Does Sugar Feed Prostate Cancer? Does Fatty/Adipose Tissue Attract Cancer? | Mark Moyad, MD, MPH

it is I understand the desire to find the akiles of cancer I understand the desire coming from a family riddled by cancer very young ages I understand that you want to find that one switch the one lever so what leaked out there long ago with sugar feeds cancer that sounds great makes sense sugar feeds cancer cut out sugar maybe you kill cancer all right now let's look at this objectively first of all if you've been around cancer enough you have to be deferential on some level to cancer cancer is a bad-ass disease and it does a lot of damage and it's a highly complicated disease that if it was so simple to cut out sugar that you killed cancer mark souls will be holding a sign saying will work for food it would be that simple I would love to make it that simple but now let me now make it even more complicated we have PET CT scans right everybody heard about PET CT scans and they use molecules for the cancer to suck up and gobble up because it likes to use those things one of the most common scans that are used out there is it called an fdg-pet CT so they use a compound baby basically a glucose molecule like a sugar molecule and that's gonna go into your cancer and then your cancer lights up and we'll know where it is dr. Scholl's can you please tell the audience when you use a glucose molecule to light up a PET CT scan how worthwhile is it in prostate cancer well yeah you qualified it because if you use it in lymphoma and lung cancer it's fantastic it's practically useless in prostate cancer it's useless in prostate cancer a serve no function what has become more useful to inject for example a fatty acid or an amino acid that builds a protein and then the cancer gobbles it up and says I'm here I love this thing yum yum yum yum yum so now should I say wasting protein feeds protein feeds cancer should I say fat feeds cancer no well it's again still complicated the point being is that even through our imaging we've learned that it's not as simple as sugar feeds cancer so well then what the hell am I supposed to do dr. Moy let me make it as simple as possible sure in my opinion is not the issue with cancer you can have a doughnut once in a while you can live your life for God's sakes a high blood sugar that's a different thing altogether a high blood sugar go back to your cardiovascular risk numbers someone that's carrying a high blood sugar for example say a 120 a 115 who knows for them there's something about cancer that loves a high blood sugar and I'll tell you why because you pump out more insulin and boy these cancers just love some of these cancers love to have insulin around because it's a mitogen it's a growth factor so the end result of being heart unhealthy is that when your heart unhealthy the body produces all this potential food for your cancer it's not the sugar that's feeding the cancer it's the high blood sugar that potentially feeds cancer think you know the BPH drugs the gains talked about did you anyone know where the BPH drugs were discovered from they were discovered from antihypertensive drugs people took high blood pressure medication their blood pressure came down and they went oh I'm peeing better this is great and they said wait that's one of the side effects yes one of the side effects of lowering your blood pressure is you pee better so will we keep learning over and over again is all this stuff is intimately tied into something heart-healthy so I wish it was as simple as sugar feed cancer the second thing that I'm concerned about in prostate that I think really disrupts the game is a lot of adipose tissue is not a good thing for prostate cancer I mean prostate cancer loves it so weight gain is enormous ly detrimental for some men and prostate cancer and in ways we're just learning about so one thing that we've learned from surgeons doing radical prostatectomies even though I know this is making you cringe but we've learned some things basically is that when you look at the surgeons who have done some of the most surgeries for radical prostatectomy and they look at the area around the prostate after they remove it they see more and more adipose issue around it what does that mean that means just when not only when you put on adipose tissue in the belly the rest of the body also picks up adipose tissue the liver the pancreas all around including around the prostate so what pathologists are beginning to think right now Epstein and some of these other guys out there and women they're beginning to think that having all of this fat tissue around the prostate serves as a magnet it's basically saying to the cancer come on come on out leave the prostate we're gonna secrete all these different hormones and things in cytokines and factors and it's part of the reason we might be seeing more aggressive prostate cancer in men that gain weight and I believe that yeah survival much better in lean people compared to over that's why it devastates me to see men on hormone therapy who gained a lot of weight which I understand you put them in male menopause but there has to be a conversation a locker room speech before you get your first injection of lupron or anything else and before you take an anti-androgen pill and you go listen man you know how when you're married your wife might have gone through menopause and then she went through perimenopause and that takes a couple years then there's menopause well we're gonna put you through that process in about 30 days so you tell your wife that so that she's sensitive to what you're going to to because sometimes men weren't very sensitive when women were going through hot flashes in menopause they go off and now men we put them in this state in 30 days including the weight gain and so if you don't know what's about to happen to you and you gain a whole lot of weight upfront it's that much harder to get rid of it because not only do we get rid of your testosterone we get rid of your meta metabolism so you're not metabolizing as well so it takes a lot more to lose a pound so if we can tell people not to gain weight or just to gain very little upfront man that's a winner yeah it's easier to not put it on in the first place [Music]

Channel: Prostate Cancer Research Institute

Views: 128,955

Keywords: Gleason Score, Diet, Nutrition, Lipids, Fats, Proteins, Amino Acids, Fatty Acids, Tumor Growth, PSA

Id: -PyqazlkpCE

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021