As if sugar doesn’t have enough PR problems, a new study [3] published in January suggests it encourages the growth and spread of breast cancer tumors in rats. Common sugar is half fructose and half glucose, and the researchers showed that the fructose half shows particularly carcinogenic activity. This is similar to recent evidence that pancreatic cancer cells can distinguish between fructose and glucose — and perform better [4] when fed the former.
Thus, the wagons of scrutiny are circling a little closer around sugar, and fructose in particular.
This idea, sometimes called the “fructose hypothesis [5],” refers to several studies suggesting fructose is processed differently in the body than other sugars and with more deleterious effects, including inflammation [6], ob