Low-Calorie Drinks To Reduce Bowel Cancer Recurrence?

I enjoy researching and trying to find anything in the world that possibly may help our cancer patients at New Hope Unlimited. Sometimes I come across an article or study that really impresses me and sometimes there is one that I absolutely don’t believe. I am reporting on this article but I do not believe in it. Artificially sweetened  drinks may not contain sugar but they possibly have enough chemicals in them to cause cancer somewhere in the body. Read this for yourself and make your decision as to what you believe. I feel that the herb Stevia is a wonderful substitute for sugar.

Drinking artificially sweetened soft drinks like diet colas may be linked to a lower risk of cancer return or death in those patients who have stage 3 colorectal cancer.  Catharine Paddock PhD composed an article that was fact checked by Jasmin Collier explaining this theory.

They believe that 1/2 of the effect is due to artificially sweetened options displacing the sugar-sweetened ones.  A study published in the journal PLOS ONE, investigated the relationship between artificially sweetened soft drinks and advanced bowel cancer.  Co-senior study author Prof. Charles S. Fuchs, director of the Yale Cancer Center at Yale University in New Haven, Ct, says that artificially sweetened drinks help to avoid cancer recurrence and death in those who have been treated for advanced colon cancer.

He admits these popular drinks have a checkered reputation and are believed to carry health risks, despite the absence of documented evidence to back this up.  Fuchs and his colleagues suggest their findings should now be confirmed with further studies.

Bowel or colorectal cancer starts in the part of the intestines that includes the large bowel or colon, and the rectum, the part that joins the colon to the anus.  It begins as small growths or polyps, on the inner lining of the bowel, even though most do not become cancerous.  They are usually removed during screening to further prevent the chance of cancer.  Bowel cancer is the third most common and the second biggest killer in the U.S. among cancers in both women and men.

In the U.S. the latest statistics show there were 38 new cases of bowel cancer and 14 deaths for every 100,000 people in 2015.  As this cancer progresses, the primary tumor grows and spreads through the blood or lymph system, breaking away cells to give rise to secondary tumors in other parts of the body.  The process is metastasis.  In stage 4, the most advanced stage, it has spread to other parts of the body.  The less advanced stage is 3 and has not reached distance organs but might have reached the nearby ones.

A growing body of literature has linked recurrence and death in colon cancer to states of excess energy balance, typically marked by factors such as diabetes, raised glycemic load and higher consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks.  Nobody has yet studied whether or not consuming artificially sweetened soft drinks might have an effect on colon cancer recurrence and survival.  They analyzed data from 1,018 patients diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer who had been taking part in an adjuvant chemotherapy trial.  They had filled out questionnaires concerning their diet during and after treatment.  Statistical tools were used to measure the strength of links between the consumption of artificially sweetened drinks and cancer recurrence and death.  Data spanned a median follow-up period of 7.3 years after the first questionnaire.  After this period, 348 patients experienced either new primary tumors or recurrence of their colon cancer.  Of these, there were 265 who died during the follow-up.

They believe that switching to artificially sweetened drinks after cancer has become advanced can make a different. Even though concerns have been expressed about artificial sweeteners increasing diabetes, obesity and cancer, the evidence is not conclusive.  The association between these sweetened beverages and lower colon cancer recurrence and death was stronger than suspected, according to Fuchs.

Dr Fredda Branyon