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I keep seeing this claim in alternative health circles that sugar feeds cancer and if you restrict carbohydrate from your diet, particularly refined sugar, you can prevent cancer or even "starve" existing cancer. Here is an example of this claim:

The reason Food Therapies for cancer even exist today (beyond the fact that they work) is because someone once saw the connection between sugar and cancer. There are many food therapies, but not a single one allows many foods high in carbohydrates and not a single one allows sugars, BECAUSE SUGAR FEEDS CANCER.

Why doesn't your physician tell you this? Hard to tell. Maybe your doctor feels it is his job to cure your cancer, not yours. Maybe because your doctor learned about Warburg, but never put the rest together, never placed nutrition into the equation. Maybe because your physician didn't study nutrition. Heck, as late as 1978, the AMA's official position (found in the Congressional Record) was that nutrition had nothing to do with disease.

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Melissa
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No. A fairly recent study performed at MIT has outlined a potential alternative pathway that's probably very common, as the study points out that lack of glucose and oxygen is not an uncommon state for cancer cells:

Much of the body’s supply of oxygen and glucose is carried in the bloodstream, but blood vessels often do not penetrate far into the body of tumors, so most cancer cells are deficient in those nutrients. This means they can’t produce fatty acids using the normal lipid-synthesis pathway that depends mostly on glucose.

The finding, reported in the Nov. 20 online edition of Nature, challenges the long-held belief that cells synthesize most of their lipids from glucose

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