Can You Have A "Sweet Tooth" With Prostate Cancer?

Given the vast numbers of men diagnosed with prostate cancer, undoubtedly there are many who have eaten fruit-rich diets and stayed PC-free and many who have eaten fruit-rich diets and not stayed PC-free (and all diets in-between). There are many factors at play, so it's pretty much impossible to say whether the various outcomes were due to, or despite, fruit choices.

Even strict Keto diets allow for moderate amounts of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cantaloupe, and watermelon (yuck!!!), along with high-cocoa (85%+) dark chocolate, so you can satisfy your sweet tooth without sugar overload.

I personally have a terrible sweet tooth, but I kept a fairly strict Mediterranean keto diet from diagnosis this past January to surgery in June. I have mostly fallen off the keto wagon post-RARP (including eating some junky sweets), but I still skip breakfast and eat a large salad for lunch most days. I've had two consecutive undetectable post-op PSA tests, but that doesn't mean anyone should follow my dietary example.

I will state up front that this comment will be helpful to no one and is certainly not advice.

I am 70 years old. I have congestive heart failure and stage IVB prostate cancer. I'll be damned if I'm going to restrict myself to foods that do not give me pleasure. One of highlights of the quality of life I cherish is to enjoy my meals and my snacks. I'm pretty certain that a T-Bone or candy bar is the least of my problems. I do not eat what my dinner eats for dinner and for those that are unaware, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are their own food group. 😁

The trick with fruits is you eat whole fruits not juice from fruits. That allows your body to absorb the sugar more slowly. I’ve been specifically told by a dietitian that I should not be drinking fruit juices because of this. Orange juice is great, but it’s full of sugar and drinking orange juice straight isn’t great. Eating whole oranges is just fine.

The amount of glucose in your bloodstream is regulated by your pancreas, and the energy from everything you digest is eventually converted to glucose, regardless of what form it started in.

You need glucose in your bloodstream to survive and maintain consciousness. If the pancreas stops working properly, then your blood sugar can get too high (diabetes) or too low (reactive hypoglycemia) after eating, but otherwise, the fact that your cancer cells rely on glucose for energy — like every other cell in your body — doesn't mean that every time you eat something sweet, your cancer spreads. I expect you'd lose consciousness and go into a coma long before you were able to lower your blood sugar enough to starve the cancer cells.

... but that said ...

Type 2 diabetes is a serious risk when we're aging, and being on hormone therapy (like ADT) increases that risk still further. Bombing your pancreas with a lot of sugar at once makes it work harder than when the sugar trickles in from digesting a complex carbohydrate, and eventually your pancreas can become damaged and unable to maintain your blood sugar in the normal range. THAT'S why it's a good idea to go easy on the simple carbohydrates: not because cancer cells (like all cells) use glucose as fuel (we can't do anything about that), but because you don't want to beat cancer only to have to fight diabetes. So if you're not already diabetic, pre-diabetic, or genetically-predisposed to type-2 diabetes, make sweets just a "sometimes" treat, in moderate portions; if you are, talk to your doctor about what's safe.

I hope this helps.

I have to agree with Jeff and North - sugar overload is not healthy for our body for many reasons. Drinking prepacked juice is absolutely not recommended - however if juice is produced in a home blender using a WHOLE vegetable or a fruit, it is another matter.
As long as there is NO added sugar and fiber is not removed and it is not consumed in ridiculous amounts, that should be OK. One carrot in a blander is healthy thing - 15 carrots in a juice bottle or carton with added color, preservatives and sugar is not.

Regarding sugar intake and cancer - as far as I read it is not about amount of glucose per se, it is about effect of EXCESS sugar on our body, inclooding cancer cells.

Excess sugars cause inflammatory processes that support cancer growth and even can cause cancer. It is all about sugar spikes - those are a problem, not sugar per se. Our body uses any food to brake it down to glucose and use it as energy and that is a normal process but overloading our body with big amounts of excess sugars IS a problem since it effects our body on so many levels by messing up metabolism and causing inflammation which in return is supporting cancer growth. So eating strawberries - no problem, eating strawberries with ice cream and chocolate chip cookie crumbles - could be a problem.

I am a big proponent of supplements and veggie and fruit based diet, but I do not believe that one single thing can "arrest" any cancer by itself, so if you wish to help your body heal or prevent cancer growth you should have multi faceted approach that will be beneficial to your body in general - do whatever your doctor recommends, have a healthy veggie and fruit based diet with possibly plant based protein and occasional animal based protein source, eat non processed diet and try to exercise every day : ) (30 min of any activity that rises your heart-rate is good).

Making your own juice is great!

Personally, I'm comfortable enjoying a glass of store-bought unsweetened orange juice with my breakfast, combined with a protein (unsweetened peanut butter) and a complex carbohydrate (toasted, home-made whole wheat bread).

That's a good way to ensure that my pancreas sees a steady input of glucose rather than a single big sugar bomb, like would happen if I regularly had fruit juice with something like sugary cereal (which I don't eat) or pancakes with maple syrup (which is a very rare "sometimes" treat).

Managing sugar input isn't difficult: it's mostly just a matter of common-sense moderation and balance.

Sugar, on its own, has downsides. As someone who has been very careful about what I eat (and failing often, admittedly because... cravings), fruit juice is pretty bad for you. Even blended fruit can be bad for you. The reason is that you can "drink" far more than you will typically eat. How many oranges does it take to make a glass of juice? Say it's 5-7 for a full glass. Now what is the chance you will eat 5-7 oranges? Yes, of course, you get the fiber if you eat them and it makes you full, but the point is that you would never naturally consume all that sugar in one sitting, nor should you consume it in pure juice form either.

That being said, most reports about sugar's impact on caner are fairly anecdotal. Consider that eggs have been good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, good bad and now they are super healthy for you for some reason. Butter was the bane of all evil, now it's considered healthy when in moderation. The old rule of thumb still applies: just about anything in moderation.

The moral of the story is eat responsibly. Maybe it's good for cancer, maybe it's bad but without you relegating yourself to drinking filtered water and eating/drinking nothing else then you can pretty much guarantee that someone, somewhere, has an opinion about how your diet is impacting your [insert malady here].

@survivor5280 Agreed. Enjoy fruit juice and smoothies (however prepared), but remember that you're drinking concentrated fruit, and adjust according to your personal dietary needs.

It's not that they're bad for you, per se: it's just that they can sneak up on you, because you can consume a lot of them without feeling full, so you don't get the same "this is enough" signals you get when you're eating plain fruit.

I would just like to add that not everybody reacts with sugar spikes to the same kind of food as does somebody else. Yes - there are known offenders that will cause spike for all, but some other things , like steal cut home made oatmeal can cause spike for one person and not so much for another and so on, and so on.

The best way to check what is casing "your" spike is to buy Libre device, or similar (there are many on the market now) and check your sugar levels for a month by observing what kinds of food do cause big spikes and for how long they last.

My husband is developing application for diabetic patients that could help with proper dietary changes and sugar control and as a test we both used Libre for a month (he for 3 mos) even though we are not even pre diabetic, just to see how it works and out of curiosity. We both have the same fasting sugar and A1C BTW.

We both reacted differently to different food !!! For me oatmeal did not cause spike, for him it did, for example. We also had different reaction for different fruits etc. etc. The point is, if you wish to really see what food and how much it effects your glucose, maybe invest in Libre for just one month and observe how you react to certain food. It might even help you stop eating some sugary things since once you see that spike your eyes pop out ha ha ! Orange juice for me is a no-no, but blubbery shake with soy milk is not.

Spikes can be tamed by adding fiber and healthy oils to a meal (as North is doing) so if your favorite oatmeal causes spike - try adding fiber (low glycemic index fruit like blueberries, strawberries etc ) and healthy oils (nuts, oily seeds, coconut etc ) and see if it will help, for example.

New research also points to interesting observation that it also depends of the order of things consumed in a single meal. It is the best to start with high fiber item, than protein and than eating carbs from your plate - one will have minor spike while staring with carbs will cause significant spike even though the rest of the meal is balanced. I tried it and it was true for me and my husband.

Our body is very fine tuned machine and we should show some care and some respect lol ; ). Libre opened my eyes to many things about metabolism in general.

Without being specific to carrot juice……. Many types of cancers gobble up sugar - lymphoma, lung, and brain cancers (just to name a few) are very avid for sugar (glucose).

With this in mind, years ago (in 1999) a glucose-based PET scan - F18-FDG (Fluoro-2-Deoxyglucose) PET CT - was developed. It worked great for detecting lymphoma, lung, and brain cancers; it didn’t work so well for detecting low-grade prostate cancer (but, it did work well for detecting advanced prostate cancers).

Here’s a short PCRI presentation from 2019 that discusses this topic: https://youtu.be/-PyqazlkpCE

Jusf as with most things in life, all cancers are not created equal. What you’ll often read is that a heart-healthy diet is a prostate-healthy diet.