High Blood Sugar and Polyps
“White pasta, white rice and white bread are just like sugar,” Dr. Fuhrman explains, “These nutrient-deficient foods are absorbed too rapidly, which raises glucose, triglyceride, and insulin levels in your blood.” And high blood sugar is bad for polyp recurrence. Megan Rauscher of Reuters explains:
People found to have elevated insulin or blood sugar levels at the time of colonoscopy to remove polyps face an increased risk of developing recurrent polyps, including advanced polyps -- the type with a high likelihood of progressing to cancer, research shows.I hate to sound like a low-carb lemming, but, it sure seems like a good idea to avoid all that refined bread-like junk—egad!
What's concerning is that the levels of blood sugar that produce this increased risk are actually not very high; they are "right at the border" of what doctors would consider "pre-diabetes," Dr. Andrew Flood of University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, noted in comments to Reuters Health.
For this reason, doctors and patients may want to consider more aggressive management of blood sugar than they might otherwise among people who have already had one or more polyps removed, Flood said.
