Coach Connect with Mona Haratianfar 💗 | The Role of Blood Sugar in Breast Cancer Prevention

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me Today we are going to talk about something you might have heard. The role of blood sugar in breast cancer. In other words, how do sugar levels in our blood affect our risk of developing breast cancer? And what happens if someone with breast cancer has high blood sugar? By end of this, I hope you will understand how blood sugar relates to cancer and why managing our blood sugar is an important part of staying healthy. This is coach Mona, the integrative health coach at tnt. I have a master in biomedical science, another one in cancer studies and extra certification as nutritional therapy practitioner. And my approach is really root cause nutrition centered strategy. And so let's start first by what do we mean by blood sugar? Blood sugar refers to glucose, which is a type of sugar that circulates in our bloodstream. Glucose is actually the main resource of our energy. So if when we get it from like we get the glucose from carbohydrates in foods like you know, veggies, fruit, grains. Now normally when you eat, your blood sugar rises and your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. Insulin is like a key that helps unlock our cells so they can take the glucose and use it for fuel. This process keeps our blood sugar at a healthy balanced level. But if someone's blood sugar stays too high for a really long time, which happens in diabete prediabetes, it means the sugar isn't getting into the cells properly. High blood sugar over time can damage the body and we will discuss how it can create an environment that could influence cancer development. So here are some stats for you. The current rate of obesity is 37% of U.S. adults over age of 20 and about 13.8% of U.S. adults have diabetes, which is, you know, like estimated. 37.3 million Americans have diabetes, which is a lot. And then in terms of the breast cancer, we know women with diabetes have about 20% higher risk of developing breast cancer than normal women without diabetes. So you start getting some connection between them. You might have heard the saying sugar feeds cancer. There is a bit of truth to that, but it's not really as straightforward as it sounds. Here's the deal. All the cells in our body use sugar glucose for energy. That includes our brain cells, muscle cells and yes, cancer cell too. However, cancer cells tend to gobble up glucose faster and in larger amount than normal cells do. That's one of the reason that you see doctors can use special sugar traces in PET scan to spot cancer because tumors light up when they are consuming a lot of sugar. This doesn't mean that when you eat a cookie, you will get cancer. It's just like sugar itself isn't a direct poison that causes cancer overnight, but over the long term, if you look at it, having chronically high blood sugar and high insulin level, like in uncontrolled diabetes or consistently high sugar diet, has been linked to a higher risk of developing cancer. In fact, research shows women with diabetes are more likely to get breast cancer than women without diabetes. So the link is there, but it's more about the overall environment in the body. High blood sugar, high insulin often linked with weight gain, rather than any single sugary snack. So let's talk about why high blood sugar might increase cancer risk, especially breast cancer. One big factor involves hormone. When blood sugar is high a lot, your body pumps up more insulin to try to get that sugar into the cells. Plus, high insulin levels can trigger the body to make more of a hormone called IGF1, which is short for insulin, like growth factor. Why do we care about all of these? It's because insulin and IGF1 are not just blood sugar regulators. They are very powerful growth signals. So think about them as a fertilize. In normal amounts, they can help your cells grow and function, but when you have too much, they might over fertilize cells, including any cancer cells that might be present. So make them grow and divide more. Another issue is that having consistently high sugar means there's a lot of fuel available for any rapidly dividing cells like cancer cells. And they love glucose as their first primary fuel. So high sugar environment is like a buffet for those tumor cells. Right? So potentially it can help them grow faster. Think about one, what often comes with high blood sugar, Weight gain or obesity? Right. So especially if one is consuming too many sugary foods or calories, those extra body fat can produce inflammatory chemicals. And in older women past menopause, extra estrogen, it can do that too. So both inflammation and estrogen can create conditions that make it easier for breast cancer to start to grow. So high blood sugar often goes hand in hand with these factors. High insulin, inflammation, hormonal changes, and they can all together tip the scale in favor of cancer growth. It's a combination of hormonal and metabolic effects that explain the sugar cancer link. I wanted to show you this paper, Understanding the link between sugar and cancer. An examination of preclinical and clinical evidence, which it's the resource of some of the things that I just talked about, but also in animal models, studies showed that a diet high in sucrose or fructose can significantly accelerate tumor Growth and metastasis independent of weight gain or changes in blood sugar, Indicating mechanisms beyond just excess calories. That was very interesting. So really I'd like to share a few important statistics that show this connection between blood sugar and breast cancer, real terms. So, multiple studies have found that women with type 2 diabetes have about 20% higher risk of developing breast cancer Compared to women without. There is some overlap. Diabetes is common among breast cancer patients. Studies found out that one in three women with breast cancer also has diabetes or high blood sugar. And the outcome can be worse. The breast cancer patients who have diabetes tend to have more advanced tumors and diagnosis and on average, poorer outcomes compared to those without. We talked about the risk. Now let's look at what high blood sugar does if cancer is already present. Think of the body like a garden. High blood sugar is a bit like over fertilizing the soil. So studies show that breast cancer cells exposed to high levels of glucose tend to proliferate, growth and invade more rapidly. In other words, too much sugar can act like a fuel on the fire for those tumor cells. So the laboratory research shows that high glucose conditions can activate certain signals in cancer cells that make them divide and spread more rapidly. And then the other thing is about the treatment, High sugar levels, they can result in higher insulin that can make cancer cells more resistant to treatments like chemotherapy. And a well controlled blood sugar level can create a less hospitable environment for cancer, so potentially slowing tumor growth and helping treatments work better. So for a better, you know, prognosis, it's really important to keep blood sugar in a healthy range. And the good news here is that through diet, exercise, medication, if needed, we can create a healthier train in our body to make a better environment. It's not a guarantee against cancer, but it's still it, you know, it might help. And if someone has cancer and they're undergoing cancer treatment, Good blood sugar control can actually help those treatments work optimally. So why not, you know, like, give it a shot for success? So what can we really do about it? We don't want to say like never eat anything sweet again, right? But it's more about maintaining healthy blood sugar level as a part of a healthy lifestyle to reduce cancer risk. So let's talk about diet, a balanced diet that emphasize on whole food. That's a key. And plenty, having plenty of vegetables, Focusing on like fiber that have nutrients and can make your blood sugar rise more slowly and more steadily. Imagine like when you have an apple, you can, we always say that, don't have it naked like don't have your carbohydrates or fruits naked, add some healthy fat to it. Maybe add some nut butter to that apple to help with your blood sugar. And you don't need to cut out all of the carbohydrates, but choose more complex carbohydrates to help with that blood sugar balance and limit added sugar that they are, you know, and like very refined starches, try to keep it moderate and make sure that you're staying active. That's one of the best way to control blood sugar. Like walking after your meal. You know, go for like 20 minutes, walk right after your meal. And when we move our muscles, the walking, you know, dancing, gym, whatever, it's your, your jam. Our muscles use up glucose for energy and pulling it out of the bloodstream. So regular exercise help with the weight control and also like lower inflammation. All of these are good news for reducing cancer risk. So maintaining a good healthy body weight is important, especially making sure you know about the body extra weight around the midsection that can make body more resistant to insulin and having a higher blood sugar. By eating healthy, staying active, we can shed some of that extra weight and keep it in check. Finally, if you have diabetes or pre diabetes, definitely it's really important to work with your healthcare team to manage it and to wrap up. We learned that blood sugar does play a role in breast cancer. High blood sugar and higher insulin over time can increase the chances of developing breast cancer and make an existing cancer more difficult to treat or more likely to grow quickly. It's not the only factor. Cancer is complex and has many causes, but blood sugar is important piece of that puzzle and we want to have some control over. The best part is that we can do a lot to manage our blood sugar. So you know, like epigenetics, the fact that the genetic doesn't really define having a cancer and we can change it, we can turn those genes off by our lifestyle and diet with fewer added sugar, with staying physically active, keeping our weight in control and all of those and focusing on the whole food and whole body can help fit that balance approach with blood sugar. Okay, so thank you so much for listening. I hope this has been helpful and empowering and yeah, this is the end of our chat today. I hope you have a good day. Thank you so much.