Pigging Out on Bread Could Give You Kidney Cancer, Study Shows

Darn, it’s a challenge to keep up with the massive amount of SUGAR SHOCKING news! I’m telling you: Companies seeking to dodge obesity culpability come out with new programs often, and medical studies come out right and left, offering irrefutable evidence linking all those culprit carbs (as I call them — i.e., refined carbs) with any number of diseases.

Now comes yet another study, this one from northern Italy, which links high bread consumption with almost doubling the risk of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and pasta and rice contributing modestly to an increase in its development. (RCC is the most common type of kidney cancer, accounting for 2 % of cancer in adults.)

Francesca Bravi, M.D. and colleagues at the Milan-based Institute of Pharmacological Research Mario Negri were the researchers who came up with these fascinating findings.

Interestingly, vegetables, whether cooked or raw, significantly reduced the risk of this type of cancer, the researchers reported online in the International Journal of Cancer.

The Italian scientists suggest that this association between high cereal intake (bread, pasta and rice) "may be due to the high glycemic index of these foods and their possible involvement in insulin-like growth factors."

They conclude: "Our results confirm that diet may play a role on the risk of RCC, and in particular, a moderate cereal and high vegetable consumption may have a favorable effect on this neoplasm."

This is yet another of many important studies, a number of of which I wrote about in my upcoming book SUGAR SHOCK! (Berkley Books, Dec. 26, 2006).

To be "transparent" (as super information marketer Alex Mandossian, one of my mentors, likes to say), somehow this study slipped right by me — oops!, neither my research assistant Jennifer nor I learned about it — that is, until my blogging buddy Jimmy Moore wrote about it on his provocative Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb blog.

For more info, you also can read the Eureka Alert about the study and a MedPageToday.com article about it.