Healthy Diets Can Help Cut Risk of Developing Breast Cancer

Diets high in fruits, vegetables and soy cam lower the risk of developing breast cancer by 30 percent, so suggests new research.
A study, led by Dr. Lesley M. Butler, of Colorado State University, highlighted a trend of decreasing breast cancer risk with an increasing intake of a vegetable fruit soy dietary pattern in the 34,000 Chinese women participants.
Although the researchers identified and analysed dietary patterns amongst Chinese women from Singapore, Butler consides that the findings are relevant for American women too.
The diets are not different from patterns experienced in American populations.
There are of course poor, unhealthy food patterns of meat, with plenty of starch and saturated fat. Then there’s the healthy pattern, the fruit-vegetable-soy pattern.
Butler and colleagues used data collected between 1993 and 1995 from 63,257 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study (SCHS).
The health study used one-to-one personal interviews to collect data regarding diet, education, exercise and smoking, as well as hormone use.
Previous research focusing on individual foods or nutrients has been inconsistent, the authors note.
The SCHS data, however, allowed Butler’s group to identify two dietary patterns: the meat-starch-saturated-fat based “meat-dim sum” pattern and the “vegetable-fruit-soy” pattern characterised by plenty of cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and bok choy.
Based on an intake of 165 foods, participants were scored for the vegetable-fruit-soy and the meat-dim sum dietary patterns.
Butler identified 34,028 women with no history of breast cancer in the data, all aged between 45 and 74.On the whole, they were slim, exercised, had been through the menopause, some smoked or used hormone replacement therapy.
By the end of 2005, 10 years after enrollment, 629 breast cancer cases had been identified in the Singapore Cancer Registry among study participants.
Upon data analysis, the study authors discovered that the greater the intake of fruit, vegetables and soy, the lower the breast cancer risk among post-menopausal women.