Good riddance to breast cancer recurrence
You've heard of feed a cold, starve the flu. When it comes to a recurrence of breast cancer, there is one factor you can control: what you eat.
New research says that just by reducing their amount of dietary fat, women who are postmenopausal and have been treated for early-stage breast cancer may lower their risk of a recurrence. In essence, starve it out. The study involved 2,400 women between the ages of 48 and 79. What the study showed was that after 5 years, the rate of breast cancer recurrence was 9.8 percent among women who ate a low-fat diet (which was about 33 grams of fat per day or 297 calories from fat) and 12.4 percent among women who ate a regular diet (about 52 grams of fat per day or 468 calories from fat). Overall, the women on the low-fat diet had a 24 percent reduction in the recurrence of breast cancer.
A 42 percent risk reduction was found in women on low-fat diets whose breast cancer tumors did not respond to the presence of the hormone estrogen. For those women whose tumors did respond to estrogen, there was a 15 percent risk reduction.
Now here's an important point: The subjects in this study were consuming the less health saturated and trans fats of the typical American diet. By reducing their fat intake they were in effect lowering the amount of harmful fats in their diet, which helps explain the benefits. We know that there are other fats that have positive health benefits - the omega 3 fats found in fatty fish, walnuts and flax seeds and the monosaturated fats found in olive oil, for example. When you replace unhealthy fats with healthy fats, you may not necessarily lower your overall fat intake, but you will improve your health status. Furthermore, low fat diets can be difficult to sustain over a period of time. People tend to replace fat calories with carbohydrate calories - often unhealthy processed carbs. The results of this study are useful though by no means conclusive: in my view they suggest that cutting down on less healthy fats may reduce breast cancer recurrence, especially in women whose cancers were not responsive to estrogen, what is called "hormone receptor negative". However, there's plenty of evidence to support the role of healthy fats in cancer prevention, so the key may be to favor healthy fats over unhealthy fats, instead of just a simple high fat vs. low fat diet, especially given the difficulty most people have adhering to a low fat diet.
This is significant because there is a link between fatty diets and estrogen levels, so this finding lends support to maintaining a low-fat diet, and the ability to have some control over our health just by what we put into our mouth.
