabolizing sugar is known as the Warburg effect.
Scientists have long pondered whether this phenomenon is related to how aggressively tumors grow.
“Our research reveals how the hyperactive sugar consumption of cancerous cells leads to a vicious cycle of continued stimulation of cancer development and growth,” explained study author Professor Johan Thevelein, from Belgium’s VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology, in a statement.
“Thus, it is able to explain the correlation between the strength of the Warburg effect and tumor aggressiveness. This link between sugar and cancer has sweeping consequences. Our results provide a foundation for future research in this domain, which can now be performed with a much more precise and relevant focus.”
Before now it wasn’t clear whether the Warburg effect was just a symptom of cancer, or whether it could affect tumor growth. The new study shows that the Warburg effect actually stimulates the growth of cancerous tumors – although this in no way means that sugar causes cancer. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
To conduct their research, the scientists used yeast as a model organism. Yeast also produces energy from sugar via fermentation, just like cancer cells do. It also contains the “Ras” proteins that are found in cancer.