Are Sugar and Cancer linked? Could It Make Cancerous Tumours More Aggressive

Is there a link between sugar and cancer?

Sugar in the diet cannot help but have a bad report. A nine-year collaboration has shown sugar consumption could make cancer more aggressive. 

The relationship between sugar and cancer has been a relatively long one but no-one really understood to what extent and indeed if there was any proof of the association. However, cancer cells need to metabolise energy from somewhere so why not sugar ?

It is nearly 90 years ago since the Warburg effect was described. All healthy cells in the body need energy and one of the best sources is sugar. Tumour cells or cancer cells also need an energy source and given their insatiable appetite for such energy, it’s not surprising they consume plenty of sugar.

One thought is to starve the cells of sugar. Unfortunately, we cannot be discriminative enough with our cells. cancer cells will continue to thrive on the same sources of sugar as our normal healthy cells.

The study at the VIB (Flanders Institute for Biotechnology), KU Leuven and VUB in Belgium looked at sugar metabolism in yeast cells. The ‘ras’ gene family was examined. This is a family of genes found in all animal cells as well as cancerous ones. Yeast however has a very active sugar metabolism as anybody knows when brewing beer or producing wine. Sugar breakdown is linked via the intermediate fructose-1,6-bisphosphate (not biophosphate as erroneously reported in many scientific articles) pathway. This particular pathways is linked to activation of genes in the Ras family which are associated with multiplication of yeast, normal cell and cancer cells. The mechanism is highly conserved and means that yeast are useful models for investigating this phenomenon. If the yeast are swamped with glucose then the Ras proteins are activated to a very great extent. This leads to cells growing at a highly accelerated rate.

There is every likelihood that diets which restrict sugar could be used to limit cancer cell growth although such cells can find alternative sources when required. It is certainly not clear whether sugar is a cause or a consequence of cancer developing.

Reference

Peeters, Van Leemputte, Fischer et al., (2017) Fructose-1,6-bisphosphate couples glycolytic flux to activation of Ras, Nature Communications.