healthy living
For years scientists speculated that a diet rich in vegetables was protective against breast cancer, while a diet heavy in red meat, dairy, and sugary sweets heightened the risk and pointed to the slowly rising incidence of breast cancer in Asia. Now a new study confirms this hypothesis. The study, published in the Journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, found that Chinese women who ate a diet termed to be meat-sweet” had a 60% increase in their risk of getting breast cancer compared to women who ate a “vegetable-soy” diet.
The study monitored dietary patterns in about 3,000 post-menopausal women about half of whom were diagnosed with breast cancer. The study found two distinct dietary patterns to compare and is one of the first to investigate the effect of patterns of food intake on breast cancer risk rather than a single dietary item. In the “meat-sweet” diet group, women ate high amounts of shrimp, candied fruit, chicken, red meat and desserts, while tofu, soybeans, fish, and an assortment of vegetables dominated the “vegetable-soy” diet.
While the study did not find a protective effect for the “vegetable-soy” diet, it did find a significantly increased risk for estrogen receptor positive breast cancer (breast cancer that is fueled by the hormone estrogen) among those who ate a “meat-sweet” diet. After menopause, obesity is associated with increased levels of bioavailable estrogen, due to increased conversion of the hormone androgen to estrogen and decreases in the sex-hormone binding globulin which binds to estrogen. Obesity has long been a suspected risk factor for breast cancer.
Though they did not do specific analyses to determine which aspects of the “meat-sweet” diet contributed most to the increased breast cancer risk, researchers speculate that “meat-sweet” diet may have increased risk by increasing obesity. Breast cancer risk was highest among post-menopausal women with elevated body mass index (BMI).
A shortcoming of the study may be that it did not consider other breast cancer risk factors like exercise, having children at a later age, or use of birth control pills. The results of this study were consistent with the results of previous studies that concluded that consumption of red meat increased the risk of breast cancer among both pre-menopausal and post-menopausal women and suggest that red meat may interact with other dietary factors in a “meat-sweet” diet to convert normal cells to breast cancer cells.The authors conclude by stating that although the Asian population is “poised to more broadly adopt foods characteristic of western societies”, that low consumption of such foods combined with weight control may protect against breast cancer.
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