ML HEALTH: Can Certain Foods Help Reduce Breast-Cancer Risk?

What you choose to eat really does make a difference in your risk of breast cancer. Here are a couple of recent studies backing that up.

Trans-fats, which are being phased out of food because they clog arteries, may raise the risk of getting breast cancer, according to a study by European researchers. They found that women with the highest blood levels of trans-fats had about twice the risk of breast cancer compared to women with the lowest levels.

"At this stage, we can only recommend limiting the consumption of processed foods, the source of industrially produced trans-fatty acid," the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Veronique Chajes of the French national scientific research centre at the University of Paris-South and colleagues studied women taking part in a large European cancer trial. They looked at blood samples collected between 1995 and 1998 from 25,000 women who had volunteered to report on their eating and lifestyle habits and then be followed for years to see if they developed cancer. Researchers studied 363 women diagnosed with breast cancer, comparing their blood levels of fatty acids with those of women without cancer. The higher the levels of trans-fatty acids, the more likely a woman was to have cancer, Chajes and colleagues found.

Cabbage and white turnips

On the other hand, researchers have found that cruciferous vegetables may help lower the risk of developing breast cancer, particularly for women who carry a particular gene variant linked to the disease.

Researchers found that among more than 6,000 Chinese women, those with the highest intake of Chinese cabbage and white turnips had a somewhat lower risk of post-menopausal breast cancer than those with the lowest intake. The findings, reported in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, add to evidence that compounds in cruciferous vegetables may help fight cancer.

Chinese cabbage and white turnips are two cruciferous vegetables common in the Chinese diet; in Western diets, the most common cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, cauliflower and kale. In the study, high consumption of Chinese cabbage and white turnips was linked to a moderately lower breast-cancer risk, according to TheAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Charlyn Fargo is a registered dietitian at Creators Syndicate 

website at www.creators.com.