Professor Sarah Berry

speaker

555 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Professor Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · How to eat sugar without gaining weight (crush your cravings and end energy crashes) | Prof Tim Spector & Prof Sarah Berry · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

Yes, there might be some small direct effect

sugar in terms of cancer, but most of the evidence is an indirect, where sugar is associated with an increased risk of excess calorie consumption and therefore obesity.

So people with a high sugar intake tend to have higher levels of BMI, so tend to be living with obesity.

And then we know that having more adipose tissue, so fat tissue creates this very pro-inflammatory state, releases other hormones, et cetera, et cetera.

And we know that it's that

excess adiposity, that excess fat tissue that is particularly harmful for many cancers.

So it's more likely to be that indirect effect.

Yes.

So there's many cancers.

Colon cancer is a great example.

There's other cancers as well, like breast cancer.

You have significantly increased risk of colon cancer if you are overweight because you have metabolic disturbances, you have increased inflammation and so forth.

Now, there's some interesting data that's been coming out recently showing that if you limit your sugar intake, so go on like a ketogenic style diet, so where you have almost no carbohydrates, you're not increasing any circulating glucose, that if you're going through treatment for cancer, like chemotherapy, that it can actually improve your response to cancer treatment, because there's this theory that you're starving the cancer cells of important fuel cells.

because you're starving them of sugar, of glucose, but you're still going to be producing glucose anyway in the body.

So it's something that is a kind of watch this space, but I know lots of people are talking about it.

So it's important to mention that while we talk about cancer.

But I do think that there is no strong evidence that sugar on its own, independent of excess calorie intake, independent of sugar,

obesity is carcinogenic, and the WHO, the World Health Organization, does not class it as a carcinogenic, so a cancer-causing agent.

Absolutely not.

Look, we all want a simple answer.

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