Sugar might raise cancer risk by messing with your body's insulin and causing inflammation, not by directly feeding cancer cells like many people think.

Eating sugar doesn't directly make cancer grow faster in people. Cancer cells do use sugar differently, but that's just how they work, not because of what we eat.

Eating a lot of sugar makes your body produce more insulin and IGF-1, which are like strong growth signals. Cancer cells have more receptors for these signals, so they grow faster and more aggressively than normal cells when exposed to high sugar.

Studies looking at sugar in our diet and cancer mostly find no clear link. When a link is found, it's usually only in people with certain health conditions, and it often goes away when you account for things like body weight and how much food people eat overall.

Some lab tests show sugar might help tumors grow in artificial settings, but this might not happen in real human bodies under normal conditions.

Drinking sugary drinks might increase your chance of getting cancer because of the sugar they contain. For every extra spoonful of sugar you drink daily, your cancer risk could go up by 16%. When scientists looked just at the sugar part, the link between sugary drinks and cancer disappeared, which points to sugar as the main reason for this connection.