10/14/2025
Take a look at almost any cancer treatment center in the US that uses the traditional treatment methods (chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery) and you’ll notice something outright blasphemous.
To help keep weight on their patients, they offer snacks and meal replacements. The problem? They are loaded with sugar and processed ingredients and… sugar feeds cancer.
Cancer Cells Vs. Healthy Cells
When you are looking at fighting cancer while keeping normal cells healthy, you have to ask yourself, what makes a cancer cell different?
Based on what we know from the work of Otto Warburg, Thomas Seyfried, and many others, cancer cells are metabolically damaged. Metabolically damaged in that their energy producing structures, mitochondria, are unable to operate efficiently.
This manifests in their preference for glucose as a fuel source, relatively low-yield production of ATP, and rampant production of oxidative species.
Normal healthy cells, on the other hand, are able to exhibit metabolic flexibility where they can burn multiple sources of fuel, produce more ATP, and relatively lower levels of oxidative species.
What we now know is that cancer cells, even in the presence of oxygen, choose to undergo glycolysis utilizing glucose (and sometimes glutamine) as the favored substrate. This is the more scientific understanding of how sugar feeds cancer.
This is thought to be due to damaged mitochondrial structures within cancer cells inhibiting the cells ability to undergo aerobic respiration. Glucose enters the cell and is converted into pyruvate within the cytosol but cannot enter the mitochondria to undergo aerobic respiration.
As a result, growing cancer cells upregulate glucose transport proteins on their surfaces in order to take in as much glucose as possible. There is also a rampant build-up of lactic acid in cancer cells as a byproduct of anaerobic respiration. This means as long as it is abundant in the blood, sugar feeds cancer growth in a way that will only promote its development.
