Find evidence that eating a lot of fat can boost cancer

In the past, it was thought that sugar is an energy source that can help cancer spread but it seems that fat itself is the culprit.

Finding cancer treatments has been a top priority of medicine in the 21st century. And it seems that the fight against this disease has another step forward, when Recently experts have found an agent that promotes the growth of cancer cells. It is fat, or fat in general .

Previously, experts had recognized a proof that cancer cells needed fat to grow. Now, they find more evidence that just by preventing cancer cells from absorbing fat, they can stop the cancer's metastasis.

Fat can cause cancer to spread.

In fact, metastasis is the main cause of cancer deaths. For one thing, the science that takes many years has not really understood why and how cancer cells can grow at a fast pace, while the process takes a lot of energy: from separation, move through the bloodstream, then root into other parts of the body.

In the past, medicine used to assume that sugar was the source of energy for metastasis. But at the beginning of 2016, some experts hypothesized: Is there ever a new fat factor? And research recently published in the journal Nature adds weight to this hypothesis.

First, the team identified cells that cause oral cancer in mice to spread, so that they realized that some fatty acids - including palmitic acid in palm oil - could promote metastasis.

Some fatty acids - including palmitic acid in palm oil - can promote metastasis.

More specifically, inside the cancer cells of mice have the presence of CD36 in very large concentrations. CD36 is a form of protein receptor that helps cells absorb fat. For some people, there was also some connection between CD36 and cancer patients.

So, the experts decided to try and see if the CD36 was blocked, what would happen. As a result, almost all of the metastasis process has stopped, although it cannot prevent the first tumor from forming.

"We assume that metastatic cells can only form if there are certain fatty acids. However, we still cannot understand exactly why," said study leader Salvador Aznar Benitah . CD36 key can prevent metastatic cancer ".

It seems that eating a lot of fat causes cancer to spread easily.

In addition, the experiment also showed that mice with a high-fat diet would have larger tumors and larger spreads than normal mice.

However, experts say the study is only theoretical and experimental in mice, so there is no guarantee that it is the same in humans. At this time, it is still too early to give any advice regarding human diet, especially for cancer patients.

"This is the first and very important step. Now we can identify where the cell is responsible for metastatic cancer, while also providing the potential for further research on cancer. in the future "- Benitah shared.