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It is well known that cancer cells feed on glucose, the simplest sugar. Now a new piece of research has shown that at least one form of cancer also feeds on the sugar fructose and that is bad news; because fructose is everywhere in the modern Western diet.

For this new study researchers took pancreatic cancer cells from human patients and grew them in the lab. They then added glucose to one group of the cells and fructose to another group. Using mass spectrometry to track the sugars the researchers found that pancreatic cells did distinguish between fructose and glucose even though they are chemically almost identical. The cancer cells used fructose to manufacture nucleic acids which they then used to make RNA and DNA. This allows the cancer cells to divide and grow.

The capacity of fructose to increase cancer growth is bad news as fructose consumption has increased dramatically in recent decades.