The sugar known as fructose could be a kind of rocket fuel for cancer cells, and lowering fructose intake could be one way to fight the disease, new research suggests.

Fructose is already ubiquitous in American diets, due to the heavy use of super-sweet high-fructose corn syrup in products folks eat every day.

“If you go through your pantry and look for the items that contain high-fructose corn syrup, which is the most common form of fructose, it is pretty astonishing,” said study senior author Gary Patti, a professor of genetics and medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Almost everything has it," he noted in a university news release. "It’s not just candy and cake, but also foods such as pasta sauce, salad dressing and ketchup. Unless you actively seek to avoid it, it’s probably part of your diet.”

The new research shows that fructose differs from other sugars (such as glucose) in the way that it aids and abets cancer cells.

As Patti's team explained, a sugar like glucose is processed throughout the body as a whole.

But fructose is only metabolized in two places: The small intestine and the liver.

Can cancer cells tell the difference between the two sugar types?

“Our initial expectation was that tumor cells metabolize fructose just like glucose, directly utilizing its atoms to build new cellular components such as DNA," explained study lead author Ronald Fowle-Grider, a postdoctoral fellow in Patti’s lab.

That expectation turned out to be wrong.

Laboratory analysis at the molecular level showed that tumor cells are "unable to use fructose readily as a nutrient because they do not express the right biochemical machinery," Patti explained.

However, once fructose makes its way to the liver, that organ converts the sugar into lipids (fatty compounds) called lysophosphatidylcholines (LPCs).

Cancer cells love feasting on LPCs available in their environment, the researchers found.

"LPCs are unique," Patti said. "They might provide the most effective and efficient way to support tumor growth.”

As part of their research, Patti's team fed tumor-bearing animals a diet that was high in fructose.

“We were surprised to see that it had a rather dramatic impact. In some cases, the growth rate of the tumors accelerated by two-fold or even higher,” Patti said. “Eating a lot of fructose was clearly very bad for the progression of these tumors.”

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and published Dec. 4 in the journal Nature.

In generations past, Americans used to eat relatively little fructose. But the food industry began adding high-fructose corn syrup to many products decades ago, and that's coincided with a steady rise in certain cancers among people under the age of 50, the researchers pointed out.

Could the rise of high-fructose corn syrup be driving cancer rates skyward?

The new research couldn't answer that question, but future studies might.

“It will be exciting to better understand how dietary fructose influences cancer incidence," Patti said. "But one take-home message from this current study is that if you are unfortunate enough to have cancer, then you probably want to think about avoiding fructose."

Because it's an ingredient in so many foods, "sadly, that is easier said than done," he added.

Still, “the idea that you can tackle cancer with diet is intriguing,” Patti said.

"Humans are complex," he said. "What you put in your body can be consumed by healthy tissue and then converted into something else that tumors use.”