How Refined Sugar Fuels Cancer
All dietary carbohydrates are digested into sugars called glucose. Glucose, in turn, can be metabolized (burned) for fuel using two different pathways. First, the glucose is metabolized into pyruvate. The pyruvate can then either enter the glycolysis pathway in the cytoplasm of the cell and produce lactate (this is an inefficient backup pathway), or it can be converted into acetyl-CoA and shuttled to the mitochondrial electron transport chain, which results in optimal energy production