Tag: fatigue

What’s So Bad About Sugar, Anyway?

And what does it have to do with cancer, or the risk of cancer?

There have been many theories about how cancer originates in the body.

Dr. Thomas Seyfried of Boston College published the theory that cancer begins with chronic metabolic dysfunction — that is, mitochondria within a cell not being able to create good energy for a prolonged period of time — which causes them to begin creating energy through a fermentation process rather than through oxidative phosphorylation, often called OxPhos (Seyfried & Chinopoulos, 2021).

This is the key difference between healthy cells and cancerous cells: healthy cells use oxygen to create energy, while cancerous cells have reverted to an easier, ancient way to create energy (possibly from before Earth had a proper atmosphere) through fermentation of glucose (sugar) and an amino acid called glutamine.

This difference in mitochondrial function links all cancers together, regardless of which organ it appears within.

We have known this for a while. Did you know that PET scans, widely used to seek out and image cancerous activity in the body, are taken after a person ingests a sugary dye? The sugar (glucose) goes straight to the hungry cancer cells, carrying the dye that is visible to the scanner.

Why does mitochondrial dysfunction happen?

One reason why mitochondrial dysfunction happens is simply the presence of too much sugar and simple carbohydrates in a person’s diet.

These need very little digestive breakdown and go straight to the mitochondria as glucose molecules.

The mitochondria become overwhelmed with the amount of glucose they are being asked to process. They bog down and ask for help from the pancreas and insulin. They push the remaining glucose out into the blood as a sticky residue.

Have you ever felt tired, sluggish, and slow after a big meal or too many carbs? Food coma?? That is an indication that your cells are overwhelmed. You’re in a glucose storm, and your body is suffering.

This leftover glucose in the blood sticks to your hemoglobin, or red blood cells. This is the residue measured by a Hemoglobin A1C test.

Symptoms

In 2018, we moved from Florida to New York. A lot of things changed, from the water to the weather, the pollen, the food, the amount of sunlight, noise levels, stress levels … everything, really.

I started getting what I now call “6 hour colds” in the spring of 2019. I’d feel a tickle in my throat or cough or sneeze, go take a nap, and then wake up feeling fine. I wouldn’t get sick… not for more than 6 hours anyway. It was weird, but really, I didn’t think about it much. Who‘s going to complain about not getting sick?

I also started to notice that, after a lifetime of asthma, hay fever, and allergies, mine had gone away. In Florida, I could go through a jumbo box of Kleenex in a couple of days. In New York, my husband and son were having allergies, which they rarely had in Florida, and I wasn’t. Hmmm. Must be different pollen...

I mentioned earlier that I do some work for the American Lung Association, and a lot of it involves asthma training. I remember arguing over whether asthma was a chronic condition. I thought it wasn’t because, evidently, I had “outgrown” mine.

In early 2020, well, you know what happened. Covid! My family got it, but I didn’t. Hmm… I must be lucky, or maybe I’m one of those asymptomatic carriers.

In 2021, I went hiking with my kids at Letchworth Park, the “Grand Canyon of the East.”  It’s a beautiful place, and you should definitely check it out if you get a chance. We parked at the upper falls and walked down steep stone stairs to the middle falls, maybe a distance of a mile or so, mostly stairways but some flat land, too. I was fine on the way down. Getting back to the car was a real challenge, though, because those stairs were steep!

I was getting winded very easily and had to stop a few times. I had never felt like that before. When we got back up to the car, I let my daughter drive. I was too shaky and lightheaded to do it. I recovered after a bit of rest and was fine.

Later, knowing that I needed to get some exercise and build up my stamina, I joined a gym and started doing zumba and yoga regularly. Those hour-long classes never took me to that place of exhaustion I felt at Letchworth.

There were other odd occurrences, and I don’t know if they were symptoms of CLL or not.

It seemed like my hair was thinning, but then again, I was going through menopause and that’s fairly typical.

I gained weight and had less energy in the evenings, but that sounded like menopause, too.

Sometimes, usually after walking up 2 flights of stairs, I would see blue spots. When it happened, I’d just drink a big glass of water. I had never been in an environment like this before, with the heater on 5+ months of the year and a potbelly stove in constant use. It made sense to chalk it up to simple dehydration.

I smelled different, not in a gross way, but just different, more acidic. It motivated me to exercise more and sweat more. I also started going to a sauna in the cold part of the year, approximately once a month.

My armpits were puffy, which could have been from the weight gain.

In December of 2022, I got a mammogram, which revealed an enlarged lymph node in one armpit. It was monitored with ultrasound a couple of times in 2023 and seemed to be slowly growing.

So we did a biopsy, which revealed cancer markers. Then, a battery of blood tests to confirm the diagnosis.

And here I am…