LOW FAT DIET PROVEN TO PREVENT BREAST CANCER

nancysmile

I am not sure this is exactly the place to post this but I was at a bc symposium last night at Adelphi Univ. where there were some experts speaking with a slide show on latest treatments of bc. One of the last comments by the oncologist really struck me and I wanted to share it. She said there was a recent study done on Japanese women that showed a low fat diet was as good as keeping breast cancer at bay as CMF! The dr remarked how difficult this diet is for american women to keep, herself included! I was astontished at this remark because I would've thought she might say we must stick to this type of diet. She just resigned herself and all of us to being unable to so we might as well just eat fats and get breast cancer! I'm curious as to what you all think of this. I am trying so hard to eat low fat and lost weight which is so difficult but it can be done. I have also read that dairy contributes to bc. Note that there is very little bc in Chinese and Japanese women. Just wanted you all to know.

PookieBear

Always interesting to hear the latest research.
It's so difficult to know what to believe. One study
seems to contradict another. I do try to eat well and exercise most of the time. But I won't drive myself crazy worrying to death about all the info out there. It just becomes too much sometimes.

Anonymous

Thanks for posting on that, Nancy. It is interesting that the doc just assumed trying to eat a low fat diet would be impossible. I'm of the belief (mostly my gut feeling actually) that a diet high in both fat and sugar will increase my odds of getting a recurrence or even a new primary. So I'll make every effort to control those factors! It's not easy in our society, but it's certainly doable.

Marin

JoanofArdmore

I have absolutely no trouble doing it!I've not eaten fat or sugar ..since my hippie days!

But I read a survey that said eating a low-fat diet made utterly NO difference to bc dx.(And I read it here!)

Oddly, I have found I suddenly seem to crave fat.Instead of spraying my pan w/Canola Oil to sautee, I've been dropping in PLENTY of olive oil.WTH?
(I go by the "if you crave it, your body must need it" theory.)
I still dont eat sat fat, hydrogenated fat, or omega 6 fat.

Anonymous

Joan, when did your hippie days end? You said you stopped eating sugar. You see, I get quite confused with all the crap we read. You didn't eat sugar and still got bc. I did/do everything wrong and I got bc too. LOL

We read so many conflicting stories!
Shirley

Joan2844

I've seen this information in a couple of different articles. Just by googling "low fat breast cancer," I found an article about it on www.cancer.org, dated May 2005.

The women in the control group ate about 33 grams of fat each day, versus the other group which ate 51 grams, or more. The results of this study:

"After about 5 years of follow-up, the low-fat diet had helped some of the women—those with estrogen-negative (ER-negative) tumors—lower their risk of recurrence by 42%. ER-negative tumors do not have estrogen receptors on them and therefore don't respond to hormonal treatments like tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors. That makes them more difficult to treat than hormone-sensitive tumors (also called ER-positive tumors).

The diet did not significantly lower recurrence risk in women with ER-positive tumors"

I think the problem is with quick foods and restaurants -- both of which are staples of the American diet. Mine included. If you cook for yourself, 33 grams/day is very reasonable. I'm still not there yet -- if you have any great ideas, please let me know. With my husband and my three boys, nutrition is a hard, hard thing for me.

Anonymous

Joan, with my husband ALONE it's difficult. He's a meat and potato kind of guy. However, he just said that perhaps we could add more fish in our diet. Yeah! Right!
We'll see. However, I cannot blame him for all my diet woes.

BlindedByScience

I would also try to find out if the fats allowed in the study were controlled--was transfat (partially hydrogenated) allowed or measured? This particular kind of fat is very effective at increasing inflammation and may be a much larger reason why a high-fat diet can increase the risk of cancer. Even if they were eating mostly omega-6 containing oils (canola, safflower, corn, soy, seasame), and not balancing it with sufficient omega-3 containing oils (walnut, cold-water fatty fish), they would have increased inflammation and possibly increased risk of developing bc.

I hold to the idea that using olive oil and omega-3 oils allow us to include higher amounts of fat in our diet, as long as we avoid transfats and severely limit omega-6 oils.

JoanofArdmore

"Joan, when did your hippie days end? You said you stopped eating sugar"

Hi Shirley.That's right.getting bc is just a big roulette wheel.
And yet, how can we ignore findings about eating for health(especially now)?

My hippie days were over by the 80s I guess.Although lots of ungreen people call tree huggers ancd people who care about the envirnment, and hope for an end to war hippies, still.
I guess when I was a hippie, I flirted a bit with good diet, as in getting antioxidents, and yep, not eating sugar.In fact, "in those days" many of us didn't "eat anything white"-sugar, flour..You could do worse even now, than to follow that

Thing is, my father was French, and my mother lived in Paris when they were married, while he was in medical school.They both had a very European ethic about food.Fresh food shopped in daily,No diet drenched in sugar and fats, plenty of fresh fruit & veggies.So it came pretty naturally to me, and I apparantly raised a dynasty of this kind of person.Because my daughters grew up to eat healthfully, and I quit baking millions of kinds of Christmas cookies one year when my grands were 4 and 2.They completely ignored the cookies, all 3 of them, but cleaned me out of the huge bowls of strawberries, and did pretty well on the boiled shrimp too.

I have often thought that my diet fault which might have put me on the path to bc(aside from SMOKING until I was 53) was in switching from good, lovely butter to margerine in the 70s.Years of transfats!Ugh!
I also was big on cooking food over roaring fires, the fat from the meat causing the flames to leap up and envelop the meat on the grill.
Hamburgers I charred outside and left raw inside.(mmmm )
So those would be my rues, Shirley.If I could do it all over...
If I knew then what I knew now...

Of course, in those days we were indestructable, all of us.

wallycat

I sure wish there were a definitive answer.
I use almost nothing but olive oil (organic, extra virgin).
I did all the "right" things too.
Red meat maybe once a month, mostly wild caught fish (salmon or black cod), non-farmed shrimp the few times we ate that. There was a period of time when I was vegetarian and lived on brown rice and broccoli and occasional tofu.

I did smoke for about 8-10 years, and I did use Birth control pills, and I do drink red wine with my dinner (and over-indulged in my 20s and probably up to 32). I do eat cheese and it isn't always organic. Not all my fruits/veggies are organic and I eat quite a bit of them.

I've exercised since I was 23 and have had a decent to near ideal BMI through out my adult years.

I wish they could point a finger at what causes it......

My twin (fraternal), on the other hand, says she doesn't monitor what she eats and she too was on BC pills...actually, just recently stopped 'em (we'll be 50 on the 16th of this month) and she is not diagnosed (and I pray she never will be).

Genetics??? Environment?? combination of the two that set off a chain reaction?

Lance Armstrong said he hasn't changed anything since his diagnosis and he is an 11 year survivor to date....
Julia Child ate more butter, cream, red meat than anyone I know personally...she had BC but lived to 91.

Is it a blip in our system that our body missed "cleaning up" and it may never happen again or ????

I sure wish I knew the answers.

Joan2844

"Lance Armstrong said he hasn't changed anything since his diagnosis and he is an 11 year survivor to date....
Julia Child ate more butter, cream, red meat than anyone I know personally...she had BC but lived to 91."

Gotta love Julia Child! Thanks for that info -- I knew about her and her BC, but had forgotten. I'm sure she also drank her fair share of wine. I enjoy red wine, but am haunted when I drink it. Or eat sugar. Or... any of the 100 things we're not supposed to do anymore!

At the end of the day, I believe my future is in God's hands. He already KNOWS whether I'll live 5 more years or 40 more years. It doesn't matter what I eat or don't eat. What treatment I have or don't have.

My feeling is that having a healthy body will enable me to persevere better through anything I might have to go through again, medically speaking. That is the motivation for keeping myself healthy. And, for allowing myself some wine or sugar from time to time!

wallycat

As a registered dietitian and a medical librarian, I've been trained to think "science" and have always felt confident that all the studies support a lot things. Having said that, I was devastated when I got my BC dx because I thought I had been doing most of those "right" things. I guess genetics/environment play a larger part than many want to believe.
I've had patients that did all the "right" things to prevent going on insulin and it didn't always work and patients who did all they could for cardio care....sometimes it is a crap shoot--sadly.
I agree, I don't think we can toss everything out the door, but maybe we can be a bit kinder to ourselves.
I too love red wine and am haunted (I even started a thread on the good food portion asking about it). Someone there posted a great post...what about all the alcoholic women who never get BC...and they are getting way more than the 2 glasses of wine I do with dinner.

I do agree that the healthier we go into this, the stronger we are to deal with the treatment.
I may even make some chocolate brownies for my birthday Wednesday

2up

"crap shoot"!!!!!!!!!!

period!

i'm not gonna beat myself up for one more day over my "lifestyle' "dietary preferences" or "choice of bbq briquettes etc lol"

it happened to me, and i still have a life to live ....... the day to day stressors are enough to bring me to my knees...... my time here is 'predetermined' ....... i'm gonna live it to the fullest 'damnit' ........ my life is already cut short by this disease ............ i'll be damned if it takes any more away from me!

how much time can i buy if i cut out the "latest greatest" cancer causing agent?????????

in my mind, "be responsible", but "live, live, live" ...... life is really short sometimes!

ijl

I beleive that Asian women and men for this matter have an increased risk of stomach cancer.

Anonymous

Joan, I just came back to this thread. Completely forgot I had posted on it.

I was never a hippie. My family seasoned food with lots of fat (bacon). Cooked with lard. My mom was so poor when she was growing up that they ate lard sandwiches with salt and pepper and she still alive at the age of almost 91! My dad lived until almost 93. No bc in my family as far as I know. No one but me took HRT (estrogen AND prgesterone). I used to season with fat, but I stopped that years ago. However, unlike your parents I do not and did not shop daily for fresh fruits and veggies. LOL Sometimes when I cook "fresh" veggies e.g. stir fry, I wonder just how much nutrition is left in them.

I never ever dreamed I'd get bc, but here I sit. However, I did do everything wrong so why not? I even fed my kids loads of sugar via cookies, cereals, drinks, etc. Woe is me.
Shirley

Rosemary44

It turns out that light stir-frying, steaming, and microwaving still leave nutrients in the veggies. Boiling is the culprit even for a short period of time. Oddly enough, shredding veggies very finely takes out nutrients.

Anonymous

Yes, but if "fresh" veggies sit around a long time doesn't that deplete some of the nutrition. I buy frozen broccoli a lot and I do microwave it. I microwave a lot of frozen veggies, rarely boil them.
Shirley

ravdeb

Well, I had triple neg IDC. I grew up in a home where we ate very healthy foods and our sweets were limited...my mom was afraid we'd be fat! We had to ask for sweets and potatoe chips and things like that were for special occasions.

I believe that how we eat and take care of our bodies when we are young will have an effect on our health as we get older.

That said, I kept a pretty healthy life style with regular exercise and low fat and I still got triple neg bc.

I believe it's our own individual make-up that will either give in to the cancer cells or not. Because they haven't yet found the genes that will cause the cancer or not, they do these studies in hopes of learning something new. The thing about these results is that they were results on those women who were tested. Heck..I wasn't tested!

The stats say that 80% of the lumps are benign. That's great. But what about the 20% that are not?

Triple neg is more rare than er/pr positive.

The stats are there to learn from but not to live by.

Low fat diets are good for many reasons but I don't believe it will prevent bc. At least not in my case. It also didn't help keep my cholesterol down.

We are all different. It's interesting to read what they are coming up with but it doesn't mean we have to change our entire lifestyle to keep the cancer away.

I think that we need to enjoy our lives and if low fat diets make us feel better, then go for it. All in moderation is my motto.

Rosemary44

The testing was done on veggies bought from a store, as you and I would do, and that's what they found out about which way to cook them for better nutrient value.

I always thought that frozen was ok cause that locked in the nutrients sooner. Problem for me was I always boiled the veggies to cook them and half the time, I'd be over-cooking them.

Anonymous

Absolutely, Ravdeb, lowfat is much healthier for many reasons. That's why I started cutting fats in my cooking.
It had nothing to do with breast cancer because I thought I'd never get it. That's what I call DUMB, DUMB, DUMB!
Shirley

Anonymous

Rosemary, I have heard that frozen was better for the reason you stated. However, there are times we all want fresh.

My DH (when he cooked and until I yelled enough ) would put the frozen broccoli in water and cook it until it was pure mush. Bless his pea-picking heart for even cooking.
NOT! I think it good that a man cooks once in a while. I do cook my frozen bussel sprouts in water. I haven't tried microwaving them. Hmmmm...I think I'll fix some of those tonight.
Shirley

Fighter_34

Prior to my dx my DIET was HORRIBLE in fact I just started working out a month prior to my dx. I had the typical American diet. So if going Low Fat doesn't help w/ treating cancer my hope is that it will ward off future medical problems. Who wants to win this battle only to have another one to fight.

CrunchyPoodleMama

Hmm, glad this thread got bumped because I wasn't around in '07 when it started. As I was reading the original post, my thoughts were exactly what BlindedByScience said:

I would also try to find out if the fats allowed in the study were controlled--was transfat (partially hydrogenated) allowed or measured? This particular kind of fat is very effective at increasing inflammation and may be a much larger reason why a high-fat diet can increase the risk of cancer. Even if they were eating mostly omega-6 containing oils (canola, safflower, corn, soy, seasame), and not balancing it with sufficient omega-3 containing oils (walnut, cold-water fatty fish), they would have increased inflammation and possibly increased risk of developing bc.

I hold to the idea that using olive oil and omega-3 oils allow us to include higher amounts of fat in our diet, as long as we avoid transfats and severely limit omega-6 oils.

I am eating more fat than I did pre-diagnosis... intentionally so, but the fats I choose are the good, natural fats, not the fake vegetable oils/trans-fats. I spent a lifetime eating low-fat (thinking I was eating healthfully, but doing so much wrong - including things like margarine, canola and corn oil, thinking those were healthy).

kira1234

Julia, You mentioned canola oil as being bad. I thought canola oil was ok. I also use smart balance margarine. Can you tell me why these aren't good for us?

TokyoSing

We moved from the north shore of Chicago to Tokyo 13 months ago.  It is true that the Japanese eat a relatively low fat diet. The staples are rice, veggies, tofu and fish.  Meat is a garnish - a couple of ounces to season the rice.  But they also eat much smaller portions. My husband used to say he was always a little hungry after a Japanese meal!   Everybody walks. Practically nobody drives in Tokyo, there are just not enough places to park.  Everybody - including the 90 year old grandfathers-  walk to the subway stations, climb up and down the stairs to reach the trains, hop on buses. I have even seen them on bikes. There are very few fat people.  I wear a size 6 -8, I shop at the "o-ki" floor ( the large size floor). There is not just one Japanese secret to avoiding breast cancer, it is a whole life style.

CrunchyPoodleMama

Kira, Smart Balance is one of the better fake butters, but real grass-fed butter in small amounts is better.

Re: canola, if you specifically get expeller-pressed (cold-pressed) organic canola (rapeseed) oil, I guess it can be okay, but regular canola oil at the store, like all highly processed vegetable oils (except for minimally processed ones like olive oil), are by definition rancid and bad for your health.

Here's an article on the WAPF site that goes into more detail about canola:

https://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-fats/559-the-great-con-ola.html

Of course, the canola industry has a huge PR machine and puts out info claiming to debunk some of the facts, but whatever... I choose to consume only time-honored, minimally processed, wholesome, organic fats.

kira1234

Thanks Julia, I use the smart balance because of heart issues. My brother had a very major heart attack a 52 so I am at risk of heart issues. He was in great shape, 165 pounds at 6 feet 3 inches, ran 10 miles or so daily, so he is a health nut, but he still had a heart attack. He has been advising me on how to eat since that day.

It's good to know about the canola oil, I don't know why, but I had an idea all wasn't has it seemed with canola oil. Is olive oil a good choice?

CrunchyPoodleMama

Yes, extra-virgin olive oil is a great choice! So sorry about your brother - it sounds like he's doing well now though?

kira1234

Yes he is fine. The Dr's told us he lived because he was in such good health. The heart attact happened after a 25 mile race, and they felt it was caused by some plak he had that broke loose from the run. He can only run 5 miles per day now. He lives in Japan where he works for his church, and is still very active, and is 60 now.