*I underline that because some people have apparently gotten the idea that the study shows fructose causes pancreatic cancer. The study absolutely did NOT show anything of the sort...
Cancer cells eat sugars of all kinds, Dr. Brawley told me. And this study confirmed that. The pancreatic cancer cells slurped up not only the fructose, but also the glucose. And they grew quite well on both. The difference lay in how efficiently the cells were able use the sugary fuel.
The study does provide an interesting jumping-off point for further research, Brawley told me. But, on it's own, it doesn't say anything about high fructose corn syrup (which isn't pure fructose, but rather little-more-than-50/50 mixture of glucose and fructose). In fact, it doesn't even mean that pancreatic cancer cells in a human body would use pure fructose more efficiently than pure glucose.
That's because pancreatic cancer cells behave differently in a body than they do in a test tube, Brawley told me.
"I have treatments that can cure pancreatic cancer in the petri dish," he said. "We've had that for more than 50 years. But they don't work on pancreatic cancer in humans. That tells me there's a difference, biologically, between cancer cells in a petri dish and cancer cells in a person and we have to respect that."
I asked Brawley whether there had been any studies done that correlate diets high in high fructose corn syrup to prevalence of pancreatic cancer in humans. There are two, he said. But both show only a very weak statistical relationship.
Read full at Boing2
But let's not lie to ourselves, why would you drink more soda?
- Cut soda in curbing childhood obesity,
- Wow - drinking soda may be bad for you... go figure
- San Francisco bans sugar soda from vending machines
- Pepsi Pulling Their Sodas From Schools Worldwide By 2012
- Who cares - soda, tobacco, oil and alcohol can hurt you?
- Save Kids & Planet - "Dump Soda"
- Mercury in nearly half the samples of high fructose corn syrup