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Plant foods may cut breast cancer risk

What breastcancer.org says about this article

A healthy diet is an excellent way to take care of yourself, whether you're being treated for breast cancer or trying to lower your risk. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables is recommended by cancer experts as well as registered dietitians. Besides fruits and vegetables, a diet rich in plant foods includes whole grain breads and cereals, nuts, seeds, rice, pasta, and beans. Nutrition experts say that variety is key, because different fruits and vegetables have different nutrients and compounds. Lignans are a compound found in plant foods.

The large study reviewed here (almost 60,000 women were in the study) found that women who ate foods high in lignans had a 17 percent lower risk of breast cancer compared to women who didn't eat foods with a lot of lignans.

It's not clear how lignans work to reduce risk. We do know that lignans may have a weak estrogen effect. When a weak estrogen-like substance takes the place of your body's natural strong estrogen in a breast cell's estrogen receptor, then the weak substance can act as a relative anti-estrogen. By acting in this way, lignans might help work against breast cancer that depends on estrogen for its growth.

Visit the breastcancer.org Nutrition Section for more information on how to create a healthy diet and the role of diet in breast cancer treatment and prevention.

Last Updated: 2007-03-21 14:40:18 -0400 (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Postmenopausal women who eat healthy amounts of plant foods rich in estrogen-like compounds called lignans may reduce their risk of developing breast cancer, according to a new study.

"Following the general dietary guidelines for a healthy and prudent diet, that is, consuming large amounts and varieties of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain cereal products daily (all foods rich in lignans) may also help prevent breast cancer in postmenopausal women," Dr. Francoise Clavel-Chapelon told Reuters Health.

Clavel-Chapelon, from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Villejuif, France, and associates evaluated the relationship between the amount of four types of plant ligands in the diet and breast cancer risk in 58,049 postmenopausal French women.

Over an average follow-up period of 7.7 years, 1469 women were diagnosed with breast cancer, according to the study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Analysis of the data showed that women with the highest total amount of lignans in the diet had a 17-percent lower risk of developing breast cancer compared with women having the lowest dietary lignan levels.

"The reduction in risk was confined to breast cancers positive for hormone receptors, the major type, of which incidence is increasing," Clavel-Chapelon noted.

A diet containing lots of plant foods is hypothesized to offer a breast cancer prevention strategy, the researcher added. This hypothesis was recently confirmed by a study that found a reduced risk of invasive breast cancer among postmenopausal women with high lignan levels in their diet, Clavel-Chapelon said.

SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, March 21, 2007.