Study Links Cancer to High Fructose Corn Syrup

Syrup corn. That’s what it should be called. Or maybe we should call it high corn syrup. Because much of what the commodity corn farmers are growing isn’t fit for human consumption. It is really only fit to make high fructose syrup and other highly processed by-products that make a nice tasting, yet which are totally unhealthy, for mass market to consumers where health is on the decline.

You thought obesity was bad? How about cancer? The corn syrup fructose problem now hits close to home for cancer patients all over the world. I can just see the law suits on the horizon for the corn refining industry. It turns out that fructose (found in corn as corn fructose and commonly called other names like high corn syrup, HFCS, high fructose corn syrup, isoglucose, maize syrup, glucose/fructose syrup) has been found by researchers at UCLA to be a favorite energy source for cancer cells.

The study appeared in the Aug. 1 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Research. In his study, Dr. Anthony Heaney and his team took pancreatic tumors from patients and cultured and grew the malignant cells in petri dishes. They then added glucose to one set of cells and fructose to another. Using mass spectrometry, they were able to follow the carbon-labeled sugars in the cells to determine what exactly they were being used for and how.

Heaney found that the pancreatic cancer cells could easily distinguish between glucose and fructose even though they are very similar structurally, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the cancer cells metabolized the sugars in very different ways. In the case of fructose, the pancreatic cancer cells used the sugar in the transketolase-driven non-oxidative pentose phosphate pathway to generate nucleic acids, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, which the cancer cells need to divide and proliferate.

“Although it’s widely known that cancers use glucose, a simple sugar, to fuel their growth, this is the first time a link has been shown between fructose and cancer proliferation”, said Dr.Heaney. “These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation.”

This is alarming. Think about how many cancer patients are out there happily downing soft-drinks and processed foods full of high fructose corn syrup.

“They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth,” says Heaney.

You can read more on UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center web site.

We’d like to hanks to Gena Boyle for letting us know about this report which originally appeared on MSNBC. If you see anything newsworthy that could help us raise awareness please comment.

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