Easy things you can do now to help Prevent Breast Cancer
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3. Eat less vegetable oil; increase animal fat, especially from dairy products. "Diets high in corn oil leave animals especially vulnerable to chemically induced cancers" say researchers. (Science News, 6/24/89; 10/2/99) Frightening as this statement is, it is not true only of corn oil but of all vegetable (or seed) oils including those made from soy, sesame, sunflower, cottonseed, flax, and hemp.
If you are dubious about eating more animal fat and dairy products to reduce breast cancer risk, consider this landmark study reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine (1/12/1998). To determine if food affected breast cancer risk. The diets of 61,000 Swedish women between the ages of 40-76 were followed for four years. The results~ For every 5 grams (about a teaspoonful) of vegetable oil consumed per day, breast cancer risk increased by 70%. In contrast, for each 10 grams of fat from meat and dairy products in the daily diet, breast cancer risk was decreased by 55%.
Another study, begun in the early 1970s, followed 4,000 Finnish women's diets for 25 years. Results recently released found that those who "drank the most milk had only half the breast cancer risk of those who drank the least."
American researchers agree. According to a report in International Journal of Cancer (2001), women who drank milk as children and continued drinking it as adults had half the rate of breast cancer of non-milk drinkers. (Yes, I do buy organic milk, but the studies used regular supermarket milk.)
Why~ Galactose, the primary sugar in milk, slows ovarian production of estradiol, a cancer-promoting hormone. Additionally, milk is rich in CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), a fat known to suppress breast tumors in animals.
For breast health I use yogurt, cheese, milk, butter, and olive oil daily, and eat meat occasionally.
Remember that olive oil is pressed from a fruit, not a seed. Women whose diets are high in olive oil, and who eat meat and dairy products regularly, have the lowest rates of breast cancer in the world. (Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 1/18/1995)
4. Eat less tofu and soy beverage; eat more miso and tamari
While it is true that if you begin eating soy foods as a child and continue throughout puberty the breast tissues you create during your adolescence will be highly resistant to cancer until after menopause. However, if you begin eating unfermented soy (tofu, soy milk, and the like) after puberty, your risk of breast cancer increases. (Science News, 4/24/1999)
The active ingredient in soy - isoflavone - when given to breast cancer cells in petri dishes causes them to grow rapidly. (Extracts of dong quai and licorice have a similar effect.)
Miso and tamari - fermented soy foods - are the exceptions. Both are strongly cancer preventative, no matter when you start eating them. Animal studies have found both miso and tamari highly effective in preventing cancer, even in mice genetically programmed to get breast cancer. And the more you eat, the more you lower your risk of cancer.
For breast health, I use miso and/or tamari every day. I occasionally eat tofu or edemame. I drink no soy milk, and eat no other soy products of any kind.
5. Eat foods rich in antioxidants; avoid supplements of vitamins C and E.
A diet that contains plenty of foods rich in antioxidants definitely lowers breast cancer risk. But supplements seem to do the opposite.
Doctors in Stockholm observed that, among breast cancer patients, treatment failures were higher for women taking vitamin E supplements - and the failure rate increased with dose. Studying this effect, researchers found that the anti-cancer benefits of fish oils "disappeared when [we] gave ... antioxidant vitamins”. In fact, when mice with breast cancer were given vitamin E supplements "the more we gave them, the bigger their tumors grew." The authors conclude that vitamin E supplements "preferentially protect a cancer and even aid its spread." (Science News, 4/29/1995 and 7/15/1995)
Supplements of vitamin C (synthetic ascorbic acid) are poorly used by body tissues. But cancer cells seem to thrive on it. (Cancer Research, 9/15/1999) One new "chemotherapy" links a lethal form of zinc to an ascorbic acid molecule; when the cancer eats the ascorbic acid, the zinc is set free to kill the cancer cell.
For breast health I eat 5-7 servings of dark green and bright red/orange foods daily.
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