How sugar causes cancer

Amajor breakthrough in cancer research has discovered that sugar-usually from fast food-switches off our cancer-fighting genes

- Bryan Hubbard

C stands for cancer; frustratingly, it also stands for complicated or even confusing, and that's because understanding the processes of cancer and predicting who is likely to get it are not straightforward.

As we know, smoking poses one of the biggest risks for developing cancer, and around 48 percent of smokers will get the disease—which also means 52 percent won't. The same goes for processed food. It's another big risk factor.

Researchers from Imperial College London analyzed a database of nearly 200,000 participants and discovered that for every 10 percent increase in ultra-processed food (UPF) in a person's diet, there was a 6 percent rise in cancer deaths overall (see box, page 18).

Worrying stuff, but it also means many people who eat processed food never develop cancer—even though, as a population, we are eating alot of it. In the US, the average person is consuming around 57Ib (26 kg) of sugar every year, and in the UK it's about 341b (16 kg), mainly from processed food.

Despite this vast overconsumption, researchers say they have seen only an "association" between poor diet and a host of health problems, such as obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers, but they haven’t established a direct cause-and-effect relationship.

It’s in the process

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have taken a step closer to understanding how some people dodge the cancer bullet, even if they’re not living a great lifestyle, while others become its victims.

It’s all to do with the way the body processes sugar. When the body breaks down glucose to create energy in a process known as glycolysis, it also produces the reactive compound methylglyoxal (MGO).