Low Breast Cancer Risk Linked to Teen Girls’ Diet

A new study linking breast cancer risk and teen girls’ diet has shown that eating fruits three or more times a day can ward off the commonly feared cell disease.

Maryam Farvid from the Massachusetts General Hospital and her colleagues at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health have decided to conduct their BMJ published study on a younger pool of subjects.

Giving that most research is done on adults and the breast cancer disease is known to evolve early, even as early as childhood, teen years were a good variable choice for this link study.

So reaching up to 90,000 female subjects in the Nurses’ Health Study cohort, the researchers inquired a lot about their diet, including their typical diet as a teen.

Half of the 90,000 women that ate nearly half of piece of fruit a day showed a 25% higher risk of developing breast cancer than those that ate three or more servings of fruit a day showed the study.

Apples, grapes, and bananas were associated with the lowest risk factor, which means these fruits seemed to be the ones that protected the most. Farvid says these fruits contains high doses of antioxidants that repair damaged cells and combat abnormal cell growth like cancer.

Other studies related to cancer suggest that kale and oranges can also benefit the system fighting abnormal cell growth because of their antioxidant and vitamin C properties.

The study should be a message for the meal program in schools all over the country. The program must include more fruit and vegetables. While the study didn’t find a relationship between low breast cancer risk and vegetables, they believe further stronger studies will.

The study also reveals the importance of eating whole fruits not just have the juice, unlike the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, where government nutritionists suggest eating the whole fruit of juice fruit. They don’t have the same effect.

Whole fruits are the study’s recommendation.

A different BMJ study done on 22,000 Danish women has shown that by adding alcohol to two drinks a day, the women increased their breast cancer risk by 30% in five years, but surprisingly it reduced the risk of heart disease.

These studies emphasize on the power diet might have on modulating women’s breast cancer risk from an early age.

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