Thursday, April 03, 2008
Anti-Cancer
By Greg Arnold, DC, CSCS, abstracted from "Fasting Serum Glucose Level and Cancer Risk in Korean Men and Women" in the January 12, 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
America's love affair with sugar is taking a toll on our health. It is estimated that the average American consumes 150 pounds of sugar each year. With this sugar consumption, we have seen a doubling in the rate of overweight and obese children and adolescents in the past 20 years. The World Health Organization has finally taken a stand on sugar and singled it out as a "threat to the nutrient quality of diets".
Sugar intake is a major contributor to the $132 billion that diabetes costs society each year and it also increases the risk for heart disease, stroke, and blindness from diabetes complications. A new study now links sugar intake to another leading cause of death: cancer.
Researchers conducted a 10-year study of nearly 1.3 million Korean men and women between 30 and 95 years old. The subjects provided lifestyle and medical histories and blood samples were taken every two years.
The researchers found that not only was the risk of developing cancer comparable to the risk of dying from cancer, the group with the highest fasting glucose levels (greater than 140 mg/dL) had higher death rates from all cancers combined.
The strongest associations in men were found for pancreatic cancer while "significant associations" were also found in men for esophageal, lever and colon/rectum cancer. Liver and cervical cancer were the strongest associations found for women.
For the researchers, "elevated fasting serum glucose levels and a diagnosis of diabetes are independent risk factors for several major cancers, and the risk tends to increase with an increased level of fasting serum glucose."