We went to the farmer’s market this morning, the way we do most Saturdays. Tomatoes still warm from the field, peaches you can smell before you see them, a man at the end selling honey out of his own hives.
Near the last row there was a booth for the American Cancer Society. Volunteers in matching shirts, a donation jar, information sheets fanned out on the table. Good people giving up a Saturday for a cause that has touched almost every family in America, ours included.
They were handing out free ice cream.
Ann saw it before I did. She usually does. She said something about the irony of it — a cancer booth handing out ice cream, when sugar is what cancer feeds on.
Neither of us had to stand there working it out. When you have spent years watching how food and disease fit together, a thing like that jumps straight out at you.
The volunteers at that table did nothing wrong. Somebody donated ice cream, somebody else thought it would draw people over, and it worked — there was a line. Nobody in that tent was trying to hurt anyone. That is exactly what makes it worth talking about. This isn’t a story about bad people. It’s a story about how normal something has become that ought to stop us in our tracks.
The Scan Already Knows
Here is the part most people never hear.
When a doctor wants to find cancer in the body, one of the most common tools is a PET scan. The patient is injected with a substance called FDG — fluorodeoxyglucose. Strip the long name away and you have a sugar molecule with a radioactive tag attached to it.
Then everyone waits about an hour while the body does what bodies do with sugar: sends it where it’s wanted most. And on the scan, the tumors light up. Brighter than muscle, brighter than bone, brighter than healthy tissue. Because tumors consume glucose faster than almost anything else in the body.
That is not a fringe idea from the edges of nutrition. It is the operating principle of the machine. The entire test works because cancer is hungry for sugar in a way that healthy tissue is not.
It goes further. Before that scan, the patient is told not to eat. Four hours minimum, six is common, water only. At the hospital, they prick a finger and check blood sugar, and if it’s too high the scan gets postponed and rescheduled for another day.
Why? Because if there’s already sugar circulating in the bloodstream from a meal, the tumor takes up the food instead of the tracer — and the cancer becomes harder to see. High blood sugar can wash out the picture and turn a real finding into a scan that looks clean.
Read that again slowly. The sugar you ate goes to the tumor first, and it goes there in enough quantity to hide it from the scan.
Medicine understands this well enough to build a billion-dollar imaging technology on it, and to reschedule a frightened patient’s appointment over a doughnut in the waiting room. And then that same patient walks down the hall, past a vending machine, and out through a lobby with a coffee cart in it.
What’s on the Tray
If you have sat beside a hospital bed during treatment — and a great many of the people reading this have — you already know what shows up on the tray.
Red gelatin. Pudding cups. Ginger ale. Apple juice in a foil-topped cup. Cookies wrapped in cellophane. Ice cream, in a great many cases. Bowls of hard candy at the infusion chairs, and at some centers, tokens or coupons for the machines downstairs.
One hand is delivering a drug designed to kill fast-dividing cells. The other hand is delivering the fuel those cells prefer above all others. Both hands belong to people who genuinely want that patient to live.
Why Good People Do This
There is a reason, and it’s a real one.
Weight loss during cancer treatment is genuinely dangerous. Appetite disappears. Nausea arrives and stays. Food tastes like metal, or like nothing at all. Patients waste away, and the wasting itself can become the thing that takes them. So the staff standing in that room have one urgent goal: get calories into this person, whatever calories they will actually keep down.
When someone has kept nothing down for two days and finally sips half a cup of ginger ale and it stays, that feels like a victory. I understand why it feels that way.
But calories are not the same thing as nourishment. A body under that kind of assault needs minerals, enzymes, antioxidants, phytonutrients — the raw material for rebuilding. Sugar water delivers none of it. It delivers energy in the one form the disease is best equipped to use, and it leaves the immune system, which is the body’s actual defense against cancer, no better supplied than it was an hour ago.
We are not choosing between sugar and starvation. That’s a false choice, and it’s the one almost every family gets handed.
What We Actually Know
The relationship between sugar and cancer is better established than most people realize.
Cancer cells run their metabolism differently from healthy cells, burning through enormous amounts of glucose — a pattern researchers have described for a century. A 2022 review in the journal Cancers examined the evidence and concluded that excess added sugar is tied both to the development of cancer and to worse progression in people who already have it, separately from anything sugar does by way of weight gain.
There’s a second pathway too. Sugar drives insulin, and insulin brings insulin-like growth factor along with it. Those are growth signals. They tell cells to divide. In a body where some cells have already lost the ability to stop dividing, that is not a neutral message to be sending several times a day.
None of this means a bowl of ice cream causes cancer. It means that in a body already fighting, what arrives on the tray is not a small matter, and it deserves more thought than it currently gets.
What God’s Design Points Toward
Genesis 1:29 says God gave us every seed-bearing plant and every tree with fruit for food. Notice that sweetness was never withheld from us. A ripe peach in August is one of the great pleasures on this earth, and it came from His hand.
But look at how it arrives. The sweetness in a peach comes wrapped in fiber that slows it down, water that dilutes it, enzymes that help you break it down, and a payload of vitamins and minerals riding along with it. Nothing about it hits the bloodstream the way a can of soda does.
That’s the design. Sweetness inside a package of nourishment. What we have done in the last hundred years is strip the package away and keep the sweetness — and then hand the leftovers to the sickest people in the building.
But Not Yet, If You’re in the Fight
Here is where we have to say something that may surprise you, because it is not what we normally teach.
When cancer is active in the body, we pull back even on the good sugars. Fruit included.
That is not how we talk about fruit in any other season of life. Fruit is one of the best things you can put in your body. But we have never told anyone to eat it freely. Even in good health we hold fruit to no more than about fifteen percent of what goes in over a day, because most of us arrived here after decades of the standard American diet, and the body is still working its way back from all that sugar. But a body with a tumor in it is running under different rules, and sugar is sugar to a cancer cell whether it arrived in a candy bar or a bowl of grapes. The package around it slows things down. It does not make the sugar disappear.
So during active disease we keep fruit small and infrequent, and we lean toward the lowest-sugar options — berries, a small green apple — rather than the sweetest ones.
And no fruit juice. None. Not the fresh-squeezed kind, not the hundred-percent kind, not the organic kind. The moment you take the fiber out of fruit you are drinking concentrated sugar with nothing left to slow it down, which is precisely the thing we are trying to avoid. Vegetable juice is a different matter entirely, and it is one of the best things you can do — but eat your fruit, don’t drink it.
This is a season, not a sentence. Once you are through — once there is no sign of disease left to fight — the peaches come back. Which is rather the point of getting through.
The body was built with remarkable capacity to repair itself when the conditions are right. That capacity doesn’t disappear because someone gets a diagnosis — but it does depend on being given something to work with.
If Someone You Love Is in Treatment
Start by replacing, not by fighting. Nobody wins an argument with a nurse at 2 a.m.
- Bring your own drinks. Water with lemon, herbal tea, warm broth. Ginger tea does for nausea what ginger ale was pretending to do, without twenty-eight grams of sugar riding along.
- Pack real food for infusion days. Soft, mild, simple. Blended vegetable soup in a thermos. Avocado. Soft-cooked zucchini or green beans. Something that would still be food if you took the label off.
- Get fresh vegetable juice in wherever it will go. Cucumber, celery, collard and dandelion greens, carrot in moderation, a little ginger and lemon. Vegetable juice, never fruit juice. On the days when nobody in the house has the strength to run a juicer — and in treatment there are a great many of those days — a glass of BarleyMax stirred into water takes about thirty seconds and goes down easy.
- Ask for a referral to a nutritionally minded practitioner. The oncology team is managing the treatment; that’s a different job from managing what the body is being built out of.
- Read the labels on what’s handed to you. Not to be difficult. Just so you know.
- Go easy on fruit for now. Small portions, and the lower-sugar end of it — berries, a small green apple. Fruit is not the enemy; it is simply not the season for much of it.
And be gentle with yourself here. If your family has already been through this and none of it was on your radar at the time, that is not a failure on your part. Nobody told you. That’s rather the whole point of this article.
Where Supplements Fit
Toward the back, not the front. During treatment the foundation is what’s on the plate and in the glass — real food, real juice, real water. Certain supports have a real place alongside that, but they are not the answer to a hospital tray full of sugar, and no capsule undoes what a steady drip of soda is doing. Food first, always. The right supports come second, and they work far better on top of a good foundation than in place of one.
The one families in treatment ask us about most is BarleyMax, and it belongs in this article for a reason: it isn’t really a supplement. It is barley grass juice with the water taken out. It goes in a glass, not a pill bottle, which puts it on the food side of the line rather than this one. For years now people have written and called to tell us it was the thing they could get down on the days nothing else would stay, and that the chemo weeks went differently because of it.
The Thing Worth Holding On To
I don’t tell this story to make anyone angry at the American Cancer Society, or at hospitals, or at doctors who have given their lives to helping sick people. Most of them have never been taught any of this. It wasn’t in their training. That is a failure of a system, not of the people inside it.
But you’re not required to wait for the system to catch up.
You can decide what goes in your cart this week. You can decide what you bring to the hospital on Tuesday. You can decide what your grandchildren learn to reach for when they want something sweet. Those decisions are yours, they cost nothing, and they don’t require anyone’s permission.
We saw a booth handing out ice cream to fight cancer this morning. We’re going to see things like that for a long time yet. In the meantime, there are peaches at the market. They’re wonderful, they were designed for you, and if this is a season where you have to walk past them, they will still be there when you come back.
Questions We Hear Most Often
Q: Does sugar actually cause cancer?
A: Sugar isn’t the single cause of cancer — the picture is bigger than any one food. What the evidence shows is that excess added sugar is tied to higher risk of developing cancer, and to worse progression in people who already have it. Add to that the fact that cancer cells consume glucose far faster than healthy tissue, and it becomes clear that sugar is not a neutral player in a body that is already fighting.
Q: If sugar feeds cancer, why do hospitals serve it?
A: Because keeping weight on a patient during treatment is a genuine emergency, and the staff will take any calories a patient can keep down. It comes from real concern. The trouble is that calories and nourishment are two different things, and a body in that fight needs minerals, enzymes, and antioxidants far more than it needs another cup of juice.
Q: What is a PET scan actually measuring?
A: A PET scan injects a sugar molecule with a radioactive tag on it, then photographs where that sugar goes. Tumors take it up faster than surrounding tissue, so they show up bright on the image. Patients are told to fast beforehand and have their blood sugar checked, because sugar already circulating in the blood competes with the tracer and can make cancer harder to see.
Q: Should someone in treatment stop eating fruit?
A: Not stop, but pull back. We never tell anyone to eat fruit freely — even in good health we keep it to no more than about fifteen percent of the day’s intake — and during active disease it comes down further still. The fiber and water in whole fruit slow the sugar down, but they don’t make it disappear, and a cancer cell doesn’t care where the glucose came from. So during active disease we keep fruit to small portions and lean toward the lowest-sugar options — berries, a small green apple — rather than the sweetest. Fruit juice comes out altogether, since juicing removes the one thing that was slowing it down. Once there’s no sign of disease, fruit comes back.
Q: If sugar is the problem, what about carrot juice?
A: It’s the question we get more than any other, and it deserves a better answer than a paragraph. The short version: carrot juice is a low-glycemic food — around nine grams of sugar in a cup, against twenty-one in the same cup of orange juice — and what rides along with that sugar is a concentrated dose of compounds that work against cancer rather than for it. It is not the same transaction as a can of soda, and treating it as though it were is a mistake that costs people one of the most nourishing things available to them. We’ve written the whole case out separately, evidence and cautions both.
Q: How do I bring this up without offending my loved one’s medical team?
A: You usually don’t have to bring it up at all. Bring your own food and drinks, quietly, and let the tray sit. If you’d like more support, ask for a referral to a nutritionally minded health care professional who can work alongside the oncology team rather than against it.
Where to Begin
If this is new to you and you’re wondering what to actually put on the plate instead, that’s the right question — and it’s the one we’ve spent decades answering. MyHDiet.com is where we teach the plant-based, enzyme-rich foundation that gives the body real material to rebuild with. Start there, start small, and start with one meal.
And if the person you were thinking about while you read this is in the fight right now, Ann — my wife, the one who spotted that ice cream table before I did — wrote a book for exactly that situation. Unravel the Mystery walks through what cancer is actually responding to and what to do about it, and the companion recipe book answers the question this article raises but does not fully solve: what do you put on the plate tomorrow morning.
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