Clinical Nutrition Dilemma

Many of my oncology patients ask me: Does sugar cause cancer? The fact is sugar does not directly cause cancer or promote faster growth of cancer cells. However, eating excessive amount of added sugar can lead to weight gain which eventually increases the risk of obesity. Obesity promotes inflammation which damages DNA which in turn increases the risk of cancer. The misunderstanding of sugar probably originated from the misinterpretation that cells that use more energy, including cancer cells, absorb more glucose-based radioactive tracer in positron emission tomography (PET) scans. Therefore, it was wrongly concluded that cancer cells grow faster when they were provided with sugar. For this reason, many of my cancer patients are starving themselves from sugar and many of their favorite foods. In fact, a patient with cancer going through surgery, radiation, chemotherapy or stem cell transplant often requires additional calories just to maintain their weight. In fact, all cell...

Corn syrup and maltodextrin... just to name a few ingredients of a typical oral nutritional supplement. A bottle of oral nutritional supplement typically contains about 20 to 23 grams of sugar. Sounds terrible, right? Yes, making fruit smoothies with yogurt may be a great substitution for conventional liquid oral nutritional supplement. All the fresh ingredients and probiotics in one drink. Imagine all of your patients getting one of these smoothies everyday. It would take three extra full-time equivalents just to make smoothies all day. In reality, it's not economical, it's ideology. The idea of telling my acutely sick patients to only eat healthy food seems to be the equivalent of telling my patient who did not eat well for days to just eat a celery stick because it's healthy. When one is sick, they often lose his/her appetite and eat inadequately. A high protein, high calorie liquid oral nutrition supplement becomes a quick fix to such patient. But an experience...