A possible advantage to Cancer

I'm going to stretch the "there's a silver lining to every cloud" adage here, but I thought the study was awesome in its own right.

Firstly, a little background: metabolism is based upon burning either carbohydrates or fats. The rule of thumb that determines which one is burned more is: the harder the exercise, the more you'll be burning carbohydrates, and the less you'll be burning fat. While this statement alone is somewhat misleading, we'll stop there and just take that statement as correct.

A new study, published by one of the women I graduated with from UNC, studied how women's metabolism works after having breast cancer. She compared female breast cancer survivors to women of the same age, weight, and menopausal status that had no chronic disease. She found that at all levels of exercise (low intensity, moderate, and vigorous), the survivors burned a greater percentage of fat than the healthy controls.

So, something about the cancer and treatment prevents carbohydrate metabolism, meaning the body has to rely on fat metabolism for energy. Now if we could only figure out how to really harness this phenomena so that the women had accelerated fat metabolism.

Study cited: Tosti et al., (2011) Exercise in patients with breast cancer and healthy controls: energy substrate oxidation and blood lactate responses, Integrative Cancer Therapies, 10(1), 6-15.