I have written about fruit sugar in the past as part of general articles on blood sugar and healthy diet, but some new information about the dangers of fruit sugar has just come to my attention... about cancer.

It has been known since the early 1930's that cancer has a very different metabolism from normal cells.  It generates energy without the use of oxygen by burning sugar and turning it into lactic acid.  This is the same metabolism yeast uses in sourdough bread.  It is very inefficient and requires 10 times as much sugar to produce the same amount of energy our normal cells can produce with sugar by using oxygen.  This is why the first step anyone facing cancer wants to do to slow cancer growth is to eliminate sugar and carbs that turn into sugar from their diet - to slow the cancer growth down.

The new information I just came across via Mercola and Pub Med is that cancer metastasis is fueled by the specific sugar fructose - fruit sugar.  Cancer uses fructose to increase growth of its reproductive nucleic acids - in effect it makes the cancer grow faster and spread.  It also creates inflammation, damages DNA, produces free radicals, and alters metabolism in ways that promote the formation of new cancers.

Now some of these secondary problems are counter balanced by the natural antioxidants found in whole fresh fruits, but such antioxidants are completely missing in refined sources of fruit sugar like simple table sugar which is 50% fructose.  The now famous high fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose (not really all that different than regular sugar).  The worst offender that is highly popular amongst the uninformed health foodies is Agave syrup with 80 to 90% fructose.  (Never eat Agave syrup.)  Simply put, too much fructose will kill you.

How much is too much?  My "Textbook of Biochemistry by Thomas Devlin" states that the body actually needs a little bit of fructose - about 15 grams (3 teaspoons) per day.  It will even manufacture it if it does not have it.  Beyond that the extra fructose is converted primarily into triglycerides and stored as fat in the liver - just like alcohol.  More than that the liver gets so upset when there is too much fructose around that it will shut down its other 800 functions (like detoxifying your body) and totally focus on getting rid of the excess fructose.

Most health experts now agree that 15 - 20 grams is the maximum amount of fructose per day your want to consume from any and all sources.  You get that much in just 6 teaspoons of sugar.  Your average can of soda has 10 teaspoons of sugar in it.  "Healthy" drinks like iced tea have 35 to 50 grams of sugar, vitamin water 32 grams, or a "healthy" yogurt might have 34 grams of sugar in it.  The average teen consumes 35 to 40 teaspoons of sugar a day (140 to 160 grams) and adults are not far behind.

But what about "healthy" fruit juice?  An 8oz glass of grape juice has 36 grams of sugar.  All your "low fat" foods are loaded with sugar.  Even things you would never associate with sugar are loaded with it, like bottled spaghetti sauce.  Ketchup is 60% sugar.  Both prepared foods, and fresh and natural foods are filled with sugar.  Sugar cuts across all the food lines because everyone wants it in their food.  One of the most prevalent offenders is breakfast cereal.  Originally breakfast cereals were invented to provide vegetarians a healthy alternative to the classic bacon and eggs breakfast (Harvey Kellogg back in the 1890's invented the first breakfast flake for his health sanitarium patients.)  But this was a financial disaster - no one wanted a bland tasting health flake for breakfast.  But they discovered that if they added a lot of sugar to their product, people ate it up - especially kids.

My past newsletters have focused on sugar as the primary cause of obesity in America.  Eating moderate amounts of fat (without carbohydrates) does not make you fat.  Eating proteins or vegetable fibers does not make you fat.  Eating simple carbohydrates makes you fat, and eating too much makes you fat.  It is really just that simple.  Inflammatory complications make the problem worse, but the fundamental diet choice remains the basic cause of obesity.

My first input about the dangers of fructose came 35 years ago when I was first learning muscle testing.  Back then crystalline fructose was just becoming available as a sweetener.  It was heralded as the perfect sweetener for diabetics as it did not raise insulin levels.  The instructor of my muscle testing class told us that everyone he had tested on fructose was weakened by it.  He did not know why, but it tested up as toxic.  Ten years later I read about a study on prison inmates in which half the prison was put on brewers sugar (glucose without fructose) prepared in the food they ate while the other half of the prison used normal white sugar in their cooking (which is 50% fructose.)  After 5 years they compared the health of the two halves.  The half that ate regular sugar had increased heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and so on while the half that ate the brewers sugar (sugar without fructose) showed no increase in any disease process.  Clearly normal sugar is dangerous.  But it has only been in the last 5 to 10 years that researchers are figuring out exactly why fructose is so dangerous.  The word is finally starting to get out.

Now we have this latest piece of the story linking the big C - Cancer to fructose consumption.  I think the price of eating regular sugar just went over the top.  Sugar is now found to be causative in all the biggest killers and disability makers of our time - diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and aging itself.

We are hardwired to like sweet tasting things, and we are always motivated to do what feels best now more than we are motivated to be concerned with what might be a problem tomorrow.  So how do we deal with the reality of our addiction to sweet taste?  (My personal addiction is to Root Beer - I drink 1 to 2 liters every day.)  The best answer I have been able to come up with is substitution.  Replace the sugar with an acceptable substitute.

If you are otherwise healthy and have no weight problem you can do what the prisoners did back in the study I mentioned earlier.  You can replace your normal sugar consumption with brewer's sugar, otherwise known as dextrose or glucose.  This product acts like sugar in cooking but it is a little less sweet so you will need to increase the amount by about 30% to equal the sweetness of regular sugar.  You will not typically find this in any kind of store except shops that carry brew making supplies.  I did special order 5 pounds once from Elloitt's Natural Foods, but it took a couple weeks to come in.  I buy it now in 50 pound bags from the brew store.  If enough people are interested I could bag some up and put it in the office (for those of you that don't buy in 50 pound quantities.) 

For those of us that are holding on to that extra 10 plus pounds, we need a low calorie substitute for our sweet cravings.  The chemical industry has come up with many alternatives over the years, but unfortunately every one of them has been found to be as big a problem as sugar itself.  The only practical alternative at the present time is the herb stevia, which has been safely used for thousands of years, and limited amounts of some of the sugar alcohols like erythritol and xylitol that are not metabolized by our body.  Stevia has been found clinically to actually improve insulin metabolism thereby helping with our blood sugar regulation.  Erythritol is the best tolerated of the sugar alcohols, but any of them in large quantities (ie. more than half a cup) will produce gas and diarrhea.

In the past stevia had the problem of having a bitter aftertaste.  Newer methods of extracting the sweet part of stevia has eliminated 95% of the aftertaste, but used straight its potency (being 200 times sweeter than sugar) makes it difficult to use straight.  This is the reason I created Dr. Dave's Double Sugar, a mixture of erythritol and non-bitter stevia extract.  I also created an 8X sweetener as well as a pure stevia liquid drops for beverages (this is what I use to make my Root Beer by adding it to club soda along with Root Beer flavor extract.)

So what about fruit?  With all I knew about fructose, I still believed that the negative effects of the fructose would somehow be negated by other nutrients present in healthy fresh whole fruit.  Well I was wrong.  Three years ago I had a kidney stone that got stuck in the little tube from my kidney to my bladder.  At that time I had been eating what I thought was a healthy diet that included a lot of fresh whole fruit (like 6 to 10 pieces per day.)  Well, to find the stuck kidney stone the doctors did a CAT scan on my abdomen.  They mentioned as a side note, "Hey, you have fatty liver disease.  How much alcohol do you drink each day?"  Fatty liver disease is a typical finding in a long-term alcoholic, because the liver turns the alcohol into fat and stores it in the liver.  I explained that I never drank at all and never had.  They had no answer to that and went on looking for the kidney stone.

While they may have forgotten about the fatty liver, I did not. I started researching fatty liver and that is when I discovered in the literature that fructose does the same thing to the liver that alcohol does.  So much for my belief that whole fresh fruits couldn't harm me.  They already had.  So, fresh fruits full of fructose are not good for you if you consume more than 15 to 20 grams of total fructose in those fruits per day.  Being fresh and whole makes no difference.  Too much is too much, even of a good thing.  Now fruits vary extremely in their fructose concentration.  In general however, the sweeter the fruit is, the more fructose it has in it.  Here is a listing of common fruits and the fructose found in them (borrowed from Mercola.com):

Fruit             Serving Size         Grams of Fructose
Limes                   1 medium                   0
Lemons                1 medium                  0.6
Cranberries          1 cup                        0.7
Passion fruit         1 medium                  0.9
Prune                   1 medium                  1.2
Apricot                 1 medium                  1.3
Guava                  2 medium                  2.2
Date (Deglet Noor) 1 medium                2.6
Cantaloupe         1/8 of med. melon       2.8
Raspberries         1 cup                         3.0
Clementine           1 medium                  3.4
Kiwifruit                 1 medium                  3.4
Blackberries         1 cup                         3.5
Star fruit               1 medium                   3.6
Cherries, sweet     10                             3.8
Strawberries         1 cup                         3.8
Cherries, sour       1 cup                        4.0
Pineapple              1 slice(3.5" x .75")    4.0
Grapefruit, pink or red  1/2 medium       4.3
Boysenberries       1 cup                       4.6
Tangerine/mandarin orange 1 medium  4.8
Nectarine              1 medium                  5.4
Peach                   1 medium                  5.9
Orange (navel)     1 medium                  6.1
Papaya                 1/2 medium               6.3
Honeydew             1/8 of med. melon     6.7
Banana                 1 medium                  7.1
Blueberries           1 cup                         7.4
Date (Medjool)     1 medium                   7.7
Apple (composite)     1 medium              9.5
Persimmon           1 medium                  10.6
Watermelon         1/16 med. melon        11.3
Pear                     1 medium                   11.8
Raisins                 1/4 cup                      12.3
Grapes, seedless (green or red) 1 cup  12.4
Mango                 1/2 medium                 16.2
Apricots, dried     1 cup                           16.4
Figs, dried           1 cup                           23.0

As you can see you can eat all the limes and lemons you want, but by the time you get up to figs and dates, 1 cup puts you over the top.  In general the juicy fruits and berries are the better fruits to consume.  Generally keeping your fruit consumption to 11/2 cups a day will cover you for most of the fruits.

WARNING:  based on the new data regarding cancer, you want to keep the fruit consumption and the consumption of all sugars down to almost nothing.  Sugars feed cancer.  Of all the lifestyle choices we make every day and the exposures to toxic substances that promote cancer, it appears that sugar consumption is the single biggest trigger for the greatest number of cancers.  This newest cancer information tells us that we really don't know yet all the ways that sugar is affecting us.  I suggest using better alternatives.  They do exist.      


Take care,

David

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About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
Chiropractor

Ellen Flowers FGM
Spiritual Life Coach

 

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