The Surprising Link Between Sugar and Cancer

Cutting sugar to starve a tumour is the most repeated cancer-diet advice on the internet. After 26 years treating patients from over 50 countries at Envita, Dr. Prato thinks it's also one of the most misunderstood.

This video walks through what actually drives the link between diet and cancer, why two people can eat the exact same meal and have completely different metabolic outcomes, and the lever that almost nobody talks about because it isn't visible on the plate. You'll see how insulin, IGF, and chronic inflammation create the conditions cancer cells actually thrive in, what a clean diet on paper can hide in the bloodwork, and the markers a sharper doctor would run alongside a standard panel.

By the end you'll have a tighter mental model, a specific list of tests to ask for, and a few practical levers you can move once your own physician signs off. Nothing here replaces a conversation with your own doctor, especially anyone in active treatment.

📍 Envita Medical Centers – Scottsdale, AZ
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“Prevention isn’t just about what you avoid — it’s about how you support your body.”

Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your licensed healthcare provider before making any medical decisions. Individual results will vary, and Envita Medical Centers does not guarantee outcomes. Some treatments discussed may not be FDA-approved or available in all locations. Testimonials are shared with patient consent and may not reflect typical results. Do not delay or disregard professional medical care based on the podcast's content. Certain treatments may be available only at Envita’s international clinic in Hermosillo, Mexico. No specific outcomes are promised or implied.
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Outcomes Disclaimer
The results referenced from Envita's Precision Cancer Care: 35-Fold Improvement in Response Rates are from a retrospective analysis of 199 late-stage cancer patients treated at Envita Medical Centers between 2021 and 2023, as published in the Journal of Cancer Therapy. These outcomes are not guaranteed and will vary based on individual factors such as cancer type, stage, genetics, immunity and prior treatments. Any comparisons to standard care or clinical trials are based on published data and internal analysis, not head-to-head studies. Individual results will vary.

You can read the full peer-reviewed study at: 

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=132493

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Everyone by now has heard the link between sugar and cancer, and that cancer is fed by sugar. So cut the sugar, starve the tumor. It's one of the most repeated pieces of cancer diet advice on the internet. And there's some truth to that. No one should be eating refined carbohydrates and lots of sugar. It's not good for any disease. And in my opinion, it's one of the most misunderstood areas in the diet because the real story is really not about sugar alone, but it's about your body and how your body responds. In fact, when we do in-depth testing with transcriptnomics, where we look at over a thousand points and we can see what's feeding the cancer and causing the cancer with deep multiomics, guess what we find? Sometimes the sugar is playing a little role, if any, in the cancer. It might be another thing, like other factors impacting the cancer. But we also need some of that sugar for the immune system. So two people can eat the same exact meal, and one of them feeds the process that helps the cancer thrive, while the other one doesn't. And the variable that changes that outcome is not just the food on your plate, it's something almost nobody else is talking about. And it's measurable and it's something you can actually move. My team and I have helped thousands of patients who fail the top cancer hospitals across the country. And we've done that using precision targeting, the latest technologies from around the world. And we see a certain pattern that emerges. And I'm going to go into that here. That shows up in the blood work. And it has very little to do with sugar, but we're going to talk about it anyways. In the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through what's really driving the link between diet and cancer. Why cutting sugar alone misses sometimes the bigger level. And what I'd actually like to do is show you how this works. Before you change anything, make sure you're working with a doctor and let's get started. When people say sugar feeds cancer, they're not completely wrong. Cancer cells do use glucose, they use a process called fermentation, and that is how they feed themselves. So glucose is a thing. That part's real. Your body turns many foods into glucose. Cancer cells can use that fuel tool. And yes, a chronically unhealthy, metabolic environment can absolutely work against you. That's where high insulin, your glucose levels are high. But that sentence is incomplete because it makes people think that the whole story lives on the fork or exactly what you're eating. And that's not the full case. A bigger story often lives in our blood work. So let me explain what I mean. Imagine two people eating the same bowl of pasta. I'm Italian, that's something that's very commonly done on Sundays. The same plate, the same portion, the same time of day. And one person handles the meal pretty well. They have a better metabolism for that, and their blood sugar rises and then comes down normally. Their pancreas releases insulin and their cells respond in the way they should. They have metabolic flexibility. The fuel gets in and gets handled correctly, and the system does what it's supposed to do. The other person eats the exact same meal, but their system does something very different. Their blood sugar rises high, their insulin spikes higher, and their cells do not respond the way they should. And the body has to pump out more insulin to compensate. And instead of clearing the meal efficiently, they stay metabolically disturbed for hours. Same food, different biology, different outcomes. And that's the part that no one's talking about. The problem is not just sugar. Yes, we don't want to eat refined carbohydrates, and I'm not a proponent of eating large dishes of pasta, but the problem is metabolic response. That's what I want people to understand that food matters, but how your body handles that food matters even more. So, what's actually happening? Here's a very simple version. When you eat carbohydrates, your blood sugar rises. That's normal. Your pancreas releases insulin, and that's normal. Insulin does its job, it helps move the glucose out of the bloodstream and into your cells, into your body, where it can be used for energy or stored for later. That's how the system's supposed to work. The problem starts when that system has been stressed for years. What kind of stress? Too much processed food, too little movement, poor sleep, excessive body fat, too much cortisol from stress. That's a big one most people don't even think about. Visceral fat, chronic stress, like I just talked about, the cortisol, and inflammation. So poor metabolic health over time, eventually the cells stop responding to insulin as well as they should. And that's insulin resistance. Now, the body has a problem. It still has to keep up with the sugar demands and control. So it makes more insulin and more and more and becomes insensitive to it. And that's the problem. The blood sugar stays too elevated and our sugars are high. And that matters because insulin is not just about blood sugar, it affects our hormones. It's a growth signal. And that's what cancer cells used to feed on and grow. And when insulin stays too high for too long, it becomes a growth factor, an inflammatory marker, and it becomes a problem. And it creates a biological environment that is friendly to cancer growth. In fact, if you do a PET scan, what you're really seeing on the imaging is an uptake of glucose because the cancer cells preferentially like glucose as a source of sugar. And that's one of the deeper links people are trying to understand that sugar feeds cancer, but it's just too simplistic. And we can't stop there. It's just a slogan. I want you to understand the real mechanism because once you understand the mechanism, you can stop obsessing over sugar and start asking a better question. How is my metabolic system working? Or said it another way, how well can my body move in and out of a fed and fasted state? Metabolic flexibility without getting stuck in an unhealthy, high insulin inflammatory pattern. See, that's the correct response. That's the bigger level. That's the real conversation. And I've seen this over the years. We have as a clinic all the doctors working, we've seen this over and over. Patients come in saying, I've already cut sugar out. That was the first thing I did. I'm on a ketogenic diet. And sometimes it was helpful, but oftentimes they just did something like clean out the desserts and the soda and the obvious junk foods and the refined carbohydrates. It was a really good first step. But when we look deeper and we look at the blood work, there's a different story. Their A1C hemoglobin might be too high. Their fructosamine is up, their inflammatories are up, their triglycerides, their HDL isn't where we want it to be. It's a little too low. The whole metabolic picture still is strained. So the patient feels confused. They say, but I'm eating clean. And I understand that. But eating clean is not always the same thing as fixing the metabolic problem. That's one of the most important lessons of this entire podcast. Two patients can eat the same dish of pasta and have totally different biologies. One is metabolically flexible, no problem. One is metabolically trapped. One handles the fuel really well, and one runs high insulin and inflammation and cortisol and all the other things after that meal. That's why I don't like the shallow conversation just around sugar itself. It's too simplistic. Because the next question is obvious. How do you know if this is happening to you? What should you actually measure? This is where the conversation gets practical. If I were trying to understand somebody's metabolic risk and their total picture, here are a few of the markers that I'd want to discuss and review. This is what every physician should do. This is really what I know medicine does, but functional medicine doctors probably go into a little bit more detail here. Fasting insulin. A lot of people have normal looking glucose for a while, but their insulin is already working overtime behind the scenes, and it matters. The second one is A1C hemoglobin. It looks at the average, like three-month picture of your blood sugar. That's pretty important. It's useful, but on its own, it's not enough. The third is the fasting glucose. We want to look at that. Then we can look at fructosamine, which is another marker that's showing us that that sugar could be high. C-reactive protein for inflammation. A lot of these you've heard of before. These are the markers because metabolic dysfunction and inflammation often travel together. Then I want to look at the lipid patterns. I want to look at the size of the lipid molecules in addition to the types of lipids. So what's the triglycerides, the HDL, the LDL? Is it small or large particle sizes? Because this all matters to metabolic stress. So normal is not always optimal. A lot of standard lab ranges are built to catch disease when it's already more established. But I'm much more interested, as a lot of doctors are in catching a problem earlier and preventing it, giving ourselves room to repair. That's why trends matter. That's why testing matters. That's why the things that we do and the way that we eat and our activity levels and our sleep are all important to fixing this. It's not just diet. We're looking at changing patterns. So it's not just one thing. If you're a patient, listen to me here, or you're a family member trying to get ahead of this. I would be asking the doctor these questions. Yes, check my fasting insulin, A1C hemoglobin, fasting glucose, C reactive protein, triglycerides, HDL, LDL, do the particle sizes, check the LPIR, the lipoprotein resistance. That's important. All these things are going to tell you a lot. They're going to give you good information, not just whether the values of the labs are standard range, but we want optimal ranges. That's a smart question. So these are the lab side of it. But then we need to do things to improve this. Go for those walks, stay in that zone two exercise. That helps walking, light cycling, swimming, changing the diet, increasing protein at the core of our meal. We're organic foods, grass-fed, wild caught, good vegetables that we can digest, fruits, good fiber, helping the gut microbiome, those are all gonna help us. But then the next question is really, really important and practical that most people aren't gonna think about. How do we go about this? So step one, we're gonna look at sleep because poor sleep drives metabolic dysfunction. And the reason you might be getting poor sleep might be because glucose is dropping too much at night. And so it makes you wake up, eat protein before you go to bed, a good quality protein. And the real easy way to look at that is you might be, you know, craving foods. Well, get that protein. Drop the cortisol, ashwagandha, rhodiola, right? These might help. Breathing before you go to bed. These all will help reduce the cortisol and reduce that waking up and sleeping better. Cover your eyes, use a circadian rhythm of waking up in the morning looking at the sunlight and reset your sleep. The second is movement. And I've just talked about that. Get your muscles working, weightlifting, weight-bearing exercise, whatever one you like, at least a couple times a week, with walking, rebounding, low-level cycling, swimming. These activities are very good. When you do these things regularly, you're resetting your metabolic health. See, it's not just about sugar, but it's how our body metabolizes the sugar by doing things by increasing fish oil, 3,000 milligrams, phosphatidylcholine, about 2,400 milligrams, liposomal axanthins, which go through the membrane of our cells and our mitochondria. These will reset, giving our body the building blocks for the new receptors on our cell membranes so we can improve our receptors for hormones like insulin. A lot of people never let insulin come down because they're always eating. So maybe intermittent fasting might work for you to help with this, or taking a break and keeping active. All these different things are ways to helping our insulin become flexible. The next piece I want you to look at is protein and fiber first. So make sure you've got good, healthy proteins in the diet. These proteins, grass-fed beefs, wild-caught fish, organic yogurts, fiber, these are important because these foods are gonna help you feel full, they're gonna help you process your sugars slower, and they're gonna give you nutrients. And then you need to decrease those stress levels, not just at bedtime, but all throughout the day. So the healing from why the stress is occurring. So sometimes it's financial, it's family, it's divorces, the loss of somebody close to us, and those need healing. But during that time, you can use tools like ashwagandha, rhodiola that can help reduce the stress levels throughout the day. And that will change your biology, your insulin, your inflammation, your behavior, all because of stress. It changes the way we eat, not stress eating, but from health. We want to put health into our body. And when we do all these things, we're gonna see a big difference in our metabolic flexibility and the effect that has on cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, because we want to fix that metabolic issue. And that matters. We want to be active and we wanna help our body heal from these metabolic dysfunctions. Meal timing is another thing we want to look at because it's not a one size fits all. Aggressive dietary changes are not always the best way to fix this, but changing the way we eat with the right quality of foods, making sure we have enough protein in the diet, enough fiber in the diet, and we're getting enough movement. This, especially after we eat, all these things will help our metabolic flexibility. The goal is to help our bodies handle sugar better. And the goal is to lower that chronic inflammation. See, this is what metabolic syndrome is about, or the metabolic dysfunction. That's the bigger story. That's why we believe it's so important to have this conversation in relationship to cancer patients, because it's not just about shutting the sugar down, but fixing the metabolic function. So we got to stay away from that just slogan that tells people fear sugar and tell people to really empower themselves by fixing their metabolic health. Even if you're a patient that had cancer and now are in remission, these are the things you want to do to avoid the other diseases and stay healthy. By telling people to just avoid sugar, it doesn't teach them how really insulin works and all the different factors. It doesn't teach the why behind metabolic problems, like I just went over. And that's why we need to look at the bigger level of the metabolic system. That's the version we want to fix. That's what we want patients to understand. So you don't have to be in fear or in guilt, but just an understanding that metabolic health is a process and all these little changes you make will add up. So sugar is part of the story, but it's not the whole story. The more important question is whether your body is handling the fuel in the right way, getting the support and health it needs, or whether it's just stuck in this high insulin, high inflammatory and quietly working against you. That's what we want to change. That's the action every cancer patient wants to change. Because now if we eat the right way, we're gonna get our metabolic function better, our immunity better, circulation better. All those things are gonna help us. And the easiest way to do that is by clicking onto this video and following the diet recommendations that I've given and the things that you can do that will really impact your metabolic health. And it's the right way to eat to prevent cancer or if you have cancer, because it can help you. I hope you found this video helpful and it gave you some information about metabolic health going way beyond just avoiding sugar. May the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.