Broadway Bakery Ltd today released a survey of scientific studies revealing that sugar is causing cancer, with sugar in hot beverages alone linked to increased incidences of colonic and rectal cancer, and sugar recently found to be a trigger and accelerator for breast cancer.
Broadway Bakery issued the survey at a time when Kenyans are among the highest consumers of sugar in the developing world.
“Kenyans are becoming more aware of the high risk of diabetes caused by excessive sugar consumption, but we believe that few have yetrealised that sugar is, itself, directly carcinogenic,” said Mr. Bimal Shah, Managing Director of Broadway Bakery, which has launched its own privately funded public education campaign to raise awareness in an effort to slow the soaring death toll being caused by excessive sugar consumption in Kenya.
Noble Laureate Otto Warburg first discovered that cancer cells do not need oxygen to survive, as other cells do, but can feed and grow directly from pure, un-metabolized sugar. Historically, humans only absorbed metabolized sugar from vegetables, fruits and other natural sources.
But the takeoff in confectionary and added sugar has seen the arrival of sometimes large amounts of un-metabolized sugar in consumers’ blood streams. The way in which sugar accelerates the growth of cancer cells has since been known as the Warburg Effect and sees doctors advise cancer sufferers to immediately stop consuming sugar, with a 2011 review of Warburg’s work reporting that cancer cells use 10 times as much sugar to grow as ordinary cells, meaning that the body requires extra sugar to fuel the growth of cancer.
In 2013, further scientists in Singapore and Denmark found that “immature sugar molecules aid in the growth properties of cancer cells.” Last year, research published by the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) in the journal Cancer Research was one of many more studies again that reported: “Our data provides strong evidence that added sugar (sucrose) accelerates the development of breast cancer.”
The studies on sugar and cancer have also delivered mounting evidence that sugar does not only accelerate cancer growth, but also acts as a trigger in causing cancer.
Typical was a 1993 study in Northern Italy that found that people who took sugar in their coffee or hot beverages were more likely to develop colon and rectal cancer than those who did not.
Catherina Steentoft, a scientist in the 2013 AACR study, commented that understanding the link with sugar might eventually help in developing better cancer treatment. “This is part of how we will proceed in the battle against cancer. When you know a certain process is important for the development of cancer you can start to consider ways to affect this process in a way that stops the cancer cell from taking advantage of it,” she said.
