Are soy products bad for breast cancer?

Rachel, you don't have to worry about soy as you are ER-. Of course, we can always get a different hormonal status of cancer....

Try matcha tea.  It is hard to find in the US without a sweetener though.  White tea is also good.

I would be very interested if someone has found US grown edermane.  I was told to eat it once a week.

I think that the info. changes on soy and other things.  the 2009 San Antonio BC conference is outdated.,  My dietitian who attends all of them gave me lots of print outs from the 2010

What I am doing is seeing an oco. dietitian every year, to keep up with current information.  I then run it by my oncologist.

I think the latest alcohol study was for ER - cancer only (OK if you have ER - )

Trading ideas here is fine, but your final information should come from a qualified health care professions.

Joleen, the good news about McDonalds burger is that they probably don't contain much real meat. LOL

I am currently reading the book 'Anticancer, A New Way of Life' by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber.  It was highly recommended by several ladies here and it is as good as they said it would be.  

I have just read the part about soy.  Here is what he says.

"Soy isofavones blockthe stimulation of cancer cells by sex hormones (such as estrogens and testosterone).  They also intervene by blocking angiogenesis. There are significantly fewer breast cancer cases among Asian women who have eaten soy since adolescence.  When they do have breast cancer, their tumors are usually less, aggressive with higher survival rates." 

"Take note: Isoflavone supplements (in pill form) have been associated with an aggravation of certain breast cancers, but this is not the case for soy taken in as food."

He goes on to explain that there is some evidence that the genistein in soy can interfere with Taxol and therefore, recommends that it is advisable to avoid soy during chemotherapy with taxol.

For me, personally, I have trouble trusting the sources of soy and definitely do not want to chance having gmo soy.  I have chosen not to add soy to my diet.

Barbe...In Canada (and near you) we have some excellent teas available to us.  Check out Teaopia.ca.  Just teas.  No fillers or sweeteners.  I am addicted to their white and green teas.   

I think the woman who wrote this (below) is stretching it to imply giving up dairy can cure breast  cancer, but still, she makes some interesting points to consider as far as its role in helping to stave it off .... Same goes  with meat - even in skinned chicken and turkey, lots of research shows cancer loves the arachidonic acid .... "Why I believe giving up milk is key to beating breast cancer..."

By Prof. Jane Plant, PhD, CBE, Chief Scientist, British Geological Survey
I had no alternative but to die or to try to find a cure for myself. I am a scientist - surely there was a rational explanation for this cruel illness that affects one in 12 women in the UK?

I had suffered the loss of one breast, and undergone radiotherapy. I was now receiving painful chemotherapy, and had been seen by some of the country's most eminent specialists. But, deep down, I felt certain I was facing death. I had a loving husband, a beautiful home and two young children to care for. I desperately wanted to live.

This desire drove me to unearth the facts, some of which were known only to a handful of scientists at the time. The first clue to understanding what was promoting my breast cancer came when my husband Peter, who was also a scientist, arrived back from working in China while I was being plugged in for a chemotherapy session.

The disease was virtually non-existent throughout the whole country. Only one in 10,000 women in China will die from it, compared to that terrible figure of one in 12 in Britain and the even grimmer average of one in 10 across most Western countries. It is not just a matter of China being a more rural country, with less urban pollution. In highly urbanized Hong Kong, the rate rises to 34 women in every 10,000 but still puts the West to shame.

The Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have similar rates. And remember, both cities were attacked with nuclear weapons.  So in addition to the usual pollution-related cancers, one would also expect to find some radiation-related cases.

The conclusion we can draw from these statistics strikes you with some force. If a Western woman were to move to industrialized, irradiated Hiroshima, she would slash her risk of contracting breast cancer by half.  It seemed obvious that some lifestyle factor not related to pollution, urbanization or the environment is seriously increasing the Western woman's chance of contracting breast cancer.

I then discovered that whatever causes the huge differences in breast cancer rates between oriental and Western countries, it isn't genetic. Research showed that when Chinese or Japanese people move to the West, within one or two generations their rates of breast cancer approach those of their host community.

The same thing happens when oriental people adopt a completely Western lifestyle in Hong Kong. In fact, the slang name for breast cancer in China translates as ‘Rich Woman's Disease'. This is because, in China, only the better off can afford to eat what is termed ‘ Hong Kong food'.

The Chinese describe all Western food, including everything from ice cream and chocolate bars to spaghetti and feta cheese, as "Hong Kong food," because of its availability in the former British colony and its scarcity, in the past, in mainland China.
My husband Peter and I decided to utilize our joint scientific backgrounds  ...

One day I realized, "The Chinese don't eat dairy produce!"

Suddenly I recalled how many Chinese people were physically unable to tolerate milk, how the Chinese people I had worked with had always said that milk was only for babies, and how one of my close friends, who is of Chinese origin, always politely turned down the cheese course at dinner parties.
I knew of no Chinese people who lived a traditional Chinese life who ever used cow or other dairy food to feed their babies. The tradition was to use a wet nurse, but never, ever, dairy products.

Culturally, the Chinese find our Western preoccupation with milk and milk products strange. I remember entertaining a large delegation of Chinese scientists shortly after the ending of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s.

On advice from the Foreign Office, we had asked the caterer to provide a pudding that contained a lot of ice cream. After inquiring what the pudding consisted of, all of the Chinese, including their interpreter, politely but firmly refused to eat it.

Before I had breast cancer for the first time, I had eaten a lot of dairy produce, such as skimmed milk, low-fat cheese and yogurt. In order to cope with the chemotherapy I received for my fifth case of cancer, I had been eating organic yogurts as a way of helping my digestive tract to recover and repopulate my gut with ‘good' bacteria.

Recently, I discovered that in 1989 yogurt had been implicated in ovarian cancer. Dr. Daniel Cramer of Harvard University studied hundreds of women with ovarian cancer, and had them record in detail what they normally ate. Wish I'd been made aware of his findings when he had first discovered them.

I decided to give up not just yogurt but all dairy produce immediately. Cheese, butter, milk and yogurt and anything else that contained dairy produce - it went down the sink or in the rubbish.

It is surprising how many products, including commercial soups, biscuits and cakes, contain some form of dairy produce. Even many proprietary brands of margarine marketed as soya, sunflower or olive oil spreads can contain dairy produce. I therefore became an avid reader of the small print on food labels.

Up to this point, I had been steadfastly measuring the progress of my fifth cancerous lump with callipers and plotting the results. Despite all the positive feedback from my doctors and nurses, my own precise observations told me the bitter truth. My first chemotherapy sessions had produced no effect - the lump was the same size. Then I eliminated dairy products. Within days, the lump started to shrink.

About two weeks after my second chemotherapy session and one week after giving up dairy, the lump in my neck started to itch. Then it began to soften and to reduce in size. The line on the graph was now pointing downwards as the tumour got smaller and smaller.

And, very significantly, I noted that instead of declining exponentially, the tumour's decrease in size was plotted on a straight line heading off the bottom of the graph, indicating a cure, not suppression (or remission) of the tumour.

One Saturday after about six weeks of excluding all dairy produce from my diet, I felt for what was left of the lump. I couldn't find it. On the following Thursday I was due to be seen by my cancer specialist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He examined me thoroughly. He was initially bemused and then delighted as he said, "I cannot find it." None of my doctors, it appeared, had expected someone with my type and stage of cancer (which had spread to the lymph system) to survive, let alone be so hale and hearty.

I understand [my specialist] now uses maps showing cancer mortality in China in his lectures, and recommends a non-dairy diet to his cancer patients.

I now believe that the link between dairy produce and breast cancer is similar to the link between smoking and lung cancer. I believe that identifying the link between breast cancer and dairy, and then developing a diet targeted at maintaining the health of my breast and hormone system, cured me.

I think Jane Plant is wrong. The answer is black licorice!!!!

They should have furthered that study of Western woman and not stopped at yoghurt. I bet you some of them ate black licorice too!!!!

Our cows in Canada don't get growth hormones or antibiotics in them (thus "Mad Cow" disease!)

MOTC, so you're thinking that the chemo had a bigger effect than giving up dairy?  Really?

The Jane Plant article is old news. It's from 2000, if not earlier - it just keeps getting reissued and republished. It's been discussed on this board many times before, and the gaping holes in Jane Plant's theory have been pointed out. 

For a different perspective, here's a great article that reviews dozens of studies that have looked at the connection between dairy and breast cancer:  Consumption of dairy products and the risk of breast cancer: a review of the literature

Their conclusion:  "Differences in eating patterns and breast cancer rates across countries suggest that several dietary components, including dairy products, could affect breast cancer risk. However, dairy products are a diverse food group in terms of the factors that could potentially influence risk. Some dairy products, such as whole milk and many types of cheese, have a relatively high saturated fat content, which may increase risk. Moreover, milk products may contain contaminants such as pesticides, which have carcinogenic potential, and growth factors such as insulin-like growth factor I, which have been shown to promote breast cancer cell growth. In contrast, the calcium and vitamin D contents of dairy products have been hypothesized to reduce breast cancer risk. We reviewed the current epidemiologic literature on the relation between dairy product intakes and breast cancer risk, focusing primarily on the results of cohort and case-control studies. Most of the studies reviewed showed no consistent pattern of increased or decreased breast cancer risk with a high consumption of dairy products as a whole or when broken down into high-fat and low-fat dairy products, milk, cheese, or butter. Measurement error may have attenuated any modest association with dairy products. The available epidemiologic evidence does not support a strong association between the consumption of milk or other dairy products and breast cancer risk."

Yes, this article is from 2004 but the it's a good summary of all the research done up to that time. All the more recent studies that I can find on dairy & breast cancer risk either show no relationship or actually show an inverse relationship between dairy and BC risk, particularly in pre-menopausal women but also possibly in post-menopausal women. In other words, the more dairy consumed, the lower the breast cancer rate. Note however that most of these results are not statistically significant but are directional. However there's even a study from China that shows this.

Dairy products, calcium intake, and breast cancer risk: a case-control study in China.   January 2011  "Our study supports a protective effect of high intake of dietary calcium on breast cancer risk, and no association with dairy product intake."

Dairy consumption and calcium intake and risk of breast cancer in a prospective cohort: the Norwegian Women and Cancer study   November 2010  "Premenopausal women with the highest consumption of white cheese had half the risk of breast cancer compared to those with the lowest consumption.... CONCLUSION: Dairy consumption is not strongly related to breast cancer risk in this prospective study. A non-significant negative association between calcium intake and breast cancer risk was seen, particularly among premenopausal women."

Meat, eggs, dairy products, and risk of breast cancer in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort.   September 2009  "We have not consistently identified intakes of meat, eggs, or dairy products as risk factors for breast cancer. Future studies should investigate the possible role of high-temperature cooking in the relation of red meat intake with breast cancer risk."

Dairy products, calcium and the risk of breast cancer: results of the French SU.VI.MAX prospective study.   May 2007  "Our data support the hypothesis that dairy products, through calcium content or a correlated component, might have a negative association with the risk of breast cancer, particularly among premenopausal women."

Dairy, calcium, and vitamin D intake and postmenopausal breast cancer risk in the Cancer Prevention Study II Nutrition Cohort  December 2005  "Our results support the hypothesis that dietary calcium and/or some other components in dairy products may modestly reduce risk of postmenopausal breast cancer. The stronger inverse associations among estrogen receptor-positive tumors deserve further study."

Don't you hate it when none of the studies seem to support what you want to believe?  (Not speaking for myself here; I like dairy and I'm happy to see these studies.)  At least with soy the results of the studies are all over the map which makes it easier to believe whatever you want to believe. 

Beesie - Thank you for the research on dairy. 

Jolene

Why did you give up Yams ??

I thought yams were good for bc diet.  I just can't remember why.

I think I have been hearing that yams are good for menopausal symptoms, due to their natural progesterone (if I don't have my facts mixed up, here).

Yams do have natural progesterone I think, but it's more likely that you're eating sweet potatoes anyway.  I have no idea why sweet potatoes are labeled as yams sometimes, I guess there's no regulation for it.  They're not the same at all, not even related, and SP have many health benefits and are lower on the glycemic index too.  

Erica, wouldn't organic milk have fat in it too?

I figure the other danger of milk in the USA is the growth hormones and antibiotics....or is it just the chickens that get the growth hormones down there?

If a cow (in Canada) has to be given antibiotics (ab for short), her milk is thrown out until the ab course is finished.  Unfortunately chickens receive ab-laced food for prevention, and that is leading to ab-resistant bacteria.  And that is SERIOUS.