Wednesday, April 13

Quote of the Day:  “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass… it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

From New York Times Article about sugar and Cancer link that Michael Daily sent me called:  Is Sugar Toxic? by Gary Taubes

“Now most researchers will agree that the link between Western diet or lifestyle and cancer manifests itself through this association with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome — i.e., insulin resistance…

So how does it work? Cancer researchers now consider that the problem with insulin resistance is that it leads us to secrete more insulin, and insulin (as well as a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor) actually promotes tumor growth.

As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both. Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.

What these researchers call elevated insulin (or insulin-like growth factor) signaling appears to be a necessary step in many human cancers, particularly cancers like breast and colon cancer. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 percent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells.

If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men (the authors) will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.”

I have read about the link between sugar and cancers.  I have always thought that my body didn’t metabolize sugar very well.  The worst thing you can do is eat sugar on an empty stomach and high-fructose corn syrup (which is in everything almost that we give to children) acts the same or worse than sugar!

Exercise Log:  6 miles (surplus of .16)   Today Sue B., Sue O. Lori Hogue, Susie Beaudoin and I started out walking.  We went a little ways and then Susie and I did a full 6 miles.  It was so beautiful outside that Susie and I couldn’t take our eyes off Mount Olympus covered in snow with the morning light shining on it.  Susie said  that today was not a stairmaster day, only an outside day so she made sure we had 6 miles under our belts before we finished.

Susie is hilarious, brilliant and beautiful.  When she moved to Pepperwood some 14 years ago, I mourned, but I grew to understand that distance doesn’t diminish friendship if you don’t let it.  We just pick right up where we ended last time as if no time has passed, at all!  Susie’s sass made us laugh so many times this morning-  I even worried that we were being too loud for the neighbors and there were so many times that we passed other walkers or cars and we were laughing so hard, they would just look at us.  We were definitely having too much fun!  Susie and I headed over to the “gut-buster” route near Eastwood Elementary- where we once, years ago, got lost- we literally couldn’t find an outlet to get back on Wasatch Blvd.- sounds like dumb blondes, eh?  But today, all of the sudden we were near the mouth of Millcreek Canyon and how we got there without ever seeing Eastwood Elem. is a mystery!  Sometimes when you’re with friends, that’s all you need, doesn’t matter your location!  Like the Elton John song:  “When your friends are there, everything all right”.

Susie Beaudoin and Me

View of Mount Olympus from street