Aug 9, 2010

High fructose corn syrup does not cause pancreatic cancer???

Boing2  headlines on Reuters, touting recent research published in the journal Cancer Research by scientists at the University of California Los Angeles. The implication—pushed by Reuters, other news agencies and even the head of the research team, Dr. Anthony Heaney—is that this study proves a potentially deadly link between diets high in high fructose corn syrup and pancreatic cancer.

*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?