‘Stop eating this immediately,’ warn can-cer researchers
Regular table sugar, or sucrose, is actually made up of two sugars: glucose and fructose. The study found that fructose caused tumors to grow larger and faster than glucose.
Fructose is primarily processed by the liver, while glucose is processed by the pancreas and other organs. These two different processing systems could explain the research findings.
Of course, the sugar industry attacked the study. They pointed out that fructose occurs naturally in fruit. The researchers countered that some fructose is necessary for the body. But Americans eat far more of it than they could ever ingest from fruit.
And fruits contain fiber and other healthy components mixed with fructose. Sugary drinks, the primary source of sugar in the American diet, provide no nutrition.
Three Healthy Natural Sweeteners
There are alternatives to sugar that do not pose major health risks:
Raw honey: Make sure it’s unprocessed: Refined honey can be as bad as sugar. Look for 100% organic raw honey. The darker the honey, the more nutrients and flavor it contains. It also offers antibacterial, antifungal, antiseptic, and antioxidant properties.
Blackstrap molasses: Don’t confuse this with regular molasses. Blackstrap molasses is a byproduct of sugarcane. It contains healthy minerals like iron, magnesium, calcium, and vitamin B6, which are unprocessed. It doesn’t flood your body with sugar. The sugar is released slowly. Beware of non-organic brown cane sugar: this is usually white sugar recolored with caramel.
