Increased Breast Cancer Risk Linked to High Sugar Intake

Sugar is the number one culprit when it comes to obesity. However, sugar can do more harm than piling up extra pounds on one's body. A new study suggested that it could also increase one's risk of breast cancer and hasten the spread of the disease to the lungs.

A high level of sugar in one's diet is not healthy at all, as this can increase the odds of developing and spreading breast cancer. Study co-author Peiying Yang, Ph.D., assistant professor of palliative, rehabilitation and integrative medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and colleagues published a new study supporting this fact, Medical News Today reported.

There have been previous studies associating dietary sugar intake with breast cancer risk. Some research suggested inflammation to be playing an important role in this link. Yang noted that no studies had investigated the direct impact of sugar consumption on breast cancer development in animal models or examined the underlying mechanism of the association in such models.

This inspired the team to assess how sugar intake influenced the development of breast cancer among mice. According to NewsMax, the National Institute of Health funded a study about breast cancer animal models were mice had been genetically modified for breast cancer research before being randomly placed into four different groups.

Each group was fed with a different diet with varying levels of sugar until the mice reached six months of age. The researchers stressed that the amount of sucrose and fructose that the mice consumed was comparable to what is found in a typical Western diet. They found out that those fed with sucrose and fructose-enriched diet was more likely to develop breast cancer.

Thirty percent of the mice who consumed starch-control diet had breast cancer tumors, but 50-58 percent of mice who were fed with sucrose-enriched diet developed breast cancer.

"We determined that it was specifically fructose, in table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, ubiquitous within our food system, which was responsible for facilitating lung metastasis and 12-HETE production in breast tumors," study co-author Lorenzo Cohen noted. "This study suggests that dietary sucrose or fructose induced 12-LOX and 12-HETE production in breast tumor cells in vivo," he added.

He explained that the incident indicated a possible signaling pathway, which is responsible for sugar-promoted tumor growth in mice. However, they can't explain at the time how dietary sucrose and fructose induced 12-HETE and whether it has a direct or indirect effect.

The researchers stressed that pinpointing the risk factors of breast cancer is a "public health priority" and their study proves that dietary sugar consumption plays a significant role in developing breast cancer.

The study is published in the Cancer Research Journal.