When I was seeking answers for the health challenges I was undergoing which later led to a cancer diagnosis, I immediately cut carbs, sugar and dairy out of my diet. Some may find this extreme. I didn’t.

I had not imagined myself to be unhealthy, and I was not overweight by any standard. In fact, I was health conscious. It was a shock—unimaginable, in fact—to learn that I was dealing with a life threatening disease. The decision I made to eliminate these items from my diet was simply rooted in my understanding that it would prove vital to reducing inflammation in my body to the greatest degree possible and fuel my cells with pure, detoxifying foods that would best support my health and healing.

Even with so much out of my control, I did know I could control certain things that would make a big impact on my outcome. My thoughts were one area. The treatment plan I chose was another. My diet was a third. I became my own best advocate, and you can, too.

Finding articles that directly link sugar and cancer are hard to find. What you will find a lot of if you do your own search is the indirect link between cancer risk and sugar. For instance, the National Institute of Health states: “Evidence from epidemiologic and preclinical studies demonstrates that excess sugar consumption can lead to development of cancer and progression of disease.”

For one thing, sugar can cause weight gain. Being obese or overweight increases the risk of 13 types of cancer. In fact, right after smoking, obesity is considered the biggest contributor of cancer.

The doctor who initially provided my diagnosis told me that I didn’t need to change my diet—that my body needed sugar (glucose) to function. Yes, it’s true that our cells primarily use glucose as their source of energy. However, cancer feeds off glucose at a much higher rate than healthy cells in the body. In the 1920’s Otto Warburg outlined what has since become known as the Warburg Effect, outlining cancer’s metabolic use of glycolysis to produce energy for cancer cells. In other words, cancer cells uptake glucose faster than healthy cells. We’ve known this for a century.

Sugar hides everywhere in todays food supply. It’s not just in candy and syrups; it’s in sauces, snacks, and packaged foods. You might never imagine you’d find something like high fructose corn syrup in a sour food like jarred hamburger dills, but it’s often there, too. Checking every label pays off! 

When you look at those labels, keep in mind the conversion of grams to teaspoons. Doing so, will allow you to picture how much sugar you’d be consuming. Four grams of sugar is one teaspoon. The American Heart Association (AHA) reports that the average American consumes about twenty-one teaspoons of sugar daily. Yet, the AHA also recommends that women not consume more than six teaspoons and men no more than nine teaspoons of sugar daily. If you go to a coffee shop and order a fancy drink in the morning, you could easily consume 24 grams of sugar in that drink, immediately exceeding your recommended allowance of sugar by four times.

If you’re thinking, “I’ll just switch to alternative sweeteners,” please be careful. A lot of artificial sweeteners are terrible for your health. You’d be better off eating real cane sugar then the manufactured alternatives. Seriously, they are deadly. 

A better option? Consider monk fruit—sweeter than sugar, but with zero glycemic index. Glycemic index matters; and, as monk fruit proves, not all sugars have a gram-for-gram impact on your blood sugar. 

Why does glycemic impact matter…? 

Different carbohydrates and sugars impact—or spike—your blood sugar to varying degrees. The glycemic index indicates the spike—the degree to which your blood sugar will be affected  by a given carbohydrate or sugar. To learn more you can read in depth on the impact of glycemic index here. If you want to look up specific products and discover their glycemic index, you can do that here.

In my own journey, I adopted a ketogenic (keto) diet. Essentially, I ate unprocessed foods, the more raw the better. Mostly, I stuck to meat and vegetables. When I went grocery shopping, I avoided all the inner isles of the store, where all the processed stuff is found. Instead, I shopped the perimeter: the meat section, produce, eggs.

Why did I choose a keto diet?

As noted above, the doctor who gave me my initial diagnosis told me didn’t need to change my diet, because every one of my cells needed glucose to function. But here’s what most people don’t know. Our miraculous bodies can produce glucose for our cells without ever actually eating sugar and contributing to all of the potential issues it creates in the body. Even if we stick to a strictly carnivore diet, our bodies can use meat to produce  glucose. When we cut sugar out of our diet, our bodies stop adding to our fat stores and begin breaking them down and leveraging them instead. When this begins to happen, the body will produce something called ketones for energy. This shift is called ketosis. Guess what…? Cancer cannot effectively use ketones for energy. The National Library of Medicine states “Unlike healthy tissues, cancer cells are unable to effectively use ketones for energy. Furthermore, ketones inhibit the proliferation and viability of cultured tumor cells.”

There’s my answer: I chose a keto diet because ketones starve cancer.

Keep learning and investigating! The more you know, the more you’ll understand how different pieces of information all work together. And the better you understand how different pieces of information fit together, the better you’ll be able to advocate for yourself.